#ells fics

“What the fuck?”

He nearly drops his spoon in the pasta sauce he’s been tending to. Your third glass of wine is empty (you’re on break, it’s fine) and you’re scowling at your phone. It seems as if you’re the only member of your program who isn’t tanning on an expensive boat or dining at a seaside bistro.

“They’re in Volantis,” you huff, showing him the pictures of your classmates lounging in the sunshine. “The same assholes who complain about how our stipend is so low and they can never do anything fun. And they’re in fucking Volantis. It’s… what?”

He’s grinning over the stove. “It’s good to know that some things don’t change. Every graduate program has to have a few shockingly wealthy students.”

“Yeah, but you were the one going to Volantis on holiday when you were in grad school,” you point out.

He cocks an eyebrow. “Maybe. But I never complained about the stipend.”

You didn’t need to, you want to tease him. It’s probably for the best that you were still a child when he was getting his doctorate (even if that thought makes your head spin). You can just imagine how much disdain you would’ve had for him if you were the same age, how you would’ve rolled your eyes at his neat, name-brand clothes and his crisp, unblemished textbooks. Daddy’s money, you would’ve muttered behind his back. He would’ve been off on summer holidays across the Narrow Sea, flirting with foreign girls and collecting pretentious stories about the culture and the history to share during the autumn term while you’d be waiting tables and seething with jealousy.

Well. You imagine that’s how it’d be, at least. He doesn’t talk about what he was doing when he was your age. You don’t ask.

“I’m not mad that they’ve got the money for it. Good for them, you know? I just wish they’d be honest about it,” you sigh, reaching for the bottle of red.

He hmms and returns to his cooking. Candlelight and the incandescent bulbs turn the kitchen soft and sepia. In a few weeks, the sun will be out. You’ll be able to put away your winter coats. The trees on campus will bud and bloom. You’re mad with desire for it. Of all the seasons, it’s always spring that takes the longest to set in. For now, you rub your strained eyes in his dim kitchen. The radio is playing an old song that Baelor taps his fingers to the tune of. It’s life in slow-motion, but it’s life.

“Do you still want to see Dorne? We could go. Just for a bit.”

You perk up immediately, the burst of excitement barely contained. “Yes. Gods, yes, but… aren’t your sons visiting?”

“For a few days, then they’re off to see their cousins at Summerhall and I’ve got an article to finish before the end of term.” He fixes you a plate (plenty of cheese on your pasta, he knows you so well) and sets it down for you. “I could use the change of pace.”

Can I meet them? You wish you were brave enough to ask. You overhear him on the phone with his boys sometimes. Good night. I love you. I’m proud of you, he’ll say just before he hangs up. The younger one sends letters. You’ve seen them on the kitchen table with the rest of Baelor’s mail, Matarys Targaryen, Dragonstone College printed out in messy, boyish handwriting at the top left of the envelope. You want so badly to hear all about their accomplishments, the trouble they get into, the fun they have. But he’s got a clever little smirk playing at the corners of his mouth—he knows he’s got you, he’s heard your wistful rants about how badly you wish you could just melt away in the Dornish sun—and you don’t want to ruin this. Not now. 

“We don’t… I mean, it’s a bit late to get a hotel and all that.” It’s a poor attempt at being reasonable. You’re ready to spring out of your chair and pack a bag.

“We wouldn’t need to do that.” He sits down across from you and pours himself a glass of wine. “I’ve got a villa in Sunspear.”

“You’ve got a villa. In Sunspear.”

Your shock makes him chuckle. “It was my mother’s.”

Right. Like that makes it any less ridiculous. You know his family’s wealthy. For fuck’s sake, half of the campus is named Targaryen-something-or-other. There are prime ministers and ambassadors and CEOs and socialites sprouting left and right from his family tree. But he’s not gaudy about it. You could almost forget that he’s got more money than you could ever conceive of. That the wine you’re drinking casually together on a Thursday costs more than all the groceries you’ve bought for the past month. That he could probably fetch a few million for his townhouse if he decided to sell.

You’re fighting with your landlord over a sink. He has a villa in Sunspear. It baffles you how disparate your lives are, and yet how easily they seem to fit together at times.

“Okay.” You hide your grin with a mouthful of pasta. “Let’s go.”

Whatever you’d imagined about his family’s wealth, you clearly weren’t imaginative enough.

The villa sits on a hill overlooking the city, making it seem as if you could jump from the edge of the property and land right in the heart of Sunspear. It’s late when you arrive—somewhere in the ten hour drive, you’d fallen asleep to the sound of the radio and the metronome stroke of his hand against your thigh—so the lights are on and sparkling like a glass of champagne. The gate and the gardens keep any neighbors at a safe distance, but you’d seen glimpses of the other houses on the hill on the drive in. Houses would be a degrading word to call them, actually. Castles seems like a better fit.

Inside is even more striking. Golden suns spiral in tile patterns on the floor. It makes you cringe to even walk on them. Like stepping on a museum display. In the living room, a massive fresco adorns an entire wall while an ornately framed painting hangs opposite. Your heart beats faster as you get close enough to realize that it’s not a print. 

Rich. It’s the only word you can think of. Not just expensive. The chocolatey mahogany dining table, the velvet cushions on the sofa, the creamy marble in the kitchen… the whole house is a dessert that’d leave your throat stinging from the sugar. A decadence you want to die in.

“Make yourself comfortable.” Baelor, the gentleman that he is, takes both of your bags off to the bedroom, leaving you to stand awestruck in the living room.

Over by the piano—because of course there’s a grand piano, shiny and proud and probably worth more money than you’ll ever make in your entire life—is a little table spotted with framed photos. You gravitate toward it, always hungry for the crumbs of his life, for snapshots of the stories he never shares with you. Most of them are old, a bit sun-stained. A couple in different flowery settings: the man, tall and white-haired, dressed in crisp suits and tailored streetwear, and the woman, dark curls billowing over her shoulders, eyes always glinting toward the camera with a dreamy shine.

Baelor finds you lost in the past, holding a picture of the dark-haired woman smiling under an orange tree with a blond toddler sleeping in her lap. “This is your mum?”

“How can you tell?”

“You’ve got her eyes.” You giggle. “Well, eye.”

You set the frame back down. Next to it, half-hidden, you notice a newer frame. A wedding: petals in the air, stained glass of the most intricate sept you’ve ever seen in the background, a man smiling at his bride, kissing their intertwined hands. Your breath catches in your throat. It’s Baelor. You know immediately. Younger, no streaks of gray in his wavy brown hair, but the same dented nose and faint lines framing his smile. Heart-stoppingly handsome.

And in her gorgeous white gown, auburn hair caressed by her veil, looking at him in the same way you do, like he hung every star in the sky—

“Is this—”

“Yes.” His voice is uncharacteristically tentative. “Jena. We honeymooned here.”

Oh.

It’s a punch to the gut. Or a kiss on the cheek. Your brain is reeling from the whiplash. Yes, you’re standing in a haunted house, but… it’s a haunted house that he honeymooned in. That he brought you to. It’s as sweet as it is morbid. A strange show of vulnerability. You’re a whirlwind of wistful anxiety, heart galloping like a wild horse at the smallest dash of hope, all while he looks like he’s waiting for a sharp slap across his stubbly cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes avoiding yours. You’ve never seen him so uncertain.

“It’s alright. You should talk about her.” That doesn’t sound right, and now you’re scrambling to save face. “I mean, if you want to. I’d listen.”

And you would. You’d put a muzzle on your jealousy if it meant he’d open up. You get little scraps about his brother—six unruly children, the eldest back in rehab and the youngest a five-year-old girl going on fifteen—but never about Jena or his boys. You wish he’d tell you all about his wedding. Who got drunkest at the reception. If his brother was his best man, what the speech was like. What song they picked for their first dance. What flavor the cake was.

You’d pick vanilla with strawberry. Not that you’ve pictured it. But if time passed, if he asked, if it came to that… that’s what you’d pick.

He fiddles with his rings, a sad attempt at a smile crossing his face. “Some other time, maybe.”

It’s tranquil in the villa while the two of you drift towards bed. This sort of silence is different, a sort that makes you soften rather than tense up and lock your jaw. You’re sneaking glances at him in the mirror while you brush your teeth. You wonder if he brushed his teeth on the night of his wedding. If he tumbled into bed with his gorgeous bride and forgot, woke up the next day with that grainy un-brushed feeling in his mouth. You’re so full of mundane questions. So desperate to close the gentle distance he keeps you at. You fall asleep tucked neatly into his chest, hoping that some other time isn’t too far away. 

You do try to behave.

The first two days are the most productive you’ve had in ages. A writer’s retreat that would make your classmates ache with jealousy. You flit from corner to corner of the villa, churning out pages and shifting to a new nook the second you need a change of scenery. With Baelor working away at an article in the study, you have free reign to pace around the kitchen, to occupy the entire sofa with your loose leaf scribbles, to spend an afternoon editing by the pool with only the lemon trees and the doves as your audience. All the mist and misery of a King’s Landing winter dissipates from your head in the clear, constant Dornish sun.

It’s your holiday, though. It’s warm and drowsy and so deliciously languid. In the molten haze, you forget about your drafts. You let your laptop battery die. You find yourself stretched out on a chaise in the study, a priceless first edition you’d plucked off the bookshelves utterly forgotten in your lap, watching Baelor’s thumb stroke a page of The Dornish Historical Review.

Gods, you’re greedy. You shock yourself by the depths of your own want. How fresh it feels, even after all these months.

He finds you in the garden, mid-afternoon, when you’re half-asleep and half-naked. Underneath the linen shirt you stole from him, your skin shimmers with sweat. You’re torn from the beginning of a dream by the weight of him at your side and the slip of his hand over your thigh.

“I was sleeping,” you mumble, feigning annoyance. Your legs part, a wordless invitation, and he slides his palm along the plane of your inner thigh, letting his fingertips just barely brush against the edge of your underwear.

“Were you?” He presses a kiss to your shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“‘S okay. I forgive you.”

You’ll always forgive him when he touches you so sweetly. When he nuzzles against your neck, the stubble of his beard adding little needlepoint sparks to each kiss. His hand tucks inside your underwear, pressing against your cunt, so firm, so sure. 

“Couldn’t stop thinking about this.” One finger slips between your wet folds, then another. His knuckles sink and sink, sliding across all the tender spots inside you, until the stretch makes your breath stutter. A pause. His breath against your shoulder. And then he repeats it. Muffled by the fabric of your underwear and the flesh of his hand, you can just barely hear the sloppy squelch of him drawing all the slickness from you, pulling and pushing in all the ways that make you keen and cry.

“Yeah?” You feel your body going liquid-smooth, slowly giving into the pulse that spreads from your pelvis out to your entire nervous system. “Did… was I distracting you—oh…”

“Always.” He whispers. “Everywhere. You haunt me.”

His fingers withdraw all of a sudden. You’re blinking your eyes open, about to whine and beg, when everything comes into soft clarity and you see him sucking your juices off of his fingers, his gaze fixed so intensely on your face that it’s as if he’s undoing the buttons of your soul. Your mouth goes dry.

“Fuck, let me? Please?” You’re pawing at his wrist, boneless but insistent, and his eyes go dark as he relents and slides his fingers into your mouth. You close your eyes and suck. So earthy, so tangy, laced with the bookish smell of paper on his skin. A string of saliva glistens as he pulls his hand back, tracing over your lips before he sinks the spit-coated fingers back into your cunt.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs while you moan and arch your hips into his touch. “So good for me. Let me take care of you.”

He’s steady as he works you back toward the edge that had disappeared right in front of you. So responsive to your little twitches and gasps. You can feel his wrist all drenched and sticky, the tendons flexing, each muscle moving just enough to coax your orgasm closer. A throaty hum spills out of your mouth. It’s so hot, so vibrant, so close—

“I know. I know.” His thumb just barely grazes your clit, and that does it. “Show me.”

“Fuck!” You whimper, and you’re coming all over his hand while he kisses your dumbstruck mouth. The whole world seems blindingly brilliant. Golden as the lemons that drape like fat jewels from the branches overhead. You love his cock in ways that make you shiver from the sinfulness of it, and yet there’s something singular and magical about how the same hands that caress frail pages of old manuscripts can also make you come so hard you soak the blanket underneath you.

You take his cock later, when the sun has gone down and the white bedsheets turn pale blue in the moonlight. You let him fuck you slow and safe. You marvel at the pearlescent spill of his come when he pulls out, as he marks your body like a blank paper.

Like a bride.

Late morning, and you’re sprawled out on the terrace while he marks up his own article draft. Fierce red marks bloom across the page. Entire paragraphs get the axe. He’s more critical with his own work than with students’ work. You wonder if he knows how talented he is at breathing life into history. How his articles (and oh, you’ve read them all, you’ve endured chapters and chapters on topics you know nothing about just to absorb more of him) reveal a reverence for his profession.

Have you told him how much you like reading his work? Maybe. You try to think back on all the evenings spent curled like a cat around him while he ruminates on his latest research and come up shamefully blank. 

You should say something now. Tell him to think twice before making another cruel strikethrough, tell him how you wish he’d give you a fraction of the soul that seems to spill so easily onto the page. But it’s so lovely and peaceful between the two of you. So bright. There’s hope and birdsong and citrus in the air. Why ruin it all? You tuck that thought away and return to the Top 20 Attractions in Sunspear article you’d been scrolling through.

“Did you know that Westeros’s largest lemon cake is in Sunspear?”

“Hmm?” He seems to consider that seriously. “That makes sense, I suppose. What with the Rhoynish revival and the lemon being symbolic of—”

“Was that in the assigned reading?” You quip at him, so satisfied by how that makes his chest vibrate as he chuckles. “D’you want to go?”

He flips a page, and you can see an angry red X over half of what he’d written. “I can’t say it’s on the list of things I’d like to see before I die.”

“No? Well, I’m adding it to mine.” You scroll past a list of even more absurd tourist traps until you find something more suited to his tastes. “The Museum of Dornish History is open. They’ve got an exhibit on mosaics.”

He’s quiet. Too quiet for your liking. You’ve gotten good at translating those pensive pauses.

“You don’t want to go.”

“Sweet girl,” he starts, putting his papers aside as if he’s preparing for a lecture, “it’s not that I don’t want to go—”

“We don’t have to. It’s fine.” It’s not. You just don’t want to sour this little interlude with a petty argument. You can swallow your disappointment. You’re a fucking professional at this point.

You move to get up, but he’s putting a firm hand on your thigh to keep you anchored on the sofa. “I have colleagues at the museum here. If we were in… I don’t know, Lys or Meereen, I’d take you in a heartbeat. Do you hear me?”

“I know, but…” Gods, he’s so frustratingly rational. “I wish we could go somewhere.”

It makes you sound so small, so needy. You need to hold his hand all the way down the street, not just the blocks where no one is around. You need to go out for lunch and steal chips off of his plate. You need to kiss him in public and make him blush that pretty blush of his. You need anyone who’s looking to know that he’s yours, that you’re his.

“I don’t want to make things difficult for you. I need to protect this,” he says, so gentle and a little awkward, as if he’s forcing the earnestness from somewhere raw and deep inside of him. “Will you let me? Please?”

As if you could stop him. He’s too busy protecting you to see how badly you want to be hurt. You want the difficulty. The judgment. You’re desperate for the danger and the pitfalls if it means you can be with him. Properly. Not just as a girlfriend, but… as someone. Something more than just a girl he’s fucking. 

