This is my blog…meh

The wheelhouse had been travelling for six days.

You had counted them with the particular attentiveness of someone trying to manage a large and complicated feeling by measuring its duration. Six days since your father had kissed your forehead at the gates of your family's seat and told you to make him proud. Six days of watching familiar landscape give way to unfamiliar, of your maid chattering cheerfully about King's Landing while you sat with your hands folded and your face composed and tried to locate the version of yourself that was equal to what was coming.

You were to marry a prince.

Not just any prince. Baelor Targaryen — the one they spoke of in the same breath as words like honourable and just and, with particular frequency, perfect. The Crown Prince. A man who was, by all accounts, precisely what a prince ought to be and therefore precisely the sort of person beside whom you were likely to feel the specific inadequacy of being simply and ordinarily yourself.

You had told yourself, firmly, on at least four separate occasions during the journey, that this was an enormous opportunity and you were going to meet it with grace.

You were still trying to convince yourself when the wheelhouse slowed.

"We are here," your maid breathed, with the reverence of someone beholding something magnificent.

You looked out the window at King's Landing and felt, beneath the nerves, a genuine and helpless flicker of wonder. It was so large. You had known it would be large, but the knowing had not prepared you for the reality — the sheer accumulated weight of it, buildings piled upon buildings, streets running in every direction, the Red Keep rising above it all against a sky the particular pale gold of early autumn.

You straightened your spine. Grace, you reminded yourself.

The wheelhouse stopped.

The welcoming party in the courtyard was larger than you had expected.

You descended the steps with your father's voice in your head — chin up, eyes forward, smile but not too much — and took in the assembled faces with as much composure as you could manage, which was moderate at best.

Lord this. Lady that. A maester. Several knights. A man you recognised from descriptions as Lord Hayford, something in the way he held himself suggesting mild impatience with ceremonial occasions.

And then—

He was standing slightly apart from the others, which you noticed first, and then you noticed everything else in rapid succession: the composed features, the dark hair with its threads of silver catching the autumn light, the mismatched eyes that were—

Were looking directly at you.

Not with the polite interest of a man performing the duty of greeting his betrothed. With a focused attentiveness that arrived so immediately and so completely that it momentarily disrupted your careful composure.

You held his gaze for one second. Two. Then you remembered yourself and dipped into a curtsy.

"Your grace," you said. "I am honoured to—"

"The honour is mine." His voice was even and warm and he was already moving forward, one hand extended to assist you from the last step with a naturalness that suggested it had not been calculated. "You must be tired from the journey. Six days is considerable."

"It was comfortable enough." You took his hand and felt the steadiness of it and focused very hard on not reacting to that. "The roads were kind."

"They are better maintained in the south." A brief pause in which those mismatched eyes moved over your face with a care that felt less like assessment and more like— attention. Genuine, specific attention. "Are you well? Truly. The question is not ceremonial."

You blinked.

"I am well," you said. "Truly."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"Good," he said quietly. "Then let me show you your home."

Your home.

The words landed somewhere unexpected in your chest.

You allowed him to draw you forward into the courtyard, into the welcoming assembly, into the beginning of a life you did not yet know the shape of — and told yourself very firmly that the warmth spreading through you was simply relief at arriving safely after six days of travel.

You were almost convincing.

Autumn settled over King's Landing like something deliberate.

The leaves in the castle gardens turned gold and amber and the air took on that particular quality of cool clarity that made everything feel slightly more significant than it might in other seasons. You learned the rhythms of the Red Keep slowly, the way you learned most things — carefully, thoroughly, trying to miss nothing.

You learned that the small council met on Tuesdays and that Baelor emerged from those meetings with a specific quality of contained exhaustion that he would not mention unless asked and would understate if he was. You learned that he took his evening meal late when the day had been complicated and earlier when it had not and that this was a more reliable indicator of how court had gone than anything he said about it. You learned that he kept a book in his solar that had nothing to do with governance or war — poetry, you had glimpsed once, though he had not drawn attention to it — and that he read it in the half hour before sleep with the quiet privacy of a man who did not expect anyone to notice.

You noticed. You were not certain what to do with any of it.

The betrothal was formal and the wedding was set for three moons hence and in the meantime, you existed in the particular suspended state of someone who is almost something but not yet entirely. Almost his wife. Almost at home. Almost certain of what was happening between you, in the small moments, in the spaces between ceremony and duty.

The first thing that made you pay closer attention happened three weeks after your arrival.

