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—01 THE WELCOME

—02 BAELOR

—03 DAERON

—04 MAEKAR

—05 AERION

—06 VALARR

—???

“You are not my wife! Where is Jena? Maekar, where is my wife?" he asked, growing agitated as confusion laced his mind.

•••

Those words played in your mind over and over again. You saw everything move slow.

Maybe you were dreaming, this had to be a nightmare.

There was no way that Baelor could not remember you. You, his wife.

It had to be a cruel jest from the Gods, maybe you had worried yourself crazy enough that you were growing delusional.

You do not know when or how it happened, but you were removed from the rooms where Baelor was.

You remember that your knees have up on you, a pair of arms catching you before you fell on the floor.

It was all a mess in your mind, it was as if you were the one struck in the head, not Baelor.

Confusion clawed at you as muffled voices and strange arms guided you towards the chambers you had been occupying since Baelor's injury.

“Stepmother….?” a muffled voice called, though you could not hear more than a buzz.

Your gaze was lost, as you were lost. In a way, you were, lost in all the things you tried to ignore while caring for a husband that no longer recognized you.

Grief

Guilt

Anger

Fear

Sadness

Resentment

Hopelessness

“Stepmother!" the buzz was increasing its volume, yet you could not snap out of your haze.

You faintly feel a pair of hands settling in your shoulders, shaking you, trying to get you to react. "Stepmother!” the buzz was growing frustrated "Mother!”

Snapping out of your mind, your eyes were set quickly on those of Valarr. Those same colored eyes as your husband's.

"Pardon? What—” you murmured in confusion, looking around. You don't remember getting to those rooms.

Valarr and Kiera were with you, both of them staring worriedly at your trembling form.

“How are you feeling?" Valarr asked you slowly.

You shook your head, a confused frown in your face. "What—”

"Mother!” Valarr called for you again, using a name he has never called you before, seemingly the only thing grounding you right now. "Where does it hurt?”

You gulped, trying to blink away the fog that threatened to cloud your mind "I do not understand…”

"My Lady” Kiera grabbed your attention, calling for you firmly. "You were saying that something hurts. Where does it hurt?”

It was a great question. Everything hurt; your heart, your head, your lungs as they tried to get air to your panicked self, but now, as you concentrated on other than your heart's pain, you could notice the stabbing pain in your womb.

Your shock and emotions while dealing with Baelor's loss of memory had you numb, not realizing that the pain that you had been feeling for days, had grown in size in a matter of minutes.

You opened your eyes in panic, your voice shaking as the pain started making itself known “The babe…”

Valarr and Kiera looked at each other alarmed, knowing that Maester Yormwell had warned you to avoid stress, as it would be bad for you and the baby.

You whimpered as you felt the pain increasing quickly. Something was wrong, you knew the moment you felt a liquid trailing down your legs.

Without caring for decorum and property, you reached a hand under your skirts, only to see blood covering your hand when you brought it in front of your face to see.

At the sight of blood, you started to feel dizzy and weak, weaker than you had felt moments before as fear began to set in your spine.

Valarr was swift to catch you once again as you swayed. “Stepmother, whatever is wrong?"

You gasped, whining as another wave of pain stabbed you in the stomach. You were looking pale, paler than you ever looked as you met Valarr's eyes. “The babe is coming"

⊱

After informing both Valarr and Kiera that you had started labours, Kiera kicked her husband out of the chambers, urging him to gather a Maester and ask for midwives, if not, for maids or older women who had children.

This was your first pregnancy, so you did not know what to expect nor did you have the company of your husband to comfort you.

Kiera helped you out of your dress, helping you change into a white gown, often used for sleep but perfect for it to be passed as a birthing gown.

Valarr strode into his father's chambers, not sparing a glance at neither his father, brother or uncle, his gaze solely focused on the Maester. "She has started her labours”

"What!?” Both Matarys and Maekar asked in alarm.

Maester Yormwell nodded, making haste to follow the Young Prince to the place he was needed.

"Matarys, stay with your father” Maekar ordered gruffly, as he followed the Maester and Valarr. "What do you mean she has started her labours?” he questioned.

"Exactly that, Uncle. She is bleeding”

When the three of them entered the chambers, you were already pacing around, massaging the sides of your belly as pain threatened to make you fall.

"My Lady, allow me to check on you…” Started the Maester, already approaching you.

"No!” you yelled in pain "This babe cannot come now, it is too soon!”

You could just imagine how you looked, dressed in a simple white gown stained with the blood trailing down your tights, skin pale and sticky with sweat, hair a mess and a panicked expression.

"My Lady, you must allow the Maester to see if something is wrong” Kiera tried to reason, she was the one holding you straight and you were grateful that at least you had a woman like her by your side.

"No!” you cried "No, no, no” looking at Kiera with fear in your eyes you whispered "This is not how this is supposed to happen”

She grabbed your face in her hands, shushing you softly “I know, I know it is not right, but it is happening. Let the Maester help you, my Lady"

You were growing restless, her words doing little to soothe you as your mind was working faster than you could process. This wasn't the way that your daughter should be born, surrounded by people but none of them her father. You were alone, even when you were accompanied.

The door stretched open, a few midwives entering the chambers. One of them, the older one, made her way to you. “My Princess, allow us to help you" she said softly “We will help you"

You shook your head once again, continuing with your pacing, not allowing anyone to set their hands on you as you muttered under your breath and shook your head in pain.

Pain. That was all you could feel, and you had never felt anything like it.

“I need Baelor!" you sobbed, screaming in pain.

It was a gruesome image, a woman lost in grief while she refused the help she needed.

Everyone was looking at you, concern etched in their eyes as you yelled in pain.

"Get out! This babe will not be born today!” you cried, doubling from the intense pain that you were feeling.

"You cannot prevent that” A midwife said "The child has decided they shall come today, there is not something you can do to deny the labour’s course”

“This is wrong, the babe is merely six moons along, this cannot be happening!"

As they tried to approach you, you screamed in anger and pain, not wanting anyone to be holding you. Baelor should be the one by your side at this moment.

Baelor should be there, holding you and whispering reassuring words in your ear. But he wasn't, he did not remember you, he asked for Jena.

"She's growing hysterical, My Prince” Maester Yormwell murmured to Maekar. “We need to restrain her"

“What the fuck for?" Maekar hissed.

“She is not of sane mind, My Prince" the Maester said solemnly "She will complicate things for the birth”

You could hear everything, making your way towards the Maester in fury "Of course I am not of sane mind” you spat furiously "my husband almost died and now he does not remember me” getting in his face, you were held back by Maekar "And my child is not to term!”

“Still your mind, Sister" Maekar murmured, helping you stand straight “I will settle this matter shortly"

“It is not your matter to settle!" you sobbed as another wave of pain cursed through you “It is Baelor's, only his"

He took a deep breath before looking at you with all the guilt that threatened to consume him "He cannot be there with you right now, you know this”

"I am aware!” you cried "but you do not have any authority over me and what happens to me. None of you has!”

You pushed yourself from Maekar's hold, starting to pace once again while you whined and sobbed.

Kiera moved to help you “Please, my Lady, you must lay down”

"No, I do not want to lay down!" you hissed, massaging your belly “This babe cannot come now! She is too early" you cried, almost dropping to your knees “It is too early"

Valarr made haste to help his wife hold you upright “We are aware, but you must give the babe a chance, he or she had decided to come out now"

You faced him in panic “The babe will not survive, it is too soon”

"The babe is coming, Mother” he said firmly yet calm. “Allow them to help you and give my little sibling a chance of fighting”

Why did he have to look so much like his father? you thought

Something in his words calmed you, even a little, maybe it was the fact that his eyes were kind or that he was speaking to you the way Baelor would.

Maybe it was the fact that he kept addressing you as mother, even when Baelor kept asking for Jena, his real mother while he was trying to ensure you are alright. He was making you feel as if you were not just the ghost of Jena but a part of their lives.

With tears in your eyes you nodded “Fine, help me to the bed, please" you whispered.

It was as if, somehow, the energy had shifted as soon as you muttered your acceptance. The midwives moved, preparing everything as the Maester nodded as well, ready to check on you and help you on your labours.

Maekar and Valarr were kicked out of the rooms, as they should not be in there with you, Kiera did not move from your side, holding your hand as the Maester saw how much progress were your labours.

Hours went by like this, the Maester checking on you and informing how very little you were progressing while you felt like it was tearing you apart from the pain.

That was all you could feel, pain like you have never felt before, your gown was sticking to your skin as sweat covered you.

“I need Baelor" you cried, grabbing onto Kiera's hand "Bring me Baelor, I need him, please” you begged in desperation.

She shook her head softly, caressing your head back from your forehead “You know we cannot do that, it would not be wise"

“I cannot do this without him" you sobbed, groaning in pain.

“You can, you have to do it for your girl" Kiera said, squeezing your hand “You said you believe it was a girl, right?"

You nodded in midst of another wave of pain “Yes, Baelor and I believe it is a girl"

“It is almost time to push, Princess," the Maester informed you.

You cried in agony, fear taking hold of you “I can't, I can't do this alone"

"You are far from alone, my Lady” Kiera reassured you "Now listen to the Maester”

"We are going to tell you when you need to push, Princess,” he informed you calmly.

You took a deep breath, nodding softly before starting to mutter every prayer you knew. Your baby girl had to be alright, she had to.

Your screams echoed through the Castle, bouncing the walls every time you pushed, it was a pain like no other, each push draining more energy from your already tired body.

"You can do it, Princess, your babe is almost here” One of the midwives smiled at you, trying to reassure you.

Deep down, you knew that something was wrong but you ignored those thoughts deep down in your mind, focusing on the task at hand.

"One more big push, Princess” Master Yormwell encouraged you. “I can see the head"

You nodded, hair sticking to your sweating forehead before pushing with all the strength you had left and you brought your child into the world.

You fell back, drained as you waited for a cry that did not come.

You did not hear a cry.

With little strength, you lifted your head to take a peek, only to see the midwives and Master take your babe to the other side of the room, working on them.

"My babe, Kiera” you sobbed "I want to see my babe”

She squeezed your hand, not once letting go "What is happening?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm.

“No" you whispered as you were yet to hear a cry. You tried to sit up in desperation, only to be held by Kiera.

Crying, you could only observe how they worked around your babe, trying to get her to breathe. Yet you knew that she would never draw a breath, that you would never hear her cries or see her eyes.

Your fears were confirmed when the midwife turned to you with your unmoving babe in arms. She put her in your arms, carefully, as if your little girl could feel “It is a girl, Princess. I am sorry” she whispered with sorrow.

She was fragile and tiny, more beautiful than you could have ever imagined, she looked just like you, wearing Baelor's nose and his hair color. Your tearful eyes swept through her tiny body, her little hands and the eyes that you would never meet, eyes that were closed forever.

The scream that tore from you as you held the little bundle to your chest was heartbreaking, the sound could be heard through the extents of the Castle.

Everyone who heard felt it in their bones, feeling for the Princess that was grieving not one life but two.

A/N: I was vere surprised when someone from the comments guessed where this was going. I hope it is any good, I took inspiration from Rhaenyra's stillbirth and the scene from Bridgerton where Violet is pregnant and asks for her dead husband.

The doctoral candidates deep in their dissertations. The disillusioned second-year graduate students who reek of coffee and cigarettes. The strangers from other departments, art history or public policy, sinking low in their seats as if their cover might be blown at any second. Baelor knows the archetypes who sit around his seminar table so well. He sorts them into columns, knows which ones will drop after the first week, knows which ones are already preening for a letter of recommendation. The class changes every semester—new articles to examine, different nuances to be teased out of a particular reading—but the cast of characters never does.

You’re harder to categorize. He feels it from the first week when you take the seat nearest to him on his brown-eyed side. The one that the rest of your peers, either out of shyness or respect, had left vacant. He bristles. Wonders if your nonchalance might be synonymous with a lack of seriousness.

That concern dissipates as soon as he hears you speak. You’re exactly how you sounded in your email, and more. Curious. Clever, but subtly so: no pretense, no frills, no ticking off as many five-syllable vocabulary words as you can in one sentence.

“It’s a bit of an ungenerous reading, though, isn’t it?” You chime in twenty minutes into a conversation about an article analyzing the diaries of Nymeria of Dorne. He watches your eyes dart around the room before landing on his.

There’s a fierceness to you as well, he observes. A severity that makes all the others look dull in comparison.

The table is slow to react, so he prods. “Ungenerous how?”

“I mean, it’s more interested in what her mentions of the grain trade mean for the structure of the early Dornish economy than what it might mean about her.” You flip through your flimsy dogeared copy of The Diaries of Nymeria of Dorne: 2nd Edition Translation, and Baelor can’t help but try to make out what some of your scribbled annotations are. “Here: ‘Spring rains flood the Greenblood. Barges bring wheat and salt for lemon cakes.’ She’s in the middle of a war and she’s looking forward to eating lemon cakes. Doesn’t that speak more to who she was as a person than what the economy was like?”

“For an article concerned with economics, I might argue it’s a particularly congruous quotation,” he pushes back, though with none of the ice in his voice that he might usually use to shut down a fruitless line of inquiry. He leaves the door open, inviting you through, wondering where your mind is headed.

And you, without hesitating, take his invitation. “I think it’s a wasted opportunity, that’s all. It’d be lovely if any of these historians treated Nymeria like a real human with actual desires rather than a convenient primary source.”

“That’s usually how historicization works,” one of the other students, Willem, pipes up. It’s not entirely unfriendly, but there’s an air of patronization in his tone, an unspoken assumption that of course you wouldn’t know something like that. Heat flares in his chest, a chivalric impulse that makes him flex his fingers and want to speak up on your behalf. But you only stare back at him and shrug.

“Well. Their loss, then.”

He finally gets a good look at your annotation at the end of class, while you’re chatting to the art history student next to you who had been too shy to speak the entire time. There’s a harsh circle around one of the paragraphs in the article you’d disapproved of and Fuck off! nestled in the margins.

Not a fawn, he realizes. More like a hawk, biding your time before you swoop in with something new and fresh and entirely unexpected.

Last one to leave, you pause by the door while he’s still packing up his papers into the worn leather satchel Jena had gifted him one nameday, years ago. “I hope I’m not giving my program a bad name.”