Baelor-breaks-things. You’d told him he wouldn’t break you. Now, he’s being so careful with you that you could confuse the softness for suffocation. You need to breathe.

“Okay,” you acquiesce, then tilt your head and fix him with a look. “Can I have the keys?”

So you go. Fuck it, why not? You’re on holiday, you ought to do holiday things. You visit the museum. You buy an overpriced shirt from the gift shop. You wind through sun-drenched streets while the terracotta roof tiles bake in the afternoon heat. You try your luck at a club and abandon it after a single vodka soda, too contemplative to loosen up and dance with the horribly sunburnt eighteen-year-old girls visiting from Oldtown, even though they seem well-intentioned and tell you you’re, like, sooooo pretty in the restroom.

You end up perched on a bench in a historical plaza overlooking the ocean, fingers stained by the salt and spice of street food. An old fountain at the center of the plaza bubbles and blips every time someone flicks a coin in. Seagulls pace and peck at scraps. One saunters up. Fixes its greedy eyes on you.

“Sorry, love,” you tell it, showing it the empty container. Silly thing. All want, no courage. You’d shoo it away, but it reminds you of… well, you.

Gods, it’s bright, even after nightfall. The horizon stays just slightly luminous, like the sun might change its mind and come back out at any second. Little bursts of light illuminate the plaza: camera flashes, flickering lampposts, TVs from the flats above the shops. A lone busker is still plucking at a guitar. The whole world seems so viscerally alive, as if you could dig your fingers into the ground and feel its pulse thrumming away.

It’s rare, these moments where you feel like life isn’t some secret place that you’re waiting to be taken to. It’s here. You’re in it, fully submersed, letting it illuminate all the dormant corners of your heart.

And yet, you still wish he was here. Not to clutch and kiss and flirt. You just want to have him near. To know that he hears the music, that he smells the coriander and the peppers. To know that he’s with you amidst the brightness. That he feels it too.

On the last day of your holiday, you miss the sunset. Pink melts into orange. Orange gives way to murky blue. It’s only a blur in your peripheral vision while you ride him, palms braced against his chest, forcing him to lie back and let you take what you want. You want to remember this for the rest of your life: how he praises you for chasing your own pleasure, how his hands tremble on your hips, how his eyes drift shut and he whispers your name just before he comes. 

“I don’t want to go back,” you admit while you lie naked in his arms afterward. Already, you’re dreading the mud and rain of King’s Landing, the spring days that are just barely too cool to open the windows. It’s a cruel form of time travel, departing the ease of this eternal summer for a city still wrapped in winter’s grubby fingers. Back to the damp classrooms, the puddles gathering on the cobblestones, the cold seeping into your chest and leaving you bitter.

“I know, love.” Baelor cups your chin and kisses you long and slow. “We can come back. There’s a festival at midsummer. You’d like that.”

It should make you feel hopeful. Instead, all you feel is a sea of confusion churning inside you. He won’t be seen in public with you, won’t come inside your flat, won’t let you see all the scenes and the people he keeps guarded in his past, and yet he’s holding you like you’re carved from glass and talking like it’s a sure thing, the notion that the two of you will still be together in three months. You’re two strange planets caught in each other’s orbits. Sometimes near enough to collide. Sometimes so distant you could mistake him for a shooting star flickering by. You sit up, that sea inside you cresting into a surge of clarity.

“Can I ask you something? I don’t want you to answer it right now. I want you to think about it, and then you answer it when you know for sure. I need you to be sure. Do you promise?”

There’s a look on his moonlit face that you could almost call pride. “I promise.”

“Alright.” You look in his eyes, searching the depths of the brown and the glimmers of the blue. “Is this just sex? Or is this something more?”

“Sweet girl, I—” he starts, but you shake your head and nestle yourself back into the sheets.

“Think about it.”

With his arm pillowed under your head, you lay on your side and watch the citrus trees sway in the night breeze. You’ll need to wake up early tomorrow. Get in the car, drive back to King’s Landing, say goodbye to the Dornish sun. But you stay awake just to listen to the wind blowing in from the ocean. To Baelor’s breath against your neck. To a bird fretting outside the window, making its last tiny chirps before bedtime. Your little honeymoon, singing you good night.

Can I see you?

The text pops up while you’re folding laundry in front of a halfway interesting home renovation show. You have to check twice to make sure that it’s actually him. He’d dropped you off at your flat less than twenty-four hours ago, in the middle of a spring rain shower that somehow felt more frigid than a blizzard. It sends a warm prickle of electricity down your spine, the idea that he can’t make it a whole day without wanting to be near.

It’s a relief too. Already, you can feel the loneliness seeping back in. A cold draft through the unsealed cracks of a drafty window. How distant it had been in Dorne. How dormant. And now it’s carving itself back into your bones, making your whole body feel heavier.

i’ll be over in 20

Stay there. I’ll come to you.

Shit. You don’t even have time to register the thrill. By the time you’ve changed out of your pajamas, made your bed, collected the laundry, scrubbed the bathroom, and lit a candle for good measure, he’s knocking on your door.

“Sorry it’s a mess,” you wince as you let him in, nudging a random pile of books under your sofa while he’s taking off his shoes. “Tea?”

“Please.”

It’s strange seeing him sit at the kitchen table that you saved from a dumpster. Its one broken leg propped up by an anthropology textbook you haven’t touched since your first year of undergrad. The stains from hot sauce and red wine. You make him orange spice tea in a Pennytree Rugby Club mug, so faded from the dishwasher that half of the letters are just vague smudges. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that the light over your sink blinks every few minutes. Or about the odd grumble that the heater spits out. He’s just watching you.

“Thought you’d be sick of me after a week,” you try to joke while you fuss over the tea bags, although it comes out sadder than you’d intended.

“A week wasn’t enough.” And gods, he’s so genuine, those blue-brown eyes full of barren honesty. “It was too still. Back home. Without you, I don’t…”

Wherever that thought was going, it’s lost to the haze of the fluorescent lights. You turn back to the sink, washing your hands just to have a second to think. You’re never quite sure where you stand with him. Some days it’s like you can see the doors around his heart opening, the radiance spilling from inside; others, he might as well be a constellation whose light is as mysterious as it is distant. 

“I have an answer for you. The beginning of one, at least,” he says slowly, analytically, once you’re sitting across from him, and it sends your heart racing. “You’ll forgive me if I make you wait for the rest? I want to get it right.”

“That’s fine.” You can see his red pen moving in your mind, annotating every word he says before he speaks. “I’ll hold you to it, though.”

“I hope you will.” There’s a ghost of a grin over his face, and then he says: “It’s something more.”

It’s as if the whole world illuminates into colors you’d never known existed. A sunrise over the grayscale inside you. All your animal instincts, always howling and whining for more, more, more go silent. Appeased. It’s the smallest concession. Not a door opening, more like a curtain drawn back. But it’s enough to make your world shift on its axis. The constellation of him suddenly readable. 

His broad shoulders relax half a centimeter, tension evaporating into the night. You think there’s a watery sheen over his eyes, but it’s gone just as soon as you notice. His palm is warm from his tea when you reach out to grasp it. 

“Thank you,” you whisper.

There’s an ease in the aftermath of his small, seismic confession. A layer of pressure stripped away. It’s not a fix-all. You’ll tear yourself to pieces until he finishes his soul-searching and tells you exactly what this is between the two of you, if it’s not just sex. For now, though, you’ll take anything he gives you in your fragile, fawning hands. You’ll treasure it. You’ll pray that it lasts, or that it at least has time to wind itself into the fabric of your being before one of you inevitably breaks it.

He takes your mugs when you’re finished. “Sink still giving you trouble?” 

“When isn’t it?” 

“I’ll take a look if you like.”

He’s no handyman. You’re fairly certain his only qualifications to fix your sink are those biceps of his that he keeps hidden under dress shirts and knit jumpers. But he’s sweet. Chivalrous. If he wants to be your knight saving you from the horrors of your ancient, constantly-breaking flat, who are you to stop him?

The doctoral candidates deep in their dissertations. The disillusioned second-year graduate students who reek of coffee and cigarettes. The strangers from other departments, art history or public policy, sinking low in their seats as if their cover might be blown at any second. Baelor knows the archetypes who sit around his seminar table so well. He sorts them into columns, knows which ones will drop after the first week, knows which ones are already preening for a letter of recommendation. The class changes every semester—new articles to examine, different nuances to be teased out of a particular reading—but the cast of characters never does.

You’re harder to categorize. He feels it from the first week when you take the seat nearest to him on his brown-eyed side. The one that the rest of your peers, either out of shyness or respect, had left vacant. He bristles. Wonders if your nonchalance might be synonymous with a lack of seriousness.

That concern dissipates as soon as he hears you speak. You’re exactly how you sounded in your email, and more. Curious. Clever, but subtly so: no pretense, no frills, no ticking off as many five-syllable vocabulary words as you can in one sentence.

“It’s a bit of an ungenerous reading, though, isn’t it?” You chime in twenty minutes into a conversation about an article analyzing the diaries of Nymeria of Dorne. He watches your eyes dart around the room before landing on his.

There’s a fierceness to you as well, he observes. A severity that makes all the others look dull in comparison.

The table is slow to react, so he prods. “Ungenerous how?”

“I mean, it’s more interested in what her mentions of the grain trade mean for the structure of the early Dornish economy than what it might mean about her.” You flip through your flimsy dogeared copy of The Diaries of Nymeria of Dorne: 2nd Edition Translation, and Baelor can’t help but try to make out what some of your scribbled annotations are. “Here: ‘Spring rains flood the Greenblood. Barges bring wheat and salt for lemon cakes.’ She’s in the middle of a war and she’s looking forward to eating lemon cakes. Doesn’t that speak more to who she was as a person than what the economy was like?”

“For an article concerned with economics, I might argue it’s a particularly congruous quotation,” he pushes back, though with none of the ice in his voice that he might usually use to shut down a fruitless line of inquiry. He leaves the door open, inviting you through, wondering where your mind is headed.

And you, without hesitating, take his invitation. “I think it’s a wasted opportunity, that’s all. It’d be lovely if any of these historians treated Nymeria like a real human with actual desires rather than a convenient primary source.”

“That’s usually how historicization works,” one of the other students, Willem, pipes up. It’s not entirely unfriendly, but there’s an air of patronization in his tone, an unspoken assumption that of course you wouldn’t know something like that. Heat flares in his chest, a chivalric impulse that makes him flex his fingers and want to speak up on your behalf. But you only stare back at him and shrug.

“Well. Their loss, then.”

He finally gets a good look at your annotation at the end of class, while you’re chatting to the art history student next to you who had been too shy to speak the entire time. There’s a harsh circle around one of the paragraphs in the article you’d disapproved of and Fuck off! nestled in the margins.

Not a fawn, he realizes. More like a hawk, biding your time before you swoop in with something new and fresh and entirely unexpected.

Last one to leave, you pause by the door while he’s still packing up his papers into the worn leather satchel Jena had gifted him one nameday, years ago. “I hope I’m not giving my program a bad name.”

“The opposite, actually,” he says, and the grin that spreads across your face seems like some sort of prize. It’s a twisted thing to think about a bit of well-received encouragement. He swallows hard, focuses on his coat. You don’t seem to notice his silent self-flagellation. You just lean against the door handle, giving him one last little wave.

“Good. Well. See you next week, then.”

When he steps outside, the winter air hits him harder than the bullets he’d taken in the army. He rubs a hand across his chin and sighs. Nothing is different. Every term begins with the same simmering anticipation. But something has changed. He can feel it in his bone marrow, in the fingers that already threaten to go numb in the frigid night. He can feel it in the way that he’s already anxious for next week, for whatever surprises you have waiting behind those sharp, subdued eyes of yours. Stop this, he tells himself, but it’s beyond his control. Something dormant inside of him is stirring, opening its eyes, coming back to life.

He doesn’t mean to spy. It’s a coincidence, truly, that his office has a view over the steps of Penrose Hall. He’s watched thousands of students come and go from their literature classes for years. The doors creak open and light soaks the courtyard below. Half nine. The last graduate class letting out for the night. 

There you are, hugging a pile of papers to your front. A tired slant to your shoulders. While your classmates pair off and head home in groups, you keep your own company. He wonders whose choice that is; theirs or yours.

It’s concern that makes him watch you until you disappear beyond the courtyard, he tells himself. You’re a young woman walking alone after dark. It’s your safety he has in mind. But when he looks down at the paper he’d been grading, there are dents embedded from his grip. Baelor drops it, lets it flutter to the ground. Even in the low light, the gold band of his wedding ring glares like an open flame.

“Is this a good time?”

It is. And isn’t. Of course, he says, waving for you to take a seat, because he knows the policy on his syllabus. Open office hours, noon to one, no appointment needed. You make him nervous, though. Make him feel like the nearly-shut door is a sin.

“I wanted to ask about the term paper,” you jump right in. “I know you don’t accept creative projects, but I wondered if you might be open to a more sentimental approach.”

“Hm. What does sentimental mean to you?” He leans back in his chair, rotating each ring one by one while your eyes begin to sparkle. It’s utterly captivating, utterly new. Such a question would usually make his students jump to defensiveness. Scramble to explain themselves or shut down and back away from the line of questioning. But you approach it with fascination, like he’s handed you some shiny gift to unwrap.

“I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating history like it’s dead. I read your article about the influence of pre-Andal art on the development of Dornish culture,” you say, and he can’t deny how his ego swells at that, “and I thought about how sad it is, that people like Willem think that historical means unemotional. That article almost made me cry.”

Baelor’s cheeks turn hot. A bit of praise isn’t unusual from students who hope to stay in his good graces. He wouldn’t normally blush at a comment about his reading of a source or his criticism of previous scholarship, but you see past all the technicalities and stare right into his soul. He shouldn’t indulge himself. Shouldn’t feed on that genuine admiration and curiosity that’s plain to see. He’s only a man, though. He can’t help the wretched, white-hot need that burns inside of him.

“Go on,” he concedes. “Tell me more.”

And you do. You talk and talk and he asks and you answer. You rant about an article which has found itself in your good graces and two others which you can’t conceal your disdain for. You flesh out a point you’d made about the translation of Nymeria’s diaries, the tragedy of all the gaps through which language can slip. You go on until he’s running late for his lecture at two, and you’re laughing a bashful laugh and saying gods, sorry, I lost track of time. I’ll see you next week?

True to your word, you’re there next week. And the week after that. His office hours morph into a standing appointment, reiterating points you’d made in seminar and elaborating on the ones you’d cut short. You fill his empty world with your armful of books, your patchwork philosophy, your sarcastic asides.

The silence after you leave is always the worst. It reverberates, pierces him, makes the whole room seem colder. 

In the wake of you, the guilt seeps in. Pervasive as winter’s iron-strong grip. Its poison makes his blood curdle in his veins, makes the walls close in around him. Sick, he calls himself, sick, depraved, perverted, disgusting. You’re closer in age to Valarr than you are to him. Every thought he has disgraces him. That part of himself that you’ve woken is bright-eyed and alert now, roaring and clawing at the inside of his chest. Die, he begs it, die, or at least sleep, but it’s a feral thing. It demands attention. Demands tribute.

“I know it’s not due until tomorrow.” You dance into his office one day, a grin blossoming as you hand him your term paper draft. His fingers brush against yours for half a second. That’s all it takes for his skin to turn sparkling warm. Your eyes search his. He’s started to pick up on your little tells. It’s praise you’re seeking, so it’s praise he gives.

“Ah. Trying to impress me?” He asks as a wry smile surfaces.

“Maybe.”

