Less lonely when I didn't know you
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Pairing: Daeron Targaryen x Betrothed!Reader, technically Daeron Targaryen x Sex Worker!OC
Summary:
Before Daeron has ever met the Martell woman he is expected to marry, he tells Nera, a sex worker he has been seeing for some time, that he is going to have a wife. Somehow he already knows about the Water Gardens, your father, your seven sisters, and which scraps came from Daella or Egg, despite insisting that the marriage can only be a misfortune for you. As wine loosens his tongue, pity gives way to a much more shameful comfort: once the vows are said, someone will simply exist, you will stay. When wanting even that much becomes unbearable, Daeron turns to the older methods he knows for making himself quiet: wine, sex, and exhaustion.
Word Count: 15.7k (😐)
Warnings: 18+, Explicit sexual content/smut. Sex work/prostitution. Pre relationship. Heavy alcohol use and intoxication, sex while intoxicated. Dubious/compromised consent. Dissociation during sex, sex as a coping mechanism, alcohol as a coping mechanism. Self-destructive sexual behavior. Morally gray handling of consent, references to previous dubious sexual encounters.
A/N: Daeron is being very normal about a woman he has never met. I wanted to explore the ways in which he might engage in sex before the reader becomes his wife and some aspects about his relationship with his body and the use he makes of sexual pleasure, but somewhere along the way writing him fucking someone started needing his drunken rambles about how eight daughters is a lot of daughters. Hope you like this!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote "It’s strange, I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you."
The prince is already drinking when Nera comes back from washing her hands.
That is hardly worth noticing.
He has taken the chair beside the bed rather than the bed itself, one boot hooked through the lower rung, the other planted crookedly on the floor. His coat has made it as far as the mattress. She finds it folded badly across the foot, one sleeve hanging down to brush the boards. He must have tried to be neat with it. Daeron often leaves evidence of an intention a little short of its accomplishment.
He has poured for her too.
Not much. He knows she will take a cup if the wine is good and leave the rest to him. Tonight it is good enough that she drinks before she has finished drying her hands.
Daeron raises his own cup when she takes hers. The movement comes a fraction late, as if he had noticed her only after she was already drinking.
He is drunk. Visibly so.
Not badly, Nera has seen him worse often enough to have stopped measuring it by whether his speech slurs or his feet obey him. Tonight his eyes follow properly when she crosses the room, his fingers close cleanly around the stem. There is color sitting high across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and his mouth has gone soft at the corners. Every now and then something reaches his face a little after it ought to: amusement after the joke, irritation after the thing that caused it. His thoughts seem to travel an extra distance before arriving.
Nothing unusual.
She has known him long enough for there to be a great many things about Prince Daeron that no longer qualify as unusual.
There are worse men to find waiting in a room.
Though, there are easier ones too.
He pays without making her coax the money out of him and sometimes leaves enough behind that she wonders whether he has forgotten the value of it. He can be funny when he is not trying to be, and exhausting when he is. Some nights he talks until she begins to suspect that somewhere along the way he has confused the price of a woman with the fee owed a septon. Other nights he arrives with his face already turned inward and seems to resent every word that requires him to come back out.
She prefers him somewhere between the two.
He is strange. Generous. Usually clean. Rarely cruel to her, although there are nights when he is so intent upon being charming that she wants to put a pillow over his face until he stops. He is pleasanter when he forgets to be pleasant. She likes him better when he is tired enough to leave the prince outside.
She likes him, more or less. That is all.
Nera had been younger once, and young women could make stories out of almost anything if they were lonely enough. A man came twice and preference became affection. He came four times and affection acquired intentions. She had learned eventually that men returned for reasons so dull they barely deserved naming. They knew the stairs, they knew the room, they knew which women did not talk too much, which did, where the basin stood, what a particular body would permit without lengthy discussion. Familiarity saved effort. Habit was cheaper than feeling even when it cost more coin.
A prince did not cease being a man because somebody put a dragon on his clothes.
Daeron comes back because Daeron comes back. She no longer needs it to mean more.
His cup is empty when she glances at him again.
Nera reaches for the decanter while passing, pours without asking, and puts the wine back into his hand. He does not thank her. Not from discourtesy, his fingers simply close around the cup as though it had always been there and the interruption between one mouthful and the next had required no human agency at all.
She notices because she notices bodies for a living. She does not attach anything to it.
There have been other nights when she has put wine into that hand.
Sometimes while his other hand was on her waist. Sometimes when neither hand seemed interested in doing much of anything.
Once, a long while ago now, she had stopped.
She has tried since to remember what precisely made her do it and never managed to settle on one thing.
He had been drunk enough that she had taken his boots off for him because he had sat looking at the first buckle as if it had personally betrayed him. That had not frightened her. She had had men in worse condition insist upon much more complicated things.
For a while he had been responsive. Quieter than usual, but there were nights when quiet suited him. His eyes had closed, his head had turned into the pillow. She had spoken to him once and received an answer; later she said something else and got a noise that might have been agreement.
Then, somewhere in between one movement and the next, his body had changed under her.
Not gone limp. That would have been easy.
But…still. Too still.
There had been misery in his face, she thought afterward. Or perhaps only exhaustion. He had looked half asleep and unpleasantly awake at once. His mouth had tightened around something he was not saying. Whatever it was, she found herself stopping before she had decided to.
For several breaths Daeron had not noticed.
Then his eyes opened.
“Why did you stop?”
There had been irritation in it, dulled by wine but unmistakable. Not anger exactly. More the annoyance of a man whose sleep has been interrupted.
Nera had looked down at him. “You looked-…”
Nothing came after it.
Unwell did not cover it. Nor tired. Miserable came closer, but miserable men bought sex every night and no one closed the whore houses for it. Gone would have been the word if gone were something a person could look while still watching her.
Daeron's face had changed while she searched. His eyes sharpened first.
“I didn't ask you to stop.”
She had not moved.
His jaw worked once. A flush had risen beneath the drunken color already there, sudden and ugly. Embarrassment, she had thought then. Perhaps it was. He reached toward the table without looking at it.
“Wine.”
Nera had put the cup into his hand.
He drank lying down, swallowed too quickly, coughed once and waved away the hand she offered before she could touch his shoulder. Then he drank again and held the cup out for her to take.
She had waited.
Daeron closed his eyes.
“I said I didn't ask you to stop.”
So she had continued.
The next time he became quiet beneath her hands, she remembered.
There had been no reason not to. Or none that seemed better than the reason he had already given her.
Men wanted strange things. More often, they wanted ordinary things for strange reasons, and Nera had never required anybody to explain those either. A man could look unhappy and still want to be touched, he could be frightened and want it, angry and want it. He could turn his face into the pillow because he liked the feeling better that way. He could give her every choice because choosing bored him. None of that was remarkable by itself.
Daeron enjoyed sex often enough that she knew perfectly well what that looked like too.
There were nights when he arrived hungry for it, when he kissed before she had finished shutting the door. Nights when his hands were impatient and his laughter came without having to be dragged through three layers of cleverness first. He could be greedy for attention. Greedy for pleasure. Sometimes almost boyishly delighted when his own body surprised him by being a pleasant place to inhabit.
There were other nights when the pleasure appeared incidental.
On those nights he came restless and left exhausted. He drank more. He wanted fewer questions. Sometimes he gave up decisions one after another until the only thing required of him was to remain where she put him. Nera had understood, without needing a name for it, that whatever he bought on those nights included tiredness.
That hardly made him unique.
People paid for what worked.
And Daeron had made one thing clear enough: looking distressed was not the same as asking her to stop.
She had learned him accordingly.
Tonight he is nowhere near that drunk. Tonight he sits in her chair, warmer and looser than when he arrived, and watches her pull the first pin from her hair.
She sets it in the little dish beside the mirror.
“Did you know I'm going to be married?”
Nera's hand stops with the second pin halfway out.
She meets his eyes in the glass. “No.”
Daeron takes a drink.
For a moment he looks faintly pleased with himself for having produced information she did not possess. Or perhaps only pleased that he has managed to say it aloud somewhere no one is likely to ask him to behave properly about it. The expression slips away before she can decide.
She pulls the pin free and sets it beside the first.
When several seconds pass and he offers nothing more, she asks, “When?”
Daeron looks into his cup as though the date might be floating there.
“Soon,” He thinks about that, his thumb rubbing once over the stem. “Soon enough.”
It sounds less like an answer than something he has been told repeatedly until he learned to repeat it himself.
“Congratulations.”
His eyes come up at once.
That, apparently, is wrong.
Not offensively wrong. He does not bristle. For half a second he simply looks at her with such open uncertainty that Nera nearly feels foolish for having said it. Then his face rearranges itself.
“Yes,” He murmurs. He turns the cup between his fingers, considers the word he has been given and adds, “Yes. Quite.”
The second agreement sounds less convincing than the first.
He drinks before she can decide whether he is mocking himself, her, or the custom of congratulating men for marriages they did not arrange.
Nera removes another pin.
“A Martell,” He says. She waits. Daeron wets his lips. “A Martell woman.”
Nera glances over her shoulder.
He frowns faintly into the wine, apparently aware that Martell had already supplied the relevant information.
“The eldest daughter of Prince Mors.”
There is more certainty there. Something properly learned and stored.
“Mors Martell?”
“Yes. That Mors Martell.”
