Go and open the door

a woman is less likely to go "it's stupid that women are expected to be modest" than she is to go "there is nothing immodest about a woman going out without a chaperone" or even "i can go out without a chaperone because i am so modest"

Happy pride!

Funny story, I went looking for this cursed fucking video recently and it seems like the cw scrubbed it from YouTube (curious, because videos from the same campaign for other shows are still up). However, they forgot to scrub it from Facebook, so you can enjoy it in it's all dogshit glory (image quality is whatever some weird Facebook video Downloader gave me)

He’s eighteen, or thereabout. He’s an orphan, he’s king. His grandfather is dead and he's king. At least two of his children are dead, have been dead, and that's a political failure, not something to be constantly quietly, horribly sick about.

The king is dead, long live the king! - Though it is, everyone knows, the wrong king they mean to crow, Baelor's boy supplanting the rightful claimant for the simply reason that he was too much of a coward and not enough a knight to wear his own armor, once.

There's no coronation, of course, what with the plague. Then he gets sick, in earnest, with the plague. The Spring Sickness left him with pox marks and a strengthened immune system and a chronic cough whenever a damp wind rises from the sea, so that’s nice.

you tell me there's a place called ashford. ash + ford. with a fairly insignificant noble house that gives off enough new money vibes that he's throwing a big tourney for his daughter and clearly losing huge amounts of money about it to curry favor.

and the one guy who dreams about the future sees a hedge knight stand over a great fallen dragon.

and there's fine spring fields, and there's a clear river. and the castle isn't much but it's not old either. it's noticeably not old or grand. and the place is called ashford.

the dragon's wings are black, immense. a century ago a great black dragon crossed these fields, its shadow a dreadful shadow. so perhaps it was balerion, with aegon riding great and terrible in it: aegon the first of his name, who with vhagar and meraxes burned four thousand men of the reach, its king included. they flew over the fields, and fire rained down, shattered the free and the castles to nothing.

so terrible a fire whole houses were ruined to nothing. new names and new keeps had to be brought up: the clever and the collaborators, the ashfords of the world.

the ground of the tourney grounds where targaryen princes kill each other is a dark grayish thing, with ash in it.

all things considered, house targaryen should count itself lucky ashford only took the king's firstborn son and whatever measure of dignity and good will and longevity house targaryen had harnessed for itself.

Give me a Dunk that, when visiting Summerhall with Egg, offers Maekar every one of his clumsy courtesies but cannot look him in the eye, because if he does he'll choke on the name of a dead man who shares Maekar's right eye

Give me a Maekar who keeps his back to Dunk whenever they're in the same room, because he trusts Baelor's good man not to stab him in it, but he cannot look at him, he can't

Egg forces them to share a meal with the rest of the family, and thank the seven the boy never shuts up, because at least they don't have to force themselves talk to eachother, but they're so busy not looking at eachother that they reach for the same dish at the same time, and their fingertips brush, and they're flinching back as though the touch burned them like wildfire

(it's a very awkward rest of dinner for everyone)

Maekar's solar window overlooks the training yard. He watches Dunk train Egg. He watches Dunk spar with his men at arms. He watches Dunk, from where no one can see him. He tries to see what Baelor saw. Sometimes he sees. Mostly he doesn't.

(he sees it more when Dunk is parenting Egg, when he helps the servants with their duties, when he stops a visiting knight from beating one of the squires, the way he talks to the hunting dogs, and looks after his horses, and protects the maids from drunk visiting lords)

(he watches him a lot more than he'd ever be willing to admit)

(he sees Baelor in him, a little, but that doesn't stop him hating him)

Dunk can't help but watch Maekar in the training yard. Because Maekar is a force of fucking nature. He watches from the rampart, from the shadows where Maekar can't see him, and has to force the breath in and out of his chest as he watches Maekar pulverize his opponents. He's like a snowstorm. It's mesmerising to watch.

(Dunk remembers getting stuck in a snowstorm once with Sir Arlan the only time they went above the neck. He remembers the biting unforgiving cold, and the wind so harsh it burned your skin like the dornish sun, and the unrelenting neverending force of it. Maekar has always seamed like a snowstorm to him.)

(He thinks Baelor would have liked the north, the way the people there kept themselves to duty. He wonders if he ever went.)

(Maekar would know, but Dunk would never ask.)

He wonders if Baelor and Maekar fought the same. He wouldn't know, he didn't see it at Ashford. He was too busy just trying to stay alive.

He watches as Maekar beats down on any knight at arms brave enough to face him, and struggles to see anything of Baelor in it. He imagines Baelor as a more elegant fighter than either he or Maekar could manage. They're much more brute force in style than he could ever think of Baelor as being.

(Maekar remembers wresting in the mud with Baelor as boys, of being bruised from scalp to sole, and them both being scalded for it. He'd laugh if Dunk ever told him his thoughts, but of course he never would.)

(Dunk does see Baelor in Maekar in other ways. When he handles disputes of the local people, when he goes riding and is so gentle with his horse, Baelor's horse, when he parents his children, so harsh and yet so full of love he choked on it. His children adore him, so so much, and it makes Dunk feel ways he cannot understand.)

(It's easier to watch him fight than to deal with everything else.)

And when some visiting lord or knight takes a pot shot at Dunk, says something mocking and hurtful and a little foul, he would chokes on his tongue because the look Maekar gives him is dead eyed and cold, because that his hedge knight, Baelor's hedge knight, the only person allowed to talk shit about Dunk is him.

And the feeling is so so mutual because some other (or maybe the same for dramatic fic purposes) lord or knight makes a comment about Maekar while in the training yard, and Dunk beats the ever living shit out of him. Has to be pulled off of him. Because Maekar is Baelor's brother, and they loved eachother, and that grief is his and Maekar's to share, and everyone else better shut their fucking mouths, especially in Maekar's own home.

Even before they referenced waiting for Godot I was like…this is like if waiting for Godot was sort of a thriller.

-

But of course he doesn't take it out of his paycheck, because Baelor Targaryen is a lot of things — gentle, clever, kind, funny, surprisingly vanilla in bed, sentimental, unbelievably fussy about his clothes, determined, a terrible driver, loving, impatient, prone to crying at John Lewis adverts, overworked — but one thing he is above all things is a rich arsehole.

"I was under the impression that you rather enjoyed my arsehole," Baelor observed mildly, when Dunk told him as much. He probably meant it to sound snippy, but his eyes were smiling too crinkly for Dunk to take him seriously. They were curled up in Baelor's massive four-poster bed and in the moonlight he was so beautiful it made Dunk's heart twist.

do you like dancing?

RARE WIN FOR THE MYRIEL/CONVENTIONIST G- NATION (me and like 4 other people)

Like, Dunk comes in asking for a favor. This is extremely normal, even if he's a complete weirdo about it; Targaryens probably have people climbing through windows asking for shit from them all the time, and in return offering bribes, flattery, their virtue, whatever they think will get them what they want. Baelor's kind of distantly amused by Dunk's brass balls in asking him directly "hey will you vouch for my old master and by extension FOR ME, some giant rando you've definitely never seen before in your life and don't even know the name of?" but like, same shit different knight really.

So he's like "oh yeah sure I guess I remember him," and then pulls out his sparkling neurodivergent obsessive memory for apparently every fucking tourney in all of Westeros over the last 50 years. He clearly remembers Ser Arlan with some degree of respect — I'm betting most knights facing off against the Heir to the Throne don't actually try to beat him, and the fact that he did spoke well of him. So he's telling this story and—