FandomTrela

the eyes are the bigger issue. because in public he keeps them bobby's blue, locked in, consistent. but in private when he's relaxed (when you're close, when you're touching him, when you do something that makes that pleased-feline expression cross his face) the blue drains out. slow. like ink diffusing in reverse. and what's behind it is that black.

that ancient, depthless, void black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. and he doesn't notice it happening because to him that's just. his eyes. the blue is the costume. the black is home.

and you love it. you're sitting in his lap running your fingers through his hair and his eyes go black and you light up because that means he's comfortable. that means the mask is down, means you're seeing HIM and not the bobby filter.

you beam. you're lost in it. tracing the edges of his jaw where the bone structure is pressing just slightly sharper than bobby's template allows, watching the black swirl in his eyes like deep water, and he's making that low, pleased rumble in his chest—

"dude." bobby, from the kitchen doorway, beer in hand. "your weird creature eyes are showing. put them away."

bb's head turns. slowly. the black eyes fix on bobby with a flatness that, in the backrooms, would precede something being torn apart.

bobby takes a sip of his beer. holds the stare. doesn't blink. because bobby has exactly one advantage over an apex predator and it's that he genuinely does not care. fear requires imagination and bobby has been emotionally avoidant for so long that his fight-or-flight response has been replaced by a shrug.

bb glares.

bobby takes another sip.

bb glares HARDER. the room drops a degree. one degree. his version of a warning shot.

bobby raises an eyebrow. scoffs. walks away. "freak," he mutters, affectionately, the way you'd mutter at a weird dog. bb's glare follows him out of the room and you have to physically turn his face back toward you because the black eyes are now doing the territorial thing rather than the intimate thing and the mood is very different.

"ignore him."

"he called me—"

"baby. ignore him."

bb refocuses on you. the black settles. the rumble restarts and he nuzzles into your neck. bobby turns the TV up in the other room. equilibrium restored.

but the kitchen incident. oh the kitchen incident.

bobby has you against the counter. because bobby in the real world post-backrooms is different. he's trying. he's present. he's doing the work.

and part of the work is that he doesn't take this for granted anymore. doesn't take you for granted, doesn't treat your body like something he has automatic access to. so when he reaches for you now there's an intentionality to it that wasn't there before. a question in his hands. and tonight, in the kitchen, you answered it.

he kissed you first. soft. testing. his mouth barely brushing yours, tasting the yes before he committed to it. and then you pulled him in by the shirt and the softness evaporated.

he's got you pressed against the counter edge. his hips pinning yours. one hand gripping the counter beside you and the other on your waist, thumb hooked under the hem of your shirt, pressing into the bare skin above your hip bone. his mouth is on yours and he's kissing you the way bobby used to (before the drifting, before the distance, before he forgot how) deep and hungry. and you can feel him everywhere. the heat of him. the realness of him. the right pressure. the right everything.

and it's building.

you can feel it building. your fingers in his hair, pulling, and the sound he makes against your mouth (low, rough, starving) goes straight through you.

his hand slides further under your shirt. palm flat against your ribs. warm skin on warm skin. his thumb traces the underside of your bra and your breath catches and he swallows the sound and presses closer and you can feel what this is doing to him, pressed against you, hard through his jeans.

bobby's mouth drags from your lips to your jaw to the spot below your ear that he remembers, he still remembers, after everything he still knows exactly where to—

"is it that time?"

bobby's whole body goes rigid. his hand stops. his mouth stops. his breathing stops. you feel him die a small, complete death against your neck.

bb is in the doorway. bobby's face. bobby's exact smile. but wider. brighter. with an enthusiasm that makes him glow. he's already reaching for the hem of his shirt.

"shall I get undressed?"

you start laughing. you can't help it. it erupts out of you, helpless, shaking against bobby's chest. bobby groans into your neck. guttural, defeated, the groan of a man who was thirty seconds from having his girlfriend on the kitchen counter and is now dealing with this.

"GET OUT."

"but she's laughing. she likes when I—"

"OUT."

bb looks at you. you're still laughing. tears forming. hand over your mouth. bobby's forehead pressed against your collarbone, his body still hard against yours, his hand still under your shirt. he's radiating a frustration so intense it's practically visible.

bb looks genuinely puzzled because from his perspective he read the room correctly. arousal was present. participation was implied. he was being AVAILABLE and ENTHUSIASTIC and these are qualities you have specifically praised and the signals are very confusing.

"baby," you manage, between laughs, your voice still thick from the kiss, "give us a minute."

"a minute," bb repeats. processing.

"a few minutes."

"how many is a few?"

"oh my GOD," bobby says into your collarbone. you can feel his teeth against your skin. not a kiss. frustration given a physical outlet. biting down gently on your shoulder because it's either that or actually killing his duplicate.

bb retreats. not far. you can hear him in the hallway. he's humming. he's waiting. he's counting the minutes because you said a few and he's going to hold you to that.

bobby lifts his head. looks at you. bobby's blue eyes. dark. blown. still wanting you so visibly it makes your stomach clench. his hand hasn't moved from under your shirt. his hips haven't moved from yours. he's stubbornly, pointedly, refusing to let the moment fully die.

"I hate him," he says. low. his mouth an inch from yours.

"you don't."

"I hate him a little." his thumb moves on your ribs. slow. reclaiming.

"you made him coffee this morning."

"lapse in judgment."

you pull him back in. kiss him. harder than before. your teeth catch bobby's bottom lip and he makes that sound again. the surprised, rough one, and his hand tightens on your ribs and his hips press forward and you're right back where you were, building, climbing. bobby's mouth hot on your throat and your back arching off the counter—

from the hallway: "it's been four minutes."

bobby's forehead hits your shoulder.

you laugh until you can't breathe. bobby stays pressed against you, face buried in your neck, his body slowly coming down from something it very much did not want to come down from.

you can feel him breathing hard. can feel the frustration and the want and underneath both of them, very quietly, the laugh he's trying not to let out. because it is funny. it's objectively, devastatingly funny. and bobby franklin may be sexually frustrated and sharing his girlfriend with an eldritch abomination but he's not immune to comedy.

"i'm going to kill him," he mumbles into your neck, but his shoulders are shaking.

"no you're not."

"i'm going to kill him and it's going to take less than forty-two seconds."

from the hallway: "I heard that. no, you won't."

bobby laughs. actually laughs. the real one. the loud, sharp, too-much one he hates. muffled against your throat. your favourite sound in the world pressed into your skin.

bb pouts by going still. the entity stillness. the one that makes the air feel different. he doesn't stop being functional (he'll still answer if you talk to him, still hand you things, still exist in the domestic space) but there's a quality of absence to him. like he's retreated behind bobby's face and is operating it from a distance.

you'll be curled up with bobby watching TV and bb will be in the doorway and he'll be so still that you forget he's there for a second and then you remember and the guilt hits like a truck because you should not be able to forget an ancient entity is in your hallway and yet he's made himself so small, so absent, so deliberately un-present that he's practically furniture.

and that's what gets you every time. because bobby pouts LOUD and bb pouts QUIET and the quiet one is so much worse because it reminds you of what he is. what he's always been. the thing in the corner. the thing that watches. the thing that makes itself smaller so it doesn't scare you away. except now he's doing it in your hallway and it stings every time because you want him to live fully and be happy.

so you develop a system.

"baby, get in here."

said from the couch. said without looking up. in the voice that bb knows means him specifically.

and bb materialises from wherever he was sulking (the kitchen, the hallway, the corner of the bedroom where he stands sometimes when he thinks you're asleep) and he hovers at the edge of the couch until you pat the cushion next to you. he sits and you put your legs back in his lap and take bobby's hand at the same time and for approximately eleven minutes everyone is content.

then you lean your head on bobby's shoulder and bb's thumb stops moving on your ankle.

then you squeeze bb's knee reassuringly and bobby's jaw tightens.

it's a seesaw. it's an endless, exhausting, deeply stupid seesaw and you're the fulcrum and both of them are too proud and too damaged to just SAY "i want your attention right now" so instead they perform increasingly elaborate pantomimes of being fine while absolutely not being fine.

but then... something shifts. with time, with exposure.

it's not a single moment. more so a slow accumulation. the same way the couch arrangement happened. gradually, without acknowledgment, without anyone drawing a line around it and saying "this is what we are now." it just. builds.

bb makes bobby coffee once. sets it on the counter. walks away. doesn't make eye contact. bobby drinks it. it's perfect. bobby doesn't say thank you. bb doesn't expect him to.

bobby leaves the TV on the channel bb was watching after bb leaves the room. doesn't change it. just leaves it. bb comes back and notices and doesn't say anything and sits down and the room is one degree warmer than usual.

small things. grudging things. the awkward shape of two people building something that doesn't have a name yet for your sake.

and you notice.

and the way you touch them starts to change with it.

there's a gradual shift in the intentionality of it. the hand on bobby's chest when you pass him in the hallway lingers a half-second longer. your fingers in bb's hair stop being comforting and start being deliberate, wanting.

you become aware (physically, consciously aware) of the seesaw, and instead of trying to balance it you start leaning into the tilt.

you kiss bobby on the couch. longer than usual. slower, tangling your hand in his hair. and you don't move your legs out of bb's lap. and your hand finds bb's wrist and you hold it, put it on your hip. hold him there.

bobby's mouth on yours and spot where bb's pulse point should be under your thumb. and you feel bb's fingers tighten on your ankle. not pulling. no pushing. just. holding on.

and bobby. bobby who's kissing you, slow and wet. bobby who should be focused on the kiss. bobby opens his eyes, just slightly, and looks at bb over your shoulder. and bb is looking back. and something passes between them that's not hostility and not friendship and not permission, exactly, but something adjacent to all three. a recognition. a door being tested without being opened.

you're in the kitchen one morning. bobby is behind you, arms around your waist, chin on your shoulder. his territory. his routine.

and bb comes in and you reach for him without thinking, catch his hand, pull him into the kitchen, and now bobby is pressed against your back and bb is standing in front of you. your hand is on bb's chest and bobby's arms are still around your waist and for one suspended moment nobody moves.

the three of you in the kitchen. breathing. bobby warm against your back, bb cool against your palm. the same face on either side of you wearing completely different expressions.

bobby's jaw tight, uncertain, running calculations he doesn't have the emotional vocabulary for; bb's eyes half-lidded, patient, waiting, because bb is always waiting, bb has been waiting his entire existence and he can wait a little longer.

but there's something new in the patience now. something hungrier. less polite. the way his eyes track bobby's hands on your waist isn't jealousy anymore. it's something more complicated. more curious. like he's studying the shape of this. the geometry of three bodies in a kitchen, and running his own calculations about what configuration would let him get closer without anyone having to step back.

and bobby (who's been avoiding his feelings since birth, who deflects and retreats and makes everything lighter) bobby doesn't step back either. bobby stays. arms around your waist. chin on your shoulder. looking at the thing wearing his face standing close enough to touch, and for the first time in this entire impossible arrangement, bobby's jaw loosens. not all the way. not yet. but the tension drops by a fraction. an experiment. a test.

you feel it. the softening behind you. the stillness in front of you. the two of them, through you and around you, not fighting and not pouting and not performing, just. present. testing the weight of something none of you have named.

you turn your head. kiss bobby's jaw tenderly. feel him exhale against your neck.

you look at bb. hold his gaze. run your thumb across his chest, over the place where a heartbeat would be.

"stay," you say. to both of them. to neither of them. to the shape forming between the three of you that is new and fragile and terrifying and so warm it could burn.

they stay.

and the seesaw stops rocking. and what's left isn't balance exactly. it's something else. a thing with more weight. more gravity. three points holding each other in place, each one necessary, and if you tilt your head and look at it from exactly the right angle it almost looks like a foundation.

you're testing it. all three of you. pressing on the walls. checking the weight limits. seeing how much this shape can hold before it breaks or before it becomes the only shape that makes sense.

it hasn't broken yet.

maekar's jealousy is quiet and it is devastating precisely because he would never call it that.

maekar has organised his entire interior life around not needing things. he is practical. he is useful. he is the one who notices when your shoulder is bothering you before you says so, who positions himself between you and an unfamiliar room, who stays when he wakes early because he knows you sleep better with his weight there. he has constructed a very thorough case for his own indispensability and the case is built entirely on function because function is the vocabulary he has and tenderness is the vocabulary he has been pretending not to speak for forty-odd years.

and then there is baelor. baelor who makes you laugh the unguarded way. baelor whose hand rests near yours on a cushion in a quiet solar and whose presence in a room with you has the quality of two people who have never once needed to perform ease because ease is simply what they are together. baelor who gets the softness. the looseness. the specific quality of a woman completely and uncomplicated held.

maekar watches this and files it under irrelevant and the filing does not take.

what makes his jealousy so interesting to write is that it is not about the sex. maekar is not lying awake wondering if baelor is better in bed — he knows the answer to that question with the serene confidence of a man who has conducted extensive empirical research. what he is lying awake about is the after. the quiet. the staying. the version of you that exists in those low-lit domestic moments that he does not know how to inhabit without feeling like he is doing it wrong.

he wants to be soft with you. he has no idea how to want that without it feeling like defeat.

so his jealousy comes out sideways — in the set of his jaw across a room, in the way he comes to you afterward with his hands already certain and his intentions already physical, trying to be useful in the register where he knows he is useful, trying to give you something so undeniably good that the question of the other thing doesn't need to be asked.

it sometimes comes out in tell me he does this better — a line that sounds like competitive arrogance and is, underneath, a man asking am I enough in the only language he currently has access to.

and when you finally crack him open — slowly, with your hands on his face and your patience and the specific tenderness of a woman who has known him long enough to see through every defence he has ever constructed — what comes out is not the soldier or the prince or the man who wins almost every sparring match.

what comes out is someone who just wanted to be held.

and did not know he was allowed to ask.

baelor's jealousy is louder, which surprises people, because baelor is not a loud man.

here is the thing about baelor: he has always been the brain. the diplomat. the one who thinks before he acts, who attends carefully, who is reasonable in rooms that are becoming unreasonable. he has an entire identity built around the composure, and the composure is genuine — it is not performance, it is not repression, it is simply who he is.

but underneath the composure there is a man who has heard, through walls, the sounds his wife makes with his brother (also her husband). and has noted, with the careful attention he gives everything, that he does not get those sounds. not those specific ones. not with that frequency or that particular quality of abandon.

and he has filed this under not requiring attention with the thoroughness of a man who knows that what he is feeling is not rational and has therefore decided not to feel it, and the filing, like maekar's, does not entirely take.

baelor's jealousy is the jealousy of a man who has always thought of himself as the mind to maekar's body — the one who makes you feel known, attended to, completely seen, while maekar makes you feel something more physical and immediate. he has accepted this division without ever consciously accepting it. it has simply been the way things are. and then maekar leaves a mark on your neck and you walk into his study wearing it and something underneath all the reason and composure says: why not me.

not instead of him. that is important. baelor does not want to replace anything. he wants to add something. he wants to discover whether the careful patient architecture of how he loves you has been, in some specific register, a limitation he imposed on himself rather than an accurate reflection of what he is capable of.

he wants to be rough. he wants to leave marks. he wants to hear the sound.

and what is so compelling about baelor's jealousy is that it makes him ask for it. maekar would never ask — maekar works around the asking, approaches the wanting from the side, gets there through competition and provocation and the specific dynamics that let him have things without technically requesting them. baelor looks you in the eye and says I've heard you through walls and I want to know what he does that I don't and the vulnerability of that — the specific exposure of the most composed man in the room admitting that he has been keeping score and the score has been bothering him — is extraordinary.

and then, having asked, he executes. because baelor is always going to execute. the patience turned inside out is still baelor — still precise, still attending, still the man who wanted the exact words and nothing approximate even while his cock was buried in your cunt and his composure was in pieces on the floor. he is rough in a way that is entirely his own, not an imitation of maekar, not brawl mistaken for brain — just baelor, finally, with the careful removed.

the line of confirmation — tell me I am as good as him — is the funniest and most revealing thing he does in any of these situations. because maekar sometimes uses something similar from a position of near-certainty, daring you to contradict him, already knowing you can't. baelor uses it from genuine need. he needs to hear it. he has constructed a very reasonable case for why he should not need to hear it and the case has not held and he is asking anyway, directly, with the specificity that is always his.

and what you gives him in return is not just the words. it is a different sound. not the one he heard through walls. something new. something that belongs only to this room and this version of him and this specific evening of him finally, briefly, letting himself be something other than careful.

he presses his lips to both marks afterward. his and maekar's (because of course he also leaves a mark of his own). both acknowledged. both claimed.

that gesture is the whole of baelor in one movement: the man who thinks about everything, who attends to everything, who would not in a thousand years leave maekar's mark unacknowledged because leaving it unacknowledged would mean that his jealousy is something visceral and real and dangerous rather than some twisted, dragon-esque kind of brotherly competition, and he has been loving maekar and you his whole life for that to crack the relationship.

even in the wreckage of his composure, he is still the most deliberate man in the room.

the thing that makes this dynamic work is that their jealousies are mirrors.

maekar wants the softness baelor gives you. baelor wants the abandon maekar draws from you. each of them is looking across the architecture of this relationship at the thing the other one has and feeling the specific ache of its absence, and neither of them would ever say so directly, and you know, because you always know, and you give them both what they're reaching for in the moments when they finally, reluctantly, let you.

they are not jealous of each other in the way of men competing for a woman. they are jealous of each other in the way of men who love the same woman completely and have each, in their own register, been given access to something the other hasn't — and cannot quite stop noticing the door they're standing outside of.

the good news is that you have the key to both.

the better news is that you know exactly when to use it.

You reached for the nearest document before he could recover enough to protest, unfolding the parchment with exaggerated seriousness and holding it up toward the light from the window.

“Grain inventories from Maidenpool?” You let it drop with theatrical disappointment. “Seven hells, no wonder you look miserable.”

“My love.” His voice was already roughening at the edges. “I truly must finish this, if you please.” Yet his chest remained a solid press against your back, making no effort to shift you anywhere.

You smiled to yourself and leaned forward to reach another stack near the edge of the desk. The movement was idle enough on the surface, except that it forced your back into a slow arch and dragged your weight across his lap in one long pull.

The sound he made was low and involuntary. Those large hands spread wider against your hips, no longer steadying but properly holding. Against your back, his exhale came out longer than it went in, the warmth of it pressing through the silk at your shoulder.

“Who is Lord Melcolm?” you continued pleasantly, inspecting a new letter with the grave attention of someone reading a royal decree. “He writes as though someone is actively chasing him through the halls.”

“My dear wife.” His voice dropped low. “If anyone finds us in this position again—”

“Oh, this seal is lovely.” You cut him off without turning, already reaching for a letter in dark green wax and waving it carelessly over your shoulder. The arc of your arm rolled your hips against him, and his fingers pressed into you hard enough that heat flickered low in your stomach.

“Whose house uses a heron? I cannot place it.”

A beat of silence followed, and when you glanced back at him, his jaw was set and his gaze had moved entirely away from the desk.

You shifted a bit to your left, feeling the answering hardness beneath his breeches grow more insistent with every passing moment. The fabric pulled taut in a way that made your thoughts briefly and inconveniently blank.

The movement ground your weight against him, and whatever sound he had been holding back came out quieter, pressed thin through his teeth.

Those big, veiny hands started to move their way to the curve of your hip, firm enough to leave a memory in the skin. His thumb drawing one slow stroke against the silk there before stilling. But he did not move it away. A wise instinct.

You could have turned around and devoured him. The want of it was embarrassingly persistent, pulsing low and inconvenient, and you had been sitting with it for some time. Instead you kept rummaging through the scatter of his desk, tilting one letter after another.

“Mm.” You frowned at the letter, tilting it one way and then the other. “I cannot make sense of this one at all. What does it say, my love?”

Under the guise of needing his assistance, you twisted slightly in his lap to face him, letting one knee rest atop his growing bulge. The motion felt far too deliberate to be accidental.

A silence stretched whilst he gathered whatever remained of himself. He reached to take the letter from your fingers and turned it once. His mismatched eyes settled on your face.

“That,” he said quietly, “is because you are holding it upside down.”

The mask had worn thin now. A flush had crept along the strong line of his throat, high colour against tanned skin, vivid enough that you wanted to press your mouth to it.

“Oh!” A soft, guileless giggle escaped you, and you watched the muscle jump in his jaw at the sound of it. “How foolish of me, husband.”

You set the letter aside and reached for a completely blank sheet instead. “Ah! What about this one?”

You held it up, eyes squinted, pretending to read at obviously nothing.

“It says,” you murmured, “an invitation requesting the Heir to the Iron Throne join his wife in bed, as she has grown terribly cold and increasingly impatient.”

You leaned over and pushed the page beneath his nose, close enough for your breast to press against his doublet. You tapped the blank paper like a mother teaching her son to read. “See? It says right here.”

The distance between your bodies had reduced to almost nothing now, every slow breath shifting heat between you. His eyes had gone very dark. The weight of them settling on your face with an intensity that made the room feel suddenly smaller.

His mismatched gaze dropped briefly to your mouth, then to your chest, lingering a beat too long before he dragged it back up to meet yours. A small, unguarded thing he clearly had not intended to give you.

"I believe it would be terribly unwise for the Crown Prince to deny such an urgent summons," you said, just above a whisper.

He said nothing, but the silence that followed was not empty. It sat between you thick and airless, his eyes not leaving yours for even a moment. His expression holding an answer he had no intention of saying out loud, so you gave him one in return.

You let the knee resting against him begin to move. A long, slow stroke directly against the hardness straining at his breeches. The heat of him consumed you even through all the layers in between. You felt him tense, the strong lines of his body drawing tight all at once like a bowstring pulled to its limit.

Whatever he had been holding back finally slipped through. The sound that escaped him was small and brief. His hand at your hip flexed and tightened in its wake. Then, slowly, something else moved across his face. Amusement creeping in, mixing with hunger. Like he could not quite decide whether to laugh or pull you closer. Knowing him, he would do both.

With nothing left to pretend, he set the blank parchment very carefully on the desk, smoothed it flat with one broad palm, and reached for you instead.

One strong arm closed around your waist, the solid breadth of his chest leaving very little room for pretending you had not wanted exactly this from the moment you walked through the door. The other hand curved around the back of your neck, fingers reaching into your hair, drawing you closer until your lips hovered at the edge of his.