“The opposite, actually,” he says, and the grin that spreads across your face seems like some sort of prize. It’s a twisted thing to think about a bit of well-received encouragement. He swallows hard, focuses on his coat. You don’t seem to notice his silent self-flagellation. You just lean against the door handle, giving him one last little wave.

“Good. Well. See you next week, then.”

When he steps outside, the winter air hits him harder than the bullets he’d taken in the army. He rubs a hand across his chin and sighs. Nothing is different. Every term begins with the same simmering anticipation. But something has changed. He can feel it in his bone marrow, in the fingers that already threaten to go numb in the frigid night. He can feel it in the way that he’s already anxious for next week, for whatever surprises you have waiting behind those sharp, subdued eyes of yours. Stop this, he tells himself, but it’s beyond his control. Something dormant inside of him is stirring, opening its eyes, coming back to life.

He doesn’t mean to spy. It’s a coincidence, truly, that his office has a view over the steps of Penrose Hall. He’s watched thousands of students come and go from their literature classes for years. The doors creak open and light soaks the courtyard below. Half nine. The last graduate class letting out for the night. 

There you are, hugging a pile of papers to your front. A tired slant to your shoulders. While your classmates pair off and head home in groups, you keep your own company. He wonders whose choice that is; theirs or yours.

It’s concern that makes him watch you until you disappear beyond the courtyard, he tells himself. You’re a young woman walking alone after dark. It’s your safety he has in mind. But when he looks down at the paper he’d been grading, there are dents embedded from his grip. Baelor drops it, lets it flutter to the ground. Even in the low light, the gold band of his wedding ring glares like an open flame.

“Is this a good time?”

It is. And isn’t. Of course, he says, waving for you to take a seat, because he knows the policy on his syllabus. Open office hours, noon to one, no appointment needed. You make him nervous, though. Make him feel like the nearly-shut door is a sin.

“I wanted to ask about the term paper,” you jump right in. “I know you don’t accept creative projects, but I wondered if you might be open to a more sentimental approach.”

“Hm. What does sentimental mean to you?” He leans back in his chair, rotating each ring one by one while your eyes begin to sparkle. It’s utterly captivating, utterly new. Such a question would usually make his students jump to defensiveness. Scramble to explain themselves or shut down and back away from the line of questioning. But you approach it with fascination, like he’s handed you some shiny gift to unwrap.

“I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating history like it’s dead. I read your article about the influence of pre-Andal art on the development of Dornish culture,” you say, and he can’t deny how his ego swells at that, “and I thought about how sad it is, that people like Willem think that historical means unemotional. That article almost made me cry.”

Baelor’s cheeks turn hot. A bit of praise isn’t unusual from students who hope to stay in his good graces. He wouldn’t normally blush at a comment about his reading of a source or his criticism of previous scholarship, but you see past all the technicalities and stare right into his soul. He shouldn’t indulge himself. Shouldn’t feed on that genuine admiration and curiosity that’s plain to see. He’s only a man, though. He can’t help the wretched, white-hot need that burns inside of him.

“Go on,” he concedes. “Tell me more.”

And you do. You talk and talk and he asks and you answer. You rant about an article which has found itself in your good graces and two others which you can’t conceal your disdain for. You flesh out a point you’d made about the translation of Nymeria’s diaries, the tragedy of all the gaps through which language can slip. You go on until he’s running late for his lecture at two, and you’re laughing a bashful laugh and saying gods, sorry, I lost track of time. I’ll see you next week?

True to your word, you’re there next week. And the week after that. His office hours morph into a standing appointment, reiterating points you’d made in seminar and elaborating on the ones you’d cut short. You fill his empty world with your armful of books, your patchwork philosophy, your sarcastic asides.

The silence after you leave is always the worst. It reverberates, pierces him, makes the whole room seem colder. 

In the wake of you, the guilt seeps in. Pervasive as winter’s iron-strong grip. Its poison makes his blood curdle in his veins, makes the walls close in around him. Sick, he calls himself, sick, depraved, perverted, disgusting. You’re closer in age to Valarr than you are to him. Every thought he has disgraces him. That part of himself that you’ve woken is bright-eyed and alert now, roaring and clawing at the inside of his chest. Die, he begs it, die, or at least sleep, but it’s a feral thing. It demands attention. Demands tribute.

“I know it’s not due until tomorrow.” You dance into his office one day, a grin blossoming as you hand him your term paper draft. His fingers brush against yours for half a second. That’s all it takes for his skin to turn sparkling warm. Your eyes search his. He’s started to pick up on your little tells. It’s praise you’re seeking, so it’s praise he gives.

“Ah. Trying to impress me?” He asks as a wry smile surfaces.

“Maybe.”

He shouldn’t feel so hopeful. He isn’t even certain what he’s hoping for. At best, he’s a mentor with all the wrong motivations. At worst, he’s some sort of monster. But he feels real. Painfully, explosively real for the first time in years. You’ve brought him back from a grave he was digging himself. Woken him like a bird perched outside his window, singing your smart, sweet song.

So he lets himself hope.

It’s long after you’ve left one afternoon, when he’s gathering his things to walk home for the day, when he notices one of your books forgotten on the chair. An Anthology of Westerosi Women Poets. Golden-brown pages and glue-stained binding on the spine make it look especially frail, though the date on the inside cover isn’t even years past. Well-loved, then. Tended to.

He opens to the middle of the book, but as soon as he glimpses your annotations, he shuts it. It’s an intrusion. A voyeur’s view of your relationship to the poems within. The skin on his neck prickles as if someone’s watching, though the only audience are his own books leering from their shelves.

Tucking it into his satchel, he tells himself it’ll be safer at home. Less of a chance it’ll be lost in the piles of papers on his desk or picked up by another student by mistake. He’s only being careful.

It’s frightening, really. The lies he tells himself. The excuses he makes.

There’s nothing careful about how he takes it to bed. Glass of whiskey on the nightstand, rain thrumming against the window, he opens it like a secret and runs his fingers over the pages. Feels the dips of the underlines you’ve made. The curves of your comments. Stray couplets populate the margins, imitations of your favorite lines. It’s more intimate than undressing. Like he’s seeing into the bones of you.

Somewhere in the whiskey-tinted evening, he drifts off. Snippets of poetry and the smell of ink constellate his dreams. When he wakes, his cheek is pressed to your book. Traces of your perfume cling to its pages, a ghost of you now embedded in little lines on his face. His cock is shamefully, achingly hard.

It’s Jena’s face he pictures while he stands under scalding water and curses himself for being so horrible, so weak. But it’s your face he pictures when he puts his hand on his throbbing cock. Your face he imagines under him, sharp tongue gone dumb while he fucks you. Your face that makes his heart go heavy and hollow while the water goes cold, while the shower washes come down the drain.

Microwaved stew and cigarette smoke make for a less than ideal welcome home. In the kitchen, Maekar is glaring at something on his phone, a bowl of leftovers already polished off. Somehow, Baelor is more relieved than he is annoyed. As much as he wishes he’d pillage someone else’s fridge for once, it’s good to know that his brother is at least taking the time to feed himself.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” he sighs, opening a window with a pointed look.

“I was.” Maekar groans, smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Guess which one it is this time.”

“Daeron?” It’s a genuine guess. Also a translated prayer: please, not Aerion. He doesn’t wish any more suffering on Daeron than his nephew already inflicts upon himself, but he’s certain Maekar would prefer the familiarity of rehab over whatever scandal of Aerion’s might already be plastering itself over the covers of gossip magazines.

“Father. Crafty bastard tried to set me up. Sent me off to meet with the president of philanthropy at Citadel College on his behalf and forgot to mention the meeting was at a winery and the president’s a fucking widow.” He scoffs as he flicks the cigarette over the ashtray that Baelor keeps around just for him, just in case. “He ever do that to you?”

He winces. It’s not a pleasant memory: some Hightower woman, a daughter of a friend of his father’s, pushed toward him at a charity gala at Dragonstone barely two years after Jena’s death. Baelor, show her around, Daeron said, conveniently disappearing a moment later. She had been friendly. Decent enough to look uncomfortable once she saw the ring on his finger. It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice at his father.

“Once.” 

“Well, turns out Arbor red still gives me a bloody headache. Had to ask her for a paracetamol. Dy would’ve loved that.” Maekar chuckles at himself, and even Baelor has to laugh. He remembers a holiday years ago at Summerhall, his brother flushed and whinging after supper while the children ran wild through the sitting room and Dyanna fished around in her purse. Oh, give him a break, Baelor, she’d said when he teased, poor thing’s on his cycle. 

Maekar nudges the chair next to him with his foot. Baelor lets out a long breath as he sits down, all the day’s pressures rolling off of his shoulders and into the gentle, menthol-streaked haze of the kitchen. A copy of your seminar paper draft is still on the table from where he’d mulled over it the night before. His praise adorns the pages. Perhaps it’s soft of him, but in place of critique there’s only intrigue. Say more on this written where he might tell another student Explain. There’s a stain on a corner now. The pages are ruffled from where his brother had—utterly unashamed of himself, of course—been reading it.

“You look good,” Maekar says. Baelor finds himself subject to the scrutiny of a furrowed brow and two narrowed blue eyes.

“I do?”

There’s a gruff hmm as he takes another drag. Not a visit, then. More like an interrogation. Sometimes Baelor wonders if he’s his brother’s seventh child. One who needs less checking in on, perhaps, but still. He wonders how Daeron and Aerion have become impervious to that steely gaze. Whatever mask he wears, whatever act he puts on, it carves through him all the same.

“It’s been a better term than most,” he says, and it’s true. The lectures come easier. Campus seems brighter. The classroom is all he can think about, singing a siren song while he ought to be thinking about something, anything else.

Maekar turns his attention to your draft. “This one’s clever.”

“She’s in my graduate seminar,” Baelor says all too quickly. His attempt at an unexciting diversion only makes his brother’s stare intensify.

“Yes, I can read.” He grunts, but there’s a little smirk dancing over his mouth as he looks over something you’d written. “Funny. You must like her.”

 Wringing his hands, the rings make his fingers feel like lead. “I do.”

“Well.” That makes Maekar pause, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Good for her.”

Is it? Baelor wonders. The way he feels when he reads your work, when he sees your mouth open in its witty way right before you speak… nothing about it feels good. Dangerous, perhaps. Like he could break you from the sheer weight of his want. His hands could sooner ruin you than offer you tenderness. It disgusts him. It compels him.

“You don’t need to worry about me.” It’s only half of a lie.

“No. Gods know I don’t need to be fucking worrying about you and yet you’re good at giving me reasons to worry,” Maekar grumbles, snuffing out the remnants of his cigarette and running a hand through his already askew white hair. “At least wait until she’s not your student before you do something stupid. Father says his blood pressure is fine but we all know that’s not true.”

“It’s not like that.” But Maekar raises an eyebrow, sees right through him, and Baelor finds himself admitting: “I wouldn’t know how. Not anymore. I’m not… meant for it.”

“Huh.” 

There’s a gleam in his brother’s eyes, a joke wanting to be made. He waits for the punchline. Some juvenile comment, surely, but the blow never comes. 

Perhaps it’s the common ground they both stand on but rarely speak about. How to move on. If moving on is possible. Whether they ought to accept that love was for a softer time, a younger time, or whether they should shake their warrior instincts awake and fight to prove themselves wrong. Jena and Dyanna would’ve retched to see them both where they are now. Such hardened, hopeless old men.

“Well, whatever this is,” Maekar says, and Baelor knows what he means, knows that it’s the solitude and the silence and the self-sabotage and everything else he forces himself to endure, “you’re not meant for that either.”

Half nine, and the doors of Penrose Hall are whining and groaning while the writing students file into the crystalline spring air. Two of them are bursting with laughter, smacking each other’s shoulders and giggling as they fade off into the lamplit haze. A group of three pauses for a smoke break and then go their separate ways. There’s a warmth starting to wake up King’s Landing from its winter slumber. Sound and movement ripple where campus used to be frozen.

Baelor watches for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty, and you still haven’t come out. The bells of the campus chapel strike ten. An uneasy feeling gnaws at his gut. His mind conjures up images of you in a claustrophobic corner with some man’s hands clawing at your clothes, or you on the slick, dewy cobblestones with an ankle twisted at some unnatural angle, and he’s pulling on his coat and charging down the stairs before he realizes what he’s doing.

It doesn’t take long to find you. You’re on the other side of Penrose Hall, curled up on the steps, staring at the barely-budding willow tree that brushes up against the side of the building. Knees drawn into your chest. Shoulders like shuddering wings hunched inwards. You shrink against the night’s soft sibilance, the rattle of the wind, the thickness of the dark.

“Oh, sorry. Hi.” You’re quick to wipe your eyes when you see him approaching. Even in the shadows, he can see rivulets on your cheeks. An angry tint around your irises.

“Did something happen?” It’s harsher than he intends. There’s a threat woven into the question. Blood singing, bones humming, his army-trained body is suddenly ready to carry out any command you might give him.

“No.” You say too quickly, and even a halfhearted attempt at a smile barely lasts a second. “Nothing. Fucking… it’s nothing.”

But it’s not nothing. Not to him, not if it means you’re holding yourself as if the world has sunk an angry fist into the center of your stomach. Baelor takes another step forward, gently pushing into the stormy atmosphere of you. He can feel the clouds circling, the tension becoming electric. His skin is primed for a lightning strike. 

You make a defeated little shrug, your voice straining to hold back. “It’s so lonely. In there. Or it’s like they’re all there and I’m somewhere else, or… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know…”

And then the storm breaks. Your face falls. The gravity around you gets heavier, heavier, and all his body can do is kneel against the cold stone steps and let your arms form a death grip around him while you cry.

It’s strange. It’s wrong. Muscle memory makes him hold you like he would have held Jena. He rubs uneven circles over your back, stiff and slow to surrender.  It takes a minute for his hands to adjust. To sculpt themselves to the contours of you. Trembling just as much as you are, the thought of someone coming across you both in this twisted embrace is somehow less terrifying than your warbled I don’t know. You, always on the path of some unexpected thesis. You, stringing words together in ways that make language feel lustrous. You, reduced to I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.

He’s the one who ought to feel sorry. Ashamed. He ought to pity you, and instead he’s full of a disgusting pride, so smug about the fact that he’s the one holding you together. Such uncanny power he wields over you. So sick and so selfish. In his core, a nagging truth: it feels good to be needed like this. To let his own desire bloom in return. He needs you. Your brokenness, your brilliance, he needs it all, he needs to walk into it like a room, he needs to lose himself and discover you.

