what we do in life echoes in eternity

The Targaryens believe that they have the fire of dragons coursing through their veins, but you aren't certain that it's true. If they did, you don't see how they could get anything done, at all. Because right now you do, and it's agony.

Everything hurts. From your head to your toes it feels like your body is filled with venom, burning beneath your skin, your muscles all convulsing in waves of destruction that leave you all but incapacitated. Milk of the poppy does not help, and nor does wine. If you were delirious it would probably be more bearable, but unfortunately your mind is devastatingly sharp. It feels like you have even more awareness of everything than you normally do— your skin is so hypersensitive that you can feel every fibre of your sweat-drenched chemise, and you can feel the temperature of every breath you take as it fills your lungs. The lights are too bright, sounds are louder, flavors more vibrant on your tongue. Every little thing that is happening around you gets filed into your mind so that you feel, in no uncertain terms, like you could fight an entire army yourself and survive. If you were able to move beyond the pain.

You've really done it this time. You didn't believe that the potion was anything dangerous; otherwise you wouldn't have put it in your wine. You were under the impression that it was just a little charm, something cooked up by a wise woman to make lovesick people sleep better at night. You expected it to put a gleam in your eye and a skip in your step, but not this.

"Put this in your wine and watch your love blossom like a rose in bloom," the old lady had told you as she pressed the vial into your outstretched hand. She had taken your coin readily enough and ignored the skeptical look that your lady's maid, Mircalla, had given her. "Drink deep. Enjoy the fortune of love."

Fortune of love, indeed. You're dying. You can tell just by the look on Maester Florin's face as he tests the remnants of the bottle in the corner with some convoluted apothecary setup he's constructed on your vanity table. You feel as though you have one eye on the bubbling beakers, and another eye on Mircalla as she sits by your bedside and dabs a damp cloth over your forehead.

"Is there anything I can get for you?" she asks quietly, and you know that she means well, but you have to physically stop yourself from smacking her hand away. The cloth is too rough on your forehead, scratching and squelching in your ears with the sound of the water, which smells of ale and sour fruit. Perhaps the bucket she used to bring the water in previously had been used to brew cider, but now it just makes the water stink.

"Nothing else, please," you croak at her with as much grace as you can muster. You lightly grab her wrist, squeeze it. "Thank you, Mircalla. Your services won't be needed anymore today, I think. I would not want you to see this any further."

"I am not certain that I should—"

"No. Go, please—" You just barely manage to turn your head away before a spasm of white-hot pain rips through your body, and you scream as you plant your face into your pillow. Both Mircalla and the maester jump at the shrillness of it.

"They're happening more frequently," you hear her mutter to him as she carries the bucket toward the door. "Shall I send for someone? A septon, perhaps?"

"Not yet, thank you. I must discuss the lady's affliction with her privately."

You close your eyes as if to block out the rush of sound that comes from the hall upon Mircalla opening your chamber door. You know that most— if not all— of your own family members, have retreated to other areas of the Red Keep. You assume that it's because you've been screaming loud enough to wake the dead, but perhaps there are other things happening in the castle that are more important than you managing to poison yourself.

"Maester," you grumble out dryly, your voice crackling in your throat. Now that the water is gone you aren't being assaulted by the smell of old cider, but the air still reeks of incense and acrid fumes from whatever his alchemy wrought. "I know I am dying. Just tell me why."

Maester Florin clears his throat and shifts on his feet, holding the little glass vial in his fingers. "My lady. You say that you bought this from a market stall?"

"Yes."

"And… did the seller tell you precisely what it was?"

"She said it was a potion," you tell him, tensing as a wave of pain swells up but then recedes before it can hit its peak, "to bring fortune in love. Nothing more."

There is a long silence, and you wonder if the maester has gone back to his work. You open your eyes a crack to look at him, but he is still standing in the same spot, seemingly deep in thought. Finally, he chances, "It is… not for me to ask what use you have of this potion…"

You groan, and it has nothing to do with the pain coursing through your body. You can't even gather the strength to cover your face in embarrassment, so you simply close your eyes.

It is common knowledge within the castle walls that Prince Daeron refused your hand in marriage after you were presented to him. He cited 'conflicting personalities' as the reason for his refusal— however, you had never had a complete conversation with Prince Daeron. There was no possible way that your personalities could be in conflict; you'd barely met him. Which meant that there was another reason for his refusal.

You knew that neither the King, nor the Crown Prince or his brother were pleased about it. It caused immense trouble for House Targaryen; your own family is one of the Targaryens' greatest allies, so it would only cause a rift between the two households if you were to be turned away with no good reason. House Targaryen could not afford to lose your family's alliance, and so you were asked to remain in King's Landing for another two weeks— or, to put it more plainly, until Prince Maekar or another of the Targaryens could convince Daeron to change his mind.

All of the muscles in your abdomen lock up, and what feels like a roaring hot fire rushes through your body all at once. You scream again, your back threatening to arch off the bed with your convulsing. It hurts so much. How could it possibly hurt so much? How could this little vial of fluid be enough to make you feel like you're burning alive from the inside out? You can hear your own scream ringing around the stone walls of the chamber, loud enough to startle a couple crows off of the eaves outside the open window.

While you're still curled into a ball on the bed, catching your breath, you hear a swift knock on the chamber door before it creaks open. There, you catch a whiff of spice and musk, rich and full. Your eyes fly open in horror as the source of the scent steps into the room with all the lordly grace of the seven kingdoms.

"Maester Florin," comes Prince Baelor Breakspear's voice, usually grounding and calming, but right now it hits you like a lightning bolt in the chest, knocking the very wind out of your lungs. "There seems to be much commotion. May I inquire as to how the lady is faring?"

Maester Florin bows. "Your Grace, I—"

"No."

The word tumbles out of your mouth before you can even stop it. Everything was manageable, more or less, until the Crown Prince entered the room, but now… now, his scent fills your lungs, his words are in your ears, you can practically taste him on the air, like peppercorn and sweet juniper. Your heart pounds in your ribcage like it's trying to escape, your blood singing with fire and your skin prickling with sweat.

You don't want to think about Prince Baelor right now. Each time he comes to mind, it's with an enormous wave of pain ripping through your entire body, as though the very thought of him causes the affliction to double its efforts to end you. Even so, in your mind you see the image of the Prince's concerned face when he stepped into your sick room one day ago, to make the same inquiry and send for a maester to attend you.

You have to get out. You have to leave before the next wave of pain kills you.

You're so tense that when you try to flop over on the bed, you look like a cockroach trying to right itself. "No. No no no no—" In spite of the pain in your muscles, you grab the corner of the goose down mattress and pull yourself toward the edge of the bed, until your upper body hangs off the side, limp as a wet rag.

"My lady, that is inadvisable—" Maester Florin rushes towards you as soon as your fingers meet the stone floor. "You will hurt yourself without assistance."

"Has she been like this the entire time?" Baelor's voice remains steady, but there is a newer, sharper quality to it: he's displeased. If you were to chance a look at him, you would see the carefully concealed worry beneath his practiced diplomacy, but you cannot bring yourself to look his way for fear that it might end you.

Instead, you continue trying to throw yourself from the bed, while Maester Florin actively tries to put you back in it. "No, Your Grace. Aside from the— the screaming—"

Florin's hand connects with your shoulder, and you just about punch him, the pain is so excruciating. Instead, you whack your hand against the front of his robes and bunch them in your fist to pull him close to your face.

"I asked you a question, Maester," you growl at him with a livid expression, watching his eyes widen at your sudden outburst. "Why is this happening?"

"You consumed a powerful aphrodisiac." He swallows, his eyes nervously flitting in Baelor's direction.

You make the grave mistake of following Florin's gaze, and you look at Baelor. The Hand of the King stands at the foot of your sickbed, his eyes focused on you, and only you. His face remains impassive, yet his fingers twitch as though he is contemplating what he can do to intervene.

You push Maester Florin away and begin frantically clawing your way back up the bed towards the headboard. You can feel it: the next wave of heat and pain, building in your toes and hands, inching down your limbs. "Nonono— Maid and Mother's fucking tits."

You manage to plant your face in the pillow before you let out another scream, but this time it seems worse, like you might actually split in half from the pain. You don't know how much more of it you can take. You've drenched your threadbare chemise in sweat, to the point that it doesn't really preserve your modesty anymore. All it does is stick to your damp, oversensitive skin, irritating you and making the sensory overload that much worse.

Once the pain subsides, you begin to rip at the offending garment in an attempt to draw it over your head. You're babbling nonsense, fragments of sentences and profanities that you don't even remember having in your repertoire, but you can still hear Maester Florin as he rattles off technical explanations to his Prince.

"—was purchased from a market stall— seems to be a tincture of moonbloom and gilliflower— another ingredient I have not yet identified—"

Before you can manage to muscle the useless chemise over your head, a hand settles on your back directly between your shoulder blades.

"Don't do that, my lady."

Baelor's voice is directly over your shoulder, gentle but stern. His hand presses solidly between your shoulders, holding the fabric of your chemise against your overheated flesh. You blink, seeing nothing but the headboard of the bed and cream colored linen, but feeling surrounded by him. His scent, his touch, his voice, so close and so strong, should hurt. It should hurt, because until now the barest touch has been agony, exacerbating the pain and torment.

But Baelor's touch does nothing. It's the oddest thing, enough to make you stop moving and tensing up for just a moment. You are still too hot, your skin is still too sensitive, but the only warmth and sensation that Baelor's hand brings is… comforting. Relief emanates from the single point of contact, bleeding through your body in tangible ripples that seem to stretch out down your spine and along your limbs.

That is, until the relief settles low. And then it becomes something else, something arguably worse than the pain. Your core muscles draw up tight and aching, and the heat and agony is replaced with devastating, almost crippling arousal.

You gasp, your back arching dramatically like that of a frightened cat, and you practically throw yourself away from Baelor with all the grace of a scared animal. Or, at least, you try to leap from the bed, but your body is sluggish, and Baelor Breakspear is nothing if not a quick combatant.

As soon as you try to take off, bouncing up like one of the crows into the air, Baelor's arm comes around your waist and drags you back down to the mattress. Try as you might to wriggle free and fling yourself to the floor, Baelor is strong, a force to be reckoned with.

"Stop this at once." Baelor's voice is still just as firm, but the gentility with which he orders you is… it's awful. He commands you with kindness and patience. "I will not abide you hurting yourself."

"Already hurts," you argue, although it's more of a lie the longer Baelor holds you.

It's as though he has the cure to your ailment within his very palms. But, while he holds you down, cradling you with your back to his chest, your arousal grows to a horrifying degree. You can feel your core muscles contract and release, the wetness between your legs smearing your thighs. There is a very likely chance that you may cum without any other form of stimulation, and you will not be able to survive that amount of humiliation. Perhaps he cannot abide you hurting yourself, but you cannot abide acting like a whore in the Prince of Dragonstone's arms.

You make a small, frantic noise in the back of your throat, and whimper, "I have to go. Let me go. Please. Please— Please. My lord, let me go. I have to go."

The small skirmish nears its end as you plant your hands on his forearm and try to push it away, but your hands are too weak and his arm is like a steel belt holding you down.

"Go where?" His voice is too close to your ear. You shiver in his arms, clamping your thighs together to stave off the new waves of heat coalescing between them. Goosebumps break out across your skin, and you feel your eyes widen. He sounds so fucking calm when he says, "There are several flights of stairs to descend before you reach the ground floor. Your only other option is the window, and you will break every bone in your body no matter which way you decide to go, unless you can walk. Can you walk?"

Only if you're touching me. You grit your teeth. "I have to try."

"No." It's Baelor who says it this time, and in spite of all your fighting, you can't seem to drum up any more of it.

You have to admit that it's a relief to not be in pain anymore, even if you have an entirely different set of problems to contend with, now. You slump forward in his arms, hanging your head as you dumbly squeeze at the fabric of his sleeve. "It is not proper for you to be holding me this way, Your Grace."

"I fear that it would be less proper of me to allow you to throw yourself from the window," Baelor explains rationally. Still, he releases his arm from around your waist, only bringing a hand up to move your hair away from your face. You have to physically fight not to press your overheated cheek into the cradle of his hand, like a cat seeking out affection. He pauses, and then says, "Maester, you said that you had not identified an ingredient of the tincture. Could it be dragon's breath?"

"No, Your Grace." Maester Florin speaks from across the room, where he retreated back to his apothecary setup. "With respect, I am familiar with dragon's breath. I would have been able to identify its presence with relative ease."

"She smells of it." Baelor does not say it unkindly.

"It is possible that while the tincture is in her system, the aphrodisiac effects may occur outwardly as well." Florin pauses, then clarifies, "That is, it will cause her to look, smell, or sound in ways that… some may consider… attractive, Your Grace."

Baelor remains silent. The implication hangs solidly in the air. You notice almost immediately that the maester did not include taste in that assessment, although it lingers in the subtext. The Prince is being effected by your presence, even if it is not to the same degree that you are being effected by his.

"You never answered my question, Maester," you finally interject. "Why is it killing me?"

You feel Baelor's fingers tense on your shoulder just slightly at the question, but he doesn't say anything. Instead, he waits while Florin seems to flounder for a moment, and then gently supplements, "Please answer the lady's question."

Florin looks deeply uncomfortable. "Your Grace, it's… of quite a delicate subject matter. I hesitate to cause yourself or the lady any offense—"

"Seven above, just spit it out, already!" You swipe your arm across your sweaty forehead, desperate to put an end to the hedging about. "I've been laying here dying for ages! What is it, what?"

"That's enough, now." Baelor holds a hand up to silence you, and you almost think you might bite it, except that he has such beautiful hands. You wouldn't want to mar them. You stare unabashedly at his silver ring and the lines on his palm, and you start… salivating.

Gods be good. You're going to eat him.

Florin hesitates only a second more. "This aphrodisiac… although the recipes differ across various regions, it is normally intended as a… a temporary cure for impotence and infertility. It is… I believe it is primarily used in brothels, to make— er… intercourse more— ehm. Pleasurable?"

You blink. "If it's meant to be pleasurable, then why does it hurt so much?" You still refuse to admit that you're already experiencing the so-called pleasurable function— that is, you're soaking the mattress with it the longer Baelor keeps his hand on your shoulder.

"Well, it is usually taken with the intention of… ehm. Using it for its innate purpose, you see. The aphrodisiac will remain in one's system until it has been expelled during copulation."

Baelor drops his hand from your shoulder and takes a step back. You feel the loss like a punch in the gut— quite literally, all of your muscles tighten at once, and you double over in pain.

Through clenched teeth, you say, "So, you mean I have to… to have sex?" The look on the maester's face says everything you need to know. "Or what? What if I don't? I'm— it hurts so much, I can't— I wouldn't be able to do anything… not on my own."

Your face burns at the admission. The humiliation— the irony of it all is unbelievable. The little lady took a love potion and now can't fuck herself properly enough to get it out of her system. The only hand she reacts to is the one she can't have, because it belongs to the Realm.

Florin chews on his lip while he thinks, and then explains, "This particular recipe seems more aggressive than most. That is likely due to the unidentifiable ingredient. The potion is, essentially, a slow acting poison. If it is not used for its intended purpose… I suppose, generally, there will be immense pain and fits for… three days after ingestion. Delirium sets in after about two days. And then—" His eyes flit from you, to Baelor, and back. "Then, my lady, I'm afraid you will die."

One Week Earlier

Admittedly, you knew it wouldn't work the minute you saw Daeron. He looked green about the face, his eyes so red and bleary that you thought he would keel over at any moment. If you hadn't heard him called 'Daeron the Drunken' behind closed doors, you would have tried to somehow politely ask if he was ill. Instead, you just assumed he'd had one too many before showing up to your presentation in court.

No, you aren't surprised that he turned down the offer of marriage. You were, however, surprised that he did not deliver the news himself. Instead, he sent a servant with a note while you were eating breakfast, and left you to bring it before the King. The entire meeting went over about the way you expected. Prince Maekar went to find Daeron, Prince Baelor apologized for his nephew's rudeness and the inconvenience, and the King assured you that all would be made well.

The truth of the matter is that you have no interest in Daeron, anyway. You do not want a husband who refuses to talk to you, even if his drunkenness was not an issue. Daeron has given you no reason to desire him— at this point, the prospect of the marriage would be a matter of your family's social and financial standing, and your own status as a Princess.

Now that the castle is sufficiently in an uproar about Daeron's refusal, you have made your gracious retreat to the gardens. You don't want to be in the castle any longer than you have to. Your family has already suggested leaving King's Landing in two days' time, and even so, it feels like too long to wait.

From the gardens, you look out over Blackwater Bay, watching ships disappear one by one over the horizon. You have no idea how long you sit there, but the sun slowly creeps lower and lower in the sky, until golden light filters through the leaves of the trees.

"My lady." For how large of a man Baelor is, he is light on his feet. You hadn't heard him approach, and so you jump when he addresses you, spinning around to find him standing a respectable distance away from your bench. When you stand to curtsy, he gives you an indulgent smile. "It appears that you've been out here for some time. I only wanted to ensure all was well."

You fight not to raise an eyebrow at the Prince. "You must have been watching me closely, then, Your Grace."

He squints, then pivots to peer up at the Tower of the Hand, looming over the Red Keep. "Not so close, I should think."

You snicker at that, casting your eyes away from him. Baelor is a handsome man, and kind. You find your awareness lingering on him above all others, and you're beginning to fear that your crush is becoming obvious. You feel nervous in his presence in only the best way, as though you may trip over your own tongue and say something entirely unbecoming just as soon as you open your mouth. That feeling is… refreshing, in the right company. But Baelor is heir apparent to the Iron Throne, Protector of the Realm, and you are simply a noble lady much younger than him, with the prospect of marrying his nephew. Any fantasies you indulge can only be that.

"May I join you a moment?" Baelor asks, and despite your internal angst, you cannot bring yourself to refuse him.

Perhaps it would be more proper to have your lady's maid here with you, but Mircalla has other things to be doing now, and so you sit a respectable distance away from Baelor on the bench while staring out to sea and wishing it was not respectable at all.

"In my week at court, I've discovered that I quite like this view," you say after a beat, to puncture the tight shroud of silence that settles between the two of you. "I enjoy watching the waves. I wonder what it's like to be one of them, sometimes. Rolling always towards the shore."

"Or dashing upon the rocks?"

You hum. "At least they know where they're going, rocks or no."

You retreat back into silence with him, and watch him out of the corner of your eye as he twirls his silver ring around his finger idly. He seems to be thinking hard about something, eyes fixed on the horizon with a purpose. It gives you just a moment to admire his profile— his strong, twice-broken nose, his furrowed brow, the touches of silvery gray in his close-cropped dark hair. The small freckle on his cheekbone. The stretch of his neck from beneath his collar, begging for a pair of lips or a tongue to lavish it.

"My lady, allow me to extend my apologies once more for my nephew's behavior," Baelor says finally, and you turn your eyes quickly back out to sea. "It is not the first time Daeron has been irresponsible with delicate matters. Although, it is also the fault of we who expect responsibility from him, that there must be an apology."

"I don't think it's unreasonable to expect responsibility from a prince," you answer without thinking, and then suddenly remember who you are speaking to. "…Your Grace."

"No. On that, we agree." There is a light chuckle in his voice, a slight humor that you imagine is meant to make you feel more at ease. "I do not imagine that Daeron will take long to rectify his behavior, however."

You feel a girlish temper flare within you at the idea that Daeron could rectify anything. You take a long, sobering breath, smelling sea salt and garden flowers on the air.

"You were married, Your Grace. You know quite well how to approach a—" Woman. You want to say it, but you feel it would be too forward. You reconsider, and continue instead with, "a betrothal. Do you believe that anything Daeron has done makes for a… a loving marriage?"

Baelor considers your question with the attention you would expect from the King's Hand. Then, he answers, "I would not hazard a guess as to the sincerity of Daeron's feelings toward you, my lady. Only he can truly know the answer to that. Though, it may bring you some comfort to know that…" He pauses thoughtfully. "My own marriage was not for love. It was arranged, as duty demanded. But, in time, I do believe Jena and I came to love one another, as well as a match made in service to the Crown would allow. Perhaps your marriage to Daeron would be the same."

You sit with his words. Enter into a loveless marriage, having already been besmirched by the man who you would bind yourself to, and hope that love will come in spite of it all. It sounds like a fool's errand.

"Be that as it may, I believe Daeron has already done some irreparable damage to my reputation." When you see Baelor turn his head just barely toward you, you supplement, "My lady's maid, Mircalla, shares with me the gossip I would otherwise be protected from. Sometimes, it can be… harsh. She is honest with me, which is a quality I admire most, you understand." You look down at your hands to find yourself tearing at your own cuticles in your nervousness. "She told me some hours ago that there are rumors floating about as to why— why Daeron would refuse me. Some speculated that we fought upon first meeting. Others suggest that I am pregnant with another man's bastard. Or— Or that we have already slept together, and that Daeron was not pleased with me. Can you imagine…?"

Your voice fades out on a horrified whisper. Although none of these rumors are true, each of them deal a blow to your reputation in turn. Your eyes sting with tears the longer you think of the different stories concocted about you.

"Although it may satisfy me to have Daeron grovel and beg forgiveness, it makes no difference. From now on I will be known as the whore that Daeron refused."

Out of the corner of your eye, you catch Baelor pressing his lips together tightly, raising his chin just a tick. The Prince is quiet for a moment, while you bite back your tears and turn your face away from him.

"You say that honesty is a trait that you value," Baelor remarks, and waits until you nod at him in response. "Then please trust me to be honest. I cannot imagine that anyone would truly believe that of you, my lady. You see, I have had the privilege of knowing you during your time at the Red Keep, and I find you to be exceptional in every way. I can't imagine it, because I cannot fathom anyone viewing you as anything else."

You finally turn to fix him with a watery stare, and find him looking back at you with such solitary focus that you practically wither beneath his gaze. For the first time, you notice that Baelor's eyes are two different colors. The castle is not brightly lit inside, and you have never been close enough to him to notice it, until now. One brown, one violet, they lend even more of a sense of mystery to his handsome features. You have a mind to mention it— you open your mouth to tell him that they're beautiful, but then you think better of it.

He's the Prince of Dragonstone. The Hand of the King. There is nothing that could bring you together.

Baelor holds a hand out to you, his palm facing upward. You peer down at it for a moment before placing your hand delicately in his. Baelor's thumb gently brushes your knuckles, his hand practically dwarfing your own. His palm is so warm, and when he places his other hand atop yours, your skin feels engulfed in flames.

"However," Baelor says, and locks you in his stare, "I can believe that rumors abound. It is an unfortunate effect of being highborn that many will speak on what they know nothing about. But rumors seldom bear any truth. They reflect nothing of your true nature. I assure you that House Targaryen, Daeron included, will understand that."

You blink down at your hand, enveloped in both of his. Daeron. Of course, all of this is to convince you not to lose hope, that Daeron will change his mind, that Daeron will decide to marry you.

"I… thank you for your kindness, Your Grace," you respond, for lack of anything else to say. You know that he's being as fair in his judgment as possible, but he has a duty to the King and to House Targaryen. Gently, you withdraw your hand from his as you add, "Unfortunately, I regret that my family are displeased with Daeron's refusal. I understand that they have designs on leaving King's Landing in two days' time. While I know that both you and Prince Maekar are quite persuasive, I doubt that it provides ample time for Daeron to change his mind. I imagine he wanted to refuse me the moment he saw me."

"Why do you imagine that?"

You look out across Blackwater Bay, thinking back to your first meeting with Daeron. When you curtsyed, the princeling looked as though he was going to either throw up or faint, or both. At the time, you blamed it on the drink. Now, you're not entirely sure.

"I believe he finds me ugly."

Baelor huffs a short laugh through his nose, so quiet and subtle that you would not have caught it if you weren't sitting so close to him. You turn to look at him, appalled, and find him with a soft, reserved smile on his face.

"Well, don't laugh."

"Apologies, my lady." Still, Baelor's mouth curves up at the edges as though he just can't help himself. You watch him tongue the inside of his cheek, half-amused. "I mean no jest. I just find it rather unlikely, to be frank."

"I can't think of another reason why," you explain, finally letting your true emotions ring through. You're hurt. You had given Daeron no reason to dislike you; you had been agreeable and good-natured whenever you spoke to him. "He sent his refusal via courier. He wanted not to speak to me, and he has been quite avoidant throughout my entire visit."

"It's true," Baelor replies smoothly. "Daeron has behaved abominably. But I do know him to be kind, and mannerly when given the opportunity."

You had given Daeron plenty of opportunities. You don't want to argue with Baelor, but you think that he is viewing your situation only from the position of a Prince of the Realm.

"How many hours in the day are there? How many days in a week? Daeron could have come to me during any of them, and I would have recieved him. Kind and mannerly though he may be, Your Grace," you say, looking over at Baelor Breakspear with a challenging fire in your eyes, "no one can force a man to want, any more than they can force a horse to drink."

Baelor's expression remains frustratingly unreadable. You gaze into his mismatched eyes as though they will tell you something, anything about what he's thinking, but there is nothing there to betray him.

"Daeron would be a fool not to want you," Baelor tells you, his voice low and edged with a finality that makes you want to take it for fact. "Whether he is or is not, I cannot say. Only time will tell."

"Do you say that as a man? Or as the Hand of the King?" you ask him more pointedly than you should.

"Both."

You gaze at each other for a long time, long enough that the breeze picks up and sweeps your hair up in its gust. You watch Baelor's jaw work— as small of a gesture though it is, it is the only thing about him that tells you he's contemplating something. He is no open book, your Prince, and it frustrates you as much as it seduces you. It sets you daydreaming, watching him openly in the cool evening air as his mouth curves vaguely toward a frown. Down by his knee, he worries the silver ring on his finger.

Then, Baelor lifts his hand, and with a touch so featherlight it's almost inconsequential, he brushes your hair away from your brow and tucks it behind your ear. His skin barely even meets yours— you can explain it away as him just being chivalrous, just keeping your hair from flying into your eyes. But it's enough to make your heart lurch up into your throat, nonetheless.

"It's late," you mutter, now that the sun has dipped below the horizon and the garden is bathed in shadow. You swallow the lump in your throat, trying to regain your composure as you drop your gaze.

"It is."

"It's getting dark."

"Yes," Baelor agrees, then finally looks away from you. He squints out across the bay, staring into the distance at the absence of sun. "The dragon's breath will be blooming, now."

"Dragon's breath?" You shake your head. "I'm sorry, Your Grace, I have not heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It's a night-blooming flower, native to Dorne. There is a crop of them not far off, if I recall. Come, I can show it to you." Baelor stands and offers you his hand once again, and this time, you do not hesitate to take it.

He leads you, arm-in-arm, down the garden path toward the godswood. Just as the treeline begins to thicken in the gloaming, Baelor brings you to a stop.

"Just there," he murmurs, guiding you to investigate a shrub low to the ground, littered with trumpet-shaped red blooms. As he stoops to pluck one from the shrub, he says, "Dragon's breath. They are sweetly fragranced, but do not be mistaken. They can be quite deadly if eaten."

"I'll make sure not to put them in my tea, then," you tell him as you take the flower he extends to you. It smells slightly of jasmine and woodsmoke when you hold it beneath your nose, careful not to let it touch your lips. "It's lovely."

"Yes," Baelor says, watching you closely. His eyes linger on yours for an extended moment, a gentle smile curving his mouth. Then, a serene look crosses his face. "It is said that the First Men would ingest it to convene with the old gods. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen, but I would not advise it, at any rate."

"No, I'd imagine not." You spend a second twirling the little red blossom, the same shade as the red thread in his doublet, the colors of House Targaryen. Quite suddenly, you observe, "They're your favorite."

Baelor is quiet for a moment. "What makes you so certain?"

"You thought of them first. You could have shown me anything in the entire Keep, but you showed me these. Obviously, they're important to you." You peer up at him, and you can't bite back your smirk. "I'm right, aren't I?"

Baelor huffs a small laugh, the second one you've managed from him. The sound of it warms the pit of your stomach. "You're rather sure of yourself."

"That isn't a 'no.'"

"Mm. It's not a 'yes,' either."

You crack a grin. "Okay. Don't tell me, then. But I'm right."

This time, when Baelor tilts his head downward, you catch him smiling, a flash of teeth and a dimple indenting his bearded cheek. It is imperfect, crooked and so very human. He hides it well, but you're able to see it before he gentles his face into a careful mask once again.

He doesn't know that you see it. It will remain your secret, a fascination to look back on when you're in need of comfort. You made the Prince of Dragonstone smile. A real smile.

"Thank you, Your Grace," you tell him quietly, still pinching the blossom in your fingers. "For your company. And your hospitality."

"The pleasure is mine." Baelor looks as though he may leave the conversation there, but then he adds, "One more word before we part, my lady, if you please?"

"Certainly." You step a touch closer to him. A cricket sounds somewhere in the brush. The night is beginning to wake around you, the longer you linger with the Prince. You wonder if you could draw the moment out long enough to see the dawn.

Baelor does not seem overly concerned about it. "I should like to extend an invitation to your family, if you believe they would be willing. Perhaps, rather than departing King's Landing in two days' time, they would agree to remain another fortnight?"

You blink at him. Another two weeks? For what, exactly?

Baelor answers your unasked question, as though he can see directly into your mind. "So that we may have ample time for Daeron to correct his mistake. Of course."

"Of course," you echo. You feel clean out of air in your lungs, stunned for something to say. "Your Grace, I— I would say that my family would have to answer that invitation for themselves. I cannot speak for the lot."

He affords you the most patient of smiles. "I would like to hear your answer before all, if you don't mind."

"Oh."

Another two weeks at the Red Keep. Two weeks for the rumors to spread, to converge and morph into even worse ones. Two weeks for Daeron to insult you by ignoring you, tarnish your reputation by refusing you a second time. Conversely, two weeks for Daeron to decide that he may tolerate your company and accept you.

You look down at the flower in your fingers. Two weeks to search for the sight of Baelor in the halls and in the councils. Two weeks to speak to him again. Two weeks to indulge in that wickedest of fantasies: that you might fall in love with Baelor Breakspear.

"Yes," you tell Baelor, quiet enough that it threatens to be spirited away on the breeze. "Yes, if my family is willing. I would be glad to stay another fortnight, at Your Grace's pleasure."

Baelor nods at you graciously. "Then I will see to your family's response in the morning. Thank you for your acceptance, my lady."

"Thank you for your invitation." You tilt your face towards the sky. "It is quite dark. I fear that I will have trouble on my way back, should I remain any longer."

"Indeed. The fault is mine, entirely. Allow me to walk you to the holdfast."

You make the journey back to the holdfast in comfortable silence. You find that you do not feel even remotely unsafe as long as Baelor is near; otherwise, you would never chance to linger outside the holdfast, even within the castle walls, after dark. But Baelor's presence is a relief. You would trust him with your life. You would probably trust him with even more than that, given the chance.

"My Prince."

You pause in the golden torchlight, only bright enough to illuminate the bridge over the dry moat. Down in the pit there is nothing but blackness, and a sense that if you stepped too close it would suck you in. Turning to Baelor, you have the dragon's breath blossom still in your fingers, and lift it to your face to take in its scent again— sweet, smoky, like a garden aflame. You can understand why he is taken with this particular flower.

Baelor watches you expectantly, a respectable distance away again, as though every part of your conversation this evening had been a diplomatic mission. Cleaning up his nephew's mess. Doing what is right for the Realm.

The idea rattles you. It cuts you deep and hits something within that you thought you'd left in your girlhood— covetousness. The desire to be shown favoritism, attention. To be wanted, not simply tolerated. You are not a girl anymore, but the King's Hand seems to bring her out of you as though it were second nature. You feel the urge to try to bring the boy out of him, which may be an insurmountable task. He is a prince, a warrior and a lord of refined poise and sophistication. But you have never been one to shy away from a challenge.

You step closer to him. Baelor does not move away, but follows you with his eyes, a reserved expression on his face. Perhaps he is trying to anticipate what you may do, but he does not show any signs of backing down. You imagine that he wouldn't, even if you threw yourself at him unceremoniously. If you kissed him like you desperately want to, open-mouthed and wet.

But you are not improper, or desperate. You are a lady, and well-versed in flattery and elegant flirtation. You take the dragon's breath, and you tuck the green stem into the gap between the silk fabric of his doublet and the Hand of the King pin that adorns his chest. It flares up from the pin, as though the fingers of the hand were holding it tight to his heart.

"Keep this safe," you say, your smile hiding your desirous stare. Your fingers rest against his chest for just a second longer than is proper, but you pull them away quickly enough, you think. "I would hate for it to go to waste."

Baelor's eyes soften. "Certainly, my lady."

"You are quite a wonderful man, my Prince." Your innermost thoughts become physical things, they turn balmy on your tongue. "If you may pardon my saying so. I have wanted to for some time, but… the opportunity did not present itself."

Baelor's brows raise just the slightest, but he does not admonish you. "I thank you for the compliment, my lady. You are very kind, indeed." A pause, a breath on the wind. "Lovely."

You stay there, held captive in his gaze. One violet, one brown. Finally, in spite of your sense of self preservation, you tell him, "Your eyes… They really are very beautiful, you know."

You do not wait for his answer or reaction before you bid him goodnight, and all but flee into the holdfast. And so, you are not able to see the way he watches after you with a lingering smile, and a longing gaze in those very eyes.

Present

Baelor sends Maester Florin away with an order to return on the morrow, and to alert the servants that you should not be disturbed. It is not without your notice that after he ushers the maester out the chamber door, he bolts it with a final clang that reverberates in your oversensitive ears.

You lay on the mussed bedsheets, curled into a ball. You are sideways in the bed; there is no point in putting yourself to rights, because the moment the next wave of pain hits you will become a writhing animal once again, a slave to the torrents of agony. Through the stringy, damp strands of your loose hair, you watch Baelor's back.

He leans against the door with both hands pressed flat to the wood, head bowed in thought. Or, is it distress? Perhaps both. You don't quite know what to make of his reaction to your situation, at all.

What you do know is that you feel a wave of heat flash through your body so fast and so sharp that all of your muscles tense at once, and you yelp from the blast of pain. Your head pounds as though your heartbeat originates from it.

Baelor turns at the sound of your anguish, and his face pinches at the sight of you, a small, trembling heap on the bed. "I will fetch Daeron."

"No."

"My lady, please."

He approaches the end of the bed, but you can't do more than follow the sight of his face with your eyes, until it passes too far into your periphery, and you must drop them to his belt. The sight of Baelor's belt inches away from your face is not something that helps your situation at all, however, and so you shut your eyes before your body manages to torment you further.

"Daeron is… unreliable, yes. And irresponsible. I know that you harbor wounded feelings towards him at the moment, but…" Baelor hesitates. Clearly, he knows that he is not making the best case for his nephew. His eyes roam your disconsolate form, and then he finishes, "But he is your best chance at survival. I am certain that he will be agreeable, at least in this pursuit."

"Do you even know if his cock works?"

Baelor is eerily silent. You don't open your eyes to look at him until you feel the mattress shift, and you find that he's sat on the foot of the bed, his back to you once again. His hands loosely grip the edge of the mattress on either side of him, and his posture betrays no real emotion. It is only when you notice the redness of his ears that you realize your words must have unnerved him.

"I would not know, my lady," Baelor answers quietly, after a moment. "Daeron has sired no bastards, as far as I am aware. His drunkenness may prove an issue, but questionable odds are better than none."

"I don't want Daeron. He doesn't want me."

"He is to be your betrothed." Baelor's words are flat, even. Clinical. "I understand that if he had not refused you, then perhaps you would not have resorted to… other methods—"

"I didn't take the fucking thing for him," you finally snap, gritting your teeth against the pain throbbing in your head and in your abdomen.

Baelor's voice surrenders to something inquisitive. "Then, why did you take it?"

Another moment of silence. Baelor is too still, his hand pressed flat to the mattress in front of your face. You stare, unblinking, at the glint of the silver ring on his finger, bearing the insignia of House Targaryen.

"I thought… perhaps there was someone else for me." You take in a shallow breath. "Although, I think my rash decision making outweighs my judgment."

Baelor turns and gives you the most indulgent smile you think you've ever received, even though there is immense pain behind his eyes.

"If you will not have Daeron… perhaps I can call another for you. Ser Duncan may be willing," he suggests, his voice just above a whisper. "Ser Duncan is a good and honorable man. I trust him with my life, and I would trust him with yours."

You stare at him in shock for a moment. "Oh… Oh, yes, of course. Ser Duncan. Ser Duncan. Why didn't I think of that? Ser Duncan the Tall." Baelor remains stoic, nonplussed at your sarcasm. Your stomach cramps up as you blather, "Or, better yet, why not call Ser Donnel as well? The entire King's Guard, even? Drag me down to the Great Yard, maybe they can take turns, pass me off—"

"Enough," Baelor finally snaps, shooting you a stern look. "I will hear no more of that sort of talk from you."

"Or what? Your Grace," you return with a wicked glare. "I will not be foisted off to the first man you think of."

Lit up with the fury of a thousand suns now, and sweating enough to show it, you push yourself up on wobbly limbs and tumble off of the bed onto the bearskin rug on the floor. You land on your aching stomach with a loud, "OOMF," and all the air painfully leaves your lungs.

"Stop this, now." Baelor sounds weary, as though he's bored of a game you're playing.

"No. Leave me." You crawl clumsily across the rug towards the chamber window. "I'm not going to lay there, dying in agony and— and losing my mind. I'd rather throw myself out of the tower. Let me die with quiet dignity and grace."

"Quiet dignity and grace," he eventually repeats, incredulous. He hasn't even gotten up from the end of the bed, but just watches you, fascinated with your display. "You know, I fathered two boys. Theatrics don't impress me, especially when negotiating."

"Yes, remind me again of how you're so amazing at everything, like— fathering sons, and— negotiating," you growl, huffing with the exertion of your endeavor. "Because you're— you're so fucking perfect and chivalrous. The Hammer. With your— fucking— giant, veiny— host of Dornish spearmen."

"My, you're verbose."

It's only when you threaten to tip the table by the window, as you attempt to haul yourself up to your feet, that Baelor rises. He reaches you in three quick strides, snatches you about the waist and throws you over his shoulder, just to carry you back to the bed. Your small amount of spite-fueled energy spent, you merely hang on him like a sack of straw.

Baelor lays you down so that your head hits the pillow, your hands thrown above your head. "Are you quite finished?" he asks sharply, looming over you, his eyes boring into yours. His jaw set, he states, "I am trying to save your life."

"And I am no one's whore." You stare defiantly up into the eyes of Baelor Targaryen, willing him to yield.

And, to your surprise, he does. His eyes soften, his jaw untensing as he lets out a slow, defeated sigh. "No, you are not."

He sits back, his hands still pressed into the mattress on either side of you. You miss his proximity like a lost limb.

"Forgive me. I have been presumptuous in my suggestions. I would never force you into any situation against your will or desires." A pause. "But I cannot sit idle and let you die. I beg you, my lady. Name someone, anyone, who you would trust in this matter. Someone who you would accept. I will bring them to you without question."

You gaze up at him tearfully, and feel another wave of heat blooming in your hands and feet. You press your tongue to the back of your teeth and take in the sight of him, so poised and regal, even when faced with an unmanageable task.

"Baelor."

Your hand— small, clammy with sweat and shaky from the fatigue in your limbs— reaches out and finds his— large, warm, grounding. You pull at his hand, and he lets you. His head turns just slightly, watching you as you cradle his large palm in your two hands and press it firmly against your chest, just below your collarbone.