He took your mouth at once, pressing hard at first before softening into something slower and wetter, his tongue sliding against yours until a moan slipped out before you could catch it.

Without loosening his grip, he began to grind his hardened, clothed cock against your hips. You shifted instinctively until his bulge pressed firm between your thighs. You moaned deeper into his mouth, fingers tightening in his collar, and felt him exhale hard against your lips.

The last of whatever restraint he had been clinging to all evening finally burning through. He broke the kiss to catch his breath, still holding you close, his forehead pressing against yours.

“Baelor…” you breathed, your teeth grazing his lower lip, yearning for more.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, chest rising and falling, eyes dropping to drink you in. A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth.

You asked him to lie on his back, and he did so without hesitation - with both arms tucked behind his head, a curious smile lingering on his lips.

Your gaze traced the length of him: from his face, down the line of his jaw, to his chest where dark hair sprawled, then lower still, narrowing into a dark line that disappeared under his breeches.

How could he be completely unaware of the effect it had on you?

The mattress dipped as you climbed onto him. Baelor’s hands settled on your thighs, steadying you as you lowered yourself against his lower abdomen, caging him beneath you. The position placed that dark line exactly where you wanted it. Your eyes fluttered shut.

You could feel its faint texture against your skin, coarse strands brushing in a way that sent a sharp, unfamiliar signal through your senses. Every nerve seemed to respond at once, the sensation unlike anything else you had known - a stripe of ruggedness you found utterly intoxicating.

Slowly, you began to move. Drawing pleasure from every stroke. The roughness created a steady, simmering heat between your legs. Leaning forward, you rested your forehead against his - breath breaking in short, uneven bursts.

"Is this it?", he whispered. "Is this why you wouldn't let me trim here?". He watched you with open fascination, his gaze following the sway of your hips and the gradual unraveling of your composure. 

A soft groan escaped you as you shifted your weight, moving in circles and savouring every sensation. Ensuring that every single hair of that happy trail rubbed against your slickness. You could feel yourself opening up for him, the natural lubrication of your arousal soaking into the coarse hair, making it slide and pull in a rhythmic, maddening cadence. The pleasure was intoxicating. 

You couldn’t stop moving. Your motions creating a gradual vertical line along his lower abdomen. Each time that hair grazed the damp area at the base of your opening, it triggered another surge of warmth between your thighs.

Baelor's hands roamed upward, skimming along your ribs. His touch was light, almost teasing, a counterpoint to the increasing desperation of your movements.

"You have a strange obsession with this, darling," he whispered, pausing for a fraction of a second to look up at you. His eyes were dark, blown wide with lust, but his expression remained one of pure, unadulterated love.

Then your attention drifted to his chest, fingers sinking into the thick, dark hair that spread across his pectorals and tapered toward his sternum. It softened the hard lines of muscle beneath. You traced through it lazily, relishing the coarse strands against your skin.

The contrast of tanned muscle and untamed growth left you feeling small against him, enveloped by his scent and strength. It deepened the hunger already coiling within you. The sight of him alone left your mouth dry. You loved every inch of him.

"You're so wet for me." His eyes never left your face. The slickness between you had grown impossible to ignore, easing your movements while somehow heightening every sensation.

"Tell me what you're feeling." The amusement in his voice had softened into something far hungrier.

"Full." You rocked faster, chasing the feeling. "Even though you're not inside me. I feel so full."

Baelor continued to watch you with naked admiration. His hands never stopped their gentle guidance, never tried to rush you or take control. He simply held you while you used him, patient and attentive, those dark eyes drinking in every reaction.

The coil in your belly tightened. Your thighs trembled with the effort of maintaining the rhythm. And still, that trail provided the perfect friction, the perfect texture, everything you needed to spiral higher and higher.

When you started to feel the pressure build, a golden heat radiating from the centre of your being, his name was all you could manage.

“Baelor… Baelor… Baelor.” His name was a prayer on your lips now.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured, his voice steady and grounding. “Just let go.”

And so you did. You ground down hard one final time, pressing yourself against that trail, against his navel, riding out the waves until they finally began to subside. Your body went lax, and you slumped forward. Baelor’s large arms catching you before you could collapse fully onto his chest.

A few moments passed before he cupped your jaw, tilting your face up to his. “My heart,” he whispered, planting a kiss on your lips.

“I’m definitely never trimming now,” he said quietly, his eyes bright with amused disbelief.

Makear knew what the Lannister’s where. They were cunning, power-hungry, and the very house that funded the whole of Westeros. But despite their richness, their lands and endless amount of vassal houses (whether official or through the mountain of debts they owed), the Lannisters still craved more. They craved power. Power to sit themselves in the iron throne and turn the dragon into a roaring lion.

Maekar hated them, hated their pride, their cunning, and their endless push for more. Hated them so much that when you arrived at court, a lady clearly groomed to seduce a prince and land a Lannister on the iron throne. And yet with you, any cold resolve he had towards the Lannisters seemed to falter. 

You were exactly what one would expect from a lady of House Lannister. Perfectly posed, cunning, smart, yet never letting in just how smart you truly were, and the most faltering quality of all was your beauty. You were the picture-perfect lady, and Makear despised you for it. Or at least tried to. It was hard to, when the second you walked into the Red Keep, you set your sights on him. 

He had little choice in being courted by you, you were everywhere, weaving yourself into every conversation and every thought in his mind. 

The first day you arrived, your intentions were clear. Your father had sent you to find a prince, an heir and land a golden-headed lion on the throne. Maekar had tried desperately to avoid you, and yet at every feast and dinner his eyes met yours. 

His scowls were met with your smirks. 

His grunts with your laugh.

His cold disposition met your cunning. 

You were determined to twist your way into Maekar's heart. And for the first moon, Maekar had thought it a game. Had thought you were there to tease and annoy him, and that one of his sons or nephews would end up falling into your trap. 

But after a moon of teasing him from afar, you pounced. Cornering him in the gardens, wearing a red dress moulded to fit every curve of your body, your hair styled in a way that accentuated your neck, and a neckline that was just north of scandalous. 

“My prince”, you greeted, a coy smile on your lips as you approached him. 

Maekar scowled at the sight of you and your sheer dedication to finding him. He had chosen a spot far from prying eyes, and you, his lioness, had found him not even an hour after he had escaped the ramblings of court. 

“My lady,” he grunted, forcing the book in front of him closed as you made yourself comfortable on the seat beside him. 

“What is that, my prince?” You drawled, reaching across his lap to grab the book, your hand touching his thigh as you did so. Makear remained silent, his eyes searching for something other than you to gawk at. “A history of battles by Maester Gromwell”, you hummed, “how boring.” 

Makear's scowl depended, reaching to grab the book from your hold “It’s informative,” 

You tusked, the sound drawing Maekar to give at your lips, “So, it is boring then.”

“To weak-minded individuals,” he grunted.

Your hand flew to your chest in mock insult, “Are you calling me weak-minded, my prince?” Makear turned to you, a frown on his face, but made no effort to respond. “Well…my prince, some of us,” you turned in your seat, facing him fully as you spoke, “weak-minded individuals” you mocked his voice, grunting as you spoke, “ prefer to read about stories of adventure and romance,” your eyes locked with his at that word, “and not learn about silly little wars,” 

Makear rolled his eyes, “These silly little wars are the reason a Blackfy-” your hand moved back to his thigh, itching higher than was appropriate. Makear faltered, his eyes flying to your hand, and your body that was moving closer and closer with each breath. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing, my prince, just getting more comfortable,” you dralwed, moving impossibly close to him, your hand still resting on his thigh.

Makear grunted, watching you closely ” You are…close,” he remarked.

“Do you want me to move away, my prince?” you asked, your hand moving away from his, only to be stopped by his own hand landing on top of yours. Your mouth formed a smirk, “or perhaps closer?”

“This is improper,” he grunted, making no effort to move away even as your hand went to his jaw, caressing his beard. Makears' breath faltered at the feeling. 

“Hmm, perhaps, only if we were caught,” you dralwed, your mouth ghosting over his. For a moment, Maekar prayed you would kiss him, but instead, your mouth moved past his, placing a soft kiss on his cheek before walking away, leaving only the feeling of your kiss and touch behind.

After that, the lingering gaves he had felt for a moon grew into lingering touches. Your company grew relentlessly, unendingly, and the very thing Maekar looked forward to each day.  He hated it, hated every second of it. And yet after three moons of your relentless company, his head was up your skirts licking your cunt like a man starved. 

Your hands pulled at his hair as he feasted on your cunt, his hands needing your hips as his tongue delved between your folds. 

Loud moans fell from your lips, your back arched against the wall Makear had pushed you against before dropping to his knees. 

“Makear,” you moaned, tugging his hair tightly as you felt your peak approach, the coil in you fighting before snapping suddenly. Maekar’s tongue never stopped its ministrations as he worked you through your peak, his nose rubbing your clit as his tongue continued to fuck you even as your peak fully washed over you. “Makear, s’ too much,” your hips bucked into his face at the feeling of makear groaning into your cunt as he feasted on you.

Another peak washed through you with a moan akin to a scream, racking through you, in the small alcove where Makear had you pinned.

He rose from his knees slowly, eyes blown with just as he took in your dishevelled form. A smirk rose to his lips at the sight of you, breathless and boneless as you leaned against the wall. “Look at you,” he hummed, his hand sliding to your jaw and pulling your face towards his. “Not so poised and perfect anymore,” he tusked, eyes trailing your body and the rise and fall of your breasts. 

You rolled your eyes, your hands reaching for him and pulling his mouth down to yours in a messy, heated kiss, your tongue delving into his mouth, fighting for dominance as his hands slide to your waist, pulling you against him. The kiss only broke when you forced yourself away, smirking at the groan that fell from Maeker's lips.

“And here I thought you hated me,” you hummed as you broke away from him, your hand reaching to play with the straps of his doublet.

“I tolerate you,”  You clicked your tongue in response, your hand gliding over his doublet, stopping at the feel of a ring in his pocket. His hand grabbed yours softly, pulling your hand away and grunting at the look you gave him in response.

You smirked, “Tolerate me?”  Maekar scowled, his hand reaching for the ring in his pocket, ignoring the smile on your face at the sight of it.

“The council…” he began, attempting a scowl that didn’t meet his eyes, “has suggested that we wed”

“The council,” you repeated, nodding your head in fake understanding, as you moved to inspect the gold ring, engraved with rubies and black diamonds, “and did the council also suggest you lick my-“ he cut you off, his hand gripping your jaw once more and moving to kiss you, shutting you up.

“Shut up,” he mumbled against your lips, scowling softly.

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” you hummed, taking the ring and fitting it to your finger. Maekar grunted, watching you closely as you admired the ring. “Admit it,” you drawled, your hand sliding to his chest, “you want to marry me,”

“How’s that?” you murmured, admiring the way his tan skin glistened in the candlelight.

The tops of your fingers would occasionally trace over one of the many scars that had been etched into his body; the sizes and colours of the faded lesions varied, some the length of your forearm and a lighter hue, while others were as small as a quill tip and similar in tone to the surrounding skin.

Baelor hummed in reply before a muffled, “perfect,” left his parted lips. 

The right side of his face was pressed into a cushion below, providing you with the alluring image of his open mouth, flushed left cheekbone, and fluttering, dark lashes.

He made a content rumbling every time you worked out a stubborn lump, the hand he had resting around your calf tightening in appreciation of your efforts.

A raspy, dizzying moan left his throat in a long exhale when your hands kneaded at a particularly sensitive wound–one that, despite being eleven years old, would periodically still flare up and throb.

The sound made your legs constrict around him and eyelids flicker as arousal settled thickly at the base of your spine. You lingered around the edges of the aged laceration, evoking another low, unconstrained noise from deep within his chest.

Slowly, your fingers dragged upwards, leaving a trail of long, red welts that took their time to vanish, along the length of his shoulder blades. 

The dark grey and silvery hair that rested around the nape of his neck and ear was sleek from a coating of oil, darkened from when you had earlier threaded through the strands in a besotted manner. They had looked enticingly cute; their naturally curled shape too tempting for you to not reach up and twirl them around a single, slick digit.

“Turn around,” you commanded once you had managed to get all of the painful nodules out of his shoulders, your hips rising to provide him with room to flip over.

Once Baelor was comfortably facing you, you sat back down over his pelvis, legs tightening around his body once more when he peered up at you with a knowing smile.

This part wasn’t for him as much as it was for you.

He had gained a thickness over his muscles as the years passed, a supple, malleable layer of meat that easily surrendered to your ministrations. 

You poured more lotion over your palms, rubbing them together until the liquid was warm, and then placed them atop his torso.

The hair that was scattered over the stretch of his chest immediately darkened as the balm coated his skin; the glossy sheen that enhanced the bulkiness of his upper body caused heat to unfurl within your lower abdomen, drift up, and settle in blotchy, tingly patches over your throat and face.

Baelor’s own hands were resting over the upper part of your thighs, his new position supplying him more access to you.

His body jolted forward when one of your nails accidentally scraped his dusky nipple, eliciting a startled intake of air from the older man. You bit the inside of your cheek to refrain from remarking on how sensitive he was, despite knowing that he would never retaliate even if you were to do it again.

“Enjoying yourself?” Baelor inquired after several minutes of being thoroughly prodded, scraped, and tugged at. 

His scarred brow rose in response to the engrossed, fixated look on your face.

You hadn’t noticed how drastically your breathing had changed; immersed with the way his short, coarse hairs felt when you combed through them, and how every sinewy ridge of his flesh pliantly absorbed each stroke and squeeze you delivered.

and you'd just. accept mr kitty. immediately. "oh hello" and move on. a giant, faceless black humanoid with no features and you wouldn't even flinch. and THAT'S the thing that would really get to bb.

not the cookies. or the couch. the fact that you'd reach out and touch mr kitty's arm without hesitating. without the half-second pause you still sometimes have with bb where your survival brain runs its checks before your heart overrides them. you'd just. touch him. casually. the way you'd touch a friend.

and bb would be standing there going through the most complex emotional experience of his ancient existence because on one hand: mine mine mine mine she's mine the cookie is not better than me i restructured level 0 for her i killed for her i learned the word baby for her and this FACELESS PASTRY CHEF gets a smile for FREE???

but on the other hand. on the quieter hand. the hand that thinks in longer timeframes.

you accepted something inhuman without blinking. again. not because it wore a familiar face. not because it looked like bobby. because it was gentle with you and that was enough. and if you can look at mr kitty (no face, no voice, no borrowed features, just dark and strange and kind) and reach out and touch without flinching... then your acceptance of bb was never about the face. it was never about bobby's template. it was about you. about who you are. about the fact that you are simply, deep down, a person who looks at inhuman things and sees someone worth being soft with.

which means you might have loved him without the face.

which means the face might have been unnecessary.

which means everything he built (the bobby suit, the smile, the voice, the careful meticulous replication of a boy from santa clara) might not have been what caught you at all. it might have just been. him. the cold and the dark and the hum and whatever he actually is underneath all of it.

and that realisation is so big and so complicated that bb would need to go stand in a hallway by himself for a minute. just to process. just to let the implications settle without showing something.

but yeah, he'd still be jealous of that cookie. absolutely. you don't spend centuries as the most powerful thing in the backrooms only to be outperformed by a pastry.

he'd hold a grudge about that specific cookie for weeks. he'd find ways to source you sweet things on other levels (not as good, slightly weird, backrooms approximations of treats that taste almost right), and present them to you with that half-lidded expectant look like see? i can do that too. i can give you sweet things. please make the sound. the happy sound. the one you made for the cookie. make it for me.

He had made it clear to you on your wedding night that he had no intention of bedding you. It was a cold, blunt statement of fact, delivered not out of cruelty but out of a misguided sense of honesty. He had seen the flash of hurt in your eyes, quickly masked by a composed, brittle acceptance. So, naturally, he reasoned, after some time spent in the company of the charming Ser Elyas, you would come to love him. It was a natural, tragic story. A handsome knight and a neglected princess. He had practically gift-wrapped a discreet, passionate affair for you. It was the least he could give it to you, a substitute for the husband you had probably imagined, a way to satisfy that aching, youthful urge for romance that he, a man carved from stone, could never fulfill.

Yet, from what he observed over the following weeks, the plan had failed with spectacular precision. He would watch from a high balcony as Ser Elyas, in his gleaming plate, offered you his hand to help you over a damp patch of grass. You took it with polite, distant courtesy. You would exchange a few words, an occasional jest that made the knight chuckle, but your expression remained serene, unmoved. Maekar, a veteran of countless campaigns, knew the look of a soldier performing a duty. And your nights, as the quiet reports from your maids confirmed, were spent solely in your rooms. No secret knocks, no furtive shadows slipping from your door at dawn.

He was at his wits’ end. What did you want then? He had given you everything your station and age could desire. What would wipe off that pretty, unconscious pout off your face? Perhaps, he had finally conceded, if he talked to you. A novel concept for a marriage, he knew. He would go to you, and perhaps, in a moment of unguarded frustration, you would let your grievances slip.

The previous night, he had gone to your chamber. Your maid, a timid wisp of a girl, nearly dropped her mending box when she saw him at the threshold. "Leave us," he had commanded, and she fled. You had been seated by the fire, a book open on your lap, and you looked like a startled doe at his unexpected presence, your body going rigid, your eyes wide.

"My prince," you had said, your voice a breathless question.

He had felt like an intruder in his own wife's space. "I…I came to see how you were faring," he had managed, the words feeling foreign and clumsy on his tongue.

You recovered quickly, your innate grace taking over. You poured his wine yourself, and offered him a plate of fruit and honey cake. "I am well, my prince. Truly. The book you sent is fascinating. The accounts of the Rhoynish are almost unbelievable." You were making conversation. You were making it easy for him. And so you spoke for a while. It was surprisingly pleasant and easy.

He found himself relaxing into a chair, debating the tactical blunders of the Valyrian conquest of the Rhoyne, and you had listened with rapt attention, asking pointed, intelligent questions that surprised him. You had a mind, he realized with a start. A sharp, curious mind hidden beneath the pout and the big eyes.

But he didn’t catch any clues. No lamenting a lack of knights, no forlorn sighs about the gardens, no veiled complaints about his absence. Just you, being…pleasant. So, eventually, he rose to leave. "It is late. You should rest."

The change was instantaneous. The spark of animation in your eyes died, replaced by a stricken, hollow look, as if you were wondering what you had done wrong. Your fingers tightened imperceptibly on the spine of your book. "Of course, my prince. Thank you for your company."

He hesitated. He was a man of military precision, and the sudden, palpable drop in your mood was a tactical variable he hadn't accounted for. He was already in your bed chambers. What kind of husband left his wife's bed chamber right before going to bed himself? A churlish one. A neglectful one. The servants would talk, of that he was certain. The walls of Summerhall had ears and mouths. But he did not care what servants would see or say. Their gossip was the chaff of court life. The thought that stopped him cold, that made his feet feel nailed to the floor, was simpler. He owed you basic courtesy, did he not? He had denied you everything else. He could not deny you the simple, public dignity of a husband who shared your bed for a night.

Before he could overthink himself out of it, he gestured to the bed. "Move over, then."

Your eyes, if possible, grew even wider. "My prince?"

"I will not sleep in my boots," he said gruffly, sitting on the edge of a chaise and beginning to unlace them. "I will stay. Just to sleep." He made a promise to himself then, a sacred oath. He would lie down with you, and he would speak to you until you fell asleep, so you would not be insulted by a silent, rigid vigil. Then, he would leave. He had been insulting you for months by refusing to do his duties as a husband, and this small act of presence would at least be a temporary salve on a wound he had no intention of healing.

He lay down atop the covers, fully clothed in his tunic and breeches, a stiff, awkward pillar of a man. You slipped under the furs with a rustle of linen, lying rigidly on your back. The silence was deafening. Maekar cast about for something, anything, to say. "Tell me more about the Rhoynar," he commanded, his voice a little too loud in the quiet room.

And so you did, your voice soft and hesitant at first, then gaining strength. You spoke of the legends, the songs of the Mother Rhoyne, the giant turtles that were said to be gods. He listened, inserting a dry comment now and again that made you giggle, that beautiful, rippling sound he was growing dangerously accustomed to. He stayed, and continued speaking to you about the defensive layout of river cities, the logistical challenges of moving a legion through marshland, until your words began to slur, your breathing deepened, and your face went slack with peace. He had done it. He thought he would leave when he was sure you were deep in sleep. He would just wait one more minute. Just to be certain. The fire had burned down to embers. The room was warm. The scent of lavender was soporific. And that was the last thing he remembered.

Now, it was morning. The maid’s insistent knocking on the door was a relentless, chipper assault on his senses. He was still fully clothed, his tunic creased. And you were curled up next to him, clutching his arm as if it were the most natural, obvious thing in the world. The knocking roused you. You stirred, a small hum of contentment escaping your lips before your eyes fluttered open. Your gaze, hazy with sleep, traveled up his arm, over his chest, and settled on his face. The reaction was not one of surprise, or at least not the kind he expected. It was pleasure. A deep, luminous, bone-deep pleasure that transformed your features. You were smiling. A shy, pleased smile, as if you had just woken from a beautiful dream and found it still real.

"Good morning, my prince," you murmured, your voice thick and honeyed with sleep. There was a newfound confidence in it, a possessiveness that hadn't been there before. "Are you to have a busy day? I thought I might join you, if it were permitted. Perhaps I could assist you with your letters?"

Maekar found himself staring. The words were simple, but the meaning behind them was not. His plan, the handsome guard, the neglected lady, the grand affair, it all crashed down around his ears in a shower of broken, idiotic pottery. He realized his mistake with the force of a warhammer to the chest. You thought your husband was finally coming around. The gift, the miraculous, improbable gift you had wanted all along, was not a surrogate. It was him.

You wanted this. Him. His presence. His attention. His dry, sarcastic remarks. His tactical critiques of ancient river warfare. His grumpy, unyielding, solid self.

All this time, you had wanted him.

He felt a strange, tight sensation in his chest, a feeling he hadn't allowed himself to entertain for many, many years. It was a seed of warmth, cracking through the cold, hard stone he had meticulously built around his heart. He cleared his throat, his voice emerging as a low, rusty rumble.

"You can join me," he said, the words a surrender. "If you wish."

The pout was completely gone now. The smile that remained in its place was brilliant, a sun emerging from behind a lifetime of clouds. It was a smile just for him. And for the first time since he had been forced to take a new wife, Maekar Targaryen didn't feel saddled. He felt, with a terrifying, exhilarating certainty, that he was about to be completely, irrevocably unhorsed.

