shh… don’t cry.

He closed the door behind him.

"That look on you," you said, and he was already crossing toward you. "Is something amiss?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The acknowledgment that you had read him again, and that he had permitted it.

He sat in the chair across from yours — not beside you, which told you this was a conversation he wanted to conduct with some amount of formality. He set the letter on the desk between you without preamble and let you read it yourself, because he had always understood that you did not need things explained to you. It was one of the things he loved about you, though he would not have used that word in that order. He would have said, if asked in public, that it was one of the things he deeply respected about his lady wife.

You read it twice. Then you set it down.

"When?" you asked.

"A fortnight. Perhaps less, if the lords of the Reach move quickly." He watched you with that particular stillness of his, the kind that other people mistook for patience. You knew better. He was calculating. Measuring your response against his own.

"They will move quickly," you said. "They know what this call means."

"I am afraid so."

You looked at him across the desk — the accounts between you, the raven's letter, all the small machinery of a household that would continue to function after he left it.

"Aegon is the rightful king," you said. Not as a question. Not even as reassurance. Simply as a fact you were placing between you like a stone foundation. This is what we are built on. "Rhaenyra has always been a spoiled, wilful girl. And now men must march and dragons must fly because she cannot suffer the world to be ordered as it ought to be." You shook your head, a brief, precise movement — not anger exactly, but the particular mild contempt you reserved for problems that should never have existed. "I know not how Alicent endured her all those years. The patience that must have required."

Something moved in his expression then. Brief, controlled, and unmistakable to you. It was what passed, in Ormund Hightower, for being moved — and for being quietly, deeply pleased.

"It is what always happens with these Targaryens," he said. His voice was even, measured, the voice of a man stating observable fact rather than venting grievance. He had no interest in grievance. Grievance was for men who had not yet accepted that the world required managing. "They are raised to believe that want and right are the same thing. That a dragon at one's back is sufficient substitute for legitimacy." He looked at the letter, then back at you. "Viserys named her his heir and thought that settled the matter. As though a king's wish were law unto itself, regardless of custom, regardless of precedent, regardless of—" He paused. Let the sentence close without finishing it, because he did not need to finish it. You both knew what it was regardless of. Regardless of everything House Hightower had spent centuries upholding. "She was always going to do this. The moment Viserys died, this was always where it led."

"Yes," you agreed.

He looked at you across the desk. "And you are not afraid of war."

"I am a Hightower," you said — which was not the name you were born with, but was entirely what you had become, and you both knew it. "I know what we are built on. I know what you ride to defend. And you know that had I been born a man, I would ride first into battle." You held his gaze.

Ormund looked at you with that kind of light he reserved for truly special moments. "It is a trait of yours that I have come to deeply admire along the years," he admitted.

The corner of your mouth moved slightly upwards at his praise. It was something that not everybody was gifted with: the praise of the Voice of Oldtown.

"You have a holy purpose before you, husband," you leaned back on your chair, eyes still fixed on his. "Go and defend it as only you can."

The same expression again. Brief, controlled. Unmistakable.

"Yes," he said. The same word he had used before, but weighted differently now — not agreement, but something closer to a vow.

The days that followed had a quality you could not name precisely — not grief, because you refused grief, and not ordinary life either, because nothing about it was ordinary. It was something in between. Heightened. Every evening meal felt significant. Every time he crossed a room you were in, you were aware of it.

Ormund spent most of his daylight hours in meetings. Maester, stewards, captains, septons. You heard them through closed doors, his voice unhurried and precise, issuing instructions that would outlast his presence here. He was not the kind of man who left loose ends. Before he went to war, he would ensure that every thread of the Hightower's administration was tied, labelled, and accounted for.

You managed your own parallel lists. The household. The provisions. The correspondence that would fall to you. You had always been competent — Ormund had not married you for beauty alone, though he had never pretended indifference to that either — and you would not become less so simply because he was leaving.

The last evening before his departure, you found him late in his study, the candles burned low, maps spread across every surface. He did not hear you enter. Or rather — and you suspected this was more likely — he heard you and chose not to turn, because sometimes he liked to see how close you would come before you announced yourself.

You came very close. You placed your hand flat against the center of his back, between his shoulder blades and through the soft fabric of his undershirt, and felt him draw a slow breath.

"Come to bed," you murmured, and pressed a soft kiss at the middle of his back, just were your hand was resting.

He turned then. In the low candlelight, looking down at you, something in his face was more unguarded than usual. Not entirely soft, but open, in the way a door is open — an invitation rather than a vulnerability.

"In a moment," he took your wrist in his hand and threw you a half, tired smile.

"Now," you took his hand in yours and pulled slightly.

His jaw shifted. The faintest tightening. You watched it happen and felt the familiar current move through you — the particular pleasure of prodding at a controlled man and watching control hold, barely, like a dam under pressure.

He looked at you for a long moment, and when he spoke his voice was lower than before. "You would keep a soldier from revisiting strategic matters the night before his leaving?"

It was not entirely a complaint, you could sense it in the slight playfulness of his voice.

"I would remind my husband exactly what to return home to," you pulled slightly harder at his absence of complaint.

He put his free hand at the back of your neck — not rough, not yet, but with that proprietary certainty that had never once in your marriage felt like presumption, because you had always understood it for what it was. Mine, that hand said. And you don't mind.

You didn't mind.

He walked you out of the study and down the corridor to your shared chambers, his hand never leaving you, and when he shut the door behind you both he stood for a moment just looking at you in the firelight. This, too, was something he did. He looked at you. Fully, without apology, with the same focused attention he gave to other things, as though you were something worth understanding thoroughly.

Then he crossed to you and embraced your whole body with big, hungry arms, his face pressed against your hair.

You felt him inhale slowly. Deliberately. His hands came to your hips and tightened as he breathed you in — your hair, your skin, the particular warmth of you — and a sound left him that was barely a sound at all. More of a release. The hinge of control loosening a single degree.

"Ormund," you whined slightly.

"Let me," His mouth moved to your temple, your cheek, the side of your throat. Scenting you in that slow, thorough way of his, like he was committing you to some part of himself that had nothing to do with memory. "Let me breathe you in until your scent settles as deep as my own bones."

You tilted your head and let him take what he needed, and you waited — because you both knew this was only the beginning, and you were very good at knowing when to wait.

His mouth found your pulse point. Pressed. Then his teeth. And there it was again: that pull between you, familiar as breathing, that had never once in all your years of marriage resolved itself into anything as simple as surrender.

You turned your head just slightly. Just enough that your mouth was close to his jaw, his throat, the particular place below his ear where the skin was warm and the muscle ran taut.

You had discovered that place less than a year into your marriage, on a night not entirely unlike this one — urgent, unplanned, both of you reaching for something that did not have a name. Your teeth had grazed it almost by accident and Ormund Hightower, Beacon of the South, had made a sound like a man struck.

You had filed the knowledge away immediately, and you had used it shamelessly ever since.

Now you felt him tense as your mouth neared it — he always knew, and the knowing never helped him — and you did not rush. You pressed your lips there first. Felt him go very still. The kind of still that was not composure but its opposite: a man holding himself together by will alone.

"Don't," he whispered against your temple. His voice had dropped entirely.

"I'm not doing anything," you said against his skin, tongue already tracing its prey.

"You know," he breathed, "exactly what you're doing."

You smiled and he felt it against his warm skin.

Then you bit him — not hard, but precisely, at that exact point you had mapped years ago — and Ormund's hands seized your hips with a force that lifted you off your feet entirely, and everything else became the particular, excellent chaos of the two of you.

He carried you to the bed, not gently — Ormund did nothing in this room gently, which was precisely how you wanted it. He did it with that controlled, purposeful strength of his, the kind that never felt like force because it was always entirely deliberate. He knew what he was doing. He always knew what he was doing. His hands under your arse supporting your weight were certain, and the way he set you down on the edge of the mattress was less a tenderness than a placement. Here, his hands said. I'm putting you here because I want you here.