He shouldn’t feel so hopeful. He isn’t even certain what he’s hoping for. At best, he’s a mentor with all the wrong motivations. At worst, he’s some sort of monster. But he feels real. Painfully, explosively real for the first time in years. You’ve brought him back from a grave he was digging himself. Woken him like a bird perched outside his window, singing your smart, sweet song.

So he lets himself hope.

It’s long after you’ve left one afternoon, when he’s gathering his things to walk home for the day, when he notices one of your books forgotten on the chair. An Anthology of Westerosi Women Poets. Golden-brown pages and glue-stained binding on the spine make it look especially frail, though the date on the inside cover isn’t even years past. Well-loved, then. Tended to.

He opens to the middle of the book, but as soon as he glimpses your annotations, he shuts it. It’s an intrusion. A voyeur’s view of your relationship to the poems within. The skin on his neck prickles as if someone’s watching, though the only audience are his own books leering from their shelves.

Tucking it into his satchel, he tells himself it’ll be safer at home. Less of a chance it’ll be lost in the piles of papers on his desk or picked up by another student by mistake. He’s only being careful.

It’s frightening, really. The lies he tells himself. The excuses he makes.

There’s nothing careful about how he takes it to bed. Glass of whiskey on the nightstand, rain thrumming against the window, he opens it like a secret and runs his fingers over the pages. Feels the dips of the underlines you’ve made. The curves of your comments. Stray couplets populate the margins, imitations of your favorite lines. It’s more intimate than undressing. Like he’s seeing into the bones of you.

Somewhere in the whiskey-tinted evening, he drifts off. Snippets of poetry and the smell of ink constellate his dreams. When he wakes, his cheek is pressed to your book. Traces of your perfume cling to its pages, a ghost of you now embedded in little lines on his face. His cock is shamefully, achingly hard.

It’s Jena’s face he pictures while he stands under scalding water and curses himself for being so horrible, so weak. But it’s your face he pictures when he puts his hand on his throbbing cock. Your face he imagines under him, sharp tongue gone dumb while he fucks you. Your face that makes his heart go heavy and hollow while the water goes cold, while the shower washes come down the drain.

Microwaved stew and cigarette smoke make for a less than ideal welcome home. In the kitchen, Maekar is glaring at something on his phone, a bowl of leftovers already polished off. Somehow, Baelor is more relieved than he is annoyed. As much as he wishes he’d pillage someone else’s fridge for once, it’s good to know that his brother is at least taking the time to feed himself.

“I thought you were trying to quit,” he sighs, opening a window with a pointed look.

“I was.” Maekar groans, smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Guess which one it is this time.”

“Daeron?” It’s a genuine guess. Also a translated prayer: please, not Aerion. He doesn’t wish any more suffering on Daeron than his nephew already inflicts upon himself, but he’s certain Maekar would prefer the familiarity of rehab over whatever scandal of Aerion’s might already be plastering itself over the covers of gossip magazines.

“Father. Crafty bastard tried to set me up. Sent me off to meet with the president of philanthropy at Citadel College on his behalf and forgot to mention the meeting was at a winery and the president’s a fucking widow.” He scoffs as he flicks the cigarette over the ashtray that Baelor keeps around just for him, just in case. “He ever do that to you?”

He winces. It’s not a pleasant memory: some Hightower woman, a daughter of a friend of his father’s, pushed toward him at a charity gala at Dragonstone barely two years after Jena’s death. Baelor, show her around, Daeron said, conveniently disappearing a moment later. She had been friendly. Decent enough to look uncomfortable once she saw the ring on his finger. It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice at his father.

“Once.” 

“Well, turns out Arbor red still gives me a bloody headache. Had to ask her for a paracetamol. Dy would’ve loved that.” Maekar chuckles at himself, and even Baelor has to laugh. He remembers a holiday years ago at Summerhall, his brother flushed and whinging after supper while the children ran wild through the sitting room and Dyanna fished around in her purse. Oh, give him a break, Baelor, she’d said when he teased, poor thing’s on his cycle. 

Maekar nudges the chair next to him with his foot. Baelor lets out a long breath as he sits down, all the day’s pressures rolling off of his shoulders and into the gentle, menthol-streaked haze of the kitchen. A copy of your seminar paper draft is still on the table from where he’d mulled over it the night before. His praise adorns the pages. Perhaps it’s soft of him, but in place of critique there’s only intrigue. Say more on this written where he might tell another student Explain. There’s a stain on a corner now. The pages are ruffled from where his brother had—utterly unashamed of himself, of course—been reading it.

“You look good,” Maekar says. Baelor finds himself subject to the scrutiny of a furrowed brow and two narrowed blue eyes.

“I do?”

There’s a gruff hmm as he takes another drag. Not a visit, then. More like an interrogation. Sometimes Baelor wonders if he’s his brother’s seventh child. One who needs less checking in on, perhaps, but still. He wonders how Daeron and Aerion have become impervious to that steely gaze. Whatever mask he wears, whatever act he puts on, it carves through him all the same.

“It’s been a better term than most,” he says, and it’s true. The lectures come easier. Campus seems brighter. The classroom is all he can think about, singing a siren song while he ought to be thinking about something, anything else.

Maekar turns his attention to your draft. “This one’s clever.”

“She’s in my graduate seminar,” Baelor says all too quickly. His attempt at an unexciting diversion only makes his brother’s stare intensify.

“Yes, I can read.” He grunts, but there’s a little smirk dancing over his mouth as he looks over something you’d written. “Funny. You must like her.”

 Wringing his hands, the rings make his fingers feel like lead. “I do.”

“Well.” That makes Maekar pause, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Good for her.”

Is it? Baelor wonders. The way he feels when he reads your work, when he sees your mouth open in its witty way right before you speak… nothing about it feels good. Dangerous, perhaps. Like he could break you from the sheer weight of his want. His hands could sooner ruin you than offer you tenderness. It disgusts him. It compels him.

“You don’t need to worry about me.” It’s only half of a lie.

“No. Gods know I don’t need to be fucking worrying about you and yet you’re good at giving me reasons to worry,” Maekar grumbles, snuffing out the remnants of his cigarette and running a hand through his already askew white hair. “At least wait until she’s not your student before you do something stupid. Father says his blood pressure is fine but we all know that’s not true.”

“It’s not like that.” But Maekar raises an eyebrow, sees right through him, and Baelor finds himself admitting: “I wouldn’t know how. Not anymore. I’m not… meant for it.”

“Huh.” 

There’s a gleam in his brother’s eyes, a joke wanting to be made. He waits for the punchline. Some juvenile comment, surely, but the blow never comes. 

Perhaps it’s the common ground they both stand on but rarely speak about. How to move on. If moving on is possible. Whether they ought to accept that love was for a softer time, a younger time, or whether they should shake their warrior instincts awake and fight to prove themselves wrong. Jena and Dyanna would’ve retched to see them both where they are now. Such hardened, hopeless old men.

“Well, whatever this is,” Maekar says, and Baelor knows what he means, knows that it’s the solitude and the silence and the self-sabotage and everything else he forces himself to endure, “you’re not meant for that either.”

Half nine, and the doors of Penrose Hall are whining and groaning while the writing students file into the crystalline spring air. Two of them are bursting with laughter, smacking each other’s shoulders and giggling as they fade off into the lamplit haze. A group of three pauses for a smoke break and then go their separate ways. There’s a warmth starting to wake up King’s Landing from its winter slumber. Sound and movement ripple where campus used to be frozen.

Baelor watches for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty, and you still haven’t come out. The bells of the campus chapel strike ten. An uneasy feeling gnaws at his gut. His mind conjures up images of you in a claustrophobic corner with some man’s hands clawing at your clothes, or you on the slick, dewy cobblestones with an ankle twisted at some unnatural angle, and he’s pulling on his coat and charging down the stairs before he realizes what he’s doing.

It doesn’t take long to find you. You’re on the other side of Penrose Hall, curled up on the steps, staring at the barely-budding willow tree that brushes up against the side of the building. Knees drawn into your chest. Shoulders like shuddering wings hunched inwards. You shrink against the night’s soft sibilance, the rattle of the wind, the thickness of the dark.

“Oh, sorry. Hi.” You’re quick to wipe your eyes when you see him approaching. Even in the shadows, he can see rivulets on your cheeks. An angry tint around your irises.

“Did something happen?” It’s harsher than he intends. There’s a threat woven into the question. Blood singing, bones humming, his army-trained body is suddenly ready to carry out any command you might give him.

“No.” You say too quickly, and even a halfhearted attempt at a smile barely lasts a second. “Nothing. Fucking… it’s nothing.”

But it’s not nothing. Not to him, not if it means you’re holding yourself as if the world has sunk an angry fist into the center of your stomach. Baelor takes another step forward, gently pushing into the stormy atmosphere of you. He can feel the clouds circling, the tension becoming electric. His skin is primed for a lightning strike. 

You make a defeated little shrug, your voice straining to hold back. “It’s so lonely. In there. Or it’s like they’re all there and I’m somewhere else, or… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know…”

And then the storm breaks. Your face falls. The gravity around you gets heavier, heavier, and all his body can do is kneel against the cold stone steps and let your arms form a death grip around him while you cry.

It’s strange. It’s wrong. Muscle memory makes him hold you like he would have held Jena. He rubs uneven circles over your back, stiff and slow to surrender.  It takes a minute for his hands to adjust. To sculpt themselves to the contours of you. Trembling just as much as you are, the thought of someone coming across you both in this twisted embrace is somehow less terrifying than your warbled I don’t know. You, always on the path of some unexpected thesis. You, stringing words together in ways that make language feel lustrous. You, reduced to I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.

He’s the one who ought to feel sorry. Ashamed. He ought to pity you, and instead he’s full of a disgusting pride, so smug about the fact that he’s the one holding you together. Such uncanny power he wields over you. So sick and so selfish. In his core, a nagging truth: it feels good to be needed like this. To let his own desire bloom in return. He needs you. Your brokenness, your brilliance, he needs it all, he needs to walk into it like a room, he needs to lose himself and discover you.

“I know,” he murmurs, while the wind kisses the willow branches and his breath does the same to your hair, “it’s alright. I know.”

“I know.”

You’re sad, Jena said, that it was what tumbled out in reply. Sleep-deprived under the soulless hospital lights, he should have waited for his mind to sync with his mouth before he spoke. I’m not, he should have said. Too late for that. Too late for so many things.

Time collapsed in that sterile room. The date on the whiteboard that the nurses updated every day could have been in a different language for all it mattered. Change came in the form of a new drawing from Matarys taped to the wall or the slow decay of a bouquet on the side table. He stayed awake through the night and slept without dreams in fleeting fits during the day. All the world was taupe and white. Antiseptic. What a mundane hell.

Jena rattled out a breath. “We used to be such happy people.”

And they had. They’d done everything beautifully, achingly right. They’d studied shoulder-to-shoulder in the library and kissed on the stoop of her flat after he walked her home. He’d given her his mother’s engagement ring. Their wedding had been featured in the King’s Landing Times style section. They’d had the boys. Summered in Dorne and Pentos. Bought a house at the edge of the city limits with a pool and a view of Blackwater Bay. They’d gone to the boys’ football games on weekends and gone out for fish and chips after, win or lose. They’d hosted dinner parties. Made love on weeknights. They’d been so blindingly happy. Until they weren’t.

“I’ll take it with me.”

“You’ll take what, sweetheart?” All those chasms in their conversations. The bridges he had to build. How ironic. He’d fallen in love with her mind, her law school logic. Every day, a little less of it remained.

“All that sadness.” Half of her face tried to smile. “So you can go on living. Will you let me do that for you?”

Her hand reached for his. Rings loose around her bone-thin fingers. Nails painted pink from the last time Dyanna visited. The tremor they hadn’t noticed until it was too late made the glitter catch the light with each little twitch. It was so easy to acquiesce. Dose promises like morphine. What a good liar he was. What a coward.

A month later, and there were still flecks of blush-colored polish on her nails when she was buried. He kept the engagement ring for Valarr. Her wedding ring for Matarys. All of his sadness, he kept for himself.

The last week of term arrives with a warm front that thunders its arrival over King’s Landing and then rests its humid remnants across the city. Baelor spends the afternoon tidying his desk, putting the office to rest before the holiday. Down in the courtyard, a group of students have set up camp around a bench. Their laughter echoes against the old stone buildings. No revising will be done, surely, yet it fills him with fondness. He thinks about the boys. Wonders what they’re doing on the first summery day of the year.

You catch him in the doorway just as he’s leaving, out of breath from the stairs. There’s a tin in your hands. A loop of twine around it, tied in a bow, slightly askew. So relieved to see you, he can’t stop the sigh that wrests itself from his lungs. Your name comes out of his mouth the same way he might say thank the gods.

“Um, I wanted to thank you.” You sound flustered. “For the other week. You were so lovely and patient, I’m sorry I was such a mess.”

“Please, you don’t need to apologize. I hope everything’s alright,” he says, although he knows it’s not. That expression on your face had been something wretched. A kind of hauntedness that can’t be fixed in one night. It’s there even now. Softened by the mellow sunlight, maybe, but still fluttering across your eyes. If only he could be the kind of man who would erase that darkness. Someone younger. Someone easier. He’d just make your darkness deeper, he tells himself. He’d be another ghost perching on your sad shoulders.

And yet he’s letting you slip like water through his cupped palms. Classes over for term, summer rushing in to sweep you away, you’ll be lost to the past soon. A five-month fever dream he’ll try to relive every night. He’ll miss your melancholy, yet he’ll miss that rare, swooping joy of yours even more fiercely.

“I’m looking forward to reading your seminar paper.” It’s a last-ditch attempt to prove to himself that he can make you smile, and gods, it works. You light up like the morning sky. He wishes he could stay in your light forever. Bask in it. Burn in it. Die in it.

“Bribe for good marks, then?” You offer him the tin with a sheepish grin. “I’m not a great baker but I figured you can’t go wrong with shortbread, and I added some cardamom so it’s a little different…”

He can tell you’re circling a thought as you trail off, afraid to tuck your wings and land. Your gaze keeps flickering down at the tin. Just as quickly as your clouds had parted, they’re gathering again. When you finally do look up at him, there’s a glint of something he can’t analyze. Hope, maybe. Or danger. Perhaps the two are the same.

“I really loved your class. I’ll miss it,” you say, and then there’s a small catch in your voice, a confession wriggling its way out, and you whisper, “I’ll miss you, too.”

There it is: the wondering and the wishing suddenly stripped back, all just a maze of prose leading to your hushed thesis. It’s daybreak after a long night. Sunrise over Blackwater Bay, streaked with crimson. You give him exactly what his sinful soul has yearned for and doom him in the same breath. Damnation feels dangerously akin to relief.

The doorway frames your body impossibly close to his. Your eyes are fixed on his, wanting, asking. He exhales and makes your lashes waver like minuscule feathers. One hand lifts to brush against the front of your shirt. It would be easy to push you away. It would be even easier to pull you closer. Baelor’s lips part ever so slightly. He watches you mirror him, watches how you wait right at the brink of some invisible boundary. You make it his line to cross.

He inhales. Closes his eyes. And chooses.

“And?”

“And what?”

There’s a drawn-out groan from the other end of the call. “Oh, gods. What’d you do?”

“Nothing.” He answers. “We said goodbye and she left.”

