Bookish Bee’s Fanfic blog

You thought it useful. That was why you were here on a Wednesday evening in early December, which was true, and was also not the complete account of why you were here, and you had stopped examining that discrepancy some weeks ago on the grounds that examination was not making it any simpler.

His flat was warmer than last time. He'd been home long enough to have built the evening properly — lamps on, the radiator doing its work, a record playing at a volume low enough that you had registered it before identifying it: Schubert, one of the late piano sonatas, the D. 960, playing to itself in the background with the patience of something that didn't require an audience.

He poured wine without asking. You sat in the chair you had come to think of as yours — the one across from the sofa, angled toward the window — and he settled at the desk and wrote the letter of introduction in longhand, unhurried, while you drank your wine and looked at his bookshelves and did not think about the fact that you had been looking forward to this evening since Monday with an intensity that bore very little relation to the Bodleian.

His handwriting, you noticed, was very precise. Not ornate — nothing wasted — but each letter fully formed, the lines straight without the assistance of ruled paper. The handwriting of someone for whom precision was not effort but disposition.

He folded the letter into an envelope and brought it to you, and then sat on the sofa and picked up his own wine, and the conversation moved in its usual way — from the archivist to the manuscripts to a debate about whether the physical object of a manuscript changed the reading of the poem, and then to Keats's letters because they always seemed to arrive there eventually from any starting point, and from Keats to the question of whether a poet's biography was an indulgence or a necessity.

"A necessity for Hardy," you said. "You cannot read the Emma poems without it."

"And yet they function as poems regardless."

"They function as poems better with it. The biography is the pressure behind them. Without it they're formally accomplished and emotionally coherent. With it they're — " you searched for the word — "unbearable. In the best sense."

He was watching you over his wine glass. The lamp behind him made his expression harder to read than usual, casting the planes of his face into a relief that emphasised the severity and reduced the gentleness, though the gentleness was still present in his eyes.

"Do you think that's a problem?" he said. "That the poem requires external information to reach its full weight."

"I think a poem is allowed to be in conversation with its own context," you said. "The alternative is to insist it exist in a vacuum, which serves a critical principle but doesn't serve the poem."

"The poem is not a closed system."

"Nothing is," you said. "Hardy knew that better than anyone. His poems are full of what they're not saying."

He was quiet for a moment, looking at the glass in his hand.

Something had shifted in the room. You had felt it arriving for the past quarter of an hour — not a change in the conversation, which had continued with its usual ease and depth, but something underneath the conversation, a quality in the air that was different from previous evenings. A quality of approach.

He set his glass down. And then he was still in the way he was still when he had decided something and was in the final moment before acting on the decision — the stillness that was not relaxation but its opposite, the absolute composure of a man bringing everything to bear on a single point.

He rose and went to the desk.

From beneath the letter pad he withdrew two sheets of paper. Folded once, the fold soft with handling — the soft, worn crease of something folded and unfolded many times, in private, over a period of days or weeks. He stood with them for a moment with his back to you, and in that moment — the set of his shoulders, the stillness of his hands — you understood, with a certainty that arrived before you had any evidence for it, that whatever was on those pages was not a professional matter.

He turned.

"I'd value your opinion on something," he said. His voice was level. Precise. Giving nothing away except, to someone who had been listening to him carefully for months, the very faintest alteration in its quality — the register of a man maintaining composure over something that was making composure difficult. "Recent work. The argument in the last stanza — I'm not satisfied it resolves."

He crossed to you and held the pages out.

You looked at his hand for a fraction of a second before you took them. His fingers were perfectly steady, which told you, precisely, how much steadiness was costing him.

You took the pages and he returned to the sofa and sat down and picked up his wine glass and directed his gaze toward the window, and the quality of that — the deliberateness of it, the way he had positioned himself to not watch you read — landed in your chest before you had looked at a single word.

He was afraid.

Not of your literary opinion.

You looked down at the pages.

The poem was untitled. Four stanzas, five lines each, the handwriting the same precise and unornamented hand as the letter, though slightly less controlled here — not messier, but less managed. As though the letter had been written from the outside of him and this from somewhere further in. You read it once through quickly, the way you always read a poem first — for sound and movement, without stopping.

And then you sat very still and read it again.

I had prepared the room against return: the window latched, the hours folded in, each book replaced along its given spine, the silence tuned to what I'd grown to need — a well-appointed dark, and nothing more.

Your breath came in slowly.

The room he had prepared. The deliberate arrangement of absence. The silence tuned — not merely tolerated but actively maintained, cultivated, a choice made repeatedly over years. You understood immediately what the stanza was describing and the understanding arrived not as a literary observation but as something that pressed against your sternum from the inside.

He had been alone, and had made a discipline of it, and had believed the discipline was sufficient.

You did not ask to alter this. And yet the lamp sits differently now in the evening; the page I've set aside holds, in its margin, the angle of your reading — how you press one finger to the line, as though it might escape.

Your finger, which had been doing exactly that, tracking the line, stopped.

You read it again.

The angle of your reading. How you press one finger to the line.

He had written that down. He had watched you read — had sat across from you in lamplit rooms on how many evenings now and had watched the particular private way you moved through a page, a detail so small you hadn't known it existed, and he had taken it home and made it the centre of a stanza and the crease on the paper said he had read the stanza back to himself many times since.

Something moved through you that was not entirely comfortable. The warmth of it was not entirely comfortable. You were aware of your own heartbeat in a way that made concentration difficult and you concentrated anyway, because the alternative was to look up at him and you were not ready for that.

I know these cliffs. I've read the men who stood here — who felt the living face grow clear at last through grief's own lens, too late, on stones she'd walked before him in another life — the elegy that costs what it describes.

Hardy's cliffs. Emma's cliffs. His own.

Your eyes moved over the stanza and you understood what he was telling you and the understanding was quiet and enormous. He had read this story — had spent his life reading this story, in Hardy and in himself — and he knew its costs intimately, and he was telling you that he knew them, that he stood at the edge of this with his eyes open and his full understanding of what it had cost other men and what it had already cost him, and he was still here. Still standing at the edge. Unable to stand elsewhere.

What I had not prepared for: this. Not grief but what precedes it — the impossible warmth, the cold your absence makes more than itself, the footnote at the margin of the night where your name sits, and will not be revised.

Not grief but what precedes it.

You sat with that for a long time.

He was telling you he loved you. That was what the poem said, in the only language he had been able to bring himself to use — structured, controlled, the feeling shaped into form because formlessness was not available to him, because he needed the container in order to approach the thing at all, because without the meter and the stanza and the intellectual architecture of it he could not have said it, not yet, perhaps not for some time. But inside the architecture: this. Your name in the margin of his night, written there and found there and left there because removing it had stopped being possible.

He had been carrying this, you thought. He had been sitting with it long enough for the paper to soften at the fold.

You breathed carefully and looked up.

He was still looking at the window. His profile was composed in the lamplight with a completeness that was now, to you, entirely legible — the composure of someone who had done the most exposed thing they had done in years and was sitting with the consequences of it six feet away, with no ability to take it back and no clear knowledge of what came next.

You looked back down at the pages.

You had to say something. He had asked you, in the framing he had found available to him, for a reader's response, and underneath that framing he had asked you something else entirely, and you needed to answer both questions, except that one of them had no words yet and the other required words you were now finding it extremely difficult to assemble because your hands were not quite steady on the paper and your thoughts kept dissolving against the fact of where your name sits and will not be revised.

"The last stanza resolves," you said.

Your voice came out almost level. Not quite.

He turned his head.

"You said it didn't," you said. "but I think it does." You looked at the page. The words moved slightly and resettled. "The turn in the fourth line is where the argument completes. Everything after is consequence."

"You think the final line is consequence," he said. His voice was careful. He was listening to yours with the same quality of attention he gave everything, and you were aware that he could hear, in it, what you were working to contain.

"I think —" you began, and stopped. There was a version of this response that was literary criticism and you were trying to give it and you could not locate it because your mind kept dissolving into the impossible warmth and the angle of your reading and the worn crease on the paper that meant he had read this back to himself in the evenings, alone, before he had known what to do with it. "I think will not be revised is the whole argument. Everything before it is — it's the approach. The poem moves toward that line from the first stanza. Everything before it is the—"

You stopped.

The word you had been reaching for was permission. Everything before it was the permission he required to say the last line. The careful construction of the argument, the Hardy mirror, the acknowledgement of cost — all of it a way of earning the right to arrive at the only thing the poem had ever actually been about.

Where your name sits.

You looked up at him and found he was already looking at you and had been for some time.

"The poem isn't uncertain about what it's saying," you said. Your voice was quieter now and you had stopped trying to manage it. "It's uncertain about whether to say it. That's — those are different things."

He was very still.

"The second stanza," you said.

"Yes," he said. Immediately. Almost before you'd finished.

"The detail about the reading."

"Yes."

The room was so quiet. Outside the window the December dark pressed at the glass and the Schubert moved through a slow passage and neither of you looked away.

"You've been watching me with a great deal of care," you said.

"Yes." No deflection. No qualification. The word arrived simply and completely. "For some time."

You looked down at the poem in your lap. At the handwriting — the letters fully formed, the fold worn soft, the last stanza facing up at you with the patient quality of something that had waited a long time and was not surprised to still be waiting.

"The Hardy argument," you said, and your voice was not steady now and you had stopped pretending otherwise. "In the third stanza. Positioning yourself at the cliffs."

"Yes."

"You're telling me you understand the cost."

"I'm telling you," he said, "that I understand the cost and I am here regardless."

The words came out quietly, with the same precision he gave everything, except that underneath the precision was something you had never heard from him quite so plainly before — something unmediated, something that had dispensed with the careful management and was simply present, raw at its edges, entirely sincere.

You lifted your eyes to him.

He looked as he always looked — composed, austere, the tired quality around his eyes, the severity of his face in the lamplight — except that none of those things were what you saw first now. What you saw first was the exposure of him. The enormous, careful, terrified courage of a man who had put the thing he felt into the only container he trusted and placed it in your hands and was now sitting across from you with nowhere left to retreat to, waiting.

You rose from the chair.

The pages stayed in your hands — you were still holding them, you realised, and you set them on the table as you passed, gently, face up. You sat beside him on the sofa. Not in the armchair — the sofa, close enough that the line of your arm was against his, close enough that when he turned his head he would not need to look far.

He turned his head.

You were very close. The lamplight between you, the Schubert in the background, the December dark at the window. His face was all shadow and warmth and the expression on it was the most unguarded thing you had seen from him — not disordered, nothing crumbling, but open in the way that is only possible when someone has run out of reasons to protect themselves and has discovered, in the running out, a kind of relief.

"The poem is very good," you said softly. "That isn't what I want to say. But it is very good."

"What do you want to say?" he said. His voice was low.

You held his gaze and felt the full weight of his attention and let it be what it was without managing it.

"That I have been standing on those cliffs as well," you said. "For quite some time now."

Something moved through his face. Passed through it the way light passes through water, changing everything underneath.

