#asoif

I love Maekar so much, "stressed and grumpy mother" coded characters are one of my fav.

They pitied you.

You saw it in the way court ladies lowered their voices when you passed, in the sideways glances heavy with false sympathy. Such a sweet girl, they whispered behind jewelled fans. Too gentle for him. As if the gods themselves had been cruel, binding you to a man the realm knew only as fury given flesh.

Aerion Targaryen was legendary for his fiery temper and violent nature—a feral dragon with no leash, some called him. 

And to know you—the darling of the realm, the only daughter of Baelor Targaryen—was to mourn what they believed your fate to be. Married to your brute of a cousin, shackled to a monster. They spoke of you in hushed tones, wondering how long it would take before his temper turned fully upon you.

What they did not realize—what no one seemed to remember—was that you had grown up with him.

You knew Aerion’s temper better than most, if not everyone. You had seen it spark in boyhood, had learned the difference between fury born of pride and fury born of pain. You knew how to soothe him, yes—but more importantly, you knew why he burned.

And what they always forgot, in their eagerness to cast you as the lamb, was that you were a Targaryen as well.

Not a meek Tyrell rose to be crushed beneath dragonfire—but blood of the dragon, raised in its heat, fully capable of wielding it yourself.

Yet you played the part of a delicate flower exceedingly well.

Pious. Gentle. The very image of a proper lady. You chose needlework over steel, afternoons in the gardens over the clangour of the training yard with the giggling ladies who chose to admire the men with their bloodied knuckles and sharpened blades. You were content—so it seemed—to sit beneath the sun with pastries and warm tea, fingers weaving flower crowns as birdsong drifted through the air.

After his training, Aerion would often find you beneath the old Weirwood tree, as you rested against its pale bark carved in the grass, flowers gathered in your lap. Armour discarded, skin still warm with exertion, he would wander over and without prompting, he would lower himself beside you before laying his head against your thighs as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

Your fingers never faltered.

You would place the finished crown upon his silver head, blossoms resting against pale hair, before threading your hand through the short strands at his nape. The fury that followed him everywhere else eased beneath your touch. His breathing slowed. His temper, soothed into something quiet and dangerous only in potential.

“One day,” you murmured softly, voice meant for him alone, “you will wear the conqueror’s crown.”

His eyes lazily opened to meet yours, before softening. Calloused fingers reached up, gentler than any would have believed possible, brushing your cheek as though committing the feel of you to memory.

“One day,” he said vowed, “you will be my queen.”

It was in moments such as these—when no eyes were there to watch—that Aerion allowed his guard to fall. All dragons required their treasure and you were his.

There would never be another worthy of you.

Any lord who expressed their desire to marry you were dealt with swiftly and brutally, often leaving a bloodied mess. 

All the while you said nothing and offered no protest content to let them believe you were fragile as spun glass. A lamb wed, with no choice, to a beast.

At feasts, you were most often seen seated quietly at his side. You listened more than you spoke, offering soft smiles, polite courtesies, and gentle bows of your head when addressed. Your voice was rarely raised above a murmur.

When you and Aerion spoke, it was in low, private tones, words breathed into one another’s ears. Many mistook it for control—for a husband keeping his timid wife close and carefully managed.

They never saw your fingers intertwined beneath the table.

They never noticed the slow stroke of his thumb against your skin, nor the way he leaned ever so slightly toward you, gazing at his most precious treasure with a look few would have believed him capable of—a look of love.

Aerion Targaryen loved you.

For all his many faults, it was the one truth you would never deny. Those who doubted it simply had never seen what happened behind the doors of your chambers.

Tonight, for instance.

Aerion stormed in long after the sun had sunk beneath the horizon. His temper was apparent even in his silence, you could see it through his body with how tight his jaw was clenched and how tense his shoulders were. 

Through the mirror, you watched him.

Your fingers were steady as you removed the last of your jewelry, placing each piece carefully upon the vanity. Behind you, Aerion said nothing at first. He only tore the gloves from his hands and flung them aside with a force that echoed softly against the chamber walls.

You didn’t even flinch and instead calmly rose from your seat, making your way over to him.

“My love,” you said gently. 

His jaw was clenched so tightly you feared his teeth might crack.

“Another lord with too much wine and too little sense,” he snarled at last, the words scraped raw from his throat. “They dance on the line of treason and call it wit.”

His pacing was restless, a predator caged in silk. One hand dragged through his pale hair, fingers flexing as though already imagining a throat beneath them. The firelight caught along his profile, sharpening him into something dangerous and divine all at once.

“They forget themselves,” he continued, voice low and coiled. “They forget who I am.”

You reached him before the fire, your hands warm as they slid over his shoulders. “You needn’t concern yourself with them,” you murmured, thumbs pressing slow circles into the knotted muscle there. “Not when you are blood of the dragon. Leave the sheep to their bleating.”

His breath left him in a slow, heated exhale, tension shifting beneath your touch but not yet gone. “They grow bold,” he muttered. “Too bold. A few cups of wine and they think themselves clever enough to test me.”

Aerion’s hands came to rest at your waist. “Lord Wylde thinks my place is behind my brother,” he said, voice rough with restrained fury. “Spoke of rightful lines and order… as though I am meant to bow my head and be grateful for scraps.”

Your fingers moved from his shoulders to his neck, slow and steady, feeling the frantic pulse beneath warm skin.

“And what did you do?” you asked gently.

A humourless smile touched his mouth. “Nothing… yet.”

He would not—not while his father still watched from the high seat, weighing sons and measuring heirs. Aerion knew the value of restraint in public. A prince must wear composure like armour.

But he never forgot a slight.

“Good,” you whispered, brushing your thumb along his jaw until his gaze lowered fully to you. “Let him think the matter rests. Let him believe he is safe… for now.”

Aerion studied you for a long moment, something dark and knowing passing through his eyes. “Tomorrow,” he said quietly.

You nodded once. “Tomorrow,” you agreed. “He will be on his knees, repenting for his words.”

And tomorrow, someone would learn what it meant to mistake a dragon’s patience for mercy.

His breath shuddered, just once. No one ever noticed how quickly his anger softened for you—how your voice, your touch, could pull him back from the edge where others only ever saw him burn.

You guided him to sit and slipped his cloak from his shoulders, the heavy fabric pooling soundlessly at his feet. Your fingers moved through his pale hair with quiet reverence, as if he were something precious rather than feared.

“They provoke you because they envy you,” you whispered. “Because they know you are stronger.”

His shoulders finally eased beneath your hands. His eyes closed, dark lashes stark against pale skin.

“You always know what to say,” he muttered.

You smiled, pressing a soft kiss to his temple. “That is what wives are for.”

Your fingers traced gently down his neck, soothing the last of the tension from him. “Come,” you murmured, voice warm and low. “Let the water wash the day from you. You’ve carried enough of their filth already.”

You called for the servants and had the bath drawn, ensuring the water was hot enough that any ordinary person would have recoiled from it—but for the two of you, it was just right.

Steam curled thick in the air, scented with oils and crushed herbs steeping in the water. Firelight shimmered across the surface, golden ripples dancing against stone as waves of heat rolled outward.

You dipped your fingers in to test it, nodding faintly in approval.

“Leave us,” you said when one of the servants reached for a cloth to begin tending to him. Your tone was gentle, but firm. You would care for your husband yourself tonight.

They bowed at once and withdrew, the heavy door closing with a muted thud that left only the crackle of the hearth and the soft lap of water against the bath’s edge.

A small smile curved Aerion’s mouth as he watched you through hooded lids. It was always a rare indulgence when you chose to tend to him yourself.

You stepped back to him, fingers moving to the clasps of his tunic. He did not speak, but his eyes never left your face, the earlier storm in them now banked to embers.

“Sit,” you murmured.

He obeyed without hesitation, lowering himself to the edge of the bath as you knelt before him, hands steady as you helped him out of the last of his clothing. There was no shame between you two— only familiarity and trust.

When at last you guided him into the water, he exhaled deeply, tension easing from him in a way no words ever could. The heat embraced him, steam curling around his shoulders as the day’s strain began to melt from his frame.

You slipped out of your nightdress, letting the fabric fall in a soft whisper to the ground, and stepped into the bath under his quiet, appreciative gaze. The water embraced you at once as you moved behind him, settling so his back rested against you.

Your hands moved to his shoulders, dipping a cloth into the water before drawing it slowly over his skin. 

Aerion’s head tipped back slightly, eyes closing as your fingers worked along the tight lines of muscle at his neck. Your lips brushed a feather-light kiss against damp skin, and he hummed low in his throat.

“Careful, wife,” he murmured, voice roughened by heat and the slow unwinding of tension. “You’re making it difficult to remember why I was angry.”

Your smile ghosted against his skin, unseen but felt. “Then let it be forgotten,” you replied softly.

Your hands continued their unhurried path, tending to him with quiet devotion, washing away the day’s dust and the weight of swallowed fury. Aerion’s hand found your thigh beneath the water, his thumb tracing slow, absent patterns against your skin as he relaxed further into your touch.

For a while, there was only the sound of water shifting gently around you and the steady rhythm of his breathing.

Then his grip tightened.

In one smooth movement, he turned, drawing you with him, guiding you onto his lap. The water stirred, heat rippling between you as his arms came around your waist.

“My sweet wife,” he murmured, voice low and warm, the earlier storm now long faded. “How gently you care for me.”

You leaned down, your lips finding his.

Where your touch had been gentle, his answer was not. The kiss deepened, hungry and demanding and you only submitted to his need. His hands tightened at your hips as he pressed you down against his length. 

Your mouth dropped open as a shuddering breath escaped your lips while he slowly filled you. Hs lips left yours, trailing warmth along your jaw and down the curve of your neck before finding your nipple. His hot mouth closed around the nub, gently suckling, and you let out a whine as your hips shifted, chasing the pleasure that was offered but not yet enough.

Your body jerked as he bit down gently before soothing the sting with his tongue. “Patience, my heart.”

With his grip preventing your hips from moving, you had no choice but to accept what he gave you. Your core clenched down around his cock, fluttering in need of more friction, but he refused, taking his time, alternating between your breasts as he lavished them with attention.

“Please, Aerion,” you pleaded.

He smirked, one hand moving from your hip and trailing closer to your core, the slow tease earning another desperate whine from you. His fingers finally found your clit, and your lashes fluttered as he began drawing slow circles.

