Jace’s Wife

Around you, around his family, around Cregan, he let himself be silly. Comfortable enough to laugh too loud, to make terrible puns, to drop the careful posture he wore everywhere else like a second skin. But put him in a room full of strangers, professors, classmates who didn't know him, and something in him straightened. He didn't try for it. It simply happened, an easy authority that settled over his shoulders the moment he had to command attention, and people followed him without quite knowing why. It was strange, watching it happen, watching the boy who'd once gotten the hiccups laughing too hard at his own joke transform into someone rooms listened to. He was gifted, academically and otherwise.

In public, he was much more reserved but behind closed doors he was clingy, almost embarrassingly so, hands always finding you, pulling you into his space like proximity was a need rather than a want. But in a crowd, he kept himself in check. A hand at the small of your back, light, barely there, just enough to know where you were. Eyes that found you across a room without ever seeming to search. He called you things like my love and pretty and sweetheart, old-fashioned words that should have sounded ridiculous from a twenty-one-year-old and instead sounded like exactly who he was.

However, all of that, every careful inch of composure, came apart entirely the moment alcohol entered his bloodstream.

Which was how you found yourself, well past midnight, driving to whatever frat party Jace had decided was worth celebrating something at. He'd texted you about it hours earlier, cheerful and full of exclamation points. It was nearing one in the morning when your phone rang instead, and Cregan's voice came through thick and slurred, struggling to get a coherent sentence out. You pieced together, between his stumbling apologies, that Jace was completely wasted, that he'd thrown up at least four times, and that someone needed to come get him before he found a way to make it worse.

You didn't bother changing. Pajamas stayed on, jacket thrown over them, keys in hand before you'd even fully processed being awake. Cregan, bless his drunk heart, had sent the location, and you followed it with grim focus of someone running on four hours of sleep and pure spite.

The smell hit you first, stepping through the door. Beer gone warm, sweat, the cloying sweetness of spilled mixers soaking into carpet. You scanned the crowd and found him almost immediately, because Jace was never hard to find. He was cornered near the kitchen by a cluster of girls clearly trying their luck, all of it visibly not working. He had that glassy, unfocused look of someone several drinks past good decisions, swaying slightly on his feet, oblivious to the attention angled his way.

Then he spotted you, and his whole face cracked open into the cheesiest, most lopsided grin you'd ever seen on him.

"Sweetheart!" He said it far too loud, pushing past the girls without a second look, stumbling into a hug that landed his entire body weight against you. You staggered, catching him and catching the smell of liquor radiating off him in waves. "Was just telling these lovely ladies all about you."

You huffed out a laugh despite yourself, shaking your head at the sheer obliviousness of him. "I'm sure you were."

Moving him was a TASK. He wasn't a particularly big guy, but a fully limp, fully affectionate drunk person fights you in ways you don't expect, leaning the wrong direction at the wrong moment, going boneless when you needed him to walk. You got one of his arm slung over your shoulders and your other around his waist, half walking, half hauling him through the crowd, until by some miracle you found Cregan swaying near the drinks table with a grin that suggested he wasn't far behind Jace in the wasted department.

"Got him," you told him. "Get yourself home safe, okay?"

He gave you a thumbs up so emphatic he nearly lost his balance, and you left him to it.

The drive back was its own kind of nightmare. Jace groaned twice, hand flying to his stomach, and twice you white-knuckled the wheel and informed him with real menace that if he threw up in your car, he would be the one cleaning it up with his tongue. He let out a wounded little whine at that, pitiful enough that you almost felt bad. Almost.

Getting him into your apartment was a battle you were not prepared for. You peeled both your jackets off in the hallway, which took twice as long as it should have because he kept trying to hug you mid-task, arms looping around you at the worst possible moments. By the time you got him into the bathroom and onto the closed toilet seat, you were sweating despite the late hour and the chill outside.

That was when the real clinginess set in. He wrapped both arms around your waist, more or less, burying himself into your chest like he'd decided this was simply where he lived now and no further discussion was needed.

"Jace." You tried, gently, to pry him off. "I need to actually look at you."

"No." Muffled, into your shirt. "Comfy."

"You're going to suffocate."

"Worth it."

You sighed, caught somewhere between exasperated and helplessly fond, and gave up trying to separate him entirely. Instead you worked around him, easing one of his hands to your lower waist and the other to the side of your hip so you had at least one arm free, his face still mashed against you, pouting like this was some great personal injustice. With your free hand you rubbed slow circles into his back and the nape of his neck, feeling some of the tension bleed out of him, then reached over to the sink for a washcloth, wetting it and wiping his face as best you could from the awkward angle he'd trapped you in.

You found his toothbrush in the cup by the sink, the one he kept here for nights exactly like this one, and through a mixture of bargaining and outright bribery you got him to brush his teeth. You were not waking up to vomit breath. Some lines could not be crossed, drunk boyfriend or not.

Getting him changed was, against all odds, the hardest part of the whole ordeal. He fussed over the shirt, fussed over which side of the bed was his even though it was always the same side, fussed over whether you were going to leave the room for even a second. You already knew, with total certainty, that he was going to be mortified by all of this come morning.

Finally, getting him hydrated with water, sheets pulled back, you steered him toward the bed. He kept talking the entire time, a stream of half-formed sentences about the party, about Cregan, about how pretty you looked even half asleep with your hair a mess, until you threatened, with seriousness, to revoke his cuddle privileges if he didn't stop.

He gasped, scandalized, mouth falling open like you'd suggested something unforgivable. Then he went quiet, immediately, and curled an arm around your waist as you climbed in beside him, his face tucking into your shoulder with a small, satisfied sound. His breathing evened into sleep within minutes.

You followed soon after.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Morning came too early, sunlight slanting through the curtains, and you woke to Jace already awake beside you, propped up on one elbow and watching you with an expression that had nothing energetic about it at all.

"Hey." His voice was rough, quiet, none of last night's volume left in it. "So. Cregan filled me in. On, uh. Most of it."

You stretched, blinking the sleep out of your eyes. "Did he mention the part where you tried to make out with my chest?"

Jace groaned and dropped his face into the pillow. "Please tell me that's an exaggeration."

"It's not."

He peeked up at you, wincing, guilt written plain across his face. "I am so sorry. You had to drive across town at one in the morning because I couldn't control my own liquor intake, and then I made you deal with- what- all of that… the bathroom and the awkward toothbrush. I remember bits of it and I want to disappear."

You softened, reaching over to brush his hair back from his forehead. "You did whine a lot about the toothbrush."

"I'm begging you to stop telling me things."

"You also threatened to cry when I said I'd take cuddles away."

"Okay, we're done, this conversation is over." He buried his face back into the pillow, ears visibly red, and you laughed, the sound surprising even yourself this early in the morning.

"Hey." You tugged at his shoulder until he looked at you again, all that careful composure from last night nowhere to be found, just him, sheepish and soft and clearly still rattled by his own behavior. "It's okay. You're allowed one disaster night. Just maybe pace yourself next time."

"I'll never drink again."

"You said that after the New Year's thing too."

"I mean it this time." He reached for your hand, lacing his fingers through yours, the gesture quiet and grateful in a way that said more than another apology could have. "Thank you. For coming to get me and not leaving me there to choke on my own vomit or something."

"I'd never," you said honestly, squeezing his hand.

He pulled you closer, tucking you against his chest and pressed a kiss to the top of your head. "I really am sorry. About all of it."

"I know." You let yourself relax into him, the morning light warm and the whole ridiculous night already softening into something you'd tease him about for weeks. "You can make it up to me with breakfast."

He groaned, but he was smiling when he said it. "Anything you want, my love."

Then the door opened, and a different kind of warmth entered the room.

Your mother couldn't be there, so the responsibility of getting you home safely had fallen, quite naturally, onto your boyfriend. Jacaerys had shown up the moment you were free from the surgery, dark curls slightly damp from the rain outside, jacket still smelling faintly of the cold. But when he stepped through the doorway and your eyes landed on him, there was no flicker of recognition, only a slow, owlish blink.

You stared at him with your mouth hanging open around the gauze, a thin line of drool catching at the corner of your lip, utterly unbothered by your own state.

A laugh broke out of him before he could stop it. "Hey pretty," he murmured, leaning down to poke gently at your stuffed cheek. "You look like a chipmunk hiding treats." You didn't respond, too busy watching the lights flicker, while he turned his attention to the doctor rattling off post-op instructions: soft foods only, pain medication every six hours, no straws, call if there's excessive swelling. Jace nodded along, committing it all to memory the way he committed everything that mattered to you to memory, quietly and completely.

It wasn't until you were buckled into the passenger seat, the car humming low beneath you, that a single brain cell finally sparked to life.

Jace drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting against your knee, a habit he'd never quite admit to. You clutched a worn travel pillow to your chest like it was the only solid thing left in the world, blinking at him with wide, glassy eyes, trying very hard to figure out who, exactly, this devastatingly handsome stranger was.

"Hey-" you finally said, words slurring soft around the gauze. "Hey, pretty boy."

His mouth twitched. He glanced over, just for a second. "Yeah? You talking to me?"

"You're really pretty," you informed him, with the serious conviction of someone delivering important news. Your gaze tracked the line of his jaw like it was the most fascinating thing you'd ever seen. "But you gotta pull over. If my boyfriend Jace finds out a supermodel is driving me home, he's gonna get so sad. He has the prettiest eyes. I can't make him sad."

Something warm cracked open in his chest, equal parts tenderness and barely contained amusement. He decided, then and there, to see exactly how far this would go.

"Oh yeah?" he said, clearing his throat, eyes fixed dutifully on the road, the picture of an innocent stranger. "This Jace guy sounds like a lucky dude. He treat you well?"

You looked at him like he'd just insulted a national monument. "The best. He let me borrow his favorite hoodie. He’s super smart and caring. He makes me feel safe and seen and heard." Your voice dropped, almost reverent. "And he has these tiny curls right at the back of his neck. I like to twirl them when we watch movies."

His ears went hot. He had not, in fact, expected you to get that specific. "Is he now," he managed, voice a little strangled.

"Yes. So don't try anything, mister." You pointed a wobbling, accusatory finger at him, the threat losing most of its power when your attention scattered seconds later, caught entirely by a particularly interesting tree sliding past the window.

There was a beat of silence, and then, out of nothing, you said, "You know, I used to think he was gay."

That got his attention fast. "What- Why?"

"Yeah, he has this really cool friend, Cregan. I love Cregan too, but I thought I had no chance. Cregan is also pretty." You said this all with the breezy honesty of someone who had never once filtered a thought in her life. Jace opened his mouth, fully prepared to defend his honor against this slander, but you'd already moved on, eyes welling with sudden, mysterious tears because the tree that had just passed reminded you of something you couldn't quite name. He sat there, half laughing, half stunned into silence, completely unequipped to keep up with the loopy logic unspooling beside him.

By the time they reached his apartment, you'd transferred your loyalty fully to the concept of fidelity, informing him at every step up the stairs that you were taken, thank you very much, even as YOU were the one clung to his arm like it was the only thing keeping you upright and it was.

He settled you onto the couch, propped against a small mountain of pillows, and disappeared into the kitchen for two minutes, just long enough to grab the ice packs and your liquid pain medication. He needs to make sure you’re taken care of. When he walked back into the living room, you looked up, and your whole face transformed.

Something in your brain finally clicked back into place. The pretty stranger from the car evaporated, and in his place stood the only person who'd ever mattered.