The pathetic finality of it echoes around his kitchen. He brushes shortbread crumbs from the side of his mouth. Thanks again, you’d blurted out. The tin, shoved into his hands like it burned you. The second he hesitated too long, you knew. Smart thing. Sweet, smart, beautiful girl, you’d seen right through him, right to all the fear and guilt holding him back. Your crestfallen expression and the sound of your footsteps fleeing down the hall loop endlessly in his mind. Baelor-breaks-things, destroying all the softness of that moment in the name of safety.

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.” Because there is nothing left to do. You were a sparrow flickering by his window, a final warm day in the autumn of his life. Term is over. That final look of hurt will grow smaller and smaller in his mind each year, until he can’t remember whether you were real or a dream he had just before waking.

Maekar is quiet. Maekar is never quiet.

“I thought nothing was exactly what you would’ve had me do,” he pushes, interpreting silence as disapproval.

“Well, if there was ever a time to do something, I’d say you fucking missed it.”

Frustration stabbing at the front of his skull, he rubs his forehead as he leans over the table. “You said I’d be mad to get involved with a student.”

“She’s not your student anymore, is she?” There’s a sharp exhale and probably a cloud of cigarette smoke haloing him. “First woman you’ve fancied in eight years. Seven hells, and you call me stubborn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He snaps. For once, he craves direction. Someone to tell him what to do. What not to do. It’s exhausting, these mazes he builds for himself, the dead ends and the sharp corners he gets trapped in. He wants an answer, except he’s terrified that when it comes to him, it’ll be in the shape of you.

“I mean,” Maekar says, “I don’t like the idea of you doing nothing forever.”

When he sees you again, he thinks he’s dreaming.

He’s not meant to be on campus. He’s not even meant to be in King’s Landing, but with his family packed uncomfortably tight in Summerhall and both of the boys off on their own holiday adventures, it had seemed best to retreat back to his townhouse for a week or two. Try to finish the research he’d meant to finish months ago. Try to write, prepare for the autumn term, distract himself with routine.

It’s sweltering in the capitol. Even the pages of the book he’d come all the way to his office to retrieve are swollen with humidity. The heat crawls up his back, stains his collar with sweat, makes the city vibrate from the constant hum of aircon units. Evening brings relief, but not much. When he rounds a corner and sees you descending the steps outside the library, he half-wonders if he’s gone delirious.

Oh, hello, you exhale, and he shouldn’t be so satisfied by the way your mouth twists into a little smile, but he is. He shouldn’t insist to walk you home, but he does. He shouldn’t let his heart leap into his throat when your bare arm bumps against his rolled-up sleeve, but how can he not? His whole body burns with a heat that goes beyond the simmering summer air.

“I mostly just sit there. It’s not so bad,” you tell him about your job at the circulation desk. “When I’m bored, I’ll search up people I know and see what titles they’ve checked out.”

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my library records wouldn’t be terribly fascinating.”

You give him a sideways look full of mischief. “No. They’re not. Sorry.”

Over the city skyline, the sunset drenches the brick houses in shades of tangerine. Windows reflect rich, warm light. It halos you, makes you seem like an angel framed in stained glass above the shrine in a sept. Baelor can’t remember the last time he prayed. Before Jena’s death, most likely. The sight of you, smiling and chatting in the golden hour glow, could put him on his knees. Could make a devotee of him.

You’re on a tangent about your landlord—the scum of the fucking earth, you hiss—when he slows to a stop outside his townhouse. There’s a bus stop at the end of the row. He ought to leave you there and say goodnight, to stop himself before he can destroy you with the ferocity of his longing, but gravity is pulling him inside and threatens to sweep you along with him.

“This is yours?” Your wide eyes absorb the facade of the building, the old door, the original windows he paid far too much to have restored. It’s a fault he’s keenly aware of, one he chalks up to a historian’s instinct. Refusing to let go of the past. Forcing it to suffer in his hands instead of letting it go.

“Can I make you tea?” He offers, struck by the notion of you in his home. “I never thanked you properly. For the shortbread.”

“The shortbread was a thank you, you don’t need to thank me for it.” Smart girl, you see through his poor excuse to prolong this sweet, sudden interlude. “Tea would be lovely, though.”

It’s odd seeing you drift through his living room. Your eyes wander over the art that Jena had collected. The old pictures on his mantel. Your hands cradle a teacup he’d inherited from his grandmother, who had probably inherited it from her own grandmother. You’re an interloper in his quiet world. And yet you fit in so seamlessly. Lean on the kitchen table and talk to him like it’s just another evening, like you were meant to be here. He listens to you ranting about your classmates with wonder clouding his vision and guilt nipping at his heels. So wrong. So oddly right.

“...and he’s smart, but gods, he was such a cunt.” Bashful, you hide your lips behind the teacup. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright. We’re not in class anymore.”

It sounds too much like permission to be innocent. For a searing moment, you hold his gaze. He’s seen you make the same calculations before in class. It’s the sort of scrutiny that could make lesser men shrink into themselves. That asks: what do you really mean?

He knows what he means, even if he’s too ashamed to admit it to himself.

It’s dark by the time he walks you to the door. Excuses draft themselves in his head: he ought to walk you to the bus stop, or he ought to drive you home, or you ought to stay until it cools off a bit more. They’re brimming in his throat as you linger in the foyer, as he finally picks up your poetry anthology from its spot on his side table where he’d thought about taking it back to his office for half the semester. It’s intoxicating, thinking of his fingerprints overlapping invisibly with yours on its pages. 

“Gods, I thought I’d lost this! Thank you.” Brimming with a strange kind of light, there’s a shift in the weather of you. “Honestly, thank you, Professor Targaryen, so much. For everything.”

“Baelor,” he insists. He doesn’t typically let students drop the honorifics with him, but you’re not his student anymore, are you?

“Right.” You lock eyes with him as your hand covers his own. “Thank you, Baelor. I really will miss your class.”

“I’ll miss you.” he admits all of a sudden, as if it’s ripped out of him just by the soft pressure of your palm over his knuckles. “You were brilliant. Are. You are a brilliant writer.”

What happens next, he isn’t entirely certain. He knows he leans in. He knows that his eyelids drift shut, his head bows in prayer. Whether it’s you or him who finally closes the distance, though, he can’t tell. He can only hope that it’s him. To hope that there’s still a part of himself brave enough to do something rather than nothing.

It’s more of a fight than a kiss. Both of you pushing and pulling, breaking the last boundaries of decency. He’s messy, out of practice, stiff lips taking their time to thaw and melt against yours. Your book clatters against the floor. Salt streaks across his tongue. His hands perch against the contours of your neck, drawing you closer, wanting things that only a starved man could want. Your sweetness, your submission, it makes a monster of him. Ignites that reawoken beast in his chest. When you finally gasp for air, he finds himself chasing your mouth, greed outweighing tenderness.

“I’m sorry.” He could be apologizing for any number of things. Maybe it’s not you he’s truly apologizing to. All the neurons in his brain are hopelessly still. His animal instincts latch onto the taste of you and howl a song throughout his body.

Sometimes you wonder if you just remind him of himself. Excellent historicization, he’s written on your latest essay. Your literature professors are probably sick of telling you to revise, cut to the criticism already, leave the historical details to the historians. There’s a fresh draft, cleaner, already edited in your laptop. You knew as soon as you wrote that paragraph that it was just for him. 

“Are you trying to woo me or something?” You grin at him, tapping the note.

He sets a flowery cup of peppermint tea down for you. “Maybe I’m trying to convince you to change your field.”

“I’m not cut out for history.” You’d taken his class as an elective, after all. A change of pace from your normal literary seminars and creative workshops. You hadn’t expected to like it, let alone like him.

“What makes you say that?” Head tilted, he studies you with his two-toned eyes. “You wrote the best seminar paper I’ve read in ten years.”

Ten years. Ten years ago he was married, a father of two, already tenured, and you were… well. Doing whatever stupid teenage shit you were doing ten years ago. Your face feels hot while you think of something to say, avoiding his gaze, staring at the collection of matchbooks he keeps in a bowl on the center of the table.

“Because I’m a writer,” you point out. “You’re used to reading what historians write.”

Baelor seems to mull that over like you’ve said something profound. It’s odd, the way being in his kitchen seems to pry apart all your usual defenses. You’re so cold in the classroom, so analytical, so exact in everything you say. A dog with its teeth bared. Growling and barking so no one can see how frightened you are of being wrong. But here, with the light over the stove casting a tender glow over his face, you open your mouth and some half-baked thought comes spilling out.

He’s softer too, a half-smile on his face like you’re some sort of precious thing. “I’d like to read your work.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” is your knee-jerk reaction. The lines of his forehead crinkle as the smile fades.

“Why not?”

You shrug and sip your tea. “It’s just different.”

It’s not that you only write bleeding heart poems about him. Sure, you do, sometimes, but you wouldn’t care if he read them. It’s all the rest that you don’t want him to see. The threads that show up like fragile pieces of flesh under a layer of armor. The loneliness. The insecurity. The existential dread. You know there are parts of him that he’ll never let you see. You’re allowed to keep some of yourself hidden too.

It’s always fucking raining in King’s Landing. Always flooding the cobblestone streets. Instead of soaking your shoes and trudging home after your seminar, you find a seat in his lecture hall. He doesn’t see you amidst the sea of strung out undergraduates taking frantic notes while he moves through his slides. You don’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to listen to him.

“You’ll have noticed that our readings for this week come from anthropologists, not historians. It is true that the pre-Andal period is usually considered prehistoric, but I think we would do well to remember that the early Andal people we’ll be reading about next week did not arrive into an empty void; rather, they stepped into a pre-existing culture.” He gestures to the image on the projector, ancient art spiraling over cave walls. “We know from their art and preserved burials that the First Men likely had complex relationships, storytelling practices, and religious icons. I want us to look at these engravings from about ten thousand years ago in the Mountains of the Moon. What might we say about the people who had created them?”

The sounds of rainfall and laptop keys pitter-patter throughout the hall while he leans against the podium. A gentle smile plays across his face. Not smug. Just curious.

“This isn’t a trick question, I promise.” 

He fiddles with his hands while he talks. Flexing, tapping, twisting his rings. It’s charming. Unconscious. You think about it while you touch yourself later, making yourself come like it’s a punishment.

After you wash your hands and stare at yourself in the mirror for far too long, calling yourself a fucking pervert and every other name you can think of, there are two unread texts waiting for you.

Did you not have an answer to my questions in lecture? Or were you hoping I wouldn’t notice you?

I know you would have had something poetic to say.

Fuck. Okay. Maybe a little smug.

Two in the morning and your flat is haunted by the smell of a candle that burned out an hour ago. He calls, knowing you’re awake. You’re a pair of insomniacs who only seem to go to bed at a decent hour when you’re sleeping together.

“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” he says. “That there’s a difference between what you write as a historian and what you write as a writer. ”

“I guess… it’s the difference between academic and creative. Impersonal versus personal.” You’re not as eloquent as you wish you were. But you hear his curious hum, the sound he always makes when you’re treading toward a point and he wants to hear more.

“You don’t think history can be personal?”

“Maybe. But there’s more to hide behind.”

Silence on the other end. And then, “Keep talking.”

“I don’t really have a thesis here,” you admit. Even if you did, you’re too tired to spell it out in any sort of cohesive way.

“Then you’ll find one. Keep talking, sweet girl. I want to listen.”

So you do. You talk and talk and talk, spinning in circles and never quite landing on a point. You lose your train of thought. Somewhere along the way, you diverge into ranting about an article you’d read for class, about which table in the library is your favorite, about the trip you wish you could take to Dorne if your stipend weren’t so fucking abysmal. You’re sure you’ve bored him, you’re sure you’ve put him to sleep, but each time you stop yourself he’s humming on the other end of the phone. Keep talking. 

Knees against the aged hardwood floor of his office. His fingers tense in your hair. It’s late enough that you can tell what phase the moon is in, hanging low over the crested rooftops of the University halls. But he still grits his teeth together while you run your tongue over the veins of his cock. Only the softest grunts echo low in his chest. You look up at him through watery eyes, choking yourself on him, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

You’ve never met a man like him. A man who listens to you talk for hours on end. Who wants to listen. A man whose cock you want to suck, because gods, he’s handsome, he’s tense, and the way he blushes while you go down on him makes your chest burn with a sort of pride you’ve never had before.

“Fuck, love,” he chokes out, his hand on your head going taut. “Sweet… sweet girl, I—”

And then his head drops back, all the muscles in his neck glinting in the moonlight. You savor every last drop of him, every sensitive twitch, until he’s pulling you off and up onto his lap. There’s saliva and come dripping down your chin. It glistens in his salt-and-pepper stubble after he kisses you. 

“We can’t keep doing this,” he says, but there’s a breathy little laugh in his throat and the lines around his eyes are gleaming at you, so you just laugh along with him and whisper yes, yes we can.

“Are you there, sweet girl?”

There’s a crunched-up beer can in the gutter. Headlights and neon signs reflect off the aluminum. It’s a little mesmerizing. A small distraction from the gnawing ache in your chest.

“Are you alright?”

You’re not. You’re high and alone and not dressed for the crisp autumn night. You don’t know where your friends went. Fuck, you don’t even know where exactly you are. You’d stepped out of the club to breathe and now you’re curled up on the curb like a stray dog, tears and glitter running down your cheeks. Baelor’s disembodied voice drifts past you like a ghost before you remember that you’d called him.

“Are you there?”

“Can you come get me?” Your voice is so small. “I don’t… I want to go home.”

“Where are you?” Something clatters on his end. His keys, maybe. Your hazy eyes catch the time on your phone. One thirty in the morning, and he’d picked up right away.

“Flea Bottom.” Your head whirls as you search for a street sign. “Um, Gin Alley.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

He’s pulling up in just under ten. You practically fling yourself into your arms, babbling apologies through your tears.

“You’re alright? Look at me. Did someone do this to you?” He holds your face in his hands, eyes flickering over you, checking for damage. There's an edge to him that you've never seen before. As if the hands that hold you so delicately could just as soon snap someone's nose in your defense.

You shake your head, making the whole world spin again. You wish you could say yes. Wish you could blame it on someone slipping something in your drink or feeling you up, but the only problem is you. 

“I’m just fucked up.”

You expect to be reprimanded. You want him to be angry. If he is, he doesn’t give you the self-deprecating satisfaction. He just shrugs off his coat and drapes it over your shoulders. 

“Let’s get you home.”

Home. Not back to my house. Just home. You’ll forget that bit when you wake up tomorrow. For now, you roll that around in your head over and over while the radio airs a news story about birds’ changing migratory routes in the Stormlands he drives you home.

There’s a half-drunk cup of tea keeping a pile of papers company on the kitchen table. He pours you a glass of water, makes you drink it while he takes you upstairs and sits you down on the bed. Your sweat-stained clothes end up in his laundry hamper, replaced by an old King’s Landing University shirt. You’re staring listlessly at the floor while he fetches a damp washcloth from the bathroom and dabs away your ruined makeup. Warm damp. The kind of comfortable temperature that means he’d stood by the tap adjusting the water until it wouldn’t shock you. It’s so much more than you deserve.

“I’m sorry,” you say for the hundredth time, and once your mouth opens you can’t stop yourself. “I didn’t mean to be a mess, I just get so… it’s so quiet sometimes and I hate it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing is wrong with you.” He unfurls a pair of socks and slides them onto your feet. His lips press to your kneecaps. You could shatter from the softness of it.

“Something is, though,” you insist. “I feel like a monster.”

He’s silent for a long time. “You’re cruel to yourself.”

