Perzys ānogār

The first thing Daeron feels is a hand in his hair. 

For a few breaths, he does not know enough to make a person out of it. There is only the careful pass of fingers through hair gone tangled from the floor and the night and however many hours of poor decisions preceded it; there is only the faint graze along his hairline, almost to his temple, a thing to gentle to have context and too unlikely to require one. His half-sleeping mind, useless with the softness of it, does not think of you at first. It does not think of anyone, it only knows warmth where there should be none, the slight pull of a strand caught and released, the shape of a hand moving slowly enough that his body has time to trust it before thought can interfere. 

His body, treacherous and starving thing this body is, accepts it before he understands that it has. 

Something in him sinks. Not much, not enough for anyone watching to name it. A fraction only, the barest softening of his neck, his cheek turning by a breath toward the touch. Sleep still has him by the throat. Or perhaps not sleep, perhaps something worse, something like that small falling feeling before the body remembers to be afraid of falling. 

He does not jolt awake, not this time. He is still somewhere inside that slow, impossible descent when your hand is gone, and it is the cold left behind -instead of pain, of fear, of any of the usual mercies- that opens his eyes. 

Morning finds him, unsurprisingly, badly. 

There is pale light at the curtains, thin and grey-gold, enough for it to return shape to the room and cruelty to the objects in it. The bed is beside him, the floor is beneath him. His shoulder is pressed to the bedframe, his mouth tastes of old wine, one leg has gone so thoroughly numb that it might as well belong to some other fool entirely. And, most importantly, your face is clear above him, turned toward him and far too awake. 

You are looking at him. 

For a moment, Daeron does nothing. He does not move his hands, he does not breathe properly, he does not even manage the good sense to look away. In darkness, the room had been kind enough to blur itself around him, to make intention and accident resemble one another if one did not look too closely. Morning, as always, is less generous. It has arranged the facts with humiliating simplicity: floor, bed, wife. 

The promise to leave before you woke broken before he could even remember making it. 

He had meant to spare you this. Before light, before servants, before your eyes opened and found him folded beside your bed like some stray creature. He had meant to rise, to go, to leave no sign of himself but perhaps a little warmth where his shoulder had touched the frame, and even that would have been gone soon enough. A harmless failure, if there is such a thing. Small, quiet, entirely his. 

Instead, you are awake, and he is still here. 

Your hand is no longer in his hair by the time he is awake enough to know if it had even been there. That should make it easier to dismiss. A dream, perhaps, however rare the good ones are. A stray mercy invented by the last scraps of sleep. 

But his skin remembers the path of your fingers near his temple, and his cheek feels colder, and his body has the nerve to miss something his mind has not yet agreed happened. 

That, more than the floor, is the problem. 

Daeron looks down and finds his fingers still curled into the fabric of his trousers, stiff from clutching cloth through the night. His cloak has twisted around one shoulder, and his damn boots are still on, because of course they are. When he tries to shift in place, sensation returns to his leg in a hot, ugly prickle from knee to ankle, and his mouth tightens before he can stop it. 

Well, that is certainly dignified. 

He moves away from the bed. Not far, because his body refuses the ambition of distance, but enough that his shoulder leaves the frame and his head no longer rests against the mattress. Enough, perhaps, to pretend there had been intention in any of this. 

He can feel the shape his hair must be in, which should not matter, except your hand had been in it, perhaps, and he cannot decide whether it is worse if you know you touched him or if you do not. 

You watch him do it. 

Not cruelly, not even with the sort of pity he might survive by hating it. Your eyes are too clear for that, too awake. There is worry in your face, he thinks. Curiosity too, perhaps, in the careful way you do not ask the obvious question. You look at him as if he’s a puzzle that has appeared on your floor. 

“That cannot have been comfortable.” You say. 

Daeron does not look at you when he answers, 

“I have slept in worse places, I promise you.” 

It is true, but it still makes such a poor defense, even to his own ears. 

A small silence follows. He feels it along the side of his face, the back of his neck, the places where your fingers had been or had not been. Then he looks at you properly, because not looking has begun to feel more revealing than the alternative, and reaches for the nearest thing that might keep the morning from becoming too grave to survive. 

The smile comes by habit, poorly assembled and dragged from somewhere near the ribs.it trembles before he can make it useful, but it is there. 

With nothing else, he offers, “Good morrow.” 

You blink once, and then your mouth softens. Not quite into a smile, but near enough that his chest goes briefly, stupidly tight. 

“This is certainly one way to begin one.” 

It should not help. And yet, it does. Only a little, only enough that the room does not split open beneath him. 

You have taken the shape of what he offered you, ridiculous as it is, and answered in kind. Morning, manners, a prince on the floor wishing you a good morning as if he has not just woken beside your bed with one leg useless, his hair ruined, and his last scrap of good sense and self-preservation somewhere beneath the mattress. 

Or perhaps beneath your hand. 

No, not that. He refuses to let the thought linger. He is not certain there had been a hand. He would prefer, almost not to be certain. 

You shift against the pillows, rising a little onto one elbow. The covers move with you. Daeron’s gaze drops at once to your hand instead of your face, which was a mistake, because your hand is no longer near his hair or his face but it still exists, and that seems almost as dangerous. 

Your fingers rest loose against the sheets. Empty. 

He looks away. 

“That was a very poor use of a perfectly serviceable bed, however.” You say, tone light. 

His fingers tighten once against his knee. 

There it is: the bed. It has been in the room the whole time, of course. Large and soft and impossible behind him, above him, beside him, however one measures impossibility from the floor. Still, it feels newly named when you say it, as if the object has turned to look at him. 

Daeron studies the floorboards between his boots for a shameful moment. They are ordinary floorboards. Indifferent. He finds himself grateful for that. 

“I am hardly fit company for clean sheets.” 

The answer comes easily because it is not entirely a lie. He had been all wine and smoke and cold corridors when he arrived, wakefulness worn thin enough to tear. Whatever filth clung to him had at least been real enough to name, and that has always been the mercy of practical things. dirt can be washed, sheets can be changed, boots can be removed. No one has to speak of what else a man brings into a room when he comes there after days of refusing sleep.  

He glances up only briefly. 

Your expression has changed. Not enough for accusation, not enough for certainty. Only a small adjustment around the eyes, a quiet narrowing of thought. You do not believe him, perhaps. Or perhaps you believe the words and not the shape he has forced them into. Perhaps you have mercifully decided there are some answers to brittle to touch directly in the early morning. 

His stomach twists. He waits for you to say something. 

You do not. 

A knock comes at the door, light and routine, and Daeron goes still so quickly that his returning leg punishes him for it. Before either of you say anything, the door opens, because morning has rules and servants obey them, and princesses do not usually begin the day with their husbands half-curled on the floor beside their beds like a scolded dog. 

Three maids enter with the efficient quiet of women expecting the morning to behave like morning. 

“Good morrow, Princess,” The first says, “You ought to write to y-…” 

She sees him then. 

To her credit, she does not drop anything, only chokes on her words and halts her stride. The second maid stops half a step behind her. The third looks down at the folded dress in her arms as if it has, quite suddenly, become the most interesting thing in the world. There is a pause, small but complete, in which everyone in the room -or halfway into it- appears to remember at once that no one has been given the proper script for this. 

Daeron considers closing his eyes. That has rarely solved anything, but he has always appreciated the simplicity of the method. 

Instead he lifts a hand and offers a half-hearted wave of his hand, and the first maid’s eyes widen, turning in search for guidance to you. 

You sit up a bit more fully, unhurried. Not startled, not apologetic, not embarrassed. 

“Good morrow.” 

The maids take their cue from you, and the first is quick to recover, curtsying her greeting. 

“Princess,” A bow of her head, eyes that of a cornered rabbit when she stammers and adds, “Uh, m-my Prince.” 

Daeron remains on the floor. This is not the worst state in which the servants of Summerhall have found him. There are servants in this castle who could probably rank his humiliations by season. 

Still, for some reason this feels worse in a way he does not intend to examine while still sitting beside your bed with his leg half-numb and his hair in disarray. 

You keep your attention on the maids. 

“Have a bath drawn, would you, Laerra?” 

The first maid’s -Laerra’s, he learns- eyes flicker once, very quickly, toward Daeron. Then back to you. Only once. 

“Of course, princess.” 

No one says for whom, no one needs to, 

Daeron lowers his gaze to his hands. His fingers are still stiff, and there is a crease in the fabric where he held himself all night. Perhaps you believed him, when he told you the smell of smoke and grime of the day were what kept him from your bed. Perhaps you did nt. Perhaps you only decided to answer the lie he gave you instead of the truth he could not. 

He says nothing.

The room moves around his silence. Not with the brittle and tentative care of people pretending not to have seen what they have seen, no, although in some ways that might have been easier. Instead, the maids recover because you have recovered them, and morning resumes with the terrible efficiency of a thing that has never once considered stopping for Daeron’s benefit. 

One of the girls leaves to see to your request of a bath. Another goes to the hearth and kneels before the embers, coaxing what remains of the night’s warmth back into flame. The third crosses to the wardrobe with the folded gown still in her arms and lays it out with practiced care, perfectly aware of where it ought to go, of which hook takes which sleeve, of which warm boots belong with which shade, of which dress can bear a necklace of rubies and which requires something less severe. 

They know the room. 

That is the thing that Daeron notices, the thought that lingers, though he would prefer not to. He lingers not on the quick glance the first maid gives him before she disappears, not on the way the second keeps her eyes politely on the hearth, not in the third’s sudden and heroic interest in fabric. Those are familiar enough forms of discretion, and he has lived his whole life among servants and their careful blindness. Their presence should not matter. 

It does not matter, not in the way it should. 

What unsettles him is the ease of them, the way the room opens itself to their hands, the way they know which curtains to draw first, where the kettle waits, which small casket holds your hairpins, which shawl was left over the chair the night before. The way one of them, after only a few moments, says, with the familiar worry of a woman continuing a conversation that must have begun days ago, 

“You ought to write to your sister, princess. There is barely enough orange blossom left for the week.” 

You make a small sound that might be agreement and might be offense at being reminded of it. 

“She is well aware,” You state, “She has just chosen to abandon me to northern weeds.” 

The maid at the hearth smiles down into her work. 

“I am certain she would be heartbroken to hear your plight.” 

“She should be.” 

It is nothing, a small exchange, easy enough to pass unnoticed if one belongs in the room. Daeron does not. He remains on the floor beside the bed, half-numb and entirely too awake, and listens as if the matter of dried orange blossoms sent from your family’s home is a court secret he has stumbled upon by mistake. Orange blossoms, lavender, a sister who sends things. A morning habit old enough to be teased over. A life made of little continuities that have nothing to do with him. 

He had thought, somewhat stupidly and perhaps arrogantly, that his presence would make the room impossible. 

The room appears not to have noticed he has irrupted. Or worse, it has noticed and decided to continue anyway. 

You shift on the bed, and Daeron moves because you do. 

There is no thought in it at first. You draw the covers aside, and his palms press against the floor. You sit up, and he gathers one knee beneath himself. You reach for the robe folded near the pillow, and he rises, stiffly, because suddenly remaining on the floor becomes an absurdity too large even for him to defend. 

His body objects to the change with great conviction. His leg, newly returned to him and apparently resentful of its treatment, sends another ugly prickle up his calf. His back is stiff from the strange angle of sleep. The hand he uses to brace himself on the floor is slow to open properly, fingers still half-curled from the night. He manages to stand without making a so und, which he counts as a victory, although perhaps only because he has lowered his standards beyond recognition. 

You do not comment. That helps more than it should. 

You stand and slip into the robe with your attention half on the maid at the hearth, half on the morning itself, as though your husband rising from the floor beside your bed is only one more thing to be folded into the day’s order of events. 

Your bare feet touch the floor, and your face changes by the smallest degree. 

Then, with more haste than dignity, you make for the carpet before the hearth. 

It is such an ordinary little betrayal of discomfort that Daeron looks at it a moment too long. And suddenly you are less the clear face above him in the morning light and more a woman who dislikes a cold floor, and there is something in the small, ridiculous flight from the boards that makes the room feel less like a place where he has committed some grave offense. 

He looks away a moment too late. No one seems to notice. 

You reach the carpet and tuck one foot behind the other as though to scold the floor without giving it the satisfaction of words. The maid at the hearth set the kettle near the revived flame, another brings the cups and utensils to the small table by the chairs, and the scent of lavender begins to lift into the air, faint at first and then steadier, soft enough that it reminds him of last night. 

You move toward it, and Daeron follows. 

He does not decide to. Deciding would have at least given him the dignity of refusing himself. Instead, you move, and the rest of the room becomes briefly unreadable, and by the time he understands what his body has done, he is standing near the hearth a few steps behind you like a hound awaiting instruction. 

He stops. You glance over your shoulder. 

“You may sit, you know.” 

The words are mild. Almost formal, almost amused. 

Permission, at last. That is worse than a command in some ways, and better in others. 

Daeron sits. 

Immediately, which he realizes a heartbeat too late. The chair is not far from the hearth, close enough for warmth to reach his knees and for the revived light to catch on the rim of the tea tray.  

He should have hesitated, he thinks. He should have made some polite refusal, some gesture toward leaving, some claim about duties or intrusion or whatever shape of lie would have done the least damage. Instead, you gave him a place to put himself, and he put himself there. 

Very well. Apparently this is also the sort of morning he is having. 

You pour the tea yourself. 

A maid might have done it. Perhaps one usually does, he does not know enough of your mornings to know what is habit and what has been changed around him, which is its own discomfort. You rake the kettle in hand, steady and unhurried, and fill one cup before setting the pot down. The tea is a pale, almost grey amber in the morning light. The lavender scent rises with the steam. 