"Jace!" The gasp came out thick with loopy, dramatic tears, your eyes shining. "You're here. You saved me."

He set the ice packs down gently and lowered himself onto the edge of the couch, utterly endeared. "I'm here, sweetheart. I've been here the whole time."

You threw your arms around his neck, burying your face into his shoulder like you hadn't seen him in years instead of minutes. "The guy who drove me home was so sketchy, Jace. He kept trying to flirt with me. I told him I only love you. I told him about your hoodie."

He wrapped his arms around you fully, rubbing slow circles into your back, laughter shaking quietly through his chest as he pressed his face into your hair to hide it. "I heard all of it. You did a great job defending my honor. I'm very proud of you."

A pause. Then, suddenly urgent: "Is Rhaenyra here?"

He blinked. "What? No, we're at your apartment, not my mom's place."

Your face crumpled instantly, lower lip wobbling. "But I wanted the cookies. Your mom makes the best cookies. She's so lovely." A fresh wave of tears threatened, and Jace, slightly panicked and entirely charmed, reached for his phone before you could spiral further.

Rhaenyra picked up despite clearly being in the middle of something, her voice warm even through the distraction in the background. You snatched the phone from Jace's hand with surprising speed for someone who could barely sit upright, and launched into a slurred, heartfelt conversation that made his mother laugh more than once. She teased you gently, said something that made you giggle into the phone, and Jace, watching this whole exchange unfold, felt a small, ridiculous flicker of jealousy.

"Okay, that's enough, she's mine to tease," he said, leaning in to pry the phone back, pressing a quick goodbye to his mother before she could embarrass him further.

As the heavier wave of the pain medication finally pulled at your eyelids, Jace pressed the ice packs carefully against your swollen cheeks. You whined softly at the cold, pouting up at him with such genuine betrayal that he had to bite back another laugh. His eyes, though, stayed soft the entire time, unguarded in a way they rarely were with anyone else.

He leaned down and pressed a slow, careful kiss to your forehead.

"Sleep," he murmured against your skin. "I'll be right here when you wake up."

And he was. He made sure you were cared for. He also definitely recorded your tantrums and showed you later as you whined, asking his to delete them.

We all deserve a cutie patootie like Jace in our lives <3

You’d been out here for almost an hour.

The lounge chair was angled perfectly to catch the best light, and you'd put real thought into that. Towel flat beneath you. Sunscreen rubbed into every inch of skin you could reach. The pool caught the afternoon sun and reflected it back in broken flashes of light across the tile. By every possible measure, it was a perfect summer day.

The Velaryon family had left for Essos three days ago. Some long trip Rhaenyra had put together, ruins and coastlines, their mother insisting everyone needed fresh air. Jace had gotten the call about his postponed finals the morning they were supposed to leave, and you’d watched the whole thing from the kitchen doorway, still holding your coffee (you practically lived here). His mom’s face. His quiet, steady I’ll be fine, I promise. The way he’d kissed her cheek and then, once the elevator doors had shut, turned around to look at you with a grin so wide and open it made something warm bloom in your chest.

Just us, he'd said, like he was handing you something.

And it had been, genuinely. Three days of the penthouse entirely to yourselves. You'd cooked terribly and laughed about it. You'd watched movies tangled together on the couch until way past midnight. You'd slept in and ordered takeout and just moved through the space without thinking too hard, without that low hum of being a guest in someone else's home. It felt easy. It felt, briefly and sweetly, like yours.

Today, you'd decided to make the most of the pool.

Which had led, through a very logical and completely reasonable chain of thought, to your current situation.

Okay, the swimsuit top coming off had been a choice, yes. But a justified one. You were fifty floors up. The terrace was private. The nearest building of any real height was blocks away, its windows too far to matter. You’d thought it through. And more than that, there was the simple, stubborn fact that you were not going back to university with weird pale stripes across your shoulders from this top.

So off it came. You tucked it under the chair, stretched your arms up near your head, and let the sun get to work.

You were nearly asleep when the shadow fell over you.

The warmth on your skin slowly faded, and you frowned without fully waking up. The sun didn't just disappear. You shifted, confused, and then you opened your eyes and found Jacaerys Velaryon standing directly above you with his arms crossed and an expression that was nothing short of accusatory.

You blinked up at him. Sunspots floated at the edges of your vision.

"What?" you said. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

He held the look for a moment, jaw tight, brow furrowed, clearly sitting on a whole speech. Then: "You know why I'm staring."

You genuinely thought about it and concluded that you didn't, or at least that you didn't understand why it was a problem. You'd been very reasonable about this.

"Jace," you said patiently, "you've seen me naked. Multiple times."

"That's not-" he started, then let out a breath. "Obviously. Obviously that's not the issue- Obviously I-" another pause, "that's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

He gestured at the sky, at the city, at the general idea of the world existing around you. "What if someone sees?"

You stared at him.

Then you looked, very slowly, at the terrace railing. At the city spread out below it, hazy in the afternoon heat. At the sheer drop of fifty floors of glass and steel between you and street level.

"We are," you said, "fifty floors up."

"I'm aware."

"Who," you continued, "is going to see me, Jace?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it. You watched him search for solid ground. And then, with the energy of someone who had just found exactly what they needed: "The birds."

The word just sat there in the air between you.

You pushed up slightly to look at him properly. "...The birds."

"The pigeons-" He said it with growing confidence, like this was obvious and you were just not keeping up. "You know the theory- they're not real- they're surveillance- the government."

"Jacaerys."

"Basically drones with little cameras inside them."

"Jacaerys”

He stopped. He had the decency to look, for just a second, like he knew exactly how that sounded.

"The pigeons," you said slowly, "have cameras in them."

"It's a theory," he said, quieter now. "A widely circulated one."

You let your head fall back against the cushion. The sun was still there, still warm, still perfectly placed, and you wanted very badly to go back to enjoying it. "Jaaace," you said, letting your voice go soft and drawn out and whiney, the way you knew worked on him, "please.” I don't want tan lines."

You heard him breathe out. The sound of someone whose argument was losing to the simple fact of you.

Then there was the sound of fabric.

You opened your eyes.

Jace had slipped his shirt off, the light linen button-down he'd been wearing all morning, pale blue stripes, soft from too many washes, and was just holding it loose in one hand like it was nothing. The afternoon sun hit his shoulders and you stared at him for a full second before it clicked and annoyance rose quickly to fill the space.

"Excuse me," you said flatly. "You can just stand there like that with your nipps, but I can't?"

The corner of his mouth moved. He was trying not to smile and losing. "It's different."

"How is it different."

"I'm a man-"

"That," you said, "is genuinely not the defense you think it is."

He looked at you. You looked at him. The afternoon sat warm and still around you, and then he laughed and whatever tension was left between you just melted into something softer.

"You're impossible," he said.

"You love it," you said, and turned back toward the sun.

You heard him move, footsteps on the tile, the shift of his weight, and you were already closing your eyes again when the shirt came down over your chest like a curtain, laid across you gently. Then the chair dipped as he settled beside you and tucked his head underneath the fabric, right against you.

You went completely still.

Then you looked down.

Jace was lying with his head on your chest, the shirt draped loosely over both of you, looking up at you, actually looking up at you, with an expression that had no teasing left in it. Just dark and steady and focused, the way he got when he stopped performing and just was.

"Hi," you said, a little weakly.

His lips curved. He pressed a slow kiss to the center of your chest, eyes still on yours, and then his hands found your waist, warm and sure, fingers curling into your sides like he just needed something to hold onto. The warmth of it spread through you like something poured in. "I'm trying," he said quietly, "to be a gentleman." He kissed a little lower, hands squeezing gently at your waist, and you gasped softly, your hands coming up on their own to rest on his shoulders, grounding yourself against him. He looked up at you through his lashes when you did that, something satisfied flickering behind his eyes. "You make it so damn hard."

Your fingers pressed lightly into his shoulders. Your voice came out much softer than you meant it to. "Jace."

His hands tightened just slightly at your sides, thumbs tracing slow, idle shapes against your skin, like he was in absolutely no hurry. "This view," he said, with complete and total seriousness, still holding your gaze, "is for my eyes only even if we are 50 floors above."

He held it for one more second. Then he winked.

And before you'd even processed that, the wink, the words, the shift in his face, he was already moving, and you had about one second to make a sound before you were up, lifted and thrown over his shoulder like it cost him nothing at all, the world suddenly sideways, your hands grabbing onto him out of pure instinct.

"Jace!" You held on tight, the city somewhere dizzyingly far below. "What the hell, put me down."

"I don't think so." He walked back toward the terrace door like nothing. It slid open and the cool air of the penthouse rushed over your sun-warm skin.

"Jace- I swear to god."

"There's something else," he said, easy and conversational, moving down the hall, "that I prefer to keep for my eyes only." He said kissing the side of your hip.

"You can't just- that's not- oh my god."

"You were saying something about tan lines?"

"Jacaerys Velaryon!" you said, as sternly as anyone could manage while hanging upside down over someone's shoulder, "you are such an ass."

"You love it," he said, and you could hear the smile.

You pressed your lips together hard against the one threatening to take over your face.

The shirt was somewhere on the floor of the hallway. Your top was still out on the terrace by the chair.

Let’s just say, getting a perfect tan was not on your list that day.

You had been staring at the same spreadsheet for the better part of forty-five minutes, and in that time, you had accomplished precisely three things: checking the formulas, rechecking the formulas, and arriving at the slow, creeping suspicion that you had chosen the wrong degree.

The university library hummed quietly around you, the soft percussion of keyboards, the occasional rustle of pages, the distant thud of a textbook someone had given up on and none of it was helping. Your eyes kept dragging back to the same column of numbers that stubbornly refused to cooperate, as though they had developed personalities and were doing this specifically to you.

One job, you thought, pressing two fingers to the bridge of your nose. You have one job.

The spreadsheet did not care.

You leaned back in your chair until it creaked in protest and stared at the library ceiling, briefly entertaining the fantasy of throwing your laptop off the business faculty roof. Or yourself. Whichever was more efficient.

A chair scraped against the floor.

The sound was close, directly across from you and was accompanied by the energy of someone who had absolutely no awareness that other people in this building were suffering. You looked up.

Jacaerys sat down.

He was wearing that smile. The annoyingly bright one, the one that had absolutely no business existing on someone who had just interrupted your academic crisis, the one that made his eyes crinkle at the corners in a way that you found deeply inconvenient given the current circumstances. His baseball cap was pulled low, and he’d dropped his bag onto the seat beside him with the casual ease, clearly his afternoon was going extremely well.

Yours was not.

You stared at him.

He stared back.

“I need your help,” he said breaking the staring contest. You blinked, waiting for context.

“…With?”

He held your gaze with the gravity as if he was about to announce a news of natural disaster.

“It’s about my hair.”

Silence.

You stared at him for a long moment. The spreadsheet still hadn’t balanced. The library still hummed.

Somewhere nearby, someone was highlighting something with aggressive enthusiasm.

“…Your hair,” you repeated.

He nodded.

You sighed and let your head tip back again.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

For even context, you had to go back three and a half months.

Three months ago, Jacaerys Velaryon had kissed you goodbye at the airport with his hair the way it always was: cropped short, a mullet at the end with the barest suggestion of a wave at the crown, the kind of low-maintenance cut that required approximately zero thought. He’d left for a summer internship at Winterfell S-Corp, the sprawling industrial giant run out of the North by the Stark family, a company that had made its fortune in wall defence systems, industrial fencing, and infrastructure engineered to survive centuries of arctic storms and the kind of winters that made King’s Landing people genuinely reconsider their relationship with the concept of cold.

