#daeron fluff

He watched you constantly, the color of your face, your breathing, the way you held yourself. When you swayed, he was there. When you coughed, he appeared with water. When you had a bad spell, he dismissed every servant and sat in the corner, pretending to read, while actually counting your breaths.

"You don't have to do this," you said once.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it because I can't stand the noise of you coughing. It's irritating."

Right. Okay. He handed you a cup of tea. It was already sweetened. He knew you liked it that way.

One evening, you wanted to go for a walk. He came with you, “not for company”, he said, but because he needed to stretch his legs. He brought a small flask of water, a woolen blanket, and a piece of dry bread in case you felt faint.

He walked beside you, close enough to catch you. And when you stumbled on a root, his arm was around your waist before you could fall.

"Clumsy," he muttered. It didn’t sound like he was actually annoyed, though?

You knew he cared. You could see it in the way he hovered, the way his eyes tracked you, the way he always found an excuse to be near when you were ill. He'd never admit it. He'd rather swallow his own tongue than say "I'm worried." But you didn't need the words. You had his actions.

When you caught a summer cold that turned into a lung fever, he cancelled his meetings. "They're pointless," he said. "Nothing but fools droning on about taxes. I'd rather be bored here."

He sat by your bed for three days. He read reports. He sharpened a dagger. He glared at anyone who came near. But every time you coughed, his jaw tightened. Every time your eyes closed, he checked that you were still breathing.

On the third night, you woke to find him slumped in the chair, his head dropped forward, snoring softly. You reached out and touched his hand.

He jolted awake. "What? Are you worse? Do you need the maester?"

"I'm fine. You're exhausted."

"I'm not exhausted. I was resting my eyes."

"You were snoring."

"Targaryens don't snore."

You smiled. He saw it and looked away, his ears reddening.

"You're not allowed to get sick again," he said.

"I'll try."

"Try harder."

He poured you a cup of water and held it to your lips. You drank. He set the cup aside and, after a moment's hesitation, brushed a strand of hair from your face.

"This is your fault, you know," he said quietly.

"My fault?"

"If you weren't so... you. I wouldn't care. It's very inconvenient."

He said it like an accusation. But his hand lingered on your cheek.

"I know," you said.

He grunted. "Good. Now go back to sleep. I'll be here."

"Because you have nowhere else to be?"

"Because the chair is comfortable."

He settled back, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. But his hand stayed on the edge of the bed, close enough to touch.

You fell asleep with your fingers brushing his.

In the morning, he was gone. But there was a fresh cup of tea on the bedside table, a plate of warm bread, and a note in his sharp, messy handwriting.

Had to go, will be back in a few. Don't die. It would annoy me.

Baelor – Baelor was a man of action. He solved problems. He didn't wring his hands or hover. So when he realized you were chronically unwell, prone to weakness, to sudden fevers, to days where you couldn't rise from bed, he did the only thing he could. He built a life around you that accommodated your frailty, and he never once made you feel like a burden.

He moved your chambers to the warmest part of the keep. He had the maester prepare a satchel of remedies that went with you everywhere. He assigned a handmaiden to stay with you when he couldn't be there.

You noticed, of course. You noticed the way the fires were always lit, even in summer. The way fresh linens appeared whenever you had a bad night. The way he carried you to bed when you fainted at a feast, his face betraying nothing, his arms steady as stone.

"You don't have to do all this," you said one evening, after he'd personally carried you up three flights of stairs because you were too weak to walk.

"I know."

"The realm needs you. You have council meetings, tourneys, duties-"

"The realm will survive a few hours without me." He set you down on the bed and knelt to remove your shoes. "You’re also my duty."

You giggled and looked at him, the strong line of his jaw, his dark hair, the strong hands that had held a sword in battle now gently unlacing your boots.

"You're too good to me," you whispered.

He looked up. His eyes were soft.

"I'm not good. I'm practical. You're my wife. Taking care of you is my duty."

He paused.

"And my privilege."

When you had a particularly bad spell, a fever that raged for days, leaving you delirious and weak, he stayed by your side. He read to you. He fed you broth when you couldn't hold the spoon. He held your hand through the worst of it, his thumb tracing slow circles on your palm.

One your fever broke, you opened your eyes to find him slumped in a chair by the window, still in his tunic, his head dropped forward. He looked exhausted. There were shadows under his eyes.

You reached for him. He woke immediately.

"You're awake, how do you feel?," he asked. His voice was hoarse.

"I'm awake, I feel way better."

He crossed to the bed and pressed his palm to your forehead. "Fever's gone."

"You stayed?"

"I stayed."

He sat on the edge of the mattress, took your hand, and held it to his chest.

"You scared me," he admitted quietly. "I don't scare easily."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He kissed your knuckles. "I’ll always be here to take care of you."