So are you, you want to tell him. He buries himself in articles and research on a weekend like it’s a form of self-flagellation. Like enough sleepless nights will help him atone for whatever he feels guilty about. He buries himself in you. Fucks you as if it’ll purify him, but how could it when you’re just as bad? Irredeemably self-destructive, the pair of you.

Your shaky hand reaches for the collar of his shirt. A silent ask. Make me forget this. But he intercepts it and kisses the inside of your sweaty palm, melting your lust away like rain over snow.

“Come here. You’re alright.” Lights go out and he eases you into bed, keeping his hands anchored around you as if you’ll disappear if he doesn’t. “My sweet girl. Smart girl. You’ll be alright.”

And maybe you will. There are times when you nearly believe that. Mid-afternoons in his office, curled in a faded armchair, you doze off while he parses through an article at his desk. The light trickles through the old window panes just soft and just warm enough to blanket you. There are mornings when you wake up first and get to fix him coffee (really, you just like using his fancy machine). He keeps a container of your particular creamer in his fridge. You bring him matchbooks to add to his collection.

It’s sweet. Soporific. The kind of domesticity that almost fills the emptiness inside you. When you sit down to write, the page fills with lines about folding socks. Matchbooks. Heterochromia. Hands stained with ink.

You put on real estate show reruns while you try to thread enough of those images together to make a halfway decent poem. Strange how you can actually sleep next to him, instead of staring at the ceiling and spiraling like you do back in your flat. You’re half-dreaming, just holding on long enough to see which quaint Riverlands cottage the couple chooses, when—

“Thought they’d choose the second house.” 

“Fucking hell!” Scared out of your skin, you thought he’d fallen asleep an hour ago. His laughter fills the room like a shock of warmth in the early winter air. He’s so beautiful with all the lines of his face framing his smile, silver-streaked dark hair grown out and mussed from the pillows. Fuck off, you mutter. You’re grinning too.

when are you coming back?

You’re an embarrassment to the women’s restroom queue. A line of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen, chatting or giggling or drunkenly figuring out how to operate a digital camera, all shimmering in each other’s presence, and you’re texting a graying man who’s at an academic conference. Your lack of camaraderie is probably setting feminism back twenty years. You’d said yes to a night out because you’re young, you’re fun, you should be doing something young and fun on a Friday night, but now you’re one too many drinks in and sulking against the wall. You stare at the phone until he responds. The girl behind you is actively breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone and you can’t even bring yourself to eavesdrop.

Return flight gets in at 9:45 tomorrow night.

can i see you then?

You’re so fucking desperate. A week without him and you’re in heat, howling for attention. A group of girlfriends stumbles out of the restroom and finally, you’re nearing the front of the queue.

I’ll pick you up on my way home.

ok!

i miss you

It’s like typing it out makes it sound even more miserable. You’re about to triple text, lighten the blow with some quick diversion. He responds faster.

I miss you too. I’ve been thinking about you.

What are you doing tonight? Tell me about your day.

Your knees almost give out. Trying to blink your eyes into instant clarity, you manage to pull yourself together.

at th pub

with friends :) 

Are you safe?

yeah i’m fine just bored

ive had more fun just sitting in your kitchen

i love your kitchen

At this point, your thumbs are moving of their own accord. You’re typing out something about how you love his matchbook collection, you love his stupid grandmotherly teacups, you love falling asleep to the sound of him marking up papers, you love him—

I know. That’s where I picture you when I think of you.

My beautiful girl.

Throat suddenly dry, you feel fire in your core and a heat to your thighs that makes you hazy. The fact that he probably doesn’t even mean to be turning you on only makes it hotter. But fuck, you can’t help it, the sheer nice-ness of it makes you want to ride him within an inch of his life, right there in that kitchen.

And then, of course, he has to drive it home.

I hope I dream about you tonight.

Slamming the stall shut harder than you mean to, you take three tries to latch the door and then fumble to pull your top down. The lighting’s low and the picture turns out a little blurred, but you send the image of your pretty tits and your drunken smile without an ounce of the shame you ought to have.

wish you were here <3

You’re both insatiable after he returns. A dusting of snow makes the cobblestone streets slick and lures you the warmth of his house on weeknights when you really ought to be answering emails and polishing drafts for publication. You’ve barely crossed the threshold, snowflakes still melting on your coat, when he’s kissing you senseless. A muffled greeting gets lost somewhere in your smile.

Fireplace ablaze and turning the whole living room ochre, it doesn’t take long for you to thaw. Something crinkles as he presses your back into the couch cushions. You grab a stray pile of papers from under you, nearly tossing them aside before you open your eyes and blink.

“Is this mine?” Lust-drunk and thinking in slow-motion, you can still recognize your own handwriting. Had you given him an essay draft to look over? The uneven lines don’t seem like the usual literary criticism you ask him to review. You catch a handful of words—held in the matchbook of you… divining ink stains… all the dark matter of the universe—and then you realize.

“Fuck, did you read this?” 

“You left it behind last night,” he murmurs, kissing down the lines of your throat.

“I didn’t mean to.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Surely, he can see right through you now. All the cracks you’ve tried to plaster over, all the longing you’ve tried to hide. Not just for him, but for… something gentle. Stable. Something hopeful and bright that you’re not sure either of you know how to find. 

His mouth back on yours, he pulls the papers from your hands, leaving a papercut on your pinky that bubbles with red instantly. “Ow!”

Whatever anger might’ve kindled within you dies as he takes your finger and sucks the blood away. Fuck, you love him like this. Starved and needy. Blown pupils making both eyes look entirely black. He asks with his hands and his mouth and you give, clawing at your clothes until you’re bare for him. You’re a pair of moonlit animals. If he’s already seen all the shameful pieces of you that you bury in your work, then there’s no point in holding out.

Pressing you back into the couch, Baelor bows his head to suck at your tits. Teeth graze against your nipples. Hungry. Insistent. You know what he wants as soon as he trails downwards, but you’re too impatient and too empty to let him.

“No, fuck—” you whine while he worships your inner thighs, even though the prickle of his chin over the sensitive, soft skin makes your spine arch off the cushions. “Please fuck me, I want your cock, please—”

“This first.” It’s firm. You can writhe and complain as much as you want, but when he spreads your legs and inhales the scent of your cunt, you know you can’t stop him.

He’s so diligent when he eats you out. It’s another form of study for him. Whatever makes you moan and tense gets repeated, honed in on. Tongue lapping at the hot core of you, his nose brushes up against your clit and your whole body goes taut with the shock of it. But instead of pulling back and letting your edge fade, he only nuzzles deeper.

A hand slides up your thighs to your stomach. You grab it and squeeze hard enough to cut off circulation. His rings stamp into your skin.

“Please—please fuck me now,” you’re moaning, begging, desperate to be full of him when you finally come. “I’ll do whatever you want, I fucking… I fucking promise, I just need it—”

His other hand opens you up. No resistance, only the pressure and stretch of three long fingers, you break for him and choke at the sensation of it. Combined with the tug of his lips over your clit, it’s enough to make you cry and come like the mess that you are. 

“Sweet thing,” he’s humming as he eases you through it. “Good girl. Thank you.”

Thank you? You’re struggling for breath, and he’s fucking thanking you. You’d laugh at how sweet it is, but you finally clear your eyes enough to get a good look at his face, and… gods. He’s feral. That wasn’t for you. It was for him.

You grab at his face, pulling him near until he finally lets you kiss your own juices off of him. Salt and sweat washes over your tongue. You’re so blissed-out that you don’t hear the music of his belt, don’t feel the pressure against your cunt until his thick cock is easing inside you, slowly, making you feel every inch until his hips sit flush against yours. 

“Is this what you need?” His voice is a string pulled dangerously stiff. You manage a weak mhmm, bucking against him insistently, but he doesn’t move.

“No. Look at me.” He wipes your eyes with his thumb, bringing you back to your body, back to him. “There she is. Talk to me, sweet girl.”

“I just want you.” Unrefined nonsense swirls through your head, all centered around him. “You’re so… so good, how can you… how can you be good to me?”

A shallow, experimental thrust makes you clutch at his sculpted biceps. “My angel. You’re easy to—”

“I’m easy?” Neurons finally firing fast enough to tease him, you grin at the blush that spreads across his crooked nose, over the lines of his cheeks, down to the old scars that are peppered across his chest. The drag of his cock inside you is torturously slow.

“Easy to be good for,” he finally manages to choke out once he regains control of himself. “You make… you make this so easy.”

That means something you can’t quite decipher. Right now, you don’t care. You just clench your cunt around him and spur him on, teeth clashing against teeth as his thrusts get faster and faster. 

He doesn’t fuck you like he’s trying to be good. He fucks you like he’s trying to figure out just how far he can push you. How much he can take. Like he wants you to tell him slow down, enough, please be gentle, but you don’t. You take it all and still want more. 

My girl, my angel, so good for me. The praise melts into you. Gods, you need him to finish. He’s getting sloppy, barely pulling out before he presses back into your cunt. The sound of it is disgusting and delicious. You’re soaking the couch, soaking him, leaving drool on the corners of his mouth when you kiss him, and he just keeps going.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” you cry out while he chases release, “you’re—”

Wherever that thought was going, you don’t get to finish it. His hand, the one that still smells like you, barely presses against the base of your neck. Your head drops back. Everything goes white hot and loud. The pain of overstimulation makes the orgasm bittersweet in the most savory way, striking through your whole body and leaving you raw. All your brain can process is how full you are and how warm, how strong he is.

“Oh, fuck, sw—sweet girl,” he stutters, and you know he’s getting close. You grip his arms hard enough to bruise and beam up at him through fresh tears. He’s so perfect like this, sweating and straining and vulnerable. It makes you want things you shouldn’t want.

“Inside?” You whisper, sweet as a song, and that’s what breaks him. A guttural sound, half-laugh and half-sob rips from his throat. He buries his cock so deep inside you that you can’t feel where you end and he begins. The warm flood of his come spills and spills and fills you in a way that’s hot and primal and perfect.

It feels right. 

“Was it good?” You manage to ask while his cock goes soft inside of you. Your hands play with the coarse tufts of his hair that are overdue for a cut.

“You always feel good.” 

That makes you preen a bit. It’s not what you mean, though.

“I mean my writing. Did you like it?”

“It felt like you.” It’s not a yes, but it makes you glow more than a simple yes ever could. “Alive. Intense.”

You turn your head so you can see blue and brown; your heaven, your earth. “It didn’t scare you?”

“Beautiful girl,” he furrows his brow, quizzical and almost amused, “why would you scare me?”

The truth of it is, you scare yourself.

There’s the void that seems to follow you everywhere. You’re used to that, though. You know you’ll feel it in your chest when all the noise of the day dies down. It manifests in your writing unbidden. It’s so familiar you might as well name it, put a leash on it, drag it around with you and feed it leftovers from your plate. And maybe it bubbles up, like it had that night outside the club, but for the most part it’s an unfortunate background noise.

The want, though, that’s… new. Something you don’t know how to describe. Ravenous. Unhinged. It burns through you and leaves you weak and raw.

It’s not that you want him in disgusting and depraved ways, though that’s part of it. No. You want to hear the story of every matchbook in his bowl. You want to know where he got the scars on his chest. You want to know if they have something to do with the military medal that’s framed on his mantelpiece. You want to learn the names of the people in his pictures. You want him to tell you about his sons, what they were like as boys, what they want to do with their lives. 

You want him to take off that wedding ring. You want him to take you on a proper date. Dinner. Drinks. A shitty film. You want him to kiss you where people can watch and then take you home, and you want that home to be a place where both of you live. A place where there might be a picture of you on his fridge.

You want everything with him. In the best ways, in the worst ways. Everything.

He’s been marking up papers for an hour and you’ve probably just been staring at him for the past thirty minutes. Letting your mind wander. The sunset is turning his office rosy and warm, even though the ancient radiator can barely keep your fingers from going numb when winter gets this frigid. His blue eye seems nearly violet in this light.

You cast your gaze outside. In the courtyard, figures wrapped in scarves and heavy coats cluster and scatter. One on a bench springs up to greet another. They intertwine and melt, heading off towards a lecture hall hand-in-mittened-hand.

Baelor hmms about whatever he’s reading and you can’t help it, you lean over his desk and kiss him before either of you realize what’s happening. His pen clatters to the floor. Strong hands cradle your face. It’s gentle, easy. No lust, just soft lips on yours and the leather-and-paper scent of him filling your lungs.

When you pull away, there’s a dazed look on his face. “What was that for?”

“Dunno,” is your sheepish answer.

His gaze flickers toward the door, ever so slightly ajar. He’s quiet, contemplative, and also a fucking loud thinker. The warmth seems to seep out of the room in the space of a few seconds. You read his mind and feel something fragile and needy inside you snap.

“We can’t keep—”

“Will you stop fucking saying that?”

Blue-brown eyes go oceanic with hurt, but you’re already shoving your books in your bag. Not this. Not again. You can’t keep listening to the same tired line. Maybe it used to excite you. Now it’s a crutch he leans on and you just want to pull it out from under him.

“Just tell me if you don’t want me,” you spit, as though you wouldn’t come crawling back to him like a kicked dog even if he did. “You don’t need to make up excuses.”

“Stop that.” He’s stern all of a sudden. “You’re acting like—”

Fuck. You know what he wants to say, even if he catches himself before he lets it slip. It makes your eyes sting with frustration.

“Like what?” You push. “Say it.”

He sighs your name like a curse. Fuck it, you think. If he can’t bring himself to hurt you, you don’t mind hurting yourself.

“Fine, I will. I’m acting like a child.” You’re crying in earnest now, hoping that your tears sparkle just enough to make him guilty. “You’re here too, you know? It’s not just me. Either you like fucking pathetic girls or you’re just as fucked as I am, take your pick.”

“That’s not fair,” he snaps, though you feel like you’re being perfectly fair to both of you. “You’re a smart girl, you understand that there are consequences to something like this.”

“What is this, then? Your midlife crisis? Am I the treatment for whatever’s fucking wrong with you?” It’s cruel, cold, ripped from the ugliest depths of your heart. “Whatever. Suffer, then.”

He doesn’t call after you. His colleagues give you odd looks as you hurry out of the building and gods, the cold hits you in just the right way. One solid punch to the gut, forcing all the breath out of you. You hold the tears back. You walk all the way home without falling to pieces on the street. The emptiness is there to keep you company, your loyal little ghost. You’re glad to feel it. That fierce ache in your bones. You’d started to miss it.

You apologize. Because of course you do. You spend all of two days angry at him, and then you’re scrambling to clean up your mess before the withdrawal hits you like a train.

i’m sorry. can we talk? i was so wrong.

No, you were right.

Can I see you?

He doesn’t say what you were right about. He only whispers I’m sorry while he sucks at your neck, I’m sorry while he mouths against your breasts, I’m sorry when he turns you over and strokes the back of your head while he fucks into you. Please… please stay, when you’re sobbing through the overstimulation. Stay with me, when he starts to falter, chest stuttering against your back, his nose wet when he kisses against your shoulder. Please… fuck. Sweet girl. Can I come inside you?

You cling to him when he makes tea after. The kitchen tiles bite with cold against your toes. He presses his lips to your hair while the water boils and sways from side to side. Always oscillating. Always in-between. 

There’s a new mug set out for you, a plain white one with his son’s university crest on it. “What happened to your teacups?”

“I dropped them,” he admits, pausing for a moment before he continues. “I’ve always been too rough with my hands. My brother used to call me Baelor-breaks-things when we were little.” 

He’s never talked about his brother before. It’s the tiniest opening, a door inside him barely left ajar.

“I don’t want to break this,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to break you.”

