que sera sera.

The Red Keep of King’s Landing was nothing but a collection of half-faded memories. The faces of your lady mother, Queen Alicent, and your other siblings—Aegon, Helaena, and Aemond—were remembered only in fleeting glimpses, through a sort of thick and hazy mist. You knew they all much resembled yourself in looks, with the same pale eyes and silver-gold locks.

But they were distant princes and princesses of a court you barely knew.

The only other person who resembled you so closely, but one whom you knew all too well and held dear to your heart, was your twin brother, Daeron.

The maesters at the Citadel loved to recount the tale of your quickening to the young acolytes. It was said that when he came wailing into the world from Alicent’s blood-slicked womb, the Grand Maester had no idea there was another.

The old man had wiped his brow, thinking the labor done, and only when he saw the Queen’s birthing was still taking place, her screams echoing through the chamber anew, did he realize a second babe lay within.

Alas, you were no less welcome, appreciated, or celebrated than your brother.

So when the time came for Daeron to be sent south to the Honeywine to serve as a squire for your mother’s family, the Hightowers, it had been decided that it would be best if you went along too.

That is how, for most of your life, even as a princess of the Crown, you have called Oldtown your home, raised amidst the scent of salt, tar, and the tolling of the bells from the Starry Sept.

“It is so beautiful, my princess,” Miriam spoke softly, her voice hushed with the reverence usually reserved for the Mother’s altar. She gently carded the bejeweled golden comb through the long strands of your hair. “Like pale moonlight on the water, or the morning mists on the morrow…”

Through the silvered mirror, you could see her eyes wide in awe, and you could feel the extreme caution of her touch. Her fingers did their work ever so gently—not daring to snag a single knot or cause the slightest pain to the princess.

“Thank you, Miriam,” you replied with a gentle, practiced smile. You were much used to being showered in compliments by the household, and equally used to replying to them with the appropriate courtly courtesy.

“Which dress, princess?” another of your maids, Cathy, chirped up. The other girls helped her hold up two different garments, their faces eager for your choice.

Your eyes followed the trail of the first; a gorgeous, sweeping gown made of quality red silk from the Free Cities, flowing like fresh-spilled blood and intricately embroidered with black thread along the bodice.

The other was a gown of Hightower green, fashioned from the softest Myrish wool, its collar carefully decorated with seven-pointed stars stitched in silver thread.

It was a silent, but obviously heavy choice—the colors of your father’s house against the colors of your mother’s kin.

Before you could make your choice or offer a reply, two rapid, thudding knocks sounded on the door. Before any of your maids could bid entrance, the heavy oak thing was creaking violently on its iron hinges, banging hard against the dressed stone wall as it all but flew open.

The girls around you instinctively flocked closer to one another, forming a kind of protective half-circle with their bodies, their eyes cast down toward the rushes on the floor. One of the household servants entered first, his eyes fixed stiffly ahead of him, not daring to spare any of the women the slightest glance.

“The Lord Hightower, my princess,” he announced, his voice tight with formality.

Before you could catch your footing, find a robe, or even question what was happening, your uncle was already stepping foot inside your private chambers.

You were wearing nothing but your thin linen shift, and the maids seemed to notice your state of undress as they nervously began jittering their fingers, shifting from foot to foot.

Ormund stepped into your room as he stepped into any other room in the city—like he owned the very stones beneath his boots (because in truth he did).

He was wearing a simple but finely cut doublet of dark green velvet, the color he preferred frequenting the most, slashed with silver satin. His sharp grey gaze swept across the flock of trembling girls once before settling entirely on you.

“Uncle—” you began, straightening your back and lifting your chin, attempting to summon the dignity of a Crown princess while clad only in your night-smock. Miriam took a hasty step backward from your side.

“Leave us.” he commanded the maids, his voice a low, resonant baritone that left absolutely no room for disobedience.

You could see almost all of them squirming under the cold scrutiny of his gaze. His tall, broad-shouldered frame and strong, unyielding jawline inspired absolute reverence and fear in many a young maiden in Oldtown. Alas, you were not just one of many; you were blood of the dragon.

Your jaw tightened quietly. “Your princess commands you to stay.” you firmly countered, your voice ringing clear against the stone walls.

The girls seemed paralyzed. Entirely confused, frozen in place, caught in a web of divided loyalties. They looked between their princess and their Lord, not entirely certain whose orders they should be following.

You thought Ormund’s eyes would flash with fury at the defiance, but instead, what you found on his face was a dark amusement. A sly, mocking grin threatened to spread across his features at your antics.

“Your Lord commands you to leave us at once.” he repeated. His voice carried a tone of absolute authority, carrying no hint of the amusement that danced in his eyes.

At the sheer severity of his command, the girls finally broke. They scampered out of the door one by one like frightened mice, nodding their heads in hurried acknowledgment and leaving you alone with your uncle.

A sharp sense of quiet betrayal began to unfurl within your chest.

These are my girls, you thought bitterly. They should be loyal to me. They should be listening to my commands, not his.

The only comfort, the only thing you would look upon later with a touch of gratitude, was Miriam.

Just before stepping foot through the heavy oak door, the girl looked back, her ashamed eyes searching yours for an answer, a silent plea for forgiveness. You nodded ever so slightly, letting her know she was dismissed, and the girl quickly took her leave. At least someone in this castle still recognized your royal authority.

The door creaked shut behind them as a household guard pulled it closed from the hallway, and the servant stepped outside, leaving a heavy silence in the room.

You turned your back on your uncle, returning to your vanity.

It was a magnificent piece imported from Lannisport, a gorgeous bone-white wood crafted with intricate star designs and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

It had been a gift for your fifth nameday, and you had been in love with it ever since, even if for the first five years it had been far too grand for a child to use.

Your fingers picked up the bone brush Miriam had dropped and continued the work; alas, your movements were far less gentle and much more forceful than the maid's. You yanked the bristles through your silver-white hair, your eyes fiercely refusing to meet Ormund’s in the reflection.

Once again, you could hear him shuffle his boots against the rushes, and a soft air of laughter escaped him at your stubborn antics.

“Is this how you greet the Lord of Oldtown?” he began, stepping closer to where you sat in front of your vanity, his shadow falling over your shoulder. You still refused to meet his gaze or give him the satisfaction of an answer.

“Have I not raised you with better manners, niece? A princess of the crown should know how to behave appropriately in front of Great Lords. Hm, tell me, what would your lady mother say to this?”

“I would not know, my Lord,” you countered through gritted teeth, venom dripping from every syllable. “I have not exactly been privy to my lady mother’s thoughts or her presence. After all, I was raised here in Oldtown.”

His thick eyebrows shot up in mock surprise. “Yet still… she is the Queen… and you her daughter, a princess of the royal blood.”

“A toothless princess, or so it would seem,” you muttered bitterly. “When not even my own handmaidens seem to follow my commands.”

Ormund let out a low chuckle, a sound that rumbled deep within his chest. He stepped directly behind you, placing a firm, calloused hand upon your bare shoulder, his fingers slowly caressing the pale skin.

A sudden prickle of goosebumps rose along your flesh at the unbidden contact. He leaned down, tilting his head until his lips pressed against the delicate, pale shell of your ear. His warm breath fanned over your skin, sending a cold shiver down your spine.

You watched it all through the silvered glass of the vanity—his sharp, predatory gaze watching you like a deer through the reflection.

“Ormund.” you began, your knuckles turning white as you clutched the bone hairbrush tighter.

“Uncle.” he corrected softly, his voice a low, commanding murmur against your skin.

He shifted his lips down to the crook of your neck, pressing a firm, lingering kiss into the hollow there.

“What are you—” You tensed, attempting to wrench yourself around to break free from his suffocating proximity, but his hands on your shoulders kept you firmly locked in place.

“Is it true that Tessarion has mated with Starfyre?” he questioned suddenly, as if to catch you off guard, an accusatory glint entering his grey eyes as he spoke of your magnificent beast.

Starfyre had been your very own hatchling, born from a precious clutch laid by Dreamfyre herself. He was a breathtaking vision, clad in shimmering silver-white scales that caught the light like polished armor, with wings that glittered like crushed diamonds when he took to the sky.

Though he was already considerably larger than Tessarion, Starfyre carried himself with a fierce, regal majesty— his long, serpentine neck beautifully akin to Prince Daemon’s dread mount, the Blood Wyrm, Caraxes.

“What—” Your brows furrowed in sheer bewilderment. “What? Yes, it is true… they are dragons, Uncle. They nested together in the outer pits—what did you expect them to do?”

He shushed you quietly, raising a sharp finger to cut off any word or attempt to speak. Not that you had any defense to offer… nor any way to justify the ways of your beast. Dragons were creatures born of fire and blood, and you possessed no true, godlike power over them, despite the grand illusions of Targaryen superiority that the smallfolk and highborn alike reverently believed in.

“The most concerning of… rumors have reached my ears, sweet niece… and this unfortunate discovery has only sharpened them.” He announced, straightening his spine, before reaching down and taking a single lock of your snow-white hair between his thick, calloused fingers and slowly coiling it around his digit like a pale ribbon.

“Rumors…” You parroted, attempting to turn your head to face him. But his heavy hand tightened upon your shoulders, staying your movement. His fingers dug painfully into the soft flesh beneath your thin linen shift, but you bit down the wince threatening to escape you. You swallowed hard instead, forcing your voice to remain level. “Words are wind, uncle.”

“Words are wind. Indeed.” he hummed in acknowledgement, his eyes remaining locked onto the strand of pale hair wrapped around his finger. “Alas— even the foulest wind carries a scent. And the most rumors have at least a crumb of truth buried within them. Or would you care to differ?”

“I—I do not know what you mean.” You stammered. A cold sweat began to break across your brow then, even as goosebumps rose along your arms.

It was a queer, conflicting sensation—the dragon blood in your veins made your core feel flush and hot with ancestral fire, yet Ormund's unexpected intrusion left you shivering with an icy dread.

“Oh, stop playing the fool!” He snapped at last and the suddenness of it made you physically recoil from his touch. His voice boomed against the high, vaulted stone ceiling of the chamber like a heavy war drum. It was a sound thick with agitation, sharp and aggressive.

“Ormund—” You pushed yourself to your feet, standing up to face him. Your voice shook—far shakier than a princess of the blood royal should ever sound—and you hated yourself for the weakness of it.

You needed to be strong. You needed the iron will of your house. Your lady mother, Queen Alicent, would never waver or tremble before a man's anger, you thought.

“You will stay silent and listen to me.” Ormund jabbed a thick thumb toward his own chest, his gesture sharp, almost manic. The raw authority in his command left you with little choice but to obey.

Your knees felt weak, and you sank back down with a dull thud onto your wooden stool.

He closed his eyes for a brief moment, drawing in a long, slow breath as if mentally gathering his patience before exhaling it into the quiet room. When he spoke again, his voice came out far steadier, though the quiet malice in it sent a renewed chill down your spine.

“Oldtown is the seat of the Faith, niece, as all the folk in the Seven Kingdom know. It is no place for unholy and sinful people.” He began, his tone unyielding. “The mere fact that you carry the blood of the dragon does not exempt you from the laws of gods and men, nor does it shield you from the judgment of the Seven. Not you nor your brother.”

What in the names of the gods was he talking about? Your mind raced. Desperately searching for meaning, but you could simply not fathom his intent. Still… you had learned your lesson well enough this morning; you knew better than to speak back and stoke his fury.

“You think the eyes of the Hightower do not see?” He finally spat, a look of pure disgust twisting his features. “You think I and everyone else in this castle do not see how you and Daeron look at each other? How you touch one another?”

At those words, you felt your heart drop like a stone into a well.

Daeron was your twin. He was your other half, the right part of your own soul. He understood you as no lord, lady, or maester ever could. You had shared a womb; you had been cradled together in the same nursery. It was only natural that you felt entirely comfortable in his presence. That you laughed at his jests and relished the warmth of his embrace. He was your brother, by the grace of the Seven.

“He is my brother.” You stated, standing your ground. You were proud of the sudden firmness and steadiness that returned to your voice.

Finally, the blood of the dragon was answering, and you were gaining back your footing.

“Your brother, yes…” Ormund spoke the words with a soft, mocking sneer. “And the lot of you—my royal cousin’s kin—have notoriously queer customs indeed. The abominations of Old Valyria may fly about free in King’s Landing, but Oldtown and the Faith do not tolerate such queerness.”

A bitter, breathless laugh escaped your lips before you could stop yourself. “You are out of your mind, uncle.” Through the silver looking glass, you watched as another dark storm of fury began to coil behind his eyes at the audacity.

“Out of my mind, she says.” Ormund sneered, a strange, ugly twist curling his lips. Before you could gather your senses or summon your dragon-pride, his hand shot forward. His fingers clamped around your forearm like an iron manacle, gripping the flesh so fiercely that a sharp gasp of pain caught in your throat. By sheer, unyielding strength, he dragged you to your feet, jerking you forward until you stood scarce an inch from his chest.

“Yet it is you, and your whore of a half-sister with her bastards, and your rogue of an uncle who bring abomination into the realm.” He hissed, his breath hot against your face. “And my own cousin is no better… wedding her two children to one another like beasts in a paddock.”

Any other man would have lost his head for such words. It was high treason, spoken aloud in the light of day, but here in the Hightower, Ormund was king in all but name. What defense did you have? Who would believe the word of a lonely princess over the Lord of Oldtown?

“She brings nothing but shame to the Seven and the name of House Hightower.” He spat.

You writhed against his grasp, trying to twist your arm free, but his hold only tightened, his fingers bruising the pale skin. “You are hurting me!” You cried out, squirming in his grip.

Ormund merely cocked his head to the side, rolling his eyes with a cold, mocking amusement, as if your protests were nothing more than the theatrics of a spoiled child.

“Come,” he said, pulling at you. But you dug your heels into the rushes, your body locking in place. He let out a dark, raspy snort. “Move your feet, niece, or by the Smith, you will make me drag you across the stone.”

You opened your mouth to scream, to protest, but he was already hauling you toward the far end of the chamber. Your bare feet stumbled clumsily over the floorboards, tangling together as his iron grip remained locked upon your forearm. He pushed you roughly into the secluded alcove of the solar, where the handmaidens had prepared your morning bath.

It was meant to be your sanctuary before the day's dressing, a quiet ritual interrupted by his brute intrusion.

The great tub was fashioned from fine, polished oak. Wide and deep, its rim decorated with simple, carved waves. When first poured, the water had been scalding hot—a heat that would leave any ordinary mortal blistered and weeping, but to the ancient blood of Old Valyria, it was a comfort.

Now, however, the thick blankets of steam had faded into the high ceiling. You swallowed hard, your throat dry, as he shoved you toward the lip of the tub, finally releasing his bruising hold on your arm.

“Undress.” He commanded.

Your head whipped around with sudden, fierce indignation. “What?” The word stumbled from your lips, breathless and broken.

Ormund sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, deeply displeased at having to repeat himself. “I said,” he began, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low register, “undress.”

He nodded toward the water, his grey eyes fixed on you as you stood frozen, refusing to comply. “You reek of dragon.” He spat. “I assume you went riding at first light?”

“Last evening.” You clarified, your teeth chattering slightly despite the heat of the room.

He hummed, a low, rumbling sound. “And you did not think to bathe afterward?”

“I did.” you said defensively.

“And yet you still smell of those… wretched beasts.” He spat the word beasts with a charring venom, as if the very thought of the dragons fouled his tongue. “Why must you be so difficult at every turn?”

With a heavy sigh, he whirled you around. Before you could leap away, his thick fingers caught the collar of your linen shift. With one brutal downward jerk, he pulled the sheer material down your arms. You reached towards the garment, desperately trying to catch the fabric, but his hands were too strong, his movements too practiced and unyielding.

You felt the linen slip from your body, pooling around your thighs and ankles in a breathless rush. The cool morning air hit the bare skin of your belly like a sudden winter storm. Instantly, you crossed your arms over your chest, curling inward in a desperate attempt to shield your nakedness from his searching eyes.

“No… no…” he whispered, his voice suddenly thick. He reached down, catching your wrists and pulling your arms away from your body by force. “You will not deny me this, sweet niece.”

You turned your head away in profound shame, your cheeks burning. Under the chill of the solar, the rosy points of your breasts hardened, and a fresh wave of goosebumps broke across your skin.

Ormund stepped closer, entering your space until the heavy green velvet of his doublet brushed against your bare flesh.

He brought a rough hand up to your face, his fingers cupping your chin with a firm, unescapable grip, forcing your head back up. You hated the treacherous instinct of your own body—how you naturally leaned into the warmth of his hand for a fleeting second—but you hated what came next even more. Through the coarse cloth of his breeches, you felt the rigid, swelling hardness of his manhood pressing aggressively into the soft flesh of your thigh.

“You must understand,” he whispered, his breath smelling faintly of sweet wine and incense as he leaned over you. “I do not blame you for what you cannot control. You cannot help it, poor child. This savageness… it is bred into your very bones. It is in the blood of the dragon. You are stained by it. Dirty. It is a disease.”

A hot liquid welled in your eye, spilling over your lashes. You felt stripped of all your royal dignity—embarrassed, ashamed, and consumed by a helpless, raging fury. Your teeth clenched so tightly your jaw ticked.

“But do not fret, sweet niece,” he murmured. He leaned down, pressing his lips to the wet track on your cheek, tasting the salt of your tear. “I will cure you of it. I will be your guiding light, and free you from this monstrous burden.” A slow, unsettling smile spread across his face.

“Now. Get into the water.” His voice was quiet now, almost gentle, yet it carried the absolute weight of a battlefield command. Once a general, always a general.

With no stones left to throw and no shields to raise, you had no choice but to comply.

Lifting one trembling leg and then the other over the rim of the wooden tub, you descended into the water. Most of the vapor had long since vanished, and the water had cooled to a dull, bearable warmth. As the ripples closed around your chest, you were only glad for the dark water, fore it did something to shield your naked form from his hungry, predatory gaze.

Ormund hummed in low contentment. For a single, fleeting moment, as he turned his back to you, your heart unclenched. A desperate, foolish hope flickered in your chest that he might finally leave you to your privacy.

He did not.

Instead, he marched with heavy, deliberate steps over to the cedar cabinet where your handmaidens stored the various scented waters, crushed herbs, and rare oils meant for the bath.

He pulled the drawer open with a forceful, impatient tug that made the wood groan. Instinctively, you drew your knees up to your chest, curling into a tight ball within the water, trying to minimize what he could see.

From the safety of the tub, you could only see his broad back and the dark chestnut curls of his hair as he bent his head over the drawer, examining the glass phials nestled inside.

“Which one shall it be…” you heard him murmur under his breath.

He lifted a slender glass tube to his nose, pulling the stopper to sniff the contents. A low hum of approval escaped him. “They received the new Lyseni order I made for you. Good.”

You sank deeper into the water, until it lapped just beneath your chin, wishing the oak tub would swallow you whole.

He rummaged through the collection for a few moments more. In the quiet clinking of glass, you almost found a strange, twisted peace inside the intimacy of the act. Then, his fingers closed around his prize.

“Aha.”

When he turned back around, he held a glass phial filled with a thick, pinkish-orange liquid that gleamed like a captured sunset in his large hand. He slammed the wooden drawer shut with his free hand, the sound echoing sharply against the stone walls.

“This will do perfectly.” he murmured.

As he walked back to the edge of the tub, you could see the dark dilation of his pupils, the tight clenching of his free fist at his side. You knew that look. This was not the first time he had looked at you so, nor was it the first time he had forced his way into your sacred spaces. Far from it.

You and Ormund had done things in the shadows of the Hightower that the Seven would make you repent for every single day for the rest of your lives. The septons would call it an abomination, a wicked stain upon your soul. Yet, staring up at him, a treacherous warmth began to bloom in your belly. You hated how much you wanted him in these quiet hours. You lusted for his touch, desired his strength, and craved the very danger he represented.

The worst part of it—the part you loathed most of all—was how quickly the guilt began to evaporate once the lust settled into your blood. The betraying slickness between your thighs had been there from the very moment his iron grip had clamped onto your forearm.

Let him think you are afraid, the dragon blood whispered inside you. You were far too proud, far too much a princess of the realm, to ever admit how much his rough handling truly pleased you.

“A special Lyseni bathing oil,” Ormund explained, kneeling down upon the heavy stone floor beside the wooden tub. Even on his knees, his towering frame loomed over you, leaving him almost a head taller than your sunken form in the bath. “It is exceptionally strong, but it leaves behind a pleasant, gentle aroma. Rosemary and sharp lemon—concocted from a special batch originally meant for a wealthy Magister’s wife.”

You merely hummed in quiet acknowledgment of his words, your eyes tracking his movements. With a sharp pop, he loosened the cork stopper with his teeth, tilting the glass phial so the oily, sunset-colored liquid began to drip lazily into the water around you.

The scent hit the air instantly, thick and intoxicating. The sharp, bright aroma of lemons mixed with the earthy, pine-like fragrance of the rosemary herbs, completely overtaking your senses.

Ormund closed his eyes, inhaling the rising steam deeply. The harsh lines of his brow finally unfurled in pure pleasure. “There now.” he whispered, his eyes opening to pin you with a heavy gaze. “This will rid you of that dreadful dragon stench.”

Your muscles gradually uncoiled as the sweet, sharp vapors of the Lyseni oil worked their way into your senses, eliciting a soft, involuntary sound of contentment from your throat.

Through hooded eyes, you saw a surge of possessive satisfaction cross Ormund’s dark gaze. He rolled the heavy velvet sleeves of his doublet up past his thick, hair-darkened forearms, reaching for a dry linen washcloth before dipping it into the scented water.

He wrung the cloth once with his thick, powerful fingers. You watched the warm water cascade down his digits, back into the tub in heavy droplets, hating how effortlessly your mind trailed to darker, more treasonous thoughts about those very hands.

Beneath the opaque, oil-slicked surface of the bath, your thighs squeezed together. You breathed a silent prayer of thanks for the dark water that shielded your body's betrayal from his sight; you knew precisely how smug he would be if he caught even a glimpse of the effect he still held over you.

He brought the wet linen to your skin, tracing your collarbones with a strange, quiet reverence. He began to scrub away the nonexistent dirt and the invisible scent of the dragon, working with a meticulous precision.

He handled you as though you were his most prized treasure—like a man polishing a sacred family heirloom, or the dark, rippled edges of Vigilance— the Valyrian steel greatsword of House Hightower.

The only other time you had ever witnessed your uncle display such haunting gentleness was when he cleaned that very blade.

You remembered the story Daeron had told you, fresh from the courtyard. Ormund had just taken a rebel lord's head, the steel dripping with crimson, and your twin brother had been too young, too trembling, to know how to properly wipe the Valyrian steel clean. Despite Daeron's high position as his squire, Ormund had not cursed him. Instead, he had taken the oil and the rag, showing the boy personally.

“A squire does not serve because the knight is incapable,” Ormund had told your twin that day, his voice steady over the dead man's blood. “He assists so the knight may look to the horizon, where the heavier duties lie.”

Now, those same hands traced the pale skin of your arms, sliding over your shoulders and down your back. Gently, silently, his knuckles nudged your knees apart, smoothing the cloth over your chest.

In the heavy, lemon-scented silence of the alcove, your mind drifted to forbidden shores.

You found yourself imagining a world where the two of you were wed in the Starry Sept, a world where you would legally become the Lady of Oldtown. You imagined your belly swelling with his highborn seed, envisioning a dozen children—some with the dark chestnut curls of the Hightowers, others with the striking silver-white hair of the dragon—running and shrieking through the echoing corridors of the castle.

But even as the thought bloomed, a bitter taste rose in your mouth. You knew it was nothing more than a fool's dream. An ugly, poisonous fruit that presented itself as sweet, only to choke you the moment you bit into its flesh.

Your lady mother, Queen Alicent, would sooner see Oldtown reduced to ash before allowing such a scandalous match. And Ormund, for all his dark lusts, would never disgrace his house or his standing in the eyes of the realm by taking his royal niece to wife.

And besides, the Lord of the Hightower already had three trueborn children of his own to secure his lineage.

With a low hum of approval, finally pleased with his work, Ormund tossed the sodden rag onto the floor. It hit the dark stone with a heavy, wet squelch, the spilled water staining the grey masonry an even deeper, bruised shade of black.

He leaned closer, his shadow completely consuming you.

His bare hand, still damp from the water, caressed your collarbone before trailing down, down, down…

His fingertips tracing the curve of your breast and the slope of your waist, until finally they settled over your sweet mound. Your breath hitched as he gripped your cunt. You hated how instinctively your hips arched into his palm, the bathwater sloshing softly against the wooden tub.

He began to trace his fingers along the sensitive folds of your cunt. He was teasing you—deliberately rolling the tender flesh between his fingertips, his thumb pinching and applying a slow, agonizing pressure to the bud of it.

“Do you let him touch you like this?” he whispered, his voice dropping into a dark, demanding register that made your heart hammer against your ribs. “Do you let him look at you, hm? Do you give him this right?”

