Going Through It

Spring had come late that year, and the godswood was heavy with the scent of new leaves and damp earth.

Courtiers moved through the corridors with forced smiles, speaking of the weather and the upcoming tourney at Storm's End, while their eyes darted toward every raven that arrived from the south.

You ran barefoot down the long gallery that overlooked the godswood, silk skirts whispering against the stone, laughter spilling from your lips like sunlight.

Behind you came the heavy, purposeful stride of your husband, Prince Baelor Targaryen, the man called Breakspear by half the realm, the heir to the Iron Throne, completely undone by the mere sight of you.

His dark hair was unbound, the usual careful braids abandoned in the chase—as you had once insisted that you had always wondered what he'd look like had he given it a chance to grow, and Gods help him, Baelor who had always kept his hair short and neat, had loved you with sucn unwavering devotion that he had grown it—and his mismatched eyes shone with a mischief that no one outside these walls ever witnessed.

“My lady wife,” he called, voice rich with amusement and something deeper, “you cannot simply vanish when the Small Council awaits my presence. Come back here.”

You glanced over your shoulder, cheeks flushed, and only ran faster. “Then catch me, my prince. Or is the great Breakspear’s legs too slow for a mere woman?”

He growled, a soft, delighted sound and lengthened his stride. You heard the soft scuff of his boots, the low laugh that always undid you, and then strong arms closed around your waist just as you reached the arched doorway to the solar.

He spun you against the cool stone, bracing one hand beside your head so that the weight of his body caged you without crushing and his breath stirred the hair at your temple.

“Caught,” he whispered, and pressed a kiss there, soft, lingering, right against the pulse point where your temple met your hairline. “Gods, you smell of lemon and summer. Do you know what you do to me when you run from me like that?”

Before you could answer, a dry, exasperated voice cut through the corridor.

“Seven bloody hells, Baelor.” Prince Maekar stood at the far end of the gallery, arms crossed over his black-and-red doublet, expression caught between fondness and pure irritation.

“The realm is about to bleed and you are chasing your wife through the halls like a green boy at his first tourney feast. Father is waiting. The Blackfyre pretender has raised his banners in the Reach. And here you are, kissing her temples as though the world has not gone mad.”

Baelor did not release you, if anything, his arms tightened, and he turned only his head, hair brushing your cheek, and fixed his younger brother with a look of unrepentant affection.

“The realm will still be mad in an hour, Maekar. My wife will not wait forever for me to remember that she is the only thing that makes this crown bearable.” He kissed your temple again, slower this time, as if sealing a vow. “Go tell Father I will be along presently. I have important business.”

Maekar rolled his eyes so hard it was audible. “Besotted. Utterly, hopelessly besotted. The gods save us from princes in love.” He turned on his heel, muttering curses under his breath that included several creative references to Baelor’s parentage and the general uselessness of romance in wartime. “I’ll tell Father you’re delayed by ‘strategy.’ Try not to get her with child again before the sun sets, brother.”

When the corridor was empty once more, Baelor rested his forehead against yours. The laughter had faded into something quieter, more serious. His thumb traced the line of your jaw with infinite care.

“He is not wrong,” he said softly. “The realm is fracturing. Daemon Blackfyre has the Golden Company and half the stormlords whispering his name. I will have to ride soon.” His eyes searched yours. “Promise me you will stay within the Keep. No riding out to the villages, no visiting the sept alone. Promise me.”

You lifted your hands to his face, feeling the faint scar at the corner of his mouth from some long-ago tourney. “I promise. But you must promise me something in return.”

“Anything.”

“Come back to me. Whole. Or if you cannot come whole, then come at all. I will take whatever the gods leave me of you.”

He closed his eyes as if the words had struck something vital. Then he kissed you, properly this time, deep and slow, the kind of kiss that tasted of farewell even while the sun still shone and when he drew back, he rested his lips against your temple once more and whispered, “I will always come back to you. In this life and whatever follows.”

That night the candles burned low in the prince’s chambers and outside, the city murmured with the restless energy of a capital that knew war was coming.

Bells had tolled for the evening hour; somewhere a singer practiced a ballad about the black dragon and the red, but inside your shared chambers, there was only the two of you, and the soft crackle of the hearth, and the knowledge that every moment was already becoming memory.

Baelor undressed you with a reverence that made your throat tighten, every lace he loosened, every soft brush of his knuckles against your skin, felt like a prayer.

He paused at the curve of your shoulder, pressing an open-mouthed kiss there before continuing.