The days that followed that first, accidental night established a new rhythm in Summerhall, one Maekar found himself falling into with a disquieting ease he refused to examine too closely.

You had asked to assist him, and Maekar, a man who had never refused a direct request from a lady in his life out of sheer, blunt propriety, could find no reasonable grounds to deny you. You appeared in his solar the next morning, freshly dressed in a gown of pale yellow that made you look like a spring daffodil, and settled yourself in the chair across from his great oaken desk. He expected you to be a distraction. Instead, you proved infuriatingly useful. Your handwriting was elegant where his was a cramped, soldierly scrawl.

You sorted his correspondence into neat piles: urgent, routine, and the one you tactfully labeled "probably insincere flattery from lords who want something." He had let out a surprised bark of laughter at that, and you had beamed at him as if he'd just crowned you Queen of Love and Beauty.

This became your habit. Mornings in his solar, you with your neat piles and your quiet, intelligent questions about the running of the lands. Afternoons, you would walk with him along the battlements, your hand resting lightly on his arm as he pointed out the defensive improvements he was making to the eastern wall. You listened with genuine interest, asking about murder holes and arrow slits with a curiosity that was wholly unfeigned. Evenings, you dined together, and your sweet inquiries about his wellbeing were no longer met with grunts. He found himself actually answering you, describing the frustrations of a dispute between two minor landed knights or the irritating news from court. You would nod, your brow furrowed in thought, and offer observations that were often startlingly perceptive.

And every night, the same delicate, unspoken negotiation occurred.

The first time it happened outside of your own chambers, you had been in his rooms. It was late, the fire burning low, and you had been reading aloud to him from a treatise on dragonlore while he sharpened his dagger. Your voice had grown hoarse, and he noticed the way you rubbed at your eyes with the back of your hand. He could not, in good conscience, send you shuffling down cold corridors to your own chambers. The very idea was absurd. What kind of husband kicked his own wife out into the night like a stray cat?

"The hour is late," he had said, sheathing his dagger with a decisive click. "You will stay here."

You had looked at him with that expression again, the one that was half hope and half caution, as if you were afraid of misinterpreting his words. "Here, my prince?"

"In my bed," he clarified, the words coming out more gruffly than he intended. "I will take the chaise."

But you had looked so stricken at that suggestion, your face falling in that way he was growing to dread, that he had found himself amending the plan. "Or I will join you. The bed is large enough. It is not seemly for a prince to sleep on a chaise in his own chambers."

It was a flimsy justification, and he knew it. But the way your expression brightened, the shy, pleased smile that curved your lips, was worth the internal grumbling. He lay beside you that night, a careful distance between your bodies, and spoke to you about the properties of Valyrian steel until your breathing evened out into the soft rhythm of sleep. He awoke to find you pressed against his side, your head on his shoulder, one of your hands resting over his heart as if counting the beats.

This, too, became your habit. You clinging to him in sleep like a limpet to a rock, and Maekar waking each morning to the scent of your hair and the warm, trusting weight of your body against his. He told himself it was for your dignity. He told himself it was a small kindness, a basic courtesy. He told himself many things, and believed none of them.

Then there was the incident with the lamprey pie.

A lord from the coastal holdings had sent a gift of lampreys, and the kitchens had prepared them in a rich, heavily spiced pie. You had eaten only a small portion, politely complimenting the flavor, but within hours you were taken ill. Maekar was in the yard overseeing a drill when your maid came running, her face pale as milk.

"My prince, it is the princess. She is unwell. The maester says it is the lamprey, that it has irritated her stomach something fierce."

He did not remember crossing the castle. He only remembered the cold spike of fear that had lanced through him, the way his heart had hammered against his ribs with a violence that had nothing to do with exertion. He found you in your chambers, curled on your side in the great bed, your face waxen and beaded with sweat. The maester was there, a fussy old man who was doing far too much hand-wringing for Maekar's liking.

"She will recover, my prince. It is a mere gastric disturbance. But she must eat to keep her strength up, and she refuses. The princess will not touch the porridge."

Maekar looked at the tray on the bedside table. A bowl of plain, unappetizing porridge sat there, cooling and congealing. You were facing away from it, your eyes closed, your pout firmly in place.

"Leave us," Maekar commanded. The maester and the maids scurried out like mice before a dragon.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. Your eyes fluttered open, and you looked at him with such a mix of misery and embarrassment that it made something twist painfully in his chest.

"I am sorry," you whispered, your voice thin and reedy. "I am being foolish. It will pass."

"You will eat," he said, reaching for the bowl.

"My prince, I cannot. The very thought..."

"You will eat," he repeated, and this time his voice was gentler, an unfamiliar softness creeping in despite his best efforts. He scooped a small portion of the porridge onto the spoon. "Open your mouth."

You stared at him, those big eyes glassy with discomfort, and for a moment he thought you would refuse him. But then you parted your lips, a tiny, obedient gesture, and he carefully slid the spoon into your mouth. You swallowed with visible effort, your face scrunching up, and he immediately had another spoonful ready.

"Good," he said, the praise awkward on his tongue. "Again."

He fed you the entire bowl that way, spoonful by painstaking spoonful, his large, calloused hands surprisingly steady. He did not rush you. He waited between each bite, murmuring gruff words of encouragement that felt foreign and strange, like a language he had never been taught. When the bowl was empty, he set it aside and reached for a cloth, dabbing gently at the corner of your mouth.

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that made him feel like a hero from a song, when all he had done was feed you porridge.

"Thank you, Maekar," you breathed, using his name without his title for the first time. It hit him somewhere deep, a blow he had no armor for.

"Rest now," he ordered, his voice rougher than he intended. "I will stay."

He stayed. He lay beside you, fully clothed, and let you curl into his side. He stayed until your breathing steadied and the color slowly returned to your cheeks. He stayed even after that, watching the firelight play across the ceiling, feeling the steady rise and fall of your chest against his, and wondered what in the seven hells he was doing.

But still, still, he put off the matter of bedding you.

It was not that he did not want to. The realization had crept up on him with the slow, inevitable force of a rising tide. He wanted to. Gods help him, he wanted to. The sight of you in your thin nightdress, the way your hair spilled across the pillows, the warmth of your body pressed against his each morning, it was testing the limits of his resolve, which had never been particularly strong where matters of the heart were concerned. He had simply never had his heart involved before.

But to bed you would be to open a door he was not certain he could close again. He had built his life around duty, around the cold, hard certainties of obligation and honor. He had loved once, and loss had carved a hollow in him that he had believed was permanent. You were filling that hollow, day by day, smile by smile, and the sensation was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

He was a coward. Maekar Targaryen, who had faced down rebel lords and laughed at the prospect of single combat, was a coward when it came to his own wife.

Then came the night of the kiss.

It was an evening like any other. You had spent the day in his solar, helping him draft responses to a particularly tedious batch of petitions. Dinner had been a quiet affair, just the two of you, and you had made him laugh, actually laugh, a deep, surprised rumble of sound, with a wicked impression of a pompous lord who had visited the previous week. You had retired to his chambers, as had become your custom, and he had told you about the Dragonknight's campaigns in Dorne until your eyes grew heavy.

"Goodnight, Maekar," you said, your voice soft and drowsy.

And then you kissed him.

It was not a forceful kiss, not a demand or an invitation. It was a brief, gentle press of your lips against his, as natural and unthinking as a breath. A goodbye. An act of simple, uncomplicated affection. You pulled back, your eyes already closing, and nestled into your pillow with a contented sigh, as if you had done nothing of any particular note.

Maekar lay frozen, staring at the canopy above him, his heart thundering in his ears.

You had kissed him.

This was his fault. The thought careened through his skull like a loose cannon on a ship's deck. This was entirely, unequivocally his fault. He had done this. He had planted this notion in your head, watered it with his attentions, and now it had bloomed into something he could no longer ignore.

A fortnight ago, you had been helping him remove his heavy outer tunic after a long day of inspections, your small fingers working deftly at the clasps. It had been such a wifely gesture, so intimate and so natural, that before he had known what he was doing, he had leaned down and pressed his lips to your brow. A brief, chaste kiss. A thank you. He had not even realized he had done it until he saw the way you had frozen, your eyes wide. He had cleared his throat and muttered something about the fire needing more wood, and the moment had passed.

But you had taken that kiss, that single, thoughtless gesture, and drawn a conclusion from it. You had decided, in your sweet, hopeful way, that your husband wanted you to initiate affection as well. That he was too reserved, too gruff, too locked within his own silences to ask for what he wanted. And so, with that gentle, trusting kiss, you had reached across the chasm he had placed between you and offered him a bridge.

Did he want you to? The question burned in his mind, insistent and demanding. Did he want you to kiss him goodnight, as if it were the most normal thing in the world? As if you were truly husband and wife in every sense?

He certainly was not complaining. The ghost of your lips still tingled on his, and his body was reacting in ways that were entirely inappropriate for a man who was supposed to be letting his wife sleep. He was not complaining at all. That was the problem.

He should be complaining. He should be panicking. Because this, this sweetness, this trust, this quiet, domestic intimacy, led inexorably to one conclusion. You would expect children now. The thought hit him like a splash of ice water. Of course you would expect children. A princess, a wife, a woman who had been raised to understand that the bearing of heirs was a fundamental part of her duty. And you would want them, he realized with a jolt. You would want his children. Not out of duty, but out of genuine desire. You would want a babe with his silver-gold hair and your eyes, a child you could hold and nurture and love.

Gods be good.

He turned his head on the pillow to look at you. You were already asleep, your face peaceful, your lips still curved in that small, contented smile. You had no idea of the earthquake you had just set off in his chest. You had kissed him and promptly fallen asleep, trusting him completely, utterly unaware of the crisis you had left in your wake.

Maekar stared at you for a long time, watching the steady rise and fall of your breath, the way your lashes cast delicate shadows on your cheeks. His mind was a whirlwind of duty and desire, fear and longing, the cold echoes of past grief and the warm, insistent pulse of something new.

He could not keep putting this off. The realization settled over him with the weight of inevitability. He could not keep lying beside you, night after night, pretending that this was a mere courtesy. He could not keep telling himself that he was doing this for your dignity, when in truth, your dignity was the last thing on his mind when he felt the press of your body against his in the dark.

But not tonight. Tonight, you were asleep, and he was a coward still. Tonight, he would lie here and listen to you breathe and feel the warmth of your kiss still burning on his lips.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he would be braver.

Or perhaps, he thought grimly, you would kiss him again, and the choice would be taken out of his hands entirely. The thought was not as unwelcome as it should have been.

The kisses continued.

Every night, without fail, you would bid him goodnight with that same gentle, fleeting press of your lips against his. It was never demanding, never lingering. It was a question posed in the softest possible terms, a door left slightly ajar, an invitation he could accept or decline as he saw fit. And every night, for the first several nights, Maekar accepted it the same way: by remaining perfectly, rigidly still, a statue of a man enduring a pleasant but bewildering assault.

He felt you withdraw each time, felt the tiny, almost imperceptible slump of your shoulders as you settled back onto your pillow. You never said anything. You never complained. But he knew. He was a dull rock, an unresponsive lump of granite, and he was hurting you with his passivity. The knowledge gnawed at him, a persistent, guilty ache that followed him through his days and haunted his waking hours.

The fifth night, something in him snapped. Simply, as you leaned in to press your customary kiss to his lips, he found himself moving. His hand came up, rough and calloused, to cup the back of your head. And he kissed you back.

It was not a passionate kiss. It was not the kiss of a man swept away by desire. It was a careful response, a returning of pressure, a silent acknowledgment. He felt your startled inhale against his mouth, the way your body went taut with surprise. When he pulled back, your eyes were wide, your lips parted, and there was a look on your face that made his chest constrict.

Expectation. Hope. A question that had been waiting, patient and trembling, for an answer.

Maekar looked at you, at your big eyes shining in the firelight, at your kiss-swollen mouth, at the delicate line of your collarbone visible above the lace of your nightdress. He thought of all the nights he had lain beside you, rigid with restraint. He thought of the way you smiled at him, the way you laughed at his dry remarks, the way you clung to his arm in sleep as if he were the only safe harbor in a storm.

He resigned himself. The decision came not with a sense of defeat, but with a strange, liberating clarity. He did not want to become the object of your resentment. He could not bear the thought of those eyes looking at him with bitterness, with the slow, corrosive realization that your husband was a man who denied you not only his affection but the most basic experiences of womanhood. You were young and full of life, and he had been keeping you in a gilded cage, feeding you porridge and kissing your forehead as if you were a child rather than a wife.

"You deserve pleasure," he said, his voice low and rough, the words feeling as if they were being dragged from some deep, hidden place within him. "I have been remiss in my duties."

Your breath caught. "Maekar..."

He moved before he could lose his nerve. His hands found your waist, and he lifted you as if you weighed nothing, settling you onto his lap with a decisive, careful motion. You were warm through the thin fabric of your nightdress, your body soft and pliant against the hard planes of his chest. He could feel the rapid flutter of your heart.

"I will not take what I have no right to claim," he said, the words a rough murmur against your temple. "But I can give you this. Let me give you this."

His fingers found the hem of your nightdress, and he pushed it up slowly, giving you time to object. You did not object. You only watched him with those enormous eyes, your hands resting on his shoulders as if you did not quite know what to do with them. He touched you gently, so gently, his battle-roughened hands moving with a delicacy that surprised even himself. He explored the soft skin of your thighs, the curve of your hip, the dip of your waist. He learned the shape of you by touch alone, his gaze fixed on your face, cataloguing every flicker of expression.

When his fingers found the center of your heat, you gasped, your head falling back, your fingers digging into his shoulders. He moved with slow, patient circles, learning what made you sigh, what made you shudder, what made your hips buck involuntarily against his hand. He was methodical in his attentions, as he was in all things, and he brought you to the peak with the same focused determination he might apply to a siege.

You shattered against him with a cry that was half surprise and half relief, your body arching, your hands fisting in the fabric of his tunic. He held you through it, his free arm wrapped securely around your waist, anchoring you against the storm of sensation. When the tremors subsided, you slumped against his chest, breathing hard, your face buried in the crook of his neck.

He gave you a moment. Then, with the same gentle efficiency, he rearranged your nightdress, lifted you from his lap, and placed you back onto the bed. He drew the furs up to your chin and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

"Sleep now," he commanded, his voice a low rumble.

You blinked up at him, your expression dazed and soft and so full of something that looked terrifyingly like adoration. "But you..."

"This was for you," he said, cutting you off with a firmness that brooked no argument. "Rest."

You slept. He did not. He lay beside you in the darkness, his body aching with unfulfilled need, and told himself that this was enough. He had done his duty. He had given you pleasure without complicating matters with his own involvement. It was a tidy solution, a clean, surgical strike. You were satisfied. There was no need to get himself fully involved.

This, too, became a habit.

Every few nights, when the expectant look in your eyes grew too pronounced to ignore, he would pull you onto his lap and touch you until you came apart in his arms. He learned the rhythms of your body. He knew the spot just below your ear that made you whimper when he pressed his lips to it. He knew the pace that made you clutch at him desperately, the slower, teasing touches that made you gasp his name like a prayer. He gave you pleasure as a general might distribute supplies to a besieged city: regularly, efficiently, and with a steadfast refusal to partake himself.

He thought you accepted this. He thought you understood the unspoken terms of this arrangement. He was a fool.

It was a quiet evening, the fire burning low in the hearth, the castle settling into the deep hush of night. He had just returned from a grueling inspection of the eastern watchtowers, his muscles aching, his mood as dark as the storm clouds gathering over the mountains. You were waiting for him in his chambers, a book open on your lap, a cup of warmed wine already poured and waiting on his desk.

You were always waiting for him now. The thought should not have warmed him as it did.

The night's ritual had been completed. You were nestled against him, your body still humming with the aftermath of pleasure, your breathing slowly returning to normal. He was preparing to settle you back onto your pillow, to pull up the furs and press his customary kiss to your forehead, when you spoke.

"Maekar." Your voice was soft, hesitant, but there was a thread of steel beneath it that he had learned to recognize. "May I ask you something?"

"You may," he said, his guard instinctively rising.

You were silent for a moment, your fingers tracing idle patterns on the fabric of his tunic. Then, you lifted your head to look at him, and the expression in your eyes made his heart stutter.

"Why do you not want anything for yourself?"

The question hung in the air between them, simple and devastating. He opened his mouth to deflect, to offer some gruff platitude about duty and obligation, but you did not give him the chance.

"Every night," you continued, your voice still soft but gaining strength, "you give me such pleasure. You are so gentle, so careful, so attentive. But you never…" You hesitated, a flush creeping up your cheeks, but you pressed on with the same determined courage you had shown since the day you arrived at Summerhall. "You never let me touch you. You never seek your own release. It is as if you believe you do not deserve it, or as if you think I am not capable of giving it."

"You are capable," he said, the words escaping before he could cage them.

"Then why?" Your pout was there, that unconscious, pretty pout that he had come to know so well. But it was accompanied by a look so loving, so open and earnest and full of desperate hope, that it struck him like a blow. "I could learn. I could learn how to please you, if you are willing to teach me. I am not afraid. I want to be a true wife to you, in every sense."

He felt something cracking inside him, the carefully constructed walls he had built around his heart beginning to crumble. "It is not a matter of teaching," he said, his voice strained. "There are…consequences. You are young. You should not be burdened with..."

"Children," you finished for him, and he was stunned into silence. "You are worried about children."

It was not the only thing, but it was the easiest to admit. He nodded stiffly.

You took a deep breath, and he watched as you gathered your courage, your hands clasping together in your lap. "If you do not wish for children," you said, your voice steady despite the tremor he could see in your fingers, "I can drink moon tea. We can postpone the idea. I have spoken to the maester, and he has assured me it is safe when used sparingly."

Maekar stared at you. You had spoken to the maester. You, his sweet wife, had gone to the old man and asked about moon tea. The image was so absurd, so unexpectedly bold, that he almost laughed.

But you were not finished. "I would like to have a child someday," you continued, and now your voice grew softer, more wistful. "One child of my own. No matter a boy or a girl. And I would raise it with the best of my ability, with all the love I have to give. But…" You reached out, your small hand coming to rest on his cheek, your thumb brushing the line of his jaw. "I would like to have a life first. A marriage. A husband who does not treat me like a delicate piece of glass that might shatter at his touch."

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that had undone him from the very beginning.

"I want you, Maekar," you whispered. "I want my husband."

The walls crumbled. The last defenses fell. Maekar Targaryen, prince of Summerhall, breaker of rebellions and terror of his enemies, looked at his young wife and realized he was only a man. A man who had been fighting a losing battle against his own heart for longer than he cared to admit. A man who loved his wife.

He loved you The truth of it was a physical thing, a weight in his chest, a fire in his blood. He loved your laugh, your pout, your clever mind and your gentle hands and your infuriating, wonderful habit of clinging to him in sleep. He loved your courage, standing before him now and baring your soul with nothing but hope to shield you. He loved you.

"Gods be good," he breathed, and then he was moving.

His hands found your waist, and this time there was nothing careful or clinical about the touch. He pulled you against him, crushing you to his chest, and his mouth descended on yours in a kiss that was nothing like the chaste, hesitant presses of lips you had shared before. This was a surrender. A desperate, hungry admission of everything he had been too stubborn to say.

You gasped against his mouth, and then your arms were around his neck, your fingers tangling in his hair, and you were kissing him back with an enthusiasm that made his head spin. When he finally pulled back, you were both breathing hard, your faces inches apart.

"You foolish, stubborn man," you whispered, but your voice was thick with tears and joy. "I have been waiting for you to understand."

"I understand now," he said, his voice a low, wrecked rasp. "Forgive me. For all of it. For the neglect, for the distance, for the guard I foisted upon you like a fool..."

"You gave me Ser Elyas?" Your eyes widened, and then a surprised laugh bubbled up from your throat. "Oh, Maekar. I thought he was just a very attentive guard. I wondered why he kept trying to recite poetry at me."

Maekar groaned, dropping his forehead to yours. "I am an idiot."

"You are my idiot," you corrected, and the possessive warmth in your voice was his final undoing. "My husband. And I believe you owe me a proper wedding night."

He looked at you, at the mischievous glint in your eyes, at the loving curve of your smile, and he felt something he had not felt in many, many years. Hope. Joy. A future unfolding before him that was not merely duty and endurance, but something bright and warm and achingly beautiful.

"I owe you much more than that," he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to yours once more.

The midmorning sunshine streams through the high window of Baelor’s solar. He sits behind his desk pouring over ledgers while you perch nearby silently reading a report on recent imports. Your husband has been working later than usual, and you had the idea to try and help with all the paperwork in order to free up more of his time.

Baelor glances up absently from his work. “My love, would you mind reading that aloud for me?” He asks. You begin reading from the beginning of the report. It’s extremely dry, but informative, you suppose.

You’ve been reading for several minutes when you glance up at your husband. Baelor’s elbow rests on the desk, his chin resting on his hand, his mouth curled in a soft smile, and his eyes fixed on you with an expression of such gentle and complete adoration that you stumbled in your reading and fell silent.

“What is the matter, husband?” You ask, a slow smile lighting your features.

“I love the way your voice gets just a bit deeper than normal when you read aloud. I love the way you scrunch up your nose a bit when you’re concentrating. I love the way you talk with your hands. I love you.” He finishes with a slight shake of his head, his loving expression never changing, as if he can’t believe how lucky he is to be with you.

You rise from your chair and slowly cross the room towards him. Baelor turns his chair away from his desk and towards you. You approach him and stand between his legs, gazing down at him with your head cocked to the side, a slight smile playing about your mouth. He makes no move to grab you, only gazes up at you adoringly.

You take his face in your hands, and, leaning down, place a gentle kiss on his forehead, then each bearded cheek, then the tip of his nose, and lastly you press a very soft kiss to his lips.

You pull back and look at him. “Husband, I fear my presence here is more distraction than help.”

“But a most welcome distraction.” You laugh and shake your head. “The realm needs you, so I shall leave you to your work.”

You turn to leave, but make it only a half step before Baelor’s strong arms shoot out, his hands gently grip your hips. As he pulls you backwards your heel catches on an uneven stone and you fall, laughing, into your husband’s lap, just as he intended.