You looked up at him with a look that would clearly scandalize septons.

He was looking back at you with that same gaze mirrored in his deep blue eyes. It brought you a special kind of perverted satisfaction to know that you were the only person in the Seven Kingdoms who got those looks from him. His public face was composed, measured, impenetrable. This face, almost entirely consumed by desire, belonged only to this room. Only to you.

"You bit me again," he said, slowly sinking down to his knees in front of you.

"I did," you agreed, your eyes following his through the movement.

"You always bite me."

"You always let me," you bit your lip in delight, seeing precisely how it always affected him.

He exhaled through his nose — that particular sound, half exasperation and half something far warmer — and reached for you. His hands found the laces at your back and he worked them with the same precision he applied to everything, unhurried, thorough, until the fabric loosened and he drew it from your shoulders and down. You squirmed out of the fabric and leaned back on your elbows onto the mattress.

Then he simply leaned on his heels and looked at you.

That was the other thing he usually did and that you adored of him. He refused to rush past the looking, no matter how many times he had seen you, no matter how many years had made your body familiar to him. He looked at you every time as though he was recalculating something. As though you continued to be, to him, a miracle that required his entire attention to worship.

"Gods," he said quietly. Not performed. Not meant to flatter. Just the word, dropped into the silence, the way a man drops something heavy he has been carrying.

You reached for him — his shirt, the buttons at his collar — and he caught your wrists.

"No," he said.

"Ormund—" you protested.

"No." He drew your wrists together, held them in one hand with an ease that was its own particular indignity, because you could not move and you both knew it, and the look on his face told you he knew exactly what that did to you. "You had your moment with your teeth. Now you're going to let me have mine."

You considered arguing. The consideration lasted approximately two seconds, because then he put his mouth to your bare shoulder and breathed in, slow and deep, his lips brushing the skin without quite kissing it, and every thought you had dissolved cleanly away. He used the momentum of his kiss to press you fully to the mattress, your hands, still held together at your wrists by a single hand, above your head.

"There," he murmured against you, his body climbing to cover yours. The word was almost private, said to himself as much as to you. His face moved along your shoulder, your throat, nosing into the curve of your neck with single-minded attention, and the sound that left him there was deep and involuntary and real in a way that Ormund's sounds rarely were. "Gods, you are a fucking temptress."

His mouth opened against your throat. He tasted you there — tongue and lips and the slow drag of sensation that made your spine soften — and his grip on your wrists tightened for a moment, pure reflex, as though tasting you had cost him something too.

"Do you know," he said, his mouth still against your skin, moving now toward your collarbone, "what you do to me." It was not a question. His voice was low and even and precise, the same voice he used to dictate letters and issue orders, except stripped of all its distance. "I have thought about this. All day. Through every meeting, every map, every conversation about supply lines and march routes. I thought about this." His mouth found the curve of your breast. "About you." His tongue traced a slow line. "About how you feel."

"Ormund—" you tried again.

"I am talking," he said and bit one of your nipples and got a surprised, wanton hiss from you. "I am telling you how enticing you are, my love. You might consider listening to my compliments," his voice carried a clear amount of teasing.

He released your wrists — not because you won that particular contest, but because he had decided he needed both hands now, which was an entirely different thing — and his palms spread flat against your ribcage, holding you still while his mouth continued its thorough inventory of you.

You got your hands into his hair, slightly pulling, which you knew he loved. He let you keep them there, a small groan coming out of his throat at the feeling of your fingers through his scalp.

"I have tried," he continued, between slow, deliberate tastes of the skin on your sternum, "to think of a way to carry you with me. I have actually considered it." A pause. His mouth at the underside of your breast, tongue tracing the curve. "I suspected you would refuse the question."

"I would refuse," you confirmed, breathless. Not because the idea of following your husband displeased you — you would follow him to the Seven Hells would he ask, just as you knew he would do the same should you ask it of him — but because you knew a battlefield was no place for a woman.

"I know. So instead—" he mouthed down your upper stomach, his hands sliding to your hips— "I intend to learn you. All of you. Again. So that I have something precise to remember." He looked up at you from where he was, his eyes dark and entirely focused. "Hold still for me."

"I will not," you warned him.

"You will try," he said, and his hands moved to your thighs and pulled them open.

He was meticulous. That was the only word for it. Ormund approached this the way he approached everything — with patience, with thoroughness, with the absolute conviction that there was no point in doing something if you were not going to do it properly. He mapped you with his mouth, the dip of your navel, the jut of your hip, the soft skin of your inner thigh, and every time you moved he pinned you back with those immovable hands as though you were a document he was trying to read and your fidgeting was obscuring the text.

"You're impossible," you managed between breaths.

"I'm thorough," he corrected, and mouthed at the crease of your hip, and you felt his chest shake once — a laugh, almost, barely contained — as you made a sound that was considerably less composed than you would have liked.

When he finally put his mouth on you it was without preamble, without teasing, because Ormund did not tease — he committed. He opened his mouth against you fully, tasted you with one long, flat stroke of his tongue from entrance to clit, and the sound he made as he did it was immediate and involuntary — a low, rough groan that vibrated against you and did not stop, like a man who had been waiting a long time for something and had finally, finally been given it.

He did it again. Slower. His tongue traced you with precision, learning the geography of you the way he learned everything, thoroughly and without haste, mapping where you gasped and where your hips tried to roll toward him and where the sound you made shifted pitch. Every time you moved he held you down with those hands — hard around your thighs, immovable — and continued at exactly the pace he had decided on, which was not the pace you wanted and was somehow, devastatingly, better.

He buried his face against you and breathed in.

The sound that came from him then was different from anything else — wrecked and open and real, the sound of a man undone not by what he was doing but by the smell of you, by the particular intimacy of being this close, this surrounded. His hands pulled you toward him rather than holding you still. He pressed his face against you like a man pressing into something he had been denied and intended to make up for lost time.

"Gods," he breathed against you, lips moving against your folds as he spoke. "You—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth to you again — not a stroke this time but just contact, warm and deliberate, his lips against your clit while he gathered himself. "You are—" He lifted his head just enough to look at you, his eyes dark and his mouth wet with your arousal, and the look on his face was the most undisguised thing you had ever seen on him. "I would stay here," he said, between one devastating drag of his tongue and the next, his mouth returning to you between each word like he could not help it. "Indefinitely. If you would let me. If the world would let me." Another stroke, the flat of his tongue slow and thorough. Your hands tightened in his hair. "I would consider it a worthy use of my lifetime."

"Please—"

He answered by closing his lips around your clit and sucking — brief, controlled, precisely calibrated — and the noise you made was not dignified at all.

"Tell me," he said against you, his breath warm. "Tell me you know what you are to me."

You looked down at him. He was watching you even now — even here, even like this, he was looking at your face, reading you, cataloguing you, his chin tilted up and his eyes steady on yours while his tongue moved in slow circles that made sustained thought nearly impossible.

"Say it," he pressed.

"I'm yours," you moaned, which was not precisely what he asked but was, you both knew, the truest version of the answer. "Only yours, Ormund."

Something in him gave way at that. His tongue pressed flat against you and then the tip of it found your entrance and pushed in — shallow, then deeper, fucking into you in slow deliberate strokes while his nose pressed against your clit, and the sound of it was obscene and wet and his groan at the taste of you inside was low and continuous and entirely lost. Your thighs tried to close around his head. He let them, turned it into leverage, his hands sliding under you to grip your hips and angle you exactly where he wanted while his tongue worked you open.

Then he withdrew it, dragged the flat of his tongue back up to your clit, and sucked there.

You felt him work a finger into you — one, slow, feeling you clench around it with a sharp exhale against your thigh. Then a second, pressed alongside the first, curling slightly on the withdrawal in a way that made your spine arch off the mattress. He fucked them into you at the same steady pace his tongue kept on your clit, and the combination of it — his mouth and his hand and the sounds he was making against you, like a man at prayer, like a man absolutely ruined — built something in you that had no gradual approach, just an edge, sudden and absolute.

