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Summary: You find a missing cat that belongs to a certain Targaryen. During the time which takes you to find the owner, Vhagar becomes attached to you, so now Aemond must deal with sharing her with you. See part 1 here.
The bandages came off on a Tuesday.
You weren't there for the removal, that happened at the surgeon's office, a sterile room full of equipment you couldn't name, with Aemond's mother in attendance and you very pointedly not invited. But you were there when he came home, walking through the door of the penthouse with his left eye uncovered.
The scar was still there, a pale silver line cutting through his eyebrow and disappearing into his hairline. But the eye itself, the eye he'd kept hidden behind patches carefully arranged hair, was visible now. Clouded, yes. A milky blue where his right eye was sharp violet. But open, and looking at you, or at least in your direction.
"How did it go?" you asked, setting down the book you'd been reading.
Aemond didn't answer immediately. He set his keys on the console table by the door, then walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. His hands were steady, but there was tension in his shoulders.
"Mother is optimistic," he said finally, his back still to you. "She's already talking about the next surgery. The one after this one. The specialist in Geneva she's been corresponding with."
"That's not what I asked."
He turned then, and you could see it: the exhaustion, the resignation, the carefully contained disappointment of someone who had hoped against hope and been proven right the first time. "The surgery went as expected. The eye is healed. The nerve is not."
"Oh," you said softly. "Aemond."
"Don't." His voice was sharp, then immediately softened. "Don't look at me like that. I told you. I made my peace with this years ago. It's my mother who can't let it go."
Vhagar, who had been sleeping in her cardboard box by the window, lifted her head and made a creaking sound of inquiry. Aemond crossed the room and bent to scratch behind her ears, and for a moment he looked almost normal, just a man petting his cat, the pale afternoon light catching the silver in his hair.
"There are exercises," he said, straightening up. "Vision therapy. They want me to do them twice a day, just in case." He said just in case the way someone might say just in case the dead rise from their graves. "I'm supposed to test whether I can distinguish shapes. Movement."
"Do you want me to help?"
He looked at you, his good eye assessing, his bad eye fixed on some point slightly to your left. "You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to. I'm asking if you want me to."
The pause stretched long enough that Vhagar meowed impatiently, demanding continued attention. Aemond's mouth twitched.
"Yes," he said. "I want you to."
The vision therapy kit was a sad little collection of objects that looked like they'd been stolen from an optometrist's office: a handheld eye chart, a patch to cover his good eye, a series of cards with increasingly small letters and shapes, a penlight that seemed unnecessarily clinical for a penthouse apartment. Aemond laid them out on the coffee table with the same grim efficiency he probably brought to board meetings.
"This is humiliating," he said, fastening the patch over his right eye. "I haven't done this with anyone since I was a child."
"You were a child once?"
"Briefly. It didn't take."
You sat across from him on the couch, the eye chart in your hands. With the patch on, his face looked different: more vulnerable, the scar more prominent, the clouded blue of his left eye the sole focus of his gaze. He was looking somewhere in the vicinity of your left shoulder, his pupil fixed and unmoving.
"Okay," you said, holding up the chart. "Can you see any of the letters?"
Silence. He squinted, or tried to, the left eye didn't move quite in sync with the right. "No."
"What about the big one at the top? The E?"
"No."
"Can you tell how many fingers I'm holding up?"
You raised your hand. He stared at it for a long moment, his jaw tight.
"None," he said. "Or possibly all of them. I can't tell."
You lowered your hand. "Okay. What about light? Can you see the window? The difference between the window and the wall?"
He turned his head slowly, his blind eye tracking across the room. "I can tell there's a light source. It's…brighter over there. But I couldn't tell you it was a window. It's just light and dark. Like looking through frosted glass at the bottom of a lake."
"That's something, though. Right? The surgeon said..."
"The surgeon said there was a thirty percent chance. That was before they opened me up and found the nerve damage was worse than the scans showed." He pulled the patch off with more force than necessary, his right eye blinking rapidly as it readjusted. "This is a waste of time. Mother's surgeon can bill her for the therapy kit and the follow-up appointments and the flight to Geneva she's already trying to book, but it won't change anything."
"Maybe not," you said carefully. "But you're doing it anyway."
He looked at you, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. "I'm doing it anyway."
You ran through the exercises again and again. The second day, Aemond reported that he could distinguish the penlight when you shone it directly at his left eye, a faint brightening, like sunlight through thick curtains. The third day, he thought he might have seen your hand move, though he couldn't be sure it wasn't just his brain filling in the gaps. The fourth day, he could reliably tell you whether the lights in the room were on or off, which felt like a victory until he pointed out that he could do that before the surgery too.
"It's not going to come back," he said on the fifth day, setting the eye chart aside with finality. "I've accepted that. I need my mother to accept it."
"Have you told her?"
"I've told her every time. She doesn't listen." He rubbed his right eye, a gesture of fatigue you'd come to recognize. "She thinks acceptance is the same as giving up. That if she just tries hard enough, wants it badly enough, she can fix me."
The word fix landed heavily between you. You thought about all the things you'd learned about Aemond over the past months: the careful way he held himself, the defensiveness that masked something rawer underneath, the way he offered devotion to people who gave him scraps in return. You thought about his mother, who loved him enough to find surgeon after surgeon but not enough to let him grieve what he'd lost.
"You're not broken," you said quietly.
He didn't answer. But he looked at you, and his expression cracked open, just a little, like a door left slightly ajar.
"Now you," he said on the sixth day, pushing the eye chart across the coffee table toward you.
"What about me?"
"Your vision. You mentioned it the other day, the astigmatism. Let me test you."
"You're not an optometrist."
"I have an eye chart. That makes me qualified."
You laughed, but he was already standing up, the patch dangling from his fingers, his expression set in that particular way it got when he'd decided something and would not be dissuaded. He positioned you against the far wall of the living room. "No, further back", and handed you a plastic spoon to cover first one eye, then the other.
"Read the third line," he commanded.
"I can't see the third line."
"What do you mean you can't see it? It's right there."
"It's a blur. I can see the big E. The rest is just…fuzzy shapes."
He stared at you, the eye chart forgotten in his hand. "How long has it been since you had glasses?"
"I have glasses. They're at home. The prescription is just…" You shrugged, suddenly self-conscious under the intensity of his scrutiny. "Old."
"How old?"
"A few years?"
"A few years." His voice was flat. "You told me the sight in your right eye is at eighty percent. Your left eye is at sixty percent. You're straining your right eye constantly to compensate, which is why you need the drops. And you haven't updated your prescription in a few years."
"It's expensive," you said, crossing your arms. "Eye exams, new lenses, the frames, it adds up. My old glasses work fine. I can see well enough."
"'Well enough' is not the same as seeing." He was pacing now, the eye chart rolled into a tube that he was using to gesture emphatically. "You've been squinting at your computer screen. You've been holding your phone six inches from your face. You couldn't read the street sign yesterday when we were walking back from the park."
"You noticed that?"
"I notice everything." He stopped pacing and faced you, frustrated. "Why didn't you say something?"
"Because it's not a big deal? Millions of people have outdated prescriptions. It's not like I'm going blind."
"You're straining your eyes daily. That causes headaches. Fatigue. Decreased quality of life." He was listing the symptoms like he'd memorized them from a medical textbook, which he probably had. "And you've just been...what? Ignoring it? Hoping it would go away?"
"I've been managing it. With the eye drops. Which I told you about."
"The eye drops are a stopgap. You need proper corrective lenses."
"Aemond." You held up a hand, cutting him off mid-tirade. "I appreciate the concern. Really. But glasses are expensive, and I have other things to prioritize right now. It's fine."
"It is not fine," he said, and the words came out almost fierce. "You've been here for a week. You've been helping me with my exercises, ordering food, keeping me company at three in the morning when I can't sleep. You've done all of that without being asked, without expecting anything in return, and you won't even let me..."
He stopped abruptly, his jaw clicking shut.
"Let you what?" you asked.
Silence. He looked away, his profile sharp against the window light.
"Let me help you," he said finally, his voice quieter now. "In return."
"You don't owe me anything."
"I know I don't owe you. That's not what I meant."
"Then what did you mean?"
He turned back to you, and there it was again, that expression you'd seen flickering across his face for weeks now, the one you'd been too afraid to name. "I meant that I want to. I want to help you. Not because you've earned it or because I'm compensating you for services rendered, but because I..." He stopped, swallowed, started again. "Because I care about you. Because the thought of you walking around with a four-year-old prescription and pretending it's fine makes me want to..."
"Have an affronted meltdown?"
"Don't tease me. I'm being sincere."
"I know you are." You stepped closer. "That's what makes it so funny."
His mouth twitched. "It's not funny."
"It's a little funny. You're standing there with an eye chart in your hand, lecturing me about my astigmatism, looking like you're about to call an optometrist and have them dragged here by force."
"I'm considering it."
"I know you are."
The tension broke. He was standing very close now, close enough that you could smell his cologne, clean and expensive, like cedar and cold air, his good eye was fixed on your face.
"How much do I owe you?" he asked, his voice lower than before.
"What?"
"For this week. For the catsitting. For staying here. For..." He gestured vaguely, encompassing the eye chart, the penthouse, the entire improbable situation. "All of it."
"You don't owe me anything," you repeated, this time the words came out sadder than you intended. "That's not why I stayed."
"Then why did you?"
"Because you needed someone. And I wanted to be that someone." You looked down at your hands, unable to hold his gaze. "You don't have to pay me for that. I'm not your employee."
"I know you're not."
"Then stop trying to make this transactional."
The silence that followed was heavy, charged, the air in the room suddenly too thick to breathe.
"That's not what I was doing," he said. "I wasn't...I don't see you as an employee. I haven't for a long time. I just…" He ran a hand through his hair, dislodging strands of silver-blonde from their careful arrangement. "I don't know how to do this. Any of this. I don't know how to say stay without offering something in return. I don't know how to ask for what I want without making it a transaction. I've never..." He stopped, breathed, started again. "You're the first person in a very long time who's stayed without being asked. Without being paid. Without expecting anything from me. I don't know what to do with that."
"You could say thank you," you suggested softly.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
He laughed, a short exhale that was half surprise and half relief. "That's it? That's all I had to say?"
"That's all anyone has to say. The rest is just…showing up. Being there. The stuff you've already been doing."
"I've been doing it badly."
"You've been doing it like someone who's never been shown how."
He reached out and took your hand, his fingers cool and slightly unsteady against your palm.
"I want you to get new glasses," he said. "Not because I owe you. Not because you're my employee. Because I want you to be able to see. Because I want you to stop squinting at your phone and getting headaches and pretending it's fine. Because I want to do something for you that you won't do for yourself. Is that acceptable?"
"I can't afford..."
"I know. That's why I'm offering."
"Aemond..."
"Please." The word came out desperate. "Let me do this. Let me do something for someone who actually wants to be here. Who isn't waiting for me to fix something or become something or stop being something. Just let me buy you a pair of glasses. It's the least romantic gesture I can think of. It's practically medical."
A laugh bubbled up in your throat, surprising you. "You think this is romantic?"
"I think I'm trying very hard to tell you something, and I'm doing it badly, and I'm hoping you'll meet me halfway before I make an even bigger fool of myself."
"What are you trying to tell me?"
He stepped closer. His hand was still holding yours, his thumb tracing small circles against your knuckles.
"I'm trying to tell you that I've ended things with Alys," he said. "I did it the night before the surgery. I told her I wasn't coming to Riverlands anymore. She said she'd send the salve anyway, because she'd already made it, and I said okay, and that was it. Three years, and that was it."
"I'm sorry," you said, because you didn't know what else to say.
"Don't be. I'm not." His grip on your hand tightened. "I thought I would be. I thought I'd feel...hollow. Instead I felt relieved. I felt like I'd been holding my breath for three years and someone had finally let me exhale."
"What does that have to do with my glasses?"
"Nothing. Everything." He was standing so close now that you could see the flecks of darker violet in his iris, the faint lines around his eye that only appeared when he was tired or worried or feeling something too big to contain. "I'm trying to tell you that I want you here. As you. Just you. However you'll have me."
Your heart was beating so hard you were sure he could feel it through your hand. "Aemond..."
He kissed you. It was the kiss of someone who had been holding back for months and had finally, catastrophically, run out of restraint. His free hand came up to cup your jaw, his fingers sliding into your hair, and he kissed you like he was trying to memorize the shape of your mouth, like he was making up for lost time, like you were the first good thing that had happened to him in years and he was terrified of letting you slip away.
You kissed him back. Your hands found the front of his shirt, the crisp cotton crumpling under your grip, and you pulled him closer, closer, until there was no space left between you. He made a sound low in his throat, something between a sigh and a groan, and his arm wrapped around your waist, anchoring you against him.
"You have no idea," he murmured against your mouth, "how long I've wanted to do that."
"How long?"
"Since you told me to give Vhagar a cardboard box."
You laughed, he kissed the laugh right off your lips, and somehow you ended up pressed against the back of the couch with his hands in your hair and his mouth trailing down the line of your jaw. Vhagar meowed loudly from her box.
"Your cat is judging us," you managed.
"Vhagar judges everyone. It's her primary hobby." But he pulled back just far enough to look at you, his expression soft in a way you'd never seen before. "Stay. Tonight. Not in the guest room."
"Are you sure?"
"I've never been more sure of anything." He pressed his forehead to yours, his breath warm against your skin. "Stay. Let me buy you glasses. Let me cook you dinner and lecture you about your eye health and kiss you until neither of us can breathe. Let me be terrible at this and learn how to be better."
You kissed him again instead of answering, but he seemed to take that as a yes.