You shook your head blindly, your silver hair dragging wetly across your shoulders.

“Words, niece,” he commanded softly, his grip tightening just enough to demand total submission. “I require words.”

“No.” you managed to choke out, the syllable catching in your throat.

“I need to hear it plain.” Ormund murmured, his eyes flashing with a savage, predatory glint as he watched the burning crimson rush to your cheeks. “Do you let Daeron into your bed? Into your cunt?”

The shame of it washed over you in a suffocating wave. To be pinned beneath his hold, naked and defenseless in the water, while he spoke the name of your twin brother—it felt entirely depraved, a twisted game born of the dark shadows in his mind.

Yet, beneath all the humiliation, that treacherous lust in your blood stirred, confusing your senses until the line between fury and desire blurred entirely.

“No—I do not let Daeron touch me,” you managed to whisper, a sharp gasp escaping your lips as the sheer intensity of his fingers working you apart overwhelmed you. “Only… only you.”

He laughed at that—a genuine, unrestrained bark of amusement leaving him, though the tension between you was anything but light. Pressing deeper, he joined two more fingers with the first, curling them inside your slick heat in a heavy, beckoning motion.

Your eyes fluttered shut, your thighs parting wider as your head thudded back against the rim of the wooden basin.

“Maybe you are not so unmanageable after all,” he hummed, his gaze tracking the rise and fall of your chest. “Spoiled, without a doubt. But not entirely beyond locking into place.”

Your chest tightened at his words, a strange, hollow warmth blooming inside you despite the insult. You bit your lip so hard the taste of copper threatened to burst forth, your knuckles turning white as your hand gripped the edge of the tub for dear life.

Ormund’s eyes flickered down to your straining fingers. With his free hand, he reached out, interlocking his thick, calloused digits with your own, anchoring you to him.

He brought your laced hands up to his lips, pressing a cold, lingering kiss onto the back of your hand, all while his gaze remained locked onto yours. He searched your violet eyes for any sign of true distress or displeasure. He found none.

For a time, the chamber held only the lewd squelching sounds of his fingers moving within you, slightly muffled by the water, the gentle sloshing of the bath, and occasionally your own heavy, breathless heavy sighs.

The damp white baby hairs clung to your forehead, slick with sweat and the rising mist of the bath, the bottom of your locks completely drenched.

Unable to bear the distance any longer, you leaned forward blindly, catching his lips with your own.

He groaned as your lips crashed with his own, his wine-laced breath mingling with your own. His free hand tangling into your silver locks tils your head, pulling you flush against the wood of the basin until you were facing him entirely within the cramped confines of the tub.

Your mouths clashed in a desperate rhythm as your tongue intruded past his mouth, beneath the water his fingers quickened. He moved faster, driving deeper as your inner walls constricted around his hand, your pleasure threatening to spill over the precipice.

Ormund always knew when you were reaching your peak. Your body grew restless, shifting against his touch and you became squirmy, your hand blindly clamping down on the wrist that wrought such havoc upon you.

“Yield to it, niece.” he whispered against your bruised lips, his voice a commanding growl that left no room for retreat. “Let me see it.”

With a breathless, unrestrained cry, you obeyed his command and let go, the world spinning away into a blinding haze of colors as he held you through the wave.

Only when the tremors finally subsided and he deemed the deed finished did he slowly withdraw his hand, leaving you to slump back weakly against the curved wood of the basin, completely undone.

Ormund rose to his feet, exhaling a heavy breath as his hands moved down to adjust the tight laces of his breeches. But before he could take a single step away from the water, three rapid, echoing knocks thudded against the heavy oak door.

He froze, a dark groan of frustration escaping him, as the blood in your veins instantly turned to ice.

If anyone were to find you in this scandalous compromise with the Lord of Oldtown, you would be absolutely doomed.

A princess of the Blood Royal caught in such a depraved state would bring ruin to the realm and shame to the High Tower. Yet, to your absolute horror, Ormund did not falter. He did not hide. Instead, he cleared his throat and called out to the door with a booming, careless command:

“Come in!”

“Ormund!” you hissed in a frantic, terrified whisper.

You scrambled to stand up in the oak tub, desperately looking around for a linen robe or a dry sheet to cover your nakedness, for there was no denying he was inside your private chambers.

But the bottom of the basin was slick with the Lyseni oils. Your foot slipped on the smooth wood, and you stumbled, your heart leaping into your throat as you barely caught yourself on the damp rim of the tub. The water sloshed dangerously against the sides.

Ormund marched with long, confident strides to the other end of the solar.

With a rough, heavy yank, he pulled the thick brocade privacy curtain shut, cutting off the alcove from the rest of the room. Thank the Gods, you thought, pressing your back against the wood. He was reckless, but he was not utterly insane.

You heard the heavy oak door creak open at that exact same moment, followed by the soft shuffle of boots upon the floor rushes. You caught your breath, freezing like a hunted doe, trying to keep the water completely still so it wouldn't make a single sound.

Your blood ran instantly cold when you heard the first word spoken from the solar.

“Uncle.” It was Daeron’s voice.

You all but shrank into the water, wishing you could disappear into the copper depths. Your naked form left you feeling utterly vulnerable, stripped of every ounce of your royal dignity.

“Nephew.” Ormund acknowledged curtly. You heard the heavy thud of his boots as he shifted closer to the doorway to block the boy's path.

Daeron cleared his throat. You could not see him through the heavy curtain, but you could picture him perfectly: clad in the deep green fabrics of your mother's house, the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen worked in silver thread upon his leather belt. His pale brows would be creaked in confusion, his young face puzzled as to why the Lord of Oldtown was standing in his sister’s private solar. Alone. The reality of it stung like a whip.

“I wish not to… intrude, my Lord,” Daeron said, his voice carrying the polite, practiced cadence of a well-bred squire. “But the Septon has been awaiting your presence at the Starry Sept for almost the entire morning.”

He had easily slipped into the dutiful role expected of him, and you hated how natural it sounded.

“Ah,” Ormund managed, his tone dripping with a feigned nonchalance, as if the holy matters of the city had completely slipped his mind. “Indeed. The hours slip away far too treacherously.”

“I kept him company in the courtyard and assured him that you had urgent, pressing matters of the estate to attend to.” Daeron explained, trying to look out for his master.

Ormund cut him off by placing a heavy hand upon the boy's shoulder.

It was a hand that was still completely drenched in the bathwater—slick with the sweet, musk-scented evidence of your recent release. You heard the distinct, wet slap of his palm against the fine velvet of Daeron's doublet.

The droplets clung to the fabric, immediately soaking into the cloth and staining his squire's garment with the very nectar Ormund had coaxed from your body only moments before.

You burned red with a sickening, paralyzing embarrassment. Gods, you thought, closing your eyes in agony. Your own twin brother was standing a mere few feet away, unwittingly bearing the scent of your sin upon his clothes.

“Thank you, Daeron,” Ormund said, and you could hear the smug, insufferable smirk in his voice. “You are a most dutiful squire. You will make a great knight one day, I am certain of it. You might even surpass your uncle Gwayne one day…”

You knew the Lord's arrogance wasn't born from a genuine desire to compliment the boy, but rather from the thrilling, twisted pleasure of the secret he held right behind the curtain.

“Uncle—is everything alright?” Daeron wondered aloud. You heard a slight shift in his footsteps, as if he were tilting his head to peer over Ormund’s broad shoulder, trying to catch sight of your vanity.

But Ormund kept him firmly locked in place, his grip unyielding. “Of course everything is alright, boy. Why would it not be?”

Ormund countered the question without an inch of doubt, lying straight through his teeth while his royal niece sat naked, shivering, and thoroughly ruined just on the other side of the silk hanging.

“Now, be a good squire and ride ahead to tell the Septon I am arriving.” Ormund patted the boy's cheek with an affectionate, patronizing hand, sending him off.

Daeron opened his mouth one last time, squinting a pale brow. His lips formed a shape as if to call out your name, wondering where his sister had vanished to on this morrow, but under the heavy gaze of his Lord, he relented.

“As you command, my Lord.”

The heavy oak door banged shut behind him, the latch clicking into place with a definitive thud.

An invisible weight lifted from your chest, and you finally managed to let your shoulders drop, exhaling a long, shaky breath that you had been holding for what felt like an eternity.

You stood up from the tub, the cooled water cascading down your pale thighs and clinging to your skin as Ormund drew back the privacy curtain.

He stepped into the alcove, his dark eyes sweeping over your dripping form one last time. His gaze was entirely silent, unreadable, and devoid of the warmth that had filled it moments before.

He gave you a single, curt nod of his head, turning on his heel without a word. The heavy door opened and closed once more, leaving you alone in the quiet solar—aching, profoundly confused, and shivering in the sudden cold.

©RHAENYRAS-CROWN: I DO NOT APPROVE OF MY WORKS TO BE TRANSLATED OR COPIED ANYWHERE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION.

gif credits: @baelcrtargaryen

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Finally, after what felt like hours, you watched as the last truck full of equipment left. With the night officially being over, you let out a big exhale.

This entire day could not have been more amazing. Everything was absolutely perfect and Hannah would not stop gushing over how great you did. Reflecting on the day left you with a lingering smile on your face. After such a busy day, you were so ready to get back to the hotel.

Having the wedding venue next door to a hotel was incredibly convenient, as most of the wedding party booked hotel rooms through tonight. The rest of your night was going to be chill as ever – maybe order some room service, definitely take a hot bath, just relax.

And then, John Logan showed up and completely wrecked those plans.

You told yourself after your first interaction that no matter what, you would not like him. You couldn’t. The best man and maid of honor trope? What a cliche. But it turns out, the universe had other plans for you.

His attentiveness, his kindness, and of course, your mutual attraction to one another made you feel like you were both magnets, constantly finding each other throughout the night. You relished in the joyous occasion of watching your best friends get married, while also enjoying each other’s company.

Before you knew it, Logan had your hotel room number.

Who were you to deny yourself what the universe was clearly shoving right in your face?

You opened your door, dropping your purse on the front table as you exhale. It only takes a few minutes before a soft knock is heard at the door. You walk back over, looking through the peephole, seeing Logan standing there. You smile, opening the door for him.

You look down, seeing he’s holding a very familiar white rose – one he definitely should not have taken from the table centerpieces. He holds it up to you, your smile growing at the sweet action, taking it from him. 

Logan starts to walk in, holding the door for you as you walk back into your room. Placing the flower on the nightstand, you turn around to face him, walking over to him, grabbing his face and kissing him, releasing all the tension built up from the entire day.

He turns you both around, you feel yourself walking backwards until you feel your back gently hit the wall next to the door. Logan pins you in place, his grip firm on your sides as he continues to kiss you. Your hands find his broad shoulders, placing them there as you slowly bring your hands up to the nape of his neck, scratching ever so slightly.

He groans at the feeling, moving his lips down to your jawline, down to your neck, your head leaning back as his hands slide further down your back to your waist. You let out a sigh as his lips reach your collarbone, goosebumps spreading on your body as your hands move to remove his jacket.

You look him up and down as he takes a step back, loosening his tie before taking his jacket off, gently tossing both items on the floor. He starts to unbutton his undershirt as you try to reach the zipper on the back of your dress.

Your eyes rake down his body, mesmerized as his muscles flex in the dim, warm lighting of the hotel room. He looks big, strong, better than anything you could’ve ever imagined.

And oh, you were imagining it. All damn day.

You can’t take your eyes off of the spot below his bellybutton, a slight trail of hair leading to the waistband of his pants. You giggle softly to yourself, still fumbling over your zipper, as Logan walks over to you, your eyes meeting back with his. He leans in closely to your ear,

“Turn around.”

The way he says it causes more desire to pool deep inside you as you listen, turning to face the wall. You feel his gentle hands on your back, you remove any hair in his way as he slowly unzips the dress. His lips find your neck once again as he unzips your dress. You lean your head back into him, exhaling deeply.

He steps back as you turn around, letting the dress pool on the ground, stepping out of the dress. Logan stands there, drinking all of you in. You feel vulnerable but empowered exposing yourself to him, having nothing but your bra and underwear on.

“You are so fucking beautiful,” he says, looking you up and down before closing the space between the two of you, reconnecting your lips. You feel his tongue tease your lips as he kisses you deeper. He brings his lips from yours down to your chest, kissing the valley between your breasts. You stare down at him, your lips swollen and your body burning as he sinks lower, getting down on his knees.

His hands grip your hips as you feel yourself clench around nothing, feeling his hands get closer to where you want him. Where you need him.

Unexpectedly, his hands trail down from your hips to your thighs, then your calves, down to your feet, before he begins unbuckling the clasps of your very uncomfortable heels. You chuckle lightly at the act, smiling down at him. One after the other, you step out of your heels, Logan tossing them and your dress to the side.

You clench your jaw, attempting to keep it together as his hands slowly make their back up your legs, before one hand slightly traces the skin above the band of your underwear, goosebumps arriving on your skin at his delicate touch.

“Can I…?” he asks. 

“Can you what?” you retort with a teasing smile, moving your hand into his curly hair, running your fingers through it.

He looks up at you with his glazed over eyes, smiling slightly back at you, maintaining eye contact as he presses a kiss to your inner thigh, his hands moving to the sides of your thighs, gripping slightly. 

“You know what,” he says shyly, pressing a light kiss on your hip bone.

“I wanna hear you say it,” you state, shocking both him and you at your unexpected demand.

Having this man on his knees, practically begging to pleasure you was making the need for him grow by the second. He drags his hands up and down your thighs as he looks at you.

“I wanna make you feel good. Let me eat you out. Please,” he practically begs, knocking the wind out of you as you smile at him, nodding quickly in response as he grins back at you.

“Just relax, baby,” he says, kissing your inner thigh. 

His words send another rush of blood straight to your clit as you exhale and nod once more, feeling his hands all over you. He pushes your underwear to the side, the cool air hitting you as he wastes no time wrapping his lips around your clit. You gasp as your hand continues to hold his hair, your other hand stabilizing yourself against the wall. You moan as his tongue slips between your folds, your hips twitching as his mouth sends waves of pleasure through your entire body.

Your grip on his hair tightens as he hits your sweet spot, your eyes closing as your head leans slightly back.

“Fuck Logan, right there,” you moan out, the pleasure he’s giving you, along with your pretty mouth moaning his name makes the blood rush straight to his dick. He takes his free hand and presses down on his groin, attempting to alleviate some of the pressure.

His other hand reaches up, finding yours planted against the wall. You open your eyes, glancing over at your hand, lifting it towards his, interlocking your fingers, the subtle action creating an intimacy you both were desperately craving.

He removes his mouth for a moment and you lightly groan at the loss of him. He stares up at you as he takes his free hand and moves it to rub your clit with his thumb, watching you squirm with every touch. You moan again as his thumb works your clit, his fingers teasing your entrance before he slowly sinks two inside of you. 

He slowly curls his fingers inside you, smirking seeing your hips jerk at the action. Another moan slips out of your lips as he removes his thumb from your clit, his mouth taking its place.

The pleasure becomes too much to bear, your eyes shut as your brain starts to fog, not being able to remember the last time you felt this good. You squeeze his hand tighter, gripping his hair tighter as you feel your orgasm approaching.

“I’m so close,” you say breathlessly, desperately praying he doesn’t switch up what he’s doing. Logan continues doing exactly what you like, moving his fingers and tongue in a perfect rhythm when you feel a wave of pleasure course through your veins. Your moan turns into a groan as your orgasm crashes over you. 

Logan works you through it, slowing his movements down, removing his mouth. He looks up at you like you are a work of art, taking a mental picture as he feels you cum all over his fingers.

You breathe through the residual jerks of your body as he slowly removes his fingers from you. He stands up, unlacing your fingers slowly as the bliss continues to run through you. His hands find their way back to your waist as he kisses up your neck, your jaw before your eyes finally meet, your head resting against the wall as he smirks smugly at you.

“Don’t get cocky,” you tease, laughing lightly and still catching your breath. He chuckles before leaning in and kissing you once more, the kiss softer but hungrier, his desire for you growing more and more.

He takes your hand and you both move to the bed. You crawl on the bed as he takes his pants off, before joining you. You lay flat on your back as he climbs over you, looking at you with a gentleness you don’t think you’ve ever experienced before. He leans down to place a delicate kiss on your forehead, making your heart flutter. He trailed kisses from your forehead, down your nose and back to your lips.

You arms drag from his shoulders to his biceps as you feel him grind his hips into you, the sensation causing both of you to moan together. You lift your hips up, trying to offer him some release as he grinds down harder into you. He buries his head in the crook of your neck as the pleasure ramps up inside of him, small, pretty moans leaving his mouth.

“I have a condom,” you say, exhaling, “It’s in my purse,” you moan out, your eyes rolling back as the friction continues to overwhelm you with pleasure.

He lifts his head up and smiles down at you, pecking your lips before getting off of you. You notice his dick standing at full attention in his boxers, desperate for some release. He removes his boxers as you unclasp your bra and shimmy your underwear off. He slides the condom on before turning around. He doesn't think he can get any harder, but the sight of you completely naked changed that thought real fast.

He climbs back on the bed, hovering over you again.

“You sure this is okay?” he asks, his dick teasing you, feeling it slowly slide it up and down your still very sensitive clit.

“I promise, it’s okay,” you reply, reassuring him as your hand goes up to his cheek, leaning up to kiss him. He reciprocates the kiss, intensifying it as he lines himself up with you and pushes himself slowly inside you.

The feeling of fullness is overwhelming, Logan’s lips leave yours as your head falls back, his lips leaving kisses on the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your jawline. Logan settles inside of you, your tightness and warmth already making it hard for him not to cum, as you grip his shoulders. 

Giving him the subtle nod to move, he quickly finds himself a steady rhythm, your foreheads touching as he thrusts into you. He leans down to kiss you once more, moaning into your mouth as every spot inside you is gripping him just right. You lift your leg up, allowing him to thrust even deeper inside you, as he buries his head in the crook of your neck.

“God, you feel so good, baby,” he whimpers, trying to hold out for as long as possible. You moan in response, clenching around him at the praise. He reaches a hand down in between your bodies, rubbing circles on your clit, the added sensation making you moan out in euphoria.

You feel the tight knot returning in your lower stomach as his thrusts become both sloppier and harder. His body stiffens up before releasing into the condom, groaning into your neck, his other hand gripping the bed sheets tightly. You followed soon after, your nails digging into his back as you came again, your walls pulsing around his dick.

He collapsed gently on top of you, both of you staying still for a few moments, catching your breath before he slowly moves off of you. He quickly gets off the bed to discard the condom before coming back and laying down in the bed. You scoot over to lay with him under the covers, his arm open as you snuggle up to him, his arm wrapping itself around you.

He presses a kiss to the top of your head, the calm settling in as you find yourself getting very sleepy.

“You did amazing today,” he says softly, rubbing his hand up and down your arm.

“So did you,” you say, giggling at the innuendo as he joins you in laughter, you both relishing in the intimacy of the moment, knowing deep down that this wasn’t just going to be a 'one-time hook up only' thing.

Who doesn’t love a good cliche?

✧･ﾟ*✧･ﾟ*✧･ﾟ*✧･ﾟ*✧･ﾟ*✧

Your fingers curl tightly around each other, clutched around the silver seven-pointed star that hangs from your neck. It was a passing gift from your mother, the only fading reminder you have of her before she shipped you and Daeron off to Oldtown. The sharp edges press into your palm, your firm grip baiting it to pierce the skin and let you bleed. You hold it as if it will provide you with sanctity, with answers, as if it carries enough weight to anchor you against the storm inside your own mind.

Prayers leave your lips in whispers, so soft that they may blow away with a gentle breeze, only heard for the Gods above.

The words are so familiar to you that no thought is needed when speaking. The prayers have been woven into you since you were a mere child, your first memories in Oldtown coming from the countless mornings within the grand septs as the watchful eyes and ears of septas linger on your every word.

You recall the nights when sleep refused to come, so alone in your thoughts that your only salvation was the comfort of the Seven who would watch over you. Who would listen to you like no one else would.

"Father above, judge me fairly."

Your voice trembles only slightly, memories of the day’s happenings washing over you like a typhoon that seeks to destroy everything in its path.

"Mother, grant me mercy."

Your eyes remain shut. You do not wish to see yourself reflected in the polished marble before you. The face of a Targaryen, a face that belongs to a family infested with sin and poison.

"Warrior, grant my brother strength."

Your lips curl up as your twin Daeron’s face comes unbidden. Your other half.

The two of you had entered the world together amid an established legacy and fierce politics that were only more ignited with the birth of Rhaenyra’s first bastard mere moons before you.

Daeron was the perfect image of what a prince should be, just and kind and gentle. Raised in Oldtown with the Faith illuminating his path forward.

You found your purpose to be more muddled. Women of your age have already been married off, given away to men for favors, for alliances, for power. Yet when you bring up your future to your Lord Ormund, he dismisses you with a delicate caress of your face and more questions left in the air than answers to fill your mind.

The abrasive huff of Daeron’s dragon interrupts your prayers as your hands tighten around each other. You resist the urge to open your eyes and glare. Perhaps your brother’s only fault was the affection he held too tightly onto for his beast, the unmistakable connection that revealed his roots.

Two dragon eggs had been sent to Oldtown amongst the blankets and cradles of yourself and your brother, a chain that bound you to the impure blood of House Targaryen. Daeron’s egg hatched as he grew, a beast he called Tessarion.

Yours never hatched.

When it was clear your egg was never going to transform into a beast, bearing scales upon the hard shell that remained ice cold despite constant heat from hearths, Lord Ormund had pulled you onto his lap and held you with open affection that you had never witnessed before.

“It is a sign of your purity,” he said to you amidst your tears and confusion, naivety leading you to think something was wrong. You remember the warmth of his hand as it stroked your cheek. “Proof that we can cleanse the wretched blood right out of you.”

His satisfaction was perhaps your only saving grace.

"The Maiden, preserve my innocence."

Your throat tightens and you almost laugh at the irony.

There had never been innocence for those born into House Targaryen with madness flowing through your veins. There was the constant knowledge that one day, your blood would be judged by what your ancestors had done.

And the bloodshed that lies beyond the very doors you have barricaded yourself in is just more proof of it, of the destruction that lies within the bones of those who are cursed to carry their name.

"...the Crone, grant me wisdom."

You lower your head more, blocking out any slivers of light that may pass into your vision.

Wisdom enough to understand, to forgive. Wisdom enough to know whether you are truly different from the monsters history claims your family to be.

Your final prayer catches in your throat. It is a name rarely invoked, but one you have found yourself needing to utter recently.

"The Stranger..."

The words feel heavier than usual. They feel more imminent with every passing second that war rages on around you.

"...when my hour comes, receive me kindly."

You quietly bask in your solitude, save for the beast that has calmed since its earlier destruction, granting you a moment of privacy when none can typically be afforded. No footsteps surrounding you, no whispers full of venom in your ears, no judgement to be cast upon your pious display.

There is only peace.

But peace always yearns to be broken.

The heavy wooden doors of the sept groan beneath the force of an impatient hand.

Your eyes remain closed.

For a moment, you allow yourself to be lulled by the illusion that you did not hear it. That the Gods have granted you one final breath of silence before the world demands you return to it.

But the footsteps that follow are too familiar, ones you’ve heard all your life that ring with careful measure and heavy authority. You do not need to turn around to know who has entered.

“My dear girl.”

Lord Ormund Hightower’s voice echoes through the sept, carrying with it the same weight of control that is flaunted by the banners of Oldtown that now hang over the conquered land of Tumbleton.

His. 

You scold yourself for the way that your heart still recognizes the sound of his voice, stuttering at the familiar smooth tone that brings you familiarity in a strange, war-torn place. You hate that some small, foolish part of you still searches for comfort in it when your mind knows that none can be afforded to you.

You lower your head further, bowing before the Seven that have guided you with structure and discipline instead of the man whose unpredictability has uneased you so.

“Lord Ormund.” You respond barely above a whisper.

You do not call him father, but the word has always lingered at the base of your tongue.

He is the man who raised you, who held you in his arms as an infant and held your hand when delivering you to the sept for your lessons. The man who took you and your brother in when your mother pleaded, desiring children who were raised to be Hightower and not Targaryen despite the curse that she herself had granted upon you.

Yet he is not your father. He is not a man who loves you unconditionally, and what you feel for him is not the love of a child to their father, but what a devotee feels about their object of admiration.

You were raised to be a perfect Hightower daughter, proof that a Targaryen could be cleansed—proof that he could be the one to strip a Targaryen of the poison that flows through their every fiber of being.

And you silently thank the Gods for it.

But still. Every day is a test, every look sent your way with pointed eyes is another way to see if you will fail him, fail his teachings, fail the undeniable proof of his power and influence.

You find the violence of war pushing on the very foundation of what he has enlightened you to, of the Faith that you have had anchored into your soul, into your very way of life. The blood that spills from every death leaves stains behind that taint the very meaning of the Father’s justice, and taints your understanding of Lord Ormund’s piety.

His boots scrape against the stones below him as he approaches, each step slow and deliberate, but with purpose.