His arms immediately snake around your waist, holding you tightly to him. He buries his nose in the side of your neck, inhaling the scent of orange blossom from your hair, and planting gentle kisses along your neck and behind your ear.

You turn your face towards his and his mouth finds yours in a fiery kiss, his tongue sliding into your mouth, one hand still gripping your waist tightly, the other against the side of your face. You kiss back and swivel your hips, grinding into him. He moans low into your mouth. You run your fingers through his curls that he had allowed to grow simply because he knew you loved them.

You feel the hand on your face slide into your hair, pulling your head back slightly causing your mouth to fall open a bit more. Baelor seizes this opportunity, deepening the kiss until you are almost dizzy and nearly give in to him completely. You remember you aim, though it is difficult, and the hand you have threaded in his hair tightens. You grip his curls and pull your husband’s head back, breaking the kiss. Baelor groans both at the loss of contact and at the feeling of you tugging his hair.

He tries to catch your mouth with his again, but your hand in his hair holds him fast and he cannot. He looks at you almost pouting and you nearly break again, but remain strong. You wriggle free of your husband’s arms, knowing that he could physically prevent you from leaving if he chose, but knowing also that he would never force you to do anything.

You stand just out of his reach and look down at him, all mussed hair, flushed cheeks, and blown wide pupils. “See husband? You only prove my point. I am a distraction.”

He had thought this part of his life was over, especially the older one, but then he had met you. Despite being old enough to more than likely be your father you had been instantly attracted to him. 

Also you never did accept when he had tried to be proper turning you down due to the age difference between the pair of you. 

You who could still run on four hours of sleep, were in the prime of your life, and could fall and not feel the consequences for the next week. You had wanted him, and the thought still perplexed him, but you learned not to question it any more. 

You had texted saying that you and your friends would be out in less than a minute. That was five minutes ago, and he was beginning to worry. He let out a sigh, pulling his keys from ignition before making his way into the bar. 

It wasn’t that crowded allowing him to easily spot you and your two friends perched against the bar talking to the female bartender. You had a bright grin on your face, your hands moving widely as he took in your appearance. 

You wore a pair of jeans shorts fitted with a black top. It was nothing widely inappropriate, but the small v neck that curved down to your chest still managed to make his mouth water slightly. 

Your friend, Alice, a red head around the same age as you poked you in the ribs nodding her head toward him causing you to spin around. Your face lit up further, which he did not know was possible and he felt as if he was standing outside in the hot weather at the warmth that spread through him. 

“Baelor!” you exclaimed, practically running into him as you stumbled less than gracefully toward him. 

He reacted quickly, arms wrapping around you to stabilize you as you stared up at him. You pressed a quick kiss to his cheek before dragging him back to the bartender that you had been talking to moments before. 

“Oh, meet my new friend Cara! This is my sexy husband I was telling you about,” you gushed grinning up at him as you had won something grand, but he felt as if there was a winner from the pair of you it was definitely him. 

He let out a laugh shaking his head, “I am too old to feel sexy.”

Your reaction was immediate. You looked almost offended, and he would have laughed, but he was trying to take you seriously, but was miserably failing. 

“Alice! Margaret!” you called, causing your friends to turn toward the pair of you. 

“Isn’t Baelor sexy?”

“Extemely! We love Dilfs!” Margaret exclaimed, her words sounding even more slurred than yours, but still just as genuine. 

“Yes! You are rocking the salt and pepper!” Alice added in agreement, before they returned to paying their tabs.

A blush spread across Baelor’s cheeks. He opened his mouth a few times, gaping as if he was a fish out of water. “See! You are sexy! You will probably still be in a nursing home being sexy!”

Your laughter filled the air as you moved cupping either side of his cheeks and before he could react your mouth was on his. His hands gravitated toward your hips pulling you flush against him, as he allowed the kiss to progress further into what he was usually comfortable with in public. 

But you had just fed his ego, you were gorgeous, and he had such a hard time telling you. He was sure that if you had asked for it he would buy you the city if it was a wish of yours. 

“I love you,” you muttered against his mouth, finally needing to pull away for breath. Your chest rising and falling rapdiy against his own as your hand moved to trail across the grey in his beard that you had told him on numerous occasions drove you wild. 

“I love you,” he replied, back staring down at you with a fond expression.

“You are the sexiest old man ever,” you then declared, a wide drunken grin filling your beautiful lips as you stared up at him like he had hung the moon. 

And you meant, because not only was he good looking, but he was caring. He was generous, and he was an amazing husband. 

Your amazing husband. 

“Whatver you say, my love,” he told you press to the top of your head. He looked to your two friends who had finished paying, causing him to look down at you, “Have you paid yet?”

“Nope,” you replied, popping the p as you tucked yourself under his arm. 

“I got it,” he then assured you, despite you having made no move to gather your own wallet.

You let out a small laugh, pulling yourself from him to face the bartender, “Sexy and is going to pay my tab!” you gushed once more looking at Cara as Baelor fished his wallet from his pocket. 

“Can we go get ice cream somewhere, Bae?” you then asked, but he knew you already knew exactly what he would say. 

“Of course,” he replied automatically, handing the woman his card to pay off your tab for the evening. 

Your eyes lit up, “See! Sexy!”

He handed Cara his card as he turned toward you, “Because I am buying you ice cream.”

“Oh, you are anyways. The ice cream is just an added bonus,” you then moved toward him pushing yourself up on your tip toes causing him to duck his head down toward you, “And when we get home I am going to show you just how sexy you are and how wet I am thinking of you,” you told him nipping his ear lobe. 

His eyes widened as he had to look away from you, forcing out a cough as he tried to urge his cock not to harden in his brief, but it was already too late. 

He had never driven to get home so fast before, and you made good on your word.

baelor taglist: @sacha1slytherin @erylilly @thebl00dwyrm @ilocuras24 @xkatherinexo @alaeratrrn @ynnlvrs @theonewhoshallbeunnamed @sem-ra @darylandbethfanforever9

Bobby doesn't say anything. He adjusts the lens cap on his camera. Fidgets with the chain at his neck.

Terrence is right and Bobby knows Terrence is right but the knowing sits in his chest like a coal. Warm and constant and completely unhelpful. Because knowing he should do something has never been Bobby's problem. Bobby's problem is the gap between knowing and doing, the six-inch canyon between I should tell her and but what if she—

What if she doesn't.

That's the thing. That's the whole thing.

Bobby Franklin, who has never once in his seventeen years of life been afraid of a single goddamn thing, is afraid of this.

Because every other girl has been fun, a performance, something he could walk away from if it went sideways with his hands in his pockets and his dignity intact.

You are not a game.

You're the girl who sits next to him in English and argues about symbolism with her whole body, leaning forward, gesturing, getting that crease between your eyebrows when she thinks he's wrong.

He's usually wrong. He knows less about books than you do and more about cameras, but he argues back because the crease is the best thing he's ever seen and the arguing makes your eyes do something electric and Bobby would rather be wrong in your vicinity than right anywhere else.

You're the girl who laughed at his stupid joke in the parking lot three weeks after you transferred. Most do the polite laugh. You didn't. Not the social laugh, but the real one, the caught-off-guard one that made you cover your mouth with your hand and look at him with wide surprised eyes like you didn't expect to find something funny here.

Bobby felt the ground shift under his feet at that sound. Just slightly. Just enough.

You're the girl who, last Tuesday, fell asleep on his shoulder in his car in the parking lot after school because you'd been up late studying and he was supposed to drive you home and you passed out before he made it out of the lot.

Bobby sat there for forty-five minutes with the engine off, not moving, barely breathing, because your weight against his arm was the best thing that had ever happened to him and he would rather have died than woken you up.

He didn't tell Terrence about that. He didn't tell anyone. Some things are too big to say out loud without them changing shape.

"She probably doesn't even like me like that," Bobby says casually.

The verbal equivalent of a shrug. But his thumbnail is picking at the edge of the lens cap and Terrence knows him well enough to know what that means.

"Bobby. She waits for you after fourth period. She made you a mixtape."

"That's just—"

Terrence's eyes narrow. "She drew a little heart on the label, you idiot."

"That's how girls write," Bobby shoots back "They put hearts on everything."

Terrence stares at him. The stare communicates several things simultaneously, including you're the dumbest smart person I know and I can't help you if you won't help yourself and I'm begging you to stop being a coward about the one thing in your life that actually matters.

"Go," Terrence says flatly. Final. He points down the hall. "She's at her locker. Go. Right now. Before you talk yourself out of it again, you chickenshit."

Bobby pushes off the wall. Adjusts the camera at his chest. Runs his tongue along the inside of his teeth, a nervous habit he's never been able to break, and starts walking.

The hallway is that particular kind of after-school empty. Half the lights already off, the last few students filtering out in clumps, the janitor's cart parked outside the gym already. Bobby's sneakers squeak on the linoleum. The camera bumps against his ribs with each step, and his heart is doing an unnecessary loud thumping sound inside his chest that he would very much like it to stop.

He sees you before you see him.

You're at your locker. Door open, half-hidden behind it, pulling books out and stacking them in that particular order you have. Heaviest on the bottom, paperbacks on top, the system you explained to him once and he pretended to listen to while actually just watching the way your hands moved.

You've got a pen behind your ear. Your hair falls across your face and you keep pushing it back. It keeps falling and you keep pushing it and Bobby has wanted to brush it back for you approximately nine hundred times but has never once done it. Because that would require crossing a line he's been toeing for a year and a half and he isn't sure the other side is safe.

He lifts the camera. Force of habit, security blanket, the viewfinder a barrier between himself and anything too real. He frames you in the shot—your profile, the locker, the late-afternoon light slanting through the hall windows and catching the edge of your jaw—and you must hear the click of the shutter release or feel the weight of being watched because your head turns and your eyes find the lens.

Your expression does two things in rapid succession.

First: the glare. That specific look you give him when you catch him filming. The narrowed eyes, the set jaw, the Bobby, I swear to god that you don't even need to say out loud anymore because he's seen it enough times to read it off your face like subtitles.

You don't like being filmed without warning. You've told him this. He's not listened. This is an ongoing negotiation between the two of you that neither of you is actually trying to resolve because the argument itself has become a language. His way of saying I can't stop looking at you and your way of saying I see you looking.

Second: the smile. The one that comes right after the glare, the one that undoes it completely, the one that breaks across your face like dawn.

Your eyes warm. The corners of your mouth pull up. And there it is.

That thing, that specific thing that Bobby has never been able to name, the thing your face does when you see him, like something in you loosens whenever you see him.

You push the hair out of your face and this time it stays and you look at him and you're smiling. Bobby's hands are shaking and he lowers the camera because for once in his life the viewfinder isn't enough. For once, he needs to see this with his actual eyes.

"Are you filming me getting my books?" you demand but it's playful, light.

"Documenting," Bobby shoots back. "There's a difference, actually."

"Uhu-uhu. Sure."

"Cinematically speaking—"

"Bobby."

"—the mundane rituals of daily life, when captured through a lens—"

"Bobby."

"—become elevated to a kind of visual poetry that—"

"If you say visual poetry one more time I'm putting that camera in my locker and you're not getting it back for a week."

He grins. Can't help it. The grin is the one thing Bobby can't control around you. Everything else he can manage. The posture, the voice, the practiced cool, but the grin just happens. Wide and crooked and too honest. The grin of a boy and not the smirk of the person Bobby pretends to be, and every time it shows up he feels exposed and every time it shows up you smile wider like it's your favourite thing ever, and Bobby doesn't know what to do with that information except keep grinning like an idiot.

He ambles over. Leans against the locker next to yours. Close enough that his shoulder almost touches the open door, that the space between your bodies is a decision rather than an accident.

He crosses his arms over the camera, which presses it flat against his chest, and his chin tilts down slightly so he's looking at you through his lashes. A move that is, on other days and with other people, a calculated thing, a weapon in Bobby's considerable arsenal. Right now it's just the only angle at which he can look at you without you seeing how hard his heart is beating.

"So," he says. Smooth. Easy. The voice working the way it's supposed to.

"So," you say back.

Your books are stacked in your arms. You're holding them against your chest like a shield. Your chin tilts up. You're looking at him and there's something in your face—amusement, warmth, that particular intelligence you carry—and Bobby is suddenly, viscerally aware that you know exactly what he's doing.

You always know. You've known since the first week.

Since the first time he walked you to class and you looked at him sideways and said you don't have to do this, your class is on the other side of the building and he said I like the exercise and you said you hate exercise and he said I'm turning over a new leaf and you said you're turning a pretty specific shade of red for a guy who just likes walking and Bobby had wanted to die and also to kiss you and also to never stop talking to you for the rest of his life. All at once, all in the same breath.

You know. You've always known. And you've been waiting.

"Heard a rumour," Bobby says.

Your face reveals nothing. "About what?"

"About you."

"What kind of rumour?"

"The kind where—" He stops. Recalibrates. The smooth line he had prepared—something clever, and deflecting, something with an escape hatch built into it so he could retreat if your face did the wrong thing—evaporates.

You're looking at him. Just looking, with your books against your chest and the pen behind your ear. The hallway light makes your eyes do that thing again. The warm thing he's spent a year and a half filming because he can't say your eyes make me feel like I'm going to die without sounding moderately insane.

"You know what, never mind the rumour. Forget the rumour. There's no rumour." He shifts against the locker. The cool metal bites through his shirt. "I was just—I wanted to ask you something."

Your eyebrow goes up. Just one. You do that, too. The single-eyebrow raise, the one that says I'm listening and I'm going to enjoy watching you struggle with this. Bobby loves it and hates it in equal measure because it makes him feel seen in a way that's thrilling and terrifying at the same time.

He opens his mouth. The words are right there. They're lined up and ready and all he has to do is push them through his teeth and into the air between your bodies and let them land.

"Do you want to—I just wanted to ask, I mean you look—"

Oh my fucking god, a meteor should just strike him down where he stands—

"Robert Bobby Franklin." Your voice is different. Still warm but there's a new quality to it now. A steadiness, a weight, like you're planting your feet. Your smile hasn't changed but your eyes have gone sharper, more focused, the way they get in English class when you've figured out the thesis before the rest of the room. "Are you trying to flirt with me?"

Bobby's brain empties like a glass knocked off a counter by Mr Whiskers.

He should say something smooth. Should say I'm always flirting with you, haven't you noticed? Deploy the grin and the lean and the voice and make it a bit, make it a joke. Turn it into something he can retract if your face shifts. He should do any of the things that Bobby Franklin would normally do in a situation where his chest is cracking open.

What he does instead is hold up his hand. Thumb and forefinger. Pinched together. A tiny gap between them—half an inch, less, barely daylight between the pads of his fingers.

"Little bit," he admits. His voice is not smooth. It's husky, caught in some throaty register he can't control. It's the voice of a boy standing on the edge of the highest dive peering down. "Yeah, you caught me. Little bit."

The hallway is too quiet. Somewhere down by the gym the janitor's cart squeaks across the floor. Bobby is holding his fingers an inch from your face like an idiot, showing you the exact width of his courage, which is half an inch and shrinking rapidly.

You look at his fingers. Then look at his face. Your mouth doesn't smile, not exactly, but curves into something softer and more complicated than that. A curve that lives in the space between amusement and tenderness and makes Bobby's pulse trip over itself.

You don't say anything. You just... look at him. For what feels like a long time. For what feels like the exact amount of time it takes for Bobby to understand that he's not going to die from this afterall.

That the expression on your face is not rejection, that the reason you're not answering is not because you're figuring out how to let him down gently but because you're letting the moment be what it is.

Because you, unlike Bobby, are not afraid of moments.

Bobby feels his shoulders drop. The tension he didn't know he was holding—in his jaw, his neck, the hand gripping the camera strap so tight his knuckles have gone white—releases. Not all at once. Slowly. Like a fist unclenching.

He takes a step closer. Not a big one. An inch. Two. Enough that the space between you contracts into something deliberate, a tension that has a name, something that both of you are actively choosing.

His arms are still crossed but looser now, the camera a barrier he's not hiding behind anymore so much as resting against. He can smell your shampoo. He can see the curve of your bottom lip that he filmed once, in close-up, from the passenger seat while you were driving his car and yelling at him to put the camera away with a laugh.

"Go out with me," he says. Not a question. An offering, a dare, a door held open with both hands.

Your chin tilts. Your eyebrows lift. You shift your books to one arm and the pen behind your ear slides and you catch it without looking, a move so smooth and so you that Bobby's chest does the cracking thing again, that seismic shift he's been trying to film his way around for eighteen months.

"Are you trying to ask me to be your girlfriend, Robert?"

The full name. Not Franklin, not Bobby, just Robert. The name you use when you're being serious underneath the teasing, and the sound of it in your voice makes him want to say yes.

Just yes. Just the word, no armour, no escape hatch, no joke to retreat behind. Just a boy telling a girl the truth.

Bobby grins. The real one, the crooked one, the one he can't control. He unfolds his arms. Lets the camera hang. Tips his head to the side, just slightly, and his earring catches the light and he looks at you—really looks, bare-eyed, no viewfinder, no glass—and says:

"We'll see how the date goes first, baby."

Baby. The word lands between you like a dropped coin and Bobby hears it come out of his mouth and feels his face heat because he didn't plan that, it just....came out, natural as breathing.

As if his mouth has been holding that word in reserve for a year and a half and finally found the opening. Baby. Like it was always yours. Like he was always going to end up right here, leaning against a locker with his heart in his throat, calling you something soft because he finally ran out of ways to be hard and dismissive.

Your expression shifts, lips parting, just slightly. Your eyes go wide for half a second and Bobby sees it: the surprise, the genuine surprise, like you weren't expecting that, either. Like for all your certainty and your sharp eyes and ability to read him like a book, you didn't predict the word baby and it landed somewhere tender.

Bobby watches you hear it. Watches the surprise dissolve into warmth. It starts at your eyes and moves to your mouth and settles into the whole shape of your face.

You're smiling. Not the mock-exasperated smile. Or the caught-you-filming smile. Something new. He hasn't seen this one before, or maybe he's seen it a hundred times and is only now letting himself look at it without the camera in the way.

He crosses his arms again. Looks at you for a beat. The grin fades. Softening, the cockiness draining out of it until what's left is just Bobby. Just the boy under the performance.

His jaw relaxes and his eyes go quiet. And the expression on his face is the one he's been hiding for eighteen months, the one the camera was supposed to protect him from. Open, unguarded, wanting so much it's almost visible, a want that makes his hands shake and his voice drop and his whole body lean toward you like gravity.

"Yeah," he says. Softer. Almost shy, which is a word that has never applied to Bobby Franklin in his entire life and applies now, here, in this hallway, with you. "I'm asking, okay? Seriously. I'm asking."

The space between you is small enough to step across and neither of you steps. But neither of you steps back and the moment holds, suspended, full, the kind of perfect that Bobby will one day try to capture on tape. Because he doesn't know yet that this is the moment he should have put the camera down forever and just lived inside of with his bare, stupid, brave hands.

But that's later.

Right now, Bobby is seventeen and his hands are shaking and you're smiling at him and the whole world is the width of a hallway and for the first time ever, he's not afraid.

"Yes."

📹 better bobby series masterlist.

INSERTS HIMSELF WHERE?

Around that time when you moved to King’s Landing to marry Prince Valarr, one of Lady Jena’s ladies-in-waiting – Aemma – left the court to come back to her castle. Apparently, she turned out to be pregnant after her husband’s visit.

You were very happy for the woman because she seemed to be kind and understanding but also funny. You knew she would be an amazing mother and the sight of her glowing face reminded you that soon you would become a mother yourself.

It was a scary thought – to become pregnant with a man you only just met. But you knew it was inevitable. Perhaps other marriages could wait a year or two before starting the journey of parenthood but you were marrying the heir to the throne. You knew your position and your place. You would become the Queen one day but in return you had to offer your body and womb to the battles of nearly constant pregnancy and childbirth.

Prince Valarr himself was not scaring you, though. You couldn’t believe that an arranged union with an heir to the throne could turn out to be so harmonic. He was charming, handsome, chivalrous and smart. Not much older than you, not a brute, not a drunkard, not a man-whore. It felt as if you won a lottery.

Not a man-whore at all. In fact, he was as pure for you as you were for him. 

That was one of the reasons why he demanded that no bedding ceremony was to be held. He didn’t have to convince his father for long, though. Prince Baelor would be surprised if his son requested this tradition to take place.

“You must not worry, my Lady,” Valarr held your hands after leaving his father’s chambers. You were waiting for him in the corridor, pacing nervously. “My father agreed to ignore the bedding ceremony tradition. I explained to him it would be disrespectful to my wife and the future Queen of the Realm. It is not proper for anyone to see you like this. Anyone but me, that is,” he added with a blush.

“Oh, my Prince, thank you so much!” You squeezed his hands tight. “I am so grateful.”

“You should not be. It is my duty as your betrothed to be your protector whether it means shielding your body from injury or your honour and pride.”

After a beautiful and elegant wedding feast, without any prying eyes, the wedding night was rather heavenly. You were over the moon for the whole morning and still giggling slightly while having supper, squeezing Valarr’s hand under the table. His cheeks were crimson red while his parents were exchanging looks. King Daeron seemed to be pleased that your union was so happy and Prince Matarys was furrowing his brows, not understanding why you were acting like that.

After the supper you were supposed to take a walk in the gardens with Lady Jena. She spotted your impatience during the walk as you couldn’t wait to join your newlywed husband in your chambers and do all the things from the night before once more.

“(Y/N), my dear… There is something I must inquire about,” Lady Jena began carefully.

“What is it, my Lady?” You asked her.

“It is… awkward to talk about but…the maid has informed me that your bedsheet this morning was… clean,” she swallowed thickly, struggling to find the right words. “I hope you understand it is important for people to see the… the blood,” she finally muttered and you widened your eyes at her words.

What did she mean that the people needed to see blood?!

Lady Jena noticed your scared facial expression.

“I don’t mean to accuse you! My son is pleased with you and I have no reason not to be either. But you did not have a bedding ceremony and people need proof that…” Lady Jena hesitated once again. “You did consummate the marriage, right?”

“O-of course!” You gasped.

“Perhaps my son’s lack of experience is to be blamed for the inconvenience…” Lady Jena kept speaking in unfinished or mysterious sentences, which was frustrating you greatly. “Just please, do so again tonight.”

“Oh, we will!” You fervently assured with a head nod and she cracked a smile at that.

When you finally went back to your chambers, your excited and blushing husband was already waiting for you. He opened his arms for you to hug him but you sighed and frowned instead.