When you stood bare before him he looked at you as though he had never seen anything so precious in all the Seven Kingdoms.

“I dream of this,” he murmured, lifting you onto the great canopied bed. The mattress dipped beneath his weight as he followed. “Even when I am awake. Especially when I am awake. I close my eyes in the council chamber and see the way the light touches your hair. I hear the scrape of a quill and think of your laughter.”

He settled between your thighs, the heat of him a welcome weight.

His mouth found the sensitive place just below your ear, then the hollow of your throat, then lower still, mapping you with a patience that belied the urgency in his hands and when at last he rose above you again, eyes searching yours in the golden light, he held himself still.

“Tell me you are mine,” he said, voice rough. “Not the realm’s. Not the court’s. Mine. Say it so I can carry the words into whatever comes next.”

“I have been yours since the day you placed that cloak around my shoulders,” you answered. “Longer, perhaps. Since the first time you smiled at me across the training yard and forgot to breathe. I am yours in every way a soul can belong to another.”

A broken sound left him as he entered you slowly, so slowly that every inch felt like a vow being rewritten in flesh and only when he was fully seated did he hold still, forehead pressed to yours, breathing with you until the initial stretch eased into pure, aching pleasure. “My beautiful wife, my everything.”

Then he began to move, deep, measured strokes that drew soft gasps from your lips.

He kissed your temples between each thrust, soft and almost worshipful, as though anchoring himself to the living reality of you.

One hand cradled the back of your head; the other laced with yours against the pillows. The world narrowed to the slide of skin, the quiet sounds you made for him alone, the way his hair fell around your faces like a private curtain shutting out the realm and its coming war.

“I love you,” he breathed against your temple. The words were a confession and a plea. “Gods help me, I love you more than the Iron Throne, more than my own name, more than the peace of the realm itself. If the Stranger came for me tomorrow I would still die grateful that I had this, that I had you.”

You arched beneath him, nails scoring lightly down the strong muscles of his back, and felt him shudder.

He shifted the angle of his hips and something bright and overwhelming built low in your belly.

When release took you both it was quiet and devastating, no grand cries, only the tight clutch of bodies and the whispered repetition of each other’s names like a litany.

Afterward he remained inside you, still kissing your temples, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth, as if afraid that if he stopped the moment might end forever.

“Stay,” you murmured into his hair, fingers carding through the dark strands, a soft smile playing at your lips.

“Always,” he answered, the word muffled against your skin. “Even when I cannot. Especially then. I will find my way back to you, my heart. I swear it by the old gods and the new, by the blood of the dragon and by every quiet hour we have stolen together.”

He held you through the long night, one arm a steady band across your waist, the other hand resting over your heart as if to count its beats.

Neither of you slept much. There was too much to say, and too little time left in which to say it.

The First Blackfyre Rebellion did not arrive with a single trumpet blast. It seeped into the realm like poison in wine, first the whispers in the alehouses, then the open declarations from the Reach, then the banners of the black dragon rising from Oldtown to the stormlands.

Daemon Blackfyre, the bastard son of Aegon the Unworthy, had claimed the sword Blackfyre and with it a throne he believed his by right of steel and blood. He had the Golden Company, the loyalty of many second sons and ambitious lords, and a cause that burned bright enough to draw men from their hearths.

Baelor rode out from King’s Landing at the head of a glittering host, the red three-headed dragon of House Targaryen streaming above him. You stood on the battlements with the wind in your hair and watched until the last spearpoint vanished into the haze of the kingsroad.

He had kissed your temples one final time before mounting, had pressed his forehead to yours beneath the eyes of the entire court and whispered, so only you could hear, “Wait for me.”

You had answered that you would wait until the stars themselves fell from the sky.

What neither of you knew was that Daemon Blackfyre had already decided you were a useful piece on the board.

“The Breakspear loves his lady wife beyond all reason,” Daemon was said to have remarked to his captains one night around a campfire somewhere in the Reach, the black dragon banner snapping overhead. “A man who loves that deeply is a man who can be broken. Bring her to me. Alive, if possible. Dead, if she proves difficult. Either way, Baelor will come running and when he does, we will end this war with one stroke of the sword.”

The men he sent were not common sellswords.

They were knights who had once sworn to the red dragon and now flew the black, men who knew the secret passages of the Red Keep and the habits of its household.

They came in the quiet hour before dawn, when the guards were changing and the city still slept beneath a sky the color of old bruises.