Whatever this magic is, be it gods sent or gods cursed, it reacts the second his skin touches yours. Your entire body sparks alive with sensation— but rather than the unrelenting heat and pain of the poison coursing through your veins, it's solace. You let out a soft moan at the feeling, like gentle sunlight flooding through your body the moment that his fingers lace with yours.

"My Prince," you whisper shakily, and feel his fingers flex just slightly against your chest. Your heart pounds against your ribcage so hard that you know he feels it. He can probably feel the unbelievable heat radiating off of you. "It's— I feel so much pain. I hear the voices of the guards on the ramparts and I taste— I taste the salt from the sweat on your brow. I feel as though I will rip in two when the waves come, and nothing has made it better except— except you. When you touch me. Your hands on me… it's you."

Baelor is quiet, listening to your rambling speech. Tears stream from your eyes. It is both a relief and a terror to confess what you feel to him.

Then, Baelor removes his hand from your chest and brings it to cup the side of your face. The tenderness of his touch strips you to the bone. You feel like you're breathing only for him, like he commands the very air that gives your body function. His thumb brushes your damp hair away from your face, wiping away your tears with it, and he gazes down at you with such care, such affection.

He says your name softly, but there's a touch of sadness in it. He closes his eyes, breathes in long and slow through his nose. "I cannot do what you ask. You must name another."

"Please." You make a frail noise in the back of your throat, feeling as though you may begin sobbing in a moment. You shake your head, lifting one hand to clutch at Baelor's wrist.

"I cannot," he insists, although he doesn't pull his hand away from you. You don't know if he is bearing in mind what you told him— that his touch is the only thing that keeps the pain from tormenting you. There is palpable tension in his expression, his brow furrowed and his mouth set in a firm line. "I am the King's Hand and heir to the throne. If you were to be gotten with my child, it would cause a scandal."

"I am already rumored to be pregnant, remember? House Targaryen has weathered far worse than a bastard child," you remark weakly.

"But you have not. I would not dishonor you in such a way." When you pout and look as though you may argue, he continues, "Whatever rumors circulate about you, we need not give them merit."

"So you would have me carry another man's bastard, instead?"

Baelor snaps his mouth shut, his expression turning suddenly guarded. He makes as though he may pull his hand back as he turns away from you, and your stomach drops.

"Baelor, no."

You clap your own hand over his, turning to nuzzle into the warmth of his palm. On instinct, you plant your lips against his skin, and it's as though something savage bursts alive within you. Some greedy, desperate thing takes hold as your eyes drift shut, with each breath tasting the warmth and spice of his skin as though your tongue were flush to it.

"Don't let go," you whisper into the cradle of his hand. "If you let go of me the pain will return, and I can't— I can't bear it anymore, Baelor, I can't—"

"I know. I won't let you go, darling." He sounds strained even as he reassures you, but he doesn't remove his hand.

There is a long silence, while you practically lose yourself in the feeling of just… giving in. You relax into the glowing feeling, hot pleasure sweeping through your body, up your limbs and into your core, replacing any pain that had been there before. It's glorious. It distracts you, pulls your mind away from the reality of the situation— that you cannot simply have him hold your face and hope that the poison works its way out of your system on its own.

Without meaning to, you drag your parted lips along his fingers, as though exploring them just with your mouth. His fingers are so long. Slender and dextrous, calloused from hours of sword training. You feel each bump and ridge against your mouth and you're trying so hard not to sink your teeth in. Your lower lip catches on the band of his silver ring and draws back, letting the smallest flash of your teeth graze his skin.

You hear his breath catch, and your eyes fly open, suddenly aware of what you're doing. Baelor watches you from the corner of his eye as you press your face into his touch, his jaw locked up tight, his free hand a fist where it rests on his knee.

You feel as though you should apologize, but you can't bring yourself to. Apologize for what? For desiring him? Wanting him? He's so handsome. His differently colored eyes study you, a painful reminder of it. You stare back at him, imagining what it would be like to trace his face with your lips, as well.

"You told me once that Daeron would be a fool not to want me," you say, and you take a purposefully slow breath, because if you don't you may start heaving for air. "Are you a fool, my Prince?"

Baelor lets out a soft sigh, and looks quickly away from you. His fingers twitch slightly against your cheek. He's silent for a long time, long enough that you begin to fear you've misread him, confused his kindness for something deeper.

But then he tilts his head down, and without looking at you, he says quietly, "I am not, my lady. Though, whether my desire in itself is foolish, I have no idea. I may be doomed for it."

"Then… perhaps we are both doomed," you admit, your eyes practically dancing over his features. "I can't think around my desire for you. All I know is that you— you are all that I want in the world. Scandals and suspicious potions be damned."

"Gods above." You watch Baelor roll his eyes toward the ceiling. When he returns his eyes to you, it's with a look of solemn admiration. He strokes his knuckles along the curve of your jaw. "I'm beginning to believe you exist simply to torment me."

You allow yourself to fashion a wobbly smile. "Me? Torment the Breakspear? Never."

Baelor huffs a quiet laugh, looking away from you in a manner that is almost… shy. You can see his jaw flex beneath his short beard and a rosy flush come over his face, and—

You just made Baelor blush.

You lay with that, watching him in the silence. His hand drifts from grazing your jaw to resting flat against your collarbone again, and you lift your own to trace your fingers languidly along the back of his palm. You can hear his breath come out shaky at the light contact, and it's just enough to give you the clarity to really, truly think about this.

His hands on you could be enough, you realize. You practically came the moment that he touched you, and if this magic can just be expelled from your system by an orgasm, it might be that he doesn't need to do anything more than just… put his hands on you. It feels good enough as it is— the heat of him, the smell and the feeling of him, are all adding to the pleasurable fire burning in your core. But, if you felt his hands go… down…

"Baelor."

His name comes out of your mouth faster than it should, and he snaps his eyes to you with a look of sudden concern, as though he expects to find something wrong. But nothing really is wrong— at least nothing that hasn't been wrong to begin with.

"What if—" You bite your lip, trying hard not to move your hips in any way that could startle him off. Your cunt throbs just at the thought of feeling his hands on your body with no barrier. "What if you just… touched me?"

Baelor seems to think your question over, searching your face for any kind of deception. But you simply stare at him openly, your eyes pleading, heart pounding as you feel his thumb stroke once over the hollow of your throat.

And then, his eyes drift down. They linger on the swell of your breast, heaving under the thin, practically sheer linen of your chemise. Everything is too intimate, too bright in the mid-afternoon sun slanting through the open window, illuminating you. Gods, it feels like you're already naked before him with the way he just stares, undressing you in his mind. It hits you directly between the legs, and you clench your thighs together to stave off the rush of arousal.

Your breath hitches, and Baelor snaps his eyes back up to your face, as though he's just remembered himself. "I am touching you."

"Y-You—" Your breath hiccups in your chest with how hard you're trying not to gasp for air. "You don't know how cl-close I am to— to—"

You clap your hands over your face, feeling a flush of heat throughout your body that has nothing to do with his hand on you. It's hard enough to be begging him for some kind of stimulation, but to tell him how close you are to an orgasm just from his touch is mortifying.

Not for the first time, Baelor seems to be able to see inside your mind without you voicing your thoughts. "Tell me," he plies gently, his thumb sweeping across your damp skin. He remains so composed, even when you feel like dissolving into thin air. "What is it that you feel… when I touch you?"

He's still hesitant, but his voice holds a curiosity that he hadn't made manifest before now. Everything in you winds up tight at the sound. He's not just indulging you, he wants to know. You know that he's trying to be proper— Baelor is a man of restraint, of infinite patience and regard for honor and decency. You know that he's clinging to his morals even while trying to rationalize the problem set before him.

But he bolted the chamber door, you remember. Behind your closed eyelids, beyond the sound of your heavy breathing and his, more measured, you can hear the clang of the bolt reverberate in your ears all over again. His hands pressed to the solid oak, his head bowed in thought. Why would he have locked you in together? Unless…

"It feels like sunrise after a frost." Your voice is muffled behind your hands, because you refuse to look at him while you say such things. You don't think you could bear to see his face, as you confess, "It is as though all of this poison in me changes, and it becomes heavenly. I feel… when you touch me… as though my body is not my own, but yours to— to do with as you please. To mold to your whim. And I would let you, my lord, I— I would have you do anything that you desired to me, and I would ask you only to do it again. I could glut myself on your touch and it would not be enough, it undoes me in ways I cannot explain, I… You set your hand upon my back and I thought… I thought I was going to c-cum—"

You choke off on a quiet, humiliated sob. So there it is, out in the open now, with no way to take it back. Baelor is still frustratingly silent, but you refuse to pull your hands away from your face to look at him, because you can't find it within yourself to be clever or brave anymore.

"You wouldn't even need to— to deflower me," you continue, blathering now, unleashing any thought that comes to mind as a way to fill the silence. "It would hardly even be anything that would be significant to anyone, just— just lay your hand upon me, and I might— I could—"

"Where?"

All things stop at once. Your thoughts, your breath, your heartbeat. You freeze up like he has just found a way to completely obliterate you with one word. You take a sharp inhale to kickstart your lungs again, and hesitantly curl your fingers away from your eyes to look at him.

Baelor's eyes are transfixed on your face, unwavering, his expression open and earnest. He waits for you to answer him, but when it becomes apparent that you can't, he supplements, "Show me where you would have me touch you."

You consider him for just a second, just long enough for the gravity of his words to register. He wants you to show him. It occurs to you to tell him that he could touch you anywhere beneath your chemise— your stomach, your hip, your knee— and it may yield the same results. But you don't.

You take Baelor's hand, the one resting on your chest so steadily, and you move it. He allows you to, watching you all the time, the pupils of his mismatched eyes blown wide. With one hand you pull at the fabric of your chemise, tugging it up your legs, while you guide his own beneath it. As soon as his hand touches the plush skin of your thigh, you both gasp in tandem— but for different reasons.

For you, it's the burst of sensation, the sharp arcing pleasure that shoots up your spine and grips at something tight and cruel in your core, making you stifle a moan. You were right. The proximity of his touch to where you want it most makes all the difference— you fist at the gathered fabric in your hand and try not to rock your hips toward his touch, but your pussy throbs threateningly at the heat of him so close to it.

Baelor is simply startled. His brow shoots up, his jaw slack as he breathlessly murmurs, "Oh, my sweet girl."

You're drenched down your thighs, a fact that you had failed to mention to him. His fingers slip through the wetness there, feeling it against your skin, and his breath leaves him in shock.

"I— I wasn't like this, before." You take a shaky inhale, and tremors travel through your entire body. "Before you."

It's as though something within him cracks, and all of his inner turmoil is laid bare before you, etched across his features like a carving on stone. The fear, the worry, the frustration, all manifest in his pinched brow and the dip of his mouth, the tremble of his breath. But there is something else there, too— raw desire, sharp as a knife's edge. It's in his eyes, in the way that his shoulders draw tight, in the set of his jaw. It's in his hands, the way that his fingers shift and press into the pillowy flesh of your thigh.

Baelor's thumb sweeps along the curve of your inner thigh, the same affectionate, instinctive gesture that it had been as he laid his hand on your chest. But on this part of your body it is more suggestive, and perhaps ill-advised. His thumb glides too close to the core of you and, quite by accident, he discovers that you are bare of any smallclothes.

Your gasp is sudden and loud. The brush of his finger against your bare sex is enough to make you jump, your hand clamping down on his wrist desperately as pleasure dances like pure dragonflame over your nerves. Your cunt pulses, and a feeble moan breaks from you. "Baelor, please."

He halts, and something changes in his expression. Call it the end of resolve, or a breaking point. There is no hiding anything from him now, you know. He has seen everything, knows what you are laying with.

"No more begging," Baelor finally says, and it's a gentle order. This man who has led armies, who has killed and fought to defend his realm, speaks to you with infinite tenderness. "I have you now, darling. I am for you. You need not beg anymore."

I am for you. He is your knight, upholding his vows, taking up his sword to defend you.

You shiver to feel his grip on your thigh tighten just a bit, a final test of his resolve before he moves it. There is a shift beneath the white linen of your chemise, and then Baelor's knuckle drags slowly through your soaked folds.

Your breath stalls in your chest as your mouth drops open. His touch turns you golden. Your body seems to light up from the inside, fresh heat blooming low in your stomach. Heart pounding in your chest, you stutter, "Oh, fuck— fuck, Baelor, this— this is too much, you don't have to—"

He shushes you, and the look in his eyes threatens to undo you more than his finger tracing a line through your cunt. There is a fire in his eyes that was not there before. The fire of a dragon, of a Targaryen. His gaze feels almost like a physical caress as he says, "Hush, now. I do this willingly."

Fuck. His voice is deep, rich and soft as velvet as he stares at you with that unwavering intensity, touching you between your legs. Your Prince. Touching you between your legs. It completely arrests your ability to think. He is slow, methodical in his movements as he is with everything; he glides the length of his finger through your pussy without rush, letting you feel each bump and ridge as they pass over your clit.

With your heightened senses, you can hear how wet you are, and the salacious sound of his fingers gliding through the mess you've made is enough to drive you up the wall. He begins drawing circles around your clit with the tip of his finger, and you melt into the mattress. You feel as though your pleasure and your need have turned you inside out, bitten chunks from your sensibilities.

He's too beautiful. The thought plagues you more and more. Baelor is too handsome, too competent with his strong hands and too gentle with his lust-roughened words. Gods above, you feel like you could cum— you should have cum by now, with how badly your cunt spasms under his attention, how hypersensitive your clit is as he continues tracing languid circles around it.

Then Baelor dips down and sinks a single finger into you, where you leak and ache desperately for him. Your thighs widen to give him more room, and he takes it, pushes in to the knuckle and gives you a practiced crook of his finger.

A sound rips from you— something animalistic and completely unfamiliar, a moan from the very depths of your fevered being. You tighten a fist in the tangled bedsheets and turn your face to the side, trying to hide from him while he makes you unravel at the seams.

"Look at me, darling." At the hushed rasp of his voice, your cunt clamps down hard on his finger. He pauses, halting all movement until you turn your head to open your eyes to him.

What you find in his face is enough to move the endless soul in you. You have spent two weeks etching Baelor's face into your memory— his careful, poised demeanor, the way he steadies his expression to keep it neutral, tactful. You know his cautious smiles, and you know his deeper one, the one that you hold tight to your chest like a secret. You know his kindness, and you know his disappointment.

But you've never seen this. This unbridled lust, his every feature touched by the amount of desire he has for you. He gazes at you like he feels everything you do, and more. Baelor inclines his head, and he appears so composed, as he always does, but his chest is heaving— you can see it and you can hear it, in the rattle of his inhale, in the obvious rise and fall of his shoulders.

"I will have you look at me when I do this," Baelor tells you, his eyes so dark and hungry that the very glint in them is wicked. It unnerves you, runs quick and hot through your veins. "I will have you see all that I give, and know it is yours to keep. Only yours. Do you understand?"

You swallow hard. "Yes, my lord."

"Baelor." His voice is quiet when he corrects you.

"Baelor."

He flexes his finger within you and your face crumples, your thighs shaking where they lay spread on the mattress. His free hand comes to rest on your thigh and makes to pull your legs further apart, prevents you from moving it back to center. It is not a rough or demanding move, but it conveys his message. Stay. Don't move away.

Baelor whispers something in a language you don't understand— High Valyrian, most like, but it makes no difference that you cannot speak it. It sounds warm, seductive in his throat, and a tremble rolls through your body at the sound of it.

Soft moans fall from your lips as he adds a second finger beside the first, and your hips nearly leave the bed. You take him in so easily, a quiet breath of disbelief leaves him, and he shifts, giving you strokes that have you fighting to keep your eyes open and fixed on him. A gentle back and forth, a hot press against the wall of you. Your body doesn't know how to react— hot then cold, trembling and then still, rocking against him and then backing away as though it's too much and not enough all at once.

His silver signet ring grazes you, hard to offset his softness. You're so close, you can taste your release on the back of your tongue like the entire ocean is rising within you. You grab at the pillow beside your head, ripping at it between fingers that don't know what to do with themselves. Your eyes clench shut at the sudden onslaught, your head tilted back on the pillow.

"Look at me," Baelor reminds you, his voice gently commanding.

Quick as he says it, you snap your eyes open again and find his fixed on you, dark and fathomless. There is a sudden surge, a quickening in your breath. "Oh, gods, Baelor—"

It looms like some wretched, evil thing come to destroy you. You snatch at his forearm frantically, trying to warn him, but unable to form words.

"I know. I feel it," he soothes, a palm moving sweetly against your thigh. He squeezes you there, a reassuring touch even while his other hand takes you apart. "You don't have to hold on anymore. I've got you. I've got you."

Your hips lurch towards him, your vision whiting out. His fingers hit a spot both perfect and devastating inside of you, and your mind's focus is whittled down to a fine point, aimed at him.

"Cum for me, lovely girl," Baelor orders. So you do.

He remains constant. Even when the wave rises and breaks within you, even when you writhe and let out a ragged cry, the sound torn from a hidden, previously unknown part of you. Through the seemingly unending torrents, Baelor remains your anchor. He does not change. He does not move. He does not let you go.

You turn pliant in the aftershocks. He gentles his movements— he does not stop them altogether, but turns them lighter, slower. His thumb brushes over your clit, and you jolt hard enough to convince him to finally withdraw his hand.

Baelor watches you closely, his darkened eyes focused on yours, but that familiar tenderness is returning, creeping across his features. The span of his fingers curves around the meat of your thigh, measured breaths leaving parted lips. His other hand is drenched with your fluids, still held cautiously between your legs as though hesitant to pull back entirely.

"How do you feel?" He asks then, softly.

You blink at him, and then up at the canopy over the bed. You're still shaking, your brain fizzling and humming from the orgasm he'd given you. "I don't… I don't know, I— that's the first time anyone has ever— done that…"

Baelor stays quiet for a beat, a small, affectionate smile curling the corners of his mouth. Then, he clarifies, "Do you think that it worked?"

"Oh." Yes, that. You had somehow forgotten that there is an ulterior motive to all of this, that it is not just sex for the sake of sex. "We… We could check?"

The words leave your mouth meekly. You don't want him to let you go. You don't want him to go away. Yes, you want the poison to be gone from your system, but you are greedy. You want him to stay with you and take you until morning. You want him to keep looking at you like that, like he'd swallow you whole, bones and all.

Unfortunately, Baelor listens. He slowly lifts his hands away from you, leaving you entirely. For a few calm seconds, nothing happens. Your body is still awash with the remnants of your orgasm, your skin still tingling with the memory of his touch. You lay there for a moment, thinking, was that it?

But then you look at Baelor again. He stares down at his hand— the one drenched in your arousal. It shines in the mid-afternoon light, strings of it threading between the parting of his fingers as he… feels it. Rubs his fingers against each other to test the silkiness, pulls them apart just to watch it web across the gap in thin strands.

You watch, wide-eyed, as he returns his gaze to your face. And he lifts his fingers to his mouth to suck your wetness from them. His eyes, amber and violet, trained on your expression until they flutter shut, and he groans.

"Oh— gods on fire."

Your whole body tenses up with the fury of it. The pain. It assaults you worse than before, with a ferocity that scares you. There's so much of it that it is not enough to scream— you can't even breathe for it. You curl into yourself and roll, the muscles of your stomach and core pulling taut.

"No. No no no— Baelor." You whimper, blindly throwing your hand back to grab at him. You find a wrist— left or right, you don't know— and pull so that his hand smacks down onto your flank with a lewd sounding slap. "Didn't work. It didn't— fuck."

"All right. All right, my love. Come here." Baelor's hand slides around your waist to gather you into his lap. You slide across the bedsheets with your spine bent into a crescent, knees pulled to your chest. "I've got you. I'm right here, just relax." You jerk involuntarily in his hold, an elbow catching him in the ribs. He grunts, adjusting his arm around you, curling himself over you like a shield. "Relax. Relax."

You will the tension in your muscles to release one by one. You imagine yourself absorbing into him, your head resting on his strong thigh as you allow your body to feel him. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, the distracting warmth radiating from the space between his legs. The smell of him there, strong and sweetly arousing. The taste of something on the back of your tongue— sweat and something muskier, something more masculine.

Him. The taste of him, through silk, through smallclothes. Your head spins, and you fight not to turn your head further into his lap, not to nuzzle into the crotch of his breeches and just breathe him into your lungs.

"Stupid fucking sex potion," you mumble angrily once the pain recedes. "Secret ingredient. Bullshit."

"All right," Baelor says again to quiet you, laying his hand on the crown of your head soothingly. You imagine that he understands what you're feeling, though, because he doesn't argue.

"What do we do?" Your voice is thin, a barely-there thing in the quiet.

"We continue."

You turn your head. Baelor is gazing down at you, eyes glittering with affection. He exudes a calmness that you cannot feel, even though your overwrought body relaxes into him. "You want to… continue?"

"We need not stop at one." Baelor pets your head, shrugs a shoulder. "I wouldn't, even under normal conditions."

You stare at him, aghast. "Your Grace."

He gives you a wry smile. "We don't know what this 'secret ingredient' is. Perhaps it needs… more. We can continue until it takes." Another pause. "You'll have to forgive me for my choice of words. It's my first time experiencing the… joys of a sex potion, as well."

You snort incredulously, trailing your fingers along his clothed forearm. "And what if it… takes?"

You don't need to elaborate. What if you become pregnant with his child, like he suggested you might? What happens if you bear the heir apparent a bastard, and still end up married to his nephew? What if you cause a scandal?

"Then… we continue," he repeats. "Come what may." Baelor takes your hand in his, presses a kiss to the back of your palm. You are filled with so much adoration for him that it almost wounds you. It sets up a home in your body, right below your heart. "Whatever happens, it makes no difference. You may have anything that you want from me."

"Even your hand?"

"Especially that."

"In marriage?" Your chest tightens up in anticipation. You gaze up at him, willing him to accept you, clutching his hand like he might pull it away, recoil in disgust. If he were to turn you down now, you think that it might just kill you before the poison does.

Perhaps he feels how hard you tense up in your nervousness. He pulls back just the slightest bit and peers at you, taking in your expression, before his own turns into something open, genuine. His eyes crease at the corners as he traces a single finger down the part in your hair, and he replies, "Yes. I will marry you, darling girl. I should have, the moment I was able to. I should have begged you on my knees."

You smile at the mental image that provides. The Hand and Heir on his knees for you. "I would have liked that."

He gives you the fondest look. "I have no doubt."

You fiddle with his hand. His skin is soft, prominent veins running up the back and to the knuckles. You fit your hand to his like a question, examining the difference in size and shape. The ring on his middle finger, still damp from where it's been. In you. In his mouth.

"Why did you do that?" You don't mean to ask the question aloud, but it comes out anyway.

"Do what?"

You glance at Baelor and determine that he's only asking because he wants to hear you say it, and not because he's really confused as to what you mean. He looks coy, which is not something you've ever seen on him before— but you think that it suits him.

"Taste it." The words feel sharp in your mouth. "You didn't have to. I wouldn't have expected you to."

He breathes in deeply, and exhales on a long, low hum. Then, his eyes find yours again. "There are few pleasures in this world that compare to the taste of a woman. I wanted to."

Your heartbeat thrums in your ears. "And?"

"And you taste divine." A deft finger twists in the hair just at the very top of your head, twirling it around and around in hypnotic circles. "I would taste you again, if you would allow me."

It's your turn to hum. You hold his one hand in both of yours, tracing the details of them with your fingertips. Your thumbs map out the dip of his palm, the raised, sword-strengthened calluses beneath his fingers. The meat of his hand, where it connects to his wrist.

Without pausing to feel embarrassment or shame, you bring his hand to your mouth. You brush your lips over his fingers just barely, before you take them in and suck on them. You hear a shudder in Baelor's breath, but you don't stop. It is an intimate thing, to have his fingers stroke your tongue, to taste yourself on him, to know that his own tongue had been in the exact same place moments ago. You whimper and draw them in deep, your lips fitting around the silver ring against his knuckle, your eyes falling shut. He watches you, allowing you to take his swordsman's hand and fit his fingers between your teeth, trusting you not to bite down.

You sigh as you release them, dragging your tongue along the ridges and dips of his fingers on their way out. "I wanted to do that," you admit to him quietly. "For a while."

"You like my hands, it seems," he muses, a note of approval in his voice.

"Very much." You blink at him, suddenly feeling shy under the intensity of his gaze. "I'll let you have me however you want, my Prince. I only ask that first… you kiss me."

"Is that so? Only a kiss?" You nod, and Baelor smirks. He drags the tip of his pinkie finger gently down the slope of your nose. "You drive a hard bargain. If I kiss you now, I fear I may never stop."

"Don't stop."

Baelor lets out a short breath, and then scoops you up into a sitting position. You grunt in surprise, grabbing for his shoulders at the sudden movement, but you settle with his arm tight around your waist. Your heart skips a beat when he cradles your head in his palm, his fingers tangled in your hair.

"I don't think you understand just how wonderful you are," Baelor whispers, his mouth so close to your that the warmth of his lips practically touches yours. He hovers there, a breath away, and it's torturous to hold back. "You'll be the death of me."

With a shaking hand, you rest your palm against his cheek. You feel the scruff of his beard, the way that his jaw tenses the tiniest bit. "And if I don't kiss you, I'll die."

That seems to finally crack his composure. Baelor brushes your hair away from your face, strokes his thumb over your cheekbone, and closes the gap.

His kiss sends shocks of warmth through you, and you melt into him with a quiet sob of relief. Relief from the tension and swells of pain and fear. Relief at finally being able to hold him, to kiss him, open mouth to open mouth. You clutch at his shoulder, his neck, and swing your thigh over his to sit halfway on his lap.

He moves with you, his strong arms keeping you steady as you sink against him, groaning into you. Each point of contact feels bright, like if you opened your eyes to look you would find yourself glowing where he touches you. But his mouth moves against yours like silk, his tongue against yours, and he tastes like peace. It feels like the end of the storm, the answer to all your problems— even if it is only just the beginning.

Baelor's hand slides down to your lower back, holding you fast, splayed wide across your spine. His fingertips press into the flesh there, pulling you closer, until you're flush against him.

Your cunt grinds down onto the meat of his thigh, and you moan brokenly into his mouth. The sound of his name again, sweet on your tongue. He captures your lips with his, his other hand coming down to grip your hip. He rocks you against his thigh purposefully, swallowing the desperate sound that leaves you when your clit presses into the heat of him, through frustrating barriers of fabric.

You make a small, disgruntled noise, and your hand falls to the belt around his doublet. Nails scratching at the leather, you fumble with the buckle until it comes free. You feel beneath the cover of his doublet to find his soft linen shirt, warm from the heat of his body. Strong muscles tense beneath the lightness of your touch.

You huff a perturbed sigh against his mouth. "You are too clothed."

"You are too impatient," Baelor returns, but there is a huskiness to his voice that makes his words seem inconsequential. He shrugs out of his doublet to let your hands wander over his shoulders, down to squeeze the width of his arms. His beard tickles along your jaw as he presses kisses to your skin, trailing up to your ear. "Lie back, darling."

You recline on a pile of tangled sheets, chemise rucked up around your hips. Heat kisses your cheeks and pulses low in your core, your thighs instinctively wanting to close in on themselves, but they are stopped in their endeavor by Baelor's hips.

The mattress dips beside your shoulder where he leans his weight, hovering over you, a veil of security against the rest of the world. He drags his open mouth across your skin like this is not only for your benefit, but for his. You feel the flash of wet and warmth from his tongue, and your back arches up against him. He moves so slowly, savoring, his breath tumbling across your heated flesh like clouds of smoke.

It feels good. It feels so heavenly that you don't quite know how to accept it— you feel almost as though you should move away, but you would only be condemning yourself to more torment. You are bound to the bed by curiosity, an insatiable need to see what he does next. To feel his mouth touch more of you, places that you never thought to feel a pair of lips, teeth, or a tongue.

Baelor skims lightly over your breasts through the fabric of your chemise, while his hands find the curve of your waist. As he lowers, he ever-so-slowly tugs the fabric up, up, up, until you are bare from the waist-down and left open for his wandering mouth.

Your hands cling to him, one clawing against his back, the other gliding over the back of his head, cradling him to you. You gasp to feel the heat of his tongue on the skin just beneath your ribs. "Baelor…"

He hums in acknowledgement of his name, dragging his lips down over the curve of your stomach and lingering there. Baelor is thorough in a way that shouldn't shock you as much as it does— he lavishes you with his tongue and his lips, the quickest grazes of his teeth making you lurch against him with small sighs and moans. You are entirely alive with feeling, winding you up, until your whole body tenses and releases with it.

Then, he's moving. He passes over your pelvis and your aching, swollen cunt, and goes lower, settling between your knees. You make a little sound, a whimper of protest when you can't hold his head in your hands anymore.

He shushes you with his mouth against the inside of your knee, and then the wet swath of his tongue licks upwards in a way that takes you entirely by surprise. Bold, quick, his face so close and coming towards the most intimate part of you that you startle. "Gods—"

"Let me." It's a quiet plea, hushed against the skin of your inner thigh, one big hand cradling it to his cheek. There's the prickle of his beard, then the soft soothing of his tongue after. "My sweet girl. Let me taste you here."

"Yes," you sigh, even as he's already licking over the trail that your arousal has left, smeared across your overheated flesh.

The aphrodisiac effects may occur outwardly. The maester had said as much, and it becomes more and more apparent that, as Baelor lingers there, breathing in your scent and tasting you on his tongue, he is becoming intoxicated by the poison leeching from you. It's in the way his breath falls unevenly from his mouth, the way his gaze has gone a bit glassy with want, his pupils so wide that his beautiful, incongruous eyes are nearly black.

Baelor takes to you with a wide, flat stroke of his tongue that practically burns you alive. Your back leaves the mattress, your hands snatching at his head. Your cry breaks in your throat with its intensity and pitch, already taken to pieces by the single touch of his mouth to your cunt.

He groans into you— fully moans, as though this is entirely for his benefit and it is not something that he's doing in service to you. It is not a sound that you would have ever expected to hear from him, half-animalistic and far from the restrained, princely figure you've come to know him as. Large hands grasp at your hips and bring you further into his mouth, firm and consuming.

His name leaves you on a squeal. You're being too loud and you know it— through the open window, you can hear birds soar past, voices down in the courtyards. Any and everyone will hear you, and what the Prince of Dragonstone is doing to you, if you can't help it. You barely have the mental fortitude to let one shaking hand leave his head and clap over your mouth to stifle your cries.

He pulls back, releasing your clit from between his lips with a wet sound that makes your face burn. His eyes find yours, and you feel pinned beneath the weight of his gaze. "Do not silence yourself. Let me hear you."

You hesitate for only a second, but he doesn't move. Baelor's eyes remain fixed on your face as you reach forward, then stroke a hand over the crown of his head, a tentative and seeking touch. Then he returns to suck at your clit again, and you have to bite your tongue on a whimper.

He remains there for a long time. Long enough that you begin to think you may go delirious from the pleasure, and not from the poison throbbing and coursing through your veins, effecting him as he tastes you. He drags you to the precipice, to a place where reason and restraint don't exist anymore. There, you threaten to burn alive.

You cum into his mouth with a hoarse cry, your head tipped back on the pillows. It splinters through you like it may both destroy you and rebuild you anew at the same time— there's a rush, a flood between your legs that you don't expect, any more than you expect Baelor to stay there and take it, in all its viciousness.

You can't quite think. You feel him lingering there, his lips and tongue still on you, but it's as though you've been entirely unmade. He doesn't move, just remains solid and capable with his attention on your spent cunt, his tongue still lapping at the wetness that drips from you until you're certain— almost entirely certain— that this is not for the sake of the poison. This is not the potion at work. This is sex for the sake of sex.

"Baelor," you murmur, your voice a bit too high and airy in your throat. Your fingers dig at his scalp for something to make sense of. "D'you think— think it worked—?"

"Mm. You need another." Baelor answers you before you finish asking the question, his eyes narrowed as he rears back. His face is painted in your wetness, glistening around his mouth as he breathes heavily. "Let's not take any chances, shall we?"

"No, I wouldn't want to— to take chances— oh."

Baelor is climbing the line of your body, traversing over you like a panther on the hunt. His parted lips trail a wet line over your stomach, and he nudges your bunched up chemise back, further up your ribs. With trembling hands, you grab the useless fabric and pull it, tugging it frustratedly over your head so that you can throw it across the room.

"My beautiful girl," Baelor whispers into your skin, almost as though talking to himself more than you. His palm smoothes over the curve of your ribs and comes up to cup your breast, a reverent and tender touch, as though simply feeling the weight of it in his hand. "So stunning. Oh, I dreamt of this."

"You dreamt…?" You stutter out a gasp when his mouth closes hotly over your nipple, and your hands fly up to grasp the back of his head.

"I dreamt," Baelor repeats, moving his attention to your other breast with the same amount of care. "I wanted. I wished."

You pull him by the nape of his neck and he moves with your urging, lifting himself over you so that you can kiss him. The dampness of your arousal, still lingering in his facial hair, smears against your cheek as you lick into his mouth and taste yourself, oddly sweet on his tongue.

"Take your clothes off," you grumble against his lips, the slightest note of impatience lacing your tone as your fingers dig against his shoulders.

His linen shirt meets your chemise somewhere on the floor. Your hands find his chest, sliding down over hard muscle padded with soft flesh. He has a body befitting a man of his station— a soldier, hard and lean, bearing the scars of battle but unashamed of them. You trace a scar stretching across his ribs, trailing down towards his navel. Unhurried fingers dance over the trail of hair stretching downwards, guiding you towards the waist of his breeches.

"You're beautiful." It comes out more forceful than you mean for it to— but gods, do you mean it. You want to map out his body with your hands and your lips and your teeth, you want to learn every inch of him by rote, and still never stop once you know all. You try to convey it to him with your eyes, because you can't find any other words to express it. "You're so beautiful, Baelor, you must know."

He smiles, and it's that smile. The one that has haunted you since you saw it last, the one that you want to see over and over again. It causes a swelling feeling in your chest that… probably isn't healthy, but none of this is. It would be death to deny it now.

"You flatter me," Baelor says, his thumb stroking idly against your thigh, where his hand rests. His eyes are soft, flicking over you with so much adoration you struggle not to squirm beneath it.

"I tell the truth," you murmur, slipping two fingers just beneath the waist of his breeches to trace just below the fabric. His breath hitches, and you smirk. "I could always lie, but I imagine you'd see right through it, now."

"It would be very unladylike of you," he remarks, his smile turning sardonic.

"Hm. Can't have that." Even as you say it, your hands are untying his breeches, your fingers tugging until you're able to slip them down his hips. "We both know just how ladylike I am."

One boot comes off, then two, and his breeches shed to leave him in his smallclothes. There is no finesse to his movements— the seduction is over, leaving only sharp intent and the promise of what's to come. Desire wound tight like a spring, loaded to snap at a single touch.

That touch comes when you slip your fingers along the band of his smallclothes, a single, featherlight graze against the laces. Baelor's entire body goes rigid over you, as if you've held a blade to his throat. You guide them over his hips and down his thighs, until he snaps to and shirks them the rest of the way. He whispers your name, something between awe and guttural need forming the word in his throat.

"Baelor," you hum in response when your fingers find him and wrap around his cock. You freeze for just a moment— he's larger than you expected, and the prospect sends a little shiver through you. The Hammer, you think to yourself. Of course. He's hot to the touch, burning and throbbing against your palm, so hard it seems like it should be unbearable for him. But he bears it, for you. "Do you know how many women in the realm dream of this?"

He makes a small noise of warning, twitching in your grip.

Your grin turns wolfish as you pass your thumb over the head, flushed and leaking. "Do you know how many would kill for this? Would die to lie beneath you like this?"

"Heavens above." He shudders out a sigh as you stroke him, his forehead falling to rest against yours. "Don't— you mustn't say such things to me, my love, I— I have to be so careful with you. You have no idea."

So this is what it is, to have him lose his composure. No longer the Prince of Dragonstone, Hand to the King, heir to the Iron Throne— in your hands, he is simply a man. A man who wants, whose breath spills warm across your lips. Whose hips search for yours when you wrap your legs around his waist.

"Would you let me have you, my Prince?" you ask him, and your voice is light, inquisitive. It can't be anything else, because you are just as desperate as he is. You don't have it in you to be teasing, you are simply open with your need for him, allowing your innermost thoughts to surge to the forefront. Your forehead pressed to his, you look up through your lashes to find his eyes closed, squeezed shut in some vain attempt to hold on. "My love?"

His eyes snap open to meet yours, pressed so close that your noses touch. Baelor groans quietly when you guide him between your legs without waiting for an answer— it was a rhetorical question, after all.

But all the same, he replies, "Anything you desire."

Baelor drops his hips, enough to follow the guidance of your hand. He fills you in one fluid stoke, and together you take a long, deep breath.

"You are…"

"Perfect." He finishes your sentence for you, hushed and airy though it is. It feels as though you could be interrupted at any moment with the way he holds you, like a secret, like something that should never been spoken or heard about. Like you are only for him to know this way.

He presses his hips flush to yours, making you keen from the fullness, the exquisite stretch. The potion, for what it's worth, does make everything slicker, easier— you are so swollen and relaxed from his mouth, your body so attuned to his that there is no pain. Only the pleasure of his touch remains.

He moves, and it lights you up from within like wildfire. Your back arches towards him, your chest pressing up against his, and a sound unlike anything you've ever made tears from your throat. Arms blindly snatching for him, you wrap yourself around him as though he may try to move away.

He nuzzles his nose against yours, almost too tender of a gesture for the position you find yourself in. "That's it, darling. Take all of me."

Your mind clouds with pleasure as he rocks his hips into yours. You feel like you're drowning in the skin on skin, stripped to the skin and pressed flush to him. Your hand smoothes down his back, feeling rigid muscle and raised scars there, too.

He withdraws and presses forward, setting a slow, deliberate pace that drives you practically mad. He's so gentle and tender even when everything about him, about this situation, tells you that he wants to let go of his restraint. Widening your thighs on instinct, your hand cradles the back of his head, bringing his lips closer to yours.

"Don't hold back," you tell him, and you feel his breath pause where it fans against your cheek. Even though to try to be commanding, your voice cracks. "Baelor— stop holding back—"

Baelor presses a single, chaste kiss to your lips, and you are too caught up in the moment to realize that it's a warning, a subtle apology before he's shifting. He lifts your hips, planting his knees on the mattress before he pulls you into his lap, your back bent over the expanse of his strong thighs.

You slide down the mattress with an undignified squeak, hands scratching along the sheets for stability where there is none. And then you settle into your new position, gazing up at him with a stunned expression.

He's unbelievably gorgeous. His chest leaps with his breath, tanned and freckled skin glistening with a thin layer of sweat. He pants through parted lips, his eyes sharp and focused as they always are, cheeks flushed. He's a vision, and he's all yours.

Baelor splays his hand flat against your chest, running his palm over the skin where, beneath, your heart pounds a drumbeat loud as thunder in your ears. Then he drags his touch down, between your breasts, over the curve of your stomach. His hand settles warm and solid over your navel, thumb stroking you tenderly enough to make you let out a soft sigh.