“Is this what you needed, my love?” he murmured, voice low and warm against your skin.

You nodded, breath unsteady, fingers tightening, nails digging into his shoulder and leaving bright red lines against his pale skin. “More… please.”

You leaned forward, lips meeting his, your teeth sinking into his bottom lip and earning a sharp hiss from him. You smirked as you felt his grip tighten, his restraint fraying. You clenched down on him again, and he snapped—grabbing you and hauling you off his lap, turning you and before you could react to the sudden emptiness. He pushed your upper body against the lip of the tub before driving into you roughly.

One hand gathered your hair into his fist, sharply pulling your head back and forcing your spine to arch as he continued his relentless pace.

“Is this what you needed?” he crooned. “To be treated as if you were my whore?” he grunted, hips snapping sharply with each word.

You could only whine, mouth open as your fingers braced tightly against the bath’s edge. The cooling water sloshed over the sides, spilling onto the floor in wide puddles, but neither of you paid it any mind.

Pleasure and pain were offered to you in equal measure, a heady combination that left your mind foggy and focused only on your husband.

His fingers strummed against your clit faster, and you felt yourself tighten against him. He groaned, his thrusts growing sloppier as his control slipped away. His fingers pinched down, and you finally unraveled with a scream, your body shuddering as waves of pleasure crashed through you.

Aerion followed moments later, a breathless grunt falling from his lips as he spent himself deep inside you. He gave a few more thrusts, prolonging the sensation, before finally stilling, his forehead dropping briefly against your back as the last of his strength gave way to the aftermath.

For a long moment, neither of you moved—only the sound of shared breathing and the soft crackle of the fire filled the chamber.

“One of these days,” he murmured hoarsely, still catching his breath “your belly will swell with my child.”

You answered with nothing more than a quiet, breathless hum, too content to form words.

After a few lingering moments, Aerion shifted, withdrawing carefully. A small whimper slipped from your lips at the sudden emptiness. He rose from the bath first, then slipped his arms around you, lifting you with effortless strength from the now-cooled water.

Cradled against his chest, you let your head rest against his shoulder as he carried you across the chamber. Water droplets clung faintly to your skin as he laid you gently upon the bed, the furs soft beneath you. He joined you moments later, pulling you close as the firelight flickered over tangled sheets and tired limbs.

You stayed with him until the fire burned low and his breathing evened, his head resting against your shoulder like a great, slumbering beast temporarily tamed. When you were certain sleep had claimed him, you eased yourself free with careful patience, pulling the furs up around his broad frame.

Then you rose, calmly slipping on a robe to cover yourself. The sweetness drained from your expression as swiftly as a candle snuffed between fingers.

Moving soundlessly, you crossed to the door and slipped into the corridor beyond, where a guard in your service stood watch. He straightened at once and dipping his head.

“Princess.”

“Find Lord Wylde,” you said quietly. “The one who insulted my husband tonight. And send word to our friends in the city,” you continued. “I want to know who he owes money to, who his heir beds in secret, and which of his bannermen grumble behind his back. Anything and everything about his dirty little secrets.”

The guard bowed his head again. “At once, Princess.”

With that, you slipped back into your chambers and moved to your desk. Sitting down, you unfolded a fresh piece of parchment. Your hand was steady as you wrote. Unlike your husband, you were not one to raise your voice or rage.

Your ruthlessness did not require noise.

By morning, Lord Wylde would be given a choice: comply quietly, publicly repent his insults, or watch his name unravel piece by piece until nothing remained but ashes and shame.

You glanced back toward the bed, where Aerion slept peacefully, untroubled.

They believed you endured his temper.

The truth was far more dangerous.

Aerion burned the world when provoked—

but you were the one who decided who would be reduced to ash.

“Good morning.” You whisper, dipping your fingers under the silk sheets to trail through his silver hair. The heat of Aerion’s mouth trailing against the tender skin of your inner thighs was a familiar one; you did not need to open your eyes to know it was your husband. 

“Took you long enough.” The vibration of his voice,  thick with the remnants of sleep and lust, sent a shiver down your spine. His teeth nip against your skin as his wet kisses trail higher. “Feeling lazy today, are we?”

“Shut up.” Your voice comes out breathy as his fingers tighten around your thighs, spreading them a little wider as he worked his teeth, lips and tongue over the already hickey-painted skin, placing fresh dark marks over the faded ones. 

“Feisty this morning, wife.” Aerion’s fingers travel up your thighs, scratching and squeezing as they go before settling on your soft hips. “I’ll make you regret that insolence.”

Before you can even think of a retort, he teasingly ghosts his lips over your already slick-heat, making you gasp. It was only a whisper of a touch, yet it drove you crazy, and the worst, most infuriating part? He knew it.

“Open your eyes,” His silky voice demands as he squeezes your hips. “I want you to look at me.”

Your hips roll instinctively towards the familiar allure of his lips. He would not ask a second time. He never asks a second time. Your eyes flutter open, blinking against the soft morning light…and your breath catches in your throat.

You had seen him like this almost every morning of your marriage, yet the sight never failed to make you squirm. Aerion's usual perfect silver hair was a mess from sleep, his pale cheeks flushed, and his lips were swollen from kisses as he lay between your legs, basking in the golden rays of light. Yet it was his eyes that made your fingers clutch the sheets just a little tighter.  They bore into yours; the usual violet was almost completely blackened with want as he stared up at you, challenging you to look away. You never did. 

“Good.” It was a simple praise, but from Aerion? It made your chest swell. You watched him gaze up at you for a few more achingly long moments. “You look pretty like this.” He whispers, before finally slipping his tongue against your heat in a slow, teasing drag.

“Fuck.” You gasp, hips jerking foward but his grip tightened, forcing you still.

“...Taste pretty too.” Aerion murmurs, drawing his tongue back into his mouth for a moment to savour your taste with a satisfied groan. It was sinful, the sight alone of him dipping his tongue back against you, licking and sucking as he stared up from between your thighs, could undo you.

It did not take long for Aerion to lose interest in teasing; he was not a patient man after all. Your hips struggled against his firm grip, needy and desperate as his lips planted hot, sloppy kisses against your heat. 

“Eyes. On. Me.” He growled, wrapping his lips around that sensitive little bundle of nerves that he just knew drove you crazy. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think; the only thing you could do was bite back a stream of curses that threatened to fall from your lips and try your best to keep your hips still for him.

A familiar ache tightened in your lower stomach, like an ever-burning and desperate heat as he flicked his tongue against you.  You whimper, propping yourself on your elbows as you look down at your husband make a mess of you with his lips. Your breath hitches as he dips his silver head lower, teasing your needy entrance with his hot tongue…before slipping inside. 

Immediately, your head falls back, and a cascade of gasps escapes your lips as you feel him drag inside you, slipping in and out in the most languid way, forcing your hips to chase him. Aerion's thumb pressed against your bundle of nerves again, rubbing in slow circles, guiding your pleasure closer as he fucked you with his tongue. The tension in your lower stomach tightened further, and you could feel your climax begin to build. When your moans of pleasure hit a new volume, and your hips began stuttering against his tongue, he knew you were close.

Just when you were going to come undone, Aerion abruptly withdrew his lips and tongue, pulling a needy whine from your lips as your hips buck, searching for him. A grin danced on your husband's lips, which now glistened with your wetness, as he watched you writhe and jerk in need of his touch. 

“Cruel.” You frustratedly choke out, the ache between your legs making you whimper, desperate to finish. 

“That I am, dear wife.” Aerion slowly licks your slick from his lips with a low hum. “But I did warn you, you would regret your insolence.”

--

“I finished,” said Aegon, swinging his legs off the chair. His face showed little certainty, when he kept glaring at his own notes like they personally offended him.

“Show it to me.”

The bones in your back cracked painfully, as you moved to sit up in the bed. It annoyed you over comprehension – the weakness overtaking you, making you feel like a rugged doll. You imagined being punched till unconsciousness to be a similar experience, except your state dragged on for two days now.

Your insides ached for some movement, for straightening your body, but whenever you tried to stand up your head spun and limbs refused to serve you.

You made yourself as comfortable as you could and waved for the boy to pass you his book and papers. You looked away from the reading after seeing a few sentences, to send him a little smile. Once again he was being harsh in his judgment. The writing wasn’t perfect, it certainly wasn’t passionate or without mistakes, but it was enough for the prince to be proud of himself. You definitely were.

Aegon was a child smart over his years, but that didn’t mean he was fond of doing geography assignments. It was enough that he ran away from his maester, probably when the poor man closed his eyes for a mere moment. You bet he panicked when the little prince was gone, while he was supposed to be doing the writing…

Your heart swelled when you saw his little head peak from the door this morning. “How are you feeling?” He asked quietly. 

The closed drapes and dim light in the room told him everything about your possible headache, and considerable as he was, he didn't wish to make it worse.

You welcomed him inside, but with a warning that he shouldn't come too close. You appreciated the boy’s concern a lot.

It was sweet but heartbreaking, seeing the way he looked at you when he thought you didn’t see –  not a look of a prince, a carefully educated Targaryen, but just a boy who lost his mother far too early. 

Aegon adored you, and if you only didn’t battle the awful sickness, you would gladly gather him in your arms like you often did. He liked to be treated seriously, approached like a reasonable child, but you knew he sometimes needed the assurance, the closeness and promises that everything would be fine. Especially, when he made that sad face, like he was truly concerned for your fate.

You saw it a lot on him today, and you cursed your own condition. It was hard to keep him away, but you knew infecting him would be much worse.

“It is a splendid work, Aegon.”

You didn't mind that he tried to lie to you about his supposed free time. He couldn't fool you, but you didn’t pry, and suggested that he should do his job anyway, just here, by your side. You called the servant to move the hangings a bit, so he could read in proper light.

It seemed like he could always find his way to you. You imagined your tray always full  of sweets had something to do with it – a tray that was prepared just for him, but you wanted him to remain unaware.

When you hummed in recognition while reading, he started to climb up the bed to sit next to you, and it broke your heart to stop him. “Egg, carefully! I won't forgive myself if…”

“I know.” He nodded and obediently stood a few steps back. You smiled at him weakly. “Well, if I caught it too, I could at least keep you company…”

“Oh, yes, and avoid lessons, hm?” You offered.

“Maybe… if I had a bad temperature?”

“You're a smart boy, you mustn’t waste it, my dear,” you reminded, and he only shrugged. “You are finding ways to avoid them anyway, look at you here!”