You woke to the cold kiss of steel at your throat and a gloved hand over your mouth and the last thing you saw before the darkness of a heavy hood closed over your eyes was the black dragon embroidered on a man’s sleeve.

The fields outside the village of Redgrass were already soaked in blood when the messenger found Prince Baelor.

He had been fighting for hours, his armor dented, his famous spear broken and replaced with a longsword taken from a fallen knight of the Golden Company. Maekar fought at his left side, m grim of face, cutting down Blackfyre men with methodical, almost clinical fury.

The air reeked of iron, smoke, and the sweet rot stench of opened bowels and somewhere to the south the Golden Company held a ridge, and the black dragon banner snapped in the wind like a living, hateful thing.

The messenger was a boy no older than sixteen, face white with terror and exhaustion, his horse half-dead beneath him. He had ridden through the lines with a sealed letter from the Hand and a verbal message he could barely force past his lips.

“My prince—my lord—forgive me—” The boy’s voice cracked. He swallowed hard. “Daemon Blackfyre sent men into the capital three nights past. They took the princess. Your lady wife. They mean to use her against you. The Hand has sent riders in pursuit, but the trail leads toward the Blackwater. If they reach the river crossings—”

The world stopped.

Baelor heard the words, yet for a heartbeat they made no sense and then the meaning crashed through him like a warhammer to the chest.

You.

Taken.

In the hands of men who followed the black dragon, men who had been ordered to bring you alive or dead.

The same men who even now might be hurting you, frightening you, deciding whether your life was worth more as leverage or as a message.

Absolute fear, cold, pure, and older than any battle seized him. His hands began to shake so badly the sword nearly slipped from his grip.

The sounds of the ongoing fight receded to a distant, meaningless roar, but all he could hear was the thunder of his own blood and the memory of your laughter echoing down a sunlit gallery, the soft press of his own lips against your temple, the whispered promise that he would always come back.

“Where?” he demanded, and the word came out raw, almost unrecognizable. “Tell me where.”

“They were seen riding hard for the Blackwater Rush, my prince. Toward the old holdfast at the crossing. A dozen men, maybe fewer after the pursuit. If they reach the river—”

Baelor did not wait for the rest as he was already turning, already shouting for a fresh horse, already ignoring Maekar’s furious protest as his brother seized his arm.

“Baelor, damn you, the battle is not finished!” Maekar’s fingers bit through the plate. “If you abandon the line now the center will fold. Daemon himself is on that ridge. We can end this today—”

“Then hold it without me,” Baelor snarled, and for the first time in their lives Maekar saw true terror in his brother’s eyes, not the controlled concern of a commander, but the raw, animal fear of a man whose entire world had just been placed in the hands of his enemies. “They have her. Do you understand me, Maekar? They have my wife. My wife! I will burn the Reach to cinders and salt the ashes before I let them keep her one hour longer than I must.”

Maekar’s face twisted and for one haunting moment the younger prince looked as though he might strike him, or drag him back by force and then something like reluctant, painful understanding flickered across his features.

He released Baelor’s arm with a curse that would have made a septa faint.

“Go, then. Take twenty men and ride like the Stranger himself is at your heels. I will hold this bloody field. But if you die for her, brother, I will never forgive either of you. Do you hear me? Never.”

Baelor was already gone, spurring his horse through the press of bodies and the rising smoke, the only thought in his mind a single, desperate prayer.

Let me reach her in time. Let me not be too late.

They found the Blackfyre party at dusk, near the ruined holdfast that overlooked a bend of the Blackwater. Smoke rose from a half-collapsed tower. Horses stamped in the outer yard, their reins held by a single squire who looked barely old enough to shave. And in the center of the open space, held between two armored men, was you.

Your gown was torn at the shoulder. A bruise darkened one cheek. Your wrists were bound with rough cord, but yet you stood straight, chin lifted, eyes searching the trees as though you had known, had always known, that he would come.

Baelor did not announce himself with horns or banners. He simply rode out of the shadows with twenty knights at his back and a fury that made the air itself seem to burn. His face was white beneath the dirt and blood of the day’s fighting.

“Release her,” he said, and his voice carried across the yard like the edge of a blade. “Or I will take your heads and send them to Daemon Blackfyre in a sack, with my compliments.”

The captain of the Blackfyre men, a lean knight with a black dragon on his breast and a scar that pulled one side of his mouth into a permanent sneer, smiled without warmth. He tightened his grip on your arm until you winced, and drew a short sword, setting the point lightly against the soft place beneath your ear.