The mild impatience is ridiculous when she has no idea how many Mors Martells there are supposed to be, but she lets him have it.
Daeron takes another swallow.
“She was raised at the Water Gardens.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” His answer comes quickly, and then again, as though confirming it to himself. “The Water Gardens.”
He shifts in the chair, fingers tugging once at the collar already loose at his throat.
“They were built for a Targaryen woman. Did you know that?”
Nera did not, and shakes her head.
“King Daeron's sister. Daenerys.” He says the name with slightly too much care, each syllable placed down individually. “She married a Martell, the Prince of Dorne. He built them for her.”
Daeron hears himself over-enunciating. His mouth twists, irritated by the betrayal.
Nera turns from the mirror, one side of her hair loose over her shoulder. There is something faintly absurd in hearing him lecture on old royal marriages while sitting in his shirtsleeves in a room he has paid to occupy for the night.
“And now you're marrying a woman raised there.”
His thumb stops against the cup.
“Yes.”
No joke follows.
That interests her.
The Water Gardens mean very little to Nera beyond the sort of images everybody north of Dorne gathers from songs and travelers: pools, heat, children under orange trees. To Daeron, apparently, they have acquired ancestry. One Targaryen bride sent south into a Martell marriage, then you, a Martell bride sent north into a Targaryen one a couple of generations later.
She cannot tell whether the connection comforts him or troubles Daeron.
Perhaps neither. His mood has been shifting too quickly to hold its shape. One moment he speaks of the marriage as though it were a mildly interesting accident that has happened to him, the next there is something careful in his voice. Something almost expectant, though he drinks before Nera has time to decide whether she imagined it.
“You've met her, then.”
“No.”
The answer comes immediately.
Daeron drinks.
Nera waits for the obvious rest of it, but nothing.
“You haven't?”
He looks up, mildly affronted. “No.”
She raises her brows. His eyes drop again.
There is hardly any wine left in the cup. He tips it, watches what remains slide along the bottom, then reaches for the decanter himself.
“Daella told me about the Water Gardens.” He says.
Nera has not asked.
He pours carefully. Too carefully. The wine touches the lip of the cup and wavers there before settling back.
“And Egg heard-…”
Daeron stops.
His forehead creases with the effort of catching a thought already moving away from him.
“Something.”
Nera waits.
“From someone.” He finishes, less confidently.
He drinks, and the silence stretches.
There it is.
He has heard himself.
Not quite embarrassment. He is too drunk to manage embarrassment with much elegance. But the knowledge has reached him that he knew where you grew up, knew the history of the place, could name the source of one scrap and had nearly begun explaining the provenance of another before remembering that no one had asked him to account for any of it.
He has been collecting things.
No, Nera corrects herself. Collecting is too tidy for Daeron. It suggests intention, a man holding out his hand and deciding what he means to keep.
Hoarding is nearer.
Something heard from Princess Daella. Something Prince Aegon repeated. A name dropped at supper. An old marriage remembered only because another one has suddenly made it relevant. Little scraps taken in without acknowledgment and kept somewhere in that wine-soaked head until he could produce them all in a room where he had supposedly come for something else.
About you, though he has never met you.
Nera realizes she has been looking at him too long.
Daeron catches her.
“What?”
She only shakes her head and turns back toward the mirror.
The answer clearly dissatisfies him. His eyes stay on her reflection for another moment, narrowed slightly, but whatever question he might have asked loses its way before reaching his mouth. He drinks instead.
Nera removes the last pin.
Her hair falls fully around her shoulders, and she combs her fingers through the places where the metal has caught it. Behind her, Daeron says nothing.
For perhaps a minute she expects him to begin again.
He does not.
Good. Nera has no particular interest in his betrothed.
You are far away, unknown, and almost certainly unaware that your future husband is sitting half-undressed in a paid room discussing the architecture of your childhood home. If the match is like most marriages made between people with titles, it will happen regardless of whether either of you has found the proper feeling for it.
She wonders, briefly, what you have been told about him.
Not about Nera, not about tonight.
About Daeron.
The wine, the whore houses, the stories that follow princes when they make themselves interesting often enough. Perhaps they have softened it for you. Perhaps they have not. A woman sent north to marry a man generally had somebody willing to tell her what sort of man waited there.
Nera hopes so, though she cannot have said exactly why.
Daeron finishes his cup while she lifts her own again.
Marriage, in her experience, does very little to a man's nature.
She has watched husbands climb these stairs for years. Some arrived with wedding rings still new enough to shine. Some took them off before entering and tucked them carefully into purses or boots, as though the wife ceased to exist once the metal disappeared. Others never bothered. A wedding could change the hour a man left, how much discretion he expected, whether he complained about the expense.
It did not make him someone else.
She does wonder whether Daeron will continue coming after he marries you.
The thought carries no particular sting.
If he comes, he comes. If he does not, somebody else will want the room.
Perhaps marriage will make him cautious. Perhaps it will make no difference at all. Perhaps you will object and he will discover, to his surprise, that objections can matter.
Nera does not know enough about you to guess.
Nor, apparently, does Daeron.
That thought almost makes her look at him again.
She doesn't. Instead she drains the last of her wine and crosses to the bed.
His coat is still lying across the coverlet. She picks it up, folds the dangling sleeve back into place, and carries it to the chair near the wall where it will not end up crushed beneath somebody's knee.
One of his boots is directly in her way.
Nera nudges it aside with her foot.
“Sorry.” Daeron says from behind her.
He makes no attempt to retrieve it.
She looks over her shoulder.
His mouth twitches. There he is.
She leaves the boot where it lands.
The room has begun to settle into something she knows better.
Nera takes off her earrings, setting them one at a time beside the pins. One catches at the lobe and she has to worry it loose with a fingernail. When she glances toward Daeron, he is watching, but there is no particular urgency in it.
They have done this too often for every fastening to become an invitation.
She turns her back and reaches for the hooks of her dress.
Usually, by now, he would do one of several things. Come over and offer to help, then make a worse job of it than she could have managed alone. Stay where he is and watch. Make some unnecessary observation about the dress that somehow becomes a complaint about his father, the weather, or the state of the realm. On very drunk nights, simply wait for Nera to solve the problem herself.
Tonight he stays in the chair.
The first hook comes free.
Then another.
Daeron pours more wine.
She hears the small liquid sound behind her, then the muted knock of glass against the table.
The third hook sticks. Nera works a fingernail beneath it.
No Martells. No Water Gardens. No marriage.
Whatever urge had taken him appears finally to have spent itself.
Good.
She has heard stranger things in this room. Men speak before sex because silence makes them nervous. They speak afterward because leaving requires getting dressed and words fill the delay. They confess things to women they pay because payment has a beginning and an end, and there is comfort in knowing exactly when a confidence will cease to matter.
Perhaps that is all Daeron has been doing.
He had news, and he told someone.
Nera frees the stubborn hook.
The dress loosens incrementally across her back.
Behind her, Daeron shifts in his chair. Leather creaks. He says nothing.
This is the part she prefers with him: the moment when whatever he has brought through the door begins to lose its claim on the room. His jokes usually stop. The prince does too, if she is lucky. There is only clothing and lamplight, the bed, the basin, the familiar sequence of movements neither of them needs explained.
Conversation sheds itself with the clothes.
Soon he will either come to her or wait until she crosses the room.
Nera rolls one shoulder, easing the loosened fabric away from her skin.
Daeron takes another drink.
The silence has lasted long enough that she is thinking about whether she ought to trim the wick in the lamp before they begin.
“She has sisters.”
Nera's fingers stop.
For a moment she genuinely has no idea who he means.
“Who?”
The silence behind her is so pronounced that she turns.
Daeron is staring at her.
He looks almost offended, but there is no performance in it. For one drunken second he simply cannot understand how she has lost the thread of a conversation that, from his side of the room, has apparently never ended.
“My wife.”
The words come easily.
Too easily, perhaps.
Nera watches them reach him only after he has said them.
His gaze drops toward the cup.
“Betrothed.” He corrects. The correction is quieter and arrives late enough that the first word has already had its time in the room.
He takes another drink.
Then, as if correcting the title has corrected nothing else, he adds, “Seven of them.”
“Seven sisters?”
“Yes. Seven,” He nods once, solemn with wine. “Eight daughters altogether.”
He considers that for a moment, his eyes dropping somewhere past the floor.
“There are six of us,” He says eventually. “Six is already…” His hand makes a small, useless turn around the cup while he searches for the end of the thought. “A lot.”
Nera cannot help it. A smile pulls at one corner of her mouth.
Daeron sees.
“What?”
The question is suspicious rather than sharp.
“Nothing,” She turns back toward the hooks, but the smile remains. Behind her, there is a small disgruntled sound. Nera laughs under her breath. “I only wondered when eight daughters became your particular concern.”
That silences him.
For a beat she thinks she has pushed too far.
Then Daeron mutters, “Seven sisters is a great many sisters.”
There is enough wounded dignity in the pronouncement that she laughs properly this time.
He leans farther back into the chair, watching her with the resigned irritation of a man enduring an injustice he cannot quite articulate.
“I am glad this interests you.”
“It does now.”
“You're very welcome.”
The answer comes dryly, but a little too slowly to be polished. Wine has softened the edges off the delivery.
Nera frees another hook.
After a few breaths Daeron says, quieter, “She's the eldest.”