"Ormund—" His name came out broken.

He felt it in the way you tightened around his fingers. His tongue pressed harder, his fingers curled, and his free hand came flat against your stomach and held you down as you came — not away from him but into him, your hips driving against his face as he held you there and took everything you gave him, his mouth open against you and breathing you in through every wave of it, his groan vibrating against your clit until the last of it had wrung itself out of you.

He kept his fingers inside you. Kept his mouth on you, gentler now, lips soft where his tongue had been relentless, as though he was unwilling to leave entirely. His face pressed against your inner thigh and he breathed — long, slow, deliberate — like a man storing something precious against a long winter.

He did not let you recover, however. That would not have been like him.

He was kissing back up your body before you had finished — your stomach, your ribs, the underside of your breast — and you used the moment, because you always used the moment, and got your hands under his shirt. Got it over his head. He allowed it because he was occupied with your throat and because somewhere in the last few minutes the balance of control had quietly shifted in the way it always did with you two — not a defeat for either of you but a renegotiation, conducted entirely without words.

You got your mouth to his neck. His jaw, tasting yourself there. The soft skin below his ear. He went still.

"Don't," he warned. The word barely had any voice or sternness in it.

"My love," you purred sweetly, against that particular point of skin.

"I am warning you—"

You bit him.

His whole body shuddered once, like a struck bell, and then his hands were at your hips, flipping you and earning a high-pitched laugh from you. He repositioned you with a brisk decisive authority that might have been punitive except that his mouth was at your shoulder the whole time, his lips and teeth at your skin, breathing you in even as he arranged you exactly where he wanted you. He was muttering something against your skin. You caught fragments of impossible woman, you impossible—, and the warmth of it moved through you like sunlight.

"Insufferable," he said, against the back of your neck. His weight settled over you. "You are entirely—" His mouth dragged down your spine. "—insufferable." You heard how he worked at the laces of his breeches.

"You love me," you said into the pillow.

His hands went under your stomach and pulled your body upwards with a force that added weight to the already existing heat that had claimed your insides long ago. His mouth kept descending down your back and paused at the roundness of your ass, a hand resting on one of your meaty cheeks, his mouth on the other, and he bit down. Hard. Clearly intending to leave a mark that mirrored the one that, he was suspecting, was already appearing on his neck.

The sound you let out was somewhere between a yelp and a moan. He kissed the marred skin and traced his tongue over the indentation of his teeth.

"Love does not begin to cover what I feel for you," he finally said. Quiet. Certain. The same way he said everything that actually mattered — without decoration, without performance, because it did not require either. Your stomach flipped again.

He pushed into you.

Not all at once — he was too deliberate for that, too aware of himself even now — but in a slow, inexorable press that did not stop until he was fully seated, until there was nowhere left to go, and the sound you made at the stretch of it was something you would not have made for anyone else in the world. He felt enormous. He always did, at this angle, on all fours with your hands in the sheets and his weight behind you, and the completeness of it — the specific, overwhelming fullness — dragged a second sound out of you before you had finished making the first.

He held you there. His forehead dropped to the back of your neck. His breath came out in a long, fractured exhale against your skin, and you felt his chest expand and contract as he took in the scent of you surrounding him on all sides — your hair, your skin, the heat of your cunt gripping him — and whatever composure he had left was simply gone, burned through, and what remained was just the man.

Just Ormund. The one who lived underneath all that magnificent discipline.

"Fuck," he murmured. Low and private. Not for you — or not only for you — but for himself, for whatever part of him was still capable of language. "You feel—" He stopped. Tried again, his voice rough at every edge. "You feel like — every single time — like—" He could not finish it. He had run out of words, which almost never happened, and you felt obscurely triumphant about it even now, even like this.

Then he moved, and finishing thoughts aloud became temporarily impossible for either of you.

He was not gentle and you did not want him to be. He set a pace that was deep and relentless from the first stroke, his cock driving into you with a force that rocked you forward and would have shifted you entirely if his hands had not held you exactly where he wanted you — anchored, immovable, taking everything he gave. You felt every inch of him on every withdrawal, felt the drag of it and then the full, devastating push back in, and the sound of it was wet and rhythmic and obscene in the quiet of the room and neither of you cared.

His mouth found your shoulder. Your nape. He was breathing you in between thrusts, his nose dragging across your skin between each forward drive of his hips as though he needed it, as though the scent of you was what was keeping him moving.

"Look at you," he said at your ear, rough and low, his hips snapping forward as he said it. "Look at what you do." Another thrust, harder, and your hands fisted in the sheets. "Every time. Every gods-damned time I push into you and you—" He broke off. His jaw pressed against your temple. "You take me so well. You always— you were made for this." The words were not pretty. They were not meant to be. They were true in the way that only the most unguarded things are true — stripped of performance, stripped of everything except the wanting underneath. "My extraordinary, infuriating—" He mouthed at your throat, teeth grazing. "—beautiful—" A thrust that punched the breath out of you. "—utterly loyal wife."

The word loyal in his mouth did something to you that had nothing to do with the fucking, and everything to do with it. Because you knew what it meant to him. You had always known.

His hands slid from your hips to your shoulders. The change in grip was the only warning. He pulled you back into each thrust now, using the leverage of your shoulders to drive himself deeper still, and the cry that came out of your sore throat was not dignified and you did not care, because the angle was devastating and he knew it and he did not stop, just kept pulling you back against him with that controlled, purposeful force, his cock seated so deep on each stroke that thinking became a thing that happened to other people, not to you.

"Ormund—" you cried out again.

"I know," he said — and then, lower, his mouth at your ear, "You're mine. Say it."

"Yours," you told him, breathless.

The sound he made was not civilized.

Before you could process it, he pulled you upright, your back against his chest, his arm coming across your collarbones and your stomach. Something that felt more intimate and more absolute: a claim. His forearm against your sternum, your back flush against him from shoulder to hip, his cock pushing back into you from this new angle while his other hand splayed flat across your stomach and held you against him.

You could not move. Not meaningfully. You were entirely encompassed by him — his arm, his chest, his hips — and the position meant every thrust drove up into you rather than forward, a different depth entirely, and the noise you made the first time he rolled his hips like that was something you had no word for.

"There," he said against your temple. His voice had gone very quiet. Frayed at every seam. "You are so beautiful like this."

He fucked you like that — slow, now, deep, with a grinding deliberateness that was somehow worse than the pace before, because it gave you nothing to brace against, nothing to do but feel every movement and listen to him come undone against your neck. His arm tightened across your chest. His face pressed into your hair and stayed there, nose buried in it, breathing you in on every stroke like you were the only thing he had left to hold onto.

"You ruin me," he said, muffled in your hair. "Do you know that. You have always—" A grunt, pulled from somewhere that had nothing to do with composure. "—always ruined me. Before I even touch you. The smell of you. The—" Another thrust, and his sentence dissolved. "I think about this. Every hour I am away from you I think about this. About being inside you. About how you—" He stopped again. His rhythm was losing its deliberateness now, becoming something more honest and more urgent. "I cannot think about anything else when I am in you. There is nothing else. There is only—"

He moaned your name. It came out like something torn loose from him, and then again, lower, as his rhythm stuttered and drove deep and his hand on your stomach pulled you hard against him and held you there.

He drove into you and stayed.

His whole body shuddered — not once but in waves, his hips rocking in short grinding pulses, and his hand on your stomach slid down, finding you where you were joined, his fingers pressing against your clit with the same remorseless precision he had used earlier — not asking, not teasing, simply applying himself to the problem of you with the focused efficiency that characterised everything he did.

"Come for me, my love," he said against your neck. Rough. Certain. Not a request. "I want to feel you coming undone around my cock."