“What is it, my sweet?” He asked, worryingly. He approached you and rubbed your arms. “Do you not feel well? Do you need anything?”

“No, it’s just… Your mother told me…” You huffed and he furrowed his brows. “That the maid was complaining about our bedsheets being too… clean,” you explained, hoping he would know what that meant but he seemed to be as puzzled as you were.

“Too clean?” Valarr blinked a few times.

“Apparently it should be stained with blood as a sign of consummation,” you whispered shyly and his cheeks turned even more pinkish than before.

“Oh,” he took a step back from you. “Well, that is the most curious and odd custom. I do wonder why my father has never told me about it.”

“I wasn’t told either. But I got an impression that your mother rather insisted,” you said, looking down.

“Do not worry, my Lady, I will not let any harm come to you,” Valarr took his dagger from the desk as he approached your bed. “I assume the custom is for the woman to bleed but I am a gentleman,” he assured you and cut the inside of his arm right below the elbow slightly. You hissed and looked away.

He made sure the blood dropped onto the sheets and then he walked away to clean the fresh wound and bandage it quickly. It was a shallow cut and did not require much attention. He could easily hide it beneath his tunic during the day and it would heal in no time.

“Thank you so much, my Prince,” you approached him to kiss him on the lips.

“At your service, my Lady,” Valarr smiled sweetly and leaned in to kiss you back.

Lady Jena was pleased in the morning as she nodded at you by the breakfast table. You nodded back, feeling so mature now.

Months passed and you were not blessed with a babe of your own. At first everyone was understanding and kind about it, telling you that it took time sometimes. But when Lady Aemma already had her own and you still were not pregnant, people started worrying.

You were worrying the most, terrified they would consider you useless and send you away. You were aware of the fact that you were failing at the only task you had been sent to King’s Landing for – to give Prince Valarr heirs.

“Please, my Lady, we still have time. Besides, I will not allow anyone to send you away. I swore to protect you for the rest of my life,” Valarr assured you as he held you tight when you were crying on the edge of the bed. He put his arm around you and placed a kiss upon your temple.

“My Prince, you say that now but soon they will manage to convince you to get rid of me! I am good for nothing if my womb is barren!” You sobbed, hiding your face in the crook of his neck.

Valarr awkwardly patted your back and shushed you, caressing the back of your head.

“My darling, you are to be my Queen. That means much more than carrying my heirs,” he whispered.

“If I don’t give you sons, your bloodline and legacy end with you,” you sniffled and squeezed him even tighter.

“I have a brother, I have cousins. My family’s bloodline is safe,” Valarr tried to convince you.

But he also tried to convince himself. He loved you – of course. He loved you as much as he could love someone. He had been waiting his whole life to meet his future wife and finally be happy and devoted like his parents were. But he knew that if you were truly infertile then your future would be a difficult one and full of whispers in the court. 

And he truly wanted to have children with you. More than anything.

“Perhaps the problem lies in me, not you,” he added and you moved away to look into his wet mismatched eyes. “We do not know who is to be blamed.”

“They always blame the woman,” you reminded him.

“We will make them blame me. If it comes to cruel gossip and accusations, I will make sure they all believe the fault is in me,” Valarr promised, his lower lip trembling slightly.

He would do anything to protect you.

You sobbed even more now, this time out of the amount of love that you felt for this man. You cupped his cheeks and pressed your forehead to his, your tears mixing.

“I love you,” you breathed out.

“I love you,” he replied. “And nothing will change that.”

Lady Aemma visited with her babe when her husband was in King’s Landing for business. The boy was six moons old already and the cutest baby you had ever seen. His name was Steffon.

You frowned at the sight of him, though, as you sipped on your tea in Lady Jena’s chambers. Your mother-in-law was cooing to the boy, beaming with happiness and you couldn’t help but feel jealous. Your heart was stinging at the sight because you knew how much she had to wish to be a grandmother finally.

“What an adorable little boy he is,” she smiled at Lady Aemma. “You are so lucky, my dear. I am so happy for you.”

“Thank you, my Lady,” Aemma bowed her head. “Does Lady (Y/N) wish to hold the babe?” She glanced at you.

“I am not sure,” you admitted, putting the cup of tea down with a forced smile. “I lack experience with babies.”

“Nonsense, it comes naturally,” Lady Aemma insisted as she put the boy into your arms.

You held him awkwardly. He was staring at you with big eyes and you began to rock him softly as you imagined it should be done.

“See? A natural,” Lady Aemma smiled at you.

“If it was natural for me, I’d be blessed with a babe by now,” you muttered.

“Hm?” Lady Aemma asked but you were not looking at her anymore, focused on Steffon. So she laid her eyes on Lady Jena.

Your mother-in-law sighed and took Aemma by her elbow to walk her to the corner of the room.

“Lady (Y/N) and Prince Valarr struggle to conceive,” she whispered but you still could hear. You gritted your teeth but said nothing, pretending that you were too busy with the babe that you were not aware of the conversation taking place.

“Really? I thought they simply wanted to enjoy their marriage and wait,” Lady Aemma confessed.

“No,” Jena shook her head. “They have been trying since their wedding night.”

Long silence occurred.

“Oh!” Lady Aemma exclaimed and turned around to look at you. “But what can possibly be so difficult about conceiving a babe?”

Lady Jena’s eyes widened. She extended her hands as if she begged her former lady-in-waiting to drop the subject but Aemma was already approaching you.

You were looking at her with a terrified expression. You were surprised at her insolence but also the way she seemed to be so confident was quite intimidating.

“I am already expecting my second,” she caressed her small bump that was now visible under her hand. You blinked a few times in disbelief.

“Congratulations,” you whispered, handing Steffon to Lady Jena who sat next to you.

Lady Aemma took a seat in the armchair in front of the sofa you and your mother-in-law were occupying.

“I am an expert now, I guess,” Aemma chuckled. “I can give… tips,” she laid her eyes on Lady Jena as if she was waiting for her approval.

Lady Jena sighed and nodded. She knew her son and you were desperate and she hadn’t been bold enough to speak so openly with you herself. Nothing Lady Aemma would say could possibly make your situation worse anyway.

“My Lady?” Lady Aemma looked at you now and you nodded, hesitantly. You fidgeted your fingers with the hem of your sleeve nervously.

“How often do you lay with your husband, may I ask?” Lady Aemma asked. “Frequency is important with these things.”

Lady Jena blushed and you could feel your cheeks burning, too.

“N-nearly every night,” you answered.

“Good, that’s good,” Lady Aemma smiled warmly. “Well, now, many people fail to realise that what helps women to conceive is … the pinnacle.”

Lady Jena looked away immediately and you furrowed your brows.

“Pinnacle?” You asked.

“Do you experience it?” Lady Aemma asked, excitedly waiting for your answer.

“I do not know that that is,” you admitted, openly.

“It is a feeling of… Of intense pleasure,” Aemma explained patiently. “When you lay with your husband, that is.”

“Oh!” Your eyes sparkled as you nodded. “Oh, yes, I do. It feels very nice to lay with Valarr.”

Lady Aemma smiled politely.

“Hm, I’m not sure if we understand each other correctly. It is no ordinary pleasure…” She scratched the back of her head and your smile dropped. You were lost again. “A woman’s pleasure is somewhat more subtle than a man’s…” Lady Aemma was trying to look for the right words.

You were so confused. Each time you were talked to about those things, people seemed to struggle. Your mother, your septa, Lady Jena, the maester and now even Lady Aemma. You had a feeling this whole baby-making thing had to be extremely difficult after all. Perhaps that was why you were failing constantly.

“You see…” Lady Aemma took a deep breath in. “When he… inserts himself…”

“Inserts himself?” You interrupted her. “Insters himself where?”

Lady Aemma did not finish her sentence nor answer but her mouth stayed open slightly. She looked at Lady Jena and your mother-in-law looked back at her with equal astonishment. Meanwhile, you couldn’t understand those reactions and still wondered what the insertion was supposed to be about.

“My darling… When you lay with my son… What do you do, exactly?” Lady Jena asked.

“Oh!” Your cheeks burnt as you looked down to avoid her gaze. “We… We kiss a lot! We kiss like we couldn’t kiss when we were only betrothed. And we… We touch… We touch each other and it feels so nice,” you couldn’t help a loving smile even though you were embarrassed. “I enjoy being close to him. That’s more than I could ever ask for.”

Lady Jena smiled sweetly. Even though she found the situation both shocking and funny, she did not laugh. She handed the fussy babe to Lady Aemma and moved closer to you as she put her arm around your shy form to hold you closer. You looked up at her with a scared gaze and she kept on smiling.

“It warms my heart to witness how much you love my son. Truly,” she assured you and fixed your hair gently. “But darling… It is no wonder any longer why you cannot conceive a child.”

“What do you mean?” You asked, swallowing thickly. You laid your eyes on her, then on Lady Aemma.

“To conceive a babe you have to… become one,” Lady Jena explained. “The act of consummation requires Valarr to… insert himself inside of you and spill his seed,” she added, her face red as tomato now. 

“H-his what?” You asked.

Goodness, that was all so odd and scary.

Lady Jena cracked a smile and put her hand on your abdomen to rub it gently.

“When a man spills himself inside of a woman, the babe grows in her womb from the seed he planted there,” she explained.

“But what does he insert and where?” You shook your head, still confused.

“The intimate parts,” Lady Aemma answered quickly. “His… you-know-what must go into your… you-know-what.”

You winced at the thought, which made the women laugh.

“It is painful for a woman but only at first,” Lady Aemma added. “Do not get discouraged. After that, you will find pleasure you never thought would be possible to experience.”

“Speaking of,” Lady Jena furrowed her brows as she laid her eyes on your face. “What was the blood on your bedsheets after the wedding night?”

“We thought it was a tradition to cut the bride… Valarr cut his arm instead… I guess we thought wrong?” You bit your lower lips and the women chuckled once more.

“What a gentleman our Prince is,” Lady Aemma commented.

“Oh, darling, no… No one cuts brides on their wedding nights. The blood should come out of your… you-know-what,” Jena used Aemma’s phrasing, “after the first… insertion. That is why it’s so important. It is proof that the marriage was consummated.”

You blinked slowly a few times. You finally understood as it clicked inside your brain.

Your marriage remained unconsummated even though you had been married for over a year now.

Now you had to figure out how to announce it to your husband.

“Wh-what?” Valarr asked, his pretty mismatched eyes widening and his hands sweating already.

“Our marriage is not consummated properly,” you repeated quietly and looked down. He was sitting by his desk after answering the letters and you were standing above him, nervously playing with the sleeves of your dress between your fingers. “That is why we can’t conceive.”

“Who told you that?” He asked, swallowing the lump forming in his throat.

“Lady Aemma and your mother agreed with her after she learnt that there was no… insertion,” you whispered.

“Insertion?” Valarr raised his brow at you.

He felt extremely stupid. As your husband, he should have been the one to show and teach you. If he had failed at that… It meant he was a pathetic excuse of a Lord Husband. Perhaps staying pure and never visiting brothels before his marriage hadn’t been that good of an idea.

Just like your septa had told you once to just lay down and take it, his father had only told him that he would know what to do. Obviously, both of you remained oblivious.

“They mentioned seed. That it must be spilled inside a woman for the child to grow,” you looked into his eyes nervously and his mouth opened slightly.

“A-ha…” He gasped. “I… I think I might know what that part means.”

“I was thinking of that, too. Is it that wet thing that…?”

“Yes,” Valarr interrupted you as he nodded, his face becoming red in an instant. 

“Apparently this… fluid should go inside of me,” you sighed.

“How? Through that… insertion?” Valarr looked up and you nodded.

“You should put your… Into my…”

“I think I know now,” Valarr shushed you as he stood up, wiping his sweaty hands into his breeches. After that, he put his hands on your arms and looked deep into your eyes. “Do you want to try it?”

“I mean… We have to… to have a baby,” you explained. “But… But I am scared. They mentioned it will hurt me at first. And the blood… There will be blood,” you bit on your lower lip.

Valarr hesitated.

“How am I supposed to be doing this when I made an oath to protect you from harm? How can I be the one to bring you pain?” He wondered out loud.

“I do not know!” You nearly sobbed. It was all so scary and confusing but you also felt like a complete idiot that you two had failed at something that seemed to be simple for others.

“There must be a way around it… There must…!” Valarr leaned in to peck you on the lips as he took a step back. “I shall speak to my father. He will tell me everything. And we will try tonight. Only if you wish to,” he added, looking carefully at your facial expression and looking for any sign of disapproval.

“No, no, please do. We must,” you insisted, lifting your chin up. “We must,” you repeated.

One moon later your monthly blood did not come. Another moon later you fainted while walking up the stairs, which caused the maester to confirm the happy news.

Three moons after finding out about the insertion, your abdomen was already slightly swollen with the growing babe.

Valarr was exceptionally proud, his hand constantly rubbing your bump, his face beaming with joy and pride. You were equally happy but you felt awkward each time Lady Jena and Prince Baelor were smirking at the sight of the growing life inside your womb.

The fact that you were finally expecting and the rumours had stopped meant more than anything, though.

You were sitting in the garden and embroidering by Lady Jena’s side. You were making a blanket for the babe and she was making a tiny hat for her first grandchild.

“Can I ask something?” You inquired after biting on your bottom lip for quite a while now, waiting for the right moment.

“Darling, always. Please, always inquire. No matter what the question is about,” Lady Jena looked at you intensely.

“I was thinking… How long after the babe is born do we have to wait until we can… lay together again?” You asked, less shyly than before because over the past few weeks you had learnt how educational such conversations could be.

Lady Jena chuckled.

“Usually the maesters ask for at least six weeks of abstinence after the labour. That is if everything goes well. Why?” She answered.

“Oh… So six moons and six weeks more?” You looked displeased. “Goodness, it is a torture.”

“Wait… You… You have stopped now?” Lady Jena raised her eyebrow.

“Well, of course! We do not want to harm the babe!” You gasped, looking at her funny.

“But the maester said the babe is alright and the pregnancy is going well,” Lady Jena explained. “There is no need for abstinence,” she added.

“I see…” You hummed to yourself. “Well, I will tell Valarr to inquire from the maester about it. Just to make sure.”

“Very well then,” Lady Jena nodded with a chuckle.

“Lady Mother?” You went back to your embroidery so you weren’t looking at her anymore but you wanted to keep the conversation going.

“Yes, dear?”

“Lady Aemma was right. There is truly nothing difficult about conceiving a babe,” you admitted with a shrug of your arms.

Your mother-in-law laughed but it was a laughter filled with affection and joy.

“I’m glad, my dear. Hopefully it means I will become a grandmother to many children.”

“The maiden dances through the sky She lives in every lover’s sigh. Her smiles teach the birds to fly, And gives dreams to little children” -The Song of the Seven

The Brook

In the bare moonlight, at the hour of the wolf, when the last prayers lie spent a schemes lie sealed, and only the wakeful keep their watch…there wandered a maiden robed in trembling light. Upon mortal lips and the world lies balanced between sin and absolution, she walked. Not as flesh walks. But as something remembered. She moved unseen among the daughters of men, answering whispered pleas for virtue, for solace, for grace unbroken.

The Maiden moved where she was called, and where she was not. In every whispered vow, she lingered. In every trembling doubt, she listened. For she was not one alone, but one of Seven, and never wholly separate from them.

The Father weighed.

The Mother wept.

The Warrior burned. 

The Smith endured. 

The Crone watched.

And she…

She felt. 

Not as mortals felt, in bursts and wounds, but as a tide that never ceased. For such was her charge: to guard what fragile innocence the world so carelessly profanes. 

Men came and went as storms upon a field…taking, breaking, leaving naught but ruin in their passing. Maidens knelt to her with tear-stained prayers: for love betrayed, for vows undone, for lovers lost to war’s unyielding maw. Ever the same lament, yet never did she wholly despair. For still she sought beauty… in valor, in mercy, and in innocence held fast as shield against the dark.

She passed unseen among the daughters of men, gathering their prayers as one gathers fallen petals…each fragile, each already fading. Broken vows. Stolen innocence. Love unreturned, or worst forgotten.

Men, she had learned, were creatures of taking.

And yet…not all.

There was one.

A prince. Dragon-blooded, yet tempered not in fire alone, but in conscience.

She had seen him beneath the sun. Where men performed themselves in steel and splendor. Where the Warrior’s gaze burned brightest. She beheld him once, Prince Baelor, at the wedding tourney of his aunt, Daenerys. That day, she had turned her ear to the bride’s silent pleas, torn between duty of marrying the Prince of Dorne and a forbidden love. The realm bent toward union, yet beneath it stirred defiance: Daemon, wrathful and unyielding, his heart laid bare in steel, willing to risk it all for Daenerys.

He fought like a tempest unchained.

But Baelor—Baelor brought the storm to heel.

She had not meant to linger upon him. He was but one thread among many, one life among countless that would rise and fall beneath the Father’s judgment. And yet, when he rode, it was not wrath that guided his hand. It was restraint. When he struck, it was not hunger that followed. But ending.

Lance met lance in thunderous accord, till in the final tilt the fury broke. The bastard prince was cast down, struck hard and humbled, his rage scattered like splintered wood upon the ground. Not for glory did Baelor ride, but to preserve what sanctity the day yet held, to shield the innocent from the ruin of another man’s grief. 

The Warrior had watched him. 

The Father had weighed him. 

Even the Crone had stilled her turning gaze.

And she…

She had wondered.

What is this thing that does not take, when it may?

In that moment, she had known this one was different.

Rare as starlight at dawn. 

And though she was but a spirit…unseen, untouched…something within her stirred. A longing most improper for one such as she. To be known. To know. 

Yet she stilled her heart.

 I am no maiden to be chosen, she thought, but one to whom prayers are given.

Better to feel nothing…than to break as those she pitied. 

Still, the memory of him lingered. 

And so, beneath a warm summer night, she turned among the fireflies…each a fleeting star caught in mortal air. The fireflies gathered, as they always did, drawn her not to her form, but to what lay beneath it. For a moment, they circled her in quiet orbit…Seven light…always, there were seven. 

A breath. 

A sound. 

Now, beneath gentler light, she let herself take shape.

Not wholly. Never wholly. 

She turned among them, her motion less a dance than a drifting, like a thought not yet spoken. And from her lips came song, though she had never learned it, and never needed to. Her spirit brimmed too full, she sang of valor, of longing, of a prince who made the world seem briefly kinder. 

Of Baelor Breakspear. 

A prince of breaking lances. 

A man who chose less when given more, 

Curious. How curious.

“Why should you linger?” murmured the Crone, somewhere behind her thoughts.

“Why should you care?” pressed the Father, soft but unyielding,

“Why should you not?” whispered something that might have been her own voice.

And so she sang.

So lost was she in song that marked not his coming —-until the earth betrayed him.

A misstep. A fall.

The world narrowed.

Steel found her hand, not from her, but from memory. The Warrior’s echo, faint but present.

“Who goes there?”

“A soldier,” came the answer, rising. “and a clumsy one.”

“Show yourself, ser, else you shall taste a sharper greeting.”

“Believe me, my lady, of the two, I am likelier to end this quarrel.”

And when he stepped forth into the moon’s pale grace

Her breath faltered.

Not a soldier.

The prince himself.

When he stepped into the light, she felt it then.

Not divinity.

But gravity.

For the first time in all her quiet watching, she was seen. Not as whisper, nor presence, nor prayer but seen.

As though, for the first time, something in the world pulled her instead the other way around. And she who had never needed to steady herself…felt something like imbalance. She, who had watched the hearts of countless souls, found her own laid bare in that fleeting instant. 

“Forgive me, my prince…I knew not who walked at such an hour.”

She would not have said it. She should not have known him.

But she did.

She always did.

“Nor I, fair lady, why one so gently bred walks unguarded in the dark.”

She dared not speak her truth. Yet truth, ever stubborn, slipped through in softer guise. 

“I sought but breath and quiet. This brook soothes more than counsel halls. All this talk of war…it wearies me. Green boys thirst for renown, and yet…” her voice fell, “...it is not glory they remember at the end, but gentleness….all for an heirloom sword placed in princely hands.”

When he answered, ah, how it struck her. 

Not pride. Not hunger. 

But burden.

As he spoke, she listened, and something unfamiliar stirred. 

Not the endless tide of mortal longing she had known since time’s first breath.

This was…

Singular.

Bound.

Finite.

His words did not echo. They did not multiply.

They stayed.

With her.

She listened. 

Not as goddess. 

But as woman. 

Here stood no creature of empty song, but one who bore the very virtues she was sworn to keep alive. Honor without cruelty. Duty without blindness. 

What a wondrous thing, she thought. 

“A bitter charge,” she said softly. “Must it not gall you… to fight in your father’s name?”

And when he answered, when he spoke of truth above blood, of conscience above crown…something within her yielded. This was no fleeting spark. This was flame that might endure.

When he spoke of mercy, 

of the lives weighed upon a single choice, 

of sons and brothers, and lovers he would never wish to slay. 

It did not ripple outward into the world. It settled.

Here.

And when he spoke of the lives he would not take…

She felt, for the first time, the shape of a choice that could not be undone. 

“How strange,” she thought, though she did not say it. “To live where every act is final.”

And how heavy that must be. And how… beautiful.

Her heart, though divine, knew then a mortal ache.

Not for glory. 

But for him.

The night shifted. An owl’s call cleaved the silence—The Crone’s quiet summons. Time, ever watchful, drew its veil. She turned her gaze skyward, lips parting in silent answer.

I know… I must go.

“My prince, I must away. Forgive my boldness. My thoughts run freer that my caution.”

“No, my lady. Your words were dearly given…and dearly taken.”

That undid her more than any blade. 

“I did but amuse myself. I thought not the subject of my song would walk forth to hear it.”

She moved to pass, but he stayed her.

A hand. 

A touch. And then—

A kiss.

Fire.

Not of flame. But of feeling long denied. 

For one impossible instant

The Father did not judge. 

The Warrior did not burn.

The Crone did not turn her gaze forward.

All stilled.

And she felt…not everything.

But one thing,

Warmth.

Sharp. Immediate. Terrible in its clarity.

Her breath caught, not from surprise, but from limitation.

She could not feel this everywhere.

Only here.

Only now.

Only because of him.

And that…

That frightened her more than any prayer she had ever heard.

“You have eased my troubled mind,” he said. “I would see you again.”

Again.

Such a small word.