The humor passes without either of them dismissing it.
“I gathered.”
“Of eight.”
“Yes.”
He rubs his thumb back and forth over the stem of the cup. His brow has creased again.
“That must be different.”
Nera glances back. “From what?”
Daeron gives a vague little movement of his shoulder.
“This.”
The room, perhaps. Summerhall. Himself. His family. He does not seem entirely sure which.
“There are six of us,” He repeats. “And that's already…” He exhales through his nose and abandons the sentence. Perhaps he has become aware he has already said his thoughts on the matter. “There are always people everywhere.”
It is the closest he comes to explaining.
Then he starts talking again before Nera can answer.
One of your sisters may be coming north with you. He thinks it is one of the younger girls. Not the youngest. Or perhaps that part is wrong. Daella had said something about two sisters; Daella says things as though everybody had been standing beside her when she learned them. Egg heard that Prince Mors meant to bring several of his daughters. Or perhaps Egg heard that from Aemon.
Daeron stops halfway through trying to remember who told whom what.
He drinks.
The information has begun to loosen with him. Names become uncertain. Sources overlap. He repeats one thing before realizing he has already said it.
But the facts themselves have remained.
“She must be used to noise.” He says after a while.
Nera has returned to her dress. “Who?”
This time Daeron makes an exasperated sound.
She looks back and finds him glaring without much force.
“Yes, yes,” She says, relenting. “Your betrothed.”
That mollifies him, though he tries not to show it.
“She grew up with seven sisters.”
“So you've mentioned.”
“I know.”
He sounds aggrieved that she keeps treating this as repetition when, in his mind, he is apparently advancing an argument.
“Seven,” He says once more, softer. “It must be noisy.”
“Probably.”
“Summerhall isn't,” His thumb circles the cup again. “Not like that.”
Something about his voice has changed.
The amusement goes out of Nera before she means it to, and she looks at him more carefully.
Daeron is staring somewhere toward the curtained window, his face gone vague around whatever he is seeing there.
Nera says, “Perhaps she'll like the quiet.”
He looks at her.
For an instant there is something terribly young in the expression. Not happiness. Nothing so simple. Only the startled attention of someone who had not considered that the answer might be kind.
“Perhaps,” He says. Too quickly. He lowers his eyes almost at once. “Or hate it.”
There.
Nera understands a little more of the sisters now. Not enough to make a story of it, but enough.
He has not only learned that there are seven of them, he has tried to hear them.
A crowded house. You accustomed to sisters moving in and out of rooms, to voices over meals, to the kind of noise that means people belong there. He has wondered what Summerhall will sound like to you after that. Whether it will feel peaceful or merely empty. Who you might bring north. What you will miss once you arrive.
More imagining than Nera would have expected from a man who announced his marriage like a peculiar fact somebody had only just informed him of.
She does not point this out.
Daeron is tolerable partly because she has learned which observations would make him intolerable.
Nera frees the last hook.
Her dress loosens against her arms.
“What is she like?”
The question comes without much thought.
It is the natural thing to ask after listening to him talk about you for this long.
Daeron stops.
Not dramatically, the cup simply ceases moving in his hand.
His lips part, then close again.
Nera waits.
For all the things he has hoarded -the father, the sisters, the Water Gardens, the old marriage, the journey north, the sister who may or may not accompany you- there is suddenly nowhere left for him to go.
Nothing among the scraps has become an answer.
His eyes lift to Nera's face.
For a moment they look clearer than the rest of him.
“I haven't met her.”
“I know.”
Nera means only that he already told her.
The words come softer anyway. Daeron hears that too.
His gaze falls.
He does not reach for another fact this time. Does not tell her something Princess Daella said or something Prince Aegon overheard. He sits with the empty place where you ought to be.
Then his hand rises.
The cup is already in it.
He drinks as though only just remembering what the cup is for, and Nera turns back to the dress hanging loose around her shoulders.
For a while neither of them speaks.
The question had not seemed cruel when she asked it. What is she like? It was the sort of ordinary thing one asked after listening to a man talk for half an hour about where his future wife had grown up, how many sisters she had, who might accompany her north, and what some prince had built for a Targaryen bride generations ago. Nera had expected another answer dragged out of whatever little store of facts Daeron had assembled. Instead she had found the one empty place in it.
He sits with the cup held too close to his mouth and watches the wine rather than her. The flush across his cheeks has deepened. Nera cannot tell whether that is the drink or embarrassment; with Daeron, one often becomes the other before there is time to separate them. He rubs his thumb slowly along the stem, stops, takes another mouthful, then seems to forget what he meant to do with the hand afterward.
Nera eases one shoulder free of her dress and leaves him alone with the silence.
“Mother hated pity.” He says eventually.
She looks back.
Daeron does not lift his head. The words appear to have been addressed as much to the wine as to her.
“The word?” Nera asks.
“The word,” He considers it, forehead drawing faintly together. “The thing too, I think.”
He pauses again. The memory is clearly there, but not the exact language, and Nera watches him worry at it with the stubborn seriousness drink sometimes gives him.
“She said it made people ugly.”
His mouth twists almost immediately.
“No. That's not-…” He waves one hand, irritated with himself. “That pity was an ugly way to look at someone. Something like that.”
There is no joke attached to the admission, nothing to make the dead princess smaller or Daeron less earnest for remembering her. Nera has heard men speak of their mothers after enough wine; most of them become either saints or monsters by the third cup. Daeron rarely speaks of his at all. When he does, the usual tricks seem to desert him. He cannot quite make Princess Dyanna Dayne ridiculous, even for his own protection.
He drinks again, and the cup is halfway down when he says,
“I pity her. My…betrothed,” Nera's hands stop at the loosened fabric. Daeron sees her look and shuts his eyes for an instant. “I know.”
The answer is almost impatient, but the impatience is with himself rather than her. He has heard the contradiction. Apparently he does not intend to solve it.
Nera sits on the edge of the bed and begins working one stocking down her calf. “Why?”
For several seconds Daeron simply stares at her, as though she has asked why fire burns.
Then his attention slips away.
“She has to come here,” The first answer is so ordinary that Nera almost shrugs. Daeron makes a vague motion with the cup, wine shivering against the rim before he steadies his hand. “Leave all that.”
The gesture encompasses nothing visible. Dorne is hundreds of leagues away; the Water Gardens exist in this room only because he has spent the evening putting them there. Seven sisters, eight daughters, voices he has never heard. He has filled the space with them so thoroughly that Nera almost understands the direction of his hand.
“For Summerhall.” She says. If it is an attempt at reassurance, even she isn’t sure.
“Yes.”
The word does not satisfy him.
He scratches at the side of his thumb with one fingernail, drinks, then tries again. “Her sisters. Her father. Whatever she does there. Whoever she knows. All of it.”
Another swallow. He is drinking more quickly now, not yet enough to make his speech truly slur but enough that certain words begin arriving twice, or after the thought that should have contained them.
“She has to leave it and come north. Come here. For-…” His hand moves again. “This.”
This time Nera looks at him long enough that he notices.
He does not clarify.
Perhaps he means Summerhall. Perhaps marriage. Perhaps the particular chair he is sitting in, the wine in his hand, himself at the center of whatever future has been arranged for a woman who does not yet know his face.
Nera pulls the stocking over her heel. “Women marry away from home all the time.”
Daeron's head comes up more sharply than the amount of wine in him should permit.
“Yes, Nera. I am aware,” The irritation is immediate and real, but it spends itself almost as quickly. He looks away first, dragging one hand across his mouth. “I know.”
Nera leaves it there.
There is something in him that cannot bear having what he has made singular returned to the ordinary. Women leave their families to marry every day, noble daughters are sent across kingdoms because fathers have agreed to it. None of that explains the sour little crease between Daeron's brows.
He rubs his palm against his knee, catches sight of the wet shine the wine has left across his knuckles, and stares at it as if somebody else put it there.
“She has to marry me.”
The sentence is quieter than everything before it.
No gesture now. No broad this into which he can pour castle, duty, distance and himself all at once.
“She has to marry me.” He says again, and the second me comes out almost sober.
Nera has seen that happen before. Drink loosens most things in him, but occasionally a thought cuts through it so cleanly that he seems less drunk for one sentence than he did before the first cup. It never lasts. Usually he pours wine over the opening as soon as he realizes it exists.
He does so now.
Nera rolls the stocking between her hands before setting it aside and watches him only from the corner of her eye. He has reached a conclusion. She can see that much. Whether it is true appears to matter less than the fact that it is firm enough to stand on.
A woman he has never met must be miserable to marry him. That he can understand.
He cannot tell Nera what you are like. He cannot know whether Summerhall will feel quiet or empty to you, whether you will miss your sisters every morning or be relieved to escape seven other women under the same roof, whether you will think him amusing, tiresome, disgusting, pitiable, or merely strange. He does not know whether the stories sent south have frightened you or whether anyone has bothered to tell you much at all.
But he can decide that this is a misfortune.
There is relief of a sort in certainty, even an ugly one.
Daeron turns the cup slowly between both hands, looking at the wine as though the answer has sunk there with the dregs.
“Mother would have told me not to say that.”
Nera lifts her head. “Your mother?”
He nods.
Something almost like a smile moves at one corner of his mouth and fails before it can become anything.
“She would have corrected me.”