He lifted his hand slowly — with that deliberateness that was the most intimate thing about him, the quality of nothing accidental, every movement chosen — and put it against your face. His palm to your jaw. His thumb at your cheekbone, just beneath the eye. The touch was warm and absolutely certain and he looked at you from inside it with the expression that had been accumulating since the bookshop and had simply, until this moment, had nowhere to arrive.

You placed your hand over his, against your own face.

He exhaled — not dramatically, not a performance of relief, simply the long and quiet release of something held very tightly for a very long time. The sound of a man setting something down.

His eyes moved once, briefly, to your mouth, and returned to yours.

"There is a great deal," he said, "that I want to say to you. And very little of it will —" he stopped. The precision failing him for once, the words not arriving in the right order because the feeling was larger than the available language. "I find I'm not able to —"

"You wrote it," you said. "That's enough. You wrote it and I read it and I know."

He looked at you. His thumb moved at your cheekbone, slow and careful, learning the geography of something he had wanted to touch for longer than he had admitted to himself. The tiredness in his eyes was still there, and the depth, and the grief that was always present somewhere in him, and alongside all of it now — rising through it, warmer than the rest — something that was simply and entirely glad.

"I've been standing at those cliffs," he said quietly, "since that Tuesday afternoon in October."

The bookshop. The amber lamplight. The two hands arriving at the same spine.

"I know," you said. "So have I."

He kissed you.

Softly, without urgency, with the quality of a man who has been moving toward something for long enough that the arrival is not a surprise but a completion — the relief of a word finally pronounced correctly after many silent attempts. His mouth was warm, and the hand on your face did not move, and the kiss lasted long enough to be unmistakable and ended before it was anything other than what it was: a declaration, tendered with the same seriousness he gave to true things.

He rested his forehead against yours.

His eyes were closed.

You stayed like that for a moment — his forehead against yours, his hand on your face, the poem on the table behind you with its last stanza facing upward — and the flat was very quiet and the December night pressed at the window and neither of you spoke because there was nothing that needed to be said that had not already been said, in one form or another, over two months of lamplit rooms and borrowed books and conversations that had always, always been about something more than what they appeared to be.

"Stay," he said. Barely above a murmur. "Not—," a pause. "Simply stay. For a while."

You turned your face so that your cheek was against his cheek, your hand still over his.

"Yes," you said.

Outside, the city continued its indifferent work. Inside the room the lamp held its warmth, and the Schubert found its way through to a quieter passage, and the poem lay where you had set it with the final line facing up toward the ceiling of a flat where the silence had been tuned, for years, to the frequency of one — and which, tonight, without announcement or drama, had become something else entirely.

Where your name sits, and will not be revised.

He had known, when he wrote it, what it meant.

So, now, did you.

A.N.: I had a lovely reader that described this work as watching a fragile flower being born and I think that is the most beautiful thing someone has ever said to me regarding what I write. We are close to finishing this story, next chapter will need an adjustment on the content warnings, just saying as a heads up (and as a teeny tiny spoiler).

Dalgliesh taglist: @harubonchari @baelorenthusiast @probablydeadbynowdotcom @caffeinatedwoman @thorins-queen-of-erebor @sgmwester @ms0anthrop

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (TV Series)

Daeron Targaryen

The Corpse and the Dragon- Daeron Targaryen x Nonbinary Pirate OC 🫚🧥👽🤡👹💅

Chapter 1,

Baelor (Breakspear) Targaryen

Me and You- Modern Professor Baelor x OC

👽🌥️🤡☠️👹🫚🫶😩📝💪💅 (this one really has all the tags)

Chapter 1, 2, 3,

Maekar Targaryen

Coming soon…

Lyonel Baratheon

Persuading the Stag- Lyonel Baratheon x OC, Eventual Daeron Targaryen x OC (Persuasion by Jane Austen Adaptation)

🫚💅👹😈😩

Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,

Dalgliesh (TV Series)

Adam Dalgliesh

The Birdhouse Code- Adam Dalgliesh x OC

🫚🕵🏻‍♀️👽🫶🤡👹 (kinda 💪 but 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

Frankenstein (Movie)

The Creature/ Adam

The Language of Porcelain- The Creature x OC

🫚😩🌥️💅👹🧥🤡🧛‍♀️

The text from Valarr arrived twelve minutes before you were supposed to meet.

so terrible news. kiera situation. cannot make it. SO sorry. dad said he'd go instead if you still want to?? he's literally already in the area for work. no pressure obvs

You stared at your phone for a moment.

is your dad going to be weird about it

Valarr's response was immediate.

dad is constitutionally incapable of being weird about anything. also he literally works at the museum three streets away so he's probably already mentally in the bookshop. please go he'll be sad if you cancel he's been in meetings all morning

You looked at that for a second. The image of Baelor Targaryen being sad about missing a bookshop trip was doing something to your composure that you chose not to examine.

fine tell him I'm at the corner table

THANK YOU you're literally saving his day and probably mine too bc kiera is

He did not finish the sentence. You sent a sympathetic emoji and put your phone down and ordered a coffee and tried very hard not to think about the fact that you were now waiting for your best friend's father in a cafe on a Saturday afternoon, which was a sentence you were choosing not to examine too closely.

He arrived seven minutes later.

You knew it was him before you looked up properly — there was a quality to the way he moved through the cafe that you had catalogued during the various times you had been at Valarr's house and found yourself in the same room as his father. Unhurried. Certain of his own pace. The kind of person who did not navigate around other people so much as other people instinctively made space.

He was wearing a jacket that suggested he had in fact come directly from the museum — slightly more formal than a Saturday probably required, dark, the kind of jacket that had probably lived on the back of an office chair all morning — and he was carrying, you noticed immediately, a book. Not in a bag. Just — in his hand. Like he had picked it up to read on his walk over and had not put it down yet because he was still thinking about whatever was on the last page.

He found you, and something in his expression arranged itself into warmth.

"I'm sorry about Valarr," he said, settling into the chair across from you with the ease of someone who had decided this was simply the situation and there was no point in making it awkward. "Kiera rang him about twenty minutes ago — I'm not entirely sure what happened but it sounded significant."

"He sent approximately four apology texts," you said.

"That sounds right." He set the book on the table and flagged down the server with the unhurried confidence of a man who had been in many cafes and knew how they worked. "He felt terrible about it. He was very insistent that I — I believe the phrase was do not be boring."

"Are you boring?" you asked.

He looked at you over the menu with those eyes — attentive, with the quality of someone who was already slightly amused by the question. "I work in a museum," he said. "Specialising in medieval and Byzantine history. The jury, I think, is still out."

"Byzantine is genuinely fascinating," you said. "The iconoclasm period specifically."

The menu lowered approximately two inches.

"The iconoclasm period," he repeated.

"The politics of it," you said. "Everyone talks about it as a theological dispute but it was fundamentally a power struggle between the emperor and the church dressed in theological language, which is—"

"Which is significantly more interesting than the religious framing suggests," he finished, and there was something in his voice that had not been there thirty seconds ago — a quality of attention that had sharpened from polite and warm to entirely focused in the space of one sentence about Byzantine iconoclasm.

You had said something right.

You were not going to examine how much you wanted to keep saying right things.

The coffee arrived.

Baelor ordered his with the automatic ease of someone who did not need to think about it — flat white, no sugar — and settled back in his chair and looked at you with the expression of a man who had come here expecting a pleasant if slightly obligatory Saturday afternoon and was recalibrating.

"How do you know about the iconoclasm period?" he asked. Not testing. Genuinely curious, in the way of someone who has encountered something unexpected and wants to understand it.

"My grandmother," you said. "She was obsessed with Byzantine history. Had about forty books on it. I grew up reading them because they were the most interesting things in her house."

"What else did she have?"

"The complete collection on the fall of the Western Roman Empire by Gibbon. Three books specifically on Theodora — she had strong opinions about Theodora."

"Everyone should have strong opinions about Theodora," he said, with a conviction that suggested this was not a casual statement.

"She also had this absolutely unhinged book about the administrative structure of the Carolingian empire that I read when I was fourteen and found genuinely compelling."

Baelor set his coffee cup down.

He looked at you for a moment with an expression you had not seen from him before — not the warm composed attention of Valarr's father being polite to Valarr's friend, but something more unguarded than that. Something that looked, if you were reading it correctly, almost like delight.

"The Carolingian administrative structure," he said.

"It was a very good book," you said.

"I think I own that book," he said. "I have recommended that book to colleagues who hold doctorates in medieval history and been looked at like I was suggesting light reading."

"The section on the missi dominici alone—"

"Is extraordinary," he said, and then caught himself, and the tips of his ears went very slightly pink in a way that you were fairly certain he was unaware of. "Sorry. I'm — Valarr did say not to be boring and I've just launched into—"

"I brought up the missi dominici," you pointed out.

"You did," he said.

"I knew what I was getting into."

He looked at you for a moment. Something shifted in his expression — a recalibration, subtle and complete, like a man who has been holding a map of a situation and has just realised the map and the territory do not entirely match.

He picked up his coffee. "Right," he said. "The missi dominici."

They closed the café.

Not intentionally. It simply became apparent at some point — you were not sure exactly when — that the afternoon had developed a quality of its own that neither of you had planned and both of you had stopped managing. You had gone from Byzantine iconoclasm to the Carolingians to a twenty minute debate about whether the popular historical narrative around the fall of Rome was more politically motivated than academically honest, during which Baelor had leaned forward with his elbows on the table and the expression of a man who had stopped remembering to be measured about things he found genuinely exciting, which was — a lot. It was a lot. His hands moved when he talked about history, which you had not known about him, and he had a specific smile that arrived when you said something that surprised him, which was different from his usual composed warmth and considerably more dangerous to your ability to function normally.

He was not being smug about knowing things.

That was the thing that had been doing something to your composure since approximately the iconoclasm conversation. He could have been smug — he worked in a museum, he had the credentials, he had probably forgotten more about medieval history than most people ever learned. But every time you said something he did not expect he looked at you like you had shown him something he genuinely wanted to see, with the uncomplicated delight of someone who loved a subject and was simply glad to find another person who loved it too.

It was, you had concluded somewhere around the second coffee, the most attractive quality you had ever encountered in another person and you needed it to stop immediately, but it was not stopping.

"We should probably—" he said, at the point when the server had refilled your water glasses for the third time with the pointed patience of someone whose shift was ending.

"The bookshop," you said.

"Right." He reached for his jacket. "Although at this point I feel I should warn you that I have — opinions. About the history section."

"What kind of opinions?"

"The kind that Valarr refers to as dad, please and that my colleagues find professionally embarrassing."

"Tell me the opinions," you said.

He looked at you. The smile that crossed his face was not the composed public one. It was something underneath that one — warmer and more unguarded and slightly helpless, the smile of a man who had been trying to be measured and had run out of reasons to bother.

"Right," he said. "The opinions."

The bookshop was three streets from the café and was exactly the kind of place that seemed to exist specifically for people like Baelor — floor to ceiling shelves, the particular quality of light that only occurred in rooms full of old paper, a complete absence of any organisational logic that was somehow navigated instinctively by everyone who belonged there.

Baelor belonged there immediately and completely. You watched him walk through the door and visibly relax in the specific way of someone arriving somewhere they understood.