“You should not be here.”

Your eyes open, staring straight ahead as you halt your prayers. The dim light from the candle flames around you fill your vision, the scaly snout of Daeron’s beast glowing faintly in the corner of the room. The sept envelopes itself in darkness as the doors close behind your guardian, leaving you at his mercy.

A bitter laugh almost escapes you, and you respond without turning to look at him, perhaps out of the cowardice that would manifest the moment you lay your eyes upon his face. “I should not be in the sept? Where else do I belong while your men plunder the streets like barbarous creatures?”

He sighs, stepping closer until a gentle but firm hand lays itself upon your shoulder. You resist the urge to flinch at the touch. “Do not be smart with me. You know what I mean.”

Your fingers tighten around the seven-pointed star, as if squeezing it tight enough will provide you with an answer you need.

You know exactly what he means.

You should not be near the place where blood was spilled. You should not have seen what happened. You should not question what you witnessed.

You should simply bow your head, find a more acceptable place to pray, and accept that the men with swords and shields donning the symbols of Oldtown know more of righteousness than those forced to kneel before them.

“The Gods hear all prayers,” you whisper.

“They also hear the commands of their chosen servants.” His thumb rubs against the small sliver of skin uncovered from your gown.

You finally crane your neck to look up at him.

The candlelight flickers against his face, illuminating the familiar features that once brought you safety as a child.

You remember climbing into his lap after nightmares, the way his hand rested on your hair as he told you the Seven watched over you, how he watched over you with the same reverence, to look for their guidance and his to light your way forward.

Agitation simmers deep within you.

“You burned him.” The words leave your mouth before you can stop them.

The silence that follows feels heavier than before.

Lord Ormund does not react with words immediately. Instead, his hand stills and he looks at you with the same expression he wore when you were a child confessing some minor mistake.

Disappointment.

“He was a rebel.” His voice hardens as if sensing that defiance that stirs within you.

“He was protecting his wife,” you bite back.

“He committed violence against a Hightower soldier.”

“He was afraid!” Your voice cracks slightly as it raises for the first time. You stand hastily and whip towards Lord Ormund, and he lets you, the hand on your shoulder almost instructing you to move closer to him. “He saw a man who was to harm his wife and he was afraid.”

His jaw tightens. The hand on you tightens, as if telling you to stand down without words.

“Fear does not excuse an act of treason.”

“And does faith excuse your cruelty?”

The question lingers in the air, imposing on propriety and inviting danger to mingle in the tension that has built between the two of you.

It was a question you knew better to ask. One that causes the brief inception of rage to flicker in his eyes, rage of what rebellion you have let inside of your head and make a home out of your purity he has worked so hard to protect.

You know what he sees in you now. A girl who questions. A girl with too much of her father’s blood still flowing through her veins, with too much of her mother’s weak conscience.

A girl who he has not yet finished training.

“You have spent too much time with your brother,” is what he deigns himself to say.

Your stomach twists with the thought of Daeron. Poor Daeron, too just and kind to be thrown into the boughs of merciless war.

“Daeron is good.”

His smile is tight as his thumb resumes brushing against your smooth skin.

“Indeed he is,” he murmurs. “But he is still a Targaryen. And I’m afraid you still are, too.”

The words strike harder than you expect. Even after all these years, all your lessons and prayers, you are still burdened by the name that you carry.

You were still the daughter of a Targaryen, a daughter of dragons, and Lord Ormund never let you forget it.

“I have spent my entire life trying to prove that I am not.” You know you sound pathetic, desperation dripping from your words for some semblance of acknowledgement, of belonging. Of acceptance you have never received since the moment you left the womb a cursed child. His expression dampens, but only slightly. In his features there lies a dangerous kind of softness that has always confused you.

“You should not have to prove anything.” His hand moves again, this time caressing your chin with his thumb and index finger. “Yet time and time again you show me that there is still some of that fire in you that I have worked so hard to snuff out. You still kindle the sparks with these impulses. I only mean to save you from it, my dear.”

You almost believe him. Warmth spreads across you, a feeling you have been longing for since the day a raven delivered the news of his death and Aegon’s ascension.

But that warmth is snuffed out almost as quickly as it had spread, dying out as both of his hands gently lift to your face.

It is a gesture you know all too well.

They are the same hands that have comforted you.

The same hands that wiped your tears when you were young.

(The same hand that caressed your brother’s cheek mere hours earlier and called him a good boy before subjecting him to a savagery that makes a mockery out of the justice and mercy that the Father and the Mother promise to uphold.)

His hands move your head to look at him, his eyes searching yours for something that you cannot name. Repentance? Acceptance?

“You were given a blessing most Targaryens never receive.”

Your body stiffens under his touch.

“Guidance.”

The word is gentle, but you know the meaning behind it is not.

“You were raised among the faithful. You were taught humility. I have protected you from the corruption that has plagued your family for generations.”

His thumbs brush over your cheekbones. “You were spared.”

Your breath catches with his words, because that is the cruelest part.

Somewhere deep inside, you have always wondered if he was right. If the Gods truly had spared you.

If your dragon egg remaining cold was a sign that you were good, that you could be saved. That your inability to claim a beast meant you were never supposed to be like them.

And yet you think of Daeron, of his compassion and kindness. Of the way he feels a kinship with his beast, of the way you knew he felt sympathy for the people Oldtown had conquered when others only saw their usefulness.

You think of your mother.

Of the small glimpses you remember from the last time you saw her, before even reaching ten. Of the deep red hair that Daeron had inherited, the plushness of her lips as she kissed your forehead in a fleeting goodbye, the way her trembling hands moved to clutch the seven-pointed star around your neck as she whispered, my girl.

Of the woman who you know deep in your heart loved you enough to send you away despite delivering sin into this world.

And you wonder what your duty is, what the Gods truly have planned for you if not to follow their ways.

“Was it righteous?” you ask quietly.

Lord Ormund’s hands still.

“What do you speak of now, darling?” he murmurs, his eyes searching yours as a faint crinkle forms in his brow, perhaps out of concern.

“With what happened today.” The topic feels like stepping onto thin ice, crackling beneath the weight of undiscovered consequence. 

“Was it righteous?” you repeat.

His expression falters for a brief moment. But you catch it, and you see it—the realization that you are not truly asking about the man who was put to death, but of Daeron. Of him.

You are questioning him. His decisions. His teachings. His devotion.

You are questioning the man who raised you to fear the monster within your own veins while slowly showing you that monsters could wear the colors of the Faith.

“You question your brother?” His voice is steady and flat, answering you more with a firm response rather than a question. It feels too harsh coming from the man before you, the root of a warning that threatens to grow into a ferocious weed.

“No.” Your answer comes quickly and you raise your hand to cover his own that still rests upon your cheek, still seeking his tenderness despite it all. Tears sting your eyes and you inhale with a shuddering breath as Lord Ormund pulls you close to his chest at the sight.

“I question myself.”

And that, more than anything, is what seems to wound him. Because Ormund can tolerate hatred and rebellion. He can fix that, mold you back into the good girl he knows you can be. But he cannot tolerate the possibility that you do not see him as your salvation.

He leans forward slightly, pressing a delicate kiss to your forehead.

“You are tired, my dear girl.” His voice lowers as he brings his lips to your ear, stroking your face in a dull pattern that seeks to lull you. “You have seen too much today.”

Perhaps you have, and perhaps that is the problem. Perhaps you have seen enough to know that the world is not divided as cleanly as the sermons claimed.

Good and evil, faith and sin, purity and impurity, all tangled in the same wretched roots that have been made to sow war and deceit and violence. All trampled among the feet of soldiers fighting battles they do not have answers to.

Perhaps the Gods are not asking you to choose between the blood in your veins and the prayers in your heart. Perhaps they are asking you to understand why both exist.

And yet no answers come. You do not know what they are looking for. Just as you have not known the answer to anything, only knowing the way your knees scrape the stones when you pray for long hours, and the way that the Seven provide comfort when no one else can. 

Somehow the uncertainty frightens you more than the war ever could.

“I need to confess to you, my Lord.”

My Lord. The words sound like pure honey and lavender to his ears, the sweet unease of your voice a gift for him from the Gods themselves. It is what you called him when you were a young little thing, tiny hands clutching onto his doublets, unsure and untaught about the proper rules that a young girl must follow.

It reminds him of when you were good, when you listened to his every word like he was whose name was on your lips every time you knelt and prayed before succumbing to the vulnerabilty of sleep.

“Speak.”

His voice is commanding, shepherding you to a guiding light. To his guiding light.

A shuddering breath leaves your lips, and a tear glides down your cheek from the corner of your eye. Ormund wipes it with his thumb, his touch lingering on the proof of your possible atonement that he may grant you.

“I do not know what I am supposed to be. What you wish me to be.”

The confession is barely audible, so low that if his breath were not mingling with yours, he may have missed it entirely.

In that moment, Ormund does not see you as a symbol, or as a Targaryen. He sees you as a frightened girl pleading before the Seven. Before him. A girl in desperate need of his guidance.

“Dear girl, you are mine.”

The words bring only a small semblance of comfort to you, despite understanding what they mean. You are his possession, his responsibility, his girl.

You are someone that he loves to keep, loves the idea of, and naively, you think that this means he has come to love you.

They are words you have heard before, words that have been uttered when no one else can impede. Words only meant for the two of you to hear. It feels special, somehow, an important secret he has placed his trust in you to keep.

And yet your gaze drops back to the seven-pointed star in your hand, resting upon your chest, of the confliction that still refuses to settle itself inside of you.

"But I belong to the Seven."

Ormund watches you carefully, searching your features for any touch of disobedience.

"And the Seven gave you to me."

You don’t know how to respond. The silence that follows is colder than any winter the North may suffer.

Behind you, Tessarion lets out a faint grunt, a potent reminder of the vileness that Ormund has worked so hard to erase from your very being. The connection of your twin, your other half, that cannot deny the dragon blood that flows through him. The piece of you that Ormund has taught you to deny, to distance yourself from.

His eyes flicker toward the beast with open disdain before returning to you. There is something unsettling in the calm with which he studies your face, as though weighing whether the girl he raised still exists beneath the blood he has spent a lifetime trying to purge.

"Look at me," he says.

You do, without hesitation.

His fingers tighten beneath your chin, leaving no room for you to turn away. The gesture is practiced, almost gentle, but you recognize it for what it is. It is not affection, but direction, a means to instruct your way of being.

Before you can make sense of the look in his eyes, he leans forward.

His lips brush against yours.

The contact is brief. Colder than you could have imagined. It steals the breath from your lungs not because of its tenderness, but because every instinct in your body rebels against the unknown feeling, rebels against your Lord Ormund indulging in weakness, into a dangerous spiral of depravity. You freeze completely, a closed fist against his strong chest, your mind emptying as though the Stranger himself passed a hand over your thoughts.

When he draws back, lips glistening with saliva and new breath filling his lungs, you cannot meet his gaze.

Shame blooms hot beneath your skin, and you feel more stained than the stones covered in the faint red of spilled blood beneath your feet.

Your fingers fly to the seven-pointed star hanging at your throat. The pointed silver bites into your palm as you clutch it desperately, as if the familiar edges might anchor you to something holy.

You silently think of the Mother—of your mother, fleetingly,—and pray for an answer, a means to understand.

Nothing comes, and your mind remains silent, the previous storm settled into an eerie calm.

“My Lord…” you start, but the words you wished to say escape you and shatter into miniscule pieces of uselessness.

Ormund's expression remains composed, almost paternal, almost affectionate, as though nothing improper has occurred. As if he has not made you question your entire livelihood, the true intentions he hid from you in your upbringing.

“Do not look so frightened, my girl,” he says quietly, too intimate for your liking. “You have always sought my guidance. Let us not stray from that now.”

The instinctual feeling of reassurance in your stomach fills you with quiet horror.

His eyes search yours as he lifts your head back to him. He’s looking for your agreement, your submission. A nod.

You nod.

A smirk pulls at his lips as he caresses your face once more.

“Come.” He pulls away, and you curse yourself for chasing after his warmth, the familiarity of his touch. You link your arm into his as he begins walking away.

“Where to?”

His eyes find yours again. “Back to our lodging.” He squeezes your hand that rests on his arm, as if silently anchoring your hold to him. “Your brother needs you.”

You almost ask if it is Daeron that needs you or you that needs Daeron at this moment, but you smartly hold your tongue this time.

Instead you decide to give into your weaknesses, sinking back into the contention that Lord Ormund’s touch brings you, a feeling that you can predict and that you can rely on even if deep down you know you shouldn’t.

Next to you, Ormund smiles as he feels you return back to him, your head resting against his shoulder as he leads you out of the sept, you letting him control your path forward.

His darling girl knows that he will save her from her innate faults. That he will save you from falling into the wickedness that rules over your namesake.

He will continue to show you what you can become. What he can make you.

A girl that he can mold to prove that blood can be overcome from devotion. 

A girl that will worship him as one would a God, who would bring her to her knees and cry out for him, for him to grant her salvation.

His, his, his.

Surprisingly, it was your cousin, Daeron, who offered you the most kindness. He was the only person you could yield to in the entire Hightower base. You could only pray he wasn’t relaying every conversation you’d had back to the Lord Ormund Hightower.

Everyone else treated you like you were common. Specifically Ser Gwayne Hightower.

He was rude—and vain—and arrogant. He was irritating. When he would try to make conversation, you would always end up in a fight. And it was just your luck for him to be the one instructed to take you on a multiple-week-long journey from the Reach and back to your rightful home in the Red Keep.

He was the one to tell you that your mother had taken King’s Landing back. You assume your mother saw it fit to have the Queen Dowager’s brother be the one to accompany you, because maybe she has something in store for him when you make it there. Perhaps a beheading? He could do without the ability to speak.

Then he was the one to tell you that you would join her in King’s Landing. That you were finally going home. It was the only thing to come from his mouth that made you joyful.

You overheard chatter that by you departing the Reach as soon as the letter was received, and by you making it back unharmed, House Hightower would be granted something close to immunity for their role in the war. You knew it was something a lie. Your mother and stepfather would never let the Green beasts live with what they had done—not only to you, but to her son too. To your mother herself.

The thought of what your mother might be doing to the Dowager Queen now gave you anxiety from being excluded. You should expect that they’ll be calling for Daeron’s capture too, though perhaps you will be able to put in a good word for him—get him sent to the Wall instead of hanged.

Speaking of Daeron, he was already somewhere distant when you had finished gathering your belongings, even though the things you owned in the encampment were scarce. You had said your goodbyes to each other not long ago—he claimed he had to prepare for something with Lord Ormund, and that he would not be available the next morning, for your departure.

You were, as expected, ready to leave. You had wanted to lie down and rest so that the next morning would come sooner, but Ser Gwayne had called you into his tent for one final word.

“There was something else written in the letter. Something I believe should have been saved for a calm moment, such as this,” he begun, and held up the refolded parchment which illustrated the clemency that would be provided to House Hightower upon your safe return to King’s Landing. “Would you prefer to read it, or shall I?”

The glint in his eye was one of compassion. You did not like it.

You shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “Proceed.”

He raised his brows, pressing his lips together before giving a heavy sigh and opening the parchment back again. The fingers that gripped either side of it seemed to waver. His eyes quickly found the line he had so desperately wanted to read.

He inhaled a heavy breath. “The Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne Jacaerys Velaryon was slain in battle against the Triarchy Fleet. He was struck down by crossbow fire alongside his dragon, Vermax, in the waters off the Gullet.”

Gwayne let his hands drop slowly, and he sealed the parchment back. He looked back up at you.

Your head was shaking back and forth. Denying his words, maybe. The movement had come naturally, and you could not stop it.

“Is this a jest?” you exhaled a small laugh, hoping it would work to quell the distress already coursing through your veins.

You knew it was not a jest.

You knew if the war did not end soon then he would die in some violent, gruesome way, but to hear it confirmed was something entirely different. To hear it confirmed by a Hightower was something worse. The primal need for the man before you dead, perhaps in such a way your own brother was killed, washed over you in an instant.

He remained silent at your question. "It pains me, though your brother's death does not alter our course,” he said instead. “We shall depart at first light.”

It pains him?

You will show him something that pains him.

There was a lengthy distance between the two of you already, but you quickly closed it as you rushed across to smack him across his cheek.

Your hand stung, yet you did not wait for his reaction. Instead, you turned on your heel and left the tent.

Jace did not hit you until the fresh air did, and you let yourself shed the tears that you had pushed back into your sockets. The tears that you could not—would not—let fall in front of the enemy.

day one

You never liked Gwayne. He was arrogant, and he would treat you as if you weren’t the daughter of the Queen—or more importantly to them, the granddaughter of King Viserys, and the niece of their usurper.

The ride up the roseroad so far had been silent. He had tried, but you did not speak a word in response. It pains me, he had said, and then he practically told you to get over it and go home! He is moronic, and conceited. It pains you that you have to make this journey with him.

If need be, you could be doing this by yourself. You’re fierce enough to ride alone—gods, you’re essentially already riding alone, Gwayne’s useless self.

Your brothers taught you to be fierce, in spite of their age. Jace had always insisted on letting you spar with them in the yard of the Red Keep, and you learned quite well from it. You certainly couldn’t beat a knight with your skills, but it had helped you gain a certain confidence that princesses tend not to have.

Aegon had never liked you practicing with them. Neither did Ser Criston. You did beat the usurper once—caught him off guard and swept him out from under his feet—which must have bruised his ego in the process, as he felt it just to push you to the ground when your back was turned right after. That earned him a clout in the ear from Ser Harwin.

You chuckle to yourself recalling the memory—specifically Aegon’s stupid face when he realized who had hit him, and more specifically when Ser Harwin did not get in trouble for it—and you notice Gwayne looking at you in your peripheral. The smile is wiped clean off of your face.

“Does something amuse you?” he mutters.

When you look over to see him, he is glowering at you, his upper lip lifted with judgment.

“I understand you may not have many fond memories to look back on when times are tiresome, but I do.” You look forward at the road ahead.

He scoffs out a laugh. “I have many fond memories.”

“Tell me one,” you counter.

All you can hear is the wind blowing through the trees. Ser Gwayne Hightower, the parentless knight, no recollections to look back on fondly.

Gwayne sucks in a breath. “I do not have to.”

“That is what I thought.” You smirk to yourself, and lightly kick the side of your horse, forcing it forward and ahead of him.

day two

You were unsure if you should speak the words you did, but they had just slipped out at a certain point.

“I take it you did not care much for Jace.” Your gaze had already been trained on the head of your horse. It seemed hard to look anywhere else.

You and Gwayne had been mindlessly trekking forward all morning, both of your eyes still heavy with the slumber that you had lacked, sleeping in an inn on top of stiff beds.

“What makes you say that, princess?” he asks.

“You are a Hightower. Your sister is the Dowager Queen. Your nephew is the usurper. You kill for them—” you look over to him. He has been staring at you the whole time, and he looks quite furious.

“I believe you will find I do not have much of a choice in the matter,” he interjects sharply.

Your head shakes. “Everyone has a choice.”

He huffs. “What do you reckon I do? Desert my army? Get caught and hanged for treason?”

“I would.” You look back at the road ahead. “I should.”

Gwayne sighs, and returns his attention to the road as well. “We both have duties, my princess. Duties one cannot simply run from once they get to be too demanding.”

“Essos is said to be nice this time of year.”

A short laugh escapes him. “Essos is said to be nice all times of the year.”

You let out a heavy, deflated sigh. “Would it not be nice? I’m sure they don’t care about who we are there. We could be free. You could be a sellsword, and I…” your thought trails off. You cannot think of what you would be somewhere like Essos.

“You could be a scribe,” Gwayne says sincerely.

You nod. “I could.”

The idea of a life in Essos, perhaps with Gwayne, seems appealing at the very moment. The lack of sleep much be getting to you.

It does seem nice. Abandoning your name, as much as you are loyal to it, could be the best decision that you have made. He seems to want the same, if you convince yourself his words weren’t just tactical, some way to earn your empathy so that you will convince your mother to spare him once you reach the Red Keep.

If the war would not come to an end with her taking of the throne, you would have to escape there yourself. And if Gwayne wanted to come with you, if he was still alive by the time you left, you might just be willing to take him with you. Silverwing—who had surely made it back to Dragonstone—was large enough to saddle two.

day three

The inn you would stay in tonight would be much worse than the last. Not only because of the stiff beds, but because of the lack of them too.

Gwayne knew of the ones that would not ask any questions while not costing all the coins in his possession. So far they had been shit, but they had been true to their history of keeping quiet with matters that did not concern them, as far as you both knew.

You would remain outside with your cloak hood pulled tight over your head and your body facing a wall until Gwayne would come fetch you to take you to the room.

He would refer to you as his squire to the innkeepers and guests who questioned your presence. If they had questioned your demeanor, he would call you reserved and paranoid. Nobody had asked anything past that, but if they did, he was prepared to tell them that you had been tormented by some childhood event.

When Gwayne had taken you to your room that night, you had not expected to be faced with a singular bed.

“Have you gotten your own room?” you had asked, not realizing until you had drawn off the cloak from your head that there was only one mattress before you.

Gwayne only shrugged. “It was all that remained. The innkeeper told me that puppeteers are traveling in town, and all seem to be staying here.”

You could not contain your fury at the thought of sharing a bed with him. Or making him sleep on the floor. “How many fucking puppeteers are there?” you demanded, body tense with unreasonable anger.

He scoffed out a laugh. “My princess, it isn’t exactly the largest inn.” He had already begun shucking off his armor, as well as ridding himself of his gambeson and chausses. “You will live. I will sleep on the floor.”

“Are you sure? Can’t you speak with the innkeeper?”

“There is no need to draw any more attention to us. And what, princess, will you be sleeping on the floor in place of me?” he mocked, already in knowledge of the answer. “Do not fret over it. I have slept in worse places.”

You were silenced at that, and had called him for help with undoing your dress. The whole ordeal was strangely impersonal. He had done it the night before, and you felt nothing. Perhaps it be the exhaustion both of you had carried.

The two of you had retired to your respective sleeping areas shortly afterward, both clad in just your smallclothes.

Later that night, you found yourself wide awake, shivering in the relentless cold that seemed to break in past the shut windows.

Gwayne had been sleeping on the floor furthest from where you were lying on the bed. You assumed he was sleeping as well, but it was strangely silent. You had expected to hear the soft breathing of someone consumed by their slumber, though all you heard was the whistling of wind outside.

And your heart still held unpleasant sympathy for where he had been forced to rest. If your thoughts were true, he was not sleeping at all.

“Ser?” you whisper.

“Is something wrong?” you hear from below.

You smile at his voice. No, at being right. You do not smile at his presence, you smile because you like being right. You rolled over then, the mattress groaning beneath you, to stare at the dim expanse of the side where he lay.

“Are you comfortable there, on the floor?” you question, smile piercing through your words.

He scoffs. “You jest, princess, but I have no doubt that this floor is just as soft as the mattress you lay on.”

You were hit with a flurry of breathless laughter at his words. It must be your lack of sleep. You could hear him chuckle too after some point, but both of you had been slowly silenced as the seconds passed until you could only hear the commotion outside again.

Perhaps you should invite him to sleep alongside you. You are not without mercy. Of course, it would be strictly unromantic, not like how a wife and her husband might find one another on restless nights such as this one.

“Would you like to put that to the test?” you say without a second thought.

Gwayne clears his throat. “I would not want to invade on your solace, princess.”

“There is plenty of room for you.” You crawl across the bed to see him.

Your eyes find him as he thoughtlessly fiddles with the edge of his chemise, and as he freezes once he meets your gaze.

You beam down at him again. “And it would bring me solace, knowing you were sleeping the slightest bit easier.”

“Are you sure of it?”

“I am.” You think it is the sleep deprivation deluding you. You would never act like this normally. He can sense it too.

He slowly rises from his position on the ground, and multiple bones crackle once he stands.

You roll back over to your side of the bed, watching as he joins you. He seems tense, especially as you join him under the covers.

The two of you lie in bridled silence, neither one of you able to fall asleep. A chill runs through you from the temperature, and Gwayne’s head swivels to look at you.

You turn over on your side to meet his gaze, expecting him to say something. He does not, and looks back up at the ceiling instead.

Your brain, clouded by the fact that you are simultaneously freezing cold and devastatingly fatigued, opens, then pauses as you search for the words.

“Are you cold as well?” you mumble.

Gwayne shrugs nonchalantly. “Slightly.”

You chuckle mirthlessly. “I am.” The sheets suddenly feel rough against your skin. “More than slightly.”

“I can ask the innkeeper for another quilt.”

His earlier words flash back to you. “There is no need to draw any more attention to us,” you repeat.

You see the corner of his lip turn upward. “What do you reckon I do, then, princess?” he asks, and you reach out to touch his arm.

The muscle quickly tightens under your hold.

“You’re warm.” You move closer to him. “If we lie close together, we might just make it through the night.”

That is how you ended up huddled next to Ser Gwayne Hightower for the rest of the night.