You, meanwhile, had gone south. Tyrell Luxury Group had accepted you into their Maison Tyrell couture division, and for three months you had lived inside a world of silk and structured lighting, watching hairstylists perform what could only be described as amazing work on the heads of runway models. You’d learned things, even things about fashion completely irrelevant to your degree.

Three months.

Different cities. Different climates. Different worlds, almost.

Barely any FaceTimes because the hours were genuinely cruel on both ends, you were often busy creating power points or coordinating things between people at midnight while he was already halfway through a morning site briefing. Mostly texts. Voice notes when you missed each other enough to want the sound of the other person’s voice without the worry of a call.

And then, finally! you’d reunited.

Except.

Jace no longer had the hair he’d left with.

Winterfell, apparently, had other plans. The northern cold air, clean, relentlessly damp northern air had done something to him in the intervening months. Where there had once been a short, manageable cut, there were now curls. Proper curls. Shoulder-length, loose-but-defined, soft-looking curls that caught light in a way that seemed almost deliberate.

The cold climate had transformed his hair into something that belonged in a different century or a fantasy novel, maybe, the kind where people rode dragons and looked devastatingly good doing it. (😏)

You had become, immediately and without shame, completely obsessed with his hair.

It had started the afternoon he’d come back, when you’d reached up almost instinctively to touch one of the curls and felt it spring gently back against your fingers, and something in your brain had simply misfired in the best possible way. After that, your hand seemed to find its way into his hair every chance you got. Watching TV? Your fingers were working slow, idle patterns through the curls at his temple. Studying? One hand on your notes, one hand buried in the soft weight of his hair. Walking together? You weren’t entirely sure how you managed it, but somehow, with enough creative coordination, you found a way.

Jace never said a word about it.

Instead, he’d started investing excuses. Excuses to be horizontal on the sofa or when you were studying at the coffee table. Reasons to rest his head in your lap, or against your chest, his eyes drifting half-shut while you absentmindedly scratched behind his ears and massaged his scalp in slow, looping circles. He’d made a sound once, low and content, like a large cat who had worked out exactly where it wanted to be. You hadn’t teased him about it. It felt too soft for that.

It had become, quietly and without either of you naming it, his favourite kind of affection.

Unfortunately, King’s Landing air had opinions.

The city in summer was a humidity machine. You knew this. You’d grown up with it, the thick, wet air that settled on everything like a second skin, it made fabric cling and tempers shorten and hair do things hair was not supposed to do. It had apparently taken approximately two weeks to undo everything Winterfell had built.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Back in the library, Jace reached up and slowly removed his baseball cap.

You gasped.

It wasn’t a dramatic gasp. It was involuntary, something your body produces before your brain has time to intervene.

“…No.”

His face fell. “What?”

“You-” You pressed your lips together, hard, because the library had a noise policy and you were genuinely at risk of violating it. “You look like Dora the Explorer.”

Silence.

A long silence.

“…Didn’t realise it was that bad,” Jace said quietly.

The curls, his beautiful, Winterfell-blessed, soft and defined curls, had staged a coup. The King’s Landing humidity had gotten to them, and the result was a triangle. A perfect, enormous, fluffy triangle of frizz that began somewhere around his ears and expanded outward with a confidence that was almost impressive. It was not the romantic northern curl situation you had spent weeks running your fingers through. It was something else entirely.

“Hey.” He pointed at you, affronted, which was difficult to pull off with that hair but he managed. “What do you mean I look like Dora?”

You clapped both hands over your mouth.

The sound that escaped anyway earned you a sharp look from the student two tables over.

“I’m sorry,” you managed.

“You are absolutely not sorry.”

“I’m trying to be.”

“You failed.”

You dissolved anyway, shoulders shaking, the giggle fighting its way out despite every effort. There was something about the combination of his genuinely offended expression and the spectacular geometry of his hair that made containment impossible. He was so pretty, normally. The contrast was doing something to you.

“I look that bad?” he asked, and there was something almost plaintive under the indignation.

You nodded. “I still love you though.”

He sighed and dropped his forehead directly onto the table.

You watched him with fondness and residual laughter and with something warm underneath both of those things.

“This is tragic,” he announced, face down, voice muffled by the table.

You reached over and gently poked one of the frizzy curls. It didn’t spring back. It barely moved. That was the problem.

“You need a proper curly hair routine,” you said.

His head lifted. He looked at you like you’d said something in a foreign language.

“…A what?”

“A curly hair routine.”

“…There’s a routine?”

“Yes.”

“I thought hair was hair.”

The look you gave him communicated, as clearly as a look could, that this was perhaps the most incorrect thing he had ever said. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“There are routines. Multiple. Depending on curl type, porosity, climate-”

“Plural?”

“Very plural.”

His eyes widened slightly. He looked, for a moment, genuinely alarmed by the scope of this information. You thought of the hairstylist’s backstage at Maison Tyrell, the way they’d talked about curl care with the intensity of chemists and felt something like vindication on their behalf.

“I learned loads working backstage,” you said. “Trying to coordinate things backstage. I watched the hairstylists.”

“So, you know how to fix this.”

It wasn’t quite a question. His eyes had gone hopeful, and something about that expression, eager and a little helpless, so different from his usual composed self, made it very hard to say anything other than yes.

“I think so.”

His whole face changed. The bright smile returned, the one that made the library feel less fluorescent.

“Perfect.” He slapped both palms flat on the table.

“Let’s go.”

“…Go where?”

“Shopping.”

You blinked at him. Then at your spreadsheet. Then back at him.

“Jace,” you said carefully.

“What?”

“I have an accounting quiz tomorrow.”

“And?”

“I need to study.”

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest with an expression telling you that he is about to present a proposal he’s very pleased with.

“As the top student in our year,” he announced, “I shall tutor you.”

You narrowed your eyes.

“In exchange…” He pointed, dramatically, at his own head.

“You fix this.”

For a moment you just looked at him. The triangle of hair. The hopeful expression underneath it. The absolute audacity of the entire interaction.

Then you started laughing again, quickly muffled behind your hand, earning yourself a second sharp look from the student two tables over who was clearly having a worse afternoon than even you.

“I cannot believe,” you said, once you’d recovered, “that you are negotiating with your own girlfriend.”

He shrugged, entirely unrepentant. “It’s called business.”

“You’ve become insufferable.”

“I learned from the best.”

“…Who?”

“My mother.”

You snorted. You couldn’t help it. Rhaenyra Targaryen was, among many things, a formidably good negotiator. The resemblance was uncanny.

“Fair enough,” you said, and began closing your laptop.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

The Sephora on the high street was cool and white and smelled like overlapping perfumes that somehow managed not to cancel each other out. You stood in the hair care aisle with your notes app open like it was a battle plan because, in a sense, it was.

“Okay,” you said, scanning the list. “We need Gisou Honey Infused Leave-In Conditioner.”

Jace picked it off the shelf and dropped it into the basket without ceremony.

“Done.”

“Ouai Curl Crème.”

In it went.

“Pattern Beauty Curl Gel.”

Another toss.

“And-” You let yourself feel a small, private flicker of triumph. “Gisou Honey Infused Hair Oil.”

Basket complete. Mission accomplished.

Jace held the basket up and examined the growing collection of products thinking about a bill he hadn’t fully anticipated.

“…Is all of this strictly necessary?”

“Yes.”

“It feels expensive.”

“It is.”

A pause. “How expensive?”

You told him a rough estimate.

He absorbed this.

“Right.”

You looked at the basket again, and then a small, guilty feeling began assembling itself quietly in your chest. You’d approached this like it was your own bathroom, your own money, your own decision and it wasn’t.

“Actually,” you said.

Jace caught your expression immediately. He’d always been quick to read you. “What?”

“I feel bad.”

“For?”

“Making you buy all this. It’s a lot. And I just sort of- assumed.”

He looked at you for a moment. Then he reached into his back pocket taking out his wallet and produced a sleek black credit card with ease as if had never once thought about the number on a price tag which he probably didn’t considering his background.

“…Mother’s,” he said simply.

You stared at the card. Then at him.

“Must be fun,” you said, very pleasantly, “being born into nepotism.”

“HEY!”

A woman browsing dry shampoo three feet away turned to look.

“It’s true,” you said.

“I work hard.”

“I’m sure you do, Prince Jacaerys Velaryon.” You said in a teasing tone.

“I am not a prince.”

“You practically are.”

“I take genuine offence at your tone.”

“I take genuine offence at your bank account.”

He laughed so loud, the woman with the dry shampoo gave up and moved to the next aisle muttering about how kids these days are so disruptive.

“You are unbelievable,” he said, still laughing.

“And yet-” You smiled up at him, very sweetly. “You still date me.”

He looked at you. Something in his expression went soft before he could stop it.

“…Unfortunately,” he said.

“Liar.”

“Very unfortunately.”

“You’re smiling while you say that.”

“I know,” he said, and made no effort whatsoever to stop.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Rhaenyra’s penthouse was exactly what it always was: impeccably maintained, decorated in understated luxury that announced itself without trying, and carrying the faint, clean scent of whatever candle she kept burning in the entryway. You liked it here. It felt, in the way that certain places do, like somewhere that was just calm.

You emptied the shopping bags onto the kitchen island and were doing a mental inventory when something clicked.

“Shoot.”

Jace, who had been reading the back of the curl gel with more focus than he’d given most of his coursework this semester, looked over. “What?”

“I forgot my hairdryer.”

“…That’s all?”

“And my diffuser.”

He shrugged with the ease of someone for whom this was a solvable problem rather than a logistical crisis. “We’ll borrow Mum’s. Pretty sure she has those.”

“Are we allowed?”

“We’ll ask.”

The front door opened.

As if summoned by fate itself, in walked Rhaenyra Targaryen. She was still in her work clothes: a black suit, perfectly cut, and not a wrinkle on it despite what must have been a full day inside it. Her laptop bag was over one shoulder. Behind her, Joffrey trailed in from school with his bag already halfway off his shoulder, heading for his room after giving Jace and you a quick greeting. He must have some activity planned for himself.

“Hello, you two,” Rhaenyra said.

“Hi, Mum.”

“Hello!” You said enthusiastically.

She paused, looking between the two of you with a suspicious expression she reserved for moments when something was clearly afoot, but she hadn’t yet worked out what. “What are you plotting?”

“Nothing,” you both said in sync.

She looked at you. Then at Jace. Then at the collection of hair products arranged on her kitchen island.

“I don’t believe either of you.”

Jace scratched the back of his neck, a tell you’d learned to recognise months ago. “Can we borrow your hairdryer?”

“…My what?”

“And the diffuser attachment.”

A beat of silence. Rhaenyra’s gaze moved, slowly and deliberately, between the two of you. She was the kind of person who could communicate volumes without raising her voice, and what she was currently communicating was something in the vicinity of I raised this child, and I know exactly what that face means.

“Should I ask why?”

“No,” Jace said.

“…That’s somehow more concerning.”

You smiled your most innocent smile. “It’s for science.” A brief, long-suffering pause.

“I regret asking,” she said. Then, after another moment of studying you both: “Fine.” She pointed toward the stairs. “But if I come home to a flooded bathroom-”

“It won’t be.”

“Or my hairdryer broken-”

“It won’t be. I’ll handle it” you said quickly.

“Or glitter anywhere-”

“There isn’t glitter.”

“There had better not be.”

