#cautionary tale

✧─────✧

Your friend texts you at half ten: staying with b tonight, don't wait up, and three emojis you don't need to interpret because you know her face when she looks at Baelor Targaryen and it is the face of someone receiving something they didn't think they deserved. She's been luminous with it all weekend. It is almost painful to be near, that particular cleanness—the way she softens around him, the way he makes room for the softening without even seeming to try. You have been watching it happen from outside the glass of it, watching the shape of something that fits, and you have not named what it produces in you because you have been trying very hard not to.

You are on the terrace. The terrace at Summerhall is wide limestone, ironwood furniture gone dark from decades of weather, lanterns burning along the balustrade and a view of grounds that go dark and enormous at the treeline, and it is breathtaking in the way that old money is breathtaking, which is to say it doesn't try, which is to say it has never had to. The estate smells tonight like it's been kept in something. Warm stone and grass that's given up and underneath it all something else, something sweet going wrong, the grounds fermenting gently in three weeks of heat that won't break.

You have been out here for two hours because your room is unbreathable and because Summerhall receives you in a way that makes you uneasy, a way that makes you feel watched, and the terrace is the only part of the estate where the sky is big enough to dilute that feeling.

Maekar comes out of the east wing and the dark changes.

He's been on the phone. You know this through the body—his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the quality of stillness that is not rest but its opposite, a stillness that has been working very hard. He's in a dark shirt with the cuffs undone, hair loose, and the hair is silver-white in the lantern light, Targaryen-white, the hair of something that didn't come from anywhere ordinary and has never looked like it did.

Daeron, you think. Or Aerion. There is always one of them on fire at the edges of his life—a call he has to take, money he has to move, a disaster he has to contain before it gets to the papers—and he manages all of it without complaint and very nearly without expression, and you have been watching him manage it for months now and it has taught you something about him that you wish you didn't know: that the control is not ease. The control is effort. Enormous, sustained, ongoing effort, and it is effort applied to something very large that has no interest in being controlled.

He sees you. He doesn't say anything. He sits in the other chair across from you, the table between you small and dark, knees close in the way the terrace furniture has always arranged you close without asking.

You put the cloth bag on the table.

He looks at it. Picks it up. Opens it and smells it and you watch something move across his face, not surprise, the decision not to be surprised, which is different. “Where did you get this.”

“Dispensary in town.” You pause. “The woman said it would help with the heat.”

He looks at you over the bag with his controlled face and his controlled eyes and says nothing for long enough that the nothing becomes its own communication. Then he sets the bag down and he takes a pipe from his shirt pocket—slim, dark—and starts packing it, and that's all. That's the whole conversation. He packs it and you watch his hands and your mouth has gone dry in a way that is not about the heat.

✧─────✧

The smoke is barely anything. Silver-thin in the lantern light, gone before it reaches the dark. You breathe in and it tastes like the floor of something very old, like a church that became a forest, like something deconsecrated returning slowly to the earth. You breathe out. He takes the pipe and breathes in without looking away from you and breathes out and sets it on the table between you and you both wait.

And wait.

The grounds begin to glow.

Just at the roots. Just a pale sick light at the base of the dead grass, bioluminescent, like the lawn is a sea floor, like something has been living in it a long time and is only now surfacing. The lanterns are bowing toward you, slow and patient, and you know this isn't real but it is also completely real, the distinction has gone somewhere you can't reach. Summerhall breathes out—the whole estate, a long exhale through the limestone and the ironwood and the old walls, like an animal releasing something it's been clenching in its maw, and you feel it through the soles of your feet and think: the house has always held something in its teeth. There is a wrongness in it that lives in the walls, in the east wing especially, in the way certain rooms feel like they remember a specific thing that happened in them and haven't finished digesting it.

Maekar grew up in this house. It occurs to you now—sitting here, feet on the breathing stone—that this might explain everything about him. The specific shape of his damage.

He is looking at you.

The underneath expression. The one he catches and folds away at dinner, across rooms, in hallways—the one you have been collecting glimpses of for months without letting yourself name it. It is not folded away. It is just there, open in the lantern light, and it is… a lot. It is the most of him you have ever seen and it is directed at you and your body knows before the rest of you does, your body has already arrived somewhere your mind is still pretending not to go.

✧─────✧

Time loses its grip.

You are on the terrace and you are also upstairs, somehow, looking through the ceiling at your friend and Baelor. Not literally. But the salvia has made the house transparent in a way that feels literal, and you can feel them up there—the shape of what they have, the warmth of it, the way it has its own gravity. Baelor who is Maekar's brother and nothing like him. Baelor who is easy where Maekar is not, open where Maekar is not, who looks at your friend like she is a thing that happened to him and he is grateful for it. You have sat across from them at dinner and watched your friend become more herself in his presence and you have thought: that's what it's supposed to look like. You have thought: that's the clean version.

And then you have looked at Maekar at the other end of the table and felt the thing you feel and thought: and what is this version, then.