“For pitying her?”
Daeron looks at Nera as if the question has complicated something he had thought simple. He considers, then gives a small, helpless shrug.
“For being cruel, probably.”
“To her?”
His brow furrows.
“To someone.”
The answer seems to amuse him faintly only because he knows it is inadequate. He drinks rather than repair it.
Nera does not know what Princess Dyanna used to correct in her eldest son. She can imagine plenty. Daeron has always had a particular talent for turning knives inward and then looking surprised when somebody else bleeds from standing too close. Perhaps his mother had known that before the rest of them did.
Whatever memory has come to him, he does not offer it. His gaze goes distant for a while, not the heavy vacancy Nera has seen in bed with him, only the ordinary absence of a man remembering someone who cannot answer back.
She pulls off her other stocking and sets it beside the first.
The silence lengthens enough that she thinks his mother has gone wherever dead mothers go when their sons stop speaking of them.
Then Daeron asks, “Would my mother have liked her?”
Nera stills.
The question is so far removed from the room that for a moment she wonders whether she heard him properly.
Daeron is looking into his cup.
“My wife,” He adds, after the silence makes him think she needs clarification. His mouth tightens almost at once. “Betrothed.”
The correction has grown wearier each time he makes it tonight, as though the true word keeps arriving first and he is becoming tired of chasing after it.
He finally looks at Nera. “Would my mother have liked her?”
There is no cleverness in the question. No drunken grin acknowledging its absurdity. He seems, for one strange second, to expect that she might possess an answer.
“I never knew your mother.”
Daeron blinks.
The obviousness of this works its way slowly across his face.
“No,” His gaze drops. “No, you didn't.”
A breath leaves him that almost becomes a laugh, though nothing in his expression is amused.
Nera does not know what else to give him. She knows the name Dyanna Dayne because everyone knows the names of dead princesses. She knows that Maekar had loved his wife because even people who never come close to courts hear stories about royal grief. She does not know whether Princess Dyanna laughed loudly, held grudges, liked clever girls, disliked Martells, tolerated fools, or would have taken one look at the woman chosen for Daeron and approved.
The person who knew her is sitting three paces away.
“You did.” Nera says.
Daeron's fingers stop moving against the cup.
He does not seem offended this time by being given his own question back.
For a while he genuinely thinks.
The wine has made thought slow but not impossible; she can almost see him feeling his way through memory, discarding whatever answers are too convenient.
“She would,” He says eventually. Nera waits. Daeron glances up, seemingly dissatisfied by the certainty he has just produced, and weakens it. “I think.”
Something gentler passes over his face before he can hide it.
“She liked people.”
He frowns at once.
“That sounds stupid.”
Nera does not rescue him from it.
“She did,” Daeron insists, quieter. “She would have tried.”
The last word seems to matter more than the rest.
Nera shifts the dress higher against her chest where it has begun to slip. “Then perhaps she would have liked her.”
Daeron looks at her.
For an instant nothing happens.
Then she sees the next thought arrive.
It changes him before he speaks. His mouth closes. His eyes fall back to the cup. Whatever softness had survived the memory of his mother tightens into something less forgiving.
“Perhaps she'd have pitied her too.”
The words are barely louder than the room.
He hears them.
Nera knows because his fingers close suddenly around the stem.
“No,” Daeron shakes his head once. “No. She wouldn't.”
The denial comes faster the second time, almost offended on his mother's behalf.
“She didn't.”
Nothing after it.
Not she didn't believe in pity. Not she never pitied anyone. Only the blunt little defense of a dead woman who has been made to do something in his imagination she would not have done in life.
Nera watches his thumb whiten against the cup.
He should leave the thought alone.
Daeron rarely leaves anything alone once it has found the soft part.
“Maybe she'd have made an exception.”
There is no humor in it.
Nera looks at him and, for the first time tonight, genuinely has nothing to say.
She could tell him he is being ridiculous. Perhaps he is. She could tell him his mother would never have looked at her own son and decided marriage to him was a special category of suffering. But Nera did not know Dyanna, and Daeron has always been too quick to hear when comfort is counterfeit. Anything she offered would be a story made from a dead woman she never met.
So she lets the silence stay.
Daeron appears to be waiting inside it.
Nera cannot tell whether he wants disagreement, absolution, or merely some noise that will prevent him from hearing himself.
None comes.
He drinks.
She returns to the hooks of her dress.
For a while the room settles again into small sounds: fabric giving under her fingers, glass touching Daeron's mouth, the crackle from the lamp near the bed. The conversation might reasonably die there. Nera would prefer it to. Dead mothers are beyond what she was paid for, and Daeron seems to know it too; he watches her hands instead of speaking, face gone tired beneath the color of the wine.
Then he says, “She'll have her own rooms.”
Nera pauses with one hook caught under her nail.
The sentence is so practical that she wonders whether she has missed several thoughts between one mouthful and the next.
“Your betrothed?”
“Yes.”
Daeron nods, almost relieved that she has followed him.
“Her own rooms. Whatever rooms she wants, I suppose. Summerhall has enough of them.”
He glances vaguely toward the wall as if he can see the castle through plaster and distance.
“She can have her women there. Her things. Sisters, if they stay. One of them is meant to come north, I think. Perhaps two. Daella said-…”
He stops himself with a grimace.
Nera's mouth moves before she can prevent it.
Daeron sees.
“Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was not.”
He gives her a tired look that says he does not believe her, but the little exchange does not quite become banter. His attention has already slipped back to the rooms he has apparently furnished in his head.
“She can do as she likes,” He says, more slowly. “With them, I mean.”
Nera gives a small nod.
Daeron looks down at his hands.
“I needn't be there.”
A beat passes.
“Much.”
There it is.
Nera rests one hand against the mattress and studies him.
Daeron either does not notice the qualification or is pretending very hard not to.
“You mean to avoid her?”
His head comes up at once.
“No,” The answer is much too quick. He hears that as clearly as Nera does. “I didn't say that.”
“No.”
“It would be absurd.”
Daeron shifts in the chair and nearly knocks his knee against the small table beside him. He catches himself, frowns at the furniture as though it has moved maliciously, then straightens.
“We'll live in the same castle. There are meals. People will expect-…”
He stops, mouth tightening.
The excuses have begun assembling themselves faster than he can make them convincing.
“People expect husbands to appear occasionally.”
Nera says nothing.
Daeron knows exactly how that sounded.
“And she is my-…” He closes his eyes. “Betrothed.”
The correction comes with a tired little exhale.
Nera has begun to suspect the word wife has settled somewhere in him already and that betrothed is merely the thing he remembers to call you afterward.
“I needn't bother her often.” He says.
Often.
Nera lets the word sit untouched.
Daeron stares at his wine.
After a little while, he adds, “It would be strange never to speak to one's wife.”
There it is again.
This time he either does not notice or does not have the energy to repair it.
Nera does not point it out.
“Perhaps she reads,” Daeron continues after another drink. “Or writes letters. Seven sisters, she must write constantly unless they all despise one another, which seems possible.”
The corner of Nera's mouth twitches.
Daeron catches it.
“I wasn't joking.”
“That is why it was funny.”
He looks briefly wounded by this and then too tired to defend himself.
The wine has begun showing more plainly now. Not in the shape of his words so much as their order. He starts somewhere, doubles back, repeats a fact he has already established, forgets whether Nera knows something and explains it again. The careful little structure he maintains when sober -or less drunk- is loosening at the seams.
“I could sit somewhere,” He says, almost a mumble, almost a request for permission. Nera's amusement fades. Daeron has not looked up. “Not in the way.”
He wipes a bead of wine from his lower lip with the side of his thumb.
“If she were doing something. I wouldn't-…” He trails off, frowning at the space between his boots. “I wouldn't have to say much.”
The picture arrives all at once for Nera, though Daeron seems not to realize he has shown it to her.
No marriage bed, no children, no wife waiting on him at supper with a smile. No fantasies of obedience or possession like the ones men usually reveal when they speak too long about women who cannot hear them.
A room that belongs to you.
Letters open somewhere on a table. Perhaps one of the seven sisters occupying a chair. Whatever pieces of Dorne you manage to carry north arranged around you until Summerhall becomes livable.
And Daeron somewhere at the edge of it, apparently satisfied if he can take up a little space without being sent away.
He looks embarrassed enough by the image that Nera does not tell him she has seen it.
“I wouldn't stay long,” He says. The word lands differently from the others. Daeron notices too. His mouth tightens slightly, but he continues. “Only enough to be a nuisance.”
Nera watches him over the rim of her cup.
“Perhaps she won't mind.” She attempts.
She means the nuisance, perhaps the visits, perhaps nothing in particular. It is an ordinary kindness, no larger than the earlier suggestion that you might like the quiet.
Daeron receives it as though she has placed something fragile in his hands.
His eyes lift.
For a moment Nera sees precisely how drunk he is because his face does not protect him quickly enough. There is something there that looks almost like wanting and something immediately behind it trying to stamp the wanting out.
He looks away.
“At first.” He says.
Barely audible.
The words seem to surprise him once spoken.
His shoulders draw in by a fraction. His thumb begins moving again along the cup.
Nera understands enough not to mistake them.
He is not imagining that you will come to like him. Nothing in his posture contains that kind of confidence. Daeron does not look like a man imagining affection growing with familiarity.
Quite the reverse.