The orgasm did not build so much as detonate — sudden and total, your whole body clenching around him, and the sound you made was his name broken in half, and he groaned at the feel of you tightening on his cock, a low continuous sound like something structural giving way. His fingers did not stop. He worked you through every tremour, his hips stuttering forward in short desperate pulses as your body gripped him, and the combination of it — his hand, his cock, the arm across your chest holding you immovable against him while you came apart — was so complete, so inescapable, that there was nothing to do but take it and make sounds you would not think about later.

He followed you over the edge with very little left between him and ruin.

He spent himself fucking it into you with an intent that was indistinguishable from marking, from claiming, from the deep wordless insistence that you were his and he was here and this was something that could not be undone. The groan that tore out of him was enormous and private and pressed into your hair, muffled there, just for you and for this room and for no one else in the world.

His arm did not loosen. If anything it tightened, pulling you closer still against his chest, his lips finding the side of your neck as the last of it moved through him. He was still rocking into you, slowly now, working through every wave with those long unhurried strokes, like he refused to be finished, like the idea of withdrawing was something he was simply not prepared to accept yet.

He went still at last. His arm stayed where it was. Your own hands started caressing his forearms, the one across your chest and the one that connected him to your core. Your nails dragged paths along his warm skin, and he groaned contently against your neck, pressing kisses across your pulse.

After you regained your breaths, you pulled him with you to the pillows of the bed. You shifted before he could settle into stillness. Turned, repositioned, until you were facing him — chest to chest, your face level with his in the dark. He let you arrange this without comment, which was its own kind of accommodation from a man who did not usually cede the arrangement of things.

For a moment you just looked at each other.

His hair was disheveled. You had done that. His throat bore the faint mark of your teeth, just below his ear, already beginning to colour. You had done that too, and you felt no remorse about it. If anything, the sight of it did something warm and territorial to your chest.

His eyes moved over your face in that way of his — cataloguing, reading, finding the things you had not said.

Your hand found his chest. Pressed flat against it. Found his heartbeat. You were not aware, exactly, of deciding to do it. Your hand simply went there, the way it always did, the way it had done for years, because this was where you put your hand when you wanted to know he was real and present and still here. Ormund's heartbeat under your palm. Evidence.

You felt him look at you. "You are counting," he mentioned, quietly.

"I am not."

"You are." He did not say it as an accusation. His voice was very low, very even, the way it got when he was being careful with you. Which he rarely needed to be. "You only do that when something worries you."

You did not answer. Your hand stayed where it was.

He watched you for a long moment. In the low, guttered light his face was open in the way it only ever was here — unguarded exactly in the way he only allowed himself to be in your presence.

Then his hand came up and covered yours. Over his own heart.

"It's still beating," he said.

"I know that," you said, a little sharply.

"It will keep beating," the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth. "You needn't worry."

Your jaw tightened. You were not a woman who wept. You had not wept since childhood, more or less, had trained yourself out of it the way you had trained yourself out of many things that felt like weakness in the world you both moved through. But there was something pressing at the back of your throat tonight that was not tears exactly and was not nothing either, and Ormund could see it, because Ormund could always see it, and the fact that he was not saying anything about it was the kindest thing he could possibly have done.

Your fingers laced through his over his chest. He looked down at your hand. Back up at your face.

Something crossed his expression then — something that had no name in the ledger of his usual emotional vocabulary. Something softer than respect and less contained than love and entirely, devastatingly real. He had looked at you this way before. In the Sept, on your wedding day, when you spoke your vows without faltering, your voice clear and sure while half the assembled nobility waited for a girl too young and too bright to stumble. You had not stumbled. He had looked at you then the way he was looking at you now.

Like he could not account for you. Like you were, to him, a continued astonishment.

His thumb moved over your knuckles. Slow. Back and forth.

"How," he said, very quietly, almost to himself, "does something as tender as you—" He stopped. His eyes moved over your face again. The line between his brows, the one that appeared when he was genuinely puzzling over something. "You should have no interest in me whatsoever. You know that."

"You've said so before."

"It bears repeating." But there was no real bewilderment in it. There was wonder. There was the particular reverence of a man who had stopped trying to explain a thing and had simply begun to be grateful for it. "I am—" He considered his words, which he always did, which you had always loved. "I am not an easy man."

"No," you agreed.

"I am not warm."

"Not often."

"I am demanding, and frequently preoccupied, and I have been told I make people feel they are being quietly assessed at all times."

"You do," you confirmed. "It's very unnerving. I find it attractive."

The almost-laugh again. That soundless shift in his chest beneath your hand.

"You are deranged," he chuckled.

"Probably," you slightly shrugged and looked at his eyes. "But only because you drive me so."

He was quiet for a moment. His thumb had not stopped moving across your knuckles. Outside, somewhere in the walls of the High Tower, the building breathed the way old things breathed — settling stone, distant sea of the Whispering Sound, the hush of very late night. Tomorrow, he would be sleeping in a tent somewhere on the road north, and you would be in this bed alone, and your hand would find the pillow he slept on without you asking it to.

You already knew this. You were not afraid of it. But your fingers gripped his harder, and you did not let go.

He noticed. He looked at your hand and then at your face and the expression there was the one he saved for the Sept — for the moments of genuine private devotion that he would rather have died than perform in public. You had seen him pray. Not the performed public piety of a lord of the Reach, but the real thing, quiet and serious and meant. He prayed like a man paying a debt he considered himself lucky to owe.

He looked at you like that now.

"I thank the Father every morning," he said. Quietly. "That it was you." His eyes did not leave yours. "That I got you. Of all the outcomes — of all the matches that were possible, all the women I might have married—" He stopped. Shook his head slightly. "I thank Him. Every day. That I was given the sense to choose well. To choose you."

Your throat was doing the thing again.

"You chose me for political reasons," you said, because one of you had to say something manageable.

"Initially," he allowed. "And then I met you." The thumb again, across your knuckles. "And I thanked every one of the Seven individually ever since."

You looked at him. He looked back. The candles were nearly out now, just the last of the embers in the grate casting the room in deep amber, and in that light he looked like something that had always existed, something permanent, something that was here before you and would be— You stopped that thought where it started.

He would come back. You knew he would. You had never doubted it, not in the marrow of yourself, not where it counted.

His arm came around you. Pulled you in, fully, your face against his throat, his face in your hair, and he held you there with the same certainty with which he did everything — like he had made a decision and the decision was this, you, here — and you felt him breathe you in one more time, slow and deep.

"Sleep," he said against the crown of your head.

You closed your eyes and you slept.

In the morning you found him before the dawn had fully decided what it wanted to be.

The sept of the High Tower was old — older than most of the tower itself, the stones worn smooth by centuries of Hightower knees on the floor, Hightower hands folded in petition, Hightower voices lifted in the particular quiet language of people who believed they were being heard. You had always loved it at this hour. The candles lit for the night vigil still burning, the coloured glass beginning to catch the first grey suggestion of morning, the smell of incense and cold stone and beeswax that meant, to you, something foundational. Something that did not change.

Ormund was already there.

He was kneeling before the Father — of course he was, it would always be the Father first for him, the judge, the lawgiver, the one who weighed the scales of men — and he did not hear you enter, or if he did he did not turn, because this was not a place where he performed attention. His head was slightly bowed. His hands were folded before him with a precision that was not stiffness but intention. Even in prayer he was utterly himself.

He was already in his armour.

You had known he would be. Ormund would not have come to the sept on the morning of his departure in anything less — not from pride, but from the same instinct that governed everything he did: a man should meet the Gods as he would meet any lord of consequence. With preparation. With respect. With the acknowledgment that some audiences demanded your best.

The armour was extraordinary. You had seen it before — had watched it being fitted, had run your hands across the worked surface of it in the armory with a proprietary satisfaction you did not bother to conceal — but it struck you again now, in the candlelight, in the hush of this old room.