You had mentioned, in passing, during a walk in the gardens — mentioned, not emphasised, barely lingered on it — that you found the castle library somewhat overwhelming in its organisation and had not yet managed to locate the histories of the First Men that you had been intending to read.

Three days later you found them on the table in your chambers.

No note. No ceremony. Simply the books, stacked neatly, with a small piece of parchment bearing only the relevant shelf location in the library so you could return them when finished.

You had stood there looking at them for a long moment.

Then you had gone to find him.

He was in his solar, predictably buried in correspondence, and looked up when you entered with an expression that arranged itself into welcome so naturally you wondered sometimes if it was simply his default when he saw you.

"The histories," you simply said.

"I thought you might want them sooner rather than later." He said it simply, returning his attention briefly to the parchment before him. "The library organisation is genuinely counterintuitive. I have lived here my entire life and still find myself in the wrong section occasionally."

"You did not have to—"

"I walked past the shelf." A slight pause. "It was not an inconvenience."

You looked at him for a moment. At the composed profile, the careful hands, the complete absence of performance in the gesture — it had not been done to impress, you understood that with sudden clarity. It had simply been done because he had thought of you and acted on it.

"Thank you," you said quietly.

He looked up.

"Of course," he said. Simply. Like there had been no other possible outcome.

You went back to your chambers and sat with the books in your lap for a while without opening them.

It happened again. And again.

Small things, mostly. The kind that could be explained away individually as courtesy or coincidence but that accumulated, over weeks, into a pattern too consistent to be either.

He remembered that you found large formal dinners draining and began, without comment, ensuring you were seated near people he had assessed you would find interesting rather than merely important. He noticed when you were cold before you said so — the Red Keep had draughts in specific corridors that you had not yet learned to anticipate — and without fanfare simply began walking on the side that blocked them. He asked your opinion on things with a genuine interest that made it clear he intended to consider what you said rather than simply perform the asking.

Once, during a particularly tedious reception, you had caught his eye across the room and made a very small and very subtle expression of suffering and he had excused himself from his conversation within five minutes and appeared at your elbow and said quietly that there was something in the adjoining gallery he thought you might find interesting if you wished to see it, and the something had turned out to be a window seat with a view of the gardens and a significantly reduced density of courtiers.

You had sat there for twenty minutes talking about nothing of consequence and it had been the best part of the evening by a considerable margin.

"You did that on purpose," you said, when it became clear the something had been the window seat all along.

"I have no idea what you mean," he said, with the composure of a man who had absolutely done it on purpose.

You had laughed.

He had watched you laugh with an expression that was there and gone too quickly to fully read, and then he had smiled — not the courteous public smile you had catalogued in your first weeks, but the quieter real one that you were only beginning to understand was different — and looked back out the window.

You had filed it away with all the others, trying very hard not to read too much into it. Trying very hard not to think about the way he looked at you sometimes when he thought you were not paying attention.

Trying very hard to remember that Baelor Targaryen was simply a good man and good men were kind to their betrothed and none of this necessarily meant—

Stop it, you told yourself firmly.

You stopped it. For approximately three days.

The wedding was six weeks away when one of your maids said the thing.

Not maliciously. That was almost worse — she said it with the cheerful thoughtlessness of someone making conversation, brushing your hair before bed, talking about nothing in particular.

"It is fortunate," she said, "that Prince Baelor is so dutiful. Some men would make the arrangement considerably less comfortable."

You met your own eyes in the mirror.

"Dutiful," you said carefully.

"Well — yes." She seemed to sense something in your tone and backtracked slightly. "I only mean — he is very attentive. Very correct. You are lucky he takes his responsibilities so seriously."

She moved on to talking about something else.

You stopped hearing her.

Dutiful.

The word sat in you like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward through every memory you had been carefully accumulating. The books. The draughts. The window seat. The way he looked at you.

Duty.

He was a man who took his responsibilities seriously. Everyone said so. You had said so yourself, early on, when you were still cataloguing him from a careful distance. A good man. An honourable man. A man who would be kind to his wife because that was simply who he was, not because—

Not because he was—

You moved your head and the maid set down the brush carefully.

"I am tired," you said. "I think I will sleep."

You did not sleep.

You managed a week.

A week of telling yourself it did not matter, the distinction was irrelevant, you were building a life with a good man and that was more than most people had, and you were not going to be foolish enough to want more than that.

A week of noticing, with new and painful attention, every moment of his consideration toward you and trying to see it as duty rather than— rather than whatever you had been allowing yourself to imagine.

You were not very good at it.