He then pulled the blanket up to your chin and tried to make you sleep for another few hours.

Daeron – Daeron had spent most of his life being the one who needed care. He drank too much, stumbled too often, relied on others to pick him up. So when he married you, someone who needed him, it changed something deep inside him. You were always getting sick. A cough that lingered for weeks. A fever that spiked without warning. Days when you were too tired to lift your head, too weak to walk to the window. Daeron didn't panic, well, he tried not to. He also tried to make sure he wasn’t overbearing or micromanaging you. He just stayed.

He learned your rhythms. The way your skin went pale before a bad spell. The way your breathing shallowed when the pain was bad. The way you smiled through it, like you didn't want to be a bother.

"You're not a bother," he said one afternoon, when you'd apologized for the third time.

"I keep you from your duties."

"My duties can wait." He handed you a cup of tea.

He didn't make very grand gestures. He just showed up. Every day. Every night. When you were sick, he brought you whatever you craved, sweet cakes, warm bread, broth from the kitchen. When you were well enough, he took you for slow walks in the garden, his arm looped through yours, ready to catch you if you stumbled.

When you fainted at dinner, in front of everyone, he scooped you up, carried you to bed, and sat with you until you woke.

"You're going to exhaust yourself taking care of me," you said.

"Then we'll be exhausted together."

He smiled.

Another winter, you caught a chill that settled deep in your chest. You coughed for weeks, couldn't keep food down, lost weight you couldn't afford to lose. Daeron moved into your chambers. He slept in the chair by the fire, woke every few hours to check on you, to make sure you were still breathing.

"This isn't sustainable," you said, your voice a rasp.

"Then get better."

"I'm trying."

"I know." He pressed his forehead to yours. "I know."

On the worst night, you woke from a coughing fit to find him holding you upright, his hand on your back, his face pale.

"I thought-" He stopped. Swallowed. "I thought you stopped breathing."

"Daeron, I’m not going to die."

"O-of course not. I was just… worried."

He held you all night and in the morning, your fever had broken. Your chest was still tight, but you could breathe easier.

He brought you tea and sat beside you, his knee pressed to yours.

"I love you," he said. "Even when you're sick."

"Especially when I'm sick?"

"Especially."

Maekar – Maekar was not a soft man. He did not coo or coddle. He communicated in grunts and glares and the occasional sharp word. So when he married a woman who was constantly ill, who fainted, who coughed for weeks, who needed constant care he handled it the only way he knew how.

He got gruff.

"You look terrible," he said, not looking up from his papers.

"Thank you."

"Drink this." He pushed a cup toward you. It was some foul-tasting tonic the maester swore by. Ew.

"What is it?"

"Medicine. Drink it."

You drank. He grunted in approval.

Throughout your marriage, he learned to read you. The slight sway before a faint. The shallow breath before a coughing fit. The glassy eyes that meant a fever was coming. He didn't ask if you were okay, he just acted.

When you fainted in the courtyard, he carried you inside and didn't say a word. When you had a coughing fit at dinner, he put his hand on your back, steady and warm. When you were too tired to walk, he picked you up and deposited you on the nearest surface, a chair, a bench, the bed.

"You don't have to-" you started once.

"Shut up." He wasn't being mean. He just didn't know how to say “I'm worried.”

He started keeping a small bag by the door, water, dried meat, a warm cloak, smelling salts for when you went out. He never explained it. He just grabbed it and threw it over his shoulder.

"You pack like a mother hen," you said.

"You collapse like a sack of flour. We're even."

One day, you caught a fever that wouldn't break. You were sick for weeks, too weak to rise, too tired to eat, your skin pale and clammy. Maekar cancelled his meetings. He didn't say why. He just didn't go.

He sat by your bed for hours, pretending to read, his eyes flicking to you every few seconds. He fed you broth when you couldn't hold the spoon. He held your hair back when you got sick. He grumbled the whole time, but he never left.

"You don't have to stay," you said, your voice barely a whisper.

"I know."

"The castle needs you."

"The castle can burn."

You stared at him. He stared back.

"Don't look at me like that," he said. "I'm not being romantic. I'm being practical. You're my wife. I'm supposed to keep you alive."

He pressed his palm to your forehead. "Fever's still there. Fuck."

"I know."

He cursed under his breath and went to fetch a cold cloth.

When you were all better, you woke to find him slumped in the chair by the window, his head dropped forward, his sword across his knees. He was pretending to sleep, but his eyes opened the moment you stirred. He crossed to the bed, pressed his hand to your forehead, and grunted. "Fever's gone."

"You watched over me?"

"Obviously." He sat on the edge of the bed. "Someone had to." Yes. Maekar is so mother hen.

Valarr – Valarr was a planner. He liked to be ready for anything. So when he married you, he did what he did best. He prepared.