You were pretty glad of that – not as much as Maekar, though – that except being better than his brothers in books, Aegon could also find his way around the court. He could avoid events, and find events when he wanted. He wasn’t easy to fool, and remained polite while still having a bone of inducibility in him.

“You won't tell anyone?” He asked in hope.

“Of course, I won't tell anyone. Who do you think I am, Egg?”

He answered you with a bright smile and took the checked paper from you.

“Do you think the maester will forgive me? It wasn’t nice to leave him without a word…”

“He will have to. You completed your assignment, after all!”

“Because you forced me,” he pointed out, and you laughed weakly.

“Well, he doesn’t need to know that, yes?”

A soft knock interrupted your peace, and the prince instinctively tucked his papers behind his back. You ordered the person to come inside, and soon your caretaker bowed his head. The maester’s age was not impressive, you would even say that he was a young man, but his skills in healing deserved all praises. You knew his story – he gained most of his knowledge by assisting the people who tended to the king, and was now assigned to other Targaryens.

In these past few days you grew to appreciate his abilities, but they weren’t making him any more approachable. He was not indifferent, not openly rude – your lord husband wouldn’t allow you to keep such a man close – but his remarks were always haughty.

“Your grace,” he said proudly, while putting down his apparatus that – you hoped – he only carried around for the effect, and wasn’t going to use them on you.

Then his eyes twitched, when he noticed the boy standing close to your bed.

“Oh, little prince Aegon! Your maester was looking for you, boy. The poor man is out of his mind worrying,” he muttered in a scolding voice that you didn’t like at all.

Egg merely shrugged his shoulders, not very worried about a man like that. You waved your hand at the maester to let him know he should leave the matter.

“I asked prince Aegon to sit with me, since he was done with his assignment and the maester decided it's a good moment for a nap,” you said barefacedly, betraying signs of made up annoyance.

Aegon looked down to hide the smile when you winked at him. 

“Oh, that is quite unacceptable of him…” he hummed, like any of that truly interested him. You knew it didn’t, but he wasn’t blunt enough to clap his hands and turn to your health just yet.

It wasn’t long, though.

“Are you feeling better, your grace?”

“I’m alive. That would be it,” you mumbled, knowing that he will force you to elaborate anyway.

But he put his attention on Aegon first. He gestured at him like he was not even a common boy, but a dirty little beggar under his feet. Truth be told, if that’s how he treated a prince, you really didn’t want to know how he approached the poorest of sick people. You would pray that they never have to face him…

“Alright, my prince. Leave now, we have no use for your presence.”

Aegon looked at you with confusion on his face. He was not used to being spoken to that way, and even if it didn’t offend him really, it clearly caught him off guard.

“It is alright, Egg. Go and enjoy the rest of your day,” you added quickly, to make sure he won’t make that sad face again, which would make you throw the maester out and sentence him for two days in stocks. “Oh, and apologize to the maester in my name.”

“I will,” Aegon promised, while disappearing from the chamber.

He left heavy silence after him, which clearly remained unnoticed by the maester. He rearranged his things, and looked at the notes about your health again.

“So… the temperature is what worries me, my princess. I will check if  you’re burning again,” he had the decency to warn you, before he stepped closer, and you had the chance to catch his hand.

He opened his eyes in shock, but was calmed by your peaceful face.

“The prince doesn’t deserve harshness like the one you showed him,” you said firmly, despite keeping your composure. It was just a wish, a piece of advice to direct him.

“I… I worried that he will exhaust you, my princess. You should save your strength now, and not waste it on the boy’s nonsenses."

“The prince is far from saying any nonsense, and you must know that I find his company very calming. Thank you for your concern.”

He bowed, as if to sooth your irritation. “It is my job, your grace.”

He made sure to check how you are feeling, made new reports of your state, and mixed some of his herbs.

The whole arrangement was taking awfully long – just like the sickness – and you started to get bored. Being tied to a bed was far from your dreams, and a terrible company of the maester only made it less bearable.

All you wished for now was that your husband would finally find a moment of freedom to come see you. You didn’t know how powerful your unspoken wish was.

“So how is the court?” You broke the silence, tired of only hearing your own stertorous breath. “I hope I didn’t burden the prince too much with the duties I had to leave on him.”

The man looked up from his job, like he was offended that you dared to interrupt him. You could see when he forced himself to remain calm, and turned to the book again.

“My princess, you shouldn't doubt your husband,” he said firmly, with superiority.

It boiled your blood, truly. Not only did he spoke to Aegon like he held very little respect for him, due to his age, but he also now lectured you.

“I don't doubt him, you cunt,” you spat, surprising yourself.

Normally you wouldn’t be so quick to jump into anger, but today your weariness dragged you into this irritable, unstable state. Also, Maekar’s company wasn't a good influence in the matter of keeping your patience on a leash.

You watched the man’s shocked expression with a frown, and in the corner of your eyes you saw the door open again. To your mild entertainment and satisfaction – the maester didn’t, and kept staring at you like you had slapped him.

Just then Maekar grunted, not really sure what he stepped into. All he knew was that he heard your heated remark. He had to fight his own smirk, since he would make him look too approachable. He didn’t want that. Especially with that sorry fucking excuse of a monk nearby, currently by your bed.

The maester rolled his eyes, and made an assumption dangerous for his safety.

“Aegon, I told you not to–”

The words died on his tongue, when he saw the boy’s father instead. He closed the door after him quite firmly, and took a few steps closer. It was funny to watch; he looked like a hunting animal who took pride from circling its surrounded prey. 

“Prince Maekar! I apologize for the mistake…” The maester bowed his head low, but that was not enough for Maekar.

The king’s youngest son nodded, like he only confirmed his thoughts. He didn’t look you in the eyes just yet, and if he intended to play with the maester, you expected he would not do that for a while.

“A mistake is forgivable. Speaking about a prince with no respect, less so.” He stepped closer, until the younger man backed off into a wooden dresser, and gulped visibly. “He might be an unruly child, but to you, he is a grandson of the king.”

“Of course, your grace…”

Suddenly your entertainment was spoiled by a terrible headache hitting you.

“The same goes to my wife. Especially when you are tending to her, do you hear me? Next time I will have your tongue so you don’t bother her with speaking again,” he threatened, obviously far too roughly for the considerably small offence. “And she doesn’t doubt me, you cunt,” he repeated, and you had to roll your eyes, despite the pain.

“The man meant no disrespect, Maekar. Please–” You were interrupted by a violent fit of cough, “please, lower your voice,” you barely managed to choke out.

Your voice suddenly fell small, your throat felt dry, and you turned your head to the side, to hide the tears welling up in your eyes from the lack of proper breathing.

“My prince, if you would allow me…”

Maekar scoffed.

“Why in the seven hells are you asking, you fool? Do your thing!”

He almost pushed the man to your side, and soon a cold hand touched your heated forehead. He forced you to drink some awful medicine and applied ointments on the nape of your neck.

Maekar watched him like a hawk, especially when the maester suggested that washing your face with ice-cold water would help – if not with the temperature, then at least with the headache. You didn’t care much anymore, you just wanted for it to be gone. Soon a small basin was carried inside.

You managed to throw a threatening look at your resentful husband, who kept staring daggers at the young man’s back. With your silent pleading, an ask that he didn’t like at all, he had to give in.

Maekar moved to the window to stare outside, just for a moment, when he heard your piercing scream.

“You–” your voice died in your throat. “You fucking idiot!”

Maekar turned and if only he had his sword on him, his hand would certainly fly to the handle.

But don’t let it fool you: prince Maekar wasn’t any less dangerous unarmed.

He saw that you had jumped out of bed and was now dripping in the cold water that must have been spilled on you as an accident.

The maester’s hands trembled, and with a glare of pure terror aimed at prince Maekar, he sank to his knees.

“Your grace…”

“Don't your grace me!” You continued, your body shaking.

You clutched the bedding, wanting to throw it over your shoulders, but they turned out to be equally wet.

The kneeling man was snatched up as quickly as he fell. He pleaded incoherently when Maekar held him by the collar, grunting his teeth.

It was your unsteady, heavy breath that made Maekar abandon the idea of calling for an executioner to lend him his axe, and turning your personal bedroom into a place of brutal torment.

“You are the luckiest fool in this kingdom today,” he rasped out, and dragged the man to the door. He made sure to make his grasp especially painful. “Don’t you fucking dare to cross my way again, or you will be thrown into wintry Blackwater Bay. Then you will be toasted on a fucking stake, just to drown you ultimately.”

“Y–yes, my prince…”

You could hear the man hit the ground, and you could only imagine he crawled back, as far from the chamber as he could.

Unfortunately your clattering teeth didn’t allow you to hear much. You were too focused on hugging your own arms around you for some heat, and tried to find a dry piece of the bedding to crawl under.

“He was watching you while you were dressed like this?”

Maekar moved behind you, and you could recognize he was clenching his jaw from anger. It was all in his voice, the anger not aimed at you, but the threatened man.

“Was I supposed to wear a high neck and long sleeves?” You rasped out in a desperate scoff.

You had a simple nightgown on you, the neck not very low, neither too see-through. Only now it was all wet… Well, if the maester wished to see more before, your husband was seeing just that right now.

A strong pull turned you around and Maekar threw an arm around your shoulders to hold you close. Without allowing you to move even a bit, he turned to a coffer and looked for something that could warm you.

He flinched from the cold when he snapped the gown clinging to your body off of it, and wrapped the fur around you.

There was one thing worse than a sick princess of a realm, and it was a sick princess and a prince. Still, you didn’t even try pleading for him to stay away. There was no chance to make him change his mind about holding you close at nights, and if he did that, there was no reason why he wouldn’t do it now.

He was an experienced man who faced sicknesses, battles and things far worse. He patiently changed your compresses over and over again when you were burning up, and warmed you with his presence when you shivered. There was always an unspoken promise in his acts, and you knew he would never abandon you; in health or lack of it.

“I'll send for someone competent,” he said quietly, irritation still staining his voice.

“That man was competent,” you reminded, even if it was now hard to believe in.

Maekar giggled a nasty laugh.

“You must be out of your mind, really. He spilled a bucket of water on you!”

“Out of fear for you…”

“That is his one advantage, then: he should be afraid of me.”