The problem was that you had already, somewhere in the accumulation of small things and golden afternoons and quiet conversations, done something inadvisable.

You had fallen in love with him.

Thoroughly. Helplessly. In the way that sneaks up on a person because it did not arrive all at once but assembled itself quietly from a hundred unremarkable moments until one day the structure was simply complete and there was no unknowing it.

And now you did not know if it was returned or simply — performed. With the best possible intentions, by the best possible man, who would never deliberately mislead you, but who might simply be incapable of being less than wonderful to someone in his care regardless of what he actually felt.

You were sitting in the library — the histories of the First Men open in your lap, unread — when he found you.

He always found you. That was another thing you had noticed and were now trying not to assign meaning to.

"You have been quiet this week," he said. Not an accusation. Simply an observation, offered in the tone of someone who had been paying attention and had decided to say so.

"I am often quiet."

"Not like this." He settled into the chair across from you with the unhurried ease of a man who had decided he was not going anywhere. "Something is wrong."

"Nothing is wrong."

"You are a poor liar."

"That seems presumptuous. You have known me three moons."

"Two and a half." The mismatched eyes were steady on your face. "And yes."

You looked down at the unread book.

The silence stretched between you, not uncomfortable but full — the kind of silence that had weight and shape and was asking something of you.

"Can I ask you something?" you said finally.

"Always."

You looked up. "Do you— " You stopped. Rearranged. "How do you— " Another stop. You took a breath. "Is this—" Your hand moved slightly, indicating the space between you, the whole of the past months, all of it. "Is this duty?"

The quality of his stillness changed.

"What do you mean?" he asked quietly.

"I mean—" The words were harder to say than you had thought they would be. "You are a good man. Everyone says so. You would be kind to anyone in my position because that is simply who you are. And I—" You stopped. "I am aware that I cannot always tell the difference between— between who you are in general and who you are with me specifically. And it matters." Your voice had gone slightly unsteady. "It matters to me. To know the difference."

The silence afterward was very still.

Baelor looked at you across the library with an expression you had not seen from him before. Not the composed public face. Not even the quieter private warmth you had grown to treasure. Something beneath both of those, sitting more exposed than he usually allowed, as though your words had reached past every careful layer directly to whatever lived underneath.

"Come here," he said quietly.

"I am—"

"Please."

You went.

He moved the books from the chair beside his chair and when you sat by his side, he took your hand in both of his — that familiar gesture, the one that had started in a courtyard on an autumn morning — and held it with the same deliberate certainty he had held it then.

"Look at me," he said.

You looked.

"I am going to say something," he said carefully, "that I should have said more clearly and sooner. And I want you to hear it properly."

You waited.

"There is nothing dutiful," he said, "about the way I feel about you."

The words landed quietly and absolutely.

"The books were not duty. The walks were not duty. The window seat—" something moved at the corner of his mouth— "was absolutely not duty. I did not arrange your seating at dinner because I am responsible for your comfort. I did it because I know by now that Lady Rowan makes you laugh and Ser Willam bores you to your foundations and I wanted your evening to be good." A pause. "Not because it was required of me. Because I wanted it."

Your throat had tightened considerably.

"Baelor—"

"I have been—" He stopped. Gathered himself in the way he did when precision mattered. "I have been trying to be measured about this. To give you time to settle here, to know me, to make your own determinations without pressure from me. It was not— I did not intend for the restraint to read as indifference." His hands tightened fractionally around yours. "I am sorry that it did."

"It didn't read as indifference," you said quietly. "It read as— I could not tell if it was me or simply— your nature. You are good to everyone."

"I am courteous to everyone," he said, with a gentle precision that made the distinction clear. "What I am with you is—" He paused. Seemed to make a decision. "Different. It has been different since the first day. Since you looked at me and held my gaze and answered my question about the journey honestly instead of correctly." A beat. "I noticed you immediately. Completely. And I have not— I have not stopped."

The tears arrived without much warning.

Baelor's expression shifted immediately, his thumb moving to your cheek with that instinctive gentleness, and he looked at you with something so open and unguarded that the last of the stone in your chest simply dissolved.

"I did not mean to make you uncertain," he said quietly. "That is the last thing I would ever want."

"You didn't," you managed. "I did that myself."

"Then let me be clearer, so there is no more room for uncertainty." He held your gaze with complete steadiness. "I love you. I have loved you for some time. Not only because you are my betrothed and it is my duty, and not because you are easy to be good to, though you are." Something warm and certain in his eyes. "Because you are you. Specifically. Entirely."

