wrap me in your skin and bones

You brought out two sides of Maekar. A gentle side, reserved only for your eyes and ears when he was feeling particularly romantic. But you also enjoyed when he explored a different side. To the outside world he was gruff and standoffish. Rude, some might say.

But you enjoyed that side as much as the other. Demanding, dominating, passionate but aggressive. You sought that side out and Maekar loved you for it. When he would burst into your shared chambers, carrying a proverbial storm cloud behind him, looking at you like you were the only person who could tame it.

The door near swung on its hinges as Maekar entered, boots clicking against the ground as he paced the room before it had even closed over again. You barely batted an eye, closing the distance between you and catching his arm as he passed.

But he didn't stop like he usually did. His jaw so tense you thought his teeth might crack under the pressure. It seemed it would take a little more work to dispel this cloud.

You released your hold on his arm, turning your back as though ignoring him. Letting your robe drop from your shoulders as you changed into your nightgown. The moment you pulled the silk up over your body, you could feel his eyes on you. If you had looked at him, you would have seen the questioning raise of his brow as he stopped pacing.

Were you not going to try and calm him down as you usually did?

If he had been paying more attention, he would have seen right through your little game. But instead he fell into the trap.

"Don't even think about getting into that bed," he snapped, crossing the room and tugging you back towards him.

His hold was tight, almost daring you to defy him in whatever way you could.

If Maekar was dominating, you were anything but submissive. It was a mutual control. Maekar took the lead and you allowed him to. And it worked perfectly. He could unleash the tension often found inside him, and you would get the satisfaction you needed. The feeling of teasing him until he broke.

"But I need to sleep, my love, it is late after all…" you answered, testing the strength of his hold with a small wriggle.

Maekar only held you tighter, his lips on the crook of your neck. Pressing his chest against your back as his breath tickled your skin.

"And what of your husband's needs?"

The low grumble of his voice sent a shiver down your spine. You just needed to push him a little bit more. You chewed at your lip, weighing your next words on your tongue.

"What of them?"

That was enough. The same arms that wrapped around your waist now lifted you from the ground. Planting you on the bed with a less than gentle thump. His body caging you to the bed, arms either side of your head. The smile on your face said it all, you were right where you wanted to be. And so was Maekar.

Maekar had brought things out of you that you had never thought you would enjoy. The domination, bringing a bratty side of you that you never believed existed. There was a freedom in it. Forgetting the outside world and exploring new pleasures together.

The sound of Maekar's hand hitting your backside was so much louder than you expected. Sending a jolt up your spine that almost forced a moan from your lips.

Another strike. Then another. Then another. Each one making your skin hot and your core pulse. And Maekar could see it.

"You aren't supposed to be enjoying this, you know?" he teased. stroking a palm over your heated skin.

It didn't stop him striking your flesh again, however. Nor did it stop him ignoring the steadily hardening length beneath his breeches. Just another new pleasure to explore.

Maekar Taglist:

@multyfangirl @foxyanon @tumblin-theworldaway

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@targaryen-dynasty @thought--bubble

The night King Aegon died, Dragonstone seemed to remember every death that had come before it.

The castle had never been a gentle place. It had been raised by Valyrians who thought stone should look like something that had screamed itself into permanence. Towers bent like black claws against the sky. Gargoyles watched the sea with frozen hunger. The walls sweated salt and old heat. Even in mourning, even under rain, the island did not soften. It crouched above the water with the patience of something older than grief, something that had watched kings come ashore with crowns in their hands and watched their bones leave in silence. You had been born beneath those towers, Princess Y/N Targaryen, daughter of Aegon the Conqueror and Rhaenys of the bright laugh and quick hands, sister to Aenys, blood of the dragon on both sides and still somehow treated like a delicate thing whenever men wanted your silence. It would have been funny, if it had not been so tiring.

Your father was dead.

That was the truth every candle tried and failed to soften. Aegon Targaryen, First of His Name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Shield of His People, Rider of Balerion, the man who had bent Westeros around the heat of his will, was gone. Not slain in battle. Not burned in dragonfire. Not dragged down by some heroic enemy with a song already forming around the corpse. He had died as men did, suddenly, obscenely, inside the body that had carried all that conquest. The Stranger had not cared for titles. The Stranger never did. Men built thrones and banners and lineages because they could not bear that little truth. Death came anyway, rude and unimpressed.

In the great hall, Aenys wore grief like a robe made for someone broader. Your brother sat beneath the carved dragons with the new crown near his hand rather than on his head, pale, shaken, gentle-eyed, already surrounded by lords speaking in careful voices. They called him Your Grace now, but they watched him as men watched thin ice beneath their boots. He thanked them. He listened. He nodded. He looked toward you once, helplessly, as if the two of you were children again and he had found himself lost in a corridor too dark for comfort. You had wanted to go to him. You had wanted to put your hand over his and remind him how to breathe. But the hall was full of men measuring weakness with the quiet industry of butchers checking the fat on a lamb.

So you had remained still.

That was one of the first lessons you had learned as Aegon’s daughter. Stillness could be a blade if held correctly. Your mother had taught you that before she died in Dorne, though she had never said it so grimly. Rhaenys had danced through rooms other people stalked through, but she missed nothing. She had known when to smile, when to cut, when to charm a man so thoroughly he thanked her after she opened his throat in public without spilling a drop of blood. You remembered her hands braiding your hair on a warm morning before she flew south. You remembered her perfume, orange blossom and smoke. You remembered Meraxes’s shadow swallowing the yard, and your mother laughing at some jest Aenys had made, her face turned toward the sun.

Then Dorne had eaten her.

After that, nobody spoke of softness in your presence without earning your contempt.

Visenya stood apart from the others in the hall, straight as a spear, black and silver, her lined face giving nothing away. She had not wept. You did not think she had forgotten how. You thought she considered tears a private language, and Visenya Targaryen did not give language freely to those who had not earned it. Her gaze rested on Aenys with a coldness that might have been judgment or might have been fear wearing armor. Beside her, half in shadow, stood Maegor.

Your half-brother had been a hard boy and had become a harder man. There were men who grew into their faces as they aged, and then there was Maegor, who seemed to have been carved for war before his cradle was built. He was broader than Aenys, taller than most lords, with shoulders made for mail and violence. His silver hair fell loose tonight, damp from the storm, and the dark tunic he wore made his eyes seem paler than usual. He did not fidget. He did not offer comfort. He did not pretend grief had turned him kind. The lords near him kept a careful distance, the way men avoided stepping too close to a chained beast even when assured the chain was strong. Sensible of them, really. A rare outbreak of intelligence in a royal hall.

Maegor’s gaze found you through the smoke and candlelight.

It did not ask if you mourned. It did not offer sympathy. It held you with the old, unspoken recognition that had existed between you since he had first been old enough to understand that you were not like the simpering girls presented at court, not like the pretty hostages dressed as companions, not like the ladies who lowered their eyes and called obedience virtue because some septon had told them fear was holiness. You had been Aegon’s daughter and Rhaenys’s shadow, smiling when you wished, silent when you chose, but never tame. Maegor had seen that before most. He had been a boy with a wooden sword and too much force in his hands. You had been older, already expected to behave like a princess, already bored of men telling you how princesses should breathe.

He had struck a training dummy so hard one morning that the post split.

“You will break every blade they give you,” you had told him then.

He had looked at you, sweat on his brow, fury in his mouth. “Then they should give me better blades.”

You had laughed. He had stared as if nobody had ever laughed at him without fear before. Perhaps nobody had.

That was years ago. Before Aenys’s marriage. Before Maegor’s disastrous match with Ceryse Hightower, that pale Oldtown offering laid at the feet of politics and the Faith like a lamb dressed in silk. Before the realm learned to whisper that Queen Visenya’s son had no heir and King Aenys’s children were too many, too fragile, too soft, too beloved by the wrong factions. Before your father’s body cooled and every lord in the hall began pretending loyalty had not already become arithmetic behind his eyes.