Not one thing about it is remarkable enough to justify the care with which he watches it. 

Then you turn and offer the cup to him. 

For a breath, Daeron only looks at it. 

A task, he thinks. Something ordinary enough that he can understand the expected use of his hands. 

He takes it because he has been given it, because he remembers his manners even when they have to crawl to him from very far away, because refusing would be stranger than accepting, because you are looking at him and the cup is somehow easier to meet than your face. 

The first tremor is small. Small enough that, had he been alone, he might have ignored it. The second sends the tea lapping against the rim, and he tightens his grip st once, too quickly, too visibly, his fingers closing around the porcelain with enough force that the heat bites into his skin. A drop spills over anyway, sliding down the side of the cup and across the knuckle of his thumb. 

It burns. He does not let go. 

For a moment, the whole of him narrows to the ridiculous work of keeping tea inside a cup. Not the bed, not the floor, not your hand in his hair or not in his hair, not the maids moving around the edges of the room, not the fact that he has no idea what to do with the mercy of being allowed to remain. Only the cup, the heat, the small crescent of liquid threatening the rim, and his useless hands making a spectacle of what ought to be simple. 

You look at the tea. Then at his fingers. Then, mercifully, not at his face. 

“I was overgenerous.” You say, choosing to critique the pour of the drink instead of him. Instead of the evidence that his body has followed the ruination of his mind, and some combination of too little sleep and too little drink has taken his hands from his control. 

A breath catches somewhere behind his teeth. It might have become a laugh in a different man, or in a different morning, or in a different world. 

Overgenerous. 

Yes. But not with the tea. 

The thought is there and gone before he can punish himself properly for it. You have been overgenerous with the chair, with the cup, with the calm way you let the morning move around him as if he has not dragged some private wreckage into your day. Overgenerous with the fiction that the problem is the pour and not the hand holding it. Overgenerous, perhaps, with letting him have the smaller lie when the larger truth sits beside him like another guest at the hearth. 

He lowers the cup enough to keep from spilling more. 

“My thanks.” He says, because that is safer than anything else. 

“For the tea or the absolution?” 

The question is light enough that one of the maids might mistake it for teasing if she were listening. Daeron does not make that mistake. 

He looks at the cup for a moment, before retorting, “I had not realized they were being served together.” 

This time, your smile does arrive, small and brief, and he has the terrible satisfaction of having caused it while wishing, at once, that he had not seen it clearly enough to want another. 

You turn back to the tray to pour for yourself. 

“It is better with orange blossom,” You say, after a moment, returning your attention and your words to the tea, “The lavender alone is too dull in the morning.” 

Deron brings the cup to his mouth because holding it and not drinking it has begun to feel absurd. The tea tastes of lavender and something faintly bitter beneath the floral softness. His mouth still tastes of old wine, the tea does not cure that, but it argues with it, which is more than he expected. 

“You dislike dull things in the morning?” 

“I dislike unnecessary dullness at all hours.” 

You are adding nothing to your own cup. No honey, no milk. Only the tea as it is, apparently inadequate but still worth drinking. The maid at the hearth makes a small, amused sound and hides it badly by taking the kettle and moving it away. You ignore her, which tells him this, too, belongs to the room: the tea, the orange blossom, your sister’s delay, the maid’s poorly hidden amusement, the shape of a morning that has made space for all of it before he even set foot here. 

“It lacks the freshness of orange,” You point out, glancing down into your cup. “And pomegranate rind. But my dear sister has abandoned me to lavender and boiled water.” 

He ought not to find the petulant affront at imperfect tea endearing, he ought not to smile. He does anyway. 

You sit then, close enough that the light from the hearth catches the side of your face and the steam from your cup rises between you in thin, vanishing threads. 

“When she remembers her duties,” You continue, “You should try it properly.” 

It is a small thing, so small a better man might have known how to leave it small. A cup of tea, no more. A comment made because you were speaking of orange blossoms and lavender and sisters who send gifts from home. Not an invitation, not a promise, not anything he should take into his hands and hold so tightly it cuts him. 

Daeron knows this. He knows this with the same part of himself that knows the cup is not too full. 

He should say something. A jest, perhaps. Something light enough to return the offering to its proper size. Instead, the warmth of the cup presses into his palms, and the room continues around him, and for once Daeron cannot find the cruelty in allowing himself to imagine a later in which he is still permitted to be here. 

“You might regret teaching me to expect better tea.” Daeron says. It is not the answer he meant to give. 

He meant to make some harmless remark about your sister, perhaps, or about orange blossom being wasted on a man whose palate has survived far worse offenses than inferior lavender. He meant to keep the offer where you had left it: small, domestic, no more dangerous than steam rising from a cup. Instead, the warning comes before he has decided whether he is making a joke of it. 

A poor habit, that. Speaking. 

You look at him over the rim of your cup. 

“I shall take my chances.” 

Of course you say that lightly, of course you make it sound as if the danger is only tea, only expectation only a prince developing standards inconvenient to your stores. That is the mercy of it, and the trouble. You leave the words exactly where he has placed them and somehow hear what sits beneath them anyway. Or so he hopes, against hope. 

Daeron lowers his gaze to his own cup. The spilled drop has cooled against his thumb, leaving a faint tackiness where tea and heat and his own unreliable hand have conspired against him. 

“A brave woman.” 

“A curious one, mostly.” You correct. 

That makes him look up again. 

You say it without solemnity, which is the only reason he does not retreat behind whatever flattery or foolishness he can find. There is no grand claim in your expression, no pretty gentleness arranged for his benefit. Simply the same watchful softness from before, made more dangerous by the fact that it is not trying very hard to disguise itself. Curious, then. Not frightened or disgusted. Yet, anyhow. 

He takes another careful sip of tea because the cup gives him something to do with his mouth other than make matters worse. 

The room continues around you both. The two maids that were lingering in your room finishing their duties bow their goodbyes and take their leave, while he hears somewhere beyond one of the internal doors water being poured. The bath exists now as a consequence of his own excuse, which means it is both mercy and a trap, and he is too tired to decide which name is less humiliating. 

You set your cup down first. 

“Had you slept before you came here?” 

The question is not abrupt, not exactly. It is simply placed there, careful and plain, as if you have followed the thread he offered and found, beneath better tea, the shape of something less easily sweetened. 

Daeron’s fingers settle more firmly around the cup. 

“That depends on what one counts as sleep.” 

The answer arrives with enough ease to be a tad painful. He even manages to make it sound mildly thoughtful, as if the matter is philosophical rather than pathetic. As if sleep is a category to be debated over breakfast, as if he has not spent a lifetime learning all the ways a body may close its eyes and still refuse to rest. 

You tilt your head a little. 

“I mean the kind after which one wakes rested.” 

Ah. A most difficult standard. 

He considers lying. He considers several lies, in fact, arranging themselves obediently as soldiers at a muster. Some are polished enough to be believed by someone less awake than you. Some are true in ways that would not help him. Some involve dignity, which is ambitions of them. 

In the end, he obeys an unspoken command, fulfills an unvoiced request, and offers truth. 

“Then no.”  

Your expression does not change enough for him to resent it. That is inconvenient.  

The truth sits between you, small and ugly and not nearly complete enough to explain itself. He dislikes it for that. A fuller truth, perhaps, could have defended itself. This one only sits there, insufficient and exposed, while you look at him as though you are not yet finished seeing it. 

Because his mouth proves often faster than his thoughts, he uselessly adds, 

“There was not enough wine to make a convincing attempt at it.” 

The words are lighter than the admission beneath them, or try to be. He hears that himself. Hears, too late, the shape of what he has given away. 

His reputation precedes him, he knows this. Tales of his vices carry just as far as the reputation of his House. But this is different, this speaks of something more. Not wine as pleasure, not wine as vice alone -though the Realm, he is sure, has enjoyed that simpler story well enough-. Wine as tool, wine as door, wine as a blunt instrument taken to the back of wakefulness until something in him quietens or pretends to. 

He brings the cup to his mouth again and finds it too empty to help him now. 

Your gaze drops once, briefly, to the cup. Then back to him. 

“And before last night?” 

There it is, then. The next door opening before he has found a way to close the first. 

Daeron leans back on the seat, or attempts something like it. The movement pulls at his stiff shoulders, reminds him of the floor, of the bedframe, of the absurd fact that he has already provided you with more evidence than any sensible defendant would allow. 

“Summerhall has more chairs and corners than any reasonable castle requires.” 

For a moment, there is no sound but the hearth.  

You do not smile. Not quite. 

“That was not an answer.” 

“No,” He says, with practiced insolence, “But it was a very accurate inventory.” 

That earns him something. Not a laugh, not fully, but a narrowing of your eyes that suggests amusement has considered entering the room and decided, for the moment, to remain near the door. He will take it. The Gods know he has taken less. 

You look toward the bed, then toward the chair beneath him, then back to his face. The movement is small, too small to accuse, too small to name. still, Daeron sees the path of it and feels something in him draw tight in answer. 

Floor. Chair. Bed. 

Not a difficult inventory. 

He knows what you are trying to understand, or thinks he does. A husband who will not sleep in the bed. A prince who appears at dawn beside it. A reputation dragged in behind him like mud on a cloak. A set of inconveniences you did not choose and are no expected, by law and Gods and men, to manage. 

You are measuring the burden of him, he thinks. 

Unsure as to why the words seem to claw their way past his throat, why restlessness demands of him something and his body obeys before he choses to, he rushes to say, 

“I did not mean for this to become part of your morning.” 

The words are not apology enough and too much apology at once. He hears the stiffness in them and dislikes it. He dislikes, too, that they are the nearest thing to honesty he can reach without touching the larger shape of it. 

Your dingers rest against the handle of your cup. 

“It became part of my morning when I woke and found you on the floor.” 

He concedes with a gesture of his head, looking away, “That was…poor planning on my part.” 

Your mouth softens a little. 

“I was warned of your proclivity for that,” You recall, “By you, if memory serves. Which only proved to me you were telling the truth, by the way.” 

It startles a laugh out of him. Barely one, gone almost before it arrives, more breath than sound. Still, it is there, and for a second the room loosens around the fact of it. 

Daeron looks back at the tea. 

“I should not keep you.” 

He begins to set the cup down as he says it, the motion careful and deliberate, because if he can return the cup, rise from the chair, leave the hearth, reach the door, then perhaps morning can still be folded back into something nearer to what it should have been. You will have your cold floors, your orange-less tea, your maids and your gown and your sister to accuse of betrayal. He will remove the question of himself from the room before it grows teeth.  

“You cannot leave now,” You say. His hands still on the cup. Your words do not sound like a plea, but they do not sound like an order either. Faltering for only a moment, you straighten in your seat and explain, “If you go, I will have ordered a bath for no one, and my maids will have one more reason to think me strange.” 

Daeron blinks once, then, because he cannot help himself, “They have reasons?” 

“They think me unreasonable about tea.” 

“A grave reputation.” 

“But a defensible one. If nothing else, written off as Dornish eccentricity. Requesting a bath for a ghost, however, would be…absurd of me.” 

He looks at you, and you merely look back, composed and absurd and apparently very serious about the political cost of unused bathwater. It should not work, it is as transparent an attempt at manipulation as there ever was one. 

You are not asking him to stay because you wish him to, nor are you asking him to stay because he looks like he may fall apart if given a corridor with no instruction. You are asking him to spare you a minor domestic embarrassment. 

A task, then.  

A reason to stay that does not have to be hunger, that does not have to bring shame. 

Daeron’s fingers leave the cup. 

“I would not wish to imperil so delicate a reputation.” 

“No,” You say, smile curving at the corners of your lips. “I thought not.”  

There is something too knowing in your response, but before he can decide whether to take offense or comfort from it, the door opens again. 

The maid who had left returns with cheeks slightly warmed from haste, though she has enough discipline not to show more than that. She curtsies from the threshold to the bathing room. 

“The bath is ready, Princess.” 

The words arrive like mercy with a latch on it. 

Daeron stands because this time there is a clear thing to do. His body protests less now, or he is better prepared to ignore it. The chair shifts beneath him, the light of the hearth slipping over the cup he has left behind, over the small place where his thumb has marked the porcelain with tea. He does not look toward the bed. He does not look toward your hand. 

He does, however, look at you. 

Only briefly. Only a moment. 

You give him no softness large enough to drown in, no visible permission, no careful speech about rest or shame or whatever else might someone be entitled to after finding a man on their floor. You only lift your cup again, as though the morning has not been derailed in the slightest. 

“Do try to enjoy it.” You say. 

“For the sake of your reputation also?" 

“Well, yes,” You agree, a glint in your eye when you turn your gaze to him, “It would speak poorly of me as a wife if my husband walks to the bath I had drawn for him like a man to the gallows.” 

For a moment, he forgets the maid, the bath, the open door. 

Wife is not a new word, the Gods know the word has lingered in his head since long before he had a face and a voice to tie to the title. Even if not spoken aloud, it has been spoken over him by septons and lords and witnesses, folded into contracts, fastened to him by law and ceremony. But in your mouth, in the morning, with tea still warm in his hands and steam waiting in the next room, the word seems to land in him differently. 

Not softer, worse than that somehow. As if the word has been allowed to mean something. 

He turns toward the adjoining chamber where the bath waits. 

It is an escape, of a kind. Only another room, steam, water, the consequences of the lie he was permitted to give. Still, it is away from the hearth, away from your eyes, away from the chair where tea sounds dangerously close to a promise.

The wine is not enough. That is the trouble with it tonight. 