He tried to drag your idle body to the bed, but you clung to his neck and made him stop in his tracks. Soon he was sitting in a chair in front of the fireplace, with you curled up on his lap, wrapped in furs. With carefulness that only you knew, he brushed your hair out of your face, and took the wet strands from under the fur, so they don’t irritate the bare skin on your neck.

A big hand kept on your head made you lean even more into him. You smirked weakly when you noticed that your shallow breath on his throat gave him shivers.

“I hate this place,” he grunted, caressing your body. He didn’t even notice, but he started swaying in the chair softly. You didn’t know if it was a habit from his children’s young years, or if he thought it would soothe you too, but it warmed your heart. And warmth was what you needed more than anything that moment.

“The very second the snow melts, we leave for Summerhall. I’m sick of it all…” he kept complaining, and you laughed despite the terrible trembling of your body that you couldn’t stop.

“You are sick of it? Look at me.”

“Fair. You look awful these last few days,” he admitted insolently, earning a weak smack on the shoulder from you. “What? You’re not a specimen of strength now, darling. It would be different if you could listen to me and…”

“Not overwork myself?” You offered, hearing the talk for the numerous times in the past few days.

“Aye,” he grumbled. “I couldn’t catch a fucking moment of peace with you, that’s how busy you were. Now you have to pay.”

“To you?”

“I wish. Maybe when you are less sweaty from burning up,” he joked cruelly, but smirked. “To your own body, I meant.”

You only scoffed, obediently laying your head on his chest.

“I’m counting the days to our leave as well,” you confessed quietly.

Unfortunately, your husband had duties to attend to, and despite your complaints that he was abandoning you again, he didn’t buck.

“You have to lay down,” he ordered, moving you to the bed. Tucking you it, he held your shoulder like you would try to spring up the moment he was gone. “Rest,” he said in a voice almost threatening.

“But–” 

“Do you think I'm an incapable fool, like the man suggested?” His rasp was teasing, of course, but you knew him well enough to be aware of the idea sown in that thick head of his.

“Never. I just don’t want to behead anyone while–”

He interrupted you again, like an annoyed teenage boy who was teased enough to snap. “When you’re not there to tame me?”

You smiled widely. You looked weak, felt even worse, but Maekar never saw a sight more dear to him.

“When I’m not there to watch, I wanted to say.”

A/N: Hi, readers. My studies haven’t been going very well lately, and I’ve been feeling a bit sad, so I ended up writing this and putting it out. I honestly don’t even know if it’s good, but it did make me cry toward the end while I was writing, so I suppose that has to count for something. Goshdarn it, my feelings were too much with this one. I’ve really fallen in love with these people, and I think that’s what kept pulling me back to them. I know I said this probably wouldn’t be posted until after my exams, but I’m not feeling too well, so here it is. It’s only a small snippet, not much, but hopefully it satisfies some cravings in the meantime. :) I was happy to finally incorporate Papa Baelor in this!

Warnings: Angst, emotional confrontation, breakup aftermath, family conflict, unresolved feelings, grief-coded heartbreak, class differences, paparazzi mention, emotional distress, strained father-son relationship, possessive family dynamics, references to panic/desperation

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At the Royal Westeros Museum

It wasn’t that Karl was looking for Valarr, because he wasn’t. Not that he cared much for statistics, or for the particular arrogance of mathematics that believed human lives could be reduced to likelihoods and clean conclusions. Even so, probability had a meaner imagination than coincidence ever did, and once their paths had already crossed in one place, the Royal Westeros Museum, it no longer seemed so absurd that they should cross there. Valarr had already been due in this part of the country for a board meeting. This, apparently, had only made arranging the rest of it easier.

So this was not chance, not really. It was something quieter and more dangerous than that. A message sent too casually. A time agreed to too easily. A meeting that might still, to anyone less involved, be mistaken for something ordinary.

This was the meeting his sister had wanted for years, and of course, they were having it now, after everything had already been ruined.

“Val.”

Karl said it simply, but Valarr still looked up the way strangers did, or the way people tried very hard to behave like strangers. Surprise came first, then that small and unmistakable dislocation of feeling catching up to the body, a brief oh, you are actually here, despite the fact that he had arranged this and had not truly believed, not in the part of himself that mistrusted hope, that Karl would come.

There was fear beneath Valarr’s composure. It touched the pit of his stomach with a queer, unsettled twist, the sort of feeling he almost never got. He had sat through board meetings with men twice his age. He had handled negotiations with people who had been in business longer than he had been alive. Rooms like that had never managed to make him feel much of anything beyond boredom and calculation. But this was different. This was her younger brother. Her only brother. This was the first time he was standing before him in the flesh after the breakup.

Valarr had been seated on a bench before the entrance, one ankle crossed neatly over the other, the picture of ease from a distance. Up close, it was a poorer performance. He had checked the time on his watch too many times. One of his hands had flexed once, then been forced still. When he rose, he did so with the same polished grace he brought to everything else, as though his body had learned long ago how to betray as little as possible.

“Karl,” he said.

The museum was busy that day. It was a Saturday, and the entrance hall was alive in the loose, directionless way public places always were on weekends. Parents tugged children toward maps and ticket lines. Couples paused beneath hanging banners to decide whether they wanted natural history or marine life first. Students clustered together and argued over which exhibits were worth seeing and which were overrated. A little girl in a yellow coat dragged a plush shark by one fin across the polished stone while her mother tried and failed to hurry her along. Somewhere overhead, voices rose into the tall vaulted ceiling and came back thinner, softened by height.

The air smelled faintly of polished floors, old wood, climate control, and coffee from the café below.

Valarr was dressed well, though he had clearly tried not to look as though he had dressed for this. Dark wool coat left open at the front. A fine knit beneath it, simple enough to seem unstudied, costly enough that Karl could probably have covered a month of groceries with it. Clean shoes. Watch at his wrist. Nothing loud. Nothing careless. Even his sunglasses, now pushed up into one hand, looked expensive in a way that made the eye understand it before the mind did.

On his way there he had already had an unfortunate brush with paparazzi, two of them calling his name from across the street, one nearly stepping into him while trying to angle a better shot, both asking questions with the kind of entitlement that only came from people who no longer believed other people had a right to privacy. That irritation still clung faintly to him, but it sat beneath everything else now.

He did not know how to greet Karl. A hug felt too intimate. A handshake felt too formal, too cold, too much like pretending none of this had history. The uncertainty left him standing there for one awkward second too long.

Karl noticed. Of course he noticed.

He looked like any seventeen-year-old boy still growing into himself and already half aware of it. There was uncertainty in the line of him, but also a familiar sort of comfort, the comfort of someone standing in a place he loved. Valarr could not tell whether that ease came from the museum itself, or from the fact that Karl had chosen a public place for this, somewhere filled with noise and people and exits. Maybe it was both. Maybe Karl had been clever enough to want the safety of witnesses without ever having to say so aloud.

Before today, Karl had always belonged to a distance that could be managed. A face in a video call. A voice through a phone speaker. Long texts answered at strange hours. Emails that ran longer than they meant to. Now he was here in front of him, breathing and shifting and real in a way he had once been meant to be much sooner.

His sister had wanted them to meet properly for so long.

“Did you wait long?” Karl asked.

Valarr suspected the question was more for Karl’s benefit than his own, something polite to put between them while they figured out how to stand in the same space without either of them visibly flinching.

“No,” Valarr said. “I just got our tickets and sat down for a minute.”

Karl nodded.

He had a definite doe-like quality to him: wide eyes, a narrow nose, an oval face, a mouth that always looked as though it might say more than it meant to. It hurt Valarr to look at him for too long. Not because Karl looked fragile, though there was some of that, but because too much of him belonged to her. The eyes were wrong and right at once. The colour was close enough. The shape of them worsens. He had loved those same features on her, and here they were again, rearranged on the face of the brother she had once wanted him to know properly.

It stung in a meaner way than he had expected. Looking at Karl felt like pressing on a bruise just to prove it was still there.

Karl’s eye contact, though, was not soft. It was hawkish and exacting, and because he was so close to Valarr’s height now, there was no way to miss it. He stood there in a dark jacket zipped halfway up, black Converse squeaking faintly whenever he shifted his weight, hair long enough now to sweep across his forehead and nearly brush his shoulders. He brushed it back once with his fingers in a gesture so unconscious that Valarr felt his heart turn over with it. She used to do something similar when she was thinking. Not the same. Close enough.

Karl had once belonged to the future Valarr thought he was building. Standing beside him now felt like being handed back a piece of that future only so he could see what he had broken.

Valarr motioned toward the entrance. “Come on.”

They moved in together with the rest of the Saturday crowd. Valarr took out his phone and scanned their tickets. The screen flashed acceptance, and the two of them were carried with everyone else into the wide central halls of the museum.

“You got the tickets already?” Karl asked as they stepped forward. “You know I can get us a good discount. Being a student has perks.”

He tried to make it a joke. The effort of it showed anyway.

The thing was, Karl knew as well as Valarr did that the ticket price was nothing to him. Less than nothing. A number so insignificant it probably would not have stayed in his mind by the time they reached the next room. But to Karl, it would have been something to account for. A small treat. A choice made against other choices. Savings scraped together through a week for the sake of a hobby he cared about.

He brushed his hair back again. It was a boyish motion, but not a careless one. It looked like nerves dressed up as tidiness, like wanting to present himself well and needing something for his hands to do.

Valarr smiled and shook his head. “It’s nothing.”

The words left his mouth on instinct, easy and polished and wrong.

He saw the effect of them at once.

Karl’s mouth pressed thin. His eyes dropped to the floor, to the pale reflection of the overhead lights on polished stone, to the squeak of his Converse. Something in his face closed with quiet efficiency, like he had expected as much and hated himself for expecting it.

Valarr felt the correction too late. To him, it had meant the money did not matter. To Karl it sounded like he didn’t.

The silence that followed was mercifully brief, but only because the museum filled it for them. A child somewhere to their left announced in a stage whisper that taxidermy was creepy. A museum guide laughed politely. A pram wheel clicked over a seam in the floor. Somewhere not far off, the gift shop bell chimed as someone entered.

It was awkward after that in a way neither of them could ignore. Valarr still did not know whether he ought to have hugged him, shaken his hand, or done nothing at all. It felt strange, almost obscenely belated, to finally be seeing the boy in person when his sister had once wanted it so badly. For the longest time, text messages and emails and video calls had been sufficient placeholders. They had allowed intimacy without commitment, connection without the mess of bodies in one space. Even after the breakup, after the fracture of it and the breach of trust, after all the damage done to her and, through her, to her family as well, Karl and Valarr had still kept in touch.