You were unaware of the fact that he was lying frozen next to you, and that he did not get a wink of sleep, especially as you mindlessly slung an arm around his middle in your slumber. And as your nipples, solid from the cool breeze that had seeped in through the windows, brushed up against him as you shifted throughout the night.

day four

Gwayne had stopped to relieve himself when you heard them.

The myriad of chirps from some kind of birds had caught your attention, and you had jumped from your horse in an instant, following the sound.

You found yourself on the edge of an open field, behind some bushes, as you looked down to some small yellow birds that weren’t flying away. You deduce that they must like your presence.

It wasn’t long before Gwayne anxious voice interrupted your calm, calling your name just moments before stumbling upon you.

“What are they?” you whisper.

“Chicks,” he responds, in a normal tone. At your silence, he continues, “baby chickens.”

“Truly?” you question, head cocked to the side, watching them.

Gwayne stares at you. “Have you… never seen chicks before?”

“No, only…” you turn your head to him, “chickens.” You shrug.

He shakes his head with a theatrical sort of despair. It would have seemed real if the corners of his lips were not upturned.

“You truly are a princess,” he mutters, and crouches down to the ground.

You stoop down alongside him, watching as the chicks run past one another, chirping quietly.

“Can I touch one?” you mumble.

He gestures with a chin toward the chirping bunch. “Go on, then.”

You reach down to one of the animals, but you can’t quite seem to get a good grip on it. You don’t really try to grip it. You do not find the chance to. Instead, your hand just lingers hesitantly above the crowd of them.

Gwayne’s hands come down to meet yours. He grabs one of them, effortlessly and gently, cradling it in his hands.

Your hand is still lingering beside his, still in a motion as if you were going to grab one, as he did, so he brings the chicken in his hands to yours. You bring your free hand to join the other and cup them together.

He lets one hand release the chick into yours, and it comes down below the two of your hands as if to hold it steady. The other covers the chick to prevent it from jumping out of your hold.

The hand that is under yours touches it, and urges it to close. “Gently,” he murmurs, and you’re holding the chick on your own now, gently and effortlessly, just like he was.

His hands withdraw from yours. He watches as your lips curl up, a pure joy that he had yet to ever witness fill your face, do exactly that. His own mouth mirrors something similar.

You shudder nervously as the chick twitches around in your grip. It comes out half in the form of small chuckles and half in struggled exhales.

Your brows draw together. It seems impossible to relax them, and you feel a panic settle in at nothing in particular. Perhaps it be that your brothers are dead, maybe because you are with a man that you have such complicated and mind-boggling feelings for, or that you were just held as a prisoner for the Greens, and that man is a Green, he is the Green, the Hightower Green you have been conditioned to hate—

Gwayne has stopped smiling. You feel tears running down your face. The chick flies out of your grip once you try to see it closer, and you try your hardest to catch onto your breath, to catch it as it runs from you, but you cannot. You are sobbing before you get any sense to stop it.

“My princess?” he leans closer to you, a wavering hand inching dangerously close, and you push yourself from off the ground. He follows.

“I’m sorry,” you manage through heaving breaths, smoothing down your now wrinkled dress. Why are you apologizing? You do not know why you are apologizing. He is a Green. He should be apologizing to you, for being on the side of the war that killed your brothers—oh, gods, your sweet brothers. Your sweet, young, desperate, dead brothers.

“It’s all right,” he mumbles. His hands, still, are reaching toward your arms, yet not touching. Never touching. Just hovering near yours, always, like he wants to touch you, but he doesn’t.

You wipe your eyes, but the tears keep falling. You mutter something again. Sorry, you hear yourself say again, and then your body moves for you. You wrap your arms around his neck in an embrace so tight you might be strangling him.

He stumbles back slightly, arms still hesitating beside you, and then finally you feel it. He folds them gently around your waist. As gentle as he held the chick.

“Don’t cry,” he comforts.

You do not obey. You would if you could, but for now, you remain in his hold. You, regrettably, enjoy it.

day five

Gwayne did not like to see you cry.

He had first seen it the moment you realized you were captured by the Hightowers. You hadn’t been conscious enough when they found you to care about where you were being taken. He hadn’t enjoyed the sight then, not as his belligerents did, and he does not like to see it now.

He was the one to convince his fellow commanders to spare your life and to instead take you as a hostage. He was the one to have you held in a tent next to his own in the encampments with his two most upstanding soldiers posted outside, and not in those grimy cages fit for animals. He was the one to have you ride your horse directly next to his when on the road with the rest of the army—much to your dismay—as to prevent any dishonorable conduct from occurring. He would never tell you these things, of course, but they live with him.

Gwayne would tell himself that he did all of these things because it was right, that he would do it to any other female prisoner-of-war, given the shocking lack of honor among his knights who vowed to defend it. He had done a good job separating the wheat from the chaff when he became a commander, but there were only few he truly trusted to never harm the young, an innocent—and those who cannot protect themselves. Like you.

You liked to put on a front. And it somewhat worked with others, but not with him. He wishes it would, for some odd reason. Maybe he would not see you the way he does, if it did. He would still treat you with mercy, but it would not be to the level it is. He would never have accepted your hug. He thinks he would have pushed you away.

He wouldn’t have, but he believes he would have.

Since he had finally felt your touch the afternoon previous, the road to the Red Keep had been as quiet as the first day of your journey together. He suspected you had been embarrassed after letting him see your emotions, as you had been combative toward him every day since you had woken up from your comatose state.

He had expected it to come at some point, the unveiling of your feelings, but not in that way. He had expected to hear you sniffle from beside him while on your horses. He would have stayed silent, and he would have let you cry. He believes he would have let you cry on your own if you hadn’t come to him for comfort first.

The fact that you did had brought him joy. It made him hopeful, in some strange way he did not feel himself familiar with.

“You are betrothed to Lord Samwell Blackwood, are you not?”

You look at him, puzzled. “He has been with the Stranger since the war begun.”

Gwayne nods curtly. “So I’ve heard.”

“Then why have you asked?”

He inhales a heavy breath. “I feel it my duty to tell you of this.” He clears his throat. “Before your mother took the throne, there was word among our commanders to betroth you to your cousin, Prince Aemond.”

“You jest.”

“I do not.”

You cock your head to the side, wetting your lips. “And what did you have to say in the matter?”

“That is unneeded for you to know.”

“Why? Because you encouraged them to?”

His voice picks up immediately where you left off. “No, because I fought against it.” He scoffs a laugh. “The One-Eyed Prince is… he is mad.” At your gawking laugh, he turns his head to you. “You must know it too. He is simply and utterly mad.”

“You are his uncle.” You would never tell of his treasonous words to any other, but you feel you must remind him.

“Are you going to betray me and inform my army of the fact?”

“I do not have loyalty to you, though I will not speak of the words to another.”

“Good. Now you tell me something in confidence,” he presses.

You shake your head at the sheer audacity of him. “Why would I do that, ser?”

“What else will we converse about? It is a long and arduous road ahead of us.” His eyes peer into yours, and you feel a sudden urge to tell him everything you have ever kept from him.

“Alright then,” you look to the sky in mock ponder. “When I was young, I would pray to the gods each and every night for a gallant and true knight to take me away from the Red Keep and off to some distant land. There was this one knight, he had belonged to our Kingsguard, who I absolutely adored.” You sigh on the memory, oblivious to the fact that a true and gallant knight was riding right alongside you. “I was just a girl then. It was a silly dream. And the gods do not always play in my favor.”

Were you jesting? Or were you truly so oblivious?

“Do you remember his name?” he asks.

“It has lost me. But I remember his face. He was gorgeous, that one, and very gentle, too. Back then he was the same age as my brother is now.”

He does not let you sit with the fact that you mentioned your brother as if he were alive. “That’s quite young, isn’t it?”

You nod. “Indeed. He was the youngest of every knight in the Keep. Perhaps the youngest in history.”

“What happened to him?”

You exhale a breath, and look down to your horse’s head. “He was in the fire that killed Ser Harwin. I do not know why he had been called to Harrenhal, and I suppose I shall never know. Are you yourself betrothed, or married, ser?”

He huffs. “Gods, no. I was, and remain, of little use as a political pawn for House Hightower, my father being the second son.”

“Therefore if you were to wed, you would do so for love,” you state.

“I suppose so.”

day six

The hood of your cloak was pulled tightly over the upper half of your face, seemingly ritual for whenever you made it to inns, and you felt a tap on your shoulder.

You turn, expecting to see Gwayne, but in his place stood a knight in armor, donning a Hightower sigil on his gambeson.

It is your luck to see Gwayne rushing up from behind him to fetch you.

“Squire, let us retire to our room, yes?” he says, and you nod eagerly, pulling the hood further over your face. The two of you attempt to move forward, and you make it past the knight—

“That is no squire,” the man interjects, grabbing onto your wrist, stopping you. “That is a girl.”

Gwayne steps in between you and the knight, forcing him to release your joint from his hold. His gaze flicks down to the man’s gambeson.

He takes a step closer to him and lowers his voice. “If it pleases you, she’s my distraction for the night, ser. Not worth your notice.”

The knight clears his throat, and Gwayne steps back.

“Blessings upon King Aegon.” He smiles, turning back to the inn entrance.

His hand guides you forward, lingering on the small of your back, surely for the sight of the knight behind you. And then it trails down, over the curve of your back end, and you feel the slightest grip onto it before the door behind you closes, and his hand immediately falls away.

The walk to your room is silent.

Gwayne swallows painfully once you make it to your room.

“I’m sorry—” he begins.

“How may I distract you tonight, ser?” you interrupt, smiling stupidly at his lie, and he sighs one of relief at your lack of offense.

He breathes out a laugh, and swiftly moves to shed himself of his armor. He has been struggling on his own each time he has done so. You only noticed it the last night, and offered help, but had been rejected.

You would not ask this time, you would simply do. Your fingers were desperate and untrained in their efforts, but they did the trick in time for him not to deny you, and he was rid of the metal captivity.

You turn as he does, ridding yourself of your heavy cloak and pushing your hair out of the way of the laces of your dress. He pulls them loose without a word, and the warmth of his body behind yours would surely prove the most effective thing of the night, you decide as you gaze at the thin quilt on your bed.

As your gown slides down your body, you can hear the shuffling of Gwayne removing all but his linens behind you. If you took just a step backward, you would be touching him.

“It is a terrible coincidence, the Hightower army resting here,” you mumble, your hands fiddling with the light cloth around the your wrists.

“It is,” he agrees solemnly.

You retreat from his warmth and sit on the edge of your bed, your back up straight and your fingers clasped together in your lap. You weren’t particularly tired this night. Maybe it be from the surge of adrenaline at the knight outside, and it had already raged through your limbs, rendering them restless the moment the door to the inn had shut behind you.

Gwayne’s hand was close to you then, to an area you regarded as most private among you, a maiden. The memory of it twinged deep in your stomach. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

He had joined you in sitting on the edge of a bed, albeit his own. His own stature had mirrored yours. All tense and surged with the possibility of a fight.

“It is rather cold this night,” you mutter.

Gwayne nods curtly. “It is.”

Your gaze lowers to watch your fingers be relentlessly picked on by those of the other hand. “I fear one of those knights will bust through the doorway, and take me away with little fight, you being so far from me,” you whisper. The night was silent enough for him to hear it.

“I fear the same.”

You look up at him. “If he were to do so, it would certainly raise suspicion if your whore was sleeping in a bed adjacent to yours.”

He takes a turn to meet your eyes. “If you wish to sleep in the same bed as I, you need only ask.”

Your tongue darts out to wet your lips. “May I sleep in your bed tonight, Gwayne?” you muster.

“As you wish, my princess.”

day seven

Your horse stops before you instruct it to.

In the distance lies a field of flowers, pink and purple, some yellow, and all illuminated by sunlight. It was nearly time for it to set.

You cannot still be in the Reach, you think. It has been much too long, but thank the gods if you are. What a sight to see.

You want to see it closer. Gwayne will be okay with it, you declare, and you hop off of your horse and begin walking in the direction of the field.

“No, princess,” he says, exasperated. “We cannot go off trail again.”

“The flowers,” you breathe. “It is beautiful.”

The scent in the air is intoxicating. It is rather pungent, the closer you get to it, and the air seems more sultry than just moments before.

You remove your cloak from your shoulders, letting it drop behind you as you continue forward. It is the slightest bit relieving from the heat, but your body quickly acclimates to it again, and the sweat begins beading. It is no wonder. The sleeves under your dress are long. It makes you question why you decided to wear such a stupid thing, in this climate.

Once you make it to the field, it envelopes you. The fever. It starts in your lower abdomen in a heavy thrum and travels up the rest of your body.

Where is Gwayne?

You turn around. He is just a few steps behind. He has been trailing behind you the entire time. It was hard to notice, with the pull of the meadow, but now that you are here, he is all you can think about. All you can focus on. You do not like that.

His hair illuminates in the sunlight, much like the flowers. Your skin tingles.

He froze in his movements the moment you did. You continue further into the field. His feet fall in step with yours, and you think you can hear his breathing, all shaky and uncertain.

You make it to an empty patch of the meadow, and stop once again.

“Ser?” you turn back to face him. The scorch of the sun worsens with each passing second. Sweat gathers on your brow. “My dress... please… help me get it off.” You raise a timid arm to your back, accepting defeat once you find yourself unable to reach the laces.

Gwayne’s thumb twitches toward you. His forehead glistens. He must be burning too.

You spot the clench of his jaw, and take a wary step toward him.

“Stop—” he holds a hand out, body turning away from you. “Do not move. Please. Just stay there.” He avoids your gaze.

“What is it?” you ask. You know what it is.

You know what he is feeling, because you feel it too. It presses hard and deep in your abdomen, and it just wants to be relieved. You want to be relieved. And Ser Gwayne Hightower looks rather handsome in this light, surrounded by the pink and purple—and was it red?—flowers. He seems close to pouncing on you like a wild dog. Gods, may he?

He had always been alluring. May it be your frustration that you could never have him in the way you wanted that made you so combative, or the fact that he is a Green—it is probably both, but neither seem so important now. Not when you feel the heat of a thousand suns burn through you, all the way to your core, and then all over again.

The man himself looks close to releasing in his braies just by looking at your face. It brings you some ease, yet also further discomfort, to know that he feels the same as you. You had blocked out the idea, seeing yourself as delusional and unrealistic for thinking he would ever show any form of attraction toward you.

“Gwayne—” you exhale, though it releases itself in the form of a groan. “It is sweltering.” You bend over to clutch the end of your dress, and you are close to pulling it off yourself, if fate was willing. Something halts you.

“Please, don’t.” His voice sounds pitiful. It is all low and whiny. “I do not know if I can handle that. Not now. Not when… fuck.”

You want to keel over and die.

You release the cloth from your grip and let the dress fall back down. You rise back up, slowly, and flatten down the wrinkled fabric of your middle with your hands.

Your lips tremble. “What do you want to do?”

“I am unsure.” He still cannot look you in the eye. “It is impure, and unchivalrous for me to be thinking of you this way.”

“I am all right with it.” It is then that you realize how you sound. Desperate for a Green, as if you were a common whore, which is probably what he thinks of you as. At least he tries to fight it. You should fight it too. You are fierce enough to fight whatever it is that is welling up inside of you.

Your eyes are squeezed shut, and the shame tries to conquer the hunger—but the hunger wins in the blink of an eye. The blink of your eye, in fact, as you look back at Gwayne.

“We cannot,” you mumble. “We should not. I am a maiden. You are the opposition. We cannot.” You repeat the words to yourself, over and over, like a mantra. If the shame did not prevail, perhaps distraction will. Your eyes shut tight again, and you repeat the words. We cannot. We should not. You are a maiden. He is the opposition.

We cannot, we should not, you are a maiden, Ser Gwayne Hightower is hard by simply standing in your presence—

Your eyes snap open, and you find that you are standing directly in front of him. You must have been inching closer to him with each sentence you repeated.

Your gaze flicks down to his crotch. Sure enough, your thoughts did not lie to you. Perhaps your dragon blood has given you the gift of prophecy.

He finds it appropriate to look at you, finally, and you realize how close you are to one another.

In specific—how close your lips are to one another. So, so close, yet so far. You almost want to give in, and you lean just a little closer. He stays still, though when you stop moving, his head moves closer too, close enough that you can almost feel his breath fanning into your own mouth.

Your noses are touching, that is how close you are. You could just slot your lips right onto his. It would be so easy, so incredibly simple, if you would just move forward, just a little—

His hands reach up to cradle your face in his hands, thumbs on either side grazing your cheekbones. They move down your face, down to your lips, and one of the thumbs strokes over the bottom lip. And he closes the gap.

You feel his lips envelope yours first, and then you feel his tongue inch into your mouth. Your lips close over one another’s, and he moans. Ser Gwayne Hightower is moaning into your mouth, and it feels like you have been sent to each of the seven heavens and back again. Your head is pushed backwards with the force of his kiss.

Your hand reaches around to brush over his nape. His hands travel further down your body, one finding itself wrapped around your waist, the other petting your breast over your dress. It seems that the true touch of it pacifies him, as it allows you to push deeper into the kiss, letting your tongue slide into his mouth.

You only break away to lower yourself to the ground. He follows, as though the answers to every challenge in his life were held on your lips. He hikes your dress up your legs, your smallclothes with it, until they both pool at your waist.

He lifts two fingers to his mouth, coating them in spit before reaching down to your bare cunt and thrusting them inside. You let out a shrieking moan, letting your head press into the dirt below you and thrashing back and forth in pleasure.

“Look at me,” Gwayne instructs. You let your eyes lock onto his, you try, but the deep press of his fingers inside of you makes it hard to focus. His lips, hanging open, hover just above yours, and he moves forward to bring you and he together again.

It is breathing moans into each other’s mouths and pathetic, desperate mashing before you finally get the hold onto his lips, or perhaps him onto yours. His fingers cease, and slip out swift enough for it to go unnoticed for a single moment.

He breaks apart from your mouth, and wastes no time in sliding himself down your body. The disappointment at the loss of his fingers does not last long, as his lips lock onto your cunt.

Gwayne snakes his arms under your legs and he yanks your body closer to him. Your fingers curl in his hair, and he only laps harder at you.

“Y—yes, ser—” you cry, your thighs squeezing his head, clit pulsating under the assault of his tongue.

He breaks away for just a moment, big blue eyes locking onto your weak ones. “Not ser. Gwayne. My name is Gwayne.”

And he dives back into you, gathering your wetness on his tongue in a torturous swipe from bottom to top, one that earns a sweet little whine from the depths of your throat. It reminds him, in that moment, of the sounds you would make when you did not get your way back in Oldtown—the sounds he would shamefully think of as he fucked his fist late at night, the sounds that he would repent about for thinking and acting on with such humiliating vitality, and more importantly, for not regretting any of it in the slightest.

The sheer relief you get from his mouth onto yours is unlike anything you have felt before, because you have not felt it before. You had heard word of the act in song, and in gossip spread around by your ladies-in-waiting, but to experience it was the greatest decision you ever made. A true, gallant knight between your legs, satiating the hunger that spread in your loins and his alike, yet he is only focused on your release now, latching his tongue on your clit and sucking hard.

His fingers graze your folds and glide around the edges, already slick with your wet. One finger probes, just the slightest bit, and you shudder at the contact.

You let out a loud cry as it presses itself fully inside, without warning. Perfection, you think you hear him say. The words vibrate on your clit, agonizingly so.

His finger pumps in and out of you, and his mouth works on your cunt all the same. The fire in your veins only grows stronger as your climax approaches.

Your fingers tug and pull on his hair, and somewhere in the middle of your gratification a second slim finger of his joins the first, pressing deep into your cunt as they allow him.

The sounds coming from your mouth you do not think you have ever made before. They approach from deep in your lungs and are hoarsely ripped from your throat.

It creeps closer, that unfamiliar thing called release, and your walls tighten around his fingers. Gwayne only sucks harder, and pushes his fingers further into your cunt, his knuckles pressing into your folds.

The feeling floods your body in an instant. It feels prickly, for some odd reason, and it nips your limbs, but blissfully so. Your brain feels fuzzy, and you cannot think of anything but him. It is a way that makes you crave for it immediately once it ebbs.

You let out a little sob once his fingers slip out from inside you. You didn’t know you were crying, and a few stray tears fall from your eyes before you realize.

Gwayne licks a stripe up your cunt, collecting whatever fluids he procured down there into his mouth and swallowing them with the gulp of a man who might just be dying of thirst.

He is up your body and has his wet lips on yours by the time you tear yourself away from the sight. It is then that you feel how truly hard he is under his linens. His cock presses against your spent core, and he nearly jerks back at the contact.

“Gwayne,” you breathe, and his head shoots up to look at you.

“What is it, sweet girl?” he mumbles, suddenly winded by the sweet sound of his name on your tongue.

“I want you to fuck me.”

He is frozen solid at your ask. Your arousal on his mouth glistens with each slight twitch upward. “You’re sure of it?”

You nod, but it is not enough.

“Tell me,” he commands.

“I want you to fuck me, Gwayne, how else must I tell you?” you reply impatiently, and grind your hips up to feel his hardened cock brush against you once more.

Both of your hands come up and intertwine themselves behind his neck, preventing him from straying any further—pulling him down to you, in fact, so you can grind up on him some more.

You lift your head from the ground to try and capture his lips into a somewhat calculating kiss, but his strength prevails, and his head softly twitches back before your mouth can get hold on his.

You fall back, defeated, but his hand comes to hold your wrist, and he comes down to close the gap. He chuckles into your mouth at your desperation, and you only kiss him harder, as if you were trying to become one with him.

His hand rubs up and down your wrist for a moment, before he reaches down to release his lower half from his linens.

You take a hand from off his neck and reach down to meet his own, searching around for his cock. You get a firm grip on it, stroking it up once. He lets out a shuddery moan, and his hand finds your wrist once again—not stopping you, but guiding you, perhaps.

He pumps himself with your hand, and you let him for only a moment, before overpowering his gentleness and guiding his length to your cunt. The tip of it glides on your folds. You could die right here, and it would be okay.

Gwayne pushes into you with a wounded groan, his jaw hanging wide open. You, on the other hand, nearly shriek.

He rocks himself out of you slowly, then back into you almost sluggishly.

“Is this all right?” he manages through strangled breaths, and you nod fervently, using the hand still on his neck to push his head closer to yours.

You mean to kiss him, but his forehead lies on yours instead. You’ll take what you can get.

He presses swift pecks on your cheeks, on your nose, and on your lips as he gains momentum. Your eyes flutter shut, but his hand comes up to press a few light smacks to your cheek.

“I said to look at me,” he grunts. “I want to see your eyes—“

You open them back up at that. They’re glossed over again, with tears, and you’re glad that Gwayne does not take it as pain. There was pain, but it is long gone. He kisses the droplets as they fall from the corners of your eyes.

It is utterly intoxicating, the drag of his hips. He seems to lose himself in the feeling too. Wave after wave of constant pleasure washes over you with the somehow gentle slam of him into you.

You babble incomprehensible speech, just as lost as he is as he, slack-jawed as he fucks you. His eyes are focused on your face, your face saturated with sweat, for a single twitch of anything at all, yet he finds nothing. Nothing but rapture, as he believes it should be. He brings his hand back down to your clit and strokes it so delicately, but it brings you sweet relief all the more.

You feel it cresting again. Up your spine, down your legs, dumbing your brain into mush, prickling at the back of your neck. “Gods, Gwayne—Oh, gods, I’m gonna—“

You don’t finish the sentence. It hits you, you cum again, so hard around his cock, and it isn’t long into your perfect bliss before he is pulls out, spilling his seed onto the bunched-up cotton of your dress.

You feel as though you are one with him. It is like your flesh melts into his. Your sweat certainly does, especially as he joins his forehead with yours again, all sticky and damp.

“I am deeply sorry—” he says in between quick kisses, “to have taken your maidenhood.”

You shake your head softly. “If it shames you so, I can raise a proposition of marriage to my mother once we get back to the Keep.” He laughs at that, unknowing you were not telling a joke.

Still, you breathe out a chuckle.

day nine

The communal bath that you had found yourself in was satisfyingly empty. Since Gwayne had taken your maidenhood two moons previous, you had been desperate for it to happen again, and again, and perhaps a thousand times more, though you resisted the urge to ask outright while in the inns.

Now, though, seemed like the perfect moment to do so. You could clean yourself properly for the first time in weeks, and then dirty yourself all over again with the satisfaction of your mutual sin.

He had already undone the laces of your dress for you, and you stepped out of the gown that dropped to your feet, eager to feel the warmth of the water envelop your skin. And for him to join you. So that you could see—and feel—his bare body, properly. You had already shed your linens by the time you made it to the water.

You had retreated to the further side of the bath, so that you could watch as Gwayne undressed himself. It was nicer like this, being able to take in his body for the first time, as he stripped off his gambeson, then his chausses, and then, finally, his smallclothes.

His figure was very unsurprisingly robust. The light of the countless candles surrounding the baths set for quite the intimate atmosphere.