You didn't stay in the guest room. One moment you were kissing him against the back of the couch, his hands in your hair and his mouth warm and insistent on yours, and the next he was leading you down the hallway past the guest room door without even pausing, his fingers laced through yours.
His bedroom was exactly what you'd expected and nothing like you'd imagined. Minimalist, yes, pale walls, pale linens, a huge bed, but there were books stacked on the nightstand, three of them with spines cracked and bookmarks protruding. There was a glass of water on the coaster. There was a gray cat hair on a pillow, which Vhagar had apparently claimed despite having her own climate-controlled tower in the living room.
"She sleeps here," Aemond said, noticing your glance at the hair. "I've tried to stop her. It's impossible."
"I wouldn't expect you to succeed. She's very determined."
"She's very spoiled." He said it with the same gruff affection he always used when talking about the cat. "I should warn you, I've been told I'm not an easy person to sleep next to."
"By whom?"
The question slipped out before you could stop it. He didn't flinch, but something flickered across his face, there and gone. "Alys. Among others."
"Well," you said, sitting down on the edge of his enormous bed and trying not to think about Alys in this room, in this bed, "I've been told I steal the covers. So we'll be even."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "Noted."
You woke several times in the night, you always did in unfamiliar places. The first time, the clock on the nightstand read 1:47 a.m., and you were cocooned in blankets with Aemond's arm draped over your waist and his breath slow and even against the back of your neck. You smiled into the darkness and let yourself drift back under.
The second time, it was 3:22 a.m., and you were freezing.
The blankets were gone. All of them. You were curled on your side in the fetal position, your arms wrapped around yourself, and somewhere in the vast expanse of the king-sized bed, Aemond Targaryen had apparently constructed a fortress and was sleeping soundly inside it.
You tugged at the nearest corner of blanket. It didn't budge. You tugged harder. Somewhere in the darkness, Aemond made a disgruntled sound and rolled over, taking the blankets with him.
"You're a blanket thief," you whispered accusingly.
He didn't respond. He was deeply asleep, his face half-buried in the pillow and his silver-blonde hair spread across the pillowcase like spilled moonlight.
You gave up on the blankets and shuffled closer to him instead, pressing yourself against his back for warmth. He stirred, murmuring something unintelligible, and his arm reached back to pull you closer. A moment later, the blankets descended over you again, tucked carefully around your shoulders by hands that were still mostly asleep.
"Thank you," you whispered.
"Mmph," he said, and pulled you tighter against him.
The third time you woke, it was 5:14 a.m. and his mouth was on your shoulder.
He was still mostly asleep, his breathing deep and regular, but his lips were pressed to the curve of your shoulder where the collar of your borrowed t-shirt had slipped down, and they were moving slightly, not kissing, exactly, just resting there, warm and dry and strangely tender.
You should have been annoyed. You'd been asleep. You'd been comfortable. But instead you felt a slow, honeyed warmth spreading through your limbs, your sleep-fogged brain registering the sensation as something pleasant rather than intrusive. You made a small sound of acknowledgment and tilted your head, giving him better access without really meaning to.
His mouth moved to the side of your neck. Still not quite kissing, just resting there, his breath warm against your pulse point. His hand, which had been curled loosely at your hip, slid up your side in a slow, absent motion, like he was petting a cat in his sleep.
"Aemond," you murmured.
"Mmph."
"Are you awake?"
No answer. His lips pressed a little firmer against your neck, then relaxed. He was definitely still asleep. You closed your eyes and let yourself drift again.
Proper consciousness arrived with the gray light of dawn and the insistent yowling of a cat who had decided that 6:30 a.m. was a perfectly reasonable time for breakfast.
"She's your cat," you mumbled into the pillow.
"She's your alarm clock now," Aemond replied, his voice rough with sleep. He hadn't moved away from you. If anything, he'd gotten closer, his chest pressed against your back and his arm still wrapped around your waist. His mouth, you noticed, was still somewhere in the vicinity of your shoulder. "I should feed her."
"In a minute."
He huffed a laugh against your skin, and the sensation sent a shiver down your spine that had nothing to do with cold. "You're a terrible influence."
"I'm a great influence. I'm teaching you to relax."
"Vhagar will destroy something if I don't feed her. Last time I was late, she knocked a first edition off the shelf."
"Was it valuable?"
"Very."
"And you still keep first editions on shelves she can reach?"
He paused. "That's a fair point."
Vhagar yowled again, louder this time. Aemond sighed and extracted himself from the tangle of blankets and limbs. You immediately missed his warmth, the solid weight of him behind you, you burrowed deeper into the pillows to compensate.
"I'm going to feed the terrorist," he said, and you felt his hand brush your hair back from your face. "Go back to sleep."
"Mmkay."
You were already half-gone when you felt his lips press to your temple, brief and soft. "I'm glad you stayed," he murmured, and then he was gone, padding out of the room with Vhagar's yowls leading the way.
That morning consisted of coffee, breakfast and a shower that had taken longer than strictly necessary because Aemond's bathroom had heated floors and water pressure that felt like a massage.
You were sitting on the couch in the living room, attempting to read the book you'd abandoned the day before. Aemond was beside you, ostensibly reviewing documents on his tablet but mostly just scrolling with an expression of vague disdain. Vhagar was in her box. It was, you thought, the most peaceful you'd felt in months.
Then Aemond reached over and pressed his thumb into the space between your shoulder blades, and you flinched so hard you nearly dropped your book.
"What are you doing?"
"What are you doing?" He was staring at you, his hand still hovering in the air. "Are you injured?"
"I'm not injured."
"Then why did you wince like I caused you pain?"
You shifted uncomfortably, trying to angle yourself away from his probing fingers. "It's nothing. I just...I exercise. Sometimes you get knots from exercise."
"That's not exercise tension." His voice had taken on that particular clipped quality it got when he was on the verge of diagnosing a problem and would not be dissuaded from solving it. "Exercise tension is distributed differently. This is concentrated in your upper back and shoulders. It's the kind of tension you get from..."
"From what, Dr. Targaryen? Did you get a degree in sports medicine I don't know about?"
"From poor sleep posture," he finished, ignoring your sarcasm entirely. "Or from stress. Or both."
"I sleep fine."
His good eye narrowed. "You tossed and turned all night. I had to put the covers back on you three times."
"You counted?"
"I count everything. It's a habit." He set his tablet aside and turned to face you fully. "How long have you had back pain?"
"I don't have back pain."
"You flinched when I touched you."
"Because you surprised me."
"Because you have knots in your shoulders that shouldn't be there." He was looking at you the way he looked at reports that didn't add up, like there was a discrepancy somewhere and he was going to find it. "What kind of bed do you sleep on?"
The question was so unexpected that you laughed. "What?"
"Your bed. At your apartment. What kind is it?"
"I don't know, a normal one? It's a bed. It has a mattress. What does that have to do with anything?"
"What kind of mattress? How old is it?"
You could feel heat creeping up the back of your neck. "It's fine. The mattress is fine."
"Every time you say the word 'fine,' I become more convinced that something is very much not fine." He leaned closer, his gaze unnervingly intent. "Tell me about the mattress."
"Why do you care about my mattress?"
"Because I care about you, and you're in pain, and I want to know why."
The directness of it knocked the air out of your lungs. You stared at him, your carefully constructed deflections crumbling around you, and he stared back with that unwavering violet gaze. You realized with a sinking feeling that you weren't going to be able to avoid this conversation.
"It's a foldable bed," you said quietly. "Okay? It's a foldable bed with a thin mattress. I've had it since I moved to the city. It was cheap, and my apartment is small, and I can fold it up when I need more space. It's practical."
"A foldable bed."
"Yes."
"Like a futon?"
"No, not a futon. A foldable bed. Like…a cot, basically. But with a mattress. A thin mattress."
"How thin?"
"I don't know, a few inches? It's fine. I've been sleeping on it for years. My back is used to it."
"Your back is not used to it. Your back is screaming for help and you've been ignoring it." He stood up abruptly, paced to the window, paced back. "You've been sleeping on a foldable bed. For years."
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"That thing where you have an affronted meltdown about my life choices."
He stopped pacing and turned to face you. The expression on his face was so genuinely distressed that your irritation softened into closer to guilt. "I'm not having a meltdown," he said, very clearly having a meltdown. "I'm simply trying to understand why you would...how you could...you told me your glasses prescription was outdated because it was too expensive, and I thought, fine, that's a one-time expense, people put things off...but you've been sleeping on a cot? For years? While you were here taking care of me and my cat and refusing to let me pay you?"
"It's not that bad..."
"It is that bad. It's objectively that bad. You have tension in your shoulders that I could feel through your shirt with one touch. You wake up multiple times a night. You..." He stopped, his jaw working. "I bought Vhagar a custom orthopedic cat bed. It cost more than a human mattress. And you've been sleeping on a cot."
"To be fair, Vhagar is a very spoiled cat."
"Vhagar is a member of the family. So are you."
You stared at him. He stared back, his chest rising and falling a little too fast, his hands clenched at his sides.
"I didn't mean..." he started.
"Aemond."
"I meant it," he said, quieter now. "I know it's too soon to say things like that. I know we've only just...but I meant it. You've been part of my life for months now. You've taken care of my cat, you've taken care of me and you've done all of it without asking for anything in return, and the whole time you've been going home to a foldable bed and a three-year-old glasses prescription and Gods knows what else you haven't told me about." He ran a hand through his hair, disheveling it completely. "It's not acceptable."
"It's my life," you said, but the protest sounded weak even to your own ears. "I've been managing."
"I know you have. You've been managing brilliantly. You've been surviving on very little and making it look easy, and I admire that, I do, but..." He crossed the room and sat down beside you on the couch, close enough that his knee pressed against yours. "But you don't have to anymore. You don't have to manage alone. You have me now. If you want me. I have more resources than I know what to do with, and it would make me genuinely happy to use some of them to make your life easier. Not because I think you can't handle it. Not because I'm trying to buy your affection. Because I care about you and I want you to be comfortable. That's all. That's the whole reason."
You looked down at your hands, twisted together in your lap. "It's embarrassing," you muttered. "Telling you these things. I don't like you knowing how close to the edge I've been living. I don't like feeling like a charity case."
"You're not a charity case. You're the person I've been falling in love with for months."
Your head snapped up. "What?"
"Too soon," he said immediately, a flush creeping up his neck. "That was too soon. Forget I said it."
"You're in love with me?"
"I said forget I said it."
"Aemond."
"I have a habit of becoming attached to people too soon when they don't feel the same. I'm aware of this. I'm working on it."
"You think I don't feel the same?"
He didn't answer, which was an answer in itself. You reached out and took his hand, threading your fingers through his. His grip tightened like he was afraid you might pull away.
"I stayed," you said. "When you had surgery. I stayed when Alys wouldn't even visit. I stayed in your apartment for a week and ate takeout only from approved restaurants and helped you with your vision exercises and eye pains at three in the morning. Does that sound like someone who just tolerates you?"
"I don't know," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know what it sounds like. I'm not good at reading these things. I always assume the worst."
"Then let me be clear." You lifted his hand to your mouth and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, feeling them flex beneath your lips. "I stayed for you."
He pulled his hand from yours, and for a terrible second you thought you'd said something wrong, but then both his hands were cupping your face, tilting it up toward his, and his mouth was on yours.
"I'm going to buy you a mattress," he murmured against your lips.
"Aemond."
"A proper mattress. And new glasses. And whatever else you need. And you're going to let me, because I can't concentrate on kissing you if I'm thinking about the knots in your shoulders."
"That's emotional blackmail."
"It's practical concern."
The optometrist's office was aggressively beige, the kind of institutional neutrality that made you feel like you were inside a waiting room for purgatory. Aemond sat in the chair beside you with rigid posture, his arms crossed and his good eye fixed on the wall chart like it had personally offended him.
"I don't understand why this is taking so long," he said, for the third time in twenty minutes.
"It's an eye exam. They're thorough."
"They're inefficient."
"They're looking at eyeballs. You want them to rush?"
His mouth tightened. "No."
"Then be patient."
"I'm being patient."
When the optometrist finally called your name, Aemond stood up with you. The optometrist glanced between the two of you with professional curiosity.
"Husband?" she asked.
"Something like that," Aemond said before you could answer. The casual possessiveness of it sent warmth blooming through your chest.
You emerged with a new prescription that was significantly stronger than your old one, a trial pair of frames that made the world look unnervingly sharp, and a receipt that Aemond plucked from your hand before you could even look at the total.
"This is mine now," he said.
"It has my name on it."
"Administrative error." He was already walking toward the checkout counter, his long coat sweeping behind him. "Pick out frames."
The shared calendar was your idea.
You'd missed a text from him, three hours buried in a work project, your phone on silent and your attention elsewhere, and when you finally surfaced, there were five messages waiting, each one progressively more restrained in that particular way Aemond got when he was trying not to seem worried.
Checking in.
Hope your day is going well.
Let me know when you're free.
No urgency. Just checking.
I'm sure you're busy. Text when you can.
The last one had been sent two hours ago. You called him immediately, your stomach tight with guilt.
"I'm sorry," you said before he could even say hello. "I was working. My phone was on silent. I didn't mean to disappear."
"I know." His voice was carefully neutral, the way it got when he was trying to hide something. "It's fine. You're allowed to be busy."
"I don't want you to think I'm ignoring you."
"I don't think that."
"Aemond."
A pause. Then, quieter: "I might have thought that. Briefly. But I know it's irrational."
"It's not irrational. We should have a system."
"A system?"
"I'm making a shared calendar. Color-coded. You'll be able to see when I'm working, when I'm free, when I have appointments. That way if I don't answer, you'll know it's because I'm in a meeting, not because I've decided to flee the country."