“I know,” he murmurs, while the wind kisses the willow branches and his breath does the same to your hair, “it’s alright. I know.”

“I know.”

You’re sad, Jena said, that it was what tumbled out in reply. Sleep-deprived under the soulless hospital lights, he should have waited for his mind to sync with his mouth before he spoke. I’m not, he should have said. Too late for that. Too late for so many things.

Time collapsed in that sterile room. The date on the whiteboard that the nurses updated every day could have been in a different language for all it mattered. Change came in the form of a new drawing from Matarys taped to the wall or the slow decay of a bouquet on the side table. He stayed awake through the night and slept without dreams in fleeting fits during the day. All the world was taupe and white. Antiseptic. What a mundane hell.

Jena rattled out a breath. “We used to be such happy people.”

And they had. They’d done everything beautifully, achingly right. They’d studied shoulder-to-shoulder in the library and kissed on the stoop of her flat after he walked her home. He’d given her his mother’s engagement ring. Their wedding had been featured in the King’s Landing Times style section. They’d had the boys. Summered in Dorne and Pentos. Bought a house at the edge of the city limits with a pool and a view of Blackwater Bay. They’d gone to the boys’ football games on weekends and gone out for fish and chips after, win or lose. They’d hosted dinner parties. Made love on weeknights. They’d been so blindingly happy. Until they weren’t.

“I’ll take it with me.”

“You’ll take what, sweetheart?” All those chasms in their conversations. The bridges he had to build. How ironic. He’d fallen in love with her mind, her law school logic. Every day, a little less of it remained.

“All that sadness.” Half of her face tried to smile. “So you can go on living. Will you let me do that for you?”

Her hand reached for his. Rings loose around her bone-thin fingers. Nails painted pink from the last time Dyanna visited. The tremor they hadn’t noticed until it was too late made the glitter catch the light with each little twitch. It was so easy to acquiesce. Dose promises like morphine. What a good liar he was. What a coward.

A month later, and there were still flecks of blush-colored polish on her nails when she was buried. He kept the engagement ring for Valarr. Her wedding ring for Matarys. All of his sadness, he kept for himself.

The last week of term arrives with a warm front that thunders its arrival over King’s Landing and then rests its humid remnants across the city. Baelor spends the afternoon tidying his desk, putting the office to rest before the holiday. Down in the courtyard, a group of students have set up camp around a bench. Their laughter echoes against the old stone buildings. No revising will be done, surely, yet it fills him with fondness. He thinks about the boys. Wonders what they’re doing on the first summery day of the year.

You catch him in the doorway just as he’s leaving, out of breath from the stairs. There’s a tin in your hands. A loop of twine around it, tied in a bow, slightly askew. So relieved to see you, he can’t stop the sigh that wrests itself from his lungs. Your name comes out of his mouth the same way he might say thank the gods.

“Um, I wanted to thank you.” You sound flustered. “For the other week. You were so lovely and patient, I’m sorry I was such a mess.”

“Please, you don’t need to apologize. I hope everything’s alright,” he says, although he knows it’s not. That expression on your face had been something wretched. A kind of hauntedness that can’t be fixed in one night. It’s there even now. Softened by the mellow sunlight, maybe, but still fluttering across your eyes. If only he could be the kind of man who would erase that darkness. Someone younger. Someone easier. He’d just make your darkness deeper, he tells himself. He’d be another ghost perching on your sad shoulders.

And yet he’s letting you slip like water through his cupped palms. Classes over for term, summer rushing in to sweep you away, you’ll be lost to the past soon. A five-month fever dream he’ll try to relive every night. He’ll miss your melancholy, yet he’ll miss that rare, swooping joy of yours even more fiercely.

“I’m looking forward to reading your seminar paper.” It’s a last-ditch attempt to prove to himself that he can make you smile, and gods, it works. You light up like the morning sky. He wishes he could stay in your light forever. Bask in it. Burn in it. Die in it.

“Bribe for good marks, then?” You offer him the tin with a sheepish grin. “I’m not a great baker but I figured you can’t go wrong with shortbread, and I added some cardamom so it’s a little different…”

He can tell you’re circling a thought as you trail off, afraid to tuck your wings and land. Your gaze keeps flickering down at the tin. Just as quickly as your clouds had parted, they’re gathering again. When you finally do look up at him, there’s a glint of something he can’t analyze. Hope, maybe. Or danger. Perhaps the two are the same.

“I really loved your class. I’ll miss it,” you say, and then there’s a small catch in your voice, a confession wriggling its way out, and you whisper, “I’ll miss you, too.”

There it is: the wondering and the wishing suddenly stripped back, all just a maze of prose leading to your hushed thesis. It’s daybreak after a long night. Sunrise over Blackwater Bay, streaked with crimson. You give him exactly what his sinful soul has yearned for and doom him in the same breath. Damnation feels dangerously akin to relief.

The doorway frames your body impossibly close to his. Your eyes are fixed on his, wanting, asking. He exhales and makes your lashes waver like minuscule feathers. One hand lifts to brush against the front of your shirt. It would be easy to push you away. It would be even easier to pull you closer. Baelor’s lips part ever so slightly. He watches you mirror him, watches how you wait right at the brink of some invisible boundary. You make it his line to cross.

He inhales. Closes his eyes. And chooses.

“And?”

“And what?”

There’s a drawn-out groan from the other end of the call. “Oh, gods. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.” He answers. “We said goodbye and she left.”

The pathetic finality of it echoes around his kitchen. He brushes shortbread crumbs from the side of his mouth. Thanks again, you’d blurted out. The tin, shoved into his hands like it burned you. The second he hesitated too long, you knew. Smart thing. Sweet, smart, beautiful girl, you’d seen right through him, right to all the fear and guilt holding him back. Your crestfallen expression and the sound of your footsteps fleeing down the hall loop endlessly in his mind. Baelor-breaks-things, destroying all the softness of that moment in the name of safety.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.” Because there is nothing left to do. You were a sparrow flickering by his window, a final warm day in the autumn of his life. Term is over. That final look of hurt will grow smaller and smaller in his mind each year, until he can’t remember whether you were real or a dream he had just before waking.

Maekar is quiet. Maekar is never quiet.

“I thought nothing was exactly what you would’ve had me do,” he pushes, interpreting silence as disapproval.

“Well, if there was ever a time to do something, I’d say you fucking missed it.”

Frustration stabbing at the front of his skull, he rubs his forehead as he leans over the table. “You said I’d be mad to get involved with a student.”

“She’s not your student anymore, is she?” There’s a sharp exhale and probably a cloud of cigarette smoke haloing him. “First woman you’ve fancied in eight years. Seven hells, and you call me stubborn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He snaps. For once, he craves direction. Someone to tell him what to do. What not to do. It’s exhausting, these mazes he builds for himself, the dead ends and the sharp corners he gets trapped in. He wants an answer, except he’s terrified that when it comes to him, it’ll be in the shape of you.

“I mean,” Maekar says, “I don’t like the idea of you doing nothing forever.”

When he sees you again, he thinks he’s dreaming.

He’s not meant to be on campus. He’s not even meant to be in King’s Landing, but with his family packed uncomfortably tight in Summerhall and both of the boys off on their own holiday adventures, it had seemed best to retreat back to his townhouse for a week or two. Try to finish the research he’d meant to finish months ago. Try to write, prepare for the autumn term, distract himself with routine.

It’s sweltering in the capitol. Even the pages of the book he’d come all the way to his office to retrieve are swollen with humidity. The heat crawls up his back, stains his collar with sweat, makes the city vibrate from the constant hum of aircon units. Evening brings relief, but not much. When he rounds a corner and sees you descending the steps outside the library, he half-wonders if he’s gone delirious.

Oh, hello, you exhale, and he shouldn’t be so satisfied by the way your mouth twists into a little smile, but he is. He shouldn’t insist to walk you home, but he does. He shouldn’t let his heart leap into his throat when your bare arm bumps against his rolled-up sleeve, but how can he not? His whole body burns with a heat that goes beyond the simmering summer air.

“I mostly just sit there. It’s not so bad,” you tell him about your job at the circulation desk. “When I’m bored, I’ll search up people I know and see what titles they’ve checked out.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my library records wouldn’t be terribly fascinating.”

You give him a sideways look full of mischief. “No. They’re not. Sorry.”

Over the city skyline, the sunset drenches the brick houses in shades of tangerine. Windows reflect rich, warm light. It halos you, makes you seem like an angel framed in stained glass above the shrine in a sept. Baelor can’t remember the last time he prayed. Before Jena’s death, most likely. The sight of you, smiling and chatting in the golden hour glow, could put him on his knees. Could make a devotee of him.

You’re on a tangent about your landlord—the scum of the fucking earth, you hiss—when he slows to a stop outside his townhouse. There’s a bus stop at the end of the row. He ought to leave you there and say goodnight, to stop himself before he can destroy you with the ferocity of his longing, but gravity is pulling him inside and threatens to sweep you along with him.

“This is yours?” Your wide eyes absorb the facade of the building, the old door, the original windows he paid far too much to have restored. It’s a fault he’s keenly aware of, one he chalks up to a historian’s instinct. Refusing to let go of the past. Forcing it to suffer in his hands instead of letting it go.

“Can I make you tea?” He offers, struck by the notion of you in his home. “I never thanked you properly. For the shortbread.”

“The shortbread was a thank you, you don’t need to thank me for it.” Smart girl, you see through his poor excuse to prolong this sweet, sudden interlude. “Tea would be lovely, though.”

It’s odd seeing you drift through his living room. Your eyes wander over the art that Jena had collected. The old pictures on his mantel. Your hands cradle a teacup he’d inherited from his grandmother, who had probably inherited it from her own grandmother. You’re an interloper in his quiet world. And yet you fit in so seamlessly. Lean on the kitchen table and talk to him like it’s just another evening, like you were meant to be here. He listens to you ranting about your classmates with wonder clouding his vision and guilt nipping at his heels. So wrong. So oddly right.

“...and he’s smart, but gods, he was such a cunt.” Bashful, you hide your lips behind the teacup. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. We’re not in class anymore.”

It sounds too much like permission to be innocent. For a searing moment, you hold his gaze. He’s seen you make the same calculations before in class. It’s the sort of scrutiny that could make lesser men shrink into themselves. That asks: what do you really mean?

He knows what he means, even if he’s too ashamed to admit it to himself.

It’s dark by the time he walks you to the door. Excuses draft themselves in his head: he ought to walk you to the bus stop, or he ought to drive you home, or you ought to stay until it cools off a bit more. They’re brimming in his throat as you linger in the foyer, as he finally picks up your poetry anthology from its spot on his side table where he’d thought about taking it back to his office for half the semester. It’s intoxicating, thinking of his fingerprints overlapping invisibly with yours on its pages. 

“Gods, I thought I’d lost this! Thank you.” Brimming with a strange kind of light, there’s a shift in the weather of you. “Honestly, thank you, Professor Targaryen, so much. For everything.”

“Baelor,” he insists. He doesn’t typically let students drop the honorifics with him, but you’re not his student anymore, are you?

“Right.” You lock eyes with him as your hand covers his own. “Thank you, Baelor. I really will miss your class.”

“I’ll miss you.” he admits all of a sudden, as if it’s ripped out of him just by the soft pressure of your palm over his knuckles. “You were brilliant. Are. You are a brilliant writer.”

What happens next, he isn’t entirely certain. He knows he leans in. He knows that his eyelids drift shut, his head bows in prayer. Whether it’s you or him who finally closes the distance, though, he can’t tell. He can only hope that it’s him. To hope that there’s still a part of himself brave enough to do something rather than nothing.

It’s more of a fight than a kiss. Both of you pushing and pulling, breaking the last boundaries of decency. He’s messy, out of practice, stiff lips taking their time to thaw and melt against yours. Your book clatters against the floor. Salt streaks across his tongue. His hands perch against the contours of your neck, drawing you closer, wanting things that only a starved man could want. Your sweetness, your submission, it makes a monster of him. Ignites that reawoken beast in his chest. When you finally gasp for air, he finds himself chasing your mouth, greed outweighing tenderness.

“I’m sorry.” He could be apologizing for any number of things. Maybe it’s not you he’s truly apologizing to. All the neurons in his brain are hopelessly still. His animal instincts latch onto the taste of you and howl a song throughout his body.

Baelor had not always been this way. What no one witnessed was the part he shielded most vigilantly, surpassing in his care even his father’s political dispatches, the royal household’s travel details, and any information a spy would seek to pilfer.

Before the arrangement — before the older ladies, their knowing hands and their borrowed hour of something that was not love but was, in its own blunt way, mercy — before all of that, there had been a boy who could not eat breakfast without his hands shaking.

The first year, they had called it “growing pains”. His older cousins had slapped him on the back and offered knowing smirks. His younger brothers had snickered, their laughter ringing as he awoke, his face flushed and his body tense from dreams that remained frustratingly vague, leaving only a remaining heat and a deep ache like a burning pool in his core, accompanied by the humiliating dampness on his stomach and sheets. Baelor had tried to ignore it. Tried to pray it away. Tried cold water, long rides, sword practice until his arms shook. It had helped at first.

There had been mornings — too many — when the ache was so fierce he could barely stand upright. He would wake before dawn, already stiff and throbbing, his body demanding something, anything, his mind a tight, ashamed circle around the refusal to give in. Not from fear. Fear was clean; you could name it, trace it to a source, work against it. This was something that lived below thought and decision, below the surface of everything he presented to the world. It was the body betraying the mind, the relentless, animal insistence of need that would not be reasoned with, prayed away or subdued by cold water or sword drills or long, exhausting rides that left him too tired to think.

You are a prince.

You are not some sweaty squire rutting in the hayloft.

Do something about it.

He couldn’t. Not because the idea hadn’t come to him. It had, in flashes: crude, obvious, suggested in half-joking whispers by older boys and men who thought they were helping.

Use your hand, make it go away.

Easy, they said.

The way the boys in the yard spoke of it, the way squires laughed about “relief” in the haylofts, made it sound like the simplest thing in the world. For them, maybe. For Baelor, it was not simple. It was a trial. Every lesson he’d ever absorbed about his name, his faith, his House, and his own place in the story rose up against it like a wall.

