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Foreordained

Pairing: Daeron Targaryen x f!reader

Summary: Daeron avoids his wife after his dreams, until one vision changes everything.

Warnings: angst, fluff, smut. Talks of death, alcoholism.

The scent of him always reached you first. It was the smell of the city that clung to his clothes: smoke and sour wine, the faint, cloying perfume of the Street of Silk, and beneath it all, the salt tang of Blackwater Bay. You had grown to know it as intimately as you knew the lines of his face, the particular cadence of his footsteps when he tried so very hard to be quiet. He never was. Daeron Targaryen, for all his dreams of dragons and death, could not move through the world without leaving a wake of chaos behind him.

Tonight, the chaos arrived well past the hour of the owl. You had not waited up for him; you had learned, in the three years of your marriage, that waiting was a fool’s errand. Waiting meant watching the candle dwindle to a puddle of wax, meant listening to the distant revelry of the Red Keep and wondering which pleasure house held your husband tonight, meant feeling the slow, cold creep of resentment curl up in your belly like a serpent. You were in your bed, the heavy drapes drawn against the chill, a book of Seven Kingdoms histories open and unread upon your lap. You were not waiting. You were simply…not sleeping.

You heard him before you saw him. A stumble in the outer chamber. A low, muffled curse in High Valyrian, the words slurred almost beyond recognition. The clatter of something, a pitcher, perhaps, or a cup, knocked from a table. Then the softer, placating murmur of the maids. You could picture it without rising: Daeron, bleary-eyed and swaying, his gold hair a tangled mess, his fine doublet stained with wine and Gods knew what else. He would be leaning heavily against the doorframe of his own dressing room, his beautiful, tragic face slack with drink, while two or three patient servants attempted to undress him, to wipe the grime from his skin, to make him something approaching presentable.

You did not go to him. You had done that, once. You had rushed to his side, your heart a frantic drum of worry and love, your hands reaching to steady him, to help. You had learned that he could not meet your eyes in those moments. That your presence, your kindness, only seemed to deepen the well of his shame, to make him curl in on himself like a salted snail. It was a strange, bitter mercy, you had decided, to let the maids do their work without the added weight of your disappointment in the room.

So you stayed. You turned a page in your book, though your eyes did not move across the words. You listened to the distant splash of water, the low, rhythmic sounds of a body being scrubbed and dried. The maids would be silent, efficient. They were paid well for their discretion.

The door to your bedchamber opened much later. The sound was soft, almost hesitant. The tallow candle on your bedside table guttered in the sudden draft, sending frantic shadows dancing across the stone walls. You did not look up from your book, though you still saw nothing of the text. You simply waited.

His silhouette filled the doorway. He was clad only in a loose linen sleeping shirt that fell to his knees, his feet bare. His hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, revealing the sharp, sculpted beauty of his Valyrian features. The room was dim, but even so, you could see the deep, bruised hollows beneath his eyes. He looked like a ghost of himself, a pale, sorrowful wraith haunting the edge of your sanctuary.

He took a stumbling step into the room, then another. He did not speak. He never did, on nights like these. The man who could make you laugh until your sides ached with his dry, witty quips, who could debate the finer points of history and philosophy with a scholar’s passion, was now reduced to a creature of pure, desperate need. Words were beyond him. Apologies were a currency he had spent into worthlessness.

He reached the foot of the bed. His hands, long-fingered and elegant, the hands of a musician or a painter, came to rest on the carved oak footboard. They were trembling. They were always trembling. The maesters said it was the drink, a weakness of the nerves. You knew it was more than that. You knew it was the weight of the visions, the fire and blood and screaming he saw behind his eyelids every time he closed them. The drink, you had come to understand, was not the cause but the desperate, failing antidote.

His gaze, when it finally found yours, was an ocean of mute agony. There was no explanation, no excuse, no lie about an evening with the king or a late council meeting. There was only the raw, undeniable fact of him: your husband, returned from his self-destruction, standing at the foot of your marriage bed with nothing to offer you but his broken, wanting body.