Not that it is poor wine -he is honest enough to admit he doubts he ever drank wine for its taste-, nor that there is too little of it. The scattered servants lingering still have been dutiful enough in that regard, appearing and disappearing at the edge of the smaller dining chamber with the quiet, practiced misery of men who have learned the shape of a prince’s worst habits. 

A cup emptied, a cup filled. A flagon replaced before it is asked for. A candle trimmed. A glance lowered. All of it a dance so familiar that Daeron has long since stopped noticing the steps. 

He had meant to sleep here, he thinks. Or perhaps he had only meant to drink until sleep became a less frightening notion. There is a difference, he knows it, though it has grown thin after so many hours awake. He has slept only in scraps these last few days, if scraps may be called sleep at all: his eyes closing for a breath or two between one cup and the next, his head dipping toward his shoulder before the body startles itself back into obedience, the darkness behind his eyelids already too crowded to trust. 

No dream has taken him tonight, and that should be a mercy. It is not, because he knows that it only means they are waiting. 

They do that, sometimes. Withdraw long enough to make him foolish, to find him with defenses lowered. Long enough to make him think perhaps the body can outlast them, perhaps wine and wakefulness and motion can hold the door shut if only he is clever enough, stubborn enough, ruined enough. Then, when he inevitably fails, they come back. With teeth. 

So he drinks. 

Or tries to. 

The cup is halfway to his lips when the ring catches against the rim. 

A small sound, nothing more. Silver against gold, clear and bright and indecently clean in the muffled room. 

Daeron stills. 

The servant nearest the wall stills with him, as if the sound were command enough. Daeron does not look at him, his gaze has dropped instead to his own hand, to the ring there, to the pale gleam of it around a finger that does not feel entirely his. 

It is not the first time he has noticed it, of course it isn’t. Rings are made to be noticed; vows are made to be remembered. That is the cruelty of them, or perhaps the mercy, if there is a difference between them at all. 

He is married. 

The thought arrives first as a fact, and only after a breath as a wound. 

Not because the word displeases him, though he sometimes wishes it would. That would certainly be simpler. Crueler, perhaps, but simpler.  

No, the word has the opposite danger. It is too warm a word for what has been done to you, too intimate for a bond you did not choose, too claiming from a man who has spent the weeks since your wedding making of his absence a mercy. 

His wife. 

He does not often allow himself the shape of that thought without placing something else around it like a frame. Vow is safer. Ceremony, witness, some public facing architecture of a thing that might otherwise become want if he lets himself look at it for too long. Duty is easier, a public contract is easier, the Gods know both are things he knows how to fail and how to survive breaking. 

The ring rests against the cup. 

Wine below, vow above. 

The jest would almost be good, if he were less tired. 

There had been other answers once. Poor ones, ugly ones. Warm rooms where no one asked too carefully what a prince wished to forget. Laughter softened by coin, by wine, by habit. Hands that did not need to be known in the morning. Mouths that did not ask for truth before biting. A body could be made into a simpler thing in such places, and for a few hours the world might have been kind enough to believe the lie. 

He does not go there now. Not since you were married. 

It is not virtue, he knows himself better than to try and find that in himself. It is only a vow, and a vow, he has found, is sometimes easier to keep than a self. 

He has so little of himself left to give you. This, at least, he can keep from anyone else. 

The thought is small. Ridiculous, perhaps. A beggar’s candle laid at an altar. He does not know what you would do with it if he ever had the poor taste to offer it aloud. Pity him, perhaps. Worse, thank him. Worse still, accept it for what it is. 

A poor gift, really, which is why it remains unsaid, unrevealed. But it is a promise he can keep, a vow he can keep from breaking, and he has little else to offer.  

Fidelity, if nothing else, might be one of the last things left in him worthy of offering to you. 

Daeron sets the cup down. 

The servant shifts, “My prince?” 

The wine trembles once in the cup, a tiny wave, then settles. 

Daeron looks at it a moment longer, as if it might yet become useful, as if it might yet open some road beneath him where sleep is only sleep and the dark behind his eyes is only dark. 

It does not. 

He stands. 

The room moves with him, not spinning, not quite, but drawing itself a little too slowly into place. He is not drunk enough, the realization is a weight on his chest. Not sober enough to be steady, not drunk enough to be safe, the worst state between. 

“My prince,” The servant tries again, softer now, “Shall I-” 

“No,” Daeron tells him, though he does not know what is being offered. More wine, a chair, a bed, a mercy. It hardly matters, “No, I have been admirably tended to, but I require nothing more.” 

It is meant to sound light. It almost does. 

He leaves before the man can decide whether to believe him. 

___ 

Summerhall sleeps badly. 

Perhaps that is only because Daeron does, perhaps houses are innocent of the futures men place inside them. Stone is only stone, timber only timber, shadow only shadow, and it is no fault of Summerhall’s that the dark gathers in the wrong corners. 

Still, at night, the place feels less built than waiting. 

The corridors are nearly empty at this hour. A few guards stand at their posts with faces made blank by discipline, the torches burn low in their brackets. Autumn has begun to thin the warmth from the walls, drawing summer out of the stones by slow degrees, and the air that moves through the halls carries the first sharpness of the season to come. 

Summerhall was refuge once, home once. 

It still is, in some ways. That is the cruel part. Grief clings to the old stone, yes. His mother is part of its walls as surely as mortar is, part of the rooms no one names too directly, part of the hush that gathers around his father’s worse days, around certain doors and certain hours. But it has no ash in its memory yet. No blackened stone, no terrible fire anyone speaks of but him, on nights where sleep does not let go of him and servants find him incoherent and half-mad, in the worst grief his dreams draw from him.

He grew up beneath these arches, learned the turns of these passages, the windows that catch dawn first, the stair that groans in the rain, the place where the mosaic above the east gallery has cracked and never been properly mended. 

It should be safe. It remembers him young, after all. Almost happy, almost whole. 

Instead, it feels haunted by what has not happened. 

A shadow lies along the pale stone ahead of him, too dark to be only shadow. For a moment it looks like soot, as if some fire has already passed its hand along the wall and left the proof behind. Daeron blinks, and it is only the angle of torchlight, only night, only his mind making ruin out of darkness because it has grown too practiced at the work. 

He keeps walking. 

Movement is useful, it gives the body instruction. One foot, then the next. A turn. A stair. Another corridor. So long as he walks, he is not lying down, and so long as he is not lying down, sleep remains a thing at distance. A country glimpsed across water, a door closed but not yet opened. 

He does not think about where he is going. 

That is what he tells himself, at least. 

The castle knows the path even if he does not. Or his body does. It carries him through Summerhall with a purpose his mind refuses to dignify, to linger on. Past the gallery, past the windows where the night presses black against the glass, past a shutter that rattles softly in the wind -sounding for one breath too much like a whisper, or a wing, or a hand against wood-. 

He touches the ring as he walks. 

Not fondly, not even consciously at first. His thumb finds the edge of it and turns there, worrying the metal as if it were a thought that might be worked smooth by repetition. 

His wife is asleep somewhere in the castle. 

No, not somewhere. The correction comes before he can prevent it. He knows exactly where. 

He stops at the next turn, absurdly, as if stillness might undo that knowledge. It does not. 

The corridor beyond is familiar. Too familiar. The guards at the far end are familiar, the door between them is familiar. 

Your chamber, he thinks. 

The law has made it his as well. 

Theirs, it insists. 

The word sits badly. 

Him and you. You and him. Joined by words as if words have ever been a harmless thing. To think of the room as something of the two of you feels like reaching for more than a door, more than a bed. It feels like placing himself beside you in a sentence and expecting the sentence to hold all the weight. 

Still, he has not asked for separate chambers. 

You haven’t, and some foolish part of him clings to that fact and makes him not quite able to ask for them either, even if for your sake he ought to.  

He cannot say he remembers the path that took him here, the thoughts, if there were any, that led to the decision to drag himself to your doorstep. 

Calling it your doorstep is not really accurate, he gathers, but he cannot bring himself to even name himself the distance he knows he ought to put there -the distance he owes you, the distance you deserve-. 

So he has done the kinder thing, or what he has told himself is kinder. He has slept elsewhere. In chairs, or couches. Once in a garden bed after too much wine and not enough sense. In guest rooms when some excuse could be found. In rooms that smelled of smoke and spilled drink. Nowhere that required you to learn the weight of him beside you. 

He has spared you, with great dedication. Has made a habit of it. 

And yet, here he is. 

One of the guards straightens as he approaches. The other looks briefly toward the door, then away again with admirable discipline. 

Daeron smiles before he can decide not to. It is a thin, trembling thing, but he remembers his manners. 

“My prince,” The guard greets, keeping his voice low, “Shall I announce you?” 

The absurdity of it nearly makes Daeron laugh. 

Announce him. At the door of the chamber that is his by law and not his by any honest measure. Announce him. A visitor, a petitioner, a man who has arrived somewhere he has a right to enter and still stalls, awaiting permission that won’t come. 

He lets his words carry the smallest theatrical offense when he answers, 

“At this hour?” Daeron asks. A beat passes. His smile remains, his certainty does not. “It is late, is it not?” 

The guard’s eyes lower at once. Kindness, perhaps. Or discomfort. Often they look the same. 

“Very late, my prince.” He confirms. 

“Good.” Daeron says, though he has no idea what good means here. 

He looks at the door. 

He should leave. 

The thought is clear enough that ought to count for something. He should turn around, he should go back to the dining chamber, or to some chair, or to whatever patch of floor first offers itself. He should not bring wine and wakefulness and the stink of fear to your threshold. He should not stand outside your room like a stray hound that has mistaken pity for invitation. 

His hand lifts anyway. 

The latch is cool beneath his fingers. When his ring makes the slightest sound against the metal of it, it sounds less like a call to heel than a comfort. 

For a moment, Daeron does nothing but stand there with his hand on the door and his ring cold against the metal. Behind him, the guard breathes carefully. Ahead of him, wood and silence, just quiet. 

No. Not quiet. 

Something softer than that, less daunting than that. 

The faintest shift of sheets. The low, faint crackling fo a dying hearth. And beneath it, so slight he might have imagined it, the steady rhythm of someone sleeping. 

The room beyond the door is quiet, but it is not empty. 

Daeron opens the door. 

The room receives him before he understands that it has. 

That is what feels most dangerous, most daunting. Not the darkness, not the hush, not the low, dying glow of the hearth.  

There is little enough light to see by, only a weak gold caught in the embers, a faint redness under ash. The sort of firelight that should trouble him with its closeness to other things. burnt things, blackened things, screaming things. It does not. 

Daeron stands just inside the door with one hand still on the latch, and some part of him loosens before he has given it permission. His shoulders. His jaw. The small, ugly clench behind the ribs that has held him upright for hours, days, however long it has been. It eases by a fraction, and the easing is so unexpected that it almost feels like being caught. 

He closes the door. 

His body does that, too, before his mind has quite approved it. 

The latch clicks into place. It is a small sound. Soft, really. Careful. Still, he flinches as if it has struck the room instead of merely closed it. The guards are on the other side now. The corridors, the cold, the low torches, the palace with all its waiting shadows. Behind him. Kept out. 

Or he has shut himself in. 

Or he has shut himself in with you. 

The thought is absurdly difficult to place, shelter and trap wear one another’s faces in the dark. A cornered thing does not always know whether it has found a den or a cage. Worse still, Daeron cannot decide which of you is the beast cornered. 

So he does not decide. He remains very still. 

The room is nearly blind around him, though he can make out the dark shapes of furniture by degrees: the curve of a chair near the hearth, the small table beside it, the heavier shadow of the bed. The air is warmer than the corridor, though only just. Warm with what remains. Linen. Ash. The faint trace of the oil you use in your hair, something soft and foreign to Summerhall, carried here with you and made ordinary. Beneath it, almost imagined, the dry ghost of lavender tea. 

You have made a place of this room. 

A shawl left over the back of the chair by the hearth, one end slipping toward the floor. A book, open-faced on the seat as if you meant to return to it and sleep had interrupted you. A pair of gloves laid neatly together, fingers touching fingers like hands intertwined. 

Small things. Things of yours. 

Daeron looks at them because they are safer than the bed. Or, at the very least, he tells himself they are. 

The chair by the hearth catches him first. He can imagine you there too easily, and because the imagining comes without permission, he hates himself for the sweetness of it. You sitting while the night gathered at the windows, you reading with the shawl drawn around your shoulders, you turning a page. You, pausing at some sound in the corridor that was not him, or perhaps was never going to be him. 

Perhaps thinking of him. 

The thought is obscene, and he pushes it away. 

Not because there is anything indecent in it. That would almost make it easier. But there isn’t, the thought is soft, domestic, harmless. The idea that you may have sat in this room, in the quiet, and allowed him some place in your mind not shaped by duty or dread or regret. That you might have wondered where he was, whether he would come, whether he slept. 

He should not want that. He should not want to have been thought of kindly in a room he has spent weeks avoiding. 

The bed is there. He has known it all along, and he turns toward it finally, because all the smaller proofs of you lead there in the end. 

You are asleep on your side, turned slightly toward the room, one hand drawn near your face on the pillow. The dying hearth almost gives nothing of you to sight. A line of cheek, the loose fall of hair, the line of the sheet near your shoulder. The faint suggestion of fingers resting open against the silk, soft in a way that makes his own hands feel suddenly large and ruined and too badly made to hope for the touch of yours. 

He looks away. Then looks back. 

Only once. A brief glance, a stolen thing. But enough. 

The moment feels breakable, that is the word his mind does not quite form and his body knows regardless. Breakable. As if he has opened the door upon something made of glass, or frost, or morning before anyone has spoken into it. The dark around you is only dark, the night is only night. You sleep as though sleep is something one might enter without being dragged there, as though the body might surrender and not be punished for it. 

He has brought the wrong world to your door. 