You bit back a smile as he inched closer to the bath, stepping inside with a heavy sigh of relief. The Hightowers did seem to prioritize cleanliness. Perhaps they place it next to godliness. Gwayne certainly does not seem to mind, given how keen he was to eat your cunt until you came undone on his tongue.

He threw his head back with a shuddering sigh once he finally sunk into the water. You watch as the grime expels from the surface of his body in one fell swoop, becoming one with the rest of the stream.

“Have you something to say?” he questions, a brow darted upward at your uncharacteristically blissful expression.

Your cheeks flushed, a harder, content smile crossing over your face. “Just observing.”

“Must you observe so far?” he mutters.

“I must,” you sneer, giving a firm nod.

His eyes flick down to your bare breasts, sat warped on your chest under the soft wave of the water.

He quickly averts his gaze to the center of the bath once you perk them forward with your arms.

“I am truly apologetic,” he starts. “For taking your maidenhood. ‘specially in such an unclean place, where anyone could have seen us if they had simply come to probe into the noise.”

You scoff. “Would you have preferred it happen inside the walls of some dull inn?”

“I’d have preferred you comfortable.”

“I was comfortable. I am comfortable.”

At his silence, you push yourself off of the wall and glide over to him. He sits frozen as your chest brushes against his arm.

“Are you a maid, ser? Well—were you a maid?” you question, feigning a look of innocence.

“I haven’t been a maid for a long time, princess.” His head hangs low.

He lets you grip his arm and guide it between your legs. “Are you ashamed of the fact?”

“I am ashamed that I am not,” he mutters, seemingly unfazed as you grind your cunt against his wrist. You let out a low moan, your breath wavering before you realize his lament.

So you release his arm from your hold and straddle his hips, placing your hands on each of his shoulders. Your chest is eye level with his face. It seems to be the only thing that can bring his head back up.

You can feel his cock hardening below you as you rock back and forth against him. He watches your face that stares down back at him—both of your jaws are slack, and you breathe heavy pants into each others mouths, gaining some semblance of pleasure from the act.

But it is not enough, no. It is never enough.

You take a hand from his shoulder and reach down to grip his length, guiding it into your walls at once. You push down unto him with a sweet little cry, one quickly silenced by his lips on your own.

His kiss is just as tender as you remember it being, amorous flowers aside, and you hum into him. A hand cups your cheek and he tilts his head, his tongue breaching the plush of your lips, just exploring.

Your fingers curl around his nape as you thrust, up and down, up and down, and he concurrently rolls his hips back and forth.

“Fuck—sweet princess—” he moans once he breaks apart from your mouth.

You gasp and shudder, and he reaches his head up to kiss all over your face. Your eye, the brow bone above it, down to the highest point of your cheek on the side of your face, then to the corner of your lip, and then he cranes his head down to kiss you on your neck. You throw your head back to allow him access.

Once he reaches your sternum, he darts his tongue out first when attaching his lips to it. “Oh, gods,” you whimper into his hair.

“Ser? Gwayne—” you can't quite speak, the words near dying on your tongue. “Are you mine, Gwayne? Tell me—” your hips slow, and his only speed up. He begins fucking up into you, and another moan rips through your throat.

He nods fervently against your neck, lifting his head back up to see you. “I am yours, princess. Fuck—” his hips stutter, though he relents.

It does not give you solace. If he is yours, how long shall he remain so? Until the gods rip him from your grasp—which would be soon now, with each tread of your horses closer to the Red Keep.

His hand slides up to your ribs as if to stabilize you, and he wraps it around your middle. His forehead drops to your shoulder, raising with each jolt of your body upward, the constant slam of his cock up into your cunt and then out again.

You know few things now, except for him. Your walls clench around him, and he nearly ceases at that. You continue in his ministrations, rocking back and forth onto him, savoring in the way his length hits you in the spot that makes you feel near the brink of climax.

“I love you.” You think you hear yourself say. And he just watches you, as you chase your peak, so blissfully unaware of the words that just came from your mouth. Your sweet mouth.

Gwayne reaches a hand to cradle your head, and push it closer to his, so that he can take your sweet mouth into his. It is less of a kiss and more of two mouths pressing against each other, but you accept it either way. The two of you pant raggedly against each other, and you feel your core tighten with each deep press of his cock inside of you.

He can feel it too. It is more of threat than satisfying, the idea of spilling his seed inside of you, but you seem to not care. You might just not know. If you were true to your word of your maidenhood—he does not care if you were or not—you must be pitifully unknowledgeable on the subject.

He remembers word of you being betrothed to some high lord widow who had died on the frontlines of battle when the war first broke out, fighting for the side of your mother. Then, once you were captured, there was word of you marrying one of his two younger Targaryen nephews. The thought of you being kept as a prisoner for Aemond sends a shudder through his body, and he rids himself free of the idea as his orgasm approaches closer.

“My princess—” he tries. You do not notice. You persist in your pursuit of release, and he grips your jaw gently, catching your attention. “Look at me.”

You nod at nothing in particular, mouth hanging open and mewling needy whimpers as you oscillate on his cock.

“I cannot—I cannot cum inside.” He lets out a strangled moan as you begin grinding faster than just moments before, as if encouraging him to do so.

“Why not?” you breathe.

His head nearly lulls back as he staves off his own release. “You could get with child.”

You grip his hand and lead it to your breast, and he lets himself fall for your entrancement, kneading it between his fingers. Your nipple is caught between two of them, and he presses them together just the slightest bit too hard, earning a wince from above him. It makes him realize he has been regrettably neglecting them this entire time.

“My breasts are sore.” You inhale sharply. “I shall bleed soon.”

Ah. In that case—

Gwayne dips his hands back into the water, finding your hips to guide them, delighting in the way your moans grow more and more fervent as his cock drags against your walls.

It approaches swift, and you do not have any time nor stamina to warn him of it. You wonder if he can sense it.

Just as quick as it came, it washes over you in an instant. Your muscles clamp down around him, and he moans loud into your shoulder—you soon feel a warmth deep in your womb, the warmth of his seed. A minuscule part of you hopes it will take.

Shortly afterward, he lifts your bodies from the water, carrying you with your legs wrapped around him. His cock has slipped out of you, but the kiss he places on your lips distracts you from the loss.

You push his chest, separating your mouths, and wrap your arms around his neck. “Let us leave together, Gwayne. Silverwing is large enough to saddle two. You could be a sellsword, and I a scribe—I your wife. I shall give you children, if it is what you desire. We can spend our days in rest and tranquility, like this.” Your breath still hasn’t caught.

It is a moment of silence before Gwayne finds the words. The dubious words, though the ones that provide enough hope to settle you. “Perhaps, my princess. Do not worry yourself with eventuality.” And he sets you down on the marble just above the bath. Your calves dip back into the water, and it is then you realize that they are aching.

He kneels down into the water and takes your legs over his shoulders. You feel the stretch in your thighs, equal parts from their growing soreness and the length of his shoulders. His release begins seeping out of your cunt from the pressure of it all.

He presses a kiss to the inside of your knee, then to the inside of your thigh, and then finally to your clit. His head dips down to your opening, and he sucks.

It becomes more like he is kissing, or eating you, at some point. You cannot tell. The pleasure has already gotten to be too much, and you are writhing under him.

His arms wrap around your thighs and he pulls you closer to his mouth, and you loudly and embarrassingly moan, your fingers rake through his hair, gripping it tight when his nose brushes against your clit.

You haven’t discovered his objective, but thank the gods for him. It is somewhat relaxing and simultaneously frustrating for him to be lapping away mindlessly at your cunt.

“Please, Gwayne, let me cum—” you beg, all breathless and crestfallen, and his eyes flick up to you. He finds you are the most spoiled thing he has ever met, yet also the most beautiful. He thinks, in that moment, that he truly should consider being taken as your husband.

He nods once. “As you wish.”

And his mouth is replaced by his fingers. He pumps them into you, a relentless pace, and his lips find themselves back onto you, but now on your clit.

He laps at you and rocks his fingers further inside, getting your folds all slick and glossy with both your own and his own arousal, as well as his own saliva.

He curls his fingers deep in your cunt, in that spongy spot that once sheathed his cock, and it is enough to bring you to climax before you realize it.

You swear your vision goes black for a moment as you cum, and the bliss fills your body over the irritation. It was embarrassingly fast how quickly he brought you to absolution, but you did not have enough might to let it wash over you the way your orgasm had.

Gwayne looks up at you with those big blue eyes of his, now glossed over. The lower half of his face is sheen with your cum—his cum—and he pants and lifts himself up to join you on the marble, his strong body glistening with the damp of the bath.

You think you might faint.

day fourteen

Tonight’s inn had been the nicest of all fourteen. You and Gwayne had jointly decided for it to be the last of your stops, and that you would make the journey the rest of the way there without sleeping.

It was not long to King’s Landing. As much as you had longed to see your mother, and to be home again, the thought of what would happen to Gwayne in the coming days was a thought too harrowing to bear.

But it had lingered in your mind since the field. Certainly he could not leave you, having taken your maidenhood. Your mother would find a way. She knows what it is like to be infatuated with someone you should not be infatuated with. She knows Gwayne. As a soldier for the opposition, yes, but she knows him all the more.

If she has held mercy for his sister, she would certainly hold mercy for him, especially given the situation at hand. The situation of you being in love with a Hightower, and him having bedded you—well, fucked you in a field, then in a bath, a few scattered moments along the road of him lapping at your cunt, or sticking his fingers there to cull your nerves the nights you were too tense to sleep. Your mother coddled you enough before you were taken hostage, and she would certainly do more once you are back with her.

Gwayne seems to sense your restlessness. You have resorted to single bed rooms in the inns, given the underestimated lack of coin he decided to bring with him. He has been able to pick up on your behavior for the last few days—noting to himself how much you lack sleep the closer you get to King’s Landing—and he has always been able to get you to talk about it. Tonight, you seem not wanting of his perception.

He turns over to face you. “Are you feeling well?” he asks.

You look to him for a moment. “I feel fine.”

Propping himself up on one arm, he maneuvers himself closer until he is hovering above you, as he stares down at where you lie. “You mustn’t need to lie.” His voice is soft.

Your lungs expand with a heavy breath of air. “I do not wish for you to leave when we return to the Red Keep. You told me that we would talk about it, and we never have.”

He brushes your hair behind your ear with his free hand. “What would you like to talk about?”

“I want us to wed.”

Gwayne stares into you. And then hangs his head low with laughter.

“I am serious, Gwayne. If you swore fealty to my mother, the rightful queen, she would show you mercy. I have no doubt she has shown it to your sister, and to your niece and her daughter too.” His smile was wiped from his face sometime as you spoke.

“You cannot be certain of that, though, can you princess?” he mumbles, raising his head back up to cock it to the side.

“I cannot.” You begin picking at the skin around your fingernails.

Gwayne places a hand over them, stopping you. “The agreement was for me to bring you, unharmed, to the Red Keep. And then I would leave, or they would have my head.” His hand envelops one of yours.

“My mother would not let them have it, if I simply tell her.”

“You speak lightly of a heavy thing, my princess.” He squeezes your hand a bit tighter. “If you so much as suggest that the Hightowers are anything less than treasonous vipers, your mother’s council will smell a captive who has learned to love her cage. You are her only daughter, yes, and she adores you. Therefore, if she discovers how thoroughly I have failed to keep my distance, amnesty will be the last thing she grants my house. It will be fire and blood, starting with my head on a pike.”

“She knows what it is like to love someone forbidden to her.”

Gwayne grins at your words. “She also knows she must satisfy her council,” he says softly.

As much as it pains you, you realize he is right. Yet he still remains as handsome as ever in the dark, and his lips are glossed over, looking so plump and lonely.

“Will you kiss me?” you mutter, and kiss you he does. His mouth is just as soft as you had imagined, and he is still so tender and hesitant in his ministrations you almost feel a want to take over.

Your lips are pliable, though, and part for him almost instantly. The hand that held yours comes up to cradle your cheek, and your legs open up a spot for him to slot himself into.

You are grateful for the loss of layers in spite of the outdoor elements—which have been terribly cold nearly the entire journey—as they give you easy access to the growing length in Gwayne’s linens.

He breathes a low groan into your mouth when you reach a hand under the fabric cuff of his waist to grip his cock. You pump him in a slow rhythm, and he nearly falters completely, the arm propping him up above you buckling and lowering him to his elbow.

The hand cradling your face moves to your own core, and he hastily hikes your shift up your thighs. His fingers find your cunt, pressing his thumb to your clit and stroking it.

The two of you breath and pant into one another’s mouth, the speed of both of your caresses increasing as your moans do.

“Would you—” Gwayne pants, “like me inside?”

You nod eagerly, and pull your hand from his cock. His own hand ceases motion on you, and he uses both arms to gather your body and flip you onto your stomach. The featherbed mattress bounces with the movement, and you reach your hands behind you to pull your shift up entirely to your middle, perking your ass up toward him.

Gwayne has already rid himself of his smallclothes in the meantime. He places a hand right above your backend, stabilizing both you and himself, and lines himself up with your cunt.

He leans his body over yours and presses soft kisses along your spine, pushing himself inside of you with a long groan. You let out a needy one all the same.

“Keep moving—” you beg, letting the top of your head fall to the pillow below you. He hums in response, and begins thrusting slowly, still hesitant.

It is a stretch, but a welcome one nonetheless. It is easy to lose trail of your thoughts with the drag of his cock in and out and the press of his chest to your back, the song of his pretty little grunts and groans singing in your ear.

He wraps his arms around your middle, one hand gripping a breast through the soft cotton of your shift. You flick your hair away from your neck, and his lips quickly find the spot, tipping you into absolute bliss.

One of his arms, the one not clutching your chest, sneaks down to your core, and he begins rubbing your clit with a seemingly endless vitality.

The other pushes the two of you up so that you are both standing on your knees. Your hands extend to his head behind you, pushing it closer as you awkwardly crane your neck so that you can join your lips with his in what may be the sloppiest way they have ever met each other.

His fingers continue their assault on your pearl, and his hips rock into you, and it all feels so much. So good, yet so much. Your chest rises and falls rapidly with each slam of his cock into your cunt, the strength of which also makes his head bob slightly into your kiss, coating the area above and below and beside your lips with his own spit.

There is little surprisingly little build-up to your release. It comes quick, like the tide coming in to take away a shell from the shore. It seems to tear through you, lighting up every nerve in your body, pulled straight from your breathless lungs and your racing heart and illuminating your frenzied brain with nothing other than euphoria.

He is still pumping in and out of you, seemingly chasing his own release. You feel a warmth deep in your overwhelmed cunt, and you know he has come, his body slowing entirely. He breaks away from your lips with a soft little cry, and you simply look at each other for a moment as your breath returns to the both of you.

In this moment, you think Ser Gwayne Hightower is the most beautiful creature in the world.

“You are more than a beauty,” he says in turn. You grin at him, still breathless, and join your lips together once more.

day sixteen

When you arrive at the gates of the Red Keep, Syrax and Caraxes are posted on the battlements.

You look over, and Gwayne seems as if he might just curl up and die. You scoff out a laugh at the sight, and he immediately straightens his back.

Open the gates, yells some guard from behind the wall, and the gate begins to part, grinding against the gravel below.

You will see your mother today. For the first time in months, you will see your mother. Will she be different? Is she a different person now that she is on the throne? More importantly, will she be a different person now that her eldest son is dead? You wonder if they have burned the body yet, or perhaps even set it out to sea. He could not become a Targaryen, as he would never become King—the gods would not allow it, so history will remember him as a Velaryon. It would only be fitting for his body to be released into the water.

You should tell her about this. She must be so overwhelmed with all of her recent duties, she may have forgotten about the fact. Is little Joffrey still in the Vale? Surely, mother must have sent for his return by now. He is too vulnerable there on his own, no matter who he is with.

When you blink hard in an attempt to settle yourself, you realize your horse has been guided inside the walls of the Keep, and Gwayne is helping you off of your horse. His hands are on your waist, and you jump down with a grip on his wrists to stabilize you. Yet your eyes are not on him—they are on any entrance, every door where your mother could come out of.

He sighs, and you finally glance at him. His hands hesitate to leave their spot on your middle. “You are home, and you are safe, my princess.” And then his arms drop back to his side, as if ashamed he let them linger for a moment too long.

“Must you go?” you breathe out a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood that seems to deepen with each passing moment.

His hand reaches for yours, and his voice is lower now. “It is the deal.”

For some reason, your heart seems to shatter. It feels odd and disheartening, knowing that he in this moment has a harsher effect on you than anything before.

Your expression has dropped, and Gwayne must be able to see it. His hand grips yours tighter, and he sucks in a breath, his head dropping to avoid your gaze. Your gaze, which quickly wells with tears. You are confused as to how this would have been the outcome of your journey together—and you are unsure if you are glad of it, or instead disappointed in yourself for not realizing that this is what would always happen.

You lower your voice too. “I do not want you to go,” you say, and your hand finally reciprocates Gwayne’s affection. You clutch it, tight, hoping it may get through to him.

It does not. His head does not lift, not even a single bit. You think you can see his brows furrow.

“I have done my duty, my princess,” he mumbles.

Hundreds of solutions flow through your mind in an instant. He could stay, swear fealty to your mother, and he could be yours. He could be your sworn shield and protector. He could be yours, if he would only say yes.

You open your mouth to say it, but nothing comes out. The words die on your tongue.

“Stay,” is what you can manage. “Please, Gwayne.”

His head tilts up, but he still averts his gaze from yours. Something else, something in the distance, catches his attention. It catches yours too. Two heads of familiar lengthy silver hair—your mother and her husband—inch closer to you and Gwayne.

The hand that held onto his was already back at your side. You must have done it without thought.

“Mummy,” you mumble. And she smiles.

She inches closer to you, seemingly dumbfounded that the sight before her is real. “Sweet girl,” she says, and you feel close to crumbling.

You want to step closer, to close the gap between the two of you, but you cannot bring yourself to leave his side.

But Gwayne is by your side one moment, and gone the next. He is pulled away by the gold cloaks, and it is with little struggle. He lets himself be pulled away. He lets himself be pushed out of the walls of the Keep, and he watches as you stand and stammer all bewildered and reaching to plead his forgiveness to the queen.

The gate closes on him once his horse is by his side.

day thirty five

You have not found much use for yourself since you have returned to the Red Keep. Neither has anyone else.

The war still rages on. It reminds you of the promise you had made to yourself, to leave if it did not end, to leave with Gwayne to Essos. He would be a sellsword, and you a scribe, under the protection of Silverwing.

It seemed a better life, a freer life, you and he on the road together. Being locked away in your chambers of your own volition, anything seemed better.

But Gwayne had abandoned you that day. He had let himself be carried away, and your mother had ignored your pleas of his fealty. It seemed nobody was on your side.

You had only wished for peace. Whatever had grown in place of it had taken your brothers away from you, and Gwayne, too, in some way.

If the war had not gone on, perhaps you could have met him another way. Perhaps he would have been your betrothed. And you could love him the way you wanted to, the way you should have since you woke up in the encampment with him by your side.

He had protected you all those months ago, you had come to realize. The violence of the men who fought under his command would have harmed you more than the words that came from his mouth when defending himself in your stupid fights, the ones you would feed into when he forced you to ride alongside him as the soldiers would march further into the Reach. The words that you replied with when he would anger you, when he would attempt to get close to you.

You should have let him get close to you when he tried. Your need for survival had prevailed then and you took every attempt as some sort of tactic to manipulate you to his side.

But Gwayne had no side, as you swiftly figured out. He wanted out of his cage seemingly as badly as you did, but he did the intelligent thing—the thing he warned you he would always do—and returned to his people, to those he swore loyalty to.

These days, it feels you have no people. Your mother is always off attending to her royal duties, your stepfather and cousins assisting her. And you have no brothers left to bond to. Joffrey is still too little, and too shy, to converse with. The others, your half-siblings, are just a few years young.

If the Hightowers had left you for dead that day, you think you would be more comfortable in the arms of the Stranger than you do in this seemingly haunted home. Your maidenhood would be untainted, and your memory would live on as tragic and loyal. You had left to fight for your mother’s cause after all and you would have died for it then, gods willing.

A piece of you wants to hurl yourself from a window for the treasonous thoughts you have had, but you just want peace. You want peace and freedom. Most of all, though, you want Gwayne.

You can only hope he wants you too, wherever he is. You will wait, and you will bide your time until the war is over—if you live until then. And you will take Silverwing and fly to him, and you will be with him, and you will exile yourselves to Essos. You will dream of that outcome until it happens.

Something deep inside you says it will.

Tonight was no different. Gwayne was always on alert here, half waiting for someone to make an attempt on his life while asleep. Thus allowing him to hear the steps coming quickly towards him.

The feet sounded bare, padding against the floor, but they were loud nonetheless echoing through the halls.

He was immediately shooting out of bed, hand wrapped around his sword in an instant. With the weapon raised he waited, hearing the steps stop just outside his door before it was opened revealing just who had come for him.

But it was no solider making an attempt on his life. It was you. He breathed your name out like a prayer, the blade dropping to the floor with a loud clatter. Moving toward you, pulling you into his chest, without hesitation.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, gripping your red dress in his hands. It was a favorite of his, one that you had worn often before this whole mess had started.

The one that had tore you apart.

"Rhaenyra said you were here…and I had to see you. I had to make sure you were alright," you confessed, your voice cracking as he could hear the concern laced through it.

He pulled back cradling your face as you smiled at him. It was the one he loved so much. The one that filled him with warmth, and occupied his dreams in your absence, "I have missed you so much," he whispered.

"Make up for the lost time then."

His mouth was on yours in a second, claiming yours, "I have missed you so much," he repeated against your mouth. He needed you to know just how much he had longed for you these days. He pushed you back toward the mattress. Your hands moved quickly freeing his cock from his breeches.

He went to lay you down against the mattress, but you stopped him. You turned your bodies causing the back of his knees to hit the bed before you pushed him back. He sat up staring at you, as you pulled your dress up around your hips.

You looked younger almost, in a way he could not explain. Entirely different from the last time he had laid eyes on you, and even now as he tried to recount in his mind just when that was exactly, but he did not let himself dwell on it.

You were here, and he was going to enjoy your time together no matter how small that might be. You straddled him, gripping his cock in your hand as you ran him through your slick folds,"Are you wearing nothing under neath?" he questioned, raising a brow.

You did not respond, but his mind did not stay on it long as then you sank down on top of him. "Oh fuck," he moaned out.

Neither of you moved for a moment, simply existing there, feeling each other, before you finally began to rock your hips back and forth setting the pace. He allowed you to with no complaint, simply holding your hips as he looked up at you.

"You feel divine," he told you, as he watched your face contort in pleasure as you rode him. He could still remember the first time it had happened, you had told him you needed no instruction as you had been riding dragons all your life.

"You are a vision of beauty in these dark times," he continued, his praise, as he could feel you clench around him like a vice.

"Are you a bard or a solider?" you asked, grinding your hip down into him hard, causing him to moan.

"Both. I am both for you," he confessed.

"What else are you for me?" you asked, your hands moving to lace through his red hair forcing him head back to look at you.

"Whatever you want me to be," he assured you. His release came out of no where, as you moaned at his name loudly, pressing yourself further into him. You did not move, and he did not pull out both of you clingly to the other as if you were afraid you would both disapear.

Because that was the truth was it not? The moment would end and you would have to go back to wherever you came from and he would be stuck here.

Something felt wrong though. Something he could not quite put his finger on it, but he did not want the thought to consume him. If anything he wanted you to consume him instead. To simply be a man and woman in love rather than anything else.

You a Targaryen. He a Hightower on different sides of a war for a throne neither of you would even sit.

His ragged breaths filled the air. He buried himself further into your chest, trying to hide away from the world even if it was only for a moment longer,"I must go," you whispered, your hands running through his hair gently working the knots from it. You leaned down pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

"Why?" he questioned in protest, trying to cling to you, but it felt as if his fingers were slipping through you.

He could feel you shift against him, and he could not stop you from pulling away. He tried to urge his mind "Because I am dead. Remember you helped kill me at Rooks Rest?" You pulled away from him and suddenly you were dressed back in your riding leathers, blood smearing your face. The smell of ash filling his nostrils.

His mouth opened, as everything came back. Your dragons screeches as she was ripped apart. The way he watched you fall through the sky, crashing through the castle. A horror that had been repeating through his minds for day.

The real reason as to why he could not find sleep as you were always there awaiting him in his dreams, but even tongiht it seemed you would make your way to him either way.

He could see it all now. When he found your body, your neck not angled right, your limbs cold and disfigured, before he watched the men remove your dragons head, "No.No. No," he cried dropping to his knees.

He burnt your body himself, trying to honor you in some way, but it obviously was not enough. You were haunting him, because he had failed you. He crawled to the floor trying to burry his face into your stomach, "I am sorry. I am so so sorry," he sobbed.

You reached down wrapping your fingers around his chin. You were unnaturally cold, and the light from your eyes was now gone, as they resembled something close to black, "No apologies will ever bring me back. All because you chose the usurper over me."