His father had named him for Baelor the Blessed. That was not a story you could crawl out from under. From childhood he’d been fed the tales: the king who fasted and prayed, who walked the Boneway barefoot to make peace with Dorne and rescued the Dragonknight from a snakepit, the king who locked his sisters in a tower rather than risk sin.

Baelor the Beloved.

Septons did not tell those stories lightly to the boy who bore that name. Each telling carried an unspoken:

And what will you be, little Baelor?

In that frame, desire was not neutral. It was a test.

Every morning Baelor woke aching; he did not think: my body is doing what bodies do. He thought: I am being watched and judged.

By gods. By history. By all the mouths that had ever formed the word Blessed after his name and meant it not as a joke but as a hope. If he closed his hand around himself in the dark, no one would see. Baelor knew that. But he would know, and that was enough. It would not be an accident or a misfortune of the flesh; it would be an act. A choice to lean into temptation instead of resisting it. To use himself the way other men used wenches and whores and then knelt in the Great Sept of Baelor the Blessed and called it weakness.

He could not bear to put that stain on the name he carried. Not when so much of his childhood had been spent being told he was a different kind of Baelor: not mad, not fanatical, but balanced, decent, a bridge between dragon and Faith. And it wasn’t a weak symbol for an heir to bear his name, as those who favored great bastards liked to claim — it was power, for Baelor II Targaryen, a formidable warrior of his time, to bear a name distinct from Aegon or Maegor.

Under that lay the uglier, more practical terror. Seed, in his family, was not abstract. It had names and faces, and politics. The realm was teeming with Aegon the Unworthy’s bastards. Growing up, Baelor knew these tales intimately: the clenched jaw of King Daeron when the topic of his legitimised half-brothers arose, and the delicate dance of words the inhabitants of the Red Keep performed around Daemon Blackfyre, as if the name itself held the power to crumble the very walls. The shame was not abstract. It had names. The whispers about House Blackfyre, the way people tightened their mouths when they said bastard in the same breath as Targaryen. The broken peace that had followed. The way his father’s jaw had hardened when those topics came up in council, the way his mother’s hand had gone motionless on her embroidery.

We do not need more bastards.

Baelor knew it. He had known it since he was old enough to understand why certain children never sat at the high table. The message was clear: a Targaryen’s seed, mislaid, could break families and kingdoms. A Targaryen heir had no right to treat his body like some common man’s — something that simply did as it desired. Targaryens must wed early and spill into their wives as much as they pleased, filling the realm with royal blood. Legitimate blood. In adolescence, Baelor did not fully separate the mechanics. In his head, it all sat in one shame‑coloured bundle: the urge, the spilling, the imagined child that might one day come from the habit of thinking of his need as something to be indulged rather than governed. Not that he believed touching himself would produce a bastard. It was that he feared teaching himself that when his body shouted, he listened and obeyed it.

That was the sin of Aegon the Unworthy, the one who took countless mistresses from all over the kingdom, at its core: not a single act, but a lifelong reflex of indulgence. A pattern. For a boy like Baelor, indulging in self‑pleasure in the dark felt eerily like a rehearsal. He imagined it in the bleak hours: starting now, in secret, telling himself it harmed no one. Then, in a year or two, with some desperate, infatuated maid in a dark corridor, with some lady in a half‑closed room, the urgency the same, the habit the same, only the stakes different.

The knowledge that highborn maidens with their sisters, aunts and mothers watched him with parted lips and hungry eyes, all but offering themselves up for the smallest brush of his hand, did him no kindness; it sharpened the ache instead of easing it, turned his need into a weight he had to carry into every room. As the holder of all power across the continent and the focus of the realm’s attention, how was a young heir meant to confront this challenge? Baelor did not know. Better, then, not to start at all. Better to stand rigid in the dawn light, nails half‑mooned into his own palms, and wait for the ache to ebb on its own than to teach his hand that this was an acceptable answer.

Daemon Blackfyre. The name had teeth. Since he was old enough to remain seated during council sessions, Baelor had heard countless conversations, and this name silenced more than half of them. The same man had trained them. By seventeen, Baelor knew Daemon almost as intimately as he knew his own brothers. Aegon the Unworthy’s greatest sin and greatest bastard, raised to knighthood and then to apparent legitimacy by a dying king’s whim. A bastard son who had been given Blackfyre, the Conqueror’s own sword, and with it, whether anyone admitted it or not, a portion of the idea of kingship.

The private tale, however, was known to Baelor, too — the story etched into the Red Keep’s very essence, in its words and its deliberate lack thereof. He had grown up watching the way courtiers described Daemon: tall, strong, golden, and the sort of man bards liked to sing of. A Targaryen on both sides, with all the impossible, cruel beauty of Old Valyria stamped clean across his face. Even those who disapproved of him could not quite keep the admiration out of their voices when they spoke of his bearing, his prowess, strength, his way with men and women both. He had heard, more than once, whispered lines:

He looks more like a king than the king’s own sons.

And Baelor was not Targaryen on both sides.

Baelor had eyes. He had a mirror and knew what he looked like. His mother’s Martell blood sat plain on his face: black hair, dark skin. Features that would not have been out of place in Sunspear, if you stripped them of the dragon cloaks and Westerosi titles. The Targaryen in him showed, especially in his vibrant lilac eye, but not like it did in Daemon’s — both of them. As a boy, it had stung. That his bastard uncle — dangerous and of the seed of a man the realm cursed — looked more like the storybook dragonlord than he, the king’s firstborn, ever would.

The comparison had not stopped at looks. Daemon was said to have been everything a knight should be: fearless in battle, laughing in the lists, the man others listened to because they wanted to, not because they had sworn to. Daemon made friends easily and made enemies without meaning to. Women. Gods, women. Maids and ladies and half the serving class wherever he rode had opened for him like sunflowers.

Baelor recognised too much of himself in that description. He was tall, strong, good in the yard — very good in the yard. He had discovered, slowly and with some surprise, that he could hold a hall’s attention without forcing it, that people liked him, that men listened when he spoke and women’s eyes followed him when he crossed the floor. And he had the same tinder in him that Daemon surely had: the quick, instinctive flare of wanting when he saw a girl laugh with her head thrown back; the restless ache in his body that did not care about politics, duty or the stories told about faith and bastards.

Baelor could have been that man, if he leaned even a little in that direction, if he let himself drink more, laugh louder, answer the pull of bodies with a shrug and a grin. He could have become a softer version of the same story. Not a bastard uncle, but an heir with the same flaws, the same hungers, the same dangerous magnetism.

That thought disgusted him. The disgust was not clean. It was braided with something like envy, something like a younger boy’s longing: to be that unbothered, that simple in his appetites. But the overriding feeling, the one that made his gut clench when he heard Daemon’s praises recited, was a hard, cold refusal.

I will not be that.

Baelor owed it to his father, at the very least. To the man who had spent half his life stitching the realm back together after Aegon’s whims, who sat at councils with a weariness in his bones that no amount of cleverness could erase, who still flinched, almost imperceptibly, when a lord let Blackfyre’s name sit for too long in a sentence. Daeron had spent years standing between his family and his own father’s malice, taking every jest about “Dorne‑stained” dragons on the chin rather than let it touch Myriah or the children. Aegon had mocked Baelor’s “smeared” blood even as he exalted the supposed purity of his golden bastards, and Daeron had met that contempt with a lifetime of quiet, stubborn defence — raising his mixed‑blood heir openly, honoring his queen, refusing to let the court forget who wore the crown. Baelor would not be the one to reopen that wound, not after decades of his father’s back held between them and Aegon’s scorn.

Baelor owed it to his name, too. When people muttered that naming the heir “Baelor” was folly — that it evoked weakness, madness, impotence, a king who starved himself half to death for piety — Daeron had quietly insisted otherwise. It was not a jest in Daeron’s mind. It was an answer — a counterpoint to Aegon. A way of saying:

My sons will be different.

Baelor’s profound love for his father, and his father’s even greater love for him, made him believe and long to justify that faith.

So when the aches started, and the dreams, and the humiliating, helpless wetness in his sheets, Baelor did not think of them as purely his own problem. They became part of the story he told himself about the fork in the road ahead.

On one side: Daemon. Beautiful, beloved, bright. Targaryen who could do as he pleased, whoring and laughing and leaving a trail of bastards and broken oaths in his wake until the entire realm had to choose between the man who looked like a king and the man who actually was one.

On the other: the thing his father wanted him to be. The steady point. The proof that a Targaryen could burn hot and still choose the cold thing over the warm one.

Self‑pleasure sat, in his mind, directly on that line. If he used himself that way — at ten, at thirteen, at fifteen — what separated him, really, from those whose lack of restraint had nearly broken the realm? If he treated his own body as something that demanded and received, how long before some girl, some lady, some whore, was in front of him when the demand came? He did not trust himself not to be like Daemon, if he let himself start. He did not trust that whatever made Daemon love the feeling of being wanted and answered wouldn’t wake in him the same love, the same readiness to risk other people for the sake of his own satisfaction.

So Baelor went the other way, as far the other way as he could. Baelor built his manhood on denial and the idea that power lay in not taking, not reaching, not easing the ache when he could. That if he could stand upright in the morning with his loins on fire and his hands empty, he was proving something. Not to anyone else, but to himself, something that Daemon never had. It did not make the insecurity go away. If anything, it sharpened it.

Baelor never spoke of it. He performed instead.

Perfect at table.

Perfect at practice.

Perfect in the sept, head bowed at all the right moments, lips moving in prayer while something beneath his sternum frayed and frayed and frayed. His brothers did not hinder him — not actively — but their mere existence, as brothers’ so often is, was no support at all. Aerys laughing in the tiltyard. Rhaegel with his music and his easy charm. Maekar, younger still, already promising to be formidable, watching everything with those level eyes, already building himself into someone who would not need to be managed. They were careless, they did not know they were careless. Baelor loved them for it, and it hurt him, a small, consistent hurt, the way a new boot hurts before the leather softens.

They don’t have to be this; he had thought, watching them.

Only me.

Only him.

Only Baelor, the one the realm was watching.

Only the eldest, whose portrait of perfection could not afford a single crack, while the most basic of all a man’s functions had been quietly eating a hole through the foundations.

The anxiety had been the worst of it. Not the desire itself — men desired. Men had always desired; that was not the shame. The shame was in the losing, in the helplessness of it, in the way it invaded everything regardless of his efforts. In the way he had suspected, lying awake in the small hours, that he was not a prince failing to control himself but simply—

Not yet a man.

Not in any sense that mattered underneath the titles.

The profound guilt of not being enough: Targaryen enough, heir enough, man enough.

Baelor’s sword arm was great. His horsemanship was exceptional. He had read everything the maester could put in front of him and remembered most of it. Baelor could walk into a room and command it. And still. Still, there were mornings when he could barely stand upright from the weight of a need he could never answer. Under that, beneath piety, beneath politics, was the most personal thing of all: the question of who he was.

From the time he was old enough to understand words like heir and duty, Baelor had built himself on one core conviction: he was the steady one. Daeron was a righteous king, but everyone remembered the chaos that had preceded him. The swirling instability of Targaryen passions left unchecked. In that atmosphere, Baelor understood quickly what was wanted of him.

Be the fixed point.

Be the one who does not sway.

Baelor learned to listen more than he spoke. To weigh, to moderate, to say no to himself in small things so that when the great things came, the muscle would already be trained. His identity, long before his voice broke, was built on restraint, control, on being just and merciful — not brash and thoughtless. Baelor was a son who could be trusted not to embarrass his father, his mother, or his house.

Then puberty hit like a hammer.

By almost fifteen, it stopped being something he could out‑ride or out‑pray. Breakfast became a trial; his hands shook so hard over the bread trencher that Rhaegel had reached once, half‑laughing, to steady the cup for him, and Baelor had nearly been sick with the humiliation of it. That was the year he went to his father. Not with the whole truth of wet sheets, bitten palms and the sense of being hunted in his own skin. But with enough of it that Daeron understood there was a breaking point somewhere ahead, and his son was walking toward it blindfolded.

He saw it clearly: not a boy’s clumsy ignorance about how to ease himself, but the older, heavier trouble of an heir wound too tight. The problem was not that Baelor did not know what to do with his body; it was that he was too responsible, too perfect, too determined to carry it all alone. What hurt in him was not young lust but the conviction that suffering in silence was part of his duty. Daeron’s heart broke to see his son stretched thin over sharp rocks, convincing himself that bleeding was what was required.

King Daeron, being who he was, had offered the most decent solution he could see: a wife, as early as the septs and the maesters would permit it. In Daeron’s mind, a good woman beside a man could mend almost any hurt, no matter how deep. He wanted that kind of quiet salvation for his son, having known it himself from the day he had wed Myriah and for every year of their life together.

A girl would be of their choosing, good for the realm and good for Baelor, a match that would smooth three problems at once: the aches, the succession, and growing unrest around Dorne politics. The sheer, calm practicality of it made something in Baelor crack, even as he knew his father meant only to help. Baelor had listened, stiff and straight, while Daeron spoke of alliances and duty, and then the words had blurred. Baelor was on his knees before he knew he meant to move.

“Please,” he choked out, the sound desperate. It was not a tone he had ever used with his father. It was not a prince’s tone.

“Father, let me choose. Just once. Let me choose her.”

It shamed him, how quickly the composure went. He had been a perfect son and heir for so long, to beg for anything felt like spitting on his own image. Tears burned his eyes anyway. Baelor did not ask to escape marriage or duty, did not ask for freedom or some indulgence. He asked for a name that would come from his own mouth and not a council list. One choice, in a life where every other path had been laid out in ink before he could walk. Daeron had looked at him for a long, still moment, the way he did at lords across the table when they surprised him. Then the king’s shoulders softened by a hair’s breadth, and his hand came down, firm, on Baelor’s bowed head.

“Very well,” he had breathed. “I will trust your judgement, as the realm must learn to trust it in greater things.”

It should have felt like relief. Instead, it sat beside the ache like another weight on the scale.

Baelor had his one promised choice. His body’s treachery remained.

Overnight, it seemed, the body he had governed with ease ran when told, fought when told, slept when told. And then it stopped listening. It woke him on its own schedule, pulsing with a need that didn’t care about reason, or timing, or the list of duties he had set for himself the next day. It had been so much easier when he was a child. Back then, virtue had meant not stealing sweetmeats from the kitchens, not striking a brother in temper, not skipping lessons to sneak down to the dragon skulls. Those were clear lines. He could see them, and he could stand on the right side of them and feel the warmth of his own goodness.