You should have been angry. You were angry. It was a cold, hard stone lodged deep in your chest, a constant companion. You were angry at his weakness, at his selfishness, at the whispers that followed you through the halls of the Red Keep like a persistent wind. Poor lady, they’d murmur behind their hands. Married to the dreamer. The drunkard. The whoremonger. You were so very tired of being strong, of being the anchor, of being the one who was perpetately left behind.

You closed the book with a sharp snap. The sound made him flinch. Good, you thought, a petty, vicious thrill running through you. Let him flinch. And yet, you did not turn him away.

Because beneath the anger, beneath the hurt and the exhaustion, you understood the language he was speaking now. It was a crude, desperate, physical tongue, but it was the only one he had left at this hour. It was his way of trying, in the only way his shattered mind and body would allow, to bridge the chasm he had dug between you. It was not an apology, but it was a plea. A raw, humiliating, moaning plea for connection, for absolution, for proof that at the core of it all, there was still something left between you that was just yours.

He moved around the side of the bed, his steps silent now on the carpet. You remained motionless, your spine rigid, your face a mask of neutrality you had perfected over years of practice. He pulled back the heavy duvet, and a draft of cool air washed over your legs, making you shiver.

Then he was on you.

He didn’t crawl into the space beside you. He crawled over you, his lanky, trembling body a cage of heat and the lingering, faint scent of lavender soap. He settled his weight upon you, his hips finding the cradle of your thighs, and you felt the stark, urgent heat of him pressing against your belly through the thin linen of his shirt and your silk nightdress. He was already hard, already desperate. His face, so beautiful it sometimes made your heart ache to look at it, hovered just inches above your own. His eyes, a shade of violet so deep they were nearly black in the candlelight, were wide and wild, pupils blown.

He didn’t kiss you. He just stared, his breath coming in shallow, ragged pants that fanned across your lips and tasted of mint and the faint, underlying sourness of wine. One of his hands found your hip, his fingers curling into the silk of your nightdress. The other hand, his left, came up to your face. His thumb, still trembling, traced the line of your jaw, the curve of your lower lip. It was a touch of such devastating tenderness that it nearly broke your resolve. This was the Daeron you loved. The man who existed in the quiet moments, the one who was, when sober, or almost sober, so achingly gentle it made you weep.

But his sobriety was a ghost in this room.

You remained still and silent beneath him. You were not unwilling, but you were not welcoming, either. You were a fortress, and you made him storm the gates.

He seemed to understand. A choked, desperate sound escaped his throat, something between a sob and a groan. His hand left your face and fumbled between your bodies. You felt his knuckles graze the soft skin of your inner thigh as he rucked the hem of your nightdress up, bunching it around your waist. The air was cool on your exposed skin. He didn’t bother to undress you, nor himself. He simply shoved his own shirt up enough to free himself, the fabric riding high on his lean stomach.

His fingers found you, and he froze.

You were dry. You were, in fact, still angry, your body a locked door he had not even bothered to knock upon.

In the early days of your marriage, this would have been the point of collapse. He would have rolled away, consumed by a fresh wave of shame, and the chasm would have yawned even wider. You would have lain beside each other in the dark, two separate islands of misery, until dawn broke. But that was before. Before he had given up on words.

A tremor ran through his entire body. But he did not stop. He did not care, or at least, he could not afford to care. His need was a tide that would not be turned by a little difficulty. He would make you ready. He would force your body to forgive him, even if your heart would not. It was a logic born of desperation.

He shifted his weight, pressing his forearm across your hips, pinning you in place. It wasn’t a violent hold, but it was an unarguable one. He was stronger than he looked, your drunken prince. He held you still as his trembling, spit-slick fingers returned to you. He worked them against your dry, soft folds, not with the teasing, patient artistry of his sober self, but with a single-minded, frantic devotion. He was a man digging for water in a desert, convinced it must be there.

It was clumsy. It was too much, too fast, the friction a raw, uncomfortable sting. You gasped, not with pleasure, but with a sharp intake of breath against the intrusion. He stilled instantly at the sound, his frantic rhythm breaking. The pressure of his arm on your hips loosened.

For a moment, you thought he would stop. His watery violet eyes searched your face, and you saw a flicker of the man he was supposed to be, the one who would rather die than cause you a moment’s pain. He was in there, trapped, watching himself from behind the fog of drink.