There was always a basket by the bed. Inside: a warm cloak, and a handwritten list of your symptoms, medicine, and more remedies in case someone else needed to help.

"Valarr, we're just going to the garden," you said.

"The garden is outside. You could faint. You could get cold. You could-"

"Valarr."

He sighed. "Humor me."

He brought the basket everywhere. To dinner. To the library. To the courtyard. The servants whispered, mainly because that basket was a woman’s basket, but he didn't care.

Aftwr a particularly bad fainting spell, he just moved into your chambers, brought his books, and stayed.

"You don't have to-"

He didn't look up from his reading. "I want to."

He read to you when you were too tired to hold a book. He held your hand when the pain was bad. He tracked your fevers on a piece of parchment, noting the times, the temperatures, the effectiveness of the tonics.

"You're very organized," you said.

"Someone has to be."

Alas you caught a cough that turned into a lung infection. You couldn't keep food down. You couldn't sleep. Every breath was a struggle. Valarr barely left your side.

He brought you tea. He fluffed your pillows. He read aloud from a history book, his voice low and steady, even when you couldn't follow the words.

"You're going to exhaust yourself," you said.

"I'm fine."

"You're pale."

"I'm always pale."

He wasn't. He was tired. You could see it in the shadows under his eyes, the way his hands shook when he poured your water.

"You should rest," you said.

"So should you."

He climbed onto the bed beside you, careful not to jostle you, and wrapped an arm around your waist.

"I'll rest here," he said. Yes. No problem with that.

You woke to find him asleep beside you, his face pressed to your hair, his arm still around you. The basket was on the floor, rummaged through but still packed.

You touched his cheek. He woke instantly.

"Your fever," he said, already reaching for your forehead.

He exhaled and closed his eyes.

"Good," he said.

When you finally recovered, he took the basket and repacked it. More water. An extra blanket. A new vial of everything.

"We're not going anywhere," you said.

"We will."

He kissed your forehead.

"Just in case," he said.

He carried the basket out the door.

You had never been with child before. You were not in-tune enough with the changes in your body to know.

So you waited. And then you stopped waiting, because the evidence was fairly unignorable, and your body was making its position on the matter quite clear.

The maester confirmed it gently that morning, with the careful diplomatic neutrality of a man who had navigated the Targaryen household long enough to understand that news of any kind had to be delivered cautiously. You thanked him, and he went, and you sat for a moment in the quiet of the solar with your hands folded in your lap and the birdsong coming through the open windows.

A kind of terrified gladness. The gladness was real. The nervousness was also real.

You made a deliberate decision to be glad.

Then you went looking for Daeron, which was not always a straightforward exercise. 

Daeron occupied Summerhall like water occupied low ground - he found his own level, which was to say, he was frequently in places he should not be and rarely in places he should. He was not in your shared solar, where his books were stacked in the characteristically chaotic manner of a man who insisted he had a system. He was not in the great hall. You checked the south-facing gardens, where a man could sit with his back to the wall and watch the light move without anyone requiring anything of him.

He was not there either.

You found him eventually, in a narrow corridor off the east wing, crouched down to his brother Aegon's height - Aegon was nearly eight years old and scowling ferociously about something - and Daeron looked immediately and completely ridiculous, because he was a tall man and folding himself down to speak to a child did nothing good for his dignity. He was speaking to Aegon in a low, patient voice, and Aegon's scowl was gradually, reluctantly, losing some of its conviction.

He looked up when he heard your footsteps and something in his face changed - a small change, barely perceptible to anyone who had not spent two years learning the particular vocabulary of it, but you had. What it said was you. Just that. You. The particular look of attention that he gave you, which was different from the attention he gave anything else, sharper and softer at once, as if you were something he was still not entirely sure was real and was checking again, as he apparently needed to check regularly, just to confirm.

"My dearest lady wife," he greeted, and unfolded himself upward, joints protesting audibly. "Aegon and I were just discussing the finer points of - what were we discussing, Egg?"

"Nothing," Aegon said, with great dignity.

"That's the one. Nothing of consequence." He dusted his knees, a habitual gesture that achieved nothing but seemed to satisfy him. His eyes were on you, though, and there was something in your face that he was reading. "Are you well?"

"I need to speak with you," you said. "When you have a moment."

He studied you for another beat, then turned to Aegon. "Run along," he said, and Aegon did, in the determined way of children who have decided they are leaving entirely on their own terms.

Daeron fell into step beside you without being asked. You walked the corridor together, your footsteps a quiet counterpoint on the stone, and the light came through the arrow slits in long pale bars.

He glanced at you sideways after a moment - the particular glance he had when he was reading something in you and had not yet decided whether to mention it. He said nothing for several steps. "Something happened."