Baelor did not yet have a place, in his sense of manhood, for governed weakness. In his mind, there was mastery or there was failure — nothing in between. His instinct when a decision jeopardized his carefully constructed self-image was, as always, to halt all action. Baelor chose not to choose. He clenched his jaw, dug his nails into his palms, prayed, rode, fought, bathed in cold water, did everything except the one thing that would have given his body what it wanted. Not because it never occurred to him. Because to a boy who had been raised to believe his worth lay in his ability to restrain himself, that one small, secret act felt like admitting that the foundation had cracked. He had believed, in those months, that he was somehow wrong.

Not sinful.

Wrong.

Defective.

As if the desire itself were proof of weakness: that he, who was supposed to be the best of them, the steadiest hand, the clearest head, the future king, could be undone by mornings, brought to a sweating, clenching, almost tearful wreck in his own chambers, jaw working in silence, before the household was even awake.

The arrangement had changed it.

It was his mother who refused to watch him come apart by inches. Queen Myriah had been born in a land that did not pretend bodies were simple or safe; she had grown up with songs about Nymeria’s ten thousand ships and men who started wars for the sake of a bed, and she had no illusions left about what unchecked desire could do, or what trying to pretend it did not exist did to a boy — her firstborn son. She went to her husband not as a supplicant but as a woman presenting a solution he would rather not look at, knowing very well how much he hated the shape of it.

Daeron listened, stone‑faced, while she set it out in plain, careful terms: older ladies, married or long widowed, wombs barren, chosen for sense rather than softness; women who understood what was at stake and would treat their prince’s body as a duty, not a dalliance. The suggestion made Daeron’s mouth twist, as if he had been fed something rotten. Baelor, their Baelor, and… this. It offended the entire worldview he had crafted while watching his unworthy father, his notion of what kings and queens ought to be, but the offense did not change the fact that his eldest son was fraying under a pressure he could not relieve alone.

Daeron closed his eyes and, for a heartbeat, Myriah saw not the king who had pieced the realm back together but the man who had grown up under Aegon’s shadow, who had watched bastards sprout like weeds wherever his father rode and had spent half his reign cutting away at the thorns. What she proposed tasted to him like a smaller echo of those old disgraces, something sordid within the walls of the Red Keep he so desperately tried to weed out. Then again, Daeron had never faced such a problem. He had wed the love of his life early and had never truly struggled to master himself, a quiet testament to his temperate, inward‑bent nature. He could see, man to man, that Baelor carried far more raw vigor than he himself had ever done, something closer to Aegon’s restless fire than to his own cool reason, and that it would have to be governed before the realm watched the same catastrophe unfold twice.

When Daeron answered, it was in the tone he reserved for hard peace terms: measured, constrained, already half‑ashamed.

There would be moon tea, every time, without fail. There would be absolute trust placed in Myriah alone for the choosing of the women, and no names would ever pass his lips. Daeron would not know who went through his son’s chamber doors, would not have their faces dragged into council gossip or yard whispers about which lady eased the prince before supper. And he would not hear of it, not from his queen, not from his son, not even dressed up as a pious confession. If this thing had to exist, it would exist in the narrow, intimate space between husband and wife — and nowhere else. Better this, the lesser evil, than have his heir skulking through brothels, the whole realm whispering about yet more “blessed” bastards springing up to outstrip their betters.

Myriah accepted the terms. It was as close to approval as such an arrangement would ever have. A sin wrapped in care, signed and sealed between king and queen, and never to be spoken of again. After all, this was meant to be a temporary measure, only a few years until Baelor found his own wife. And they made it very clear he was expected to do so as swiftly as possible. They both understood that Baelor was already suffering for a crime he had not yet committed; if this quiet, ugly mercy kept him from shattering completely — or from seeking wilder, more dangerous outlets — Daeron would shoulder the private shame of having allowed it.

It did not begin with ladies. That would have been too much; Baelor could not have endured a face, not at first.

The queen sent servants instead: mature women drawn from the household with the same ruthless care she might have used for spies. Never young girls, whose timid nature and untested hearts could put them all at risk; Myriah would not place the heir to the realm in the hands of some trembling youth, no matter how ready they might be to swear their lives for him. She knew better. She remembered perfectly well what it was to be an impressionable girl herself, how her own heart had fluttered whenever she caught sight of young Daeron. And Myriah was Martell royalty, long accustomed to rank and princes; she knew exactly what proximity to power, beauty, and noble integrity did to the blood. No matter how strong‑willed or loyal those girls believed themselves to be, any maiden servant with eyes in her head would crumble at the mere thought of laying hands on a prince like Baelor.

The chosen women were sworn to silence, face covering drawn over their features until even their own mothers would not have known them by more than the set of a shoulder. They came to his bedchambers at odd hours, never on a pattern, announced by a single, discreet knock. Baelor would be stripped bare and turned from the door to face a window, hands clasped tight behind his back as if under inspection. The woman — faceless and almost formless in her plain wide gown, linen falling over her tightly kept hair and her features — would not bow or speak. She would simply cross the floor with her eyes on the rushes, sit on the low bench beside him and turn half away, so that even if the cloth from her face slipped she would never see more of her prince than the line of his calf, the curve of his ankle, the flex of his thighs.

Their hands, though, knew all of him. That had been the point.

Their hands were neither delicate nor roughened or calloused. His mother had sought out women who worked with their hands, but not at filthy tasks, and whose duties kept them far from royal company. They would never stand in the same halls as Baelor or any of the court, so there was no risk of some stray, lingering glance shattering the careful anonymity she had built around him. Those women were accustomed to prolonged holding, carrying, squeezing, twisting, jerking, pulling. Women who had spent years wringing sheets, hauling water, churning butter, shaping dough until their palms and forearms thickened with quiet strength and endurance. Those hands could take his full, raging length and girth without faltering, could keep a steady, unbroken rhythm for as long as he required it, slow or quick as the need demanded. And Baelor’s need ran toward the hard and the relentless.

They wouldn’t stop until he shattered.

He would close his eyes and count his breaths.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

The ache climbed and broke and ebbed like a tide, and he rode it in silence, jaw tight, nails printing crescents into his own palms behind his back. It felt, in those first awful afternoons, less like pleasure than like being emptied with a knife — humiliating and necessary and, afterward, leaving him boneless with a kind of stunned, resentful relief.

Only when Baelor could endure that without flinching did Myriah change the pattern. The veiled servants stopped coming. In their place, one by one, arrived ladies of the court: older, clever‑eyed, wrapped in dignity and good gowns instead of anonymity. They knocked with the same discreet hand, entered with the same lack of ceremony, but they met his gaze when he turned to face them. They called him “Your Grace” at first, then “Baelor” when he asked them to, and touched him like a man and not a problem.

His mother had chosen well. Widows who had buried husbands and would never risk a scandal now, matronly beauties with grown children, a sharp‑tongued lady from Dorne who laughed once, delighted, at the sight of him and then schooled herself at his startled flush. Each knew precisely why she was there. None of them pitied Baelor. They instructed him, steadied him, let him learn the map of his own body from hands that knew how to guide without taking. In that, Myriah never failed her son.

The first lady — witty, deft, entirely practical in the way she handled his stammering nerves — had taken the shaking boy and shown him, without embarrassment or drama, that desire was not the enemy. That the body was not a shameful thing to be suppressed but a landscape to be understood, its territories mapped and learned and, eventually, with practice, governed.

“You are too much in your head,” she had said once. Her fingers worked the laces of Baelor’s doublet with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been undressing Targaryen princes as a hobby for years, although Baelor had been the first.

“Come down from there.”

Baelor had learned to come down. By the time the second lady was introduced to the rotation, he was less afraid of his own hands. By the third, he had understood that his body, when not fighting itself, was not the problem he had feared. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. He was, it turned out, very well built for this.

At first, Baelor was unsure how to process the discovery; it felt like an unexpected, unopened, and slightly unsettling gift within him. He unwrapped it carefully, over months, under the patient tutelage of women who had, in some cases, already raised grown children and had no patience left for false modesty in any direction. They were frank with Baelor — he had asked them to be. He requested truth, driven by a practical need for clarity, recognizing that mastering any endeavor hinges on a brutally honest appraisal of one’s abilities. Baelor constantly sought guidance, wanting to know where he faltered and when he succeeded, listening with the same intense focus he employed in council meetings. He had been, as it turned out, an excellent student. A prodigy in that craft, in a sense. And desperate to please.

Baelor had always known, in the abstract, that he differed from his father. Daeron’s blood ran cooler, turned inward toward books, strategies and councils and the quiet satisfactions of a mind well‑used; the king had married once, early, and seemed never to have been much troubled by the sort of hunger that had haunted Baelor from boyhood. With Queen Myriah Martell warming his bed in all her Dornish beauty, Daeron could scarcely fathom what it meant to have his needs go unmet; his had always been answered, and more than answered, tenfold beyond anything he had ever thought to ask for.

Baelor, by contrast, felt built on a hotter pattern. His mother’s Dornish fire ran high in him, and somewhere under that, the same reckless excess that had once driven Aegon the Unworthy from bed to bed. He had gone into the arrangement believing that made him dangerous. What the women showed him, inch by inch, was that it simply made him alive.

Given permission to move, Baelor did not remain passive for long. Once the initial terror had burned off, Baelor leaned into what his body could do, to test his own strength the way he did in the yard. He learned how to brace his weight above a woman without crushing her, how to drive and withdraw and change the angle until he could feel her shudder around him; how to set a pace that made them gasp and clutch at him, or slow to a lazy roll that drew the moment out until his own self‑control frayed. The ladies in the rotation were not shy about letting him know when he impressed them. Some praised his stamina; others his focus, the way he listened to their climbing breath and hands and adjusted without being told. Some were even astonished by the sheer endurance of his jaw and neck when Baelor set himself to the task of pleasuring a woman with his mouth alone, holding steadily to it without wavering or breaking rhythm for breath.

Their frank approval did something the septons never had: it allowed him to see his vigor as a gift, not a flaw to be scourged away.

In the privacy of his own bedchamber, with women his mother had chosen and he had learned to trust, Baelor could be as intense as he truly was. He could take them hard and uncompromising when the need arose like a storm, could show the full force of his manhood without fearing that loss of control would birth a scandal or a war. Each encounter ended not in shame but in a growing, grounded certainty: that this, too, was part of him, and that he could carry it without being ruled by it.

Acceptance did not quiet his desire; it settled it, gave it shape and channels. By the time a year had passed, he understood that his body’s appetite, married to his mind’s discipline, was precisely what made him Baelor — the realm’s delight, as no one else could quite manage to be.

After a year of the arrangement, Baelor’s walk was imperceptibly different, a change that registered on a gut level before it could be articulated. Something in the quality of his stillness, in the way he occupied space, the way he held his shoulders and chest, the particular, unhurried weight of his eye when it landed on something — or someone. Of course, he grew larger and his voice fell deeper, but besides that he had simply become more entirely himself, as if the anxiety had been a scaffolding around an unfinished structure and someone had quietly removed it overnight, revealing the exquisite and captivating facade.

The charm, which had always been present in the Targaryen blood, settled into something warmer and more decisive. It was not performance, or the careful, schooled graciousness of a prince meeting his public. Baelor radiated an effortless confidence, a certainty born from the unvarnished accounts of women who saw him clearly and acknowledged his commanding presence in any space.

Baelor had always been looked at; now he understood, in exact detail, what they were looking at — or for. When he stepped into a hall, something in the air shifted a half‑beat before anyone moved, a tightening of shoulders, a small intake of breath. Ladies whose husbands droned beside them found sudden, pressing business in the direction of the door he had just come through, their eyes skating over him as if by accident and then returning, lingering that fraction too long to be polite. Some hid it behind their fans, lashes lowered, voices turning cool and measured as they asked after his health while their gaze slid, hungry, over the line of his chest and the suggestive fall of his breeches, and the easy way he carried his body. Others did not bother to hide it at all. They watched him like mares watching a stallion put through his paces: weighing, measuring, wondering how he would move with his full weight loosed.

Baelor saw it in the girls in the gallery, too. A single glance up with his lilac eye, a lazy smile cast their way from the floor below, and they flushed to the roots of their hair, laughter breaking out in sharp, breathless little bursts as they clutched at one another’s sleeves and whispered behind their hands. And he saw, just as clearly, the men watching the women. Brothers stiffening, husbands’ mouths tightening, fathers’ eyes narrowing as they followed the line of their ladies’ gaze and found it fixed on the king’s heir. Baelor saw them seeing it — saw the quick, sour awareness in their faces that in any room he entered, he was the measure by which their own manhood was, however unwillingly, compared.

Baelor was not vain about it. He had worked too hard to be vain and understood the immense price paid: the sleepless nights, the sheer exertion, the crushing guilt, and the agonizing years spent battling his inner self until he was utterly exhausted in his own bed. He knew the particular, humiliating arithmetic of it: to be stripped down to the rawest animal part of himself and found wanting, and then to build, slowly and with considerable outside help, a different creature on those same bones — one that now walked untroubled into any room in the Red Keep and made the air tilt toward him.

Baelor was grateful, genuinely so. The arrangement had been necessary, and it had worked; the man it had helped make of him was precisely the man his house, his father, and the realm required. He wore that self like someone who has shouldered a heavy burden for a long road and knows, down to the ounce, how much it weighs and how to bear it.

“This,” he had thought, at his aunt Daenerys’s wedding tourney, lance levelled against Ser Daemon Blackfyre, the crowd roaring, controlled heat of readiness singing through his muscles.

“This is what I paid for.”

He had won.

And became Baelor Breakspear.

The doctoral candidates deep in their dissertations. The disillusioned second-year graduate students who reek of coffee and cigarettes. The strangers from other departments, art history or public policy, sinking low in their seats as if their cover might be blown at any second. Baelor knows the archetypes who sit around his seminar table so well. He sorts them into columns, knows which ones will drop after the first week, knows which ones are already preening for a letter of recommendation. The class changes every semester—new articles to examine, different nuances to be teased out of a particular reading—but the cast of characters never does.