“Please,” he whispered. The word was cracked, a broken syllable from a broken man. It was the first word he had spoken to you since entering the room. It wasn’t a command. It wasn’t an excuse. It was begging.

And because you loved the man trapped inside, because you pitied him, because some dark, shameful part of you even understood the frantic, ugly nature of his love, you let your knees fall open a little wider.

It was all the permission he needed. He shuddered, a full-body tremor of relief, and returned to his task with a renewed, though somewhat gentler, urgency. He circled his fingers, slicking them again and again with his own saliva before bringing them back to your cunt, spreading the moisture, coaxing a reluctant response from your flesh. He was a moaning mess, the sounds spilling from his lips low and constant and utterly unprincely. They were sounds of pure, concentrated effort, of a man trying to perform a miracle. His hips, where they were pressed against your thigh, gave tiny, abortive thrusts, seeking any friction.

Slowly, involuntarily, your body began its betrayal. The discomfort lessened, replaced by a growing heat. A slickness that was not just from his efforts began to bloom, a treacherous welcome for the man your heart was so furious with.

He felt it, too. Of course he did. His eyes, which had been scrunched shut in concentration, flew open to meet yours. There was a terrible, hopeful light in them. He pressed one finger, then a second, inside you. They slipped in smoothly now, a fact he registered with a broken, triumphant moan.

“Yes,” he breathed, the word hot against the skin of your neck. “Yes, my love. Yes.”

The endearment, spoken in that wrecked, reverent voice, was a knife twisting in your gut. You turned your head away, staring at the dancing shadows on the wall, focusing on the physical sensation to block out the emotional conflict. This was his act of contrition. This was his prayer. You would let him pray.

He withdrew his fingers, and you felt the blunt, hot head of him take their place. He nudged against your entrance, a sensation that was now slick and wanting. He pushed in. A single, deep, unrelenting slide until he was fully seated inside you. You both gasped, a shared, involuntary sound of connection. For one suspended moment, you were perfectly joined, and it felt like a homecoming, a return to the center of the world.

Then he began to move. There was no apology in his rhythm, as there was when he was sober. No gentle, questioning strokes. This was a fucking driven by ghosts. He was trying to prove something, to you, to himself, to the uncaring gods who sent him his cursed dreams. He fucked you with a deep, pounding intensity that seemed to emanate not from his body but from his very soul.

The headboard began a gentle, rhythmic knock against the stone wall. His face was buried in the crook of your neck, his breath searing against your skin, a continuous stream of panted, broken Valyrian and Common Tongue fragments. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you. Please. I love you. I’m sorry.” It was a litany of despair, timed to the frantic, deep thrust of his hips. His trembling hand found yours on the rumpled sheet and gripped it so tightly your knuckles ground together.

You wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him deeper, and focused on the climb. The physical pleasure was a strange, detached thing, a bright, sharp peak that rose above the fog of your misery. You chased it, used it, let it build in your core until it burst, stealing your breath and arching your back from the bed. The involuntary clench of your release was what finally unraveled him. He gave a strangled, sobbing cry, his entire body seizing as he spilled himself inside you, his hips giving a few last, erratic jerks.

The silence that followed was immense.

His full weight collapsed onto you, a crushing, welcome burden. The trembling had stopped, for now. You could feel the frantic, panicked hammering of his heart against your own chest, slowly beginning to calm. The expensive linen of his sleeping shirt was damp with both of your sweat. You lay there, pinned, staring at the ceiling, your mind a perfect void.

Then he started to cry. It was a silent thing at first, just the hitch of his breath and the wetness you could feel spreading on your skin where his face was still hidden against your neck. Then his shoulders began to shake. He was weeping, soundlessly, exhaustedly, like a child who has finally worn himself out past the point of tantrums and found only a deep well of sadness on the other side. His tears were scalding hot on your skin.

Your fortress walls, so carefully constructed, crumbled into dust. The anger didn't vanish, but it was momentarily eclipsed by a wave of profound, heart-shattering pity. This was not the triumphant return of a conquering hero. This was the wreckage.