It was Hightower armour in the truest sense. Not showy, not theatrical, nothing like the Valyrian steel theatrics of the Targaryens. But beautiful in the way that serious, carefully made things were beautiful. The lines of it followed the lines of him. It had been made for his particular dimensions, his breadth of shoulder, the specific geometry of a man built for exactly this.

He looked like something out of a song, kneeling there. Like something meant to last.

You crossed the floor quietly. Took your place beside him — not behind him, not at a deferential distance, but beside, because that was where you had always been — and you knelt on the worn stone and folded your own hands and turned your face to the Father.

You felt Ormund register your presence. Not by any sound or movement, but by a subtle shift in the quality of the air beside you. The way stillness changed when someone was no longer alone in it.

You began to pray.

Not aloud. You never prayed aloud except in the formal liturgies, because real prayer, the kind that meant something, was a private exchange. You spoke to the Father first, because Ormund was here and this was his patron and it felt right to begin where he had begun. You asked for his victory. Not in the way of desperate petitioning, not with the grasping quality of fear, but with the steady directness you brought to all serious requests. He is a good man and a just lord and he goes to fight for a rightful king. See him through it. Allow him to come home to me.

Then you turned, internally, to the Mother.

The Mother you had always found the easiest to speak to. Not because you were soft — you were not, and she was not either, not really, not if you read her honestly — but because the Mother's mercy was not weakness. It was the understanding that men who went to war were still made of the same flesh as the children they once were, that even the strongest armour had a seam, and that the space between competence and survival sometimes came down to grace rather than planning.

Mercy, you asked her. Not for me. For him. Whatever comes — show him your mercy.

You did not know how long you knelt there. The morning light shifted through the coloured glass, slow and incremental, and the candles guttered in a draft from somewhere, and the sept breathed around you with the deep patience of old sacred spaces.

You rose together. The way you did most things. He turned to look at you, and stopped.

You had not dressed formally. There had been no one to put your hair up at that hour, and besides, you had not wanted to — some instinct had kept you from it, had made you shake your hair loose down your back before you came to find him, long against your simple gown, the early light catching it as it caught the glass. You saw him take it in. Saw his eyes move over you in the way they did — that slow, full attention — and something in his armoured stillness shifted. Not broke. Just — shifted.

"You look," he said, and then stopped himself. "Like something that should be written with the best of inks," he said. "And sung at every gathering."

You looked at him. The armour. The candlelight. The worn stones of a sept that had held his family's prayers for three hundred years.

"So do you," you told him.

He was quiet for a moment. His eyes were on your face with that quality of attention that, after all those years, still did something to the centre of your chest. Like being stood in direct sunlight. Like being the fixed point a very serious navigator had chosen to reckon from.

"I wish to tell you something," he said, and your attentive silence was cue enough for him.

He looked at you. He breathed in once, slow, the way he did when he was not buying time but simply ensuring that what he said next would be exact. Ormund did not speak imprecisely about things that mattered.

He took your hands in his. "I love you."

Three words from another man might have been ordinary. From Ormund Hightower, standing in his armour in the sept of his ancestors on the morning he went to war, they landed like something structural. Like a cornerstone being set.

"I know you do," you said softly.

"I know you know." His jaw moved. "I am telling you anyway. Because I want it said. Here, in this room, in front of—" he gestured, briefly, at the figures of the Seven around you. "I want it witnessed by the same that granted me such happiness."

You did not speak. He continued.

"I have been many things in my life," he explained. "I have tried to be a just lord. A capable commander. A faithful son of the Seven. I have tried to serve this city and this house with everything I am." His eyes did not leave yours. "But there is nothing — nothing I have done or been or built — that I value as I value this union. This marriage." His voice, that measured, precise voice, was very quiet now. "You."

The morning light was coming fully now, amber and rose through the old glass, falling across the floor between you in long coloured bars, and you were standing in it, your hair loose, and he was standing in his armour, and the sept around you was silent and old and full.

"I go to war for a right cause," he said. "I go because it is right. Because Aegon is ours and Rhaenyra is not and the realm requires men willing to stand for what is true regardless of cost." The certainty in it was absolute. You had always loved that about him — the way he held convictions the same way he held everything else, with both hands, without flinching. "I believe in what we fight for. You know I do."

"I do," you nodded.

"But when I ride out this morning—" He stopped. Something passed through his face, brief and real. "When I ride out, it will not be the rightness of the cause I carry. Not first." His eyes were on yours. "It will be you. It is always you. You are the light I ride toward, every time I have ever ridden away from this tower. You are what makes Oldtown worth defending. What makes any of it—" He stopped again. "You are my beacon," he said, simply. "You have always been my beacon."

Your throat did the thing. You let it.

"Ormund," you said.

"I wish—" He exhaled. "I wish for nothing more than to come back to you. To walk through that gate and find you exactly as you are now, or arguing with the steward, or bent over your accounts with that expression you get when the numbers displease you." His mouth moved upwards. "I wish for nothing more than to hold you again. In this sept. In our bed. Anywhere."

When he finished speaking you rose onto your toes and put your arms around him.

It required a small adjustment — the armour added width and edge to the shape of him you knew by heart, and you had to find the angles of it, the places where you could hold on properly — but you did, your arms around his neck and your face against his jaw, and for a moment he did not move. Just stood there, solid and present, absorbing the fact of you against him.

Then his arms came around you.

Not gently. With the full weight of everything the morning meant — his departure, the road ahead, the particular quality of a man who did not know how to hold something halfway — and you felt it in the way his armour pressed against your chest and his face dropped to the crook of your neck. He breathed you in there, slow and deliberate, the way he always did, except that this time it had an urgency underneath it, a need beneath the control, the wanting of a man who was already thinking about how long it would be before he could do this again.

You held each other in the old quiet of the sept. Then he drew back. Not far. Just enough to find your face with his hands, to tip your chin toward him.

He kissed you.

You knew his kisses. You had catalogued them over years the way he catalogued everything — thoroughly, without meaning to, until the knowledge was simply part of you. The chaste press of his mouth when in public, perfectly correct, revealing nothing. The ones in bed that were not kisses so much as declarations, warm and consuming and entirely without restraint. The particular kiss he used when you were winning an argument — sudden and deliberate, his mouth on yours cutting off whatever point you had been making, and the infuriating thing was that it always worked.

This was none of those.

This was slower than the ones in bed and deeper than the ones in court and it had none of the strategic quality of the argument kisses. It had no strategy at all. It was simply Ormund, his hands steady on your face and his mouth on yours, and the thing it contained was not passion exactly and not tenderness exactly but something that lived beneath both of those — the full, unguarded weight of a man who did not say everything he felt and had chosen, here, in this room, in front of the Gods, to say it this way instead.

You kissed him back and did not try to name it. Some things did not need naming. Some things only needed to be held, and you held it for a long time.

When he drew back, his thumbs moved once across your cheekbones. He looked at you. You looked at him.

You reached into the neckline of your gown.

The cloth you produced was simple — a small square of linen, nothing remarkable to look at, the kind of thing that would have meant nothing to anyone else in the world. It had been sitting against your skin since you dressed, warm from your body, and you had said nothing about it until now because you had wanted it to hold you as long as possible before you gave it away.

You held it out to him.

He looked at it. Looked at you. Something moved through his careful composure the way light moves through water — distorting everything underneath for just a moment before the surface stilled again. He understood immediately. He had always understood you immediately.

He took it from your hand and brought it to his mouth.

His eyes stayed on yours as he did it — steady, deliberate, holding your gaze with that unwavering attention of his while he pressed the linen to his lips and breathed in, slow and deep, and the look in his eyes as he did it was so naked and so entirely his — not soft, not tender, but devoted, utterly and completely devoted, the way he was devoted to the Seven and to this house and to the idea of things that were worth protecting — that you had to work to hold his gaze and you did, because you were his equal in this as in everything, and you did not look away.

He lowered it from his mouth. He reached into his sleeve and tucked it there, safely, close against his wrist. Pressed it flat with two fingers to be certain of it.