You’re harder to categorize. He feels it from the first week when you take the seat nearest to him on his brown-eyed side. The one that the rest of your peers, either out of shyness or respect, had left vacant. He bristles. Wonders if your nonchalance might be synonymous with a lack of seriousness.

That concern dissipates as soon as he hears you speak. You’re exactly how you sounded in your email, and more. Curious. Clever, but subtly so: no pretense, no frills, no ticking off as many five-syllable vocabulary words as you can in one sentence.

“It’s a bit of an ungenerous reading, though, isn’t it?” You chime in twenty minutes into a conversation about an article analyzing the diaries of Nymeria of Dorne. He watches your eyes dart around the room before landing on his.

There’s a fierceness to you as well, he observes. A severity that makes all the others look dull in comparison.

The table is slow to react, so he prods. “Ungenerous how?”

“I mean, it’s more interested in what her mentions of the grain trade mean for the structure of the early Dornish economy than what it might mean about her.” You flip through your flimsy dogeared copy of The Diaries of Nymeria of Dorne: 2nd Edition Translation, and Baelor can’t help but try to make out what some of your scribbled annotations are. “Here: ‘Spring rains flood the Greenblood. Barges bring wheat and salt for lemon cakes.’ She’s in the middle of a war and she’s looking forward to eating lemon cakes. Doesn’t that speak more to who she was as a person than what the economy was like?”

“For an article concerned with economics, I might argue it’s a particularly congruous quotation,” he pushes back, though with none of the ice in his voice that he might usually use to shut down a fruitless line of inquiry. He leaves the door open, inviting you through, wondering where your mind is headed.

And you, without hesitating, take his invitation. “I think it’s a wasted opportunity, that’s all. It’d be lovely if any of these historians treated Nymeria like a real human with actual desires rather than a convenient primary source.”

“That’s usually how historicization works,” one of the other students, Willem, pipes up. It’s not entirely unfriendly, but there’s an air of patronization in his tone, an unspoken assumption that of course you wouldn’t know something like that. Heat flares in his chest, a chivalric impulse that makes him flex his fingers and want to speak up on your behalf. But you only stare back at him and shrug.

“Well. Their loss, then.”

He finally gets a good look at your annotation at the end of class, while you’re chatting to the art history student next to you who had been too shy to speak the entire time. There’s a harsh circle around one of the paragraphs in the article you’d disapproved of and Fuck off! nestled in the margins.

Not a fawn, he realizes. More like a hawk, biding your time before you swoop in with something new and fresh and entirely unexpected.

Last one to leave, you pause by the door while he’s still packing up his papers into the worn leather satchel Jena had gifted him one nameday, years ago. “I hope I’m not giving my program a bad name.”

“The opposite, actually,” he says, and the grin that spreads across your face seems like some sort of prize. It’s a twisted thing to think about a bit of well-received encouragement. He swallows hard, focuses on his coat. You don’t seem to notice his silent self-flagellation. You just lean against the door handle, giving him one last little wave.

“Good. Well. See you next week, then.”

When he steps outside, the winter air hits him harder than the bullets he’d taken in the army. He rubs a hand across his chin and sighs. Nothing is different. Every term begins with the same simmering anticipation. But something has changed. He can feel it in his bone marrow, in the fingers that already threaten to go numb in the frigid night. He can feel it in the way that he’s already anxious for next week, for whatever surprises you have waiting behind those sharp, subdued eyes of yours. Stop this, he tells himself, but it’s beyond his control. Something dormant inside of him is stirring, opening its eyes, coming back to life.

He doesn’t mean to spy. It’s a coincidence, truly, that his office has a view over the steps of Penrose Hall. He’s watched thousands of students come and go from their literature classes for years. The doors creak open and light soaks the courtyard below. Half nine. The last graduate class letting out for the night. 

There you are, hugging a pile of papers to your front. A tired slant to your shoulders. While your classmates pair off and head home in groups, you keep your own company. He wonders whose choice that is; theirs or yours.

It’s concern that makes him watch you until you disappear beyond the courtyard, he tells himself. You’re a young woman walking alone after dark. It’s your safety he has in mind. But when he looks down at the paper he’d been grading, there are dents embedded from his grip. Baelor drops it, lets it flutter to the ground. Even in the low light, the gold band of his wedding ring glares like an open flame.

“Is this a good time?”

It is. And isn’t. Of course, he says, waving for you to take a seat, because he knows the policy on his syllabus. Open office hours, noon to one, no appointment needed. You make him nervous, though. Make him feel like the nearly-shut door is a sin.

“I wanted to ask about the term paper,” you jump right in. “I know you don’t accept creative projects, but I wondered if you might be open to a more sentimental approach.”

“Hm. What does sentimental mean to you?” He leans back in his chair, rotating each ring one by one while your eyes begin to sparkle. It’s utterly captivating, utterly new. Such a question would usually make his students jump to defensiveness. Scramble to explain themselves or shut down and back away from the line of questioning. But you approach it with fascination, like he’s handed you some shiny gift to unwrap.

“I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating history like it’s dead. I read your article about the influence of pre-Andal art on the development of Dornish culture,” you say, and he can’t deny how his ego swells at that, “and I thought about how sad it is, that people like Willem think that historical means unemotional. That article almost made me cry.”

Baelor’s cheeks turn hot. A bit of praise isn’t unusual from students who hope to stay in his good graces. He wouldn’t normally blush at a comment about his reading of a source or his criticism of previous scholarship, but you see past all the technicalities and stare right into his soul. He shouldn’t indulge himself. Shouldn’t feed on that genuine admiration and curiosity that’s plain to see. He’s only a man, though. He can’t help the wretched, white-hot need that burns inside of him.

“Go on,” he concedes. “Tell me more.”

And you do. You talk and talk and he asks and you answer. You rant about an article which has found itself in your good graces and two others which you can’t conceal your disdain for. You flesh out a point you’d made about the translation of Nymeria’s diaries, the tragedy of all the gaps through which language can slip. You go on until he’s running late for his lecture at two, and you’re laughing a bashful laugh and saying gods, sorry, I lost track of time. I’ll see you next week?

True to your word, you’re there next week. And the week after that. His office hours morph into a standing appointment, reiterating points you’d made in seminar and elaborating on the ones you’d cut short. You fill his empty world with your armful of books, your patchwork philosophy, your sarcastic asides.

The silence after you leave is always the worst. It reverberates, pierces him, makes the whole room seem colder. 

In the wake of you, the guilt seeps in. Pervasive as winter’s iron-strong grip. Its poison makes his blood curdle in his veins, makes the walls close in around him. Sick, he calls himself, sick, depraved, perverted, disgusting. You’re closer in age to Valarr than you are to him. Every thought he has disgraces him. That part of himself that you’ve woken is bright-eyed and alert now, roaring and clawing at the inside of his chest. Die, he begs it, die, or at least sleep, but it’s a feral thing. It demands attention. Demands tribute.

“I know it’s not due until tomorrow.” You dance into his office one day, a grin blossoming as you hand him your term paper draft. His fingers brush against yours for half a second. That’s all it takes for his skin to turn sparkling warm. Your eyes search his. He’s started to pick up on your little tells. It’s praise you’re seeking, so it’s praise he gives.

“Ah. Trying to impress me?” He asks as a wry smile surfaces.

“Maybe.”

He shouldn’t feel so hopeful. He isn’t even certain what he’s hoping for. At best, he’s a mentor with all the wrong motivations. At worst, he’s some sort of monster. But he feels real. Painfully, explosively real for the first time in years. You’ve brought him back from a grave he was digging himself. Woken him like a bird perched outside his window, singing your smart, sweet song.

So he lets himself hope.

It’s long after you’ve left one afternoon, when he’s gathering his things to walk home for the day, when he notices one of your books forgotten on the chair. An Anthology of Westerosi Women Poets. Golden-brown pages and glue-stained binding on the spine make it look especially frail, though the date on the inside cover isn’t even years past. Well-loved, then. Tended to.

He opens to the middle of the book, but as soon as he glimpses your annotations, he shuts it. It’s an intrusion. A voyeur’s view of your relationship to the poems within. The skin on his neck prickles as if someone’s watching, though the only audience are his own books leering from their shelves.

Tucking it into his satchel, he tells himself it’ll be safer at home. Less of a chance it’ll be lost in the piles of papers on his desk or picked up by another student by mistake. He’s only being careful.

It’s frightening, really. The lies he tells himself. The excuses he makes.

There’s nothing careful about how he takes it to bed. Glass of whiskey on the nightstand, rain thrumming against the window, he opens it like a secret and runs his fingers over the pages. Feels the dips of the underlines you’ve made. The curves of your comments. Stray couplets populate the margins, imitations of your favorite lines. It’s more intimate than undressing. Like he’s seeing into the bones of you.

Somewhere in the whiskey-tinted evening, he drifts off. Snippets of poetry and the smell of ink constellate his dreams. When he wakes, his cheek is pressed to your book. Traces of your perfume cling to its pages, a ghost of you now embedded in little lines on his face. His cock is shamefully, achingly hard.

It’s Jena’s face he pictures while he stands under scalding water and curses himself for being so horrible, so weak. But it’s your face he pictures when he puts his hand on his throbbing cock. Your face he imagines under him, sharp tongue gone dumb while he fucks you. Your face that makes his heart go heavy and hollow while the water goes cold, while the shower washes come down the drain.

Microwaved stew and cigarette smoke make for a less than ideal welcome home. In the kitchen, Maekar is glaring at something on his phone, a bowl of leftovers already polished off. Somehow, Baelor is more relieved than he is annoyed. As much as he wishes he’d pillage someone else’s fridge for once, it’s good to know that his brother is at least taking the time to feed himself.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” he sighs, opening a window with a pointed look.

“I was.” Maekar groans, smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Guess which one it is this time.”

“Daeron?” It’s a genuine guess. Also a translated prayer: please, not Aerion. He doesn’t wish any more suffering on Daeron than his nephew already inflicts upon himself, but he’s certain Maekar would prefer the familiarity of rehab over whatever scandal of Aerion’s might already be plastering itself over the covers of gossip magazines.

“Father. Crafty bastard tried to set me up. Sent me off to meet with the president of philanthropy at Citadel College on his behalf and forgot to mention the meeting was at a winery and the president’s a fucking widow.” He scoffs as he flicks the cigarette over the ashtray that Baelor keeps around just for him, just in case. “He ever do that to you?”

He winces. It’s not a pleasant memory: some Hightower woman, a daughter of a friend of his father’s, pushed toward him at a charity gala at Dragonstone barely two years after Jena’s death. Baelor, show her around, Daeron said, conveniently disappearing a moment later. She had been friendly. Decent enough to look uncomfortable once she saw the ring on his finger. It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice at his father.

“Once.” 

“Well, turns out Arbor red still gives me a bloody headache. Had to ask her for a paracetamol. Dy would’ve loved that.” Maekar chuckles at himself, and even Baelor has to laugh. He remembers a holiday years ago at Summerhall, his brother flushed and whinging after supper while the children ran wild through the sitting room and Dyanna fished around in her purse. Oh, give him a break, Baelor, she’d said when he teased, poor thing’s on his cycle. 

Maekar nudges the chair next to him with his foot. Baelor lets out a long breath as he sits down, all the day’s pressures rolling off of his shoulders and into the gentle, menthol-streaked haze of the kitchen. A copy of your seminar paper draft is still on the table from where he’d mulled over it the night before. His praise adorns the pages. Perhaps it’s soft of him, but in place of critique there’s only intrigue. Say more on this written where he might tell another student Explain. There’s a stain on a corner now. The pages are ruffled from where his brother had—utterly unashamed of himself, of course—been reading it.

“You look good,” Maekar says. Baelor finds himself subject to the scrutiny of a furrowed brow and two narrowed blue eyes.

“I do?”

There’s a gruff hmm as he takes another drag. Not a visit, then. More like an interrogation. Sometimes Baelor wonders if he’s his brother’s seventh child. One who needs less checking in on, perhaps, but still. He wonders how Daeron and Aerion have become impervious to that steely gaze. Whatever mask he wears, whatever act he puts on, it carves through him all the same.

“It’s been a better term than most,” he says, and it’s true. The lectures come easier. Campus seems brighter. The classroom is all he can think about, singing a siren song while he ought to be thinking about something, anything else.

Maekar turns his attention to your draft. “This one’s clever.”

“She’s in my graduate seminar,” Baelor says all too quickly. His attempt at an unexciting diversion only makes his brother’s stare intensify.

“Yes, I can read.” He grunts, but there’s a little smirk dancing over his mouth as he looks over something you’d written. “Funny. You must like her.”

 Wringing his hands, the rings make his fingers feel like lead. “I do.”

“Well.” That makes Maekar pause, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Good for her.”

Is it? Baelor wonders. The way he feels when he reads your work, when he sees your mouth open in its witty way right before you speak… nothing about it feels good. Dangerous, perhaps. Like he could break you from the sheer weight of his want. His hands could sooner ruin you than offer you tenderness. It disgusts him. It compels him.

“You don’t need to worry about me.” It’s only half of a lie.

“No. Gods know I don’t need to be fucking worrying about you and yet you’re good at giving me reasons to worry,” Maekar grumbles, snuffing out the remnants of his cigarette and running a hand through his already askew white hair. “At least wait until she’s not your student before you do something stupid. Father says his blood pressure is fine but we all know that’s not true.”

“It’s not like that.” But Maekar raises an eyebrow, sees right through him, and Baelor finds himself admitting: “I wouldn’t know how. Not anymore. I’m not… meant for it.”

“Huh.” 

There’s a gleam in his brother’s eyes, a joke wanting to be made. He waits for the punchline. Some juvenile comment, surely, but the blow never comes. 

Perhaps it’s the common ground they both stand on but rarely speak about. How to move on. If moving on is possible. Whether they ought to accept that love was for a softer time, a younger time, or whether they should shake their warrior instincts awake and fight to prove themselves wrong. Jena and Dyanna would’ve retched to see them both where they are now. Such hardened, hopeless old men.

“Well, whatever this is,” Maekar says, and Baelor knows what he means, knows that it’s the solitude and the silence and the self-sabotage and everything else he forces himself to endure, “you’re not meant for that either.”

Half nine, and the doors of Penrose Hall are whining and groaning while the writing students file into the crystalline spring air. Two of them are bursting with laughter, smacking each other’s shoulders and giggling as they fade off into the lamplit haze. A group of three pauses for a smoke break and then go their separate ways. There’s a warmth starting to wake up King’s Landing from its winter slumber. Sound and movement ripple where campus used to be frozen.