You looked at him for a long moment.

"I love you too," you said. "I have been trying not to for approximately six weeks because I was frightened it was one-sided."

The smile that crossed his face was the realest one you had ever seen from him. Not the courteous smile or even the private warm one but something underneath both of those, something that seemed to arrive from a place he did not usually allow visitors.

"Six weeks," he said quietly.

"At least."

"I knew I would love you since that day in the courtyard," he said. The laugh that escaped you was slightly tearful and entirely helpless.

Baelor brought your hands to his lips and held them there and looked at you over your knuckles with those mismatched eyes full of something steady and certain and entirely his.

"No more uncertainty," he said quietly. Not a question.

"No more uncertainty," you agreed.

Outside the library windows the autumn light had gone the deep gold of late afternoon, long and warm across the shelves and the books and the two of you sitting together in the quiet of it.

The wedding was on a morning in late autumn when the frost had just begun to touch the edges of things.

You stood beside him in the sept with your heart very full and your hands very steady and listened to him say the words with the same quiet certainty he brought to everything that mattered to him.

Afterward, in the brief moments between the ceremony and the feast when the world had contracted to just the two of you in a small antechamber, he looked at you the way he had in the library and said nothing at all.

He didn't need to. You already knew.

That evening at the feast your eyes met in a moment amidst conversations that held little interest for either of you. He looked at you with that quiet real smile and something in it that said I love you as plainly as if he had spoken it aloud.

The thing about arriving somewhere entirely new, you had discovered, was that everything was information.

The way people moved through corridors. Who made space for whom. Where the light fell at different hours and which rooms caught the cold and which held warmth. You had always learned places this way — quietly, observantly, building a picture from accumulated detail rather than relying on what you were told.

King's Landing was going to take some time.

You had known this before the wheelhouse stopped in the courtyard of the Red Keep on a grey autumn morning, frost beginning to cling to the stones and your breath visible in the air. You had known it standing in your father's hall a month ago while he explained, with the careful satisfaction of a man who had secured something significant, that you were to marry the fourth son of King Daeron.

Prince Maekar Targaryen.

You had made enquiries. Quietly, the way you did things. The responses had been — varied.

Difficult had come up with some frequency. Uncompromising. Formidable. One elderly lord had simply said sharp and left it at that with an expression suggesting this covered a great deal of ground.

One lady, however — a woman who had spent time at court three years prior — had said something different.

He is not cruel, she had said carefully. He is simply — exact. He says what he means and means what he says and has no patience for people who do otherwise. If you are straightforward with him, he will be straightforward with you.

You had found this, on balance, more reassuring than the others. You were a reasonably straightforward person, after all.

The wheelhouse door opened.

You descended into that grey morning with your chin up and your eyes open and your heart doing something inconvenient in your chest that you chose to categorise as reasonable nerves about a significant life event.

The welcoming party assembled in the courtyard was considerable.

You catalogued them with the automatic efficiency of someone who has spent a lifetime learning rooms — lords, ladies, a maester, several knights — and then your attention arrived at the man standing slightly apart from the others and stayed there.

Large was the first word that came to your mind to describe him. Not in the soft way of men who had never worked for anything, but in the particular way of someone built by years of genuine physical demand. Broad through the shoulder, carrying himself with an economy of movement that suggested he was always aware of exactly where he was in space.

The hair was more silver than you had expected from the descriptions. The beard. The lines of a face that had seen considerable weather and not been softened by it.

And the eyes — violet, which you had known to expect, but the quality of them had not been conveyed — sharp and direct and already, before you had descended the last step, fixed on your face with an attention so complete and so immediate that it momentarily disrupted the careful composure you had assembled for exactly this moment.

You held his gaze for a breath.

Then you curtsied correctly and said the correct things, and listened to him say the correct things back in a voice that was exactly as direct as advertised, and told yourself very firmly that the way he had looked at you was simply the assessment of a man meeting his betrothed for the first time.

Completely normal, nothing to catalogue separately.

Despite yourself, you definitely catalogued it separately.

He did not speak much at the welcoming dinner.

You had been warned about this — not specifically, but the general picture assembled from your enquiries suggested a man who conserved words for when they were useful and considered most social occasions insufficiently useful to warrant extensive deployment.

What he did instead, you noticed, was listen.

Not with the polite performance of listening that courtiers had raised to an art form — the occasional nod, the maintained eye contact, the mind clearly elsewhere. Actually listen. The way people did when the information mattered to them.