It was not a question.

"Something happened," you agreed with a nod.

You stopped. There was a window here, a proper one, and through it you could see the outer courtyard, the stable block, two grooms moving about with a placidity that seemed slightly offensive given what you were currently feeling. You turned to look at him.

Just say it. Say it plainly.

"I'm with child," you told him.

The silence that followed was approximately three seconds long. In those three seconds, you watched several things cross his face in quick succession. First, a sort of blankness, the processing pause of a man whose mind had just received information it was busy organising. Then, something that was not quite disbelief but was perhaps the near-cousin of it, the version that appeared when you believed something wholly and were still somehow surprised by the weight of it. And, finally, the one that stayed, that settled - something that you could only call joy, though it was the slightly dazed, eyes-wide variety of joy, the kind that did not quite know what to do with itself yet. 

"...Oh."

And then he said it again, differently, lower, with more weight to it.

He crossed the two steps between you and took your face in his hands - his hands, which always ran slightly cool, which always smelled faintly of wine and, underneath that, like parchment and the particular kind of cedar that lined the wardrobes in your shared room - and kissed you, properly and thoroughly, the type of kiss that required a moment to recover from afterward. When he pulled back, his eyes were very bright.

"Are you certain?" he asked.

"The maester confirmed it this morning."

"The maester." He looked as though he were running through the maester's qualifications in his head and finding them, on reflection, satisfactory. "Right. Good. He's- he’s right, usually." He exhaled, and it came out unsteady at the edges. His hands were trembling very slightly where they framed your face, though not the usual, unsteady tremble from the wine.

"Daeron."

"Yes, I'm - yes." He closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them. He looked at you with an expression that was, if you had to name it, tender in some helpless way of someone knocked slightly off-balance and choosing not to mind. 

"Come here," he said, and he wrapped his arms around you and picked you up - entirely off the ground, which was unexpected, because Daeron was not, by his own cheerful admission, the most physically demonstrative man in the Seven (Nine?) Kingdoms, but apparently this news warranted it. He turned, once, in a slow circle, his face pressed into your hair. You could feel him laughing, quietly, against your temple.

"Careful," you told him, but you were laughing too. You could not help it.

"I am being extraordinarily careful." He set you down but did not immediately let go, kept his arms around you with his chin resting on top of your head. "This is probably the most careful I've ever been about anything."

"That's a low bar."

"I'm choosing to take that as a compliment."

You stood there a moment longer, in the corridor with the light coming through the window and the grooms moving about outside with their unconscionable placidity, and Daeron held you. Not tightly exactly, but with a particular attentiveness, as though monitoring. Checking. Making sure.

You felt, despite everything, despite the memory of your last failed pregnancy sitting quiet and patient somewhere in the back of your chest, a thing that you could only call hope.

And Daeron's arms were warm around you, and the morning was bright.

- - -

He brought you sugared almonds from the kitchen the next morning.

You were still half-asleep when he set them on the pillow beside you, and you lay for a moment with your eyes not yet open and the smell of sugar close to your face, and the sound of him already in the room somewhere, the faint shift and settle of him in the chair by the window. When you opened your eyes, he was dressed, his book open in his lap, his expression assembled into something that was trying very hard to be casual and was not entirely succeeding. He looked up when he heard you stir and raised one eyebrow in what he imagined was a nonchalant manner.

"Good morning. I brought almonds. I thought perhaps - I don't know. Sweets seemed appropriate."

You looked at the almonds, arranged in a neat little pile on the pillow. Then you looked at him.

"You've been up since dawn," you yawned. It was not a question.

"I sleep erratically. You know this."

"You brought me almonds before the sun was fully up."

"I happened to be passing the kitchens." He said this with the serene dignity of a man whose position he had already determined was unassailable. "The cook was awake. She was very kind."

"I'm sure she was."

"She seemed to think the occasion warranted it." He turned a page in his book. "The occasion being, presumably, morning. And not - not anything in particular."

You ate the almonds. They were very good. He watched you eat them with a careful, studied casualness of a man who was in fact watching very closely, his eyes dropping to the page every time you glanced up and rising again each time you looked away, a rhythm as deliberate and transparent as breathing.

This was the first week.

- - -

He did love you. That was worth saying plainly, because it would have been easy to look at your husband - at the wine always close to his hand, at the hollows that living behind his eyes had put under them, at the way he sometimes drifted out of a room mid-conversation, lost in something that was not quite this world - and to misread his absences as indifference.

They were not indifference. 

He was present in the small ways that mattered more than the large ones. In the way he brought you sweets from the kitchens on mornings when he knew you were tired, in the way he read to you by the fire in the evenings, in the way he rubbed the ache out of your feet without being asked, in the way he noticed, with that quiet uncanny attention of his, what you needed before you had learned to name it yourself.