The tears streamed down his face as you smiled, and it did not hit right. It was not the one filled with warmth or even the shy one you would cast him across the hall. This was someone else's smile on a face that resembled you, "Sleep well, my love. I will be back again and again and again until you leave these blasted walls or die here."

And just like that you were gone, leaving him once more, as sleep evaded him and he thought of nothing but you and the guilt that ate away at him.

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A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS

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Valarr Targaryen

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Are You Real

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Instead the Stranger had taken her in her prime, through dragon fire that had burned her flesh and rotted her core until she had eventually succumbed to it. Or perhaps it was the grief of losing another son, that in the end had been too much to bear. Many in the Red Keep suspected that the loss of Queen Helaena and their youngest son had been what had driven Aegon to madness, until his own men had taken pity. 

Only the Gods knew the truth of it, now all there was for Jacaerys to understand was that the two rulers, legitimate and usurping, who had sat the throne after Viserys were now dead, and the crown had landed on his head. 

Under the looming presence of the Iron Throne, Jacaerys paced the marble floors, attempting to make sense of the utter devastation around him. The high ceilings now felt suffocating, as though the very sky was crumbling over his head. 

“I should not be there,” he said outloud, almost to himself, or perhaps to the Gods, but his faithful friend Cregan Stark still answered his call of anguish. 

Wrists resting atop the pommel of Ice, which he carried at his waist these days, the young lord was watching over him as Kingsguard would, with the sort of silent presence that reminded Jacaerys that he was not alone in carrying his grief. 

“This is your rightful place, my prince,” he reminded him with the steadfastness he had come to expect from the northerner. 

“No it is not. It shouldn’t be, not by decades at least,” he resisted, and Cregan knew him to be right. 

Upon answering the call of the Dragon Queen, never would he have imagined that he would see a great dynasty fall to its knees in such a short time. Dragon riders had risen and fallen as quickly as the tide and as unpredictably, and he feared that it was only through sheer fate that one legitimate heir remained.

While it was not in his character to contemplate potential ruin, he knew the face of the crown could have been a child not even a decade old, would Jacaerys have drowned along with his dragon at the Gullet.

“Why have the Gods allowed it? Why allow my mother to die but me to survive?” Jacaerys lamented, the healed wound in his shoulder throbbing then, a pulsing burn from an arrow that had scarcely missed his heart—in that instant he almost wished it had not, and had allowed him to rest at the bottom of the sea with Vermax, instead of standing to inherit ruins.

“It is not for us to know,” Cregan replied, knowing it was no comfort. Then he cleared his throat, meaning to lead the young king to where he was expected. “They are waiting for you.”

Jacaerys turned to him then, his eyes rimmed with red and his face gaunter than a man of his age should be, the face of a man who had seen the Stranger many a time. “I cannot rule.”

Cregan stepped forward and put a heavy hand on his shoulder—still, the touch felt like the comfort of a brother, the sort Jacaerys sorely missed, and he leaned into it for support. “Then allow me to counsel you. We have been friends, haven’t we?”

Jacaerys nodded, swallowing heavily—the battlefield forged strong friendships, bonds of brotherhood the like he would have never imagined beforehand. “We have,” he confirmed. “There is no one else I trust.”

“Then believe me when I say, you will be a fine king,” Cregan replied, and it planted the seed of an idea in him, that perhaps not all of it was a curse—perhaps this was the call of destiny, no matter how painful, and he only had to answer it. “One I will gladly bend the knee to.”

The Red Keep had been your birth place, and now you were certain it would be your resting place. It had now been a fortnight since Rhaenyra had taken the Iron Throne once more, returning to King’s Landing with an army several thousands strong, made of Rivermen and Northerners, only to find that the revenge she sought had already been taken from her. Aegon laid cold in his bed, and she followed mere days later. 

You had been confined to Maegor's Holdfast, kept under close watch in your rooms most days, as though you were more than you were, more than a woman and instead a danger to the unlikely king now wearing the crown. You had never had to think of yourself as a political pawn until your brother Aegon, having taken the throne once more, had summoned you to the capital. You had obeyed your king, but in the span of a few weeks, he had perished and left you and your mother to face the consequences of his actions.

You loathed him as much as you loathed Rhaenyra and her brood. It was a cruel turn of fate, almost a cruel sort of poetry, that both pretenders to the throne had perished in the pursuit of it, leaving their heirs to scrub their blood from the stone floors and rebuild the dynasty they had destroyed, or pay the price of their pride in their own blood. 

All those that had betrayed Rhaenyra’s faction were now facing justice, and you feared you were only waiting for the executioner’s blade. You wondered whether your nephew’s own sword would do it, or if he would entrust the task to his most loyal man, Cregan Stark. Perhaps they would show mercy and send you into exile, to become a Silent Sister. 

Death or eternal silence,you knew what you would rather endure. 

Thus you waited for the Stranger in the room that had seen your childhood and little else, as you had been sent to Oldtown for your education once the first spring of your womanhood had bloomed. The Faith of the Seven now rooted you and guided you, and you clung to prayers as not to fall into madness.

On the third night of his reign, it was not the hand nor the blade of justice that came to you, but Jacaerys himself, and you wondered whether the following morrow would be the last dawn you would see. 

You stood abruptly as he entered, glancing towards the guard at the door with dread. “Rest easy, you have nothing to fear from me,” Jacaerys assured you. He was dressed in regal clothing made of black, the velvet layer on the inside of his cape a deep red. His hair fell to his shoulders in dark curls, nearly black in the low light of the candles. 

“Don’t I?” you asked, openly weary and hostile. “Where are my niece, and my mother?”

“Confined to their own rooms,” the young man replied with what seemed to you as regret. 

You noticed that he was not wearing the crown, but his head was bowed as though it was weighing on his neck, a constant presence. “Might I see them?” you inquired, but it sounded more like an order you were giving him.

“Your niece, yes,” Jacaerys conceded. 

“She’s a motherless child. Surely you would not have her be confined alone,” you insisted, and it seemed to convince him.

“You will be escorted to see her,” he offered, but it did little to appease you.

You approached him in careful steps until he could see the unshed tears glimmer in your eyes, your brow furrowed in concealed anger. You were trembling, ever so slightly, and when he searched your face for any familiar flicker, he found none—you were his blood, and yet nothing tied the two of you together but hatred.

“What will happen to us, now?” you inquired, gauging him. Standing face to face, you were reminded then of the years of your childhood, and you wondered whether the boy you had known then was still within reach, or if he had perished alongside his kin, replaced by a man you did not know.

“Nothing, for the time being. You are to be confined until trials have been run,” he explained.

Hope burst in your chest then, a starving dragon freed from its chains taking to the skies, ready to burn the lands around it. “And after that?”

Jacaerys looked pained then, a frown between his brows. “I do not know,” was all he answered, and he looked like a child, frightened by his own crown and unable to yield the power he possessed, and you hated him for it. 

“Why have you come, then, if you do not know of my fate?” you accused, your burning tears pearling at the corners of your eyes, your simmering rage like a silent sob caught in your chest, and he did not have any more answers for you.

Once Jacaerys had left, leaving more doubts and fears behind, you realized you had only addressed him in questions. There was a rage inside of you, and a primal fear that was no doubt similar to that of a beast caught in a trap, forced to eat through its own leg to free itself. 

You only had blunt teeth, but you still hoped you could sharpen them in due time.

Over the last pair of years, Jacaerys had sat at many a council of war, at the Painted Table in Dragonstone, but always as a councilor himself, advising his mother—it was only now that he realized how comfortable such a position was, making the decisions without having to enforce them, or without having to consider their consequences.

Now he was the one standing at the head of the table, leading men that sat in front of their marble ball as though they had paid a price for it and ought to claim them with pride, when in truth they had been named because they were alive and breathing. 

Corlys Velaryon was still abed from his wounds, but the men who had advised his mother during her last days were now serving him, waiting for him to name his council as he wished. All of them were taking their orders from a king young enough to be their son or grandson, one or two failing to conceal their contempt for that fact, and Jace wondered if such was the fate of all the kings that had preceded him. 

However what Jace lacked in years lived, he made up for in the devastation he had seen. In many ways grief was his experience, more so than strategy and governance, and he supposed it forged a man just as well.

Before the war he had never realized what came with being king—the grief, knowing the crown had only been passed on because the previous monarch had perished. It was all the more burdensome knowing his mother had barely reigned, and never over peace.

Since Cregan’s declaration of devotion, he had had the time to contemplate the sort of king he would want to be, the sort of legacy he would want to leave behind, whether his reign would be long or short. What mattered to him most was not to assert his authority or to be admired—he needed to rebuild and to leave the crown strong for his heirs. His reign would not be for himself, but for those who come after. 

With such a conclusion he sat before his council that morning, Cregan at his right where the Hand would usually be.

Roland Westerling, an older man with a calm disposition, handed a roll of parchment to Jacaerys, the seal of which had already been broken, a golden stag. “Lady Elenda Baratheon has accepted your terms of peace,” he informed the council as soon as they were all seated. 

“Nearly half of the great houses in the land are now ruled by babes and their mothers as regents,” Unwin Peake commented, as though this simple fact held an inherent flaw.

“I will gladly deal with these women. They might make wiser rulers than their husbands, who took to arm against my mother,” he said, unrolling the parchment and reading it over quickly before passing it along to Cregan. “Lord Roland, your daughter Joanna now rules House Lannister, does she not?”

“Indeed,” Roland answered with a slight smile of pride. “Loreon is a boy of barely five.”

Once great, powerful houses with proud men at their helm, the Lannisters and the Baratheons were now led by women, mothers of their heirs who would now lead the very men that had marched to war refusing to bow to a queen, and Jacaerys would laugh at their fate if he could summon the mirth. 

“There is still unrest in the Reach, I’m afraid,” Thaddeus Rowan said. “Those who remain loyal to the Greens are loath to settle, however the Hightowers are now ruled by a boy of seven and ten. He might easily be reasoned with.”

“Summon him to King’s Landing. I will receive him,” Jacaerys decided, to which Roland took note.

“He has made a rather unusual request to the High Septon,” Thaddeus continued with an appalled expression on his face. “He has asked for permission to wed his own father’s second wife, Lady Samantha Tarly.”

Jacaerys frowned—while there was no blood between a boy and his step-mother, it was still highly unusual and perhaps distasteful, especially since Oldtown was the cradle of the Faith. “How do you know of this, my lord?”

“Lady Sam is my niece, by my sister,” Thaddeus supplied. 

Without a word, Cregan gave Jacaerys a slow tilt of his head. “The Tarlys supported my mother, as did your house, did they not?” Jacaerys asked Lord Roland. “Did Lady Sam’s loyalties lie with my mother?”

Thaddeus observed Jacaerys for a moment. “Indeed.”

“Write to the High Septon in my name,” Jacaerys then decided. “Have him grant the marriage.”

As soon had he given the order, barely breathing after his words, that Unwin Peake cleared his throat. “While we are speaking of marriage, your grace, there is a matter we must discuss,” the man said, sharing a look with the other lords that spoke of a preceding agreement. “I loathe to be the one to say it, but a young king shall need a queen and heirs.”

“My brothers are my heirs,” Jacaerys protested. 

“The future of the realm partly rests on you securing a long-lasting peace,” Roland said. “While we have come to understand that an informal betrothal was made in childhood between yourself and Lady Baela Velaryon, she might not be the wisest match.”

Baela and himself had been children together, and while the expectation had been for them to marry, he cherished her friendship and had rarely considered the prospect. “A marriage is an alliance, a political calculation,” he continued.

Cregan crossed his hands atop the table and leaned forward. “What do you suggest?” he asked, but Jace could tell he already knew what point they were about to make, and he braced himself.

“The breach between the two branches of House Targaryen may be mended,” Thaddeus offered carefully. “Were his grace to wed the remaining child of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower.”

Horror rose from the pit of his stomach, settled only when he caught eyes with Cregan, whose gaze was calm and direct—without a word needed between them, the northerner gave him a slow nod, and with that, his fate was sealed.

Evening was falling, a heavy veil over the Red Keep, made of darkness and cold wind. Winter was settling and the days were darker and shorter, plunging the castle in a grim atmosphere that lasted from the end of the afternoon to the late morrow.

Supper was still an hour away when you were summoned to the king’s quarters. The room was brightly lit with candles and a fire, perhaps even more than was comfortable, as though Jacaerys was attempting to keep the darkness at bay. You stood near the threshold while he remained further into the room, arms clasped behind his back like a soldier at attention.

“I have asked you here to present to you a proposal I hope you will agree to,” he announced, the words sounding rehearsed, empty of all sincerity. “The realm is shattered and House Targaryen is in ruins, but together we might unite it.”

As soon as the words had left his mouth, you knew you had come to hear. “Will you wed me, and put an end to this bloodshed once and for all?”

Your answer came like the crack of a whip. “I may not.”

“I understand that this is not what you would have wanted, however—” Jacaerys prepared his arguments, but you did not let him speak.

With a raised hand, you silenced him. “You misunderstand me. This has nothing to do with what I want, but what I can do,” you explained, your face contorting in anguish.

“I don’t understand,” he said, cutting you off as though he suspected what was coming and desperately wanted to keep it at bay, but he could not have known, you thought.

Rage rose in your throat, acrid and burning, but you swallowed it down. You wanted to curse your brother out for putting you in such a vulnerable position, but damning the dead would do you no good, and you did not wish to betray your king’s memory in front of the man who had replaced him.

“A few days before Aegon died, he took me to wife in a secret ceremony,” you admitted, tears clouding your eyes, and Jace’s heart ached in sudden pity. “Ask the Septon and he shall confirm.”

“Aegon is dead, a widow is permitted to remarry,” he countered, and he could tell from your face how impatient you were becoming with him.

“I have not bled since,” you clarified. It had been two moons now, but the Maester could not say with certainty until the quickening, and your morrows remained without any sickness, yet you doubted, dreading the child that might be inside of you.

Jacaerys blamed his naiveness. “Are you implying—”

You looked upon him severely. “I may be carrying Aegon’s child, yes,” you said, and this simple but devastating truth rang loud in the room—it could be your salvation, as much as your downfall. 

“This changes everything,” Jacaerys whispered, and upon noticing the subtle way you were trembling, once more inhabited by fear in his presence, quickly made his promise. “No harm will come to you, you have my word. I shall keep your secret until you are certain either way.”

You knew you should have been grateful, but you hated the mere thought of owing him any sort of gratitude. It was just as well that he ignored your tears, much as he had done the day prior, as though he sought you out not to converse with you, but to shout into a void that echoed back to him. 

Jacaerys waved you away, crumbling once the doors shut and he was alone once more. He might have been young and uncertain of himself, but he knew what would happen if you were to birth a son.

Aegon’s supporters were still many, and his reign was still too fragile. Power often turned loyal men into self-serving traitors ; he could still easily be toppled, be murdered in this very room as Aegon had, and a babe placed upon the throne in his stead. 

Unable to bear the storm inside of him he took hold of the crown resting atop the mantle of the hearth and threw it at the wall, wailing until his voice broke. 

Grief held him by the throat, an invisible hand that felt like that of the Stranger choking his breath from his very neck. The wounds on his shoulders ached and throbbed anew, as fresh in his mind as the day they had been inflicted.

“What should I do, mother?” he pleaded to the night. “What would you have me do?”

Alone and broken, the young king wept. 

Torch in hand, he could hardly raise his arm to light the pyres, and where a word from him would have been expected, he could not summon his words. Instead the Maester recited a prayer in High Valyrian that he did not hear over the rush of his own blood in his ears. 

“All eyes are on you, my king,” Cregan murmured once silence had returned to the assembly, not as a stern reminder, but as encouragement. 

With a reassuring glance over his shoulder, to the nobles that had gathered, along with the Rivermen and the Northerners, as well as the Dragonkeepers, Jacaerys finally took the step forward. As he lit the pyres one by one, he prayed that wherever she was, his mother forgave him for his perceived sins. 

Despite his reason knowing it was the order of things, there was no escaping the feeling that he had stolen the crown from her. It was unfair, against the very laws of nature, he would argue, that he would be king when she never had the chance to reign.

The assembly watched the pyres go up in flame, the smoke adding to the heavy sky above their heads.

“She would be proud of you,” Baela said in a whisper, meant only for him and Cregan to hear, but he could not accept the praise.

Instead he walked away without a word, dismissing the Kingsguard that offered to open the door to the litter for him. He mounted his horse, choosing the path that would lead him through the city unguarded, but he refused to be scared of his own people. Cregan and Baela followed on their own horses, flanking him as they had done all day, two pillars holding him up. 

Once he would have crossed the gates of the Red Keep, he would have to disappear once more, instead replaced by the crown, the monarch, and there would be no time to mourn. 

“All day long I am plagued by demands and advice that often contradict one another, how am I to know which decision is right?” he lamented as the party made their way back to the city's gate. “They all expect me to guide them, but how might I know that I am not leading this realm into war, once again?”

“Surround yourself with counselors you trust, who look out for the interests of this realm and not their own,” Baela advised, and he regretted that she could not stay, but he understood her reasons for returning to Driftmark. He knew that before long, the matter of the succession to the Driftwood throne would arise.

“I should dismiss Unwin Peake, then,” he spat, then once the vitriol had been spoken, came to a wiser, more useful conclusion. “I shall write to my mother's cousin, Jeyne Arryn. I will need a trusted Hand once you have gone back to the North,” he said, glancing at Cregan.

The young man frowned, but gave a nod of agreement. “I hope you do not see this as disloyalty,” he said.

Jacaerys almost laughed, a mirthless exhale pushing past his lips again. “There hasn’t lived a man as loyal as you, Cregan.”

“I shall stay and serve as your justice until it is done,” his friend promised, and he was grateful for such a strong presence at his side—it also comforted him in his decision that Jeyne would be an apt replacement. She was kind to her kin, in her own way, but stern and unyielding towards other matters, and that was what he needed.

“And I shall answer any call,” Baela reminded him firmly. “I am only across the Bay.”

Jacaerys looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, taking in her kind smile and earnest eyes, the strength he knew she carried in her body and spirit. In another life, perhaps, she would have made a good queen.

For a fortnight you remained a distant spectator to the start of Jacaerys’ reign, and as he had promised, no harm came to you while you waited to know whether your blood would come, or you would be burdened with Aegon’s child. The prospect of carrying a contender for the throne was one you feared, and even though you knew many were still loyal to your bloodline, the truth of the matter was that you remained a woman, and would only gather support in a son’s name.

Were you to bear Aegon’s son, you would be raising him to be at war with his own family, while Jacaerys had offered you a crown and a promise of peace.

The trials saw many men executed or sentenced to the Wall, when Cregan Stark seemingly judged there still remained enough strength and honor in them. In some ways you wondered whether the Northerner was ruling as he pleased, instead of acting on the orders of his king.

In a gesture of good will and mercy, Jacaerys had allowed you to visit your mother for a half hour, and while you were escorted to a small chamber deep inside Maegor’s Holdfast, you felt as though you were being led to the jails. The chamber was plunged into darkness even though it was afternoon, heavy curtains drawn against the sun, and the whole room smelled of prayer incense. The stones were cold under your feet, even through your slippers and the carpet.

When you had first crossed the threshold, Alicent had held you long and tight. She was dressed almost as a Septa, in black clothes that made her look thinner and more frail than she was. Gone was the woman who had welcomed you to the capital nearly three months prior, dressed as was proper for the Queen Dowager, and confident the war was being won.

Since then Aegon had died, poisoned by those he kept close, and so had Rhaenyra, her wounds festering until a fever took her, and a boy now sat the throne. “What is happening out there?” she asked, leading you further into her room. “I am not allowed to know any of it. Are we to stand trial as well?”

“I do not know, mother,” you said. “Many men have been put to the sword, or sent North, but it seems even Jacaerys isn’t certain of our fate.”

Something dark crossed your mother’s face then. “My son should be sitting the throne, not this—” Alicent nearly whimpered, clutching the rosary she carried everywhere these days, the points of the star digging into her palm. 

She cut herself off, but you knew what words lurked beneath the surface. “All things considered, he has been merciful, mother,” you protested weakly, knowing full well you could have suffered terrible consequences for your confession. 

“He might be merciful, but that doesn’t make him true. If there is a rightful king it should be Daemon’s son, the little Aegon,” she accused, the name sounding awful in her mouth.

You said nothing for a while as Alicent sat in an armchair, the weight of their downfall visible on her shoulders and in the lines of her face. You poured the bitter tea your mother preferred into two cups, watching the fragrant steam rise. “On advice of his council, he has offered me his hand in marriage,” you finally said, setting the strainer aside and putting the lid back on the pot.

“Oh, my daughter, you would be queen?” Alicent asked, rising once more and rushing to you. “In those circumstances, it would be well to use this to your advantage. Men are easily swayed by beauty, if you know how to work your charms,” she explained in a hushed tone, taking your hands into hers.

“Do you mean for me to seduce him?” you asked.

Alicent shook her head. “He is young and still malleable. He has just acceded to the throne, and his council and courtiers hold the power now, but you may influence him as well. Be agreeable to him and he will come to trust you, and listen to you, eventually.”

“I understand,” you nodded—it all seemed logical to you, in a sense.

Alicent looked nearly mad in the low light of the candles, her eyes blown wide and her hands trembling where she was clutching you. “And when the time comes, he will bare his back, and we will have our revenge,” she whispered. “You may still light the way for us.”

Alicent’s words ringing in your head, you made your way back to your chambers once the half hour had come to an end, wondering what path would be yours to take, muttering prayers as you climbed the stairs, pleading for a sign of what was right. 

The Gods seemed to hear your desperate pleas, and as you reached the top of the staircase, a sudden ache in your core speared you into place. Gasping, you rushed to your chambers, heart in your throat, and slamming the door behind you, took a handkerchief that you wiped between your thighs. 

The white linen came wet with a bright red smear.

You did not know whether to be relieved or devastated—one way or another,your fate was nearly sealed.

Late at night was the only moment in the day Jace was able to have some solace—or perhaps in the early seconds of the morning before he fully woke, still on the edge of slumber, when the whole world was at peace and he was not king yet, just a young man clinging to his dreams. 

He spent most of his evenings at his desk, answering his private correspondence or writing in his journals, reading the diaries of former Maesters and lords, educating himself on the preceding reigns. He had taken to learn everything he could about his great-grandsire, Jaehaerys—the way he had built a strong, powerful reign, and the way his legacy had collapsed within the next three decades following his passing. 

Jace was eager to learn from the past, and not repeat its mistakes. 

To his relief, his mother’s cousin Jeyne Arryn had acceded to his request, and was now on her way to the capital, leaving her young nephew behind to regent the Vale. She had already proven herself, ruling the Vale for the last decade and a half while bearing the burden of being a woman, and such was the sort of advice he needed.

A sharp knock at the door came to interrupt him—he pressed the seal into the freshly poured wax, waiting until it hardened before peeling it back, and then called the visitor in. Ser Adrian Redfort, a white cloak personally chosen by the Lord Commander to protect Rhaenyra, stepped into the room. 

“My king,” the man greeted. “The princess is requesting an audience.”

Jacaerys discarded his letter and waved for him to let you in, suddenly wary that an unfortunate news was to come. He remained seated as you entered, crossing his trembling hands at his lap, partially hidden by the tabletop. The look on your face was grave, but you did not waste any time before you spoke, putting an end to his torment.

“My blood has come,” you said, almost too quiet to hear, and he had never been so relieved to hear of blood. “I am not with child.”

Seated behind his desk, the young king seemed relieved, though he attempted to hide it, but you could see the way his frown smoothed over, and the corners of his mouth eased slightly. “Very well,” he replied.

“I have thought of your proposal,” you said. “I will marry you for the sake of the realm.” 

“Before you agree, there are terms you should be aware of,” Jacaerys immediately answered, his gaze lowering to the desk in front of him where various letters were scattered over a map of the Reach.

“I am listening,” you said, your own eyes lingering to the coast where Oldtown sat, heart aching at the memory of your youth in the sun, far from the schemings of the capital.

“Lord Lyonel, your cousin’s son and heir, now rules House Hightower,” Jacaerys said, allowing you time to respond.

“I know him well, we were children together,” you replied, crossing your wrists at your belly, trying to gather some composure at the terms you would next be offered—all the while knowing you had no choice in the matter, and those would be orders instead of proposals.

“He is on his way to King’s Landing to treat with me,” Jacaerys explained, rising slowly until you were face to face, the large mahogany tabletop standing between the two of you . “He could treat with us together instead, if you could guarantee to think of the good of the realm instead of pride.”

Closing your eyes for a moment, you dropped your chin to your chest, reminding yourself of your mother’s words. “The realm has too long been at war,” you murmured. 

“Neither of us will ever convince the other of their good right, but together we have a chance to put an end to this,” he said, so earnestly you raised your gaze to him again. You understood then that he truly believed it, and you wanted to laugh in the face of such blatant optimism.

“While the overwhelming advice is that I wed you for the common good, I would not bring an enemy into my bed,” he continued, and the menacing glint in his eyes made you shiver.