“Prince Baelor. How predictable. Daemon said you would come. He said the Breakspear would abandon even the decisive battle for the sake of one woman.” The man pressed the blade a fraction harder. A thin line of red appeared against your skin. “Drop your weapons. All of you. Or she dies here, and you can explain to the realm how your great love got her throat cut while you watched like a helpless green boy.”

Baelor’s men shifted uneasily. Twenty against a dozen, but the blade at your throat changed the arithmetic of the world.

Baelor himself had gone utterly still, his heart hammering.

Only his eyes moved, calculating distance, angle, the precise moment when the captain’s attention might flicker, the exact reach of his own longsword.

You met his gaze across the yard and in that look passed a lifetime of understanding.

You saw the fear in him, the same absolute, soul-deep terror that had driven him from the battlefield at Redgrass.

You also saw the resolve, and the terrible calculation of a man who would risk everything rather than watch you die under another’s blade.

“Do not yield,” you said clearly, though your voice shook. “Baelor, do not. Whatever happens, do not give them what they want, promise me, please.”

The captain’s smile widened. He pressed the blade harder still. The red line lengthened.

That was when everything shattered.

One of Baelor’s younger knights, green, desperate, and positioned too far to the left, loosed a crossbow bolt. It was meant for the captain. It flew true enough, but the man twisted at the last instant, using your body as a shield.

The bolt took him in the shoulder instead of the heart.

He staggered, cursing, and in the same motion drove his short sword forward, not in a clean killing stroke, but in a wild, defensive thrust as he tried to keep his footing and control of his captive.

Baelor was already moving. He had thrown himself from the saddle the moment the bolt flew, longsword flashing in the dying light.

He reached the knot of men in three strides, cutting down the second guard with a single brutal stroke that nearly took the man’s head from his shoulders.

The captain, wounded and half-blind with pain, swung blindly toward the new threat.

And Baelor, seeing only the blade still near your throat, seeing only the man who had dared to lay hands on you, struck with all the force of his terror and love and rage.

The longsword punched through the captain’s side and continued on, because in the press of bodies and the chaos of the moment there was no clean angle left. The tip of the blade, red already with the captain’s blood, found the soft give of your flesh beneath the ribs.

For an instant no one moved.

The world held its breath.

Then the captain crumpled.

You made a small, surprised sound, more breath than cry, and looked down at the steel that had entered you.

Baelor’s steel.

The sword he had swung to save you.

“No,” he said. The word was barely sound. “No. No, no, no—”

He caught you as your knees buckled, lowering you both to the packed earth of the yard with a care that was almost gentle even in its desperation.

His hands, those same hands that had once chased you laughing through sunlit halls and undressed you with reverence in the candlelight, now pressed frantically against the wound as if he could push the blood back inside by force of will.

The sword still protruded; he dared not pull it free.

“Look at me,” he begged, voice cracking into something raw and young. “My love, look at me. You are going to be well. Do you hear me? The maesters will come. I will carry you myself if I must. Just stay with me. Please. Please stay.”

You lifted a trembling hand and touched his face, smearing bright blood across the dirt and sweat on his cheek.

Your eyes were already growing distant, but they found his with the same clarity they had always held, the same love that had once made him forget the Iron Throne existed.

“You came,” you whispered. A faint, wondering smile touched your mouth. “I knew you would. I never doubted.”

“I will always come,” he choked. Tears cut clean tracks through the dirt and blood on his face.

He bent and pressed frantic, desperate kisses to your temples, once, twice, a third time, as if the familiar gesture could somehow reverse the irreversible, as if the press of his lips might seal the wound or call your spirit back. “I love you. Gods, I love you more than life. Do not leave me. Please. I am nothing without you. The realm can burn to ash. Just stay. Stay with me.”

Your fingers curled weakly in his silver hair. The smile remained, soft and almost peaceful.

“Then I will wait,” you breathed, the words barely more than a sigh. “In whatever follows… I will wait for you. As I always have.”

The light left your eyes while his lips were still pressed to your temple.

Baelor Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, victor of a dozen tourneys and the greatest hope of his house, made a sound that no one who heard it ever forgot, a raw, animal howl of grief that rose above the clash of the dying fight and the rising wind.

He gathered your body against his armored chest and rocked, whispering your name over and over as if repetition might weave a path back from the dark.

Around them the last of the Blackfyre men were cut down without mercy. The yard grew quiet except for the stamp of horses and the soft, endless press of a prince’s mouth against the cooling skin of his wife’s temple.