But then he's sliding his cock into you again, a wicked thrust that punches all the air from your lungs, and his hand presses down. Your brows draw together, your mouth falling open on a silent moan as he hits something so devastating inside of you that it makes your eyes involuntarily roll back in your head.

"Feel that?" Baelor murmurs, his voice roughened with desperation as he does it again, and again. Pull back, push forward, press down. "Feel how deep I am inside you?"

It comes out so… possessive. Spurred on by the fact that he's the only one to do this to you, the only person to see you like this. Like he's staking a claim to you with each roll of his hips. His fingers rub back and forth over the soft flesh of your stomach, and you do feel it— the tip of his cock as he drives it into you, reaching so deep within you that it makes a faint bulge in your lower stomach.

You sob out an incoherent response, lights dancing behind your eyelids. Your hands, searching for something to hold onto as his thrusts gain momentum, find the pillow above your head. You squeeze it, pull blindly as though it will bring you some respite, and the downy soft padding of it covers your face, smothering the obscene moans that spill from your mouth.

Baelor's hand all but slams down on top of the pillow with a dull thump. You feel the impact through the feather stuffing, a slight bump against the tip of your nose before he's snatching it away from you and flinging the accursed thing across the room. It hits one of the open window shutters and falls to the floor.

"Do not. Hide." It's a snarl released from his throat, his hand coming to cup your chin and pull you to center. "Show me your eyes."

You blink your eyes open at him and bite your lip, trying to keep your whimpering at bay. You watch his core muscles flex with the movement of his hips, his chest dappled with golden sunlight, his jaw tightening with the effort to remain consistent, even when you told him to let go.

"There she is," Baelor whispers, a flicker of awe crossing his features. "My beautiful girl."

His thumb strokes across your lower lip, and without even thinking, you close your lips around it. The pad of his thumb, tasting of salt and the sweet musk of your own cunt, strokes against your tongue. A quiet groan breaks from him, his thrusts turning erratic and unmeasured when you suck hard.

Baelor drops his chin toward his chest, his face drawn in silent agony. "Fuck."

Your cunt clamps down hard around him at the sound of the swear falling from his lips. You don't know why the single word is enough to drive you crazy— probably because you've never heard Baelor curse before, and it's such a juxtaposition to the rest of him. The unshakeable prince brought to shambles by your lips around his thumb, your legs around his core.

Your orgasm mounts suddenly, and your teeth bear down hard on his thumb. It's enough to throw him off-kilter. He hisses through his teeth and pulls you with his free hand, seating himself deep inside you, his hips pressed flush to yours. He slides his hand from your waist downward, through the soft curls of hair on your mound. He finds your clit, brushing a circle around it with the tip of one, impossibly gentle fingertip.

You cum so quickly that the force of it turns blinding and sharp. Your cunt pulses on his cock with an urgency that wracks your entire body. But it is not enough for him that you lay there milking him— no, he has to escalate it.

Just as soon as it hits, Baelor's hand is gripping your thigh, pushing your leg up until your knee hooks over his shoulder, and he bends you. Your thigh presses tight to your chest as he moves over you, his cock hitting immeasurably deeper now. You claw desperately at his back, fingernails scratching, raking hard lines that will be too easy for his servants to notice, come morning.

He doesn't let up, even for a second. Still driving his hips, fucking you through the pulsing of your cunt, his body holding you down against the bed. His thumb slides from your mouth with a wet pop, spit smearing across your cheek as he cradles your face. Baelor replaces his thumb with his tongue, kissing you deeply, reverently, like he can feed all his devotion into you with it.

"Good girl," he whispers into your mouth, dragging his hips back slowly and then filling you back up even slower. You squirm, drowning between your legs from the oversensitivity and the entirely new angle he hits at. The sound that he makes is unbelievably erotic, something between a sigh and a rasping moan that cracks in his throat. "So good for me, my darling."

You cry his name, latching onto him with a trembling hand. "Fuck— Baelor. You need to cum. You should—"

"Don't." He shakes his head, fixing you with a heated look. He swallows, exhaling a stuttering breath. "Not— not yet, I don't—"

But you're nodding against him in retaliation, tightening your core muscles around his cock, squeezing him so hard that he makes a noise like you've punched him.

"Fuck," Baelor grits, hanging his head. "Oh, fucking Seven, you just— just can't stand to lose— can you—?"

Perspiration beads on his brow, and you have the sudden urge to lick it. So, you do. You pull him down by the neck, and he goes, following the urging of your hand like it's a command he's beholden to. You run your tongue across his temple, up and over his drawn brow, and he shudders.

In spite of everything— the overstimulation, the frightening possibility that you might cum again— you manage to break a small, breathless smile. Your mouth finds the shell of his ear, and your voice drops unexpectedly low. "Yield."

He plants his hips against yours, pressing your thigh so far against your chest that your knee almost touches your ear. He cums with an exquisite moan against your cheek, your tongue still pressed to his face to taste more of him, as though you can consume the very beauty from his skin.

You take his hand— the one against your thigh, holding it up around his waist— and guide it down between your flush bodies. Even while you feel him pulse inside you, he follows your guidance without question. He rubs a light caress against your clit, just enough to send sparks shooting up your spine.

You cum again for him, and it's gentler this time— like sunlight breaking through a storm. You give him a soft, relieved moan, while you pulse on his cock and your tense muscles release beneath him.

You both lay there in the feeling, letting the pulsations die down as you settle. And then, he stirs just a bit.

"Better?" Baelor murmurs, nudging his nose against yours.

"Much."

You feel him smile as he kisses you, his hand coming up to cup your cheek. You let him linger there, smiling into your mouth, for a few more seconds— and then you kick your heel against his shoulder, where your leg is still slung up and pinned against you.

He laughs at the disgruntled noise you make, lowering your leg and smoothing his palm up the length of it as he pulls it to rest against his hip. "My strong girl. You're quite the force when you want something, hm?"

"Don't you forget it," you grumble, but there's no real heat to it.

"I'm not likely to anytime soon."

You sigh when he withdraws from you, but only so that he can roll you both, gathering you into his arms. You lay with your head on his sweat-slick chest, his arm encircling your shoulders to hold you close. Relaxing into him, your body spent, you place a hand over his chest to feel his heart thundering beneath your palm.

Both naked, tangled up in each other, you remain like that for a while. Your fingers drawing idle shapes against his chest, gliding through the hair there as it rises and falls with his breaths as they even out.

He's yours. The thought flits through your mind, light as a feather. He's going to marry you. You'll be his wife. Many things about it make your chest tighten. That you'll be the Crown Princess in the process. That eventually, you will be expected to be Queen.

As quickly as your fears bubble up, one thing quells the flood. He's Baelor. He'll take care of you. He always seems to. You trust him to. You… you love him for it.

"You're staring."

You blink, and tilt your head to look up at him. You had been staring, directly at the mess you made between his legs, while your mind whirled in a dozen different directions. You should probably feel embarrassed at being caught, but there's mirth in Baelor's eyes. His hand pets affectionately against the back of your head.

"We're betrothed," you say, in lieu of an explanation.

"So we are."

"The King should probably know."

Baelor makes a short noise. It rumbles in his chest, against your cheek. "The King can wait until the 'morrow. I'm not terribly enticed by the idea of leaving you tonight." He turns his head slightly towards the open window. "After all, I'd imagine most of the Keep knows about it, by now."

You giggle, turning your face towards his chest. You nuzzle into the hair over his heart and breathe in, smelling the comforting scent of his skin. Remarkably, it is less strong than it has been all evening, no longer heightened to the point of overwhelm. You can't hear every damned thing in the Keep anymore— nor can you taste the saltwater on the air from the bay.

"Baelor."

"Mm?"

"I think it worked." You press a kiss to his sternum. "We did it."

"Good." A pause. Baelor heaves a deep sigh. "Do not. Ever. Drink another fucking sex potion. For the love of the suffering Seven."

You tut, a teasing smile quirking at your lips. "So I shouldn't use the second one I have in my drawers, then?"

Baelor's head snaps towards you. When you see the look of terror on his face, you dissolve into a fit of laughter, pulling yourself closer against his side.

He huffs a quiet chuckle, but you can't mistake the sound of relief underlying it. He lays a warm palm against your bare shoulder. "Troublemaker."

"Yes, I am." You bite your lip, trailing your hand down his stomach, your fingers grazing lightly enough that you watch his abdominal muscles tense beneath the touch. "But I want you like this all the time."

"Naked?"

"Unmoored."

You turn your head to find him regarding you with the same calmness you've come to expect from him, but with a fire burning within his gaze. He smirks slightly. "That shouldn't be too difficult for you to accomplish, I fear."

With a hum, you slip your leg over his hips and lift yourself to straddle him. His hands find your waist, steadying you. You raise yourself up, one hand braced on his chest, the other falling to one of his hands. Beneath you, you feel his cock begin to harden again as you place his hand on your breast.

"Then let me begin, my Prince."

The wedding is scheduled for three weeks later, at Baelor's behest. Long enough for the lords of the seven houses to arrive in due course, but not long enough for there to be question if you indeed are with his child.

You spoke about it at length, actually. He was very insistent, seeing as how he was trying to actively put one in you at the time.

On the day of your wedding, you sit in your vanity chair and fiddle with the cuffs of your dress. It is white and gold, of a fabric quality you've never been able to luxuriate in before. It feels stifling. You fear walking in it, breathing in it, doing anything that may damage it at all. You sit with your spine stiff and straight, allowing Mircalla to fix pins into your hair. Several other serving girls flit about the room, attending to various other chores.

When you feel you've just about had enough of the prodding of pins, a knock sounds at the chamber door. Your heart thuds in your chest, and you shift in your seat, hoping that it may be your husband-to-be, come to steal you away for a moment before the ceremony. It would not be unlike him— Baelor is a busy man, but attentive as often when he can be. Even if it is a mere kiss in an alcove, or a five minute interlude in the courtyard, there is always a time and a place that he can find to be with you, to show you his affections.

But the chamber door opens, and your guard steps a foot into the room. "Prince Daeron to see you, my lady."

Daeron? Your brow draws in confusion, but you rise from your chair, regardless. "Enter."

Daeron stumbles into the room with all the grace of a newborn deer. The maids all pause in tandem, and a hush falls over the room as he blinks up at each of them awkwardly, his blue eyes a bit less bleary than normal, his honey-gold hair tied back with a black ribbon for the festivities. "Apologies for my… intrusion?"

"No harm done, my lord." You clasp your hands anxiously behind your back, all the same. "What may I do for you?"

"I had wanted a word with you, my lady. Alone. For only a moment, if you wouldn't mind?"

You think that you would mind, very much. But the longer you regard Daeron, trying to cling to your vitriol, the less you can find any. You are about to be married to the Crown Prince, a gorgeous and honorable man who you are falling desperately in love with, to no one's surprise.

You cannot bring yourself to refuse Daeron— and so, you dismiss your ladies with a courteous nod.

As soon as the door shuts, Daeron is crossing the room and slumping into an armchair by the window. You do not move, but follow him with your eyes as he slouches, heaving an enormous sigh.

"Are you drunk?" you ask him pointedly.

"Always." He flashes you a sardonic smile. You give him an incredulous look. "Necessity compels. But I am here, and not at a tavern, at least."

"Better wine, I'd imagine."

"Mm, yes. Arbor red. An excellent choice, indeed." He pauses, his eyes flicking over you apprehensively. "I came to… apologize, my lady. I fear I have behaved rather badly towards you, and I felt I owed you an explanation."

You only blink at him. "Yes, you do."

"Right." He licks his lips, seeming to collect his thoughts. "Before you came to King's Landing… I dreamed of you."

"How romantic."

"No, not— not so much." Daeron takes a breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. "You see, my dreams… they have a tendency to come true. It isn't always a good thing." He pauses for a long moment, his eyes focused on the middle-distance, appearing to see something that you can't. "When I dreamt of you, it was… I saw you dying, my lady. I saw you on your death bed. And you cursed me for it."

You say nothing, but watch him as his shaking hands smooth against his pants.

"I didn't know what it meant. But I figured, when I saw you, that if I was going to be the reason for your death— in screaming agony— then it would needs be best for both of us if I held no relation to you. If I could refuse you and not speak a word, it would be… you wouldn't have died. And I wouldn't have been the cause."

"But, I have not died, my lord."

"No." Daeron lets out a short laugh, void of humor. "But, you had an affliction some weeks back, did you not? I heard it was rather a close call." He fixes his eyes on you, and he looks so deeply apologetic. Like a kicked dog, he peers up at you through his lashes. "If I was in any way responsible for— for any pain caused, I am truly sorry, my lady. My intentions were noble, I assure you. My execution, however…"

"Leaves something to be desired, yes." You close your eyes, breathe in slowly. Daeron reeks of alcohol, but you don't allow it to deter you from stepping closer to his chair. "In your dream, what was it that I said? How did I curse you?"

Daeron swallows, his eyes flicking around the room briefly. "You said… 'I don't want Daeron. He doesn't want me. I didn't take the fucking thing for him.'" Your face must betray your thoughts, because Daeron regards you closely before nodding solemnly, folding his hands in his lap. "Right. So, it was that."

Your heart pounds so hard that you swear it's trying to leap up into your throat. "Daeron. Whatever you think you saw—"

"It's not for me to pry." His eyes continuously move from your face to various areas of the room, like he doesn't want to look at you head-on. "What I know is that you are well now, and marrying my uncle. And I am happy for you, my lady. I truly am. It has been many years since I saw him smile the way he does, when you aren't looking." Daeron finally chances to look you directly in the eye, and he looks gravely serious. "Do not take this the wrong way, but I think that we would have been terrible for each other. Wouldn't you agree?"

For the first time since Daeron stepped into your chambers, a smile crosses your face. "You know, I think you're absolutely right. We would have killed each other."

Daeron lets out a sad chuckle. "Quite so."

He looks around, at a loss for a few seconds, before he heaves himself up and stands over you. He's quite a bit taller than you first thought— maybe it's because he isn't slouching as much, now.

"Forgive me, my lady. I've taken enough of your time. I wish you a long and happy marriage." He winks. "Only, one not to me."

That finally earns him a giggle from you, and Daeron smiles, before lifting your hand and pressing a chaste kiss to your knuckles. You watch him cross the room, narrowly avoiding bumping into your vanity chair as he moves.

At the door, Daeron pauses and turns back to you with a reserved smirk. "Just so you know. My cock does work. If the need should ever arise again."

He ducks out of the room before the pillow you throw can hit him.

Love was not lost; it was simply dormant, lingering under the surface and waiting for the right spark to bring it back to life.

Baelor still felt fondness when he gazed at his good lady wife. The strong, beautiful woman who had given him two healthy sons, and when she expressed her desire not to have more, he respected her wish. Otherwise, he was certain they would have rivaled Maekar and Dyanna. He adored his boys, longing for more little ones to be following at his heels. But a good husband respects his wife's wishes, does he not?

They still lay together, nestled close and finding creative ways to bring each other pleasure, but Baelor missed spilling between her pliant thighs. In his youth, he would ravage her any chance he could, making her squeal and blush. Many gifts were bestowed upon her, and songs were sung of his devotion and love for her. It was not gone, nor did he suspect her desire for him had disappeared entirely, but perhaps these were just the curses of passing time. Now, with their two sons, one a man grown and the other on the cusp, they felt the effects even more, and disappointment settled deep inside.

A breath of fresh air swept through the Red Keep when you arrived at court, draped in yellow silks as if you were a sunbeam. One of Queen Myriah's ladies, Lady Dalt, was in failing health, and you were called to be by your grandmother's side to help nurse her and attend to the Queen in your grandmother's absence. Prince Baelor and Lady Jena were sent to greet you upon your arrival, and both fell under your bright enchantment.

"My lord, my lady," you said respectfully before lowering into a gentle curtsey.

"Lady Dalt, it is our pleasure to welcome you to court," Lady Jena smiled, red hair cascading down her shoulders. She wore a vibrant violet gown with diamond and pearl jewelry. A netting of pearls blanketed her shimmering hair. A glittering thunderbolt dangled from the silver chain around her neck. Her cheekbones were sharp and defined with a full mouth and kind, blue eyes. A stunning beauty.

"It is an honor to have you here, even under such sad circumstances," Prince Baelor said. His outfit was a more somber black with slashes of crimson woven through his doublet. Rings of gold and ruby gleamed on his fingers, but it was those eyes of differing shades that were captivating. One brown, one blue. Most intriguing.

"The pleasure is mine. The good queen is most kind to allow her personal maesters to attend to my grandmother in her time of need. I am happy to serve in whichever capacity is needed."

Baelor and Jena exchanged a look, their eyes meeting in a silent exchange. Both had felt that spark. It had breezed in with you. Sunshine and lemons. A rainbow spilling down the halls.

"Allow us to show you to your quarters," Baelor said, offering you his arms.

"I'm sure the heir of the realm and his good lady wife have better things to do," you teased.

"Nonsense, we would like to assure that you are settled properly. Your grandmother is a beloved in our court, and we will see you well tended to," Jena insisted, guiding you onto Baelor's arm before squeezing her husband's shoulder.

"Your grandmother's rooms are adjoining, should you need to assist her," Baelor explained.

"That is most kind and thoughtful," you smiled, slipping free of his arm to take a look around before pushing one of the windows open. "It is a bit stuffy." Your smile made Baelor and Jena's hearts skip a beat. They watched as the sun warmed your cheeks, longing to lay their lips over the sun kissed flesh.

"If there is anything you require, please let us know. We wish for you to feel comfortable here," Jena offered as her husband's hand slipped over her lower back. She was always so generous and welcoming, one of the many reasons he loved her.

"That is kind of you, my lady. I…if I am not overstepping, I would greatly appreciate some colorful cushions and bedding, if possible. To cheer it up a bit," you said kindly.

"I will talk with the steward at once," Jena said.

"We will leave you to settle and rest, but mayhaps you'd like to join us for dinner in the Tower of the Hand this evening? A private audience with just us before we expose you to the full court," Baelor stated.

"Oh, I would love that! Thank you, Your Grace."

"Until this evening, then," Baelor smiled, and the two left you to rest as the servants filed in to help unpack your belongings.

Queen Myriah had instructed the servants to prepare a bath for you, knowing the rituals from Dorne. You bathed in warm water, floating with jasmine, rose petals, and lemon rinds. It felt good to wash the grime away from your skin that had clung to it during your travels. After your bath, you looked in on your grandmother, dabbing her forehead and helping her drink the herb laced tea.

"My cough is getting better," she told you weakly.

"That is wonderful," you said, fluffing up her pillows. "Your cheeks have color in them as well. These are all good signs."

"Thank you for coming, my dear."

"I only wish you had summoned me sooner," you said gently, kissing her forehead and smoothing back her graying hair. "But I am here now, and you'll be feeling right as rain soon. Mother sent me with some treatments and a taste of home." Your mother wished to come, but such a tumultuous journey would have stressed her.

"With a fine Dornish queen, I do not lack for home," she chuckled.

"What about lemons from our gardens?" you teased. "Mother sent me with a whole trunk."

"Oh! Delightful."

"Now, rest. I will check in on you before supper." You kissed her cheek before returning to your chambers.

You peeled the rind from the lemons, steeping them in the hot water fetched for you, drizzling in some Tyroshi honey along with the lemon juice. After it was covered with a clean cloth, you left it to steep, intending to serve it with your grandmother's supper. Two handmaidens helped you get ready for dinner with Prince Baelor and Lady Jena. You chose another garment of dazzling yellow silk decorated with patterns of white lemons. White-gold hugged your throat and fingers with tiny matching hoops dangling from your ears. You dabbed a bit of citrus oil on your wrists, hollow of your throat, and behind your ears. Before departing for the Tower, you checked on your grandmother once again, helping her take sips of the brew.

"You look lovely, my darling girl. Enjoy your supper." You left her with a kiss as two guards escorted you up the winding stairs that led to the Tower of the Hand.

"Lady Dalt," the guard introduced before stepping aside to allow you passage.

Lady Jena bristled around you, her red hair braided and glittering with amethysts, and she wore a samite dress in an almost orchid color. "My, you are bright." Her tone was amused, and the curve of her knuckle trailed down your cheek, making your flesh warm beneath her touch.

"Should I change?" you asked, suddenly feeling nervous.

"Oh, no. Yellow is such a beautiful color on you," she praised.

Baelor wore a similar outfit to earlier this afternoon, except the doublet was the color of freshly spilled blood. He poured three cups of wine, presenting two to you and Jena.

"Thank you, Your Grace," you said, smiling as you drew it between your ringed hands.

"Please, you needn't bother with that fuss. You may call me Baelor when we are in private," he said.

"My, that makes me feel rather special," you beamed, touching your hand to your heart.

"You are special, dear girl," Jena mused before taking a sip of the wine, the red liquid staining her lips.

Your fingers lightly touched the necklace around your throat, nervously tugging and sliding the chain through your fingers as you gauged the looks Baelor and Jena were giving you.

"Why do I suddenly feel like I am being served up as the main course?"

Baelor and Jena exchanged a sly look. "You are perceptive," Baelor hummed.

Jena stepped closer, lifting your hands and pressing the lip of the cup to your mouth, prompting you to take a deep sip of the sour Dornish red. One of your favorites. Your grandmother had a loose tongue. "But not if you don't wish to be," she whispered, swiping away a stray opaque ruby droplet that dribbled down the corner of your mouth.

You took a deep breath. It seemed for a brief moment that you held all the power in the equation, and you should use it to your advantage. "Mmm, well, first I would like the supper promised to me and an evening to consider. I think that is fair, wouldn't you agree?" You were interested, but not too rash to quickly fall into an arrangement with them. You doubted that many made the prince and his wife wait for their desires to be fulfilled.

"I would," Baelor nodded, extending his hand and motioning you toward the table. There was an absence of servants, which was strategically planned, no doubt.

The olives were fresh and flavorful, crunching pleasantly beneath your teeth.

"You must try the duck," Jena smiled, nodding toward Baelor to serve you a piece.

He was skilled with the knife, cutting through the succulent meat to ensure you got a decadent slice with crispy skin.

"Thank you, Y…Baelor," you smiled after quickly correcting yourself. After lifting the fork to your mouth, you sank your teeth into the tender piece of meat and skin. "Absolutely delicious."

Those mismatched eyes were glued on you, as were Jena's stunning sapphire-hued ones, making you feel like the duck about to be devoured.

"I can feel you both attempting to wear me down," you chided playfully.

"Tis a compliment, my dear lady," Baelor said, though he was respectful enough to lower his gaze. Jena seemed bolder, never faltering. You could appreciate it.

"Indeed, it is," Jena murmured, finding herself enraptured by you. She had never felt such stirrings before, never dared to think of another besides her husband. But this little rainbow sent from Lemonwood had conjured her mind into a frenzy. Though she did not wish to have you simply for herself, she imagined you nestled between her and Baelor. Mayhaps you were a missing puzzle piece, sent to complete them. "Now I'm certain they cannot compare to what you can get from home, but there are lemon cakes for dessert."

"I could never refuse a lemon cake, good or bad," you grinned.

Jena lifted one with three fingers, the large amethyst on her ring finger catching in the candlelight before pressing the sweet to your lips. With a soft flutter of your lashes, you parted your mouth to allow her to feed it to you. The candied lemon rind was tart, the icing sweet, and the cake crumbled between your teeth.

"It is delicious," you murmured after swallowing it down.

"Good," Jena beamed, cleaning your mouth with her linen napkin.

"We are meant to be behaving, my dear," Baelor scolded gently.

"Oh, forgive me. Have I offended you, dear girl?" Jena's hand glided over the curve of your cheek, and you couldn't resist pressing into her palm.

"Not at all. A bit of teasing is acceptable, my prince," you said, turning your gaze toward Baelor and watching a mischievous smile curl across his lips.

His chair scraped against the floor shrilly before he approached you, wine cup in hand. Heat bloomed through your lower belly as he loomed over you, something dark in those mesmerizing eyes. "Open." A simple, sharp command. You were beginning to think they held a fascination for your mouth.

He tilted the cup, draining the wine into your mouth with one hand cupped beneath your chin, yet a few drops still plopped onto your yellow gown, staining the fabric. Your head spun, wine heady on your tongue as it filled your mouth, and you very nearly buckled to your knees, ready to accept their offer. Baelor reached for a linen napkin, dabbing at the burgundy droplets that clung to the bodice of your dress. A warm flush heated your skin, spreading down your neck and toward your chest. His warm thumb traced over your stained, swollen lips.

"Now, who is the one misbehaving?" Jena cooed, standing behind her husband and wrapping her arms around his waist with her chin resting on his shoulder.

"She said she didn't mind," Baelor reasoned.

"I fear I must take my leave lest I rush headfirst into this," you whispered, nearly stumbling as you stood up. Prince Baelor quickly steadied you.

"Of course, one of the guards will escort you back to your chambers. We eagerly anticipate your decision on the morrow," he said, bowing his head.

Closing your eyes, you inhaled deeply to gather your wits. "I assure you that you shall have one. Good evening."

"Might we give you a kiss before you depart?" Jena asked, and Baelor fixed her with a stern look. "To ensure sweet dreams."

"I…well, yes, I suppose that would be acceptable."

Jena took hold of your chin, drawing you close and pressing a chaste kiss upon your lips before turning your head toward Baelor. He followed suit.

The guard escorted you back to your chambers, where you fell face down on the bed, breathing in deeply and clutching a pillow tightly against your chest. Their taste lingered on your tongue. Thoughts swam through your head like a raging sea until dreams eventually pulled you into a deep slumber. When you woke the next morning, bright white sun streamed through the windows. You rubbed your face and entered your grandmother's room, still wearing your stained dress.

"The brew you made did me a world of good, dearest," she smiled, sitting in a chair by the window. "I can see you had an eventful evening." She raised a dark brown.

"That is wonderful news," you praised, bending to kiss the top of her forehead. You broke your fast with her, helping spoon feed her a hearty broth. "And it was nothing of the sort, just a simple dinner."

"Mmm," she hummed.

When you returned to your chambers, you discovered servants bustling about. Pillows, cushioned chairs, silks, and tapestries in vivid hues were placed, bringing warmth and vibrancy. Blues, yellows, greens, pinks, purples, reds, and oranges. You were particularly enamored with the tapestry depicting green trees bursting with ripe lemons. After the servants departed, you burnt a bit of jasmine incense and meditated with your thoughts. You requested a private audience with Prince Baelor and Lady Jena later that afternoon. Prince Baelor summoned you to the Tower nearly two hours later.

You wore a blue dress on this visit, like the calm waves of the sea, with silver jewelry, and your hair swept out of your face.

"There's our little rainbow," Jena smiled, wearing a lilac gown with long, billowing sleeves.

"I heard your grandmother is feeling better, very good news," Baelor smiled, standing to greet you.

"She is, thank you."

Anticipation hung in the air, and each one waited for the other to speak. You twisted the silver ring around your middle finger before doing so.

"How would this arrangement work?"

"Please, sit," Baelor said, waving toward the cushioned bench and pouring you a glass of wine. Jena moved to your left side, drawing your hand into her lap while Baelor sat to your right, placing the cup in your free hand. There was a comfort in being between the two; the sweet fragrance of rose wafting from Jena and an earthy spice clinging to Baelor.

Details were discussed. They wished to share you. You would become their mistress, which was not unheard of in the royal household, but it would be treated with utmost care. You would not be paraded around like a conquest, but cherished and valued. Nearly all the wine in your cup was gone by the time the discussion ended. Your mother's nagging voice circled the back of your head, cautioning you against his, that Prince Baelor and Lady Jena were nearly old enough to your own parents. But you did not heed the phantom warning; you wanted it more than anything.

One word was all that was needed. "Yes." It toppled from your lips with ease.

The amber glow from the candles and the orange firelight illuminated the room, bathing you in warmth as Baelor unlaced your crimson gown, letting it billow around your feet. Jena pressed a sweet kiss to your lips before removing your under shift, leaving you in just jewelry, slippers, and stockings. Baelor's calloused hands cupped your breasts, thumb circling around your nipples until they hardened. Ravenous teeth scraped over the delicate skin of your neck. A dragon looking to pierce its prey. Lady Jena's fingers were like sparks over your bare skin, lightning strikes searing your flesh. Each one left their mark.

You settled in Baelor's lap, stockinged thighs thrown over Jena's shoulders as her hungry mouth pressed against your damp cunt. A rose flush clung to her pale cheeks, her pink tongue delving between your folds, making you whimper against Baelor's palm clamped over your mouth. You could taste the salt of his skin. His other hand skimmed down your belly, seeking your swollen pearl and circling it. They worked in tandem to bring you to a sweet release, leaving you trembling and panting in the aftermath. You had never been touched in such a way before. Just stolen, secret kisses, and once a squeeze to the arse. This was utterly divine.

The next night, Jena demonstrated how to pleasure her husband's cock. That rosy mouth wrapped around his stiff flesh, sliding alluringly over it and stretching her lips crudely wide. She pulled away just before his seed spilled, guiding you into her place. It was a strange feeling, making your eyes water and triggering a gag reflex, but she coaxed you into relaxation while Baelor stroked your hair.

"You're doing so well, sweet girl," he praised, which was a remarkably high compliment in itself and one you wished to chase. His seed spilled down your throat; sticky and salty, while Jena's fingers tangled in your hair.

The evenings bled into long hours before you snuck off in the early dawn before the rest of the Keep roused. Thighs marked with pink bumps from Baelor's beard, Jena's red nail scratches on your hips and down your back, and cunt aching from their sweet abuse. Pillows muffled your yawns as you managed to sleep for a bit until the time came for you to look after your grandmother, who was doing much better. You wondered if you would have to return home soon, now that she was in better health. Quickly, you shook such thoughts from your mind. Queen Myriah was delighted at how well you got along with Lady Jena and moved her into her service for the duration of your stay.

"We have a present for you, little pet," Jena cooed, pulling you into her lap and kissing you.

"Oh?" you asked, eager to discover what it was.

Baelor presented you with a necklace on a velvet cushion. Jewels of various colors hung from the golden chain. Ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst, citrine, a fire opal, and an indigo hued tanzanite. Every shade in the rainbow.

"It's beautiful, thank you," you beamed as Baelor fastened it around your neck.

They treated you like a princess, spoiling you with trinkets and attention. It was easy to become wrapped in it, to become enveloped in them. You weren't brazen about it; you weren't flaunted around the Keep as a plaything, all of it kept private. Which is perhaps why your meddling grandmother arranged a meeting between you and Lord Leo Tyrell's son when the vassal was visiting at court. You were polite and agreed to tea, not wishing for any suspicion to arise, but you had no intentions of marrying him. You were able to fake a smile for an hour, sipping on your tea and eating cream cakes to keep from screaming as he blathered on about upcoming tourneys.

Though that night at the feast, he asked you for a dance, and you could feel Baelor and Jena's eyes on you. You didn't think you could refuse and accepted his offer, gliding across the stones and twirling as the musicians played.

"What a lovely couple they would, don't you think, Your Grace?" your grandmother whispered loudly to Queen Myriah, who gave a sly smile. Mayhaps you should not have worked so hard nursing her back to health.

You returned to your seat, feeling irritated, and scraped your fork down your plate, relishing in the abrasive sound it made. Your mood did not lift as the night ended and you returned to your chambers. The guard arrived at his usual time to escort you. While part of you wished to be in their company, to be wrapped in their arms, you resisted. Your mood was foul, and you wished to stew in peace.

"I am not coming," you told him crossly before slamming your door and strewing in front of the fire, digging your bare feet into the stone beneath them.

Nearly an hour passed before there was a knock on your door. You put on your slippers and flung the door open. "I told you that I'm not coming!" The words garbled in your throat when you saw Baelor and Jena standing there instead of the guard.

"Yes, so we came to you," Baelor replied coolly as Jena slipped into your chambers.

"I do not recall inviting you in," you growled.

The prince shut and bolted the door behind him before taking hold of your chin, fingers digging into your flesh. You had not seen this side of him before. Jealousy laced through his eyes.

"Is that any way to talk to the heir of the throne?" he accused.

"Oh, so now are the heir with me?" you scoffed.

"I fear our little pet has forgotten her place. Parading about with that Tyrell boy," Jena said, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. She dipped her finger into the pot of sweet cream on your table, coating it. You craved a sweet treat during the hour of the ghosts. Baelor turned your face toward hers, and she shoved her cream-coated finger into her mouth. "We must remind her, husband."

"Indeed."

All you could do was mumble around the finger shoved in your mouth before Jena withdrew it, and a soft, wet pop vibrated through the air. She peeled the robe down your body before capturing you in a violent kiss, teeth gnashing and blood spilling from where she split your lip. You nearly tripped as Baelor spun you around, lapping the blood away and trapping you into an intoxicating kiss that nearly drew all the air from your lungs.

"Do you think that Tyrell boy can make you feel as we do?" Jena whispered in your ear, tugging on your hair.

"N…no," you whimpered once Baelor pulled his mouth away from yours. "I do not care for him; that was my grandmother's doing."

He withdrew his dagger, slicing through the silk of your nightdress, leaving it in tatters. The flat of the blade pressed against your nipple.

"Look at the wildnesses you bring out of us, sweet girl," Baelor whispered, gold flickering in his brown eye.

"I like it," you admitted, heart pounding in your chest. There had been nights when you had been bound with silk or leather, resting on your knees while you pleased them. Soft fabrics wrapped around your eyes as they teased you, competing to see who could make you peak the quickest.

Jena's teeth sank into your shoulder, hard enough to break the skin and leave a mark. It seemed the ravenous dragon blood had somehow toppled into her veins, searing deep in her skin just like it was slowly doing for you. They may have lost their actual dragons, but their allure and power shone brightly. Through your heavy-lidded eyes, you saw the riding crop attached to Baelor's belt. Tonight would be painful, but you would walk on hot coals for them. You would run through fire. A little pain seemed of no consequence.

Your upper body rested against Jena's lap after Baelor bent you across the bed. Arse upturned and vulnerable. The leather tenderly caressed your skin before the sharp crack marred it. Baelor was methodical, striking your skin precisely and criss crossing over the delicate flesh until scarlet welts bloomed. The pain made your skin itch and burn, making the throbbing and need between your thighs almost impossible to ignore. He knelt behind you after, kissing each mark he left while Jena stroked your hair and let you suckle on her fingers.

"Our good girl," she purred while Baelor's hands stroked your hips. "Sweet little pet."

There was a rustling of clothes before he entered you from behind, while Jena continued to hold and stroke you. His thrusts were more powerful this night, driving himself deep inside you.

"Would you like your prince to fill you with his seed?" Jena whispered, her blue eyes turning dark, almost an indigo. She knew what her husband desired above all else. A soft pair of thighs to rut against and a willing cunt to spill in.

"Y…yes please, my lady," you whimpered.

"He desires it above all else, sweet girl; it would make him happy," she whispered, stroking the back of your neck.

"P…please, Your Grace, spill inside me," you begged.

His hips slammed into your sore, bruised arse before he spilled, sending his seed deep inside your cunt and spilling down your thighs. But you weren't satiated yet; you needed them embedded inside you. Flesh burning next to yours. You clawed at Jena first, as Baelor's amused laughter filled the room.

"Our little pet has claws," Jena purred, letting you do as you wished. You suckled on her rosy nipples, tugging them between your teeth. Your tongue trailed over her soft belly before it buried in her cunt. Nails dug into her hips while you tongue fucked her until she mewled like a needy cat in heat. Her naked body arched, hand clamped over her mouth to muffle her moans before she spilled against your mouth.

You set your sights on Baelor next, dragging your nails down his furry chest and the V leading to his ruddy, leaking cock.

"Might you need some time to recover, Your Grace?" you teased wickedly.

"Should I whip you again for such insolence?" he asked sternly, tugging on your hair.

"I fear I might need many beatings before the lesson stick." You felt brazen tonight.

"Do not fret, little pet. I will guide you well." His cock slowly stirred to life, and you wasted no time engulfing him with your mouth. He hissed, bucking his hips.

Jena shifted behind you, the curve of her pelvis pressing agaisnt your arse while you sucked on Baelor's cock.

"We should get you a cock, wife," Baelor grunted.

"Yes, I should like that," she purred, moving her body to the side and sinking two fingers inside you.

Wish fulfilled. Caught between them both, stuffed full and drooling, weeping with desire. Baelor had enough spend to spill into your eager mouth as you clenched around Jena's fingers, soaking them with your release. But it did not end there. It ended with Jena astride Baelor's face with you riding his cock. You milked him dry that evening, hoarding each delicious drop. Jena's mouth melded against yours in a brazen kiss while she soaked her husband's mouth, and you soaked his cock. That morning, they were the ones to sneak off into the early dawn light.

Fate would assure you remained in their favour, forever bound to them.

Two full turns of the moon later, brought you unannounced to the Tower of the Hand, wringing your hands nervously.

"What has you so distressed, sweet pet?" Baelor asked, concerned written all over his face as Jena poured you a cup of pink wine from the Arbor to help soothe your nerves.

Your hand trembled as you took a deep breath.

"I am with child."

He had made it clear to you on your wedding night that he had no intention of bedding you. It was a statement of fact, delivered not out of cruelty but out of a misguided sense of honesty. He had seen the flash of hurt in your eyes, quickly masked by a composed, brittle acceptance. So, naturally, he reasoned, after some time spent in the company of the charming Ser Elyas, you would come to love him. It was a natural, tragic story. A handsome knight and a neglected princess. He had practically gift-wrapped a discreet, passionate affair for you. It was the least he could give it to you, a substitute for the husband you had probably imagined, a way to satisfy that aching, youthful urge for romance that he, a man carved from stone, could never fulfill.

Yet, from what he observed over the following weeks, the plan had failed with spectacular precision. He would watch from a high balcony as Ser Elyas, in his gleaming plate, offered you his hand to help you over a damp patch of grass. You took it with polite, distant courtesy. You would exchange a few words, an occasional jest that made the knight chuckle, but your expression remained serene, unmoved. Maekar, a veteran of countless campaigns, knew the look of a soldier performing a duty. And your nights, as the quiet reports from your maids confirmed, were spent solely in your rooms. No secret knocks, no furtive shadows slipping from your door at dawn.

He was at his wits’ end. What did you want then? He had given you everything your station and age could desire. What would wipe off that pretty, unconscious pout off your face? Perhaps, he had finally conceded, if he talked to you. A novel concept for a marriage, he knew. He would go to you, and perhaps, in a moment of unguarded frustration, you would let your grievances slip.

The previous night, he had gone to your chamber. Your maid, a timid wisp of a girl, nearly dropped her mending box when she saw him at the threshold. "Leave us," he had commanded, and she fled. You had been seated by the fire, a book open on your lap, and you looked like a startled doe at his unexpected presence, your body going rigid, your eyes wide.

"My prince," you had said, your voice a breathless question.

He had felt like an intruder in his own wife's space. "I…I came to see how you were faring," he had managed, the words feeling foreign and clumsy on his tongue.

You recovered quickly, your innate grace taking over. You poured his wine yourself, and offered him a plate of fruit and honey cake. "I am well, my prince. Truly. The book you sent is fascinating. The accounts of the Rhoynish are almost unbelievable." You were making conversation. You were making it easy for him. And so you spoke for a while. It was surprisingly pleasant.

He found himself relaxing into a chair, debating the tactical blunders of the Valyrian conquest of the Rhoyne, and you had listened with rapt attention, asking pointed, intelligent questions that surprised him. You had a mind, he realized with a start. A sharp, curious mind hidden beneath the pout and the big eyes.