She moved toward the door again. She had only returned to drop Joffery back home after school since the driver had to leave for an emergency but then paused, glancing back once more at her son’s hair, the triangle situation, now freed from the baseball cap and said nothing, though her expression said quite a lot.

Joffrey had already made it most of the way down the hall. “You two are weird,” he called, without turning around.

“We know!” both of you answered, at exactly the same moment.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Jace’s room was as tidy as it could be. He hated making a mess and sometimes you teased him about perhaps having an OCD with how he takes pleasure in cleaning his room. His books stacked with a loose intention of order, a desk that looked like it had seen serious work, curtains that let in the late afternoon light in long, golden bars that fell across the floor.

You laid everything out across the desk with the methodical care of someone who was, in this specific domain, taking this extremely seriously. Leave-in conditioner. Curl crème. Curl gel. Hair oil. Diffuser. Borrowed hairdryer. Small microfibre towel. Everything in order.

“Right.” You clapped your hands together. Jace looked up from where he’d been reading a product label again, apparently trying to extract information that wasn’t there. “First things first.”

“What?”

“We need to wash your hair properly. No shortcuts, it needs to be clean for any of this to work.”

“Okay.”

You looked at him. He looked back.

“So,” you said. “Take your shirt off.”

A slow, wicked grin spread across his face like sunrise. “…Yes, ma’am.”

You recognised that expression. You’d seen it before. You pointed at him immediately. “Don’t. You. Dare.”

He stepped closer. He was feeling playful, leaning down until there were only a few inches of air between your faces, his curls (the chaotic ones, the tragic ones) falling forward slightly.

“If you wanted to get me shirtless,” he said, with great deliberation, “you could’ve simply asked.”

You smacked his arm, which made him laugh, and then you physically pushed him in the direction of the bathroom. “Shut up.”

“I was being helpful.”

“You were being annoying.”

“Same thing, sometimes.”

“Not even close.”

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

The sink situation was, in retrospect, predictable.

You’d known it would be a little awkward, washing someone’s hair over a bathroom sink required a certain amount of spatial negotiation but you hadn’t quite accounted for Jace’s general inability to remain still when he found something funny, or his apparent talent for misdirecting water in every direction that wasn’t the drain.

Your white shirt took a direct hit.

You felt it happen. That cold spreading bloom of water soaking through the fabric. You looked down. Then up. Jace had frozen, the guilty expression because he knew exactly what he’d done written plainly across his face.

“…Oops,” he said.

You looked down again. Back up. Slowly folded your arms.

“So,” you said, in a mockingly pleasant tone.

He waited for you to continue.

“If you wanted to see my bra,” you said, “you could’ve simply asked.”

The pink that climbed up the sides of his neck to his ears happened so fast it almost startled him. “I- that’s not-” He pressed his lips together.

Then he laughed, helpless and real and embarrassed, and the sound of it bounced off the bathroom tiles.

“Now you’re using my lines,” he managed.

“I know,” you said, noting in your mind to change your shirt.

The actual process, once it began in earnest, had a quiet rhythm to it.

Jace sat on the low stool you’d dragged in from the corner of his room, which was barely adequate, but he folded himself into without complaint. You worked the leave-in conditioner through his damp hair carefully, section by section, making sure it was evenly distributed before handing him the bottle.

“Work this through while I change,” you said.

He glanced at the bottle, then at you. “You trust me?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“About sixty percent.”

His expression was deeply offended. “I deserve at least seventy.”

“Prove it and we’ll renegotiate,” you said, and disappeared into the bedroom to swap the wet shirt for one of his oversized T-shirts that lived on a hook behind his door. It smelled like him. You spent approximately no time thinking about that.

When you came back, the leave-in conditioner had, in fact, been distributed with reasonable competence.

“…I’m impressed.”

“I follow instructions.”

“Occasionally.”

He opened his mouth. You talked over him, squeezing the curl crème between your palms and beginning to work it through.

It happened almost immediately. The moment the product touched his damp hair, and you began scrunching, gathering sections upward, coaxing them into shape, the curls began responding. Coming back. Reforming with a soft, almost indignant energy, as though they’d always been there and the humidity had merely been an interruption.

Jace caught it in the mirror.

“…Wait.”

“There they are,” you said quietly.

“I can see them.”

There was something in his voice that wasn’t quite awe but was adjacent to it. You didn’t comment on it, just kept working, methodically and with more care than the task required, because these were his curls and you had spent two weeks deciding you were very attached to them.

The hair or curl gel came next. You demonstrated first by taking a small section, working the product through from root to tip, then coiling the curl gently around your finger.

“See how that defines it?”

He watched, then tried.

“Like this?”

“Almost but make it looser. Let the curl do the work.”

He adjusted. The curl sprang gently into shape.

Something in his expression shifted, he focused with concentration, learning a new thing.

You worked in companionable quiet for a while. Then—

“My hands are tired.”

“Hush.”

“This takes a long time.”

“Curly hair requires patience.”

“No one told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“I’ve made a terrible decision.”

“You asked for this.”

“You like them more. Don’t lie!”

“That’s...true” you said.

The diffuser was the final step, and it was, honestly, the most important one. You attached it to Rhaenyra’s hairdryer, set it to cold, and began working it carefully beneath each section, lifting the curls up rather than disturbing them, letting the air do its work without the disruption of direct heat.

Jace tried to copy your movements once you handed him the drier back but he looked faintly absurd doing it, which was deeply endearing.

“This feels ridiculous,” he said.

“It works.”

“I look like I’m doing something from a tutorial.”

“You are doing something from a tutorial. My tutorial.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite disagreement.

The room filled with the low hum of the dryer and the smell of warmed product, sweet, clean, faintly floral from the honey oil you’d set aside for the end. Outside, the King’s Landing afternoon was doing its best impression of early evening, the light going amber through the curtains. You were aware, at the edges of your attention, of the spreadsheet you hadn’t finished and the quiz that was tomorrow and the tutoring session Jace owed you.

But that was later.

You switched the dryer off.

The quiet it left was comfortable. Easy.

You stepped back. Folded your arms. Regarded him with the gravity of someone revealing a finished painting.

“And,” you said, with appropriate ceremony, “voila.”

“It’s voilà,” he said automatically.

You pointed at him. “Don’t ruin my moment.”

He laughed, and then he turned toward the mirror, and the laughter quieted.

His shoulders went still.

The curls were back. Properly back and not the explosion of frizz from the library, not the soft but undefined waves of the days before you’d intervened. These were curls. Defined and bouncy, with a softness to them that caught the warm light and held it. They framed his face in a way that made him look like himself again, the Winterfell version of himself, the version you’d been very quietly delighted by for the last several weeks.

He turned his head. Slowly. Watching from one angle and then another.

“They actually look…”

“Amazing,” you supplied.

“…Amazing,” he agreed, like he was still arriving at the word.

You added the finishing touch, a few drops of the honey oil, warmed briefly between your palms before you smoothed it lightly over the surface of the curls, giving them that last suggestion of shine and then stepped back for real.

“Done.”

He kept looking at his reflection with an expression you didn’t see often, genuinely caught off guard, a little undone, the studied composure he usually wore without thinking temporarily absent.

“I haven’t seen my hair look like this since Winterfell,” he said.

“I know.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned from the mirror, and without ceremony or announcement, he wrapped both arms around you and pulled you in.

“You genius,” he said, into your hair.

A kiss to your forehead. Then your cheek, the warmth of it brief and deliberate. Then the other cheek. Then the tip of your nose, which made you scrunch it. Then your jaw.

“Jace.”

Another kiss found its way to your temple.

“Jace.”

His lips curved against your cheekbone. You could feel him smiling.

“Enough,” you said, though the word didn’t come out with any real conviction.

He pulled back just far enough to look at you, still smiling, and then pressed one last proper kiss to your lips, brief and fond and slightly smug.

“Thank you,” he said.

You rolled your eyes. Fond. Always fond, with him. “Now you know how to do it yourself.”

“I’ll probably forget.”

“Then I’ll make you a list.”

He considered this. “Better,” he decided, with the satisfaction of someone whose problem had been neatly solved and reached for your hand. ┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Rhaenyra walked past the doorway a few hour later.

Jace was at his desk, working through a set of accounting questions with a focused look he put on when he was actually concentrating, a pencil turning slowly in one hand. You were curled in the sofa across the room with your notes in your lap, the study session having you guys dispersed around to concentrate. It was quiet between you in the way it sometimes was, comfortable and unhurried, two people occupying the same space and not needing to fill it.

She paused.

Took one step back.

Looked inside.

Her gaze moved from you to him, and landed on his hair, the curls, soft and defined and clearly the work of deliberate effort, catching the desk lamp light in a way they hadn’t in weeks. She blinked once. Twice. The expression on her face cycled through something unreadable before arriving at something that was, unmistakably, approval.

She looked at you.

“…What did you do?”

You smiled. The small, satisfied smile of someone who had earned it. “Curly hair routine.”

Rhaenyra looked back at her son.

A quiet came over her, and then she said, with perfect composure and a warmth she wasn’t quite hiding: “…Finally.”

Jace looked up from his work. “What does that mean?”

She smiled at him softly and simply replied, “It means,” she said, “that my son’s hair no longer looks like a bird built a nest in it.”

A beat of perfect silence.

Then, from somewhere down the hallway, with the unerring timing of a younger sibling who had been waiting for precisely this moment:

“I TOLD YOU IT LOOKED LIKE A BIRD’S NEST!”

Jace’s expression collapsed into something pained and theatrical. He dropped his pencil. He put his face in his hands.

“I live with traitors,” he announced, to no one in particular.

You and Rhaenyra looked at each other across the room.

And then you laughed, both of you, properly, helplessly until Jace groaned again and neither of you could have answered him if you’d tried.

Fire danced with a horrific, erratic grace across the blackened waters of the Gullet, transforming the vital shipping lane into a sprawling, floating graveyard. Flames leapt from ship to ship in hungry arcs, feeding on timber and pitch and the desperate prayers of drowning men. Beneath the merciless onslaught of Team Black’s dragons, mighty Triarchy war-galleys splintered like kindling, their hulls cracking open to swallow their crews whole. Great masts toppled into the waves with the slow, theatrical finality of falling monuments. And yet, this was no easy victory. No clean triumph etched into the history books with golden ink. Below, Lord Corlys Velaryon’s fleet fought with everything it had, attempting to trap the armada in the narrow, choking passage, buying time in blood and smoke and screaming iron.

The atmosphere was a living thing, a suffocating shroud woven from the sharp salt tang of brine, the acrid bite of billowing smoke, the unmistakable iron-sweetness of fresh blood, and the sickening, almost honeyed stench of burning pitch. It coated the throat and burned the eyes.

High above the carnage, roaring through the roiling tempest of fire and ash, rode Prince Jacaerys Velaryon.

He sat astride Vermax like a man born to the sky because he was. The great emerald dragon cut through the smoke-choked air like a gleaming blade, his scales catching the hellish firelight below, wings spread wide. Jace’s riding leathers were already dark with spray and soot. His dark curls whipped against his face. He did not notice. His eyes were fixed on the battle, calculating and measuring, feeling the terrible weight of command settle across his shoulders with the intimacy of something he had worn all his life.

He had locked his mother in her chambers at Dragonstone before leaving. Had stood outside the door and listened to her pound against it, her voice cracking on his name. The sound had nearly unmade him entirely. But she was the queen. She was the cause. She could not be lost, and Jacaerys Velaryon had long since made peace with the arithmetic of that.

She lives. Therefore, I go.