"History is in the back," he said, already moving. "Past the travel section, which is organised by continent rather than alphabetically, which I have thoughts about, and through the archway. Don't let the archway fool you — it looks like it goes to philosophy but it doesn't."

"Sounds like you've been here before," you teased.

"I may have a tab," he said, without turning around.

You followed him through the travel section — organised by continent, as advertised — through the archway that did not lead to philosophy, and into a room that was essentially floor to ceiling history, organised by period, with handwritten shelf labels that had clearly been redone at some point in the last decade and not entirely consistently.

Baelor stopped in front of the medieval section and looked at it with the expression of a man surveying a landscape he had complicated feelings about.

"The Byzantine section," he said, "is filed under Eastern Europe, which is—"

"Reductive," you said. He turned to look at you. "Historically, geographically, and culturally reductive," you continued. "It's like filing Rome under Italy."

He stared at you for a moment.

"I have said those exact words," he said slowly, "to the owner of this shop. Twice. In those exact words."

"What did he say?"

"He said that's where people look for it." A pause. "Which is pragmatic and also completely misses the point."

"It completely misses the point," you agreed.

Baelor looked at you with that expression again — the unguarded one, the one that had been appearing with increasing frequency since the missi dominici and that he appeared to be losing the ability to fully manage. There was something in it that was different from the version you had been cataloguing during visits to Valarr's house. Warmer than that. More specific.

"Right," he said, and turned to the shelf, and you watched the back of his neck go very slightly pink.

You were extremely pleased with yourself.

An hour later you had accumulated a small pile of books each — his significantly larger than yours, though he had shown you each one with the genuine enthusiasm of someone sharing things they loved rather than performing expertise, which was the thing that kept doing the thing to your composure — and had ended up side by side in the narrow aisle between medieval and early modern, which was not a wide aisle, consulting the shelves with the proximity of people who had stopped noticing the proximity because the conversation had taken over.

You reached for a book on the top shelf at the same moment he did.

Your hands did not quite collide but they came close enough that you both stopped.

He was — close. The aisle was narrow and he was taller than you and the combined effect of both of these facts was that when you looked up you were looking at him from a distance that was significantly less than the distance that had existed between you at the café table, and the expression on his face in the half second before he registered that he needed to have an expression was—

Not composed. Not the curator. Not Valarr's father being politely warm to Valarr's friend. Just a man, in a bookshop, standing very close to someone, with an expression that had not been filtered through any of the usual management.

He registered it approximately one second after you did.

You watched the composure return — not completely, not at its usual speed, the edges of it slightly uneven in a way they were not normally — and he took the book from the shelf and held it out and said, very evenly: "This one is worth reading. The author's thesis about manuscript transmission is contested but the primary research is solid."

"Thank you," you said, taking it.

"The footnotes specifically," he said, to the shelf.

"I'll read the footnotes specifically," you said.

A pause during which the narrow aisle continued to be narrow.

"We should probably find the till," he said.

"Probably," you agreed.

Neither of you moved immediately.

Then he did — stepped back, with the slight over-correction of a man giving a situation more physical space than it strictly required — and you followed him toward the front of the shop with your small pile of books and the specific warmth of an afternoon that had not been what either of you planned and had been, despite or because of that, one of the better ones you could remember.

At the till he paid for his books with the focused attention of a man concentrating on a transaction and not on anything else, which was so transparently what it was that you looked at the display of bookmarks near the counter rather than at his face because you were kind like that.

Outside on the pavement the afternoon had gone golden, the particular late Saturday light that made the city look briefly like somewhere worth staying.

"Thank you for not cancelling," he said. He was looking at the street rather than at you, with the quality of someone choosing their words carefully. "I'm aware it wasn't — you came to spend the afternoon with Valarr, not with his—" he stopped.

"I had a very good afternoon," you said simply.

He looked at you then.

"So did I," he said. The composure was there but the edges were still slightly uneven and you could see, if you knew where to look, which you did, the thing underneath it that he was managing with less success than usual.

You smiled at him.

He looked at you for a moment longer than was strictly accounted for by polite conclusion of a Saturday afternoon, and then he said goodbye and that he would tell Valarr you had survived his abandonment, and walked back in the direction of wherever his car was.

You watched him go for approximately four seconds before you got your phone out and opened Valarr's chat.

your dad knows about the missi dominici

Valarr's response took thirty seconds and consisted entirely of a series of increasingly alarmed emojis followed by

oh no oh no are you okay

You looked down the street in the direction Baelor had gone. You thought about the narrow aisle and the unguarded expression and the pink at the back of his neck and the smile that had been arriving with increasing frequency and decreasing composure since the iconoclasm conversation.

I am so normal about your dad

that's a lie

It was, in fact, a lie. You decided to brush it off instead.

how's Kiera

He sent back a very long string of text that you read while walking to the tube and that successfully occupied your attention for approximately three minutes before your brain returned, with the reliability of something that had found a preferred direction, to the bookshop and the narrow aisle and Baelor Targaryen saying the footnotes specifically to a shelf because he needed somewhere to look that was not your face.

You were, you concluded, in considerable trouble.

You heard him before you saw him.

You and Daeron had been on the sofa for the better part of two hours, working through a series of increasingly bad decisions in the film he had put on, when the sound came from upstairs. Not loud exactly. More — sustained. A specific quality of noise that suggested a man encountering a situation and responding to it with his full vocabulary.

Daeron paused the film. You both listened.

Another burst of it, muffled by the ceiling but comprehensively audible, featuring several words in combination that you were fairly certain constituted a new grammatical construction.

"That's the bathroom," Daeron said, with the calm of someone who had been hearing his father swear at inanimate objects for his entire life and had developed a classification system. He stood up. "That's the bad bathroom."

"How many bathrooms are there."

"Four." He was already heading for the stairs. "Only one of them is currently antagonising my dad, which statistically is pretty good for this house."

You followed him up.

The bathroom was at the end of the upstairs hall and the door was open and the sound of water was immediately, obviously wrong — not running water, not shower water, but the specific urgent sound of water going somewhere it was not supposed to go with considerable commitment to the project.

Daeron stopped in the doorway. You stopped behind him and looked over his shoulder and took in the situation.

The cabinet under the sink had been fully removed — it was propped against the wall behind the door — and the pipes beneath were exposed and one of them was, there was no other word for it, enthusiastically wrong.

Water was going in several directions with the democratic generosity of something that had decided if it could not go one place it would go all places. A wrench and several other tools were arranged on the sodden bathmat with the organisation of someone who had started this project with a plan and had encountered escalating complications.

Maekar was on the floor.

Specifically he was wedged half under the sink with his legs out, in jeans and a dark t-shirt that had not survived the situation in any meaningful way — soaked through, hair wet, jaw set with the expression of a man conducting an intense personal negotiation with a section of copper piping. His forearms were braced against the cabinet frame and there was water dripping from his elbow onto the already comprehensively wet bathmat and he had not yet registered that he had an audience.

He said something to the pipe. It was not a nice thing.

"Dad," said Daeron.

Maekar turned his head. Took in Daeron. Took in you behind Daeron, with the brief additional quality of a man who had forgotten a guest was in his house and was now processing this in the context of being soaking wet on a bathroom floor.

"The compression joint went," he said, which you recognised as an explanation directed at Daeron and as a form of dignity preservation directed at you. "Hand me the adjustable wrench. The large one."

Daeron looked at the arrangement of tools on the bathmat with the expression of a man confronting a foreign language.

"Which one is—"

You reached past him, picked up the adjustable wrench, and held it out. Maekar's hand came out from under the sink and closed around it and then stopped. He turned his head and looked at you. Not at Daeron. At you.

You held his gaze with the equanimity of someone who had grown up watching their father fix things and knew what an adjustable wrench looked like.

He took it.

You watched him go back to work, the specific focused efficiency of someone who knew what they were doing, and you watched him encounter the problem — the angle was wrong, the joint was seated badly, there was a secondary issue with the isolation valve that he had not got to yet — and you watched him get to the point where what he was doing was not going to work.

"The valve," you said. "The isolation valve on the left — it's not fully closed. That's why the pressure's still—"

Maekar stopped.

He came out from under the sink enough to look at you properly. Water dripped from his hair. His expression had the quality of a man who had received unexpected information and had not yet decided what to do with it. "How do you know about isolation valves," he said. Not rudely. Just — directly. The way he said everything.

"My dad," you said. "He does all of this for a living. I grew up handing him tools."

Maekar looked at you for a moment. Then he looked at Daeron.

Daeron, who was still holding nothing and had the slightly glazed expression of a man who had identified this situation as one he was not going to be useful in, gave a small shrug that communicated don't look at me with minimal effort.

"The valve's behind the— you'd have to get down here," Maekar said, which was not quite an invitation but was the closest thing to one that his current position and dignity allowed.

You pushed past Daeron.

You dropped to your knees on the wet bathmat without hesitating, which you felt Maekar register even though he said nothing, and looked at the pipes with the assessment of someone who had spent enough Saturday mornings under kitchen sinks and in airing cupboards to know what she was looking at.

The isolation valve was most of the way closed but not fully — a quarter turn away from where it needed to be, which was enough to maintain the pressure that was making the repair impossible.

"Got a flathead?" you said.

A brief pause. Then the flathead screwdriver appeared in your peripheral vision. You took it, reached in, gave the valve the quarter turn it needed, and felt the pressure in the pipes ease almost immediately — the aggressive water going several directions becoming a manageable drip and then, mostly, stopping.

"There," you said. "Now the joint should seat properly."

Silence.

You turned your head.

Maekar was looking at you from approximately eighteen inches away with an expression you had not seen from him before. Not the gruff default. Not the frown at something failing to cooperate. Something that had not fully decided what it was yet, moving through several registers in the space of a second — surprise, reassessment, and something underneath both of those that arrived and was immediately and firmly pushed somewhere else.

"Right," he said.

He went back to the joint.

You stayed where you were and passed him things when he needed them — not waiting to be asked, just reading the work and anticipating it the way you had learned to do at your father's elbow, handing things over with the quiet efficiency of someone who knew the rhythm of this kind of job — and you felt him register each time, the slight adjustment in his attention, the way he started to reach for something and found it already there.

At some point Daeron, in the doorway, ceased to exist as a presence in the room. You were not sure when this happened. You were not sure when you stopped tracking anything except the pipes and the work and the specific focused quality of being next to someone who knew what they were doing.

"Jointing compound," Maekar said.

You found it. Handed it over.

He worked in silence for a few minutes — good silence, the silence of someone who was inside a problem and making progress. You watched his hands. He had good hands for this kind of work, large and certain and knowing where to be, and there was water still dripping from his forearm onto the bathmat and you were, you noted with some resignation, very wet from the knees down and did not care even slightly.

He tightened the joint.

Reached past you to the isolation valve and opened it by degrees, carefully, watching the joint.

No drip.

He opened it further.

Still nothing.

He opened it fully and you both watched the pipes for a long moment with the specific quality of attention that plumbing demanded — not quite trusting, not yet — and the joint held and the water went where it was supposed to go and Maekar sat back on his heels and exhaled.