"That seems like a lot of effort for..."
"Blue is work. Green is free time. Red is appointments. Yellow is maybe-free-but-probably-napping." You sent him the invite link. "Accept it."
He did. A moment later, his voice came back, softer than before. "You're doing this so I won't worry."
"Yes."
"You don't have to manage my anxiety."
"I'm not managing it. I'm working around it." You added a block of blue for the following Monday. "See? Now you know I have a project deadline on Monday morning and won't be reachable until noon."
He was quiet for so long that you checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped. "Aemond?"
"I'm here." His voice was rough. "I'm just not accustomed to people anticipating my needs before I've expressed them."
"Get used to it."
"I'll try."
The first time you had sex, he gave you space afterward.
He wasn't dismissive. He didn't roll over and go to sleep or check his phone or do any of the things people do when they were trying to signal that the encounter was over. But he did get up. He did disappear into the bathroom for what felt like a very long time. And when he came back, he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to you, his shoulders tense, like he was waiting for something.
"Are you okay?" you asked.
He turned. "I was about to ask you the same thing."
"I'm fine. Great, actually. Why are you all the way over there?"
He blinked, his good eye shifting from your face to the rumpled sheets to the bathroom door and back again. "I assumed you'd want space."
"Did I ask for space?"
"No, but..." He stopped. Started again. "In my experience, people usually want space. After. It's an intense experience. I thought you might need time to recalibrate."
You propped yourself up on one elbow, the sheet slipping down your shoulder. "Did Alys want space?"
His jaw tightened. "We're not talking about Alys."
"Okay. Did other people want space?"
"I don't want to talk about other people either."
"I'm just trying to understand. You gave me space. I didn't ask for it. I'm still in your bed. I haven't moved. What does that tell you?"
He looked at you for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then, very slowly, he lay back down beside you. Not touching, but closer than before. His hand rested on the pillow between your heads, palm up, an invitation.
"I'm not good at this part," he murmured. "The after. I never know what's expected of me."
"There's nothing expected. You just stay."
"Just stay."
"Mm-hmm." You reached out and traced the line of his collarbone with your fingertip, feeling the tension in his muscles gradually ease. "And maybe bring me water. I'm thirsty."
He was out of bed before you finished the sentence, returning thirty seconds later with a glass of water and a plate of something that looked like expensive crackers. "You should eat something too. Electrolytes. Protein."
"Did you have snacks prepared?"
"I like to be ready for contingencies."
You took the water and drank half of it in one go. He watched you with an expression that was somewhere between satisfaction and relief, like he'd completed a task correctly and was waiting for feedback.
"Now come back," you said, patting the bed beside you. "You're still too far away."
He came back. He lay down beside you, closer this time, his arm tentatively settling over your waist. When you didn't pull away, he pulled you closer.
"This is okay?" he asked.
"This is perfect."
"I can stay?"
"You can stay as long as you want."
He pressed his mouth to the top of your head and didn't move for a very long time.
The second time, he brought you water and food without being asked, and when you made grabby hands at him from the bed, he climbed back in without hesitation. The third time, he didn't even get up; he just reached over to the nightstand where he'd already placed a glass of water and a small plate of fruit, his foresight so thorough it was almost comical.
"You're getting good at this," you told him, eating a strawberry while sprawled against his chest.
"I'm a quick study."
The fourth time, you woke in the middle of the night to find his arms wrapped around you and his face buried in your hair, holding on even in sleep. You didn't pull away. You pressed closer, fitting yourself into the curve of his body, and he made a sound of contentment so deep you felt it vibrate through your bones.
The thing about Aemond Targaryen was that he didn't know how to do anything by halves.
You'd suspected this early on: the caviar for the cat, the custom leather carrier, the way he'd offered you a weekly retainer instead of just asking if you wanted to grab coffee sometime. But it wasn't until he started reorganizing your kitchen cabinets that you realized the full scope of what you'd signed up for.
"What are you doing?" you asked.
"Your plates are in the wrong cabinet," he said, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to be doing on a Saturday morning in someone else's apartment. "They should be next to the dishwasher for efficient unloading. Also, you have four mismatched mugs and one of them is chipped."
"That's my favorite mug."
"It's a health hazard."
"It's a mug."
He held up the chipped mug, his expression that particular blend of affronted and resolute that you'd come to recognize as his default setting. "You could cut your lip. I'm replacing it."
"You're reorganizing my kitchen."
"The spice rack is also a disaster, but I'm pacing myself."
You leaned against the doorframe and watched him for a moment. He'd already fixed the dripping faucet last week, you'd mentioned it once. Before that, it was the wobbly leg on your coffee table. Before that, the drafty window that he'd re-sealed himself, his sleeves rolled up and his hair falling in his eyes.
"Aemond," you said.
"Hmm?"
"You're acting like you live here."
He paused, a plate in each hand, and turned to look at you. His expression was guarded, the way it got when he wasn't sure if he'd overstepped. "Is that a problem?"
You thought about it. Thought about the way he'd cleared a drawer in his penthouse for your things two weeks ago without asking, just pointed to it and said "yours" like it was the most natural thing in the world. Thought about the way he'd added your work schedule to his own calendar, the blue blocks of your meetings appearing alongside his boardroom appointments. Thought about the way he'd started saying "we" instead of "I" without seeming to notice.
"No," you said. "It's not a problem."
"Good." He went back to the plates. "Your silverware drawer is next."
The key appeared a few days later.
It was on a simple ring, no fuss, no ceremony. He slid it across the kitchen counter toward you while you were eating the breakfast he'd made: poached eggs on toast, because he'd decided your usual breakfast of cold cereal was "nutritionally inadequate" and had taken it upon himself to rectify the situation.
"What's this?" you asked, though you already knew.
"A key. To the penthouse." He wasn't looking at you; he was focused on the eggs, nudging them onto your plate with the precision of a surgeon. "You're there often enough that it makes sense. The doorman knows you, but this is more efficient."
"A key to your apartment."
"Our apartment," he corrected, still not looking at you. "If you want. I know you have your own place. I'm not suggesting you give it up. But you spend most nights at the penthouse anyway, and Vhagar misses you when you're gone, and I..." He stopped, swallowed, started again. "I sleep better when you're there."
You picked up the key. It was warm from his hand. "Our apartment."
"Only if you want."
"Aemond."
He finally looked at you, his jaw set in that particular way it got when he was bracing for rejection. You reached across the counter and took his hand, threading your fingers through his.
"I want," you said.
The tension went out of his shoulders. "Good. That's good. There's also a parking space in the garage if you ever get a car, and I've added you to the building's approved guest list permanently, and there's a form you need to sign for the concierge service..."
"Aemond."
"I'm doing it again."
"You're doing it again."
"I don't know how to take things slowly." He confessed. "I don't know how to do this in stages" He lifted your joined hands and pressed his mouth to your knuckles. "I've already told my mother about you," he said against your skin. "I hope that's not too fast."
Your heart stuttered. "You told your mother?"
"She's been asking why I seem less miserable than usual. I told her it was because of you."
"What did she say?"
"She said she wanted to meet you. I told her you'd probably find that terrifying, and she said that was a reasonable response, and then she asked if you had any dietary restrictions for dinner."
"Dinner," you repeated.
"Sunday dinners are a family tradition. They're usually terrible. My brother will be there, and my sister, and probably my grandfather, who will say something offensive, and my mother will pretend he didn't, and I'll spend the whole evening wanting to leave." He paused. "But it would be better if you were there."
You stared at him. He stared back, his expression so earnest and so anxious and so completely, utterly sincere.
"You want me to meet your entire family at Sunday dinner."
"Not if you're not ready. We can wait. We can do it in stages. I can introduce you to my mother first, separately, or we can start with Helaena, she's the least intimidating, although she'll probably want to show you her insect collection..."
"Aemond."
He stopped. You stood up, walked around the counter, and kissed him. His hands came up to cup your face automatically, his body relaxing into yours like he'd been waiting for this exact reassurance.
"I'll come to Sunday dinner," you said against his mouth.
"You will?"
"Someone has to defend you from your grandfather."
He laughed. "You have no idea what you're signing up for."
Vhagar, for her part, seemed entirely unimpressed with the new living arrangements.
She had accepted your presence in the penthouse with the same regal indifference she'd shown when you found her on the concrete outside your building, which was to say she acknowledged your existence primarily by sleeping on whatever surface you'd just vacated and yelling at you when her food bowl was empty. But Aemond had apparently decided that Vhagar was not just his cat, but their cat, and he referred to her as such with a casualness that made your heart do strange things.
"Vhagar missed you today," he'd say when you walked in the door. "She was waiting for her mother."
"I'm not her mother."
"You found her on the street. You fed her boiled sausages. You introduced her to cardboard boxes. You're her mother."
Vhagar, who had indeed been sitting by the door, meowed and wound herself around your ankles.
"Traitor," you told her.
She blinked slowly and walked toward her food bowl, her message clear.
The first time you heard him say "we should enroll her in something," you thought he was joking.
It was a lazy Sunday morning, the Sunday before the Sunday dinner, in fact, and you were curled up on the couch with coffee and a book while Aemond read the news on his tablet. Vhagar was in her box, which had been upgraded to a deluxe model with a memory foam cushion that Aemond had special-ordered from a pet boutique.
"We should enroll her in something," Aemond said, not looking up from his tablet. "She needs enrichment. Mental stimulation. There's a feline agility course. It's supposed to be excellent. They have an obstacle course and everything."
"She's fifteen years old."
"Age is not a barrier to physical fitness. I read an article."
You set down your coffee and turned to face him fully. "Aemond, you're talking about our cat like she's a toddler who needs extracurriculars."
He looked up from his tablet, his expression completely serious. "She's very intelligent. She needs challenges."
"She needs naps. That's what she needs. Naps and boxes."
"I'm just saying we should consider it."
"We are not enrolling our elderly cat in feline agility."
He looked like he wanted to argue, but Vhagar chose that moment to let out a particularly loud snore from her box, and he deflated slightly. "Fine. But I'm getting her the puzzle feeder."
"The what?"
"It's a bowl with obstacles. She has to solve puzzles to get her food. It promotes cognitive health."
"You're going to make our cat solve puzzles for her dinner."
"She'll enjoy it."
Vhagar snored again. You looked at Aemond. Aemond looked at you.
"She's going to hate it," you said.
"I'm getting it anyway."
He did. Vhagar hated it. She sat in front of the puzzle feeder for ten minutes, staring at it with the particular disdain she usually reserved for Aemond's brother, then knocked it off the counter with one deliberate paw and meowed until Aemond gave her regular bowl back.
"I told you," you said.
"She just needs time to adjust." He looked at Vhagar, who was now eating her caviar from her regular bowl with the air of a queen who had successfully quashed a rebellion. "She's perfect," he said, with such genuine affection that you couldn't bring yourself to tease him about it.
It wasn't just the cat he started sharing with you. He'd schedule his business trips around your availability so Vhagar wouldn't be alone. He'd consult you on decisions that had nothing to do with you: a new investment, a dispute with his brother, whether he should fire a board member who'd made a comment about his eye. He'd listen to your opinion, weighing your words.
"People are going to think we're married," you said one evening, after he'd introduced you to a business associate as "my partner" without a flicker of hesitation.
"Good," he answered.
"That wasn't a suggestion."
"I know." He was making dinner, he'd decided your cooking skills needed improvement and had started giving you what he called "practical demonstrations," which mostly involved you sitting on the counter while he cooked and explained techniques you'd forget immediately. "Is it a problem?"
"People thinking we're married?"
"Mm." He added something to the pan that sizzled and smelled incredible. "I know we haven't discussed it. The future. What this is. But I'm not interested in being casual about you. I don't know how to be casual about anything."
"I've noticed."
"If that's too much..."
"It's not. It's not bad," you said. "It's just fast. You don't do anything by halves."
"I told you. I don't know how."
"I know." You took the pan from his hand and set it on a cold burner, then stepped into his space, your hands resting on his chest. "I'm not complaining. I'm just observing. If I had a problem with it, I'd tell you."
"Would you?"
"Yes. I told you the puzzle feeder was a bad idea."
"That was about the cat."
"This is about us. Same principle." You rose on your toes and kissed him. "I don't mind the husband thing. I don't mind the key or the fact that you've apparently decided Vhagar is our child. I'm still here. I keep staying. What does that tell you?"
He exhaled slowly, his hands settling on your waist. "That you're either very patient or very foolish."
"Or both. Or I love you. Take your pick."
He kissed you again before you could say anything else, his arms wrapping around you and pulling you tight against him.
"We're going to ruin the sauce," you murmured against his mouth.
"I don't care about the sauce."
"You always care about the sauce."
"I care about you more." He said simply, like it was the most obvious truth in the world.
The clock on the nightstand read 12:47 a.m. when you accepted that sleep wasn't coming.
It was the complete absence of sleep, your mind as clear and alert as if it were noon. You'd been lying in the dark for nearly two hours, listening to the distant hum of the city and the steady rhythm of Aemond's breathing beside you, and your body had simply decided that tonight was not a night for unconsciousness.
You turned your head on the pillow. Aemond was on his back, his profile sharp against the dim glow of the city lights filtering through the curtains. In sleep, the perpetual tension in his jaw relaxed, and he looked younger. Softer. Like the man he might have been if the world had been gentler with him.
You watched him for a while. The way his chest rose and fell. The way his fingers twitched occasionally, as if he were reaching for something in his dreams.
Carefully, you leaned over and pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose.
He made a small sound, something between a grunt and a murmur, and his hand moved toward you in his sleep, reaching. You stayed perfectly still until he settled again, his fingers brushing your arm and then going slack.