Such a mortal word. 

It implied time. Waiting. Wanting.

Such perilous hope.

The Crone stirred.

The Father weighed. 

The Mother, distant, grieved for something not yet lost. 

And she…

She chose 

Just a little. 

Fate had already begun its weaving.

“Then return, my prince,” she said softly, “I shall pray the Seven guide you through the storm of war…”

Her hand lingered in his, treacherous in their reluctance.

Not because she forgot to withdraw it—

But because she wished, for the briefest treason—

To know how it felt.

To hesitate.

“And…that they show you mercy.”

======================================

The Hastilude

Since the war, the Seven had been called upon in many guises. 

The Father, to weigh justice, that the rightful might find his seat upon the Iron Throne.

The Mother, to cradle the wounded, to comfort the orphaned, to fill the cold halls with bread and warmth.

The Warrior, to lend strength where steel was drawn.

The Smith, to forge and shield, that even the frail might stand in battle. 

The Crone, to grant wisdom, that men might yet discern their path in a broken world. 

And the Stranger…

That it might, at last, be stayed. 

But the Maiden…

She remained among those who endured. A gentle keeper of hope, of innocence unbroken, she walked where prayers were whispered still: among septas in their vigils, among maidens in quiet homes, among children who yet believed in spring beyond ruin. 

The war did end. 

She saw it as one might see the turning of a tide. 

Baelor rode with his host from one horizon, and Maekar from the other. Two brothers drawing the realm back into itself. It felt, in that moment, like a herald’s cry made flesh: it is done.

And then came Bloodraven. Arrows fell like rain.

Daemon and his sons were struck drown, and the field was made red with ending.

She did not turn away. 

War demanded witness, and she, above all, must be fair. 

Yet within her, in some small and secret place, there lived a single fragile wish:

Let him live.

And he did. 

She felt it before she saw it. The quiet easing of breath. The loosening of dread. He rode for home with a heart made heavy by victory, his gaze shadowed not with triumph, but with remembrance. He mourned them all. Even those who had stood against him. 

Eight moons passed.

The realm rose slowly, like a child long neglected, learning again to stand. From ruin came order. From grief, a fragile kind of pride. A good king was praised, and a just Hand beside him. Fields were tilled. Bread was baked. Life, stubborn and unyielding, endured. 

And from afar, the Maiden watched. 

She smiled, at times, to see what he became.

Yet sometimes a thought would trouble her:

Did he remember?

Surely not. She had been but a moment, a passing thread in the long weaving of a prince’s life. 

Then came the feast, held for the birth of Maekar’s son, Daeron, named for the good king. The great and lesser houses gathered, clothed in splendor, eager to forget the taste of war in wine and song. 

The young sought her favor, whispering prayers for love, for fortune, for gentle matches. 

And she granted what she could. 

Yet a thought, bright and dangerous, stirred within her:

May I not, just once, be granted the same?

The Crone would have warned her.

The Mother, perhaps, would have understood. 

So she yielded.

Just once.

She withdrew to the godswood. There, beneath ancient boughs, she let her voice rise, not in praise as minstrels made it, all grandeur and gilded falsehood, but in truth.

She sang what she had seen. 

What she had known.

What she had come, despite all reason, to love. 

And she thought herself unheard.

“Wake me, my lady,” came a voice behind her, soft and breathless, “for if this be a dream, I would know when I must mourn its passing.”

She turned. 

Baelor stood before her, winded from haste, his gaze fixed as though afraid she might vanish between one heartbeat and the next.

“My prince—”

“Yes,” he said gently, stepping nearer, “it is I. Led by a voice I could not mistake, though all the world conspired to drown it.”

They spoke. Lightly, at first.

As though neither dared name the weight beneath their words.

He spoke of a soldier—-

She answered as though she did not know him.

Yet in every turn of phrase, they circled the truth.

For all the times she had felt his presence in the press of a battle, she knew the measure of each stroke. 

When it should fall true, and when it should turn aside. In some small, guarded chamber of her mind, she had never wished it would not land….that fate might stay its hand, and grant her but one meeting more. 

The thought did flood her then, and summon forth a smile most fond, unguarded, and bright with quiet grace. 

“He lives,” said she, soft as a prayer. “The gods, in mercy, saw fit to return him.”

“Then I must thank them,” he murmured.

“You stand before gods not your own,” he said.

“I am,” she answered. I am one of them.  

“yet I think the world too wide for any one voice…or any face of it. There are spirits in all living things, I would have them know they are not forgotten.”

She said it lightly, but something in the air stilled, as though the trees themselves listened.

“Then you are kinder than most rulers I have known,” said he. 

“And you?” she asked. “Are you kinder now, my prince...or only more careful?”

“Careful enough,” he said, “to know the difference.”

The night deepened around them, soft with bloom and silvered light. 

“It is good to see you again, my prince." The ache to say those words has finally eased her heart. 

“And I you,” said he, and it made her heart feel warm of all sorts. 

He held forth his hand, and never before had such an offering been made to her. A fleeting thought did stir, what judgement the Seven might cast upon so strange a touch…yet she did drown it swift and silent. 

And then she placed her hand in his, and his grasp about it felt as the warm embrace of morning, breaking gentle after a bitter dawn.

She had known the rugged press of his palm, battle worn were his hands, and longed to kiss away their harshness…to restore them unto gentler grace. Yet, ah how tenderly did he cradle hers. And as her eyes did linger upon his face, she marked a graze upon his cheek.

“You are marked.” she murmured, her fingers brushing the faint scar upon his cheek.

“A small remembrance.”

“War leaves little that is small,” she replied. 

“Then let this be counted among its mercies,” he said, smiling fondly.

They laughed, then soft, unguarded, as though the world beyond the trees had no claim upon them. And in that laughter, something shifted. Something neither could name, yet neither could deny. When his hand seeked her again, with the loving brush of his thumb, she felt his willingness to cross oceans to stand beside her.

“Tell me your name,” he said at last, quieter now, “I would not lose you again to silence.” 

She hesitated.

To be known…or to remain as she was: untouchable, unseen, safe. 

Yet nowhere in all the realms did she wish more to remain than here.

With him. A touch of heaven for him, and for her more than anything. 

Then laughed she, like unto the spring in bloom, and moved as summer leaves upon a gentle breeze, light and unencumbered, with a merry gleam within her easy eyes. A modest twirl did bear her just beyond his reach, as though she took delight in being near yet not attained. She turned the tide of their discourse, for well she knew it would but break her heart to watch this fair and budding feeling unravel before them both. And so she asked the poet to spare her verses and bid her time still. 

“Must I perform at your bidding?” he said at last, recovering. “And be commanded so boldly? I ought to have you seized for such insolence.” he jested. 

“Oh how noble,” she laughed and he could not help but join her. Oh their laughs, it sounded like a million little stars twinkling.

“Come, my prince. Spare a few pretty words, if any be true to your spirit.” 

Please, for it might be the last time I might see you…

And so he stilled. And drew courage from within 

As if his life depended on it, as her lady commands him. 

He spoke with such earnest and unashamed manner, being seen for who he was, not by titles, and for the grace he was given, for the chance to see her once more. 

And she too never had felt more seen, appreciated, and yearned for. Of feelings growing out of love? Oh. Of love that cannot be. For she was a god, and he was a mortal.  Her tears fought her back, and trickled upon her somber cheek. 

“Forgive me,” he said softly, stepping nearer. “I had hoped for smiles, not sorrow.”

“It is no sorrow,” she answered, her voice warm despite the trembling. “But something…growing.”

It was all she can tell him. She smiled then. Soft, unguarded.

“As payment for such words, my prince, I would offer you a token.”

“A token?” he said lightly, though his voice betrayed him. “What treasure might suffice for one so burdened with titles?”

“Close your eyes.” she whispered low. 

This shall be my gift. 

To him, and yet unto myself. 

For a love that may not be. 

Let this pass, and live only in remembrance. 

And when he did—

She kissed him.

Lightly at first, as though the moment itself might break beneath too much truth.

But it did not break. It deepened. Careful, searching—not conquest, but recognition.

When they parted, it was only for breath.

“I was lost in it,” she said, wonder trembling through her voice.

“It is I who must beg pardon,” he answered, unsteady. “For answering boldness with more of the same.” They laughed again, softer now. Changed. 

And then…from the hall beyond faint yet unmistakable, rose the same ill-wrought song he had so despised. 

The hammer smashed the bastard with giant veiny—-Host of Dornish spearman!

Baelor groaned, closing his eyes. “Of all the moments to be remembered, must it be that one?”

She laughed again, brighted now. “Take care, my prince. The realm already makes you legend.”

“A poor one, if sung so badly.”

“Then you must give them better verses.”

He looked upon her…in earnest did he behold her. His gaze, his very eyes, and the quiet hold he kept upon her seemed to stay the march of time itself. 

Scarce had the echo of that wretched song faded from the air when another voice broke the night, clear, well-known, and far less sufferable in its insistence. His dearest brother called out for him, seeking his presence amidst the godswood. The world returning.

“Stay,” he said, taking her hands once more. “I would have you known–not as some passing dream, but as you are.”

Her smile faltered. “There are truths,” she said gently,”that fare better in quiet places.”

“Then let me be the judge of that,” he replied, smiling gently. “I would not have you fade again into some dream I must doubt come morning.”

Her lips parted…

She almost told him.

Almost.

The moment hung, fragile as spun glass.

“My prince…” she began.

And stopped.

Her gaze did soften then. And whatsoever truth had stirred therein sank once more beneath the surface. A tender strife. 

Oh that I might be seen, her spirit cried, and yet remain unseen, to be held in truth, yet never wholly known. 

She would not steal from him the fullness of his days. She would have him live—live richly, brightly—take joy, take love, and raise fair children who should bear his likeness, his mismatched eyes and his bearing. Such was the quiet mercy she chose, though it tore at her breast. 

For the realm had need of good men such as he—steadfast, gentle, and true—and she would not be the shadow that dims worthy a light.

Love, she knew, could unmake as surely as it could bless. 

I must not wound his heart anew, this must be done. 

“Go,” she said at last. “I shall remain.”

He believed her. 

With one last kiss, he turned—and was gone.

And when he returned—-

There was nothing. 

No trace. No sign.

Only silence beneath the pale tree.

The wind stirred, soft as a farewell. 

And there, upon the carved face of the weirwood—

A single firefly glowed. It lingered…

Then drifted toward him, slow and gentle, until it came to rest upon his shoulder.

Baelor did not move. 

His eyes fixed upon it, wide with something he dared not name. 

Then it flew. Gone.

He stood very still.

And at last—

A single tear fell.

======================================

The Tourney

She heard them before she came. 

Not with ears, as mortals do, but in the quiet turning of devotion. In whispered hopes tied with ribbon and breath. In soft, trembling prayers laid at unseen feet. 

Gwyn of Ashford. A maiden crowned in bloom and expectation. They called for love. For beauty. For favor. And so she came. Not as a queen, nor as judge, but as a blessing.

She moved unseen among garlands and laughter, her presence no heavier than sunlight upon water. Where Gwyn walked, the air softened. Where she smiled, courage found root. A gentle hand, unseen, guiding the tilt of a chin, the grace of a word. 

This was her place. This was what she was. 

Until—

He came. 

Baelor. 

Not in prayer. Not in plea. Not seeking her. 

And still—she knew him.

Her stillness broke. 

Not outwardly, no mortal eye marked the change, but within, where no change had ever been before. 

A remembering. 

Not of thought… but of feeling. 

Her gaze found him across the tourney grounds. And for the first time since her making, something in her faltered. 

He lives. 

Not wonder. Not yet. 

Something closer to trembling. 

Then came cruelty.

Swift. Thoughtless. Bright with arrogance.

Aerion Targaryen moved as fire does, all consuming, not caring what it left behind. A scream. A girl’s finger, broken.

The Maiden stepped forward and was stilled. 

Not by force. By presence. 

The Father’s gaze.

The Crone’s knowing. 

Do not.

Not common. Not unkind.

But law.

She stilled. 

And watched. 

Then a hedge knight stepped where she could not. 

Again—choice. 

Again—cost.

And something within her, long untouched, bent toward him in quiet approval. 

Men who chose. 

Men who could fall—and did not.

Duncan, rough-handed, uncertain, carrying truth like a burden too heavy for his years. He asked for justice—not with grace, but with need. 

And Baelor answered. 

She watched that closely. 

Not the words, but the choice. 

Recognition stirred in her again, not of face, but of soul. The same man who had stood at the brook. The same quiet defiance of ease, the same turning toward what was right, though it cost him.

He remembers, she thought.

Not her. 

But what she had shown him.

And that was enough to wound her. 

When Baelor sought Duncan, she lingered near. 

So near. Closer than breath. She could have spoken to them.

A word. A whisper. A nudge of knowing.

A nearby brook offered him solace in pondering what must needs be done, to fight against kin, or to fight for what is right. 

The Crone turned her gaze. 

Trust.

So she did not.

And for the first time…it hurt to obey…

The trial was called. Seven stood. And Seven watched. Not as one—but as many. She stood among them.

Whole.

Untouched.

Unmoved—until him.

Steel rang. Bone answered. 

Men broke beneath force and will—and she remained as she had always been: unshaken, unmarked. 

Until Baelor bled. 

Then—something tore. 

Not flesh. Not form. 

Something deeper. 

Every blow he took echoed where no blow had ever reached. 

And when the mace fell—

When brother struck brother—

She gasped. 

A sound not meant for her. 

Small. Broken.

No.

She moved.

Too fast. Too far.

And the Stranger stood before her. 

The stranger did not bar her with hand, but with certainty. “He is mine.”

“No,” she said. 

The word came raw. Unshaped.

The Warrior did not turn.

The Smith did not speak. 

The Mother wept—but did not move. 

The Crone watched.

The Father…considered. 

“I beg you,” she said. 

Not as goddess. Not as aspect. 

But as something lesser. 

Something learning how to kneel.

Silence held.

Then—

A yielding. Not victory. Not mercy. 

Allowance.

“Until dawn.”

They laid him out in a noble bed. Washed and still. Mourned in waiting. 

Between fire and earth.

Between king and god. 

Between ending and decree. 

And in that narrow space…She came.

He was broken.

Even in stillness, the wound spoke. Bruise beneath skin. Blood beneath bandage. The quiet violence of what had been done. She touched him—and trembled. Not from fear. From knowing. 

This could end.

This should end. 

Her hands hovered, then pressed—light as prayer. 

“Mother,” She whispered, voice unsteady, “lend me mercy.”

“Crone…show me what must be done.”

No answer came. 

A bramble lay within her hand, poised to be wrought into a circlet, each thorn and tendril bent toward that should bespeak the Seven. Her will was steel beneath the silk, unyielding, resolute, bent wholly to her prince, and yet, in truth, to him.

All this she bore for that man, whom the realm had scarcely yet beheld in full measure. For in him there burnt a promise not lightly spent, and she, though set apart, would see it flourish, though it cost her every hidden longing. 

So she chose.

It was not power. 

Not as the others wielded it.

It was giving. 

Piece by piece. 

Moment by moment. 

Something of her…undone…

Something of him…restored…

She did not know when it was enough. 

Only that she could not stop. 

Until—

Breath. 

When he stirred, she broke.  Not into light. Into tears. 

“Spare him,” she whispered—not to gods now, but to whatever still listened. 

“Spare him.”

And when he spoke—

She became something new entirely. 

He spoke—and the world altered. Not in sound. In meaning.

She had been called before. Praised. Named. Worshipped in fragments of understanding. But never…seen. 

“You’re alive.”

Such simple words. Such mortal relief. 

And something within her answered—not as goddess, but as woman newly made. 

He reached for her. Slowly. As though she might vanish if he moved too quickly. 

She did not withdraw. She could not. 

Not when something in her—unformed, unnamed—leaned toward him in answer.

“Do not leave me again.”

Again. 

The word struck deeper than any prayer. 

He remembers. 

Not her face. 

Not her name. But the absence she left behind. 

“I cannot stay,” she said. 

And this time, it was not truth alone. 

It was cost.

When he woke again, the night had deepened. So had she. 

Time did not pass for her as it did for him. 

But now—now she felt it. 

Each moment thinning. 

Each breath…borrowed. 

He looked at her as one looks upon something already half-lost. 

“Tell me your name.”

She almost did. 

The impulse rose—sharp, sudden, dangerous. To be known

To be called. 

To belong to something beyond prayer.

She shook her head. 

Because if she spoke it—she feared she might never return to what she had been. 

“You are no courtly maid,” he said softly. 

His gaze did not waver.

“You come as prayer comes…unseen…and all at once.”

She stilled. There it was.

Not knowledge. Not yet.

But nearness. 

He did not understand her. 

But he had begun to understand the shape of her. 

And that… frightened her more than the Stranger ever had. 

“Then be mine.”

The words came fragile and fierce all at once 

“And I shall give the realm a queen worthy of it.”

A mortal promise. 

Earnest. 

Impossible. 

And for the first time—

She felt sorrow not as observation…but as wound.

“The gods would forbid it.”

“Then why are you here?”

Because I chose you. Because I broke.

Because I wanted—

She swallowed the truth.

“Because I asked to be.”

“I pleaded with time,” she continued, quieter now. “For this moment.”

“And what price?”

Everything. 

Nothing.

Something still unfolding…

She lowered her gaze. 

Not in shame. 

In uncertainty.

A thing she had never known before him.

He did not press.

And in that mercy—she loved him.

When he drew her close, it was not possession. 

It was invitation. 

“Let me love you,” he said, voice rough with pain and something brighter beneath it.  “If only for this night. Let the dark be our witness…and no god judge us.”

At that, she stilled. Something flickered across her face…like candle light shaken by breath. Something in the air shifted, subtle, but certain. As though the world itself had drawn breath.

“No god…” she echoed, softer. Not in defiance…but in wonder. 

Then she closed her eyes. 

Then whispered…

”Then I am yours.”

“And I, yours.”

And she, who had never been asked, answered. 

At first, she did not understand what passed between them. 

Touch, to her, had always been distant. 

Wind through leaves. Light upon water. 

The brush of prayer against something unseen. 

But this—

This was weight.

Warmth.

Nearness that did not fade. 

She trembled. 

Not from fear. 

From too much. 

Every place his hands found her became suddenly known. 

As though her form, once only shape, now filled with meaning.

“Am I—” she faltered, the question breaking before it formed. 

He stilled at once. 

“You are,” he said gently, though she had not finished.

Always answering.

Never taking.

She followed him then.

Not guided—but learning.

As though each motion revealed something newly possible. 

Where he was careful, she grew certain.

Where he hesitated, she answered. 

Not as mortal woman taught by time—

But as something discovering what it means to become one.

Their breaths met. 

Not taken. Shared. 

And in that sharing, something passed between them that neither god nor man had named. 

Not hunger. Not innocence lost.

But innocence given. 

Freely. 

Knowingly. 

Once. 

Time bent around them. Or perhaps—she simply began to feel its passing. 

Each moment sharper than the last. Each touch more fleeting. 

As though the world itself had grown aware of what it would soon reclaim. 

When stillness came, she lay against him. 

Listening. Not idly. 

But with quiet urgency. 

His heart. 

Unsteady. 

Mortal. 

Finite.

“I would give my crown,” he whispered, voice worn thin, “to keep you.”

Her hand stilled over his chest.

“You cannot.”

“I would.”

“I know.”

And she did.

That was what made it unbearable. 

And sleep took him, she felt it. 

The failing. Not yet death…but its nearness.

The slow unmaking already begun. 

“No,” she whispered. 

This time—not to him. 

To everything. 

She bowed her head. And prayed.

Not as a goddess. 

But as supplicant. 

“Let him live.”

Silence.

“I will leave him,” she said. “I will not come again. I will not touch what ist not mine to touch.”

Still silence. 

Her voice broke. 

“Take from me what must be taken—but let him live.”

And somewhere—something answered. 

Not in words. 

In balance. 

When he woke—whole—she was already gone. 

But not far. 

Never far. 

She watched as he searched. 

As he spoke her into doubt before others. 

As he tried, and failed, to make them understand what cannot be held in mortal certainty. 

And still—he did not forget. 

It began softly. As such things often do. A cough in the city. A fever in the alleys. A quiet closing of doors that did not open again. 

No trumpet marked its coming. No omen named it. The Great Spring Sickness.

And yet—she felt it.

Not as mortals did, in flesh and failing breath—but as a shift. A rebalancing. A scale long tilted…correcting. 

She stood above King’s Landing. Unseen among its towers, and listened. Not to prayer. To absence. 

Where voices should have risen, there came only stillness. Where candles should have burned, there was wax left cold and untouched. 

And beneath it all—the Stranger moved. 

The Stranger did not rage. Did not hunger.

He gathered.

Quietly. Endlessly.

As he always had. 

As he always would. 

She knew it then. Not in thought. In certainty. 

This was not cruelty. 

This was answer. 

“One life,” said a voice behind her. 

The Crone. 

She did not turn. 

“One life, held past its hour…must be answered.”

Her hands trembled. Not with doubt. With recognition. 

“I did not take them,” she said. 

“No,” the Crone agreed. “But you asked.”

“And I was answered.”

“And so,” said the Crone gently, “must the world be.”

Below, the city broke. Septas fell at their altars, hands still folded in prayer. Children burned with fever, their cries fading into silence. Mothers held bodies that would not wake. 

And among them—

Him. 

Baelor wept. 

Not as king. Not as symbol.

As father. 

She came to him. Or as close as she could. 

Closer than wind. Closer than memory.

And still…he did not feel her. 

“Why?” he asked the empty air. 

His voice did not rage. That would have been easier. 

It broke.

“I gave what was asked. I ruled as I must. I kept faith.”

His hands clenched. 

Then opened. 

Powerless.

“Is this the cost of living?”

She knelt before him. Though he could not see. Though he could not know. 

“I am here,” she whispered.

“I am here.” 

But her voice did not reach him.

Not anymore. 

That had been the price she named. 

Jena wept beside him. A mother with empty arms. And Baelor….Baelor did not curse the gods. That, more than anything, undid her. 

His grief did not turn to cruelty. Did not harden into wrath. It opened. Wider. Softer. As though loss had carved in him a space large enough to hold the suffering of others. 

And she understood. Too late to undo it. Perfectly in its design.

He lived. 

And so–-others did not.

Not by his will. Not by hers alone.

But because the world does not bend without breaking elsewhere.