You sat back on yours.

The bathmat was thoroughly destroyed. Your jeans were wet from the knee down and there was something that appeared to be jointing compound on your left hand and probably on your face as well given that you had pushed your hair back at some point without thinking about it. Maekar was still comprehensively soaked, water drying in his hair, jaw slightly less set than it had been when you came in.

He looked at you.

"Your dad's a plumber," he said.

"Plumber, electrician, general person of all trades," you said. "He used to take me with him on weekend jobs when I was small. I was useful for getting into small spaces."

Something moved through Maekar's expression. Not the almost-smile exactly — something that happened before the almost-smile, the thing that decided whether the almost-smile was going to be permitted. "You handed me the adjustable wrench before I asked for it," he said.

"You were about to ask for it."

"I hadn't said anything."

"You didn't need to." You looked at the now-functional pipes with the mild satisfaction of a finished job. "The body language was pretty clear."

He looked at you for a moment.

Then he looked at the pipes.

Then he looked at you again, and this time the thing moving through his expression stayed a beat longer before he put it somewhere — the reassessment fully completed now, the previous category clearly revised, something in the revised version that he was choosing not to examine in a wet bathroom on a Saturday afternoon with jointing compound on the bathmat.

He chose correctly for approximately four seconds.

Then his gaze went, briefly and entirely without his permission, to your hands — to the water still tracking down from your wrists along your forearms in the specific way that wet things did — and something happened in his expression that was there and gone so fast you might have missed it if you had not been paying the exact quality of attention that you were paying.

You had been paying exactly that quality of attention.

He looked at the pipes again with the focus of a man who had found something to look at that was not your forearms and intended to look at it until the situation resolved itself.

"The valve needs a new washer eventually," you said, kindly, because you were a kind person. "It's seating a bit soft. Not urgent but worth doing before winter."

"Right," he said.

"I can tell you what to get if you want. My dad has a supplier — trade prices."

Maekar looked at you with the expression of a man receiving information that was practical and useful and entirely beside the point of what was currently happening in his head and who was grateful for the practical and useful information for exactly that reason.

"That would be useful," he said.

"Great." You stood, brushed the wet from your knees with the philosophical acceptance of someone who had made peace with the bathmat situation, and became aware for the first time in some minutes of the doorway.

Which was empty.

You and Maekar both looked at the empty doorway simultaneously.

Daeron had, at some point during the isolation valve situation, simply — ceased to be there. No announcement. No explanation. Just the specific absence of a young man who had assessed a situation and made a strategic withdrawal with his coffee and his survival instincts intact.

You looked at the empty doorway. Maekar looked at the empty doorway.

"He does that," Maekar said.

"Does he."

"When he decides he's not needed." A pause. "Or when he decides something is none of his business."

You looked at Maekar.

He was looking at the doorway still, with the expression of a man who had just heard himself say something and was assessing whether it had meant what it might have sounded like it meant and what, if anything, to do about that.

He appeared to conclude: nothing. For now.

"I'll get you a towel," he said, standing with the efficiency of a man who had identified a practical action and was grateful for its existence. "You're soaked."

"So are you," you pointed out.

"I live here," he said. "It's different."

He went to the airing cupboard in the hall and came back with a towel and handed it to you with the directness he brought to everything — no ceremony, no hovering, just the towel, held out, yours if you wanted it. You took it and he went to get one for himself and came back and you both stood in the bathroom doorway drying off with the comfortable ease of two people who had just fixed something together and had not yet decided what to do with the afternoon that remained.

"Thank you," he said. Not elaborately. Just the two words, said with the weight of someone who meant them and did not see the point of dressing them up.

"It was a straightforward fix," you said.

"It wasn't," he said. "The angle was bad and I'd missed the valve." A beat, during which he appeared to consider whether to say the next thing and decided to. "You didn't make a production of it."

You looked at him.

"Neither did you," you said. "About me knowing."

Something in his expression acknowledged this — a small precise movement, almost but not quite the almost-smile. "Daella would have filmed it," he said. "For — what do they call it."

"Content," you said.

"Content," he repeated, with the tone of a man for whom this word had never fully made sense and had stopped trying to make it. "She would have made it content."

You laughed.

It was a real one — the unguarded kind, arrived without warning — and you watched it land on Maekar with the specific quality of something he had not anticipated and was not immediately sure what to do with. The almost-smile made a full appearance this time. Brief. Real. Directed entirely at you.

He looked away first.

Downstairs, at a volume suggesting he was in the kitchen and had decided the kitchen was where he lived now, Daeron turned the television on.

Maekar looked at the ceiling briefly with the expression of a man who knew his son and had drawn accurate conclusions.

"There's tea," he said. "If you want. Before you go."

It was not please stay. It was not I would like you to stay. It was Maekar, offering tea, in the specific way of someone for whom there is tea if you want was as close as he was currently able to get to either of those things.

You had grown up watching your father fix things. You knew how to read what was underneath what was said.

"Yeah," you said. "I want."

He nodded once and headed for the stairs and you followed him and downstairs Daeron turned the television up slightly, for absolutely no reason, in the way of someone who was providing cover for a situation he had chosen not to witness and had absolutely engineered anyway.

You sat at the kitchen table with wet jeans and jointing compound on your hand and watched Maekar make tea with the same focused efficiency he brought to pipework and thought that you were, objectively, in considerable trouble, and that it was entirely worth it.

A.N.: i promise there will be a third because we have to jump on these sexy old men, we cannot leave it like in the middle of it. For those who have read Dalgliesh's how you call to me, yeah, Baelor's part here was heavily inspired in it (i just love him so much as a nerd)

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @mongrelcryptid @sacha1slytherin

You said you could come to him if that was easier.

A pause. "Yes," he said. "If you like."

His flat was in Kensington, the third floor of a terrace not unlike yours but quieter and considerably less beleaguered by its occupant's work. It was spare in the way of someone who had arranged a space for habitation rather than comfort, though there were books everywhere — different from your books, more ordered, organised with a precision that suggested he knew exactly where everything was and why. The furniture was dark wood and clean lines. On the desk by the window there was a typewriter with a sheet of paper in it, blank, and beside it a glass that had held whisky and was now empty.

On the low table near the window, a folder of photographs, face down.

He had answered the door in his shirtsleeves — the first time you had seen him without either coat or jacket — and the formality that those layers produced was absent in a way that felt significant. He looked tired. Not the ordinary tiredness of late hours, which you had seen before and which sat lightly on him, but a deeper kind, the kind that took up residence behind the eyes.

"Come in," he said. "I'll find the Auden."

He moved to the bookshelves and you came in and stood for a moment looking at the room. The blank page in the typewriter. The empty glass. The folder on the table that he had made no move to put away and which, you thought, he had probably been sitting with before you arrived.

You sat in the chair he indicated and he found the essay in a collection of prose criticism and brought it to you, and you took it and opened it and read the first two paragraphs because that was what you had come to do, and all the while you were aware of him settling into the chair across from you, not with his usual quality of ease but with the quality of someone who had been still for too long already and was not certain that stillness was what they needed.

"Do you want tea?" he said. "Or—"

"I'm fine."

You read another paragraph. He sat in the chair next to yours.

The room had a quality of held breath. Outside the window the street was quiet, the November dark complete by now, the lamp posts doing their unremarkable work.

"Bad case?" you said. You did not look up from the essay.

A pause. "Is it apparent?"

"Only to someone paying attention."

He said nothing. You turned a page.

"It isn't the investigation itself," he said, after a moment. "The circumstances are — there is a woman. The victim. She lived alone for eleven years in two rooms and when we came to look at what she had left behind, there was almost nothing that spoke of — " he stopped. "Very few people knew she had existed at all."

You looked up now.

"She had been a scholar," he said. "Languages. She had studied in Paris before the war. There were books, and notebooks filled with translations she had made for her own purposes — no one had commissioned them, no one had asked for them. She had simply — continued the work, alone, in two rooms, for over a decade, because it was what she knew how to do."

His voice was level throughout. That was, you had come to understand, when it required the most careful listening: when the levelness was doing a great deal of work.

"And no one noticed," you said.

"Not until someone had cause to."

The essay was still open in your hands and neither of you was looking at it.

"I find myself — " He stopped and began again. "It isn't unusual for a case to present lives that were solitary. It's a common enough circumstance. What I find difficult is — the notebooks. The translations. The quality of care in them." He looked toward the window. "She made that work in the same spirit that someone tends a garden no one visits. Because the alternative was to stop."

You put the essay down on the arm of the chair.

The room held the particular quiet of a flat where one person lived alone and had done so long enough that the silence had become structural rather than incidental.

"The alternative to your poems would be to stop as well," you said. "That seems relevant."

He looked at you. Not the complete, directed gaze of his usual attention — something more unguarded than that, the gaze of someone caught at an aperture they hadn't intended to leave open.

"That's perceptive," he said. And then, more quietly: "Uncomfortably so."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He picked up the empty glass from the table, looked at it, set it back down. "I went to her flat again today. Not for the investigation. There was no reason to go." He paused. "I stood in the room where she kept the notebooks and I couldn't — I wasn't certain what I was doing there."

You were quiet for a moment. You thought about what he had told you in the pub: the grief that found all the places where one had been insufficient. The way it moved through the present, annexing what it found.

"You were paying attention to her," you said. "Possibly for the first time anyone had in years."

He made a slight sound. Not agreement, not dissent. The sound of something acknowledged.

"Is that enough?" he said. "Posthumously."

The question was not rhetorical. He was genuinely asking — not you specifically, but the room, the situation, the moral weight of things that could not be corrected.

"I don't know," you said. "I think it matters that you went. That you stood there." You looked at him steadily. "I think she would have understood it."

He met your gaze and held it, and something moved through his expression that was not quite composed — a brief passage of something raw and then the composure reinstated itself, quietly and without drama, the way water settles after a stone.

The folder of photographs was on the table between you. He had not touched it since you arrived.

"The Auden essay," he said. "The argument he makes about Hardy's metres — I think it speaks directly to your third chapter."

"Yes," you said. "I think you're right."

Neither of you looked at the essay.

He reached forward and moved the folder to the floor beside the table — a deliberate small act of putting something aside — and as he straightened up, his hand came to rest on the arm of his chair. An ordinary placement, loose, the long fingers at rest.

You looked at it for a moment.

Then you moved your arm and put your hand over his.

Not a performance of comfort — nothing so legible as that. Simply your hand placed over his, palm to knuckles, with a quietness that matched his own register. You felt the warmth of his skin and the slight tension in his hand before it registered your presence and stilled.

You didn't speak. You looked at the middle distance, at the dark window and the lamp-lit street beyond, and let the gesture be what it was without framing or apology.

He did not move his hand.

For a moment nothing happened. The flat held its careful quiet, the radiator ticking, the distant sound of the street below. And then, slowly — with that deliberateness that characterised every movement he made, nothing accidental, nothing not chosen — he turned his hand under yours.

Not dramatically. Simply a rotation of perhaps forty degrees, until his palm was against your palm and his fingers were alongside yours, not interlaced, just — alongside. The contact was clean and warm and completely still.