Your phone was on the nightstand. You picked it up and dimmed the brightness as low as it would go, then opened your reading app. Vhagar, who had been sleeping at the foot of the bed, lifted her head and gave you a look that clearly said why are you awake at this ungodly hour.
"Can't sleep," you whispered.
She blinked slowly and tucked her head back under her tail, dismissing you entirely.
You scrolled through articles you wouldn't remember. Checked the weather. Read half a recipe for something you'd never make. The clock ticked forward: 1:23 a.m. 2:15 a.m. 2:58 a.m. Your eyes didn't feel heavy. Your mind didn't feel foggy. You were as awake as you'd been at breakfast, which was deeply unfair given that you'd done nothing all day except lounge on the couch with Aemond and Vhagar, reading and napping and eating the elaborate lunch he'd decided to make.
A lazy Saturday. That was probably the problem. You hadn't expended enough energy to be tired, and now your body was exacting revenge.
At 3:42 a.m., you heard the first bird. A single tentative chirp, somewhere beyond the windows. By 4:00 a.m., the sky had begun its slow shift from black to charcoal, and the birds were singing, a chorus of tiny optimists announcing a dawn you hadn't earned.
You looked at Aemond. Still asleep. Vhagar hadn't moved.
With exaggerated care, you slid out from under the covers and padded across the bedroom. The balcony door was in the living room, floor-to-ceiling glass that opened onto a terrace overlooking the city. You slipped through the door and into the cool pre-dawn air, pulling it mostly shut behind you so the sound wouldn't carry.
The streets below were nearly empty, the traffic lights cycling through their patterns for no one. The sky was a watercolor wash of gray and pale blue, the first hints of gold bleeding up from the horizon. You leaned your forearms on the railing and let the cold air settle against your skin, your thin sleep shirt doing nothing to keep out the chill.
Maybe this was fine. Maybe you just weren't tired tonight, and that was okay, and you'd be tired tomorrow instead. Maybe you could watch the sunrise and make coffee and let Aemond sleep, and by the time he woke up you'd have been productive, you'd have answered emails or read a book or done something useful with this strange, stolen time.
The cold was starting to seep into your bones. You didn't move.
Behind you, the balcony door opened.
You turned. Aemond stood in the doorway, his hair disheveled and his eyes still heavy with sleep. He was wearing only his pajama pants, his chest bare, and he was looking at you with an expression caught between confusion and concern.
"You're outside," he said, his voice rough.
"I'm getting fresh air."
"It's four in the morning."
"I know. I couldn't sleep."
He processed this for a moment, his good eye blinking slowly. "How long have you been awake?"
"Since we went to bed. I never fell asleep."
"You never..." He stopped, rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, and stepped onto the balcony. The cold hit him immediately; you saw the goosebumps rise on his arms, but he didn't flinch. "It's freezing. You're not even wearing a coat."
"I'm fine."
"You're shivering."
You looked down at your arms. You were shivering, you realized. You hadn't noticed.
"Come inside," he grumbled.
He held the door open and you walked through it, suddenly aware of how cold you'd gotten, how stiff your fingers were, how long you'd been standing out there without moving. The warmth of the apartment wrapped around you like a blanket, and you shivered harder, your body finally registering the temperature change.
Aemond disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the charcoal gray cashmere blanket, the one that smelled like his cologne. He wrapped it around your shoulders, then steered you toward the couch and sat down beside you.
"You've been awake all night?"
"I don't know why. I'm not tired. I didn't have any caffeine. We didn't do anything yesterday, so maybe my body just wasn't ready to sleep."
"That's not how sleep works."
"I know how sleep works. It's just not working on me tonight."
He studied your face for a moment, then reached out and pressed the back of his hand to your forehead, the way you'd seen him do to Vhagar when she was lethargic. "You don't feel warm."
"I'm not sick."
"Stressed?"
"No more than usual."
"Racing thoughts?"
"Not really. I was just…awake. Completely awake. Like my brain decided it was morning."
He leaned back against the couch cushions, his arm coming around your shoulders and pulling you against his side. His skin was still cool from the balcony, but he was warming up quickly. "You should have woken me."
"You were sleeping. You looked peaceful."
"I don't care about peaceful. I care about you." He pressed a kiss to your temple. "Next time, wake me."
"There might not be a next time. This has never happened before."
"Then it's even more important that you wake me. If something unusual is happening, I want to know."
You didn't argue. You leaned into him and let the blanket cocoon you both. Vhagar wandered out of the bedroom, meowed once at the sight of both humans on the couch, and jumped up to settle on Aemond's lap.
"It's almost six," Aemond said quietly.
"I know."
"Still not tired?"
You took stock of your body. Your eyes didn't feel heavy. Your limbs didn't feel leaden. Your brain was still chugging along at full speed, cataloging the sounds of the morning, the texture of the blanket, the warmth of his arm around you.
"No," you admitted. "I don't know what's wrong with me."
"Nothing's wrong with you. Your circadian rhythm is temporarily disrupted." He said it with the confidence of someone who had definitely read several articles on the subject. "It happens. We can fix it."
"How?"
"Melatonin. I have some in the bathroom."
You shook your head. "I don't want to take anything."
"It's not a drug. It's a hormone your body produces naturally."
"I know what melatonin is. I still don't want to take it." You didn't know why you were being stubborn about this. Maybe because sleeping was supposed to be a natural thing, something your body just did, and the idea of forcing it felt like admitting defeat. "I'll just stay up. I'll be tired tonight."
"You have work tomorrow. You can't go to work on no sleep."
"I'll manage."
"You'll be miserable."
"I've been miserable before."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted, gently displacing Vhagar, who meowed in protest and relocated to the armchair.
"There are other ways to induce drowsiness," his voice had dropped into a lower register.
"Like what?"
His hand found your knee under the blanket, his thumb tracing slow circles against the bare skin. "Physical exertion. Relaxation. A combination of both."
It took your sleep-deprived brain a moment to catch up. When it did, you felt heat rise in your cheeks. "Are you offering to tire me out?"
"I'm offering to help." His hand slid higher. "Unless you'd rather try counting sheep."
"I don't think sheep are going to work."
"No," he agreed, and leaned in to kiss you.
His hand came up to cup your jaw, tilting your head to deepen the angle, and you made a small sound against his lips.
"Let me take you back to bed," he murmured.
"I'm not tired."
"I know. That's the point."
He stood and offered you his hand. You took it and let him pull you to your feet, the blanket sliding off your shoulders. He led you back to the bedroom, his fingers laced through yours.
"Lie down," he said.
You did. The sheets were still warm from his body, and the pillow smelled like him. He stretched out beside you, propped on one elbow, and looked down at you with an expression that was equal parts tenderness and intent.
He kissed you again, deeper this time, and his hand slid under your sleep shirt to rest against your stomach. His palm was warm, his touch firm but gentle, and you arched into it without thinking.
"Relax," he murmured against your mouth. "This isn't a race. We have time."
He took his time. His mouth traced a path from your lips to your jaw to the hollow of your throat, lingering at each stop like he was memorizing the taste of your skin. His hand moved higher, his thumb brushing the underside of your breast, and you gasped.
"Still not tired?" he asked, and you could hear the smile in his voice.
"Not even a little."
"Good. I'd hate to think I was boring you."
He pulled your shirt over your head and tossed it aside, then his mouth was on your collarbone, your sternum, the curve of your breast. His tongue traced a slow circle around your nipple, and your hips bucked involuntarily.
"Aemond."
"Mm." He didn't lift his head. "I like when you say my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're already halfway gone." He moved to your other breast, giving it the same thorough attention, and your fingers tangled in his hair. "Let go. I've got you."
He worked his way down your body. His mouth on your ribs. His tongue tracing the line of your hip. His fingers hooking into the waistband of your pajama shorts and sliding them down your legs. By the time his mouth found the inside of your thigh, you were trembling, your hands fisted in the sheets.
"Please," you breathed.
"Please what?"
"Please...I need..."
"I know what you need." He pressed a kiss to the crease of your thigh, maddeningly close to where you wanted him. "I'm getting there."
He got there. When his mouth finally found you, your back arched off the bed and you made a sound that was half moan, half sob. His hands held your hips steady, his tongue moving in slow, precise strokes that had you climbing higher and higher until you weren't thinking about sleep or birds or the strange wakeful night, you weren't thinking about anything at all except the heat of his mouth and the pressure building at the base of your spine.
"Come for me," he murmured against you, and you did, your body arching and shuddering and finally going limp against the mattress.
He kissed his way back up your body, pressing his lips to your stomach, your ribs, the valley between your breasts. When he reached your mouth, you could taste yourself on his tongue.
"Tired now?" he asked.
"Mmph."
"That's not a word."
"Tired," you managed. "Very tired. Your fault."
"My plan worked, then." He pulled the covers up over both of you and settled beside you, his arm wrapping around your waist.
You wanted to say something: thank you, or I love you, or you're absurdly good at that, but your mouth wouldn't cooperate. The drowsiness that had eluded you all night was rolling over you in waves, heavy and warm and irresistible. You tucked your face against his chest and let your eyes fall closed.
The left side of the bed was the problem.
You'd established the sleeping arrangement early on: you on the right, Aemond on the left. It made sense. His left eye was blind, and having you on his right meant you were always in his field of vision. When he woke up in the morning, you were the first thing he saw: your face on the pillow beside him.
He loved that. He loved it more than he knew how to say. He'd spent so many years waking up to an empty bed, to silence and solitude and the cold knowledge that no one was waiting for him. Now he woke up to you, warm and real and there, and it felt like a gift.
But the bed was vast, king-sized. And you were a restless sleeper, prone to migrating across the mattress in the night, chasing dreams or warmth or whatever invisible thing pulled you from one side to the other.
The first time it happened, Aemond woke up to an empty right side of the bed and felt his heart stop.
He was still half-asleep, his brain sluggish with the remnants of whatever dream he'd been having. His hand reached out automatically, searching for you, and found only cold sheets. The pillow beside him was empty. The space where you should have been was vacant.
Panic hit him.
He sat up so fast his head spun, his right eye scanning the room, the bathroom door, the path to the living room. Were you gone? Had you left? Had something happened, some emergency, some...
He turned, twisting his whole body to compensate for his blind left side, and there you were.
You were on the far left edge of the mattress, practically falling off, one arm dangling over the side. You'd migrated across the entire bed in your sleep, a journey that had left him alone on his side and you precariously balanced on his bad side, completely out of his sight.
He exhaled, his heart still hammering. Then he reached over and pulled you back toward the center of the bed. You made a sleepy sound of protest but didn't wake, your body curling automatically toward his warmth.
"Don't do that," he whispered to your sleeping form. "Don't go where I can't see you."
You didn't answer. You were already dreaming again.
After that, it became a recurring problem. Not every night, most nights you stayed on your side, draped over him or curled against his shoulder, but often enough that he developed a morning ritual: wake up, check right side, panic briefly if the right side was empty, twist around to check the left side, exhale in relief when he found you there.
He hated the split-second of terror when he thought you were gone, the way his body remembered all those years of waking up alone and assumed the worst.
"I'm sorry," you said one morning, after you'd woken up to find him staring at you with an expression of barely-concealed relief. "I did it again, didn't I?"
"You were on the left side."
"I don't even remember moving."
"You never remember moving. You sleep like a migrating whale."
"A whale?"
"A very graceful whale. With excellent sleeping habits aside from the migration."
You sat up, rubbing your eyes. "Does it bother you? The left side thing?"
He hesitated. "It's not your fault. You're asleep. You can't control it."
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at you, at your sleep-rumpled hair and your concerned expression, and felt the familiar urge to deflect, to minimize, to pretend it didn't matter. But this was you, and you'd told him he was allowed to want things, and so he told the truth.
"I don't like it," he admitted. "When I wake up and you're not on my right side. I can't see you. I have to search for you. And for a moment, I think..." He stopped, swallowed. "I think you're gone."
"Gone where?"
"Just gone. Left. Disappeared." He tried to make it sound casual, but it came out strained. "I know it's irrational. I know you wouldn't leave without telling me. But I spent a very long time waking up alone, and my brain hasn't caught up to the fact that I don't have to anymore."
You reached for him, your hand cupping his cheek. "I'm not going anywhere."
"I know. I just want you to stay where I can see you."
"Then I'll try harder. Maybe I can build a pillow barrier or something."
"A pillow barrier."
"To keep me from rolling. Like a bumper lane at a bowling alley."
"That's absurd."
"So is waking up in a panic because your girlfriend rolled over. We're both absurd."
He couldn't argue with that. So he let you build your pillow barrier, a long bolster that ran down the center of the bed, theoretically preventing you from crossing into his blind spot. It worked about half the time. The other half, you somehow circumvented it in your sleep, climbing over or burrowing under or simply teleporting to the other side in a way that defied physics.
"You're a witch," he said on one of those mornings, after finding you on the left side despite the barrier. "That's the only explanation."
"I'm a very tired witch who needs coffee."
"I'll make coffee. You stay on the right side."
"I'm not even asleep anymore."
"Still. Stay."
You stayed. You stayed on the right side of the bed, and on the right side of his body, and in the right place for him to see you every morning when he opened his eyes. It was such a small thing, really, which side of the bed you slept on. But it mattered to him.
The morning after the pillow barrier failed for the third time, you woke up before him. You were on the right side, your head on his shoulder, your hand on his chest.
