You kept the household running because it was easier than sitting with your own thoughts.

Was Daeron safe?

Will he come back in one piece?

Is Gwayne still alive?

You oversaw the linens, argued the steward down from an unreasonable order of salt cod, walked the empty library where Daeron’s lesson books still sat stacked and unopened, because no one had thought to move them and you could not quite bring yourself to be the one who did. The guard Ormund left behind, four men, headed by an older knight named Willas, treated you with the particular over-correct courtesy of men who had been told, in terms they did not repeat to you, that you were under Lord Ormund’s personal protection, and were not entirely sure what to do with the fact.

You told yourself, in the voice you used for things you did not wish to examine too closely, that the strange hollow feeling under your ribs was only worry for Daeron. It was easier to believe that in daylight. At night it wore thin.

You had not seen Cannibal for almost five moon cycles. This was not, in itself, so unusual, there had been longer silences before, whole seasons where you climbed the cliff path and sat on cold rock and spoke to no one but gulls, and told yourself it meant nothing, that wild things came and went as wild things did. But you had never gone this long with a war on, with dragons dying in battle weekly, and the not-knowing had begun to sit in your chest like a stone you could not put down.

You started dreaming of fire more often than you ever had before. Not Cannibal's fire, precisely, you had never seen him breathe it, not truly, not aimed at anything living, but fire all the same, green and orange flames against a dark sky, and a sound underneath it that you did not have a name for and did not want one.

It was on the ninth night after the host rode out that you woke gasping, sheets damp beneath you, with the absolute, bone-deep certainty that something was wrong, the way you had known, once, a knife was coming for Daeron before your mind had finished naming it a knife.

You lay still in the dark for a long moment, telling yourself it was only a dream, the ordinary treachery of a mind left too long to its own devices. But your heart would not slow, and beneath it, distant enough that you might have imagined it, close enough that you were fairly certain you had not, you thought you heard something. A sound too vast to be a storm and too deliberate to be the sea. A roar, pitched low, carried on wind from somewhere far to the east, you realised with a cold drop in your stomach.

You were out of bed before you had decided to be.

You did not let yourself think, not properly, not in the way that might have stopped you, because thinking had never once in your life led you anywhere but to a longer list of reasons to stay exactly where you were told to stay. You dressed in the dark, in riding clothes you had not worn since you bought them, your first week in Oldtown all those years ago and had kept anyway, folded at the bottom of a chest, for reasons you had never examined. Your hands were not quite steady.

You had never carried a sword but you knew you should take something with you, just in case. You were done, you found, with being a woman whose only weapon was the good fortune of being underestimated. The armoury sat in the undercroft beneath the west wing, close enough to the guardhouse that you had to time your crossing carefully, and you knew its shape well enough by now, from years of finding Daeron there when he ought to have been at his letters, to move through it without a candle.

Rows of pikes. A rack of practice swords, blunted, for the yard. Real steel further back, kept for the household guard, arranged with the particular obsessive order of a place Ormund Hightower had personally inspected for dust.

It was tucked at the end of a low shelf, half-hidden behind a coil of oiled rope, that you found the blade. It was a small, plain blade, a dagger really, no longer than your arm, its hilt wrapped in leather gone dark and soft with age and handling. It did not belong with the rest. The rest of the armoury was Hightower steel, new-forged and formal, the sort of weapon meant to be seen and wielded by warriors. This one had the look of something kept rather than displayed, a thing someone had once carried every day and then, for reasons you could not understand, had stopped carrying, and had not been able to throw away either.

You turned it over once in your hands. The balance was good. It would have to do.

The guard at the postern gate was young and had clearly not expected that you were a woman likely to attempt what you were attempting, because he let you through with nothing more than a startled, "My lady—" that you did not stop to answer. You had spent years being unremarkable. It turned out to be its own kind of armour.

The cliff path in full dark was a different creature than the one you knew by daylight, and you took it faster than was wise, your breath tearing ragged by the time the ground leveled out onto the ledge above his cave, salt wind pulling your hair loose from its plait, the sea a vast restless dark below you and, ahead, where his cave mouth opened into the rock, a low glow that had not been there in the months of silence.

He was there. He was awake, and he was agitated in a way you had never seen him, pacing the width of the ledge, wings half-mantled, the low banked rumble of him gone sharp and constant, a sound with an edge to it you felt in your bones more than heard.

"Cannibal," you said, which had never once made him do anything, and did not now, except that his great head swung toward you, his green eyes catching what little light there was, and for one held breath neither of you moved.

You had spent years telling yourself you understood the shape of your own recklessness, had catalogued it carefully enough to believe you could see it coming. You did not, this time, see it coming at all. One moment you were standing at the mouth of his cave with your heart going too fast and a stolen blade in your hand, and the next you were clasped in Cannibal’s gigantic claw, being whipped into the darkness of his cave.

He did not kill you. He hadn’t killed you the first night, when you had wanted him to. But this was different from all the years of careful, wordless tension that had come before. He had turned, wings unfurling, and stalked toward you. He lowered his head and opened his great mouth, huffing hot air in your direction. He was going to eat you. Perhaps he planned to roast you first. But then he dropped a shoulder and swat back toward the mouth of his cave and you had done the only thing that made any sense in that moment, which was to catch a fistful of the ridge along his neck and pull yourself up before he could leave without you.

You had never ridden him. You had never ridden anything larger than the placid mare Alicent had once let you take round the King's Landing training yard as a girl. There was no saddle, no reins, nothing but your own hands white-knuckled in the gap between two great black spines, and the ground dropping away beneath you with a suddenness that stole every thought from your head.

You did not choose where he flew, could not have chosen it, had no more control over the ancient and furious thing carrying you through the dark than you had over the tides or the rising of the sun and the moon. He flew north, you think, low and fast, following some pull you could not name and would not, until the moment came, have called anything so grand as instinct. The coast fell away. The road unspooled pale beneath you in threads of moonlight. And somewhere past the third hour of a flight that left you frozen through and half-sick with a fear too large to properly feel, the horizon ahead began to become visible.

Grey. And the smell of burned flesh.

“Cannibal, no. You can’t drop me in there. I can’t fight,”

You understood, distantly, in the small clear part of your mind that had not yet given itself over entirely to terror, that you were flying into something you had no business being anywhere near, on the back of a dragon no one commanded, toward death itself. You understood it and could do nothing whatsoever about it. Cannibal did not slow. If anything, the scent of charred flesh ahead seemed to draw him faster, some old and terrible hunger in him rising to meet the wind, and you had time only to press yourself flatter against his neck and pray, in the wordless animal way you had not prayed since you were small, that whatever brought him here was not the thing you feared it was.

You knew only that you were somewhere no living person had any business being, on the back of a beast now roaring a challenge into the smoke-thick air with a sound that seemed to come up from the rock itself.

Cannibal dropped.

You have no memory of deciding to let go. You have only the memory of the ground coming up too fast, of Cannibal's wing tilting hard enough that your grip failed entirely, of a short and terrible weightlessness, and then rolling hard across scorched earth with the wind knocked entirely out of you, close enough to a collapsed picket line that a length of rope caught your ankle and likely saved you from rolling straight a sharp rock.

You lay there a moment, staring up at a sky full of smoke, and thought, with the peculiar clarity that comes only in moments too large for ordinary fear, that this was, in fact, exactly the sort of thing your entire life had been arranged to prevent.

Then you got up, because lying still in a burning camp has never once been a plan that worked for anyone, and you began to run.

You do not remember, afterward, the whole of what you saw in the time that followed. You stumbled into the ruin, catching your breath against a stack of stones.

You did not know where you were going. You knew only that whoever had been here before you, were now dead, and a dragon was to blame.

Then there was a woman dressed in a fine gown.

“My - my Lady..” you stammer, still winded.

“I was wondering when you’d arrive,”

“I - I think you’ve got the wrong person. I should not be here,”

“Oh no, child. You are exactly where you’re meant to be”.

“You don’t know me, please. I - I’ll leave”, you promise, backing away from the woman.

“My name is Alys, you need not be afraid. Your friend has not long left”,

“My friend? I don’t know who you’re talking of”,

“Tell me, have you mastered the black terror, yet?”

You did not think. Your hand went to your sword before your mind had finished the thought, and the blade was in your palm and pressed firmly flat against the inside of your wrist before you had registered she’d moved at all.

"Let go," she said, and something in her voice, you do not know what, compelled you to do exactly that.

The blade clattered to the stones beneath your feet.

She looked at you for one long, strange moment, soot-streaked and wild-eyed, and then she spoke.