You left before the feast of mourning turned into a council by another name.

No one stopped you. A few glanced your way, but no man reached out. Even after all these years, even after marriage offers rejected, alliances proposed, bargains dressed up as concern, there remained something about you that reminded them of the mother you had lost. You were not Rhaenys. You lacked her easy brightness, the lightness with which she disarmed fools. Grief had made you more deliberate. Court had made you smoother. Watching men exploit Aenys’s kindness had made you cruel in small, useful ways. Still, you had her mouth, her eyes, and when you chose to smile, men remembered too late that Rhaenys Targaryen had conquered as surely as Visenya and Aegon had.

The corridors of Dragonstone were colder away from the hall. Torches hissed in iron brackets shaped like dragon jaws. Rain struck the narrow windows and ran down the glass in trembling lines. Somewhere below, the sea hurled itself against the cliffs with mindless devotion. You walked without escort, skirts whispering over black stone, your mourning gown heavy with dark embroidery worked in the shape of wings. Around your throat rested a ruby your father had given you when you were ten, too large for a child then, perfectly suited to a woman now. Aegon had fastened it himself and said you had your mother’s fire. You had believed him because children believed fathers before they learned fathers were men, and men, even great ones, were full of failures dressed as duty.

You reached the gallery overlooking the eastern yard and stopped.

Below, Balerion slept like a hill of darkness.

No, not slept. Rested. Waiting. There was a difference with dragons. The Black Dread lay coiled in the rain, vast beyond reason, his scales drinking what little moonlight escaped the clouds. Steam curled from his nostrils. Every breath moved through the yard like a bellows stirring a forge. He had carried your father across seven kingdoms. He had burned Harrenhal. He had made kings kneel. Now he lay riderless, and the world seemed wrong for it.

“He will not take Aenys.”

Maegor’s voice came from behind you.

You did not turn at once. “You sound certain.”

“I am.”

“Dragons are not swords, brother. They are not passed from hand to hand because men think inheritance should be tidy.”

“No,” Maegor said. His steps came closer, slow, measured, no jingle of ornament, no wasted sound. “They choose strength.”

You looked down at Balerion’s enormous head, at the closed eye larger than a shield. “And you think strength is always loud enough to be recognized.”

“I think weakness is always loud enough to be punished.”

There he was. No comfort, no false gentleness, no attempt to place flowers on a corpse and call that governance. You turned then, finding him only a few paces away. The torchlight carved his face into bronze and shadow. Maegor wore grief strangely, if he wore it at all. Not as sorrow. As insult. As if Aegon’s death had offended him by leaving too much unfinished.

“Aenys is king now,” you said.

Maegor’s mouth tightened. “Aenys is crowned. That is not always the same thing.”

“You should not say that where stones can hear.”

“These stones have heard worse.”

“They have,” you agreed. “Mostly from our family. A proud tradition of giving architecture trauma.”

His gaze moved over your face. There was no humor in him, not tonight, but something almost alive flickered behind his eyes when you spoke. Maegor did not laugh easily. You were not sure he laughed at all anymore. But he listened to you with a focus that had always felt more dangerous than affection from another man. Other men admired. Other men desired. Other men thought wanting you made them brave. Maegor looked at you as if he had long ago decided you were inevitable.

“You left him alone in there,” he said.

“Aenys is not alone. He has half the realm pressing its tongue to his boots.”

“He needed you.”

“He needed Father not to die.”

Maegor accepted that with a faint tilt of his head. “That too.”

You looked back toward the rain-streaked window. “I will speak with him when he can hear me. Not while lords crowd him, not while septons murmur about divine order, not while every man with land and vanity tries to carve a future from his shock.”

“He will listen to them before he listens to you.”

“Perhaps.”

“He loves you. That does not mean he understands you.”

The words landed too close to a truth you had spent years folding neatly and hiding beneath silk. Aenys loved you. He had loved you all his life with the open warmth that made people forgive him things they would have condemned in another king. As children, he had followed you through Dragonstone’s halls, coughing in winter, laughing in summer, asking questions until you threatened to feed him to the crabs. You had protected him from courtiers, from his own anxieties, from the knowledge that your father’s disappointment hurt him more because Aegon rarely needed to say it aloud. But Aenys wanted peace so badly that he often mistook appeasement for mercy. He wanted love from a realm built by flame. He wanted the Faith to bless what it had barely survived. He wanted lords to remember oaths when ambition smelled blood.

It terrified you how much you loved him. Love made women stupid in songs. In life, it made them tired.

“And you understand me?” you asked.

Maegor stepped closer. “Better than he does.”

“You understand what you want of me. Men often confuse the two.”

“I have never confused wanting you with anything else.”

There it was, finally spoken plainly enough to make the torches seem louder. The rain kept falling. Balerion breathed below. Somewhere deep in the castle, a door shut, voices faded, the machinery of succession grinding on because humans, being ridiculous little creatures, saw a dead king and immediately began arranging chairs around the corpse.

You held Maegor’s stare. “Careful.”

“No.”

The answer was immediate. Flat. Perfectly Maegor.

Your pulse changed, not quickening like a maiden startled by a kiss, but deepening, turning heavier. You were no maiden. No untouched ornament kept in a tower for bards to ruin with metaphors. You were a woman grown, a princess of House Targaryen, old enough to know desire from threat and foolishness from fate. You had known men’s eyes, their hands, their hunger carefully wrapped in compliments. None of them had unsettled you like Maegor because none of them had ever looked at you without trying to make himself smaller first.

“You have a wife,” you said.

“I have a Hightower bargain.”

“A wife,” you repeated.

“A barren one.”

The cruelty in it should have repelled you more than it did. Perhaps that was a sin. Perhaps that was blood. Perhaps the difference mattered only to septons and other professional cowards.

“Do not speak of her as if she chose the bargain more than you did.”

“I did not choose her.”

“No. Your mother chose ambition. Father chose peace. Oldtown chose influence. The Faith chose its own reflection and called it holy. Ceryse chose obedience because women are praised for swallowing knives politely.” You moved past him toward the next archway, needing air that did not taste so strongly of smoke and Maegor. “Do not pretend you were the only one chained.”

His hand closed around your wrist.

Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to stop.

You looked down at his fingers, then up at him. “Release me.”

For one moment, he did not. The pause was small, but it contained every brutal thing in him, every lesson Visenya had carved into her son, every instinct that told him possession was safer than pleading. Then his grip loosened. He did not step back.

“You think I would force you?” he asked, voice lower now.

“I think you would force the world if it stood where you wished to walk.”

“Yes.”

“At least you are honest.”

“Not with everyone.”

“No. With everyone else you are blunt. That is not the same as honest.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger. Interest, perhaps. Hunger wearing thought. “And with you?”

“With me, you are dangerous because you do not lie enough.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile, not quite. “You prefer liars?”

“I prefer men who know the difference between desire and destiny.”

“Destiny is a word weak men use when they want permission from the gods.”

“And desire?”

“Desire needs no permission.”

You should have left. Truly, you should have. There were a hundred sensible reasons, and the fact that you could name them all made it even more irritating that your feet remained planted on the stone. He was your half-brother. He was married. He was Visenya’s son, all iron where Aenys was silk, all appetite where other men had manners. The realm was shifting beneath you. Your father’s death had made every private choice political. Any fool could see that.

Unfortunately, fools were often less tempted.

“You came after me,” you said.

“I came to find you.”

“Why?”

“Because when they crown him, they will start killing him slowly.”

You did not answer.

Maegor’s voice roughened, not with softness, but with conviction. “Not with knives. Not at first. They will flatter him. Frighten him. Bleed him agreement by agreement until nothing remains but a king who signs what stronger men place before him. The Faith will smile and call it guidance. The lords will call it counsel. You will call it what it is.”

“Cowardice,” you said quietly.

“Predation.”

That made you look at him again.

He stepped nearer, and this time you did not move away. “You know it. You watched them tonight. You saw their eyes.”