Beside him, Baela streaked across the smoke on Moondancer fierce and brilliant, her silver hair streaming behind her like a war banner. And then, piercing through the mist like something half-imagined, a new silhouette emerged. Jace’s eyes snapped to it. His stomach lurched with shock before his heart swelled with a pride so fierce it nearly hurt.

Rhaena. Flying the wild dragon Sheepstealer.

Of course she was.

Together they were three dragons raining hell from the heavens, and for one blazing, exhilarating moment, Jace believed they might actually win this despite Sheepstealer almost knocking him out. He watched their collective fire devastate Admiral Lohar’s vanguard below, great tongues of flame consuming the armada’s leading ships, sending men screaming into the sea. He felt the savage triumph of it. The rightness.

Then the heavy, rhythmic thrum of scorpions began.

Massive iron bolts tore through the clouds around them. The Triarchy fleet was enormous, he had known this, had known it academically the way one knows a thing from maps and reports but knowing it and watching it materialize below him in all its terrible scale were entirely different experiences.

He pressed Vermax into a steep, dangerously low dive.

Below, through the roiling chaos, Jace had spotted Lord Corlys’s flagship being violently rammed by Lohar’s vessel. The silver-haired sea snake, his grandfather by every measure that mattered, surrounded and struggling. Jace made his decision in the space of half a breath. He would break the enemy lines. He would fly low. He would end this.

He flew too close to the water.

His focus had narrowed to a single burning point, the ships, the threat, the duty and so he did not hear the volley until it was already too late.

A heavy iron shaft sliced violently through the membrane of Vermax’s right wing with a sound like tearing cloth and screaming metal fused together. Another slammed directly into the dragon’s chest with a concussive, world-shaking force that Jace felt through every bone in his body.

Vermax screamed.

The sound ripped through Jace like a physical blade. Not a roar, not the magnificent, terrible declaration of a dragon in battle. A scream. Raw and agonizing and so deeply personal that Jace felt his own lungs seize in sympathy, as though the bolt had pierced him too. The great emerald body shuddered beneath him. The massive wings faltered, losing the steady rhythm that held them aloft. The world tilted.

They were falling.

“No-”

Jace yanked desperately on the reins, his boots straining hard against the stirrups, body thrown forward as the sea rushed upward to meet them with terrifying speed. Wind screamed past his ears. The fire and the smoke and the battle became a chaotic blur of sensation.

“Vermax, fly!”

The dragon fought. Even now, even broken and burning, Vermax fought. A beast born of fire, refusing absolutely to yield to the water. One wing beat heavily, then another. The torn membrane fluttered uselessly, a tattered rag of what it had been, but still Vermax tried, and something in Jace’s chest shattered at the sight of it.

“Soves!” His voice broke on the word, all royal dignity stripped away, reduced to something raw and helpless and very young. “Soves, Vermax! Please-”

One final, agonizing beat of the wings.

It was not enough.

Freezing, brine-heavy water swallowed Jacaerys Velaryon whole. It was not like diving, it was like being struck by the earth itself, like the sea had become solid in the last instant before collision, and he felt the shock travel up through his ankles, his knees, his spine, rattling his teeth in his skull. The sheer velocity of the crash tore his fingers from the saddle. The weight of his armor dragged at him immediately, a slow, patient, lethal pull downward into the dark.

Primal instinct flared.

He unhooked himself and practically clawed upward. His lungs burned. The cold was absolute, the kind that doesn’t feel cold at all but rather feels like being unmade, like the sea was simply erasing him a layer at a time. He could see nothing, only dark water and distant fire and the enormous bulk of Vermax somewhere below him, a shadow become a nightmare. He burst through the surface with a gasp so violent it tore his throat.

“Vermax!”

He spun in the churning water, hair plastered to his face, salt burning his eyes. The battle raged on around him, ships groaning and splitting, men screaming, iron raining from all directions. The world had not paused for him.

“Vermax!”

Through the haze of cresting waves, he found him. His dragon, his Vermax, who had carried him since boyhood, who had grown as he had grown, who had been as much a part of him as his own heartbeat was desperately trying to swim. The damaged wings beat uselessly to try to swim up. His great neck was straining upward. His eyes, when they met Jace’s from below the water, held something that a person with less grief in them might have dismissed as imagination. They did not look like the eyes of an animal.

They looked like the eyes of someone saying goodbye. A massive anchor, or debris, Jace could not tell which, tangled around Vermax’s exhausted body. The sea accepted its offering. With a final, sorrowful look that Jacaerys Velaryon would carry with him for the rest of his life.

He never resurfaced.

Something inside Jace broke. Not cracked. Not bent. Broke, the way an old bone breaks, the kind that doesn’t ever quite knit back the same way. He hauled his upper body onto a large piece of floating wreckage with the determination of a body that had not yet received the message from his mind that none of this mattered anymore. His chest heaved in ragged, desperate gasps. He was shaking. He was exhausted in a way that reached all the way down into whatever part of him had believed, until this moment, that he might survive this.

He had not brought enough of that belief. He saw that now.

He thought of his mother.

The image of her face, proud and terrified and trying not to show either rose unbidden. He had done this for her. Had done all of it for her. He hoped she would understand, someday, that locking her in her chambers had been the most love he had ever offered anyone.

He thought of Baela. Of Rhaena.

He thought of-

A sharp, dull impact struck his upper back.

Jace lurched forward with a sound that was almost nothing, barely a breath. Confused, of all things, not yet understanding, he glanced over his shoulder. A heavy crossbow bolt protruded from his shoulder blade at an angle that his mind catalogued with strange, distant calm, the way one notices a detail in a painting.

Slowly, numbly, he turned his head toward the source. A Triarchy war-galley drifted just yards away. Lined along the wooden railing stood a row of Admiral Lohar’s soldiers, unhurried, methodical, their crossbows leveled at the figure in the water.

They knew exactly who he was. There was no urgency in their posture, no battlefield fever. This was an execution.

The heir to the Iron Throne, stranded and defenseless. A second bolt flew. It slammed into his chest. He heard it before he felt it.

Then a third...straight to the neck.

A strange, sudden calm washed over him.

The deafening roar of the battle receded, becoming muffled, distant, the way sounds narrow when one goes underwater. The sea rocked him gently now, almost tenderly, as if it had been waiting all along to offer this small mercy at the end. He had not expected kindness. He was grateful for it.

He thought of his mother, safe on Dragonstone.

He thought of Baela’s laughter.

He thought of his brothers.

And he thought with a softness that surprised him, with something that might have been the very last warmth his body could generate, of you. Of a future that would not be built. Of a promise he was not sure, now, that he had ever been given the chance to make.

The last image to imprint itself on the fading mind of Jacaerys Velaryon was that reflection.

A burning sky, mirrored in the water.

Beautiful.

Tragic.

Then everything went black.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Jacaerys bolted upright with a gasp that felt like surfacing.

His eyes flew open. His hand flew to his chest and then to his neck, pressing hard against his sternum, feeling for something, a wound, an absence, a bolt buried in bone and found nothing but the soft cotton of his t-shirt and the solid, living rhythm of his own heart. He sat there for a long moment, chest heaving, and simply stared at the ceiling.

White plaster. Crown moulding. A small water stain shaped vaguely like a continent.

No smoke.

No dragon.

No sea.

No battle.

Just a bedroom. His bedroom.

Morning sunlight filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows in long, clean shafts, illuminating the warm disorder of his life: the desk buried under business textbooks and notebooks with pages dog-eared and margins crowded with his handwriting, his laptop open from the night before with a lecture slide still visible on the screen, a hoodie slung over the back of his desk chair. Outside the windows, King’s Landing stretched endlessly in the early light, the city already stirring, glass towers catching the sun.

His alarm clock flashed 7:00 AM.

No swords or the banners of House Targaryen. Jace pressed the heels of both palms against his eyes and breathed.

The memories were still there. That was the wrong word for them, memories. They did not feel like the soft, dissolving stuff of ordinary dreams that faded on the edges as soon as you tried to examine them. They felt like the other kind of remembering, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind. He could still feel the cold of the Gullet in his fingers. He could still smell the smoke. He could still feel the weight of dragon-riding leathers across his shoulders, the particular pull of Vermax’s movement through the air, the way the saddle had sat against the backs of his thighs.

He could still feel the bolts.

Just a dream, he told himself. The words felt inadequate in his own mouth, like trying to describe a storm with the word weather. He muttered them anyway, pressing his face harder into his palms.

“Just a dream.”

A dream where he had been a prince.

A prince who had died.

His stomach dropped with a physical lurch. The alarm was still beeping. He silenced it with a slap and sat on the edge of the bed for one more moment, just one, breathing in the ordinary scent of his ordinary room.. Then his brain supplied the information he had been avoiding.

Classes.

Shit.

He was already late.

He moved through his morning routine with the efficiency of someone running on instinct rather than thought, shower, clothes, a cursory battle with his curls that ended, as it always did, in a draw. He emerged from the bathroom in jeans and sneakers and his favorite dark hoodie, his hair doing exactly what it wanted. There wasn’t time to argue with it. There was rarely ever time.

The smell of coffee reached him in the hallway. It pulled at something in his chest and he followed it through the penthouse to the kitchen.

His steps halted in the doorway.

Rhaenyra stood at the island counter, reading something on her tablet with the focused, slightly stern expression she wore when she was processing information she found annoying. A coffee mug steamed beside her elbow, forgotten. She was already dressed soft grey, elegant, effortlessly so in the way that had always seemed to come naturally to her and she looked exactly as she always looked in the morning, tired by all the corporate bullshit.

CEO of Targaryen Corporation. One of the most influential women in King’s Landing. The most formidable person he had ever known.

His mother.

The word hit him somewhere unsteady. Something twisted painfully in his chest, relief so acute it nearly hurt, threaded through with the dreaming grief of a boy who had watched her face in his mind as the water closed over him, who had spent his last conscious moment believing she was safe, needing her to be safe, and had been right without ever knowing he was right. He crossed the room before he had consciously decided to.

He wrapped his arms around her.

Rhaenyra nearly dropped her coffee.

“Jacaerys-”

She caught herself, setting the mug down with a firm clink on the marble countertop, and then without hesitation, because she had always been this, whatever else she was, she wrapped her arms around him and held him back.

“Sweet boy.” Her voice was softer now. Her fingers found their way into his curls the way they had when he was very small. “What’s the matter?”

Jace swallowed against the tightness in his throat. The dream came rushing back through him like a tide, the war, the weight of a crown his mother should have inherited without blood, the desperate, bone-deep need to protect her. The image of her face as he had walked away from Dragonstone, toward the dragon, toward the battle, toward the Gullet. The way he had looked back.

He shook his head against her shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

“You are clearly not fine.”

Her hand moved in slow, soothing circles against his back. Despite himself, despite everything, Jace felt something in him begin to loosen.

He laughed. A weak, slightly broken sound, but genuine. “I just…” His voice cracked on the nothing he was trying to say.

Rhaenyra pulled back slightly to look at him. Not the way she looked at her board of directors, or at rivals across conference tables, or at the city from thirty floors up. The other way. The private way, that only he and his brothers ever saw.

“What happened?”

He wiped his eyes quickly, hoping she wouldn’t comment on it and took a breath.

“I had the most vivid dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

He hesitated. There was something strange about saying it. As though speaking about it aloud would make it either more real or less, and he wasn’t sure which outcome he wanted.

“I was a prince,” he said.

Rhaenyra blinked. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not that.