He looks like a man who has granted himself one brief interval before familiarity does its work.
At first.
Before you know which nights he drinks until he can barely stand. Before you learn how much easier he is when he has decided to make himself entertaining. Before whatever stories came south become ordinary household knowledge. Before he becomes exhausting rather than merely peculiar.
Perhaps, for a little while, you will not mind when he appears. Perhaps ignorance will purchase him a chair in the room.
It is not much of a future.
Nera has heard men ask the Gods for kingdoms with less hunger than Daeron seems to have invested in that small and fleeting future.
He drains the cup.
“She'll know soon enough.” There is no theatrical misery in the sentence. He says it as though explaining weather.
Nera reaches for the decanter before he does. She pours into her own cup first this time, then fills his.
Daeron watches the wine rise.
“You'll have time,” She says. It is so ordinary that Nera nearly forgets it the moment she has spoken.
Daeron does not.
“Time.”
He takes the cup but does not drink.
For several seconds his fingers simply rest around the stem.
Nera can almost see the word changing shape for him.
She had meant time to become accustomed. Time to learn one another's habits. The ordinary stretch of days that follows a wedding when two strangers stop being entirely strange.
Daeron seems to hear something else.
His eyes move toward nowhere in particular. Summerhall again, perhaps. Rooms. Meals. A door he will know is yours. Things carried north and left on tables because they belong there. Not one evening, not a paid room whose purpose ends when the candles burn down, not a woman who may decide there will be no next time.
Marriage.
The word has permanence built into it before affection ever enters.
“She has to stay.” Daeron says it almost absently.
Then something in him eases.
Not enough that another person might necessarily notice. Nera does because she has watched his body for years now in all the small ways that matter to her work. His shoulders drop a fraction. The restless movement of his thumb stops. His grip on the cup becomes suddenly still.
His eyes lose something too.
The anxious attention that has been jumping from her face to his wine to the room beyond them seems to fall away for one strange breath. He looks younger for it. More tired.
Relieved. Only a little. Enough.
Nera sees it. Daeron looks at her and he knows she has.
The relief disappears so quickly that it leaves the shame naked behind it.
“She has to stay.” He repeats.
The sentence has changed in his mouth.
The first time it had been almost soothing. The second carries all the pity he had been insisting upon earlier.
Poor woman.
She has to stay.
Nera hears both versions now, and from the look on Daeron's face, so does he.
For a moment neither of them moves.
A man taking comfort in the fact that his wife cannot easily leave him is not remarkable to Nera. She has heard worse from men with half his titles and twice his certainty. Men who speak of wives as acquisitions before the wedding feast is cold, who count obedience among a woman's virtues because obedience saves them the indignity of being refused. Husbands have sat on this same bed and laughed about the things marriage permits them to demand.
There is nothing novel in power making a man feel safe.
What is strange is Daeron's horror at finding himself comforted by a piece of power most husbands would never think to question.
He looks at Nera as if waiting.
She cannot tell for what.
Perhaps disgust. Perhaps contradiction. Perhaps for her to laugh and make the confession smaller than it has become. Perhaps some part of him wants her to tell him that he is wrong, that there is no permanence here, that the thought he has just spoken is too ugly to survive being said aloud.
Nera does none of those things.
What would she challenge? Marriage is marriage. Once the vows are said, you will be his wife. Barring death or some intervention of Gods or Kings, you will live where the marriage places you. That is the world as both of them know it. Daeron has not invented the structure simply because he is ashamed of benefiting from it.
So Nera shifts the loosened fabric higher on her chest and leaves the sentence where he put it.
Something in Daeron sinks.
Not exactly disappointment, more the look of a man who threw something ugly onto the floor expecting somebody else to kick it back at him and has instead been forced to look at it where it lies.
He takes a long drink.
“She'll hate it here.”
The retreat is almost clumsy, but Nera recognizes it anyway.
Back to Summerhall. Back to Dorne. Back to a future in which everything has already been decided against him and therefore nothing can surprise him.
“You don't know that.”
Daeron lets out a short breath.
“No,” His mouth twists around the admission. “No, apparently I know very little.”
He looks toward the cup again.
For a second she expects him to produce another fact about the Water Gardens merely to prove otherwise.
He doesn't.
“Perhaps she'll hate me first.”
There is the ghost of a joke in it, but no real expectation that Nera will laugh.
She doesn't.
Daeron drinks.
The wine has been moving through him steadily since Nera returned from the basin, and now it is beginning to show in ways he cannot entirely disguise. His movements remain deliberate, but deliberation itself has become visible. He places the cup rather than setting it down. When he reaches for the decanter, his hand corrects its path halfway there. The next swallow is larger than the last.
Nera watches his throat move.
He has spoken aloud a want tonight. She is not sure Daeron knows that is what happened.
He has called it pity, then rooms, then being a nuisance, then time.
Now stay.
The word appears to have frightened him more than any of the others.
He drinks again.
When he lowers the cup, his hand misses the table edge by the width of two fingers.
Glass strikes wood awkwardly.
Nera reaches out before she thinks and catches his wrist.
Daeron goes still.
Her fingers are around the pulse beneath his skin.
For one moment he looks down at the contact instead of at her face.
Nera remembers other nights. Wine handed into the same hand. His body quiet beneath hers. The sharp irritation when she stopped and made him notice himself.
She releases him.
Daeron draws the cup back, not quickly, but enough to put his hand wholly in his own keeping again.
“She can't just go,” His voice is quieter. Nera settles her hand in her lap. Daeron is staring at the table. “Not once it's done.”
A breath.
“She can't decide-…”
The sentence catches.
He closes his mouth, then opens it again as though there were several possible endings and none of them bear saying.
Nera waits.
“She can't just go.”
The second attempt comes almost without drunkenness.
That same terrible clarity.
His eyes lift to hers.
Nera understands more now than she did when he first said stay.
Not everything, but enough.
Most people in Daeron's life have reasons to be there that have nothing to do with him. Family, rank, employment, money. A room like this has an end built into its beginning. Nera stays because he pays her to stay; eventually one of them opens the door.
The woman he is going to marry will be different in one blunt, undeniable respect.
There will be another day.
Even if you dislike him. Even if you keep your own rooms and fill them so thoroughly with your own life that Daeron becomes no more than the occasional inconvenience crossing their threshold. Even if every visit ends with relief when he leaves.
There will still be a threshold he may, sometimes, cross.
Nera sees now why the thought has settled into him like warmth. And she sees that he despises the warmth for being there.
Daeron is still looking at her.
For one strange second she thinks he wants her to tell him that nothing is permanent.
That wives run away. That marriages can fail. That women disappear. That vows do not make people stay in all the ways that matter.
She could tell him any of those things and none would answer what he has actually said.
Once the marriage happens, there will simply be someone in the architecture of his future who is not there because he hired her for an evening.
Perhaps that is all he wants.
No.
Nera has listened to him too long tonight to believe that.
It is all he presently permits himself to want.
Daeron lifts the cup. Empty.
He looks into it as if surprised.
Nera waits for him to reach for the decanter.
He does not.
Instead he sets the cup down with exaggerated care. His palm remains against the tabletop for several seconds afterward, fingers spread against the wood.
Then he stands.
The chair legs scrape hard enough against the floor to make Nera straighten.
Daeron sways once. He catches the back of the chair and closes his eyes, waiting until whatever movement the room has taken upon itself settles again.
When he opens them, he looks at her.
Nera knows that look.
Not because it is seductive, it isn't.
There are nights when Daeron looks at her and she knows immediately that he wants her. Those nights have heat in them. Appetite. A particular alertness in the eyes and hands.
This is different, but she has seen this version too.
The restless man deciding he has talked enough. The prince who has reached some place inside his own head he does not intend to remain.
Whatever was exposed in him a moment ago begins shutting down behind his face.
He crosses the room.
No mention of his mother. No more Water Gardens. No sisters. No rooms waiting at Summerhall, no imagined chair placed carefully out of the way, no woman who may not mind him at first.
Daeron does not say wife again.
Or betrothed.
Or stay.
Nera has just enough time to put her cup aside before he reaches her.
His hand comes to her jaw with more certainty than anything he has done for the past several minutes. His thumb settles below her ear. For a heartbeat he simply holds her there, breathing wine between them.
Then he kisses her.
There is no clever line before it. No attempt to charm her into what both of them already know he paid for. No laughter.
Only after Daeron presses closer does she understand that he has not changed the subject. He has ended it.
Nera answers the kiss because answering it is easier than anything they have been doing for the better part of an hour.
There is nothing particularly unkind in that. It is simply familiar. She knows what Daeron wants when his hand comes around her jaw and his mouth finds hers, or knows enough that she no longer has to wonder what answer he expects from her. Dead mothers and Dornish brides are beyond the ordinary terms of their arrangement. This is not.
His mouth tastes strongly of wine, and for the first few breaths he kisses her with enough purpose that the conversation begins to recede almost at once. His other hand catches at the loosened back of her dress, finds fabric where he expected skin, and tugs with an impatience made clumsy by drink. Nera reaches behind herself and finishes the work he has started badly, letting the dress slip from one shoulder and then the other. Daeron helps shove it down her arms, gets the fabric caught around one wrist, and abandons the problem for her waist as soon as she steps free of it.
There is nothing hesitant in him now, which makes the change feel ordinary enough.