“I knew you would be tricky, I won’t keep you long though. You have things to do. People to see. Lives to save.”

“Are you a witch?”

“I am many things.”

“The friend you mentioned. Who do you speak of?”

“Ser Gwayne Hightower.”

“Gwayne? Is he well? Is he safe?”

“Gods no. He is rather the opposite”, she almost joked.

You sway backwards, her words shaking you to the core.

“Now, back to your Dragon”.

“How do you know —” , “— I have seen it,” she taps her head as she turns away from you.

“You just find a way to make him understand,”

“Wait, what do you mean? Where are you going?”

“This is your journey, not mine. Hurry along now, best to catch up with your knight. Oh, and I would perhaps greet his army without the Dragon, to begin with.”

“And Daeron, the young Prince? What have you seen of him?” you shout after her as she continues to walk away.

“Oh, that’s entirely up to you, my dear. Now off you go. I have matters to attend to”, she disappears around a corner and you swear you hear a sheep bleat echo through the ruins.

You rub your head and blink hard a few times, willing the hallucinations away.

"Gwayne."

You half run - half limp from the ruins. Cannibal is waiting outside, snacking on charred remains when you see him.

“You’ve been speaking to a witch. Bad dragon!” you seethe at the great beast. He shows no signs of understanding, but he never does.

“You need to stay hidden,” you speak, as you gesture to the trees.

His green eyes flick between your body and the trees.

You attempt to push him towards the forest. He growls and flashes his teeth.

“Cannibal, ao urnegon issa! Pōnte īlon morghūljilis.” -you cannot be seen! They will kill us both.

He huffs another growl and stalks heavily toward the trees.

“Kirimvose” - thank you.

He turns back and obnoxiously snatches the leg of a dead soldier to continue feasting on before retreating to the trees.

You found the camp by its noise. The low murmur of men who had survived something and the clink of armour being stripped and stacked, a horse somewhere whinnying to its friends. You came out of the treeline with your sword still in your fist and soot on your face and no earthly explanation for either, and the first man who saw you levelled a spear at your throat before you had finished drawing breath to speak.

"I'm not — I mean you no harm," you said, hands lifting, palms out, the blade dangling from one finger like it might disown you if you let it.

“I’m looking for Ser Gwayne Hightower.”

The spear did not lower, in fact, it pressed even harder. "And who might you be, to go looking for him."

You had not worked out an answer to this question. It seemed, in hindsight, an oversight.

"A friend," you said, which had the considerable advantage of possibly being true, and the equally considerable disadvantage of that fact depending on if Gwayne actually thought of you in that way. The last time you had spoken to him, he was about to ask you questions on your background you had no truthful answers to. You just hope that would be overshadowed by taking the blade meant for Daeron in the market.

You were still working out what to say next when a second, familiar voice cut across the first, and you knew it before you had placed why you knew it, some old animal recognition your body arrived at faster than your mind.

"Let him go," Gwayne said, and then he was there, coming round the flank of a supply cart with his sword still drawn and his face doing something complicated when it found you. Shock, then relief, unguarded enough that you saw it before he could put it away. Then, hard on its heels, the particular fury of a man who has just realised exactly what this meant.

"What," he said, low, "in every one of the seven hells, are you doing here."

"I could ask you the same."

"I am here because I am a knight and there is a war. You are here because—" He stopped. Looked past you, at the treeline, at the sky, at anything that might explain it. "How did you even find this camp? We are a moons' hard ride from Oldtown. You do not even have a mount with you."

"I — I had help," you said, which was also true, and also nothing.

"What help? I swear to the Gods if the Prince and his dragon is involved in this—“

"Ser Gwayne." You said his name, glancing around the crowd of men that had gathered, “please — I'll explain. Just not here."

He looked at you a long moment, jaw working, and you watched him decide, you could see the decision happen, the way you had learned to see most things about him happen, in the set of his shoulders before it reached his face, that he would let it wait, for now, because the alternative was making a scene in front of forty exhausted soldiers who did not need one more thing to wonder about.

"Not here," he agreed, and it did not sound like agreement so much as a debt he intended to collect.

It was Criston Cole who found you before Gwayne could discuss things further. He entered the tent the way you imagined he did most things, like a man who expected the ground to rearrange itself in deference to him, and stopped a few feet off, and looked at you. He didn’t just look at you. He analysed you, with great attention.

"You," he said, and there was a frown in it that had nothing to do with suspicion of a stranger in camp and everything to do with something else, something that made the back of your neck go cold. "Have we met?"

"I don't believe so, ser."

"I could swear it." He was still looking with a furrowed brow. You made yourself hold still under it, the way you had once made yourself hold still under strangers gazes across a hundred suppers, giving nothing, offering nothing, a door with no handle. Your mind flashes back to all of the dinners you had to sit through, your blood questioned.

She doesn’t look Targaryen.

She shared the womb with a perfect Prince, she can’t not be Targaryen.

Perhaps her mother strayed, but that doesn’t explain her twin brother.

How strange.

You see Gwayne, in the corner of your eye, move, snapping you back into the now.

"I hope it does not trouble you overmuch in the meantime, Ser." You said it lightly. It did not feel light. It felt like standing very still while something walked around you sniffing the air.

"How did you come to be here, my lady? This is no country for a wandering woman. We have had reports of a dragon in the sky not an hour past. Flew directly over our position, in fact, though it took no man. Strange business. You did not, I hope, cross that path alone."

"I saw no dragon," you said, and did not let your face do anything at all, which was, you thought, probably the hardest thing you had done since you left Oldtown.

"Hm." He did not look satisfied. He looked, if anything, more interested, and you understood with a sinking certainty that Ser Criston Cole was a man who collected unanswered questions the way other men collected debts, and meant, eventually, to call every one of them in. "And your journey here?"

"I would rather discuss it with Ser Gwayne first, if it please you. It concerns his family."

It did not please him, you could tell, but it was a door he could not push through without discourtesy, and whatever else Criston Cole was, he was not stupid enough to create friction when the man in question stood mere feet away. He inclined his head, a fraction too slow to be entirely gracious, and left the tent.

"Come with me," Gwayne said quietly, once Ser Criston was out of earshot, steering you out of the tent and toward the relative privacy of the treeline by your elbow. "He does not forget a face he thinks he knows."

"I gathered."

"The entire camp watched a dragon drop out of the sky not an hour ago, yet you saw nothing. You know how that sounds to a man like Cole?”

"I'm aware," you said, sharper than you meant it, because you were tired down to the bone and your hands had only just stopped shaking and you did not, in this particular moment, need to be told the size of the hole you had flown yourself into. Gwayne heard the sharpness and, to his credit, did not answer it with more of the same. He only looked at you, and something in his face eased into something else: worry, plain and unhidden, the kind he usually kept better locked away than this.

"You're hurt," he said, nodding at your wrist, where you had not noticed until he said it that you were bleeding, a shallow scrape from the fall, dark against your skin, where the still relatively fresh scar from the blade meant for Daeron, had reopened.

"It's nothing."

He exhaled, hard, through his nose, and for a moment you thought he might actually shake you. "Gods, woman. Tell me what happened. All of it. And then tell me how you knew to come at all, because I did not send word, and no raven flies from Oldtown in a single night. Did Daeron have a hand in this? Did he fly Tessarion? Is he safe?”

You looked at him, soot-streaked himself, you noticed now, a healing cut above one brow, alive, whole, standing in front of you.

“I - I don’t know, Ser —”, “don’t lie to me, woman!” he seethes, clenching his jaw.

"I had a dream," you said instead, which was, in its way, the truest lie you had ever told him. "That something was wrong. I couldn't stay in Oldtown not knowing."

He studied you for a long moment, the way Criston Cole had studied you, except that where Criston's gaze went looking for a name, Gwayne's only ever seemed to go looking for whether you were lying to spare yourself pain or to spare him it, and you watched him decide, again, to let it lie, for now, filing it away with all the other things about you that did not quite add up, the growing ledger of a debt you were increasingly certain you would one day have to pay in full.

"Rhaenyra sits the throne," he said instead, low, watching your face for a reaction. “Aemond and his dragon have deserted us. This is hopeless. I have sent word to Ormund. Last I heard, he had taken Tumbleton and was waiting on the Prince’s dragon.”

"That's not possible," you said, which was foolish, because it plainly was, because he was stood in front of you having ridden away from the proof of it.

"It's true." Gwayne's mouth was a hard line.

You said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not have said too much, and so you did the thing you had gotten very good at, and let the silence stand in for everything you could not afford to feel where anyone could see it.

"Where," he said, in a different voice entirely, "did you get that?”