He listened to you with this quality for the entirety of the dinner.

You were talking mostly to Lady Arryn on your other side, and the conversation was pleasant enough, but you were aware — with the peripheral attention you had developed for exactly this kind of thing — of Maekar beside you. Still, present. Not participating in the table's general noise but not entirely absent either.

At one point Lady Arryn said something that made you laugh — genuinely, not politely — and you felt rather than saw something shift slightly in the stillness beside you.

You glanced over. He was looking at his wine.

"Do you find Lady Arryn amusing?" you asked quietly, because you were a reasonably straightforward person and the elderly lady's advice was fresh in your mind.

He looked at you. Direct, as advertised.

"I find her adequate," he said. "I find the question of what makes you laugh more interesting."

You stared at him for a moment. He returned to his wine with the composure of someone who had not just said something that landed like a small precise arrow directly in the centre of your chest.

You turned back to Lady Arryn, brows slightly furrowed and filed it away. Told yourself very firmly it was simply an observation.

Winter settled over King's Landing like a declaration.

Sharp mornings and early dark and the particular quality of cold that got into stones and stayed there. You learned the Red Keep the way you had intended — carefully, observantly, building your picture from detail.

You learned that Maekar was in the training yard before dawn every morning regardless of weather, that he ate simply and without much interest in the ceremony of meals, that he had strong opinions about military history and expressed them without invitation to anyone who raised the subject within earshot, and that he was, as advertised, genuinely difficult.

You watched him reduce a knight to a state of profound professional humiliation in approximately four sentences during a training observation. You watched him dismiss a lord's petition with a bluntness that left the room briefly airless. You watched him sit through a court reception with the expression of a man enduring a minor but persistent physical ailment.

He was, objectively, a great deal.

The thing was—

That he was not like that with you.

Not entirely. He was still direct — bluntly, immediately, without the social cushioning most people employed. He still said what he meant without apparent concern for whether it landed comfortably. He did not perform warmth that he did not feel.

But there was something different in the way he was difficult with you versus the way he was difficult with everyone else.

With everyone else it was — weather. Impersonal. The sharpness of a man who had long since stopped moderating himself for the comfort of people he did not consider worth moderating for.

With you it was—

The first time you noticed it properly was two weeks after your arrival.

You were in the main hall of your solar, working through correspondence with your maid when he appeared in the doorway, assessed the room with his standard military efficiency, and crossed directly to where you were sitting.

"You are in the wrong chair," he said.

You looked up. "I beg your pardon?"

"The light is behind you. You will strain your eyes." He moved to a nearby table, lifted a candlestick that was not his to move, and set it beside your correspondence with the certainty of a man who had not considered the possibility of objection. "That chair—" he indicated one six feet to the left— "catches the window light in the afternoons."

You looked at the chair. Looked at him.

"How do you know which chair catches the window light?" you asked.

A brief pause.

"I have been in this room before," he said.

"So have a lot of other people."

Something moved in his expression that he shut down immediately. "Do you want the better light or not?"

You moved to the other chair. He left without further comment.

You sat in the improved light and thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.

It kept happening.

It was to note that nothing about Maekar was gentle or particularly deliberate in its presentation, as you had noticed over the passing weeks. It happened the way he did most things: directly, without ceremony, as though the action were simply the obvious response to an obvious situation, and he could not understand why it required comment.

He appeared beside you at events with the air of a man who had simply happened to end up there. He inserted himself into conversations where someone was boring you with the blunt efficiency of a man who had decided the conversation should end and ended it. When you were cold — the Red Keep's draughts were considerable — he did not offer his cloak with the gallant performance of a suitor. He simply reappeared at court wearing one fewer layer than he had been previously and if anyone connected these facts that was their business.

He argued with you.

This was, perhaps, the most distinctive quality of how he was different with you versus everyone else. He argued with you genuinely — not talking over you or dismissing you but actually engaging; pushing back on things he disagreed with, demanding you defend positions you had stated, listening to your defence with the focused attention of someone who intended to update their view if warranted. And, to his credit, he had done so on at least two occasions.

You had never had someone argue with you like that. Like your opinion was worth the effort of genuine contest. You found, to your own surprise, that you loved it.

"You are wrong about the Andal migrations," he said one evening, during a dinner that had somehow become a conversation about ancient history.

"I am drawing on three separate sources," you said.

"Your sources are drawing on each other. The primary account is Maester Edwyn and the other two are simply Edwyn with additional speculation."

"And you have a better source?"