“A prince?”

“Yeah.” A small smile found its way onto his face, unwilling, almost involuntary. “You were a queen.” Something passed across her expression something soft, something she would never have allowed in a meeting room. “Oh?”

“I died fighting a battle for you.”

Silence.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and brushed a curl from his forehead with the gentleness that had no performance in it, something she reserved for the three of them and no one else.

“Well,” she said finally, her smile warming to something that was almost, almost teasing. “That sounds exhausting.”

Jace stared. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“You are standing in my kitchen wearing yesterday’s hoodie and telling me about dragon wars, Jacaerys.”

He opened his mouth to protest then closed it. “Fair.” She squeezed his shoulder. “It was only a dream.”

“You know,” said a new voice from the doorway, “some families start their mornings with good morning.”

Luke wandered in carrying a cereal box like a trophy, nineteen years old and permanently, professionally smug. He surveyed the scene with the cheerful heartlessness of a younger brother who had found ammunition and intended to use it.

“Did Jace finally lose his mind?”

Behind him, Joffrey, fourteen and grinning with the particular delight of someone who had been waiting for this squeezed past into the kitchen. “About time.” Jace rolled his eyes so hard it was almost an athletic achievement. “There he is.”

“Dreaming about being a prince?” Luke plucked a bowl from the cupboard with casual ease. “That’s because you’re already treated like one.”

The napkin Jace threw hit him square in the face. Luke threw it back. Rhaenyra sighed with the air of a woman who had calculated exactly how many more years of this lay before her and found the number disheartening.

“My sons,” she said, picking up her coffee. “Truly intellectual giants.”

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Breakfast passed with the comfortable velocity of mornings that had been rehearsed through repetition until they ran themselves. Luke complaining about something, Joffrey eating cereal in quantities that defied his size, Rhaenyra reading from her tablet while simultaneously tracking all three of them with the peripheral attention of someone who had never once been entirely off duty.

Jace was reaching for his coffee when Rhaenyra glanced up.

“Are you still picking up your girlfriend?”

He froze.

The coffee cup remained halfway to his face, arrested in mid-air.

“…My what?”

Luke’s head snapped up. The expression that crossed his face was one of pure, unalloyed joy. He looked like he had been handed a gift.

Rhaenyra stared at her eldest with the patient, faintly incredulous expression of a woman who had not expected to be performing this particular reality check on a Tuesday morning.

“Your girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Jace set the cup down carefully. “Right.”

You.

He had a girlfriend.

A beautiful girlfriend, and she was his girlfriend, and she had been his girlfriend for- he was briefly lost in the arithmetic of it, which was itself a kind of answer and she was wonderful, she was brilliant, she made him laugh, and somehow in the space between waking up with the sea in his lungs and standing in his mother’s kitchen in yesterday’s hoodie, he had momentarily forgotten she existed.

And then, because his brain was apparently in full catastrophic mode this morning: betrothed. Not yet. Not technically. But the word had been sitting in the back of his mind ever since he woke up from his dream.

Heat flooded his face with spectacular completeness. Luke nearly choked on his cereal.

“Oh my God.”

“Shut up.”

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“Only briefly.”

“Only” Luke dissolved entirely, shoulders shaking. Across the table, Joffrey watched with the dignified appreciation of a connoisseur.

Rhaenyra shook her head slowly. “Honestly, Jace.” “It was a very intense dream,” he said, with as much dignity as one can muster while slowly turning the color of a sunset.

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“The dream had dragons, Mum.”

She gave him the look. The specific look, the one that had been making him feel twelve years old since he was actually twelve years old. “She’s a lovely girl. I wish you’d bring her home more often.”

Jace stood from the table with the decisive energy of a man drawing a conversation to a close. “I was planning to.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Today?”

“…Possibly.”

“Good.” Rhaenyra returned to her tablet, the slight smile at the corner of her mouth saying everything she was too dignified to say aloud.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The underground parking garage was cool and dim, smelling of concrete and oil and the expensive quiet of a building where people took the lift rather than the stairs. Jace’s Porsche sat in its usual spot, Oak Green Metallic, catching the fluorescent light.

Vermax.

He had named the car Vermax which now sounded so ironic to him.

He stood beside the driver’s door for a moment, hand on the handle, the thought arriving fully formed and then sitting there in his chest with an odd weight. He had named his car Vermax years ago. He had thought it was because he liked the sound of it, or because it was the name of a character in a book he’d read, or because of some half-remembered reason that had never quite solidified into anything coherent.

He looked at the car. The deep green of it. The long, low lines of it, built for speed, built for the sky-

Built for the sky.

A strange feeling settled over him, the kind of not-quite-vertigo that comes with recognizing something without being able to name what it is you’re recognizing. Like seeing an old friend across a crowd before you’ve registered their face.

He shook it off. Got in and drove.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The street outside your house was quiet in the way that Tuesday mornings in King’s Landing occasionally managed to be, with the morning light that made ordinary things seem briefly considered. Jace pulled to the curb and sat for a moment with the engine idling, window down.

Then the front door opened and you stepped out. He got out of the car.

The morning light caught your hair the way it always did, making you look almost angelic in Jace’s eyes in that moment. You were still in the act of adjusting the strap of your bag when you spotted him, and the smile that crossed your face. Happy just to see him.

And for one strange, suspended moment, another image overlapped the morning like a transparency laid over a photograph. A figure standing on the cliffs of Dragonstone. The sea grey below and the wind pulling at dark fabric. Watching him leave. The expression on her face, your face, heartbroken and resolute and trying to be neither.

Waiting for him to come back.

The image dissolved as quickly as it had arrived. The morning reasserted itself. You were walking toward the car, your bag settled on your shoulder now, your smile still in place, and Jace found himself already stepping forward already moving toward with certainty that was less decision than gravity.

Before you could say a word, he took your hand and raised it, and pressed a kiss against your knuckles. Deliberatea and unhurried. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, in other rooms, in other centuries.

“How are you, my beloved?”

You stopped.

Looked at the hand.

Looked at him.

And then, because you were you, you laughed, the bright, surprised sound of someone caught genuinely off guard. “What has gotten into you this morning?” you questioned him.

Jace grinned, and the grin felt more like him than anything else had all morning. “I genuinely have no idea.”

“You’re being sooo weird.” You studied him with the narrowed eyes trying to grasp his words and actions. “How weird is this going to get?”

“I had the wildest dream.”

“Oh?” Already your expression was shifting into the one you wore when you were preparing to be entertained. He leaned forward and kissed you softly quick, warm and certain.

“In it,” he said against your smile, “you were my princess too.”

Your cheeks went pink with entirely gratifying speed. “Oh my God.”

“You asked.”

“I asked what was wrong with you, not-”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, I am going to need you to be normal for the next five minutes-”

“I make no promises.”

He opened the passenger door for you, still grinning, and the morning felt lighter than it had when he’d left the penthouse.

The dream wasn’t entirely terrible, he thought, settling behind the wheel. If nothing else, it had done this, sharpened his vision, made ordinary things brilliant again. Made you more vivid than you’d already been, which was saying something considerable. He found himself smiling the entire drive to university.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

University should have felt normal.

Instead, Jace spent the entire morning convinced he was losing his mind by degrees as new details of his dream would hit him.

The dream lingered with a persistence that ordinary dreams did not have, the kind he usually forgot by the time he reached the kitchen. This one clung. Every corridor he walked reminded him of castle hallways, the echo of footsteps on stone, and the smell of torch smoke. Every crowded lecture hall conjured the geometry of noble courts; the subtle theatre of power performed through proximity. His Strategic Management lecture had an entire section on resource allocation that kept pulling his thoughts sideways, toward councils and war rooms and Dragonstone. He stared at his notebook.

He had written, in the margin: Corlys was right about the Gullet.

He had no idea when.

“You’re disassociating again.”

Jace blinked.

Across the seminar table sat Cregan Stark, regarding him with the expression he used on everything: tall, dark-haired, slow-blinking, fundamentally and constitutionally unimpressed by the world and all its events. He was from Winterfell like genuinely, actually from Winterfell, which Jace had always found slightly funny without ever quite being able to explain why.

They’d been best friends since secondary school, the friendship that had calcified into something so much more. They were like brothers in every sense. Also, he looked almost exactly like the Cregan from the dream.

Same jaw. Same eyes. Same expression, the one that said I am listening to you and I find you exhausting. Same, in other words, as he always looked well except his had slightly shorter hair.

“What?” Jace managed.

Cregan raised one eyebrow. “You’ve been staring at me for ten seconds with an expressionless face.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had a strange dream. I feel like I keep repeating these words over and over again.”

“You texted me at four in the morning.”

Jace went very still.

“I did?”

Cregan reached for his phone with the patience of a man who had long since resigned himself to the chaos of being Jace Velaryon’s closest friend. He scrolled briefly, then began reading aloud in the flat, informational tone of a news anchor delivering a weather report.

“‘Brother, imagine if we were medieval nobles.’”

“Oh, God.”

“‘You would have loved Winterfell.’”

“Cregan-”

“‘You were Lord of the North.’” He glanced up briefly. “I’m from Winterfell, Jace. I grew up in Winterfell. I know what Winterfell is.”

“Please stop-”

‘I miss Vermax.’

Cregan lowered the phone.

“I don’t know what Vermax is, if its not talking about your car.” he said.

Jace buried his face in both hands and made a sound that was less a word than a comprehensive statement. “You were never meant to read those.”

“You sent them to me.”

“I was apparently not fully conscious at four in the morning. I don’t remember doing this at all.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

The question arrived without ceremony, Cregan always asked things he actually wanted to know, dropped into a conversation like a stone dropped into water, watching to see what it displaced. Jace hesitated for long enough that the silence became its own answer.

“Yeah,” he said. Then, quietly: “Not entirely.”

Cregan nodded. He didn’t push. This was something Jace had always valued about him, the Stark capacity to hold space without filling it.

“Tell me later,” Cregan said, and turned back to his laptop.

Mostly, Jace thought. He was mostly okay. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You found him outside the business building at noon, materializing from the flow of students and your smile arrived before you did.

Jace felt the thing in his chest that had been clenched since 7 AM ease, slowly, like a hand opening. There was something about you that operated on him this way, had always operated on him this way, since the beginning. A quality of presence that grounded him, that made the world’s coordinates make sense again. He’d never found quite the right words for it. He’d stopped trying.

You slipped your hand into his without ceremony.

“Better than this morning?”

“A little.”

“Still thinking about your prince dream?”

He laughed, the sound freer than he expected. “Unfortunately.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“I was literally fighting a war.”

“You were dreaming about fighting a war.”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, if this dream becomes your entire personality, I want it on the record that I tried to prevent it-”

“Noted and rejected.”

You rolled your eyes with magnificent feeling. “I make no promises about what I tell your mother.”

Together you walked toward the café nearby. A small, overcrowded place called something Jace could never quite remember but it had had excellent coffee and terrible lighting and was perpetually full of students and professors who had clearly rather be somewhere else. The place that existed to absorb the ambient anxiety of a university and convert it, through caffeine, into something marginally more functional.

You had barely settled into your seats when a familiar voice arrived from approximately two tables away, belonging to someone who had apparently been watching for them.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew.”

Aegon Targaryen dropped into the empty chair beside Jace with the comfortable confidence of a man who owned, and this was literally true, approximately half the building they were sitting in. Twenty-six, blond, expensive, reliably catastrophic. His jacket probably cost more than Jace’s car maintenance for the year, and he wore it with the carelessness never once considering the cost of anything.