They say that when Prince Maekar finally reached the holdfast the following morning, having left the field at Redgrass in the hands of loyal captains once the black dragon’s host began to break, he found his brother still kneeling in the blood-soaked dirt, your body cradled in his arms.

Baelor had not moved all night. “I killed her, oh, Gods, I killed my wife.”

He had not allowed the silent sisters near, he had simply held you, and kissed your temples, and spoken to you of every small, private joy the two of you had ever shared, as though the words might weave a path back from wherever the Stranger had taken you.

Maekar, hard man that he was, stood in silence for a long time.

The younger prince’s face was unreadable, but something in the set of his shoulders spoke of a grief he would never name aloud.

At last he went to one knee beside his brother and rested a gauntleted hand on Baelor’s shoulder.

“She is gone, Baelor,” he said, voice rough with an emotion he rarely allowed. “The gods have taken her. You must let the sisters do their work. The realm still needs you.”

“I killed her,” Baelor said simply. He did not look up. “My own hand. My own blade. In trying to save her I became the instrument of her death. Tell me how the realm is supposed to need a man who cannot even protect the one person who made the realm worth saving.”

“You were trying to free her from traitors. The blame lies with Daemon and the men who took her from her bed. Not with you.”

“Does it?” Baelor looked down at your still face and with infinite gentleness he brushed a strand of hair from your brow and pressed one last kiss to your temple, soft, lingering, the same way he had always done when the world was quiet and the two of you were alone. “I was supposed to protect you. That was the only vow that ever truly mattered. And I failed. I failed you.”

He allowed the silent sisters to take you at last. He walked beside the litter all the way back to King’s Landing, never once mounting a horse, as though any distance between his body and yours was unbearable and when they laid you in the quiet sept of the Red Keep he refused to leave.

For three days and three nights he kept vigil, speaking to you in the old tongue of Valyria, in the soft common speech of the court, in the private language of shared glances and half-finished sentences that only the two of you had ever understood. He told you of the battle.

He told you of Maekar’s curses. He told you, over and over, that he loved you, and that he was sorry, and that he would wait as long as it took.

On the fourth morning Maekar found him asleep on the cold stone floor beside the bier, one hand still resting over yours as if even in exhausted sleep he could not bear to let go.

The war continued.

Daemon Blackfyre fell at last upon the Redgrass Field, cut down by the combined fury of Baelor’s remaining forces and Maekar’s relentless advance. The black dragon was broken. The realm, for a time, was made whole again.

But something in Baelor had been broken beyond mending. He still fought when called upon. He still advised his father, the king.

He still smiled when the court required it, and spoke of justice and the good of the realm with the same measured wisdom that had once made men call him the best of the Targaryen sons.

Yet those who knew him best, Maekar above all, saw the emptiness behind his eyes, because his brother no longer chased anyone through the halls of the Red Keep.

He no longer laughed as though the world were a private jest shared between two hearts.

At night, when the candles burned low in his chambers, servants sometimes heard him speaking softly to an empty chair, or felt the faint brush of a kiss against a temple that was no longer there to receive it.

In the years that followed, bards would sing of the Battle of Redgrass and the fall of the Blackfyre pretender.

They would sing of Baelor’s courage and Maekar’s iron will.

Few dared sing of the quiet tragedy that had unfolded at a forgotten holdfast beside the Blackwater, of a prince who loved too deeply, and of the accidental blade that ended the only story that had ever truly mattered to him.

Yet sometimes, when the wind moved through the godswood of the Red Keep just so, those who lingered near the heart tree claimed they could hear two voices, one deep and steady, one bright with laughter, speaking of lemon-scented summers and the promise of a love that would wait, if need be, beyond the ending of the world.

For Baelor Targaryen had sworn he would always come back to you.

And in the quiet places between the heartbeats of the realm, it was said that somewhere, somehow, you were still waiting.

bolts to see you when he hears that your best friend brought you over to swim and hang out. says the crassest things about your tits and lifts you up when you try to duck around him to go back inside the house, a poor excuse to grope you. throws you into the pool when you scream at him to let you down, mostly because he probably wants to see your bikini get all wet :((

it makes you hate going over to your best friend's house, so you usually invite them over to your place, but that just ends in Soap confronting you when he sees you around town. maybe he snatches you bag and holds it over your head just to watch you try to jump for it, says he'll only give it back for a kiss :(( but at the last second, he turns his head and gives you a sloppy kiss on the mouth :((