The salvia is showing you something. The salvia is not kind—it just shows you what's there, without the usual padding between you and the knowledge of it. What it's showing you is this: you and Maekar are the warped version. The rotten one. Whatever Baelor and your friend have that is clean and new and growing toward something—you and Maekar are the dark mirror of it, the same structure but wrong, the same pull but sourced from something different, something that tastes like the grounds smell tonight: overripe, too sweet, the sweetness of a thing that went past its moment and kept going, that didn't stop when it should have.

You think about this and find that you don't care. This is possibly the most frightening thing the salvia has shown you. That you can see it clearly—the wrongness of it, the way it would look from the outside, the way your friend upstairs with her clean good thing would look at this if she knew—and you don't care. You want it anyway. You want the rotten one. You would like to put it in your mouth.

Maekar says your name.

It comes from somewhere different in him than his voice usually comes from. Lower. From the unlocked place, the place the control lives in front of. Your name in his mouth and the salvia has removed the insulation between you and the fact of it and what the fact of it does to you is—consuming. You feel it in your sternum and the backs of your knees and somewhere at the base of your skull where you've been keeping the locked version of all of this for months.

You look at him. The silver-white of his hair loose around his jaw. His face in the bad amber light, a face made of decisions, of long sustained effort, and right now it is not deciding. It has already decided. The having-decided is all over it, open like a wound, and he looks dangerous like this. He looks like the house when the house breathes—like something revealing it has been alive the whole time, that it has been alive and waiting, and wanting.

The salvia crests.

The terrace tilts—just a degree, just enough—and you grab the arm of the chair and his knee, the nearest thing, and his knee is right there and the warmth of it goes up through your palm and into your arm and into your chest and lodges, and he goes utterly still. The kind of still that is total awareness of exactly where every part of himself is in relation to every part of you.

His hand closes over yours on his knee.

Not moving it. Just—weight. His palm over the back of your hand and his pulse against your knuckles going fast, faster than the pulse of a man sitting still should be, and the knowledge of it moves through you like the heat, like the rot-sweet smell of the grounds, like something that has been getting inside you for weeks without asking.

✧─────✧

He moves your hand.

Not away. Further up his thigh, slow and deliberate, and the deliberateness of it is—it is its own thing, it does its own damage, and you make a sound you will think about later with complicated feelings and he looks at your face when you make it, he is watching your face the entire time, and then something in him breaks open.

“You know what this is,” he says. His voice is lower. It's coming from somewhere different in him, somewhere that doesn't do the thing his controlled voice does. “I need you to know.”

You think: I know exactly what this is. I named it months ago and put the name somewhere I don't look and it doesn't matter. I know what the clean version looks like from the outside. I have watched the clean version have dinner. I would like the other one.

“I know.”

He pulls you forward by the wrist—not gentle, not asking—and you go, you go because the careful part of you is somewhere out in the glowing grass and you are just a body on a terrace, and then you are between his knees, kneeling on the limestone, and his hands are in your hair and he is kissing you like something that has been held a long time finally let go. Like he's furious about it. Not at you—at the months of it, the sustained effort of not, the sheer accumulated weight of looking and not and looking and not and now the not is over and he is not gentle. His hands in your hair, the ironwood chair scraping under his weight, the kiss tasting of smoke and something underneath it that is just him, just the specific and terrible fact of him, and you have wanted this for so long it has its own geology by now, its own sediment, and it is nothing like what you prepared for. It is larger. It is the large, unreasonable, consuming thing inside the controlled container finally, briefly, out.

The grounds glow below the balustrade. Somewhere above you Summerhall exhales again, a deep stone breath, and a door clicks softly in the east wing, and neither of you surface. His mouth at your jaw, your throat, tasting the sweat gathered along your collarbone—the kiss going somewhere it shouldn't, going everywhere, the salvia making time negotiable and the body the only clock, and you understand in the way you understand things when your sense vacates and things fall apart that you have been building toward this since the first weekend you came here, that it has been building itself without your permission, that the wrongness of it has never been a deterrent. That the wrongness is part of it. That you are kneeling on the limestone between his legs and the stone is biting into your skin and you will have the marks of it tomorrow and you do not care. The pair of you trapped in this warped embrace on the terrace in the dark and the rotten-sweet grounds and the breathing house—all of it is the dark mirror and you do not care, you are not going to care, you choose the rotten one, you have already chosen it.

He pulls back. His forehead drops to yours. Both of you breathing, the same overripe air going in and out of you, the lanterns behind him, his hair a pale wreck of itself.

He doesn't say anything. Neither do you. The salvia is still running soft and insistent through your blood and the grounds are still faintly glowing and above you your friend is asleep or not, luminous and clean in the warm version of this, and you are here on the limestone between Maekar Targaryen's knees with your hands in his shirt.

“Come inside,” he says. Low. From the unlocked place.

Not a question.

You go.

✧─────✧

The heat broke three days later.

You were still there when it did.

In the morning your friend came down bright-faced and warm and you looked at each other across the breakfast table and she had the clean one and you looked at her and thought: yes.

And thought nothing else.

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