Slowly, as if moving through deep water, you brought your free hand up and laid it on the back of his head. His hair was damp and silken under your fingers. You began to stroke it, a soft, repetitive motion, the same way you would soothe a frightened animal. There were no words of forgiveness you could offer that would mean anything, no assurance that it would not happen again. There was only this. The dark. The silence. The solid heat of him in your arms, and the quiet salt of his tears on your skin. It was, you realized with a dull ache, the most truthful communion you had shared in months.

A couple moons later, his behaviour started to change. His visions still came, unbidden and brutal, flashes of fire and screaming, of dragons dancing and cities turning to ash. They took him at odd hours, and after them, the thirst was a monstrous, living thing inside him. He would still drink. Gods, how he would drink, a desperate, frantic attempt to drown the flames he saw behind his eyes with a flood of strongwine and ale.

But one thing had changed. At first, you didn’t believe it. On the first night, when the knock came on your chamber door not from a stumbling, bleary prince but from a couple of strong-armed Red Keep guards, you assumed they were delivering you bad news.

He’s dead in a gutter, you thought, a cold, terrible certainty gripping your heart. But they were merely holding him upright between them, his head lolling, his fine hair falling over his face. He was utterly, catastrophically drunk.

“Found him in the lower bailey, my lady,” one of the guards said, his voice carefully neutral. “Was trying to climb the serpentine steps. Kept askin’ for you.”

He had not gone to the city. He had not gone to the brothels. He had, in his mindless, sodden state, been trying to crawl home. To you.

That was the first time.

The second time, you were the one who found him. A frantic maid had fetched you to the small, private hall where he and his closest companions sometimes gathered. His friends were gone. He was alone in the dark, slumped in a chair at the head of the table, a single candle burning low before him. An empty flagon of Dornish red lay on its side. He wasn’t unconscious, just staring with glassy, unfocused eyes into the guttering flame. When he saw your silhouette in the doorway, a spark of recognition, a terrible, desperate relief, flickered in his face.

“You’re here,” he had slurred, the words thick and labored. “I came here. Not…not there. I came here. For you.”

He couldn’t walk. You and a page boy had to practically carry him to your chambers. He was heavy and limp, his head resting on your shoulder, his breath sour and hot on your cheek. But he had come here. He hadn’t gone to the perfumed arms of a stranger to lose himself. He had, however clumsily, however pathetically, chosen you.

The third time, he made it all the way to your very door. You had been asleep and woke to a soft, persistent scrabbling at the wood, like an animal trying to get in from the cold. Alarmed, you had risen and opened it to find him on his hands and knees, his elegant clothes soiled and torn, his eyes wide and unfocused. He looked up at you, and the expression on his face was one of pure, pitiful adoration.

“I dreamed you died,” he whispered, his voice raw with terror and drink. “You died, and I was alone. You were gone. I had to…I had to find you.”

He crawled past the threshold, and you knelt down to meet him. He collapsed into your lap, his arms wrapping around your waist, his body wracked with silent sobs. He was a prince of the blood of Old Valyria and the dragon, and he was on your floor, clinging to you like a shipwreck survivor to driftwood.

You were bewildered. What had changed? Why was he no longer avoiding you in his worst moments? Why was he bringing his wreckage to your doorstep instead of hiding it in the city’s dark corners? It was, in a twisted way, a kind of improvement. But the reason for it gnawed at you. Hope was a dangerous, fragile thing; you were terrified to let it take root.

The answer came on a night that was, by all accounts, a good one.

He was almost sober. He’d had a cup of watered wine with the evening meal, perhaps two, but the haunted look was absent from his eyes. He had been reading to you from a dense historical tome, his low, melodic voice tracing the exploits of Volantene and Dothraki Khals. You were curled up on a chaise lounge before the fire, your head resting on his thigh, and his free hand was idly, gently, stroking your hair. It was so peaceful, so achingly normal, that you felt a sense of profound gratitude. This was the man you had married. The gentle scholar, the dry wit, the tender lover.

Later, in bed, he was the same. He was gentle, as he always was on these lucid nights. He fucked you almost apologetically, as if each sigh and gasp of pleasure he drew from your body was an undeserved gift. He let you rise above him, let you take your pleasure at your own pace, his hands resting on the sway of your hips, his violet eyes gazing up at you with a reverence that bordered on religious. He made you laugh with a perfectly timed, absurdly aristocratic quip in the afterglow as you lay tangled together. You felt truly, brilliantly happy.