You felt it from your hand to somewhere considerably further in.

Neither of you looked at the other. You sat in your respective chairs with the lamp throwing its warmth between you and your hands on the arm of his chair in that quiet, voluntary arrangement, and outside the window the city continued without interest.

After a while — you couldn't have said how long, time having become somewhat approximate — he turned his head and looked at you. You felt the look before you met it, that mild physical quality of his attention arriving a half-second before you turned.

His expression was very quiet. There was something in his eyes that was neither the composure nor the tiredness but something underneath both of them, older than either: a kind of careful recognition, as though he were identifying something he had suspected for some time and was only now permitting himself to see.

You looked back at him and did not look away, and the moment extended itself with the patience of something that had been waiting a long time and was not in any hurry now that it had finally arrived.

Then he looked down at your hands.

"I should not let you — " he began.

"You're not letting me," you said. "I placed my hand there myself."

A pause. Something very close to a smile, or the shadow of one, at the corner of his mouth.

"No," he said. "I know that."

You stayed another hour. You talked about the Auden essay, properly this time, and he made tea and the conversation moved between Hardy and the case — carefully, with your guidance, as though the talking helped the thing settle — and at one point he read you a short passage from one of the notebooks he'd had transcribed, the woman's translation of Verlaine into English, careful and quite beautiful, made in two rooms for no one.

You sat with the weight of it together.

When you left, he held your coat for you at the door, and this time when his hands settled at your collar they remained a moment longer than last time — not long, a few seconds, but deliberate in the way that distinguished a gesture from an accident. His fingers against the back of your neck, light, precise, and then withdrawn.

He opened the door.

"The essay," he said.

You held it up — you'd been holding it since you stood.

"Goodnight, Adam," you said.

"Goodnight."

You went down the stairs with the Auden essay under your arm and the ghost of his hand at your collar, still resident in your nervous system, and you walked four streets before realising you had gone in entirely the wrong direction.

A.N.: I had a pretty relaxed day, so I decided to proofread what I had left of this chapter and upload it. By the way... the kiss comes next chapter 😏

Dalgliesh taglist: @harubonchari @baelorenthusiast @probablydeadbynowdotcom @caffeinatedwoman

He asked, on the telephone — the first time he had called, your number exchanged at some point after the pub in the way that practical details sometimes arranged themselves without discussion — whether you wanted him to hold it until the next occasion or whether it was convenient for him to bring it directly. His voice on the telephone had the same quality as in person: unhurried, precise, slightly dryer than the words themselves.

You told him to bring it directly and then stood in your kitchen for a moment afterward, looking at nothing in particular.

Your flat was on the third floor of a Bloomsbury terrace, small and south-facing, with windows that let in more light than the rooms strictly warranted. It was the kind of flat that revealed its occupant immediately and without mercy: books on every horizontal surface, arranged by a system that made complete sense internally and would have been impenetrable to anyone else; papers spread across the kitchen table in overlapping strata that represented weeks of work; two coffee cups that should have been washed two days ago; a cardigan over the back of every chair.

You had made a moderate attempt at order before he arrived and then abandoned it on the grounds that rearranging books to create the impression of someone who didn't live inside books was a dishonesty too fundamental to sustain.

When he knocked you opened the door and he was standing in the hallway in the dark overcoat with a paper bag under one arm, and he looked at you in the usual way — that immediate, full arrival of his attention — and said nothing for a moment.

"Come in," you said.

He came in and stood just inside the door, and you watched him take the flat in. He did it the way he did everything: without obvious movement, his gaze moving in a quiet, methodical way that was not intrusive but was certainly thorough. You felt it as you always felt his attention, that mild physical quality, warmth at a slight distance.

You saw it through his eyes for a moment: the books, the papers, the two cardigan-draped chairs, the desk by the window buried under its own archaeology, the single lamp in the corner that you'd had since your undergraduate years and that gave off a slightly orange light you had always meant to replace.

"Sit anywhere that's clear," you said, taking his coat. "I'll make tea."

"Don't go to trouble."

"It's a kettle," you said, from the kitchen. "It requires almost nothing from either of us."

There was a brief quiet, and then you heard the soft shift of books being carefully moved, and when you came back with the tea he was sitting on the small sofa, having relocated a stack of Hardy criticism and a folder of photocopies to the floor with the precise, respectful manner of a man handling other people's work. The paper bag was on the cushion beside him.

You sat in the armchair across from him and he passed you the bag.

The book inside was in remarkable condition. The binding was intact, the cloth only faintly rubbed at the spine, and when you opened it the pages had that slight foxing at the edges you expected in anything this age but nothing worse. The title page was clean. Wessex Poems and Other Verses. 1898. His name in the typeface that always seemed slightly uncertain to you, as though Hardy himself hadn't quite believed it would come to anything.

You turned the pages slowly. Here were the drawings Hardy had made himself — his own illustrations for his own poems, awkward and sincere and quite unlike anything a professional illustrator would have done, which was exactly what made them right. The hand of a man who needed to make the thing himself.

"This is extraordinary," you said. "Where did you say—"

"Cecil Court. An estate collection." He picked up his tea. "The dealer knew what it was but not what to ask for it. I gave him a fair price."

You looked up at him. "Thank you. Really."

He looked at you steadily. "It belongs in use."

You turned back to the book, to a poem near the middle — Neutral Tones — and read the first stanza with the silent-moving-lips quality of someone whose reading had always been more physical than they realised. When you looked up again he was watching you with an expression that was thoughtful and very quiet.

"You do that," he said. "Move your lips slightly, when you read something that matters."

You hadn't known that. Or had known it once and forgotten. "A childhood habit," you said. "My mother spent years trying to cure me of it."

"It seems worth keeping."

There was nothing arch in the way he said it. It was simply an observation, tendered with the seriousness he gave to things that struck him as true. You looked back at the book.

Outside the window the November afternoon was already conceding to evening, the light dropping in that precipitate way it had in this month, as though it had somewhere else to be. The flat was warm — the radiator under the window working for once — and the lamp in the corner threw its familiar orange glow across the floor.

"Can I show you something?" you said. "In the context of what we were discussing. About form and constraint."

"Yes, of course."

You moved to sit beside him on the sofa, bringing the book with you, and opened it to She to Him, the sonnet sequence Hardy wrote as a young man and folded into this first collection as though wanting to establish, from the beginning, that this was the territory.

"This sequence," you said. "He was twenty-four, twenty-five. And already writing in this form — the sonnet, which is the most constrained form available to him — about feelings that are completely without restraint in their actual content." You held the book between you, tilted so he could read. "Here. The feeling is enormous. Yet may I not contemplate on my loss / And talk to myself alone, however I will? And it's held inside fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme that was four hundred years old when he borrowed it." You traced the stanza lightly with one finger. "The form doesn't diminish the feeling. It — amplifies it. By contrast. Like a room that's too small for what's in it."

He had leaned forward slightly to read, and the angle of his shoulder was close to yours, not quite touching. You were aware of it with the specific awareness that proximity produces when it has not yet resolved into anything.

"The Shakespearean form rather than the Petrarchan," he said.

"Yes, exactly. Which matters — the couplet at the end gives him somewhere to arrive. A conclusion the feeling couldn't reach on its own." You turned the page. "Without the couplet, the sonnet can circle indefinitely. The couplet forces a reckoning."

He was reading the poem, not looking at you. His face in profile had its usual quality of severe composure, the long line of his jaw, the slight tension at the corner of his mouth that you had come to think of as his thinking expression.

"Do you write?" he asked.

"No. I only read."

"There's no only about that."

You looked at him. He turned the page, and his hand in doing so came close to yours where you held the book — near enough that you felt the movement of air from it.

"What I mean," you said, "is that my relationship to the material is analytic rather than generative. I understand it as a critic. As a reader." You paused. "I'm not sure I have the — courage for it. To make the thing and stand behind it."

"You have the intelligence."

"Intelligence isn't courage."

He looked at you then, a direct look of the kind that always arrived with that slight alteration of the atmosphere between you. "No," he said. "It isn't. But it often disguises itself as such, in people who use it for protection."

You held his gaze for a moment. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"I think it's what we're both doing," he said quietly. "In our different ways."

The flat was very still around that. The radiator made its occasional ticking. Beyond the window the street had gone dark and lamp-lit, and someone passed below on the pavement with a dog, the click of claws briefly audible and then gone.

You looked back at the book, at the poem, at Hardy's young handwriting of feeling in a container four centuries old.

"My supervisor tells me I'm too close to the material," you said. "That I read as though I have a stake in it."

"Do you?"

"Yes," you said. Simply and without elaboration.

He was quiet. And then, with a movement so deliberate and unhurried that you were aware of every stage of it, he reached toward you and tucked the strand of hair behind your ear that had come loose and fallen against your cheek.

It took perhaps two seconds. His fingers barely grazed the line of your cheekbone, and he did it with the same precise care he gave to old books and to words — nothing wasted, nothing incidental — and then his hand returned to his own side of the small space between you.

You did not move.

Neither did he.

The book was still open on your knee, She to Him on the left-hand page, and you looked at it without reading it. Your heart was doing something unremarkable and completely ordinary and very loud.

He was looking at the book too. His profile was composed. His hands rested on his knees and were completely still.

"You do that yourself," he said. "Constantly. Tuck it back." A pause. "It doesn't stay."

"I know," you said. Your voice came out even, which surprised you. "It never has."

Neither of you said anything else for a moment. The charged quality of the silence was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people aware of the same thing, on either side of a threshold neither had yet chosen to cross.

Then he reached forward and turned the page of the book, to the next poem in the sequence, and the movement was calm and deliberate and released something in the air between you without resolving it.

"Read me the next one," he said.

You looked down at the page.

Your voice, when you began, was slightly lower than usual. Not performance — simply the register the poem seemed to require, and the room, and the lamp throwing its orange light across you both, and the particular quiet of a November evening inside a flat too small for everything it was beginning to contain.

You read to the end of the sonnet. The couplet arrived and concluded, and you closed the book gently over your finger.

He was looking at you when you finished. Not at the book, not at the middle distance — at you. The look had that quality you had no precise word for: complete, still, carrying something large and carefully managed. In it was something that had not been there before the two seconds of his hand at your cheek, some increment of openness, as though a door had been moved fractionally off its latch.

He didn't speak. You didn't speak.

Outside a car passed, its headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling and gone.

He stayed another forty minutes. You talked about the illustrations, and about the 1898 reviews, and about whether the later Collected Poems represented genuine revision or merely correction, and the conversation had its usual quality of ease and depth and the particular pleasure of talking to someone who listened as carefully as he did.

When he left, he put on his coat at the door and paused with his hand on the frame in a way that was not quite hesitation.

"Thank you for the tea," he said.

"Thank you for the book."

He looked at you once more — briefly, and with that depth — and then nodded and went down the stairs.

You stood in the open doorway and listened to his footsteps descend and then the street door close below. Then you went back into the flat and sat back down on the sofa, in the warm impression where he had been, and held the closed Wessex Poems in both hands for a long moment.

The strand of hair had already come loose again.

You left it.