“I would have borne it,” she whispered, unseen. “All of it. If only it had been mine to take.” 

But she was not the Mother. Nor the Stanger. 

She was only—

The one who chose.

And so she watched. And wept. 

And learned the shape of consequence. 

Years had worn him. Not into weakness, but into quiet. The kind that comes when a man has outlived too much of what he loved. 

The Crone came to her once more. 

Not unkind. Never unkind. 

“It is time.”

This time—she did not beg. 

She only asked. 

Once.

And the answer came—

Not as resistance. 

But as opening.

So she went. To the godswood. 

To the place where memory had taken root. 

He came as she knew he would. 

Drawn not by command…but by something older than reason

He walked slower now. 

Each step measured. Each breath known. 

And yet—

When he saw her—

He stopped as though struck by something beyond pain. 

“Will you leave me again?”

His voice broke on the question. 

Not as king. 

As the man who had once woken to emptiness and never ceased remembering it.

She smiled. 

And this time—

There was no sorrow in it.

Only truth. 

“No.”

He did not run to her.

Did not fall.

Did not question. 

He came to her as one approached something long awaited and finally understood. 

“I have known you,” he said, voice low, unsteady, “all my life since.”

Not certainty. Not proof. 

But something deeper.

“I have looked for you in every kindness I could not name.”

“I have come to bring you home,” she said. 

He exhaled. Not in fear, not in grief. But in release. 

“To them?” he asked. 

“To all you have lost.”

She paused. 

Then softer— 

“And to me.”

She reached for him as he took her hand. It was warm. It was real. And for the first time he understood why it had always felt so certain. As though all mercy he had ever known had once passed through it. 

And now—he felt it. 

Not as flesh. Not as heat.

But as recognition fulfilled.

“My maiden fair,” he whispered.

And for the first time…she did not turn away from the name. 

“My king,” she answered.

Behind him, the world remained. Before him, something gentler. Not darkness. Not ending. But a place where nothing was taken. Only kept.

And together…he went.

He laughed then. Soft. Worn. 

Almost disbelieving. 

“I wondered,” he said, “if I had dreamed of you.”

“You did,” she answered. “And you did not.”

His hand found hers. 

No tremor now. 

No hesitation.

“I would have followed you then,” he said. 

“I know.” 

“I would follow you now.”

“I know.”

And this time, there was no cost left to name. 

The world did not shatter. 

Did not mourn. 

Did not mark the moment with storm or flame. 

A king died. 

So softly, none might mark the hour. Within the quiet of the woods he passed as though the earth itself had hushed to keep his rest. 

They found him laid upon a bed of grass, as one but newly fallen into gentle sleep…

Peace upon his brow, and his lips a smile so warm, so kindly set, it grieved the heart to wake him.

But something else…long divided was made whole…

And where head fallen—there came, in time, a small and quiet blooming.

Unseasonal. Unbidden.

Lancel had said it plainly enough in the small council chamber three weeks prior, with the particular straightforwardness of a man who has run out of patience “my daughter is of age, Your Grace, and I would see her settled well, and there is no finer match in the Seven Kingdoms than your son,” and the council had agreed, Baelor had agreed, and the whole thing had been arranged with smooth efficiency.

King Daeron II's nameday celebration had been Baelor's own suggestion as convenient cover for the visit. A natural occasion for the Lannisters to travel to the capital, he'd said, and you had apparently been wanting silks that weren't available back home, it would also give Valarr and you time to find footing without the weight of a formal betrothal negotiation hanging over every interaction.

The Lannister procession came through the gates of the Red Keep at midday, when the autumn sun was still high enough to be warm without being punishing, and Baelor was already in the courtyard to receive them– standing at the foot of the keep's great steps with two of his household knights behind him and Lord Tarly at his elbow, saying something about trade routes that Baelor was not listening to.

He could not have said, afterward, why he had come down himself rather than sending a steward. It was not customary, strictly speaking, for the Prince of Dragonstone to stand in the courtyard like a man waiting for something. He had told himself it was a matter of courtesy.

The horses came through first, then the outriders, then the luggage carts, and then the carriage– crimson-lacquered, the Lannister lion picked out in gold on the door, and Baelor watched a groom move to open it and watched Lord Lancel step down first, broad and unhurried, already scanning the courtyard. Then a figure behind him, partly obscured, one hand catching the carriage door for balance as you stepped down, and then the hand let go and you straightened, and Baelor–

Baelor stopped thinking about trade routes.

He was not certain how long he stood there before he remembered he was supposed to be doing something. You were looking at the keep, at the towers of it, with the unhurried attention of someone who has decided to take a place in properly before saying anything about it, and there was something in it, in the simple fact of you standing in his courtyard looking at his home like it was worth looking at, that struck him somewhere in the chest with a precision he had not been braced for.

You were not looking at him. Most people, upon arriving in the courtyard of the Red Keep to be received by the Prince of Dragonstone, looked immediately at the Prince of Dragonstone. It was a reliable quality in people, the instinct to locate the most important person in a space and orient toward them.

Though you were looking at the towers.

And then, as if you had simply finished with them, your gaze came down and found him, and Baelor, who had stood in front of armies without flinching, who had presided over councils that decided the fates of thousands, who had buried his wife and raised two sons and not been rattled by anything in longer than he could remember– felt something move through him that he could not name and did not try to. 

"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Tarly was saying.

"Mm," Baelor said, which covered most things, and walked forward to meet Lord Lancel.

The man clasped his hand with both of his, warm and firm, the grip of someone genuinely pleased to be here. "Your Grace," Lancel said, with the easy warmth of a man whose plans were going according to schedule. "You're too generous, as always." He glanced around the courtyard briefly. "King Daeron will be well celebrated. The city seems in fine spirits for it."

"It does," Baelor agreed, pleasantly. "His Grace will be glad you've come, my lord. He asks after you." He said it to Lancel's face the way a man was supposed to, and not to the figure just behind Lancel's shoulder, who had not moved and had not spoken.

He was extremely aware of not looking at you.

And then Lancel shifted, stepping slightly aside with the particular ease of a man about to make an introduction he has been looking forward to, and Baelor looked, because there was nothing else to do, because the alternative was to visibly avoid looking, which was worse, and you were there.

He extended his hand and said, "It is a pleasure to finally meet you, my lady…" and stopped, because he found, absurdly, that he wanted to hear your name from you rather than say the version he'd read in correspondence, which had always felt like a different thing from the real one.

You looked at him with the same look you'd given the towers and said your name, and offered your hand, Baelor took it and thought, with a clarity that was almost violent in its precision: I have made a terrible mistake.

Your name sat on his tongue like it had always been there. Like it belonged. He filed that away with considerable force, straightened and said pleasantly, "We hope King's Landing treats you well, my lady. I understand there are silks here you've been after?"

Something shifted in your expression, brief, contained, the ghost of something wry moving across your face before being put away. "There are, Your Grace," you said. "Though I suspect my father has also brought me here for reasons that have considerably less to do with silk."

Beside you, Lancel made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite anything, and Baelor looked at the man and found him studying the middle distance with the focused interest of someone who had absolutely heard what was just said, and Baelor looked back at you and felt the corner of his mouth move before he'd decided to let it. "Perceptive," he said.

"Occasionally," you said, and the word had a lightness to it, almost a warmth, and you held his gaze for just a beat longer than was strictly necessary before you looked away toward the keep, and Baelor looked away toward Lancel, and that was the first thirty seconds, and he was already in considerable trouble.

It had not been long before Valarr eventually came down. Baelor still in conversation with Lancel, still being perfectly composed about all of it, when the doors of the keep opened behind him and Valarr came down the steps into the courtyard with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had been told guests had arrived and saw absolutely no reason not to come and find them immediately.

He was, Baelor thought, with the particular mixture of pride and something considerably less straightforward, very like his mother in that way. Jena had never waited for things to come to her either.

"My lord," Valarr said, extending his hand to Lancel with the bright warmth he gave most people on first meeting, the smile of a young man who genuinely liked people and wanted them to know it. "I've been looking forward to your visit." And then his gaze moved easily, the way it always did, searching out the most interesting thing in the space, and found you, and something in his expression shifted into the particular surprised pleasure of a man who had been given something better than he expected. "And you must be–"

"His daughter," you said, with a faint lift at the corner of your mouth. "Yes."

Valarr blinked. Then laughed, a real one, caught off guard by it, and said, "I was going to say my lady, but yes, that too." He took your hand and bowed over it with a gallantry that was entirely genuine and only slightly showing off, and when he straightened he was already tilting his head with that look he got when something had caught his interest and he intended to find out more about it.

Baelor watched his son look at you with the slow dawning delight of someone who had been expecting a pleasant obligation and found something else entirely, and felt something move through his chest that he could not call by its right name in a courtyard in broad daylight. It was not pride, though there was pride in it somewhere. It was something uglier than pride– the sudden, unreasonable, completely inexcusable awareness that he did not want this. 

That he had arranged it himself, had sat in a council chamber and approved it with both hands, and was standing here now watching it begin to work exactly as intended, and wanted, with a clarity that shamed him, to undo all of it. To send Lancel Lannister back to Lannisport. To find some quiet room and keep you in it and not share you with anyone, least of all his own son, who deserved none of what his father was currently thinking and had done nothing wrong except arrive in a courtyard and smile at a girl.

Baelor looked away. He was not a selfish man, had never been, had spent the better part of his life making sure of it. He was not going to become one now, and certainly not at the expense of Valarr, who was good and kind and deserved a match that his father had not already decided to covet before the first afternoon was out.

He was not going to do that.

He looked away, and kept looking away, and was thoroughly disgusted with himself.

"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Lancel was saying beside him.

"Entirely," Baelor said, and looked back at Lancel with the practiced ease of a man who had been half-present in conversations for most of his life and had learned to manage it gracefully.

Behind him, Valarr said something that made you tilt your head and give him that look — the assessing one, the one that made people feel they were being read — and then say something back that made Valarr laugh again, and Baelor kept his eyes on Lancel and his expression pleasantly attentive and turned away.

He was very good at turning away.

He was considerably less good at it than he used to be.

King's Landing was louder than you had expected, and warmer, and smelled quite differently from Lannisport, which smelled of salt and sea wind and the particular clean cold of the Westerlands coast. Here it smelled of people and dust and something underneath it that wasn't quite pleasant but wasn't quite unpleasant either, the smell of a city that had been alive for a very long time and had no interest in apologising for it.

You had wanted the silks, and you had gotten them, three bolts of Myrish lace and two of a pale sea-coloured silk that you had been thinking about for the better part of six months, and your chambers in the Red Keep were comfortable and the servants were efficient and the view from your window was the sort that made you stand there longer than you meant to every morning, the whole of the city spread out below you in the early light.

It was fine. It was more than fine. You were being very ungrateful, you told yourself, for the small persistent feeling at the back of your mind that said your father had not brought you all this way simply because he was feeling generous about silk.

Your father had done it again. Brought you somewhere and arranged for there to be a man, the way he always did, the way he had been doing since you were old enough for it to be a thing worth arranging.

Lord Whatshisname from the Reach, the second son of somebody important from the Stormlands, the cousin of someone your father owed a favour to. They arrived, they were pleasant or they weren't, they made their interest known or they didn't, and nothing ever came of any of it. Your father would look at you afterward with that expression of fond, exhausted patience and say that your heart was merely just too big for most men to know what to do with it, which you had decided a long time ago was a very kind way of saying that you were too much.

You were used to it by now. You were good at making peace with things you were used to.

What you were considerably less good at, you were discovering, was making peace with Baelor Targaryen.

You had noticed him noticing you, which was the problem, and you had noticed him in return, which was a bigger one.

It would have been easier if he were not handsome. You had not been prepared for that, which in retrospect was foolish of you, he was a Targaryen, and Targaryens were not, as a rule, difficult to look at, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and being confronted with it in a courtyard on a random warm afternoon when you had nowhere to put your face. 

He was broad-shouldered and distinctive-bearded with greys decorating spots of it and had the kind of face that had been lived in long enough to have something behind it, though his eyes were mismatched, one brown and one blue, and they were the most specific thing about him, the thing that made looking at him feel like being caught even when he wasn't looking back. You had decided on the first evening to stop noticing any of this and had been failing at it consistently ever since.

And then there was the other thing, which was worse than the handsome, which was the way he paid attention. Not in the way men at court paid attention to women, which was a performance you had seen enough times to recognise immediately and set aside without much effort. This was different. The difference was in the quality of it, the way his attention when it landed on you felt less like being looked at and more like being seen, and those were not the same thing at all and you wished they were, because you knew how to handle being looked at. 

You had been handling it your whole life. You did not know what to do with someone who listened to the things you said and also, somehow, to the things you didn't say, who noticed the small ways you held yourself in a room and said nothing about it, who had looked at you on the first afternoon across a courtyard with those mismatched eyes and made you feel, for one disorienting moment, like you had already been known by him for a very long time.

You were fighting it. You wanted to be clear about that, at least to yourself, because there was no one else you could be clear about it. You were fighting it with the practical, clear-eyed determination of someone who understood the situation completely and had absolutely no intention of making it worse. 

The situation was: you were here for Valarr. Your father wanted this match and your father's wants were not nothing, they were the product of careful thought and genuine care for you, and Valarr was warm and kind and had laughed at something you said on the first afternoon with a genuineness that had caught you off guard. 

Valarr was fine. Valarr was more than fine. Valarr was who you were supposed to be thinking about, and you were thinking about him, you were making a concerted and ongoing effort to think about him, and it was working, mostly, except for the times you were sitting in a room and his father said something quietly funny and you had to remind yourself, with more effort than should have been necessary, that you were not there for his father.

You were very good at not finishing thoughts that started that way. You had gotten a great deal of practice at it over the past week and expected to need considerably more before this visit was over.

The tourney held in honour of King Daeron II's nameday was on a bright, punishing afternoon, the sun sitting high and merciless over the yard and the heat of it pressing down on everything like a hand laid flat on the back of your neck. 

You sat in the royal box with your father on your left and the awareness you had been managing for two weeks now on your right, in the form of Baelor Targaryen, who had been there when you arrived and had set aside whatever he had been discussing with Lord Tarly when you sat down with the easy unhurried attention of a man who was very good at making you feel like the most important thing in the room without doing anything that could be specifically identified as doing that. 

"How are you finding the celebrations so far, my lady?" he asked, as the lists filled below and the crowd noise swelled around you.

You fanned yourself with the folded programme your maid had pressed into your hands on the way in and looked out at the yard. "Considerably hotter than I was prepared for, Your Grace," you said.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "King's Landing in early autumn. It gets worse before it gets better."

"That is the least reassuring thing anyone has said to me since I arrived," you told him.

"You've been speaking to the wrong people, then," he said. "Most of them are much less honest."

You glanced at him sidelong and found him looking at the lists with that composed half-smile of his and looked away again before he could catch you looking. "And is that what you are, Your Grace?" you asked, directing your words at the yard below. "Honest?"

"Occasionally," he said, and something in the way he said it made it feel like more than a word, like it was the beginning of a sentence he had decided not to finish, and you fanned yourself again and watched the first knight take the field and told yourself the warmth in your face was the sun.

It was midway through the afternoon, when the crowd had warmed to the sustained pleasant noise of people who were genuinely enjoying themselves, that you heard your name called from below. 

You looked down. Valarr was on his horse at the edge of the lists, having just unhorsed a knight from the Vale with the easy competence he brought to most things physical, and he was looking up at the royal box with that bright open smile of his and a question in his expression that he made verbal a moment later, raising his voice just enough to carry. "My lady, would you do me the honour of your favour?"

The crowd nearest the box rippled with the pleasant noise of people who found this charming, and you felt your father shift beside you with the satisfied stillness of a man watching something go according to plan, and you stood carefully because standing quickly in this heat was inadvisable and reached up to unhook the laurel wreath from your hair.

"Good luck, my prince," you called down, and leaned over the railing to pass it to the page who had appeared below, and as you straightened you became aware of two things at once. Your father's expression, which was pleased in a way he was not quite bothering to conceal. And the quality of the silence on your right. 

You sat back down. You looked forward at the lists. You told yourself you wouldn’t even gaze upon Baelor but you did the eaxt opposite.

He was watching the yard, his profile composed and still, he did not look at you, and somehow that was worse than if he had, because you had spent enough time in his company over the past week to know the difference between him not looking at you because there was nothing to look at and him not looking at you because he had decided not to. 

Valarr won. Of course he won. He was young and quick and had been trained by the best in the kingdom, and he dispatched the Dornish knight he was paired with in two passes with a thoroughness that brought the crowd to its feet. You clapped with everyone else, genuinely pleased, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was simple uncomplicated gladness.

And then Valarr rode up to the box again and the crowd went quiet in the anticipatory way of people who knew what was coming, and he looked up at you with that bright easy smile and declared you queen of love and beauty, and the yard erupted, and you rose and accepted the crown of pale roses with the composed grace your mother had spent years teaching you, and you smiled, and it was fine, it was genuinely fine, you were glad.

You just also couldn't stop thinking, somewhere very quietly underneath all of it, about what it would have felt like if it had been his father asking for your favour instead. What Baelor's voice would have sounded like carrying across that yard. Whether he would have smiled after, the way Valarr was smiling now, or whether he would have simply looked at you with those mismatched eyes of his and let that be enough.

You sat down and did not think about that anymore, and were almost entirely successful.

The feast was held in the great hall on the fourteenth evening of your stay, by which point you had been in King's Landing long enough to stop finding the noise of it startling and long enough to have developed, you were privately admitting to yourself, feelings that were becoming increasingly inconvenient.

Not for Baelor. You were managing that. You were managing it very well, you thought– you had developed a system, which was to look at him only when it was necessary and to keep your expression pleasantly neutral when you did, and to occupy your mind with other things when you found it drifting in directions it had no business drifting, and it was working, mostly, except for the times it wasn't, which were more frequent than you would have liked but still, you felt, within the bounds of manageable.

The inconvenient feelings were for Valarr.

This was not something you had planned for. You had arrived in King's Landing with your silk. your suspicions, your practiced composure and your very sensible intention to be pleasant and unattached to let your father do whatever your father was going to do without getting your own heart involved in it, and then Valarr had been– Valarr. Warm and easy and funny in a way that didn't require anything from you, and genuinely interested in the things you said in the way that some men performed interest and some men actually felt it, and you had caught yourself, over the past two weeks, looking forward to seeing him in a way you hadn't planned on and were now trying to figure out what to do with.

It was fine. It was more than fine. You were making peace with it, the way you always made peace with things. Your father wanted a match, Valarr was a good man, and you were starting to feel something real, perhaps that was simply how it worked sometimes. 

You had almost entirely convinced yourself of this by the time Valarr appeared at your shoulder during a lull in the dancing and said, "My lady, would you dance with me?" and held out his hand, and you looked at it for a moment. "I would," you said, and took his hand, and let him lead you out among the other dancers, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was uncomplicated.

He was a good dancer, better than you'd expected, though you weren't sure why you'd expected otherwise. He held you with the comfortable confidence of someone who had learned young and never had reason to be nervous about it. The music was good, the hall was warm and bright, you talked while you danced the way you had started talking over the past two weeks, easily, without the careful weight of people trying to make impressions on each other.

"You look like you're enjoying yourself," Valarr said, with a slight lift of amusement in it, like he was pleasantly surprised.

"I am," you said, which was true. "Should I not be?"

"Most people look slightly terrified at formal feasts," he said. "Like they're being evaluated."

"I am being evaluated," you said. "I'm just choosing not to find it terrifying."

He looked at you with that tilted-head thing he did when something caught him off guard, and laughed. "That's– yes. That's exactly the right way to think about it, actually." He turned you neatly through a gap in the other dancers. "My father says something similar. He says the court can only make you small if you let it."

"Your father," you said, very carefully, "seems like a wise man."

"He is," Valarr said, simply and without hesitation, the way people spoke about things they had never had cause to doubt. "He's a good man. Better than he gets credit for, I think. People see the prince and they forget the man."

You looked at him while he said this, at the open uncomplicated affection on his face, and felt something complicated move through your own chest in response to it that you did not examine. "That must be–" you started, and then Valarr's feet stopped.

Not gradually. Not the slowing of someone who has decided to stop. It was a full, immediate, involuntary halt, like a man who has walked into a wall he didn't see, and you stumbled slightly into him, and said, instinctively, "Oh– I'm sorry, did I–" and started to look down at his feet, thinking you'd trodden on him.

"No," Valarr said, distantly, already not quite looking at you. "No, you didn'™ forgive me, my lady, I–" He was looking past you, toward the doors of the great hall, and his expression had done something you hadn't seen it do before, something unguarded, startled and– lit, somehow, like a man recognising something he hadn't expected to see here. "Forgive me," he said again, already moving, already stepping back from you with a brief apologetic incline of his head. "There's someone I– I'll find you later, my lady.”

And then he was gone, moving through the crowd with a purpose that had nothing to do with you, and you stood in the middle of the dance floor as the music continued around you and the other couples moved past you like water around a stone, and you turned, slowly, because some part of you already knew you didn't want to see it and were going to look anyway, and found Valarr across the hall at the doors, smiling at a girl you had never seen before.

She was beautiful, which you noticed the way you noticed most things that were true and inconvenient, with a flat, clear-eyed acknowledgment that didn't help at all.She had pink hair, dressed in the particular style of the Free Cities that sat slightly apart from the Westerosi fashion around her in a way that drew the eye, and Valarr was taking her hand and pressing his lips to it and saying something that made her laugh, and his smile– his smile was different from the one he'd been giving you all evening. Wider. Less considered. The smile of someone who had forgotten, just for a moment, that they were in a room full of people.

You were still standing in the middle of the dance floor.

You became aware of this, and of the number of people around you who were either too polite or too interested in their own conversations to remark on it, and you moved smoothly, with the composed unhurried walk of someone who had somewhere to be and had chosen this direction deliberately, back to the table, back to your seat, back to the cup of wine your father's steward had left for you, and you sat down and folded your hands in your lap and looked at the table.

Your father noticed. Of course he noticed, he noticed everything, always, it was his most reliable quality, though he said nothing, because he also knew when silence was more useful than speech. 

You did not look at Valarr and the pink-haired girl.

You looked at them for approximately forty-five seconds, which told you everything you needed to know, and then you looked at the table and felt the heat of embarrassment move through you slowly from your chest outward, warm and thorough and deeply unpleasant. It wasn't grief, exactly. It wasn't heartbreak you hadn't been there yet, you hadn't had time to get there, it was something smaller and sharper, the embarrassment of having started to let yourself believe something that turned out to be beside the point. 