“You won’t.”

You don’t know that for sure. Or maybe you’re the one who will do all the breaking just to spare him the pain. For now, you let the rise and fall of his chest measure the passing seconds. Fractured messiness pressed together. Almost whole. With your eyes closed amidst the sound of rain on the eaves, you can almost imagine that everything you’ve ever longed for is right here.

Summer is doing something strange to you.

It’s not the heat. Well, it’s not just the heat, because you’re no exception to its heavy, vicious presence. The aircon tries its best, but when the sun reaches its apex and the streets radiate so hot you can taste the asphalt in the air, no one can escape it. You’re pouring sweat the whole walk home from campus. The second you step into the townhouse, your drenched clothes get stripped off and kicked into a sad little pile while you stand in front of the open fridge in your underwear and chug water like your life depends on it.

But then there are the dreams. Hazy, fractured, they stick to the inside of your skull like bits of wet confetti. You’ve started scratching lists into your journal first thing in the morning. An attempt to remember, to find meaning in the recurring symbols. Feathers, ink stains, someone’s hands all bloodied-up. Each night feels like a trip to some mysterious place that leaves you bone-weary and befuddled when you wake.

And amidst it all: Baelor. The lack of him winds itself into a needy cord around your neck. Strangles you while you retreat into your own mind during the long hours at the circulation desk. You’re more lust-struck than you’ve ever been in your life. Hands constantly scrambling to sate the need, each time you come around your own fingers you’re only deepening the void in your gut.

The evenings that Baelor doesn’t call spread like jam, thick and viscous. You languish in the muggy air, half-asleep, feeling an emotion you can’t put a name to. On the horizon: clouds looming heavy over Blackwater Bay. There’s a thunderstorm building, threatening to break.

You’re in the middle of a dream where your teeth are falling out when your phone rattles you awake. A groggy Hello? while your tongue prods the corners of your mouth, making sure that everything’s where it ought to be. The sheets have embedded little wrinkles onto your arms and cheeks. A sheen of sweat swaddles you while you peel yourself upright. There’s air humming through the vents and the overhead fan is doing its best, but you can tell the aircon is straining to keep up.

“Did I wake you, love?”

“No,” you mutter, blinking the sleep out of your eyes, “no, sorry, I’m awake.”

A little chuckle on the other end, probably him hearing right through your lie. “You work too much, you need your rest. I can call back—”

“No, please?” You can’t hide how needy you are. “Tell me about your day?”

You put him on speaker while you stumble downstairs, pouring yourself the tallest, iciest glass of water possible. He clearly didn’t take your commandment to have fun very seriously. Peer reviewing articles, editing syllabi for the fall term, helping his brother with business… his day sounds about as tedious as yours. You hmm and uh huh? while he talks, investigating the thermostat (which claims it’s about ten degrees cooler than it actually feels).

Funny, though. He sounds lighter. You’d go so far as to say excited, though nothing he reports seems particularly exciting.

“Can’t believe you,” you tease when he’s finished. “You know you’re allowed to take a break? No one’s going to kill you for it.”

“Work comes before play, you know that.”

“I’m not talking about play. I mean an actual break. Do nothing for a day, I dare you. Go stare at the clouds.” You’ve never seen him truly idle in all the time you’ve known him. Always fretting over a task, no matter how small: making tea, reorganizing a stack of papers, taking a call from one of his sons or brothers. The notion of him sitting somewhere, hands empty, eyes unfocused, is as strange and unsettling as your tooth dream.

“What about you, sweet girl?” He asks, oh-so-conveniently changing the focus back to you. “Did you use the money I left you?”

“Mhm.” You cast a sideways look at the untouched envelope on the kitchen table while you formulate some sort of story. “Um, I got my nails done.”

“Good girl. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” 

“Stop that.” It’s sinful, how cocky he sounds, praising you for spending his money. “D’you want me to bankrupt you or something?”

“You’d have to try awfully hard to do that, love,” he says. You can hear the smirk in his voice. Fucking rich boy. No matter how well he hides it, he’ll always be part of a class so far above you that he might as well live among the clouds. You, with your student loans quietly gaining interest and the odd collection of part-time jobs you’ve been working since you were fourteen… you’re solidly in the dirt of the world.

“You’d better start working on an airtight prenup, then.”

Fuck. Stupid joke. Your smile fades into thin air, skin prickling as if the room’s suddenly gone cold. You should know better than to use marriage as a punchline. It’s one of those lines you leave uncrossed with him, even if it hovers between the both of you like a loaded gun. Of course you’d be reckless enough to pull the trigger at some point.

“About that,” he says, in a tone that you can’t read over the phone. Heart pulsing out of control, your mouth goes dry and your brain comes up with a hundred possibilities for what he’s about to say next, each one more disastrous than the last. 

“Uh huh?”

“I told my boys that I’m seeing someone,” he says.

“Oh.” 

Genuinely dumbstruck, a long moment goes by before your brain fully processes what he’s said.

“Um, did you tell them that… like, how we met, or—”

“I said we met on campus. I think it’s best to leave it at that.” There’s a rumble of an inhale or an exhale. “But I told them that you’re a writer. That you work at the library. They’d like to meet you.”

“I’d love that,” you say so quickly, giddy with nerves, “I’d love to meet them, honestly. Anytime. If that’s alright with you.”

“I’ll figure out a time. Thank you, sweet girl.”

You’re not sure what to say. You’re not sure what to do with your hands. You’re standing in the middle of his kitchen, still bleary from your evening nap, feeling like a bomb just went off. Seismic tremors ripple through your bones. The sun glints off of your phone screen and casts a shiny, trembling reflection onto the wall.

The lie by omission doesn’t even bother you. You’d gladly play along with whatever story he wants to tell so he doesn’t have to admit that you were his student. You’re real. Not some nameless secret. Something more means that you’re someone who gets to meet his sons. His brothers someday, maybe. You’re someone who can fit into his life. Someone who might end up in one of those picture frames over the mantle someday. 

It’s all you wanted, really. A dream come suddenly, shockingly true.

There’s some sort of muffled conversation on the other end of the call. “I’m sorry, sweet girl. More business. I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” You stutter through the big, stupid grin on your face. “Talk to you then.”

“Good. Good night, love.”

“Good night.” You say, and then: “I love you.”

There’s the briefest silence.

Your breath hitches in your throat.

And then the call ends.

Fuck.

You’ve said it before, haven’t you? Surely you’ve let it slip by now. Gods, you’ve probably thought it a thousand times. While you’re falling asleep next to him. While he’s inside you. While he’s making you tea and hmm-ing while he reads your writing. He’s called you “love,” but that’s different. You’d use that with children, with shy undergrads who are nice to you in the library, with a seagull, for fuck’s sake. But as you stand there in the stark stillness of the kitchen, wracking your brain, you come up blank.

Maybe he hadn’t heard you? You try to replay the conversation in your memory. How long had that pause been, between you blurting out I love you and him hanging up? It feels like a whole handful of seconds had gone by, but maybe you’re remembering it wrong. Maybe he’d hung up in the middle of you saying it. There was someone in the background, maybe he was distracted by them. Maybe you broke up a little.

Or maybe he heard you loud and fucking clear. And didn’t say it back.

“Fuck.” You hiss. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck!”

Your phone clatters to the floor. Typical you. Shattering all the happiness you’d worked so hard to build. Fucking idiot, you curse yourself, whole body slipping into panic. Hands shaking while you fetch your phone off the hardwood, you’re trying to avoid going into full cardiac arrest when you look down and see that it’s pulled up your emergency contact screen. 

Fucking hells. If this doesn’t constitute an emergency, you’re not sure what does.

It takes all of two rings for that familiar accent to greet you, bright and buoyant as ever. “Hey! I was just thinkin’ of you, isn’t that funny?”

“Dunk,” you warble, “I fucked up.”

“Winger!”

The pub’s packed tight. Saturday night, and there’s a football game on. King’s Landing Dragons versus Winterfell Direwolves. You bump your way past a stag party hogging the bar. The group of guys bang their fists and chant while the groom-to-be chugs his beer. The first daters, the uni friends, the girl groups mingling with the guy groups, all the usual suspects are there. 

“Oi, Winger!”

You follow the sound to the corner, because even in the middle of all the chaos, you’ve at least got the certainty that Winger means you. And sure enough, you find him there: Duncan, tall and solid as ever, wrapping you in the sturdiest hug you’ve ever felt as soon as you lay eyes on him.

“You grew!” You giggle while you’re smushed against his chest. Your go-to line for as long as you can remember. Maybe he has grown, you wonder when he finally sets you down. He looks different. Good. He’s grown his hair out, shoulder-length and shiny as fresh copper even in the low lights. But those blue eyes, that scrappy old flannel with the hole in the cuff… he’s the same Duncan who you met when you were eight, that lost puppy of a boy who latched onto you as much as you did him.

“Nah, only sideways,” he grins, patting his gut (where you’re absolutely certain there’s nothing but abs). “Hey, you alright?”

He probably knows the answer is no. You look as tired as you feel. You’d been on the phone with him until the small hours of the morning, ranting and crying and pouring yourself shot after shot of Baelor’s top-shelf whiskey. Even now, the smell of alcohol in the air makes your stomach turn. The fact that you’ve wrestled yourself out of bed and taken the ferry all the way to Dragonstone is a fucking miracle.

“I’m fine.” You shrug, which means not at all. 

“It’s fine if you’re not, y’know.” Mercifully, though, he changes the subject before all the weariness and heartache can claw its way to the surface again. “Hey, come meet my friends.”

He introduces you to Raymun—Fossoway, as in Fossoway Cider? you ask, and he just nods his mop of dark curls and blushes—and Raymun’s fiancée Rowan. Duncan fetches you a club soda while you get the full story about the whirlwind romance, the engagement, the wedding plans. They’re a funny couple. Finishing each other’s stories. Her correcting the details about how exactly he’d proposed. Him babbling about how he’d chosen the ring. You get a full slideshow of picture after picture of their baby, too: Rosie, three months old, apparently being fawned over by Rowan’s girlfriends for the evening.

“She’s Daddy’s girl through and through,” Rowan sighs, and Raymun just beams with pride.

“Aye, but she’s got her Mum’s good looks.” There’s a cheeky little look between them. Like they’re sharing a joke you’re not in on.

It’s sweet, though. How comfortable they are with each other. How they ebb and flow, how they tease and flirt. You’d be more charmed by it if you weren’t struck by the crushing question of whether you and Baelor could ever have it so easy.

Maybe you could’ve, if you hadn’t gone and royally fucked it up.

“So Duncan says you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you cringe internally, always so graceless making small talk about yourself. “Um, I’m in grad school at KLU. It’ll be my last year this fall.”

“Ugh.” Raymun catches himself. “Sorry. Nothing to do with you, I promise.”

“He’s got a thing about King’s Landing,” Rowan adds for him. “Hates the fancy folks. The Velaryons, the Celtigars, all them.”

“It’s the Targaryens mostly, but I—”

“Oi!” She elbows him in the ribs. “She’s fucking dating one of them, idiot. Remember what Duncan said? Have some class.”

“Oh! Right, sorry. No, I didn’t mean… it’s nothing personal, just, like, the principle,” Raymun scrambles sheepishly. You’re sure, from the looks on their faces, that you’ve gone a bit stiff. Residual pride puffs up your chest, even if today you’d gladly rant about the “fancy folks” and how much they tend to set your nerves aflame.

“That’s alright.” You manage a lopsided smile. “I get it. They’re not for everyone.”

Duncan, always your savior, swoops back in with another round of drinks. “Hey, pool table’s open. You want to play?”

“No mate, I’m shit,” Raymun insists, but he looks all too happy to be strong-armed into a game.

“You boys do that.” Rowan nudges you. “Fancy some air?”

Outside, you can hear the cheers and groans as the football game enters the second half. Rowan takes a hit of her cherry-flavored vape while the pair of you lean against the brick exterior and bask in the lukewarm breeze. Across the street, a pack of drunk uni boys whistles at the pair of you. Fuck off! you both yell back at the same time.

“Gods, sorry,” you wince. Rowan gives you a quizzical look, cocking a perfectly-plucked eyebrow.

“Sorry for what? They were talking to you.”

“What?”

Judging from the way she gives an incredulous little chuckle, you must look properly astounded. “Yeah, babe. I’m not their type now, am I?”

“Are you serious?”

You wonder if there’s something wrong with your eyes. She’s gorgeous. If someone told an artist to draw a beautiful woman, they’d draw her. Even under the dull streetlights, her curls are a bright, soft crown. Perfectly messy, perfectly twirled into an effortless bun that you could never, ever hope to achieve. The v-neck of her emerald green top frames her tits just right. Her jeans might as well be custom fit from the way they hug her ass. She’s a goddess, a vision, the kind of woman who you feel a little embarrassed standing next to, and you’re just… well. You’re you.

“You should be everyone’s type,” you offer, directing your gaze back to the concrete before you seem as perverted as those boys across the street.

“Aw, thanks,” she grins. “Sorry about Raymun, by the way. He’s from the Reach, you know how they get all territorial.”

“It’s fine. Really. He seems lovely.”

“Yeah, he’s a nice one.” You can feel her eyes on you, parsing you apart. “How’s yours?”

“Mine?” 

Gods, it feels strange to talk about Baelor like this: so casual, so open. Like your relationship is as typical as anyone else’s. You’ve spent a year having heart palpitations about the notion of anyone at the university finding out about the two of you, and now you’re calling him mine on the sidewalk for any of the tipsy passersby to hear.

“He’s good,” you reply after chewing on the inside of your cheek for a minute. “He’s away for the summer, actually. Visiting family and all that.”

“That’s too bad.” She offers you a sympathetic hit of her vape. “Nothing like reunion sex though, yeah? They’re fun when they’re all pent up.”

Coughing up a cherry-flavored cloud, laughter bubbles from deep down in your chest. It’s a strange sound. Something you haven’t heard in what feels like ages. Light as a baby bird, making your whole body sparkle with a nicotine-laced effervescence. Maybe this was what you’ve needed all along as the antidote to your hollowness: summer air, girlish giggling, conspiratorial smiles shared with a potential partner in crime.

And maybe it’s that lack of pretense, that clever warmth that Rowan has, that makes you blurt out: “I told him I loved him last night.”

“Oh?”

“He didn’t say it back.” You’re wincing at yourself, but the floodgates are open and the rant tumbles out all at once. “I mean, it was right before I hung up, so maybe he didn’t hear me? But I think he probably did. And just before that, he said he told his sons about me and that they wanted to meet me, so I thought… I dunno, it just slipped out, but I thought it made sense, you know?”

“Maybe you just shocked him,” she reasons. “It’s one thing to think it, it’s another to hear it, yeah?”

Well. It all sounds so simple when she puts it like that.

You gnaw on your lip for a long minute. “What should I do?”

“If I were you? Nothing. You’ve said your bit, it’s his turn to say his.” Rowan tilts her head. “Aw, hey. Does he make you sad like this all the time?”

“No!” You’re quick to protest. “No, he’s perfect. I really do love him. It’s just… it’s hard sometimes.”

“Yeah, well. That’s just how it is, ain’t it?”

A car rumbles by, boosted bass making the ground quiver beneath you. Craning your neck to look past the old rooftops, past the glow of King’s Landing shining from across the bay, you stare into the night sky and just breathe. Messy you. Foolish, fucked-up, poetic you, always entangling yourself in complications because it’s more comfortable for you that way. You’ve been drifting in the atmosphere of your confusion. Untethered. And beside you, Rowan tucks her vape back in her pocket, a friendship one hour old and already pulling you back down to the ground.