He came here to fuck. Whatever strange road he took getting to it, they have finally arrived.
Nera steps backward and Daeron follows until the backs of his knees meet the bed. He sits harder than he means to, a breath escaping him that nearly becomes a laugh, and catches himself with one hand against the mattress while she stands between his knees.
“Graceful.” She murmurs.
Daeron looks up at her, eyes bright and softened by the wine. “I have other virtues.”
“Do you?”
His mouth twists, but he does not bother finding the next answer. Usually he might. On another night she could regret giving him so much as a syllable to work with. Tonight his hands return to her instead, moving over her hips and beneath the loosened linen with the hurried familiarity of someone who already knows what is underneath.
Nera pushes his coat farther aside, then works at the remaining fastenings of his clothes while he kisses whatever skin comes within reach. His fingers are less precise than they would be sober, but not aimless. When he wants her nearer, he pulls her nearer; when something feels good enough to catch his attention, the attention comes with it.
That is useful enough.
She gets his shirt over his head. His undershirt follows. Daeron lifts his arms when she tells him to and lets the linen fall where it falls, then looks down as Nera drops to her knees between his legs.
The shift in him is immediate.
His hand comes to her hair, not forcing, only gathering it away from her face as she opens his breeches. By the time she takes him into her mouth, whatever faint abstraction had lingered after the conversation has been replaced by the much simpler demand of sensation.
Daeron exhales sharply, head tipping back.
There is no question that he likes this.
Nera knows men well enough not to confuse an erection with enthusiasm, but she does not need to. Daeron's body does not have to speak for him yet. His fingers tighten in her hair and then loosen when he remembers himself. His hips shift toward her before he checks the movement. When she changes the pressure of her mouth, he makes a low sound that has nothing performative in it, and when she pulls back long enough to look up, his eyes are already on her.
“Again.” He says.
Clear enough.
Nera lowers her head.
It has always been possible for Daeron to enjoy sex. Sometimes extravagantly so. There are nights when he arrives already laughing at something that happened elsewhere, kisses her against the door before she has even asked for payment, becomes impatient if she takes too long undressing, and spends the next hour behaving as though pleasure were something liable to be confiscated if he does not consume enough of it first. He can be greedy when he wants to be, chasing what feels good with a concentration that leaves surprisingly little room for irony.
Tonight is not quite one of those nights, but he is here for now, and Nera knows the difference.
She has one hand braced against his thigh while the other keeps him steady. The muscles beneath her palm tighten when she takes him deeper. Daeron's breath roughens, his head comes forward again, and his gaze finds her face before closing briefly when pleasure becomes large enough to make watching unnecessary.
This much needs no interpretation.
When Nera pulls back, Daeron's eyes open and he makes a dissatisfied sound that nearly makes her smile.
There he is.
The room becomes easier once there is something immediate for both of them to do. Clothing gathers around the bed. Daeron's remaining boot ends up kicked partly underneath it. Nera's dress lies where she stepped out of it. The lamp burns at her shoulder and the wine waits on the table.
The marriage does not.
There is no Martell woman behind Daeron's closed eyes, no imagined face replacing Nera's. Men do that too, and Nera would know the signs well enough: a wrong name, a request for hair arranged some particular way, eyes kept shut while a woman becomes useful chiefly because she resembles somebody else.
Daeron does not turn Nera into anyone. If anything, he seems intent upon removing people from the matter altogether.
He has spent too much of the evening making one unseen woman increasingly solid inside his own head. Now what he wants from Nera is simpler: mouth, heat, pressure, breath, something immediate enough that thought has no room to grow teeth.
Nera has been paid for stranger purposes.
She keeps going.
Daeron is still watching when it pleases him to watch, still reaching when he wants more. At one point he pushes the hair that has fallen over her cheek aside so he can see her, then swears under his breath when she does something particularly effective and closes his eyes anyway.
His body is becoming busier while the rest of him grows quieter.
That, too, is familiar.
On restless nights Daeron often seems dissatisfied if he leaves with too much strength remaining. He likes to spend it. Nera learned that before she ever bothered asking why. If he arrives pacing, he generally wants to leave with legs that feel heavier than they did coming in. Sometimes pleasure is clearly the point. Sometimes pleasure merely helps.
Tonight, tiredness appears to be part of what he is buying.
Nera lets him have enough of the first before she stops.
Daeron looks down at her, breathing hard, and for a moment there is a clear flash of irritation at the interruption. Then she rises. His hand catches her waist before she is fully upright and pulls her between his knees.
He kisses her again.
The urgency has a different texture now than it did at the beginning. Not greater. More directed, as though the fact of continuing matters more than what precisely comes next.
Nera does not bother naming the difference.
She climbs onto the bed with him, and Daeron follows.
For a while they remain on their sides, kissing, hands moving with the fluent lack of ceremony that comes from repetition. He knows where she likes to be touched because she has corrected him before. She knows which parts of him are more responsive after wine and which become numb first. There is no romance in competence, but there is ease.
When she rolls him onto his back, he lets her. When she shifts astride him, his hands settle on her hips.
Nera lowers herself onto him slowly enough to watch his face. Daeron's eyes close and his fingers tighten hard against her skin. She pauses until the first strain leaves his mouth, then begins to move.
His hips answer hers.
For several minutes there is nothing particularly strange in any of it. Daeron watches her when he opens his eyes. He changes angle when something feels better. When Nera shifts her weight in a way that catches him unexpectedly, he gives one short, startled laugh against her shoulder, almost boyish in its lack of defense.
The sound nearly makes the whole evening ordinary.
Then his gaze slips past her.
The table.
Nera follows it without needing to turn her head completely. The wine is where she left it.
Still moving slowly above him, she reaches back and puts the cup in his hand.
Daeron drinks without breaking the rhythm between them, one hand still spread over her hip while the other lifts the wine. The gesture is so familiar that neither of them gives it ceremony.
He drinks too much for one swallow.
Nera waits until he lowers the cup, takes it from him, and sets it within reach again before continuing.
Later the sequence repeats without either of them speaking. This time Daeron's hand begins moving toward the table before his eyes open, and Nera sees it soon enough to place the cup into his fingers.
Wine. Sex. Movement. Breath.
The narrowing works.
Daeron becomes quieter, though at first the quiet feels like nothing more than the ordinary consequence of exertion. His breathing has grown too rough for conversation to be worth the trouble, and Nera has no need to fill the room simply because he has stopped doing so himself. She has had enough of his talking tonight.
His responses remain clear in other ways. When she changes pace, he reacts. When she touches him in a way he likes, his hips follow. When she moves his hand somewhere useful, sometimes his fingers close and do what she expects.
Sometimes they simply stay where she puts them.
Nera notices because noticing is part of the work.
She does not immediately care.
Daeron has surrendered choices to her before. Sometimes he plainly enjoys it. There are nights when being told where to lie, where to put his hands, how she wants him seems to free enough of him that he becomes more attentive rather than less.
So when Nera slows and asks, “What do you want?” she only needs to decide what they are doing next.
Daeron's eyes open halfway.
“Whatever you like.”
Nera waits perhaps a second.
The answer is not unusual.
She chooses something she knows works.
Daeron lets her arrange him without complaint, and when she begins again his body responds so strongly that any reason to question the choice disappears into the reaction itself. He swears under his breath, fingers twisting into the sheet as his hips move toward her rather than waiting.
Nera keeps going.
For a while pleasure itself seems to make him more present. He reaches for her, pulls her down, kisses her with enough interest that she has to turn her head to breathe. When she shifts to something else, he follows readily.
Then the intensity settles.
Daeron's eyes close again.
Nera changes the rhythm.
“Like that?”
“Yes.”
She continues.
A little later she begins, “Or do you want-…”
“Yes.”
Nera's hand pauses.
He has not heard the question.
The realization is irritating before it is troubling. Daeron lies with his face turned slightly toward the pillow, eyes still closed, breath coming hard through parted lips. He does not seem aware that anything has gone wrong.
Nera waits just long enough for him to notice the pause.
He opens his eyes, not fully.
“You know what you're doing.” He says.
The words are tired rather than flattering. That is the answer he meant to give.
Nera looks at him for another moment.
She does know what she is doing. That is part of what he pays for.
So she chooses.
No second question, no need to make him sit up inside himself and produce a preference he has already told her he does not care to produce.
The sex resumes, and Daeron follows whatever she sets without complaint.
For a time that is all.
Nera notices that he has begun allowing her to move him rather than moving with her. She changes their position and he goes where she puts him. She pushes one of his knees higher and it remains there. She catches his wrist, places his hand at her waist, and his fingers close only after a delay.
His body keeps answering, which makes most of the rest easy to ignore.
His breathing changes when something feels good. His muscles tighten. His hips still move toward certain sensations even if he no longer bothers adjusting for them afterward.
Pleasure continues to reach him.
What changes is what he does with it.
Earlier, when something felt particularly good, Daeron chased it. Now pleasure seems to occupy him for the length of the sensation and then pass through. He does not reach for more. He takes whatever Nera gives him and waits for whatever comes after.
The effort appears to matter more.
Nera lets him roll them again when he shows enough initiative to do so. Above her, he works harder. His arm begins trembling beside her head. Sweat gathers at his temples and darkens his hair. His breathing becomes rougher, and with every minute his body looks less capable of carrying thought anywhere useful.