“I found it in the armoury. I don’t have my own—”

"It was mine," he explained. "When I was a boy. My mother had it made for me the year I turned ten, before—" He stopped again, and did not finish that sentence either, and you understood, with the particular sick lurch, that the blade you had armed yourself with in the dark had a history that predated your need of it.

As soon as posters for Onegin began to curl at the corners, a new casting was announced. Still second casting, but to Daeron it is a considerable relief to have completed a task and to be trusted with the next one. He gets to keep his job. And his partner. What the both of you have been cast in is another story.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Lyonel drags hands down his face. "This is so tepid my balls have undescended. Again."

No one in the room has any idea which person Lyonel Baratheon means. Possibly all ten of you. He's blessed the company which, as he states, made him into what he is today, with a guest reappearance and an exclusive piece he's choreographed himself. While describing it to the groups of lucky tens he's said something shocking about sex and abundance, and a lot of other bacchanal things, none of which have shocked or interested Daeron. There have been tons upon tons of visionaries with a wet dream they simply must recreate using stock of bodies comelier and more able than they themselves possess. He's seen the moves before, too—half of them are a direct Mayerling ripoff, only more debauched and vulgar.

What, however, does interest Daeron is the endless opportunities to touch you differently. And to be touched by you. The choreography includes impact, intentional knees between legs, ass-groping, hands on tits, one foot (yours, truly) on his chest, plenty of hair pulling and, most importantly, kissing. Passionate, desperate, aggressive making out. The prospect of swapping spit with you and being professionally absolved for the indulgence excites Daeron so much he's suckled on only one wine bottle this entire week (maintenance sips somehow do not count in his head).

Every pair has similar steps with a decaying twist towards the end of each sequence. The trick is to dance it precisely one count apart to depict, as Lyonel has called it, 'the erosion addictive desire inflicts on relationships.' Daeron suspects some wench has fucked Lyonel to another dimension and then broken the poor bastard's heart.

"I was told I am not getting a bunch of virgins, but you—" Lyonel points to a frightened-looking couple that's fourth in succession. "You two make embracing celibacy feel all of a sudden exciting."

The girl sucks her lips inward. Her partner keeps a reassuring hand on her lower back looking like he'd rather be somewhere else, throwing up.

Lyonel’s pointing finger travels down the line and arrives at the two of you. His voice lowers, which somehow makes him more offensive. “And whatever unresolved shit is going on here, I don’t care. I want burning passion.”

Daeron’s brows lift. Lyonel continues before either of you can defend the temperature of your private affairs.

“If you feel like killing each other, excellent. Remember that murder is very adjacent to praying-mantis foreplay and utilise it.” He looks between your faces, increasingly disappointed by both. “So far this has had all the emotional force of bird-watching with no birds in sight.”

You swallow. You have had versions of Lyonel before, choreographers who mistook public humiliation for rigour and spoke about bodies with the confidence of men who never had to lend their own. None, however, possessed Lyonel Baratheon’s status, which meant the others had occasionally been required to behave as though employment law applied to them.

Daeron’s fingers brush yours. The touch is small enough to hide behind the line of your thighs, and when he leans closer his mouth barely disturbs the hair beside your ear. “You’re doing well,” he whispers. “He’s simply incapable of recognising anything below a public indecency charge.”

Lyonel squints. One hand rises to scratch through his beard. “You,” he says to Daeron, “would be wiser to approach her as someone who seduced you, ruined you and rejected you. Stop making those—those fucking puppy eyes at her as if she’s standing on some unreachable pedestal.”

Your scoff is unpreventable. Lyonel’s attention shifts to you; one eyebrow rises.

“I like your energy better,” he says. Then he claps both hands, loud enough to startle the fourth couple. “Again. All of you, before I cut my dick off.”

The cassette is wound back. A blunt pulse starts beneath the strings, and the first pair step into the middle phrase.

She arrives one count ahead of him, turning beneath his arm with a look over her shoulder that promises something sweet enough to make an intelligent person stupid. He follows willingly. His hand finds her waist; hers slips behind his neck and draws him down into a kiss that is still only an indication, lips resting without pressure, yet the intention around it is lovely. She could take the soul out of him and return it washed and folded. He would thank her for the service.

The next couple inherit the movement one beat later. Their version has already lost some patience. The catch at the waist becomes a pull, the turn finishes too close, and she keeps him waiting for the kiss until his spine bends after her. When their mouths almost meet, affection has acquired blunt fangs.

Another count passes. The third woman strikes her partner’s chest before letting him take her wrist. He circles it hard enough to whiten the skin beneath his fingers, and the kiss here is expected to arrive as settlement rather than reward. Their bodies remain beautiful through the ugliness of it, lines kept long while the hands grow less civil.

The fourth pair begin with the frightened girl Lyonel has just accused of reviving chastity. Fear makes her precise. She twists out of her partner’s hold, lets him catch her again, then drives her knee between his thighs with enough conviction to earn a grunt from him. His reassuring hand has become possessive at her lower back. By the time she fists his shirt and brings his face down, both of them look surprised by how well disgust suits them.

Then the phrase reaches you.

Daeron catches your hips from behind. His palms travel lower on the next count and close over your ass, taking enough of it to satisfy Lyonel’s demand that he gets his hands dirty. The grip has grown competent over the week. He knows where the muscle gathers, how firmly he can pull before your balance changes, where his fingers may spread without making the movement look cautious.

You throw your head back beside his and drive an elbow towards his ribs. He avoids it by design, catches your forearm and turns you through. Your bodies separate for half a count before colliding chest to chest.

The shove lands squarely against his sternum. Daeron travels backwards, bare feet sliding, then returns with the delayed violence built into his sequence. One hand closes at your nape while the other finds your buttock again and drags you across the final step. You catch his jaw. His cheek compresses beneath your fingers.

All of that works. The impact has bite, the handling looks indecent, and the single-count delay between your movements gives the impression that each of you is learning cruelty from the other in real time. For a week the two of you have reached the final beat and placed your mouths together with the dry, conscientious restraint of dancers indicating where a kiss will eventually go.

Today Lyonel wants the eventuality.

The couple before you break apart. Your count approaches through the music, carried on the same phrase that has already swallowed four other pairs.

Daeron looks delighted. You can feel the smile trying to form beneath the hand holding his jaw, while your own mouth has gone dry enough to stick at the corners.

You pull him by the chin, feeling your fingers getting colder and colder, because there are people here, because he is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and because you want this elsewhere. You want this, private and abashed, you want this in slanting rain while he's walking you home and you both linger by the main door for too long, you want this when his breath doesn't smell of spirits and cigarettes, when his smile is not so smug and after he's asked you please, can I kiss you? Please, I really want to.

What happens instead is Daeron's mouth touches yours, not because it wants to, but because it's been forced to. Your entire face calcifies into an expression of nothing.

Daeron remembers his late mother describing the kisses his stiff-lipped father gave her in public as 'corpse kisses.' They allegedly involved a cold, stagnant mouth and a thousand-yard stare that reached way past and through Dyanna's skull, and ever since Daeron learnt about the existence of such a dull form of kissing he's made a vow to himself to never kiss, or let anyone kiss him like that. Wanting to grant affection is one part of Daeron's life-long struggle. The affection being desired is another. You have just successfully made him break that given promise.

Your lips are deathly. Afflicted with numbness so prominent his tongue grows cold at the tip. It all takes such an unwanted direction Daeron feels mildly disgusted with himself for kissing a girl that seems like she'd rather drink piss than open her mouth for him. The kiss is not a kiss at all. It's Daeron fisting your ass cheeks, bowing over you and dragging his stupid fondness-starved maw on you, and licking across the tightly shut seam, while you stand, petrified, with your eyes gauging and all fingers spread like you've been dumb-struck to some crucial spot in your spine.

Lyonel groans loudly. "That's—" he starts. "I have no words. I think I've just been castrated."

Daeron touches your forearm. The gasp that leaves you is absurdly large for two fingertips, as if the nerves beneath them have reached into the coma and pulled you upright. You blink several times. His face has gone slack with hurt; even the red annoyance across his cheekbones has drained, leaving him pale around the mouth.

Your hand closes over his wrist. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what—”

“You don’t have to be so convincing,” Daeron says. His voice is quiet enough to sound private despite the room full of people. “It’s only work. Nothing else.”

“I know, I just—”

“I would like everyone to take a lunch break,” Lyonel announces, despite it being five in the afternoon. “Come back in thirty minutes. Except for you two, obviously.”

His hand gestures towards you both. Terror catches beneath your ribs. Daeron only looks displeased, which on him involves a slight flattening through the eyes and the sort of stillness that promises elaborate complaint later.