Wine, wakefulness, cold corridors and old fears. Shadows that become soot if looked at too long, fire where there are only embers, screaming where there is only wind. He keeps it all inside his skin by will or habit or some uglier thing, but skin has never seemed a reliable border to him. 

He does not wake you. He does not even truly consider it. 

There is a world, perhaps, where he does. Some other world made kinder by accident. In it, your eyes open without fear, your face does not tighten at the sight of him, your mouth does not shape his name as accusation or pity. In it, you see him in the dark and do not wish him elsewhere. 

Perhaps you shift aside, perhaps you lift the covers. Perhaps you say nothing at all. No questions, no startled breath, only room made for him. 

In that world, he is the sort of man who climbs onto bed beside you. 

In that world, he is the sort of man who can gather you against him as something real and loved and his -not owned, never owned, but held-. A tether, to this time, this house, this body, this world where the walls are not yet black and the dead are not yet calling. 

Or in that world, perhaps you hold him. The thought comes worse, a blade, a wound. 

In that world, your hand tangles in his hair, your palm settles softly at the back of his neck. In that world, there’s a touch moving over him as if there’s nothing in him that might cut you for coming too close, as if the skin that has always felt to him like something flayed and exposed might learn, beneath your hand, to be only skin. 

In this world, Daeron closes his eyes. 

When he opens them again, nothing has changed. You are still sleeping, the room is still dark, the bed is still impossible. 

Not forbidden, that would imply a gate, a guard, a rule. This is simpler than that. A man may stand beneath the Dragonmont and understand that dragons will never fly above him again, a boy may look toward the stars and know he has no road there. One might desire a thing and never mistake desire for reach. 

The bed is yours. 

The law has made room for him beside you, but law is a clumsy, useless thing. It cannot build belonging out of witnesses and words alone, it cannot make him the man who would be allowed to lie down in the warmth you have left open by sleeping. 

So Daeron approaches, but he dares not climb into the bed, dares not touch it. 

Heavy steps take him to your side of the bed, though he does not name it that. There is no question of the other side. The other side is the place a husband might claim if he had courage enough or cruelty enough, but it means nothing. The bed is soft because you are in it, the room is shelter because you occupy it. If there is any warmth in the world in this night, it gathers where you breathe.  

He is not brave or cruel enough to climb into bed, but the Gods know he is not strong enough to step away from it, from you. 

He goes to the floor beside it instead. 

He lowers himself carefully at first, then less carefully. 

By the time he reaches the cold floor, the movement feels less like sitting and more like yielding. The boards are cold beneath him. He notices it distantly, and almost welcomes it. Cold is honest, hardness is honest. Neither asks anything of him, neither allow him to forget himself. 

His shoulder comes to rest against the bedframe, the edge of the mattress. 

For a moment he sits upright, knees drawn toward him, boots still on, cloak still around his shoulders. A trespasser, dressed for leaving, dressed to give away how much he does not belong here. His hands settle against his knees, fingers curling into the fabric there. He isn’t sure if he’s holding himself in place or holding himself back, and gathers the difference does not matter. 

The ring presses cold against his finger. 

He touches it, deliberately, once. Only once. 

Above him, you shift in your sleep. Daeron goes still. 

The sheets whisper. Your hand moves a little on the pillow, fingers loosening, palm open and empty beside your face. He looks at it, because a hand is safer to look at than a cheek, the delicate fan of lashes, a mouth he knows the softness of. Because a hand may be imagined without the gnashing violence of wanting the person it belongs to. 

But even that is not safe. 

Your fingers are soft with rest, and his own tighten in his clothes until the knuckles ache. 

He thinks, absurdly, of touching nothing. 

Not you, not the sheet, not the covers hanging near his shoulder. Not the edge of the mattress where his head has begun, without permission, to lean. He thinks of making himself into a shape that asks for nothing and leaves no mark. He thinks that if he can be still enough, quiet enough, perhaps this will not count as taking. 

Only a moment, he tells himself. 

That much is allowed. 

Perhaps not allowed, but forgivable. So small an indulgence it may pass unnoticed by Gods and wives alike. 

Only a moment, and then he will go. He will rise before morning, before the servants breach the quiet, before light can make something of him. You will wake to nothing worse than the room you had before him, the bed undisturbed, the air untroubled. You will never need to know that he brought himself here and then thought better than to burden you with the knowledge. 

He will spare you this. 

He lets his head rest, barely, against the edge of the mattress. 

The covers are soft beneath his temple. Not warm, not enough. Enough. 

Your breathing moves above him. 

In. 

Out. 

The room follows it. 

Or he does. 

The hearth gives a low crackle no more than a settling ember. Once, that night have become something else. Tonight, it remains small, contained, simply a sound in a room where someone is sleeping. 

Your breathing returns. 

In. 

Out. 

The dark does not empty itself around him, it has a rhythm now, a body. A witness that asks nothing, knows nothing, but stays. Daeron listens to it with the attention of a man counting waves from a shore, though he does not know what shore he has reached, or whether he is meant to be there, or how long before the tide drags him back. 

Only a moment, he thinks again, but the thought has lost its teeth. 

His fingers loosen in the fabric against his knees. 

His body, traitorous and wise, gives up another inch of itself. Then another. The line of his spine softens against the bedframe. His eyes close. 

He means to open them. 

He will. 

Before morning, before you wake, before this becomes anything that must be answered for. 

Above him, you breathe, and sleep takes him before he can forbid it.

The room is loud enough that, for a while, it almost passes for mercy. 

Not quiet, never quiet. Quiet rooms are for men who have made some peace with closing their eyes, for men who can surrender themselves to sleep and trust that sleep will not open its maws and bite pieces off them. Quiet rooms are for honest and welcome exhaustion, for hearths gone low and beds that promise warmth, rest. 

Daeron has never known what to do with quiet except drink against it. 

So, he remains where the noise is thickest, pressed into the heat and smoke and laughter of the room until the borders of himself grow mercifully indistinct. Someone is singing near the hearth, too loudly and badly enough that every other voice must rise to drown it. Cups strike against tables. Dice skitter over wood. A woman cheers with her head tipped back, throat bare and warm in the candlelight, and somewhere behind her a man curses over a lost throw. 

“That was never a six.” Daeron says, or thinks he says. 

The man across from him looks up, affronted. “You accuse me of cheating, my prince?” 

“I accuse you only of optimism, ser.” Daeron returns, and that is enough. The table laughs, comes alive. 

For one small, tolerable moment, he is almost there with them. 

Not whole, not well, nothing as miraculous as that. Just present enough to watch the man theatrically clap a wounded hand over his chest as if Daeron’s accusation has pierced him clean through, present enough to notice the woman beside him chuckling into her cup, present enough to feel the crooked pull of his own mouth and know, distantly and awkwardly, that this part is not always false. 

He can do this. Often. Sometimes. 

He can sit in a room and make a man laugh over dice, he can tilt his cup in lazy surrender when someone declares him cruel, he can answer a joke with another and let the room mistake it for the ease of a man comfortable in his own skin. He can be pleasant company, when enough wine has softened the edges of him and no one asks him to be anything sturdier. 

There is wine in Daeron’s cup. There is always wine in Daeron’s cup. 

He does not remember who filled it last. That is one of the smaller graces of rooms like this. Hands move, cups empty, cups fill, someone leans too close, someone speaks with sickening familiarity and he focuses on the familiar instead of the nausea. Nothing is required of him here, except the shape everyone has already agreed he occupies. 

The drunken prince, the ruined prince. The man with eyes gone soft and unfocused, with his collar open and his mouth wet with wine, laughing half a breath too late at jokes he has not entirely heard. 

It is, strangely, a kinder fate than being listened to, than being believed. 

If he’s drunk, no one asks what else he is. If he smiles, no one asks what he has seen. If his hand trembles when he lifts the cup, there is a reason for it already waiting in the room, a reason simple enough for other people to carry. Too much wine, too little sense. Daeron the Drunken, poor Daeron, useless Daeron, sweet enough when he is too far gone to make trouble and clever enough only in ways no one has use for. 

Better that. Better wine-sick than frightened, better ridiculous than prophetic, better a familiar disappointment than a thing anyone thinks of looking at too closely.  

He drinks. 

The taste is long past mattering, it has turned sour at the back of his throat, thick with smoke and something coppery where he has bitten the inside of his cheek without noticing. He swallows anyway. Past pleasure, past taste, past the little dignity he once had of refusing a cup when his stomach has begun to turn against him. 

He knows he is not drinking toward pleasure, if he ever did. Pleasure is too delicate a word for what he is doing. 

He is drinking toward the point where sleep cannot find him whole. 

That is the hope, if such a thing can really be called that. Not rest, for rest would require trust, and trust would require a world that has not taught him what awaits him. Rest would require the innocence of believing that closing his eyes is only closing his eyes. 

So he drinks. Until the path between wakefulness and sleep is damaged, until thought loses its clean edges, until whatever waits in his dreams must claw through wine and exhaustion. He drinks, so he will not have to go to bed a willing man. He drinks so that, when sleep comes, it will have to take him by force. 

It is one of the last means of defense he has, one of the few remaining mercies he wrenches from this world. 

Around him, faces come apart. 

A mouth red with wine. A ringed hand thumping the table. Teeth flashing in decadent joy. A sleeve brushing his wrist. A curl of dark hair stuck damply on someone’s temple. Gold at a throat. The blurred oval of a face turning toward him and away again before he can decide whether he knows it. 

Whole people require a kind of presence he knows he does not have to spare. 

Fragments are easier, fragments cannot ask to be remembered. Fragments do not return, covered in blood and soot, screaming and dying, in his dreams. Fragments do not claw their way to him and accuse him of having known and done nothing to save them. Fragments do not stand whole and warm before him while some future flame licks at their hems. 

A cup is only a cup. A hand is only a hand. A laugh is only a sound. 

Until it isn’t. 

The laughter rises suddenly from the far end of the room, many voices at once, sharp and bright and too high. And for the smallest part of a breath, the sound twists. 

Not laughter any longer. 

Screaming. 

Daeron goes still. No one notices. Or perhaps they do, and they call it drunkenness, which is kinder. 

The man beside him is still laughing, shoulders shaking, face flushed and stupidly alive. Someone pounds the table, someone shouts for more wine. The song near the hearth falters and begins again from the wrong verse. 

Laughter, then. Only laughter again. 

His fingers have tightened around the cup, and when he notices he makes the mistake of looking down. 

Wine has spilled over the rim and onto the table, dark where it gathers in the grooves of the wood. It spreads slowly, patiently, finding every carved line, every knife-mark, every small injury men have left behind without meaning to. For a moment it is only wine, but then the candlelight catches in it, and the red deepens, thickens. 

Daeron lifts the cup before the thought can finish forming, and drinks what remains.  

Across the room, the door opens. 

Cold air pushes in, alive and sudden. The nearest torch flares as if taking a breath, and its flame leaps high, gold-white at the heart, and the smoke twists hard toward the ceiling. The smell catches in his throat. 

Burning. 

No. Tallow, smoke. Nothing more. 

His body does not believe him, and his mind has long since been lost to him. 

For a moment the room tilts, enough that he has to set the cup down or risk dropping it. The table is beneath his palm, the wood rough and sticky. Someone’s knee knocks against his under the table. Someone’s hand claps his shoulder, hard and friendly, and the weight of it lands like a command to remain. 

There. Here. Now. 

The present returns by force of contact, by the truth of a human touch. 

Daeron lets out a breath that almost becomes a laugh. It must be close enough, he gathers, for the man beside him grins as if they have shared some joke between them. Perhaps they have. Perhaps Daeron has said something, perhaps he was amusing. He often is, when enough of himself has been put away. 

The hand remains on his shoulder a moment longer than necessary. 

Daeron does not move away. 

“Still with us, my prince?” 

The question comes from somewhere almost close enough to touch him. Almost. 

Daeron turns his head because turning is easier than answering, and finds the man beside him smiling with the loose, ruddy affection of someone who has never had cause to distrust his own sight. His hand is still on Daeron’s shoulder. Broad palm, heavy rings, a thumb pressing once, companionably, against the bone. 

“I try not to be.” Daeron answers. It earns him another laugh. 

Good. There, at last. Proof of life.  

The room accepts the answer and moves around him again, forgiving the stillness it had not understood enough to condemn. The man’s hand falls away and Daeron tells himself he doesn’t miss the touch. Dice are thrown again and Daeron pretends they don’t sound like horses galloping for war. Someone calls for another round, someone protests a debt with all the wounded dignity of a lord dispossessed. 

He smiles at that, because for a moment, the room is only a room again. 

That is the trick of it, the cruelty and the mercy at once. Because it does not fail all at once, no ruin is kind enough to come with one gust of wind, with one beat of a dragon’s wings. The wine turns to blood and then back to wine, the laughter sharpens into screaming and then becomes only joy again, the smoke catches in his throat like a memory of burned flesh and then thins into tallow. 

The world gives itself back in pieces, and Daeron has learned to hoard them. 

A cup. A table. A song. A joke. A hand. 

Especially a hand. 

The next one comes to his wrist. 

Not hard, not even possessive, at first. Fingers touch the inside of his sleeve, just where the cuff has slipped loose, and linger there as if by accident. Daeron looks down before he looks toward the person it belongs to. 

A narrow, thin hand. No rings. Nails bitten short beneath the stain of wine. Warm fingertips against the place where his pulse is making a fool of him. 

“There you are.” A voice says, amused. He does not know if they mean the words kindly or not. He does not know if it matters. 

For the space of one breath, perhaps two, everything that had been spreading too wide and too thin inside him narrows to the small, ridiculous fact of fingers at his wrist. Not fire, not blood, not whatever waits beneath sleep with its patient mouth. Wrist, sleeve, skin. The simple, almost animal certainty of pressure, of contact. 