“Hey, c’mon. Enough of that.” She gives you a playful nudge in the ribs. “Raymun really is shit at pool. Want to do a round of boys versus girls? You look like you could use a win.”

Breathy laughter drifting off on the wind, you rally your energy and find it shockingly renewed. “I could.”

Neither of you are a particularly skilled shot. But true to her word (and Raymun’s own), he really is utter shit. Drunken blush every time the cue strikes a ball at an awkward spot, he endures Rowan’s teasing all while staring at her with the widest, most starstruck eyes you’ve ever seen on a man. Team rivalry gets forgotten somewhere in the banter. You all lose track of the score and whose turn it is. They’re magnetized to each other’s sides, lips on necks and hands on hips, a sort of public foreplay that would make your stomach turn if it were anyone else. You’ll give them a pass. They’re too cute to hate.

“Hey, there she is!” Duncan claps as you sink the four ball, even though he’d spent ten minutes helping you set up the shot. His palm’s sweaty when he high-fives you. Big, toothy grin on his face. In the din of pop music from thirty years ago and angry football fans howling at the TV, you wrap your arms around his tree trunk frame and close your eyes. So solid, so constant. Your Dunk.

“Thanks for this,” you murmur into his shirt. “I missed you.”

He nests an innocent kiss onto the top of your head. “Missed you more, Winger.”

It’s two in the morning by the time you finally rattle the key into the lock of Baelor’s townhouse. Drunk on nothing but happiness. Humming some synth pop song the pub had on repeat. You’ve got girls’ night plans with Rowan in the works. A promise to Duncan to come to a match for the boys’ rugby team he’s started coaching. Every little nook of your heart feels so full. You pull out your phone and find two missed calls and two unread texts.

Please let me know when you get this. I just want to know that you’re safe.

You tap out a reply and then toss your phone somewhere into the sea of bedsheets while you head for the shower.

i’m fine!

For once, maybe you mean it.

It’s not easy to do nothing. But you do it. Or, at least, you skirt as close to “nothing” as you can. A week later, phone on speaker propped against the mirror, makeup scattered across the vanity like a glittery bomb’s gone off, you don’t bring up that rogue “I love you”. You tell him about your plans for the night: mini-golf with Duncan, Rowan, and Raymun. You assure him that yes, you’ll pay for it with the money he left. You listen to his updates: his older son off to Tyrosh for an internship, his younger son invited on a beach holiday with school friends, his brother called into the city on business, all convenient excuses for him to shut himself in the library of his summer mansion and work until his eyes water. You let the conversation simmer in mundanity, pretending like nothing’s changed, like there’s not a needy creature pecking at your ribs from the inside, begging him to say it back.

“It’s good that you’re spending time with your friends,” he says. “I’m happy for you.”

There’s something taut about his voice. It makes your stomach flutter with nervousness. Are you? you’d push if you were bolder. I’m happy for you. I’m proud of you. I miss you. All these things he says, as if he’s steering toward a confession and slamming on the brakes at the last second. You bite your tongue while you swipe on another layer of your already-melting mascara. Silence has become your new accomplice. It stretches and stretches until it snaps.

“I should go.”

“Alright.” Disappointment dulls the excitement. “The aircon’s broken, by the way.”

“I’ll have it looked at.”

“Okay.” You wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. “Good night.”

There’s another pause. Breath held tight, you stare at the screen and wait. 45:05, the call time says. It ticks up and up. 45:06, 07, 08. You could say it again. Make sure he hears it. Double down, put all your cards on the table and dare him to make a move.

No. You’re doing nothing, you remind yourself. So you don’t.

“Good night, sweet—” is all you hear before you hang up.

There’s a man in the living room.

Still half-asleep, mouth dry, the margarita you’d split with Rowan last night making your stomach unsteady, you feel like you’ve stumbled into a bizarre little dream. Your detective instincts are slow to kick in. There’s no sign of a forced entry. He’s not shoving Baelor’s antique clock and silver candlesticks into a bag. If he’s a robber, he’s a fucking terrible one.

The stranger prods at the thermostat. Sleeves of his nicely-pressed white shirt rolled up, you have to stare for a moment at the sheer size of his forearms. Faint sweat stains make the contours of his biceps visible through the fabric. The aircon? you wonder, although he’s absurdly well-dressed. Maybe that’s just the kind of world that Baelor lives in, though. Even the electricians are clad in expensive watches and designer shoes.

“Hello?” You try your voice, finding it roughened by a morning rasp.

He turns, fixes you with a furrowed-brow look, eyes giving you a thorough once-over. A few strands of crisply-coiffed white hair cling to his forehead. He seems vaguely familiar, yet you can’t begin to think of who he reminds you of. You’re suddenly all too aware of the fact that you’re wearing nothing but a scrappy pair of panties and a three-sizes-too-big King’s Landing Dragons tee you’d dug out of Baelor’s closet.

“Ah,” he says. “The lady of the house.”

“Um…” your brain buffers. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone this soon.”

“Clearly.”

That wakes you up. Fancy electrician with an asshole scowl and the snark to match. Subtly trying to smooth your shirt further down your thighs, you consider whether it’s best to scramble back upstairs and leave him to his work or continue your strange journey to the kitchen for the cup of coffee that’s singing your name.

“Can I get you something to drink?” You offer, stomach growling, coffee winning out. “Tea or coffee?”

“Whiskey on the rocks,” he says, and your nervous laugh dies in your throat as you realize he’s not joking. “What, is the ice maker broken too?”

He digs into his back pocket as he swaggers through to the kitchen. You follow like a wide-eyed lost dog, stuttering faint protest when he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and nestles one between his lips. Massive hands pluck a matchbook from Baelor’s collection on the kitchen table—silver, emblazoned with a hotel logo—and strike a flame while you stand dumbfounded in the doorway.

“Seven hells,” the stranger grunts, flipping through the cabinets, “where does my fucking brother keep his glasses?”

Oh.

It all comes together. The white hair, the looming frame, the annoyance oozing from every pore. A recurring figure in half of the photographs in the house. The man you know Baelor’s talking about each time he says my brother with a sigh, half-frustration and half-fondness. Maekar.

“Other side of the sink.”

Ah, he huffs, fetching himself a glass. You let him pillage the liquor cabinet while you brew a pot of coffee. There’s no way you’re about to have this interaction without any caffeine in your body.

“Baelor didn’t say you were coming.” You try to sound nonchalant while the machine burbles and drips. Maekar makes himself completely at home at the kitchen table with his glass of whiskey in one hand and cigarette in the other. 

“Used to be that I could drop in anytime I liked.” He drains half the shot in one sip. “But that was before you.”

Tucked against the corner cabinets, the air in the room feels impossibly humid and dense. It’s hard to read the expression playing out behind his well-groomed white beard. Accusation? Amusement? You feel like you’re going through the motions of your morning under a magnifying glass, cold eyes drilling into your every move. You know he’s judging your choice of attire. He’s probably judging which mug you choose from the cabinet: a hand-painted one that reminds you of the teacups Baelor had broken months ago. The almond milk you’re pouring into your coffee. The way you refuse to dirty a spoon just to properly mix the milk in, opting instead to just sip the too-bitter coffee while the white clouds settle to the bottom.

The more you stand there amidst the silence and the stares, the more you start to feel a sense of pride prickling at your chest. The townhouse has, for better or for worse, become the place you think of when you think about home. Your milk in the fridge. Your books strewn across the couch. Your hair getting caught in the drain of the tub. Maybe you won’t call him out on what this seems like to you—a nosy little brother taking advantage of a convenient opportunity to snoop—but you won’t shy away, either.

You clatter your mug onto the table, taking a seat and pointing at his nearly-empty pack of menthols. “D’you mind?”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he shrugs, sliding it across the table. You’re not a very well-practiced smoker, only ever indulging to look cool in front of handsome boys or to round out a night of drinks. Luck is on your side, though. You strike a match and take a drag without coughing.

“So was there a reason for you dropping in when you know your brother’s not here?” You dare to ask, meeting his steely gaze.

“Maybe I missed having a decent glass of whiskey.”

“Uh huh.” Doubtful, you tilt your head. “Like you can’t afford good whiskey?”

“I can afford it just fine,” he grumbles, “I gave this to him for his nameday. My fucking mistake, though. The distillery’s out of business now. Should’ve kept it for myself.”

Somehow, you doubt that. There’s a tenderness in the way he holds the bottle. A little smirk ghosts across his face. He seems like the kind of man who will whine and complain about wasting expensive liquor on his brother when really, deep down, he’s all chuffed with himself and his gift-giving abilities.

“Anyways. I thought I might do some investigating while I’m in the city,” he continues, blowing smoke sideways. “I’ve got this mystery, see.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“My brother.”

Can’t help with that one, you want to tell him. You’re still working at unraveling that particular mystery yourself.

Worry outweighs any clever remarks, though. “Is he alright?”

“He ought to be. It’s King’s Landing that usually makes him such a miserable old bastard, not Summerhall.” He quips. “Suppose that’s your doing, too.”

“You think he’s miserable?” Tired, you’d understand. Flustered, maybe, especially if he had heard your confession. But miserable… that makes you chew the inside of your cheek while your cigarette smoulders between your fingers. As much as you’re happy keeping Baelor at arm’s length while you wait for him to make a move, any move, you hate thinking of him wallowing his summer away.

“I think he’ll work himself to death if he gets the chance. And we don’t want that,” he raises an eyebrow, “do we?”

There’s a little guilt trip woven into that question. A hidden implication: that he’s only working as much as he is to distract himself from missing you. You’ve tried, you want to protest. It’s all you’ve been doing since he left. Gods, it’s a fucking bit between you two now. You’ve held up your end of the bargain, filling your evenings with Duncan and Rowan and Raymun instead of rotting away in the achingly empty bed.

Maybe you could’ve tried harder, though. Made less of a joke of it. Pushed him to put down the papers and the emails. Guilt twists your stomach in knots. Here you are, all proud of yourself for having a life beyond him, all while he’s shutting himself in a dark, lonely library like it’s a form of penance.

“Got any plans next week?”

“Hm? No.” Jarred back to reality, you rush to take one last drag of your cigarette before it burns out. Coffee washes the taste out of your mouth. Bitter replacing bitter. You can’t say that you have anything worth mentioning planned for the upcoming Midsummer holiday. With the University closed for the week, you were probably going to get drunk with Duncan and watch an obscene amount of reality TV.

“Come to Summerhall, then.” Maekar’s glass clinks as he sets it down, empty, the imprint of his lips fading on the rim. “At least the aircon functions there.”

“You’re sure that’d be alright?” You can’t deny the way you light up at the offer. Your mind conjures up images of rolling green hills, elaborate mansion halls cool and crisp even during the peak heat of the day, Baelor’s weight next to you as you fall asleep. It’s a tempting portrait.

“It’s my house, if I say it’s alright then it’s alright.” He coughs, forehead reddening. You watch him contemplating another glass of whiskey, ultimately deciding against it and pouring himself the dredges of the coffee you’d made.

“And I won’t be a bother? To your family?”

“Won’t be many of us this year.” No milk for him, but you could’ve guessed that. “His boys won’t be there, if that’s what you’re wondering. Me and him. My four youngest. Everyone else’s made a run for it.”

It’s exactly what you’d been wondering. Odd how those blue eyes seem to drill straight into your brain. You wish there were a book you could consult here. Is it alright to meet your maybe-boyfriend’s nieces and nephews before his sons? Is it acceptable to show up to his family’s summer mansion to stage a work-life balance intervention? When in this situation do you demand to know whether he loves you back?

“If you think he’ll be fine with it, then alright.”

“Good.” The way he says it makes you think that you didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. “You do own trousers, I hope.”

“No, I walk around Uni like this,” you deadpan, fighting sarcasm with sarcasm. Under different circumstances, you’d worry about making a good impression. Defer to shyness. The way this morning is going, though, you’ll be lucky if he gets a lukewarm impression from you.

Maekar just scoffs. “Careful, girl.”

Room heady with smoke and coffee, you breathe deep and wonder what you’re getting yourself into. There’s a thick, threatening undercurrent in the air. Tense as a warm front before it snaps. Nothing about it feels careful.

It’s raining when Baelor picks you up from the train station in Ashford. He lets you tuck yourself into your arms, lets you linger there in the parking lot, lets the steady drizzle dampen his hair while he holds you. I missed you so much, you murmur into his shirt, relishing in the way he kisses you. So what if there’s only two other cars around? It’s delightfully public, deliciously normal.

“I missed you, lovely girl,” he says, his wide hands wiping rain off of your forehead. Even with dark circles framing his eyes, he looks at you with a kind of gossamer-soft glow that makes your heart ache from sweetness.

Once you’re settled in the passenger seat, he drapes a hand over the steering wheel while the other perches possessively on your thigh. “I’m sorry my brother maneuvered you into coming here. He shouldn’t have intruded like that.”

“I don’t mind. I didn’t really need much maneuvering.” You trace the tendons of his fingers while he drives. Ink stains decorate the outside of his pinky. His wedding ring occupies its spot on his ring finger. You try not to think about that. You try not to think about whether its constant presence might have anything to do with the fact that he hadn’t said I love you back, either. Keep yourself the fuck together, you’d chanted over and over in your head on the train. You repeat it now, to the rhythm of the windshield wipers as the rain comes down. Keep. Yourself. The fuck. Together.

Somewhere in the repetition and the downpour, you drift off. It’s only when you feel the car jolt from asphalt to gravel that you wake. Sun peeks through still-bulging clouds, making the whole world glisten. Everything you see is impossibly green. Impossibly lush. The trees that line the road are likely older than Westeros itself, aching under the weight of their own gnarled limbs. 

There’s a gate looming ahead, dragon motifs woven into the metalwork. Your one semester of Valyrian in undergrad doesn’t do you much good, but you try nonetheless to read what’s spelled out at the peak.

“Pez… perz…”

“Perzys ānogār,” he finishes for you, perfect rs rolling off of his tongue. “Fire and blood.”

You’d scoff at that, joke about how dramatic his family is, how he ought to get that tattooed, but then you see it. Summerhall. Framed by the rolling hills of the Stormlands, it’s a sliver of sun pulled from the sky. Afternoon light refracts off of the windows. Looming like a golden palace amidst all the greenery, you’re blinded by the finery, by the arches, by the sprawling, manicured grounds that seem like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a child’s storybook. It is a palace. A princess might as well be trapped in one of the tall towers that stands at each corner of the mansion. For all you know, there’s a dragon lurking somewhere nearby.

Baelor pulls up to the courtyard, where a man in a crisp suit is opening your door before you can process what’s happening. “Welcome, miss.”

“Will you have her bags taken to my room, please, Yorkel?” Baelor hands him the keys while you find your footing.

“Right away, sir.”

“Thanks,” you manage to say, jaw still slack as you stare at the exterior. 

A firm hand finds its spot on the small of your back. “Shall we, sweet girl?”

If you were starstruck by the outside, the inside is enough to blind you. Double staircases and a massive chandelier greet you in the entryway. North wing to the right, Baelor explains. Dining room, library, lounge, drawing room, sitting room (you don’t fully understand what the difference between the last three is). South wing to the left, mostly bedrooms. He guides you up the stairs, where a massive portrait hangs front and center: a man in a suit with a dragon brooch on the lapel, his hand on the shoulder of a seated woman in a rust-orange Dornish-style gown. You’ve seen iterations of their faces in Baelor’s living room and in the Sunspear villa. Daeron and Myriah. Young and regal. Like a king and a queen.