When he woke up a few minutes later, his eye opened and found you immediately. You watched the moment of recognition cross his face: the relief, the softening, the way his whole body relaxed when he confirmed that you were still there.
a/n: Liked the fic? You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3
addict!Aemond modern!Daemon (no slash, just Daemon being a dad to his brother's incredibly horribly behaved adult son)
warning: drug abuse, substance abuse, organ trafficking, non-consensual taking of organs, hospitals, medical procedures, mentions of suicide and self-harm behavior, read at your own risk
summary: In which Aemond disappears for three years only to be found face down in a canal after putting his truck through the guardrail on the interstate.
And of course, Daemon is his emergency contact, put down in a frenzy when Aemond was ten and lost his eye.
Now he is 26 and in so much more trouble than simply fighting pneumonia in the ICU, for drugs are not cheap and men get angry when their money is not paid back on time.
As Daemon uncovers Aemond's three-year hiatus, things begin to take a disturbing turn for the worst when Aemond is discovered with a fresh surgical site and down a kidney.
And oh yeah Alicent will not stop blowing up his phone and Rhaenyra just served him divorce papers.
This is really shaping up to be the Tuesday from hell, and that was before Aemond pranced into the parking lot, buck ass naked and got hit by a Honda Civic.
He's gonna need something stronger than vending machine coffee.
********
chapter five: in which Daemon yells at a doctor and Aemond takes a swing and a miss
**********
“You weren’t supposed to know about this.”
It feels like glass shattering against his chest, like the fragile hope for some type of reconciliation has been ripped from his hands once again to gash at his heart as Aemond flashes a quick glare in his direction before looking away again.
“What, how would you rather I have learned?” he snaps. “Perhaps when I got a call from the morgue that your body had been found?” the irritation in his voice smothering the hurt the only way he knows how; with an angry flash of his eyes and a clench of his jaw.
Aemond flinches away from his tone, shoulders coming up around his ears, and he sighs, pausing to gather his thoughts and calm his tone. Aemond cannot take his anger at this moment, that can come later, much later if the sheer number of IV lines in Aemond’s arms are anything to go by.
He pulls a beige looking chair to the side of the bed, the weird plasticky feel of the fabric squeaking gently against his jeans as he sits down heavily, suddenly feeling older than the forty-five he liked to lie about in the bars late at night when the beer was good and the girls got sloppy.
He reaches for Aemond’s hand, but Aemond pulls it away, sluggishly adjusting himself against the pillows and he again feels a stab of hurt as his fingers close on the space where Aemond’s hand had rested against the rail.
Always a step behind, always chasing while Aemond was always running, even when his legs had been knocked out from under him and he could do nothing else but crawl.
Still, he evaded him, as though he could by some sheer force of will outmaneuver the people who loved him and cared for him so that he might run straight back into arms that fed him drugs and cut little pieces of him away until there was nothing left to even discard.
“Aemond, I-“
“Don’t okay” Aemond mumbles, eye flicking away from him to stare at the wall. “I said stuff I didn’t mean because everything hurt, and I was confused and I was just…talking circles. That’s all. It didn’t mean anything, I still fucking hate you.”
Ah yes; back to that old familiar script, polished and rehearsed until he could fire off the words like they were his own, even though they both knew it was the opposite.
Aemond says it like he thinks he will actually fool him, like he doesn’t look small and so much like the seventeen-year-old who got thrown in county lock up for the first time, angry and defiant but fearful and unsure under all the blustering bravado.
His hair is dyed; badly. The cheap black looks green in some places and slightly muddy in others, the stark hospital lighting probably not helping matters much. His layers were choppy, ragged and wispy, as though he had taken scissors to his hair in the depths of some drug induced fit.
Or, he thinks dully, someone cut it for him so that he might not be as noticeable crossing the southern border; silver hair ran in the family and while it was a source of pride, it was anything but discreet and would have had to be covered so as to not draw the second glance of some hapless border agent.
He imagines the hands that buried themselves in Aemond’s hair, the dirt gathered in a thick crust under stained fingers as they savagely yanked on Aemond’s scalp and made him whimper and whine, bent over some grimy sink in a sleazy gas station bathroom as soft bunches of silver fell to the floor around him.
Feathers yanked from a bird’s delicate wings, the raw patches stinging with every swipe of dye.
He wants to say something soothing, to calm Aemond and let him know he is safe, that whatever horror he endured before all this can be cast away to become nothing but a distant bad dream, but the angry purple track marks visible against Aemond’s pale skin and the echoing linger of Elinda’s earlier words seem to posses him and the you came back to me dies on his lips as he instead reaches for the familiar anger that Aemond had come to expect from him.
“Aemond there were horse tranquilizers in your system” he says, his voice catching on the last word as horror surges up at the violence of the bruising around Aemond’s elbows. “You were drugged. Like an animal.”
“So?” Aemond shoots back sullenly, reaching over to pick at the tape securing his IV. The rattle of the handcuff against the bed rails stopping him cold and he rolls his eye in indignation.
“Those fucking pricks got me chained to the bed like I’m a felon.”
“Aemond, you are a felon” he says tiredly, reaching up to scrub at his eyes, he winces as his eyes sting at the intrusion. He has not slept and he knows he will probably not be likely to get a nap in for some time. “There is a file sitting in the county sheriffs’ office right now with your name on it that is several inches thick.”
“Okay, and? The system is fucked, I was exercising my free will, the government only exists to police bodies when it benefits them.”
He barks out a laugh, “those are some mighty high claims for you to be making, spoken like a truly privileged member of a society that only seeks to keep you from overdosing in some crack house and then being sold for parts.”
Aemond turns to look at him finally and his lips curl in a nasty grin, a maniacal gleam in his eye that he knows all too well when Aemond wants to be cruel, “would you rather I had then?”
“No, Aemond that’s not-that’s not what I meant.” His hand comes up to massage the bridge of his nose, and he belatedly wonders which intern he can bribe with a twenty to get him some medical grade Tylenol, the good stuff not the weak as piss over the counter shit that never seemed to make a dent in his migraines.
“Oh, but it is, isn’t it?” Aemond hisses, the oxygen cannula in his nose tugging violently on raw inflamed skin as Aemond surges up on shaking arms, “a neat and tidy end for the felon, for the addict.”
“Aemond” he warns, fear beginning to creep along his spine as the myriad of bedside alarms tangled in Aemond’s arms and chest begin to chirp.
But Aemond doesn’t stop, head weaving slightly as he fights to train his eye on him, “poor, poor Daemon, such a waste of a perfectly good nephew. But no matter” Aemond’s voice takes on a cheerful tone; fake, brittle, hooked at the ends like a fishhook and he the bass that took the bait and wound up with a barb in his cheek. “You have plenty of good kids you never have to worry about. That perfect fucking bitch ass Jace and his saint of a brother, never can do any wrong.”
“Aemond, stop” he cries, launching out of the chair, as Aemond’s eye suddenly rolls back again and his body goes rigid.
He’s grabbing the boy before he goes down again, screaming for the nurse as he lowers Aemond down to the mattress, holding his arms as Aemond jerks and bucks and makes breathy half choked noises that sound like he’s drowning.
“Please, stop” he’s begging, he doesn’t know who he is begging per say, only that when foamy spit begins to trickle from Aemond’s mouth and spill down his chin he’s crying again.
He would be embarrassed, he thinks, humiliated even; but he has neither the wherewithal nor the energy to give a shit about any of that and simply lets himself sob as a stampede of nurses comes charging around the corner and someone yanks him away from the bedside.
“Push Keppra and get the fucking doctor on the phone, now!” an older blonde nurse says, laying Aemond on his side, her hands cradling the back of his head and gently pushing his lines out of the way.
She carefully pulls his hair out of his mouth and then curses when a sudden trickle of bright red blood leaves Aemond’s mouth and stains the sheets, “damn it he bit his tongue. Where the fuck is Doctor Strong?”
He gapes, “Harwin?” He steps toward the nurse, “Harwin Strong?”
The nurse looks back at him over her glasses, a disapproving look in her eyes that softens slightly as he backs toward his place by the wall.
“Yes. You know him?” she asks tersely, turning back to watch another nurse inject two syringes into Aemond’s IV line.
“Fuck, yeah” he says, eyes trained on Aemond as his shaking begins to let up. He doesn’t let out the breath he was holding until Aemond finally goes slack, head collapsed against the pillow, fingers still slightly twitching.
“He’s uh, my wife’s first husband. I think-“ he steps forward shouldering his way to the bed as Aemond’s eyelid cracks open, a bloodshot eye dizzily sweeping the room before closing again. He kneels by the bed, face level with Aemond’s and strokes a hand along the sharp line of Aemond’s cheek. “I think my wife is getting back with him, I kinda cheated on her with a girl at a bar.”
“Mhm” the older nurse grunts, sweeping Aemond’s lines out of the way so she can adjust his arm, “that sounds like an issue I do not want to hear about.”
He startles slightly, looking up at her with a wounded expression but she simply shrugs. “I am not paid enough to do my job as is, I am not adding free emotional labor to a man who doesn’t know how to keep it in his pants to my quite frankly staggering list of things that need to be done.”
“I was just-“
“Daemon? Daemon Targaryen?”
“Oh, for the love of fucking god” he whispers under his breath as all six foot whatever of Rhaenyra’s first husband comes striding in like he owns the place.
“What-what is this? What happened?” Harwin’s eyebrows furrow as he takes the clipboard from the nurse as she leaves the room and stalks down the hall with a scowl that could crack concrete.
He doesn’t answer, everything feels so far away and the rushing in his ears seems to reach a fever pitch as he looks down at Aemond’s matted hair. Nothing seems real, save the oily slick of Aemond’s hair and the half rasping breathes he struggles to draw into his chest.
Daemon
How long, he wonders, had Aemond nursed this animosity toward his family?
Daemon
How long has Aemond been so adrift within his head that he cannot even allow himself to be held when he’s so obviously hurting?
“Daemon!”
He blinks, hard.
“Huh?”
Harwin is watching him from where he stands on the other side of Aemond’s bed, eyes worried and concerned.
He sneers, ripping his gaze away as Aemond begins to stir under his hand.
“M’-fu ff” Aemond mumbles, swatting feebly at his hand.
Harwin’s gaze latches onto Aemond as he gently reaches for Aemond’s wrist to look at his hospital bracelet. “This needs to updated, his chart shows a penicillin allergy and I’m not seeing that on here.”
Aemond groans and jerks his hand toward the oxygen cannula, “off.”
Harwin gently catches Aemond’s hand, “hey let’s leave that alone, okay? Do you know where you are?”
Aemond blinks, “hopital.”
Harwin nods, “close enough.”
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Fuck off” Aemond groans, burying his head under the pillow.
Harwin chews his lips, reaching into his pocket for a pen as he glances at Aemond’s chart again.
“Aemond, what year is it?”
“Mhm.”
“Who’s the president?”
“Obama.”
“Ah I wish, kid. But no unfortunately. It’s Donald Trump.”
Aemond’s brows furrow as he pulls his head out from under the pillow slightly, “still?”
“Again, I’m afraid” Harwin answers, his lips twitching in a slight smile.
“Mh, that sucks” Aemond says and slides his head back under the pillow.
“That’s good right?” he asks, turning to watch Harwin as he scribbles notes on Aemond’s chart, a chart that he realizes is rather thick; he catches a glimpse of red highlighted words and bold block letters, but his eyes are blurry from lack of sleep and he still does not know where he put his glasses.
Probably back at the house being chewed on by Caraxes, that dog had an irritating ability to grab things he knew he shouldn’t and then proudly display the remnants of whatever household object he had mangled like a war prize on his bed.
Harwin looks at him over the top of the clipboard. “Um. Well, it’s too early to know exactly…”
“Oh, don’t fucking lie” he spits out, the long night finally catching up to him as he pushes himself to his feet. “Listen I know you are feeling rather pleased with yourself because of the divorce and all that, but I’m really not here to talk to you about that.”
Harwin says nothing just bends down to gently thumb back Aemond’s eyelid before Aemond sluggishly slaps his hand away.
“And I know you probably think I’m the bad guy, and I’m the fuck up and all that fucking shit, but listen here-“
“Daemon” Harwin says gently, “no one was talking about the divorce but you. I need you to focus right now because I have three cops in the hallway outside that are waiting for me to update them on his condition because they need a statement from him.”
He shoots a quick glance toward the brightly lit hallway, the sound of boots scuffing the linoleum and the quiet crackle of handhelds making him nervous for reasons he doesn’t understand.
“He can’t-he can’t be interviewed right now, look at him” he gestures at the bed where Aemond has pulled the blanket almost over his head, “he’s barely coherent.”
“I know” Harwin agrees, “but nonetheless they need pictures of his eye and the surgical site where his kidney was taken so they can open a case file on him. It needs to be on the DA’s desk by tomorrow morning, I need to let their forensics guy in here.”
“No!” he says, sharply enough that Aemond whimpers beneath the covers.
“Listen, I don’t like this any more than you do, but I have to let them work” Harwin says, his voice strained as he reaches up to rub at his temples, “I will need you to stand back and give the photographer space, they can’t have you in frame at all.”
“No one is touching him” he snarls, stepping back toward the bed as he leans over Aemond’s body, “you can tell those cops in the hallway to stick their fucking cameras and all that shit up their asses. Aemond’s not being touched by anyone tonight, I forbid it.”
“Morning.”
“What?”
Harwin exhales, “it’s morning.” He raises his arm, pulling his coat sleeve up to peer at a sleek black Apple watch. “Three ten in the morning, to be exact.”
“Oh.”
Harwin reaches for his sleeve as a small man balding at the temples and crown enters the room, nervously flicking a glance at him as he shifts his camera between his palms.
“Is this, the uh…the dude?” the man asks.