He should pull away. Not because there is danger in it yet, not exactly, but because he knows all too well the treachery of small mercies, how quickly the body begins to ask for the thing that quiets it, how shamelessly it learns. 

He does not pull away. 

Instead he lifts his gaze, slow enough that the room blurs in the corners of it. 

The face above the hand is a face only for a glimpse. A mouth first, curved as it has been smiling for some time, a cheek warmed by wine, hair escaping pins -or perhaps never pinned at all-, eyes he cannot hold onto. The candlelight moves, and the features moves with it, rearranging themselves before they can become anyone he might have to remember. 

“Am I?” He asks. 

The mouth smiles wider. 

“With us.” They clarify. 

A reasonable thing to say, he’s certain. A harmless thing. The kind of thing people say to drunk men when they have gone quiet at the table. 

Daeron looks down at the fingers still resting at his wrist. 

“With someone.” He says, aimlessly, helplessly, and does not know until the words have left him whether he meant them as jest or confession. 

The mouth laughs. 

So it was a jest, then. He lets it be. 

The fingers tighten once, gently. Reward or answer, he cannot tell. Warmth moves into him through that narrow point of contact, absurdly powerful for how little of it there is. It does not comfort, no. comfort is too large a word, too clean. This does not make the room safe or the night shorter or sleep less hungry. 

But it gives the panic somewhere to land, and that is enough to make him choke with something like gratitude. 

Someone fills his cup again. Wine sloshes dark against the rim, and Daeron watches the red tremble without letting it become anything else. The hand at his wrist remains.  

Daeron laughs quietly, because this time he means to. 

It comes out low and a little ruined, but real enough that the mouth beside him softens with interest. 

The fingers at his wrist slide, only slightly, until they rest over the jump of his pulse.  

Daeron lets them. 

“Careful with him,” Someone says from across the table. “He’s promised now, is he not?” 

The words should be nothing. 

They are spoken over dice and wine, tossed into the room with the same carelessness that has tossed everything else tonight: accusations, cups emptied too quickly, songs begun without knowing the words. 

A harmless comment, really. A passing cruelty so ordinary no one thinks to call it cruel. 

Daeron does not look up once. 

Promised. 

It is a strange word for a thing that has never belonged to him. Promised makes it sound soft, almost holy. A ribbon tied at a wrist, a hand offered before a septon, a cloak gently covering shoulders, a vow spoken with firelight trembling against the walls. Promised makes it sound as if there is wanting somewhere in the arrangement, as if there is anything in it but names and ravens and seals pressed into wax by men who will not be made to lie beside the consequences. 

Still, the thought idly lingers in his mind. 

He is promised. 

No. 

He has been given. 

That is not right either. 

Somewhere, there is a woman who has been given to him. 

That is worse. 

The thought settles with a weight wine cannot soften. It sits beneath his ribs, quiet and exact like a knife, more solid than the hand at his wrist, more real than the room around him. You. A woman. A name he has heard and deliberately not held onto, a House a father and a deal, a date moving toward him with all the patient cruelty of things decided elsewhere. 

Poor thing. 

The pity comes at once. Cleanly, so cleanly it nearly feels like a wound. 

Poor woman, poor stranger with your future folded and sealed and sent ahead of you like a letter. Poor thing, to be delivered into the hands of a man who cannot keep hold of a cup without trembling when the room turns wrong; to be told there is honor, privilege, in this; to be dressed, veiled, named wife, and bound to whatever Daeron has made of himself. 

He wants to laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because it is the only sound he can allow his throat to release. 

“You look stricken, my prince.” Says the person beside him. 

The fingers at his wrist move again, a small stroke over the veins. Too gentle to be an accusation, too intimate to be nothing. 

Daeron lifts his gaze. 

The face is still difficult to hold. Mouth, cheek, lashes lowered briefly over eyes he cannot name the color of. The candle behind them makes a halo out of stray hair, then smoke moves between them and the shape loosens. 

“Do I?” He asks. 

“You have the look of a man being led to virtue.” 

That earns laughter from the table. 

Daeron smiles, because the room expects him to. He lets the smile come crooked and mild, lets his eyes lower toward his cup as if the joke has landed where jokes are meant to land. 

“Then someone has taken a wrong turn,” He says, “I have never been accused of knowing the way.” 

Another burst of laughter. A cup hits the table. Someone declares that if virtue has any sense, it will bolt the door before he arrives. 

And just like that, the room accepts him back into the shape of himself that amuses it. The hand at his wrist remains, wine gleams in his cup, the spilled red on the table has gone dark and sticky around the edges.  

And like a beast hungry and denied of a taste the thought circles its way back to him. 

His betrothed. 

No, not his. His betrothed, as if language can make possession clean. His betrothed, as if you have walked willingly into the title. 

He pities you most of all. 

Not because he is kind, he does not trust kindness in himself enough to name it. He pities you because he knows with the bitter intimacy and inescapable certainty of a man looking down at his own ruin, what is being tied to you. The wine, the dreams, the days after nights like this. The laughter that comes too late, the silences that come too early. The body absent from itself, the mind never his to begin with. The name Daeron the Drunken, carried before him like stink, like song, like warning. 

You have done nothing to deserve him. That is the truth of it. 

And still.  

The thought arrives so softly he almost misses the sheer violence of it. 

Still, there will be a room somewhere. A marriage bed, a door closing, a woman breathing near him because the world has arranged it so. A presence that does not leave at the end of an hour, a hand that might remain because it has nowhere else it is expected to go. 

No. 

He cannot think that. 

The hope is obscene here, under the fingers of a stranger, with wine souring on his tongue and laughter thick around him. Obscene, because pity should be cleaner than want. Obscene, because he knows you are being forced to be bound to him and still some starved part of himself lifts it head at the thought of being less alone. 

Someone, you, might stay. 

Not love him, he is not yet drunk enough for that kind of stupidity. Not want him, not see him and find anything worth keeping. 

Only stay. 

The word opens inside him, like a reopened wound. 

He looks down at his cup before he can imagine it bleeding. 

The hand at his wrist tightens, mistaking the movement for invitation or weakness or both. A thumb presses over his pulse, and for a moment the touch is useful again. Wrist, skin, pressure. Here. 

“Will your betrothed mind?” The mouth asks, voice lowered now, near enough that the words are more breath than sound. 

Daeron should ask what they mean, but he knows. 

The room has begun to narrow around the place where they touch him. 

“My betrothed.” He repeats, as if testing a language that his mouth has no right to. 

It is a foolish phrase, too courtly for this room, too clean. It should call to mind banners, courtyards, hands folded in laps. 

Instead, because he is drunk and ruined and cruel in all the ways hunger makes a man cruel, he thinks of a hand in the dark. 

He drinks before the thought can become more than that. 

“She would be wise to mind a great many things.” He says instead. 

The person beside him laughs softly. 

“And you?” 

Daeron looks back at the hand on his wrist. If he focuses for too long on the touch, it feels as if it is pressed over exposed nerves, as if some unbearable coldness is seeping from it. 

But it would take something from him to move away. Some intact and sober little piece of himself would have to rise, gather itself, decide against warmth, decide to be alone again inside his own skin. 

He cannot find it. 

“I have never been wise.” He says instead. 

It is treated as permission. Perhaps, he knew it would be. 

The mouth does not ask him again. It should matter, he thinks, or almost thinks. It should matter that the question has passed and no answer clear enough to warrant the name has followed it. It should matter that his betrothed is still there as certain as another body sitting at the table, faceless and wronged and impossible, and that his own words have done nothing to move her aside. 

The room does not think it matters. 

Cups strike wood. Someone makes a low, approving sound.

The table has only heard the shape of a jest, and Daeron has given them enough of those tonight to make this one easy to accept. I have never been wise, a fine answer from a drunken prince. 

They laugh, and the sound is pleasant enough. Low, near, human. It does not turn into screaming this time, and for that alone he could forgive a great deal. 

The hand finally leaves his wrist. He feels the absence of it at once. 

It is absurd, humiliating. A small withdrawal of warmth no more meaningful than a candle guttering in a room on fire, and still some part of him notices the absence with the quick, starved attention of a dog hearing a door close. 

Then the hand is at his cup instead, easing it from his fingers. 

“There are stronger things than wine, my prince.” 

The table laughs. Not cruelly, not entirely. There’s affection in the sound, or something close enough to pass as it in a room like this. Someone else says something he does not catch, something vulgar enough to be answered with another burst of amusement. The words move around him, warm and indistinct, and the woman smiles as though all of this has been agreed upon by everyone who matters. 

The loss of the cup should trouble him more. And it does trouble him, more than he can admit, more than he can understand. Somewhere beneath the wine, beneath the heat, beneath the thumbprint of vanished pressure at his wrist, an instinct lashes out, an animal lifts its head and takes note. No cup, no hand, no clear path back to the thing he had been using to keep sleep damaged and silent. 

The fingers touch his sleeve again. 

The instinct sleeps again, the animal quiets. 

“Come away from the table.” The person says. Or orders, commands, sentences. It is not a question and Daeron is almost grateful. 

Daeron turns his head, slowly, and the room takes a moment to follow. 

A face, nearer now. Still not whole. Mouth first, wine-dark lower lip, a cheek with a. faint mark near the jaw. Eyes catching candlelight and giving none of it back in any color he can hope to remember. A face assembled from fragments. 

“Careful,” A man from the other side of the table calls out, grinning, “His bride might send assassins after you.” 

More laughter. 

His bride. 

The words move through him more cleanly this time, perhaps because they have found the wound already made for them. 

Poor thing, he thinks again. 

It is immediate, almost steadying. Poor thing, who will be told that vows make sense of what men have already decided; who will be given a place beside him and be expected to stand near enough to inherit the smell of wine and ash from his skin; who has not yet seen him like this and already deserves apology. 

And beneath it, worse than pity, worse than shame, the thought he had tried to drown before it learned its own shape. 

If you stayed… 

The woman beside him has risen, and Daeron notices only when the hand at his sleeve becomes a hand at his elbow, urging rather than touching now. 

It would cost so little to resist. 

A turn of the wrist, a laugh made sharper, a prince’s coldness, if he could find it. Even a drunk man can refuse a hand, Daeron knows this. Men refuse things all the time. Cups, debts, Gods, women, warnings. 

Daeron does not refuse. 

Refusal asks of him to gather himself from every place the room has scattered him. From the wine soaked grooves in the table, from the smoke above the hearth, from the laughter that for a breath was screaming. From the thought of the woman who will be made his wife. From the warm place at his wrist where fingers had been. From the mouth near his ear saying come, my prince, come now. 

He cannot gather that much of himself. He is not even certain he wants to. 

The hand at his elbow tightens. 

“There,” She murmurs as he rises too quickly and the room lists hard to one side, “Easy.” 

Easy. 

The word lingers somewhere bitter in him. 

His knee catches the bench, but someone steadies him with a loud chuckle and a congratulatory slap to his back. Another hand. The table cheers with the lazy vulgarity of men who believe they are watching a willing prince be led toward a familiar sort of pleasure. 

Perhaps they are. He certainly wants them to be. 

Other nights, the story has been true enough. 

He has sought it, bought it, gone willingly to hands and mouths and the blessed numbness of a body given something simple to do. There are women in this city who know the look of him after a dream that finds him despite his best efforts, who know how quickly he drinks after, how little he likes quiet, how easily pleasure -his or anyone’s- gives him an escape from himself. 

Daeron lets himself be pulled upright. 

For a moment his hand finds the edge of the table. Sticky wood beneath his palm, wine drying black-red in the knife marks. The room bends around him: faces, mouths, cups lifted, teeth flashing, flame catching on rings and eyes and spilled drink. 

The hand pulls, and of course, he goes. 

Daeron the Drunken goes where he is led if the hand is warm enough, if the room lough enough, if the night has not yet finished with him. 

The woman at his side says something to the others. He does not catch the words, he catches only the amused tone. The table answers with another cheer. 

His cup remains behind. 

That, if nothing else, should make Daeron stop. 

Instead he looks once toward it and then away. 

The hand has found his wrist again. Warmth closes over the pulse, firm enough now that it is no longer only anchoring. 

She leads him toward the back of the room, where the shadows are thicker and the song from the hearth arrives softened by smoke. The floor is uneven beneath him. His shoulder brushes a hanging curtain. Someone’s perfume burns his nose, sweet and stale. The air changes. 

Behind him, the room continues without injury, without hiccup. 

That is another thing Daeron has learned to expect, to almost find comfort in: how little the world changes when he leaves it. He promised Egg not to linger on such thoughts, though. 

At the edge of the corridor, he turns his head once, though he does not know what he means to look for. The table is already closing over the space where he thinks he had been, a man reaches for his abandoned cup. Someone laughs, and the dice begin again. 

No one calls him back, no one looks his way. 

The hand at his wrist tugs lightly again. Daeron follows. 

The curtain does not lead to a room, Daeron understands that late, and only in pieces. 

A hanging of dark, moth-eaten wool. A sliver of a passage behind it. Barrels pushed against the wall, their iron hoops dull with old damp. Linens thrown over something shapeless on the floor, greyed by dust and old spills, more rag than cloth. 

Not a room, but a place behind a room, a place for things no one wants to look at while candles are lit. 

The woman who has brought him here does not let go of his wrist until he is inside. Some disgusted, self-flagellating part of himself thinks to tell her she need not secure a leash, the faint unspoken promise of a warm touch is enough to make him obey, always has been. 

Her touch changes before he can make a joke at his own expense. 