The others disperse through a low murmur. Bags are collected, jumpers dragged over damp heads, and the fourth couple leave together with his palm returned to its rightful place at her back. Lyonel waits with both hands clasped over his crotch until the last person shuts the door.

Then he lifts his head. “You are…” he says to Daeron, and scratches once through his beard. “I get it.”

Daeron’s mouth tightens.

Lyonel turns to you. “I believe there are many problems to unpack here, but I suspect an audience is one of them. Which is very unfortunate, given that the piece is meant to be seen. You will have to do it in front of people or you will lose the placement.”

You nod too quickly.

“However.” Lyonel looks directly into your eyes. “I understand that I seem to you a mad, extravagant, delusional man." A beat. "I am a mad, extravagant, delusional man, but I possess an ounce of empathy. Let us see whether you can manage it with fewer gawkers.”

He turns away and drags a chair from beside the piano. To Daeron it bears a ghastly resemblance to a cuck chair, particularly once Lyonel positions it several yards away and sits with his back to you, facing the mirror.

“I am not here,” he says. “I will say nothing beyond ‘again’ when required. I may sigh. You will have to let that slide.” He settles deeper into the chair and spreads his knees. “Daeron, you have thirty minutes to make her want to kiss you. Begin.”

You take your places. The sequence behaves until the final count, where Daeron hesitates. His eyes search your face. The force leaves his frame so suddenly that his chest sags away from yours and his cheek slides out of your hand before your mouth can reach him.

Pain twists across your face. Daeron sees it and steps back into position without Lyonel saying a word.

The next attempt ends with your foreheads meeting hard enough to produce a blunt knock. You both recoil, hands flying up, then stare at one another through watering eyes. From the chair comes a long exhalation which Lyonel would presumably classify as involuntary.

On the third run Daeron misses the turn before the shove. His foot crosses too far, the delayed count collapses, and he has to catch your elbow to keep you from travelling into the barre. He swears beneath his breath. You reset again.

The fourth attempt reaches no farther than the opening hold. “Wait,” Daeron says.

He comes towards you and places both hands on your shoulders. The contact is broad and warm, entirely still. He looks at you for so long that you have to crane your neck higher, searching his face for whatever instruction he cannot seem to arrange.

Air leaves through his nose. Then he bends towards your ear. “Can I kiss you?” he asks.

You suck in a wet breath. “N-now? Without—?”

Daeron nods. His hair brushes your cheek. “Here,” he says, reaching for your hand. He places two of your fingers against the inside of his wrist, then pinches a fold of skin beneath them. “Do this, anywhere, if you want me to stop. All right?”

You give a small bob with your head. Daeron drags his nose back from the warm place above your ear, down the ledge of your cheekbone and along the side of your nose. The hand he has been holding gets guided upwards and laid against his jaw, then he brings the rest of you closer by the waist until scarcely a breath remains between your mouths.

You pull.

The first meeting is gentle. Lips merely resting over lips, their softness compressed into a thin shared line. Daeron’s breath leaves him in a sweet little shudder and washes over your skin. Neither of you opens your eyes. You only drag your mouths against each other without parting them, slow enough to feel every small give.

He is remarkably soft-lipped today. You had expected something drier, a little sanded around the edges, because even occasional drinking leaves its tax upon the mouth. Instead, there is smoothness. Moisture. You could go as far as to accuse him of resorting to lip balm.

Inside, Daeron is roiling. He adores kissing. This is kissing. The timid beginning he knows will eventually fall apart, air slipping from your nose and tickling the peak of his cupid’s bow whenever your mouth brushes higher. He adores the delay, the pressure kept light enough to make every millimetre significant, the sense of another person deciding whether to let him farther in.

It is a tender language in which Daeron possesses embarrassing fluency. He has wanted to introduce himself to your mouth for so long that merely being allowed to linger upon it feels lavish. Given any place without counts, mirrors and your cucked choreographer seated politely in the corner, he could stay here and let the whole evening perish around him.

He has no idea whether you are enjoying this or simply acquainting yourself with the feeling of him. For the moment, he would accept either.

Then your fingers clamp over his jaw and draw him another inch closer. Your mouth opens. You suck his upper lip so hard Daeron nearly chokes on the groan climbing through him.

His hands recover their destination. They slide down your back, take fistfuls of your ass and use them to bring you flush against him. Standing this way, he has to curve his spine to meet your height, though he could easily tip your head backwards and kiss you halfway into the floor.

Your tongue comes out and licks over his.

Daeron is thrilled. You taste amazing. You taste like a lovely fucking girl, and one capable of getting aggressive with him, too, because your teeth catch the rouged flesh above his chin and make it sting. Then you lick over the bite, kind enough to soothe precisely what you have chosen to hurt.

He is a goddamn good kisser. With your eyes closed, you are alone with him. He has just asked whether he can come upstairs, and you have said yes, but kiss me first. His hair is soft where your fingers enter it. His jaw carries a crust of stubble too pale to see, though the coarseness beneath his nose and across his cheeks scratches your lips whenever they stray from his and begin devouring the rest of his face.

“Oh, fuck—” Daeron breathes when you pull at his roots.

The sound sobers you by a fraction, gently enough that desire remains undisturbed. You open your eyes and look into his.

The setting sun pours through the ceiling-high windows and strikes them strangely. You had thought they were blue. Up close, Daeron’s irises carry splodges of the most delicate lilac, mere specks of watercolour overbleeding across grainy paper. They are very pretty. A ridiculous urge comes over you to brush both thumbs beneath them.

“Now, that,” Lyonel begins.

Both your heads snap towards the mirror. He is still seated in his chair, chin propped in one hand, wearing an expression of dreamy contentment.

“That was fucking hot."

It was. God, it was. Daeron's cheeks are as pink as yours are hot. You give him another once-over before both of you have to get back to the meanness the piece requires and wonder how much tenderness sits hidden in him and whether holding it would be possible.

Lyonel gets to his feet and turns the chair round with one hand. “Let’s make it hotter by actually putting it together, shall we?” he says. “From the middle phrase.”

You return to position. Daeron comes behind you and settles both hands over your hips, palms broad enough to warm most of them. Before the music starts, he lowers his mouth beside your ear.

“Can I kiss you again?” he whispers.

You nod. His thumbs press once into the points of your hips, then release as Lyonel reaches for the cassette player.

The phrase begins. You move through the first collision with less force spent resisting what comes after it. Daeron receives your elbow, loses you for half a count, catches you on the delayed turn and lets the momentum pull both of you off-centre before the choreography rights itself. Your shove sends him backwards. He returns lowered through the knees, one hand finding your nape while the other closes over your ass and hauls you through the last step.

Your fingers catch his jaw.

The faces meeting at the end belong to different dancers now. Fear has loosened from yours. Daeron’s earlier delight has quietened into something hopeful and humble, and when he looks at your mouth he waits there, asking again without making a sound.

You pull him in.

Your mouths meet open. Teeth knock, noses crush together, and Daeron exhales through the collision with a hoarse little sound that disappears between your lips. His hands take greedy fistfuls of your flesh while his knees remain bent beneath him, leaving you the height and leverage to direct the kiss wherever you please.

You turn his face and bite. He follows the angle instantly, moulding himself to the front of you until the whole length of his body appears poured there. Each pass of your tongue draws a slow roll through him. The movement begins under his ribs and carries down through the hips, pressing him into you with the pelvic logic of sex.

Your breathing grows nastier. It saws between your mouths, wet and uneven, while you kiss too hard to preserve any clean line through the neck or shoulders. Daeron’s nose drags across your cheek. Your teeth catch his lower lip again, and the small moan he gives you lands directly on your tongue, quiet enough that it belongs to you alone.

His grip shifts lower. He pulls you into the next roll with both palms and opens his mouth wider beneath yours, pliant wherever you force him, hungry wherever you give. From the mirror, the two of you have already passed through undressing and reached whatever comes after. The clothes only make the indecency more concentrated.

The music moves on without you. He keeps kissing you through several counts that contain no kissing whatsoever, and you let him, one hand fixed around his jaw while the other knots in his hair. His body continues that slow, intimate grind into yours until Lyonel clears his throat with such forced politeness it sounds like he's enjoying the view in a way he shouldn't.

You break apart incrementally. Daeron’s mouth follows once before he remembers where he is, lips bitten red and breath still dragging through them.

“That will do for today,” Lyonel says. He looks between you with the exhausted satisfaction of somebody whose vulgar theory has just been proven right. “You have another month. So far, it looks promising.”