Baelor watches for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty, and you still haven’t come out. The bells of the campus chapel strike ten. An uneasy feeling gnaws at his gut. His mind conjures up images of you in a claustrophobic corner with some man’s hands clawing at your clothes, or you on the slick, dewy cobblestones with an ankle twisted at some unnatural angle, and he’s pulling on his coat and charging down the stairs before he realizes what he’s doing.

It doesn’t take long to find you. You’re on the other side of Penrose Hall, curled up on the steps, staring at the barely-budding willow tree that brushes up against the side of the building. Knees drawn into your chest. Shoulders like shuddering wings hunched inwards. You shrink against the night’s soft sibilance, the rattle of the wind, the thickness of the dark.

“Oh, sorry. Hi.” You’re quick to wipe your eyes when you see him approaching. Even in the shadows, he can see rivulets on your cheeks. An angry tint around your irises.

“Did something happen?” It’s harsher than he intends. There’s a threat woven into the question. Blood singing, bones humming, his army-trained body is suddenly ready to carry out any command you might give him.

“No.” You say too quickly, and even a halfhearted attempt at a smile barely lasts a second. “Nothing. Fucking… it’s nothing.”

But it’s not nothing. Not to him, not if it means you’re holding yourself as if the world has sunk an angry fist into the center of your stomach. Baelor takes another step forward, gently pushing into the stormy atmosphere of you. He can feel the clouds circling, the tension becoming electric. His skin is primed for a lightning strike. 

You make a defeated little shrug, your voice straining to hold back. “It’s so lonely. In there. Or it’s like they’re all there and I’m somewhere else, or… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know…”

And then the storm breaks. Your face falls. The gravity around you gets heavier, heavier, and all his body can do is kneel against the cold stone steps and let your arms form a death grip around him while you cry.

It’s strange. It’s wrong. Muscle memory makes him hold you like he would have held Jena. He rubs uneven circles over your back, stiff and slow to surrender.  It takes a minute for his hands to adjust. To sculpt themselves to the contours of you. Trembling just as much as you are, the thought of someone coming across you both in this twisted embrace is somehow less terrifying than your warbled I don’t know. You, always on the path of some unexpected thesis. You, stringing words together in ways that make language feel lustrous. You, reduced to I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.

He’s the one who ought to feel sorry. Ashamed. He ought to pity you, and instead he’s full of a disgusting pride, so smug about the fact that he’s the one holding you together. Such uncanny power he wields over you. So sick and so selfish. In his core, a nagging truth: it feels good to be needed like this. To let his own desire bloom in return. He needs you. Your brokenness, your brilliance, he needs it all, he needs to walk into it like a room, he needs to lose himself and discover you.

“I know,” he murmurs, while the wind kisses the willow branches and his breath does the same to your hair, “it’s alright. I know.”

“I know.”

You’re sad, Jena said, that it was what tumbled out in reply. Sleep-deprived under the soulless hospital lights, he should have waited for his mind to sync with his mouth before he spoke. I’m not, he should have said. Too late for that. Too late for so many things.

Time collapsed in that sterile room. The date on the whiteboard that the nurses updated every day could have been in a different language for all it mattered. Change came in the form of a new drawing from Matarys taped to the wall or the slow decay of a bouquet on the side table. He stayed awake through the night and slept without dreams in fleeting fits during the day. All the world was taupe and white. Antiseptic. What a mundane hell.

Jena rattled out a breath. “We used to be such happy people.”

And they had. They’d done everything beautifully, achingly right. They’d studied shoulder-to-shoulder in the library and kissed on the stoop of her flat after he walked her home. He’d given her his mother’s engagement ring. Their wedding had been featured in the King’s Landing Times style section. They’d had the boys. Summered in Dorne and Pentos. Bought a house at the edge of the city limits with a pool and a view of Blackwater Bay. They’d gone to the boys’ football games on weekends and gone out for fish and chips after, win or lose. They’d hosted dinner parties. Made love on weeknights. They’d been so blindingly happy. Until they weren’t.

“I’ll take it with me.”

“You’ll take what, sweetheart?” All those chasms in their conversations. The bridges he had to build. How ironic. He’d fallen in love with her mind, her law school logic. Every day, a little less of it remained.

“All that sadness.” Half of her face tried to smile. “So you can go on living. Will you let me do that for you?”

Her hand reached for his. Rings loose around her bone-thin fingers. Nails painted pink from the last time Dyanna visited. The tremor they hadn’t noticed until it was too late made the glitter catch the light with each little twitch. It was so easy to acquiesce. Dose promises like morphine. What a good liar he was. What a coward.

A month later, and there were still flecks of blush-colored polish on her nails when she was buried. He kept the engagement ring for Valarr. Her wedding ring for Matarys. All of his sadness, he kept for himself.

The last week of term arrives with a warm front that thunders its arrival over King’s Landing and then rests its humid remnants across the city. Baelor spends the afternoon tidying his desk, putting the office to rest before the holiday. Down in the courtyard, a group of students have set up camp around a bench. Their laughter echoes against the old stone buildings. No revising will be done, surely, yet it fills him with fondness. He thinks about the boys. Wonders what they’re doing on the first summery day of the year.

You catch him in the doorway just as he’s leaving, out of breath from the stairs. There’s a tin in your hands. A loop of twine around it, tied in a bow, slightly askew. So relieved to see you, he can’t stop the sigh that wrests itself from his lungs. Your name comes out of his mouth the same way he might say thank the gods.

“Um, I wanted to thank you.” You sound flustered. “For the other week. You were so lovely and patient, I’m sorry I was such a mess.”

“Please, you don’t need to apologize. I hope everything’s alright,” he says, although he knows it’s not. That expression on your face had been something wretched. A kind of hauntedness that can’t be fixed in one night. It’s there even now. Softened by the mellow sunlight, maybe, but still fluttering across your eyes. If only he could be the kind of man who would erase that darkness. Someone younger. Someone easier. He’d just make your darkness deeper, he tells himself. He’d be another ghost perching on your sad shoulders.

And yet he’s letting you slip like water through his cupped palms. Classes over for term, summer rushing in to sweep you away, you’ll be lost to the past soon. A five-month fever dream he’ll try to relive every night. He’ll miss your melancholy, yet he’ll miss that rare, swooping joy of yours even more fiercely.

“I’m looking forward to reading your seminar paper.” It’s a last-ditch attempt to prove to himself that he can make you smile, and gods, it works. You light up like the morning sky. He wishes he could stay in your light forever. Bask in it. Burn in it. Die in it.

“Bribe for good marks, then?” You offer him the tin with a sheepish grin. “I’m not a great baker but I figured you can’t go wrong with shortbread, and I added some cardamom so it’s a little different…”

He can tell you’re circling a thought as you trail off, afraid to tuck your wings and land. Your gaze keeps flickering down at the tin. Just as quickly as your clouds had parted, they’re gathering again. When you finally do look up at him, there’s a glint of something he can’t analyze. Hope, maybe. Or danger. Perhaps the two are the same.

“I really loved your class. I’ll miss it,” you say, and then there’s a small catch in your voice, a confession wriggling its way out, and you whisper, “I’ll miss you, too.”

There it is: the wondering and the wishing suddenly stripped back, all just a maze of prose leading to your hushed thesis. It’s daybreak after a long night. Sunrise over Blackwater Bay, streaked with crimson. You give him exactly what his sinful soul has yearned for and doom him in the same breath. Damnation feels dangerously akin to relief.

The doorway frames your body impossibly close to his. Your eyes are fixed on his, wanting, asking. He exhales and makes your lashes waver like minuscule feathers. One hand lifts to brush against the front of your shirt. It would be easy to push you away. It would be even easier to pull you closer. Baelor’s lips part ever so slightly. He watches you mirror him, watches how you wait right at the brink of some invisible boundary. You make it his line to cross.

He inhales. Closes his eyes. And chooses.

“And?”

“And what?”

There’s a drawn-out groan from the other end of the call. “Oh, gods. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.” He answers. “We said goodbye and she left.”

The pathetic finality of it echoes around his kitchen. He brushes shortbread crumbs from the side of his mouth. Thanks again, you’d blurted out. The tin, shoved into his hands like it burned you. The second he hesitated too long, you knew. Smart thing. Sweet, smart, beautiful girl, you’d seen right through him, right to all the fear and guilt holding him back. Your crestfallen expression and the sound of your footsteps fleeing down the hall loop endlessly in his mind. Baelor-breaks-things, destroying all the softness of that moment in the name of safety.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.” Because there is nothing left to do. You were a sparrow flickering by his window, a final warm day in the autumn of his life. Term is over. That final look of hurt will grow smaller and smaller in his mind each year, until he can’t remember whether you were real or a dream he had just before waking.

Maekar is quiet. Maekar is never quiet.

“I thought nothing was exactly what you would’ve had me do,” he pushes, interpreting silence as disapproval.

“Well, if there was ever a time to do something, I’d say you fucking missed it.”

Frustration stabbing at the front of his skull, he rubs his forehead as he leans over the table. “You said I’d be mad to get involved with a student.”

“She’s not your student anymore, is she?” There’s a sharp exhale and probably a cloud of cigarette smoke haloing him. “First woman you’ve fancied in eight years. Seven hells, and you call me stubborn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He snaps. For once, he craves direction. Someone to tell him what to do. What not to do. It’s exhausting, these mazes he builds for himself, the dead ends and the sharp corners he gets trapped in. He wants an answer, except he’s terrified that when it comes to him, it’ll be in the shape of you.

“I mean,” Maekar says, “I don’t like the idea of you doing nothing forever.”

When he sees you again, he thinks he’s dreaming.

He’s not meant to be on campus. He’s not even meant to be in King’s Landing, but with his family packed uncomfortably tight in Summerhall and both of the boys off on their own holiday adventures, it had seemed best to retreat back to his townhouse for a week or two. Try to finish the research he’d meant to finish months ago. Try to write, prepare for the autumn term, distract himself with routine.

It’s sweltering in the capitol. Even the pages of the book he’d come all the way to his office to retrieve are swollen with humidity. The heat crawls up his back, stains his collar with sweat, makes the city vibrate from the constant hum of aircon units. Evening brings relief, but not much. When he rounds a corner and sees you descending the steps outside the library, he half-wonders if he’s gone delirious.

Oh, hello, you exhale, and he shouldn’t be so satisfied by the way your mouth twists into a little smile, but he is. He shouldn’t insist to walk you home, but he does. He shouldn’t let his heart leap into his throat when your bare arm bumps against his rolled-up sleeve, but how can he not? His whole body burns with a heat that goes beyond the simmering summer air.

“I mostly just sit there. It’s not so bad,” you tell him about your job at the circulation desk. “When I’m bored, I’ll search up people I know and see what titles they’ve checked out.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my library records wouldn’t be terribly fascinating.”

You give him a sideways look full of mischief. “No. They’re not. Sorry.”

Over the city skyline, the sunset drenches the brick houses in shades of tangerine. Windows reflect rich, warm light. It halos you, makes you seem like an angel framed in stained glass above the shrine in a sept. Baelor can’t remember the last time he prayed. Before Jena’s death, most likely. The sight of you, smiling and chatting in the golden hour glow, could put him on his knees. Could make a devotee of him.

You’re on a tangent about your landlord—the scum of the fucking earth, you hiss—when he slows to a stop outside his townhouse. There’s a bus stop at the end of the row. He ought to leave you there and say goodnight, to stop himself before he can destroy you with the ferocity of his longing, but gravity is pulling him inside and threatens to sweep you along with him.

“This is yours?” Your wide eyes absorb the facade of the building, the old door, the original windows he paid far too much to have restored. It’s a fault he’s keenly aware of, one he chalks up to a historian’s instinct. Refusing to let go of the past. Forcing it to suffer in his hands instead of letting it go.

“Can I make you tea?” He offers, struck by the notion of you in his home. “I never thanked you properly. For the shortbread.”

“The shortbread was a thank you, you don’t need to thank me for it.” Smart girl, you see through his poor excuse to prolong this sweet, sudden interlude. “Tea would be lovely, though.”

It’s odd seeing you drift through his living room. Your eyes wander over the art that Jena had collected. The old pictures on his mantel. Your hands cradle a teacup he’d inherited from his grandmother, who had probably inherited it from her own grandmother. You’re an interloper in his quiet world. And yet you fit in so seamlessly. Lean on the kitchen table and talk to him like it’s just another evening, like you were meant to be here. He listens to you ranting about your classmates with wonder clouding his vision and guilt nipping at his heels. So wrong. So oddly right.

“...and he’s smart, but gods, he was such a cunt.” Bashful, you hide your lips behind the teacup. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. We’re not in class anymore.”

It sounds too much like permission to be innocent. For a searing moment, you hold his gaze. He’s seen you make the same calculations before in class. It’s the sort of scrutiny that could make lesser men shrink into themselves. That asks: what do you really mean?

He knows what he means, even if he’s too ashamed to admit it to himself.

It’s dark by the time he walks you to the door. Excuses draft themselves in his head: he ought to walk you to the bus stop, or he ought to drive you home, or you ought to stay until it cools off a bit more. They’re brimming in his throat as you linger in the foyer, as he finally picks up your poetry anthology from its spot on his side table where he’d thought about taking it back to his office for half the semester. It’s intoxicating, thinking of his fingerprints overlapping invisibly with yours on its pages. 

“Gods, I thought I’d lost this! Thank you.” Brimming with a strange kind of light, there’s a shift in the weather of you. “Honestly, thank you, Professor Targaryen, so much. For everything.”

“Baelor,” he insists. He doesn’t typically let students drop the honorifics with him, but you’re not his student anymore, are you?

“Right.” You lock eyes with him as your hand covers his own. “Thank you, Baelor. I really will miss your class.”

“I’ll miss you.” he admits all of a sudden, as if it’s ripped out of him just by the soft pressure of your palm over his knuckles. “You were brilliant. Are. You are a brilliant writer.”

What happens next, he isn’t entirely certain. He knows he leans in. He knows that his eyelids drift shut, his head bows in prayer. Whether it’s you or him who finally closes the distance, though, he can’t tell. He can only hope that it’s him. To hope that there’s still a part of himself brave enough to do something rather than nothing.