That is the thing Daeron notices first, before fear, before shame, before anything in him can gather itself into a shape worth naming. At the table, the hand was an anchor, but here it becomes something with intention. 

By the time the curtain falls closed behind them, she has become a woman in pieces. 

A mouth, wine-dark and smiling. A hand at his collar. A voice low with amusement, telling him to look at her as if looking is a simple thing, as if faces have not been coming apart in the candlelight all night. 

“There,” She says, when his gaze finds hers for half a breath before he loses it again. “You are very far gone, aren’t you?” 

He is. 

The truth of it moves through him without force, without malice. He could agree with her, perhaps. He could tell her that far gone is the point, that he has been drinking toward absence with all the desperation better men reserve for prayer. But his tongue is thick behind his teeth, and the room keeps arriving late, and her hands are already making decisions before his body has decided to make one. 

He has to lean against the wall before he knows he has reached for it.

The wood meets his shoulder hard enough to make him blink. His head is too heavy, his mouth too slow, his hands full of delayed intentions. Every part of him seems to arrive after itself: breath after fear, shame after touch, thought after the body has already been moved.

She makes useof his weakness, and presses his body against the wall, unfastening what is easiest first. 

For some reason, he lingers on the lack of care in the undressing. There is no cruelty great enough to blame, only the practical confidence of someone accustomed to being obeyed by loosened laces and drunken men. His collar gives way beneath her fingers, his coat is pushed from one shoulder, the belt at his waist is handled before he has finished noticing her hand has left his throat. 

Daeron looks down. 

Her knuckles. His waist. The dark line of fabric pulled from his body. The pale inside of her wrist. The place where his body is answering as if reminding him that not even his own flesh is his.  

He should say something, he thinks that very clearly. Or almost clearly.  

Something. 

Not wait, not stop, perhaps. The thoughts do not form with enough shape to be chosen. They drift beneath the wine, beneath the heat, beneath the immense exhaustion weighing at his very heart. 

She says something with the shape of a question. Daeron does not answer. 

She smiles as if he has. 

That is how it happens, or how it begins to happen. No force great enough to give him something to resist, only a warm mouth and a body that answers, only the loss of the pieces of himself where refusal might have lived if he had been sober enough to build it. 

Hands guide him backward until the wall presses against his back, the cold seeps past his clothes. The figure before him presses closer, leg slotting between his. 

Daeron looks at the wall over her shoulder. 

For a moment, the shadow there is dragon-winged. 

For a moment, the room smells of smoke. 

For a moment, the noise beyond the curtain becomes something else. 

Then a hand enters his hair and pulls, not cruelly, but not gently either, and the world once again narrows to a single point of sensation. 

Scalp, neck, breath. Body. Here. 

The relief of it is so immediate that he hates himself for it. 

His body has always been easier than his mind. More treacherous, perhaps, but simpler. The body can be given instructions. Touched here, moved there, made to answer even when he is absent from the answering. The body does not need prophecy explained to it, nor sleep made safe. It knows pressure, heat, pain, the bluntness of another body close enough to block the dark. 

The woman says something, but Daeron does not catch the words. 

He catches tone instead, and it is enough. Amusement, want, satisfaction with his pliancy. With the way his head tips when fingers tighten in his hair, with the way he does not move away when she falls to his knees before him, with the way he lets her decide what will happen now that the wine has done most of the work of hollowing him out. 

Her own clothes are adjusted with the same efficiency. A loosened tie, a shift of fabric, a glimpse of skin he does not know what to do with. She does not feel indistinct in the way his own body feels. She is -frighteningly- present in pieces. In a mouth biting too hard, in hands freezing and scalding at once. In a thigh against his knee, in hair slipping forward as she leans over him, in breath warm at his cheek.  

“Stay with me.“ She murmurs. 

It is almost funny. Almost. 

He might laugh, if he trusted laughter to come out of him as laughter.

But there is something else too near his throat, something rawer and wetter and far less useful, and he swallows it down because even now, even here, some part of him understands that there are sounds a body should not make in front of another person.

Her hand takes his and puts it where she wants it. Daeron lets it be put there. 

The shame of that arrives late, and weaker than it should. His fingers curve because fingers curve when guided. His breath catches because breath is a thing the body does before the mind can forbid it. She makes a pleased sound, small and close, and the sound goes through him but it hurts too much to become pleasure. 

It becomes instruction instead. 

There is, at last a role. And with it comes relief, and horror at the relief. 

He does not have to know what he wants, he does not have to gather himself. He does not have to explain the wine, the smoke, the laughter that became screaming, the thought of you, of his betrothed, like a closed door with light beneath it. Someone else has decided what he is for, and there is relief, and there is grief, in that. 

His body knows old instructions. 

His body can be guided, coaxed, made to answer pressure with movement, breath with breath, touch with the dull, obedient reflex of living flesh. The body can remain, can be present, even if he is not. The body can betray him. 

It is not the same as wanting, and her mouth on his is not the same as a kiss, and her hands on his skin not the same as a caress. But this place has no use for distinctions that delicate, and neither, it seems, does she. 

The night loses sequence, loses sense. 

It comes to him in fragments. 

The wall cold through his shirt. 

The floor hard beneath his knees, then his hip, then his back, each change arriving before he has agreed to the last. Dust and old linens caught beneath his fingers. Her hand at his jaw. His name breathed too close to his ear. Fabric caught beneath his hip. The curtain moving.  

The distant room, laughing as if nothing in the world has changed. The world remains assembled. 

A cup strikes a table, a man shouts the end of a song. Someone laughs again, ordinary and drunk and alive, and the sound passes over the curtain as if there is no reason it should stop. 

Daeron tries holding onto the floor because it, at least, does not ask him to answer. It is only there. Hard, filthy, but certain. A place for the body to be when the mind has gone too far to keep it. 

The candlelight moves against the fabric. Her mouth says something. 

Her weight. Her breath. His own hand clutching the linen. 

The thought of his betrothed appearing and vanishing, faceless and impossible. Poor thing.  

Forgive me. 

No. Not forgive. 

You owe him nothing, especially not forgiveness. 

He tries not to think of you. He fails. 

Not because the woman touching him resembles you. She does not, she cannot. You have no face in him yet, no voice, no hand he has any right to imagine. 

That is what makes it worse, somehow. 

You are not there, and still the thought of you stands somewhere beyond the room, like a warm hearth behind a pane of glass. 

Some touch might not feel like it takes. Some presence might feel like safety. Someone might stay. 

Hope opens its mouth, bares its teeth. 

Daeron turns his face away. 

The woman above him mistakes it for something else and follows. Good enough. 

Let the body be misunderstood if misunderstanding it keeps it occupied. Let hands make use of what everyone has decided he is careless with. Let the night spend him down past dignity, past pleasure, past the instinctual recoil that has nowhere to go. 

At some point, his eyes close. 

Not in rest, never in rest. 

Only because keeping them open has become one more choice he cannot make. 

When he opens his eyes again, the light from the outside is dimmer. 

The corner is colder than it was. Or perhaps he is, he isn’t sure. The noise beyond the curtain has thinned into something distant and shapeless, a few voices, a burst of laughter, the dull strike of a cup against wood. Life continuing on elsewhere. 

The woman is no longer touching him. 

For a moment, Daeron does not understand the absence. His body has arranged itself around pressure, around hands, and now the pressure has gone. The shape remains, but not the weight, not the warmth. Like a handprint left on skin, like a door closed after light. 

He turns his head. 

She is standing now, straightening her skirts. Not hurriedly, not guiltily. There is a moment of comfort in the ease of her, in the practiced fastening of laces, the smoothing down of fabric, the small satisfied exhale through the nose as she reaches for a discarded sleeve. 

She looks whole, in a way he does not feel. Pleased, in a way he doubts he’s capable of. 

His mouth is dry. 

There is something he should say, but he does not know what it is. 

She glances at him and smiles. He resists the urge to flinch. 

“There you are,” She says again, softer now, “I thought I had lost you for a moment.” 

For a moment. 

As if it is charming, as if his absence had been a tricked played for her pleasure, as if she had noticed him slipping away and found it sweet, or useful, or simply not important enough. 

Daeron looks at her, and the effort it takes is immense. 

She laughs under her breath and leans down, close enough that her shadow falls over his chest. 

“You really are far gone, aren’t you?” The words land plainly this time. 

She touches his cheek with the backs of her fingers, almost fondly, almost mockingly. His skin does not seem to belong to him quickly enough to flinch. 

“Sleep it off, my prince,” Then, after a pause, with a glance towards his rumpled and loosened clothes, the old linens and rancid wood beneath him, the wreckage of him, “Your bride will have her hands full.” 

The curtain barely stirs as she leaves. 

A gasp leaves him as if with her she takes the air of the room. Or perhaps with her absence he can breathe again, he isn’t sure.  

She goes as easily as she came, taking her warmth with her, taking the shape of the corner they occupied with her, taking the last false use of this body with her. 

The space does not become empty at once, and instead it empties by degrees. 

First the space where he lays, the scattered linens over hard wood. Then the air where her voice had been. Then the place on his skin where the last touch cools. 

The curtain falls still behind her. 

Beyond it, the room continues. 

A cup struck against wood, someone calling for more wine, the end of a song dragged loose and crooked from a dozen drunken mouths. Ordinary, familiar sounds, the same sounds that held him together earlier, or close enough to together that the difference had not mattered. 

They do not hold him now. 

Daeron lies where she has left him and listens to the room living past him. 

It is almost funny, how little the world requires of him in order to go on. A cup abandoned, a chair filled by someone else, a prince missing from a table, a body behind a curtain. 

The floor is hard beneath him, that is the first thing that seems willing to remain true. 

Not kind, not warm, not safe, only true. 

Hard boards beneath his shoulder, old linens against his cheek, dust caught in the damp of the back of his neck. His clothes loose where she left them, his skin cooling in the places where the night has touched him too much and not enough. 

He had been led away. He had been made useful. He had been left to sleep it off. 

The story is so simple when told from outside his body. 

Inside it, nothing is simple. 

Inside it, the wine is sour behind his teeth, and his pulse is still trying to answer a hand that is no longer there, and the place where the old wood digs into his back feels less like the floor than evidence. His body has been forced present and then abandoned with the present still clinging to it. 

He had wanted collapse, he had wanted to be overcome, he had wanted sleep to come without asking anything of him. 

And now he is closer to it than before, emptied out and heavy-limbed, eyes burning, skin cooling the room tilting gently around the edges as if the world is considering finally letting him fall. 

But the dreams will find him anyway. 

And now, with the last clear cruelty the night leaves him, Daeron thinks they will find him like this. 

Not whole, not defended, not even properly absent. Only spent. 

The word comes to him without mercy. Spent, as a cup is spent, as a candle is spent, as a body is spent. The floor holds him because he has not yet found the strength to rise from it, the linens beneath him have become cool in places and damp in others. His skin knows where hands have been before his mind can decide what to do with the knowledge. 

He does not move. 

Movement, he thinks idly, irrationally, would make the body his again, and he is not certain he wants it again. 

The candle gives a weak little jump, and for a moment, the shadows move across the wall like wings. 

Daeron closes his eyes, and forces them open half a breath after. 

Sleep is too near now.  

He has brought himself here with such care. Cup after cup, smile after smile, touch after touch. Past pleasure, past taste, past dignity, past himself. He has made of himself a road toward collapse, and walked it willingly, knowingly, and so no one ought to be found guilty for leading him the last few steps. 

And still. 

His body is heavy enough for sleep now, yes. His limbs feel poured into the hard floor, his mouth sour, his thoughts slow and fraying at the edges. He has succeeded, in that small and miserable way. The body has been worn down, the body has been used up, the body will not be able to fight sleep for long. 

And yet the worst of it is that some dull, animal part of him understands this as success. 

Not happiness, not mercy, nothing so beyond him as comfort. Only success in the small and miserable terms that he had given the night. The body has been brought low, the mind has been dulled, and the road to sleep has been damaged enough that perhaps the dreams will have to crawl through wine and exhaustion and shame before they can find him. 

He has gotten what he was after, and it should feel like relief, like mercy. It does not. 

The floor presses hard beneath his shoulder, the linen has twisted under his cheek, rough with old dust and the damp warmth his body left in it. His clothes sit wrong on him, loosened and crooked and cooling where hands had made careless work of them. The air behind the curtain is close, stale with smoke and wine and perfume, but the warmth is going out of it. 

Nothing gathers around him. No hand returns to his wrist, no voice lowers near his ear, no weight settles beside him and makes the ground less hard by simply sharing it, no one draws the linen over him despite the fact it would make a poor covering. No one remains long enough for the dark to become anything else. 

No one has stayed to make this collapse into rest. No one has remained to turn the spent thing back into something worth keeping, no one has made a shelter of scattered linens on the ground, or a mercy of the dark, or a hand of the weight pressing down on his chest. 

The dark is only dark. The floor is just the floor. 

His hand moves before he gives it permission. 

Not far. Only to his own wrist, where your fingers -no, not you, not you, the woman from the room, the woman whose face he cannot keep, the woman who had known he was far gone- had held him. 

His fingers close around his own wrist, loose at first then tighter, until the pulse beats against his palm. 

There. Here. Now. 

It does not work the same when he is the one doing it. Of course it does not. 

He almost laughs, it catches somewhere in his throat and stays there, dry and ugly and small.  

His betrothed. 

The thought arrives without a face. Perhaps that is why it can come at all. 

Not a woman yet, not a voice, not eyes to disappoint or a mouth to turn away from him. Only a title, a fact, a vague shape of a future. His betrothed, as if words can make any worthy thing out of what will be done to you. 