He waves both of you towards your things. Apparently the others are also being sent home, which will thrill them when they return from their five-o’clock lunch break and discover their only contribution was leaving.

Daeron gathers his jumper, pushes his feet into his shoes and waits while you pack. His hair remains disturbed where you held it, and when he speaks his voice has not entirely recovered. “May I walk you?”

You look at him for an embarrassingly long time. “Sure,” you say, spineless enough to make you dislike yourself.

This time the walk is unbearable in a completely new way. Daeron makes no attempt to fill the well of awkwardness with jokes or put-upon sightseeing. He walks silently beside you and stares at his own feet, sometimes yours, following their wet little trod along the pavement as if the answer to something might appear between steps.

You have to hold the umbrella higher for him. He still walks hunched beneath it, and still there is too much of him; one shoulder spreads beyond the edge and darkens gradually with rain. You consider telling him to come closer. You don't.

Three streets from your flat, the place where you told him here is good enough last time arrives and passes. Daeron notices nothing. Or notices and says nothing, which is worse. Your building appears around the corner before you find a voice capable of stopping him, and there it is: the precise door, the number above it, the chipped brass buzzer beside the frame. Daeron has acquired the complete knowledge of where you live.

You climb the first two steps beneath the shallow awning. He remains on the pavement, and the elevation brings your eyes nearly level. Perhaps yours sit a little higher now. It feels weirdly useful.

Rain ticks against the umbrella between you. Daeron looks like he wants something. His gaze stays on your face long enough for hope to become physically embarrassing, a warmth crawling under your collar while you prepare some useless thank you, see you tomorrow and begin turning towards the door.

Then he drops onto one knee.

Your mind performs such a disgusting trick that you scowl at it internally. He reaches for the sliver of skin between your ballet flat and the hem of your trousers. His fingers wrap around your ankle with careful, cool pressure.

“You’ve been favouring the other one,” he says. His thumb settles beside the tendon. “Is this one all right?”

You swallow. “Have—have I? I…I didn’t notice.”

There might have been a difference. You cannot remember one. He could also be making complete shit up for the privilege of touching you, in which case he might have invented a more useful concern involving your ass, or your waist, or a sudden medical necessity to pull you against him again and put his mouth—

“I must have imagined it, then,” Daeron murmurs.

His fingers leave you. He straightens, unfolding until the umbrella has to rise with him, and the new distance feels punitive.

“Sleep well, I suppose?” he says. His wet shoulder gleams beneath the streetlamp.

“Mhm.” You nod. “You too.”

Ask me, ask me, ask me, ask me. The words beat behind your face like a trapped insect. Ask whether you can come upstairs. Ask for tea, ask for water, ask to inspect the pipes, ask whether there is any more lipstick left in the flat that requires professional removal.

Daeron only smiles, lopsided and tired, then steps backwards into the rain.

You blink after him. He has travelled several paces before panic finds enough breath to operate your throat. “Daeron!”

He stops and turns. Hope moves through his body. It makes a small sway in your direction and sends water sliding from his hair.

“Do you, uh—” Do you want to come upstairs? Your grip tightens around the umbrella handle. “—do you want to take this?”

You push it towards him.

The sway reverses. Daeron looks at the umbrella, then at you, and lifts one hand in refusal. “Nay, it’s fine. Later.”

He turns again.

You stand beneath the awning and watch him go. Had he come close enough to take it, you might have found the courage. Had his fingers brushed yours again, had he looked at your mouth, had he said please in that careful voice, you might have opened the door and allowed the rest to happen without ever technically inviting it.

Daeron had hoped for the same cowardice from the opposite direction.

Every new thing with you is eye-opening, and he worries he will soon be lidless if he does not do something about it. First your fury reached him below the belt. Then comfort. Then came your apology and, surprisingly, ogling. Today you let him ask. Gave him an answer and a means of revoking it, then kissed him near bloody.

Now you know where his mouth fits against yours. He knows the little wet breath you take before opening. Both facts appear capable of obliterating him.

Dreams have grown so loud since he began drinking less they sometimes happen in waking. They return in longer pieces, whole enough to have him snap up before dawn with his sheets twisted around his legs. He sees faces clearly. Sometimes yours appears among them, which makes the prospect of closing his eyes tonight feel unwise.

Daeron reaches inside his coat. A few swallows. Enough to take the edge off and make sleep less ambitious. He tells himself this while unscrewing the flask, and the lie is so familiar it scarcely requires wording.

The first mouthful burns pleasantly. He walks as he drinks, with his lips still tender from you, and does not look back because he has already looked back twice since turning the corner.

You watch until the rain has swallowed him past recognition. Then you fold the umbrella, take out your key and shoulder yourself into the building. Make your way up by hoarding two steps at a time.

Daeron has never left. You take him with you, and he's more present the closer you are to your door. Your mouth remembers him perfectly. Then, the memory seems to spread lower. Bag slips from your shoulder in the hallway. You turn to lock up, then rest your back to the wood and press two fingers to the centre of your lower lip. The flesh gives, swollen from teeth and pressure. Daeron’s breath returns there in sweet little shudder followed by the rougher sound dragged out of him when you pulled his hair.

Your hand moves beneath the coat. Under the waistband. The leotard has gone damp between your legs. Its seam presses directly against your clit when you bend your knees and slide down the door, and the pressure recalls how he bonded himself to you with his body yielding wherever your hand directed his face.

This is new. A willing man, a vulnerable man has never happened to you before. All that height and talent and spoilt beauty made pliant, asking with his eyes even after you had already said yes. You wonder what it would take to make Daeron tender. To make his eyes water and his cock hard.

You slide two fingers beneath the gusset. Wetness coats them immediately. A breath leaves through your nose, terribly familiar to the ones he had adored against his cupid’s bow. You find the clit and begin small, firm circles, and then your mind improves the doorway by one line. Daeron turns when you call him and comes back beneath the umbrella, eyes lifted towards you on the steps. This time you ask properly. This time he climbs.

He asks, Can I kiss you?—and you put his hand between your legs instead of answering. The choreography didn't need to pretend it was about anything except fucking. You don't need to either. He comes to you in fragments, real, and made up, and improved. Mind supplies the image him discovering what he has done to you, the hopeful softness gone startled, then wolfish. You pull his hair until his mouth opens, and invent him with his clothes off and no opaque water around him.

He lies long-limbed and pale, sallow skin gaining colour by seconds. Your imagination begins in the little triangular hollow between his pectorals, where the muscle divides above the sternum and leaves a soft, thumb-sized place that seems to yearn for a mouth. A few pale hairs gather there. You put your tongue among them, then travel lower while his chest rises too quickly beneath your face.

Daeron’s body is made lean through labour rather than denial. His ribs show when he twists, but the belly has flesh enough to warm beneath your palm, a shallow softness over the hard lattice that appears whenever he breathes or laughs or pulls his knees towards himself. The hair below his navel refuses the tidy little line some men cultivate. It spreads in a fair, unruly rug over the lower stomach, thickening towards his cock as if all the fuzz on him has been slowly migrating there for winter.

You want to rub your face in it. The thought is so graceless it makes your fingers slip.

Wetness smears higher across your clit. You correct the angle and picture the hair rasping your cheek while Daeron watches, pink and swollen.

His arms look beautiful beside him. Long, veined, loose upon the sheets, the vessels rising blue-green beneath thin skin and travelling from wrist to elbow with the branching nature of roots. The same network shows through his calves and over the tops of his feet, made prominent by years of forcing blood through limbs worked past reason. You imagine pinning one wrist beside his head and watching the tendons pull when he tests your grip.

He would let you. The image of his strength does very little until you picture him giving it over.

You spread your knees farther on the floor. The door presses cold through your coat while your fingers circle faster, and Daeron’s invented hand replaces them with admirable ease. His thumb is broader. Calloused. It requires no lesson. The Daeron you have built has touched more cunts than you have female friends and, worse, has probably cared whether every one of them came. He finds the place with a foul little certainty, holds the pressure there, and looks horribly pleased when your hips begin to follow his hand.

“Here?” he asks in your head.

You answer by bucking against him. His mouth opens around a soft, boyish sound.

The rest of him assembles below your palm. Waist nothing short of slutty. Hipbones clean enough to catch light, with two deep cumgutters carved beneath them by muscle and low fat into ruthless anatomy. Those sharp channels run through the lean pull of his lower belly, guiding your eyes towards exactly what they have been named for.

You follow them. His cock lies hard against the fuzz, skin flushed darker through the length with a bright bead already glossing the head. Hard for you. Leaking for you. Daeron has his knees knocked apart and his face turned into the pillow, though his eyes keep finding you because he's not missing any of this.