He was nothing like the monster from the dream. The dream-Aegon had been something Jace couldn’t fully bring himself to examine yet. Jealous and bitter and capable of terrible things. This Aegon was mostly known for throwing parties that became local legend and mysteriously managing to avoid all professional consequences for anything he did, ever. Jacaerys supposed that has something to do with his mother and his uncle Aemond keeping these things contained.

“To what do we owe the honor?” Jace asked.

Aegon’s attention had already moved to you.

“And how are you?”

“Good,” you said politely.

“Still putting up with him?”

You smiled. “Barely.”

“Excellent answer.”

Jace groaned. Aegon looked absolutely delighted. “You’re blushing,” Aegon observed, with the tone of someone reporting a natural phenomenon.

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

You leaned over the table, and Jace recognized the look on your face immediately. The collaborative look. The look that meant you had identified an ally.

“He was calling me his beloved this morning.”

Aegon’s chair nearly lost him. He grabbed the table.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“In what context?”

“He kissed my hand. In the street. Before nine in the morning.”

Aegon looked at Jace the way someone looks at an archaeological discovery with facination, slightly appalled, deeply pleased. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened.”

Jace contemplated his options. Leaving. Changing his name and moving to Braavos. Committing entirely to the persona of someone who had never been caught calling his girlfriend my beloved at eight forty-five on a Tuesday.

None of these were practical.

He reached for his coffee and said nothing, which Aegon correctly interpreted as total defeat.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

After Aegon eventually wandered off, ostensibly to a meeting, credibly to cause chaos somewhere else and so the café settled back into its ordinary rhythms. Students came and went. Espresso machines hissed. The ambient noise absorbed itself.

You and Jace remained at your table, and the laughter faded naturally, the way good laughter does, not dying but simply becoming something quieter.

He was staring into his coffee again.

You watched him for a moment.

“You never told me the whole dream, since it has you in a weird mindset today.” you said quietly.

His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the cup. He was aware of you looking at him, with your full attention, which had always been more like listening than looking, patient and genuine and without agenda.

“To put it simply, there was a war,” he said.

You didn’t ask him to explain. You waited.

“A civil war.” He looked up briefly, then back at the table. “A war over who would rule over Westeros. My mother was supposed to inherit as was the rightful heir to the throne but there were those who didn’t accept it. Didn’t accept her.”

“And you fought for her.”

“Of course.”

The images came without invitation, Dragonstone’s grey halls, the council table, the maps spreading the whole kingdom out before them like a wound. The feeling of duty that had lived in his chest since childhood, not as a burden but as a definition. This is who you are. This is what you do.

You reached across the table and took his hand. He continued.

“I flew a dragon. I know this sounds no so scary but-” Despite everything, he heard the ghost of wonder in his own voice. “Vermax. He was- he was mine. Since I was a boy. He knew me.” The wonder curdled, softened into something heavier. “He died with me.”

Your thumb moved in a slow arc across his knuckles. “The last thing I remember,” he said quietly, “was dying. Floating in the sea, after everything.” He paused.

“It was strange. It wasn’t- it wasn’t the way I would have imagined. It wasn’t terrifying.”

“What was it?”

He thought about it honestly.

“It was sad,” he said. “But calm.”

You were quiet for a moment. Then you reached up, and the gesture was so unexpected that he went still, your hand cupping his cheek, steady and warm, thumb tracing a line beneath his eye.

He leaned into it without thinking.

“I’m glad it was only a dream,” you said softly trying to calm his anxieties that he didn’t want to confess out loud.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

The tightness in his chest released, not all at once but in stages, like a knot worked loose over time. He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips briefly to your palm, and you let him, and neither of you made anything of it. She’s right, he thought. Whatever that was. Whatever it meant.

He was here. Alive. With his family, with his best friend, with his girl.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was, actually, everything.

The afternoon passed.

Classes ended. The university slowly emptied like it did every day at dusk, students and professors releasing themselves back into the city like a pressure valve opening. The parking lot filled briefly with the usual chaos and then thinned.

“My mother wants you over more often,” Jace mentioned, as they walked toward the Porsche.

“Apparently she likes you.”

You brightened immediately. “Really?”

“She said so unprompted. First thing this morning.”

“Good.” You smiled with satisfaction. “I’m charming.”

Jace looked at you sideways. “You are deeply smug about this.”

“I’m charming,” you repeated, pleasantly. He laughed. “Come over tonight?”

You looked at him, with that look you had, the one he’d never found a word for, the one that made him feel simultaneously seen and unsteady in the best possible way. Made him feel a bit giddy.

“I’d love to,” you said.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The penthouse was unusually quiet when they arrived. Rhaenyra was visible through the glass of her home office, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, reading from a document with the focused intensity and it was clear that the woman needed a break from everything. Luke had evaporated somewhere. Joffrey was reportedly studying, a claim no one in the household had ever been successfully able to verify.

You and Jace settled at the dining table with laptops and scattered notes and the collective fiction of productivity.

For forty minutes, it was remarkably functional. Jace had his economics module open. You were working through something, he didn’t ask, didn’t need to and the sound of quiet typing and the occasional turn of a page created a kind of companionable silence that he had always thought of as the specific luxury of being comfortable with someone. presence. You could simply be in it.

He was reading about capital allocation.

“Jace.”

He looked up.

“You’re getting lost in your mind again.”

“I’m not what are you talking about?” he said automatically. Then, because honesty was something he’d apparently committed to today: “I was thinking about- uhhh. Economics?”

“That is not better.”

“You look pretty,” he said simply.

The silence that followed had a distinct texture. You looked at him for a long moment. Then you slowly, deliberately, closed your laptop.

“No,” you said.

“What?”

“You don’t get to say things like that when I’m trying to study.”

“I was simply making an observation.”

“You are impossible.”

He was very pleased with himself. He did not bother hiding it.

An hour later, the economics module had not progressed. The textbooks had been consolidated into a single pile and pushed to the far end of the table, a gesture that meant these exist and will eventually be addressed, which was as much as either of you were willing to commit to. A film had been agreed upon via negotiation.

Blankets appeared.

The overhead lights went off.

And somehow, as these things always somehow managed, you ended up curled against his chest on the enormous sectional, his arm around your waist, the film playing distantly while neither of you particularly watched it. Your breathing slowed first. His heartbeat was steady and familiar beneath your ear.

The city moved quietly outside the windows.

You didn’t remember falling asleep.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The prince stood before you.

The wind came off the sea like a cold hand, whipping through his dark, curling hair, pressing his black riding coat against his frame. Behind him, Dragonstone rose in its glory against a steel-grey sky, all sharp towers and dark stone, magnificent and terrible, built by people who had never believed in half measures. The sea crashed against the rocks far below. Dark clouds gathered on the horizon with the patient, deliberate advance of something inevitable.

“No.”

Your voice came out broken.

“No, please.”

He looked at you the way he always looked at you as if you were the clearest thing in a world that had lately become very unclear, like looking at you was the one thing he could do without effort in a life that had demanded extraordinary effort from him since the moment he was old enough to understand what he was.

“I have to go.”

“You don’t,” you said, even though you knew it wasn’t true. Even though somewhere beneath the desperate present tense of the argument, the truer, older part of you already knew exactly what was coming. Already knew the shape of this farewell.

His hands found yours.

They were warm. Strong and real, so real that makes their loss so much more brutal than the loss of things you never fully believed in.

“You can stay,” you said. Your voice was steadier than you felt. “You can let someone else-”

“I cannot.” His voice was gentle but stern. He was stubborn and so if he made peace with this decisions, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tears burned behind your eyes. The fear inside you was almost unbearable and burning, it was twisted and layered, because you knew. You already knew. This was not a premonition, not a vague presentiment. It was knowledge, carried somewhere beneath language, beneath memory, in whatever part of you had been this person before.

You knew what awaited him at the Gullet.

Fire.

Water.

“You promised.” The words escaped before you could decide to say them.

His expression shifted. Something moved across it, grief, tenderness, the ache of a man who loves something too well to pretend it isn’t breaking. “And I will keep that promise but this is a battle I must fight for both myself and my mother.”

He stepped closer, and you let him, and he pressed a kiss to your forehead so gently it barely qualified as a touch at all.

Then he rested his brow against yours. His eyes never left yours.

“If I do not return- which I intend to,”

The world seemed to hold its breath.

“I will find you.”

A tear escaped. Traced the line of your cheek. He watched it with eyes that were very dark and very steady.

“In every lifetime if not this one. I promise.”

The words landed somewhere deep in you, somewhere wordless, somewhere older than the language you used to think with. A promise that had the weight of truth rather than intention.

You memorized his face. The curls. The strong jaw. The eyes, brown and earnest and alive, so alive.

He smiled.

Then he stepped away.

He turned toward the waiting dragon.

Toward the dark water below.

Toward a destiny that was also a death.

And all you could do was watch him leave. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You woke with a gasp that tore itself from somewhere past your chest.

For several seconds, you could not find the room. Could not find yourself in it. There was only the dream...the cliffs, the wind, his forehead against yours, the sound of his footsteps retreating and the grief of it, which was specific and devastating and nothing at all like the vague emotional residue of ordinary sleep.

Tears burned behind your eyes. Your heart was pounding.

You pushed yourself upright. A blanket tangled around your legs. The room was dim, the film long since ended, the television showing a menu screen. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, King’s Landing glittered in the full dark of night, the city’s lights reflected upward in a warm wash against the low clouds. Jace must have moved you to his room when you fell asleep.

The bedroom door opened.

Jace stepped in carrying two mugs, steam rising from both. He had apparently, at some point during your sleep, been productive.

The moment he saw your face, he froze.

“Hey.”

The concern in his voice was immediate, the shift from normal to careful happening in the space of a single syllable.

“What’s wrong?”

You didn’t answer. The words were somewhere on the way, but in the meantime your body had already decided what it needed, and what it needed was to close the distance between you and him as quickly as possible.

You stood.

Crossed the room.

The mugs barely survived. He caught them against the edge of the side table with an impressive reflex, setting them down quickly before his arms came around your waist, and you buried your face against the side of his neck, and breathed him in.

“Sweetheart?” Low and careful. His chin came to rest on top of your head.

You stayed there for a moment just letting the reality of him replace the dream of him. The warmth of him. The solidness.

Then you pulled back. Not far. Your forehead came to rest against his, which put you close enough to feel his breath and see the small crease of worry between his brows.

“I had a dream,” you said. It seems it was your turn to utter those words.

Something moved across his face. He went very still in the way that meant he was paying every variety of attention he had.

“What kind of dream?”

“I saw a prince.”

His breath caught. You felt it.

“I saw him leaving for a battle. He was going to fight-”

Your voice faltered, then steadied. “He knew he might not come back. And he said-” You stopped.

Jace’s arms tightened around you, almost involuntarily. “He said he would find me,” you continued. “That if he didn’t return-” Your eyes met his, and something in your chest recognized something in his. “He would find me in every lifetime.”

Silence.

Complete, absolute silence.

Jace stared at you.

Because those were the exact words. Not a version of them, not a paraphrase but the exact promise, the exact phrasing, the exact scene, the stone of Dragonstone under grey skies and wind coming off the sea. He had lived it from one side and you had lived it from the other, and here you both were, in a penthouse above a city that did not have dragons, with the memory of them living in your bones.

His throat moved.

You smiled softly with tears still bright at the corners of your eyes. Your hand lifted, your fingers moving gently through his curls, the same gesture that felt simultaneously new and ancient.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” you said.