Then he looked at you one last time.

"Go," you told him, before either of you could make this harder than it already was. "And come back to me not as a corpse, Ormund Hightower."

He looked at you for a long moment. His thumb moved once more across your cheekbone.

"I have every intention," he said quietly, "of dying an old man. In my own bed. With you beside me." The faintest pause. "Everything else can wait."

Then he kissed you one last time.

It was not slow. It was not careful. It was the kiss of a man with a march ahead of him and a war to fight and a wife he intended to return to, and it pressed you back almost imperceptibly on your feet, his mouth hard on yours, his hands framing your face with a grip that was just short of desperate — Ormund Hightower's version of desperate, which looked like certainty in anyone else. He kissed you the way he had held you in the dark, the way he had breathed you in all night, with the full unguarded force of everything he was, and for a moment it felt less like a goodbye than like an attempt to take you with him the only way he could. To press the shape of you into himself so completely that no amount of distance could undo it.

Then he let you go and he went.

The sept held you in its old quiet. The coloured light fell across the floor in long bars of amber and rose. The candles burned low. Outside, somewhere beyond the stones of the High Tower, you heard the sound of horses, of men assembling, of a world — your world — preparing to move.

You stood in the silence he had left behind and you did not weep. You turned back to the Mother, and you folded your hands, and you thanked her in advance.

He would come back.

You had never doubted it.

A.N.: I am afraid some parts may be OOC for Ormund, and I apologise for it in advance. This has been kind of a writing-trusting exercise for me, as I have not been able to fully study his character from the show with just a single chapter). Also, as this is a House of the Dragon fic and not part of my usual AKOTSK work, I was a bit hesitant as to use the usual taglist. I finally decided to tag everyone just in case (if you don't want to be tagged in upcoming HOTD fics, just let me know). Also, this has been proofread just once, so expect some possible mistakes here and there.

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @sacha1slytherin @faithfullyvigilantsliver @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff @a-sunflower-in-bloom @heieufh @karakatitsa-sonya @eleventhboi @celestialsonglines @xglittergoddess @warpedlilium @themoonseroticoracle @hrh007 @fraaiefreule91 @hannisreading @samthegreenapologist

Want to join the taglist? Leave a comment here!

The first time Egg realized his father was in love with his aunt, it came to him as most truths did in his childhood: carelessly and from the mouth of someone who should have known better.

The afternoon was hot, with the sun beating down hard on Egg's back, slicking it with hot droplets of sweat. It felt unbearable. Dust was also clinging to the air, to his skin and to the back of his throat.

He thought that squiring would be something finer than this. Something worthy of the stories and songs. Instead it was just weight. It was sweat. It was the sour, lingering scent of wine that followed Daeron everywhere he went.

"Seven save me," Daeron muttered, swaying as Egg struggled with the fastening at his shoulder. "Did they give me a squire or a stableboy?"

"I can do it," Egg said eagerly.

"You always can," Daeron replied, listing his cup. "And yet..."

He did not finish his thought. Egg bit down on his tongue and tried again. His fingers slipped. Until by chance or pure stubbornness, the buckle caught.

Egg stepped back and looked up at his perfect work, waiting for some well deserved praise. But recieved nothing. Egg groaned and looked up ready to complain to Daeron but the older boy was no longer looking at him.

His gaze had gone elsewhere, beyond the yard, beyond the garden hedges, fixed on something Egg could not yet see.

"What is it?" Egg asked, rising onto his toes, as though the height might grant him some assistance with the high hedge. It did not.

Daeron did not answer at once. He drank what remained in his cup, slow and unhurried.

"Have you ever noticed the way Father behaves around her?"

Egg frowned. "Around who?" (the boy was now jumping up and down to try and gain some view beyond the hedges).

"Our aunt. (Y/N)"

Egg blinked. "No?"

Daeron hummed softly. "It's nothing. Less than nothing."

Egg wracked his brain trying to come up with some possible answer to what Daeron was insinuating. "Does Father have some problem with her?"

Egg was worried then because you as well as your family were meant to come to Summerhall before coming with them to Ashford for a tourney.

"Quite the opposite." Daeron turned to Egg and wiggled his brows. Egg frowned, knowing what that meant. "That doesn't mean anything."

"No, it doesn't."

"She's married. To Prince Baelor."

Daeron hummed.

"Father wouldn't-" Egg stopped, the rest of the thought refusing to settle into something. "He loved Mother."

At that, something in Daeron's experession shifted.

"He did."

The words hung there, unfinished. Egg waited for more but none came. "She's our aunt."

"And he's our father."

Egg shook his head. "You're wrong."

"Perhaps." Daeron set his empty cup aside and crouched slightly, bringing himself nearer to Egg's height. "Just watch him. You'll see it, or maybe you won't. These sort of things aren't meant to be seen at all."

He straightened, clapping a hand against Egg's shoulder. "Come on. I'll need another drink before I pretened to be a knight again."

Egg followed, though more slowly. He told himself there was nothing. Daeron was just drunk and imagining things.

The second time Egg noticed, no one said a word at all.

It happened in the Great Hall, in the lull between courses, when the noise softened just enough to hear the quieter things. The scrapes of a cup against the table, the half whispers of conversations and all that. The portion of the night where everyone was relaxed.

Egg had not meant to watch. He told himself he wasn't. But Daeron's voice had settled somewhere in the back of his mind and it was impossible to ignore it. So he took Daeron's words to heart. Watch him.

So he did. Egg watched his father from his place at the dinner table next to Aemon (who had his head buried in some large textbook. Egg was slightly concered over his brother's potential future neck problems).

His father sat at the end of the high table by his brother and Egg's uncle. His posture was straight and his expression was carved hard. He spoke when spoken to, nodded whe required and drank very little. There was little to nothing strange about it.

Until, his Aunt (Y/N) laughed.

It was not loud, nothing that would turn heads or draw attention to it. (Y/N)'s laugh was a lovely one and a familiar one to Egg. (The laugh came from a joke that Matarys told her but Egg did not hear what it was. From what he knew of his cousin, Egg didn't think it was a funny joke and his aunt was just being polite).

But Egg saw it. The way his father had stilled. Not entirely or in a dramatic way. But it was as if the statue had been shooken. A breath that was being held onto for a second too long.

Egg frowned. His father did not turn, did not look, his gaze remained fix on Baelor as the two were in a conversation. Maekar did not speak right away. Baelor carried on, asking a question that was answered by some lesser lord sitting next to Maekar. His paused moment slipped past, unoticed by all except for Egg.

It meant nothing, Egg told himself. Less than nothing.

People paused all the time. People lost their places. It was not uncommon. Afterall some people just get lost in their thoughts. It was not-

His father's hand tightened slightly around his cup. So slight it might have been imagined. Egg watched however, as he took a measured drink and set it back down with too much attention than it required.

Still, he did not look. Not at you. Egg found his gaze looking upon you instead. Looking radiant in the red silks that were probably made in Dorne. You had now reached your hand over to your husbands to get his attention, and leaned in to speak with a soft smile.

Prince Baelor and Princess (Y/N). Future King and Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. They looked right. They looked happy. The very pitcture of what Egg thought a loving marriage would look lile. As though the world had placed them exactly where they were meant to be. Egg was content knowing they loved each other.

So Egg went back to his food and started to shift his peas from his plate to Aemon's instead. Content to pretend that he was overanalyzing his father's behaviour.

The third time Egg noticed, it was close enough to touch.

It happened in the gardens, where the air was softer and world felt far away from the Seven Kingdoms. Egg had not meant to follow. At the time it had felt like nothing at all. He was just wandering paths he knew well, doing his best to avoid the maesters and his lessons.

That was until he saw them. He stopped before he could be seen and hid behind a tree.

They stood beneath the shade of an overgrown arbor, where the light filtered through in fragments painting them in gold. It was rather close. Not close enough to be indecent or improper. Just, closer than what was necessary.