“I saw them.”

“You know what must be done.”

“I know what you think must be done.”

“I know what Father knew when he burned Harrenhal.”

You felt anger flare then, clean enough to be useful. “Do not use my father’s name as a cloak for every violent thought in your head.”

“Our father,” Maegor said.

“Our father,” you allowed. “And he conquered, yes. He burned. He killed. He also stopped. You never learned that part.”

His face hardened. “Stopping gave the realm time to remember disobedience.”

“Stopping gave the realm time to become a realm instead of a graveyard.”

“And now?”

“Now Aenys is king.”

“Now Aenys is prey.”

The silence after that was uglier because it was not empty. It was full of things both of you knew and neither wanted to confess cleanly. Aenys was kind. Aenys was legitimate. Aenys was loved. Aenys was not made for a throne built from swords. The realm might survive him if the gods were unusually generous, but gods, as a rule, seemed to enjoy watching House Targaryen solve problems by becoming worse.

“You speak treason on the night of our father’s death,” you said.

“I speak truth on the night truth is needed.”

“You speak hunger.”

“For the throne?” he asked.

“For power. For war. For me.”

Maegor’s eyes dropped to your mouth.

There was the answer, honest as a wound.

“Yes,” he said.

The word went through you with more force than it should have. You had been desired before, but desire from Maegor was not a perfumed note, not a courtly song, not some knight’s trembling confession beneath a balcony. It was a door barred from the inside. A torch lowered toward oil. It was the knowledge that if you stepped closer, neither of you would pretend surprise when the fire took.

“You should go back to your wife,” you said.

“You do not want me to.”

“Do not tell me what I want.”

“I have watched you refuse every lord Father placed near you.”

“Most men become unbearable when encouraged. I was performing a public service.”

“I watched you smile at their gifts and leave them untouched.”

“They had poor taste.”

“I watched you look at me when you thought no one saw.”

Your breath caught before you could stop it. A small betrayal. Maegor saw it, because of course he did. Men like him survived by noticing where armor shifted.

“You were a boy when I first knew you,” you said, hating how unsteady the words felt beneath their composure.

“I am not a boy now.”

“No,” you said. “You are not.”

The storm pressed itself against the windows. The torches snapped. The castle seemed to lean inward, nosy old beast that it was, eager for another family disaster to add to its collection.

Maegor lifted his hand, slowly this time, giving you every chance to move away. You did not. His fingers touched the ruby at your throat, then the skin just above it. The contact was not gentle in the way singers praised gentleness. It was careful, which from him meant more. His thumb rested at the hollow beneath your jaw, feeling your pulse. Your body, treacherous thing, answered before your pride could organize a proper defense.

“You are trembling,” he said.

“I am angry.”

“You tremble when angry?”

“I tremble when I am deciding whether to strike.”

His gaze burned down into yours. “Then strike.”

You did.

Not with your hand. That would have been simpler, cleaner, and much less catastrophic. You caught the front of his tunic and pulled him down to you, and Maegor came willingly, mouth meeting yours with the violence of something long denied. The kiss was not sweet. Sweetness had no place there, not under those stones, not with your father dead and your brother newly crowned and the realm already sharpening its teeth. It was heat and grief and blood answering blood. His hand went to your waist, gripping through black silk. Yours slid into his hair, dragging him closer when he made a rough sound against your mouth.

You had imagined this before. Seven save you, you had. In idle moments, in angry ones, in the hollow hours after court when every lord’s face blurred into another and only Maegor remained vivid because he never begged to be liked. You had imagined his hands. His mouth. The weight of him. You had imagined telling him no and meaning it. You had imagined telling him yes and damning yourself with open eyes.

He backed you against the stone between two dragon-carved arches. The cold bit through your gown. He kissed your throat, not with courtly reverence but with a hunger that made your fingers tighten in his hair. You turned your face toward the ceiling, breathing hard, and saw one of the gargoyles staring down with its ugly stone mouth open. Typical Dragonstone. Even the masonry lacked decency.

“Maegor,” you said.

He stopped at once.

That, more than the hunger, nearly undid you. He lifted his head, his breathing rough, his hand still at your waist but no longer pulling.

“If you tell me to leave,” he said, “I will.”

You searched his face. You believed him. Not because he was harmless, not because he had suddenly become good, not because desire had purified anything. You believed him because his pride would survive denial better than begging. Because he would not want you like a conquered town. Because some part of him, buried deep beneath all that iron, knew you would rather throw yourself from the cliffs than be taken unwilling.

“And if I tell you to stay?” you asked.

His grip flexed once. “Then I stay.”

“With all that means?”

“With all that means.”

You should have asked what all meant to Maegor. A more cautious woman would have. A better woman, perhaps. But better women often ended up traded between houses while men congratulated themselves on peace. You were tired of caution being demanded from women so men could spend recklessness like coin.

You took his hand and led him from the gallery.

Neither of you spoke as you passed through the inner corridors toward your chambers. Speech would have made the choice smaller. Servants had withdrawn for the night, either out of mourning or survival instinct, and the few guards you passed lowered their eyes with impressive commitment to staying alive. Maegor walked beside you, not behind, not ahead. The restraint in him was visible only because you knew how little he possessed by nature. Each step seemed to pull something tighter between you.

Your rooms had once belonged to your mother.

Aenys had offered to have them changed after she died, but you refused. You had kept the carved screens she liked, the Myrish carpets, the painted chest with silver hinges, the old harp in the corner no one touched because nobody living played it as she had. You had changed the colors over the years, less gold, more deep red and black, less girlish brightness, more flame under ash. But Rhaenys remained in the bones of the chamber. Her laughter was gone, but sometimes at night, when the sea wind slipped through the shutters, you could almost imagine the echo of silk and music.

Maegor entered and looked around once.

“You think of her here,” he said.

“Always.”

“She would hate the hall tonight.”

“She would have smiled through it first.”

“And then?”

“Then someone would have discovered too late that her smile had teeth.”

He looked at you then with something close to approval. “You are like her.”

“No,” you said, walking to the table where wine waited untouched. “I am what was left after Dorne took her.”

Maegor was silent behind you.

You poured wine, drank, and let the burn settle your nerves. When you turned, he had not moved far from the door. That was almost amusing, in a bleak way. Maegor Targaryen, terror of yards and tourneys, standing in your chamber like a man awaiting sentence.

“Are you afraid?” you asked.

His jaw shifted. “No.”

“Liar.”

“I am afraid,” he said, as if forcing the words through his teeth, “that if I touch you again, I will not be able to forget the shape of you.”

The honesty stripped the mockery from your mouth.

You set the cup aside and went to him. The space between you disappeared slowly this time. No storm-driven collision, no grief disguised as fury. You reached for the clasp of his cloak and unfastened it. The heavy black fabric fell from his shoulders to the floor. He watched your hands as if they were doing something more dangerous than undressing him. Maybe they were. Armor could be replaced. This could not be put back into silence once named by touch.

“You speak as if forgetting was ever possible,” you said.

His hands found the laces at your back. “Not for me.”

“No. I know.”

He worked the ties loose with surprising patience. Men always liked to claim women’s clothing was mysterious when really they were simply impatient and undertrained. Maegor, at least, had the decency to treat the matter like a siege requiring skill rather than brute force. The gown loosened, heavy fabric sliding from your shoulders, pooling at your feet with all the quiet drama court ladies spent fortunes trying to achieve. Beneath it, your shift clung lightly to your body, thin enough that the room’s chill raised gooseflesh along your arms.

Maegor touched your shoulder. One finger first, then his whole hand, warm against your skin. His eyes moved over you with naked want, but not the shallow kind that made women feel consumed by stupidity. This was darker. Reverent, if reverence could have a blade in it.

“You look at me as if I am a crown,” you said.

His hand slid to your throat, not pressing, only holding. “No crown was ever worth this.”

You laughed once, breathlessly. “That is the sort of thing that ruins kingdoms.”