“Neither do I.”

“But if it was real-”

His forehead pressed more firmly against yours.

“You kept your promise,” you whispered.

He felt his throat close.

And for the first time since he had woken to the sound of an alarm clock and a bedroom that wasn’t the sea, he stopped wondering whether the dream had been real. He stopped wondering whether he was grieving something imagined or something true. He stopped needing to know.

Because you knew.

You had been there.

You rose onto your toes.

Your lips met his.

It was slow and gentle. He kissed you back like someone returning to something, like a navigator finding a landmark in familiar water.

Like he had been waiting centuries and perhaps his soul had waited for this moment. The moment to return to her. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The knock was soft.

They both startled apart with the excellent reflexes of guilty consciences, then immediately demonstrated the dignity of two people pretending they hadn’t. Jace cleared his throat. Rested his forehead against yours for one final second. His breath was unsteady in the best way.

Another knock.

“Jacaerys?”

Rhaenyra’s voice, measured, carrying through the door with the easy authority of a woman who managed board rooms and board members and the shenanigans of three sons as a single uninterrupted professional skill.

“Dinner is ready.” They heard the muffled voice of his mother.

Jace answered at a volume calibrated for normalcy “We’ll be there in a minute!”

A pause that had weight.

“Five minutes,” his mother’s voice returned, drier than a desert, and entirely aware of everything and perhaps making a wrong assumption of you two being alone in his room.

You laughed, pressing your face briefly against his shoulder to muffle it. He was already smiling.

“Your mother doesn’t trust you.”

“She absolutely does not.”

“And honestly?” You poked his chest. “I don’t blame her.”

“You wound me.”

“Good.” You pulled your hand back, but he caught it, quick and easy, and pressed a kiss to your knuckles again. The same gesture as that morning. The echo of it traveled through both of you clearly.

Your cheeks went pink.

He watched it happen with a feeling in his chest that was too large and too simple to require any examination at all.

There she is, he thought. My girl.

My princess.

He took your hand properly, fingers laced and led you toward the dining room.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈ They heard the argument before they reached the dinner table.

Luke and Joffrey, seated across from each other in the arrangement that the family had collectively accepted as a flaw, were conducting a debate with the commitment of two people who had come to win.

“No, because you’re objectively wrong-”

“I’m objectively right-”

“You don’t even know what objectively means.”

“I literally do.”

“You used it wrong.”

Joffrey groaned with his whole body. “I hate this family.”

“You are this family,” Luke pointed out.

Joffrey considered this. “Exactly.”

Rhaenyra, at the head of the table, was pinching the bridge of her nose with annoyance. This was her normal and yet it was tiring.

The moment she saw you, her face entirely changed.

“There she is.”

You smiled. “Hi.”

She stood and pulled you into a hug with a warmth that was, Jace thought privately, rather more enthusiastic than his own homecoming greeting most mornings. “I was beginning to think my son had invented you.”

“Mum.”

“What? He never brings you over.”

“That’s his fault,” you said.

“Traitor,” Jace said.

“You’re literally my boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

You smiled sweetly. “I’m allowed.”

Rhaenyra looked delighted in the specific way she allowed herself to look delighted when she was genuinely pleased, a rarity outside this apartment. Luke immediately leaned toward you.

“See? This is why she’s my favorite.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Unfortunately.”

Jace threw a bread roll at him.

Luke threw one back.

The war began immediately, and lasted approximately five seconds before Rhaenyra’s single sharp look ended it. She had a look for this. It was very effective.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, settling back into her chair and accepting a bread roll from the basket with the serenity of someone who had already mentally exited the building, “if I raised wolves.”

“That’s insulting,” Joffrey said.

Everyone looked at him.

The fourteen-year-old shrugged with the composure of someone who had thought this through. “Wolves are smarter.”

The silence held for two seconds before Luke’s expression cracked. Jace looked at the ceiling. Rhaenyra’s attempt at severity collapsed at its foundations.

You sat beside Jace with your hand warm against his under the table, and you were already laughing, and the sound of it filled the room the way laughter does when a room is already full of people who are glad to be there.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Dinner found its rhythm.

Conversation moved in the easy, overlapping way it does with people who have logged enough hours together that they no longer need to manage it consciously. Luke complained about a group project with the vivid resentment of having decided the problem was everyone else.

Joffrey explained something about a game or a film or a historical period but the audience could not quite keep up, but that seemed to be part of the experience. Rhaenyra complained, with great economy, about company politics, and then told a story about a colleague that had everyone at the table paying full attention (It was Aemond who everytone is afraid of in their company).

You listened to all of it.

Jace, mostly, watched.

He had not expected this. Had woken this morning in the sea, or the memory of it. Had spent the drive to university with the dream still active in his body, had sat through lectures half-present, had carried the weight of Vermax’s last look in his chest all day like a stone.

And now.

He watched his mother smile at something you said. He watched Luke do the thing he did when he was actually amused, which was different from when he is pretending. Watched Joffrey explain something to you directly, having apparently determined that you were worth the effort, and watched your face do the thing it did when you were genuinely interested in something, slightly forward, slightly bright, entirely present.

You fit here. Not as a guest, not as someone being accommodated. As someone who belonged. He thought of the dream again.

Remembered standing at the dragonpit of Dragonstone with his armor on and the dragon saddled and the sea grey behind him, and looking back at everything he was leaving, his mother, his brothers, you, the stone halls and the cold salt wind and the ordinary miracle of a morning that didn’t require a king’s son to die for it.

He had wondered, in those last seconds at Dragonstone, if he would ever see any of them again. He had his answer now.

The realization settled in his chest quietly, without drama. Not a revelation, something more like a confirmation. A peace he hadn’t known he was looking for, finding him here, at a dinner table with a bread roll dent in the tablecloth and Joffrey currently holding forth on something no one else understood.

No war. No dragons. No succession. No battles. Just family. Just love.

Just this.

Halfway through dessert, Joffrey’s phone lit up. “Oh!” He reached for it with the speed of receiving news they’d been waiting for. “Dad’s calling.”

Jace felt himself smile before the screen even showed Laenor’s face.

It appeared a moment later, that face, familiar and warm and slightly tanned by whatever sun was currently shining on whatever harbor on whatever coast he was sailing toward. Behind him, a bright blue sky suggested somewhere in Essos, probably. The man was perpetually in motion, perpetually somewhere else and yet found time for them. He was not their real father, but he might as well have been. After Harwin passed away, Rhaenyra had remarried Laenor as more of a deal since Laenor wasn’t interested in anything but he cared for Rhaenyra platonically and it seemed to have worked out great and that’s all that mattered.

“There are my favorite children.”

Luke snorted. “We’re your only children.”

“And yet somehow still my favorites.” Laenor’s gaze found you across the table, and his face smiled “There she is.”

You laughed. “Hello.”

“Good. Finally, someone sensible has arrived.”

“Hey!” Three voices, simultaneous.

Laenor continued as though he hadn’t heard. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m well, thank you.”

Jace groaned. “Why does everyone in my family like her more than me?”

“Because,” Laenor said, and the timing was beautiful, “she has manners.”

The table erupted. Even Rhaenyra, which was a significant achievement.

Laenor spent twenty minutes on the call, chatting about his route, trading insults with. He heard both Luke and Joffery’s rambling. He asked Rhaenyra about the board meeting she’d complained about, and listened to her answer. He asked you about your studies, and remembered something you’d mentioned three calls ago, and asked a follow-up question about it.

The man had walked into their lives years ago and simply decided, without announcement or conditions, that these were his sons. No performance of it. No documentation. Just- love, extended to fill the available space.

Dream Laenor had disappeared. The thought arrived gently, without bitterness. The dream-Laenor, who had been present mostly in his absence, who Jace had barely known, who had been lost before Jace could understand what losing someone meant. This version was here. This version showed up.

And Jace was, quietly and completely, grateful for that. The call ended. The dessert finished. The evening moved toward its natural conclusion with the comfortable inevitability of all good evenings. Luke vanished in the direction of his room. Joffrey disappeared with a quantity of snacks that could feed a whole army. Rhaenyra retreated to finish what she’d started, she always had something she was finishing, this was simply who she was and the penthouse settled into quiet

Which left you and Jace, alone on the balcony.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

King’s Landing stretched below them without end. The city was all light from up here, not the individual lights, not streets and windows and the moving points of cars, but the collective glow of it, the warmth of a few million people living their lives in proximity, translated upward into something that looked, from this height, almost like its own kind of fire.

A cool breeze moved through the dark, carrying the city’s particular nighttime mixture of warm pavement and distant food and the faint, improbable ghost of something floral from a rooftop garden somewhere below. It found its way into Jace’s curls and did what it wanted with them.

You stood beside him. Close enough that your shoulders touched.

Neither of you spoke. Neither of you needed to. The city was enough, for a while.

Then you broke the silence the way you often did when a thought entered your head.

“Do you think it was real?”

He didn’t ask what you meant.

The dreams. The prince and the princess. The battle. The promise made at the edge of the world on the morning of an ending. The specific weight of standing on Dragonstone and knowing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

You slipped your hand into his. Your fingers were cool from the night air. He closed his hand around yours.

“But it felt real,” you said.

“It did.”

Another silence, this one richer. Weighted, but not heavily, weighted the way a good book is heavy, in a way you want.

“If it was real…”

Jace looked toward you. The city’s light caught you from below, softening the angles, turning you luminous in the warm way of a portrait painted with care. The same thing he’d thought this morning returned, effortlessly, as though it had simply been waiting for the right lighting.

Radiant.

The same as the princess from the dream. The same, and also entirely herself.

“If it was real,” you continued, a smile finding the corner of your mouth, “I think she’d be happy.”

“Who?”

“The princess.”

Your fingers squeezed his.

“Because she got her prince back.”

Something moved in his chest and he felt a giddy sensation.

“And he got his princess,” he said quietly.

The smile you gave him in return was the specific, undone kind that he privately thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He doubted this would change.

“You know,” he said, after a moment, “I’ve spent all day thinking about the battle.”

“The Gullet?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the city. “The part where I died.”

You were quiet beside him.

“And?” you said, finally.

He looked back through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse.

His mother, visible in her office, signing something. The small movement of her hand showing her actions. Luke in the hallway beyond, typing away at his phone aggressively with determinations of someone looking to win an argument even if he may be wrong.

Joffrey somewhere in his room planning a prank on his mother.

And all of it, all of this life, this ordinary, extraordinary life, glowing warm behind glass thirty floors above a city that had never known a dragon. His family.

“I think that prince would’ve liked this,” he said.

You followed his gaze.

You understood immediately. He could see it in the way your face softened, not with sadness but with tenderness that recognizes grief and holds it carefully.

A life without war. Without the weight of a crown.

Without sacrifice, the kind that swaps one beloved thing for another in an endless, devastating ledger.

Just family.

Just love.

Just peace.

You rested your head on his shoulder.

He turned his head and pressed a kiss to your hair, slow and quiet.

Neither of you saw it.

But just for a moment, a breath, almost a blink, the glass of the balcony door held a reflection that was not quite yours.

Two figures. Side by side. Dressed in black and red, the colours of a house that had once held the world.

Standing exactly as you were standing. Looking out at exactly what you were looking at.

Smiling.

At each other, and at this, and at everything that had managed, against all odds, to survive.

Then the image dissolved.

The glass held only the room behind it, warm and lit and full of the sound of Luke losing the argument.

And Jace, and you.

Exactly where you were always meant to be.