(Y/N) was speaking, though it was too soft that the words could not reach Egg. Instead he had to settle on watching the shape of them. As (Y/N) was speaking his father did not interrupt, did not look away. Just gazed at your face.

From the looks of it, you had finished speaking and there was a moment of silence between the two of you. Then, your hand had lifted.

It wasn't anything dramatic. Just brushing your hand against his sleeve. It should have been nothing because it was nothing. But again, his father had stilled. The way his breath seemed to catch, the way his hand at his side tightened just slightly.

He did not pull away, did not reach back, did not move at all. The two of you stood there, closer than what one would expect, with your hand on his arm. To Egg, it looked like a different sort of painting. One he had not seen at the dinner the other night.

Then you stepped back and distance returned. Whatever had just been there, slipped neatly back into place.

His father inclined his said, said something Egg could not hear but it was probably something drab (his father was a rather blunt speaker). Whatever it was, it resulted in a smiling (Y/N). Your smile was smaller and softer and gone quicker than normal.

And then it was all over again.

Egg did not move from where he stood, though he knew he should. He felt as if he was intruding on something. His thoughts felt tangled. Nothing had occured.

With that, he took a step back and starting walking back into the castle.

The fourth time Egg noticed, it nearly did not remain theirs alone.

It was not meant to be a moment at all. That was what made it dangerous.

The corridors were quieter at that hour, the castle settling into itself as the evening wore on. Voices dulled behind closed doors. Footsteps softened. Even the torches seemed to burn lower, their light unsteady against the stone. Everyone was preparing for bed.

Egg had been sent on some errand he no longer remembered.

It did not matter. He would forget it entirely, later.

What he would remember, what would stay, was this:

The turn of a corner. The sound of a voice, too low to make out. And the way he stopped before he understood why.

This time, from behind a corridor, Egg saw them at the far end of the passage, half-shadowed, as though the castle itself meant to keep their secret.

They were close. Too close. Much closer than before in the garden.

Once again you were speaking. Or not. Even in the dimmed hallway, Egg could see you were loosing your composure. The normal picture perfect you seemed frazzle in the dark corridor. Words were spilling out quick but quietly. As if it was something that had been held back for too long.

Egg could not hear them, only feel the shape of them in the air, sharp and unsteady. (He was thinking to himself that he should really work on his sneaking abilities so he could somehow find himself closer so he could properly eavesdrop).

His father said nothing. He only watched you. Not as a prince might. Not as a brother should. As though the rest of the world had fallen away.

Egg’s breath caught, though he did not know why. He should not have been there. He knew that. And yet he did not move.

You stopped speaking. The silence that followed was not empty. It pressed in, taut, waiting.

His father took a step forward. It was small, measured and hesitant. Enough to close what little distance remained between you.

Egg felt it then, that strange, tightening awareness, like a thread pulled too thin. Something was about to happen. Something that could not be undone.

Your hand lifted, hesitant, uncertain, as though you had not meant to do it at all. His father’s followed. Not touching. Never touching.

But close enough that the space between them felt like something real. Something fragile. Something one breath away from breaking.

And for a moment, the two of you didn't move.

Footsteps echoed from the far end of the corridor. And the spell shattered. Your hand dropped at once. His father stepped back just as quickly, the distance snapping into place as though it had never been crossed at all.

By the time the servants turned the corner, there was nothing to see.

It was just a prince standing where he ought to stand. A lady composed, untouched. Silence, neat and proper, where something else had been moments before.

Egg pressed himself back against the wall, heart beating too fast for something he did not understand.

No one noticed. No one said a word. And yet, Egg knew.

That it had almost—

He swallowed, the thought slipping from him before it could take shape.

It had been nothing.

A step taken. A hand lifted. A moment that came too close to becoming something more.

The fifth time Egg noticed, nothing threatened to happen at all.

There was no interruption waiting in the wings. No footsteps. No tension poised to break. Only certainty.

It happened in a corridor (the same one as before) and he was not meant to linger in, though he had long since stopped believing that mattered. The castle had begun to feel less like a place one moved through, and more like something that simply contained him.

He heard your voice first. And then his father’s.

Egg stopped before he saw you.

You stood facing one another, not hidden, not secret, simply… there. As though there had never been anything to conceal.

Your hands were folded neatly before you, composed and contorlled. The opposite of what you looked like the previous night he had seen the pair of you.

“I leave with Baelor at first light,” you said. Your voice did not tremble. It did not need to.

His father nodded once. “I know.”

No hesitation. No question. Only acknowledgment.

Egg watched the way you held his gaze for a moment longer than was necessary. Not lingering. Not resisting. Just, steady.

“As it should be,” you added quietly.

It was not said like a comfort. It was said like a truth that had already been lived. His father’s expression did not change. But something in him did.

Not outward. Not visible in any way that would matter to anyone else. Only Egg saw it.

The smallest tightening at the corner of his mouth. The faintest pause in his breathing. As though something had been set down carefully, something heavy, something once held too close.

“You will be well,” he said. It was not a wish. It was a fact he had chosen to believe.

You gave a small nod. “As will you.”

And that was all.

No step forward. No reach. No fracture in the space between you. Only distance, held deliberately in place. As if it had always belonged there.

You turned first.

Not away from him in avoidance, but toward what was waiting for you beyond the corridor. Beyond the castle. Beyond this moment entirely.

Duty, already ahead of you.

His father did not watch you leave. Not when it mattered. Not when it might have changed anything.

He simply stood there until your footsteps faded completely, until even the echo had gone soft enough to disappear.

Then he turned away as well.

Egg remained where he was. Not because he was unseen. But because there was nothing left to witness.

Only something he finally understood in full:

Not all loves ended in ruin. Some ended in choice. And in that choice, quiet, certain, unspoken they had already lost each other long before either of them ever reached for anything at all.

The one and probably last time Egg understood how truly doomed they were, it was at Ashford Meadow.

Some loves are loud enough to shake kingdoms. Others live and die in stolen glances, in half-finished sentences, in the spaces between what is felt and what is never allowed to be spoken.

The tourney had turned the world bright again.

Colour returned in banners and gowns, in the gleam of armor beneath the sun, in laughter that carried too far across the fields as though nothing in the world had ever been wrong.

For a moment, Egg believed in that brightness.

He had never seen so much life. Never felt so far from the boy he was meant to be. He had lost Daeron somewhere in a tavern’s chaos and shaved his head in reckless relief, as though shedding identity might make him freer. He had even met a hedge knight, Ser Duncan, before the crowd swallowed him whole.

Then the royal family arrived. And everything began, quietly, to fall into place.

Egg hid among skirts and passing legs as he watched them take their places. His aunt stood near the pavilion.

The wind caught at her dress, lifting it in soft, unsteady motion, and for a moment she looked less like a princess and more like something imagined, something almost too gentle for the weight of her name.

She smiled more easily now. Baelor lived. And so she could, too.

He stood beside her with easy warmth, speaking to those who approached them, his hand resting at the small of her back as though it had always belonged there.

She laughed at something he said, turning toward him, bright and unburdened.

It should have been enough. It was enough.

And still... Egg knew, somewhere deep and unspoken, that in another life, in another shape of the world, it might have been his father standing there instead.

Behind them, Maekar stood at a careful distance, speaking with a lord he was not truly listening to. His attention kept returning, again and again, to where it should not.

There was no grief in it. No rupture. No visible wound.

Only something quieter. Something held too tightly to be named.

Their eyes met once. His father’s. Hers.

It lasted no more than a heartbeat. And yet Egg felt it as something entire. A silence stretched between them, thin, precise, almost reverent.

Until Baelor spoke her name.

She turned. And the moment was gone. The world continued exactly as it should have. But Egg did not move. He watched.

Later, Baelor was called away. And Maekar stepped into his place beside her. It looked like nothing. It was nothing.

A conversation between in-laws. A passing exchange. A courtesy sustained by courtly habit.