“Kingdoms ruin themselves. We only give them songs to blame.”

Then he kissed you again, and whatever clever answer you might have offered dissolved.

You undressed him with less patience than he had given your gown, tugging at fastenings, pushing fabric aside, needing the proof of him beneath the black severity he wore like a second skin. He was scarred in small places, marked by training yards and tourneys, by the ordinary violence of a man raised to believe pain was instruction. He was warm under your hands, alive in a way the mourning hall had not been. When your palms pressed to his chest, his breath changed. When your mouth touched the base of his throat, his hand clenched in your hair, then loosened at once, restraint snapping into place like a chain pulled tight.

“Do not be gentle because you think I might break,” you said.

His eyes darkened. “I have never thought you breakable.”

“Then do not handle me like glass.”

That was the last mercy you gave either of you.

He lifted you as if you weighed nothing, and you wrapped yourself around him with a gasp you would deny under oath if any god had the nerve to ask. He carried you to the bed that had belonged to your mother’s rooms but never, thank every sane power, to your mother’s marriage, since the royal household had always operated with enough separate chambers to let everyone pretend dignity survived dragon incest. He laid you down and followed, bracing himself above you, his hair falling around his face, his mouth swollen from yours. For one suspended moment, you saw him not as the realm saw him, not as Visenya’s weapon, not as Aenys’s dangerous brother, not as the man lords feared and septons would someday curse until their throats grew raw. You saw the boy who had split the practice post because no blade was strong enough. You saw the man he had become because nobody had taught him wanting did not always need to become conquest.

You touched his face.

He went still.

“Y/N,” he said, and your name in his mouth was not soft. It was worse. It was needed.

You drew him down.

The night took shape in heat and breath and the storm beating against the shutters. He learned you not like a courtier seeking praise, but like a warrior studying terrain he meant to remember in darkness. His hands were firm at your hips, your ribs, your thighs, never timid, never careless. Your body answered him with an honesty that pride could not polish into something respectable. When he entered you, slowly despite the strain in his arms, your nails bit into his shoulders and his forehead lowered to yours. The world narrowed to the ache of being opened, the rough sound he made when you pulled him closer, the old Valyrian curse he breathed against your mouth as if prayer and profanity had finally admitted they were cousins.

There was no innocence in it. No pretty lie that this was an accident born from grief. You moved with him because you wanted to. Because the realm had taken your mother, your father, your peace, your usefulness, and tried to leave you with only duty in exchange. Because Maegor was dangerous and you knew it. Because some part of you was dangerous too, and he had never made the mistake of pretending otherwise. He drove you upward until the bed ropes creaked, until your breath broke, until pleasure pulled the room apart and remade it in flashes of candlelight and skin. He watched your face when you came undone, jaw clenched, eyes fierce with something almost like pain. Then he followed you over, burying his face against your neck, his body shuddering with a loss of control so complete it felt more intimate than any vow.

Afterward, the storm sounded farther away.

Maegor remained over you for several breaths, heavy but not crushing, as if the act of moving might restore the world too quickly. You traced the line of his spine with your fingertips. He turned his head enough to look at you, and there was a vulnerability there so brief most would have missed it. You did not. You had been raised among dragons. You knew rare things when they appeared.

“You are quiet,” you said.

“I am thinking.”

“A tragedy for everyone nearby.”

His mouth twitched against your shoulder. There. Almost a laugh. Someone should have recorded it for the histories, since the maesters would otherwise insist such a thing was anatomically impossible.

He shifted to your side but kept one arm around you, possessive in the old way, as if his body had declared law before his mouth could draft it. You let him. For now.

“What are you thinking?” you asked.

“That I should have done this years ago.”

“You were young years ago.”

“So were you.”

“I was less foolish.”

“No,” he said. “You were better at hiding it.”

You turned your head to glare at him. “You are very bold for a man in my bed.”

“Our bed, tonight.”

“Do not get ambitious.”

“I am always ambitious.”

“Yes, I had noticed. Subtle as a dragon landing in a sept.”

He looked at the ceiling, then back to you. “Come with me when I return to King’s Landing.”

The warmth in you cooled by a careful degree. “There it is.”

“I do not want you left here with ghosts.”

“How touching. I was worried you had gone soft.”

“I want you where I can see who approaches you.”

“And there goes the touching part, murdered in infancy.”

His arm tightened. “Lords will come now. Suitors. Envoys. Men with sons. Men with brothers. Men who think Aenys can be persuaded to sell your hand for quiet.”

“Aenys would not sell me.”

“Aenys would persuade himself he was protecting you.”

That one struck, and Maegor knew it.

You sat up, taking the sheet with you, hair spilling over your shoulders. Candlelight moved over the ruby at your throat, still somehow in place, stubborn little thing. Maegor watched you with guarded intensity.

“You think I do not know?” you asked. “You think I have not heard the suggestions? A Baratheon cousin for Storm’s End. A Lannister for gold. A Hightower arrangement to soothe the Faith further, because one Hightower bride was not enough perfume poured over rot. Every man at court thinks a woman’s body is a bridge if he can convince himself the river matters.”

“I would kill any man who tried to take you.”

“Yes, Maegor. I know. That is not the reassuring declaration men seem to think it is.”

“It should be.”

“It really should not.”

His gaze hardened. “You would prefer I do nothing?”

“I would prefer men stop deciding possession is protection.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“And sometimes it is just a prettier cage.”

He sat up then, the sheet falling to his waist, his expression shutting piece by piece. You hated that you understood why. Maegor knew cages too. Not the same sort. Not silk, not smiles, not marriage contracts sealed with hymns. His cages had been expectation, comparison, Visenya’s hand on his shoulder, Aegon’s vast shadow, the realm whispering that he was too much and never enough. But pain did not absolve him. It only explained the shape of the weapon.

“I will not be hidden behind you,” you said. “Not as mistress. Not as shame. Not as some secret you visit between council meetings and your wife’s cold bed.”

“Ceryse means nothing.”

“She means something to the Faith. To Oldtown. To the realm. Do not insult me by pretending politics vanish because your cock is satisfied.”

His eyes flashed, but not with offense. If anything, the bluntness steadied him. Maegor had always preferred ugly truth to scented evasion.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

You looked toward the shutters. Beyond them, the sea was black and restless, and somewhere in the yard below, Balerion dreamed without a rider. “I want Aenys protected.”

“He will not accept protection from me.”

“Then make him accept usefulness.”

“He fears me.”

“Most people with a pulse fear you. Learn to work around this shocking inconvenience.”

Maegor’s mouth tightened again, that nearly-smile returning despite himself. “You ask me to serve him.”

“I ask you not to break him because you can.”

“He will break without me.”

“Then stand near enough that others think twice.”

“And when thinking twice is not enough?”

You turned back to him. “Then we will speak again.”

“We.”

“Yes,” you said. “We.”

That word changed the room more than the bedding, more than the storm, more than the evidence of what your bodies had done. Maegor heard it as you meant him to hear it. Not surrender. Not promise. Alliance.

He reached for you, but this time he only took your hand. His thumb moved once over your knuckles, rough and warm.

“You would make a hard queen,” he said.

You smiled faintly. “I was not aware we were discussing crowns.”

“I am always discussing crowns.”

“Exhausting man.”

“You would,” he insisted. “Hard, but not cruel without cause. Loved by those who remember Rhaenys. Feared by those clever enough to see Visenya in your spine.”

“I am not Visenya.”

“No. You are worse.”

You arched a brow.

His gaze held yours. “Visenya does not make men want to kneel. She makes them understand they should.”

The air shifted again, intimate in a different way. Dangerous, yes. But then, everything in your bloodline was dangerous. The trick was deciding whether danger served you or devoured you.

“You speak treason again,” you said.

“I speak prophecy.”

“Prophecy is what people call ambition when they want candles around it.”

“That sounds like something you would accuse me of saying.”

“You are a bad influence.”