The pity is duller now, exhausted by its own return, but it is still there. Poor thing, somewhere in the world, perhaps asleep right now in a bed that has not yet learned his name. Poor thing, who will be brought to him and told there is honor in standing close to ruin if ruin has a dragon’s blood in its veins. 

You have done nothing to deserve him, he knows this with the same certainty with which he knows the dreams come true. 

And still, because he is cruel, cruel in the private ways starvation makes a creature cruel, the thought of you reopens an already-bleeding wound. 

Betrothed. Wife, soon. 

Not the woman from the room, who has left. Not the voices beyond the curtain, everyone’s and no one’s. 

Betrothed, wife. His. 

A word that means a presence expected to remain after the candle gutters. A body not hired by the hour, not carried away by amusement, not gone once the use has been through. A touch that might linger when the room empties, a hand that might not withdraw simply because the night has ended. 

He turns his face onto the hard ground before the thought can become a wish, turns his body on its side and ignores the stabs of pain from making out of nothing a shelter. 

It is obscene to want that of you. It is obscene to pity you and need you in the same breath. 

Obscene to lie in this corner, in this body with the room still holding the shape of what has been done to him, and let some ruined part of himself lift its head toward a woman who has not yet had the chance to hate him. 

You will not stay because you want to, you will not touch him because you see in him something worth keeping. He knows that. 

He knows that. 

His fingers tighten around his own wrist anyway. 

For a moment, he lets the pressure pretend to be another hand. Only for a moment, only because the dreams are near, and the room is empty, and the title has no face to be harmed by what he does with it in the dark. 

His wife. 

The words are too soft, too dangerous, too close to prayer. 

Daeron opens his hand. 

The pulse beneath his skin remains, foolish and living and impossible to quiet. 

Beyond the curtain, someone laughs again. This time, it is only laughter, and this time, that makes it worse. 

He lies still on the ground, curled in on himself on a corner that has not become shelter, with the dark gathered close and sleep coming for him at last, and tries not to imagine anyone beside him. 

He fails before his eyes close.

Aegon II Targaryen House of the Dragon / Fire & Blood

"Who can presume to know the heart of a dragon?"

Aemond Targaryen House of the Dragon / Fire & Blood

"I will not fail."

Daeron Targaryen, son of Maekar A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms / The Tales of Dunk and Egg

"I dreamed of you."

Blog Notes

Requests are closed. Suggestions, prompts, or concepts may occasionally inspire me, but I do not take formal requests.

My work leans femdom in perspective and dynamic. The men I write are usually submissive, yielding, devoted, desperate, service-oriented, or otherwise non-dominant in intimacy.

And just as you remember the steps that separate you from your favorite spot in the garden where you planted the blue flowers Baela sent from Pentos, from the steps Jace once stumbled down and lost a tooth against, from the Weirwood tree you wasted entire days underneath of; you remember, with dreadful clarity, another time Aegon made a similar offer. 

Not in words, then. Not so plainly, so cleanly. You were both too young to name most of the things you were doing to one another, much less the things you were willing to become for each other. But he had offered it all the same. 

You were barely above five and ten, burning hours beneath the weirwood tree trying to perfect the rougher syllables of the Low Valyrian of the Free Cities while Aegon was relentlessly insistent on distracting you from such a boring task. You remember his head on your lap, your book half-balanced above him, your hand over his mouth to keep him from interrupting you. You remember pear glaze on linen, red leaves above you, the warmth of the day, the strange and careless easy of being young enough to believe such moments could survive the world that had made you.  

You remember it too clearly now. The ease of it, the foolishness of it, the strange and yet cruel mercy of not knowing that days like that were already running out. 

You did not know then that you would leave, not truly, not in any way that mattered. You did not know that the world narrowing around you had already chosen its shape, that nothing would keep it from closing. 

Years later, you wonder whether your mothers saw the echo of themselves beneath that tree and hated you both a little for it. Not for what you had done, not even for what you were, but just for being young enough to believe that closeness could remain untouched. Young enough to lie beneath the same branches where another bond had once taken root and believe, foolishly, that yours might be spared. 

And with the clarity of time and distance you can see how desperately, how hopelessly, the both of you were clinging to a world where war was not yet a looming presence, ever-growing. Where the displeasure of both your mothers at how often you seemed to gravitate to one another did not exist. Where every interruption was only an interruption, and not the first pressure of a noose tightening around your neck.  ___ 

A knot of the old Weirwood tree’s root is digging into your lower back, but you refuse to move until you manage to recite the words with the correct pronunciation, until you read aloud without leaning into the more familiar sounds of High Valyrian. 

You run one finger across the words etched on the book that sits on your lap, not unlike when you were younger and learning the intricacies of your ancestor’s tongue. Before you dare speak them aloud, you try memorizing them and their unfamiliarity. 

Your aunt Laena sent this book to you along with many others, given to your parents to carry with them back home on dragonback the last time they ventured to Pentos. The books, histories and tales of heroes of Essos, are littered with scribbled notes of her own and some of Daemon, with instructions on how to learn the unfamiliar sounds of the Valyrian of Meereen. Laena and Daemon arranged for a tutor to be sent from Volantis to the Keep, but they are still weeks from arriving, and you refuse idleness in the meantime. 

The words sit awkwardly in your tongue, familiar enough to resemble High Valyrian and yet altered enough to feel like you are speaking through someone else’s teeth. 

“Krenyikhé un-unyish…ishk nyetodha poj ir-…” 

You hear him before you see him footsteps careless over the grass, no attempt made at stealth despite how many times he has insisted he would make a fine thief if ever he were forced to earn his keep. 

“You are su-…” You lift a hand, one finger held up to stop him as you continue fighting against the damned sentence written before you. 

“Irg-irosh nyeshka majij ya yelwa rim,” You finish, resisting the urge to make a face at the stubborn instincts of having learnt High Valyrian first still twisting your tongue. You lift your gaze to Aegon’s, “What?” 

“That was terrible.” 

Your eyes narrow, “How would you know?” 

“By how angry you are at yourself,” He decides, taking a moment to stand idly there, looking at you, before he blurts out, “You look insufferably dutiful.” 

You return your gaze to the book on your lap. 

“And you sound insufferably bored.” 

“Cruel. Accurate, but cruel.” He retorts. 

Something wrapped in linen drops onto the grass beside you. You look down, and find a few pieces of small spiced pear cakes. Still warm, from the smell of them, the glaze clinging in golden patches to the cloth. 

You lift your gaze back to his, a smile betraying you and starting to curve at your lips. 

“You hate pear.” 

“Violently.” He agrees, already lowering himself onto the grass beside you as if the matter has been settled. 

“Then why steal pear cakes?” 

“Because you don’t,” You stare back for a moment, a breath, uncertain on what to say. He reaches for one of the small cakes with a sigh, “And because if I brought nothing, you would accuse me of interrupting you without cause.” 

“You are interrupting me without cause.” 

“No,” He says, biting into the cake and grimacing at the flavor at once, “Now I am interrupting you with provisions.” 

He does not ask before lowering himself onto the grass beside you, nor does he ask before making a pillow out of your skirts. You do not ask him to move, merely lifting the book for a moment before lowering it again. 

“It is a dreadful language.” He decides after your third attempt at the same phrase. 

“It is not dreadful, just unfamiliar.” 

“It sounds as if High Valyrian fell down a flight of stairs.” 

“You say that, as if your High Valyrian has not spent its whole life at the bottom of one.” 

Aegon hums, unoffended, unfazed.  

“Then why bother with either?” A moment, a breath, and something is different, though you cannot point out what, when he states, “We could leave the whole thing behind.” 

You lower the book enough to look down at him, “The whole thing?” 

“The Keep. The court. Our mothers and their quarrels. The old men who follow mine about and the young ones who follow you,” He squints up at the red leaves above you, pointedly and unsubtly avoiding your gaze. “Vermithor and Sunfyre could have us across the Narrow Sea before anyone thinks to look for us past Dragonstone.” 

For a breath, you imagine it. That is the danger of it. 

You imagine it all too easily. Bronze and gold over the Narrow Sea, the Keep shrinking behind you, no mothers, no councils, no courtiers, no careful smiles. Only open sky and the beat of wings beneath you. 

You should laugh at once, but you do not. 

The answer catches somewhere behind your teeth, held there by the strange, treacherous shape of the offer. He said it as if it were a jest, but not quite. He does not look at you, and as always that tells you more than his words do. 

You choose mercy, though you aren’t sure for whom, and instead jest, 

“And how will you communicate, hm?” You ask, “Your Valyrian is pitiful, and only traders speak Common across the Narrow Sea.” 

“That’s what you’d be there for.” 

“You would make out of a princess a mere translator?” 

His eyes slide back to yours, a slow smile taking shape on his lips. 

“Is what I want to make out of you really a door you intend to open?” 

You stare at him for what you are certain is a beat too long. Then you lift the book between you again. 

“You are a plague.” 

“Yours, though.” 

“Unfortunately.” 

You mutter the next phrase in Low Valyrian, tongue catching on the unfamiliar sound, and then repeat it under your breath again, correcting the shape of the vowels as best you can. 

Aegon takes a deep breath and releases it slowly, annoyingly, an attempt to make you aware of his deep and theatrical suffering. 

“I am trying to learn.” You state, meeting his eyes over the top of the book. 

“I am trying to sleep.” 

“Then sleep.” 

“You keep speaking.” 

“Then leave.” 

He closes his eyes again, “No.” 

You look down at him, fondness and exasperation catching in equal measure, and your lips betray you with more than a smile this time, letting be spoken quiet words in a more familiar tongue, 

“Avy raqan, ñuha qrinēdrurys.” 

One eye opens, focus sharp and almost as rapacious as Vermithor’s when he’s woken from slumber. 

“That sounded familiar.” 

“Nightmare.” You provide. 

“Ah,” He considers this, and then his mouth curves with unbearable satisfaction “But yours.” 

You narrow your eyes, “What?” 

“You said yours,” He says, too pleased with himself for a man whose grasp of the language extends mostly to insults, commands, and words he should not have been taught. “Ñuha. I understood that part.” 

“It wasn’t a compliment, Aegon.” 

“No,” He agrees, settling more comfortably against your lap, “But I’ll take it.” 

“There’s nothing for you to take.” 

“You called me yours.” 

“I called you a nightmare.” You retort without missing a beat. 

He does not give an inch, though. 

“Your nightmare.” 

“Aegon.” 

He looks terribly pleased with himself. You lift the book again before he can see the smile tugging at your lips. Or before he can hear, in the silence left by his satisfaction the unsteady little thing your heart has done at the realization that he has caught only half of your carelessness. 

Mine, ñuha, he heard. Nightmare, qrinēdrurys, he heard. 

He did not hear the rest, or if he did, he knows too little of the language to understand it. Better than he preen over being claimed by you than ask after the words that came before it, softer and more dangerous than either of you could name clearly. 

“You’re impossible.” You say, returning your attention to the page. 

“But yours, apparently.” 

“Selectively deaf, then.” 

“Only when it benefits me.” 

“That explains much of your education.” 

“My education is excellent.” 

“Your Valyrian is pitiful.” 

“And yet I understood the important part.” 

“You understood the easiest part.” 

“The important part.” He insists, still far too pleased with himself. 

You try to continue, sounding the next phrase under your breath, but Aegon has made himself impossible to ignore. Not by moving, not even by speaking at first, only by lying there with that smug little curve to his mouth, as if he has found some treasure in your carelessness and means to hoard it for as long as he is able. 

“Stop looking so pleased.” You grumble. 

“I cannot.” 

“Try harder.” 

“I refuse.” 

You make the mistake of glancing down at him. And worse, you make the mistake of letting him see the smile curving at your lips. 

He notices, because of course he does, and refuses to let the opportunity pass him by. Lifting a hand to pull at yours and make you lower the book again, he taunts, 

“Say it again, the nightmare part?” 

You do not even hesitate, “Absolutely not.” 

“The other one, then.” 

Your gaze drops to the book quickly, perhaps too quickly. 

“There was no other part.” 

“Liar.” 

“How would you know, hm? You do not speak our language.” 

“Teach me, then.” 

“I am trying to teach myself.” 

“I am a better pupil.” 

“You are a distraction.” You retort. 

“A beloved one.” 

“An unwanted one.” 

He shakes his head slightly, “That is not what you said.” 

He repeats the Valyrian words under his breath again, mangling the vowels with such deliberate violence, with such insolent intent that whatever fondness had gathered in you is swiftly overtaken by the urge to smother him. 

“Stop that.” 

He only does it again, worse, laughter clinging to his voice. 

You cover his mouth with one of your hands, a gesture he only snickers at and does not fight.  

After a while, his hand rises to pull yours away, but refuses to release you. Instead he keeps your hand in his, playing idly with your fingers, tracing the faint paths your veins take over the back of your hand and the inside of your wrist, following the lines across your palm as if they are another language he aims to learn badly.  

A while passes like that, with your pitiful attempts at sounding out unfamiliar words, and Aegon alternating between dozing off and laughing whenever your frustration grows sharp enough that you threaten to drop the book on his head. 

Approaching steps break the ease with which you were letting the day pass the both of you. The sound is softened by the grass of the garden, and yet it brings such tension into Aegon’s frame, into your own, that it might as well be the crack of a whip. 

“Yours or mine?” Aegon asks, and though he does not move from his place on the ground, doesn’t remove his head from your lap, you can feel and see the tension that has taken over him. 

While neither Rhaenyra nor Alicent have forbidden either of you from seeing one another, they have grown rather displeased at how often you and Aegon seem to be in each other’s company. And in a court filled with twice as many eyes as both women -both sides- insist on matching the other’s vigilance, there is scarcely a corner in the Keep you can spend time together without the Princess and the Queen being made aware sooner or later. 