"My lady."

You looked up. Baelor was watching you from further down the table, his expression giving nothing away, his eyes doing that thing where they were more specific than his face, seeing more than the face admitted to, or so it always felt when they were directed at you. "Are you alright?" he said, quietly enough that it was for you and not the table. 

You smiled. You were very good at smiling when you needed to, you had been practicing since you were old enough to understand that a lady's face was a thing she owed to the room she was in. "Of course, Your Grace," you said, pleasantly. "It is a wonderful evening."

His eyes did not move from yours for a moment, and in that moment you had the uncomfortable feeling of being seen very clearly by someone who was not going to say so. "It is," he agreed, and looked away, you looked at your hands in your lap, while the hall moved cheerfully around you, and the wine in your cup was very good and you barely tasted it.

"I think I need some air," you said, to no one in particular, or to your father, and rose before anyone could respond, and walked to the doors of the great hall with the measured, unhurried steps of someone who was fine, who was perfectly fine, who was simply in need of a moment outside and would be back shortly. 

The Red Keep was large enough that you could walk for some time without doubling back, and you had been walking for ten minutes before you found yourself in a part of it that was quieter than the rest, an older wing, by the look of the stonework, the torches fewer and the ceiling lower and the whole corridor having the particular quality of a place that was maintained but not often used.

There was a window alcove at the end of it, deep-set, with a stone seat worn smooth by what must have been centuries of people sitting in it, looking out at whatever this particular angle of the keep faced. You sat in the alcove and pulled your knees up slightly and looked at the courtyard and let yourself, finally, in the absence of anyone watching, feel all of it.

It wasn't much, in the end. A few tears, which you caught with the back of your hand before they could make it past your cheekbones, the kind of tears that came less from sadness than from the pressure of holding a face together for too long. It was the frustration of it. 

The frustration of being here, again, in this same position you had been in a dozen times before, having tried and adjusted and made peace and tried again, and somehow always arriving at the same place: standing in the middle of a room watching someone look at someone else the way you had started, foolishly, quietly, to hope they might look at you.

Your heart is too big. You had always thought that was a generous interpretation of the evidence. It suggested rather more plainly that there was simply something about you that people grew tired of, some quality you had too much of or not enough of, something that made men perfectly happy to spend a fortnight in your company and then look across a room and find someone else entirely, the fact that you could never identify what it was did not make it better, it made it worse, because you couldn't fix a thing you couldn't name. 

You wiped your eyes with the back of your hand and took a slow breath and looked at the dark courtyard and told yourself firmly that you were done, that this was enough, that you were going back to the feast in five minutes and you were going to be perfectly pleasant for the rest of the evening and you were going to stop being so–

The voice came from behind you, low and unhurried, and you knew it before you had finished turning. You stood up too quickly, nearly getting your foot caught in the hem of your dress, as you brought your hands to wipe your face, the hem of the dress righted itself.

Baelor was standing at the entrance to the alcove, a few feet away, looking at you with an expression you had not seen on him before and could not immediately read. 

“Your Grace,” you said, your voice came out steadier than you deserved credit for. 

"Just Baelor," he said, quietly. "If you'll allow it."

You lowered your hands. You could feel that your eyes were red, that there was very little you could do about it. "Baelor, then," and the name sat differently in your mouth than the title had, warmer, more familiar, like something you had been saying for longer than two weeks.

He did not look away from you, and did not look around the alcove or at the courtyard below or at anything else, just at you, and you had the sense that the looking was very deliberate, that he was choosing to look at you the way people chose to say difficult things, because they had decided it was the right thing and were going to see it through. "What's upset you?" he asked.

"Nothing," you said immediately, with a smile plastered on your face. 

Baelor looked at you, and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, not quite anything else, just a small acknowledgment of what you had just done. "My lady," he said.

"Nothing worth mentioning," you amended.

"That isn't the same as nothing," he said.

You looked at him. He looked back at you. The torch at the end of the courtyard below moved in a breath of wind, sending the shadow of it shifting across the stones.

"I'm merely–" you started, then stopped, then started again. "It has been a long evening, Your Grace– Baelor." The name again, and the same warmth in it, and you saw something shift very slightly in his expression when you said it. "I needed a moment away from the noise."

"You've been crying," he said, simply and without cruelty, just the fact of it.

You opened your mouth then closed it, looking at the courtyard then back at him, because looking away from him felt somehow more revealing than looking at him.  "A little," you admitted. "It's nothing."

"It doesn't look like nothing," he said. He had not moved from the entrance of the alcove, had kept that careful distance, and you were aware of it. Aware of the distance and his awareness of it, of the sense that it was a choice he was making and maintaining. "If something has happened to distress you, I would know of it."

There was something in the way he said it, not a demand, not the authority of a prince requiring information, but something quieter than that, something that had more weight in it than a command would have had, precisely because it wasn't one. You felt it somewhere in your chest and looked at your hands.

"I was enjoying myself this evening. Before." You smoothed your skirt, a small unnecessary gesture. "And then I found myself somewhat abruptly not, and I think I simply needed to…" gesturing vaguely at the alcove, "...be somewhere quiet for a moment. That is all."

"Valarr," he said.

You looked up. He was watching you with that steady, specific attention, and you felt the back of your neck go warm despite the cool of the corridor. "I don't—" you started.

"You don't have to," he said.

The quiet between you held for a moment, full and textured, the kind of quiet that was made of things not said. 

"I feel foolish," you said, finally, quietly. "I know it is foolish to feel foolish about feeling foolish, so please don't tell me that." You said it with a small attempt at lightness, and he received it without patronizing it, and so you continued. "I had started to think perhaps there was something there. Between Valarr and I. Something real." You looked at the courtyard. "And then he looked across the room at her, and I could see that whatever he'd had with me was. It was practice, maybe. Or kindness. And she was the actual thing."

Baelor said nothing for a moment. You could feel him looking at you, and you kept your eyes on the courtyard because meeting it felt like more than you had the composure for just now.

"You think you scared him off," he said, carefully. 

You made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. "I think I always do, somehow," you said. "My father says my heart is too big for most men. Which is very kind. I have somewhat less kind interpretations of the evidence."

"What evidence," Baelor said, and something in his voice had changed, something that made you look at him despite yourself, and find him watching you with an expression that was more intent than before, something in it that you couldn't name.

"The pattern of it, I suppose. The same thing, more or less, every time. I am, I think I am quite a lot. I talk too much, or feel too much, or– I don't know exactly what it is, only that it seems to be reliably too much for people to–" you stopped, because you had said rather more of that than you intended to, and your voice had done something at the end of it that you were not pleased with.

"Look at me," Baelor said. You looked at him.

"You are not too much," he said, and he said it the way he said things he meant. 

 His eyes had not moved from yours, and they did not move now, and you felt the looking of them like something warm and specific, like a hand placed with care. "You are not too much and you have not scared anyone off and whatever the pattern is that you think you've found, you have read it wrong."

You looked at him, this man standing in a quiet corridor with torchlight from the courtyard moving on the stones behind him, looking at you with something in his face that had no safe name and that you had been avoiding naming for two weeks, and felt something in your chest pull in a direction that was deeply inconvenient and completely beyond your ability to manage.

"Baelor," you said. Very quietly. Not as a sentence, not going anywhere, just the name, because it was the only thing you had.

"Yes," he said. Just as quietly. 

His jaw tightened fractionally, and he looked at you, and you looked at him, and the torch moved in the courtyard below, and neither of you said anything else for a long moment that held everything and nothing at once.

Then he straightened, and something careful came back into his expression, the composed half-smile of a man rearranging himself. "Come back to the feast," he said. "You have nothing to be ashamed of, and I won't have you sitting in a corridor thinking otherwise."

You looked at him for another moment. Then you stood, and smoothed your dress, and said, "Yes, alright," and followed him back through the quiet corridor toward the noise and the light, and did not think about the way he had looked at you.

You thought about it for the rest of the evening.

"This is absurd."

Your father's voice had the particular controlled fury of a man who had been raised never to shout and was currently finding that a significant inconvenience. He had been saying it for the better part of ten minutes now, in various configurations, and each time it landed a little heavier than the last.

"I did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated," he said, to the room, to the lords seated around the long table, and most specifically to Baelor Targaryen, who sat at the head of it in the place of King Daeron, who was ill. Nobody had commented on that. Baelor was the Prince of Dragonstone and the Hand of the King. "My daughter did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated. We had an agreement– Valarr was to court my daughter, and in return House Lannister offers the crown its full support and cooperation. And now, a week after the feast, Lady Kiera of Tyrosh appears and the boy announces he will be marrying her and no one else."

He looked at Baelor directly. "It’s fucking nonsense."

You were looking at the table.

You had been looking at the table since you sat down and had no immediate plans to stop. You were not upset about Valarr. That was what made all of this so much harder to sit through. You were not upset about Valarr, not genuinely, not in the way your father seemed to believe you should be. You had seen the way Valarr looked at Kiera of Tyrosh across the great hall and understood, with a clarity that was almost kind in its simplicity, that whatever had been between you and Valarr had been warmth and nothing more.

It was genuinely fine.

What was not fine was that your father had reminded you last night, when the news spread through the Red Keep and reached your chambers before supper, that you were once again unwed, once again the almost, once again the woman that men were perfectly pleasant to and then left for another woman. He had not been cruel about it. He was never cruel. But he had been sharp, in the way only people who loved you could be, and the sharpness of it had stayed with you through the night and was sitting with you still.

You kept your eyes on the table. Hands folded in your lap. Face arranged into something you hoped read as dignified rather than what it actually was.

"My lady."

You looked up before you had decided to.

Baelor's voice had a quality that did that to you, had done it since the first afternoon in the courtyard, and you still had not worked out how to stop your body from responding before you had chosen to respond. He was looking at you from the head of the table with an expression that was calm and unhurried and gave nothing away, the way his expressions always did, except for his eyes, which were doing the thing they always did, which was see you considerably more clearly than you wanted to be seen. He did not look stressed. He did not look rattled by your father's outburst or by the situation or by any of it. He looked, infuriatingly, rather pleasant.

"What are your thoughts on the matter?" he said, and leaned back in his chair as he said it, settling more fully into the seat, and his hands came to rest on the armrests with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable in the space he occupied. 

You noticed his hands, which you had no business noticing– the width of them, the rings he wore, the particular way they moved when he was thinking, deliberate and unhurried, like everything else about him. He was turning one ring slowly with his thumb, the one on his right hand with the Targaryen sigil carved into dark stone, turning it in a slow circle without seeming to know he was doing it, and you watched it for a moment longer than you should have and thought, with shame of a person whose mind had gone somewhere they had absolutely not given permission to go, about what those hands would feel like.

Around your wrist. Against your jaw. Curved at the base of your throat, pressing, the weight of them, the warmth.

You looked back at the table.

Your face felt very warm. You were grateful, for the first time, for the poor lighting in the small council chamber.

When you looked back up at him he was still looking at you, and his expression had shifted by something so small it was barely a shift at all, just a quality in the eyes, something that said he had noticed exactly where your attention had gone and was choosing, with great deliberateness, not to say so.

The heat moved from your face down the back of your neck.

"I am quite happy for Prince Valarr and Lady Kiera," you said, with every ounce of composure you had been rehearsing since the night before. "They seemed very well suited to one another and I wish them–"

"No the fuck she isn't," your father said.

The room went very quiet in the specific way of rooms where people are pretending very hard not to have heard something. You closed your eyes for one brief moment. Opened them. Looked at the table.

Baelor's gaze moved from you to your father with the slow deliberateness , something in his expression cooled, not unkindly, but with the quality of a man who had a great deal of patience and was keeping careful track of how much of it was being spent.

"I appreciate Lord Lancel's candour," he said, evenly, and then looked back at you, which was somehow worse. "If there is a grievance—"

"The grievance," your father said, the restraint in his voice something impressive in its way, "is that my daughter has been made to look a fool, and House Lannister has been made to look a fool, and this needs to be resolved before I say something in this chamber that I cannot unsay, or I swear to the gods that—"

"Wed her to me."

The words fell into the room like a stone dropped into still water, and everything stopped.

Your mouth opened. You were not aware of deciding to open it. You became aware of it after, along with the fact that you had looked at Baelor before you looked at anyone else, which said something you were not going to examine right now, and he was looking back at you, just at you, not at your father or the lords or the room, just at you, with an expression that was entirely unreadable and eyes that were not.

"What," your father said. Flat and slow, the voice of a man refusing to accept that he had heard correctly.

"Wed her to me," Baelor said again, with the same even unhurried certainty of a man repeating something perfectly reasonable that someone had simply failed to hear the first time.

He had not looked away from you. You were having some difficulty breathing at a normal rate.

Your father looked at you with an expression you could not parse, something between disbelief and calculation, and you looked back at him and then back at Baelor because you could not seem to stop doing that, and Baelor was still watching you , and you felt warmth moving through you that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber.

"This does not solve the insult to my house," your father said. The snarl had gone out of his voice, replaced by something more careful, a man recalibrating. "My daughter was brought here under the understanding that she would be a prince's wife. You're asking me to consider her a consolation prize, Your Grace, which I find—"

"I am asking you to consider her a princess and future queen," Baelor said, still without looking at anyone but you, his voice patient and his hands still on the armrests of that chair. "She would be Princess of Dragonstone. When the time comes, queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Any children we had would be princes and princesses of the realm." A pause. "House Lannister would lose nothing it was promised and gain considerably more. The alliance holds, my lord, and your daughter's position would be rather more significant than the one you came here seeking."

"More significant," your father repeated, with the flat tone of a man being maneuvered and knowing it and not yet having decided how he felt about it.

"Considerably," Baelor said.

Your father looked at you again. You looked back at him and tried to make your face say something useful, and were not entirely sure what it said instead. Whatever it was, he looked at it for a long moment and then looked away, pressing his mouth into a thin line and saying nothing, which was Lancel Lannister's version of thinking very hard about something.

"She's been on the market longer than I care to admit, as the whole of Westeros is aware. You'd be getting goods that no one wanted, Your Grace, with respect to my daughter." he said finally, the snarky edge back in his voice, the particular one he used when he was testing something.

You stared at the table.

You had spent your entire life being loved by this man and in this moment you wished, very sincerely, that he would stop.

"Lord Lancel," Baelor said, and something in the way he said it made you look up despite yourself, and you found him looking at your father with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and had a quality underneath it like stone. "Your daughter is not goods, nor is she something to be appraised. I'd ask you to remember that in my council chamber."

Your father had the grace to look briefly taken aback. He cleared his throat. "I only meant—"

"I know what you meant," Baelor said, mildly, and looked back at you, and the shift from that cool quality to the way he looked at you was so immediate and so different that you felt it somewhere behind your sternum like a hand pressed flat. "I also know it isn't what I think."

The room was very quiet.

"I think it's rather a good idea."

Your voice cut through the quiet of the room cleanly, and you felt everyone in it look at you, and you looked at your father.

He was staring at you with an expression you had not seen on his face in a very long time, something between surprise and the particular stillness of a man recalibrating quickly. You held his gaze and kept your face very still and said, quietly, "After all, since no one wants my goods," and you let the words sit there between you, his words, and watched something move across his face that he could not quite contain, something that was not quite guilt but was adjacent to it, "he wants me for how I am."

The indifference in your voice was real and it was not real, both things at once, because underneath it was something older and more tired than anger, the particular hurt of being spoken of that way by someone who loved you, you were absolutely not going to cry in this council chamber in front of four lords and Baelor Targaryen, but you let your father see it in your face for one moment, the hurt, before you looked back down at your hands.

The silence in the room had a different quality to it now.

Your father said nothing. You could feel him beside you, the particular stillness of a man who had said the wrong thing and knew it and did not yet know what to do with that knowledge, and you did not look at him. 

“Alright,” your father said finally, his voice stripped of its earlier edge, much softer this time.

You looked at Baelor without meaning to. 

“In a moons time then.” He says, concluding the council. 

You were a wife.

You still could not quite believe it, even standing in the middle of your shared chambers with the candles burning low around you and the sound of the city muffled behind the thick stone walls and the weight of the day sitting on your shoulders like something physical. Wedded to Baelor Breakspear Targaryen. His princess. The words sat strangely in your mind, too large for the space you had made for them, and you stood with your back half to him and your hands clasped in front of you and tried to find somewhere to put yourself in this room that was now yours as much as his.

You had heard things, today. People talked at weddings the way they always talked, freely and without much care for who was listening, and you had caught enough of it in passing– in the sept, in the corridors, at the feast– to know what the court thought of this union. That he had married for duty. That he was trying to put a ghost to rest. That you were an alliance and a convenience and that Jena Dondarrion would always be the woman who had actually held his heart, and everything after her was simply duty.

You had smiled through all of it. You were very good at smiling through things.

The door closed behind him.

"Are you alright?"

His voice, even now, even after weeks of hearing it, did something to the back of your neck. You kept your eyes on the far wall and said, "Yes," and heard, in the small silence that followed, that he did not believe you.

"We are wedded now," he said, and his voice was soft, unhurried, the way it always was. "I would rather you not speak lies to me."

You felt his hand before you fully registered that he had moved, his fingers closing gently around your arm and turning you, not forcing, just the suggestion of it, and you let yourself be turned because there was no version of this where you were going to stand with your back to him all night. He was close. Closer than he had been permitted to be before tonight, and the candles threw his shadow long across the floor behind him and caught the silver in his beard and the particular quality of his eyes, one brown and one blue, both of them on you.

You opened your mouth. Closed it.

"Can I ask you something?" you said, and your voice came out smaller than you intended.

"Of course," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.

You looked at the middle of his chest because looking at his face felt like too much right now. "I heard things today," you said. "People talking." You stopped, felt the embarrassment of it move through you, and made yourself continue anyway. "About your lady wife. Jena." You said her name carefully, like a thing that needed to be handled. "They said — they said you married again for duty, to put her memory to rest, and that I am an alliance and nothing more." You looked up at him then, because you needed to see his face when he answered. "Is that true?"

He looked at you for a long moment and there was no anger in it and no grief, just that steadiness, that particular focused attention he gave you that you had never quite gotten used to. "My lady wife who perished was the duty," he said, simply and without cruelty. "I was fond of her. I did love her, in the way that you love someone you have built a life alongside. But that was many years ago, and it was not–" he paused, and something shifted in his expression, something that looked like a man choosing his words not because he was being careful but because he wanted to be accurate. "It was not what I felt the day I saw you in that courtyard."

You went very still.

"I have never felt that in my entire life," he said, and his voice was quiet and even and utterly without performance, the voice of a man stating a fact he had already made his peace with. "That feeling. The strength of it." His eyes had not moved from yours. "I came close to calling off the betrothal entirely. I could not justify it to myself — I thought you had feelings for Valarr, I thought I was simply a man of a certain age wanting something that was not his, and I told myself that every morning for weeks and believed it less every time."

"You thought I had feelings for Valarr," you said.

"I did," he said.

"I didn't," you said.

Something moved across his face. "I know that now," he said.

The candles moved in a breath of air from somewhere and the light shifted across his face and you stood there in your wedding clothes in your shared chambers and felt the heat of the past weeks, all the looking and not looking and the rings and the council chamber and the alcove and every moment you had pressed down and put away, rising up through you all at once like something that had been held underwater finally breaking the surface.

"Baelor," you said.

"Yes," he said. Not a question. Just the word, steady and warm, and he was already close and he did not move closer and did not move away and simply waited, the way he always waited, with the patience of someone who had decided something and was content to let you arrive at it yourself.

You reached up and touched his jaw before you decided to, your fingertips against the grey of his beard, feeling the texture of it, and you heard the quiet sound he made at the back of his throat, barely anything, just the smallest exhale, and it moved through you like heat.

His hand came up to cover yours where it rested against his face, his fingers closing over yours, warm and certain, and you felt the size of that hand, the breadth of it, and thought about everything you had thought in that council chamber and felt your face go warm.

"I have been wanting to do that," you admitted, very quietly, "since the first week."

"Only the first week," he said, and the warmth in his voice had a low quality to it now, something underneath it that you had not heard before, and you felt it in your chest and lower.

"Perhaps since the courtyard," you said.

"That's more honest," he said.

You laughed, a small unsteady thing, and he smiled at the sound of it, and then the smile faded into something more intent as he looked at you, and his free hand came up slowly, giving you every opportunity to move away, and curved at the side of your neck, his thumb at your jaw, tilting your face up, and you felt the weight of it exactly the way you had imagined it and it was worse than imagining, it was so much worse, warm and specific and certain.

"I am going to kiss you," he said, low and unhurried, watching your face.

"I know," you said.

"Are you alright with that," he said.

You looked at him, this man who had been patient for weeks and built a fire in your chest without touching you and was asking you, on your wedding night, if he was allowed. "Baelor," you said, and your voice had gone soft with something you did not bother to hide anymore. "Yes."

He kissed you slowly, the way he did everything, without rush, and his mouth was warm and his beard was exactly as strange against your skin as you had imagined and also nothing like you had imagined, and his hand at your jaw tilted you into him and his other hand found your waist and you felt the warmth of both of them through the fabric of your dress and made a small sound against his mouth that you had not planned on making.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, his forehead nearly against yours, his thumb moving once along your jaw, and his eyes were very dark in the candlelight.

"I have been wanting to do that," he said quietly, "since considerably before the first week."

You laughed again, breathless, and felt him smile against your temple when he pressed his lips there, and then to your cheek, and then to the corner of your mouth, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world who has nonetheless decided to use it very specifically.

"Baelor," you said, against his mouth.

"Mm," he said, which was not quite an answer and did not need to be.

His hands moved to the laces at the back of your dress, slowly, finding them without rushing, and you felt the loosening of it, the give of the fabric, his fingers warm against the skin of your back as he worked, and you pressed your forehead to his jaw and breathed him in and felt the particular quality of the quiet in the room.

"Are you still nervous?" he asked, low against your hair.

"A little," you admitted.

His hands stilled at your back, just resting there, warm and certain. "We have time," he said. "All the time there is."

You pulled back enough to look at him, at his face in the candlelight, at those mismatched eyes that had been looking at you since a courtyard in early autumn, and felt something settle in your chest that had been unsettled for a very long time.

"I don't want time," you said. "I've been patient for months."