“I have not begun to be.”

Despite yourself, you laughed. It surprised you, and him too. For a moment, grief loosened its grip enough to let something else breathe. Not happiness. That would have been too clean. But something warmer than despair, something living.

Then a knock sounded at the outer door.

Both of you went still.

The knock came again, tentative this time. “Princess?”

You recognized the voice. Elinda, one of your ladies, young, loyal, and inconveniently awake.

Maegor’s expression turned lethal.

You put a hand on his chest. “Do not murder my lady because she has timing fit for a mummer’s farce.”

“She should not be at your door.”

“It is my door. People do occasionally approach it. Civilization continues its tragic march.”

“Princess?” Elinda called again, more worried now. “Forgive me, but King Aenys asks for you.”

That changed everything.

You rose at once. Maegor caught your wrist, not restraining, only stopping you long enough for his gaze to search yours.

“He calls,” Maegor said.

“He is my brother.”

“So am I.”

“Yes,” you said, looking down at him. “That is the problem and the point.”

You pulled away and dressed without allowing your hands to shake. Maegor watched from the bed, silent as you stepped into a dark robe and belted it at the waist. The mirror showed your hair mussed, your lips bitten, your throat marked faintly where his mouth had been. You stared at yourself for one heartbeat too long, then took powder from the small silver dish on your table and softened what needed softening. Women had been repairing the visible consequences of men since the dawn of time. Another proud tradition.

When you turned, Maegor had risen and dressed enough for decency, though not enough to pass unnoticed by anyone with eyes and a working brain. Fortunately, most courts trained people out of both.

“You cannot come with me,” you said.

“I can.”

“You will not.”

His face darkened.

“Aenys asked for me,” you said. “Not for you. If you enter behind me now, half the castle will understand before morning, and the other half will invent something worse.”

“I do not fear rumor.”

“No. You only underestimate it because you prefer enemies with armor.”

He came toward you, stopping close enough that you could feel his heat through the robe. “This is not finished.”

“No,” you said. “It is not.”

“If he offers your hand to someone else, I will not stand idle.”

“If he offers my hand to someone else, I will refuse.”

“And if he commands?”

You looked at him then, really looked, letting him see Rhaenys in your face, Aegon in your blood, and something entirely your own beneath both. “Then he will learn I am not his to command in that.”

Maegor studied you for a long moment. Then he nodded once.

It was not submission. Maegor did not submit. It was recognition. That would do.

You opened the door only wide enough to step into the corridor. Elinda stood outside with a candle, pale and anxious. Her eyes flicked once past your shoulder before she stopped herself, which proved she was not stupid, merely doomed to serve in a family where private life was designed by dragonlords.

“Princess,” she said carefully.

“Say nothing,” you told her.

“I saw nothing.”

“Excellent. You may yet survive court.”

Her mouth trembled as if she nearly smiled, then she lowered her head. “His Grace is in the painted chamber. He dismissed most of the lords. He seemed distressed.”

Aenys distressed. Poor water, still wet.

You followed Elinda through the corridors, your body still carrying Maegor’s touch beneath the robe, your mind already armoring itself for your brother’s grief. By the time you reached the painted chamber, dawn had begun to pale the edges of the storm. The room smelled of wax, wet wool, and old maps. Aenys stood near the table where the Seven Kingdoms lay painted in careful colors, as if borders were not simply wounds men agreed to respect until greed made them forget.

He turned when you entered.

For one moment, he was not king. He was your brother, hollow-eyed, silver hair loose, hands trembling faintly at his sides. The crown sat on the table beside him. He looked afraid of it. Sensible man. Crowns had a long history of ruining the heads beneath them.

“Y/N,” he said.

You dismissed Elinda with a glance and went to him. Aenys reached for you, and you embraced him. He held on tightly, face pressed briefly against your shoulder, and the child he had been lived again in that gesture. Your heart hurt with sudden, savage tenderness.

“I cannot do this,” he whispered.

“You can.”

“No.” His voice broke. “No, do not say that because you think you must. Father was... Father was Father. He could silence a hall by breathing. Mother could make men love her while she took everything from them. Visenya frightens men into remembering their knees. Maegor frightens them into remembering their graves. And I...” He pulled back, shame in his eyes. “I make them comfortable.”

“You make them less afraid.”

“That is not enough.”

“No,” you said, because love did not require lying. “It is not enough by itself.”

He flinched, but he listened.

You took his hands. “You need counsel you trust, not flatterers. You need strength near you, even when it displeases you. You need to stop believing every man who kneels has yielded anything more than his knees.”

Aenys swallowed. “You sound like Visenya.”

“Then Visenya must occasionally be right. Horrifying, but survivable.”

A weak breath of laughter left him. Then his face sobered. “She wants Maegor named Hand.”

You had expected it and still felt the floor shift beneath the words.

“And what do you want?” you asked.

“I want peace.”

“Peace is not a man. It cannot serve as Hand.”

“Do you think I should name him?”

You thought of Maegor in your chamber, his hands on your skin, his voice saying prey. You thought of the lords in the hall. You thought of the Faith waiting in Oldtown, already calculating how far it could push a king eager to be blessed. You thought of Aenys, gentle and frightened, and Maegor, brutal and certain, and yourself between them like a bridge no one had built safely.

“I think,” you said slowly, “that if you keep him far from power, he will become a threat outside your reach. If you bring him close, he will be dangerous, but visible.”

Aenys stared at you. “That is not comforting.”

“No. It is advice. Comfort is usually less useful.”

He looked down at your hands. “Do you trust him?”

There were many answers. None clean. Trust was too simple a word for Maegor. You trusted him to be himself. You trusted his hunger, his pride, his violence, his refusal to bend without deciding how to break what pressed him. You trusted that he wanted you. You trusted that he would burn cities before admitting fear. You did not trust him with mercy. You did not trust him with Aenys’s softness. You did not trust him with a crown.

“I trust him to protect what he considers his,” you said.

Aenys looked up. “And does he consider this family his?”

You almost laughed, but the sound would have been cruel. “Yes. In his way.”

“That is what frightens me.”

“As it should.”

He turned away, pacing once around the painted table. “The Faith will oppose him. The lords may resent him. Ceryse’s kin will demand favor. Visenya will press. I can already hear them all. I can hear Father telling me to decide, and I do not know which choice ruins us more.”

You went to the table and touched the painted shape of the Blackwater. “Then do not decide tonight.”

“I must.”

“No. Men who want something from you will tell you urgency is duty. Sometimes it is merely theft.”

Aenys went still.

“You are king,” you said. “Let them wait. Let them wonder. Let Maegor wonder too.”

His brow furrowed. “You think delay is strength?”

“I think choosing when others demand haste reminds them the choice is yours.”

For the first time that night, Aenys looked at you not as a drowning man looks at shore, but as a king might look at counsel. It gave you hope. Naturally, hope in Westeros tended to behave like a candle in a rainstorm, but still, there it was.

“You should be Hand,” he said quietly.

You smiled. “The realm would choke.”

“I might enjoy watching that.”

“There is my brother.”

He smiled back, faint but real. Then his gaze softened. “Stay near me.”

“I will.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

He embraced you again, and over his shoulder, through the narrow window behind him, you saw the yard below. The storm had begun to break. In the gray before dawn, Balerion lifted his head.

And there, at the edge of the yard, stood Maegor.

He was too far away for you to see his expression clearly, but you knew he was looking up. Not at Aenys. Not at the crown. At you.

Balerion’s massive head turned toward him.

The world seemed to pause.

Aenys did not see it. His face was still pressed against your shoulder, his grief warm and human and painfully fragile in your arms. You held him, but your eyes remained on the yard as Maegor took one step closer to the Black Dread. The dragon’s nostrils flared. Steam poured white into the dawn. No guards shouted. No one moved. Even Dragonstone seemed to hold its breath, grotesque old pile of stone that it was, thrilled to witness another omen men would later pretend had been obvious.