“What the fuck do you think, guy?” he snaps, yanking his arm away from Harwin and stepping toward the smaller man teeth bared, “so help me God get the fuck away from him!”
“Daemon!” Harwin hisses and he’s dragged back against the wall again. “Stop it and let the man do his fucking job!”
He glares at the man but doesn’t make a move to push Harwin off and the man takes that as a sort of sign that he can continue.
And of course, the second the man pulls the covers back to get at Aemond’s wound site, Aemond sits bolt upright and screams, a sound so raw and gut wrenching he jerks in Harwin’s hold.
“GET OFF ME, NO NO! STOP NO” Aemond cries, swinging an uncoordinated fist at the tech, the metal handcuff rattling on the bed rails with a loud clang as the man dances back with a yelp.
“Aemond, stop” he jerks himself away from Harwin and before he can get grabbed again, he shoves the tech away from the bed, thrusting the man away by the flaps of his jacket as he puts himself between the now irate man and the bed. He blindly reaches a hand back, trying to keep Aemond from launching himself off the bed and ripping his lines out again, and Aemond, in his panic reaches back, his grip shaking and too tight as he dissolves into great wracking sobs that echo off the walls.
He cannot help the surge of relief he feels when Aemond’s hand closes on his own, can’t help the stuttering affection that rises within him as Aemond bends his head forward and rests it on his arm, hot tears running down his face to wet his sleeve.
“Get out” he growls, and the tech opens his mouth to argue, flicking his gaze back and forth between Aemond and him.
“Listen, I’m just-“
“I said” he snaps, “get out.”
Harwin steps forward and gently takes the tech by his elbow, “hey, um. Let’s step out in the hallway for a minute, here please? My patient just had another seizure, and he is not ready for any stimulation right now.”
The man blusters, going red in the face, “this is unprofessional, that kid is fucking feral and needs a muzzle!”
Harwin nods sympathetically, “please, just come with me and I’ll get this all sorted out, okay?”
The tech rolls his eyes but lets himself be guided back out into the hallway, Harwin shooting him a dirty look over his shoulder as he does so. “You and I will have words when I get back” Harwin says, and he just shrugs as he turns back to Aemond.
“I told him not to touch my boy and I fucking meant it.”
“I’m not your boy” Aemond says quietly as the room settles and once again the steady beeping of the machines fills the silence. He lifts his arm unsteadily to wipe his nose on the edge of his arm, sniffling as his tears begin to slow.
“You are now” he says, and crouches down so that he can pull Aemond into him, sliding his hand around the back of Aemond’s head and bringing his head to rest on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, you have felt this way for this long, but you must trust me. People are going to come in here with preconceived biases about you because of your arrest record and your drug usage. You have to tell me what happened, Aemond. Please, let me help you.”
Aemond stiffens at first, resisting his hold, but as he speaks Aemond melts into his hold and soon enough his face is pressed against his shoulder.
“You know, who the Shephard is?” Aemond asks finally, voice small and afraid.
His stomach seems to drop right down to his shoes, “oh, Aemond. Oh fuck.”
Summary: You find a missing cat that belongs to a certain Targaryen. During the time which takes you to find the owner, Vhagar becomes attached to you, so now Aemond must deal with sharing her with you.
a/n: I had this in my drafts waiting for Aemond to come back in the show and him down and his dragon flying away was perfect for this!
The first time you saw Vhagar, she was a lump of storm clouds curled against the concrete base of your building, so still you almost mistook her for a discarded sweater. It was late autumn, that particular gray hour when the sun gives up and the streetlights haven’t quite decided to take over, and you were fumbling for your keys with cold-stiff fingers when the lump moved.
Not a sweater. A cat. A massive, ancient-looking cat the color of woodsmoke and iron, with a face like a disappointed dowager countess who had seen empires rise and fall. Her fur was thick and slightly ruffled, the way old velvet gets when it’s been stored wrong, and she was watching you with enormous yellow-green eyes that seemed to hold entire centuries in their depths.
“Hello,” you said, because you were the kind of person who talked to animals automatically, even when they looked at you like that.
The cat opened her mouth and yowled.
It wasn’t a meow. It wasn’t even a proper cat sound. It was a declaration, a demand, a rusty hinge of a noise that seemed to ask where you had been and why you hadn’t brought tribute. She stood up, stretched with the deliberate slowness of a creature that had never needed to hurry for anyone, and padded directly toward you.
“Do you belong to someone here?” you asked, looking at the entrance to your apartment building. The cat wound herself around your ankles with surprising force for something so elderly, nearly knocking you off balance. Her fur was cold from the outside air, and when you bent down to touch her, you felt the frail architecture of age beneath the thick coat, shoulder blades too prominent, a spine like a string of beads.
She had a collar. Good leather, emerald green, with what looked like real gold hardware. But there was no tag. No phone number. No name.
“Someone’s looking for you,” you murmured, scratching behind one ragged ear. The cat closed her eyes and leaned into your hand with the air of someone accepting their due. “Come on, then. Let’s get you inside.”
You opened the door and she walked in ahead of you like she owned the place, which was probably how she walked into every room she’d ever entered. The lobby was empty. You expected her to head for one of the apartment doors on the ground floor, to indicate somehow where she lived, but instead she sat down in the exact center of the lobby and began grooming her flank with the meticulous disdain of someone who had been terribly inconvenienced.
“Right,” you said. “Not helpful.”
You waited. The cat groomed. The elevator went up and came back down empty. Someone’s mail was sticking out of box 3B. The radiators clanked.
“Okay,” you said finally. “I have to go up. If you’re still here tomorrow, we’ll figure something out.”
She paused mid-lick to give you a look that said she had never been dismissed in her life and wasn’t about to start now.
She was still there when you got back from work the next day. Not in the lobby, outside again, on the same patch of concrete, curled into the exact same shape as if she’d never moved. The November dark had settled in thick and cold, her fur was beaded with the beginnings of frost, it made your chest clench.
“Absolutely not,” you told her, scooping her up before you could think better of it. She was heavier than she looked, a dense warm weight in your arms, and she made a sound like a creaking door as you carried her inside. “You’re coming upstairs. You’re eating something. We’re figuring out who you belong to.”
She didn’t struggle. She settled against your shoulder like she’d been doing this for a thousand years, her purr starting up low and rough like a motor that hadn’t been run in a while. Her claws kneaded gently into your coat, catching on the wool.
Your apartment was small. One bedroom, a galley kitchen, a living room that doubled as a dining room that doubled as an office. The cat surveyed it from the threshold with an expression you could only describe as politely appalled.
“It’s not much,” you said defensively, setting her down. “But it’s warm.”
She sniffed the baseboard. She investigated the corner where the radiator met the wall. She walked into the kitchen and sat down in front of the refrigerator with the clear expectation that it would open for her.
“What do you even eat?” you muttered, opening the fridge and scanning your meager contents. You didn’t have cat food. You didn’t have anything that seemed cat-appropriate. But you did have milk, and you did have a package of those cheap hot dogs from a supermarket.
“This is probably terrible for you,” you said, boiling one anyway and cutting it into small pieces, pouring a bowl of milk. “But you look like you’ve survived worse.”
She ate like she’d never seen food before. She drank the milk in laps. She looked up at you with a milk-white mustache on her gray muzzle and made a sound that resembled approval.
“You’re welcome,” you said, and sat down on the floor beside her.
You put up posters in the neighborhood: FOUND CAT, with a photo that didn’t do her justice and your phone number at the bottom. You posted in the local lost pet groups. You took her to a vet to check for a microchip, but there was nothing, which the vet found strange given the obvious quality of her collar.
“This is full-grain Italian leather,” the vet said, turning the collar over in her hands. “And the hardware is eighteen-karat gold plated. Someone spent a lot of money on this cat.”
“But no tag,” you said.
“But no tag,” the vet agreed. “Some people just assume their animals will never get out. Especially indoor cats. How’s she been eating?”
“Everything,” you said. “Anything. I gave her the crusts from my grilled cheese yesterday and she acted like it was a five-star meal.”
The vet laughed. “At her age, that’s a good sign. She’s healthy, just old. Very old. Probably fifteen, maybe older. Keep doing what you’re doing.”
So you did. You bought proper cat food eventually, the decent mid-range kind from the grocery store, and she ate it with the same enthusiasm she’d shown for the hot dogs and the milk and the leftover tuna salad. She slept on your bed every night. She sat in the window and watched the street below. You started calling her Lady, for lack of anything better, she ignored it with the same regal indifference she showed to everything else.
“You’re someone’s, aren’t you?” you said one evening, scratching under her chin while she purred like a broken generator. “Someone filthy rich.”
She closed her eyes and leaned into your hand, offering no answers.
You found the flyer on a Tuesday morning in early December, taped to a lamppost two blocks from your work office. The paper was thick and slightly glossy, the kind of paper that cost money, and the photo printed on it was clearly professional, the same gray cat, the same yellow-green eyes, but photographed against a dark background with studio lighting that made her look like a painting.
MISSING: VHAGAR, the flyer read. $7,000 REWARD FOR SAFE RETURN.
There was a phone number. That was all. No name. Just the cat’s name, the reward, and a number.
Vhagar. You tested the name in your mouth as you walked home, the flyer clutched in your cold hand. It sounded ancient. Mythological. Exactly the kind of name someone would give a cat who wore eighteen-karat gold on her collar and had professional photographs taken of her.
“Your name is Vhagar,” you told the cat when you got home. She was sprawled across your pillow in a pose of magnificent indolence, one paw draped over her eyes. At the sound of the name, her tail twitched. “That’s you, isn’t it? Vhagar.”
She lifted her head and looked at you, and for the first time since you’d found her, she let out a proper meow, short and declarative, as if to say finally, you’ve figured it out.
You sat down on the edge of your bed. Seven thousand dollars. That was two months of rent. That was the dental work you’d been putting off. That was breathing room, actual breathing room, the kind you hadn’t had since you’d moved to this city with its brutal rents and its casual cruelties and its complete indifference to whether you sank or swam.
But it wasn’t the money that made you pull out your phone. It was the way she’d been shivering on the concrete. The way someone had loved her enough to buy her that collar and take those photos and offer seven thousand dollars no questions asked, but not enough to put a tag on her. Not enough to think she might ever leave.
You typed the number into your phone before you could talk yourself out of it.
He answered on the second ring.
“Yes.”
Not hello. Not who is this. Just yes, flat and dry as old paper, a voice that expected the world to get to the point and not waste his time.
“Hi,” you said, suddenly aware that you hadn’t planned what to say. “I’m calling about the cat. The flyer. Vhagar. I think I have her.”
A pause. Just long enough to make you check if the call had dropped.
“Proof,” the voice said. “Send me proof.”
“What kind of...“
“A video that shows she’s alive and unharmed and actually in your possession.”
The demand was clipped, almost cold, and you felt a spike of irritation. You were doing him a favor. You could have kept the cat. You could have ignored the flyer entirely. But you swallowed your pride because seven thousand dollars was seven thousand dollars, and you’d already decided.
“Do you have Whatsapp or something with this number?” you asked, “I’ll send a video.”
He said yes and hung up without saying goodbye.
“Charming,” you muttered to the cat. Vhagar yawned, showing a pink mouth.
You recorded a thirty-second video of Vhagar on your bed, demonstrating that she was indeed alive and unharmed and being gently scratched behind the ears by someone who was not a cat thief. You sent it to the number. Thirty seconds later, your phone buzzed.
That’s her. Where can we meet?
You looked up the name attached to the number, of course. You weren’t stupid. You were about to meet a stranger from the internet to return a cat worth seven thousand dollars, and you wanted to know what you were walking into.
His name was Aemond Targaryen. The social media profile that came up was locked down tight: private, no profile picture, just the name and a cover photo of what looked like a dragon from some fantasy series. You scrolled anyway, finding nothing, until you thought to try LinkedIn.
His LinkedIn profile was not private.
The photo hit you first: a man in his twenties, maybe, with sharp cheekbones and jawlines like cut glass and hair so pale it was almost silver, pulled back from his face. He was wearing a dark suit and looking slightly to the left of the camera with an expression of controlled impatience, like he’d been forced to sit for the photograph and was counting the seconds until he could leave.
Below the photo was a wall of text. Degrees. Certifications. Projects. Internships at companies you’d seen on the news. A master’s degree. A bachelor’s from some private university in Oldtown. Fluent in four languages. Currently serving as Vice President of Strategic Operations at Targaryen Industries, which a quick search revealed to be a multinational conglomerate dealing in everything from real estate to renewable energy to defense contracting.
Old money. Very, very old money. The kind of money that had its own Wikipedia page and several unflattering investigative journalism pieces.
“You belong to him?” you asked Vhagar, who had climbed onto your laptop keyboard and was slowly erasing several paragraphs of an email you’d been drafting. “You belong to a billionaire’s son with a dragon fixation and cheekbones that could cut glass?”
Vhagar purred smugly and stepped on the delete key.
The meeting place was outside a high-rise in city center that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated poor people. All black glass and angular steel, a lobby visible through the ground-floor windows that contained more marble than the average museum. A doorman in a uniform stood at attention by the revolving doors.
Aemond Targaryen was waiting on the sidewalk.
He looked exactly like his LinkedIn photo and nothing like it at all. The photo had captured his bone structure but missed everything else: the way he held himself like a blade, the way his one visible eye tracked movement with unsettling precision, the way the left side of his face bore a long, pale scar that cut through his eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline. He was wearing a long black coat that probably cost as much as the cat’s reward, and he was looking at the cat carrier in your hands with an expression you couldn’t quite read.