It was in that quiet, sacred space, the two of you sweaty and sated and wrapped in each other, that the truth finally slipped out.

You had been tracing the line of his jaw with a single finger, a lazy, loving exploration. “Why?” you murmured, the question you had been holding for weeks finally finding voice. “Why do you come home to me now, when you’re…lost? You never used to.”

He went still beneath your touch. The air in the room, which had been so warm and close, suddenly seemed to grow thin. For a long time, he did not answer. His gaze drifted from your face to the canopy of the bed above him, as if he were seeing something else entirely.

“I had a dream,” he said, finally. His voice was distant, hollow, stripped of all its earlier warmth.

A chill chased away the lingering heat of your passion. His dreams were not normal dreams. You knew this. You waited.

“It was different from the others,” he continued, his eyes still fixed on something you could not see. “There was no fire. No blood. No screaming. It was just…a room. A quiet room, bathed in soft light. I was in a bed.” He held his own hand up, frowning at it as if it were a foreign object. “I felt…tired. A deep, bone-tiredness. But peaceful. Like a book that has finally reached its final, well-worn page.”

He paused, and his eyes finally met yours. They were clear, bottomless pools of sorrow and a strange, unsettling joy.

“And you were there,” he whispered. “You were sitting on the bed beside me. You were holding my hand. And you were…still young. Your hair was still the colour it is now, your face unlined. Beautiful. So beautiful. You were crying, but you were smiling at me.”

His hand found yours under the sheets and gripped it, hard.

“I was dying,” he said, his voice cracking. “In the dream, I was dying. And I understood, in the way you just know things in dreams, that you would live on. For a long, long time. You would mourn me, but you would not be broken. You would be…alright.”

A single tear slipped from the corner of his eye and traced a slow path into his hairline. A smile, the most heartbreaking thing you had ever seen, bloomed on his face. It was a smile of pure, unadulterated relief.

“Do you see?” he asked, his voice filled with a terrible, sincere joy. “I don’t have to live without you. I will go first. Before you. The dream showed me. I will never have to know a world that doesn’t have you in it. I will never lose you.”

He let out a shaky breath, as if a monster that had been sitting on his chest for years had finally climbed off.

“And you…” he brought your hand to his lips and pressed a long, tender kiss to your knuckles. “You will be free. You’ll remarry, perhaps. A lord. Someone solid and sane, who does not smell of wine and night terrors. Someone who can make you happy in a way I was never able to. You’ll be happier. Truly.”

He looked at you then, his gaze earnest and bright and utterly convinced. “I’ve never been so happy in my life as I am right now, knowing that. I don’t have to avoid you anymore. I don’t have to hide my worst self from you, because I know how the story ends. And it ends well. It ends with me gone, and you safe, and young, and loved.”

He was finished. He lay there, looking at you with that serene, dreadful smile, waiting for you to share in his joy. He had given you the most romantic, horrifying, selfish declaration of love you had ever heard. His greatest comfort was his own death. His happiest thought was your eventual, happy widowhood.

He knew you deserved better. He was, in his own broken, twisted way, truly happy with that outcome.

The tears that filled your eyes were not only for his death. They were also for the life you were living, right now, with a man who was already half a ghost. You did not speak. There were no words for this. You simply pulled him to you, cradling his head against your chest, and held him as tightly as you could. He nestled into your embrace with a content sigh, his body relaxing completely, as if he had just confessed a long-held secret and been granted absolution.

His breathing deepened into the slow rhythm of sleep. A few moments later, he began to tremble, a faint, constant tremor that seemed to emanate from the very marrow of his bones. Another vision, perhaps, flickering behind his closed eyelids. You held him through it, stroking his hair as the fire burned down to embers in the hearth.

You held him, and you thought of the man you married, the gentle scholar with the laughing eyes, who was still in there, somewhere, buried under the ashes of prophecy. You thought of his terrible, joyful dream of abandoning you to a lifetime alone. You thought of the future: a long, lonely expanse for you, a mercifully short, tormented one for him. He thought it was a happy ending. You stroked his trembling back and felt the faint, frantic flutter of his heart against your ribs, a caged bird. You were not so sure.

a/n: You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3

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