But he didn’t catch any clues. No lamenting a lack of knights, no forlorn sighs about the gardens, no veiled complaints about his absence. Just you, being…pleasant. So, eventually, he rose to leave. "It is late. You should rest."

The change was instantaneous. The spark of animation in your eyes died, replaced by a stricken, hollow look, as if you were wondering what you had done wrong. Your fingers tightened imperceptibly on the spine of your book. "Of course, my prince. Thank you for your company."

He hesitated. He was a man of military precision, and the sudden, palpable drop in your mood was a tactical variable he hadn't accounted for. He was already in your bed chambers. What kind of husband left his wife's bed chamber right before going to bed himself? A churlish one. A neglectful one. The servants would talk, of that he was certain. The walls of Summerhall had ears and mouths. But he did not care what servants would see or say. Their gossip was the chaff of court life. The thought that stopped him cold, that made his feet feel nailed to the floor, was simpler. He owed you basic courtesy, did he not? He had denied you everything else. He could not deny you the simple, public dignity of a husband who shared your bed for a night.

Before he could overthink himself out of it, he gestured to the bed. "Move over, then."

Your eyes, if possible, grew even wider. "My prince?"

"I will not sleep in my boots," he said gruffly, sitting on the edge of a chaise and beginning to unlace them. "I will stay. Just to sleep." He made a promise to himself then, a sacred oath. He would lie down with you, and he would speak to you until you fell asleep, so you would not be insulted by a silent, rigid vigil. Then, he would leave. He had been insulting you for months by refusing to do his duties as a husband, and this small act of presence would at least be a temporary salve on a wound he had no intention of healing.

He lay down atop the covers, fully clothed in his tunic and breeches, a stiff, awkward pillar of a man. You slipped under the furs with a rustle of linen, lying rigidly on your back. The silence was deafening. Maekar cast about for something, anything, to say. "Tell me more about the Rhoynar," he commanded, his voice a little too loud in the quiet room.

And so you did, your voice soft and hesitant at first, then gaining strength. You spoke of the legends, the songs of the Mother Rhoyne, the giant turtles that were said to be gods. He listened, inserting a dry comment now and again that made you giggle, that beautiful, rippling sound he was growing dangerously accustomed to. He stayed, and continued speaking to you about the defensive layout of river cities, the logistical challenges of moving a legion through marshland, until your words began to slur, your breathing deepened, and your face went slack with peace. He had done it. He thought he would leave when he was sure you were deep in sleep. He would just wait one more minute. Just to be certain. The fire had burned down to embers. The room was warm. The scent of lavender was soporific. And that was the last thing he remembered.

Now, it was morning. The maid’s insistent knocking on the door was a relentless, chipper assault on his senses. He was still fully clothed, his tunic creased. And you were curled up next to him, clutching his arm as if it were the most natural, obvious thing in the world. The knocking roused you. You stirred, a small hum of contentment escaping your lips before your eyes fluttered open. Your gaze, hazy with sleep, traveled up his arm, over his chest, and settled on his face. The reaction was not one of surprise, or at least not the kind he expected. It was pleasure. A deep, luminous, bone-deep pleasure that transformed your features. You were smiling. A shy, pleased smile, as if you had just woken from a beautiful dream and found it still real.

"Good morning, my prince," you murmured, your voice thick and honeyed with sleep. There was a newfound confidence in it, a possessiveness that hadn't been there before. "Are you to have a busy day? I thought I might join you, if it were permitted. Perhaps I could assist you with your letters?"

Maekar found himself staring. The words were simple, but the meaning behind them was not. His plan, the handsome guard, the neglected lady, the grand affair, it all crashed down around his ears in a shower of broken, idiotic pottery. He realized his mistake with the force of a warhammer to the chest. You thought your husband was finally coming around. The gift, the miraculous, improbable gift you had wanted all along, was not a surrogate. It was him.

You wanted this. Him. His presence. His attention. His dry, sarcastic remarks. His tactical critiques of ancient river warfare. His grumpy, unyielding, solid self.

All this time, you had wanted him.

He felt a strange, tight sensation in his chest, a feeling he hadn't allowed himself to entertain for many, many years. It was a seed of warmth, cracking through the cold, hard stone he had meticulously built around his heart. He cleared his throat, his voice emerging as a low, rusty rumble.

"You can join me," he said, the words a surrender. "If you wish."

The pout was completely gone now. The smile that remained in its place was brilliant, a sun emerging from behind a lifetime of clouds. It was a smile just for him. And for the first time since he had been forced to take a new wife, Maekar Targaryen didn't feel saddled. He felt, with a terrifying, exhilarating certainty, that he was about to be completely, irrevocably unhorsed.

The days that followed that first, accidental night established a new rhythm in Summerhall, one Maekar found himself falling into with a disquieting ease he refused to examine too closely.

You had asked to assist him, and Maekar, a man who had never refused a direct request from a lady in his life out of sheer, blunt propriety, could find no reasonable grounds to deny you. You appeared in his solar the next morning, freshly dressed in a gown of pale yellow that made you look like a spring daffodil, and settled yourself in the chair across from his great oaken desk. He expected you to be a distraction. Instead, you proved infuriatingly useful. Your handwriting was elegant where his was a cramped, soldierly scrawl.

You sorted his correspondence into neat piles: urgent, routine, and the one you tactfully labeled "probably insincere flattery from lords who want something." He had let out a surprised bark of laughter at that, and you had beamed at him as if he'd just crowned you Queen of Love and Beauty.

This became your habit. Mornings in his solar, you with your neat piles and your quiet, intelligent questions about the running of the lands. Afternoons, you would walk with him along the battlements, your hand resting lightly on his arm as he pointed out the defensive improvements he was making to the eastern wall. You listened with genuine interest, asking about murder holes and arrow slits with a curiosity that was wholly unfeigned. Evenings, you dined together, and your sweet inquiries about his wellbeing were no longer met with grunts. He found himself actually answering you, describing the frustrations of a dispute between two minor landed knights or the irritating news from court. You would nod, your brow furrowed in thought, and offer observations that were often startlingly perceptive.

And every night, the same delicate, unspoken negotiation occurred.

The first time it happened outside of your own chambers, you had been in his rooms. It was late, the fire burning low, and you had been reading aloud to him from a treatise on dragonlore while he sharpened his dagger. Your voice had grown hoarse, and he noticed the way you rubbed at your eyes with the back of your hand. He could not, in good conscience, send you shuffling down cold corridors to your own chambers. The very idea was absurd. What kind of husband kicked his own wife out into the night like a stray cat?

"The hour is late," he had said, sheathing his dagger with a decisive click. "You will stay here."

You had looked at him with that expression again, the one that was half hope and half caution, as if you were afraid of misinterpreting his words. "Here, my prince?"

"In my bed," he clarified, the words coming out more gruffly than he intended. "I will take the chaise."

But you had looked so stricken at that suggestion, your face falling in that way he was growing to dread, that he had found himself amending the plan. "Or I will join you. The bed is large enough. It is not seemly for a prince to sleep on a chaise in his own chambers."

It was a flimsy justification, and he knew it. But the way your expression brightened, the shy, pleased smile that curved your lips, was worth the internal grumbling. He lay beside you that night, a careful distance between your bodies, and spoke to you about the properties of Valyrian steel until your breathing evened out into the soft rhythm of sleep. He awoke to find you pressed against his side, your head on his shoulder, one of your hands resting over his heart as if counting the beats.

This, too, became your habit. You clinging to him in sleep like a limpet to a rock, and Maekar waking each morning to the scent of your hair and the warm, trusting weight of your body against his. He told himself it was for your dignity. He told himself it was a small kindness, a basic courtesy. He told himself many things, and believed none of them.

Then there was the incident with the lamprey pie.

A lord from the coastal holdings had sent a gift of lampreys, and the kitchens had prepared them in a rich, heavily spiced pie. You had eaten only a small portion, politely complimenting the flavor, but within hours you were taken ill. Maekar was in the yard overseeing a drill when your maid came running, her face pale as milk.

"My prince, it is the princess. She is unwell. The maester says it is the lamprey, that it has irritated her stomach something fierce."

He did not remember crossing the castle. He only remembered the cold spike of fear that had lanced through him, the way his heart had hammered against his ribs with a violence that had nothing to do with exertion. He found you in your chambers, curled on your side in the great bed, your face waxen and beaded with sweat. The maester was there, a fussy old man who was doing far too much hand-wringing for Maekar's liking.

"She will recover, my prince. It is a mere gastric disturbance. But she must eat to keep her strength up, and she refuses. The princess will not touch the porridge."

Maekar looked at the tray on the bedside table. A bowl of plain, unappetizing porridge sat there, cooling and congealing. You were facing away from it, your eyes closed, your pout firmly in place.

"Leave us," Maekar commanded. The maester and the maids scurried out like mice before a dragon.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. Your eyes fluttered open, and you looked at him with such a mix of misery and embarrassment that it made something twist painfully in his chest.

"I am sorry," you whispered, your voice thin and reedy. "I am being foolish. It will pass."

"You will eat," he said, reaching for the bowl.

"My prince, I cannot. The very thought..."

"You will eat," he repeated, and this time his voice was gentler, an unfamiliar softness creeping in despite his best efforts. He scooped a small portion of the porridge onto the spoon. "Open your mouth."

You stared at him, those big eyes glassy with discomfort, and for a moment he thought you would refuse him. But then you parted your lips, a tiny, obedient gesture, and he carefully slid the spoon into your mouth. You swallowed with visible effort, your face scrunching up, and he immediately had another spoonful ready.

"Good," he said, the praise awkward on his tongue. "Again."

He fed you the entire bowl that way, spoonful by painstaking spoonful, his large, calloused hands surprisingly steady. He did not rush you. He waited between each bite, murmuring gruff words of encouragement that felt foreign and strange, like a language he had never been taught. When the bowl was empty, he set it aside and reached for a cloth, dabbing gently at the corner of your mouth.

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that made him feel like a hero from a song, when all he had done was feed you porridge.

"Thank you, Maekar," you breathed, using his name without his title for the first time. It hit him somewhere deep, a blow he had no armor for.

"Rest now," he ordered, his voice rougher than he intended. "I will stay."

He stayed. He lay beside you, fully clothed, and let you curl into his side. He stayed until your breathing steadied and the color slowly returned to your cheeks. He stayed even after that, watching the firelight play across the ceiling, feeling the steady rise and fall of your chest against his, and wondered what in the seven hells he was doing.

But still, still, he put off the matter of bedding you.

It was not that he did not want to. The realization had crept up on him with the slow, inevitable force of a rising tide. He wanted to. Gods help him, he wanted to. The sight of you in your thin nightdress, the way your hair spilled across the pillows, the warmth of your body pressed against his each morning, it was testing the limits of his resolve, which had never been particularly strong where matters of the heart were concerned. He had simply never had his heart involved before.

But to bed you would be to open a door he was not certain he could close again. He had built his life around duty, around the cold, hard certainties of obligation and honor. He had loved once, and loss had carved a hollow in him that he had believed was permanent. You were filling that hollow, day by day, smile by smile, and the sensation was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

He was a coward. Maekar Targaryen, who had faced down rebel lords and laughed at the prospect of single combat, was a coward when it came to his own wife.

Then came the night of the kiss.

It was an evening like any other. You had spent the day in his solar, helping him draft responses to a particularly tedious batch of petitions. Dinner had been a quiet affair, just the two of you, and you had made him laugh, actually laugh, a deep, surprised rumble of sound, with a wicked impression of a pompous lord who had visited the previous week. You had retired to his chambers, as had become your custom, and he had told you about the Dragonknight's campaigns in Dorne until your eyes grew heavy.

"Goodnight, Maekar," you said, your voice soft and drowsy.

And then you kissed him.

It was not a forceful kiss, not a demand or an invitation. It was a brief, gentle press of your lips against his, as natural and unthinking as a breath. A goodbye. An act of simple, uncomplicated affection. You pulled back, your eyes already closing, and nestled into your pillow with a contented sigh, as if you had done nothing of any particular note.

Maekar lay frozen, staring at the canopy above him, his heart thundering in his ears.

You had kissed him.

This was his fault. The thought careened through his skull like a loose cannon on a ship's deck. This was entirely, unequivocally his fault. He had done this. He had planted this notion in your head, watered it with his attentions, and now it had bloomed into something he could no longer ignore.

A fortnight ago, you had been helping him remove his heavy outer tunic after a long day of inspections, your small fingers working deftly at the clasps. It had been such a wifely gesture, so intimate and so natural, that before he had known what he was doing, he had leaned down and pressed his lips to your brow. A brief, chaste kiss. A thank you. He had not even realized he had done it until he saw the way you had frozen, your eyes wide. He had cleared his throat and muttered something about the fire needing more wood, and the moment had passed.

But you had taken that kiss, that single, thoughtless gesture, and drawn a conclusion from it. You had decided, in your sweet, hopeful way, that your husband wanted you to initiate affection as well. That he was too reserved, too gruff, too locked within his own silences to ask for what he wanted. And so, with that gentle, trusting kiss, you had reached across the chasm he had placed between you and offered him a bridge.

Did he want you to? The question burned in his mind, insistent and demanding. Did he want you to kiss him goodnight, as if it were the most normal thing in the world? As if you were truly husband and wife in every sense?

He certainly was not complaining. The ghost of your lips still tingled on his, and his body was reacting in ways that were entirely inappropriate for a man who was supposed to be letting his wife sleep. He was not complaining at all. That was the problem.

He should be complaining. He should be panicking. Because this, this sweetness, this trust, this quiet, domestic intimacy, led inexorably to one conclusion. You would expect children now. The thought hit him like a splash of ice water. Of course you would expect children. A princess, a wife, a woman who had been raised to understand that the bearing of heirs was a fundamental part of her duty. And you would want them, he realized with a jolt. You would want his children. Not out of duty, but out of genuine desire. You would want a babe with his silver-gold hair and your eyes, a child you could hold and nurture and love.

Gods be good.

He turned his head on the pillow to look at you. You were already asleep, your face peaceful, your lips still curved in that small, contented smile. You had no idea of the earthquake you had just set off in his chest. You had kissed him and promptly fallen asleep, trusting him completely, utterly unaware of the crisis you had left in your wake.

Maekar stared at you for a long time, watching the steady rise and fall of your breath, the way your lashes cast delicate shadows on your cheeks. His mind was a whirlwind of duty and desire, fear and longing, the cold echoes of past grief and the warm, insistent pulse of something new.

He could not keep putting this off. He could not keep lying beside you, night after night, pretending that this was a mere courtesy. He could not keep telling himself that he was doing this for your dignity, when in truth, your dignity was the last thing on his mind when he felt the press of your body against his in the dark.

But not tonight. Tonight, you were asleep, and he was a coward still. Tonight, he would lie here and listen to you breathe and feel the warmth of your kiss still burning on his lips.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he would be braver.

Or perhaps, he thought grimly, you would kiss him again, and the choice would be taken out of his hands entirely. The thought was not as unwelcome as it should have been.

The kisses continued.

Every night, without fail, you would bid him goodnight with that same gentle, fleeting press of your lips against his. It was never demanding, never lingering. It was a question posed in the softest possible terms, a door left slightly ajar, an invitation he could accept or decline as he saw fit. And every night, for the first several nights, Maekar accepted it the same way: by remaining perfectly, rigidly still, a statue of a man enduring a pleasant but bewildering assault.

He felt you withdraw each time, felt the tiny, almost imperceptible slump of your shoulders as you settled back onto your pillow. You never said anything. You never complained. But he knew. He was a dull rock, an unresponsive lump of granite, and he was hurting you with his passivity. The knowledge gnawed at him, a persistent, guilty ache that followed him through his days and haunted his waking hours.

The fifth night, something in him snapped. Simply, as you leaned in to press your customary kiss to his lips, he found himself moving. His hand came up, rough and calloused, to cup the back of your head. And he kissed you back.

It was not a passionate kiss. It was not the kiss of a man swept away by desire. It was a careful response, a returning of pressure, a silent acknowledgment. He felt your startled inhale against his mouth, the way your body went taut with surprise. When he pulled back, your eyes were wide, your lips parted, and there was a look on your face that made his chest constrict.

Expectation. Hope. A question that had been waiting, patient and trembling, for an answer.

Maekar looked at you, at your big eyes shining in the firelight, at your kiss-swollen mouth, at the delicate line of your collarbone visible above the lace of your nightdress. He thought of all the nights he had lain beside you, rigid with restraint. He thought of the way you smiled at him, the way you laughed at his dry remarks, the way you clung to his arm in sleep as if he were the only safe harbor in a storm.

He resigned himself. The decision came not with a sense of defeat, but with a strange, liberating clarity. He did not want to become the object of your resentment. He could not bear the thought of those eyes looking at him with bitterness, with the slow, corrosive realization that your husband was a man who denied you not only his affection but the most basic experiences of womanhood. You were young and full of life, and he had been keeping you in a gilded cage, feeding you porridge and kissing your forehead as if you were a child rather than a wife.

"You deserve pleasure," he said, his voice low and rough, the words feeling as if they were being dragged from some deep, hidden place within him. "I have been remiss in my duties."

Your breath caught. "Maekar..."

He moved before he could lose his nerve. His hands found your waist, and he lifted you as if you weighed nothing, settling you onto his lap with a decisive, careful motion. You were warm through the thin fabric of your nightdress, your body soft and pliant against the hard planes of his chest. He could feel the rapid flutter of your heart.

"I will not take what I have no right to claim," he said, the words a rough murmur against your temple. "But I can give you this. Let me give you this."

His fingers found the hem of your nightdress, and he pushed it up slowly, giving you time to object. You did not object. You only watched him with those enormous eyes, your hands resting on his shoulders as if you did not quite know what to do with them. He touched you gently, so gently, his battle-roughened hands moving with a delicacy that surprised even himself. He explored the soft skin of your thighs, the curve of your hip, the dip of your waist. He learned the shape of you by touch alone, his gaze fixed on your face, cataloguing every flicker of expression.

When his fingers found the center of your heat, you gasped, your head falling back, your fingers digging into his shoulders. He moved with slow, patient circles, learning what made you sigh, what made you shudder, what made your hips buck involuntarily against his hand. He was methodical in his attentions, as he was in all things, and he brought you to the peak with the same focused determination he might apply to a siege.

You shattered against him with a cry that was half surprise and half relief, your body arching, your hands fisting in the fabric of his tunic. He held you through it, his free arm wrapped securely around your waist, anchoring you against the storm of sensation. When the tremors subsided, you slumped against his chest, breathing hard, your face buried in the crook of his neck.

He gave you a moment. Then, with the same gentle efficiency, he rearranged your nightdress, lifted you from his lap, and placed you back onto the bed. He drew the furs up to your chin and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

"Sleep now," he commanded, his voice a low rumble.

You blinked up at him, your expression dazed and soft and so full of something that looked terrifyingly like adoration. "But you..."

"This was for you," he said, cutting you off with a firmness that brooked no argument. "Rest."

You slept. He did not. He lay beside you in the darkness, his body aching with unfulfilled need, and told himself that this was enough. He had done his duty. He had given you pleasure without complicating matters with his own involvement. It was a tidy solution, a clean, surgical strike. You were satisfied. There was no need to get himself fully involved.

This, too, became a habit.

Every few nights, when the expectant look in your eyes grew too pronounced to ignore, he would pull you onto his lap and touch you until you came apart in his arms. He learned the rhythms of your body. He knew the spot just below your ear that made you whimper when he pressed his lips to it. He knew the pace that made you clutch at him desperately, the slower, teasing touches that made you gasp his name like a prayer. He gave you pleasure as a general might distribute supplies to a besieged city: regularly, efficiently, and with a steadfast refusal to partake himself.

He thought you accepted this. He thought you understood the unspoken terms of this arrangement. He was a fool.

It was a quiet evening, the fire burning low in the hearth, the castle settling into the deep hush of night. He had just returned from a grueling inspection of the eastern watchtowers, his muscles aching, his mood as dark as the storm clouds gathering over the mountains. You were waiting for him in his chambers, a book open on your lap, a cup of warmed wine already poured and waiting on his desk.

You were always waiting for him now. The thought should not have warmed him as it did.

The night's ritual had been completed. You were nestled against him, your body still humming with the aftermath of pleasure, your breathing slowly returning to normal. He was preparing to settle you back onto your pillow, to pull up the furs and press his customary kiss to your forehead, when you spoke.

"Maekar." Your voice was soft, hesitant, but there was a thread of steel beneath it that he had learned to recognize. "May I ask you something?"

"You may," he said, his guard instinctively rising.

You were silent for a moment, your fingers tracing idle patterns on the fabric of his tunic. Then, you lifted your head to look at him, and the expression in your eyes made his heart stutter.

"Why do you not want anything for yourself?"

The question hung in the air between them, simple and devastating. He opened his mouth to deflect, to offer some gruff platitude about duty and obligation, but you did not give him the chance.

"Every night," you continued, your voice still soft but gaining strength, "you give me such pleasure. You are so gentle, so careful, so attentive. But you never…" You hesitated, a flush creeping up your cheeks, but you pressed on with the same determined courage you had shown since the day you arrived at Summerhall. "You never let me touch you. You never seek your own release. It is as if you believe you do not deserve it, or as if you think I am not capable of giving it."

"You are capable," he said, the words escaping before he could cage them.

"Then why?" Your pout was there, that unconscious, pretty pout that he had come to know so well. But it was accompanied by a look so loving, so open and earnest and full of desperate hope, that it struck him like a blow. "I could learn. I could learn how to please you, if you are willing to teach me. I am not afraid. I want to be a true wife to you, in every sense."

He felt something cracking inside him, the carefully constructed walls he had built around his heart beginning to crumble. "It is not a matter of teaching," he said, his voice strained. "There are…consequences. You are young. You should not be burdened with..."

"Children," you finished for him, and he was stunned into silence. "You are worried about children."

It was not the only thing, but it was the easiest to admit. He nodded stiffly.

You took a deep breath, and he watched as you gathered your courage, your hands clasping together in your lap. "If you do not wish for children," you said, your voice steady despite the tremor he could see in your fingers, "I can drink moon tea. We can postpone the idea. I have spoken to the maester, and he has assured me it is safe when used sparingly."

Maekar stared at you. You had spoken to the maester. You, his sweet wife, had gone to the old man and asked about moon tea. The image was so absurd, so unexpectedly bold, that he almost laughed.

But you were not finished. "I would like to have a child someday," you continued, and now your voice grew softer, more wistful. "One child of my own. No matter a boy or a girl. And I would raise it with the best of my ability, with all the love I have to give. But…" You reached out, your small hand coming to rest on his cheek, your thumb brushing the line of his jaw. "I would like to have a life first. A marriage. A husband who does not treat me like a delicate piece of glass that might shatter at his touch."

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that had undone him from the very beginning.

"I want you, Maekar," you whispered. "I want my husband."

The walls crumbled. The last defenses fell. Maekar Targaryen, prince of Summerhall, breaker of rebellions and terror of his enemies, looked at his young wife and realized he was only a man. A man who had been fighting a losing battle against his own heart for longer than he cared to admit. A man who loved his wife.

He loved you. The truth of it was a physical thing, a weight in his chest, a fire in his blood. He loved your laugh, your pout, your clever mind and your gentle hands and your infuriating, wonderful habit of clinging to him in sleep. He loved your courage, standing before him now and baring your soul with nothing but hope to shield you. He loved you.

"Gods be good," he breathed, and then he was moving.

His hands found your waist, and this time there was nothing careful or clinical about the touch. He pulled you against him, crushing you to his chest, and his mouth descended on yours in a kiss that was nothing like the chaste, hesitant presses of lips you had shared before. This was a surrender. A desperate, hungry admission of everything he had been too stubborn to say.

You gasped against his mouth, and then your arms were around his neck, your fingers tangling in his hair, and you were kissing him back with an enthusiasm that made his head spin. When he finally pulled back, you were both breathing hard, your faces inches apart.

"You foolish, stubborn man," you whispered, but your voice was thick with tears and joy. "I have been waiting for you to understand."

"I understand now," he said, his voice a low, wrecked rasp. "Forgive me. For all of it. For the neglect, for the distance, for the guard I foisted upon you like a fool..."

"You gave me Ser Elyas?" Your eyes widened, and then a surprised laugh bubbled up from your throat. "Oh, Maekar. I thought he was just a very attentive guard. I wondered why he kept trying to recite poetry at me."

Maekar groaned, dropping his forehead to yours. "I am an idiot."

"You are my idiot," you corrected, and the possessive warmth in your voice was his final undoing. "My husband. And I believe you owe me a proper wedding night."

He looked at you, at the mischievous glint in your eyes, at the loving curve of your smile, and he felt something he had not felt in many, many years. Hope. Joy. A future unfolding before him that was not merely duty and endurance, but something bright and warm and achingly beautiful.

"I owe you much more than that," he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to yours once more.

The first proposal arrived on a Tuesday.

Baelor knew this because he had been in his mother's solar when the messenger came — had been in the middle of a sentence about grain yields in the Reach, which was not a subject that had ever previously caused him difficulty — when Myriah had accepted the sealed letter, read it with the pleasantly neutral expression she deployed when delivering information she intended to observe him receiving, and said: "Lord Ambrose Celtigar has written to your father regarding a match."

Baelor had finished his sentence about grain yields. He had said I see with the composure that had served him in war councils and throne rooms and every demanding context his life had presented him with. He had excused himself at a reasonable hour and walked back to his solar and sat down and looked at the wall.

Lord Ambrose Celtigar was thirty four years old. Not unpleasant looking, by general report. He held a respectable seat, had no significant character defects that Baelor was aware of, and was by every measurable standard a perfectly suitable match for a young woman of good family and accomplishment.

Baelor sat with this information for some time. He thought about it with the same thorough attention he brought to tactical assessments and pieces of legislation that required careful consideration. He thought about Lord Celtigar's seat and Lord Celtigar's reported appearance and Lord Celtigar's presumably functional absence of character defects. Then, against his better judgement and with the inevitability of a man who has been trying not to think about something for several moons and has finally encountered a reason he cannot maintain the effort, he thought about you. He thought about the particular way you laughed when something actually struck you as funny rather than merely requiring a polite response. He thought about all the moons of carrying something carefully that he had been meaning to do something about and had not yet done something about, and he sat with the full uncomfortable weight of that gap until the candles had burned considerably lower than when he sat down. Then he went to bed and did not sleep particularly well.

The second proposal arrived on a Thursday. Ser Willam Waxley — twenty eight, well regarded, good family, reportedly personable in the specific way that made Baelor briefly and irrationally consider what reportedly personable actually meant in practice and whether it was a quality you would find appealing, which was not a line of thinking he pursued to its conclusion because he had more self-respect than that. He received the information from his mother over correspondence review, said I see, finished his tea, and continued with the correspondence. It took longer than usual. He kept losing his place.

The third proposal arrived the following Monday, and Baelor heard it from one of his mother's ladies who mentioned it to another in passing while crossing the training yard without any awareness that he was within earshot. Lord Patrek Mallister — young, wealthy, the kind of man described by other men as having prospects, which was a phrase Baelor had always found vague and now found specifically aggravating. He held his sword incorrectly for the remainder of the session. His master at arms observed this with the expression of a man who had seen many things in training yards and had made a professional decision to comment on none of them today.

By the second week Myriah had stopped pretending she was telling him incidentally.

She told him directly now, with the pleasant composure of a woman delivering information she had every right to deliver, and watched his face with the specific attentiveness she had been applying to him since he was approximately four years old and had not, in the intervening decades, become any less accurate. "Lord Rowan," she said one Wednesday morning, in the same tone she might use to note the weather. "He sent a very thoughtful letter. Apparently he is an articulate man — the letter suggested genuine consideration of the match. He mentioned his gardens specifically. Considerable, by his account."

"How nice for him," said Baelor, examining his correspondence with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely reading every word and not at all conducting a parallel and involuntary assessment of whether considerable gardens were a meaningful advantage in the context of a marriage proposal.

"They are in the Reach," Myriah offered. "Lovely climate."

"I am aware where the Reach is, Mother."

"I am simply noting that Lord Rowan appears to be a man of—"

"I am aware," he said, with the measured evenness that cost him slightly more than it usually did, "of Lord Rowan's considerable attributes."

Myriah looked at him over the rim of her tea with the serenity of a woman who had already drawn her conclusions and was simply allowing the conversation to confirm them at its own pace. Across the room you turned a page of correspondence with your habitual focused attention, entirely unaware that a man three feet from your queen was conducting his seventeenth silent assessment of the morning of whether the Reach's climate was in any way a disqualifying characteristic in a prospective husband and arriving, frustratingly, at no useful conclusion.

The problem — and he had examined this problem with the thoroughness it deserved, sitting with it in his solar across several evenings while the candles burned and the city went about its business outside his window — was not that the proposals were coming. Of course they were coming. You were accomplished and intelligent and the kind of person who made rooms better by being in them, and proposals were the entirely predictable result of other people having eyes and using them. The problem was that he had been meaning to do something about a feeling he had been carrying for far too many moons and had not done something about it, and now other men were doing something about it, and the window in which doing something felt like a considered and deliberate choice was rapidly becoming a window in which doing something felt like a response to a crisis. He did not want to do something as a response to a crisis. He wanted to do something because it was right and honest and because he meant it entirely, not because Lord Rowan had considerable gardens and the Reach had a lovely climate. The distinction mattered to him. The distinction was, currently, making his life significantly more difficult than it needed to be.

The fifth proposal was from a lord whose name he forgot immediately upon hearing it, which concerned him more than anything else that had happened so far. He had a good memory. He did not forget names. He went back to his solar and sat with the wall for an hour before acknowledging that the wall had never once been helpful and he should probably stop consulting it.

Maekar found him on the battlements on a Thursday evening, which was not unusual — Maekar found him in various places occasionally and delivered his opinions without invitation, which was simply a feature of having a brother that Baelor had long since accepted. "You look terrible," Maekar said, by way of greeting, leaning against the stone beside him with the air of a man who had come here with a specific purpose and was not going to be deflected from it by pleasantries. Baelor thanked him with the composure of someone receiving a compliment and returned his attention to the city. The city, like the wall, was not particularly helpful.

"The proposals," Maekar said.

"I am not discussing this."

"You have been discussing it with yourself for two weeks. Loudly, in the sense that everyone can see you doing it even though you have not said a word." Maekar paused, with the brief patience of a man making a concession to tact before abandoning it. "She does not know. She has no idea — she sorts the correspondence and answers the proposals politely and has absolutely no indication that you are standing on battlements losing your ability to remember lords' names because of it."

"I did not forget his name."

"You called Lord Fossoway Lord Forrest twice in council," Maekar said flatly, "and his name is Fossoway and you never forget names. Do something about it."

"It is not that simple."

"It is exactly that simple. You consider things until other men act and then you consider the consequences of other men acting. Do something about it." He let that sit for a moment, then pushed off the wall and left with the decisive efficiency of a man who had said what he came to say and had no interest in discussing it further.

Baelor stood on the battlements for a while longer. He thought about Lord Fossoway, whose name he had apparently been calling wrong. He thought about Lord Rowan's gardens and Lord Lyonel Tyrell, who had not yet written but whose existence as a potential candidate Myriah had mentioned with the casual precision of someone planting a seed and fully expecting it to grow. He thought about you sorting correspondence with your focused attention entirely unaware that he was up here mangling names. Then he went inside, because the battlements were cold and the wall had already established it was not going to be helpful and Maekar was right, which was an irritating thing to have to acknowledge even internally.

The sixth proposal arrived on a Friday morning and was, by his mother's assessment delivered with a serenity that he found specifically challenging, the most serious one yet. Lord Lyonel Tyrell. Young. Wealthy. The heir to Highgarden.

He sat in his habitual chair and looked at the correspondence he was not reading and thought about Highgarden with the sustained focus of a man attempting to locate a flaw and being unable to find one. Highgarden had gardens that made Lord Rowan's look modest. It had resources and position and climate that were objectively difficult to argue with. Lord Lyonel Tyrell was, by every measurable standard, an excellent prospect, and Baelor was a fair enough man to acknowledge this even when the acknowledgment was deeply inconvenient.

You were at the correspondence table. You were wearing the blue dress — you always concentrated better in the blue dress, he had noticed this some time ago, something in the colour seemed to settle something in you. You had a small ink stain on your left forefinger from where the pen had slipped earlier and you had not noticed and he had noticed and had said nothing, because saying you have ink on your finger would have been a reasonable and unremarkable thing to say and for some reason this morning reasonable and unremarkable things felt slightly beyond him. He was going to lose you to Highgarden. Lord Lyonel Tyrell was going to take you to his considerable gardens and his considerable resources and you were going to sort his correspondence and make his rooms better by being in them and—

"Your grace."

He looked up. You were looking at him from the correspondence table with an expression of mild concern, which meant the expression on his face had apparently communicated something he had not intended to communicate. "Are you well?" you asked, and he said yes, and you looked at him with that observational patience that had always seen more than he planned for, and said he had been quiet, a different kind of quiet, and he told you he was perfectly well with the composure he had left and you returned to the correspondence and he looked at the window and thought, very clearly and very finally, that he was done thinking about Highgarden.

He stood up.

He crossed the room.

He stopped beside the correspondence table and you looked up and he looked at you — at the ink on your left forefinger and the blue dress and the expression that was currently hovering between curious and concerned — and he thought about Maekar saying do something about it with the bluntness of someone who had run entirely out of patience for watching things not happen. He thought about Lord Fossoway, whose name he had been mangling. He thought about Lord Lyonel Tyrell's gardens, which he was done thinking about.

"There is something," he said, "that I should have said some time ago."

You put down your pen.

"Alright," you said quietly, a light frown appearing on your face.

He looked at you — at your face, which was giving him its full attentive consideration the way it always did — and he thought about how he had wanted to do this properly. Considered rather than reactive. Chosen rather than pressured. He had wanted the moment to be right and he had been waiting for the moment to be right and the moment had apparently decided not to wait for him and had gone ahead and arrived anyway in the middle of a Friday morning over a correspondence table with an ink stain on your finger, and he found, standing here, that he did not mind this even slightly.

"I love you," he said. Quietly. Plainly. With the full weight of the words and several proposals in his mind and one brother's bluntness behind it. "I have loved you for some time. I had wanted to tell you when the moment felt properly considered rather than — I had wanted it to be right rather than reactive, and in attempting to ensure that I have apparently been calling lords by the wrong names and holding my sword incorrectly and consulting walls, none of which has been productive. It has been brought to my attention, with some force, that I consider things at the expense of doing them. I am attempting to correct this."

The solar was very quiet.

You looked at him for a long moment, something moving across your face through several registers — the attentive reading quality, and then something warmer and more wondering beneath it, and then something that was almost but not quite a laugh — and you said: "Lord Tyrell."

"Has excellent gardens," he said. "Yes."

"And Lord Rowan."

"Lovely climate."

"And Ser Willam Waxley and Lord Celtigar and—"

"Yes," he said. "All of them. I am aware of all of them in considerable detail, I have been aware of all of them in considerable detail for two weeks, and I would like, if it is at all possible, to stop being aware of them."

The almost-laugh became something more definite, and he stood beside the correspondence table and watched you laugh softly and found that the moons of careful management had nowhere left to go except simply — out. Released. Like something that had been held very tightly finally being allowed to exist without the holding.

"I was not going to accept any of them," you said, when the laugh had settled into something quieter and warmer. "I had no intention of accepting any of them. For reasons that I think are probably apparent."

He went still. "How long," he said.

"Longer than two weeks," you said softly.

The solar was warm and golden and entirely, completely quiet. He reached across the correspondence table and covered your hand with his — the one with the ink on the finger, the one he had noticed and said nothing about, the one he was done saying nothing about — and felt you turn your palm and close your fingers around his with the ease of something that had always been going to happen and had simply required a Tuesday and too many proposals for his liking and one correctly remembered name to arrive.

"I would like," he said, "to have a conversation that is considerably overdue."

You looked up at him with that real smile — the one underneath all the others — and said: "Are you going to consider it first, or simply have it?"

He looked at you for a moment. "Simply have it," he said.

Outside the solar a Friday morning in spring continued with cheerful indifference to the fact that Prince Baelor Targaryen had just resolved moons of careful management in approximately four minutes. Somewhere in the castle Myriah Martell set down her tea with the expression of a woman who had been waiting for this particular Friday since approximately the third moon and found it entirely satisfactory. In the adjoining corridor Maekar, who had absolutely not been listening at the door, walked away with the expression of a man who had said do something about it and had been correct and intended to bring this up at the earliest opportunity and every opportunity thereafter.

You were still holding his hand across the correspondence table. Baelor looked at that for a moment — at your fingers closed around his and the ink stain and the blue dress and the smile that was still present in the corners of your mouth — and thought that he intended to do something about that too. Properly this time. Without the walls and the battlements and the involuntary memorisation of other men's garden statistics. Simply and directly and without further delay, in the manner Maekar had recommended and that he was now prepared to fully endorse.

He was, after all, done considering.

A.N.: I have been sitting with this request for some time. Sorry for being this late, I have not been as inspired as I would have wanted to. Some people have noted that the AKOTSK is kinda dying (or dozing off) and I think I have the same feeling, idk. Guess I need to take it easy for a minute or two. Thank you all for your constant support, you are all champs <3

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @mongrelcryptid @sacha1slytherin @faithfullyvigilantsliver @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff

You hastily wipe your face with the corner of your apron, and busy yourself with pouring the tisane you made for pain into the mug. You make a show of taking a sip of it yourself first, scalding your mouth just like the Captain did.

"My lady, that is not -" the Crown Prince says, reaching for the mug to take it from you, but you stubbornly finish your taste of it noting that it could absolutely use some more ginger if you had any.

Once you force the swallow down, you cough once into your arm, eyes watering again, this time from physical pain alone and hand the mug over.

"Just so you can be sure," you say, wincing with the rough burn along the roof of your mouth and back of your throat. It wasn't nearly as hot as the tea the Captain willingly drank but gods that does smart something fierce. You'll be suffering when eating anything remotely warm for the next couple of days that's for sure. You let the pain center you, and try not to feel embarrassed at your previous outburst. The grief is unavoidable, you know this. And he wanted the truth. Uncovering that wound on your heart was the only way you could tell that story.

"That wasn't necessary, I trust you." The Prince says.

"Your Grace, you've known me for an hour," you point out in disbelief.

"It has been at least two. And in that time you've done much to shield me, heal me, and have put up with my questioning your painful past. I trust you."

"Thank you, you Grace," you say, because what else could you say? "I will try to be worthy of it."

"I find that I am the one not worthy, my lady. My house has failed you, and yours deeply and I mean to rectify it."

"That isn't -, your Grace, I was one errant noble, lost in the shuffle of a hundred such cases. My family was marked down as extinct, I know they were because my captors told me as much. I don't blame you or your house for not knowing I was still alive. I know the aftermath was chaotic."

The Prince snorts, and absently rubs his finger against his forehead while staring down into the mug like it offers all the answers, or maybe even a way to change the past. He cradles the mug in one broad hand, and taps the ceramic with base of the ring on his finger. It clicks against the glaze in an almost thinking sort of noise.

"Chaotic is…painfully accurate. Aside from rounding up all the rebels, and then deciding punishments…gods it felt like it wouldn't end. Every time we turned around there was another house, another noble line to rake over the coals." He recalls.