Maegor stopped before Balerion.

The dragon lowered his head.

Not fully. Not submissively. Dragons did not bow, whatever singers claimed after enough wine. But the Black Dread lowered himself enough that Maegor could reach out and lay one hand against the dark scales of his snout.

Your heart struck once, hard.

Aenys pulled back, noticing your face. “What is it?”

You looked away from the window.

“Nothing,” you said.

A lie. A necessary one.

By midday, all Dragonstone knew.

Prince Maegor had approached Balerion and lived. More than lived. The Black Dread had accepted his hand, then his weight, then his command. At dawn, while King Aenys mourned and lords slept badly in borrowed chambers, Maegor Targaryen had mounted the greatest living dragon in the world. By afternoon, men spoke more softly when his name passed their lips. By evening, ravens were being drafted with trembling fingers.

Aenys took the news with a stillness that hurt to watch.

“He was Father’s dragon,” he said in your chambers later, voice thin.

“He was never only Father’s dragon.”

“No. I know.” Aenys sat near the window, the crown now on his head because you had told him if he feared it, he should wear it until the fear grew bored. He had laughed when you said it. Then he had put it on. Progress, apparently. “The lords will see meaning in it.”

“The lords see meaning in burnt bread if it helps their argument.”

“Y/N.”

“Yes. They will see meaning.”

“And you?”

You stood behind him, looking out at the sea. Far above, a dark shape moved through the clouds, too large to be any bird. Maegor had flown Balerion twice already. Once around Dragonstone. Once far enough that the island seemed smaller when he returned. Men had watched from the yard in silence, and Visenya had looked satisfied in a way that made your skin prickle.

“I see danger,” you said.

Aenys closed his eyes. “So do I.”

“But danger can be used.”

“That sounds like him.”

“It is mine.”

He opened his eyes and looked back at you, studying you more closely than you liked. “Did he speak to you last night?”

You kept your face calm. “Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“That you are prey if you insist on trusting wolves because they wag their tails.”

Aenys winced. “Charming.”

“You asked.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Many things. Your name. Stay. Prophecy. Not finished. No crown was ever worth this. Desire needs no permission. Dangerous things, each of them still alive beneath your skin.

“Yes,” you said. “But nothing you need carry tonight.”

Not through the halls this time. Subtlety, it seemed, had briefly visited him and found the accommodations poor but tolerable. He entered through the narrow passage behind your mother’s old solar, a private route built in Valyrian days, when families apparently expected betrayal often enough to include convenient architecture. You had known he would come. You had left the candles burning low and dismissed your ladies early. A stupid risk, perhaps. But grief had burned away your patience for pretending.

Aenys accepted that because he trusted you. The guilt of it sat beneath your breastbone like a small knife.

That night, Maegor came to you again.

He wore riding leathers, blackened by rain and smelling faintly of dragon, smoke, and storm air. His hair was wind-tangled. There was something different in him now, not softer, never that, but expanded. Balerion had not made Maegor more arrogant. He had made the arrogance seem justified, which was deeply inconvenient for everyone who preferred their dangerous men unsupported by cosmic symbolism.

“You rode him,” you said.

“I did.”

“And?”

His eyes found yours. “The sky is smaller than I thought.”

Trust Maegor to mount the largest dragon alive and insult the sky afterward.

“You will be unbearable now.”

“I was unbearable before.”

“At least you have self-knowledge.”

He crossed the room and took your face in his hands, kissing you with less desperation than the night before but more claim. You let him for three breaths, four, then pushed him back.

“We need to speak.”

“I dislike those words.”

“Most men do. They usually precede consequences.”

His hands remained at your waist. “Speak.”

“You cannot move against Aenys.”

His face closed. “If he endangers the realm...”

“No. Listen to me. You cannot move against him because I will not forgive you.”

That stopped him more effectively than any threat could have.

You continued before he could answer. “You think the realm needs force. Perhaps it does. You think Aenys needs steel near him. I agree. You think men are already circling him. They are. But if you become one more danger he must survive, then you are no better than the rest, only larger and louder.”

“I am not like the rest.”

“No. You are worse if you choose to be.”

His jaw worked. “You ask me to kneel.”

“I ask you to stand where your blood needs you.”

“To serve a weaker man.”

“To protect your brother.”

“He is your brother more than mine.”

“He is still yours.”

Maegor looked away, toward the hearth where the flames burned low and red. “He has always looked at me as if I were a blade left too close to a child.”

“Were you not?”

“Yes.”

The answer was so immediate, so coldly honest, that it hurt.

You stepped closer. “Then become something else.”

His laugh was quiet and unpleasant. “Men do not become something else because women ask nicely.”

“I have no intention of asking nicely.”

He looked at you again.

“You want me,” you said. “Not as a passing bedmate. Not as a secret. Not as comfort. You want me beside you in whatever future you keep imagining when you stare too long at crowns. Then hear me clearly. If you bring ruin down on Aenys for ambition alone, you lose me.”

For a moment, the room felt as if it had no air.

Maegor’s eyes were pale violence. “Do not threaten me with yourself.”

“It is the only threat you might heed.”

“You think I would let you go?”

“No,” you said. “I think I would leave anyway.”

The terrible thing was that he believed you. You saw it strike through him, saw the anger, the denial, the instinct to seize, the deeper knowledge that if he caged you he would destroy the very thing he wanted. Maegor could break doors. He could break men. He could not break you and keep you.

He turned from you, hands flexing at his sides. For several breaths, he said nothing. Outside, the sea pounded the rocks as if trying to get into the conversation. It would probably have offered better advice than half the council.

At last, Maegor said, “What would you have of me?”

The words were rough. Costly.

You went to him and stood at his back, not touching yet. “Take the office if he offers it. Refuse insult from lords, but do not create insult where none exists. Let the Faith expose its appetite before you feed it fire. Give Aenys victories he can survive. Give the realm reason to fear disobedience without making them pray for your absence.”

“And you?”

“I remain with Aenys.”

He turned sharply. “No.”

“Yes.”

“You belong at my side.”

“I belong where I choose.”

“At his side, you are surrounded by men who would use you.”

“At yours, I am surrounded by one.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek. “You think I use you?”

“I think you would, if I let love make me stupid.”

The word slipped out before you could dress it in something less dangerous.

Love.

Not affection. Not desire. Not blood answering blood. Love, that reckless little arsonist.

Maegor went very still.

You could have taken it back. You did not.

His voice changed when he spoke. “Do you?”

You swallowed. “Do not make me say it like some girl in a song.”

“I am not asking for a song.”

“No. You are asking for surrender.”

“I am asking for truth.”

You hated him a little then. For wanting it. For making you want to give it. For standing there like judgment in riding leather while your entire life rearranged itself around a word you had not planned to use.

“Yes,” you said. “Damn you.”

Maegor crossed the distance between you and kissed you with such force that your back struck the wall. His hand cradled the back of your head before impact could hurt, the other arm locking around your waist. The kiss was not triumphant. It was furious, almost desperate. You understood with a strange twist of tenderness that Maegor had expected loyalty, desire, fear, obedience from the world, but not this. Not love freely given with teeth still bared.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.

“I love you,” he said.

The words sounded unused. Dragged from somewhere deep and poorly lit.

“I know,” you whispered.

“I will not be parted from you.”

“You will, when we must be careful.”

“I hate careful.”

“Yes, that has been made painfully obvious to the realm.”

“I will not let them give you to another.”

“They will not.”

“If Aenys tries...”

“You will do nothing until I ask.”

His expression made clear that this instruction offended every natural law he recognized.

“Maegor.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “I will try.”

For him, that was practically a religious conversion. Alarming. Someone should inform the septons so they could panic in a more organized fashion.

You touched his mouth with your fingers. “That is enough tonight.”

His eyes opened. “Tonight.”

“Yes. Tonight.”

He kissed your fingers, then your palm, and the tenderness of it was so unexpected you almost pulled away. Not because you disliked it. Because tenderness from Maegor felt like finding a flower growing from a sword wound. Impossible. Unsettling. Too alive.