But Egg saw too closely now. The ease that should not have been ease. The closeness that should not have existed at all. A handmaiden passed. Words were spoken too quietly to catch.

And then, Maekar offered his arm. She took it with no hesitation. It was a simple thing.

And yet the way her fingers settled there, the way his arm did not move away, the way neither of them corrected the distance. It felt like recognition. Like something remembered instead of chosen.

Too familiar to be coincidence. Too natural to be allowed. A blush rose faintly at his father’s neck. Gone as quickly as it came.

And for a moment, it felt almost right.

Until Valarr came running, bright and alive, breaking everything open again. The spell did not shatter. It simply… dispersed. Like smoke.

The world ended at Ashford Meadow.

It did not, of course.

The sun still rose over Ashford, pale and indifferent. The wind still moved through the fields, stirring banners that now hung heavy and dark. People still spoke, still walked, still breathed.

But something had ended all the same.

Baelor died.

The bells had tolled for what felt like hours, their sound low and unrelenting, echoing through the castle and out across the tourney grounds. Even now, standing among his family, Egg swore he could still hear them, like something lodged deep inside his chest.

They had chosen to burn him at Ashford. Egg wasn’t sure why that made it worse, but it did.

This place had been bright, only days ago. Full of laughter and colour and life. He could still remember it, the banners snapping in the wind, the roar of the crowd, the way everything had seemed so large and full of promise.

Now everything felt hollow.

Egg stood stiffly beside his father, his hands clasped too tightly in front of him. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He wasn’t sure he could.

His thoughts wouldn’t stop circling back. If only he hadn’t left Daeron. If only he had stayed. If only—The pyre crackled. Egg forced himself to look.

Flames climbed steadily, consuming what remained of Baelor’s body. The heat pressed against his face, sharp and unbearable, and still he couldn’t look away.

His gaze shifted. His aunt stood closest to the fire. She did not weep. She did not speak.

She stood as though carved from stone, her face pale, her expression empty in a way that frightened him more than tears ever could.

Valarr stood before her, shaking. Egg could see it even from where he stood. The way his cousin’s shoulders trembled, the way his head bowed forward as though the weight of it all might crush him.

Her hand rested gently in his hair. Not moving. Just there.

Behind them, Kiera stood still and silent, her presence quiet, almost ghostlike.

Egg swallowed hard. He had heard what happened. Everyone had.

Whispers had spread quickly, slipping through corridors and between servants like smoke.

They said she had been the first to reach him. That she hadn’t believed it. That she had demanded a maester, again and again, as though saying it enough times might undo what had already been done.

They said she had knelt beside his body, hands pressed to him, begging the Seven to give him back.

That she hadn’t seemed to notice the blood. That it had soaked into her sleeves, her hands, her skin.

Egg squeezed his eyes shut briefly.

They said Ser Duncan had tried to pull her away. That she had fought him. That she had screamed. Not words, just sound. Raw and broken.

And then his father came.

Maekar had been the one to pull her back. They said she had struck him. That her fists had hit his chest, over and over, as though he were something she could break. That she had cried into him like the world was ending.

Egg opened his eyes. He looked up at his father now.

Maekar stood beside him, unmoving. Rigid. Every line of him held tight, controlled, as though he had locked something inside himself and thrown away the key. Every line of him held tight, controlled, as though he had locked something inside himself and thrown away the key.

Egg wanted to say something. Go to her.

He didn’t know if he would have said the words aloud or not. He only knew the thought pressed against his throat, desperate and insistent.

Go to her. She shouldn’t be alone. Not now. Not like this.

But Maekar did not move.

He stood where he was meant to stand. He did what was expected of him. Nothing more.

Egg felt something twist inside him.

But he had learned, by now, where to look.

So he looked closer.

He saw the way his father’s hands were clenched at his sides, knuckles pale beneath the skin. He saw the tension in his shoulders, in his jaw, in the stillness that was not calm but restraint stretched too thin.

And then it happened. Briefly.

So brief Egg might have missed it, if he hadn’t been watching.

His aunt lifted her head, just slightly. As though something had pulled her attention away from the flames. Her gaze crossed the distance between them. And found his father.

Maekar looked at her. Not as a prince. Not as a brother. Just as a man.

Everything was there. Egg felt it, even from where he stood.

Grief, sharp and consuming.

Longing, familiar, aching, unrelenting.

Regret, heavy, suffocating, endless.

All of it, laid bare in a single look that lasted no more than a heartbeat. It was too much. Too intimate.

Her gaze dropped. Maekar’s jaw tightened. And just like that… It was gone.

The fire crackled. The wind shifted. The world went on.

And whatever might have been… didn’t.

Egg shouldn’t have followed her. He knew that.

Even so, he slipped from the hall, keeping to the edges where torchlight thinned and attention softened. He was careful, quiet and was left unseen.

He told himself he would stop at the doorway. He didn’t.

The hall was dim when she entered, curtains drawn heavy against the day. It felt smaller than it had before. Quieter in a way that pressed at the ribs.

She moved slowly, like each step had to be chosen in advance. Egg lingered just beyond the threshold, half-hidden in the corridor’s shadow.

She crossed to the high table to Baelor’s seat and sat down. For a long moment she did nothing at all. Then, carefully, she lifted her hands. Baelor’s rings caught what little light remained.

Egg’s throat tightened before he could name why. She turned one of them between her fingers. Over and over. Not fidgeting, holding on.

As though stillness might undo something. The door opened again. Egg went rigid. His father stepped inside.

There was a pause in him that Egg did not recognize. Not fear, exactly. Not hesitation either. Something closer to awareness. As though the room had become uncertain ground.

As though he was not sure he was allowed to cross it.

She did not look up. Did not acknowledge him. Did not move. For a moment, he only stood there. Then he crossed the room and sat beside her. Not close. Never close.

Silence gathered between them, dense and unyielding.

“I do not know where to begin,” Maekar said at last.

His voice was quieter than Egg had ever heard it.

She let out a breath that almost broke on its way out. “I do not know either.”

“I’m sorry.”

The words felt too small the moment they left him.

They stayed anyway. Unanswered.

“You know,” she said after a while, still looking at the ring, “my mother once told me not to love anyone more than my children.”

Maekar did not speak.

“I loved my children,” she continued. “And I loved my husband.”

Something in him shifted at that, barely visible, but real.

“And I loved you.”

The silence that followed did not feel empty. It felt held.

Carefully. Like something fragile that neither of them trusted to fall.

“(Y/N),” Maekar said at last, roughened, “there are no words—”

“You know,” she cut in, not unkindly, but with something steadier beneath it, “in a way, I wish you had meant to kill him.”

The air changed.

Maekar’s head turned slightly, as if the words had weight enough to move him. “How could you say that?”

“It would make things simpler,” she said. “For me. As selfish as that sounds.”

He did not answer. There was nothing to answer. A long pause. Then—

“Do you remember,” she asked, quieter now, “when Baelor and I were betrothed?”

A breath left Maekar that might once have been laughter. It wasn’t now. “Of course I do.”

A faint sound from her. Almost agreement. Almost nothing.

“You said you would burn your entire house down before you let it happen.”

His mouth tightened at the memory, something old and unguarded passing through him and gone again before it could settle.

“I was young,” he said.

“We were all young,” she replied.

Silence returned, softer this time. Less sharp. No less heavy.

Then she moved.

Slowly, she took one of the rings from her hand. Turned it once between her fingers. Twice.

And placed it in his palm.

“Here.”

Maekar looked down at it.

“I cannot take this,” he said. “He was your husband.”

“And he was your brother.”

That landed cleanly. Without argument. Maekar closed his fingers around the ring anyway. Not tightly.

Egg stepped back before either of them could notice him there, retreating into the corridor as quietly as he had come. He did not run. He did not linger.

Some things, he understood, were not meant to be seen all at once. Or spoken.

He understood then that some things were never meant to be spoken. Just simply known and lived with.