Dalgliesh taglist: @harubonchari @baelorenthusiast @probablydeadbynowdotcom @caffeinatedwoman

You stopped him before he could rip the IV out, holding his wrists down.

"Stop it." You hissed out, trying to prevent him struggling but he was relentless, body writhing despite the pain that flared at each attempt. "You're going to rip your stitches open."

He let out a noise — half whimper, half groan, all weakness. He looked ashamed that he allowed the noise to escape, cheeks tinging pink as he continued to glare at you. You were unsure if his rouged cheeks were sourced from embarrassment or the suspected fever. He repeated the question, this time the words coming out clearer.

"Fucking shit—" He groaned out, the swears spitting out of his mouth as another wave of pain rippled through his body. "Who are you?"

He had stopped moving now, his fingers curling into the garnet silk as he tried suppressing another wince. He wasn't successful, his face screwing up. Everything just hurted so much — his chest, his ribs, his lungs, everything. Especially his abdomen, the skin prickled there, the pain was deeper, crueler.

You muttered a reply. His mind went blank when he heard it, trying to decipher the meaning behind it until he finally recognised it for what it was. A name. Your name. It was pretty, suited you well, but it meant nothing to him.

"That's not what I asked." He mumbled, the consonants slurring, softening. He continued to glare at you, or at least tried to. You were moving too fast, making him dizzy as you rounded the side of the bed going to something he was unable to see from his laying position.

"Someone your family kidnapped." You responded, not bothering to sugarcoat the truth as you grabbed the stethoscope once more, lifting the neckline of his shirt as you let the chest piece settle where his heart was, counting the beats. It was thrumming steadily, quickening for a moment when the cold metal kissed his hot skin, his body involuntarily shuddering at the sudden contact, but his heart beat settled once more. It was still faster than what it should have been.

He was quiet, unsure if you were lying to him or just making a weird joke, but the deadpan stare you gave him confirmed that you weren't.

You moved it lower, aiming for his lungs this time.

"Slow, deep breaths." You instructed, focusing on the sounds — it sounded mainly normal, except for the slight wheezing sound you could hear each time he inhaled.

You removed the stethoscope, moving to scribble your result onto a new page, ensuring to include a note about the patient being awake.

"You Blackfyre?" He finally asked, voice strained, his mouth feeling strangely dry.

You hummed softly at his question. You had heard that name far too many times in the past day, being mumbled like a curse. And even now when Aerion had said it, it was dripping in vitriol. You vaguely recognised it; you had seen it many times during your late night research, the name seeming to follow House Targaryen like a shadow, lingering on the sidelines. Far enough that you did not truly know much about the Blackfyres, but close enough that you knew there was history there. Hatred, to be exact.

It was deeper than simple animosity, harsher than just business ventures going wrong; there was shared blood, a certain permanence forged through relation. And that hatred seemed to never waver.

Maekar cursed it with anger, Aerion announced it with disgust — it was clear that this was an ancestral loathing that was being passed down generation to generation, and would certainly be inherited by the next.

"You're more stupid than I expected." You answered, keeping your gaze focused on the neat, equally spaced lines of your notebook, the ink swirling in the space between as you continued to write your observations. Clammy skin, looks pale. "Why would I be allowed to care for you if I was?"

You noticed his breathing becoming shallow, as if the very task of breathing was becoming difficult for him. You frowned slightly, shit. Was he getting worse?

He was quiet for a moment, and you could almost see the thoughts rattle in his skull, desperately trying to find a reason as to why you were at fault for being abducted. You suppose you were, in some sick twisted way. You should have never helped.

"Peake, then?" Aerion tried again, brows furrowing as he felt pain ripple through his chest with each breath he took.

"No."

"Then why the fuck would they take you?"

"No idea." You muttered exasperated, grabbing for the oral thermometer in the hopes that it would shut him up. Just for a few minutes at least. "Open your mouth."

He screwed his lips shut, forcing them into a tight line as he watched you with weariness, as if you were holding a dagger rather than a thermometer.

You were going to scream.

You closed your eyes, breathing in deeply, exhaling — repeating the motions once, twice. But still your head ached, and still you felt your anger flare once more. You just had to take care of him, ensure he wouldn't drop dead, and then you could leave. And now this loser wasn't even letting you do what you were abducted for? What you were being forced into doing?

He was pissing you off.

You bit the inside of your cheek, trying desperately to not swear at him (and to not hit him either, which was becoming an extremely tempting thought).

"You were shot." You stated, your finger curling around the cool plastic of the thermometer as you forced your voice to remain stable. You pulled his shirt up, exposing pale skin and his bandaged abdomen as you poked at the very spot where the injury was. He flinched. "And I dug the bullet out. I cut your middle open to check if your organs had been blasted through. And I then stitched you up. If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it then. Open your mouth."

He just watched you, eyes squinting as he tried to judge the weight of your words, to discover whether they held any truth. But thinking just made the room spin more violently, and he already felt sick.

Slowly his lips pried open, his gaze darting away from you as he allowed you to put the thermometer into his mouth, as if by denying you his attention he was not truly accepting defeat. The metal nudged against his tongue as you gently pushed it underneath the pink muscle. You held it there for ten seconds, the time seeming to drag as all you could hear was his shallow breathing.

You already knew the result before you had even seen the small digital screen, the square flashing numbers just confirming what you feared. 39°C. His temperature had jumped since the last time you had checked, and before you could control yourself, the back of your hand was resting gently against his forehead, gauging the temperature as if the thermometer had lied to you.

He moved his head at the contact, trying and failing to escape your hand (but he couldn't move much, and soon gave up).

"What's wrong?" He questioned, voice coming out hoarse.

You didn't answer him, instead turning to Dunk who had been lingering at the entrance the entire time, quietly observing you.

"I need paracetamol." You stated, ripping out a page in your notebook as you began to write the name of the antibiotics you needed, hesitating for a moment as you tried to recall the exact names and dosages. You offered the piece of paper to the tall man. "And, um, these antibiotics."

You had ensured your handwriting was legible, that each inked letter was clear and unable to be misread, but even then Dunk just stared at you blankly, his gaze darting from the piece of paper in his hand, to you, and then back to the paper.

"Ceftriaxone and metronidazole." You recited, your brows furrowing as you watched him repeat it back.

"Paracetamol, ceftriaxone, metronidazole." Dunk muttered to himself over and over, trying not to stumble over the syllables, turning to leave as he folded the piece of paper once, twice, placing it neatly in his blazer pocket. It had been written, so why was he determined to commit it to memory? It made no sense.

You turned to Aerion.

He had already been staring at you.

Observing you with a wary quietness, not truly trusting you. He didn't have to, the sentiment was shared.

"Am I dying?" He mumbled pathetically, and you rolled your eyes at him.

You wanted to reply sarcastically, to be cruel and mock him, but it was hard to be a bitch when he was watching you with genuine fear, his skin all pale and sweaty as he waited for your response with baited breath. It must've felt like he was dying, pain coursing through his body each time he tried to do something as little as breathing.

So you showed him some mercy, unable to find it in you to be mean.

"No. You have a fever."

You didn't explain what a fever could mean, that it hinted at another issue. That you prayed that you hadn't missed something during the surgery. You hadn't, right? You were certain that everything went well, but you could barely remember.

It seemed to have comforted him at least.

"Just a fever?" He repeated, letting you help him sit up, his back hitting the ornate headboard. Despite your gentleness, he still hissed in pain, a stabbing ache throbbing through his full abdomen, the air escaping his lungs. "Don't need meds then. Dragons don't take meds."

You stared.

One second passed, and then another. And you just sighed, choosing to ignore his words. It was the fever talking, it had to be.

(But with three separate dragon heads facing your direction, and numerous other examples of dragon paraphernalia dotted around the room, you weren't entirely sure. Was this dude a furry? You'd rather not know.)

'Mother Above, give me patience.' The silent prayer repeating in your mind as you began to lift his shirt, fingers ghosting his skin as you helped him out of it. The prayer had no value to you, and you felt slightly silly for resorting to muttering words you had not even recited since your father had died. But you were desperate and they helped distract your mind, even if it were only for a moment.

He grunted lowly as he allowed you to pull the cotton over his head, dropping the t-shirt on the end of his bed, the branded label flashing at you slightly as the fabric pooled by his feet. You would have to get him a new shirt, this one having the scent of iron and sweat clinging to the fibres.

You unwound his bandages, gathering the loose material as you disposed of it, your attention returning to Aerion's abdomen.

"Like the view, Angel?"

You frowned at his words, gaze flickering up to meet his only to find him smirking at you, his eyes sharpened with amusement.

"Oh definitely." You replied sarcastically, not even hiding the harsh eye roll you offered him. "The sight of deathly pale skin and blood really gets me going."

His smirk twitched slightly at your response, eyes narrowing. He didn't appreciate your sarcasm. But you didn't care, you weren't going to offer him sincerity, not when you hadn't slept in more than 24 hours, not when you didn't even want to be here. You preferred him when he was unconscious, when his brain was blurred with pain. When he was unable to speak.

He remained quiet as you cleaned his wound once more, your hands gentle as the skin twitched beneath your touch, watching as he tried to restrain his flinches. You noticed his sharp inhales, the way his fingers curled into themselves. You said nothing, but ensured your touch was lighter.

You wrapped his abdomen again, fresh bandages spanning around his waist, flush against the lean muscle, your arms wrapping around him in an awkward half hug each time the bandages circled his person. You were close, too close — he was able to smell the scents of your soap, something floral, something sweet, he was unable to pinpoint the exact notes.

He could only swallow harshly when you were at this distance, half sat upon the edge of his bed as you secured his bandages, ensuring they were tight enough. His gaze traced the contours of your face, the slope of your nose, the curve of your cheek. Brows pinched in concentration, a small wrinkle forming in the middle of them. The plush of your lips set in a tight line. His gaze lingered there the longest.

But you pulled back all too soon, mind distant as you advanced towards the large mahogany armoire, rifling through it until you had found exactly what you were looking for. It was a strangely difficult task, to find an old shirt that would be baggy on his frame, it seemed like the silver-haired Targaryen dared not repeat his outfits, all clothing items appearing as if they had only even been worn a maximum of three times. You had only wanted to find something that wouldn't cling to him, that would have minimal opportunity to disturb his bandages, yet it felt as though you had searched through his entire closet just to find one that had been bunched up into the corner — the soft cotton now a faded grey, suggesting that it had once been dyed black but age had bleached its fibres.

It was slightly wrinkled, evidence of being neglected and forgotten (yet its very presence suggested the opposite — why would this remain when it simply did not fit the evident pattern of his wardrobe? Why was this not discarded also?) The typography was simple, white peeling vinyl simply stating VSC below the minimalistic image of an anvil.

Aerion did not bother speaking to you after that, his mind going blank as he allowed you to manipulate his limbs, dragging the old shirt over his upper body, your touch ghosting along his skin, causing goosebumps to rise. He was unsure of what to even say, all he knew was that he wanted to speak more yet his mind was not allowing him to do so. And soon he yielded to the temptations of sleep once more, falling into the clutches of slumber, the thought of you drifting across his mind as he began to have hazy dreams of gunpowder and arsenic.