“No matter my thoughts on your legitimacy, you now hold the power,” you admitted bitterly.

“As queen, you would have power as well,” Jacaerys assured you, slowly walking the desk until he was standing so close you could see the flickering candles reflecting in his dark eyes. “Convince Lyonel to stand down and bend the knee, and I will grant you my trust. I don’t intend to keep my queen in chains.”

While you had never been an outward romantic, and you had always known you would marry for political gain or alliance, you had never thought you would one day be a pawn to bridge the chasm left by war. It was unfair, in many ways, on both you and Jacaerys, to be sacrificing yourselves for the good of the realm, but you supposed it was the role of both king and queen.

It did not feel right to be called queen when that title belonged to your mother and your departed sister, but Alicent had been right. This was the only way you could take back some authority, yield some political influence and perhaps, restore what had been stolen. You were the way to put Hightower blood back on the throne—Gods willing you would have a son, and then perhaps honor would be restored.

A royal wedding should have been a cause for celebration and rejoicing, instead it was a solemn ceremony held under the eyes of all in the city, nobles and commoners alike, a show of unity and reconciliation. Soon word would spread in the realm and all would know that the two lineages born of Viserys were one, and the conflict was well and truly over, or so Jacaerys seemed to hope.

Tradition was to be upheld, insisted both the Council and the Faith, but Jacaerys asserted that there would be no bedding ceremony of any kind. “I will not have anyone in this room. The Maester may come in once it is done,” he admonished, closing the doors to the king’s quarters in the court’s face once you had been escorted to his chambers. 

“Thank you for that,” you whispered once the two of you were alone. 

“I did it for my sake as well,” he confessed, looking nervous. 

You did not answer and instead walked to the bed, ready to once again lay on your back and allow your husband to claim you as was his right. It would be the second time you would look at the moldings on the ceiling and forget about your own body until a man was done with it.

However, Jacaerys stopped your endeavor. “No,” he called, and you tilted your head in a silent question, confused as to what he expected from you. “I would not share your bed by force. I would not touch you until you wanted me to.”

“It is your right as husband and king,” you reminded him, a mirthless laugh on your lips.

Jacaerys went to his desk where a pitcher and cups sat, and swallowed a mouthful of wine, desperate for composure, loath to be in such a vulnerable position. “I have never been with a woman, and I would not have the first night I am to be a forceful occasion,” he confessed, and you could hardly understand how it was relevant. 

“I am your wife, to do with as you see fit, you cannot force yourself upon me,” you replied, and it made him nauseous.

“We shall disagree on this, then,” he said, setting the wine aside, the sweet taste of grape turning sour in his mouth. “It will not be our last disagreement.”

Fear struck you then, as you remembered your mother’s words vividly. Your position would not be safe until you truly were the wife to the king, the rightful queen. The future of your blood rested in your hands, and no matter how honorable he was, you could not allow him to compromise your position. 

Without a word you came to him and reached for the clasps of his doublet, undoing them swiftly, but he stopped you once more, grabbing both your wrists gently. “Please, your hands are shaking,” he said gently. “Is this what you truly want?”

You hated to admit it, but he had been honest towards you since the beginning, and thus you could not find it in yourself to lie. “No,” you said quietly, your eyes still fixed on the dragon brooch at his shoulder.

“Then you shall not lay a hand on me nor I on you,” he said firmly, letting go of you. 

Your arms fell to your sides, defeated. “The Maester will know and our marriage will be invalid,” you protested. 

“Leave that with me,” he said, gesturing to the armchairs in front of the fire. Uneasy, you still complied and sat where he wished, staring at the flames and wondering what other foolish ideas he had, if you had put yourself in danger by complying, if instead you should be the one to force his hand—he seemed unsure of himself at times, perhaps you could convince him.

You heard the sounds of a belt coming undone, then the ruffle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath. For a moment too long you sat there, listening to the rhythmic ruffles and short breaths, and it took you a minute to realize what was occurring, and when you did, you felt yourself flush in embarrassment.

Time stretched and his panting grew more frantic, until Jacaerys cursed under his breath. “Should I help?” you asked, biting your lip.

“No,” came the sharp answer. Finally, after a minute more, another sharp intake of breath pierced the air, a bitten groan that reminded you too well of your first wedding night. 

You heard him undress, then wash his hands in the basin. “It is done,” he said. When you rose again, his doublet was discarded and his shirt as well. He had put on a robe over his bare chest—he looked flushed, his high cheekbones tainted with red. His hair looked as though he had raked his fingers through his curls, giving them an unruly look.

Jacaerys felt your eyes on him as he picked up a small knife from his desk, a seal opener, and cut the inside of his arm near the crease of his elbow. It would be easily hidden by a sleeve, and none would be the wiser. He smeared some of the blood on his palm, then wiped it on the mattress where the evidence of his solitary act laid. 

“What is it?” you asked when he went back to staring at you. 

“Your hair,” he answered, almost embarrassed. “It is too… tidy.”

“Oh,” you breathed, then reached for the braid and undid it, raking a hand through your mane. You were obviously embarrassed as well, and he thought it served him well.

As Jacaerys opened the doors to his chambers once more, and both the Septon and the Maester came into the room, you were reminded of the night of your first marriage. For the second time your humiliation was to be witnessed, your virtue publicly claimed by a man you did not love ; tears came to your eyes and you wished that Jacaerys would send you away soon, to pray for guidance and plan your revenge.

Now you had been queen twice, and yet you felt as powerless as you ever had without the crown.

Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Thank you so much for the amazing feedback on the first chapter, it went straight to my heart. Chapter three will be posted next Saturday, July 18th.

Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239

@thegirlwithoutaname87 @harryssattelitestomper @rtyuy1346 @kplatzman @neenieweenie

@cinnamoonfairy @g0oshtt @orchidsinthesun @darling-darling3 @pookynknowntranger

@cloudyzip @softlittlevigil @at-a-rax-ia @noneedtosearch @darkrion

@tappyj @tojisprincess @strangersunghoon @devil-on-acid @minaridior

It was a messy jumble of words, ink stains obvious on the fading paper, the emotions spilling out before you could even register what you were writing. All you knew was that you needed the whole thing out of your system and onto the only thing you knew what to do and that was to write. 

Before you could stop, or be smart about it, everything was poured on the paper. Lengthy, descriptive, and full of the things you wanted to say, and things you know you can’t say, because even at that age, you knew that liking John Logan was a beautiful terrible idea. 

Because he was your best friend. And you aren’t supposed to like your best friend. At least, in your head. Who are you to ruin the friendship, you know?

You remember folding it in half. Then again, then for a third time, like you were trying to make it as small as possible. Like diminishing it physically would diminish what the words on the paper meant. 

You'd been looking for somewhere to put it. The trash felt too final, too much like admitting it had existed, and you were halfway on just stuffing it under your pillow  when you'd found the box. Your grandmother's, handed down at the end of summer with a kiss on your forehead and the words for letters you mean to send someday. Wooden, old-smelling, with a brass latch that stuck a little if you didn't press it just right.

You'd tucked the letter in and shut the latch.

That was the beginning of it.

-

It had been a random tuesday, back in junior year of high school.

John – he had always been John to you before he became Logan – had after school hockey practice. You'd been draped over the boards for the past ten minutes, watching from the bleachers the way you always did when you had nowhere better to be, which was most days— something you'd never quite admitted to yourself until recently. Because the walk home was shorter from this direction. You had a whole catalogue of reasons, and not one of them was true.

John had been the last one off the ice.

That in itself was not unusual. John Logan was always the last one off the ice. The coach was nice enough to lend him that extra time, considering that he had always been the kid that loved hockey more than anything else. 

And you would always wait in the bleachers. Sometimes on your phone, most times watching him as he skated. You count the amount of times he circled it, especially when you felt bored but didn’t have the strength to look away. Because something about him was magnetic to you. You wondered what it was, every time you stay that extra ten minutes in the rink.

Then after his usual rounds (at most, seven rounds), he looked up, and caught your gaze.

John grinned. The stupid, lopsided grin that suddenly made your heart skip. Then he skated all the way over to the boards, where you were, and leaned on them as he grinned. His helmet was tucked under his arm, hair damp at the temples, “You just got here?”

“Yep. Passed by after practice.” You tried to keep your tone as casual as possible, like the sight of him didn't make your heart skip. 

“You really didn’t have to come by, you know. It’s late.”

“I wanted to.” You smiled. You didn’t say anything else as follow up. Because adding something else after that would mean that you were admitting something that you weren’t ready to admit. And you would have to explain everything else that you didn’t name yet.

He looked at you for a second, searching for something in your face, and then he looked down and smiled again. It was softer this time, private, the one that felt like it wasn't for anyone else, the one he wore when something surprised him in a way he found pleasant, and tilted his head. 

"Sure. Thanks for that.”

You just shrugged.

John nods over at the locker rooms. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll get you hot chocolate at the cafe nearby.”

You huffed, lips curling in amusement. “There? Really? Last time we went there, you said you didn't like the hot chocolate they made.” 

John just grinned at you. “Yeah. But you like it.” 

He skated away after that. Like those words didn’t make you freeze, your eyes trailing after him, heart stuttering and your brain finally naming that warmth that spread on your cheeks. 

And that was it. That was the whole thing. That was the moment that broke you open.

You'd gone home that day and picked up the closest paper and pen, and the words just started coming, because they didn't have anywhere else to go. You wrote about how his smile was the most disarming thing he could have. You wrote about the way he'd leaned on the boards and looked at you like looking at you was just a natural extension of breathing. You wrote about how his curls fell perfectly on his face.

You wrote about how the hot chocolate from the machine in the convenience store nearby had been terrible, watery and too sweet for him, and even when you told him he didn't have to drink it, he'd laughed and drank it anyway and said that it was fine with all the cheerfulness of someone who genuinely didn't mind, and how that had somehow made everything worse.

You wrote, hesitantly, but filled with everything in your chest— I like him. 

You folded the paper into thirds, tucked it into your grandmother's box, and pressed the brass latch shut.

You didn't open the box for three weeks after that. Not because you were over it, but because you were hoping, very determinedly, that if you didn't look at it, the feeling would dissolve on its own.

It didn't.

-

The letters accumulated the way all things do when you are trying not to notice them: gradually, and then all at once. 

By the end of junior year, there were ten. By senior year of high school, fifteen.

They were not all long. Some were barely a paragraph, dashed out on notebook paper in the middle of class when something happened that you had no one to tell except him, which was the problem, because he was the person that you would usually go to about these things… so you tell the paper instead.

Junior year, you wrote about how naturally John seemed to do things for you. Carrying your bag, buying things in the cafeteria when you didn't want to get up from the bench. But at the same time, it was always the question if he liked you, or if he was being nice

You remembered I hate raisins in things. You picked them out of the muffin before you gave it to me. You've been doing that since seventh grade and I only just noticed today that it's something you do on purpose.

Jealousy would often seep into your letters, as well. Because you knew he was well liked. That John had a future of having girls that would throw themselves at him, and he would always entertain it with his smile and pretty curls and— 

— but you act like I’m special, and that they don't matter. But I don't have the right to even stop them from liking you, so all I could do is watch and wish that you would instead look at me.

You kept those folded five times. 

--

Senior year, anger would sometimes seep into them.

I should tell you. I should tell you that I lie in bed until 3 am wondering if anything would happen between us. I should— but you are so unfair. You act like you care, and then I'm left hanging again. I still have your jacket. That stupid, gray jacket that you gave me. The damn gray jacket that was your favorite and you don't let anyone wear but you handed it to me when I was cold. And at the same time, you turned and smiled at Kaia like she mattered and. I hate that I like you and I hate that it feels like you do too— but then you turn around and act like you don't.

Some were the soft, bewildered variety, written in the margins of homework you’d never turn in, about something small he'd done that shouldn't have meant as much as it did.

You know how everyone else talks over me when I'm telling a story and moves on before I'm done? You always wait. You just… wait. You wait until I'm finished, and then you respond to what I actually said, not what you were going to say next. I don't know if you know you do that. I don't know how to tell you that it matters.

When you both got into Briar University, John on a hockey scholarship, you on a Merit Scholarship— you celebrated together in the parking lot of the ice rink, his arms around you, lifting you a full two inches off the ground, and you laughed and said “John, put me down!” even if you knew that deep down, you didn’t mean any of it, wanting him to keep his arms around you longer. 

You'd gone home that night and written four pages.

I keep telling myself I'm not following you. And I'm not. I worked for this, I studied late into the night and doubled my efforts whenever I would fail because I wanted Briar before you got in.  But some part of me is terrified that the reason I want it so badly is mixed up with the reason you're going, and I can't separate them cleanly, and that scares me.  What if I didn't want Briar so much as I wanted to be wherever you were going to be? What does that mean? What am I supposed to do with that? I don't have an answer. I'm going to go to sleep. I'm going to not think about it. I'm going to go to Briar, even if I can't solidify why I am.

You went to Briar.

You don’t address it after the long four page letter, and somewhere between orientation week and prelims, the box had gone from a strange habit to a necessity, a pressure valve that kept everything from building to critical mass.

You'd gotten good at it. At the translation of feeling into ink, at the sealing away of things that had no business existing in the open air. The box lived under your bed, behind your extra blankets and a stack of Intro to Lit anthologies you kept meaning to donate. The latch, temperamental from the start, had gotten worse with age. 

You'd meant to fix it.

You kept meaning to do a lot of things.

The letters still ranged from two lines to four pages, even when you entered Freshman Year in Briar. They still kept the same amount of yearning and thoughts you would never find the courage to say, or even send to Logan– and soon after, you started signing them too.

John – or maybe Logan?  You started being called Logan after you teamed up with Tucker and the rest. So maybe I should change it up to. Adapt and change, you know. Though it would be weird to start calling you by your last name.  – With love, and judgement.

You tried to call him Logan. He looked at you then with such offense that you back tracked and went back to calling him John. He said it made him feel better. Special, because John was a name only you could use. 

You wrote another letter that night, trying to reason out the butterflies and the implications of what he meant. Because rationalizing it away makes it easier than admitting it out loud.

They kept piling up. Letter after letter.

This sucks. You remembered my coffee order even after I changed it three times in two months. I can’t blame you for how well you treat me. It’s just how you are.  I should just stop putting meaning into things, but the other part of me just wants to believe that maybe it did mean something. UGH. John Logan you fucking suck. I hope you trip on the ice during practice. Actually, no. That was a joke. Maybe. – With love.

You called the longest ones your pathetic, yearning lovergirl letters. Late-night things, written when the distance between what you felt and what you were allowed to say felt too wide to sleep across. Those ones you sometimes read back in the morning with a kind of horrified tenderness, like finding a diary from a younger self. 

They were overwrought. 

They were honest in ways you couldn't quite access in daylight.

John, I've been thinking about the thing you said last week, that you don't know what you'd do without me. You said it so easily. Like it was just true, just a fact of your life, the way you'd say it's cold out or practice got cancelled. I don't know what to do with that. I've been turning it over and over in my head trying to figure out what it means and I think the honest answer is that it means exactly what it sounds like and nothing more and I need to learn to be okay with that. I'm working on it. – With love. P.S. You should stop handing me your hoodies when I get cold and letting me keep them. It messes with me and my late night 3 am delusional thoughts.

John, You have this thing you do when you're listening to someone — you get very still. Most people, when they listen, they nod, they mm-hm, they start formulating their response and you can see the moment they stop actually hearing you. You don't do that. You just go still and you look at the person and you listen, like it costs you nothing, like you have all the time in the world. I don't think you realize you do it. I don't think you realize what it does to people. What it does to me. I'm going to stop writing now. Before I start turning into the 3 am yearner I was last night. Again. — With love.

By freshman year of college, there were thirty letters.

Sophomore year is when it all cracked.

Classes started to weigh on you in a way freshman year hadn't warned you about. Rehearsals that ran until midnight, choreography notes bleeding red ink across marked-up scores, tech week for the department showcase bleeding into finals week, the constant ache in your calves and the tape on your feet that never seemed to come off in time — a dance major was not a degree that let up, and you were running harder than you ever had, barely sleeping, more often than not with Logan being the one thing keeping you sane, showing up with food you hadn't asked for and quiet company at your desk — or in the studio doorway — at midnight, watching you run the same eight counts until your body finally understood what your brain already knew. 

And then there was the puck bunny thing.

You didn't have the right to say anything about it, not really. You understood why. John Logan was hot. He was charming, easy to talk to, easy to fall for — and there was always a rotating cast of girls finding excuses to linger near him after games. You watched it happen the way you'd always watched it happen, except now you were closer to it, in his dorm, at his games, in the middle of the aftermath. And you had no claim to any of it. He wasn't yours. He'd never been yours. You just got to watch, the way you always had.

So you stopped writing. You shoved the box into the dark crevice under your bed and didn't take it out again. You prayed it would stay there. You told yourself you were moving on.

Meeting Davis was almost spontaneous — a late night out at Malone's, small talk with a guy from your gen-ed class that turned into something steadier. He was easy. Uncomplicated. He didn't make your chest hurt the way John did, and for a while, that felt like a relief instead of a warning sign. The letters stayed buried. Things between you and Logan went back to what looked, on the surface, like normal. Friends. Best friends. 

Because that was all it was going to be.

-

"So how are things with Davis?" Logan asked, leaning against the kitchen counter while you hunched over a marked-up piece of choreography notation, notes scattered across the counter in purple and yellow highlighter, counts and spacing diagrams bleeding into the margins. Gen ed notes scatter on top of them, but you seemed more preoccupied with the scrawls of markings for your major.

"Things are fine." You tried to keep the annoyance out of your voice, but Logan had always been perceptive, and it showed in the way his brows drew together.

"Yeah? Then why do you sound like that?"

Your pen dug a little deeper into the page. "Sound like what?"

"Like things aren't fine."

Your head snapped up, an evident frown pulling at your mouth. "It's none of your business, John."

Your voice came out sharper than you meant it to, and you winced, immediately regretting it. "Sorry. That was — sorry."

He didn't push on the apology. Just crossed his arms and softened his voice instead. "What's wrong?"

You hesitated, pen hovering over your notes, and then you let out a long groan and dropped your forehead against your textbook. "I don't want to start venting."

"Vent anyway."

"He keeps asking when I'm free. Wants to hang out constantly, and I get it, I do, but callbacks are in two weeks and I have a showcase piece I'm not off-book for yet, and I told him that, and he just —" You sat up, dragging a hand down your face. "He said it's kind of pathetic that I care this much about a theater degree. That I don’t have a future in this and that I’m only wasting my time."

Logan's jaw went tight. He would also do that when something pissed him off, and you knew him enough to know that he was also pissed off at what you said. "He said that?"

"Basically."

"That's not — " He stopped himself, exhaled through his nose, clearly working to keep his voice level. "You've wanted this since we were sixteen. You used to run your combinations for me in your driveway at eleven at night in the middle of winter because you couldn't get the phrase to feel right, and I stood there freezing my hands off holding your phone so you could film it."

That got a small, watery laugh out of you. "You always came outside, though. Even when it was that cold."

"Because it mattered to you." He said it so plainly, like it wasn't even a decision he'd had to make. "Anyone who makes you feel stupid for caring about the thing you've wanted since we were in high school doesn't get to also get your time. That's not — that's not how it should work."

You didn't have an answer for that. You just nodded at your notes, throat tight, and went back to studying, and Logan stayed leaning against the counter a while longer before he finally pushed off it and went to make you tea you hadn't asked for, the same way he always did.

-

Things ended with Davis not long after that — quietly, without a scene (an irony you did clock, even mid-breakup), the kind of ending that comes less from a single fight and more from a slow accumulation of moments where you'd chosen your scripts, your late rehearsals, your friendship with Logan, over him, and he'd finally said out loud what he'd clearly been thinking for weeks. You didn't wallow in it. It hadn't felt like losing something so much as setting something down.

Allie, your dorm neighbor across the hall, caught you in the laundry room a few days later, sorting a basket of mismatched socks.

"Wait, so you and Davis are actually done?" Allie asked, propping her hip against the dryer.

"Yeah." You shrugged, feeding a quarter into the slot. "It didn't work out." She knew about what he said, and she made the same face as you the moment you told her. She was the friend you made in one of the early collaborations your major did with hers, and she was the one who knew well how taxing it would be on your body and to have someone just brush it off? She had also pushed for you re-evaluating your whole relationship before you even talked to John about it.

"Huh." Allie studied you for a second too long. "You don't seem that broken up about it."

"I'm fine," you said, and mostly meant it, which felt strange enough that you didn't examine it too closely.

Allie didn't push, but she gave you a look on her way out that said she'd clocked something you hadn't said out loud.

Your roommate and best friend in all things best friend, Jai, was less subtle about it. She came in that night to find you cross-legged on your bed, not doing anything in particular, just sort of staring at the wall.

"Okay, what's actually going on with you?" Jai said, dropping her bag and sitting across from you. "You broke up with Davis, which you knew most of us had been telling you to, but usually break ups have the whole grieving process. And right now,  you look like you're thinking about a math problem, not a breakup."

"I don't know. I think I just — I didn't care as much as I should have. The whole time. I feel bad about that." You fiddle with your fingers. “That maybe I feel this apathetic because I didn’t care as much in the beginning.”

Jai considered you for a moment, tilting her head the way she did when she was about to say something you weren't going to like. "You know what I think?” 

You looked up at Jai, who nodded over at the space under your bed. “You never wrote about him.”

You blinked. "What?"

"The letters." Jai said it like it was obvious, like she'd noticed the box's absence the same way she'd notice if you'd rearranged the furniture. "You've had that thing since I've known you — you disappear into it when something's actually gotten to you. You didn't write a single letter about Davis. Not one, in like four months."

You opened your mouth to argue and found you didn't have anything to argue with.

You hadn't written about Davis. Not once. Every single letter in that box, every one you'd ever written, had one name on it, and it wasn't his.

The realization hit you like cold water. 

You hadn't moved on. Not even a little.

That night you pulled the box out from under the bed — dusty, a stray cobweb clinging to one corner — wiped it down, and wrote the first letter in months. You didn't let yourself think too hard about what it meant that your hand knew exactly how to start again, like it had never really stopped.

I dated someone in hopes of getting over you– only to realize that every time I sit across from him, I imagine its you. It’s not fair on him. Or myself. But though he did deserve the break-up… he didn’t deserve someone who is still hung over a guy she liked since high school, It’s stupid. Terribly so, but I had four months of thinking that dealing with him was much easier than dealing with the constant ache in my chest every time I see you.  Maybe it’s more stupid of me to get back to writing to you and acknowledging the constant hurt i feel. — With love, reluctantly, again, and always.

By Junior year, the letters slowed but never stopped completely. The program was, if anything, worse than sophomore year — a full-length ensemble piece now, not just technique classes, and you were buried in rehearsal schedules and rep notes, and the only thing that made any of it bearable was Logan, constant as ever, still showing up with food, still sitting on the studio floor with you at 1 a.m. while you both pretended you weren't exhausted, still somehow always exactly where you needed him to be. 

Jai, who had appointed herself the unofficial keeper of your feelings since the Davis revelation, was relentless about it.

"You have to tell him," she said one night, apropos of nothing, while you were both supposed to be doing readings for your gen ed classes. "Junior year of high school, senior year, all of freshman and now half of junior year of college. That's — I did the math, that's four years, and you're going to keep writing it down instead of just saying it?"

"It's not that simple."

"It kind of is, though."

You'd relented eventually, worn down by her insistence and your own exhaustion at holding the same shape for four years straight. You told her you'd do it. You'd tell him. Maybe at the house party that weekend, when everything felt looser and easier and less like something you had to plan for.

You didn't get the chance.

You found him in the kitchen of the party, laughing with a girl whose name you didn't know, and before you could process anything, she'd leaned in and he hadn't leaned away.

You didn't wait to see more than that. You turned around and left before he ever noticed you'd been there, walked back to your dorm in the cold without your jacket, and didn't cry, exactly — just sat on your floor and wrote until your hand cramped.

I stopped hoping tonight. I think I needed to see it to actually believe it, because apparently telling myself wasn't enough. I'm not writing this one for you to ever read. I'm writing it so I stop lying to myself about what almost happened this weekend, and didn't, and isn't going to.

I keep thinking about how badly I wanted to walk over there and how I didn't, and how that's the whole story of us, isn't it. Me, standing a few feet away, wanting, and staying exactly where I am.

You told Jai it hadn't worked out. She didn't push for details, just sat with you until you didn't feel like crying anymore.

Things between you and Logan, in the weeks after, went quiet in a way that wasn't quite a fight and wasn't quite normal either — some instinctive retreat on your end that you dressed up as being busy. Eventually it faded, the way most things did when you were both incapable of staying upset at each other for long, and by the second half of the semester you'd settled back into something that looked, from the outside, exactly like it always had. You told yourself that was enough. You tried, in your quiet, determined way, to move on.