You did not speak again for a while.

The second time you took him to your bed, it was slower. No less hungry, no less forbidden, but less ruled by grief. He undressed you as if committing each motion to memory. You unfastened his leathers and pushed them from his shoulders, pressing your mouth to the places where riding straps had marked his skin. He said your name when your hands moved over him, low and strained, and you learned there was power in making a man like Maegor lose words. You liked it more than was wise.

He held you beneath him, then let you turn him onto his back when you pressed against his chest, his brows drawing together at the novelty of yielding even that much. You smiled down at him, hair falling around your face.

“Do not look so betrayed,” you said.

“I am considering whether I allow this.”

“You are in my bed. You allow many things here.”

His hands settled on your hips. “Only for you.”

“Good.”

You moved over him, taking him in slowly, watching his control fracture by degrees. It was a beautiful thing, in the way storms were beautiful from towers built too close to the sea. His grip tightened, but he let you set the pace. Let you bend, let you kiss him, let you draw those rough sounds from his throat until he sat up and wrapped you in his arms, unable to remain beneath you any longer without making a war of restraint. You laughed against his mouth, and he swallowed the sound like it belonged to him.

After, you slept.

Not for long. Dawn came gray and thin, spilling over your bed with no respect for ruin or revelation. Maegor woke before you but did not leave. When you opened your eyes, he was standing at the window, bare to the waist, looking out toward the yard where Balerion was no doubt terrorizing the local concept of scale.

“You should go,” you said, voice rough with sleep.

He looked back. “You say that often.”

“You ignore it often.”

“I am consistent.”

“You are impossible.”

He came back to the bed and sat beside you. For a moment, his hand rested on your hair with surprising care. “Aenys will name me Hand.”

“You sound certain.”

“He fears what happens if he does not.”

“He also hopes what happens if he does.”

Maegor considered that. “You gave him that hope.”

“Someone had to. The court was hardly overflowing with useful emotional labor.”

“I will stand beside him,” he said. “For now.”

You studied him. “And when for now ends?”

His gaze did not move from yours. “That depends on him. And you.”

There was no perfect answer in him. No promise that ambition would never curdle into violence, no lie that he would become gentle for your sake, no miraculous transformation to satisfy a septa’s moral lesson. Maegor was still Maegor. The dragon had not become a lamb because you had touched it. But he had listened. He had bent one inch where most men would have broken themselves pretending they had not heard.

In your family, that counted for more than it should. A sad little standard, really, but House Targaryen had never been known for emotional moderation.

You sat up and kissed him once. “Then we keep the realm alive one day at a time.”

“And if it refuses?”

You looked toward the window, where Balerion’s shadow moved across the yard like night remembering itself.

“Then we remind it why dragons were feared before they were crowned.”

Maegor smiled then.

Not kindly. Not safely.

By the time the bells rang for council, Prince Maegor Targaryen had left your chambers by the hidden passage, and Princess Y/N Targaryen entered the painted chamber dressed in black and red, hair braided with rubies, face calm enough to fool men who thought composure meant innocence. Aenys sat at the head of the table with the crown on his brow. Visenya stood at his right. Maegor entered last, wearing dark mail beneath his cloak, Blackfyre at his hip, and something newly terrible in his stillness.

But for you.

The lords quieted.

Aenys looked at you first.

You inclined your head.

Only then did he speak.

“My lords,” he said, voice not strong, not yet, but steadier than it had been the night before. “The realm mourns my father. So do I. But grief does not excuse disorder, nor will mourning be used as a cloak for ambition.”

Several men shifted, suddenly fascinated by the painted table.

Aenys continued, “I will take counsel. I will hear petitions. I will honor the laws and oaths that bind this realm. But let no man mistake kindness for surrender.”

Visenya’s eyes flicked toward you.

Maegor did not move.

You stood behind Aenys’s chair, hands folded, expression serene. Inside, your heart beat hard, but no one saw that. Let them see Rhaenys’s daughter. Let them see Aegon’s blood. Let them wonder how much of Visenya’s steel had found its way into you despite all their tidy assumptions about mothers and daughters and which women made which kinds of monsters.

Aenys drew a breath.

“I name my brother, Prince Maegor Targaryen, rider of Balerion, as Hand of the King.”

The chamber erupted.

Not loudly. These were high lords, after all, and high lords preferred to perform outrage through controlled coughing, meaningful silence, and the occasional strangled objection dressed as procedure. Lord Massey began to speak. A septon murmured something about consultation. A Bar Emmon cousin looked as if he had swallowed a fishbone. Visenya’s expression remained carved from satisfaction and old ice.

Maegor stepped forward.

The room quieted again.

He knelt before Aenys.

That was the moment they would remember. Not the objections. Not the murmurs. Not the political calculations breeding like rats behind every polished face. They would remember Maegor Targaryen, brutal and unbending, kneeling before his brother with Blackfyre at his side and Balerion waiting outside the walls.

“I accept,” Maegor said. “And I swear to defend your reign against all enemies.”

Aenys looked down at him. He knew, as you knew, that the oath was both shield and blade. But he placed his hand on Maegor’s shoulder.

“Rise, brother.”

Maegor rose.

His eyes found yours for one brief second.

No one else would have understood the look. Good. Let them be confused. It would give them something harmless to do with their time.

That evening, ravens flew from Dragonstone to the realm.

King Aenys had taken the crown. Prince Maegor had taken Balerion and the handship. Princess Y/N remained at court, beloved daughter of the lost Queen Rhaenys, trusted sister to the king, watched closely by the dowager queen and more closely still by every lord with ambition enough to fear a woman who stood too near power without asking permission.

The histories would write that this was the beginning of Aenys’s troubled reign.

They would write that Maegor’s rise began with Balerion.

They would write that Visenya’s influence darkened the court.

They would write many things, most of them incomplete, because maesters had a gift for missing women unless a war forced them to notice the blood on the floor.

They would not write of the storm. They would not write of your mother’s chambers. They would not write of Maegor’s hand at your throat without pressure, of his voice speaking love like a threat against his own nature, of your promise to abandon him if he devoured the brother you had sworn to protect. They would not write of the private bargain beneath the public oath.

But Dragonstone knew.

Dragonstone always knew.

As a lady-in-waiting to Lady Kiera of Tyrosh, you were the epitome of that harsh upbringing. Your dressed were never wrinkled, your hair was a masterpiece of braids and silk, and your voice never rose above a melodic, controlled murmur. You moved through the draughty halls like a ghost of perfection, carrying the weight of your family's honor on your narrow shoulders.

To you, duty was a religion. And that was precisely why you loathed Prince Daeron Targaryen.

He was the blot on the page. Known to the court as Daeron the Drunken, he was a prince who traded his dignity for the bottom of a wine flagon. You had watched him from afar for months — stumbling through the gardens, his eyes unfocused and glazed, his sandy brown hair matted with sweat. To you, he was an insult. He had been given the greatest gift in the world — the blood of the dragon — and he was throwing it away while you struggled every day just to keep your chin at the correct angle.

Every time you passed him in the Great Hall, you felt a surge of visceral disgust. You woul look at him with eyes as cold as the Wall, your spine so straight it looked ready to sharp. You saw the way his lips would curl in a defensive, bitter sneer when you glided past. You were the Perfect Lady, and he was the Royal Failure. You hated him because he was allowed to be broken, while you were forced to be a statue.

The night of the encounter began as many other. The air was thick with the scent of old incense and the damp salt of the sea. You had just finishe a grueling evening of service, reading Tyroshian poetry to Lady Kiera until your throat was dry. The moon was a silver bone in a sky of ink as you began the long walk back to your quarters.

The Red Keep at night was a different beast. The tapestries of ancient kings seemed to watch you with judgmental eyes, and the shadows stretched like grasping fingers. You walked with your candle held high, the flame steady — a reflection of your own discipline.