He was not present in every large way. He was not always there when the morning came and you woke alone in the bed, turned to find his side empty and gone cool, because he had been up since some ungodly hour in the solar. He was not always there in the late afternoon when the wine had had several hours to work on him and he was somewhere between present and elsewhere - pleasant enough, attentive enough, but not entirely in the room, like a painting of himself rather than the actual man. 

He missed things when he was in his cups, and he was frequently in his cups.

This was a fact of him, the way his sandy hair and his purple eyes were facts of him, and you had accepted it with the practical equanimity of a woman who had chosen this marriage with her eyes open and would, if pressed, choose it again.

But you had seen, in a year of marriage, the way his face changed when he looked at you when he did not know you were watching. 

That was the thing about Daeron that his family most likely did not know, that the court did not know, that the men who called him Daeron the Drunken and meant it dismissively certainly did not know: when he was not performing, when the armour of dry wit and studied indifference was down, he was a kind and deeply caring man.

He was, underneath everything, a man of enormous interior life and considerable gentleness. The wine was what he used to manage the interior life, to turn the volume down on the things he saw when he slept, to put some distance between himself and the dreams that did not stop coming. You had always known this. It did not make the drinking easier to watch, but it made it comprehensible.

He genuinely, entirely loved you, in his own slightly dazed way of a man who had not been expecting to love anyone so thoroughly and found himself doing it anyway - found himself ambushed by it somewhere between the betrothal and the wedding and never quite recovered.

You loved him with your eyes open, and you would choose to again.

- - -

(tw for my emetephobes) 

The morning sickness only worsened that week, reliable as a tax and significantly less pleasant than almonds. You learned that mornings were to be treated with caution, that certain smells were to be avoided with the same urgency one might apply to avoiding known enemies, and that the hour between waking and the point at which your body decided to make its peace with the day was an hour best spent very still and very quiet.

Daeron was, in this period, still sleeping erratically and rising late, which meant that your miserable early morning hours frequently coincided with his own miserable hour or two of nursing a head that had not forgiven him for the previous evening's indulgences.

He found you one morning bent over the basin in your chamber and sat down on the edge of the bed with the particular careful movement of a man whose skull was currently the subject of ongoing negotiations.

"We can be morning sick together. I find it builds character." He offered lightheartedly, though with a genuine warmth. 

"I will throw this basin at you," you told him. You would not, and he knew you would not, but the threat was satisfying to make.

"I believe you entirely. I'm going to sit here very quietly and be supportive." A pause. "I'm also going to close my eyes because the light is -"

"Don't you dare mention your head to me right now."

"I wasn't," he said, meekly. "I was simply observing that the morning light is extremely beautiful and I wanted to appreciate it with my eyes closed."

"Daeron."

"Yes."

"Go away."

"Of course." He did not move. 

He sat on the edge of the bed with his eyes closed and his hands folded in his lap, a picture of supportive uselessness, and the company of his carefully maintained silence was, perversely, better than no company at all. You leaned your forearms on the basin and breathed through the worst of it, and when it passed, you straightened up, and he had not moved.

"Done?" he asked.

"For now."

"Excellent." He opened his eyes, wincing fractionally at the light, and stood with the dignified caution of a man who knew better than to make any sudden movements. "I'll have something bland brought up. Bread, maybe. Water. Something deeply unsatisfying but presumably tolerable." He looked at you. "You look terrible, for what it's worth. Beautifully terrible."

"You look worse."

He considered this with apparent fairness. "We are, between us, a very glamorous couple."

The bland food helped. You ate it at the small table in your solar while Daeron drank watered wine and read - or pretended to read, mostly; you caught him looking at you over the top of his book more than once, that same careful attentive monitoring quality in his eyes, making sure. He set a bowl of dried fruit on the table beside you at some point, wordlessly, without making it into a thing. You ate a few pieces. They helped.

- - -

The weeks passed and they were good, by and large. Your stomach settled into something more manageable, and you found yourself moving through Summerhall with a faint self-consciousness. Daelle found out first, and hugged you with genuine enthusiasm. Rhea was more reserved but her smile was very warm. 

Prince Maekar heard and came to speak to his son with the slightly stiff solemnity of a man who was moved but had no interest in showing it, and Daeron stood before his father and received the congratulations with a composure that cost him something - you could see it cost him - and afterward he found you and pressed his forehead briefly against yours in a gesture so unlike his usual wry remove that it took your breath away slightly.

Little Egg told you with great seriousness that he hoped it was a boy because boys were better, and when you told him that was an extraordinarily incorrect position he was entirely undeterred. Daeron watched this exchange from the doorway with his arms folded and some sort of private, satisfied look on his face.