There was one more letter before the long silence, written the week after, when he'd shown up at your studio with soup because Jai had mentioned you were sick, and stayed on the floor doing his own reading while you slept on and off on the yoga mats, and woken you gently every hour to make sure you drank water.

You have no idea what you do to me by being like this. You have no idea, or you do, and you just don't care, because it's easier to be kind to me than to explain why you keep being kind to me. Either way, I am so tired of this constant wishing and wanting. I’ll move on. I have to. Or I’ll never get out of this stupid hole.  I love you. But it hurts to keep loving you.

By the second semester of junior year, there were forty-three letters. You left it at forty-three letters.

Ever since that night, where your anger and everything about you spilled into paper and ink– you didn't slip in another letter. It stayed at forty-three.

Forty-three letters, across four years, across the span of a friendship that had become the most important thing in your life and the most carefully guarded secret you kept. Forty-three letters that were supposed to go with you to the grave while you plan out your whole moving on shtick.

That was the plan. That had always been the plan.

The plan, it turned out, was not consulted before Thursday afternoon.

—

It was a fire drill that turned out not to be a drill.

You'd been on the floor beside your bed, hunting for your phone charger, having pulled the mattress out from the wall and tangled yourself in the extra blankets you kept stuffed behind it, when the alarm split the air — sudden, violent, the particular shriek of the Briar dorms that had never once not startled you no matter how many times you'd heard it.

Your elbow caught the edge of the blanket stack. The box, which you'd shoved back into place after re-reading that last letter just the other day, teetered on the edge of the mattress frame. You grabbed for it, fingers catching the corner.

The latch — that brass, temperamental, long-suffering latch you'd always meant to fix and never had — gave.

The box opened.

Forty-three letters, across the floor of your dorm room.

You were still on the ground, staring at them, trying to process the scope of the disaster, when you heard Logan's familiar voice, your name, followed by a quick, "It's me, don't freak out —"

You looked up. Panic set in immediately, your heart dropping to your feet.

John Logan stood in the doorway, your dorm key in his hand — the one you'd given him freshman year for emergencies and never asked back — the opening words dying in his throat as he watched the letters settle.

The alarm was still going. Someone in the hall was shouting about everyone needing to get out. The late-afternoon light came through the window, gold and slanted, landing on the scattered envelopes and the stunned expression on his face and every single letter that bore, in your own handwriting, his name.

For a moment, neither of you moved.

Then you hit the floor on both knees, grabbing at the letters with both hands, stacking them against your chest with no particular order, your mind repeating the same panicked loop — collect them, get them back in the box, get them away from his line of sight.

"These are nothing — they're old, they're just — don't look at those—" You scrambled, but the panic made the ones in your hand slip loose again, and you nearly wanted to just sprawl over the envelopes and pretend they'd never fallen at all.

But John was crouching too. He wasn't reading them. He was just looking at the envelopes scattered across your floor, and you could see the exact moment he registered what they all had in common.

All of them. Every single one.

John Logan.

Your handwriting. His name. Over and over, in blue ink and black ink, and once in green, junior year of high school, when you'd been out of everything else.

His name on the front of forty-three letters you never sent.

He picked one up. He did it with the careful hands he used for things he wasn't sure about — the same way he picked up injured birds on his way to practice, the same way he handled other people's textbooks, and, twice, your feelings, on the two occasions you'd broken down in front of him and he'd gently cradled your face and helped you through the tears. Those were among the ten thousand other things written in your letters. Things you loved him for.

"These are addressed to me," he said. His voice was quiet. Unsure, tentative, like if he spoke louder he'd scare you off entirely.

"They're not —" you stammered. "I didn't send them. That's the whole —" You pressed the stack still in your hand to your sternum. "Please. Just — pretend you didn't see them."

"How many are there?"

His voice was doing something you couldn't quite pinpoint. Low. Careful. Something heavy underneath it, if you read between the lines.

You looked at him over the letters clutched to your chest, not sure what expression was on your face that made him soften even further. Maybe it was the pure panic. Maybe it was something else.

"Twenty — wait, uhm." You paused, blinked. "Thirty-four."

He lifted a brow. "You hesitated."

"...Forty-three."

The silence after that had weight. The alarm had stopped — someone had pulled it, or the drill was over, or building staff had caught up to whatever triggered it — and the sudden absence of noise made everything feel louder. Your heartbeat. His breathing. The soft scratch of the envelope he was turning over in his hands, not opening, just turning.

"How long?" he asked.

You didn't want to answer that. The answer was the part that would make it real. The part that would say out loud what had only ever existed on paper.

"Since junior year of high school," you said quietly.

You watched him absorb it.

He sat back on his heels, and you could see him doing the math. Junior year of high school. The end of the letter stack. The date on whatever letter he was holding. The span of years between then and now.

"You've been writing me letters," he said slowly, like he was learning the sentence as he spoke it, "for four years. That you never sent."

"It's not — it's a journaling thing. It's not —"

"Your journals have my name on them."

You winced and closed your eyes. "Yes."

"Why didn't you send them?"

You opened your eyes. He was watching you with an expression that made it very hard to think clearly, and you needed to think clearly to get through this conversation without losing something you couldn't afford to lose. Carefully, you thought. Be careful. He is your best friend and he is looking at you and you are not allowed to ruin this.

"Because I didn't want things to change," you said, which was the truest and most incomplete answer you had.

"What things?"

"Us." The word landed between you, bare, nothing around it to soften it. "The way things are. The way things have always been. I didn't — I wasn't willing to risk it. So I wrote it down instead, and I kept it, and I was going to keep it forever, and this was a mistake, Logan —"

"John." He interrupted quietly. You ignored the correction.

"— you were not supposed to see these."

"What are they?" he asked. "Just — tell me what they are. In plain English."

You looked at him. Then at the forty-three letters — the ones against your chest, the ones still sprawled on the floor, the one in his hands, the stupid brass-latched box open between you. You thought about every 2 a.m., every bleacher, every game, every borrowed hoodie you'd never given back. You thought about how long you'd been careful not to say a single thing. How much energy you'd spent on the not-saying, and how completely, catastrophically exhausted you were from it.

"They're everything," you said, "that I didn't know how to say to your face."

—

He was quiet for a long time after that.

You spent most of it looking at the floor, cataloguing the letters you could see from where you sat — the corner of the very first one, faded and ink-stained, from that Tuesday in junior year. The familiar blue pen of the one from a few months ago, the night of the game where he'd scored the tying goal in the final minute and looked up into the bleachers and found you immediately, like he'd known exactly where to look, like he always knew where to look, and you'd gone home and written four pages you didn't remember most of the next morning.

Then right by your knees was the latest letter. The one that was lengthy and full of hurt and anger and everything else that you poured out after seeing him make out with another girl– You push down the memory. 

The afternoon light had shifted. It was later than you'd realized.

"I want to ask you something," Logan said, "and I need you to answer honestly."

"Okay."

"Is it —" He exhaled through his nose, tried again. You watched the struggle on his face — that particular Logan expression of someone who had something to say and was working out how to say it without saying too much or too little. You'd seen it a thousand times. You'd written about it. Letter fourteen, sophomore year of high school. The way he gets quiet before he says something he means.

"Is it the same thing I think it is?"

"Probably," you said, to the floor. "Unless you think it's a grocery list, in which case, no."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh — hoarse, surprised out of him.

"You've liked me," he said, still careful, "since junior year."

"Yes."

"And you didn't say anything because you didn't want to lose the friendship."

"Yes."

"And you wrote — forty-three letters. Instead."

"I was going to say forty-three seemed excessive, but honestly, given the timeline, I think it's fairly restrained."

"Hey." His voice changed. That made you look at him. He was watching you with something so open on his face it hit you square in the sternum. "Don't do that. Don't make it a joke right now."

You swallowed. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry either." He set the letter down between you, gently, the way he set down things he didn't want to damage, and ran a hand through his hair — the thing he did when he was thinking hard, when something had knocked him somewhere he hadn't planned to go. "I just need a second."

You gave him the second.

Outside, someone on the quad was playing music, drifting up through your open window without any particular hurry. Late afternoon light cut across the room at the angle it only ever hit in March — long and gold and slanted, the kind that made everything look like it was happening in the last good hour of something. The last hour before whatever came next.

He abruptly brings up Davis. "What about Davis?"

Your brows furrow. "What about him?"

"You dated him last year."

You hesitate. "It was a half-hearted attempt to try and get over you."

"Did it work?"

You deadpan. "Well, I broke up with him, didn't I?"

John laughs through his nose. "Yeah. Yeah that makes sense."

Another beat passes, quieter this time, before he asks if you know why he's shown up to every single one of your performances since freshman year. Not just the winter and spring showcases. The studio showings nobody came to, the ten-minute improvisation pieces you took for the sake of getting better, performed to an audience of six, the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal run-throughs that overlapped with his lift block, when he'd shown up, hair damp, sitting cross-legged in the back corner of the studio so he could leave before anyone noticed a hockey player watching a modern dance rehearsal like it was the only thing happening in the building.

"That's practice, though," you say. "You're always busy."

"Not always." He says it like it's nothing, like it was never a real sacrifice, just a matter of arranging things around each other the way you'd both always done. "I never missed a lift block or a mandatory practice for it, if that's what you're asking. Coach would've had my head, and there goes the scholarship. I'm not that much of an idiot."

"So how—"

"I just used the time I actually had. Free blocks. The hour after morning skate before class. You'd be in Studio B until midnight running the same eight counts over and over, and I'd come sit in the corner with a granola bar and my laundry, because doing laundry at the machines by the dance building was somehow always more urgent than doing it in my own dorm."

You protest anyway, because your brain is still catching up, still trying to file this under good friend the way you have filed every other thing he's ever done for four years running. "You're just — that's just you being supportive. You did that for Summer-"

"I went to Summer's event once, and that was because Dean wanted us to. I have sat through you running the same eight counts eleven times in a row at eleven p.m. on a Tuesday because you couldn't get the turn right, and I have watched you mark a whole solo with a busted ankle because you didn't want to fall behind, and I still came."

"That was one time."

"I know. I counted the limps."

That gets you. Something in your chest cracks open a little wider.

He tells you about the incidents, then — the small things you never clocked because you were always mid-combination or too deep in your own head to notice him in the doorway, or slumped against the wall outside the studio with his bag still packed from practice. The night your partner dropped you a beat early in a lift and you both recovered it so smoothly the audience never noticed, and how he'd told Tucker after, unprompted, that he'd never seen anyone save a mistake like that mid-air, like it mattered to him the way his own game footage mattered.

The way he'd show up straight from morning skate, hair still wet, to walk you back to your dorm after a late rehearsal because he didn't like the idea of you crossing the quad alone at midnight, ice pack pressed to your shin, making conversation about nothing in particular just so you wouldn't have to walk in silence. The stretch of a week during tech for the fall showcase, when you barely left the studio, and he started just bringing his own homework to do on the floor during your five-minute breaks, so you'd have someone there without either of you having to say why that mattered.

"You did that the whole week," you say slowly.

"I did that the whole week."

"You never told me you had a physics midterm that same week."

"Didn't want you to feel bad about it." He shrugs, like this is a reasonable thing to have kept from you for two years. "It wasn't your fault. I wanted to be there."

You're quiet for a second, turning that over, and something about the quiet must give you away, because he tilts his head at you. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You've got a face on. That's not nothing."

"It's just—" You stop. Start again. "If you wanted to be there that badly. If you were doing all of that. Then what was with the girls?"

He blinks. "What girls?"

"You know what girls, Logan." Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to, two years of swallowed irritation finally finding a door. "The ones after games. Hanging off the boards. The ones who got to walk up to you, because they didn't have some — some rule in their head about not ruining anything."

"That's what this is about?"

"I'm asking."

He drags a hand down his face, and for the first time all night, he looks ashamed instead of careful. "Those weren't anything," he says. "You know that, right? They were never anything."

"They looked like something."

Logan lets out a hoarse laugh — short, not really about anything funny. It's the sound of a person getting cornered by their own bad decisions. "Yeah," he says. "I bet they did."

There's something almost shameful in the way his jaw works before he goes on.

"They were a distraction." He says it plainly, no dressing it up. "You didn't — I thought you didn't feel the same way. I thought I was the only one carrying this, and I didn't know what to do with that, so I did the dumbest possible thing, which was try to feel something for anyone else so I'd stop feeling this much for you. It never worked. Not once. I always ended up back at your door with food you didn't ask for, like an idiot."

"I did care," you say, and it comes out smaller than you mean it to, four years of carefulness still clinging to your voice even now. "I thought you didn't."

"I know that now."

You stare at each other for a second, and it lands on both of you at once — the sheer, staggering waste of it. Four years of two people orbiting the same unspoken thing, each one certain the other didn't want it, each one building elaborate, private monuments to a feeling neither of you would say out loud. You almost want to laugh. You almost want to be furious. Mostly you just want to sit in the wreckage of it with him and not move for a while.

That's when he tells you about the texts.

"There's something you should probably know, since, well– I just accidentally saw your very personal letters." he says, and something in his voice makes you go still before he even finishes the thought. "I've been deleting texts to you since October of junior year."

"What texts?" you said.

"The ones I wasn't going to send." A muscle in his jaw moved. "Different medium. Same problem."

You stared at him.

"You," you said carefully, "have also been —"

"Yeah."

"Since —"

"Junior year." He kept his eyes on you. "You did that solo — the contemporary piece, the one set to that stripped-down piano track, for the fall showcase. I only went because you asked me to come, and also promised to buy me free snacks right after. So I came. I sat in the back row not expecting to care, and then the lights came up on you and you just — you weren't you anymore, you were something else entirely, and I remember thinking, very clearly, that I had never seen anything move like that. Not the piece. You. I didn't say anything to anyone. I definitely didn't say anything to you. I just knew, sitting in that folding chair, that something in me had rearranged itself and it wasn't going back." He stopped. Shook his head. "I thought you knew, later, that something had shifted for me. I thought it was obvious. I thought you didn't feel the same way, and I figured I could live with that — be your friend, be fine. And I was mostly fine. I was fine until you and Davis started whatever that was, and I wasn't fine anymore, and that's when I knew I was a lost cause."

"There was nothing with Davis," you said. "It was just — a gen-ed class, and I thought it was something—" The words died on your tongue.

"I know that now."

"John." Something enormous was rising in your chest — too big for any letter, too loud for that box. "We've been — we've both been —"

"Catastrophically stupid," he said, with a short, helpless laugh. "Yeah. I'm aware."

"Four years."

"I know."

"I have forty-three letters —"

"I know, I can see them —"

You laughed, and it came out slightly broken, and he laughed too, and for a moment it was just that — the two of you on your dorm room floor, surrounded by four years of everything you hadn't said, laughing at the sheer, impossible absurdity of it. At how close you'd been the whole time. At how completely you'd managed to miss each other while never once being apart.

Then the laughter faded.

He was looking at you. The gold light had shifted, fallen across him, and he looked the way he always looked when he was done thinking and had arrived somewhere decided. You knew that look. You'd written about it. Letter twenty-one. The way he looks when he's made up his mind about something and nothing in the world is going to unmake it.

"What do we do now?" you asked.

John reached out slowly, giving you every chance to move away if you wanted to. He tucked a loose strand of hair back from your face, hand staying at your jaw, careful. His thumb traced, barely, along your cheekbone.

"I have a practice slot tomorrow morning," he said. "Early. Six a.m., the rink's usually empty." He paused. "You could come. Sit in the bleachers, like you always do. And after — I could buy you hot chocolate. And maybe this time I could actually say what I haven't been saying for four years."

You looked at him. His hand was warm at your jaw, and the room smelled like old paper and cedar and whatever that specific thing was that his jacket always smelled like, because of course he was wearing the jacket you knew best.

"And we're doing it at the rink," you said slowly, "because —"

"Because that's where it started," he said, shrugging. "It should start there too. Not the ratty ice rink back home, but it still counts."

The feeling in your chest crested, enormous and warm, nothing like the quiet ache you'd carried for four years. That ache had been private and careful, kept deliberately small so it wouldn't take up too much room, wouldn't crowd out anything else. This was not small. This was taking up every room you had. This was refusing, loudly and completely, to fit inside a box.

"Okay," you said.

He smiled — the full one, the private one, the one that had always felt like it was only for you. Maybe it had been. Maybe you'd just been too busy cataloguing reasons not to believe it.

"Okay," he echoed.

He let go of your jaw slowly, like he was in no hurry about it, then stood and started helping you gather the letters off the floor, stacking them with surprising care, not reading them, just collecting. You watched him do it and didn't say anything. There was something strange and sweet about watching his hands handle these things that had existed in secret for so long.

He asked a few questions. Simple ones. The things you could admit to. Small rants you'd written. How you didn't read back on some of them, out of fear of what you'd find. You mentioned the one where you'd hoped he tripped, and how the very next day, he actually had.

Logan laughed at that — bright, curls settling around his face. You had to stop yourself from staring too long.

"Which one's your favorite?" he asked, holding the stack against his chest the way you'd been holding it minutes ago.

"I'm not telling you that."

"Come on."

"Absolutely not."

"I'll find it eventually."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It's a promise." He looked entirely too pleased with himself. "I have forty-three letters and the rest of my life. I'll get there."

When all the letters were back in the box, he set it on your desk and looked at it for a moment.

"You're going to have to let me read them eventually," he said.

"I really am not."

"The 'I hope you trip' one. I want to find that one."

"Absolutely not."

"I'm going to find it."

"Get out of my room, Logan."

"I thought I said you could call me John?"

You rolled your eyes. "I'm adapting to Briar. You're either Logan or John. Now get out of my room."

He grinned, the lopsided, lethal one, and you felt it the same way you always had — right in the sternum, like a bell being struck — and went, unhurried, toward the door.

"Six a.m.," he said from the doorway.

"Six a.m.," you agreed.

He left.

You stood in your room surrounded by the afterimage of all of it, then sat on the edge of your bed and put your face in your hands, staying that way for a while — not crying exactly, just feeling the full, enormous weight of something shifting into a new configuration, four years of tectonic plates rearranging themselves into something that finally made sense.

After a while, you got up, took the box from the desk, and put it back under your bed.

You set your alarm for five-thirty.

Hockey rinks always smelled and looked the same, no matter where you would go. It would always smell like ice and rubber and something underneath, though it didn't have the same ratty smell from the old hockey rink at home.

You climbed to your usual spot in the bleachers. Third row, center. You'd been sitting here since the first time you ever came to watch him practice. Even when you moved closer to Briar, you always gravitated to the same spot, before you'd known it was your spot, before you'd known you'd keep coming back. You'd just sat where the sight line was clear and the draft from the ventilation didn't hit as hard. You'd sat there every time after that, out of habit, out of something you'd told yourself was just habit.

John stepped onto the ice.

He didn't look up at the bleachers right away. That wasn't unusual. He rarely did, at first. He had a routine — you knew the routine, had watched it enough times to know it by heart — where he'd take a lap or two before he settled into the actual work of it, like he was reacquainting himself with the ice, reminding himself of the particular quality of this rink on this morning. Then he'd pick up speed. Then he'd look like himself.

You watched him. You were done pretending you weren't.

He skated the way he always skated — like it required nothing, like it was breathing, like the rink was just another place he lived and the ice was simply the ground beneath him. He did a lap, and then another, and then he started working through something, crossovers into a long sweep across the length of the rink, and you watched the way he held his weight, the clean economy of every movement, and felt the thing you always felt watching him, which you'd spent four years filing under aesthetic appreciation, nothing more, and which you were now allowed to call by its actual name.

After a while he came to the boards and looked up at you.

"You're in your spot," he said.

"I'm always in my spot." 

"I know." He leaned on the boards, the same way he had the first time, junior year, helmet under his arm, and he looked up at you with that look you were done misreading. "I skate better when you're here. I don't know if you knew that."

"I didn't."

"I didn't either, for a while. I thought it was just that the bleachers were less empty, which helps. But then I figured out it was specifically you." He said it matter-of-factly, like it was just a thing that was true. Like it was weather. Like it was temperature. "Third row, center. Every time."

"You knew the seat."

"I always knew the seat."

You looked at him, and the rink was cold, and the light was just beginning to come in through the high windows, pale and early and new, and forty-three unsent letters sat in a box under your bed, and standing at the boards in front of you — in his skates, in his gear, on his ice — was the person they were all addressed to. 

With a smile, you got up and headed down from your seat. The second you stopped in front of Logan, the only thing separating you being the rink’s wall, you smiled wider. "Hi," you said.

"Hi," he said back.

He reached for you, and you reached back, and when his hand found yours over the boards it was easy, the easiest thing, like something that had been waiting a long time to finally happen and was not going to make a fuss about it now that it had. His hand was cold from the ice, and you held it anyway, and neither of you said anything for a moment, because there wasn't anything that needed saying.

You got the hot chocolate from the machine in the convenience store. Different store, same franchise. It was, as promised, terrible. Watery and too sweet, dispensed in a thin paper cup that was already going soggy at the base.

He handed it to you and watched you take a sip and pull a face.

"Still bad," you reported. “It’s surprising how consistent the store is.”

"Still bad," he agreed, leaning against the wall, holding his own cup, looking entirely unbothered. He'd never minded the terrible hot chocolate. You'd written about that once. Letter seven. The way you seem genuinely content with things that aren't good. Like the contentment is the point, not the quality of the thing.

"You said you were going to say what you hadn't said."

"I was getting to it."

"It's been twenty minutes."

"I was working up to it," he said, and there was something almost shy in the way he said it, which was not a quality you'd had many opportunities to observe in him, and which was doing things to you that you weren't prepared for. "I've been working up to it for four years, give me another thirty seconds."

You giggled, but you still waited.

He looked at his terrible hot chocolate. Then he looked at you.

"I love you," he said. "I've loved you since I saw you performing on stage and I thought — I thought, that's her. That's the person. And I didn't say anything because you didn't, and I figured I was misreading it, and I kept not saying anything for four years and I had a phone full of deleted texts and a very long mental list of things I was not going to tell you, and then yesterday I walked into your room and saw my name on forty-three envelopes on your floor and I thought—" He stopped. Something moved across his face, somewhere between wrecked and grateful. "I thought: we are both absolute idiots."

"We really are," you said.

"We really are." He pushed off the wall and set his cup down on the machine and took yours out of your hands and set it next to his, and then he looked at you the way he had yesterday, with that decided, arrived quality, and said, "I'm done not saying it. I love you. Okay? I just — I love you."

You looked at him. This person you'd known since before you knew what it meant to know someone. This person who remembered your coffee order and picked raisins out of muffins and drove forty minutes in the rain and kept nine of your hoodies and showed up to every meet in every kind of weather and had, apparently, been composing and deleting texts to you since junior year of high school.

"I love you," you said. "I have loved you for a very long time."

He exhaled, slow, like something he'd been holding finally let go, and then he smiled — the private one, the full one, the one that had always felt like it was only for you because, you understood now, it had always only been for you — and said, "Yeah. We're definitely idiots."

"Monumental idiots."

"Historically unprecedented idiots."

"There should be a word for it."

"There probably is, in some language we don't speak." He reached out, and you let him pull you in, and he held you the way he'd held you before, the same arms, the same warmth, but with something different in it now, something that had been allowed to be what it was instead of being carefully kept at a certain size. You pressed your face against his shoulder. His chin dropped to the top of your head.

"We wasted four years," you said into his shoulder.

"Nah." His voice rumbled against your ear. "We just took the long way."

You thought about that. About the letters, and the bleachers, and the hot chocolate, and the forty-minute drives in rain,  the deleted texts, and the space between what you feel and what you're brave enough to say. About all the things that had happened in the gap.

"The long way," you agreed.

Outside the rink, the morning was getting started. Inside, it smelled like ice and rubber and cedar and something new.

—

The forty-fourth letter was the last one. Written that night, because some habits deserve a proper ending.

John. Logan. Or whatever name you want to be called–  The hot chocolate was terrible. The one near our old school was better (I’m lying, but you know that), but it’s not like you would drive an hour just to get there. Still, you know hot chocolate is always terrible from that machine. You bought it anyway because I said I wanted it and you cannot help yourself. I've been writing these since high school. I don't think I'm going to write another one. Not because I have nothing left to say — I think I'm going to have a lot to say, for a very long time — but because I'm going to say it to you from now on. Out loud. In real time. Without a box to put it in afterward. You told me today that you skate better when I'm in the stands. I wanted you to know that I run better when you're at the end of the finish line. I have never told you that. I'm telling you now. I love you. I have loved you since a Tuesday in junior year in High school when you offered me bad hot chocolate on an empty rink and smiled at me like I was someone worth skating across the ice for.I loved you through every year after that, through every letter I wrote and sealed and tucked away, through every moment I talked myself out of saying something because I was afraid of what it would cost. It turns out it didn't cost anything. It turns out you were over there deleting texts. We were both such idiots. Though I guess it does make sense with our track record. I'm done keeping it in a box, and I'll say it to your face from now on, and I'm sorry it took me four years and a broken latch and forty-three embarrassing letters, some of which you are never going to read, to get here. But I'm here. And so are you. That's enough. That's more than enough. — With love.

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.

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