But as you turned the corner near the library, a sound broke the stillness. It wasn't the rhythmic clanking of a Gold Cloak's patrol. It was a ragged, wet gasp, followed by a frantic thumping, like a trapped bird beating its wings against a stone cage.

You stopped, the flickering candlelight casting long, distorted shadows against the masonry. In a deep, arched alcove, you saw a figure. At first, you though it was a beggar who had snuck past the gates, but the shimmer of a fine silk doublet — now stained and rumpled — gave him away.

It was Daeron.

But he wasn't drunk. Not tonight. He was slumped against the freezing stone, his head between his knees, his entire frame shaking with such violence that his heels were drumming a frantic rhythm against the floor.

Your first instinct was to turn away. The lady in you recoiled at the sight of such raw, unkempt emotion. Disgraceful, you thought. Another night of excess and shame. But as you turned to leave, a sound escaped him — a broken, high-pitched whimper of genuine, agonizing terror. It wasn't the sound of a drunkard; it was the sound of a man facing his own executioner in the dark.

"Prince Daeron?", you whispered, your voice trembling despite your best efforts to remain poised.

He didn't look up. "Go away", he choked out, his voice a jagged ruin. "Leave me to my madness, little saint. Go back to your nests of silk a propriety. You shouldn't be here. You'll get your skirts dusty".

Ignoring the voice of your mother in your head — the one that told you a lady never touches a man in the shadows — you knelt beside him. The ston floor was freezing, and you could feel the dust of centuries clinging to your fine skirts, but for the first time in your life, you didn't care.

"You are not well, My Prince", you said, reaching out a tentantive hand. The moment your fingers brushed his shoulder, he flinched as if you had touched him with a red-hot iron.

"I am never well!", he shouted, finally snapping his head up. His violet eyes were bloodshot, pupils blown wide with a primal terrifying panic. "How can I be well when the world is burning in my head? How can I be well when I see the end of us all before it even begins?".

He lunged forward, his fingers digging into your wrists with a strength born of desperation. His hands were like ice, yet he was sweating. "I saw it again. Just now. The moment I closed my eyes to rest. I saw a dragon, massive and black — so large its wings blotted out the sun. It lay dead in the mud, its heart stilled, its fire extinguished. And beside it...a knight. A common, wandering knight with no name, standint over the corpse of a god, watching the world turn to ash".

He began to hyperventilate, his chest heaving in jagged, uneven bursts. "It's coming. The doom of my house. I see the fire, I smell the copper of the blood, I feel the heat of the pyre. Every time the sun goes down, the dragons die, and I am the only one who has to stand watch at their funeral".

You stared at him, the candle light reflecting in the tears streaming down his face. You had heard the whispers of Dragon Dreams, the curse of the Targaryen bloodline, but you had awlays dismissed them as the dramatic excuses of an eccentric family. Looking at him now, seeing the raw, unadulterated horror in his eyes, you realized it wasn't a legend. It was a physical weight — a psychic burden that was crushing the soul out of him.

"This is...why you drink...", you whispered, the realization hitting you with the force of a physical blow. All those months of judgment, all those sneers of The Drunken Prince — they were all wrong.

"I drink to kill the dreams...", he laughed, a hollow, jagged sound that broke into a sob. "Wine is the only wall I can build. If I am drunk enough, the black dragon stays in the shadows. If I am sober...I am a prophet of the grave. Tell me, Lady of Duty...what is the 'honorable' path for a man who carries the weight of a thousand deaths in his mind?".

For the first time in your life, the armor of your upbringing shattered. Your parents had taught you how to act, how to speak, and how to represent your name. But they had never taught you what to do for a man who was drowning in a sea of time.

"I am sorry...", you said, and the words felt heavy and real. You reached out and, this time, he didn't pull away. You pulled his head to your shoulder, letting his forehead rest against the crook of your neck. "I judged you for your weakness, but I did not know the strength it took just to stand up every morning with that fire in your head".

Daeron let out a long, shuddering breath. He leaned into you, his hand clinging to your waist like a child afraid of the dark. The silence of the hallway swallowed you both. In that moment, the hierarchy of the court vanished. There was no prince, no lady-in-waiting — only two sould in the dark, one terrified and the other offering a anchor.

"Help me to my room...", he murmured against your skin. "Please. If the guards see me like this...if my father sees me...I cannot bear the look in their eyes. Not tonight".

The journey to his chambers was a tense, agonizing crawl. You supported his weight, his arm draped heavily over your shoulders. You could feel the heat of his body through his doublet, a stark constrast to the chilled air of the castle. Every time a shadow moved or a torch flickered, your heart leaped into your throat.

You passed a bust of Aegon the Conqueror, and for a moment, the stone eyes seemed to judge you for your shattered propriety. You were a Lady-in-Waiting, a woman whose reputation was her only currency. If you were caught now, your life as you knew it would be over. Yet, as you looked at Daeron's pale, sweat-slicked face, you realized you didn't care about the Perfect Lady anymore. She felt like a stranger, a doll made of wood and paint.

"Almost there", you whispered, your voice a soothing balm. "Just few more steps, Daeron. I have you".

His chambers were a chaotic reflection of a fractured mind. The hearth was a heap of grey ash, and the air smelled of old parchment and stale wine. Scattered across the desk were frantic sketches — dragons with broken wings, circles of fire, and names of kin crossed out in dark, aggressive ink. This was the laboratory of a man trying to solve a puzzle that had no solution.

You eased him onto the furs of his bed. The room was dark, so you moved to light a candle, but he caught your hand, his grip desperate.

"Don't leave", he pleaded. "The knight...he's waiting in the corners of the room. He's waiting for me to close my eyes so he can show me the end again".

"I'm not leaving", you promised.

You sat on the edges of the mattress, and without hesitation, he moved, curling up against you. He buried his face in your lap, his arms winding around your waist as if you were the only solid thing in a crumbling world.

You began to stroke his hair, the sandy brown strands feeling like a cool silk between your fingers. You began to speak, your voice a soft, rhythmic hum that filled the empty spaces of the room. You didn't talk of duty or kings; you told him of the Tyroshian coast, of the way the sun looked when it hit the sea, and of the quiet, mundane things of the world that didn't involve prophecies of fire.

"Why are you doing this?", he asked, his voice muffled by your skirts. "You've looked at me with such hate for so long. I thought you were made of marble".

"I thought I had to be", you confessed, your own voice cracking. "My parents...they taught me that any emotion was a crack in the foundation. I hated you because you were the person I was most afraid of becoming. I was afraid of losing control".

"Control is an illusion", Daeron whispered, his breathing finally beginning to slow. "We are all just leaves in a storm. But tonight...the storm feels a little further away".

As the hours ticked by, the castle grew even quieter. Your back began to ache, and the cold of the night seeped through the stone walls, but you didn't move. You watched his face soften in the dim light. The lines of terror that usually etched his brown began to smooth out, replaced by the peaceful mask of a man who had finally found a moment of silence.

You leaned down, pressing a chaste, soft kiss to his temple. "Sleep well, Daeron", you whispered. "The black dragon is gone. The knight has ridden away. There is only the wind against the stones and the warmth of this room. I am here. I am watching".

Every time he stirred or let out a soft, subconscious moan, you would tighten your hold, whispering sweet, nonsense words of comfort until his breathing leveled out again. You became his sentry, guarding the borders of his mind against the horror of the future.

As the first grey light of dawn began to creep through the heavy velvet curtains, you realized that your parents had been wrong about everything. Duty wasn't just about being a perfect statue for the world to admire. Sometimes, the highest, most sacred duty was to be the shield for a broken heart that had no one else to turn to.

You remained awake, curled around the sleeping prince as the sun began to rise over King's Landing. You were exhausted, your reputation was at risk, and your life would likely never be the same. But as you looked down at Daeron — peaceful, at last, in your arms — you knew that you had never been more perfect than you were in this messy, silent, and beautiful moment.