Karl was loyal to his sister. Of course he was. But Valarr had also, somehow, become a kind of male support Karl had been missing for most of his life. Uncomfortably. Unfortunately. Karl had come to trust him. That was the rot of it. It would have been easier if Valarr had only broken his sister’s heart. Easier if Karl had been allowed to hate him cleanly. But Valarr had listened to him too, had steadied him too, had become something solid in a life that had not always offered much of that. What good was that now, when it was the same man who had broken her?

Still, right then, that was not yet the focus.

“I got the additional add-on with the Medieval Knights pass,” Valarr said as they entered one of the main wings. “So we can go see the armour and all the restoration work there. If I remembered correctly, you were doing some animation with knights and things, right?”

He asked it carefully, not in the shallow way people asked about hobbies they had no real interest in, but as someone who had stored away the detail because it mattered to the person saying it. Karl noticed that too. He noticed everything.

“Yeah,” Karl said with a shrug. “Sounds good. That project finished like a week ago, so... yeah. Still would be cool to see it.”

He said it casually, but there was something underneath it. Valarr showed no outward sign of disappointment. He had been trained too well for that. His face gave away little by default. But guilt moved through him all the same. Another missed thing. Another detail arriving a little too late to be useful.

They moved with the flow of people into one of the central wings, the museum opening around them in polished stone, banners, glass cases, and the drifting echo of voices that carried high and thinned in the air. Shoes squeaked. A guide somewhere nearby was explaining the migration habits of northern elk to a cluster of teenagers who looked as though they would rather die than care. The smell of coffee drifted up from below every time a door opened somewhere under the stairs.

For a while, they walked in silence.

Karl shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and glanced toward one of the branching galleries. “The mammals section is this way.”

Valarr looked over. “Lead on, then.”

Karl gave a small huff that might have been amusement. “I’ve already seen it twice.”

“And yet you are still taking me.”

“Yeah, well.” Karl glanced away. “You haven’t.”

That made something tighten in Valarr’s chest for reasons he did not want to inspect too closely.

The mammal hall opened before them in a long procession of carefully arranged displays: painted mountain backdrops, false snow, amber savannah grass, forest brush frozen in curated stillness, each animal posed as though life had simply paused around it. Children pressed their hands to the glass. A little boy nearby shouted too loudly about wolves, and his mother immediately shushed him. A father crouched beside his daughter to read a plaque aloud in a solemn voice she ignored entirely.

Karl slowed near a display of arctic foxes.

“These are one of my favourites,” he said. “Not my top favourite, but definitely up there.”

Valarr followed his gaze. “Because?”

Karl shrugged, but there was more life in him now, something easing loose as he looked at the exhibit instead of at Valarr. “I don’t know. They just look clever. Like they know something you don’t. And they’re small, but they survive in terrible places anyway.”

Valarr glanced at him. The seriousness of it was quiet but real.

“That sounds suspiciously personal.”

Karl let out a breath through his nose that almost became a laugh. “Maybe.”

They moved on. Karl pointed out a lynx with tufted ears, then an enormous moose that he insisted always looked vaguely judgmental, and then a bear posed upright in a way that made Valarr say, very dryly, “That one looks like he files taxes.”

Karl laughed then, properly this time, quick and startled enough that a few people turned their heads.

“You’re not funny.”

“You laughed.”

“I laughed because it caught me off guard, not because it was funny.”

“So I was funny unexpectedly.”

Karl rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

The tension did not disappear. It simply altered shape. Less brittle. Less likely, for a moment, to cut.

At a glass case with a family of river otters, Karl stopped again. “These are Mum’s favourites.”

Valarr turned to him. “Are they?”

“Yeah. She likes anything that looks like it has too much personality.” Karl’s mouth twitched faintly. “She says animals with annoying faces are the best ones.”

Valarr smiled before he could stop himself. “That does sound like her.”

The words slipped out as naturally as breathing. And because they did, they landed badly.

Karl went quiet.

For a moment only the museum existed: the hum of voices, the rustle of coats, the soft soundscape of wind and birdsong hidden somewhere in the gallery speakers. Valarr kept his eyes on the glass instead of on Karl.

Then Karl said, not unkindly, “Yeah. It does.”

They walked on.

The aquarium level was dimmer and cooler, washed in blue light from the tanks set into the walls. It made everyone look softer somehow, stranger too, faces passing in shadow and reflection. Children were louder here, pressing themselves to the glass, following schools of silver fish with breathless little cries. The ceiling caught the movement of water and sent trembling reflections across the stone. Somewhere in the distance, a baby started fussing. Somewhere else, two girls in school uniforms took pictures of each other in front of the jellyfish tank.

Karl’s shoulders loosened more in this section.

“When I was twelve, Mum nearly lost me here.”

Valarr looked over at once. “Nearly?”

Karl nodded toward a bench facing one of the deeper tanks. “I was sitting over there watching them feed the fish. Like properly watching. I had headphones in, so I didn’t hear her calling me, and she walked past me twice.”

Valarr stared at him, then at the bench, then back again. “Twice?”

“Twice.”

“She did not.”

“She did. Full panic too. She was about to ask security.”

Valarr laughed then, and the sound escaped before he could measure it, warmer and more genuine than anything he had managed since Karl arrived. It startled even him. Karl smiled in answer, reluctant but real.

“You are evil for not stopping her.”

“I was twelve,” Karl said, half-defensive, half-amused. “And I thought she’d see me.”

“While you sat there in plain sight.”

“Yes.”

“Watching fish eat.”

Karl nodded very solemnly. “It was interesting.”

Valarr was still laughing. “You are exactly the sort of child who would get lost by being too still.”

Karl snorted. “That’s not even getting lost. That’s her losing me.”

“That is not how parents define it, I’m afraid.”

They stopped in front of a tank full of moon jellyfish drifting in pale clusters, translucent and ghostlike beneath the blue. The light painted both of them in moving colour, silvering the edges of Valarr’s coat and laying a watery sheen over Karl’s face. Karl watched the jellyfish for a while before speaking again.

“She was so mad after. Not even yelling mad. Just that kind of mad where you know you’re going to hear about it forever.”

Valarr folded his hands in front of him. “And did you?”

“Oh, yeah. Every aquarium trip after that.” Karl glanced at him. “She’d literally count my head every five minutes.”

Valarr smiled, but softer now. “Reasonably.”

Karl’s expression changed a little at that. He looked back toward the tank, then down at the dark floor shining beneath passing feet.

There was a pause.

Then he said, “Hey, look, I’m not ungrateful or anything, but why are we meeting up? Like, I thanked you for helping me pay for my university application and all, but I tried to pay you back after saving some money, and you didn’t want anything, so what’s this about?”

Valarr felt himself go still.

Around them the gallery carried on as normal. A child knocked lightly against the glass before being told not to. A docent passed by with a practiced smile and a stack of pamphlets tucked to her chest. Water moved through hidden filters with a low, constant hush. Somewhere farther down the corridor, the gift shop was almost certainly selling plush octopi and glow-in-the-dark postcards to children whose greatest sorrow that day would be being told no.

And here they were, inside one of the largest museums in Westeros, surrounded by family outings and date afternoons and other people’s forgettable Saturdays, while something inside both of them tilted toward one of the defining moments of their lives.

This was something Valarr had been both prepared and unprepared for. On some level, he had known Karl would ask eventually. But he had not truly believed the question would come so plainly, or so soon. Maybe because part of him had not thought Karl would ask at all. Maybe because another part knew that, for all his rehearsed calm, he did not really have it in him to stand here and face the brother of the only woman he had ever loved without feeling as though something inside him were being quietly pulled apart.

It was true that Valarr had paid for Karl’s university applications. The whole lot of them. It had happened after the breakup, in one of those strange, brutal turns of life that would have sounded invented if someone else had told it. Valarr had still been in contact with him then. Karl had broken down over the phone, not telling the full story, but enough. There had been financial trouble. He might have had to take a gap year. He had wanted school badly enough that the possibility of losing it had hollowed his voice out.

Valarr had done what he knew how to do. He had offered money.

Karl had accepted with hesitation and shame, cursing him out first and saying he was not some charity case. Valarr had only told him, no, you’re not, but you deserve help too.

And over the phone, through Karl’s stressed tears and overwhelmed breathing and the sound of his life changing in ways he had not prepared for, Valarr had comforted him. All the while not knowing, not fully, how badly the woman he loved and had left behind had been struggling too.

He did not answer immediately.

He stood beside Karl with his hands folded loosely in front of him, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the glass where silver fish moved in flickering currents. For a moment he looked as though he might soften the truth into something easier to swallow. But Karl had asked too plainly for that, and Valarr respected him too much to insult him with half an answer.

“I know how this looks,” he said at last, voice quiet enough that Karl had to pay attention to hear it properly. “And I know I don’t exactly have the right to ask for your time after everything.”

Karl said nothing.

Valarr swallowed once. “This isn’t because I think money fixes anything. It doesn’t. And it isn’t because I expect gratitude from you either, because I don’t.” He glanced at Karl briefly, then back to the tank. “I helped because you needed help, and because I care about you. That part was true before, and it is still true now.”

Karl’s mouth pressed tighter, but he did not interrupt.

Valarr exhaled slowly. “As for why I asked to meet...” He paused, as if the next part cost more to say. “Because, despite everything, I did not want you to think that what existed between us only mattered to me when she and I were still together. You mattered to me separately. You still do.”

The words hung there between them, too bare to hide inside anything else.

“I know that may not mean much,” Valarr continued more quietly. “And maybe it even makes things worse. I don’t know. But I did not want to become another man who walked out of your life simply because things became complicated, or because I no longer had the easier reason to stay.”

That landed differently. Karl’s face shifted, not softening exactly, but losing some of its guarded hardness.

Valarr looked down for a moment, then back up. “If this is uncomfortable for you, or if you’d rather this be the last time, then I’ll respect that. Truly. But I asked because I wanted to see how you were. Not out of guilt alone, though I have enough of that. And not to make myself feel better. I asked because I wanted to know you were all right. Or at least trying to be.”

Karl stared at the tank for a long time after that, watching the slow turn of bodies through blue water and reflection.

“You make it really hard to hate you properly,” he said at last.