“Kiss me,” he says.

You bend over him and leave his mouth untouched. Put your lips beneath his jaw instead, where the skin is thin and his pulse sells him out. “Please,” Daeron whispers. “Kiss me.”

You suck until he cries out.

The sound goes through your hand. Your fingers become his thumb again, dragging slick circles over you while you manufacture his neck afterwards: pale skin covered in red suction marks, one deepening purple beside the throat, another high enough to show above a rehearsal collar. You give him more. Hunger rid of professional limits. It bites down, mouths, worries every tender patch until Daeron is panting beneath you and trying to offer new places without appearing too eager.

“Ride me,” he says. “Please, lovely girl. I want—I want you.”

You climb over him.

The imagined bed never acquires a room around it. It floats somewhere dark and obliging, broad enough for his legs and soft enough to receive the restless knocking of his heels. He lies open beneath you, hair damp at the temples, chest blotched pink from excitement. His cock presses hot against your cunt while you drag yourself along it, coating him before granting anything more.

He looks ruined already. Ruined by kisses. Ruined by being watched. The lovely, hopeful softness has gone glass-eyed, mouth slackening each time your clit passes over the ridge beneath the head.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells you.

The praise makes your hand falter. You bear down harder to punish it.

“No, please.” His hips lift. “Please, keep going. You feel so good.”

He says sweet things while you use him. That seems important. Daeron would pour affection into the indignity until you could no longer tell which one made you wetter: his cock twitching helplessly, or his voice breaking around lovely, lovely girl as if you are doing him a kindness by grinding him into the mattress.

You imagine lowering yourself onto him. The thick push. His face forgetting its clever shapes. “Fuck me,” Daeron gasps.

Your fingers drive faster. The heel of your hand presses into the soaked gusset while two fingertips work the clit, and the fantasy begins to jump with your pulse: his forearm beneath your grip, the rough hair against your palm, grooves of his hips flexing as he tries to remain still for you.

“Fuck me,” he says again, almost crying now. “Please, I’ll be good.”

That does it badly enough. Your head strikes the door behind you. Pleasure clenches through your belly and folds you over your own hand, trousers biting into your thighs. Daeron comes apart with you inside the dark you have made for him, throat mottled and cock jerking deep while he keeps saying how good you are until language fails and leaves him making little helpless noises instead.

You stay on the floor until your breathing calms. Two wet fingers rest against your lower lip, and when you close your eyes, Daeron kisses them clean.

Well, fuck. Now you need a drink.

You opened your mouth and closed it again. You are not entirely certain, even now, what would have come out of it, whether some careful half-truth would have arrived in time to save you, or whether the whole of it might have spilled out instead, years of silence breaking against the particular focus in his eyes, because there is a kind of tired that makes even the most practiced liar careless, and you had been tired of your own careful architecture for longer than you'd admitted to yourself.

The solar door banged open hard enough to knock the air from your lungs, and Lord Ormund came through it with Daeron marched ahead of him by the shoulder, and whatever had been building between you and Gwayne collapsed at once into something smaller and considerably less important.

"Look at him," Ormund spat, to the room in general, in the particular sharp, aggrieved tone of a man who has been personally wronged.

“Look at the state of him. Sword-fighting in the yard with the master-at-arms’s boy, rolling about in the dirt like a stableboy. How am I supposed to dine across from him. I shall be tasting his stench instead of my meal”.

"I am sorry, Uncle," Daeron offered, with the particular wounded dignity of an almost-five-and-ten-year-old.

"I don't care if you’re sorry. Fix this mess. You are a Prince. Not a pig”, Ormund shoves him further into the room and leaves, angrily.

Gwayne, who had risen from his chair the moment the door opened and arranged his face into something appropriately neutral, did not quite manage to suppress a flicker of amusement.

“I am not even that dirty,” Daeron murmurs under his breath once Ormund had left.

"I don't doubt it. Come now, let me brush your hair and get you ready for supper, you will not wish to anger Lord Ormund any more than you already have”, you say as you guide him from the room by his shoulders.

Gwayne left before you could decide whether he had dropped his line of questioning or was simply waiting for another opportunity to confront you, and you stood behind Daeron, brushing his dark auburn hair in his chambers for a long while afterward, listening to the ordinary sounds of the household going on around you. A servant's laugh in the corridor, gulls crying somewhere over the harbour, and thinking, not for the first time, that the lie you had built your life on top of was never going to hold forever, only for as long as everyone around you found it more convenient to let it.

Ormund's fastidiousness was a small and constant thread running through the household's daily life, the sort of thing you learned to navigate the way you'd learned to navigate weather. He could tell, apparently, when the kitchens had burned the bottom of a sauce from two rooms away. He complained, with real and lasting bitterness, about a particular groom who insisted on using a certain tallow soap that lingered unpleasantly on the leather of the tack. He inspected Daeron before any occasion of consequence and Daeron, who loved the yard and the practice swords and the honest, animal smell of exertion rather more than he loved being presentable, bore the inspections with the long-suffering patience of a boy who had simply decided, somewhere along the way, that this was the price of being permitted to be a boy at all in the hours his uncle wasn't watching.

You became, without quite meaning to, the household's quiet mediator in the matter. The one who made certain Daeron was scrubbed and correct by the hour his uncle expected him to be, so that the hours before it could remain entirely his own. It was a small thing. It did not feel small to Daeron, who thanked you for it more than once with the particular fierce, uncomplicated gratitude that showed he understands, even if he cannot say so plainly, that someone has gone quietly out of their way to protect the only freedom he has.

It was on an ordinary grey afternoon, rain streaking the solar windows and the lesson abandoned in favour of a fire and a shared, companionable silence, that Daeron asked you the question you had spent years dreading and had somehow, foolishly, stopped expecting.

"Do you miss your family?" he asked, without looking up from the book he had been reading.

"Sometimes," you said, which was true, and left it there, hoping it would be enough.

It was not enough. Daeron had never, in all the time you'd known him, been a boy easily satisfied with the smaller half of an answer.

“What was your mother like?”

Your hand went still on the page you'd been reading. You have had years to build an answer to this exact question, turned it over enough times in the privacy of your own thoughts that you might have expected it to come easily, yet it did not come easily at all.

"She died when I was young," you said, which was, in its bones, entirely true, the truest thing you had told him since you'd arrived. "I don't really have any memory to miss, not really, only the idea of one, which isn't quite the same thing."

"That's sad," Daeron said, with the plain, unguarded gravity children bring to grief that isn't yet their own. "What's it like, do you think? Having a mum?"

You thought, before you could stop yourself, of Alicent, his own mother, leagues away and in the middle of a war in King's Landing, a woman he had not laid eyes on since he was small enough to be sent south for his own safety, and understood, with a sudden ache that caught you entirely off guard, that the question was not really about you at all.

Alicent, you remember, had granted you a small kindness the night you ran. A small squeeze of your shoulder. The last gentle touch from a family member before you became a nobody.

"I imagine," you said carefully, "it's rather nice, having someone who worries after you more than is strictly reasonable. Someone who'd rather you smelled like a stable boy and were happy than smelled of rosewater and were miserable, whatever your uncle says on the matter." That won a small, surprised laugh out of him, exactly as you'd hoped it would, and you pressed on before he could ask anything harder. "I think Alicent loves you a great deal, Daeron. Distance doesn't undo that. It only makes it heavier to carry."

He was quiet a moment, turning that over the way he turned over everything, with more care than most grown men bothered to spend on their own feelings. "Do you think she'll send for me? When the fighting's done?"

"I think so," you told him, and meant it, though you had learned enough of the shape of the war gathering beyond Oldtown's walls by then to hold that hope rather more loosely than you let him see.

It was only once you had resumed your reading, that you noticed, with a small, cold jolt, that Gwayne had arrived and was standing just beyond the rooms half-open door, still as a man who has heard something he was not meant to hear and has not yet decided what to do with it. He did not come in immediately. When he did, some moments later, settling into his usual chair by the window with his usual half-finished cup of tea, there was something different in the way he looked at you, something that had shed a layer of its old wariness and replaced it with a quieter, more careful kind of attention altogether, the look, you thought later, of a man revising an opinion he had been fairly settled in, and finding the revision confused him more than he'd expected.

He said nothing of it that day. But he stayed for the whole of the hour before supper, which he did not always do, and when he left, he paused at the door long enough to say, "You're good to him." and was gone before you could work out how to answer.

You went to the cliffs more often that autumn than you had in years, though you could not always have said why, except that there was something in you that autumn straining toward its own kind of answer, the way Daeron's questions had been straining toward his.