The household adjusted itself around you, in the way households did - quietly and without fuss, the small accommodations appearing before you had entirely thought to ask for them. Your chair was cushioned differently. A rope appeared at the side of the stairs. The kitchens began producing, without being explicitly asked, more of the things you had been finding tolerable.

This was Daeron's doing, you realised, eventually. When you told him you had noticed, he looked briefly caught out, and then restored his expression to its usual pleasant neutrality.

"The cushioned chair," you said.

"That chair has always been cushioned."

"It was not cushioned last week."

He tilted his head with the thoughtful expression of a man considering whether a creative reinterpretation of recent events was available to him. Apparently it was not. "The chair," he said, "may have been recently improved."

"And the rope on the stairs."

"Safety measure. For everyone. I nearly turned my ankle there last month."

"You did not nearly turn your ankle."

"I was extremely nearly at risk of the possibility of nearly turning my ankle."

You looked at him. He looked back with his expression of unassailable innocence, which was one of the more improbable expressions in his repertoire. "Thank you," you told him.

Something crossed his face that he usually kept more carefully controlled. "Yes," he said. "Well."

He kissed you on the forehead and went to refill his cup, and that was the end of that.

- - -

There was a morning, sometime in the third month, when you found him in his narrow study - the one he had cleared out from a storage room, which smelled of old wood and ink - bent over the writing table with his back to the door. He did not hear you come in. You stood in the doorway and tried to determine what he was doing, and then you saw.

He was drawing.

Or rather, sketching. A sheet of parchment covered in small careful diagrams, the sort a man made for himself when he was thinking, not showing. You could see, from the doorway, that most of them were architectural. Floor plans. The layout of a room.

"What are you drawing?" you asked.

He startled slightly and turned in his chair. His expression cycled through surprise and then something that was almost caught-out, before settling into an air of nonchalance that was not entirely convincing. "Nothing in particular."

"Can I see?"

He paused. "It's preliminary."

"Preliminary to what?"

He looked at you for a moment, and then he turned the parchment around. Floor plans, as you had half-seen - a room, worked over several times, with notes in his small cramped handwriting in the margins. A room adjacent to yours. Measurements. The position of the window. An indication of which direction it faced, and beneath that, in his handwriting, south-facing. Then, beneath that, warmer.

You looked at him.

"I was considering," he said, with the sort of dignified caution of a man who was absolutely going to maintain his position regardless of how the conversation went, "the matter of the rooms adjacent to ours. Currently used for storage, which is an inefficient use of a south-facing room." He straightened the parchment slightly. "I was simply making some preliminary observations about the space."

"A nursery," you stated.

"An adjacent room with favourable light and adequate space for various potential future uses. Which could include -" he made a gesture that contained a great deal more warmth than it appeared to - "any number of things."

"Daeron."

"Yes."

"You're planning a nursery."

"I am making preliminary architectural observations."

You crossed the room and looked at the sketches more closely - the notes in the margin, the careful consideration of the window, the small addendum in the corner that read ask about the floorboards. Something happened in your chest that made it difficult to say anything for a moment.

"The floorboards?" you managed.

"Draughty," he answered, with great dignity. "Cold in winter. A general architectural concern."

"Of course."

"Nothing to do with anything specific."

"Of course not." You put your hand on his shoulder, lightly, and he covered it with his own. "It faces south," you said.

"The light will be very good," he agreed, quietly. "In the mornings."

- - -

In the evenings of those early months, you walked with him through the outer gardens when the heat had gone out of the day, and the air was cool, and green-smelling, and the light came in long amber bars through the rambling roses and the clover. 

He walked with his hands linked behind his back and talked in unhurried voices - about the histories he had been reading, about some argument between two of the stable grooms, about a poem he had come across that had struck him in the chest in the particular way that only certain lines of poetry did.

"Read it to me," you requested of him one evening.

"I don't have it with me."

"Then approximate."

He considered this for a moment, and then recited from memory in his dry slightly self-deprecating way, as though embarrassed to be caught caring about the words - and it was, in fact, a very good poem. Something about the evening light and the particular quality of things that endured not because they were protected but simply because they persisted, because they kept going. You listened to the rhythm of his voice, which was one of the good things about him, unhurried, as though all the time in the world was available for whatever needed to be said, and when he finished you told him it was nice.

"It's excellent," he said, making the slight correction without emphasis. "The second stanza in particular. The way it resolves - here, stop, look at this -" and he crouched down at the edge of the path to point at something in the clover, a small purple-blue flower, and he looked at it with that quality he sometimes had of finding the world unexpectedly interesting, as though everything in it was continuously doing things he had not expected and he had not yet lost his appetite for being surprised.

You looked at him crouched in the clover in the amber light and thought about all the ways a man could be lost to himself, and about the fact that this one - for all his difficulties, all the ways the dreams and the wine had taken their toll - had somehow kept the part of himself that crouched in the clover to look at small flowers.