Something in Valarr’s face shifted, almost a smile, though it never fully became one. “I imagine that’s an inconvenience for both of us.”

Karl let out a breath that might have been a laugh, though it came tired around the edges. He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, then let it fall.

“I think she’s in a good place now,” he said after a moment, eyes still on the tank. “Or... better, at least.” He shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug people used when trying to make something sound casual that wasn’t. “She’s with a guy.”

Valarr’s hand closed before he could stop it.

Not hard enough to draw notice from anyone who did not know him, but enough that the tendons in his wrist pulled tight beneath his sleeve. He kept his face still. Years of training, years of scrutiny, years of learning that expression could be a weakness, held where instinct wanted to break.

A guy.

He had an inkling. More than an inkling, if he was honest with himself. The shape of it had been there for a while now, pieces collected in silence, things said and not said, timing, distance, coincidence that did not feel like coincidence at all. Aerion.

His fucking cousin.

No one seemed to know they were related. Or if they did, they did not understand what that relation meant, not fully, not in the way Valarr did. Men in his family left shadows on things. Wealth, name, power, legacy, all of it moved like fire through dry grass. Whatever the Targaryens touched, sooner or later, seemed to burn with them.

Valarr kept his gaze on the jellyfish, watching their pale bodies fold and open in the blue light.

He would not act on instinct. He never did, not when it mattered. Not unless he had every piece laid out in front of him, every fact nailed down hard enough to bear weight. Suspicion was not enough. Rage was not enough. A bad feeling in his gut was not enough.

And he would not bring Karl into this. Not if he could help it.

The boy deserved better than that. Better than being dragged into the old rot and danger that came attached to Valarr’s family. Better than being made to shoulder the emotional wreckage of a dynasty that had more than enough blood and ruin to answer for already. Karl was her younger brother, beloved and still too young in certain undefended ways, no matter how hard he tried to stand like he wasn’t.

Valarr had already done enough damage to one part of her life. He would not let Karl become another casualty, too.

“What guy?” Valarr asked, and his voice came out quieter than he intended, too even to be natural.

Karl glanced at him then, maybe noticing something, maybe not. “I don’t know if they’re, like, official official,” he said. “But she seems... lighter, I guess. Happier some days.”

That should have relieved him. She was healing. She was smiling for someone. She was building a life that no longer had him in it. Instead, all Valarr felt was the sick, cold certainty that if it was Aerion, then even now the reach of his family had found another way to circle back and ruin what little remained untouched.

Valarr nodded once. “That’s good.”

And because he had long ago learned how to say the necessary thing even when it cost him, he made himself add, “She deserves that.”

Karl studied him for a second, his expression unreadable in the shifting blue light. Then he looked back at the tank.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “She does.”

A beat passed.

Then he added, “She’d hate that I’m here, you know.”

Valarr went very still. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I know.”

Karl looked at him then, really looked at him, with the kind of honesty only the young were still cruel enough to believe should always be dragged into the light. There was no softness in it. Only hurt that had had enough time to settle into shape.

“She’d hate that I’m here,” Karl repeated quietly. “Not because she’d think I was doing something wrong, exactly. But because she’d think I was letting you stay in my life like nothing happened.”

Valarr did not answer.

Karl laughed once under his breath, without humour. “And the messed up part is, I don’t even know if she’d be fully wrong.”

The blue light from the tank moved over their faces in wavering bands. Somewhere farther down the corridor, a child squealed at the sight of a ray. A mother shushed him. The world carried on at the bright edges of something much uglier.

Karl crossed his arms. “You say I mattered separately. Fine. Maybe I believe that. I think I do, actually. But she mattered too. More than that. So what am I supposed to do with that? Because I watched what happened to her after. I was there.”

Valarr’s throat moved, but he did not interrupt.

Karl kept going, like if he stopped now the rest of it would calcify inside him. “I know you loved her. I’m not stupid. I know that part was real. That’s what made it worse. If you’d just been some asshole who never cared, maybe it would’ve been easier to write you off and be done with it. But you did care, and you still left, and somehow that made everything uglier because none of us could even comfort ourselves with pretending you meant nothing.”

Valarr lowered his gaze to the floor, where blue reflections trembled across the polished stone.

Karl’s mouth pressed thin. “She cried over you like someone had died. Do you get that? Not in some dramatic way. Not loudly. She just... stopped being herself for a while.” He swallowed. “And I had to see that. Mum had to see that. We all did.”

For the first time since Karl had started, Valarr looked visibly struck by it. Not theatrically. Not enough for anyone passing to notice. But enough that Karl saw. It was there in the stillness of his face, in the way his shoulders seemed suddenly more careful, as if even breathing had to be measured now.

“I know I hurt her,” Valarr said quietly.

Karl’s expression hardened at once. “Do you?”

The question landed harder than if he had shouted it.

Valarr lifted his head. “Yes.”

“No, I mean, do you actually know?” Karl asked. “Because sometimes people say that when what they really mean is they know, in theory, that someone got hurt. But knowing it happened and knowing what it was like aren’t the same thing.”

Valarr took that without flinching, though it seemed to cost him something visible.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t know what it was like for her in the way the people who stayed do. I know what I caused. I know what I chose. I know I left damage behind me. But I was not there to witness the full shape of it, and I think that is part of what I have to live with.”

Karl looked away first, toward the tank where pale fish turned in a silver curve through the water.

“She stopped trusting things for a while,” he said. “Not just you. Things.” He frowned, searching for words he clearly hated needing. “Plans. Good news. People were saying they loved her. I think she started waiting for things to go bad before they even had the chance to be good.”

Valarr closed his eyes briefly.

It was such a small thing Karl might have missed it, if he had not already been watching him so closely.

When Valarr spoke again, his voice was lower. “There is nothing I can say to defend that.”

“Are you going to try?”

“No.”

That answer seemed to catch Karl more off guard than any excuse would have.

Valarr folded his hands again, not out of ease but discipline, as though giving them structure might keep the rest of him from showing too much. “You asked me why I wanted to meet. It was not to ask you to forgive me on her behalf. You cannot, and you should not. It was not to make myself feel less guilty. I do not think I deserve that either.” He glanced at Karl, and there was no performance in his face now, only tired and difficult honesty. “I asked because losing her did not somehow make me stop caring about what happened to the people around her. That may be selfish. It may be unwanted. But it is true.”

Karl stood with his hands pushed so deeply into his jacket pockets that the fabric strained. His shoulders were slightly hunched, not from the cold but from the effort of holding himself together. The blue from the tank washed over the side of his face, catching on his lashes and the loose strands of hair that had fallen over his forehead. He looked younger like that, not in features, but in the sheer unfairness of being made to carry something too large for his age.

For a long moment he said nothing.

“And if that truth is of no use to you,” Valarr continued, “then I will accept that.”

Karl kept his gaze on the jellyfish. Their bodies folded and opened in slow silence, pale as lanterns beneath the blue.

“I don’t know what I want from you, honestly,” he said at last.

Valarr nodded once. “That’s fair.”

“I think part of me wanted you to say something that would make it make sense.”

There was a pause. Behind them, a family shuffled past, the father carrying a folded museum map in one hand and a tray of drinks in the other while two children argued in whispers over what to see next.

“And?” Valarr asked softly.

Karl gave a small, helpless shake of his head. “I don’t think there is one.”

“No,” Valarr said. “There usually isn’t.”

That seemed to drain some of the fight out of Karl. He uncrossed his arms, then shoved his hands back into his pockets again, as if he did not know what else to do with them.

Valarr watched him, then looked back to the tank. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t come here without a reason as well.”

At that, Karl let out a sharp snort and shook his head, muttering under his breath, “Like of course.”

Valarr did not flinch. His jaw tightened once before easing again. “I love your sister,” he said, and this time there was nothing measured or polished in the words. “And I made the biggest mistake of my life. I made a very poor choice.”

Karl turned to him so fast that the hem of his jacket twisted with it. His voice cracked before it rose.

“Yeah, you can stick that up your ass, dude. Everyone has to make hard choices. That’s life.” He looked away for a second, blinking hard, then back again. “Sure, people can choose the easy way out, especially when it seems like the best option, but hard choices are made by everyone. My sister made those choices despite how hard it was. She didn’t have a trust fund. She didn’t have some solid foundation under her feet. She didn’t have all this.”

His hand came up in one fast, angry motion, gesturing at Valarr, his clothes, the easy wealth of him, the life that clung to him like something stitched into his skin.

“But she still chose to go through with it. Her engineering degree. Her work. You. She could’ve chosen things that were easier, things that would’ve gotten done quicker, but she still chose them because they mattered to her. Because they mattered to her life.”

He was breathing harder now, face flushed, eyes bright with hurt he was no longer pretending sat anywhere near as neatly as anger.

“And at the end of the day, she has to live with her choices. Everyone can have an opinion on your life, or whatever the fuck it is you have going on, but they’re all gonna be dead and gone one day and you’re still gonna be the one living with what you chose. Is that what you want?”

Valarr said nothing.

Karl laughed once, but the sound was thin and awful. “Because at some point, that’s not what she wanted. She wanted you in her life. She was willing to fight for it. But somehow, for someone with so much power and wealth and everything else, you still chose the easy way out like a fucking coward.”

That word landed between them and stayed there.

A child ran past behind Karl and nearly collided with a display sign before his mother caught him by the wrist. Light from the jellyfish tank rippled over the dark ceiling in soft blue currents. The museum did not stop for grief. It did not hush itself for heartbreak. It simply carried on.

Karl’s voice broke on the next words, and somehow that was worse than shouting.

“Seems like she didn’t mean that much to you if you weren’t willing to sacrifice it all.”

Valarr’s face changed then, only slightly, but enough. Enough for Karl to see it. Enough for something in his stillness to crack around the edges. He looked as though he had braced for anger, and maybe deserved it, but not for that.

Karl swallowed hard. His fingers curled tighter in his pockets.

“Why won’t you fight for her?” he asked.

This time, the question came out quieter.

And that was the one that truly stopped everything in Valarr.

He went still in a way that did not look like calm. It looked like impact. His eyes stayed on Karl for one suspended second, then drifted not to avoid him exactly, but to some fixed point just beyond his shoulder, as though he needed distance to keep himself upright. The muscles in his jaw worked once. One of his hands closed at his side, then slowly opened again.