Cannibal did not acknowledge you, most days. He rarely did. But you had noticed, over the years, small things that might have meant nothing and might have meant everything, that the low, constant rumble of him, banked like coals, seemed to still rather than sharpen when you settled onto the rocks above his cave; that once, only once, in a moment you have never fully trusted your own memory of, he had lowered his great head to the ledge beside you and simply left it there, warm and vast and utterly still, while you sat with your hand not quite touching the ridged black scale nearest you, too afraid of shattering the moment to test whether he'd have allowed it.

‘Fire cannot lie’, your father had told you once, a lifetime ago, holding your face in both his hands.

You had spent years believing that meant nothing where Cannibal was concerned, that whatever recognition dragons were meant to carry for their own blood, he had simply never had it, or had had it and judged you unworthy of it regardless. But sitting on those cliffs in the thin autumn light, watching smoke curl lazily up from his nostrils in his sleep, you found yourself less certain than you once had been. He had not killed you when you wanted him to, the night you ran. He had carried you here, of all the places in the Seven Kingdoms a wild and ancient thing might have chosen to fly, and had let you live in his shadow ever since without once driving you off for good. It was not a bond. You would never have called it that, not honestly, not to yourself. But it was not entirely nothing either, and you had begun to suspect, in the quiet unexamined part of yourself that still remembered what it was to be a girl who wanted, badly, to belong to something, that whatever recognition dragonfire carried for Valyrian blood, it did not always announce itself the way the songs claimed it would. Sometimes, perhaps, it only meant being permitted to stay.

You never told Daeron any of this. You never told anyone. But you thought of it, that autumn, rather more than you let yourself admit even in the privacy of your own head, and found, each time, that the thought settled something in you that little else did. The weight was getting heavier to carry.

Word of the request for help reached Oldtown on a fishing boat before it reached the Citadel by raven, the way the worst news in a port city always seems to arrive — sailors' gossip outracing anything official by the better part of a day. By evening it was being read aloud from the steps of the Starry Sept in the flat, careful language of a proclamation: the Hightowers would send a battalion to aid Prince Aegon’s claim for the throne.

You stood at the back of the crowd with Daeron's hand gripped tight in yours. You felt something in your chest go very still and very cold, the way it does when a life you thought you'd left behind reaches out, uninvited, and touches you again.

“Lord Ormund Hightower shall raise the armies of Oldtown and march north to the Riverlands in support of the rightful King Aegon’s claim to the Iron Throne”.

Three days later, you were waking the market stalls with Daeron, escorted by three guards. The crowds were thick with the particular volatile mood of a city that has been called into a war, and knew it had very few days left of normalcy. Daeron was interested in the waxes from house Beesbury, and the fine furs that had travelled all the way from the North.

You saw him a half-second before he moved, which you have never afterward been able to explain, except to say that some old instinct, court instinct, the instinct of a woman who had spent her whole life learning to read a room for its dangers, read the wrongness in his stance before your mind had caught up to naming it. You did not think. There was only your body moving, shoving Daeron hard sideways into the table of a cheese stall. The knife that had been meant for a prince's ribs ripped a long, ugly line across your forearm instead as you caught the assassin’s wrist and did not let go.

You do not remember screaming. Daeron told you, later, white-faced, that you had, that the sound of it was what brought the nearest guardsmen at a run, that you had held onto the man's wrist with both hands even with blood running warm down to your fingers, until three men in Hightower colours dragged him off you and put him on the ground hard enough that he did not get up again unassisted.

You remember Daeron's face more clearly than anything else about it, how young he looked, how entirely undone, kneeling in the market dust beside you with his hands pressed uselessly over the gash in your arm as though sheer will might close it, saying your name, your false name, the only one he had, over and over, like a boy trying to keep something from slipping under water.

"I'm well," you told him, in a slurred voice, which was not entirely true, but true enough to matter. "I'm well, Daeron. Look at me. I'm well."

You were three days abed with the wound before the maester declared you fit to rise.

He did not say very much, the first time. He stood in the doorway with a stiffness that did not suit him, looking at the bandage on your arm the way a man looks at a debt he does not know how to begin repaying, and said only, "I would be dead, if you weren’t there," and then, "The maester says it will scar."

"Most things worth doing leave a mark, my Prince."

Something in his face did something complicated at that, and he came further into the room than courtesy strictly required, and sat, in the chair by your bed, and stayed for the remainder of the day, talking about dragons, the book he had been reading, Tessarion’s progress and so on.

“Uncle Gwayne has left. My mother requested that he aid her newly appointed hand of the King”.

“And who would that be?”, you ask curiously, wondering if you knew of the name from your childhood.

“Ser Criston Cole. I have heard Uncle Gwayne doesn’t much like him,”

“Oh, and why is that?” you enquire, innocently.

“Well, he has replaced Lord Otto, obviously.. Gwayne’s father”.

“I apologise, my Prince. I find myself rather behind with news of the crown these days”.

“I wouldn’t expect anyone to care for the history of the Targaryen rule, other than a Targaryen themselves. I have been raised with the knowledge of my lineage, regrettably”.

“Yes, forgive me, they seem most peculiar at times”.

It was at that moment that Lord Ormund appeared.

“Peculiar indeed, Lady Waters, which is why Prince Daeron has been raised with the values of house Hightower. We would wish not for any of those pesky Targaryen traits to reveal themselves in such a promising young man”.

“Of course, my Lord”.

He takes a deep inhale of the room. “The salve has the most pleasing smell, does it not?” he asks with a smile on his face.

“It is rather pleasant, yes. I believe the maesters use Lavender, which is perhaps what you are able to smell”.

“Hmm, you continue to surprise me, Lady Waters”, he states as he approaches. Your eyes meet with Daeron’s, some what confused.

“The maesters tell me you are fit to rise, if you wish to join the boy and I for supper?”

“Oh, uhm, of course, my Lord. I should quite enjoy that”.

“Allow me to set eyes on the injury caused by a blade intended for the Prince, my Lady”, he requests, glancing toward your bandaged arm.

You begin to awkwardly unwind the bandage from your arm but a larger hand stops you and takes the bandage. You gulp and meet eyes with Daeron again as Lord Ormund slowly reveals the wound, unwrapping the bandage himself.

He tsks his lips together as the injury is uncovered. “It pains me to see such a scar on otherwise unblemished skin. You have proven yourself immeasurably, my Lady. I wish to reward you, yet I cannot yet decide what with”.

“That won’t be necessary my Lord, Prince Daeron remaining well and uninjured is reward enough”.

“You will move chambers, closer to mine. You shall have a guard at your disposal. I find you rather pleasing to spend time with. I should hate for you to become a victim of this war from within Oldtown’s walls”.

“Th- thank you, my Lord”.

He stands to leave, looking pleased with himself.

“Dinner shall be on the hour, reapply the lavender salve. For the sake of healing, my Lady”.

And then the door closes, and you and Daeron are alone again. Silence stretches for a long moment. Daeron stares at you, while you stare at the closed doors Ormund had just left from.

“He likes you”.

“Is he always like that?”

“Like what?”

Your eyes flash between Daeron and the door.

“Like that.. odd?”

“He has his ways.. I guess. I find myself used to it now”.

“When shall Ser Gwayne return?”

“I am not sure, I pray soon, lest we have to deal with Ormund undiluted”.

You reach over and squeeze his hand. “I am sure everything will be alright, young Prince”.

Everything was not fine.

The war came for Oldtown the way it comes for every great house eventually, not all at once, but in a steady accumulation. Ravens flew more frequently. Lord Ormund's face, at supper, grew angrier and more distracted by the week. Talk in the yard of levies being called, of the Reach's strength being mustered, of Dragons and Dragon Riders dying. You heard of Heleana’s son, an infant, beheaded in his sleep. How could your sister be so cruel? You heard of Lucerys and Jacaerys. So much needless death.

You hadn’t seen Cannibal for many weeks now. You feared the worst. You pray he hadn’t flown over a battle at the wrong moment and succumbed to this war as well.

It was on a normal evening, with the harbour gone the particular bruised gold it turns just before a storm, that Lord Ormund told you that he was preparing to march North.

"I have had word from Alicent, Cole and Gwayne require my assistance. I wish to take Daeron, and his dragon”, he said. “It will be a long journey, I plan to march for Tumbleton. I sent word to Alicent advising Cole and Gwayne go East, instead of as planned to Harrenhal”.

You kept your hands very still around the railing you were holding. "When do you leave?"

"The morrow."

"And what of myself, Lord Ormund?"

“You shall stay here and pray for our swift and safe return, I find myself rather fond of having you in my presence, but the road is no place for a lady”.