You loved him with a ferocity that frightened you slightly, sometimes.

He straightened up and brushed his knees, and turned to find you watching him. Something in his expression shifted - not quite the careful neutral he wore in public, but something easier than that, something that had decided not to bother. "What?" he asked.

"Nothing."

He looked at you for a moment with, eyes wide. Then, quietly, like he was settling something for himself rather than telling you anything, he just said, "Good."

You took his arm.

He looked down at your hand on his arm with an expression of satisfaction that he tried, not very hard, to hide, and then covered your hand with his own as you walked, his thumb moving over your knuckles absentmindedly. The clover smelled sweet in the warm air. The light was going amber across the garden.

That night he took you to bed early - the summer evenings at Summerhall lasted long, the light still pale gold at the windows, and there was no particular urgency to anything. He was different in private than he was in public in ways that still surprised you sometimes - gentler, more deliberate, more fully there. No audience, no performance required, and he did not bother with any. 

He had his mouth at your throat when he murmured, muffled against your skin, "I am, for the record, very glad of the present situation."

"Mmm."

"The general situation. Being here. You. This." A small, somewhat helpless gesture. "Specifically you."

"You're being sentimental," you told him.

"I am being factually accurate." He raised his head to look at you, his hair thoroughly undone by your hands, which suited him considerably. The last of the evening light was soft across his face, and he looked, for once, unhaunted - the lines around his eyes smoothed, the usual watchfulness gone quiet. "I'm allowed to be factually accurate."

"You are allowed to be factually accurate," you agreed.

He pressed his forehead briefly against yours, the gesture that was purely his, that he used when he was feeling something he could not fit into words and had stopped trying to. You closed your eyes and breathed him in, and the evening came down to dusk, and Summerhall settled into its quiet around you, and for a while the only world that existed was that room.

--

a/n: so, if you'll notice, these are not written in the same way that the rest of the story is. i decided to take them out because they just didn't really fit in. i feel like too far gone is much grittier and my writing style isn't quite as light and goofy in it. these scenes just didn't really fit into the flashbacks, especially with the more detailed dialogue scenes, and the whole chapter would have been too long.

originally, the flashbacks of chapter three were literally just the flashbacks from pregnancy one, when daeron was being the best husband ever, but then i decided that i wanted to show their marriage as a whole, and i wanted the flashbacks to read as more detached (which is why they're written in that weird past-perfect, 'he had had' (i wrote 'had had' so many fucking times in that chapter, it was driving me mad) tense) and make it less explicitly fluffy.

if you notice, flashback three is written to very clearly say 'he loved you before he cheated on you', and that you were actually happy with the marriage at this point, despite his drinking and other flaws. i put the 'you loved him with your eyes open, and you would choose to again' line because i wanted to allude to wifey choosing to be happy again eventually, but idek if we're going down that route.

i originally kept these because i thought that i could make a different oneshot of daeron and a pregnant wife, but idk, i'm lazy, i'll just post them unedited as some deleted scenes :)

"Halt, vile beast! You shall not lay a finger on the princess!"

A loud, demanding voice echoed through the high-ceilinged room. You looked up from your book to see Daeron stepping forward, looking every bit the noble knight. He wore his grey-and-black tunic proudly, holding up a small wooden shield painted with the red three-headed Targaryen dragon. With a serious, determined look on his young face, his golden-brown hair catching the sunlight from the stained-glass window, he pointed his wooden sword right at the "monster" in front of him.

The monster in question was Aerion, and he was taking his role very seriously.

Aerion was running around in a bright red, scaly dragon cloak, complete with a spiky dragon hood and a long cloth tail trailing behind him on the stone floor. He had been playfully terrorizing the room, knocking over small stools and roaring at the top of his lungs. But now that Daeron had challenged him, Aerion stopped. He dramatically raised his hands like claws, his silver-gold hair peeking out from under the hood as he bared his teeth at his older brother.

"I am the great dragon of the Red Mountains!" Aerion shouted, dramatically lifting one heavy boot as if he was about to stomp right over Daeron's wooden shield. "I will burn this entire castle to ashes and take the princess away to my hidden lair!"

"Not on my watch," Daeron replied, his voice calm and steady, completely contrasting Aerion’s wild, fiery energy. With a swift, calculated movement, Daeron stepped under Aerion's clawed hands and lightly tapped the top of the spiky dragon hood with his wooden sword. Clack.

"Ow! Hey!" Aerion immediately broke character, grumbling as he reached up with both hands to adjust his crumpled dragon hat. He glared at his brother, his dramatic dragon persona completely vanishing into pure childish annoyance. "You hit my head too hard, Daeron! That’s cheating! Knights aren't supposed to aim for the horns!"