This appears to suit him.
Nera knows how to make the work easier.
She doesn't.
Daeron seems to want the effort itself, so she lets him spend what remains.
The next time his arm gives enough that she has to move them, he lets himself be put back onto the mattress with hardly any reaction beyond the physical adjustment required. Nera climbs over him again and he accepts her weight, eyes already closing.
For a while she does not look at his face at all. There is no reason to.
She has a living body beneath her, responsive enough, cooperative, still capable of pleasure. Daeron initiated. Daeron told her to choose. Years ago he told her what not to mistake for refusal.
Those facts are there whether she thinks about them or not.
Nera works.
Then his hair falls into his face.
One wet strand has plastered itself across his forehead and nearly into his eye. Nera pushes it back without thinking, fingertips passing over his temple as she sweeps it away.
Daeron's eyes open all at once.
His breath catches so abruptly that Nera feels the change through both of them, and the hand that had gone loose against her side closes hard around her waist.
He looks directly at her.
For one second the difference is unmistakable.
There he is.
Nera stills.
The thought that follows is less welcome.
If that is him returning, then he had been somewhere else.
Daeron seems to take stock of her face, the room, the body beneath and around him. Recognition arrives quickly. So does embarrassment.
He turns his head away from her fingers.
“Wine.”
The word brings back another room so briefly that Nera almost misses it.
Daeron against a pillow. Her hands stopping because something about his face looked wrong.
Wine.
His hand begins reaching toward the table.
Nera is slower this time. Not much. Long enough to look at him.
Daeron reaches farther, so she gives him the cup.
He drinks as though two seconds had become an inconvenience. His breathing is too hard for the amount he tries to swallow, and wine slips from the corner of his mouth toward his jaw.
Nera's hand starts up automatically, but she stops it. Daeron does not notice, or does not care.
He drinks again and hands the cup back.
Nera sets it down.
Daeron reaches for her.
The kiss is hard enough to end whatever thought had begun between them. His hand finds her hip, and he shifts them with more purpose than he has shown in several minutes, drawing her closer and restoring the rhythm himself.
Nera follows.
That, more than anything she could ask him, tells her what she needs to know for the moment.
He wants the encounter to continue.
The fact that he wants it for reasons Nera is beginning to dislike does not make her particularly eager to stop and investigate those reasons. She has already investigated more of Prince Daeron Targaryen tonight than she wanted.
So they keep going.
The difference is that Nera notices more now that she has seen him come back.
His eyes close again after some time. His hand loosens. When she changes position, he accepts it without much interest in whether the new one is better. His body remains responsive enough that there is no clean point where everything turns from wanted into unwanted.
There is only less Daeron in each response.
Nera does not make a study of it. She has work to finish.
What bothers her most at first is the inconvenience of having noticed at all.
He has always been strange in bed on certain nights. He has always drunk. He has always had moods in which preference seemed like an irritation he wished somebody else would carry for him. Years ago, when Nera stopped because she thought he looked wrong, he had been perfectly clear.
I didn't ask you to stop.
She accepted the correction then.
It is easier to continue accepting it now.
Daeron's body grows progressively more exhausted beneath her. His thighs have begun to tremble. Sweat shines across his chest. His breathing is harsh enough that when he does make a sound, it is difficult to tell whether he intended it.
Nera slows once because the strain looks unpleasant.
Daeron immediately moves against her, asking without words for the pace back.
She gives it to him.
The breath that leaves him sounds almost relieved.
That is when Nera begins to understand that feeling good is no longer the thing he is chasing most intently.
He wants the work, the fatigue, the point at which muscle refuses another repetition and the body becomes too cumbersome for whatever mind is trapped inside it.
Pleasure helps because it is loud. Wine helps because it dulls the edges. Being moved helps because a body being told what to do does not have to choose.
Nera has known all of those facts separately for some time, she has simply never bothered putting them together.
Daeron's eyes are closed again. Nera cannot remember how long they have been that way.
That bothers her enough to interrupt once.
“Daeron?”
His name feels odd in her mouth. She almost never uses it.
His eyes open after a beat and find her. Recognition is immediate, as is the faint irritation.
Nera dislikes that she can recognize it now.
“Still want this?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. He means it, and Nera believes him.
Daeron reaches for her hip and deliberately pulls her back into the movement she interrupted, his own body answering with enough purpose to make the question feel almost unnecessary after the fact.
Nera does not ask another.
He wants her to keep going.
She does.
The problem, insofar as there is one, is no longer whether he wants continuation. The problem is that he appears increasingly indifferent to everything except what continuation eventually does to him.
Nera does not care enough to solve that problem for him tonight.
Stopping would mean making him present again. Another conversation, another look like the one he gave her years ago when she mistook whatever was happening inside him for a request he had not made. Perhaps he would be embarrassed. Perhaps angry. Perhaps simply leave.
More immediately, Nera wants to be finished.
Daeron plainly does too.
So she begins taking them there.
She keeps the pace that spends him fastest. When his hand slides from her waist and lands uselessly against the mattress, she leaves it there. When she changes the angle and his body reacts hard enough to pull a broken sound from him, she does not wait to see whether he wants more of the same.
She already knows what will get them to the end.
His body is still aroused and responsive. There is no uncertainty about that. What has changed, it seems, is the direction of his hunger.
Earlier, pleasure made him greedy, now it happens to him and passes. What he pursues is the collapse behind it.
Nera sees that clearly enough and feels no revelation attached to the knowledge. It is simply another fact about him, uglier than most and perhaps more useful.
She slows slightly when his breathing becomes ragged.
Daeron's brow tightens though his eyes stay closed.
“Don't,” Nera keeps moving, but the pace has altered. Daeron swallows. “Don't stop.”
Quiet. Clear. No confusion in it.
Nera looks at him for a moment and then obeys.
That is the simplest part of the whole night. He told her not to stop, so she doesn't.
The old words sit easily beside the new ones.
I didn't ask you to stop.
Whatever else is wrong with this, Daeron has at least been consistent about that.
Nera lets the pace build again.
His body is nearing its limit. She can see it in the tremor running through his thighs and stomach, in the way each breath comes less controlled than the last, in the muscles tightening involuntarily whenever sensation becomes too large to remain background.
His eyes remain shut.
For an instant, when pleasure crests hard enough, he surfaces simply because his body gives him no choice. His mouth tightens and his hips move with a final urgency that belongs as much to reflex as intention.
Then the tension breaks.
His whole body locks beneath her, shuddering with the involuntary force of release before the effort suddenly goes out of him.
There is nothing graceful in it, nothing like the laughing pleasure Nera has seen from him on better nights, when climax made him reach for more rather than fall away from whatever had brought him there.
His fingers release the sheet. His head turns toward the pillow, and his breathing remains harsh for several moments before beginning slowly to lengthen.
Nera waits until she is sure he is finished moving and shifts away.
Daeron does not object.
His eyes stay closed.
The room smells of wine, sweat, hot wax and sex. Somewhere beyond the wall somebody laughs and another voice answers. The world outside the bed has continued perfectly well without either of them.
Nera reaches for the cloth beside the basin.
Her hand passes near the table and, for one automatic second, angles toward the wine instead.
She stops.
Daeron has not asked.
Nera looks at him.
His face has gone loose with exhaustion. Not peaceful, simply spent enough that whatever had been driving him has finally lost the strength to keep driving.
The sight calls up another night, then another, none of them important enough individually to deserve contemplation: a face turned into a pillow while she made the choices, a hand reaching for wine without eyes opening, Daeron arriving restless and leaving barely capable of dressing himself.
Nera has seen him like this before. That is enough.
She does not need to sit beside him and decide how many times, or which nights, or whether every silence meant the same thing. There were nights he wanted sex with uncomplicated appetite; she knows because she was there. There were nights when he wanted something else from it as well.
Apparently this was one of them.
Perhaps she has helped him do this more often than she realized. The thought lands without demanding guilt. He pays her. He comes back. He has told her what he wants when she stops.
Nera knows what to give him when he has no interest in choosing. She knows which kind of exertion leaves him weak enough to sleep, and when a reaching hand means wine before his mouth bothers making the request. Above all, she knows that Daeron would rather she continue through his misery than make him explain it.
Tonight has not made a different man out of him. It has only made the pattern easier to see.
Nera lowers her hand without giving him the wine and reaches for the cloth instead.
Daeron breathes on, too tired now to resist whatever quiet the body has finally forced upon him.
For a little while after Nera moves away from him, Daeron does nothing at all.
His breathing is still too rough for sleep, each breath lifting his chest sharply before letting it fall again, the rhythm gradually losing the urgency it had a few minutes before. Sweat cools along his throat and beneath the dark hair stuck to his forehead. One hand lies open on the sheet where it fell when his grip finally gave out; the other rests awkwardly against his stomach, as though he meant to move it somewhere more comfortable and forgot halfway through.
Nera sits on the edge of the bed long enough to wipe herself clean. There is no reason to hurry now.
The room has gone very still around them, though not with the earlier kind of stillness, when Daeron sat turning a cup between his hands and every pause threatened to produce another sister, another Water Garden, another dead princess. This silence contains nothing Nera is waiting for him to say.
His eyes remain closed. His fingers no longer worry at anything. Whatever restlessness had kept finding its way into his hands all evening appears finally to have been spent out of them.