Around them, the gallery carried on. A docent passed by with pamphlets tucked against her chest. A little girl in a pink coat laughed at the jellyfish. Two students, maybe on a date, drifted past with linked sleeves and whispered commentary about the next room. Shoes squeaked. Water whispered. Light moved.

And here they were, standing in that blue-washed corridor with years of love, damage, loyalty, class, regret, and absence hanging between them heavier than anything in the room.

Then Karl swallowed and looked away first, as though even he had felt he had pushed so hard that something inside him had gone raw.

“She loves you,” he said at last.

Valarr’s voice, when it came, was too quiet for a man who had built a life on certainty. “I know.”

Karl’s throat worked. “I mean really loves you.”

Valarr’s gaze stayed on the drifting jellyfish. “I know.”

Karl did not look at him when he asked the next question. “Then why’d you do it like that?”

There it was.

Not anger, not entirely. Anger would have been easier for both of them. This was hurt sharpened into language, something tired and sincere and impossible to dodge. Valarr felt it land low and heavy behind his ribs, in that same ugly place guilt had lived ever since he left.

He took a breath, though it did not seem to help.

“I don’t have a good enough answer that would make you feel better,” he said after a moment, tone slow and careful, “and I think saying the wrong thing would only make it worse.”

Karl’s jaw worked. “That’s not really an answer.”

“No,” Valarr said. “It isn’t.”

They stood there with the jellyfish floating up and down between them, blue light moving over the glass and the floor and the edges of their coats and the shape of their hands.

Valarr turned his head slightly then, enough to look at Karl properly. Not as her brother. Not as a leftover thread from a future already ruined. As himself.

“But none of it was because she was easy to leave,” he said quietly. “It was the opposite, actually.”

Karl’s expression shifted, just slightly.

That landed too, though differently. It did not soften him, not really, but it unsettled something. He looked down, mouth pressed thin.

Valarr dropped his gaze before he could say more than he ought to. “You can be angry with me. I think you should be, at least a little.”

Karl was quiet for a long time. He rocked back on his heels, then forward again.

“I am,” he admitted. “I just also...” He frowned. “I don’t know. I still like talking to you, which feels a bit traitorous.”

Valarr almost smiled. It was not a happy expression. Too tired for that. Too aware. But it was there for a second, brief and rueful. “Life is inconvenient that way.”

Karl huffed out a weak laugh despite himself. “Yeah.”

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then Karl jerked his chin toward the next corridor, where darker tanks waited farther along and the signage pointed toward sharks, coastal life, and rotating marine exhibits.

“So,” he said, in a tone very obviously trying for normal and only half succeeding, “the sharks are this way. They’re not real sharks, obviously. More like smaller coastal ones. But they’re still good.”

Valarr nodded once, accepting the mercy of the offer for exactly what it was. Not forgiveness. Not absolution. Just movement.

“Then you’d better show me.”

Karl did.

They started walking again, slower this time, falling into step beside one another as visitors streamed around them. A stroller rolled past. Someone’s museum map crackled open. A little boy tugged on his father’s sleeve and pointed excitedly toward an overhead tank. The crowd moved around them in tides, parting and closing, people absorbed in their own afternoons, their own tiny conversations, their own forgettable Saturdays.

And in the middle of all that ordinary motion, Karl began talking again.

He pointed out favourite species first, almost automatically, as if the familiar rhythm of explaining things gave him something to hold. He offered little facts, half from memory and half from plaques he had clearly read too many times. He talked about which tanks had the best lighting, which exhibits were worth lingering in, and which section always had too many children crowding the glass. The more he spoke, the easier it came, not because anything had been solved, but because sometimes continuing forward was the only kindness left.

Every now and then, Valarr asked him another question, not just to fill the silence, but because he wanted to hear the answer. Karl noticed that, though he did not say so.

And for the next thirty minutes they wandered like that through the museum, past mammals and dim blue tanks and children pressing sticky hands to the glass, carrying with them all the awkwardness, all the fondness, all the betrayal, and all the damage too. None of it is gone. None of it was solved. But for a little while, at least, bearable enough to walk beside.

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By the time Valarr returned to the office, Karl’s question was still tearing through him. Why won’t you fight for her? He had sent her three simple lines, and the shame of how little that felt sat heavily in his chest. Was that really him fighting for her, or just another careful half-measure, small enough to survive and nowhere near enough to match what she had once been willing to risk for him?

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By the time Baelor arrived at the office the next morning, the building was still quiet in the way powerful places often were before the day fully began, all polished stone, muted light, and the low mechanical hum of climate control moving through expensive hallways. He went straight to his desk and found the morning already arranged for him with Sera’s usual precision, folders stacked squarely, annotated tabs set in order, the day’s priorities laid out without waste or flourish.

Her absence was noticeable at once.

Sera had taken leave for several days, which was uncommon enough to make the office feel very slightly out of joint. She was not merely a secretary, not anymore. Titles had long since failed to describe what she was to the running of the place. She kept the private office in order, yes, but she also carried half its institutional memory in her head, knew which directors needed flattering and which could be cornered by fact, remembered old disputes no one else had the patience to track, and understood better than most how to make power look effortless from the outside. She had served this office longer than many of the men currently seated on the board. In some practical, unglamorous way, she had become part of its foundation.

It was strange not to hear her voice somewhere nearby.

She had known Valarr since he was sixteen, when he still came in after school in private uniforms and severe ties, too young for the gravity he already tried to wear, too proud to ask where anything was, and too determined to leave without making himself useful. Baelor remembered those years with a sharper clarity than he liked. The boy had trailed him through corridors and conference rooms with the fierce, almost painful seriousness of someone already trying to earn his place before anyone had asked it of him. He had wanted to be useful. Wanted to be trusted. Wanted, though he would never have put it so plainly, to be seen.

Baelor had seen him.

Whether he had ever known how to answer that wanting with anything gentler than expectation was another matter.

Sera, for her part, had always treated Valarr not as something unfinished to be corrected, but as a boy first and then a man, both intelligent enough to be trusted and human enough to be allowed fatigue, irritation, and the occasional mercy. Baelor had never entirely approved of that softness. Yet over the years he had come to understand that it had steadied something in Valarr that discipline alone could not. She had not made him weaker. If anything, she had preserved whatever in him remained recognizably alive beneath the polish.

And lately, Baelor had found himself wondering whether too much of that had been worn away.

At half past six, the office door opened.

Valarr entered with several documents tucked beneath one arm, already dressed for the day. He looked immaculate, as he always did, dark suit, neat collar, every visible line of him arranged into control. But the effect was not what it once had been. Baelor noticed, at once and with growing dislike, that the control was being worn too tightly. There was strain in the set of his shoulders, a hollowness at the eyes that no amount of sleep had recently managed to mend, as though rest had become something incidental rather than necessary. He crossed the room without ceremony, placed the papers on the desk, and adjusted one of the folders by a fraction.

Then, as if remarking on the weather, he said, “I’ll be away from the office for several days.”

Baelor lifted his head slowly.

“Will you.”

It was not a request. That rankled first. Valarr was not asking permission. He was informing him, as though the matter had already passed beyond discussion. But under the irritation was something else, a harder thing to admit. Worry. Not the vague sort men used when they wished to excuse their temper under a nobler name, but a real and increasingly unwelcome concern that had been following Baelor for weeks now. Valarr had not been right for some time. He had continued to work, to attend, to perform, to win every room placed before him, but there had been something wrong in the effort of it. A tension that no success eased. A distance that routine did not mend.

“And why,” Baelor asked, “am I only hearing of this now?”

“I have matters to attend to.”

The answer was controlled, but too spare.

Baelor leaned back in his chair and watched him. There had once been a time when he could read Valarr easily: ambition, annoyance, calculation, pride. Those had always sat plainly enough on him, even when the boy had been trying to hide them. But adulthood had sharpened him into something more difficult. He had grown guarded in ways Baelor himself had taught him. Reserved in ways Baelor had once praised. And now, perversely, he found he no longer knew how to reach the son he had spent years teaching not to be reached.

“What matters?”

Valarr’s jaw shifted. “Personal ones.”

There it was again, that word, offered without explanation and intended to end the conversation. Months ago Baelor might have let it pass. Now he found he could not.

“You have looked half elsewhere for weeks,” he said. “You leave rooms before conversations are finished. You answer questions only to the degree necessary to stop being asked them. You are tired, though you refuse to admit it, distracted, though you continue pretending otherwise, and now you mean to disappear for several days with nothing more than a sentence at my desk. So no, Valarr. ‘Personal’ is not an answer.”

Valarr went very still.

For a moment Baelor thought he would refuse him outright. Instead he said, more quietly, “Everything is prepared. The board meetings are covered. The votes, the reports, the follow-ups, all of it. I will still be present where I am required. I am not neglecting my responsibilities.”

“That was not what I asked.”

“No,” Valarr said, and now there was the first trace of heat in it, “it never is.”

The words landed harder than they should have. Baelor’s mouth tightened.

He had not intended this to become a quarrel. That too was happening more often lately. Concern went into the mouth and came out as reprimand. It had done so for years between them. Perhaps that was habit. Perhaps it was damage. At his age a man no longer liked to examine too closely which of his failures had become character.

“I am trying,” Baelor said, more quietly than before, “to understand what has you walking around as though you are holding yourself together by force.”

Valarr looked at him then, fully, and something in his face shifted — not softened, never that, but altered enough to show that the words had reached him where harsher ones would not have. It lasted only a second.

“There are things outside this building,” he said, “that do not improve simply because I remain at my desk.”

Baelor felt the answer more than he understood it.

Something in him recoiled, not from Valarr, but from the implication that there was suffering his son had been enduring without once bringing it to him. And why would he? What had Baelor made of himself, all these years, except a man to whom burdens were presented only once they had already been mastered?

He said, too sharply, because sharpness came easiest when something softer threatened beneath it, “You are too old to be governed by whatever private misery has suddenly decided to make itself important.”

Valarr’s expression changed at once.

There it was: not coldness, but injury turned angry before it could become visible.

“I’ll overlook that,” he said, each word flat with effort, “because you do not know what you are talking about. I’ll see you at the board meeting.”

“Valarr.”

Valarr had already turned. The door shut behind him with controlled force, and Baelor sat for a moment in the silence that followed, feeling irritation, regret, and something very like dread knot unpleasantly together beneath his ribs.

He did not like being answered in that tone by anyone, least of all his son. But what unsettled him was not the defiance. It was the glimpse beneath it.