You watched as he slept once more, kicking off the slippers that Dunk had brought you last night, busying yourself with cleaning any scratches that marred your skin, evidence of your failed escape. You wouldn't be able to leave through impulsivity, that was what you had quickly deduced. And you could not appear irrational to the Targaryens either, yet that was easier said than done.

You could argue that you were the most rational individual within the premises, yet they still outnumbered you.

Fucking Targaryens.

You were not entirely sure how you were meant to handle this situation. Your mind wandered, what would Rowan do?

Well, firstly your best friend would never be in such a situation. She would have had the sense to ignore strange noises in the middle of the night. Yet if she were to ever give you advice for this situation (which unfortunately you could not ask, nor would you ever seek for you knew that it would be truly stupid to involve her), she would laugh and remind you that you were surrounded by men.

Men were simple, as she would often say. She would have been able to manipulate them all, with a flutter of her lashes and a pleasing smile, she would have softened Maekar's brutish nature and convinced the otherwise unwavering Baelor to allow her to leave.

But you were not Rowan, and it seemed as though these men did not care for your anger or your tears. Yet you could still try.

It was easier than you believed — it was not in your nature to soften yourself. Yet when you offered Dunk a hesitant smile accompanied with a gentle 'thanks' as he handed you the very antibiotics you had requested (the doses correct, the names matching the very ones you had provided), you watched with gleeful triumph as his eyes widened slightly, cheeks tinged pink as he stumbled over a reply. Yet despite the slight pride that ignited within you, you found yourself not even focusing on the man before you.

Would you be able to have such an effect on Baelor? A small voice in your head whispered that you wouldn't. That even if you fluttered your lashes at him and appeared meek, the brunet Targaryen would most likely quickly deduce your intentions. Your heart fell at the thought; he certainly would not be rendered weak by your attempts.

Dunk lingered near you after that small interaction, watching silently as you began to administer the antibiotics into his IV, his gaze fluttering over you when he believed you would not notice. You did notice, it was hard not to when the half-giant was hovering beside you, his lips parting slightly as he tried to will himself to speak to you, before dissuading himself.

You decided to rescue him from his indecision, forcing him to reply to you as you began talking half-mindedly, your gaze returning to his momentarily as you allowed idle conversation to fill the air while you settled once more into the seat by Aerion's bed.

He would avoid your gaze as he muttered hesitant responses, only allowing himself to look at you when he believed that your attention returned to Aerion, who was blissfully unaware of his surroundings.

"Egg did that?" You giggled, lips stretching into a smile that felt too real (it seemed as if you were manipulating yourself more than him, and you just tried to excuse it with your own exhaustion — surely you would be more clearheaded once you slept), watching as Dunk offered a soft smile as he recounted the story of how he met the young Targaryen.

"The boy's far more clever than me, and I hadn't even realised what had happened." Dunk complained, yet the way his eyes crinkled exposed his fond pride as he recounted how Egg had conned him into believing that he was just another Smallfolk boy. "Just that he needed help, and I gave it."

You hummed softly, tone teasing as you leaned towards him. "Yet you benefited from his scheming in the end."

"I suppose…" He mumbled as you referenced how he got his job as a Kingsguard, blush violently remaining on his face as cracked his knuckles, the room beginning to lull into an even silence once more. He wanted the conversation to continue, yet he was unsure of how to do so. He was never good with his words. He was simply glad that your anger seemed to have dulled.

Your gaze flickered down to his hands, tracing the scars and callouses that were peppered across his skin, accompanied by the very grazes you had scratched into his skin the night before. The skin still appeared raw, angry red lines that had scabbed over slightly, the skin slightly torn. Silence stretched as your gaze remained unwavering from his hands.

"I think…" You began slowly, forcing your gaze to drag from his hands, returning to his blue irises. "I think I need to speak to Baelor again, especially now that…" Your voice trailed off, watching as Dunk began to shake his head, your brows furrowing as he motioned a wordless refusal.

You interrupted your own trail of thought, slightly confused.

"No?" You questioned.

He had the decency to appear sheepish as he confirmed that no, you could not speak to Baelor. "He's returned to King's Landing, along with Maekar."

You nodded gently, steeling your expression as you tried to not react to the word return. They returned to King's Landing, meaning that where you were, where they had taken you, was certainly not still in King's Landing. Where in the Seven Hells were you then?

"Oh, okay." You replied, voice hesitant as thoughts began to whizz through your mind, only furthering the headache that plagued you. "Dunk, could you do me a favour?"

He visibly stilled at those words, his eyes widening slightly as his brain began to malfunction, stumblings of a reply exiting his lips.

"Um—" He stalled, his gaze fluttering away from you as you watches as his focus darted around the room. "Maybe— depends? Why?"

You forced the smile to remain on your lips, hoping that it appeared more fond than strained. "I just need to make a call."

"I don't—"

"Come on." You urged, your gaze chasing his as you leaned towards him. "You do owe me, Dunk. I'll forget about the full thing if you just let me."

You watched his expression with avid curiosity, observing through your lashes as his lips tightened, his gaze unsteady, fluttering to you, then towards a sleeping Aerion, and then towards the flying dragons carved into the bedframe. You watched as indecision wavered on his features, brows tightening as he prepared himself to refuse you once more. You interrupted him before he could utter those dreaded words.

"I'm not stupid, Dunk." You quickly interjected, trying to hide the nervousness that began to seep into your features, keeping your tone teasing as you stood up, grabbing his hand gently. He flinched slightly at your sudden touch, yet still allowed you to grasp his hand, "I'm not going to tell them about what's happened, I just need to make sure my family won't worry about me."

He bit his lip slightly, a small frown dawning on his features. "You're not going to mention any of this?"

"Of course not." You responded, immediately latching onto the semblance of an offer, intertwining your pinky with his. "I promise."

His gaze dipped to where your fingers were linked, and immediately you knew you had won.

This would quickly be evidenced by the fact that within the next second he was fishing his phone out of his pocket, offering it to you with slight hesitancy as your pinkies remained connected by your side as you snatched the phone out of his hands. You weren't able to discern whether Dunk regretted his decision, your attention mainly focused on remembering Rowan's phone number, each digit quickly filling the top half of the screen as you pressed the green call button, the device vibrating slightly as you waited. There was one buzz, and then another, before the familiar melodic tones of Rowan's voice disturbed the silence.

"Hello?"

Your heart soared at the sound of her voice, a part of you almost wishing to just begin sobbing, airing each and every complaint that had festered within you. But you couldn't.

Her voice called out again, the vowels dragging as her questioning tone filled the air once more.

"Helloooo?" She repeated, and you could hear the murmurings of a male voice in the background urging her to hang up. "I don't know, I don't think—"

"Rowan." You interrupted, your voice coming out more breathless than you had anticipated. "Hi, sorry, I just needed to call you."

She uttered your name in that same questioning tone, and you could hear her fumbling with her phone, no doubt checking the number that had called her.

"Babes, what— what's going on? Whose phone are you calling me on?" Her voice was laced with confusion, words stumbling over themselves only for your voice to interrupt her once more.

"Just using a friend's, but that doesn't matter. Just needed to—" You exhaled a sigh, taking a moment to recollect yourself as you tried to not stutter over your words. "Just having a family emergency, you know? Could you take care of the practice for a while? Message Alys to cover my shifts please?"

Your voice came out in a myriad of questions, trying to force your tone to remain even, to not expose any evidence of the nerves that were haunting you.

"Friend? Emergency?" She repeated the words back incredulously and you suppressed the urge to wince. She could tell you weren't telling the entire truth. "Babes, I don't understand, what's going on?"

"Ro, I am so sorry, but I can't talk right now." You avoided her question, instead choosing to feign urgency. "I'll explain the next time I see you, yeah? Love you."

You hung up before she could reciprocate any farewells, the phone emitting a definitive click as you abruptly pressed the red button, watching as the screen returned to Dunk's homescreen, a picture of a sunhat-wearing Egg sat upon his shoulders.

You let go of his hand, letting his pinky fall out of your grasp.

"Thanks." You muttered weakly, offering him his phone and a tight-lipped smile.

"Go to the kitchen." He blurted out, his voice surprising you slightly. "I just mean, you should go eat something, I can watch him."

"I'm not hungry."

"You should still have a break." He insisted. You hesitated for a moment, your gaze drifting over Aerion. Dunk noticed. "I'll call for you if anything happens."

"Maybe just for a bit?"

"Just for a bit." He encouraged, offering you a soft smile as he moved out of your way.

You quickly regretted accepting his offer of a break, immediately feeling disoriented the moment you left the room, feeling almost blinded by the stark marble that shone at you from every direction. You felt dizzy seeing something other than bloody crimson and ornate dragon heads.

The rest of the manor appeared foreign to you in the daylight, unable to discern which direction you were truly heading in. You were almost certain you had not travelled these same corridors the night prior, however, by some miracle, you somehow managed to stumble upon the kitchen.

Which had been filled by the rest of Maekar's brood.

They all stared at you as you entered, watching you wide-eyed as you tried to blend into the walls, pretending as if you had not noticed their obvious attention. You instead directed your focus towards the actual room (how enthralling, you were now being entertained by furniture), unable to ignore how it appeared awfully clinical.

Stainless steel and glimmering marble; it was truly a gorgeous kitchen, yet it appeared so sterile you were certain you could have performed Aerion's surgery here without having concerns of cleanliness or a lack there of. It appeared more industrial rather than familial, like the kitchen of an upscale Reach restaurant rather than a family home.

And like everything within the manor, it appeared unused.

Daeron broke the silence as he watched you inspect the double doored enormous fridge (yet despite the appliance being so large, it's contents were so bare, with only a few random items on each shelf).

"Made you toast." He offered, pushing the plate in your direction as he leaned against the ivory marble island. "Would ask if you want something else, but unfortunately this is where my culinary prowess ends."

You turned slightly, observing the two sad pieces of sourdough bread he offered. Slightly charred at the edges, yet the middle appeared strangely untoasted. Gods, why did you feel kinship with the toast. Just another thing the Targaryens managed to fuck up.

You grabbed the jar of raspberry jam, letting the fridge doors swing shut as you mumbled a soft 'thank you'.

You weren't exactly well-versed on abductee etiquette, instead choosing to abandon any attempt at small talk as you allowed awkward silence to fill the air, the only sound being your stainless steel table knife dragging against your toast, smearing the vivid tart jam across its surface.

And clearly the Anvil's children's were unsure of how to handle such a situation either. But seeing as they were the abductors, or rather related to the abductors, it only made sense for them to take the role of interrogators.

"Are you really a doctor?"

"You're so pretty—"

"—Can you look at Meraxes now—"

"—Are you going to be our new Mummy?"

You choked at the last question, the toast feeling as if it had impaled itself into your pharynx as you struggled to breath, unable to look at the little girl.

Daeron did not help, immediately falling into a fit of giggles at Rhae's question. But the young Targaryen did not see the humour within her question, and instead repeated it with increased urgency.

"Well? Are you?"

"No." You wheezed out, your face feeling as if it were burning. Seven Hells, fuck your fucking life.