"I have a better argument." He leaned forward slightly. "Which I will make if you stop citing Edwyn as though repetition improves him."

You stopped citing Edwyn. He made the argument. It was, frustratingly, quite good.

"You may have a point," you said.

"I have the point."

"You have a point. There is a distinction."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile — Maekar did not distribute smiles widely — but the particular movement that you had begun to understand was his equivalent.

"You are stubborn," he said.

"You are insufferable," you said pleasantly.

The almost-smile deepened fractionally. He refilled your wine without being asked.

You filed that dinner alongside everything else and told yourself very firmly to stop filing things.

The orbiting was what finally made it impossible to ignore.

You had not named it that at first. You had noticed it as a pattern without quite articulating what the pattern meant — the consistent proximity, the appearing in rooms, the finding you in the library or the garden or the great hall with the air of a man who had simply ended up there through no particular intention.

It was one of your maids who named it.

"He follows you," she said one morning, with the frankness of someone who had been observing this for weeks and had formed a view.

"He does not follow me," you said, slightly scoffing at the comment.

"He was in the east gallery yesterday."

"A lot of people pass through the east gallery."

"He walked past it twice in the same hour."

You said nothing.

"He was in the library the morning you went to find the Valyrian histories," she continued, with the relentlessness of someone making a case. "He does not use the library. I asked."

"You asked?"

"Someone had to." She met your eyes in the mirror with complete composure. "He orbits you. Like the—"

"Do not say moon."

"My lady." She set down the brush. "That man has not sat through a single court function in living memory without removing himself at the earliest opportunity. Last week he stayed for three hours."

"He had responsibilities—"

"You were there for three hours."

The silence that followed had considerable weight.

"It does not mean—" you began.

"My lady," she said gently. "It definitely does."

You looked at your own reflection for a long moment.

The thing was — you knew she was right. You had known for weeks, in the part of yourself that you had been firmly instructing to be quiet, that the revolving around had to mean something. That the arguments and the candlestick and the appearing-in-rooms and the almost-smiles that he seemed to distribute almost exclusively in your direction meant something.

But.

The other thing you knew — the thing that sat in you like a counterweight, cold and persistent — was that Maekar Targaryen had not chosen this.

Neither had you, of course. Arranged marriages were arranged and you had made your peace with that before the wheelhouse ever left your father's gates. But you had arrived at court genuinely open to whatever this became.

You were not certain he had.

And the gap between he is making the best of an obligation, and he wants you here specifically was one you could not quite cross on the evidence available.

Because what if the circling was simply — supervision. Responsibility. The particular attentiveness of a man who had been told this was his duty and was performing it with the same thoroughness he brought to everything.

What if the almost-smiles were simply relief at finding his betrothed manageable rather than something warmer. What if you had spent months mistaking tolerance for affection because you had wanted very badly to be wanted.

"I think," you said carefully, "that there is a considerable distance between orbiting someone and wanting them there."

Your maid looked at you through the reflection on the mirror for a moment.

"My lady," she said quietly. "You have seen how he is with other people, and how he behaves when you are around."

"Yes," you said. "I have. And I know that he is — less sharp with me. More present. But—" You stopped. "He did not choose me. And I sometimes think — what if he is simply — enduring because that is what he ought to do?"

The silence afterward was soft and sad.

"I think there is only one way of knowing, my lady," your maid said.

"You may be right," you said. "I need to be certain before I—" You stopped.

Before you let yourself love him fully and openly and without the careful guard you had been keeping around it.

"I need to be certain."

You managed another month.

A month of morning walks that you treasured and questioned in equal measure. A month of arguments that made you feel more genuinely met than anything else in your life and then made you wonder afterward whether being argued with was the same as being valued. A month of that steady and reliable circling he did around you, and the almost-smiles, and the appearing-in-rooms, and all of it—

All of it complicated by the thing you had heard a few days ago.

It had been a small thing, objectively. A court function — one of the interminable evening receptions that Maekar endured with his standard expression of contained suffering. You had been across the room when Lord Peake had said something to him, too quietly for you to hear, and Maekar had gone very still in the way he did before he said something cutting.

What you had caught, crossing toward them through the crowd, was the tail end of it.

—grateful she is at least tolerable, given you had no say in the matter.

You had turned around and found somewhere else to be and spent the rest of the reception being perfectly composed and not thinking about it.

You had been thinking about it for a week.

Tolerable.