It’s more of a fight than a kiss. Both of you pushing and pulling, breaking the last boundaries of decency. He’s messy, out of practice, stiff lips taking their time to thaw and melt against yours. Your book clatters against the floor. Salt streaks across his tongue. His hands perch against the contours of your neck, drawing you closer, wanting things that only a starved man could want. Your sweetness, your submission, it makes a monster of him. Ignites that reawoken beast in his chest. When you finally gasp for air, he finds himself chasing your mouth, greed outweighing tenderness.

“I’m sorry.” He could be apologizing for any number of things. Maybe it’s not you he’s truly apologizing to. All the neurons in his brain are hopelessly still. His animal instincts latch onto the taste of you and howl a song throughout his body.

⭑.ᐟ from friends to forever I @/geminiwritten

you've been in love with hangman for as long as you can remember, but he's never looked at you that way, not until he meets a guy you're dating for the first time and everything you thought was unrequited becomes dangerously mutual

⭑.ᐟ dirty laundry pt2 I @/geminiwritten

after a couple months of living together, you're still completely oblivious to how you affect jake and he's starting to spiral because now he's... feeling things

⭑.ᐟ you called my wife? I @megalony

The Dagger squad don't know much about Jake's personal life. And when he gets hurt during an exercise, they are surprised who comes to look after him.

⭑.ᐟ love of my life I @moondancediner

the dagger squad meets hangman's best-kept secret

⭑.ᐟ hangman’s mystery I @0mg-bird

Jake takes you to meet the crew after claims of him hiding you from them. You’re extremely shy and aren’t a fan of lots of people, making Jake be more protective of you. For once, Rooster knows more about Jake’s life than the others do.

⭑.ᐟ watermelons I @promisingyounglady

Jake loves ur boobs.

⭑.ᐟ request I @ddejavvu

⭑.ᐟ spring fling pt2 pt3 pt4 pt5 pt6 pt7 pt8 I @/ddejavvu

You should have known the ‘no refunds’ detail on the website for Spring Fling was a red flag. But you paid no mind to it, eager to be assigned a quick fuck for spring break. When the man that walks through your cabin door is none other than Jake 'Hangman' Seresin, your wildly infuriating fellow pilot, you have two choices: bicker the entire time and have a miserable spring break, or fuck.

⭑.ᐟ medical emergency I @marvelwitchergilmore

When Jake gets a call asking to pick you up from the hospital, it's safe to say he's confused. Especially considering neither of you were known for getting along with the other.

⭑.ᐟ just ask me I @/marvelwitchergilmore

Hangman is used to getting what he wants, so what happens when he doesn't get you?

⭑.ᐟ unlikely hero I @/marvelwitchergilmore

You're in labour and nobody is picking up, so you're forced to call someone you never thought you would have to.

⭑.ᐟ best worst christmas I @ohtobeleah

After some life altering news. You confide in Hangman which leads you to ticking off something incredibly important on your bucket list.

⭑.ᐟ roll the dice pt2 pt3 pt4 I @/ohtobeleah

When Rooster makes a snarky remark that should have never left his mouth—everyone who knew, for a brief moment in time, Is brought back to the moment where Jake Seresin lost his one and only wingwoman.

⭑.ᐟ frozen I @/ohtobeleah

Jake is so intoxicated he forgets he played a life-threatening prank on you. Leaving you to freeze, for hours.

⭑.ᐟ request I @/ohtobeleah

You and Hangman sneaking around behind everyone’s back.

⭑.ᐟ cuckhold I @/ohtobeleah

⭑.ᐟ request I @/ohtobeleah

⭑.ᐟ sign of the times pt2 pt3 pt4 pt5 pt6 pt7 I @se7entyrell

You're destined to die in Jake Seresin's arms. In every life, in every iteration, it's inescapable. Whether you loathe, or love each other, each ending stays the same. But what if it doesn't have to?

⭑.ᐟ good in bed I @honkytonk-hangman

Jake has made it crystal clear to you that you're only friends with benefits, so why did he go and delete your dating apps?

⭑.ᐟ line of sight pt2 pt3 pt4 I @/honkytonk-hangman

You're almost certain that Jake Seresin could care less about you, that is, until you're in a tight spot and the one guy you assume will hang you out to dry, instead comes to your rescue.

⭑.ᐟ they all know, he’s in love with you I @hangmanssunnies

From the night you first set eyes on Jake “Hangman” Seresin, and went home with him from the bar, you knew that there wasn’t ever going to be anything serious between you two. You just wish you could figure out why he keeps acting the opposite, and everyone thinks you are together.

⭑.ᐟ fair game I @sunlightmurdock

Bradley has been being a shitty boyfriend. His girl isn’t happy. In Jake’s eyes, that means she’s fair game.

⭑.ᐟ nothing but a gentleman I @simpforrooster

jake is obsessed with you. you eat it up. you’re obsessed with his obsession. but also with him.

⭑.ᐟ touch me, i’m sick I @ohcaptains

it’s always been easy to resist hangman’s charm – until one lonely night, when it becomes the hardest task you’ve ever had to complete. 

⭑.ᐟ there’s a honey I @bussyslayer333

3 times your aunt penny sees herself and maverick in your relationship with jake and 1 time she doesn’t.

⭑.ᐟ feels like home I @crossskylinesandcontrails

It all started with a care package. What began as a few thoughtful letters quickly unraveled into something deeper between two friends.

⭑.ᐟ this isn’t what it looks like I @phoenixsbby

Hangman is totally, 100% over his ex … he just needs a fake girlfriend to prove it.

⭑.ᐟ it’s not me, it’s you I @/phoenixsbby

your ex is back in town and that might be the kick in the ass Hangman needs to change the parameters of your situationship.

⭑.ᐟ the thing about forever I @/phoenixsbby

your casual relationship with Hangman can’t stay casual forever, especially when your heart isn’t the only one you have to protect

⭑.ᐟ baby, you down? I @softspiderling

5 times Bradley was blissfully unaware of who you’re dating and the 1 time he wasn’t

⭑.ᐟ cruel existence I @/softspiderling

you get hurt at work and Jake spirals

⭑.ᐟ my darlin’ I @mydarlingrose

when the daggers are spontaneously relocated in Texas in for a mission and have no where to stay, Jake lets them stay at his place and discover Jake has been keeping a secret from them for a very long time

⭑.ᐟ the beanery I @callsign-peach

jake goes from drinking the base’s stale coffee to bringing in cups from the cafe down the road from the hard deck, and the dagger squad is determined to find out why

⭑.ᐟ just friends I @say-al0e

Everyone seems to think you’re Jake Seresin’s girl. It’s easier than explaining to them that you’re just friends with benefits. But that arrangement doesn’t seem to be working for either of you anymore.

⭑.ᐟ opposites attract pt2 I @topguncortez

how can Hangman, cocky, arrogant Hangman fall in love with a girl who is so different than him and raise a family completely opposite of him.

⭑.ᐟ miscalculation pt2 I @mrsbbradshaw

Instead of Hangman saving both Maverick and Rooster, it was her. But at what cost ?

⭑.ᐟ husband? never heard of him I @tw1sters

When Jake stumbles into your office attempting to flirt with you, all you can do is humor the fact that your husband seems to have forgotten you.

⭑.ᐟ home life I @angelbby555

Jake acts two different ways. An asshole at work, and a caring husband at home.

⭑.ᐟ you left me no choice but to stay forever I @sunderlust

you and jake have been best friends for years and eventually he becomes the love of your life - which makes it that much harder to cope when he starts pulling away with no explanation

⭑.ᐟ he did what? I @lulunothulu

When your boyfriend cheats on you, Jake can’t help but want to rip his head off. Because how could that fucker cheat on the most perfect girl he’s ever met?

⭑.ᐟ touch and go I @seresinhangmanjake

You and Jake had been sleeping together for months, and as sure as you were of your feelings for him, you were unsure of his for you. He, however, certainly knew how he felt about you, and after you decide to go on a long trip without telling him, he lets you know just exactly what’s on his mind.

⭑.ᐟ unexpected I @littleenglishfangirl

⭑.ᐟ being the gross couple hcs I @munsster

☆ marry me I @theealbatross

The 3 times Sebastian thought about marrying you and the 1 time he asked.

☆ fight the alchemy I @/theealbatross

Garreth asks why Sebastian isn’t dating you. Sebastian spirals.

☆ i love you, it’s ruining my life I @/theealbatross

Sebastian has the worst insomnia known to man and you are not dating him.

☆ never not been mine I @/theealbatross

Everyone wonders if you and Sebastian are together. Sebastian wonders when will everyone mind their own business.

☆ a habit to kick, an age old cure I @/theealbatross

you and Sebastian are now strangers but at your most vulnerable moment he picks up the pieces. only he knows. only he can.

☆ fever (what a lovely way to burn) I @shadowtriovibes

"since you saved Sebastian from Azkaban, he has met you in the common room every morning and you have gone to breakfast together. One morning he isn't there so you go to his room looking for him to find him in bed, poorly.”

☆ request I @/shadowtriovibes

Eric Northcott is relentlessly pursuing you, so Sebastian offers to act as your heroic boyfriend to get him off your back

☆ break a sweat part 2 part 3 part 4 I @/shadowtriovibes

sebastian makes the house quidditch team after training all summer. before his first match, you let him talk you into a bet over its outcome that will in all likelihood ruin your friendship. (merlin, you sure hope it does.)

☆ mind if i move in closer? I @/shadowtriovibes

☆ it’s a sign of the times part 2 I @/shadowtriovibes

Rivals-to-lovers Sebastian and MC use a Time-Turner to travel to the future with Ominis in search for a cure for Anne. Instead they find a girl who's the spitting image of MC trying to sneak into the Restricted Section in the 1910s, only she has freckles like Sebastian

☆ fissured composure I @anto-pops

After watching you hold your own against a handsy classmate, Sebastian is feeling particularly needy and steals you away to the Undercroft to show you just how worked up your right hook got him.

☆ possessive touch I @/anto-pops

Sebastian has never been the sharing sort. He was happy to loan people notes or quills, maybe even the occasional book from the Restricted Section. But not you. Never you.

☆ sudsy confessions I @/anto-pops

Sebastian confessing his long-harbored love for you while you’re naked in a bathtub.

☆ request I @/anto-pops

☆ unspoken attraction I @arthenaa

The girls and you have a talk on who they'll date amongst the students in Hogwarts. No one mentions Sebastian despite being deemed the most handsome in your year. You wonder why?

☆ jealously, jealousy I @awkwardauthorwrites

☆ i think he knows I @/awkwardauthorwrites

Sebastian helps Y/N with an interesting request

☆ violets and verbena I @/awkwardauthorwrites

Two years have passed since the events in Hogwarts Legacy, in which Y/N has drifted away from Sebastian. What happens when she has to spend some time in the hospital wing and he comes to visit?

☆ in the middle part 2 I @/awkwardauthorwrites

After a few months of knowing the reader the boys suddenly realise one day they are falling in love with the reader and start to become a bit bitter towards each other and very jealous if another guy gives her attention.

☆ wildest dreams part 2 part 3 I @/awkwardauthorwrites

Ten years have passed since the events of Hogwarts Legacy and Y/N is invited back as part of a reunion to celebrate.

☆ diesel is desire I @wttcsms

sebastian sallow is a good friend. so good, in fact, that when you find yourself under the ungodly influence of a lust potion, he's willing to help give you some relief.

☆ trust fall I @fairytalesandlegacies

Sebastian Sallow teaches you how to fight against the Imperius Curse late one night, and in the process, some long-kept secrets are revealed.

☆ i need you I @ravenelyx

Sebastian has different ways of dealing with being hurt. One of them is burying his face in your chest while you cuddle him

☆ who do you smell? I @roarieluz

Sebastian Sallow has had a crush on Y/N for a while now, this isn't news to him but when a strong batch of amortentia is made for potions class it is hard to keep his mind clear of anything that isn't about you and what he wants to do to you.

☆ the night shift part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 I @writing-intheundercroft

You're the lead healer in the St. Mungo's intensive care unit, and a painfully familiar face ends up in your ward.

☆ a long time coming I @undergaunts

aka three times Sebastian is a flirt, one time he gets called out on it, and one time he finally does something about it.

☆ pining in potions class I @festivalsofmargot

Sebastian Sallow is forming a huge crush on you, and it’s hitting him all at once in a very annoying way. Something as simple as not being partnered with you in potions class eats away at him.

☆ pretty thoughts part 2 I @/festivalsofmargot

Sebastian is down bad for you, my dear reader. But a lot of overthinking on your part makes you blind to it. So, his only option is to keep chasing after you.

☆ a worrisome box of chocolates I @matchavellichor

☆ you look better in green part 2 I @fierymiasma

In which Sebastian sees the new transfer student wearing someone else’s scarf and proceeds to absolutely lose it.

☆ snow, scarves, and schemes I @spaceyaceface

Y/N is sick of Leander Prewett trying to court her. Luckily, she has a best friend named Sebastian Sallow who would love to help put an end to it. They devise a plan to pretend to court up until the Yule Ball. Should be simple, right? If only. 

☆ the one who stayed I @talesofesther

For a moment, Sebastian thought he lost you, and now the guilt for what happened is eating away at him.

☆ the winner takes all I @justauthoring

in which, leander prewett is a prick and sebastian shows him not mess with his girl.

☆ bludgered I @slytherizz

Sebastian never really knew what his friend saw in Isaac Cooper but he never questioned it - he made his friend happy. That is until a Quidditch match goes quickly awry and he realises his feelings for her may go far deeper than simple friendship.

☆ between the two of you I @cuffmeinblack

Rewriting of the events of the Shadow of the Study/Discovery quests.

☆ i crumble completely (when you cry) I @atlabeth

there's only one way to get into salazar slytherin's scriptorium.

☆ right where you left me I @anomalyaly

You died. Sebastian secretly had a portrait of you commissioned.

☆ in the shadow of the mountain I @ellecdc

fed up with Sebastian. After admitting he "shouldn't have acted so bitterly about your goblin friend", you expect him to be in better spirits on your next quest. He keeps putting the both of you in danger, and you've had it.

☆ i remember I @whizzing-fizzbee

You died during your seventh year at Hogwarts before you could tell your best friend, Sebastian Sallow, how much you loved him. But when he discovers a box of your pensieve memories, he learns the comforting, yet cruel truth.