"Why not? You're taking care of Aerion, even though he's mean. And you're really nice, and pretty. Do you not like my Daddy?" Rhae interrogated, head tilting as she peered up at you through her pale lashes.

Darling girl, I don't think anyone in their right mind would like your Daddy.

Yet you found yourself wholly and truly dumbfounded, unable to respond. Speechless as you could only just stare at her.

"Think she's a bit young for Dad, Sun-Rhae." Daella interrupted, immediately noting how shocked you appeared as she watched unimpressed, flipping though her magazine (the front page boasted the title 'The Maidenvault' and you quickly recognised the image of Kiera of Tyrosh pictured).

"So? Auntie Dany is younger than Uncle Maron?"

"I just—" You cleared your throat, immediately noticing how strained your voice sounded. "I don't know your dad, and…"

And you couldn't believe that you were even bothering to explain why you would never marry the man who aided in your kidnapping???

"—And she's just here to help Aerion." Daeron finally explained once he stopped laughing, yet that stupid smirk remained on his face. At least someone was enjoying this interaction. You certainly weren't.

And you were so tired that you couldn't find it in you to correct him. Sure, you suppose you were here to help Aerion, despite it being unwilling.

"Okay…" Rhae mumbled, her voice trailing off as she continued to watch you, her soft lilac gaze observing you as she looked unconvinced by the explanations offered.

"Okay." You parroted, voice weak as you tried to focus on finishing the toast before you, yet it felt as if your appetite had suddenly abandoned you. You were going crazy, surely that was what was occurring. Sleep deprivation did that to a person.

"Pleaaasssseeeee, can you look at Meraxes now, pleasepleaseplease—" Egg's voice caused you to jump slightly as you finally noticed that the bald Targaryen had managed to sneak up behind you. You gasped sharply, spinning to face him as his hands grasped at the hem of your shirt, tugging at it slightly.

"Sure! Why not!" You exclaimed, finally relenting to Egg's pleas, more so excited to finally escape the kitchen. You were certain that if you remained there any longer you would truly become insane. "Just bring her to—"

And before you could even finish your sentence, Egg ran off, darting out of the kitchen with such speed that you found your head spinning.

You just took another bite of toast.

Maybe you had already become insane.

♤♡◇♧

Taglist

You had arrived seven minutes before seven and spent those seven minutes reading the programme and being aware, without looking, of whether he had arrived yet.

He came in at two minutes past, which told you nothing except that he was not the kind of man who arrived early to literary events, which seemed consistent with what you knew of him. He took a seat four rows ahead and to the left. You could see the back of his head — the clean line of his collar, the slight angle of his jaw when he turned to read the programme — and you looked at it for approximately three seconds before returning to your own programme with the focused application of someone solving a moderately difficult problem.

The discussion afterward confirmed that the moderator did indeed have a particular interest in Victorians. You asked one question — about the relationship between formal constraint and emotional ambiguity in contemporary poetry — and felt, without looking in his direction, that his attention moved toward you while you spoke.

After, people gathered in small clusters near the door. You collected your coat from the back of your chair and turned to find him already making his way toward you through the thinning crowd. He moved with the unhurried economy you'd already come to associate with him, the coat folded over his arm, and his gaze found yours before he was close enough to speak.

"Your question was the best one of the evening," he said.

"The moderator didn't think so."

"The moderator was defensive. That's different from being right."

You put on your coat. "The Davie poem he chose for the closing — did it work for you?"

"The middle tercets. Not the ending." He paused. "Are you pressed for time?"

"No."

"There's a pub around the corner that's usually quiet on Thursdays."

It was quiet. A low-ceilinged place, dark-panelled, with the haze of cigarette smoke above the bar and the kind of lighting that made everything amber and indistinct. You found a table near the back, away from the handful of other patrons, and the conversation resumed the way it had in the bookshop — mid-thought, as if no time had passed.

He drank whisky. You had a glass of red wine that was slightly too warm, and you wrapped both hands around it without drinking it for the first quarter of an hour while you talked about Davie, and then about contemporary poetry more broadly, and then, naturally, about Hardy, which was where the two of you always arrived eventually.

"The question you asked," he said. "Formal constraint and emotional ambiguity. Is that the argument you're making in your thesis, or a separate problem?"

"It's central to it," you said. "The idea that the shape of the poem — the meter, the rhyme scheme, the stanza form — is itself a kind of emotional strategy. Not decoration. Not convention. A way of managing something that would otherwise be unmanageable."

"Feeling too large for direct expression."

"Or too dangerous." You turned the wine glass slightly in your hands. "Hardy lived inside a set of social and personal constraints that made directness almost impossible. His marriage, his class anxiety, his religious doubt. All of it pressing inward. The poems are what that pressure produced when it finally found an aperture."

He was watching you over the rim of his glass. Not speaking — listening in the way he had of listening, which was complete and still and gave you the slightly vertiginous sense of being read while you were reading aloud.

"You understand it from the inside," he said.

It wasn't a question. You looked at him.

"What makes you say that?"

"The way you talk about it." He set his glass down. "Most scholars of emotional repression treat it as a historical curiosity. A function of the period. You talk about it as though you know what it costs."

A pause settled over the table. Around you the pub continued its low hum, the distant knock of glasses, a burst of laughter from the bar that reached you muffled and irrelevant.

"Hardy appeals to people who understand longing," you said, which was not entirely an answer but was as much of one as you intended to give.

He accepted it without pressing. That was something you had noticed about him — the way he created space without filling it, which was rarer than people understood. Most people, when a conversation approached something tender, either pushed through it or retreated into noise. He simply waited.

"What drew you to poetry?" you asked. "Rather than any other form."

He considered this with the same seriousness he gave everything. "Compression," he said, after a moment. "The requirement that every word justify itself. That nothing remains because it seemed adequate, or because removing it would be effortful." He turned the glass once in his hand. "And the fact that form makes something both possible and impossible simultaneously. The sonnet can hold enormous feeling precisely because the feeling cannot exceed it."

"The container shapes what it contains."

"Yes."

"Do you find it constraining? Working within form?"

"I find the constraint necessary." A beat. "Without it I wouldn't write at all. The form is — " he paused, looking for the word with an accuracy that was characteristic — "permission. To approach something that would otherwise be unapproachable."

You looked at him. The amber light of the pub made the tired quality of his eyes more visible, and the lines around them, and something in his expression that existed in the pauses between expressions rather than in any one of them.

"What do you write about?" you asked.

He was quiet for a moment. "Loss, largely," he said. "Which is a cliché. But clichés persist because they're true."

You waited.

"My wife died," he said. "Several years ago. A son, as well. He was — very young."

He said it plainly. Not as a confidence extracted under pressure and immediately regretted — more like something he had decided, in the moment before speaking, was a true thing you were entitled to know. There was no performance of stoicism in it. He said it the way he said everything else, with that precise and level quietness, and yet the words landed differently from everything else. You felt the weight of them arrive.

"I'm sorry," you said. And then, because the words felt inadequate without being untrue, "That's an enormous amount to carry."

"Yes." He looked at his glass. "Hardy interested me long before I began writing seriously. But when I came back to the Emma poems afterward — after — I understood them differently."

"The retrospective clarity," you said, quietly.

"The remorse inside the grief." He glanced up at you and back down. "I didn't fail her the way Hardy failed Emma. That's not — I'm not saying that. But grief has a way of finding all the places where you were insufficient. Whether or not the insufficiency was the cause."

You said nothing. The instinct to speak — to comfort, to fill the space — rose and you held it back, because you knew, in the way that you knew such things, that what he had offered required space, not response.

After a moment he looked at you again, and the look was different from the others. There was something in it that was more exposed than usual — not vulnerability exactly, not the kind that was porous or uncertain, but the vulnerability of someone who had said a true thing and was now quietly measuring the effect of having said it.

"You're good at this," he said.

"At what?"

"Not speaking when most people would."

"Hardy again," you said. "You learn to sit with silence when your subject rarely says what he means."

Something in his expression shifted. Not softening exactly — the structure of his face was too defined for softening — but something eased. A fraction of the enormous composure he carried loosening at one seam.

"What about you," he said. "What drew you to him. Not the academic answer."

You turned the wine glass in your hands. Outside the pub windows the street was wet and lamp-lit, and a couple walked past arm in arm, quickly, against the cold.

"I grew up in a family where things were not discussed," you said. "Difficulties. Feelings. Anything that required acknowledging that the interior life existed." You paused. "Not unkindly. No one was unkind, really. It was simply — the way things were arranged. You understood from an early age that certain things were felt in private and that privacy was permanent."

He was watching you steadily.

"I found Hardy at fifteen," you said. "And for the first time I encountered a writer who understood that the unexpressed thing doesn't disappear. That it has as much existence as anything spoken. More, sometimes." You stopped. "He understood that the distance between two people who love each other can be entirely internal. That you can stand in the same room and be very far apart."

The last few words came out more quietly than the rest. You became aware of this slightly after the fact and took a sip of the wine, which was still too warm.

When you looked back at him, he was still watching you. The look had the same quality as before — complete, undefended — but there was something new in it now, something beneath the attention that you couldn't name precisely. The sense of a recognition. Of something encountered that had not been expected.

"You said earlier," he began, and then stopped.

You waited.

"You said that Hardy understood the pressure of what couldn't be said." He kept his gaze on you. "Do you think that pressure can be — productive? In life, rather than in literature. Or only ever costly."

It was a careful question. Precise in the way of questions that are really about something other than what they ask.

You held his gaze for a moment. "I think it depends on whether it's pressure in the geological sense," you said. "Something that accumulates until it changes the structure of what contains it. Or pressure in the mechanical sense." You paused. "One produces something. The other only damages."

He was quiet. The pub moved around you, indifferent, and the table between you held the two glasses and the folded programmes and the slight, charged stillness of something arrived at by an indirect route.

"It's nearly half past ten," he said, finally.

You looked up at the clock above the bar. He was right.

"I hadn't noticed," you said.

"No." He picked up his glass, found it empty, and set it back down. "Neither had I."

You put on your coat and he helped you with it — a brief, natural gesture, his hands straightening the collar at the back without being asked. His fingers didn't linger. It was simply done with the same quiet care he gave to old books, and you felt it all the same, a warmth that arrived before you could think clearly about it.

Outside, the air was cold and smelled of rain on stone. The street was largely empty at this hour, the lamp posts throwing long reflections onto the wet pavement.

"The tube?" he said.

"Yes. You?"

"I'll walk. It's not far."

You stood for a moment on the pavement in the particular suspension that comes at the end of an evening that has exceeded its own premise.

"Thank you for telling me," you said. "About your wife. And your son."

He looked at you. In the lamp light his face was austere again, the tiredness more apparent, but his eyes had that quality you'd come to look for without meaning to — the depth in them, the sense of something present and large and very carefully held.

"Thank you for not making it easier than it was," he said.

You didn't know, quite, what to do with that, so you nodded and said goodnight, and turned toward the tube station, your coat pulled around you against the cold.

You did not think about the warmth of his hands at your collar until you were three streets away.

And then you thought about very little else.

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