A week of tolerable sitting in you like a splinter. A whole week of looking at him and the almost-smiles and the map he had drawn you — a map, he had drawn you a gods damned map — and not being able to fully silence the voice that said:

What if this is simply what he does for someone he considers adequate. What if you are a responsibility he is managing well. What if you have built an entire architecture of hope on the foundation of a man who is merely being thorough about his obligations.

You could not keep it any longer. It was making the mornings bittersweet and the arguments hollow and the map — the map that you had folded carefully and kept — feel like something you had misread entirely.

So, you went to find him.

You found him in the armoury. You had learned this about him the way you had learned everything — by paying attention. Maekar in the armoury meant Maekar thinking hard about something he had not yet resolved.

You wondered, with a distant kind of hurt, if that something was you.

He was working through sword forms when you entered, moving with the focused economy that characterised everything physical he did, and he stopped when he saw you with an expression that arranged itself into attention immediately and completely.

Your heart did the inconvenient thing. You were so tired of your heart doing the inconvenient thing.

"You do not usually come here," he said.

"No," you agreed.

He set the sword aside. Reached for a cloth. Watched you cross the room with that still focused gaze and waited, because Maekar always waited rather than rushing toward things.

You stopped in front of him.

You had rehearsed this. Several versions of it, over several sleepless portions of several nights. You had intended to be measured. Precise. To ask the question cleanly and receive the answer without making it larger than it needed to be.

Instead what came out was—

"Am I tolerable?"

Maekar went completely still.

"What?" he said.

"Lord Peake." You held his gaze even though it cost something. "Three weeks ago. At the reception." A breath. "I heard what he said."

The stillness that followed was different from his usual stillness. This one had texture. Something moving through it that his face was working to manage and not entirely succeeding.

"You heard—"

"She is at least tolerable," you said quietly. "Yes, I heard. And I heard you say nothing back."

Maekar looked at you for a long moment.

Something was happening in his expression that you could not fully read — several things at once, moving too fast and too layered — and then his jaw tightened and he looked away briefly and then back, and the expression he wore when he found your eyes again was not one you had seen from him before.

"How long," he said. Very quiet. "Have you been carrying this."

"A week."

A rough exhale.

"And before that," he said, with the precision of a man reassessing a situation from new information, "you thought—"

"I didn't know what to think," you said. "I don't know what to think. You are — you are so present and then you say something like that and I don't—" Your voice had developed an unsteadiness you had not intended. "I don't know if I am someone you want here or someone you are making the best of. And it matters." You looked at him steadily despite everything. "It matters enormously to me."

The silence afterward was enormous.

Maekar looked at you with an expression that was almost painful to witness — not because it was closed or guarded but because it was the precise opposite. Something sitting fully exposed across his features that he was not attempting to manage, like the usual mechanisms had simply failed to engage.

"Lord Peake," he said. Low and deliberate. "Was asking me questions about you that were not his to ask. In a manner that was not—" His jaw tightened. "I did not trust myself to answer honestly in that room in that moment."

You stared at him.

"So you said nothing," you said slowly.

"Because the honest answer—" He stopped. Something working in his throat. "The honest answer was not something I was willing to give Peake in the middle of a reception."

"What was the honest answer?"

He looked at you for a long moment.

Then he crossed to you with that direct purposeful movement of his — two steps, no hesitation — and took your face in both hands and looked at you from very close and said:

"That you are the furthest thing from at least tolerable that I have ever encountered in my life."

Your breath left you.

"That I have been—" He stopped. Started again. The words clearly costing him, dragged out by sheer force of will. "I do not know how to do this. I am aware of that. I know that I am—" A rough exhale. "I know that I am not easy to read. That I communicate— badly. That what is obvious to me may not be—" His thumbs moved against your cheekbones. "I have been trying to be near you because when I am not I am—"

He stopped completely. Looked almost furious with himself.

"Unsettled," he said finally. Like the word had been extracted.

"Unsettled," you repeated softly.

"You are the only person who—" Another stop. Jaw working. "I do not follow people around reception halls or draw them bloody maps of corridors or—" He cut himself off. The red was climbing his neck toward his ears. "I have never done any of those things for any person. In my life. Before you."

Your eyes were burning.

"Then why—" you started.

"Because I wanted to." The words came out low and fierce and completely certain. "Not because you are my betrothed. Not because it is expected of me. Because I wanted to and I could not seem to stop and I did not—" His voice roughened. "I did not particularly want to stop."

You looked at him.

At this impossible prickly furious man holding your face in careful hands and going red about it and being unable to finish half his sentences because the feelings were too large for the vocabulary he permitted himself and underneath all of it—

Wanting you.