“Are these all your family?” You ask, gesturing towards the corridor walls that are bedecked in old, gilded frames. Distracted, you nearly run into a maid carrying a silver tray before Baelor manages to steer you out of the way.

“My apologies, miss,” she says, calm and classy, carrying on with her work before you can insist that you’re the one who ought to be sorry, not her. You feel like you should be apologizing for just stepping on the pristine floors and breathing the cool, lilac-scented air. All the faces in all the portraits leer at you. Intruder, they accuse silently.

“I’ll give you the full tour tomorrow,” he promises. “You’ll want to rest before dinner.”

He guides you down the halls, past the ghostly gaze of dead family members. Our room, he says at last, opening a door while you bite back a grin. The room in question is probably the size of your entire previous flat. Massive curtains have been draped back, allowing sunlight to filter through the bay windows and splash the sage green walls. Through a doorway in the corner, you can see a claw foot tub. There’s a four-poster bed, a crystal light fixture sparkling from the ceiling, a rug that probably costs more than the average house.

“You live here?” Is all you can bring yourself to say. There’s more you want to ask. You’re dying to unravel the stories behind the portraits, eager to peer around all the corners and wander through all the grand rooms. It’s a strange, surreal, sparkling world you’ve wandered into.

“Only during the summer,” he says, “and as long as my brother tolerates me.”

Right. As if that makes it humbler, somehow.

“I’ll be in the library. Dinner is at eight.” 

Pressing a kiss to your forehead, he lingers for a moment, as if he’s about to say something else. You meet his blue-brown gaze, breath frozen. But then he’s gone, leaving you to the intricate stillness, to the room that feels like a gaping mouth trying to swallow you whole.

You try to rest. Mostly, you flit in and out of consciousness. Fever dream snippets cascade every time your eyes close. You wander the halls in your dreams and wake, wondering how you’ve gotten yourself back to bed. You think you hear footsteps outside the room. Sometimes heavy, sometimes a faint pitter-patter. But when you stumble to the door and poke your head out, there’s never anything there.

Keep yourself the fuck together. Cool water and a quick rinse in the tub help. Not enough, though. Your head is still swimming as you touch up your makeup and tug on a slightly-wrinkled sundress.

It’s only a little frightening that you’d woken up to find your belongings all neatly unpacked, toiletries organized on the vanity and clothes hung up in the dresser next to Baelor’s. You don’t recall any of the staff coming in while you’d been in bed. Maybe they’re quiet, good at fluttering around unseen. Maybe the house is actually haunted.

Right down the hallway. Left to get to the entryway. After that, you’re less sure of where you’re going. You end up in the lounge (or is it the sitting room?), then the drawing room (or is it the lounge?), then a room that must be the library.

There’s a blur of white in your peripheral vision. You whip around, finding a little girl peeking at you from behind an armchair. Her pink dress is all aflutter, white hair coming loose from her barrettes. The two of you stare at each other for a moment. Ghost? You wonder.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” she says, and then scurries away before either of you can say anything else.

You try to follow, if only on the off chance that the dining room is her destination, but she’s long gone by the time you make it into the hallway again.

“Lost?”

“Fucking hells.” How is it that the most menacing man you’ve ever met can sneak up on you like a cat? “Yes, actually.”

Maekar snorts. “Are you certain you weren’t just spying?”

“That depends. Have you got something worth spying on? Secret dungeon, maybe?”

He gives you a long look from head to toe, probably trying to decide whether inviting you here was a mistake or not. You do your best not to shrink from it. He’s an animal of a man, quiet in the way he observes you but not less threatening for it. The kind of creature you might’ve been afraid of when you were little. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him, a grown-up might’ve said, even if you wouldn’t have believed it.

There’s a softness there too, though. Minuscule, buried in the lines around his eyes. It’s enough for you to see past the gruff facade. Enough to know that, just like his brother, he’s human.

“Come on, then,” he says at last. “Can’t have you wandering off.”

Of all the rooms in the mansion, the dining room might be the fanciest yet. It looks more suited to a banquet than a casual family dinner. Candlelight casts shadows over the vaulted ceilings. Maekar takes the seat at the head of the table, where a gigantic portrait of Aegon Targaryen hovers on the wall behind him. You’re fairly certain you’ve seen that portrait in history textbooks. Odd, how you’ve found yourself tangled up with a family whose fingerprints are all over the course of Westeros’s history. 

Baelor pulls out a seat for you, ever the gentleman. While the staff pours water and wine, four pairs of eyes stare at you from across the table. Two boys, two girls. The smallest: the same girl you’d encountered in the library. She’s giving you a sly grin, which you flash right back at her. 

“Aemon, Daella, Aegon, Rhae.” Maekar goes down the line one by one before he offers them your name.

“You’re Uncle Baelor’s girlfriend?” Daella seems incredulous. Twelve years old, if you’re remembering correctly, and probably the mirror image of her mother. Next to her, Aemon goes beet red and stares down at his napkin.

You shrug. “I’d say it’s more like he’s my boyfriend.”

Maekar snorts. For half a second, there’s an exchange of looks between him and Baelor, a language you could never hope to understand. Anxiety flares inside you—you’ve never called him a boyfriend before, especially not in front of other people—but he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t correct you. Just squeezes your hand under the table, warm and strong.

In between bites of Northern-style roast chicken, you answer the barrage of questions from Maekar’s children. What do you do? What do you write? Are you famous? Have you ever read The Tales of Florian and Jonquil? What did you think of it?

“Well, what did you think of it?” You reverse the question at Aegon, who perks up immediately.

“I liked the dragon fighting part! The rest of it was a bit boring.”

“Finish chewing before you speak, boy,” Maekar chides, though there’s no malice in it. Just a tired, fatherly frustration. Sorry, Aegon mutters with a mouth full of green beans.

You’re keenly aware of Baelor’s eyes on you during your dinnertime deposition. And though he steps into the conversation from time to time—Not tonight, sweetheart, he asserts gently when Rhae demands you meet her beloved pony Morning—he lets you handle their inquiries by yourself. It’s impossible to shake the sense that you’re being tested. And even if you manage to play along, even if you earn a giggle or two, your heart’s beating faster than it did in any exam you ever took in school.

After the chocolate mousse (which ends up smudged on Rhae’s nose somehow), the staff clear the table like clockwork while Aegon and Rhae whine about being sent to bed. It’s Aemon who corrals them. He lets Rhae clamber onto his back, gives a dutiful good night, Dad, to Maekar, offers you a shy smile. It was nice meeting you.

Daella lingers, sly as a fox. “Can I stay up—”

“One hour,” Maekar grunts, “and don’t let me hear that TV.”

“Thank you!” And even though he puts on a firm face, there’s nothing but fondness there when she pecks his cheek before running off to join her siblings.

It’s strange, really. You feel like you’re in the dark of the cinema. That soft sternness, that familiarity, it’s utterly foreign to you. Fatherhood might as well be a fantasy film. Blinking away your wistful stare, you turn and meet Baelor’s gentle gaze. Opening you, reading you. His hand returns to your thigh, a comforting weight, a silent I know. You latch onto his fingers with your own. It’s been too long since you had the anchor of his body latching you into reality. How fiercely you’d missed him. There’s a needy tension in your hands. Don’t let me go, it says. 

Maekar lets out a long groan as he stands, rubbing his bearded chin. “Drinks and billiards?”

“Not tonight, I think,” Baelor says without breaking eye contact, the tiniest sparkle of suggestion surfacing. “Long day.”

“Yeah,” you lie. “Exhausted.”

You’re barely inside the threshold of the room when Baelor’s mouth is on yours. Lips on lips, teeth crashing against tongue, you stumble backwards while he swallows the laughter right out of your throat. This is what you were truly starved of. The heat of his body, the possessive clutch, the way he touches you like he could break you, like he’s just barely holding himself back.

“Perfect girl,” he rumbles in between hungry kisses, “beautiful girl, do you know how good you are?”

“No—” You gasp, shivering as he makes quick work of your dress. Your mind’s a summer storm, processing touch rather than words. His hands leave you bare in the moonlight before you even fully realize what he’d said.

“No?” He has to guide your hands to his shirt, your trembling fingers fumbling over the buttons. “Do you need me to show you?”

“Please.” 

Together, you undress him. He lets his linen shirt fall to the floor while you trace the contours of his chest. You savor the salt-and-pepper scrape of the hair that blooms over his pectorals, interrupted by those two jagged silver scars, thinning and trailing down, down, down, to where it frames his hardening cock. All the muscles in his hips and thighs roll like marble, chiseled and smooth. Your eyes drink in the veins that run down the length of his cock, the moisture that gathers at the tip, the way it pulses to full erection under his white-knuckled fist. He’s a vision. A statue of a god you want to pray to.

He presses you toward the bed, and you let your legs part as your back hits the velvet comforter. The room of your body is a place you’ll always let him in. Baelor hovers over you, wolflike and wanton, eyes fixed on your exposed cunt. 

Beautiful, he repeats, a little whisper. Heart hammering against your ribs, your breath comes in shy stutters as he traces the glistening folds. His fingers prod and caress every little nook. There’s no demand in his touch. Just quiet exploration. As if the warm, wet flesh of you is some precious thing.

“Look here.” He notches the tip of his cock at your weeping entrance, waits until your eyes fixate on the joining of your bodies. “I want you to watch.”

“Oh, fuck,” you gasp, burning at the sight, watching him split you open with a slick, sinful sound, “oh, fuck—”

A wide hand claps over your mouth right before your voice elevates to a shout. Shh, shh, shh, he hisses, halfway buried inside you. Addled by lust, you forget you’re not in the safety of his house where you can cry and moan as loud as you like. You’re like a pair of teenagers. Horny as beasts, biting back the obscene sounds that bubble up. He keeps you muzzled like that for a long, painful moment, until the vibrations in your vocal cords die down.

Fuck. Oxygen deprivation sends an electric shock straight to your clit. Slowly, trembling, you wrap your fingers around his wrist. He lets you slide his hand down, over your chin, until it’s perching around your throat. The tendons in his jaw tighten once he realizes what you want.

“I can take it,” you rasp, “I want it.”

“Gods, you’re…” he’s muttering, “fuck, sweet girl, I can’t—”

“I want it.” You whine, squeezing his wrist insistently. “Hard. Please.”

“Fucking hells.” Composure entirely lost, he tightens his grip and presses his cock fully inside you all in the span of a single second.

There’s no pause. No chance to adjust to the stretch or the squeeze. He fucks you fast and fierce, setting a brutal pace that sparks your entire body alight. The slap, slap, slap of skin echoes off the walls, dulled by the blood pounding in your ears. Either he doesn’t know his own strength or he’s being rougher than he’s ever been. You don’t care. You cant your hips up to meet each thrust, mouth agape, gasping for air while he ruts into you.

“There… there you are, sweet thing, good girl,” he praises you, though there’s a sharp edge to his voice, one last vestige of restraint. Tension builds and builds low in your stomach. Your mind is screaming even if you can’t use your voice. I love you, you tell him with your body, with the drag of your tongue over his, with the scrape of your nails down his back, with each needy clench of your cunt.

You get ridiculously, indecently wet before you come. You can feel it staining his pelvis, ruining the sheets. The sound fills your foggy head: a sickening, gorgeous song. Oh my gods, you’re mouthing, jaw dropping open, all the tension coiling tighter and tighter. 

Baelor kisses the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your brow. “I—fuck, I feel it. There it is. Let it happen.”

And how can you deny him? How can you not fall to pieces as he keeps his persistent, ruthless rhythm, fucking you just the way you like, keeping you powerless and pinned beneath him? His cock and the way it fills and bruises your pussy is only half of what sets off your orgasm. It’s the look in his eyes. The possessiveness in his palms. You’re his, every particle of you.

Scream cut off by his pressure, you writhe and sob while you come, feeling the wave of it all the way down to your toes. His beard tickles your chin while he mutters filth and sweetness. He brings you through it, only increasing his pace when you’re soaked and slack beneath him.

With your head lulling back on the bed, you’re faintly aware of the light from the hall slipping through the gaps in the doorframe. The door itself is just barely ajar. You can’t tell if it’s just the blurriness of your vision, but you think there’s a shadow there. Tall, broad, faint. You blink. Tears invade your eyes. Maybe there ought to be panic rising inside you, but all you can process is how badly you need Baelor to come.

“Come inside me?” You whisper, raking your hands through his hair. It’s a cheap trick at this point, a surefire way to get him to finish. But you want it as much as you’re sure he does. Weeks apart mean you don’t want to waste his come on your belly or in your mouth. You want it deep. Careless. Spilling out of you like a secret.

“You shouldn’t—” he chokes out a strained laugh, “shouldn’t let me keep… doing that… gods…”

You just smile, all weak and watery. “I’d let you do anything to me.”

And then Baelor’s grip is going iron-strong as he comes, staining your vision with black spots. A ragged, animalistic sound bursts from his chest. Thick, hot warmth floods your core. Gods, it feels good to be claimed like this. To be so full of him.

the prof!baelor au ╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ summary: the baseline of the prof!baelorverse. the AU from which all the other AUs stem. you're a writer in graduate school at king's landing university. taking an elective outside of your department leads to a secret, tense, deeply emotional relationship with professor baelor targaryen, a widower and father of two. what starts as sex between two lonely academics turns into something more. browse the tag here

the limits of your longing

sanguine

some prof!baelor headcanons (+ more & more & more & more & more & more & more & more & more)

modern westeros worldbuilding (+ more) / fancasting the targs

maekar's POV

the maekarlings in the prof!baelor au (+ more & more)

prof!baelor as a father + my take on matarys / jena and dyanna

the sunspear villa / baelor's office

dunk & maekar's unrequited love for reader

why dunk calls reader "winger"

freaky fun facts

what if: maekar got his turn with reader (insp. by this ask)

what if: hammer/reader/anvil threesome

somno with pregnant reader

unholy triptych (feat. dunk)

tloyl memes / beautiful art of reader

freudian summerhall au ╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ summary: just like in the limits of your longing (the prof!baelor au), you meet baelor targaryen when you take his history seminar and develop a deep, hopeless crush on him. only in this universe, his wife jena is still very much alive. having suffered a series of tragedies—a plane crash that injured baelor and left his father and their two sons dead, as well as the deaths of their sister-in-law dyanna and their nephews daeron and aerion—baelor and jena latch onto you: a young, lonely writer desperate for affection. when they invite you to spend the summer with them at summerhall, the lines between parental and romantic affection begin to blur. tension simmers between you, the professor whose approval you crave, the wife who walks the boundary between mother and lover, and the gruff, solemn widower whose haunted gaze draws you closer. browse the tag here

freudian summerhall has EXTENSIVE lore and therefore has her own special masterlist here

dunk/widow!reader au ╰┈➤ˎˊ˗ summary: everything in tloyl happens: you meet baelor, fall in love, have a bit of angst and yearning about it, but eventually get married. and then, barely a year into your marriage, baelor dies (somewhat like in canon) in an accident. you're heartbroken, your newfound family is falling apart, and to make it all worse, you have your months-old baby to care for. this is the universe where your longtime best friend dunk (who's been silently in love with you for years) steps in and saves you from your grief. browse the tag here

general freaky dunk headcanons

dunk & reader's backstory & widow au headcanons

dunk & reader's first time

the father that stepped up

angsty freaky widow au musing

edit <3

more angst and anger (@ maekar)

babygirl targaryen's POV

baelor haunting the narrative