"The Yronwoods did consider taking me to the capital with them when they were summoned." You add, leaning forward while drawing your knees up towards your chest. "You'd captured the Lord and heir at Redgrass of course, but the Lady Yronwood went to King's Landing for the trial. She almost took me along, hoping she could lever me for a softer sentence for her son."

"But they did not?"

"No. Since my family was all gone there would be no one to leverage me against. So they left me at the keep. I know the Lady was furious about her son having to stay as a hostage. I heard all about it when the Lord returned. She wanted to take me to King's Landing then, to try and negotiate a swap but the Lord said King Daeron would never trade a first born son of a rebellious and living house for the first born daughter of a loyal, but dead house."

Baelor looks pained for a moment, his mouth twisting into a grimace. Before you can ask what's wrong he lets out a somewhat frustrated sigh.

"I wish I could say Lord Yronwood was wrong, but the fact is, he was correct in his reasoning. My father was…harsher than expected to so many families, but to allow such an exchange would have sent the hardliners into a froth. Gods, my uncle Brynden would have probably thrown something at my head for supporting it."

"Your uncle?" You ask carefully.

"He's better known as Lord Bloodraven these days." The Prince goes on to explain, a certain wryness to his voice. It is no where as fond as it was for his siblings, but there is still an element of something familial there. "He and I argued viciously at the time about the fates of the traitors."

"And he often throws things at your head, your Grace?" You ask, trying to suppress a somewhat incredulous smile from creeping up at the thought. Prince Baelor, having to duck some on coming item thrown by a frustrated relative – what a sight that must be.

"Only when in a temper." He jests back with a quiet chuckle. "No, I exaggerate. He's actually quite even keeled. But there were a lot of discussions during that time where he was pushing for things my father did not want to do, not even to his enemies."

He pauses and takes a long, slow sip of the tea. You watch him drink, the way he tilts his head back just a little, the corner of his mouth, the bob of his throat as he swallows. He sets the mug down on the hearth.

"Still," he continues, "I would have pushed for it, had you been brought to the capital, my lady. We are many things, my family, but I'd like to think we are loyal to those that are loyal to us."

You rest your chin on one of your knees for a brief moment, feeling like that young woman again, seventeen years old, lost, alone, and so very frightened of what would happen to you next. She did not have a Prince to offer her reassurances and comfort, but the part of you that still carries her – feels lighter hearing him speak those words.

"Thank you, your Grace. It is a comfort to hear that. I admit…I wonder sometimes what would have happened if they had taken me to King's Landing, what my life might look like now."

He nods, but doesn't look at you. Instead, he looks down at his hands, where he is slowly turning one of his rings around and around on one finger. The rings are polished to a high shine, and you wonder if that is from the care of servants, or from him, doing exactly this, over and over.

"When I came up from Dorne with the spearmen, we had to fight our way to the Boneway." He says, still turning the ring around and around. "The Yronwood had their vassals harassing us all the way through, but it was the fastest route over land. I remember looking up at the keep on the cliff face in the far distance and wishing I had time to take it."

You turn that over in your mind for half a moment and then ask, "So you could control the passage for later? Had the rebellion gone on longer?"

"Yes, thankfully it wasn't needed in the long run, but I was thinking that makes two times that we just missed each other."

"Your Grace?" you ask, confused as to what he means exactly.

"The first was at the Boneway, going by the Yronwood keep. If I'd had time to take it, we would have found you then. The second was if you'd been brought to King's Landing, I would have argued for your release."

"Neither of those are a guarantee we would have met your Grace," you point out, because perhaps yes, in those versions of the world you would have crossed paths, but what would you be to the Crown Prince, a warrior bound to the battle field or the King's council from those times? The only reason you have his attention here and now is that he's badly injured and reliant upon your discretion.

"Perhaps, forgive me the indulgence," he finally looks back at you, a small quirk of a smile on his lips, something a little sad and self deprecating.

"Nothing to forgive." You assure him, "I'll admit I think a lot about what ifs too. Especially at this time of night."

"Which one plagues you the most?"

You sit up straight from where you've been somewhat slouched over your knees, letting your arms relax from the hold you've had on your legs. It's a good question. There are many that you've turned over in your head like stones, worrying at their edges until they're smooth. What if you hadn't been captured that day? What if your father had decided march out with his spearmen earlier than planned? What if the rumors of your family's gold had never spread around Dorne? What if you had never been hired to – no, no. None of that now, you think to yourself, shutting the lid of that box in your mind.

"I suppose the one I think about most often is the simplest and the most impossible: what if there had never been a rebellion?" You say, because it's certainly true. That is the biggest what-if that keeps you up at night.

The Prince nods, his smile curling up into something more rueful.

"Yes, that is one of mine too," he agrees.

"One of?" you prompt.

"Oh yes, I have many, as well. Sometimes it feels like they are on a sort of patrol rotation. Never one more than the others, just a constant turning of a wheel. What spoke will be on top at any given moment? Well, I can't say."

"I imagine there are a great many of us who think about the rebellion in that way, makes perfect sense given the consequences of it. What's another of yours?" you ask.

He picks the mug up again and takes another long swallow.

"What if I wasn't the eldest?" he says to start. "What if my grandfather hadn't legitimized his bastards? What if the dragons hadn't all died out? What if Daemon had won that last tilt at my aunt's wedding?" He takes a breath, "What if I hadn't made it to Redgrass Field?"

You inhale sharply. That was a possibility you didn't want to imagine. It is commonly agreed that had Redgrass gone different the whole rebellion would have gone different.

"That sounds more like a nightmare," you tell him. And it is, you thing for a moment what your life would be like in that world, and while it probably would find you in much the same place, you'd have even less than you do now. Less hope, less fire, less purpose.

He nods and turns to look at you again, his blue eye shines with almost a magic light from the fire on that side. The lavender seems nearly lit from within.

"We pushed so hard to make it," he whispers to you like it is a secret, rather than a well known and widely sung about fact, "We lost men on the way because of the pace I set. We had to pass by besieged keeps and couldn't offer aid to other skirmishes." That part you realize, didn't make it into the songs.

You can't imagine what it must have been like for those men and women, rushing across the Dornish desert, then up through the swampy, empty marshes trying desperately to make it to a bloody and horrible meeting of forces. How the Prince must have known he was exhausting them, that so many would die on the way and as a result of that exhaustion on the battle field.

What must it have been like too, to walk by so many places that you could have helped, could have been the tide turning variable that saved lives?

"I saw your march from the keep, if you can believe it." You say instead, because platitudes are not what he needs right now. His mismatched eyes widen just slightly, betraying his faint surprise.

"Truly?"

"Signs of it, I should say," you correct yourself. "The distance was too great to ever see your forces, but we saw the dust you kicked up. It rose above the ridges in these great plumes. I sat by the window and watched the whole day it took you all to go through the pass."

"Did you think we were coming to the keep?" He asks, like he's expecting castigation for his choices in a rebellion almost fifteen years past. Choices that saved the realm.

"By the rivers, no." you swear, and you're sincere in it. "I had heard at that point about the gathering of the Blackfyre supporters near Kings Landing. Lady Yronwood was very…well. She liked to brag, you understand? I wasn't the only hostage in the keep by that point. Just the only useless one. She would host us in her solar and explain the latest news from her husband."

"She wanted you all hopeless?"

You shrug your shoulders, noticing again that you're still so close to him that the movement drags the wool of your gown against the linen of his chemise. You don't move away.

"I think she just liked being someone who knew things. And we were the only captive audience that she had. I honestly don't think she thought about us or our internal lives, wants or loyalties."

"Then I'm glad you weren't disappointed, at least. When you saw the dust."

"Not at all. In fact, I remember being pleased. I poured three cups out for you and your men that night, your Grace, almost the whole pot. I wanted you to make it, I prayed that you'd make it. And I'm so glad that you did. I'm sorry that one of the what-ifs that returns to you so often is one where you didn't."

"I suppose you and I would be having a very different conversation, if I had failed."

You summon a smile, trying not to think about how much darker your fate probably would have been in that version of the world.

"I don't know, you in disguise, me working for at the very least vague traitor sympathizers who hate me? Sung a certain way, we might have found ourselves in this moment even in that version of the world."

"And in that version, would you still be tending to me thus?"

"With more anxiety, but yes, I would."

He shakes his head, disbelief plain on his face.

"You fell through the cracks, your family's sacrifice has gone unacknowledged, you have been left with people who actively work against your happiness. How can you be so…?"

He trails off, seemingly a little frustrated by his lack of words to finish that thought.

"How can I be so naive?"

"Loyal," he corrects firmly, "To a house that doesn't deserve it. Not from you."

He takes in a deep breath, and turns to face you more fully, "I said it once before, but please, allow me to say it again. I apologize, for my house and how they have treated you and yours in the long years since the rebellion. Your mistreatment must be laid at the feet of my family, legitimate and not, and I…cannot apologize enough for how you have been harmed."

You are again overwhelmed for a moment by the magnitude of care this man has in him. It's not just you, and your story you realize. There is more to this…grief, this shame, than just you. More than the spokes of the wheel of what-ifs he spoke about, the wheel itself weighs on him. The weight of the past, deeds done by him but also the deeds that came before he was even born.

"You cannot spend your days martyring yourself on the altar of the Targaryen sins, my Prince." You say before you can think twice about your words.

"If not I, then who?" He asks in return, with a wry but still serious tilt of a smile.

You don't have an easy answer to that. You suppose there really isn't an easy answer to it. He will be king one day, the heir to the Targaryen dynasty and all that entails. It is a dynasty made by conquest. And in its making, thousands of tragedies were made of the conquered.

"Cruelty is often a trait my family members have." He continues when you say nothing. "They say whenever a Targaryen is born the gods flip a coin to see if this one will be great or mad. And there are times, when I look at the people I love, and I see that coin hanging in the air, spinning."

His eyes pin you in place, you cannot look away. You do not want to.

"And I wonder," he breathes, "…on which side it will land for them? I wonder which side it will land for me."

"Neither," you say firmly, suddenly glad to have a question you do know the answer to. He continues to stare at you, raising an eyebrow in bemusement at the certainty in your voice.

"Oh?"

"Yes," you say clearly. "The gods don't play games of chance your grace, first of all. And secondly, you will be neither great nor cruel."

"What will I be, then?"

"A good man," you answer simply, because this is that simple. The wheel turns, kings rise and fall. But for a time, for Baelor's time, you know that the realm will have a good man for a king.

"Your faith in me also feels misplaced," he says finally looking away from you.

"Why?"

"Because I have failed you twice already. Twice, we nearly crossed paths, and twice I missed the chance to help you."

He looks at you again, resolute. "I will not miss a third."

Loud voices shatter the quiet bubble you found yourself in before you can answer and try to dissuade that line of thinking. Tarly is speaking boisterously to someone about food in the main hall. You rise and check the candles seeing that time, has indeed continued on while you've spoken. The bandages still need to be dried you realize, they've boiled for long enough. But before you can reset on your tasks, the Prince finds your hand with his own.

You look down to see him press a kiss to the back of it, and it feels like a brand. Every concentrated feeling of your body centers on that point under his lips. Your breath stops in your throat, gooseflesh rises on your arm, your face flushes in an instant.

"My family will not fail you again. I will not fail you again."

A thousand things are at war within you at once. The whisper of his voice, the slide of his lips against your skin, the tremble in his hands, and yours, the night, the storm, your exhaustion and his, his injury, your past, his future, the current circumstances you both are in. The things you know that he still doesn't.

You almost regret not moving away earlier. You're not sure if that would have preserved the height of the walls to protect your heart from his care, but maybe putting space would have helped (it wouldn't, you know this will not be a what-if for you, you know the answer). The kitchen feels like it's own little pocket world, separate from the realities of his office, and your duties to it. He's not for you, you tell yourself firmly. Not like that. He's yours to shield. Yours to heal. Yours even to comfort. But not yours to keep.

Still, he holds your hand with shaking fingers - gently, and with the care of a knight, the care of a good man. And he pulls at the very core of you, in ways no one ever has before.

Slowly, with all the grace your mother trained you to have, all the elegance of a noble woman, you touch his cheek with your free hand to turn his face up towards you.

The Dornish ways have always been more familiar than the rest of the kingdoms, and they are the norms of your people and his. And so, with all the warmth of your homeland that you can put into your smile you bend down and press a kiss to his forehead in witness, in recognition of the promise he just made. And also in forgiveness and apology, because you are not going to let him keep it.

He startles just a little under the press of your mouth. And you wonder briefly when was the last time someone touched him with this kind of tenderness.

You pull back and stand. He remains sitting, with your hand in still held in his, looking up at you with that same quiet delight from earlier in the night, like you are a wonderful surprise that he didn't even know to expect.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Baelor read the message twice.

Then he set his phone face-down on the counter and looked at the container of pad thai.

Then he picked his phone back up and read it again.

One hundred and twenty-eight. He pulled up the browser - old habit, he preferred to look things up himself before asking anyone - and read the ranges. Optimal was below one hundred. Near optimal, one hundred to one-twenty-nine. Borderline high started at one-thirty.

So he was, technically, in the near optimal range. One single point below borderline high.

He set the phone down again.

Diet adjustments can make a real difference.

He turned the phrase over in his mind the way he turned over language in contracts, looking for the clause that mattered. Diet adjustments. His diet. He ate reasonably well, or he thought he did. He did not smoke - had never smoked, had always found the habit uselessly self-destructive. He drank, but moderately; a glass of wine with dinner when he remembered to have dinner at the table, the occasional scotch after a difficult week. He ran four mornings a week, thirty-five minutes, without fail, regardless of weather or workload. He kept his weight stable. He slept adequately.

So what, exactly, was the problem?

He looked at the pad thai.

He thought about what he had had for lunch. A sandwich from the deli on the corner. Yesterday's dinner had been the leftover half of a burrito bowl from the place down the street. Sunday he had ordered sushi. Saturday - he had to actually think about Saturday - Saturday had been the Thai place again, actually. Different dish.

He pulled up his phone's order history, almost against his will, and scrolled back through three weeks.

There was not a single meal he had cooked himself.

Not one.

He thought about this with the same calm, systematic attention he gave to a problem in a case. He was not alarmed, exactly - one hundred and twenty-eight was not a crisis - it was a nudge - a yellow flag, not a red one. But Baelor Targaryen had not built his father's firm into what it was today by ignoring yellow flags. You caught things early, or you did not catch them at all.

The issue was simple, he did not cook. He had never particularly needed to. Growing up in his parents' house, there had been household staff. He had gone to university, where there was a dining hall. He had met Jena his second year of law school, and she had loved to cook - genuinely loved it, in the way some people love a craft and not a chore. She had cooked for him with the same pleasure that he argued cases, and he had let her, gladly, because it made her happy and because he was hopeless in a kitchen and had known it. After she died, when the boys were still small and the house still felt like a wound, there had been Mrs. Shapiro, the nanny, who had cooked alongside everything else she did for them. She had stayed until Matarys started secondary school and declared himself old enough to fend for himself, and Baelor had not had the heart to keep her on for his own sake alone.

And then there was nothing. Takeout. Delivery apps. The occasional sad sandwich assembled at his own counter with whatever was left in the refrigerator.

He was fifty years old, he thought. He had passed the bar in two jurisdictions. He had argued in front of federal judges and won. He had raised two sons, more or less alone, and they had turned out to be decent, intelligent, kind young men. He had run the firm for eleven years.

He could learn to cook.

He picked the phone back up and typed cooking classes near me into the search bar.

The results were, frankly, grim. There were the expensive recreational ones - date-night pasta evenings, weekend sushi workshops, private lessons that cost more per hour than he billed at the firm's standard rate. There were the community center offerings, which appeared to be oriented toward children and retirees. And then, somewhere in the middle, there was a twelve-week adult evening course at the culinary center on State Street.

COOKING: FROM ZERO TO PROFICIENCY - A comprehensive twelve-week course for adults seeking to build a foundational cooking skill set. Monday evenings, 6–9pm. Enrollment now open.

He stared at the name for a moment. From Zero to Proficiency. He had no particular objection to being a zero, having always believed that accurate self-assessment was the beginning of all improvement, but whoever had named this course had clearly spent very little time thinking about how to make adults feel welcome in their inadequacy.

Still.

He scrolled down to the enrollment form and filled it out before he could change his mind.

He picked up the pad thai again, and finished it, and told himself it would be the last time.

It was not the last time. But it was, at least, the beginning.

WEEK ONE

The culinary center on State Street was the kind of place that had been there for years without you ever noticing it, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a stationery shop, its window displaying a modest hand-lettered sign that said CLASSES CURRENTLY ENROLLING - ENQUIRE WITHIN. You had passed it dozens of times on your way to the coffee shop at the end of the block without once registering it, and then last month your friend Julia had sent you the link to the Monday evening course with a message that said you keep saying you want to cook better, here's your excuse, I already looked up parking.Julia was not enrolled in the course. She had signed up and then decided twelve weeks was too long of a commitment.

You had signed up anyway, because you had already paid the deposit before she bailed, and also because, if you were being honest with yourself, you had been saying you wanted to cook better for almost two years, and it was beginning to feel like the kind of thing you would say for another twenty years without ever doing anything about it unless you forced your own hand.

You were not a bad cook. You could make pasta, a few stir-fries, roasted vegetables, the chicken recipe your mother had written out on an index card that you kept folded in your wallet like a talisman against adulthood. But that was roughly the extent of it, and somewhere around the third month of your office job, you had realized that your repertoire had a ceiling, and the ceiling was low, and you would eat the same six dinners on rotation until you died unless you did something about it. You had a year before your master's program started. You had evenings. You had no excuse not to.

The class started at six. You arrived at five fifty-two, later than you had meant to because the train had stalled, and you pushed through the door into a narrow reception area that smelled wonderfully and specifically of garlic, and warm metal, and something sweet underneath - vanilla, maybe, or brown sugar caramelizing somewhere in the back. A woman at the desk directed you through to the main kitchen with a wave and a smile, and you went.

The kitchen was not what you had expected. You had pictured something institutional - rows of identical stations, fluorescent lighting, the grim functionality of a school lab. Instead it was warm, the lighting amber and directional, the stations spaced generously around a central demonstration counter. There were ten workstations in all, each with a two-burner cooktop, a chopping board, a rack of basic tools, and two stools pulled up opposite each other. Most of them were already occupied, pairs of people shuffling around each other and introducing themselves and examining the tools with the cheerful uncertainty of a first night.

You looked for an empty station.

There was one left - second from the end, nearest the window that looked out onto the dark street. One of the two stools had a person already on it, and that person had their back to you, examining something on their phone with the unhurried attention of someone who had been early and settled and was perfectly comfortable waiting.

He was wearing a navy jacket over a grey shirt, no tie - the jacket had the quality of being expensive without trying to announce itself, slightly worn at one cuff in a way that suggested it was a favorite rather than a new purchase. Dark hair, cut short, neat. His posture was good in the quietly natural way that meant it was not something he thought about.

You crossed to the station, pulled out the empty stool, and sat.

He looked up from his phone.

The first thing you noticed, before anything else, was his eyes - not because of the color, though that registered a moment later, one brown and one a striking pale blue, the kind of heterochromia that made you want to look and feel slightly rude for looking. It was the expression in them, easy and attentive and very direct, the look of someone who gave you their full attention without making it feel like an examination.

"Hi," you greeted. "Looks like we're partners."

"Looks like it," he said, and put his phone away. His voice was unhurried, low. "Baelor." He offered his hand across the station.

"Hi, Baelor," you said, and shook it. His hand was warm, the grip straightforward and brief. You gave him your name.

"Good to meet you," he smiled, and he meant it, you could tell - not in the reflexive, performative way people said it, but with a kind of simple sincerity that did not dress itself up. "Have you taken something like this before?"

"No, first time." You looked around at the other stations, the organized equipment, the demonstration counter at the front where a large whiteboard announced the twelve-week curriculum in colorful marker. "You?"

"Also a first." He glanced at the whiteboard, and something shifted briefly at the corner of his mouth - not quite a smile, more like the private acknowledgment of something mildly absurd. "I'm not sure the name of this course was particularly well thought through."

You had had the same thought when you enrolled. "Zero to Proficiency," you agreed. "Bold claim."

"Ambitious," he said. "We shall see."

Before you could say anything else, the door at the back of the kitchen swung open, and your instructor arrived.

She was - there was no other way to put it - extraordinary. She was somewhere in her thirties, compact and energetic, wearing a printed wrap dress in a pattern of small green apples over mustard yellow, a color combination that should not have worked and somehow did, and her hair was a vivid, unapologetic red. She carried a large tote bag over one shoulder and a clipboard in the other hand, and she moved through the kitchen with the proprietary ease of someone who had been walking this particular room for years.

"Good evening, everyone!" she said, in a voice that was warm and slightly louder than necessary, the voice of someone used to speaking over the sounds of several working stoves at once. "I'm Rowan Fossoway - you can just call me Rowan, everyone does - and welcome to Cooking: From Zero to Proficiency! I know, I know, the name is terrible, I've been saying that to the program coordinator for four years, we're all just living with it now."

Beside you, you heard a very small, quiet exhale that might have been a laugh.

You turned to look at Baelor, and he was looking at the instructor with an expression of such careful, composed neutrality that you had to press your lips together to keep from smiling.

"Before we start," Rowan continued, setting her clipboard down on the demonstration counter with a decisive clap, "I want to say something that I say every single cohort, and I mean it every time; there is no such thing as a stupid question in this kitchen. There is no shame in not knowing something. That is why you are here. The only mistake you can make in this room is not asking when you are confused, so please - ask. We start, tonight, with knife skills. Everything else we do in the next twelve weeks is downstream of this, so let’s make sure we are doing it right." She paused, and smiled, and it transformed her face entirely. "Let's get started."

There was a general rustling as people straightened on their stools, and the kitchen attendant - a young boy, perhaps a teenager, in an apron who had been waiting quietly near the wall - began moving through the stations distributing cutting boards and knives in neat kits.

You opened yours and looked at the chef's knife, which was heavier than you expected.

"Can you use one of these well?" you asked Baelor, without quite deciding to.

He looked at the knife on his side of the station. "Passably," he said. "I suspect we are about to discover that I have been doing it wrong."

"What makes you say that?"

He looked up. "Because most things have a right way to do them, and the right way usually is not the way you arrive at by yourself." There was nothing superior in it, just the steady, matter-of-fact delivery of someone who had made their peace with not knowing things. "I grew up in a house with a cook. Then I was married, and my wife cooked. Then I had a nanny. Well, my sons had a nanny." A small pause. "I realize that sounds like an evasion of personal responsibility."

You shook your head. "Not really. Circumstances." You picked up your own knife, felt the unfamiliar weight of the handle. "I can cook some things, but my repertoire ran out around the time I graduated."

"When was that?"

"Last year.”

He nodded, absorbing this without any particular reaction. You liked that - the way he took information at face value, without the slightly performative calculation you sometimes got from people when they found out your age in the context of adult competence.

Rowan's voice cut through the ambient noise of the room, calling everyone's attention to the front, and you both turned to face the demonstration counter. She was working swiftly and fluidly through a grip demonstration, the knife moving under her hands with an ease that made it look like a natural extension of her fingers.

"The curl," she was saying. "Curl your fingers, keep your knuckles forward - the blade guides against the knuckle, the fingertip stays back. Like this. Now you try."

You tried. The knife felt unwieldy. You got the curl mostly right but your grip was too tight and you could feel it.

Baelor, beside you, was working through the motion with focused attention, his jaw set slightly, moving slowly. After three or four passes he stopped and adjusted his grip of his own accord, and tried again.

"Better," you said, without thinking about it.

He glanced sideways at you. "Thank you," he said, mildly. "You are still holding too tight."

You looked down at your hand. He was correct. You relaxed your grip, and tried again, and it was immediately better.

"Better," he said, in the same tone you had used.

The class ran from six to nine, and it went - with the particular swiftness of something that holds your attention - very fast. Rowan moved the group through knife skills and then through a brief first exercise, just a simple vegetable prep to get everyone oriented - dicing onion, julienning carrot, mincing garlic. Nothing complicated, deliberately not complicated, but involving enough that you were both concentrating more than talking, which was fine. You worked alongside each other with a natural, unforced ease, the way you might with a stranger on a project where the task was clear enough to make conversation optional.

When the onion made your eyes water, Baelor wordlessly traded stations with you so that you were further from the fan draft blowing the vapors toward your side. You thanked him.

At the end of class, Rowan assembled everyone to taste the small salad of prepped vegetables in a simple vinaigrette, declared it a fine start, and dismissed them. There was the pleasant noise of people gathering their things, brief conversations exchanged between stations, the kitchen attendants beginning to wipe down surfaces.

You packed up your bag and stood, and Baelor stood beside you, straightening his jacket with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be.

"Good first night," you said.

"Agreed." He glanced at you briefly. "See you next Monday."

"See you next Monday," you said.

You walked out into the evening air, which was cool and smelled of the bakery two doors down, and you were already, without quite realizing it, looking forward to the following week

WEEK TWO

He had thought about it. A little.

He would not say more than that, and only admitted even that much to himself with the careful reluctance of a man examining an unexpected line item in an otherwise clean accounting. He had thought about it a little, during the week. Not obsessively - he had been busy, the Wednesday motion had eaten most of his Wednesday and a healthy portion of his Thursday, and he had a meeting with a new client on Friday morning, and dinner with his father on Friday evening - but in the interstitial moments, waiting for the kettle, staring at the ceiling before sleep, he had thought about it a little.

About the class, he told himself. The class, and the knife grip, and whether twelve weeks would be genuinely sufficient to learn anything useful. That was what he had been thinking about.

He drove to State Street on Monday at ten past five, which was earlier than he needed to be there, and told himself he was coming from the office anyway and there was no point going home and coming back. He sat in the car for ten minutes reading emails on his phone, told himself he was being ridiculous, and went inside.

She was already there.

Not at their station - she was at the front, talking to Rowan, laughing at something the instructor had said, her head tilted back slightly with the laugh. She was wearing a green jacket over a white shirt, and when she laughed, she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth in a gesture that was entirely natural and entirely unconscious.

Baelor walked to their station and sat down.

He had a reason for arriving early. He had wanted to look at the week's posted curriculum - Rowan had posted a handwritten card at each station previewing the night's lesson - and review it before they began, in the same way he reviewed materials before any meeting. That was the reason.

The card said, Week Two: Heat Fundamentals - sautéing, searing, understanding your pan.

He read it twice.

She came over a few minutes later, settling onto her stool with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided they liked this place, and said, "You're early."

"I was in the area," he said.

She considered him for a moment, and there was something in her expression - a slight, amused intelligence - that gave him the feeling she did not quite believe him. But she let it go, which he appreciated. "I was talking to Rowan," she said instead, nodding toward the front. Rowan was no longer there, presumably having stepped out for some water or a bathroom break before class started. "Did you know she has a degree in chemical engineering? She spent a few years in industry and then quit to open this place. She said she missed working with her hands."

He found this unexpectedly interesting. "That is a substantial career change."

"I thought so, too. She said the chemistry of cooking and the chemistry of industry are more similar than most people think." She picked up the preview card from the station and read it. "Searing. I always end up with things stuck to the pan."

"I imagine that is a temperature issue."

"Probably. I always panic and touch things too early." She put the card down. "Do you cook anything? At all?"

"Toast," he said.

She looked at him.

"Competently," he added. "I make very competent toast."

She laughed - not the loud, tilted-back laugh he had seen across the room, but a quieter one, a little surprised, as though she had not expected him to be funny. He had not particularly expected it either.

Rowan reentered with her customary entrance, as though she hadn’t just been in the room - the swinging door, the tote bag, the clipboard - and launched immediately into the evening's introduction, drawing the group's attention to the demonstration counter where two pans had been set up side by side, one cast iron, one stainless. She had a piece of salmon and a chicken breast ready, and she was already talking about the Maillard reaction with the enthusiasm of someone who had explained this many times and had never gotten tired of it. 

"Protein plus heat plus time," she was saying. "But - and here is where everyone goes wrong - you cannot rush the first two minutes. You add your protein to the pan and then you leave it alone. You do not poke it, you do not prod it, you do not try to move it to see if it is done. Trust your pan. Trust your heat. When it is ready to release, it will release."

She made it look effortless. She always made everything look effortless, which was either inspiring or demoralizing depending on your frame of mind.

The kitchen attendant came around with the prep materials for the evening - chicken thighs, seasoned, and the components for a pan sauce to go alongside. This was more involved than last week, and Baelor could feel the group's collective energy shift from the relative ease of vegetable prep into something slightly more alert.

"Alright," he said, surveying the station. "Who takes the pan first?"

"I will," she said, already off the stool and moving to the cooktop. "I need to practice the not-touching thing. It’s my problem."

He was content to take the preparation tasks - measuring the components for the sauce, reducing them in the small saucepan Rowan had set up on the secondary burner - while she managed the sear. He worked through the sauce with careful attention, following the steps in the order Rowan had outlined them, asking one question when he was uncertain about the timing.

"It’s smelling good," she said, from the cooktop.

He looked up. The chicken was in the pan, and she was standing back from it with her arms slightly out from her sides, like a person actively restraining herself from interference, staring at it with focused intensity.

"You look like you are watching a particularly tense legal proceeding," he said.

"That is exactly what it feels like," she replied, without looking away from the pan. "I want to touch it so badly."

"Don't."

"I know." A pause. "How long has it been?"

He checked his watch. "Two and a half minutes."

"Is that enough?"

"Rowan said four for this."

"Right." Another pause. "Okay. Okay, this is fine."

"You are fine," he agreed, and returned to the sauce.

It took almost the rest of the class to get through the recipe, between the explanations, and the demonstrations, and the inevitable moment when one of the other stations produced a small amount of smoke and Rowan descended on them with cheerful authority. But the result - the chicken, seared correctly and finished in the oven, the pan sauce glossy and dark with the reduced stock - was genuinely good. Better than good, actually, for a second class in a twelve-week course.

"That's good," she said, when she tasted it. Her expression was openly pleased, the uncomplicated pleasure of something coming out right.

He ate his portion and had to agree. "The sauce," he said.

"Right? The sauce is the thing."

"The chicken is also improved by having not been touched."

"I touched it once," she said, slightly defensive.

"I know. I saw."

"The once did not count."

"The sear would suggest otherwise."

She pointed her fork at him. "You are very particular."

"Lawyer," he said, mildly.

Something shifted in her face - the small, involuntary thing that happened when people processed unexpected information. "Oh," she said. "Is that your job? Or were you making a joke about your personality?"

"Both," he said. "I am a lawyer. It has also, over time, become my personality. I am told they are difficult to separate."

"Who told you that?"

He thought about it. "My sons," he answered. "Fairly regularly."

Her expression did the thing again - the brief processing beat, recalibrating. He was aware, with a clinical detachment that he tried to maintain, that what he had just given her was information. Sons. Plural. That was not the profile of a person who had been doing only some things with their adult years.

But she took it smoothly, the way she had taken last week's information about the cook and the nanny. "How many?" she asked.

"Two," he said. "Twenty-two and twenty."

There was a fraction of a pause - not long, not uncomfortable, just a breath - and then she smiled, easy and unremarkable. "I bet they’re used to you being right about things."

"They would say that I’m used to thinking I am right about things," he said. "There is a distinction."

"Is there?"

"I have yet to convince them there is."

She laughed again, and the class was breaking up around them, and he helped stack the used equipment in the designated bins and made the mental note, somewhere at the back of his mind, that three hours had gone very quickly.

He drove home, made himself a cup of tea, and did another forty minutes of reading before bed, and he did not think about the class again.

Not particularly.

WEEK THREE

You noticed it on the Thursday of the second week.

You were on the train home from work, reading nothing, the book in your lap unopened, watching the underground stations scroll past in their flickering dark, and the thought arrived without fanfare, that you were looking forward to Monday.

Not in a generic, the-week-is-long way. Specifically Monday. Specifically six o'clock, State Street, second station from the end.

You sat with this thought for a moment and then opened your book and read the same paragraph three times without it going in, and you admitted to yourself what you already knew, which was that this was going to be marginally complicated.

He was not your type, exactly. Or rather, he was nobody's type, because nobody had a type that specific. He was fifty years old, which was twenty-seven years older than you, which was - well, it was a lot. He had grown sons who were much, much closer to your age than he was. He was a lawyer, which explained nothing about his character except that he was precise, and direct, and had probably been like that before he ever passed the bar. He had a dead wife somewhere in his biography that he had mentioned once, briefly, in the way you might mention a geography that shaped you - not with performance or deflection, just with the flat, settled weight of something that had become part of the landscape.

He was also terribly easy to talk to. In the way that very few people were. Not in the performative way of someone who had cultivated conversational ease as a social tool, but in the way that happened when someone was genuinely interested in what was in front of them - when they listened the way he listened, with their full attention and no visible agenda.

You were twenty-three years old, you thought. You were allowed to notice things.

You were not, however, going to do anything about it. You were just going to go to class on Monday, and make food, and have a conversation, and be perfectly fine about everything.

You got off the train and walked home and made the chicken recipe from week two, and it came out correctly, and you ate it and were quietly pleased with yourself, and you texted Julia, making progress. you really should have stayed enrolled.

She sent back a shrugging emoji.

You put your phone face-down on the table and went to bed.

—

Class on Monday was bread.

Specifically, a simple no-knead bread, which Rowan introduced with the reverence she seemed to reserve for things she felt were underestimated. "People think bread is difficult," she said, at the front of the room, her red hair extraordinarily bright under the kitchen lights. "Bread is not difficult. Bread is patient. Bread asks only for time and a little faith. The rest it does itself."

The recipe had been prepared in advance - or rather, Rowan had prepared demonstration dough twenty-four hours prior to show you all the result - and the evening's task was mixing the dough, understanding the ratios, and reviewing the baking method so everyone could practice at home during the week. This made the class structurally different from the previous two - more demonstration, more talking, less active cooking. More time, therefore, for conversation.

"I made the chicken," you told Baelor, while Rowan walked the class through the flour measurement on the demonstration counter.

He glanced at you sideways. "Did it work?"

"Perfectly. I did not touch it."

"Not even once?"

"Not even once." You paused. "I touched the sauce a lot, though."

"The sauce can be touched."

"That’s what I told myself."

There was a small quiet while Rowan demonstrated the water temperature - lukewarm, not hot, she was emphatic about this - and then Baelor said, "I tried the sauce on its own. Without the chicken."

You looked at him. "On what?"

"Pasta." A brief, slightly self-conscious pause that was unusual on him - he wore most silences with ease but this one had a faint awareness to it. "It was good."

"That is resourceful."

"I thought so." He reached for the measuring cup at your station and checked the water level with the same careful attention he gave everything. "I have been reading about it, actually. Cooking. During the week."

"Reading about it?"

"Books. There is a good one on the fundamentals of heat and protein - written by a food scientist, not a chef. More technical." He glanced at the side of your face. "I find I need to understand why something works before I can do it reliably."

You thought about this. It seemed like him, entirely consistent with everything you had come to expect in two weeks - the methodical approach, the insistence on the underlying logic, the way he moved through new information like it was a brief he was building from the bottom up. "Does that work?" You asked. "For cooking?"

"So far." He paused. "I have not tried anything ambitious yet."

"What counts as ambitious?"

"Anything with more than four components."

"That is a low bar."

"I am a beginner," he said, plainly and without any apparent self-deprecation. "The bar should be where the bar is."

Rowan called everyone’s attention back to the front, and you returned to the demonstration, but the conversation picked up again in the interstices - while you measured, while you mixed, while the dough sat under its cloth and Rowan talked about gluten development, and why it mattered, and what it had to do with the holes in a finished loaf.

At one point, measuring flour, you got the level wrong by a significant margin and he caught it - not by pointing it out immediately but by glancing at your measuring cup, and then at the recipe card, and then back at your cup in a sequence that was so deliberately neutral you would have missed it entirely if you had not been paying attention.

"How much did I put in?" you asked.

"About thirty grams over."

You looked at the cup, then at him. "You measured that visually."

"I’ve been reading," he said.

"That’s alarming."

"I prefer thorough."

You corrected the measurement. You were, you realized, smiling, and had been for most of the last hour.

The class ended with everyone taking home a small packet of flour and a printed copy of the recipe, along with Rowan's instruction that they try the bread at home before next week.

Outside, the evening was cool and clear, the street lamp putting a ring of amber light on the pavement in front of the culinary center. You were both pulling on your coats, the small population of the class dispersing in different directions around you.

"Are you going to try it?" you asked him, nodding at the packet of flour.

"This week," he nodded. "Thursday, maybe. I have a reasonably clear evening Thursday."

"Same." You shifted your bag on your shoulder. "It seems simple."

"Most good things are," he said. He said it without particular emphasis, the way he said most things - as though he had thought it for long enough that it had simply become a fact, requiring no decoration.

You looked at him for a moment, there in the amber-lit street, and the whole evening was quiet around you, and the thing you had identified on Thursday on the train sat in your chest with a warmth that was entirely disproportionate to the situation, and entirely unhelpful, and entirely present regardless.

"Good night, Baelor," you said.

"Good night," he said. "See you next week."

You walked to the station, and you did not look back, and you were looking forward to the following Monday from approximately the moment you turned the corner.

WEEK FOUR

He had made the bread.

It had come out well - not perfectly, the crust had been slightly thicker on one side, the result of an uneven heat distribution in his oven that he had not anticipated and would account for next time - but well enough that he had eaten two slices standing at the kitchen counter on Thursday night and felt something he had not felt about food he had prepared in a very long time, if ever, which was quiet satisfaction.

He had brought it to the office on Friday. His assistant, Clara, had eaten a slice and had told him that it was good with a sincerity that suggested she had expected to be polite about it and found she did not need to be. His partner had had two slices and said he would take a loaf if Baelor was ever making one to spare, and Baelor had said he would let him know, and then gone back to his office and found himself, briefly and somewhat to his own surprise, planning to make another one.

He thought about telling her this on Monday.

He stopped thinking about it by evening, and thought about the Henderson brief instead, which needed his attention far more urgently than the question of whether he was going to voluntarily disclose his baking progress to a twenty-three-year-old.

The number sat in his mind with a quiet insistence on Saturday evening, as he was eating leftover soup - he had made soup when he was making the bread, from a basic recipe he had found in the food scientist's book, and it was adequate - and looking at nothing in particular.

Twenty-three.

He was fifty. He had turned fifty just over a month ago, with a low-key dinner that Valarr had organized, just the two of them at the restaurant Valarr knew he liked, the one on the waterfront. They had not made a fuss of it, because he had specifically requested they not make a fuss of it, and his sons were generally good about respecting his preferences. Matarys had called from his dormitory to sing happy birthday in a way that suggested he had not been entirely sober when he made the call, and Baelor had been quietly amused and quietly relieved that his sons were, on the whole, functional and happy.

Fifty. Twenty-three.

He was being, he told himself, entirely ridiculous. He was not doing anything. He was going to a cooking class. He was making conversation with his table partner. The fact that their conversation was - he searched, with professional rigor, for the right word - easy, the fact that three hours went quickly in her company, the fact that he had once or twice in the past week thought of something and had the fleeting thought that he should mention that on Monday - none of this amounted to anything. None of this required examination or response.

He was fifty years old. He had better things to do with his interior life.

He went to the class on Monday and did not arrive early.

He arrived at three minutes to six, and she was already at their station, her flour packet and a recipe card in front of her, wearing a sweater and looking at her phone with the half-focused attention of someone waiting for something to start.