“Vhagar,” he said, and his voice was different now, still dry, still clipped, but with something underneath it that you recognized. You’d made that sound yourself, sometimes, when you came home to find Lady waiting for you on the pillow. Relief, maybe. Or something close to it.
“She’s fine,” you said, setting the carrier down. “She’s been eating well. Sleeping a lot. She’s very…opinionated.”
He crouched down, actually crouched, in his thousand-dollar coat on the sidewalk, and opened the carrier door. Vhagar emerged with the slow dignity of a dowager queen descending from her carriage, and when she saw him, she made a sound that was almost a chirp. She headbutted his hand. She allowed him to pick her up, tucking her massive gray body against his chest like she’d been doing it all her life. Which, you supposed, she had.
“Where did you find her?” he asked, not looking at you. His attention was entirely on the cat, his long fingers stroking through her fur with a gentleness that seemed at odds with everything else about him.
“Outside my building. She was sleeping on the concrete.”
His jaw tightened. “How long?”
“About three weeks ago.”
He didn’t say anything. His hand stilled on Vhagar’s back. Then he pulled out his phone, tapped the screen a few times, and your own phone buzzed in your pocket.
“The reward,” he said. “Thank you for returning her.”
You checked your banking app. Seven thousand dollars, transferred and pending.
“Right,” you said. “Well. Take care of her. And maybe…put a tag on her collar next time.”
He looked at you then. Actually looked at you, his single visible eye, the other was covered by a swoop of hair but seemed to be a glass prosthetic, you weren’t sure, fixing on your face with an intensity that made you want to step backward. His eye was violet. A pale, impossible shade of purple that you had assumed was contacts until you were standing three feet away from him and could see the way the light hit it.
“She has never run away before,” he said, and it sounded almost like an accusation. As if you had somehow lured his ancient cat away from her penthouse and convinced her to live on hot dogs and milk.
“Well,” you said again, because his stare was unnerving, “she’s home now.”
He didn’t thank you again. He turned and walked into the building, Vhagar draped over his shoulder like a fur stole, the doorman holding the door for him with a murmured “Mr. Targaryen” that you caught on the wind.
You stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer, the December cold seeping through your coat, and then you went home.
You assumed that was the end of it. You had your money, he had his cat, and your worlds had brushed against each other for exactly long enough to complete a transaction. You unfollowed the lost pet groups. You washed Vhagar’s fur off your pillowcases. You tried to ignore the way your apartment felt quieter now, emptier, the absence of her rumbling purr leaving a gap in the dark that you hadn’t expected to miss.
Four days later, your phone buzzed with a message from an unsaved number.
What did you do to my cat?
You stared at the screen. You had not saved his number but you had not deleted the chat.
Sorry?, you typed back.
The response came immediately. Vhagar. She won’t eat. She refuses her food. What were you feeding her?
You tried to remember. Milk? Boiled sausages? Some tuna. The vet said she was healthy.
The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then your phone started ringing.
“Milk,” Aemond Targaryen said when you answered, his voice flat with barely contained outrage. “You fed a fifteen-year-old purebred Persian cat milk and boiled sausages?”
“She liked them,” you said defensively. “She ate them right up. What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” he said, “is that Vhagar’s normal diet consists of sustainably sourced Beluga caviar, free-range quail eggs, and a fish broth reduction that my family’s private chef prepares fresh every three days. She has never eaten processed meat in her life. She has certainly never consumed grocery store milk. And now she is sitting in front of her bowl looking at me as if I have personally betrayed her by serving her the same food she has happily eaten for fifteen years.”
You sat down on your bed. “She ate Beluga caviar? Like, the stuff that costs hundreds of dollars an ounce?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It kind of feels like the point.”
He made a sound of pure frustration, not quite a growl, not quite a sigh. “The point is that she’s refusing to eat. She’s refusing to eat and she’s refusing to come when I call her and she spent the entire morning glaring at me from the top of her custom-built cat tower, which, I might add, has three separate levels and a water feature.”
You tried to picture Vhagar, your Lady, who had slept on a spare pillow and eaten crusts off your plate, in a climate-controlled cat tower with a water feature. The image wouldn’t resolve.
“Have you tried…playing with her?” you asked.
“She doesn’t play,” Aemond said, as if you’d suggested she do her own taxes. “I throw her the toy mouse from Hermès and she demolishes it. That’s not playing. That’s destruction.”
“What about cardboard boxes?”
Silence. Long, profound silence, broken only by the faint sound of Vhagar yowling in the background.
“Cardboard boxes,” he repeated, his voice dangerously quiet.
“Yeah. You know. The things stuff gets shipped in? Cats love them. She went absolutely feral for the box my Amazon order came in. I put an old towel in it and she slept there for three days.”
“You want me,” Aemond Targaryen said, each word precise and clipped, “to give a member of my family, a cat who has been passed down through three generations, who has her own room in our estate, who has been photographed for Architectural Digest, a cardboard box?”
“I mean, it can’t hurt?”
Another long pause. The background yowling grew louder.
“This is absurd,” he said, and hung up.
The cardboard box apparently worked, because two days later he messaged you again. Not a call this time, a text, long and oddly formal, like a business proposal that had been written through gritted teeth.
Vhagar has been eating again. The box was…effective. However, she seems to have developed an attachment to your presence during her time away. She has been restless. The veterinarian suggested she may benefit from continued exposure to you as a source of environmental enrichment, which is a phrase I cannot believe I am typing. I am prepared to offer you a weekly retainer to visit and spend time with her. The compensation would be commensurate with your trouble.
Attached was a number that made your eyes water.
You read the message three times. You thought about the seven thousand dollars already sitting in your savings account. You thought about the way Vhagar had looked at you when you handed her over, that yellow-green stare that had seemed to say this isn’t over. You thought about Aemond Targaryen’s voice on the phone, dry and furious and somehow, despite everything, deeply concerned about a fifteen-year-old cat who missed you.
“This is insane,” you said to your empty apartment.
But you typed back: When do I start?
The first visit was awkward. Aemond’s apartment, if you could call a space that occupied nearly an entire floor of a high-rise an apartment, was a cathedral of minimalist wealth, all pale wood and pale stone and pale furniture that looked like it had never been sat on. Vhagar greeted you at the door with a yowl that seemed to say finally, you’ve arrived, and immediately led you to her custom cat tower, which was indeed three stories tall and featured a tiny chandelier.
“She’s been waiting by the door since this morning,” Aemond said. He was standing in the doorway of what appeared to be a library, dressed in a dark sweater that did nothing to soften the angles of his face. “I don’t understand why.”
“She’s a cat,” you said, sitting cross-legged on the heated marble floor while Vhagar climbed into your lap. “They’re mysterious.”
“She’s never sat in anyone’s lap but mine. And my mother’s. And occasionally my sister’s, though that ended badly.”
“What happened?”
“My sister is allergic. She found out when Vhagar sat on her face.”
You laughed. You couldn’t help it. Aemond was watching you with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t not one either, a slight softening around his mouth, a tilt to his head that made him look more like a person.
“Tea?” he asked, and it sounded almost reluctant, like the offer had escaped without his permission.
“Sure,” you said. “Tea would be great.”
Every Saturday, you took the train and spent the afternoon in Aemond Targaryen’s penthouse, ostensibly to entertain a cat who spent most of her time ignoring you in favor of her cardboard box. But Aemond was always there, hovering, appearing with cups of tea that grew progressively more elaborate, then plates of food that started as simple snacks and evolved into full meals.
“You said you’ve been eating bread and cheese for dinner,” he said one evening, setting a plate of something that looked like it belonged in a Michelin-starred restaurant on the coffee table in front of you. “That’s not nutritious.”
“I’m aware,” you said, but you ate it anyway, and it was the best thing you’d ever tasted.
He started finding reasons to extend your visits. A new toy for Vhagar to try. A documentary about Chartreux cats he thought you should watch. An outing to a cat café that he claimed was for research purposes but that mostly involved him standing in the corner looking deeply uncomfortable while cats climbed all over you.
“You’re not a cat person,” you observed, as a calico tried to scale his leg.
“I’m a Vhagar person,” he corrected, gently removing the calico and placing it on the floor. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“I’m beginning to think there might be,” he said, and then he turned away before you could ask what he meant.
Winter turned into spring. Your Saturday visits turned into Saturday visits plus occasional Wednesday dinners plus a standing invitation to a Sunday morning walk in a park, which Aemond claimed was for Vhagar’s benefit even though Vhagar never actually walked. He texted you articles about cat behavior and screenshots of Vhagar doing mundane things with captions like She sat in the box again. I don’t understand and The chef wants to know if she can have the sausage recipe.
“There’s no recipe,” you told him. “You boil them.”
“I told him that. He didn’t believe me.”
He started asking about your life. Your job. Your family. The things you cared about and the things you were afraid of and the things you wanted but had never let yourself reach for. He listened carefully, his pale eye fixed on your face, his sharp features softening in increments so small you almost didn’t notice them until one day you looked at him and realized you couldn’t remember why you’d ever found him cold.
Vhagar, for her part, seemed entirely unimpressed with the whole arrangement. She spent most of your visits asleep in her cardboard box, a new one now, because Aemond had his assistant procure them weekly, and only occasionally deigned to acknowledge your presence with a slow blink or a rumbling purr.
“She likes you,” Aemond said one evening, watching the cat knead her claws into an old towel.
“She tolerates me.”
“No.” He shook his head, his gaze still fixed on Vhagar. “She likes you. She’s particular. She doesn’t tolerate anyone she doesn’t like. She bit my brother once. Drew blood.”
“What did your brother do?”
“Breathed too loudly, I think.”
You laughed, Aemond glanced at you, and the expression on his face was something you’d never seen before, open, almost unguarded, his mouth curved into the ghost of a smile that transformed his severe features into startlingly beautiful.
“I’m glad you found her,” he said quietly. “The cat. I’m glad you found her.”
“Me too,” you said, and you weren’t entirely sure you were talking about the cat anymore.
Vhagar yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep, indifferent to everything but the warmth of the room and the comfort of her box.
You learned the layout of his penthouse the way you'd once learned the streets of your neighborhood, by heart, by instinct, by the slow accretion of familiarity that turns the unfamiliar into home.
You learned other things, too. That Aemond took his coffee black but would drink tea if you made it. That he read three books a month and annotated them in a spidery, elegant script. That he had a brother he never mentioned and a sister he mentioned only in passing and a mother who called him every Sunday at precisely eleven in the morning, which he answered without fail even if he was in the middle of a sentence. That his left eye, the one always covered, the one the scar bisected, was a wound he carried with him everywhere, a quiet grief he never spoke about directly but that shaped the way he moved through rooms, always keeping his right side to the door.
You learned about Alys by accident.
It was a Saturday in late March, the kind of day that pretends to be spring but still bites with winter's teeth, and you had arrived at the penthouse to find Aemond already pulling on his coat.
"Something's come up," he said, and his voice had that clipped quality it got when he was trying not to show frustration. "I have to go out of town. I'll be back Monday."
"Okay," you said, hanging your own coat on the hook he'd cleared for you weeks ago. "Do you want me to come back then, or..."
"No." He paused, his hands stilling on his scarf. "I was hoping you could stay with Vhagar. She gets…unsettled when I'm gone too long."
The last time he'd gone out of town, a business trip to Westerlands, three days, he'd called you twice a day with updates on Vhagar's mood and appetite. You hadn't minded. The money was good, and honestly, you'd grown fond of the old cat's cranky companionship.
"Sure," you said. "Where are you going?"
"Riverlands."
You waited for elaboration. None came.
"That's…specific."
He didn't meet your eyes. "Alys lives there. She doesn't like the city."
The name landed in your chest like a stone hurled. Alys. A woman's name, spoken with a familiarity that suggested it had been in his mouth many times before. You realized, with a strange hollow feeling, that he'd never mentioned her. Not once. In all those afternoons and evenings and Sunday walks, he'd never said a word about a girlfriend waiting for him in some small town hours away.
"I didn't know you were seeing someone," you said, and you were proud of how neutral your voice came out.
"It's complicated." He adjusted his scarf, still not looking at you. "We've been together for a while. She prefers her independence. I prefer…" He trailed off, a muscle jumping in his jaw. "It works."
"Right," you said. "Well. Go. Vhagar and I will be fine."
He finally looked at you then, something unreadable flickering across his features. "Thank you," he said, and left.
The penthouse felt different without him. Larger, certainly, all those minimalist rooms spreading out around you like a museum after hours. But also quieter in a way that felt less peaceful and more hollow. Vhagar seemed to sense it too; she followed you from room to room with more persistence than usual, her ragged meow punctuating the silence.
You did what you always did when you were catsitting: you sat on the heated floor with Vhagar in your lap, you watched your shows that Aemond pretended to disdain but always ended up commenting on, you ate from the refrigerator that his private chef kept stocked with things you couldn't pronounce. But your mind kept circling back to the name. Alys. The way he'd said it: flat, contained, like a fact he'd long since stopped examining.
On Sunday morning, the house phone rang at half past eleven. You let it ring. The answering machine beeped. A woman's voice which you assumed belonged to his mother, given the time, came through:
Aemond, I've spoken with the surgeon. He has an opening in April. Answer your phone.
Surgeon. April. Cold settled in your stomach.
When Aemond returned on Monday evening, he looked tired in a way that went beyond travel fatigue. His coat was rumpled, his hair escaping its usual careful restraint, his mouth set in a thin line that softened only slightly when Vhagar waddled over to greet him.
"Good trip?" you asked, gathering your things.
"Fine."
"How's Alys?"
The pause was a beat too long. "Fine."
"She must be something," you said carefully, "to keep you driving hours every time you have a free weekend."