For years Valarr had been understandable to him. Difficult, yes. Proud, certainly. But understandable. He had been a boy who wanted approval and learned to disguise the wanting. A young man who turned excellence into armor. A son who had taken every demand placed upon him and made it look almost natural to bear. Baelor had loved him fiercely for that, though he had perhaps mistaken usefulness for strength, and silence for steadiness, and obedience for trust.

Now he found himself facing the possibility that Valarr had not been strong because the burdens were light.

Only because no one had ever allowed him to put them down.

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The board meeting later that morning began as smoothly as planned.

The long conference room gleamed with polished wood and cold light. Glass carafes of water stood untouched between leather folders and stacks of prepared reports. Members of the executive board sat in their places with the usual expressions, skepticism, ambition, thinly veiled resentment, all of it dressed in professional courtesy. They pressed Valarr on every projection and every detail, still wary of his age no matter how often he proved them wrong.

Baelor did not concern himself with that. He had watched his son do this too many times. Valarr had proved himself over and over again, sharp-minded, disciplined, difficult to rattle. He had become the polished result of every expectation placed upon him.

Raise yourself, Baelor had taught him. Never settle for anything less than the best.

And Valarr, for years, had listened.

He stood at the head of the room now, one hand resting lightly against the table as he presented the next stage of development with seamless confidence. He anticipated questions before they were asked, answered objections before they fully formed, and dismantled every point of doubt with the effortless precision of someone who had rehearsed not just his own argument, but everyone else’s as well.

Baelor watched him with the same private pride he never voiced aloud. Whatever tensions had sharpened lately, whatever distance had opened between them, Valarr was still the son he had raised, formidable, composed, brilliant. Baelor had never once doubted that if the room pressed hard enough, Valarr would rise higher in answer.

The picture was perfect.

Until it shattered.

Valarr stopped in the middle of a sentence.

Not faltered. Not hesitated.

Stopped.

The room went still around him.

Baelor felt it at once, the instant disturbance of rhythm. Several members of the board looked up from their papers. One frowned. Another shifted in his chair. There was confusion in the room now, and Baelor’s own sharpened immediately into concern before it hardened into suspicion.

Valarr stared at nothing for the briefest second, and then his hand moved to his pocket.

He pulled out his phone.

Baelor’s jaw tightened.

It was such a small act, but so out of character in that moment that it felt almost obscene. Valarr glanced at the screen, and something in his face changed.

He clicked his tongue softly.

The color in his face seemed to drain by half a shade. His jaw tightened. For the first time all morning, maybe for the first time in years in a room like this, Valarr looked as though sitting still had become impossible.

And Baelor, seeing that, felt something colder than irritation pass through him.

Fear.

Not dramatic, not wild, but real.

“My apologies,” Valarr said, though the words came too fast to feel measured. “I’ll have to cut this meeting short. There is an emergency I must attend to.”

Baelor had had enough, but beneath the anger was a sharper, uglier feeling. Whatever this was, it had reached past Valarr’s discipline with frightening ease.

“Valarr,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “whatever it is can wait. I will not have you walk out on me again. If it is something personal, then you will set it aside until your work is finished.”

It should have worked. Once, it would have.

It did not.

For the first time in his life, Valarr bolted.

Not metaphorically. Not with elegant refusal. He moved. One second, he was at the head of the boardroom table, and the next, he was out the door with his phone already in hand, leaving a stunned silence behind him.

Baelor shot to his feet so quickly his chair scraped harshly against the floor.

“Valarr.”

Then louder, with real fury now, though it was laced through with alarm, “Valarr!”

He followed him out into the hallway, his own footsteps striking hard against stone and carpet until the sounds of the boardroom faded behind them and only the corridor remained, empty except for the two of them and the elevator doors gleaming at the far end.

“VALARR!”

Valarr stopped.

He turned halfway, breath tight, phone clenched so hard in his hand that the tendons stood out along his wrist. And Baelor, who had spent his son’s whole life watching him master expression after expression until nothing true showed unless he permitted it, felt something cold move through him.

Valarr’s eyes were glossy.

Not angry. Not merely furious.

Glossy.

There was something close to panic in him, something raw enough that for a second, Baelor almost did not recognize it.

“Dad,” Valarr said, and his voice broke the clean shape of the word. “Please.”

Baelor went still.

He had heard Valarr angry before. Bitter before. Cutting, detached, furious, all of it. But this was something else entirely. This was his son looking young for the first time in years, not in face, not in stature, but in the terrible openness of desperation.

“I have never asked you for anything in my life,” Valarr said, louder now, and it was not polished, not restrained, not the careful, calculated tone he used to control rooms. It was ragged. Bare. “Just please let me take this call. I can’t lose her.”

The hallway seemed to empty itself of sound.

Baelor stared at him.

And in that instant, something in him broke too, though more quietly.

Because Valarr was right.

He had never asked for anything.

Not gently. Not selfishly. Not in the helpless, human way, sons were perhaps meant to ask their fathers for things. He had accepted pressure. Accepted expectation. Accepted the shape of the life laid before him and made himself strong enough to wear it. Baelor had always taken pride in that. Looking at him now, he felt, for one brief and unwelcome second, the weight of everything that pride had cost.

He can’t lose her.

Baelor’s mind caught on the words and stalled there.

A woman.

Not Kiera. Certainly not Kiera. Baelor knew the measure of that arrangement well enough. Valarr had been courteous, yes. Dutiful. But there had been no attachment there. No real hunger. No fear. Nothing in him that had looked remotely like this.

So who was she?

And why did Valarr look like the loss of her would ruin him?

The confusion lasted only a second, but it was enough.

Valarr used it.

He turned and strode away before Baelor could recover, lifting the phone to his ear with unsteady hands, moving with the urgency of a man who had already spent too long being delayed.

“Valarr,” Baelor barked after him. “Valarr, come back here.”

But even as he said it, the command had lost something. Force. Certainty. It sounded wrong now, too late and too hard, the same old shape of authority applied to something that had already spilled past its reach.

The elevator doors opened, then closed, and his son was gone.

Baelor stood there a moment longer than he should have, staring at the place where he had disappeared.

A part of him wanted to follow.

A part of him wanted, absurdly and too late, to ask if Valarr was all right.

A part of him wanted to call him back, not as chairman, not as the man who had spent years teaching him discipline, but simply as his father, and say, Go. Whatever this is, go.

But the boardroom waited, and men like Baelor had spent too long mistaking composure for necessity to know how to undo it in time.

When he returned to the conference room, the silence waiting for him was thick and unpleasant. Every eye in the room turned toward him, carefully neutral, and that neutrality only made his temper worse. He refused to let it show.

He exhaled once through his nose and moved back to his place, every muscle in him tight with the effort of containing the anger rising under his skin.

Only now, with the board waiting and the room still carrying the shape of his son’s absence, Baelor understood with growing unease that anger was no longer the truest thing in him. Something else had taken its place, something colder, more difficult to master. For the first time in years, he did not know what had just happened to his son — only that he ought to have known much sooner.

He could still see Valarr standing in the corridor, phone clenched in his hand, eyes bright in a way Baelor had never wanted to see. He could still hear that one awful sentence, not because of the woman at its center, though that mattered too, but because of the nakedness of it. I have never asked you for anything in my life.

The cruelty of that was not in the accusation. Valarr had not meant it as one. That made it worse.

Because it was true.

Baelor lowered himself back into his chair, but for the first time in years, the conference room no longer felt like a place of command. It felt too bright. Too narrow. Too full of watchful men and polished surfaces reflecting back the image of a father who had just watched his son beg and had still answered him like a superior officer denying a subordinate leave.

He turned slightly, about to ask Sera for water, and only then remembered she had also taken leave.

The realization struck like insult added to injury.

Thank the Gods, Maekar wasn't here.

He was beginning to feel a migraine blooming behind his eyes.

But even that irritation could not blot out the deeper ache gathering beneath it. Not guilt exactly. Baelor was not a man quick to name feelings that way. Something more primitive than that. A tightness under the ribs. A sense of having failed a moment that would not come back.

The board resumed around him in cautious fragments. Someone cleared his throat. Someone else shifted papers and ventured a question. Baelor answered automatically, his voice steady, his face composed, but part of him was still standing in the hallway.

He saw Valarr at six years old, solemn and watchful, standing in the doorway of his study because he had wanted to show him some childish drawing and had changed his mind halfway through. He saw him at thirteen, bloodied from some schoolyard fight he had refused to explain properly. At sixteen, in his father’s office, carrying too many files at once because he wanted to prove he could. At eighteen, when he had stopped asking for praise aloud and simply started working until praise became unnecessary.

Baelor had been proud of that. Proud of how little his son required from anyone.

Now, all at once, the pride felt uglier.

Because perhaps he had not raised a son who needed nothing.

Perhaps he had raised a son who had simply learned very early that needing anything would get him nowhere.

Baelor’s hand tightened once against the arm of his chair.

He had spent years teaching Valarr how never to look weak in front of others.

And some part of him, the part that was only a father and nothing more, wished suddenly and fiercely that he had not.

Elsewhere, in the sudden metallic quiet of the elevator and then the emptier corridor beyond, Valarr pressed the phone harder to his ear than he meant to.

His breathing was uneven. The world around him had gone strangely thin, as though every sound had been pulled too far away. He could hear the rush of blood in his ears. He could hear the lift doors opening. He could hear his own pulse. But beneath all of that, underneath the noise and distance and the violent thud of his heart, he could hear her.

“[Her name],” Valarr whispered.

The word came out wrecked.

He had not meant it to. He had not meant for anything in him to sound this broken. But something had finally given way, something he had been holding shut for too long, and now there was no putting it back behind glass.

The line crackled softly.

Then her voice came through, frightened, fragile, and achingly real.

“Valarr? Is that you?”

And that was when he truly broke.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Nothing so simple.

But in the silence that followed, something in him came undone all the same.

He put a hand against the wall to steady himself. His shoulders bowed, just slightly, the first visible surrender of a man who had spent years making himself unyielding. His eyes shut hard enough to hurt. All the discipline that had carried him through boardrooms, family dinners, interviews, obligations, all of it seemed useless now in the face of one frightened voice saying his name like she still trusted it to save her.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice was rough with everything he had not allowed himself to feel. “Yes, it’s me.”

He swallowed, but it did nothing.

“I’m here.”