Nera rinses the cloth in the basin and wrings it once. Behind her, Daeron shifts only enough to make the mattress move. His breathing catches briefly and settles again.
She glances over her shoulder.
He has not opened his eyes.
Nera washes herself properly, dries her hands on the least damp part of the cloth, and begins looking for her clothes. Her dress is crumpled beside the bed where it fell earlier. One stocking lies neatly enough near the footboard; the other has somehow found its way underneath Daeron's discarded shirt.
She bends to retrieve it and finds his boot still in the middle of the floor, the same one she kicked aside before they began. Nera nudges it out of her path again.
Daeron makes a small sound at that, though whether he heard the boot scrape or merely dislikes the bed shifting beneath him she cannot tell.
She straightens with the stocking in hand. Part of her dress has caught beneath his calf.
“Move your leg.”
Nothing.
Nera looks at him. “Move.”
Daeron's brow creases faintly.
“Am I in the way?” The words come so slowly that she almost laughs.
“Yes.”
He appears to consider this accusation without opening his eyes, then shifts his leg perhaps two inches. Nera tugs at the dress. It remains trapped.
She pulls harder.
Daeron opens one eye.
“You are remarkably demanding after the fact.”
There is hardly enough strength in the line to make it wit. It arrives more as habit, the remains of Daeron's usual instinct to put something between himself and being inconvenienced.
“You are lying on my clothes.”
“Mm.”
He lifts his leg properly this time, and Nera frees the dress before he can change his mind. The moment the fabric is gone, Daeron lets the leg fall again and closes his eye.
There. Enough of him remains to be troublesome.
Nera leaves him to it.
She dresses without ceremony, drawing the stockings back over skin still warm from the bed and shaking out the worst of the creases in her dress before stepping into it. The room looks different now that the work of the night is over. There are always a few minutes afterward when everything has to remember what it was before bodies began knocking it out of place: the basin carried too near the bed, clothes over chairs meant to be sat in, cups abandoned wherever a hand last needed them.
Nera puts things back because she will want them where they belong tomorrow. That is all.
When she turns toward the bed again, Daeron has begun to shiver, barely more than a tightening through his shoulders and then another. His skin is cooling quickly now that he is no longer moving. The flush of exertion has faded from his chest, though the wine remains high across his cheeks.
There is a blanket bunched near his hip, and Daeron seems to become aware of it at roughly the same moment Nera does. Without opening his eyes, he reaches down. His fingers search badly along the sheet until they catch an edge and pull.
The blanket slides crookedly across his stomach and one thigh before snagging beneath the other leg.
Daeron stops.
For several seconds Nera expects him to free it. He would have to shift his weight.
Apparently that is too much to ask.
He leaves himself half covered, one leg still bare from the knee down and most of one shoulder exposed where the blanket has twisted across him. Nera watches just long enough to be certain he is finished trying, then turns away.
If he wakes cold, he can discover blankets again.
She begins fastening the back of her dress as far as she can reach without the mirror.
The wine is still on the table. Daeron's cup sits less than an arm's length from the bed, perhaps closer than the blanket he failed to arrange properly. Nera moves it farther from the edge before he knocks it over in his sleep.
Daeron's eyelids flicker at the small sound of glass against wood.
For a moment she thinks he might reach for it, but he doesn't.
The cup remains where she put it.
That is unusual enough for Nera to notice and ordinary enough, given the state of him, that she does nothing with the observation. He has finally reached whatever point he was trying to reach. Another drink would require lifting his head, and apparently even wine has become more trouble than it is worth.
Nera crosses to the mirror.
Her hair is a mess. Several strands are still damp along her neck, and there is no point attempting to restore the arrangement she wore earlier. She finds the pins in the little dish where she left them and begins gathering enough of her hair to keep it out of her face.
In the mirror, Daeron lies behind her.
Earlier he had occupied the reflection almost constantly, sitting in the chair with the cup, watching her take her hair down, appearing faintly affronted whenever she failed to follow some conversation he had apparently continued entirely inside his own head.
Now he barely changes from one glance to the next: half covered, one leg bare, head turned toward the pillow, the wine beside him untouched. His breathing is slower each time Nera looks.
She finds one earring on the table and the other near the leg of the chair. The second has somehow rolled beneath the edge of Daeron's coat. She retrieves it, wipes it with the corner of the cloth, and puts both back on.
Behind her, Daeron says nothing.
Nera puts another pin into her hair and, when nothing follows, another. After several minutes she begins to think he has fallen asleep.
That would not be unusual.
There have been other nights when Daeron has paid for the room and then continued using it long after he had any need of Nera. The first few times, she assumed he was simply too drunk to stand.
Sometimes he was.
Other times he would lie much as he does now, spent enough to sleep for an hour or two with a heaviness she rarely saw in him otherwise. Then something would wake him: a sound from the corridor, the wine wearing thin, whatever happened inside his head once his body had gathered enough strength to become troublesome again.
He would dress, usually badly, and leave.
Sometimes he went back to Summerhall. Sometimes, Nera suspected, he went somewhere else and started the whole business over again. Another tavern. Another bed. Another cup. Perhaps another woman if the night was long enough and Daeron sufficiently determined to outlast himself.
She never asked.
Men paid for rooms by the hour. What they did with the hours after leaving hers was their own affair.
Now she understands one part of the habit a little better.
He sleeps after.
Not always, but enough.
His body can sometimes be worked into surrender when the rest of him will not agree to it.
Nera finds the last hook at the back of her dress and wrestles it closed, then looks at him again in the mirror. The thought that he may sleep there for some time creates a practical question.
“Are you sleeping here?”
Daeron does not answer immediately.
Nera waits with one hand still lifted to her hair until a sound comes from the bed.
“What?”
“I asked if you're sleeping here.”
Another pause.
“For a while.”
The words are muffled into the pillow.
Nera nods to herself. That is answer enough.
She has no objection. He has paid, more than paid, and it is not the first time she has left him asleep after everything else is done. She has never found the experience particularly intimate. A man snoring in a rented bed is still a client, whatever poets might think of shared pillows.
She returns to her hair. Daeron's eyes do not open again.
Minutes pass while Nera takes down one pin because it pulls too tightly at her scalp and tries another place. She rinses the cup she used herself but leaves Daeron's where it is. His shirt comes off the floor and onto the back of the chair where he might find it without searching, his coat joining it a moment later.
That much, she has to admit, is self-interest. A half-awake prince hunting for his clothes is considerably more irritating than a sleeping one.
The room resumes its usual shape one object at a time: basin back near the wall, dress fastened, pins gathered. The boots can remain Daeron's problem.
The lamp burns lower.
Outside, someone laughs in another room and is shushed. A door closes farther down the corridor. Footsteps pass and fade.
Daeron sleeps through all of it. Or seems to.
His face has gone slack in the mirror. Not peaceful; Nera will not give him that word. There is too much wine in him and too much effort behind the exhaustion for peace to have much to do with it.
He simply looks emptied out.
Manageable, perhaps. The body has finally become heavy enough that whatever usually keeps him moving cannot lift it.
His fingers stir once against the blanket while Nera happens to be looking into the glass. They curl and loosen again. His lips move, though no sound reaches her.
She puts another pin into her hair.
A little later something else comes from the bed, low enough that she cannot understand it.
Nera glances at him in the mirror.
“What?”
For a moment she thinks he has already slipped too far under to answer.
Then Daeron murmurs, “Her sister.”
Nera's hand stops halfway to the next pin.
He has not moved. His eyes remain closed, his face turned partly into the pillow.
“What about her?”
Daeron breathes in slowly.
“One of them is coming.”
The words are soft enough that Nera waits a moment afterward to make certain there is nothing else. There isn't.
For several seconds she simply looks at his reflection.
His wife.
The thought arrives so naturally that Nera nearly misses it.
Then she catches herself.
Betrothed.
Gods, now he has her doing it.
The amusement that comes with that is small and private and gone almost immediately, because she had thought the subject dead. Not merely paused, but gone.
Daeron has spent the better part of the night drinking himself stupid, talking until talk exposed more than he wanted exposed, then using her body until he was too exhausted to pull a blanket properly over his own legs. He has not mentioned the Martell woman once since crossing the room to kiss her.
And now, at the edge of sleep, there is a sister.
One of them is coming. Another scrap.
Nera reaches for the next pin.
“You said.”
Daeron's brow moves faintly.
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
He makes a quiet sound that may mean he accepts this information, or perhaps he has already forgotten the exchange.
Nera waits.
Nothing follows.
She returns to her hair.
Behind her, Daeron breathes evenly for several moments before mumbling something else into the pillow. Nera cannot make out a word of it and this time does not bother asking.
Whatever it is can remain his.
She finishes pinning her hair.
The mirror gives her the whole room at once: the low lamp, the discarded boot, the coat she has put over the chair, the cup of wine standing untouched beside the bed, and Daeron behind it all.
Half naked and badly covered, one leg left outside the blanket because pulling it in would require more effort than he has left. Drunk. Spent. Nearly asleep in a whore's bed.
The prince who had spent the evening building a future out of scraps has finally exhausted himself into silence.
Almost.
The last clear thing he managed to say was another fact about the woman he is going to marry.
Nera looks at him once more in the glass, lowers her hands from her hair, and lets him sleep.
Thank you so much for reading, please let me know your thoughts!