"The bread worked," she said, before he had fully sat down, looking up from her phone.

He found, against his better judgment, that this pleased him. "The crust?" 

"One side was thicker."

"Me too," he said. "Uneven heat in the oven."

She slipped her phone into her pocket. "Yes, exactly." Something lit briefly in her expression - the pleasure of having a suspicion confirmed. "I put the next one on the middle rack and it was better."

"I will try that," he said.

He had not known she was making a second loaf.

I will try that was, in retrospect, further than he needed to go, given that it implied a continuation, an ongoing exchange of bread-baking notes. But she was already talking about the week's posted topic - eggs, the card said, which covered a remarkable amount of ground according to Rowan's neat handwriting - and the moment passed naturally.

Class tonight was eggs - the full spectrum, from soft scramble to poached to proper omelette technique, and it was - Baelor had to admit - both more demanding and more immediately satisfying than anything they had done yet. The omelette technique in particular required a specific wrist motion while shaking the pan that he could not, for the first twenty minutes, get his hands to do in the way Rowan demonstrated. His first two attempts were scrambled eggs he had had the optimism to call an omelette. His third was closer but folded unevenly.

"Your wrist," she said, watching him.

"I’m aware."

"You’re not rotating it enough."

"I know."

"It’s like -" she paused, clearly trying to describe something physical in words. "It’s like you’re trying to control it. The shake. You’re breaking the motion into pieces."

He tried it again. The same result.

She put her own pan down and stood slightly behind and to his left, and asked, "May I?" and made a gesture that clearly indicated she wanted to guide his wrist through the motion. He nodded, and she reached across and curved her hand lightly around his wrist, and moved it through the motion - the rotation, the forward flick, the recovery - twice, slowly.

It was a purely instructional gesture. There was nothing in it beyond the practical. She was focused on the pan, not on him, her attention entirely on the motion she was demonstrating.

He was aware of her hand on his wrist for approximately one second past the end of the demonstration, and then she had moved back to her station, and he tried the motion again, and it was significantly better.

"That’s it," she grinned.

"Yes," he said.

He did it again, correctly, and the omelette folded. It was not perfect - there was a small tear at one end - but it was unmistakably an omelette.

He turned from the cooktop, and she was watching him from her stool, and there was something in her expression that he clocked and then put away, very deliberately, without looking at it.

She was twenty-three. She was one year older than Valarr. When she was born, he had been twenty-seven, already out of law school, already working at the firm, already more or less the person he still was. She had learned to walk around the time he was becoming a father for the first time.

This was not a thought he allowed himself to dwell on. It was not a thought that led anywhere useful. It was simply, factually, true, the way so many things were true that you did not need to examine at length.

He plated the omelette. It looked reasonable.

"It looks good," she told him.

"Adequate," he corrected.

"You’re very hard on yourself."

"I am precise," he said. "There is a distinction."

She gave him the look she gave him when she thought he was splitting hairs - he had seen it last week. The look that was more amused than anything else, a slight narrowing of the eyes. "Right," she said. "Precise."

"My sons would agree with you," he admitted. "In your current tone."

"Smart sons."

He thought about Valarr, who had his mother's stubbornness and his own methodical precision and the combined result was someone who was very good at being right and only moderately good at tolerating the same quality in other people. He thought about Matarys, who had more of Jena's warmth, her instinct for people, the ease with which she had moved through a room full of strangers. They were good young men. He was lucky.

"They have their moments," he said.

He wondered, not for the first time and not with any particular intention, what they would make of her. The thought arrived and he let it go, firmly, the way you put a file back in the cabinet when it had been retrieved by mistake.

Not applicable. Beside the point.

He ate the omelette, which was, if he was being honest and not merely precise, actually quite good. She ate hers and agreed, and Rowan made the rounds of the room collecting comments and offering praise and corrections in equal measure, and the class moved into its final half hour, and the evening was perfectly fine, and he was completely fine, and everything was fine.

WEEK FIVE

It rained on Monday.

A real rain, the October kind, with wind coming off the street in sharp, cold, sideways gusts that turned umbrellas inside out and made the walk from the station to the culinary center feel twice as long. You arrived with wet ankles and your umbrella slightly bent, and you stood in the entrance lobby shaking water off your coat and trying to restore the umbrella to something resembling its original shape, and you were in a fairly good mood about all of it, because rain had never particularly bothered you.

The class was on stocks and soups, which Rowan described as "the foundation of foundations, the place everything begins," with the fervent conviction of someone delivering a personal manifesto. There was a simmering stock already on the demonstration counter when you came in, and the kitchen smelled of it - deep, and savory, and warm in the way that cut through a cold October evening with unusual efficiency. Half the room visibly relaxed when the smell hit them.

You sat down. Baelor arrived a few minutes later, coat damp at the shoulders, and you noticed he had made an error with his umbrella that he was too pragmatic or too proud to acknowledge - he folded it neatly, set it by the station, and said nothing about the state of it, which had been comprehensively defeated by the weather.

"Your umbrella," you said.

He looked at it. "I’m aware."

"Mine too," you said, laying your own tragic wreck beside his. They sat together like two very defeated soldiers.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth.

The class worked through the theory of stocks - the difference between stock and broth, which turned out to be more consequential than you had previously given any thought to - and then moved into an exercise building a simple chicken stock from scratch, which was meditative in the way long-simmering things always were. You were tending more than actively cooking, and that left room to talk.

"How’s your week been?" you asked him, not because you needed to know but because five weeks of Monday evenings had established a rhythm, a particular register of conversation that you both fell into naturally, and it had begun to feel strange to sit in silence when there was a forty-minute simmer to get through.

"Long," he admitted. He was watching the stock with the same patient attention he gave most things. "There’s this case that has become more complicated than it should be."

"What kind of case?"

"Family law," he said. "A custody dispute." He paused, and she saw him pick the word with care. "Those are always the most wearing. Criminal cases have a clarity that family law often does not. There are usually two people who both believe entirely that they are right, and the damage accrues to everyone around them while they maintain that belief."

"Including you?"

He glanced at you sideways. "I represented one of them. So in a limited sense, yes." He paused. "What I mean is that I find them emotionally costly in a way that other case types are not."

You thought about him as a family lawyer. It fit, actually - not the way you might have guessed if you had met him and had to guess his profession, which was that he would be a corporate litigator, something sufficiently removed from the human mess of things - but in a way that made sense once you knew him slightly. He was precise, yes, and careful, and unsentimental in the way of someone who had thought through the sentiment and processed it and arrived on the other side. But underneath that was something genuinely decent, something that took the people in front of him seriously. A custody dispute needed that.

"Do you win?" you asked.

"Often enough," he said. He paused, and then added, "More importantly, my clients - the ones I take - are usually right. I am choosy about that."

"You get to be choosy?"

"I’ve been doing this for twenty-four years," he said. "And I run the firm. So yes." Another pause, a slight dry tone, "I’m aware that that sounds arrogant."

"It sounds like a fact."

He looked at you briefly. "Same thing, sometimes."

"Not the same thing," you said.

He considered this. "Fair," he said, eventually.

The stock simmered, and you talked about other things - a documentary you had seen the week prior, which he had not seen but had read about, a book he was reading, a legal history, which was far enough outside your usual reading territory that you had to ask him to explain the context. He explained it without condescension, without the slight impatience that sometimes accompanied having to explain something you found obvious. He treated your questions like good questions, which they were, and gave them real answers, which you appreciated.

At some point - somewhere in the long middle of the evening, the stock simmering, the room warm against the rain outside - you became aware that you were both angled slightly toward each other on your stools, leaning in the marginal way that happened when a conversation was working, when both people were paying genuine attention. It was not significant. It was the body's unconscious adjustment to signal interest. You knew this. You had studied enough psychology in your undergrad to recognize it and still be unable to do anything about it.

He was telling you about the Henderson case - not the confidential parts, but the structural problem of it, the specific legal challenge, with the pleasure he took in articulating a complex problem clearly. And he was good at it. He had the lawyer's gift for the analogy, the clear line from abstract to concrete, and he talked about it the way he talked about cooking, with a combination of precision and genuine engagement that was entirely consistent and entirely, inconveniently, compelling.

You ate the soup when it was done, and it was very good - Rowan's base stock had been cooking for eight hours and you had only added to it, built on the foundations she had established, but still. The results were satisfying.

The class ended at nine. Most people filtered out quickly, collars up against the rain. You were both slower, taking your time gathering things, and you ended up outside at nearly the same moment, sheltering in the covered doorway of the culinary center while the rain came down.

"Taxi?" He asked, not quite at you.

"I take the train," you said.

He looked at the rain. Then at you. "I can drop you. I drove here."

"It’s fine," you said. "I don’t mind rain."

"Your umbrella disagrees."

You looked down at the wreck of it. "My umbrella and I are not on speaking terms, at the moment."

There was a beat, and he exhaled quietly - the quiet laugh that was his laugh, the one you had noted by now, the one he gave when something amused him that he had not quite prepared for.

"The station is two streets down," you told him. "I’ll be fine."

"Alright," he said, after a moment. He did not push it, which you appreciated. "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight." You opened the umbrella - it was functional, barely - and stepped out into the rain, and you made it to the end of the block before you gave in and turned around, just for a second.

He was still in the doorway, looking at his phone. His face was lit by the screen, and the rain was coming down around the warm light of the entrance behind him, and he was just a person, you told yourself. Just a person waiting for a cab in the rain.

You turned back around and walked to the station.

You did not text Julia about it.

You thought about texting Julia about it the entire way home.

WEEK SIX

He was perfectly fine.

He would like to state, for the record - his own internal record, the one he kept with the same rigorous honesty he brought to anything - that he was perfectly fine, that everything was perfectly fine, and that the last five weeks of Monday evenings had been a pleasantly instructive exercise in culinary fundamentals with no additional significance whatsoever.

He was making good progress. That was the relevant fact. He had made the bread, twice successfully and once with a minor textural error he had diagnosed and corrected. He had made the chicken correctly, the pan sauce clean and glossy and better the second time than the first. He had made soup three times - a chicken stock, a simple vegetable, and an attempt at a French onion that had been moderately successful on the first attempt and very good on the second. He had mastered the omelette. He had made soft-scrambled eggs for himself on a Sunday morning and eaten them at the table, with toast, which had felt like an achievement worth noting, though he had not noted it to anyone.

His cholesterol was not, presumably, doing anything dramatic in either direction - he would get his next panel in February, and he would not be getting takeout seven nights a week in the meantime, and that was the point, that was why he had enrolled, and the course was serving that purpose admirably.

He was not thinking about the rain last Monday, or the two useless umbrellas standing side by side by the station leg, or the documentary she had mentioned that he had, in fact, gone and watched on Wednesday evening and found better than he had expected and wanted to tell her about.

He was not thinking about any of this.

He was thinking about the Morrison case, which had taken a complicated turn, and about the deposition scheduled for Thursday, and about whether Valarr's acceptance to law school was going to become a subject of significant family dinner conversation at the next gathering or could be managed with individual conversations, one at a time, which was his preference.

He called Valarr on Sunday.

"Dad." Valarr's voice had the ambient note of someone doing something else - a keyboard in the background, the click and shift of a productive person tolerating an interruption. "What's up?"

"Nothing’s up," Baelor said. "I’m calling."

"You don't usually call on Sundays."

"I can call on Sundays."

A pause. "Are you okay?"

"I’m fine," he said. "I made French onion soup."

Another pause, this one with a different silence. "You made it? Yourself?"

"I’ve been taking a cooking class," Baelor said. "I believe that I mentioned this."

"You mentioned signing up for one. I didn't know if you'd actually gone."

"I’ve been going for the last five weeks."

"And you're making French onion soup."

"Successfully, yes."

"Huh." He could hear Valarr processing this. "That's - actually, that's great, Dad. Why didn't you say anything?"

Because I was not sure it would work, he thought. Because admitting you have started something and then failing at it, in front of your children, was a particular species of humiliation he would rather avoid. Because he had not wanted anyone to make a fuss. "I told you that I signed up for it.” 

"Fair enough. How's the class?"

"Good," he said. "The instructor is - " and he paused, and thought of Rowan with her clipboard and her extraordinary hair and her conviction about bread, "- enthusiastic. The format is reasonable. I have a table partner."

"Yeah? Are they decent?"

"Yes," he said. A pause that lasted, he judged, approximately one beat too long. "She’s good company."

He did not know why he had said she specifically. It added nothing to the sentence. 

"Oh," he heard Valarr say, through the phone. There was something in the syllable that Baelor recognized and chose not to engage with.

"It’s a paired format," he clarified, in a tone that closed the subject.

"Right," there was something in Valarr’s response that led Baelor to believe he had something more to say, but was, for now, not testing it.

They talked about law school for twenty minutes - the orientation process, the specific requirements that Valarr was already reviewing with characteristic preparedness that Baelor found familiar and mildly funny - and then Valarr said he had to get back to it, and Baelor said of course, and they said goodbye.

He sat in the kitchen for a moment after the call, in the silence of his house on a Sunday evening, which was a silence he had been living with for years and had made his peace with.

He was not, in any serious sense, lonely. He had his work, which was genuinely satisfying. He had his sons, who were doing well. He had his father, now retired, who called every two weeks, and came for dinner once a month, and remained as sharp at seventy-eight as he had been at fifty. He had friends, or what passed for friends after decades of a demanding career and a period of grief that had somewhat reorganized his social architecture. He had the firm, which was peopled with people he respected and several he was genuinely fond of.

He was not lonely. He was simply sometimes aware of the silence in the evenings, when the work was done and there was no particular reason to be in one place rather than another.

He went back to the Morrison deposition notes.

—

On Monday, week six, the class was on roasting.

Rowan was, if possible, even more emphatic than usual - she had strong feelings about oven temperature, about resting times, about the criminal misuse of a good piece of protein through impatience. "You have worked hard," she told the room, with a severity that was entirely warm. "You have bought something worth cooking. The least you can do is let it rest."

The exercise was a roast chicken. The whole thing spatchcocked for even cooking, which required a technique with kitchen shears that Rowan demonstrated with slightly alarming efficiency, then roasted with herbs and butter under the skin and a tray of vegetables beneath to catch the drippings.

There was something unexpectedly satisfying about the whole process. The physical work of it. The smell of the butter and the herbs in the hot oven at the thirty-minute mark, the skin going golden in increments visible through the oven door, the vegetables underneath softening and beginning to caramelize in the pooling drippings. The kitchen was warm and the rain that had come back this evening was hitting the windows, and the room smelled extraordinarily good.

His bench partner was narrating the drippings situation with quiet enthusiasm, crouched slightly to look through the oven door without opening it, her hands on her knees. "Look at the color on those carrots," she said, to no one in particular, or possibly to the carrots. "That is exactly it. That is exactly what it’s supposed to look like."

"Do not open the oven," he reminded.

"I know," she said. She did not open the oven.

He stood beside her for a moment, looking through the glass at the bird and the vegetables and the glossy pooling fat, and he was struck, with a sudden clarity that he did not particularly want, by how entirely and uncomplicatedly pleasant it was to stand in a warm kitchen on a rainy evening and watch something cook with another person.

He moved back to the station. He checked the timer. He said nothing.

Perfectly fine, he told himself. Everything is perfectly fine.

He believed it, roughly.

The chicken came out correctly, which Rowan confirmed with a satisfied press of the thermometer and the declaration that they had done it right the first time. They ate it at the station, with the roasted vegetables and a simple sauce made from the deglazed pan, and it was very good - the kind of good that had an obviousness to it, the uncomplicated rightness of a thing made correctly with patience.

"I’m going to make this for my sons the next time they come over,” he decided aloud. 

She looked up from her plate. "Yeah?"

"One of them is coming home in a few weeks. Valarr. He’s just about done with his degree." He picked up his fork. "He called me out once, years ago, for never cooking when he was growing up… It was fair, I suppose.”

She thought about this. "Will he be surprised?"

"Considerably." A pause. "I’m looking forward to that part."

She smiled at this - the full one, not the contained one, the one that reached her eyes. "That’s actually a really sweet reason to learn to cook."

"I had a medical reason," he admitted. "Cholesterol."

"Sure," she said. "But that’s not the reason you just gave."

He looked at her. She looked back at him, calm, and level, and entirely right.

He said nothing. He ate his chicken.

She was, he thought, with the resigned accuracy of a man who had been arguing with himself for six weeks and was beginning to lose the argument in very small increments - she was very much not the simplest thing that had ever happened to him.

He drove home in the rain.

He did not think about next Monday.

He was, entirely and completely, fine.

WEEK SEVEN

The class was on pasta.

Fresh pasta, specifically - Rowan had arrived that Monday with a small mountain of flour, a bowl of eggs, and the energy of someone who had been looking forward to this particular lesson since the course began. 

"This," she announced, pressing both palms flat on the demonstration counter, "is the week people remember. Every cohort. This is always the one." She looked around the room with the satisfied certainty of someone who had been proven right enough times to stop hedging. "You are going to make something with your hands tonight, and you are going to eat it, and it is going to be the best thing you have eaten in recent memory. I promise you that."

You were inclined to believe her. You had been inclined to believe Rowan since week one, when she had said there is no such thing as a stupid question in this kitchen with a sincerity that made the room settle. Seven weeks of being right about things had only reinforced the inclination.

The prep stations had been cleared of their usual cooktop-first setup and reorganized around the work surfaces, each station given a clean stretch of counter, a well of flour, and a small bowl of eggs. The kitchen smelled different tonight - lighter, more floury, the warm dusty smell of something that had not yet become food. You stood at your station, and put your hand flat on the counter, and felt the cleanliness of it, the deliberate blankness, and thought, we are going to make something from scratch tonight. From the actual beginning.

Baelor arrived at four minutes past six, which was the latest you had ever seen him arrive. He sat down with the slightly compressed efficiency, as though he had had a longer day than he had intended and was choosing not to mention it, and looked at the station setup with brief, assessing attention.

"Pasta," you informed him.

"So I see." He picked up the recipe card. Read it. Set it down. "By hand."

"By hand," you confirmed.

Something moved across his expression that might, in a less composed person, have been apprehension.

"Rowan says that this is the one everyone remembers," you offered.

"That is either encouraging or ominous," he said.

Rowan launched into the demonstration with characteristic force, working the flour into a mound on the counter and making a well in the center with practiced ease, cracking eggs into the hollow and beginning to work them in from the inside out with her fingers. She narrated the whole thing as she went - the feeling you were looking for, the way the dough would resist and then relent, the specific moment when it became something rather than a mess.

"You will feel it change," she said. "Trust that. Your hands know before your eyes do."

You started your own dough. The flour went down, the well went in, the eggs cracked cleanly - you had, at least, gotten good at cracking eggs over the past six weeks - and then you began working, and immediately understood that this was going to be harder than it looked.

The dough was sticky and resistant, and it wanted to tear rather than stretch, and within two minutes your hands were thoroughly coated and it was not entirely clear that things were going in the right direction.

Beside you, Baelor had encountered the same situation and was addressing it with a focused quiet, jaw set, working methodically. His sleeves were rolled up - he did this most weeks, somewhere in the first half hour, a practical concession to the business of cooking - and there was already a streak of flour on his forearm that he had not noticed. 

You had noticed it. 

You had been keeping a private, entirely unnecessary collection of things like that - the flour on the forearm, the way he pushed his sleeves up, the way he held a wooden spoon versus a whisk versus a knife, each tool handled with the same fundamental steadiness adjusted for the particular demand of the thing.

"It feels like it’s fighting me," you said.

"It is fighting you," he replied, without looking up from his dough. "Keep going."

"How do you know to keep going?"

"Because stopping would be worse." A brief pause, hands still working. "The recipe says eight minutes. We’re only at two."

"Eight minutes of this feels like a long time."

"It’s eight minutes of kneading dough," he said, with a mildness that was not dismissive, just accurate. "It’s not eight minutes of anything difficult."

You kept going.

Rowan circulated the room, stopping at each station with comments and small corrections, occasionally physically demonstrating by taking someone's dough for thirty seconds and returning it noticeably improved. When she reached your station, she watched you both for a moment, declared your technique passable and Baelor's surprisingly good, and moved on.

"Surprisingly good," you repeated, once she was out of earshot.

"I’ll take it," he said. He had found his rhythm now, the dough beginning to smooth under his hands, beginning to look like the thing it was supposed to be. There was something about watching him work - the unhurried attention, the steadiness, the way he committed to the task completely without making it into something it was not - that you had started to think of as specifically his. Something you associated only with him and with this room, on these Monday evenings, in this amber-lit kitchen that smelled of flour, and garlic, and whatever that week's lesson was bringing into the air.

You looked back at your own dough.

By the time Rowan called time on the kneading, both of your doughs had arrived at something approximating what the recipe described - smooth, slightly tacky, holding their shape. You wrapped them in cling film and set them aside to rest, and Rowan spent the resting period walking through the pasta shape you would be making tonight - tagliatelle, cut by hand into long ribbons, and a simple sauce of butter and sage and good parmesan.

"The sauce should not be complicated," Rowan said, with the firmness of a woman who had fought this battle many times. "The pasta is the thing. The sauce exists to honor the pasta, not to dominate it."

"Words to live by," you said, under your breath.

Baelor, beside you, looked at the side of your face with an expression that was trying not to be amused and was failing slightly.

The rolling was harder than the kneading in a different way - it required a sustained, even pressure across the whole surface of the dough, and you found out that you had the tendency to push harder in the center than the edges, which produced uneven thickness, which, in turn, produced uneven cooking. You had to slow down to do it correctly, and slowing down ran against the grain of someone who wanted the thing to be done.

Baelor, by contrast, was meticulous about it. He went over the same section three times if it was not even, with a patience that was characteristic rather than performed. You had never seen him rush anything. You had never seen him treat any task as beneath the attention it required. It was one of the things about him - one of the things you had noted under the heading you were trying not to have, the heading that said reasons, the heading that kept growing regardless of your effort to keep it small.

"You’ve done this before," you said, watching his hands.

"I have not," he said.

"Then how are you so good at it?"

He considered the question with apparent seriousness. "It’s just a process," he decided. "It has steps. The steps lead somewhere. There’s no benefit to rushing." He paused. "And I read the pasta chapter. There are apparently only three ways to go wrong, and two of them are avoidable with preparation."

"What is the third?"

"Rushing," he said. "Which is also avoidable."

"I read nothing in advance," you sighed. "I should’ve read something in advance, I suppose."

"You can next time," he said. "If you make it at home."

"I’m going to make it at home," you said, with the certainty of someone who had already decided.

Something shifted in his expression - a small, quiet pleasure at this, the kind of pleasure you got from something that had worked the way it was meant to work, from seeing something take hold. He looked back at his dough, and you looked back at yours, and the kitchen was warm, and seven weeks of Mondays sat in the room around you like a comfortable thing.

"I would make it more challenging at home," he told you, after a moment. "The shapes. Orecchiette, perhaps, or something folded."

"Ambitious," you said.

"My bar has moved since week one," he glanced at you sideways, and the look had the particularity of something shared between two people who had both been there for the thing being referenced, the particular intimacy of shared history, and it settled in your chest and stayed there.

The pasta, once cut, went into the pot in long pale ribbons and came back out glossy and perfect, and the butter-sage sauce was made in the pan with a speed and simplicity that felt almost too easy after the forty minutes of physical work before it. But the result - the pasta gleaming, the butter brown and nutty, the sage crisped at the edges, the parmesan falling in light curls over everything - was extraordinary. Simple and extraordinary, in the exact way that Rowan had promised.

"She was right," you said.

"She usually is," Baelor agreed.

You ate in a comfortable quiet, the kind that had built itself over seven weeks of Monday evenings without either of you particularly designing it. The class around you was louder than usual - pasta night had a celebratory energy, people pleased with themselves in the way of having made something with their hands that tasted this good. Rowan moved through the room accepting compliments with gracious deflection, redirecting them back at the people who had made the food.

"I’m going to make this at home," you repeated your earlier sentiment.

"It’s significantly more labor-intensive than anything else we’ve covered so far."

"I know." You twisted pasta around your fork. "That’s kinda the point."

He looked at you.

"There’s something satisfying about food that takes effort," you said. "Not every night. But sometimes. It makes it mean something."

He was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. Just that, and nothing more. But the word had a weight to it, an agreement that went slightly beyond pasta, and you both knew it, and neither of you said so, and the kitchen was very warm.

The class ended, and you packed up, and you walked out together into a night that had turned genuinely cold, the first real cold of November settling over the street with authority. You pulled your coat close and he buttoned his jacket - he had not brought a coat, which was, you thought, very typical of him, the particular stubbornness of someone who had decided the evening was not cold enough to require one and was now committed to that position entirely.

"You’re cold,” you noticed.

"I’m fine.”

"You buttoned your jacket."

"It’s more practical," he said.

You smiled, and he caught it, and the corner of his mouth did the thing it did, and you stood there for a moment on the lit pavement outside the culinary center with the cold coming off the street and seven weeks behind you and five ahead, and it was just a moment - just a perfectly ordinary moment on a perfectly ordinary street - but it sat in your chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the class or the pasta or the butter-sage sauce.

"Goodnight," you said.

"Goodnight," he responded. "See you next week."

You walked to the station. The cold was sharp and clean and you did not mind it at all.

WEEK EIGHT

Valarr came home on the Saturday before the eighth class.

He arrived in the way he always arrived - with more bags than strictly necessary, a stack of books under one arm, talking before he had fully come through the door, filling the house with a warm energy that Baelor had missed without quite acknowledging that he had missed it. 

He was tall, with his mother’s nose, but the set of his jaw and the precision of his speech were Baelor's, refined by twenty-two years of watching the same habits and absorbing them without meaning to. He had his mother's stubbornness married to his father's logic, and the combination made him formidable in arguments and sometimes wearing at breakfast.

Baelor had always been not-so-quietly, immeasurably proud of him.

"Something smells good," Valarr said, dropping his bags at the foot of the stairs.

"Roast chicken," Baelor answered, from the kitchen.

A pause. Then footsteps. Then Valarr appeared in the kitchen doorway with the expression of someone revising an assumption. He looked at the oven. At the counter, where the prep had left its evidence - the remnants of herbs, the butter dish, the small saucepan for the pan sauce already rinsed and drying beside it. At Baelor, who was moving between the counter and the stove with the ease of someone who had made this specific dish three times and knew where everything was.

"You actually cooked," Valarr’s eyes were fixed on the saucepan.

"I told you that I was taking a class," Baelor said.

"You told me a lot of things." Valarr came further into the kitchen, peered through the oven glass at the bird with undisguised interest. "That looks right."

"It is right."

"How do you know?"

"Because I’ve made it before," Baelor told him, "and I know what it’s supposed to look like at this stage." He checked the thermometer. Set it down. "The skin should be darker at the edge of the breast by now. It is."

Valarr turned to look at him with an expression that was somewhere between impressed and amused, the expression he got when his father did something that violated his established model of his father. "Three times," he repeated, a hint of entertainment in his voice.

"The first time is never fully reliable," Baelor said. "You need repetition before you can trust the result."

"That is the most you thing you have ever said about cooking." Valarr pulled out a kitchen stool and sat. He watched his father move around the kitchen for a moment. "So the class is actually going well."

"It’s going well."

"And your -" a pause, carefully placed, "- table partner." He said it with the studied neutrality of someone who had prepared the neutrality in advance and was deploying it with deliberate precision. Baelor recognized the technique. He had, after all, taught the technique, though not for this purpose.

Baelor removed the chicken from the oven, set it on the rest, and said nothing for a moment. He checked the thermometer again, not because he needed to but because the action gave him something to do with his hands that was not answering the question. He set it down. He moved to the stove to start the pan sauce.

"She’s good company," he said. "As I told you."

"Right." Valarr watched him work. He was quiet in the way Baelor recognized - the way Baelor was quiet, the silence that gathered information. "You know what's interesting? You never mentioned the woman from your pickleball club. Went there every week for two years. Never once came up. You've mentioned this class every time we've spoken."

"The class has been very instructive," Baelor said.

"Dad."

"Valarr."

A silence. The pan sauce began, the stock going in, the fond releasing in the heat with a hiss and a rush of steam. Baelor focused on it with the attention it deserved and perhaps a fraction more. The smell of it was good - it was always good, this particular stage, the caramelized chicken fond lifting from the bottom of the pan in the liquid and becoming something richer than either thing alone.

"How old is she?" Valarr asked.

The question was not aggressive. It was quiet, and genuine, and his son had the good sense and the good character to ask it that way - not as an accusation, not with the edge of judgment, but as a real question from someone who knew him and was paying careful attention. It was, Baelor thought, exactly the question Jena would have asked first, in exactly that tone.

Baelor stirred the sauce. "Twenty-three," he answered.

The kitchen was quiet for a moment except for the sound of the sauce reducing and the low tick of the cooling oven behind him.

"Right," Valarr said. He stretched the vowels. He paused. "And - and so you’re friends now? Is that it?"

"No," Baelor said, immediately.

Valarr said nothing. He had learned, somewhere in his twenty-two years, the particular power of saying nothing in response to an answer that had come too fast. He had learned it from his father, in fact, who had used the same technique in enough depositions that it had become second nature, and now here his son was, using it back at him across the kitchen counter, and Baelor found himself in the very specific discomfort of being outmaneuvered by his own methods.

"She’s a student," Baelor said. "She’s taking a year off before her master's program. She’s twenty-three years old." He reduced the heat under the sauce. "There is nothing there."

"Okay," Valarr said, in a tone that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and turned it in his hands, "I'm not saying it would be a problem, necessarily. I just want you to be honest with yourself. That's all."

"There’s nothing to be honest with myself about," Baelor said.

"Okay," Valarr said again, with the same equanimity.

They ate the chicken at the kitchen table, and it was very good - better, in fact, than the version from class, because Baelor had learned what to correct, had run the temperature a fraction lower and pulled it from the oven slightly earlier, and the result was a bird that was perfectly juicy and perfectly rested and plated with the simple competence that Rowan had spent eight weeks building toward.

Valarr ate two helpings. He said, with complete and obvious sincerity, that it was excellent, and asked how the sauce was made, and they spent twenty minutes talking through the technique with the pleasure of a conversation between two precise people about something they were both interested in. Baelor found himself using Rowan's language - the fond is the thing, the liquid just lifts it, the rest is patience - and heard it in his own voice as someone else's vocabulary made his, absorbed over seven Mondays and now simply part of how he thought about it.

They talked about law school, about the autumn semester, about Matarys who had sent a stream of barely coherent texts that week that together suggested he was having a good time and studying sufficiently. They talked about the firm, about the Morrison case which had finally resolved, about the new client that had been brought in that Baelor was cautiously optimistic about. They talked until the plates were cleared, and the wine was mostly gone, and the kitchen was warm and easy and lit the way it was lit on the evenings when it was used, and Baelor was aware of how long it had been since the kitchen had been this warm on a Saturday.

At no point did they talk about the class again.

It was only when Valarr had gone to bed, and the kitchen was clean, and Baelor was sitting in the front room with his book open to a page he had not been reading for twenty minutes that he let himself think about it - about the question, and his answer, and how fast the answer had come.

No.

Immediately. Reflexively. The way you answered when you already knew what the correct answer was supposed to be, when the answer was less about truth than about propriety, about the right thing, the sensible thing, the thing that a man of fifty should be able to say clearly and mean without effort.

He closed the book.

He thought about the fact that she was twenty-three. He thought about it with the same rigorous honesty he had tried to bring to all the other times he had thought about it, the same refusal to dress it up in either direction. She was twenty-three, and he was fifty, and Valarr was twenty-two, and Matarys was twenty, and those were the facts, and the facts did not become less true because he had spent seven Mondays finding her easy to be with, and three hours at a time going quickly in her company, and his mind drifting, in the interstitial moments, toward things he had decided not to think about.

He thought about Jena. He did this sometimes, not with grief exactly - grief had long since composted itself into something quieter, something closer to permanence, to the steady presence of a person who was not there but who had shaped everything about the world they'd left behind - but with a kind of conversation. Not out loud. Just the sense of putting something in front of her and waiting to see what came back.

Jena, he thought, would not have wanted him to be alone. She had been, in the deepest way, a person who believed in not wasting things. In not letting good things go unused. He knew this about her. He had known it while she was alive and he knew it now, the knowledge layered into him over fifteen years of marriage, and grief, and the long aftermath.

He also knew, with the same certainty, that there was a difference between not wasting good things and not thinking clearly. Between allowing yourself something and being reckless with someone else.

She was twenty-three. She had her whole life in front of her, unformed and full of possibilities he could not predict and should not limit. A man his age, with his particular set of complications - the firm, the sons, the history, the particular character of a person who had been alone for so many years and had made something of the aloneness - was not a simple proposition for anyone. Was, probably, a very complicated proposition for someone who was just beginning.

He went to bed.

He laid in the dark and thought about the Morrison estate case, which needed his attention on Monday before class. He thought about the deposition on Thursday. He thought about his father coming for dinner on Friday.

He thought, briefly and against his better judgment, about seven weeks of Mondays, and flour on a forearm he had not noticed, and the two umbrellas that had stood next to each other.

He closed his eyes.

—

He arrived at the class the following Monday in the mood of a man who had made a series of firm internal decisions and intended to hold them.

The class was on fish. Rowan had arranged the stations with fillets of salmon and sea bass and the tools for both pan-searing and en papillote preparation - cooking in a sealed parcel of parchment, she explained, which trapped moisture and steam and produced a result that was impossible to achieve in an open pan. She moved through the introduction with her characteristic enthusiasm, talking about heat, and moisture, and the cruelty of overcooked fish in a way that was both genuinely funny and genuinely useful.

She was already at the station when he arrived. Deep blue today, a jumper with the sleeves pushed up. She looked up when he sat, said "fish," in a tone that was half greeting and half mild apprehension, and pushed the recipe card toward him.

"I’ve overcooked fish every time I’ve cooked it," she said. "Every single time."

"Same principle as the chicken," he said. "Heat and patience."

"I know the principle. The execution is the problem."

"The execution is always the problem," he said.

She looked at him for a moment. "You sound like Rowan."

"Rowan is usually right."

"You are usually right," she said. "You are both insufferable about it."

Something in his chest did the thing it did. He looked at the recipe card.

He was, for most of the evening, fine. They worked together with the ease that eight weeks had built, the comfortable instinctive division of tasks, the shorthand that had developed without either of them designing it. He took the salmon; she took the bass en papillote, and they talked about the technique as they worked, and Rowan came by twice with approving comments, and the fish came out well - the salmon with a sear that would have satisfied week two's standards considerably, the bass unwrapped from its parcel in a cloud of fragrant steam that made several people at nearby stations look over with undisguised interest.

"That is beautiful," she grinned, looking at the bass.

"The steam does the work," he said.

"It smells incredible."

"The lemon and the thyme," he agreed. "They compound in the sealed environment."

She tasted it. Her expression did the thing it did when food came out right - the unself-conscious pleasure of it, the way she was always entirely present in good moments without announcing them. It was, he had noticed over eight weeks, one of the things he -

He did not finish the thought.

"Baelor," she said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

He set down his fork. The question had a different register to it than the usual current of their conversation. He recognized the register. "Yes.”

She took a breath. In the way she did things - directly, without excessive prelude, having already decided to say the thing and simply saying it. "How old were you when you got married?"

He had not expected that. He looked at her for a moment, and then answered honestly, because he had decided a long time ago that honesty was always the correct starting position. "Twenty-six," he said. "We married young."

"And your wife - you mentioned she passed away. Were you the same age?"

"She was a year younger,” he answered.

She was quiet for a moment, looking at her plate with the attention of someone gathering something. Then, with the particular directness that had been a consistent thing about her, one of the things he had noted from the very beginning, "You are fifty and I am twenty-three. I’ve been thinking about that. About the fact that it’s a lot of years."

The kitchen noise moved around them, the other stations carrying on their own conversations, Rowan's voice from the far end of the room talking someone through a timing issue. Here, at the second station from the end, things were very still.

"Yes," he agreed. "It is."

She looked up at him. "Does it seem strange to you? Talking to me?"

He thought about the honest answer. He had been giving this conversation the answer it deserved, inside his own head, for eight weeks. "No," he said. "It doesn’t."

"It doesn’t seem strange to me either," she said. "Which is interesting, considering."

He said nothing.

"I’m not saying anything," she added, quickly, with a slight rueful quality that he thought was more self-aware than defensive - as though she were acknowledging her own boldness in real time. "I’m just - I’m naming it, I suppose, because it seems strange not to… It’s clearly in the room.” 

"I understand," he said.

"It’s just a lot of years," she said again. Quietly. Not with grief or accusation, just with careful honesty. She was simply putting something into the open air that had been existing in the room already, unnamed, for longer than either of them had been fully acknowledging.

"Twenty-seven," he said. "For accuracy."

She absorbed this. "Twenty-seven," she repeated, trying the number.

"You would have been -" he did the arithmetic with the swift automatic precision of a habit formed over decades of needing numbers quickly "- negative nine years old when I graduated from high school.” 

Something crossed her face that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else, some expression that occupied the space between registering the weight of something and choosing to stay with it rather than retreat. "You would have been forty-five when I graduated high school," she said. "I worked that out too."

"I can see.” 

They sat with that for a moment. The honest version of the thing, laid out plainly between them on the station counter alongside the fish and the recipe card and the two glasses of water. Twenty-seven years. A lot of living on his side. A life freshly started on hers. The arithmetic of it, not softened.

"Okay," she said, eventually. Not as a conclusion, not as a verdict, just as an acknowledgment. 

"Okay," he echoed, carefully.

Rowan called the room's attention back to the front for the end-of-class notes, and they both turned toward her, and the conversation closed in the natural way that conversations closed when the room required it, and neither of them referenced it again that evening.

But it was different now - not worse, not better, just different. The way a room was different once a window had been opened, once the outside air had come in and mixed with the inside air, even after you closed the window again. You could not un-open it. The air was changed.

He drove home, and made tea, and sat at the kitchen table for longer than he usually sat anywhere without a purpose, and thought about twenty-seven years, and what they meant, and what they did not mean, and what it was that a man was supposed to do with a feeling that was inconvenient and persistent and entirely, stubbornly unwilling to be reasoned into something manageable.

He had no satisfying answer.

He drank the tea. He went to bed.

WEEK NINE

Week nine was sauces.

Not the simple pan sauces that you had already covered as supporting work in earlier lessons, but sauces in full - béchamel, hollandaise, a simple vinaigrette built from ratios rather than instinct. Rowan described them as "the moment when cooking stops being assembly and starts being understanding," and the distinction, as she drew it, made a kind of sense that you were still thinking about on the way home afterward. A sauce was not a recipe so much as a relationship - between fat and liquid, between acid and richness, between the cook's patience and the thing that was trying to split or seize or break. You either understood it or you were guessing.

"Hollandaise is the terrifying one," the woman at the next station said, when she overheard you reading the recipe card. She said it with the resigned warmth of someone who had been burned before and had made a certain kind of peace with it.

You relayed this to Baelor when he sat down.

"I read about hollandaise," he told you.

“When?"

"Thursday." He picked up the recipe card and read it with the focused attention he gave written things, the slight forward lean that was his reading posture. "It requires continuous movement and precise temperature control. The emulsion is the whole thing - if it breaks, you have to start over or rescue it with cold water and a great deal of patience."

"That sounds exactly like something you would read about in advance," you said.

"I read about everything in advance," he said. "It’s how I function."