You couldn't help but let out a soft, sweet giggle at the ridiculous sight of them. You closed your book slightly, leaning forward over the edge of your cushion throne to get a better look at the bickering princes.

"A noble knight doesn't fight unfairly, Daeron," you chimed in, your voice dipping into a playful sweetness as you decided to side with the grumpy dragon. "And a fierce, terrifying dragon shouldn't complain about a tiny tap from a wooden sword, Aerion. Aren't dragons supposed to be fireproof and indestructible?"

Hearing your soft voice, both boys instantly stopped squabbling and turned their heads to look up at you. Aerion quickly dropped his hands, pouting his bottom lip as he looked up at you with wide, dramatic eyes. Even as kids, your opinion mattered to them more than any royal decree from their father.

"See? The princess says I'm right," Aerion muttered proudly, puffing out his chest and crossing his arms over his scaly red cloak, throwing Daeron a smug look.

Daeron lowered his wooden sword, a rare, soft smile breaking across his usually quiet face as he looked up at you. "I was only defending your honor, my princess. The beast was getting dangerously close to your throne, and I couldn't risk him stealing you away."

"Well, the princess appreciates her knight, but she commands—"

Before you could finish your sentence, you shifted your weight too quickly on the unstable pile of velvet cushions. The top cushion suddenly slid sideways on the polished marble. Your eyes widened in instant shock as you lost your balance completely. The heavy storybook fell from your lap, clattering to the floor, and your tall purple hat slipped from your head as you tumbled forward off the high throne.

"Ah!" a soft gasp escaped your lips as you fell.

"Look out!" Aerion gasped, his eyes widening in pure panic. He completely forgot about his dragon persona and dropped his wooden claws, instinctively rushing forward to reach for you, his long cloth tail tripping over his own feet in his haste.

But Daeron’s reflexes were faster.

The moment he saw you slip, Daeron dropped his wooden sword and shield without a second thought. They clattered loudly against the stone floor as he lunged forward, throwing his arms out just in time.

With a heavy thud, your small frame collided right into Daeron's solid chest. He stumbled backward a step from the impact, his boots scraping against the floor, but he held his ground. His strong arms wrapped tightly and securely around your waist, catching you completely before you could hit the hard, unforgiving stone floor.

For a second, the entire library went dead silent. The only sound was the heavy, panicked breathing of the two princes.

You opened your eyes, your heart hammering wildly against your ribs from the sudden scare. You found yourself looking directly into Daeron's warm eyes, which were filled with an intense, fierce worry you had never seen before. He was holding you so tightly against him that there was absolutely no space between the two of you, his hands trembling slightly from the adrenaline.

"Are you hurt? Did you hit anything?" Daeron asked urgently, his voice cracking slightly as he scanned your face, his hands moving to check your shoulders and arms for any injuries.

Before you could even answer, Aerion dropped to his knees right beside you two, tugging at your gown with frantic, trembling hands. His spiky dragon hood had fallen back, revealing his messy silver hair and a face pale with genuine fright.

"Is she okay?! Daeron, did she break anything?!" Aerion demanded, his usual arrogant tone completely replaced by soft, childish worry. He looked at your face, his eyes searching yours desperately. "Don't die, please! I didn't mean to burn the castle down!"

Seeing Aerion’s terrified face and feeling Daeron’s protective grip around you, the fear completely vanished from your chest. Instead, a sweet, incredibly warm feeling bloomed inside you. You let out a soft, breathless laugh, reaching out to pat Aerion's head gently before resting your other hand against Daeron's chest to calm his racing heart.

"I'm okay, I'm completely fine," you whispered sweetly, smiling warmly at both of them. "Daeron caught me. You saved me, Daeron. Thank you."

Hearing your soft voice and seeing your familiar, sweet smile, both boys let out a massive, simultaneous sigh of relief. The heavy tension in Daeron's shoulders finally dropped, though his arms remained securely wrapped around your waist, completely unwilling to let you go just yet. A soft, relieved smile tugged at his lips.

"I will always catch you," Daeron murmured softly, his gaze locking onto yours with a quiet, fierce devotion that felt way older than his actual age. "I won't ever let you fall."

Aerion pouted, crossing his arms but leaning his head against your knee anyway, his dragon cloak pooling around him on the floor. "Next time, I'll be the one to catch you. Knights are too slow anyway."

You laughed softly, adjusting your messy hair as you sat together on the floor surrounded by fallen toys and scattered cushions. No matter what dangerous storms or royal chaos awaited them in the future of the Seven Kingdoms, right here in this quiet library, you knew you would always be perfectly safe in their arms.

art:

@auenthusiast19 and @art_by_crazytom on twitter (not calling it X)

dividers:

@cursed-carmine