He reaches for your hand, brings it to his lips, and places a soft kiss to your knuckles.

"Make your goodbyes with the Prince”, he said, too quickly, and then, more slowly, "I shall leave a small guard to watch over Oldtown while I take to the front line."

"Thank you, Lord Ormund," you said, while a billion other thoughts rattled around your head.

“Be safe”, is all you can come up with.

"I intend to," he said.

They left before dawn the next day, riding out through the western gate with the Hightower host at his back, and you stood on the sea wall to watch them go with Daeron's final words spinning in your head. You did not let yourself cry until the column had shrunk to nothing more than a smudge of colour on the coast road, and even then, only a little, and only where no one could see.

Somewhere unknown, unbothered by any of it, Cannibal slept on a stack of bones, and you thought, watching the now empty road, that whatever recognition your blood had ever earned from him, it had not yet taught you how to be as unafraid as he was of what the world might take from you next. You just hoped he would return soon.

The Prince is injured. Oh, poor Daeron, he was doing so well. He was doing so well no booze got sniffed on him in a good few days. He was doing so well even second-cast shows started bringing more and more audience and soon it was a full house night after night. Sobriety must be doing tricks on him, or maybe he's bargained a sip or two backstage, between one entrance and another, because his new partner is an overambitious shrew. Good riddance, he needs some heavy handling. Some tough love, his father never gave him any. Poor Daeron landed badly and his ankle took such a grotesque shape he could hear the sympathetic hiss coming from the first row. He danced till the end, pouring the worry into Onegin's misery and the crowd clapped standing.

Only that it was your fault. You walk through the rows of murmuring corps dancers and wince at every overheard rhetoric. He looked wasted. She must be having such a hard time with him. Honestly, she has a stick so far up her ass no wonder he drinks. She thinks she's grabbed God by the feet but she's going to break her neck with him. More of this blah blah blah as you make your way out and towards the physio room, still wearing Tatiana's skin.

Simon's in the doorway. He smiles when he sees you. "Don't worry," he says. "He'll be operational in a few days."

"What happened?" you ask, voice too damn high. You cough, and ask again, lower. "Where is he?"

Simon scratches the back of his neck. "How aware are you of Daeron's... condition?"

"Painfully."

"Right." Smile returns to his face. "So—he's detoxing. Which causes tension. Which causes more damage upon fall if a fall happens." Your face must be doing something strange, because Simon frowns and spreads his palms. "Okay, it's not that bad. It's just a sprained ankle, but because he danced till the end his hip locked. I've loosened as much as was possible and put him in an Epsom-salt bath. I'm going to grab something to eat, you could come with me or—" He gestures vaguely to the door. "Wait inside? If you want. Or—"

You take it. "I'll wait," you say. "Thanks."

The room is full of physio equipment (instruments of torture), but the only thing that interests you is the ajar door to the bathroom. Air leaves your lungs in a long huff.

"I would recognise that sigh from behind a kilometre of concrete." Daeron's voice echoes through the room. "Come in, troublemaker."

You press your shoulder to the doorframe. "You're naked."

There's a slosh. "The water's opaque."

You grunt, cover your eyes with one hand and walk in anyway. The toilet is close enough to the bath that finding it blind requires only one collision of your calf with porcelain. You sit on the closed lid with your back firmly presented to him, draw both legs up and curl your arms around them until your chin can settle over your knees. "Are you okay?"

"No," Daeron murmurs. Another slosh. "I'm irreversibly damaged."

Your head turns just enough to offer him the edge of your profile. "Bastard, I just spoke to Simon."

"There you are," he says. "You have to be able to look your victim in the eye if you want to be a real villain."

"Daeron—" You turn fully this time. Your eyes make an unnecessarily careful circuit around the bath before admitting defeat and meeting his. "I'm... I'm sorry."

His smile softens. It takes the teasing out of his face so completely that your guilt finds fresh room to expand. "It's alright. It's just a sprain," he tells you. "Are they talking?"

"Oh, boy."

"Did you say anything?"

"N-no?"

"Good. Let them talk," Daeron says. He lifts one hand from the water and regards the puckered ends of his fingers. A drop gathers at his smallest nail and falls back between his legs. "I like my mysterious reputation anyway. Occasionally I confuse them by being sickeningly nice." He leaves the hand hanging over the side and looks at you again. "What happened out there anyway, hm?"

You put your face into your palms. After a moment, your fingers spread enough to let one miserable eye through. "I. I saw a critic I know in the audience and panicked?"

"Seriously?" Your shoulders rise towards your ears. Daeron watches the shrug complete itself. "Silly girl."

"Sorry."

It works on him shamefully well. Something about the smallness of the word, and the way you remain half-hidden behind your hands while saying it, makes him wonder whether you would soften in return if he ever managed to offer an apology without wit hanging off it for protection. "Stop apologising. It happens. Baptism in fire."

He turns his head towards you and catches your attention somewhere below his face. It stays there for another second. Then another. "What are you looking at, hm?"

"At opaque water," you murmur.

The water is opaque. Daeron is considerably less so.

His hair is wet and swept backwards by an impatient hand, exposing the pale temples and the ears usually half-lost beneath loose gold. Heat from the bath has coloured his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. Both arms lie along the rim, long enough to make the tub seem undersized, veins standing beneath damp skin from wrist to the bend of elbow.

Between them, his chest rests open and loose. Lean, strong, with none of the held tension you are accustomed to seeing under rehearsal clothes; even relaxed, the muscle shifts when he breathes deeply and gives a small jump beneath the skin when something amuses him. Hair gathers densely over his sternum before tightening lower down. His belly has softened into the posture, folding into shallow creases above the navel where he has sunk against the back of the bath.

The sides of him slope beneath the milky water. Everything thereafter becomes suggestion. A dark disturbance where the hair thickens. The vague submerged shape of his hips. Lower still, only the soft shadow of his cock through cloud, enough to tell you where he is without granting anything useful.

You look. Quickly.

Daeron would look too, you think. He spends half his life staring at your lips and is doing it now, gaze dropping there with serene entitlement while you pretend your own has behaved better.

One of his knees rises above the surface, bent loosely while the injured foot remains nursed in the salts. His other leg has escaped over the side of the bath. The calf hangs down beside the enamel and water travels along the tendon at his ankle before gathering at his heel and dropping steadily onto the tile.

His lashes lower. "I should make your life a nightmare now to get you to be nice to me," he says.

You drag your eyes back to his. "My life is already a nightmare."

"Such dramatics." Daeron shifts. Water lifts around his waist and runs in a soft wave against the bath's wall. Your gaze drops immediately, following the movement with an interest you disguise as concern over whether the rearrangement has uncovered anything further. It has not. "Is it truly so horrid?" he asks.

When Daeron looks over, he finds you gaping somewhere between his head and the tile. "What?"

"You have some makeup left on your ear," you say.

Your hand enters the water beside his hip. The heat catches you first, then the mineral slick of the salts. You wet two fingers and bring them carefully to his temple. "Here."

Your fingertips graze his lobe. Daeron sighs and closes his eyes.

You rub at the stubborn trace of stage makeup between thumb and forefinger, turning the ear gently to reach behind it. His neck prickles. Once the colour has come away, there is no particular reason for your fingers to remain, yet they do. Your thumb passes over the rim of his ear again, slower this time, and the small cleaning motion loses its practical shape. It moves into the hair behind it, presses lightly against his scalp, then travels higher through the wet strands.

Daeron stirs in the water. His head tips by a fraction into your hand, giving you greater access with such unthinking compliance that his smile arrives a moment later, once he has noticed himself doing it.

"What are you doing, hm?" he asks, smiling.

"Being nice to you," you tell him.

It makes him consider, very seriously, whether he can afford breaking some bone in his body.

•Using a strap-on to coax as many orgasms out of him as you can

•He's whining and whimpering under you, eyes glassy with tears

•You just coo and shush him, planting kisses to his temple, cheekbones, and neck

•he clings to you like you're his only tether to the world

•you start out making him count each release, but by the third one, he's completely gone, babbling nonsense and arching his back into you

•after you force the fifth orgasm out of him, you finally stop, pulling out of him as you coo at his whimpers

•you tell him to stay put while you clean up, taking care of the toy and wiping him down with a warm damp cloth

•he obeys, because he can't deny you anything, and stays put, even as the cloth travels lower and makes him whimper again.

•he's completely exhausted, barely able to keep his eyes open, though he refuses to let sleep take him until you climb into bed with him

•you curl around his back, pulling him close to you and pressing a kiss to the back of his neck