"I know," you smiled. "I find it very funny."

He looked at you. Not sharply - he rarely looked at anything sharply, his attention tended toward the considered rather than the reactive - just with the mild assessing quality that meant he was deciding how to take something. He settled, as he usually did, on something that was quietly both amused and undeterred. "It has served me reasonably well," he said, finally.

"Very well," you agreed. "I didn’t mean it as a criticism."

The dynamic between you had been different since last week. Not worse - genuinely not worse, you had been careful to feel that accurately and not project what you feared onto it - but different in the way that honest conversations changed things. Something had been named. The arithmetic had been spoken aloud between you, plainly and without decoration, and now it existed in the space between you the way facts existed, neither removable nor requiring constant acknowledgment, just present.

You were aware of it more or less constantly, if you were being entirely truthful with yourself. But it was a clean awareness, not an anxious one. The thing had been named, and you had both sat with it, and neither of you had done anything dramatic, and the world had continued in its general direction, and here you were on a Monday evening about to attempt hollandaise.

The béchamel went well - it was the most forgiving of the sauces, a roux with patience and warm milk added slowly, and if you went slowly enough and stirred consistently enough there was very little that could go wrong. You did yours competently; Baelor did his with the focused steadiness that characterized everything he did, and the result was smooth, and thick, and exactly right.

The vinaigrette was a revelation in the straightforward way that things were revelatory when you realized they were a ratio and not a recipe - three to one, oil to acid, and anything beyond that was preference. You had made vinaigrettes your whole adult life by guessing, and the knowledge that the thing had a logic, a consistency you could rely on, was oddly satisfying.

The hollandaise was the hollandaise.

Rowan demonstrated it first, working over the double boiler with the unhurried confidence of someone who had made hollandaise hundreds of times and had long since stopped fearing it. The whisk moved constantly, the bowl sitting barely above the steam with precision, the butter going in in a thin, disciplined stream with an incrementalism that required the kind of patience that could not be faked.

"The enemy of hollandaise," she said, as she worked, "is impatience. Nothing else. The egg can do this. The butter wants to cooperate. You simply have to let the process take the time it takes and trust that the time is not wasted." She looked up from the bowl with the expression she got when she was saying something she meant twice over. "That applies to more than hollandaise, I suspect."

You wrote that down in the margin of your recipe card.

You and Baelor split the tasks - he managed the double boiler while you prepared the clarified butter, and then you switched so he could whisk while you monitored the temperature with the probe thermometer, and you had been working together long enough now that this kind of division happened with a naturalness that felt less like coordination and more like habit. The accumulated habit of nine Mondays. The fluency of two people who had learned each other's rhythms without setting out to.

"Temperature?" He asked.

"Sixty-two," you answered, watching the probe.

"Still within range."

"Still within range."

The whisk moved. The sauce thickened, very gradually, from something liquid and doubtful into something that began to coat the back of a spoon with a glossy, pale yellow weight. You watched it with the focused attention that the task required, and you watched his hands too, the movement of the whisk that was constant and even, the patience of it.

"It’s working," you grinned, and you heard the note of genuine surprise in your own voice and did not bother to conceal it.

"Don’t congratulate it yet," he said, the whisk still moving.

"I wasn’t congratulating it, I was simply making an observation."

"Observation acknowledged." He did not look up. "Temperature?"

"Sixty-three."

"Good." A pause. The butter went in, very slowly. "Tell me when the consistency changes."

You watched. The sauce built itself slowly, the emulsion holding with the fragile confidence of something that knew how close the edge was but was choosing, moment by moment, not to go over it. You watched it, and you watched his hands, and the kitchen was warm and very nearly quiet at your station, just the sound of the whisk and the low roll of the water in the double boiler below.

"Now," you said. "It’s there."

He looked. Ran the back of the spoon through it. Checked the consistency with the efficiency of someone who had read about this and knew what he was looking for.

"Yes," he said. He took it off the heat. Set it aside carefully, wiped the base of the bowl. And then he looked up at you.

It was the look from the previous week and the week before that. The look that had been there, in various registers of the same quality, since around week four or five - present, very still, carrying more than the surface of things. He looked at you, directly, with the expression he had when something had come out right and he was letting himself be simply and honestly pleased about it - and you were close, closer than usual because of the double boiler, both of you leaning toward the work, and the kitchen was warm, and the light was amber and steady, and he looked at you and the look lasted one beat, two beats, and in those two beats something happened that was not a word, and not a touch, and not anything that could have been named in a deposition or a report, but that was entirely real and entirely there and entirely, unambiguously mutual. 

You looked away first.

"Good," you said, to the sauce.

"Yes.” His voice was even. He stepped back, slightly, and reached for a spoon.

You looked at the sauce. It sat there in the bowl, pale yellow, and glossy, and perfectly achieved, entirely indifferent to what was happening on either side of it.

Rowan came by, tasted it with the unstudied efficiency of someone who had tasted a great deal of hollandaise, and declared it excellent. She moved on.

Neither of you mentioned the two beats. You talked about the sauce, and about next week's lesson, and about a minor disaster at the far end of the room where someone's béchamel had seized irreparably and Rowan was conducting a cheerful post-mortem on where things had gone wrong, and you were both fine, and the conversation flowed in the register it always flowed in, and the evening ended the way evenings ended, with coats and bags and the cold outside and good nights said in the doorway.

You went home and stood in your kitchen with your coat still on and thought about the look and the two beats and the specific fact that you had looked away and whether he would have, if you had not.

You thought about it for a long time.

WEEK TEN

He had looked away first.

This was factually incorrect. He was aware of it being factually incorrect, and yet he had spent a not-insignificant portion of the ten days since week nine's class telling himself, with the dogged revisionism of a man arguing a case he knew was losing, that he had looked away first. That it had been him. That the moment - whatever it had been, if it had been anything, if it had not simply been the warm and close proximity of a small kitchen, and an unusual task, and nine weeks of accumulated familiarity - had been resolved on his side, by him, before anything could be said to have happened.

She had looked away first.

He knew this. He had the precision of a man who did not misremember things that mattered, who filed facts accurately even when the facts were inconvenient, especially when the facts were inconvenient, because inconvenient facts were the ones you had to know most clearly if you were going to navigate around them. She had looked away first, and the look had lasted two beats, and in those two beats he had not looked away, and that was a data point.

He ran five mornings that week instead of four. It did not resolve anything, but it helped slightly, and he had always been a firm believer in doing what helped slightly.

The week was demanding, which was a mercy. The Morrison estate case required two late nights and a call with opposing counsel that went forty minutes longer than he had expected and was nonetheless productive. He had a deposition on Thursday that required preparation. Someone wanted to discuss the firm's Q4 schedule on Wednesday, and his father came for dinner on Friday, and the week was structured enough that the spaces in which thoughts went uninvited were genuinely limited.

His father, over dinner Friday evening - roast lamb, which Baelor had attempted for the first time on the strength of the week six technique, and which had come out better than he had any right to expect - looked at him for a long moment when the class came up.

"Still going?" His father asked.

"Two remaining," Baelor said. "Ten of twelve done."

"And you are learning." It wasn’t a question - his father had the lamb right in front of him, he could see the evidence for himself. 

"Considerably." Baelor picked up his wine glass. "I made hollandaise last week."

His father raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow was one of the few places where his father's age showed - the skin had loosened slightly around the eyes, and the brow movement had taken on an expressiveness it had not had in his fifties, as though the face had decided, having held itself in composed restraint for seven decades, that it had earned a little more latitude. "Hollandaise," his father said. "Your mother made hollandaise. It took her twenty years to not be afraid of it."

"It requires patience," Baelor said. "Which I apparently have."

"You have always had patience," his father noted. "Whether you have always known what to be patient about is another matter." He picked up his own glass, and said nothing further, and looked at his son with the mild, oblique quality that meant he was saying more than he was saying, which had always been one of his most useful and most irritating qualities, and which Baelor had apparently passed to Valarr with the same precision he had passed everything else.

"The class ends in two weeks," Baelor told him, and moved the conversation elsewhere.

His father let him move it, which was a gift, and they talked about other things, and the lamb was very good, and the evening was pleasant.

—

Week ten was desserts - specifically tarts, which Rowan described as "the intersection of discipline and reward," and which required a shortcrust pastry that needed cold butter and cold hands and a practiced restraint with the amount of working you gave the dough.

"Cold is the word of the evening," Rowan announced at the demonstration counter. "Cold butter, cold water, cold hands. If your hands are warm, run them under cold water first. The enemy of pastry is warmth. The butter must remain distinct, in small pieces, throughout. The moment it melts into the flour is the moment the pastry becomes dense rather than shattering. Remember that."

She paused, looked around the room with a considering expression, and added, "This is a different kind of patience than the hollandaise. The hollandaise asked you to keep moving. The pastry is asking you to keep still - to do less, to trust that less is more. Both are necessary. Both are difficult in their own way. The best cooks learn to hold both."

Baelor filed this away with the attention he gave Rowan's more considered observations. She had a habit, roughly once per class, of saying something that was ostensibly about cooking and was also, without apparent self-consciousness, about something else entirely. He had not mentioned this to anyone. It seemed like the kind of thing that, if mentioned, would sound odd, and that was better appreciated privately.

She was already at the station when he arrived - she was there first now, or sometimes he was, and the alternation had become its own small thing, quietly established. The first arrival got the water glasses, read the recipe card, set the station in order. He did not know exactly when this had started or which of them had started it, but it had become as natural as everything else, accumulated over ten weeks of the same Monday evening in the same room.

She had the butter out, cubed, and had put it back in the refrigerator to keep it cold before he sat down.

"Smart," he said.

"I read about it," she winked, in his cadence, with the slight dry note that meant she was doing it deliberately.

He sat down. The corner of his mouth did the thing it did.

They made the pastry in measured stages - the rubbing in of the butter, the addition of iced water a spoonful at a time, the point at which you stopped working it because stopping was everything - and it was tactile in a way that much of the cooking was not, demanding the direct language of hands. Baelor found himself oddly comfortable with it, with the task of working the cold butter into the flour until it looked like rough breadcrumbs, with feeling the temperature under his palms and calibrating accordingly.

"You’re doing it right, I think," she said, watching his hands.

"The texture’s correct," he agreed.

"It’s very fine. Some of the others are overworked -" she nodded toward a neighboring station, where the pastry had the slightly greasy sheen of butter that had melted into the flour rather than remaining distinct. "You can see the difference."

"I can," he said. "Yours is good as well."

She looked at her own bowl. "I keep wanting to do more," she said. "I have to actively stop myself."

"Why?"

"Because it feels underdone. It looks like it needs more attention."

"It doesn’t need more," he said. "The oven will do the rest. What it needs now is to stop being touched."

She looked at him, and her expression was briefly, vividly amused in a way that suggested she had made the same association he had made and was choosing, with characteristic lightness, not to say it. He chose not to say it either. But the awareness of the parallel sat between them with a faint quality - not quite tension, not quite humor, some compound of the two - and for a moment the kitchen was warm, and the edge of a smile was very close to the surface on both of them.

He looked at his bowl.

"Add the water," he said.

"Adding the water.”

They refrigerated the pastry, and while it chilled they prepped the filling - a lemon curd that required the same careful heat management as the hollandaise, eggs, and butter, and lemon juice coaxed over gentle heat into a glossy, bright cohesion. He made the curd, she watched the pastry cooling and reported on its firmness with an investment in its welfare that he found - damn, there it was, the finding of things he had decided not to find, reliable and entirely outside his control.

He focused on the curd.

The rolling was careful work, and he was careful with it, and she watched him with the certain attention that she had when she was observing something rather than thinking about what to say next. He was used to being observed with that kind of attention now. He was not entirely sure when he had become used to it.

"You’re very good at this," she noted.

"I’ve been practicing," he said.

"All of it, I mean." She told him. Not the rolling, specifically. Just - all of it, the gesture taking in something larger.

He looked at her briefly. The lemon curd sat on the stove behind him, cooling to the right temperature in the bowl of ice water, doing exactly what it was supposed to do. "I had good reason to start," he said. "And good reason to continue."

She looked at him for a moment in the way she sometimes looked at him when he said something that meant more than it said. Then she looked back at the pastry. "I’m glad you enrolled.”

"As am I.”

He meant it with a precision that, if he examined it, was about considerably more than his cholesterol.

He did not examine it. He rolled the pastry.

The tart went into the oven and came out with the particular beauty of a thing made correctly - pale gold and shattering-crisp, the lemon curd set to a trembling, glossy finish that caught the kitchen light. They plated it carefully and tasted it, and it was very good, the lemon bright and clean against the richness of the pastry, the curd clinging exactly as it should.

"That," she smiled, "is genuinely excellent."

"It is," he agreed.

They ate it standing, because the tart warranted standing - this was a Rowan principle from several weeks ago, the idea that some things deserved to be eaten fully present, not sitting and eating and thinking about something else - and the kitchen was winding down around them, the class moving into its final half hour.

"Two more weeks," she said, at some point in the comfortable quiet. Not with a particular tone. Just naming it.

"Two more weeks," he nodded.

He thought about what two weeks meant. He thought about Monday evenings, and what they had been, and what they would be after the twelfth one. He thought about the second station from the end, and the amber light, and three hours that went quickly, and a conversation that he could have at no other station with no other person, that had built itself so naturally over ten Mondays that the idea of not having it had a shape to it now, a recognizable absence.

He thought about all of this and then he put it away, with the same effort it took every time, and slightly more, and he finished his tart, and the class ended, and he said goodnight.

She went left. He went right.

He sat in the car for a moment before starting the engine, in the stillness of a November night, and thought about two weeks, and what came after, and what he was going to do with all the Monday evenings that came after that.

He did not answer the question.

He drove home.

WEEK ELEVEN

You almost did not go.

Not in a serious way - you were always going to go, you had missed not one class in eleven weeks and you were not going to ruin the record now - but on the Monday of week eleven you stood in your bathroom getting ready and looked at yourself in the mirror for longer than was strictly necessary and thought about the fact that there was only one more week after this.

One more Monday. One more evening. One more three hours in that warm kitchen with its amber lights, and Rowan's extraordinary hair, and the comfortable, particular ease of the station second from the end, and then it was over. Twelve weeks done. You would have your certificate and you would know how to make pasta, and bread, and roast chicken, and hollandaise, and lemon tart, and pan-seared fish, and you would go home, and Monday evenings would go back to being Monday evenings, unremarkable and ordinary, and that would be that.

The thought sat in your chest with a weight you had been trying, not very successfully, not to fully feel.

You finished getting ready and went.

The class was on a self-directed project night - Rowan's term for the penultimate session, in which each station was given a set of ingredients and a general direction, and asked to cook something of their own choosing from the skills accumulated over eleven weeks. An exercise in integration rather than instruction. A chance to see what had actually been built.

"I am not teaching tonight," Rowan told the room with the pleasure of releasing a class she trusted. "I am watching. You know what you know. I want to see you use it."

Your station had been set up with chicken thighs, aromatics, white wine, cream, and stock. A range of possible directions. You and Baelor looked at the ingredients together, and then at each other, and the conversation that followed - rapid, practical, the shorthand of eleven Mondays - resolved itself in about ninety seconds into a plan - the chicken seared and finished in the oven, the sauce built from the fond and the wine and the cream, aromatics softened first, stock to extend it, reduced to the right consistency.

Nothing you had not done before, in components. Everything you had built, in one complete dish. A choice, not an instruction.

"Right," you nodded.

"Right," he nodded.

You worked.

It was the best cooking you had done in the class, and you knew it while it was happening, which was the quality of integration - the way accumulated skill felt different from following a recipe, the way knowledge that lived in your hands was different from knowledge that lived in your head. The chicken went into the pan with a confidence that only came from having done it enough times that the sound and the smell were information. The fond came up with the wine and you both leaned in slightly to watch it, the way you had learned to pay that kind of attention, the way Rowan had been saying for eleven weeks that attention made things better, and you believed her now in a way you had not believed her in week one.

The sauce built itself with the glossy, compounding richness that happened when you did every step correctly and did not rush.

"Taste it," he said.

You tasted it. "Salt," you suggested.

"A little," he agreed.

The salt went in. You tasted again. "That is it," you grinned.

"Yes," he said.

He plated - he had, over eleven weeks, become the better plater of the two of you, having applied the same aesthetic precision to presentation that he applied to everything else - and the dish looked, genuinely, like something that had been made on purpose and made well.

Rowan came to your station last, which was either coincidence or an instinct for drama, and either way it was appropriate. She tasted the sauce. She tasted the chicken. She tasted the sauce again with the silence of actual consideration.

"This," she declared, "is what eleven weeks looks like." She looked at both of you in turn, with the warm, clear satisfaction of a person who had watched people arrive at the other end of something and was always glad to see them make it. "Well done."

She moved on.

You looked at the dish. You thought about week one, the vegetable prep, the knife you had held too tight. You thought about all the distance between there and here, and all the Mondays that had made it up, and the particular fact that none of them had felt long.

"Rowan is right," you said. "That is very good."

"We made it well," he said.

We. Three weeks ago you would have let that land and moved on. Tonight you sat with it for a moment before you did.

You ate, and the room around you was at its most comfortable, the group having relaxed into the final stretch with the ease of people who had eaten together enough times to know how to be in each other's company. Rowan circulated, talking with everyone, her laugh ringing across the kitchen from the far end at something someone had said. The kitchen attendant had clearly been told to let things run a little longer tonight; nobody was moving to clean up.

You talked less than usual. Not because there was nothing to say but because something about the evening made conversation feel slightly beside the point, the way very comfortable silences sometimes did. You were aware of the week ahead of this one, and what came after it, and you were aware of him beside you, and of the question you had been turning over since before tonight began.

You thought about Julia. About the phone call two days ago in which you had told her, I think I am going to ask him. After the last class. And she had said finally, and you had said it might go nowhere, and she had said it might, and you had said he might say no, and she had said he might, and then she had said, but you want to ask him and you had said, yes. Yes, I do.

And that had been the conversation, more or less. Not a pep talk. Not a resolution of uncertainty. Just the honest acknowledgment of what you wanted to do, said out loud to someone who would tell you the truth about it. The decision was not dramatic. It was just real.

He was fifty years old. He had two sons and a whole life that predated you by nearly three decades and a character that had been formed and tested in ways you could not fully know. He might look at you asking him and see, with the clear-eyed practicality that was so essentially him, someone too young, someone who did not fit the shape of anything he had made room for, and say so, and that would be painful, certainly, but it would be honest, and it would be his right, and you would respect it.

But he had looked at you, in week nine and in week seven and in the weeks before that, with something that was not nothing. You were not inventing it. You had been careful not to invent it, had been rigorous with yourself about the difference between what was there and what you were projecting onto it, and what was there was real.

And you were not going to stand at the end of twelve Mondays without saying it. Without at least trying. Whatever happened after.

You looked at him. He was looking at his plate, slightly more still than usual, the particular quality of someone who was also thinking about something they were not saying.

One more Monday.

You could do this.

The class ended, and you said goodnight, and you walked to the station, and the decision sat in your chest - not light and not heavy, just steady. Real. Already made.

WEEK TWELVE

The last class.

He drove to State Street in the mood that arrived at the end of things - not grief, not quite, but the certain attention you gave to something when you knew you were doing it for the last time. The route had become familiar over twelve weeks, the turn off the main road, the corner with the bakery two doors down from the culinary center, the street that was always slightly quieter than the surrounding ones, as though some local geography directed the noise elsewhere. He had not noticed these things consciously before. He noticed them now.

He parked. He sat in the car for considerably longer than he usually sat in the car, looking at the hand-lettered sign in the culinary center window - COOKING: FROM ZERO TO PROFICIENCY - FINAL WEEK - in a different colored marker than the rest, someone's small concession to ceremony.

He went in.

She was there.

Already at the station, jacket over the back of her stool, something small and wrapped in tissue paper set on the counter beside the recipe card. She looked up when he came through, and smiled the full smile, the one that reached her eyes, and said, "Last one."

"Last one," he repeated, and sat.

She picked up the wrapped thing and pushed it toward him with the slight self-consciousness of someone who had made a decision and was committed to it but was not entirely sure how it would land. "I brought you something," she said. "You’re always reading when I come in, or when we’re waiting for something. I thought - well, it seemed like the kind of thing. It might be odd."

He opened it. The tissue paper came away to reveal a bookmark - leather, dark green, good quality, with a small embossed pattern of leaves along one edge, the craftsmanship of something made rather than bought in a chain shop.

He looked at it for a moment.

Something in his chest performed an action he had been determinedly not noticing for roughly ten weeks.

"It’s not odd," it was almost a whisper. He turned it in his hands. The leather was warm from her hands through the tissue paper. "Thank you."

"It’s a small thing," she said.

"Small things count," he told her. He put it in his coat pocket, carefully.

She looked at him for a moment - the brief, clear look she sometimes gave him when he said something that landed differently than she had anticipated - and then Rowan arrived, and the last class began.

It was celebratory, which was appropriate and which Rowan had clearly planned with the kind of careful attention she brought to all things. The lesson was a full menu - an amuse-bouche, a main, a dessert, working through all three as a cohesive meal rather than isolated techniques, each component calling on something learned in the previous eleven weeks. It was ambitious for three hours and Rowan knew it, and had structured it with the precision of someone who had run this final class many times and knew exactly where the margins were.

The kitchen had a different energy. People who had barely spoken across twelve weeks were saying goodbye with the warmth of people who had shared something, even something as modest as flour on their hands and a Monday evening for three months. The woman at the next station - the one who had warned you about hollandaise in week nine - caught his eye and raised her glass of water in a small toast, which he returned. He had not learned her name. He found himself briefly, mildly regretful about this.

He and she worked with the integration that week eleven had demonstrated, the easy instinctive fluency that had built itself over twelve weeks without either of them designing it. The amuse-bouche - a small crostini with a finely made mushroom duxelles that required the kind of patient, precise chopping that week one's knife skills had been building toward all along - came together in twenty minutes. He did the chopping, she built the duxelles in the pan with the patience that had been her week two problem and had somewhere along the way become one of her strengths.

He noticed this. He had been noticing the development of her skills over twelve weeks the way you noticed the development of something you had been present for - with a particular invested attention, the pleasure of watching someone get better at something, the satisfaction of having been there for the whole of it.

The main was a pan-seared duck breast with a red wine reduction - the most technically demanding thing that they had attempted, save for the pastry, calling on the sear from week two, the oven finish from week six, the sauce technique from every sauce lesson since. He did the sear and oven, she did the reduction, which she had become very good at, the sauce darkening in the pan with the controlled patience of someone who trusted the process and was not going to hurry it.

"It looks right," she stated, watching the reduction.

"It is right," he said. "You know it is."

She looked at him sideways. "You sound very sure."

"I am," he said. "I’ve been watching you get better at this for twelve weeks. I know what right looks like on you.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she looked back at the reduction. "On me," she said, and the words had a slight quality to them, a weight she was turning over.

"The way you look when it’s right," he corrected, with the precision of accuracy. "You look a certain way. It’s generally a reliable indicator."

She said nothing to that. The sauce reduced. He plated the duck with the care he brought to plating, the same care he brought to everything, and the result was clean and simple and quite good, and Rowan came by and tasted it and looked very pleased and said nothing, which from Rowan was its own form of high praise.

The dessert was a simple chocolate mousse that had been pre-made and chilled - Rowan's small mercy on a full-menu night, the component that required assembly rather than construction. She did the plating, he made the small garnishes, which were finicky and required patience, which he had.

At some point in the final half hour, while the mousse was being assembled, and the kitchen was winding down, and Rowan was beginning to circulate with the certificates - which were real, printed on good card stock and signed in her distinctive looping hand - he allowed himself to be conscious of the fact that this was the last time. The last time in this kitchen. The last time at this station. The last three hours of twelve Mondays.

He allowed himself to feel this fully, without looking away from it, for approximately thirty seconds.

Then Rowan was at their station with the certificates, and she handed them over with a warmth that was characteristically her - genuine, and direct, and not given to excessive ceremony, which he had always respected about her - and he read his.

Baelor Targaryen has completed the twelve-week Cooking: From Zero to Proficiency course.

She leaned slightly to look at it. "It’s a good name, I guess," she said.

"It’s a reasonable name.”

"Baelor." She said it the way she occasionally said it, with the slight, private enjoyment of an unusual name. He had never, in his fifty years, heard his name used by anyone quite the way she used it, and he was not going to pursue that thought further.

"Yes?” 

Rowan gathered everyone for the end - brief words, warm and measured, without sentimentality but not without feeling. She talked about what the class had covered, what it was for, what she hoped they would do with it. She thanked them for their attention and their patience and their willingness to not know things, which she said was the hardest skill of all and the one nobody ever thought to practice.

People began to say their goodbyes. There was the exchange of numbers at some stations, the warm, brief conversations of people closing something out. He stayed with her slightly longer than most, talking with Rowan for ten minutes about nothing in particular - about the course, about bread, about the food scientist's book he had mentioned to Rowan in an earlier week and which she had apparently gone and read - and then Rowan had other students to say farewell to, and they gathered their things, and the kitchen emptied around them, and it was the last time.

—

Outside, the night was clear and very cold, the deep cold of late November, the kind that settled in your chest when you breathed and reminded you that the year was nearly done. The street was quiet. The culinary center's warm light fell in a rectangle on the pavement, the familiar bakery two doors down dark at this hour. The hand-lettered sign was visible through the glass behind them.

He had his coat. She had her scarf, wound twice around her neck.

They stood in the way people stood when a thing was ending and the ending had not quite finished - the suspension of a goodbye not yet spoken, the last moment before the shape of things changed irrevocably.

"Well," she said.

"Well," he said.

A pause. The cold moved between them, patient and even.

"I want to ask you something.” 

He looked at her. The register was different - he knew this register, had heard it before from clients who were about to say the thing that mattered, from witnesses at a deposition right before the question they had been building toward. It was the register of something real. Something considered and decided. "Alright," he said.

She took a breath, and the cold air made it visible for a moment, and she looked at him with the full directness that had been one of the first things he had noticed about her and had never once gotten used to.

"I would like to get dinner with you," she said. "Not a class. Not a cooking exercise. Dinner. With you." A brief pause. "If that is something you want."

He said nothing.

Not because he did not have anything to say. Because he had - with the clarity of a thing you have been deliberately not looking at directly suddenly being placed directly in front of you - a great deal to say, and none of it was simple, and the night was cold, and she was standing there with the composed vulnerability of someone who had decided to do something and had done it, and she had been honest, and he had always believed that honesty deserved to be met with honesty, regardless of whether the honest answer was the comfortable one.

"You are twenty-three years old," he said.

"Yes," she agreed. She did not say it defensively. She said it the way he had said twenty-seven years in week eight - plainly, as a fact she had already accounted for.

"I am fifty," he said.

"I know."

"My oldest son," he said, "is twenty-two years old." He watched her face as he said it, because this was the part that was not academic, this was the part that was real and specific and could not be softened into abstraction. "One year younger than you."

"I know that too," she confirmed. Still steady. Still there.

The cold settled around them. The street lamp above them put its ring of light on the pavement, pale gold on dark stone, and beyond it the street was very quiet, and the bakery two doors down was dark, and the culinary center window was lit behind them for possibly the last time.

He looked at her. He thought about Valarr's question, asked in the warm kitchen over a pan sauce on a Saturday evening, with the careful gentleness of someone who loved him and was paying attention. He thought about his father's oblique observation over the dinner table, the raised eyebrow that had said more than the words around it. He thought about the Morrison estate case, and the deposition, and the Q4 schedule, and all the machinery of his life that ran on its own reliable rails.

And then he thought about Monday evenings, and three hours that went quickly, and the ease of this particular conversation with this particular person, the ease that he had not found since he could not remember when, that he had spent twelve weeks insisting was not what it was.

He thought about the silence in his house on Sunday evenings. Not with self-pity - he had long since made his peace with the silence, had built a life inside it that was full and functional and genuinely good. But he thought about it with the clear-eyed honesty that the moment demanded, the honest accounting of what was true. The silence was real. The ease of these Monday evenings was also real. Both things were simultaneously and irrevocably true.

He thought about Jena, in the way he sometimes thought about her - still not with grief, just with conversation. Putting something in front of her and waiting to see what came back. Jena, who had never wasted anything she valued. Who had believed with a completeness he had always admired that good things were for using, not preserving. Who would have looked at him standing in a cold street arguing with himself and said, almost certainly, something pithy and completely accurate that he would not have been able to disagree with.

She was twenty-three years old. That was a fact and it would remain a fact. Twenty-seven years between them - that would not get smaller, would not become simpler, would be a thing they carried. He was not a simple person. He had complications she did not yet know the full measure of, the particular complications of a man who had built his adult life largely alone and had organized himself around the aloneness. He was not certain he knew how to be otherwise.

But she was standing in front of him in the cold, having said the honest thing, and she had done it with a composure and a directness that he - he found things, that was the persistent problem, he had been finding things for twelve weeks - that he admired without reservation.

And he had not been able, in twelve weeks of concerted effort, to make her smaller than she was. Had not been able to file her under a category, something that would stay where he put it. Had not once looked at her and not seen her clearly.

He thought about what his father had said over the lamb, which was, essentially, you have patience. The question is whether you know what to be patient about. And he thought about what Rowan had said over the hollandaise, you simply have to let the process take the time it takes and trust that the time is not wasted.

She was still standing there. Patient in the way she was patient - not waiting for the right answer, just waiting for the honest one.

"I need you to understand," he said, carefully, the way he said things he really meant, "that I am not - that this is not something uncomplicated. Twenty-seven years is not a small thing. It will not become a small thing. I am not a simple person to -" he stopped. The sentence was going somewhere he had not fully figured out yet.

"Baelor," she said, gently.

He stopped.

"I know," she said. Quietly, clearly. "I have been paying attention for twelve weeks. I know."

He looked at her. The cold was very still. The street was very quiet.

The word came from somewhere that had stopped arguing. From somewhere deeper and quieter and more honest than the twelve weeks of careful internal management. From the place where things were simply, irrevocably true.

"Alright.” 

THE END

---

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The thirteenth name day of Prince Matarys Targaryen was a blur of silver-gold hair, the heavy, metallic scent of roasted swan, and the cloying, sticky sweetness of stolen lemon cakes. In the cavernous, drafty sprawl of the Red Keep, you were merely the daughter of a loyal but mid-tier noble house, a girl expected to sit straight, keep her eyes lowered, and speak only when a Prince of the Blood saw fit to address her. 

To Matarys, however, you were his shadow, his confidante, and the only person who truly understood the suffocating weight of his father’s silent, towering expectations. While Prince Baelor Breakspear stood like a statue of Dornish stone at the high table—his dark eyes scanning the hall with the clinical, unyielding precision of a man who ruled for a king—you and Matarys were huddled in the darkness under a table in the rushes.

The air beneath the linen tablecloth was thick with the smell of spilled wine and the herbal scent of lavender floor-wash. It was your private kingdom. There, Matarys whispered about the secret passages of the Keep, the ones that led to the dragon pits and the hidden spy-holes behind the tapestries of the Small Council chamber. 

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When you were older, he had promised with the fierce, naive sincerity of youth, he would ask his father to speak to yours. He had looked at you then, his violet eyes glowing in the dim light, and told you that marks were for people who didn't know their own minds. You didn't need a brand to know you were his, and he was yours. You had agreed, your hand brushing his in the dark, convinced that the Seven would surely bless a bond that felt as natural as breathing.

The following five years passed in a heartbeat of shared books and secret smiles. You watched him grow into a man, his shoulders broadening, his voice dropping into a rich baritone that reminded you of his father’s, though Matarys laughed far more often. You watched him in the training yard, his silver-gold hair dampened with sweat, and he would always find you in the gallery, offering a quick, private salute with his practice sword. 

You were waiting—both of you—for the morning of your eighteenth name day with a breathless, desperate anticipation. In your dreams, the mark would appear on your wrist, a shared sigil that would finally force the Hand of the King to acknowledge what everyone already whispered: that the Prince and the Lady were two halves of a whole.

On that dawn, however, the world didn't change with a whisper; it changed with a scream.

The heat woke you before the sun did. It was a sudden, localized agony that felt as if someone had pressed a white-hot coal against your left ribcage, just beneath the curve of your heart. You gasped, arching off the mattress, the fine silk of your nightshift sticking to your skin. It felt like the skin was being unmade, bubbled and knit back together by an invisible smith. When the pain finally subsided into a dull, pulsing thrum that vibrated with every heartbeat, you scrambled to the looking glass, throwing off your shift with trembling hands.

The truth was etched there in soot-black and crimson. It was beautiful and terrifying: the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen, its wings unfurled over your ribs, its tails coiling toward your spine. You touched it with a shaky finger, the skin still tender and flushed. Your heart sang a song of absolute, frantic triumph. It was him. The gods had been listening under that table five years ago. It was finally, legally, magically Matarys.

You dressed in a haze, your maidservants whispering at your distracted state, but you didn't hear them. You ran to the courtyard, your boots echoing on the stone, heading for the ancient stone well where you and Matarys had agreed to meet if the marks appeared. The morning air was crisp, but the dragon on your ribs was a furnace. You saw him standing by the well, his back to you.

"Matarys!" you called out, the name a prayer.

He turned, but the joy died in your throat the moment you saw his face. Matarys looked like a man who had seen his own death. He was pale, his eyes rimmed with red, and his hand was clutching his left shoulder with a grip so tight his knuckles were white.

"I have it," you breathed, stepping closer, reaching for the laces of your bodice to show him the curve of the dragon’s wing. "Matarys, I have the dragon. The gods—"

"No," he whispered, stepping back as if you were a leper. "No, you don't understand."

With a shaking hand, he pulled back his collar. Your heart stopped. There, on the pale skin of his shoulder, was not the sigil of your house. It was a leaping trout in silver and blue. House Tully.

The world tilted on its axis until you felt a cold, oily sickness rise in your throat. You stared at the trout, then back at his face. The dragon on your ribs suddenly felt like a hot iron, marking you not for the boy you loved, but for a master you didn't know. If the dragon wasn't Matarys, then who in that cursed house was meant to be yours?

"The gods are cruel," Matarys choked out, his voice breaking. "They are so, so cruel."

You left him there by the well, his tears falling into the grey stone. You couldn't stay. You couldn't look at the trout and you couldn't bear the heat of the dragon. 

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Confusion and a sense of cosmic betrayal drove you toward the Great Sept, the massive marble dome feeling like a cold, hollow ribcage that offered no comfort. You stumbled inside, the smell of incense and old wax thick enough to choke you. You collapsed before the towering, impassive statue of the Mother, sobbing until your throat was raw, demanding to know why she would brand you with a dragon if you could not have the one dragon you had given your soul to.

"The gods are rarely kind, My Lady, but they are precise."

The voice was a low, resonant rumble that seemed to vibrate out of the shadows. You looked up, wiping the salt from your eyes, to see Prince Baelor himself. He looked older than he had the night before. The perpetual weight of the Handship hung heavy on him, and the lingering, suffocating mourning for his late wife, Jena Dondarrion, was etched into every deep line of his face. He looked like a man made of shadows and duty.

You stood, your legs shaking, and in a fit of reckless, grieving defiance, you pulled aside the silk of your gown to show him the mark. "Why?" you demanded, your voice a ragged whisper. "Why give me this if Matarys belongs to a Tully?"

Baelor didn’t look away. His gaze fixed on the soot-black wings over your ribs with a terrifying, clinical intensity. For a moment, his stoic mask fractured, and you saw something flicker in his dark eyes—not lust, not even pity, but a recognition so sharp it looked like physical pain.

"You think the gods are interested in your heart?" Baelor’s voice was a low, jagged rasp, vibrating through the silence of the marble hall. He didn't reach for you. He stood perfectly still, his hands clasped tightly behind his back as if to keep them from shaking. "They are not. They are interested in their own design."

He stepped closer, the scent of leather and old parchment cutting through the heavy incense.

"I spent twenty years with My Jena," he said, and the name sounded like a prayer and a curse all at once. "I loved her with a ferocity that made the crown feel light. She was my wife, the mother of my sons, and the only peace I ever knew."

He paused, his jaw tightening until a muscle leapt in his cheek.

"But every night, when I took off my doublet, I saw the mark of a house that wasn't hers. And every night, when she lay beside me, she carried the sigil of a man who wasn't me. We had a happy marriage, My Lady, built on the wreckage of a mismatched destiny. We chose each other in spite of the skin. We were a lie that we made true through sheer force of will."

The weight of his confession hit you harder than any physical blow. You stared at him, your fingers still clutching the silk of your gown, your breath hitching. You had thought him a statue, a man of pure duty, yet he was a man who had lived two decades in a silent rebellion against the heavens.

"But Jena is nothing but ash," Baelor whispered, his voice dropping an octave, becoming something private and dangerous. "And the marks... they do not die with the person you chose. They only wait for the person you were meant for."

He looked at you one last time—a look of profound, weary surrender—before he abruptly turned his back to you.

Before you could find your voice, before you could ask him whose sigil he carried or why he looked at you as if you were his executioner, he was gone. His heavy boots echoed against the stone, a rapid, retreating rhythm that left you shivering in the shadows of the Mother, your dragon still burning and your heart feeling like it had been split in two.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The Sept at King’s Landing always felt like a tomb before the sun hit the crystals, a cavern of cold marble and the suffocating scent of seven-day-old lilies. You had been there every morning for a week, a ritual of desperation. You didn't pray to the Father for judgment or the Smith for strength; you knelt before the Mother and whispered to the stone, begging for the heat in your ribs to stop. You wanted the dragon to stop clawing at your skin. You wanted to wake up and find your sigil on his shoulder so you could go to Matarys and be whole.

Baelor found you on the seventh day. He had been watching you from the gallery for three of those mornings, a silent shadow in a black doublet, his mind a labyrinth of statecraft and the ghost of Jena. He saw you collapse, your forehead pressed against the base of the statue, and he saw the moment your resolve broke. With a jagged, frustrated sob, you reached for the laces of your gown, pulling the heavy silk aside just enough to let the cool air hit the inflamed skin.

From his vantage point, Baelor didn’t see a girl. He saw a death sentence. The three-headed dragon was unmistakable, its soot-black wings arching over your heart, pulsing with a rhythmic, crimson light that seemed to mock the dimness of the Sept.

He didn't speak. He didn't offer a hand. He recoiled as if the marble floor had turned to glass beneath him. The mark on his own neck—the one he had kept buried under high collars and iron-stiff pride for twenty years—suddenly burned with a localized ferocity that turned his blood to lead. He turned and fled the Sept, his boots echoing like hammer blows against the silence.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

He didn't go to the King. He didn't go to the Grand Maester. He went to the one place in the Red Keep that felt as harsh as his own soul: the training yard.

Maekar was alone, hacking at a heavy wooden pell with a morningstar that whistled through the air. The younger brother was a man of sharp angles and short tempers, his face already set in the permanent scowl that defined the "Anvil." He didn't stop when Baelor approached, the heavy iron spikes of his weapon shattering the wood of the target.

"You look like you've seen a Blackfyre ghost, brother," Maekar grunted, his breath coming in short, controlled bursts.

"She has it," Baelor rasped, his voice sounding thin even to his own ears. He reached up, his fingers trembling as he touched the silk covering his own brand. "The girl. The one who follows Matarys like a shadow. She went to the Sept to pray for a change of fate, but the dragon is unmistakable."