Not tolerating you. Not enduring you adequately.

Wanting you.

"You should have told me," you said. Your voice came out slightly unsteady.

"I was telling you," he said. With the exasperation of a man who has been shouting in a language he forgot to teach you. "Every morning. Every — I was telling you constantly. I did not realise you were not—" He stopped. The exasperation folding into something softer and more painful. "I did not realise you could not hear it."

The tear that escaped was entirely without your permission.

Maekar looked at it with the expression of a man who had just understood the full scope of something and found it considerably more significant than he had calculated.

"You thought I didn't want you here," he said quietly.

"I thought you were making the best of an obligation," you said. "I thought tolerable might be the ceiling."

Something moved through his face that was almost difficult to witness — the specific pain of a person realising that their silence, their indirection, their assumption that presence spoke for itself — had caused hurt they had never intended.

"No," he said. Roughly. Completely. "No. You are not—" He seemed to abandon the sentence in favour of a more direct approach. "I would have chosen you. Do you understand that? If there had been a choice. I would have chosen you anyway."

The tears arrived properly then.

Maekar made a low distressed sound at the sight of them and pulled you forward until your forehead rested against his chest and his arms came around you with the fierce careful certainty of someone who had decided this was where you belonged and intended to make that structurally clear.

"I would have chosen you," he repeated into your hair, like he needed you to have it twice.

You held onto him and let the week of tolerable dissolve out of you.

"I love you," you said into his chest. Muffled and slightly tearful and entirely sincere. "I have been trying not to fall for you like a stupid maiden since I arrived here."

The arms around you tightened.

"Trying not to," he repeated, something almost amused in the way he phrased it.

"You are very difficult," you said.

A sound escaped him. Short and low and startled — that real laugh, the unguarded one. "I am aware."

"And I love you anyway. Entirely." The silence that followed was warm and full.

His lips pressed into your hair.

"I am afraid that I am not going to become easier without a little time," he said gruffly.

"I know."

"I will still argue with you."

"Good."

"But I am—" A brief pause. "I am going to be better. At saying things. Directly. So you can hear them."

You pulled back enough to look at his face. He was flushed and slightly wrecked and entirely, completely serious.

"You don't have to become someone else for me," you said softly.

"I am not becoming someone else. I am becoming—" He seemed to search for it. "Clearer. So you do not have to put up with a husband who is incapable of communicating."

Your heart turned completely over.

"I love you," you said again.

The red reached his ears.

"I know," he said gruffly.

You raised an eyebrow. A long pause.

"I love you," he finally conceded. Like a man starting to pay a debt he was glad to owe. "Obviously. Entirely. Since approximately the moment you stepped out of that wheelhouse and looked at me like you were taking notes."

"I was actually taking notes," you said.

"I know." That almost-smile. The real one.

The wedding was on a morning in deep winter when the snow had just begun to fall over King's Landing.

You stood beside him before the sept and listened to him say the words with the directness he brought to everything true and thought, with distant clarity, that almost no other would be capable of fully knowing what sat behind those violet eyes that you had learned to read over the months.

Afterward in the brief moment before the feast he looked at you and said, without preamble—

"You look—" he stopped. The old frustration with vocabulary fleetingly visible. Then, with the deliberate care of a man who had made himself and you a promise, "You look like someone I would have chosen," he said. "In any life."

You had learned his language months ago. But he was learning yours too.

You rose onto your toes and kissed him once, briefly, and felt him exhale against your mouth like something that had been held carefully for a very long time finally being set down.

"There," you said softly. "Was that so difficult?"

"Insufferable," he said. With considerable fondness.

That evening during the feast he sat beside you, and you talked about things that had little or nothing to do with the celebration surrounding you. Maekar meticulously refilled your cup without you having to ask, and you, in return, stole some of the food from his plate.

After a moment of silence in which you looked around the great hall at all the people overcome by the emotion that a royal wedding allowed, when you returned your gaze to Maekar you realized that he had been watching you all that time.

Not with the careful concealed attention of before.

Openly. Completely. With those full violet eyes that were no longer a riddle for you. They were so full that he had needed not words to express what was behind them. He did not look away when you caught him.

You smiled and he, for a moment, smiled fully, with the intimacy of addressing an audience of one.

Outside the snow continued to fall over King's Landing.

Inside, Maekar Targaryen sat beside his wife at his own wedding feast and looked at her like she was something he had found unexpectedly and intended to keep for the rest of his life.