He didn't take the bait. He just bent down to scratch Vhagar's chin, his expression shuttered. "She's very busy. Her practice takes up most of her time."
"Practice?"
"Traditional medicine. Herbalism. Holistic healing." He said it without irony, without skepticism, as if a woman who made her living selling tinctures and salves was the most natural thing in the world for a man with multiple advanced degrees and a vice presidency at a multinational corporation. "She's very skilled."
"I'm sure she is," you said, and left before you could say something you'd regret.
After that, you started noticing things.
The way Aemond's phone would buzz and he'd check it immediately, his expression flickering. The way he'd disappear into his study for hours, his voice a low murmur behind the closed door, emerging with that same tired look he'd worn coming back from Riverlands. The way he never texted Alys, or if he did, she never texted back, because every communication seemed to require a phone call, a ritual, a set-aside block of time he guarded fiercely.
"She doesn't like texting," he explained once, when you'd commented on the absurdity of him scheduling a two-hour call in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. "She finds it impersonal."
You thought about the string of unanswered texts on your own phone: friends from college, coworkers, the guy you'd gone on two dates with last month before he'd ghosted you, and wondered what it would be like to have someone so devoted to you that they'd carve out hours of their day just to hear your voice, while you couldn't be bothered to send a single line of text back.
"She must be very special," you said.
"She is." But he said it the way someone might recite a fact they'd memorized rather than a truth they felt in their bones.
The pieces assembled themselves slowly over weeks. Alys was older than him. Alys had a practice in a small town hours from the city. Alys refused to move, refused to visit, refused to integrate herself into his life in any way that required effort on her part. Alys gave him just enough to keep him coming back: a phone call, a weekend, a jar of something homemade that he'd place on his kitchen counter and stare at with an expression that made your chest ache.
He was too smart for this. That was the thing that got you, the thing that lodged under your ribs like a splinter. Aemond Targaryen, with his degrees and his four languages and his portfolio of accomplishments that would have been impressive for a man twice his age, was being strung along by someone who couldn't even be bothered to answer a text message. And he accepted it. He accepted it like it was all he deserved, like affection was a currency that could only be earned through suffering, like love was something you had to bleed for. You suspected he was taught to fish out flirts and gold diggers easily, but he hadn't been taught to examine his emotinal needs.
You saw it in the way he was with Vhagar, too. The cat tolerated him at best: she allowed his attention, accepted his offerings of caviar and quail eggs, but rarely sought him out the way she sought you. And yet he adored her. He planned his schedule around her meals. He commissioned custom furniture for her comfort. He spoke about her like she was a revered ancestor, which, in his family, she practically was.
And you. You, who had been hired as a catsitter and somehow become something more: a fixture in his home, a recipient of his cooking, his concern and his increasingly frequent glances that lingered just a moment too long. You, who he'd started looking at like you were precious, unexpected, something he hadn't known he was allowed to want.
The pattern was right there, written in the architecture of his life: Aemond Targaryen attached himself to people who barely tolerated him, and he called it love because he didn't know what else to call it.
The call came on a Thursday in late April.
"I need you to take Vhagar," Aemond said, his voice strained in a way you'd never heard before. "For several days. A week, maybe. Can you do that?"
You were at work, hunched over your desk with a spreadsheet blurring in front of your eyes. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. I just...I have a procedure tomorrow, and I won't be able to care for her."
"Procedure?" Your stomach dropped. "What kind of procedure?"
A pause. You could hear him breathing, slow and controlled, the way he breathed when he was trying to keep himself together. "My eye. My mother found a surgeon. Another one. He thinks there's a chance."
The word another hit you like a punch. How many surgeries had there been? How many times had he gone under the knife, hoping for something that never came?
"I'll come to pick her up," you asnwered.
When you arrived at the penthouse, the doorman let you up without question, you were on the permanent access list now, a fact that still felt surreal every time you thought about it, and Aemond was waiting at the door.
He looked terrible.
His face was pale. His left eye, the one that was always covered, was visible now, hair finally brushed back. He was holding himself very still, very straight, the posture of someone who had learned long ago to carry pain without showing it.
"Before you say anything," he said, "I'm fine."
"You're having surgery."
"Another surgery. They're all the same." He stepped aside to let you in. "My mother is optimistic. She's always optimistic. The surgeon says there's a thirty percent chance of partial vision restoration, which means there's a seventy percent chance of nothing at all. I've made my peace with it. She hasn't."
You followed him into the living room, where Vhagar was sprawled in her cardboard box, a new one, large and rectangular, with a towel that had been arranged just so. She blinked at you slowly and didn't get up.
"When is it?" you asked.
"Tomorrow morning. Early. I have a car picking me up at five."
"You're going alone?"
The question seemed to confuse him. "Yes. Who else would go with me?"
You thought about Alys, somewhere in Riverlands, mixing her herbs and ignoring her phone. You thought about his mother, who had arranged the surgery but apparently not her schedule to be there for it. You thought about his siblings, who he never spoke about.
"I could go with you," you said, before you could stop yourself.
Surprise flickered across his face. "That's not necessary. You're here for Vhagar."
"Vhagar can come. She's a cat. She'll sleep through the whole thing."
"Vhagar in a hospital waiting room?"
"Fine, not in the waiting room. But I can still go. You shouldn't be alone."
He looked at you for a long moment, his good eye searching your face. "Why?" he asked finally. The question sounded genuine, as if he truly couldn't fathom why anyone would offer him comfort without being asked.
"Because that's what people do," you said. "They show up for each other."
"Ah." He turned away, busying himself with a stack of papers on the kitchen counter. "I appreciate the offer. Truly. But I've been doing this alone for a long time. I know how to handle my own treatment. Take Vhagar. I'll call you when I'm home."
You took Vhagar. You packed her into her carrier, which was, of course, custom-made leather with a monogrammed cushion, and you carried her down to the lobby and out to the street, and you stood there on the sidewalk for a full minute before you turned around and went back inside.
Aemond was still in the kitchen when you walked back in, Vhagar's carrier swinging from your hand. He looked up, his expression shifting from surprise to confusion to what that looked almost like relief before he shut it down.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm staying," you set the carrier down and opened it. Vhagar emerged with an indignant yowl and immediately headed for her cardboard box. "You shouldn't be alone, and I'm not letting you send me home just because you're too stubborn to admit you need help."
"The guest room is made up," he said, his voice was very quiet.
"Good. I'm ordering takeout. What do you want?"
"I have a list of approved restaurants in the drawer."
"Of course you do."
The surgery happened. You didn't go with him, he insisted, and you could tell it was important to him, this one last bastion of self-sufficiency, but you were there when he came back, pale and shaking and trying very hard to pretend he wasn't. The bandage was fresh, the swelling worse, and he walked through the door like a soldier returning from a battle he'd already known he would lose.
"Thirty percent," he said, lowering himself onto the couch carefully. "We'll know in a few weeks."
"The guest room is very nice," you said. "Also I made breakfast."
"You made breakfast?"
"Don't sound so surprised. I can cook some things. Eggs. Toast. Coffee. The basics."
He ate the eggs and the toast. He drank the coffee. Then he fell asleep on the couch, his head tilted back against the cushions, his bandaged eye turned toward the ceiling, and you covered him with a blanket and sat in the armchair across from him and watched the afternoon light move across his face.
Vhagar jumped onto his lap and settled there, a warm gray weight, he didn't wake up.
You stayed longer. Aemond was supposed to be resting, but resting turned out to mean pacing the penthouse at odd hours, staring out the windows, picking at the meals you ordered from his list of approved restaurants because apparently your culinary skills didn't extend past breakfast.
"I can make pasta," you offered on the third day, when he was eyeing a container of takeout Thai with the expression of someone who had eaten too much takeout Thai. "It won't be good pasta, but it'll be pasta."
"I don't trust your definition of pasta."
"It comes from a box. You boil it. You put sauce on it."
"Sauce from a jar?"
"Sauce from a jar," you confirmed.
He looked genuinely pained. "Order from the place on 57th. The one with the green awning. They know my order."
"Of course they do."
That evening, as you were eating pasta that had definitely never seen the inside of a jar, you decided to ask the question that had been sitting in your throat for days.
"Does Alys know you had surgery?"
Aemond's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "I mentioned it."
"You mentioned it."
"We talked last night. She's sending a jar of her salve. For the inflammation." He said it matter-of-factly, as if this were a perfectly normal response to your partner undergoing eye surgery. "She says it's very effective. Arnica, mostly, with some other herbs. She grows them herself."
"She's not coming to visit?"
He set his fork down. "She doesn't like the city. I told you."
"She doesn't like the city enough to visit her boyfriend after surgery?"
"It's not that simple."
"It seems pretty simple from where I'm sitting."
His jaw tightened, the familiar muscle jumping beneath his skin. "Alys is…she's not like other people. She has her own life, her own practice, her own way of doing things. I knew that when we started this. I accepted it."
"What does she accept about you?"
The question landed harder than you'd intended. His good eye fixed on your face, sharp and suddenly very violet, and for a moment you thought he was going to snap at you, tell you to leave, remind you that you were just the catsitter and this was none of your business.
Instead, he muttered, "I don't know."
You ate in silence after that. Vhagar, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, climbed onto the table and tried to stick her face in Aemond's pasta, and he let her.
At three in the morning, you found him in the living room, sitting in the dark with Vhagar in his lap and the lights of the city spread out below him like a carpet of stars. His bandage glowed white in the dimness, he didn't turn when you came in, just kept staring out the window with an expression that made something twist painfully in your chest.
"Can't sleep?" you asked, settling into the armchair beside him.
"The pain medication wears off around two. I'm used to it."
"That's not what I asked."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I keep thinking about what you said. At dinner."
"I said a lot of things at dinner."
"About what she accepts." He turned to look at you, even in the darkness, even with half his face covered in gauze, the intensity of his gaze made it hard to breathe. "I don't think she accepts anything about me. I think she tolerates me. And I've spent so long thinking that was the same thing."
"It's not," you said.
"No. It's not." He looked back out the window. "Vhagar tolerates me. But she chose you. When she ran away, she found you, and she stayed. She doesn't do that for anyone."
"She stayed for the hot dogs."
"She stayed for you." His voice was barely above a whisper. "I think I understand why now."
Vhagar purred in his lap. The distance between your chair and the couch felt impossibly vast and impossibly small all at once, a gap that could be crossed in two steps or two years depending on whether either of you had the courage to move.
"She's not coming," Aemond said. "Alys. She's not coming, and I don't think I mind as much as I should."
"How do you feel about it?"
He was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough, scraped raw, the voice of someone admitting the truth against his will.
"Relieved," he said. "I feel relieved."
You sat in silence, keeping him company in the small hours of the morning until the sky began to pale and Vhagar yawned and stretched and demanded her breakfast.
Part 2: coming soon...
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For his twentieth nameday, Queen Alicent presented her second son with a handmaid of his own.
“He is the only one of my children yet without such attendance,” Her Grace is reported to have said. “—let her be sweet and devoted, and quick upon her feet . . . a girl who will swear undying loyalty and service unto him, and to his needs.”
We are told Prince Aemond accepted the gift with all due courtesy, to the queen’s evident satisfaction. Yet if Alicent had intended only to soothe her son’s temper, or to bind him closer to her through gratitude, she misjudged the matter.
For what began as service did not remain so, and what had been offered as obedience took root, in time, as something perilously akin to love. So smitten was the prince with this girl, the pretty bastard daughter of a serving wench from Harrenhal (as Mushroom claimed).
By the end of 130 AC, Aemond had taken his handmaid to his bed and, in time, sired three children upon her. Any hour away from Vhagar was soon spent at the side of his “sweet girl,” as he took to calling her.
These, then, are the tales of their love story.
I. Mushroom's Accounts:
Chapter One: Wherein a Handmaid is Chosen
Chapter Two: Wherein Prince Aemond Makes His Preferences Known
Chapter Three: Wherein Mercy is Given
Chapter Four: Wherein the First Mistake is Made (And Want is Named by No Honest Word)
Chapter Five: Wherein a Dragon Learns Restraint (and Succumbs to Desire)
Chapter Six: Wherein Misery Enjoys Company
Chapter Seven: Wherein a Prince Learns the Shape of Want
Chapter Eight: Wherein a Dragon Keeps What He Has Chosen
this fucking house is gonna take fuckin forever and im already so so close to my budget cap
I am NOWHERE NEAR done with the map of the house and ive ran out of money to buy more furnishings :( But i have like most of the map done, and like barely any of the furnishings done
I'll have to wait til I get to like level 9 to really be able to furnish this damn thing :(
I think ill also tag The Evil Within fanart, but I don't know if a World of Warcaft player house qualifies. I know minecraft builds can qualify as art so i'm just gonna tag fanart
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@nekoboydreams BUY THIS MAN (@darthsuki) A DOCTOR PLUSHIE /j
Little Wip of a animation im workin on it :D. it's a pretty silly idea, just our beloved group from The Freak Circus grabbing some plushies of the characters!
All mods of the Freak Circus will appear! Including:
@destinysquared, @tazz-was-here TOO :D
AWWW I ADORE THISSS AHHH!!! <333 THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO MAKE THIS WOW!! HOW INCREDIBLE!!1
One of these days i won't be just a squareroot symbol hahah <33 regardless, i adore this so much!! such lovely art and a lovely idea <333 awwwww i think we would all love to be in an arcade together playing these things 83
Hey, fun thing! Tomorrow around 2:30 CST/3:30 EST, imma be joining our newly appointed voice actor, Rayne, for a twitch stream where we just talk Daybreak stuff :D
We'll answer any non-spoiling questions y'all have, give general progress updates, and Rayne will just be doing fun voiceover things ^^
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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