Maekar stopped mid-swing. He lowered the morningstar, his pale eyebrows drawing together in a line of grim realization. He knew. He had always known about the mark Baelor carried for a woman who wasn't Jena.

"And?" Maekar asked, his voice flat.

"And I cannot do this, Maekar! I loved Jena. I gave her my life, my sons, my loyalty. I will not have the gods mock her memory by handing me a child in a wedding cloak just because the skin says so." Baelor paced the length of the yard, his hands clenching into fists. "I will find her a husband. A loyal lord. Someone far from the city."

"You’re a fool," Maekar said. It wasn't an insult; it was a cold, hard fact. He stepped into Baelor's space, the smell of sweat and iron radiating from him. "You think you’re honoring Jena by playing the martyr? You’re just proving you’re a coward."

Baelor’s eyes flashed. "Watch your tongue, brother."

"No. You watch the gods," Maekar countered, gesturing vaguely toward the Sept. "I wed Dyanna because I was told to, and I found a soul. You wed Jena because you wanted to, and you spent twenty years pretending the mark didn't exist. Now the gods have brought the bill due, Baelor. You can lie to the Small Council, and you can lie to the King, but you cannot lie to the fire in your own blood."

Maekar reached out, his hand like a vice on Baelor’s shoulder. "The girl is suffering. She thinks she’s a mistake. She’s sitting in that Sept every morning begging the Mother to turn her into something she isn't. If you leave her there, you aren't being loyal to Jena. You’re being a cruel cunt who’d let an innocent girl suffer for the sake of your own self."

Baelor looked at his brother—the man who lived in his shadow, yet saw the light more clearly. "She loves Matarys."

"She loves a memory of childhood," Maekar spat. "She hasn't met the dragon yet. Go to her, Baelor. Stop being the Hand for an hour and be the man the gods branded. Tell her."

Baelor stood in the silence of the yard for a long time after Maekar returned to his training. The sun was higher now, the heat of the day beginning to bake the stone. He felt the weight of the realm, the weight of his grief, and finally, the weight of the truth.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

He returned to the Sept.

You were still there, though you had pulled your gown back into place. You looked small against the towering statues, a discarded thing. Baelor walked down the center aisle, his shadow falling over you before you heard his footsteps.

You looked up, your eyes red-rimmed and hollow. "My Prince," you whispered, trying to stand, your legs shaking. "I... I was just leaving."

"Stay," he said. The word was a command, but it was frayed at the edges.

He didn't look at the Mother. He looked at you. Slowly, with a deliberation that felt like he was pulling his own heart out through his ribs, Baelor reached for his collar. He unfastened the silver brooch, the one in the shape of a spear, and pulled back the heavy fabric of his doublet and the fine linen beneath it.

"You are not the only one the gods have forsaken with a mark they didn't want," he said, his voice a low, jagged rumble.

You gasped, your hand flying to your mouth as you saw the sigil of your house etched into his neck. It was old, the edges softened by time, but it matched the brand on your ribs with a terrifying, absolute precision.

"I have carried this for twenty years," Baelor whispered, his dark eyes finally meeting yours. "I ran from it once. My brother tells me I shouldn't run again."

He held out a hand—not the Hand of the King, but the man whose skin burned for yours. "The gods are rarely kind, my lady. But it seems they are finished waiting."

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The wedding that followed two moons later was not a celebration; it was a funeral for two hearts, conducted in the stifling, incense-heavy silence of the Great Sept. You stood beside a man who was nearly twice your age, a man who looked at you and saw a mistake the gods had made. Baelor’s brother, Maekar, stood by like a wall of iron, his own marriage to Dyanna Dayne a pillar of grim, silent stability that seemed to mock your own internal screaming. Valarr, Baelor’s eldest son and heir, watched the proceedings with his Tyroshi bride, Kiera, whose vibrant hair and open laughter were a sharp, painful contrast to the black and red of the mourning court.

In the royal bedchamber that night, the air was cold enough to see your breath. Baelor didn't even look at you. He stood by the window, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the moonlight, a wall of muscle and regret. You sat on the edge of the great bed, your heart pounding a frantic rhythm against the dragon on your ribs.

"I will provide for you," Baelor said, his voice a flat, metallic rasp. "You shall have the honors of a Princess of the Blood. You shall have wealth, and protection, and one day, if the gods are as precise as they seem, you shall be Queen. But do not look for love in this room."

He turned then, his eyes dark and hollow. "My heart is in the air at Summerhall with Jena. I will not dishonor her memory by pretending you are anything more than a political necessity mandated by a brand I never wanted."

He left the room then, the heavy oak door thudding shut with the finality of a tombstone. That was the first night of the five years of silence.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The first two years of your marriage were an exercise in the architecture of silence. Baelor had been true to his word; you lived in a state of unparalleled luxury that felt increasingly like a gilded cage. Your apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast were draped in heavy Myrish silks of black and scarlet, and your jewelry box overflowed with rubies that felt like drops of frozen blood against your throat. Yet, the man who had given them to you was a ghost who only materialized for state functions.

Baelor Breakspear was the most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms, the Hand who held the realm together while the old King Daeron faded like guttering candlelight, but in the private confines of your solar, he was a hollow suit of armor. He never raised his voice. He never showed anger. He simply did not look at you. When you sat across from him at the small trestle table for your morning meal, the only sound was the scraping of silver against porcelain and the distant, rhythmic crash of the Blackwater against the cliffs below. He would read reports from the Marches or letters from the Wall, his face a mask of Dornish stone, while you memorized the way the sunlight caught the silver at his temples.

The psychological toll was a slow, grinding erosion. You found yourself dressing with a desperate, frantic care, choosing gowns that emphasized the curve of your waist or the line of your throat, hoping for even a flicker of human recognition in his dark eyes. Once, during the second autumn of your marriage, you wore a gown of gossamer-thin silk that left your shoulders bare. As he stood to leave for the Small Council, his hand brushed against your arm—a genuine accident.

He froze. The contact was electric, a sudden, violent flare of heat that made the dragon on your ribs throb with a phantom pulse. Baelor didn't pull away immediately; his fingers lingered for a fraction of a second, his grip tightening until it almost bruised. You looked up, your breath hitching, seeing a flash of raw, naked hunger in his gaze that terrified you. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the iron shutters slammed closed. He stepped back, his face turning an ashen grey. He didn't apologize. He simply turned on his heel and marched out of the room, leaving you shivering in the heat of the morning sun.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

To fill the yawning void of your days, you turned to the only thing Baelor seemed to respect: the mind. You spent your afternoons in the Royal Library, a cavernous, dust-moted hall that smelled of ancient parchment and cedar oil. You studied the laws of the First Men, the trade routes of the Free Cities, and the intricate, bloody history of your own house. You became a scholar of necessity, carving out a space for yourself in the intellectual life of the court.

Baelor began to notice. He would find you there late at night, the two of you hunched over separate tables at opposite ends of the room. At first, the silence was as thick as it was in your bedroom, but slowly, the nature of it shifted. It became a shared silence, a mutual retreat from a court that watched your failed marriage with the eyes of vultures.

One evening, you were struggling with a crumbling Valyrian scroll regarding the taxation rights of the Stepstones. You let out a soft, involuntary huff of frustration.

"The syntax of the fourth century is inverted," a low, resonant baritone rumbled from the shadows.

You jumped, your heart hammering against the dragon mark. Baelor was standing by a bookshelf, a single candle casting long, flickering shadows across his face. He looked older than his years, the weight of the realm etched into the weariness of his posture.

"I cannot make sense of the verb endings," you admitted, your voice hushed, afraid to shatter the fragile peace of the moment.

Baelor stepped closer. The scent of him—leather, old paper, and a hint of sandalwood—wrapped around you like a shroud. He leaned over your shoulder, his chest inches from your back, his long, calloused finger tracing the faded ink on the parchment. "The scribe was Pentoshi," he murmured. "They tend to use the subjunctive when discussing coin. Read it as a possibility, not a mandate, and the mathematics will align."

He stayed there for a heartbeat longer than necessary, his warmth radiating through your bodice. You looked up, and for the first time since the wedding, Baelor was looking directly at you. Not through you. Not at the ghost of Jena Dondarrion. At you. His jaw tightened, a muscle leaping in his cheek, and he hastily stepped back into the shadows. "Goodnight, my lady," he whispered, retreating to his solar before you could find the words to ask him to stay.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

But the most agonizing part of those first two years wasn't the silence with Baelor; it was the inescapable presence of love that surrounded you. The Red Keep was a hive of bonded pairs, each one a needle in your side.

You spent a great deal of time with Dyanna Dayne, Maekar’s wife. Dyanna was a woman of quiet, unyielding grace, her eyes possessing a clarity that made you feel as though she were reading your soul. You watched her with Maekar in the training yard. Maekar was a man forged of iron and resentment, always in his brother's shadow, his temper a legendary thing. Yet, when Dyanna walked toward him, the iron seemed to temper.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

One afternoon, Maekar had been shouting at a squire until his face was flushed with a dangerous, purplish rage. Dyanna didn't say a word. She simply walked up to him and rested her hand on his sword-hilt. The transformation was instantaneous. Maekar’s shoulders dropped, his breathing slowed, and he looked at her with a quiet, brooding loyalty that made your throat ache. They were an immovable united front, a partnership of equals that didn't need words to communicate.

Then there was Valarr, Baelor’s eldest son and heir. He had recently wed Kiera of Tyrosh, and their happiness was a loud, vibrant thing that echoed through the stone corridors. Kiera was a whirlwind of color, her hair often dyed in shimmering shades of gold or lapis, her laughter a sharp contrast to the somber black and red of the court. Valarr, usually so serious and burdened by the weight of his future crown, was utterly undone by her. You would see them in the gardens, Valarr feeding her grapes from his own plate, his eyes never leaving her face. They were radiant, and they looked at you with a pity that made you want to claw your own skin off.

But the sharpest knife was Matarys.

He had married his Tully girl, Alys, and the gods had clearly known what they were doing. They were incandescently happy. You would see them near the White Sword Tower, Alys’s auburn hair catching the sun as Matarys leaned in to whisper something that made her cheeks flush with joy. Matarys would catch your eye across the Great Hall, and you could see the lingering sorrow there, the "what if" that still haunted him, but it was buried under the undeniable reality of his soul-bond. He had found his peace, and you were still at war.

You began to realize that Baelor wasn't just avoiding you because he loved Jena. He was avoiding you because he was starting to fear the pull of the mark. He treated the dragon on his skin like a festering wound, a betrayal of the woman he had chosen for himself. By the end of the second year, the "Cold War" had moved from the hallways into your very blood. Every time you were in the same room, the air crackled with a tension that was becoming unbearable. You were two dragons locked in a cage, refusing to breathe fire for fear of burning the whole world down.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The third and fourth years of your marriage were marked by a shift from cold avoidance to a high-strung, vibrating tension that felt like a bowstring pulled to the point of snapping. The silence was no longer empty; it was heavy, weighted with everything Baelor refused to say. By now, the court had stopped whispering and started watching, their eyes darting between the Hand of the King and his young, scholarly Princess like spectators at a duel.

Baelor had begun to seek your presence in ways that felt accidental but were becoming too frequent to ignore. He would "coincidentally" be finishing his business with the Grand Maester just as you arrived to exchange your books. He would linger in the doorway of the solar, watching you embroider or read, his shadow stretching long and dark across the floorboards until you looked up—at which point he would immediately depart with a stiff, formal nod.

The political climate of the Red Keep was deteriorating. King Daeron’s health was a fluctuating misery, and the Great Hall was thick with the scent of ambition and decay. In this environment, Baelor was the only thing holding the realm together, a man of iron will who spent his days balancing the books of a kingdom and his nights fighting the ghost of a woman who had been dead for years.

You saw the contrast in the others every single day, a constant salt in your wound. Valarr and Kiera had moved past the honeymoon phase into a deep, domestic bliss. Kiera was often seen in the gardens, her hair a shimmering pink-gold that seemed to taunt the drab reality of your mourning silks. Valarr would read poetry to her, his head resting in her lap, completely indifferent to the courtiers passing by. They were a beacon of what a soul-bond was meant to be: a soft place to land.

Then there was Maekar and Dyanna. Their devotion was of a harder sort, forged in the fires of Maekar’s resentment and Dyanna’s unyielding patience. You once saw them in the training yard after a particularly grueling session. Maekar was drenched in sweat, his face a mask of exhaustion and lingering anger at some slight from the Small Council. Dyanna didn't speak; she simply stepped into his space, took the heavy practice sword from his hand, and began to wipe the grime from his brow with a silk cloth. The way Maekar leaned into her touch, closing his eyes as if her hand were the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth, made your heart ache with a physical, stabbing pain.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

But the true crack in Baelor's resolve happened in the fourth year, during a routine afternoon in the lower bailey.

You were walking the perimeter with Kiera, who was animatedly describing the new tapestries she had commissioned from Tyrosh. Below us, in the sparring ring, Valarr and Aerion were engaged in a fierce bout. The clash of blunted steel rang out against the stone walls, punctuated by the grunts of the princes and the shouted instructions of the Master-at-Arms. Baelor stood by the weapon racks, his arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes critical and distant.

Suddenly, a squire rushing past to fetch a fresh water-skin tripped over a stray pike. He collided with a heavy wooden practice lance that had been leaned haphazardly against a stone pillar. The lance, a massive thing of oak and iron, slid free and began to tumble down the incline toward where you and Kiera stood.

Kiera didn't see it. You saw it, but your feet felt rooted to the stone.

Before the Kingsguard could even draw a breath, a blur of dark fabric and silver-inlaid leather crossed the yard. Baelor didn't shout; he didn't call for help. He moved with a predatory, explosive grace that made the younger men look slow. He reached you just as the shield began its final, violent descent.

He didn't push you out of the way. He stepped in front of you, catching the full force of the heavy oak lance against his left forearm. The impact was a sickening, solid thud that echoed over the sparring ring. The lance clattered to the cobbles, but Baelor didn't move.

"Are you injured?" his voice was a sharp crack of command, stripped of all its courtly polish.

He didn't wait for an answer. His hands came up, grabbing your shoulders with a grip that was entirely too strong, his thumbs pressing into the velvet of your gown. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving, his dark eyes scanning your face with a fierce, possessive panic that sent a jolt of pure electricity straight to the dragon mark on your ribs. For the first time in four years, the wall was gone. He wasn't looking at a political necessity. He was looking at his wife.

"I am fine, my Prince," you breathed, your voice trembling. "Your arm—"

"Damn the arm," he hissed, his face inches from yours. You could smell the leather of his gloves and the faint, sharp scent of his sweat. The heat radiating from him was a physical weight.

In the periphery, you saw Aerion lower his sword, his pale eyebrows raised in a look of grim, silent realization. Valarr was smiling softly, a knowing look passing between him and Kiera. The entire yard had gone silent, watching the Hand of the King hold his wife with a desperation that bordered on the scandalous.

Baelor realized it a second later. The fire in his eyes shuttered, replaced instantly by the cold, defensive wall of stone. He released you so abruptly you nearly stumbled. He cleared his throat, his face flushing a deep, angry red.

"Mind your surroundings, squires!" he barked at the yard, his voice echoing with a manufactured fury. He turned on his heel and marched toward the Holdfast without looking back, his left arm hanging slightly stiff at his side.

But he couldn't undo what had happened. He had chosen you. In a split second where instinct overrode duty and memory, he had moved to protect the woman the gods had branded into his skin.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The tension in the royal apartments that evening was suffocating. Baelor didn't join you for dinner. He stayed in his solar, the door firmly shut. But as you lay in the massive, cold bed, you could hear him pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth. The sound of a man trapped in a cage of his own making.

The dragon on your ribs wasn't just aching anymore; it was burning. A persistent, rhythmic heat that told you, with the undeniable certainty of the magic in your blood, that the mark on his collarbone was doing the same. He was losing his war against the Seven. The ghost of Jena Dondarrion was finally beginning to fade, replaced by the very real, very alive woman who had quietly laid siege to his soul for four years.

It was a powder keg, packed tight with years of denial and yearning. And as the fourth year drew to a close, the air in the Red Keep felt like it was waiting for a spark.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The fifth year did not begin with a bang, but with a suffocating, atmospheric pressure that made the very stones of the Red Keep feel damp with unspoken words. By now, the "Cold War" had evolved into something far more dangerous: a mutual, breathless awareness. You could no longer sit in the same room without the air thinning. If Baelor entered the library, you felt the pull in your marrow; if you passed him in the gallery, his hand would twitch toward his sword-hilt, his knuckles white, his gaze fixed resolutely on the horizon as if looking at you would cause the world to tilt on its axis.

The court had become a minefield of domesticity that served only to highlight your isolation. You watched Valarr and Kiera in the godswood, their laughter ringing out as they chased their young son through the weirwood trees. Valarr would catch Kiera by the waist, spinning her until her pink-dyed hair was a blur of Tyroshi silk, and they would collapse into the grass, breathless and utterly, enviably whole. You saw Maekar and Dyanna at the high table; Maekar was a man of few words and many grievances, but when Dyanna reached out to adjust the collar of his doublet, the iron of his posture softened. It was a silent, unshakeable devotion—a partnership of two souls who had stopped fighting the gods years ago.

But Baelor remained a fortress of salt and stone. He had buried his heart in the red soil of the Stormlands with Jena Dondarrion, and he guarded that grave with the same ferocity he used to guard the King’s peace. Yet, you saw the cracks. You saw the way he stayed up until the hour of the wolf, his candles burning low as he stared at the scrolls you had annotated. You saw the way he would pause in the doorway of your bedchamber, his hand resting on the frame, his shadow lingering over your sleeping form for minutes at a time before he retreated to the cold solitude of his solar.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The spark finally came during the peak of a sweltering summer. The heat in King’s Landing was a physical weight, thick with the smell of the Blackwater and the tension of a city waiting for rain. The storm broke in the late afternoon, a sudden, violent upheaval of the sky that turned the bay into a churning cauldron of grey and silver.

You found him in the godswood. He was not supposed to be there; the Hand of the King had reports to sign and councils to lead, but the storm had driven him out into the elements. He stood before the ancient weirwood, its face carved into a mask of eternal sorrow, the red leaves weeping in the torrential downpour. He was soaked to the bone, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, his heavy velvet doublet weighed down by the water.

"Is she still there?" you screamed over the roar of the thunder, the rain lashing against your face. You didn't care about decorum anymore. You didn't care about the five years of patience you had carefully cultivated. "Does Jena still stand between us in the dark? Is her ghost so large that it leaves no room for a living woman?"

Baelor didn't turn at first. He stood as still as a statue, the lightning illuminating the sharp, Dornish planes of his face.

"I have given you five years!" you continued, stepping into the mud, your skirts heavy and ruined. "I have been your loyal Princess. I have been your scholar. I have been your shadow. And you treat me like a penance! You treat this mark—" you gestured wildly to your ribs, where the dragon was burning with a white-hot intensity "—like a brand of shame!"

Baelor turned then, and for the first time in five years, his usually calm demeanour was gone. The stoic Hand, the iron Prince, the grieving widower—the masks shattered all at once. His eyes were wild, flickering with a primal, Targaryen fire that made your blood sing. He crossed the distance between you in three long, predatory strides, his boots splashing through the puddles.

He grabbed your arms, his hands bruising your skin, his face inches from yours. "It is not a shame!" he roared, his voice competing with a crack of thunder that shook the very ground beneath your feet. "It is a curse! To look at you every day and want you so badly it feels like treason! To know that every time I let myself think of your smile, or the way you bit your lip in the library, I am failing the woman I swore to love until my last breath!"

He was shaking, the rain streaming down his face, mixing with the salt of tears he would never admit to shedding. "I am starving, and you are the feast I told the gods I would never taste! I see that dragon in my dreams! I feel it burning on my own skin every time you walk into a room!"

"Then stop fighting the gods, Baelor!" you sobbed, hitting his chest with your fists. "I am alive! I am here! Jena is gone, but I am standing in the rain and I love you! I have loved you since the day you caught that shield! I have loved you since you corrected my Valyrian in the dark!"

The confession was the final blow to the fortress. Baelor let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl, and pulled you into a kiss that tasted of salt, rain, and five years of agonizing denial. It was not a gentle thing; it was a reclamation. It was the desperate, gasping surrender of a man who had been drowning and had finally found the surface.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

He didn't let go of you as he carried you back through the muddy paths of the godswood, through the side entrance of Maegor’s Holdfast, and past the startled guards. He didn't stop at the solar. He kicked open the heavy oak doors of your shared bedchamber and carried you to the great bed draped in black and scarlet.

What happened after was an exorcism. The dragon on your ribs and curse on his collarbone—no, the mark of your house on his neck—burned in a rhythmic, agonizing pulse that only subsided when the last of the walls had crumbled. Baelor didn't set you down gently; he lowered you to the edge of the great bed with a frantic, trembling urgency, his hands never leaving your skin. The air in the room was thick with the scent of damp wool, salt, and the electric charge of five years of unspent lightning.

He knelt between your knees, his fingers fumbling with the sodden laces of your bodice. The man who could command armies and balance the realm’s ledgers was undone by the simple friction of wet silk against your skin. When the fabric finally gave way, baring the dragon mark on your ribs to the flickering candlelight, Baelor let out a sound that was half-sob, half-growl. He didn't look at it with the horror he had shown in the Sept; he pressed his forehead against the mark, his breath hot and ragged against your heart.

"I have seen this in my dreams every night for five years," he whispered against your skin, his voice a raw vibration. "I tried to drown it in ink and duty. I tried to bury it with her. But it’s you. It has always been you."

He pulled his tunic over his head, discarding the heavy velvet of the Hand's office as if it were a suit of lead. There, in the dim light, you saw it clearly—the sigil of your house etched into his neck, coiling toward his collarbone. As he moved closer, the proximity of the two marks created a localized heat so intense it felt like a physical fever.

When he finally pulled you beneath him, the weight of him was a revelation. He wasn't the distant Prince of Dragonstone or the cold statue of the Small Council; he was a man of bone and muscle, starving for the touch he had denied himself. His hands, calloused from the sword and the pen, moved over you with a desperate, hungry reverence, tracing the curve of your hip and the line of your throat as if he were memorizing a map he had only ever seen in shadows.

"Look at me," he commanded, his voice a low, dark rasp.

You looked up, your fingers tangling in his damp hair, and saw the Targaryen fire in his eyes—a fierce, possessive clarity that had replaced the weary grief of the widower. When he finally drove into you, the connection was an explosion, an absolute shattering of the five-year silence. It wasn't just the union of bodies; it was the violent, beautiful collision of two destinies that had been held apart by a wall of ice.

The dragon on your ribs burned in a rhythmic, agonizing pulse that matched the thrum of his heart. Every gasp you let out was swallowed by his mouth, every arch of your body met by the unyielding strength of his. The ghosts of the Red Keep—the memories of Matarys, the shadow of Jena—were incinerated in the heat of his skin.

In the high, frantic peak of it, Baelor gripped your hands, pinning them to the pillows as he buried his face in the crook of your neck. He spoke your name not as a title, but as a prayer, a reclamation that echoed through the stone chamber.

As the storm outside began to taper into a soft, steady rain, the fire in the room finally settled into a deep, glowing warmth. Baelor didn't pull away. He stayed collapsed against you, his forehead resting against yours, his breath finally evening out. The marks on your skin were no longer brands of fate; they were the only things tethering you to the earth.

"The gods were right," he whispered into the quiet, his thumb tracing the dragon over your heart. "I was a fool to think I could fight the fire with stone."

 The ghosts were gone. The silence was broken. In the quiet after the storm, as the rain drummed a soft, steady rhythm on the roof, Baelor held you against his chest, his breath finally evening out.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The morning after the storm, the Red Keep felt as though it had been scrubbed clean of its ghosts. The oppressive, humid weight that had sat over the castle for five years was gone, replaced by a cool, crisp clarity. Baelor did not retreat to his solar at dawn. Instead, he remained in the massive bed, his arm draped heavily across your waist, his dark eyes watching you with an intensity that was no longer guarded by grief. It was the first day of a new architecture—one built on presence rather than absence.

The transition from a "political necessity" to a living marriage was not an instantaneous flick of a switch, but a slow, deliberate reconstruction. Baelor had spent twenty years loving Jena Dondarrion and five years punishing himself for your existence; he had to learn how to be a husband to a woman who wasn't a memory.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

He began with the library. It had always been your neutral ground, the place where you shared scrolls and corrected each other’s translations in the dark. Now, it became your sanctuary. Baelor began to bring the Small Council’s business there, spreading maps of the Stepstones and ledgers from the Iron Bank across the long oak tables. He didn't just ask you to proof his grammar anymore; he began to ask for your perspective on the grain riots in the Reach and the growing tensions with the Blackfyre sympathizers in the Riverlands.

"You have a sharper eye for the subtext of these letters than I do," he murmured one evening, his hand resting openly on the small of your back as you both leaned over a missive from Lord Bracken. "I see the iron, but you see the rust beneath it."

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The physical change in him was what the court whispered about most. The "Breakspear" had always been a man of rigid posture and closed expressions. Now, there was a fluidity to his movements. At feasts, he no longer sat like a stone sentinel. He would lean in to whisper a dry, biting observation in your ear, his breath warm against your skin, making you laugh in a way that caused the entire high table to go silent in shock.

Maekar and Dyanna were the first to truly acknowledge the shift. A few moons after the storm, Maekar approached Baelor in the training yard. He didn't offer a hug or a sentimental word—that wasn't his way—but he gripped Baelor’s shoulder with a strength that spoke volumes. Dyanna came to your solar later that day, bringing a gift of star-silk from Starfall.

"The air in the Holdfast is easier to breathe now," she said, her violet eyes soft and knowing. 

Valarr and Kiera were overjoyed, though Kiera couldn't resist a bit of Tyroshi teasing. She would often corner you in the gardens, asking with a wicked glint in her eye if the "Hand" was as skilled with a lady’s heart as he was with a tourney lance. You would flush, thinking of the way Baelor’s hands, once so cold and distant, now sought yours out under the table, how his fingers brushed between your thighs as if no one else existed.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The true test of the reconciliation, however, came with the birth of your first child.

The labor was long and grueling, a day and a night of searing heat that mirrored the day the dragon mark had first appeared on your ribs. Baelor refused to leave the room. The Grand Maester protested, citing tradition and decorum, but Baelor simply looked at the man with a gaze of such freezing Targaryen authority that the protest died in his throat.

He sat by your head, his large, calloused hand gripping yours. When the pain was at its peak, you saw the fear in his eyes—the same raw, naked panic he had shown when the shield had almost struck you in the yard. He was terrified of losing the life he had finally allowed himself to have.

When the cry finally rang out, Baelor didn't look at the child first. He looked at you, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw, his face wet with tears he didn't bother to hide. Only then did he take the babe from the midwife.

It was a girl. She had a shock of dark, Dornish hair and eyes that were already turning a deep, stormy violet. She was healthy, she was loud, and she was the living proof that the gods had not made a mistake.

"Jena," you whispered, naming her for the light she brought into the room.

For a moment, Baelor stood frozen in place, his heart hammering at the notion. “You mean to make Jena her namesake?” He whispered, trembling slightly. “I do,” you declare to him, “I know how dear Lady Jena is to our household, my love. I owe our entire life together to her. I could only wish that our daughter could grow to be as loved and kind as her.” You smile, watching the fear on his face melt, his eyes welling with tears. 

“Oh, my darling.” he says, letting the dam break, “You never fail to amaze me.” 

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

In the weeks that followed, Baelor did something you never expected. He took you to the crypts of the Red Keep, to the small, private alcove where a bust of Jena Dondarrion sat. He had avoided this place for years, treating her memory like a ghost that would haunt him if he looked at it too closely.

He stood before the statue of his first wife, Jena cradled in one arm and his other hand tucked firmly into yours.

"I loved her," he said, his voice steady and devoid of the old, jagged guilt. "She was my youth and my heart for a long time. But she is the past, and you are the soul. I think... I think Jena would have liked you. She always appreciated a woman who could hold her own."

He kissed the top of your head, then leaned down to touch the stone of the statue’s hand—a final, peaceful goodbye.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The years following Jena’s birth were characterized by a quiet, domestic revolution. The Red Keep, once a cavernous hall of echoes and sharp-edged protocols, began to feel like a home. Baelor had transitioned from a man who endured his fate to a man who championed it. He no longer walked three paces ahead of you in the corridors; he walked beside you, his hand often finding the small of your back in a gesture that was less about protection and more about a constant, grounding connection, the Red Keep was no longer a mausoleum. It was a home. 

You sat on the terrace as the sun dipped below the horizon, the sky a bruised purple that matched the eyes of your daughter. Jena was currently "battling" a wooden training dummy with a ferocity that made Baelor beam with paternal pride.

"She has your temper," he joked, pulling you back against his chest. His hands were warm, and the mark on your ribs was no longer a brand of fire, but a steady, comforting thrum.

"And your stubbornness," you countered, leaning your head back against his shoulder.

You watched the sun set over Blackwater Bay, the light catching the gold and red of the Targaryen banners snapping in the breeze. You were the Princess of Dragonstone, the wife of the Hand, and the woman who had broken the Breakspear. The gods had been precise, indeed. They had taken five years of silence and turned them into a lifetime of fire.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

By the time Jena was seven, her personality had become the delight and the terror of the court. She was a "Breakspear" in miniature—possessing Baelor’s dark, Dornish coloring and his iron-willed rationality—but she had your thirst for knowledge. It was not uncommon to find the Hand of the King sitting on a low stool in the library, a heavy ledger of grain yields on his lap, while Jena sat at his feet, "reading" a bestiary and demanding to know why dragons didn't live in the Red Keep anymore.

"Because they grew too large for their cages, little bird," Baelor would murmur, his eyes catching yours across the room with a private, heated brilliance. He wasn't talking about the beasts.

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The political landscape, however, remained as treacherous as the Stepstones. King Daeron’s health was a constant, wavering flame, and the whispers of the Great Bastards were beginning to grow into a dull roar. In this den of vipers, you found your true calling. You were no longer just the scholar-princess; you became Baelor’s unofficial Master of Whispers. While he managed the iron and the laws of the Small Council, you managed the silk and the secrets of the court.

You hosted salons in your solar that became the envy of the capital. You invited the wives of the Great Lords and even the more distant ladies of the Reach. Beneath the talk of fashions and embroidery, you gathered the threads of the realm’s discontent. You learned which lords were in debt to the Iron Bank and which were secretly corresponding with Bittersteel.

"You are more dangerous with a lemon cake and a smile than Maekar is with a morningstar," Baelor joked one night as you sat together by the hearth, debriefing the day's gossip. He was unlacing his boots, the firelight dancing over the dragon mark on his neck—a mark he no longer hid beneath high collars.

"I simply prefer my battles to be bloodless," you replied, leaning your head on his shoulder.

"They are never bloodless, my soul. Just quieter." He pulled you into his lap, his strength a familiar, comforting weight. "I don't know how I ruled this city for twenty years without you. I was a man trying to see in the dark with only one eye."

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The depth of your bond was tested again when you discovered you were carrying a second child. Unlike the first pregnancy, which had been overshadowed by the tentative, fragile nature of your new reconciliation, this one was a season of celebration. Baelor became almost absurdly protective. He commissioned a new set of railings for the sea-walk so you wouldn't slip, and he personally vetted every midwife in the Crownlands.

One afternoon, you found him in the armory, staring at a small, exquisite suit of plate armor he had commissioned for Valarr years ago. He looked up as you entered, his expression uncharacteristically soft.

"I spent so much time being a Prince," he said quietly, "and so much time being a Hand. I think I forgot how to just be a father. With Valarr and Matarys, I was always looking toward the next war, the next succession. With Jena... and with this one... I want to see the days, not just the decades."

The birth of your son, Maekar, was swifter than Jena’s, though no less intense. He was born during a crisp spring dawn, the sky the color of a pale opal. When Baelor held him, he looked at the boy’s silver-gold fuzz of hair—the classic Targaryen trait—and then at you.

"He has the look of the Conqueror," Baelor whispered, "but he has your heart. I can feel it."

The arrival of a son solidified your position in the eyes of the realm. You were the mother of a new line, the woman who had brought warmth back to the Prince of Dragonstone. Even Matarys, who had grown into a fine lord in his own right, seemed to find a final, closing peace in seeing his father so utterly transformed. He and Alys brought their own children to the Keep, and for the first time, the "what ifs" of your youth were replaced by the "what is" of a sprawling, chaotic, loving family.

The five years of silence were now a distant memory, a story you told yourself to remember how far you had come. You weren't a political necessity anymore. You were the anchor.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

One evening, as the bells of the Great Sept tolled for the evening prayers, you stood on the battlements with Baelor. Jena was chasing Maekar through the shadows of a tower, their laughter echoing off the ancient stone. Baelor wrapped his cloak around both of you, shielding you from the damp salt air of the Blackwater.

"Do you remember what I said that first night?" he asked, his voice a low rumble against your ear. "That you shouldn't look for love in our rooms?"

"I remember," you said, smiling against his chest. "I remember thinking you were the most stubborn man in the Seven Kingdoms."

"I was," he admitted, kissing the top of your head. "But even the strongest stone can be worn down by the sea. You didn't just break the spear, my love. You forged it into something better."

You looked out over the city, the lights of King's Landing flickering like fallen stars. The dragon on your ribs was a steady, warm presence—a pulse that matched the man holding you. The gods had been precise, but they had also been generous. They had given you a dragon, and in the end, you had taught him how to fly.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The transition from the shadow of the Hand to the light of the Crown was a slow, inevitable sunrise. When King Daeron II finally passed, leaving a realm fractured by the loss of his wit and kindness, it was Baelor who stood as the iron pillar. But he was no longer a pillar of cold stone; he was a King who moved with the grace of a man who had been softened by a woman’s love and hardened by her counsel.

The coronation in the Great Sept was nothing like your wedding. Where the wedding had been a funeral, the coronation was a rebirth. As the High Septon placed the crown of the Conqueror upon Baelor’s brow, he didn't look at the cheering masses or the glittering lords of the Reach and the North. He looked at you. You stood beside him, draped in scales of midnight silk and a mantle of woven gold, the dragon on your ribs pulsing with a heat that felt like a blessing. When he took your hand to lead you to the Iron Throne, his grip was firm and warm, a silent promise kept over a decade of transformation.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The early years of Baelor’s reign were a masterclass in the balance of power. While the King sat the throne, dispensing justice with a fairness that earned him the name "Breakspear" even among his enemies, you ruled the "Queen's Court." It was not a place of idle gossip, but the true engine of the Red Keep. You turned the library into a secondary council chamber where the laws of the realm were refined. You brought in the maesters and the septons, but also the merchant princes and the weary mothers of the Flea Bottom, ensuring that the crown's eyes saw the dirt as well as the stars.

"They call me the Just," Baelor remarked one night as you sat on the edge of the Iron Throne long after the court had cleared. The throne was a jagged, uncomfortable thing, but he sat it with an ease that came from internal peace. "But they don't know that every judgment I pass is whispered to me first by the girl who refused to let me drown in my own grief."

"A King is only as good as the silence he breaks," you replied, leaning against his knee.

Your children grew into the legacy of that broken silence. Jena became a rider of unparalleled skill, her dark hair flying like a banner of defiance against any who doubted a princess's strength. Maekar, named for the anvil but possessing your scholarly heart, spent his days wandering the halls with a book in hand, a prince who understood that words were often sharper than Valyrian steel. Valarr served as Baelor’s hand, and Matarys as Lord Commander of the Kingsguard; the brothers finally united in a court that valued truth over tradition.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

The final reconciliation with the past came on a quiet winter evening, the first snow of the year dusting the towers of the Red Keep. Baelor had called for a small, private dinner—just the two of you and the children. As the fire crackled in the hearth, Jena began to ask about the "Lady of Lightning," the woman whose memory had once been a wall between her parents.

Years ago, the question would have turned the room to ice. Now, Baelor simply smiled. He pulled a small, faded locket from his doublet—not the one he had worn for twenty years, but a new one. Inside was a lock of Jena’s hair and a lock of yours, intertwined.

"She was a great lady," Baelor told his daughter, his voice steady and full of light. "She taught me how to love. But your mother... your mother taught me how to live. One gave me my past, and the other gave me my forever."

He looked at you then, the man who had once been a statue of Dornish stone, and you saw the entire history of your five-year silence and your fifteen-year fire reflected in his eyes. The dragon mark on your ribs, once a brand of agony, was now just a part of you—as natural as the breath in your lungs.

As the bells of the city rang out to welcome the new year, Baelor stood and offered you his hand. He didn't lead you to the throne or the council table. He led you to the balcony, where the snow was falling softly over a kingdom that was finally at peace. He wrapped his heavy fur cloak around both of you, pulling you back against his chest until you could feel the rhythmic, powerful thrum of his heart against your spine.

"The gods were precise," he whispered into the crown of your head, his breath a warm mist in the cold air. "They knew I would fight them. They knew I would try to stay in the dark. So they gave me the only light strong enough to break a Breakspear."

You leaned back into him, watching the white flakes settle on the black stone of the parapet. You were the Dragon and the Heart, the Soul and the Spear. The marks had done their work. You weren't a political necessity, and you weren't a ghost’s replacement. You were the Queen of a man who had finally learned that the most honorable thing a dragon can do is keep someone warm.

The sun set on the Red Keep, not as a tomb of old sorrows, but as a lighthouse for the living. And in the quiet of the winter night, the only sound was the breathing of a house that was finally, irrevocably whole.

˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

TAGLIST:

Lyonel brings you everything, too much of everything, blankets you do not need, broths and tonics, and three different remedies a hedge witch swore by, half the contents of the kitchens. He is tireless and utterly devoted, fluffing your pillows. When you tell him, faint and amused, that you only need quiet and sleep, he tucks you in and stations himself by the door like a guard, glaring at anyone who might wake you.

Daeron climbs straight into the bed with you. You protest, telling him he'll catch it, and he waves you off entirely, settling in and pulling you against his side. He keeps you company through the worst of the boredom, tells you ridiculous stories, makes you laugh until it turns into coughing, and then rubs your back through it. He is the most restful kind of company. You can be miserable and unlovely and half-asleep, and he will simply be there, perfectly content, holding you while you wait it out.

Aerion is crazy about it. The maesters tend you under threat, and he makes the nature of the threat very clear — fix her. He will not allow anyone else to bring you your broth or sit you up against the pillows; those are his to do. He is not good at soft words. So instead, he lies down beside you and lets you rest your head on his chest, one hand moving slowly through your hair, and stays exactly that still for as long as you need him.

Valarr turns nursing you into a campaign, and he runs it flawlessly. Broth at the right hours, the chamber kept warm but not stifling, every remedy the maesters suggest procured before they finish the sentence. He is gentle and endlessly patient, making sure you are comfortable, smoothing your hair back, pressing his lips to your too-warm forehead, and lingering there. "Rest," he murmurs, every time you so much as shift toward apologising for being a burden. "You are no trouble to me. None at all."

Maekar is unbearable to everyone except you. He barks at the maesters as though your cold is a personal failing on their part, demands to know why it is taking so long, paces the length of the chamber until you tell him,  "Sit down, you're making me dizzy." He sits. He frets. He will not say he is worried, that would require admitting there is something in the world that can frighten him, so instead he grips your hand too hard and tells you that you will be well by morning because he has decided it. When you finally sleep, he stays awake the whole night listening to you breathe.