What follows them being made aware of their eldest children’s whereabouts is always predictable. A courtier carrying summons from your mother, a stern call from the Queen summoning her son as one might call a dog to heel, Ser Criston’s shadow falling too deliberately over the ground, Jace appearing with some invented errand and an expression too innocent to be believed.  

Never a command, though you almost would prefer one if only for the chance to defy it. Never a prohibition, perhaps because they know their children better than to expect it to change anything. Only interruption after interruption, until even the sound of footsteps is enough to make shoulders draw tight, your head be weighed by the reminder of the expectations set upon you. 

“Mine would send Jace, and I threatened I’d feed Vermax to Vermithor if he annoyed me again,” You decide, a smile breaking through upon hearing Aegon’s chuckle at your response. A breath, and as the steps remain certain and ever approaching, you press, “The Queen?” 

“Not enough urgency.” 

“Her dog, then?” 

“Too busy snarling at your mother.” 

You are still smiling when the young man steps into view. 

Not your mother, nor Aegon’s. Not Cole, nor Jace, nor any of the familiar hands sent to pry you apart under the pretense of decorum, of duty. 

A Lannister. 

“My Prince, Princess,” The young man greets. You think you recognize him, he is a first son of a second son. The one set to inherit Lannisport, perhaps. Bowing his head with a polite smile, he prompts, “I do hope I am not intruding.” 

“And yet.” Aegon retorts curtly, eyes closing once more. 

You move to stand, ignoring the prince’s huff of complaint as you bereft him of his preferred pillow. Courtesy demands your greeting, and so you offer it, despite the annoyance. 

“Good morrow, my Lord.” 

“Tion, Princess. Tion Lannister,” He supplies, his emerald eyes diverting from you and towards the grass behind you and the Prince lying in it. Instead of commenting on it, he diverts his attention to the book in your hand, “Low Valyrian?” 

“Indeed.” 

“Oh. May I enquire as to why?” 

You straighten a little, pleased despite yourself by the question.  

“Well, trade along the Narrow Sea depends upon more than ships and coin.” You begin, only to catch up that another voice is reciting the same words at the same time. 

“Trade along the Narrow Sea depends upon more than ships and coin,” Aegon drawled along with you, still on his back on the grass and not even lifting his head to face the Lannister. With an ease born of having heard your little speech countless times by now, he continues even though you have stopped, “A Princess who cannot speak to merchants must trust men who can, and men are terribly fond of lying when silver is involved.” 

As if sensing your gaze on him, Aegon opens his eyes and lifts his head slightly to properly look at you. He blinks up at you, innocent as a cat with feathers in his mouth. 

Then, dropping his head back on the grass, he lifts one hand and waves the Lannister boy away, “There, you have your answer. Go.” 

The Lannister does not take his leave. His smile sharpens instead, and you know, with the sinking certainty of one who has spent too long at court, that he has found courage in borrowed words. 

“If i may, I think it fitting, Princess.” 

“What is?” 

The smile forsakes any attempts at false civility, and venom shines through, “That you should study what becomes of Valyrian when it is mixed too freely.” 

Aegon’s drawn out groan of fucking Lannisters at yet another instance of this dance you have all grown tired of by now is drowned out by your voice as you prompt, “Is that so?” 

You are granting the fool one chance, one, to step back.  

You have not inherited your parents’ preference for enduring insults with grace and a stiff lip. Perhaps because of too many visits to Pentos, too many letters exchanged between you and Laena and Daemon, too many reminders that you are fire and blood.  

And this boy, this young idiot barely older than you; has decided to insult your family beneath the heart tree, and you want him to bleed for even thinking he could. 

Your hand curls into a fist at your side, your teeth grit, your breath remains carefully controlled, the only courtesy you still grant him. The fool does not care. 

“A lesser branch of a greater tongue. Almost the thing it claims to be,” He retorts, leaning closer, “You and your brothers must find comfort in that.” 

You hear grass moving behind you, Aegon moving at last. You do not wait to see if he means to stand. 

The book hits the grass before you realize you have let it fall.  

Your fist follows. The boy’s smile is still on his mouth when you strike him. 

The crack of your knuckles against his nose is a small, ugly sound. 

He stumbles back with a high, affronted sound, both hands flying to his face as blood spills between his fingers. 

“You struck me.” He sputters, as if the words might undo the fact of it. 

Aegon’s sigh rises behind you, long-suffering and almost bored, as he comes to stand at your side. A sigh. As if you had spilled wine on him rather than broken a lordling’s nose. 

“My lord father will hear of this,” The boy snaps, voice wet with blood and outrage. “The Queen will hear of this. You will ans-…” 

“No,” Aegon states. He strides forward, but even then, the word was quiet enough that, for a moment, you think he means only to contradict the boy. Then his hand closes around the back of the Lannister’s neck. “She didn’t hurt you.” 

The young man has only enough time to make a small, offended sound, you barely enough time to gasp your surprise, before Aegon drives him face-first into the weirwood. 

Blood slides over the carved face of the tree, red over white, and you have the feeling you ought to think it an omen. Instead, your eyes linger on Aegon’s hand as he releases the Lannister, on the way his fingers open and flex once, as if shaking off the feel of his neck. 

“I did.” 

He says it quietly, and that is somehow what makes it terrible. It is not an excuse, not a jest, not even a threat. He says it with the calm certainty of a prince naming law, as if the truth were not something remembered but something he could reach for, seize, and decide himself. 

Something in the simple words stills you more surely than the blood does. It is the certainty, you think. It is that for all the times Aegon has promised you truth is what we make it, now he has proven he is willing and able to make that promise a reality. 

The Lannister staggers back, one hand to his face, the other reaching blindly for the pride Aegon has just knocked out of him. For a moment, he looks younger than the insult had made him seem. 

"If you mean to tell anyone what has happened, tell it properly." Aegon tells him. The Lannister's face twists, with the disgustingly familiar arrogance of his House. 

“You’ll regret this.” He spits, though the blood makes the threat wet. 

“Eventually.” Aegon agrees without question. 

The young man doesn’t even look at you again, and instead turns and takes his leave through the hedges, one hand still clamped over his nose. Silence follows him. 

You look at the blood splattered on the tree, then at the book lying open in the grass, its pages bent. 

“You made it worse.” Is all you can think to say. 

Aegon shrugs, and bends to retrieve the book, “I usually do.” 

“That is not amusing.” 

“It was not meant to be,” He brushes grass from the corner of the cover with his sleeve, then glances at you, “Your strike was terrible, by the way. Whether you meant it to be or not, that certainly was amusing.” 

You stare at him, “It was not terrible.” 

“You broke his nose by accident, not skill.” 

“I broke it regardless.” 

A chuckle, but it sounds almost hollow, “That’s the spirit.” 

He offers the book back to you as if the day might simply resume from where it was interrupted. You do not take it. 

“The Queen will be furious.” You state instead. 

“The Queen is often furious.” 

“With you.” You clarify, an empty hope that he might see the magnitude of what he has done. If he does, he does not let the weight of it shift his stance. 

“Then she will have practice.” 

“Aegon.” You attempt one last time. 

“What?” He asks, too lightly. Your gazes meet and you aren’t sure if it is just your worry and the quick beating of your heart at what just happened, but you swear you see something more than careless calm in his eyes. Still, Aegon simply explains, “He was already going to cry to someone. I merely made certain he had the story right.” 

A breath, and your eyes lower to the book he still holds in an outstretched hand. An offer, though you aren’t certain of what. 

You take the book at last. An acceptance, though you aren’t certain of what. 

The cover is still smudged with grass, and one corner has torn slightly where it struck the ground.  

But Aegon lowers himself back onto the grass as if nothing has happened, as if blood has not marked the heart tree, as if the Lannister will not return with fathers and mothers and queens and consequences in his wake. 

A breath goes by, and then, 

“Well?” He prompts. 

“Well, what?” 

“Are you going to continue, or did you break his nose only to abandon my education?” 

Despite yourself, despite it all, he makes you laugh. And because you do not know how to do anything else, because you do not want to do anything else, you return to him. You sit on the grass again, rest your back on the bark of the now-bloodied tree. 

“You were not being educated.” You argue.  

“I was listening.” He says, settling his head back near your knee, though not quite in your lap this time. 

“You were sleeping.” 

“I listen better that way.” 

You smile despite yourself. 

Then you open the book again, though the words take longer than they should to settle into meaning. 

Aegon closes his eyes beneath the shade of the weirwood, close enough to your skirts to pretend he has returned to where he was before. 

Neither of you looks at the blood. 

___ 

Neither of you looked at the blood. 

You had become very good, even then, at not looking directly at what frightened you. At pretending that a thing could be made smaller if it was made ordinary enough. A broken nose, a ruined lesson, a prince’s temper, a quarrel beneath a tree.  

Anything but what it was: not the first time Aegon had made a wound of himself because he did not know how else to keep one from finding you, but the first time you saw the shape of it clearly. The ease, the certainty, the willingness.  

The red on the white bark seems almost too obvious now. Blood for insult, blood for name, blood for a thousand little lies and the one you were telling each other. 

He had saved you from consequences that day. Or tried to. Or made himself the easier target for punishment, which was not the same thing, though you did not understand the difference then. 

You only knew that he had acted quickly. Carelessly, as if blame could be a cloak he could throw around his own shoulders and think no more of it. You believed him when he pretended it was nothing. You were young enough to believe many things, then. 

You did not know it was one of the last times. 

That is the cruelty of memory, you think. It does not warn you while it is being made, it does not tell you: look closer, remember this, for there will not be many more afternoons beneath this tree. It lets you return to your book instead, it lets him close his eyes beside you again. It lets neither of you look at the blood. 

And still, for all that he took upon himself that day and so many others, for all his certainty, for all the foolish, frightening ease with which he made himself the guilty one, he could not change what came after. 

He could make one Lannister tell a different story. 

He could not keep your mother from leaving. He could not keep you from following. 

He could not make the world remain the one you had both been pretending to live in beneath the shade of that tree.

For a time, he almost manages not to ruin it. 

The fire burns steadily before you, the room gone soft around its light, your shoulder still resting against his and somehow that single point of contact has become the very axis of the world. You take a sip from the cup he gave you, quiet and unhurried, and Aemond tries to make himself understand that there is nothing being asked of him now. No duty to perform, no insult to answer, no wound to guard, no weakness to carve out before it can be seen. Only this. 

It should be a mercy, the absence of demand. And perhaps it is, but mercy, too, leaves him with nothing to do with his hands. 

He had thought want a sharper thing. Cleaner, perhaps. Easier to recognize by its teeth. But this want refuses any shape he knows how to master, it does not come to him as a command of the body alone, nor as the rough, simple pull he might have claimed and despised and mastered in the same breath. It is worse, somehow, for being tender. 

It is the warmth of your shoulder against his, the unguarded line of your throat in the firelight, the damp ends of your hair dark against your nightdress. The certainty with which you sit beside him, as if his place there requires no argument, no proving himself. 

A wiser man, a less starving man, might have known how to let the moment remain what it was, might have understood that not every kindness must be answered before it can be kept, that not every open hand demands proof of worth before it closes around his own. 

Aemond knows no such wisdom. 

There are things he might say, were he another man. 

That he missed you. That the rooms have been colder in your absence, and not only because the fires had been poorly tended. That some foolish, ungovernable part of him had counted the days by the lack of your voice near the hearth as the night settles and so does his mind.  

That he is glad you returned to him. 

That last thought is the worst of them, most wretched of them, and so of course it is the one that stays. He does not say it, isn’t sure he could even if he tried. Instead, Aemond turns to you. 

The movement is small enough that he might have denied it, had you not been close enough to feel the shift. His shoulder leaves yours only so that he might turn more fully towards you, one hand settling against the cushion between you, fingers spread and useless for a breath before he remembers what hands are meant to do. 

You lower the cup from your lips and look at him, though you do not do so sharply, not with the cold precision you turned on the Kingsguard, nor the amused cruelty you reserve for those who mistake courtesy for invitation. You only look, as if whatever question that has brought him near might be answered if he would let it take shape. 

He nearly retreats then. Not far, not visibly enough to be named cowardice, but enough to recover the angle of his body, the old stillness, the safe distance that could be mistaken for composure. But your shoulder was warm against his, your words settled somewhere beneath his ribs. You would miss a life with him 

The thought ruins him all over again and his hand rises before he has decided what to do with it. It should shame him more than it does. 

But for once, the body moves ahead of his command and perhaps some aprt of him is too tired, too worn and too comfortable in the warm quiet of a room shared with you, to drag it back into obedience. His fingers stop short of your hair, close enough to feel the faint damp coolness of it without yet daring touch it. 

“May I?” He asks, and the words come rougher than he would like. Less polished, less practiced, than they should be. 

Your gaze flickers form his hand to his face, and whatever you see there keeps the teasing from your voice when you answer, 

“You may.” 

With a wariness and a dread that come from a familiar place, from somewhere on a beach standing before the Queen of All Dragons and uttering a command that both knew was a plea; he touches you. He touches you as if permission might still be withdrawn if he is careless with it. 

Only the ends of your hair at first, damp silk against the pads of his fingers. Then the line of it where it rests against your shoulder, the smallest possible indulgence, harmless enough that a less desperate man might not have made anything of it. 

You remain still for him, and it makes the touch, the indulgence, easier. It makes the want worse. 

He doesn’t know which one of you moves first after that. Perhaps you turn into his hand, perhaps he mistakes the slight shift for invitation because he is already half-mad with seeking one. 

A if hearing his thoughts, you move to prove there is no mistake at all. You set the cup aside, a barely-there clink of the metal against the table. 

The small deliberateness of it nearly undoes him before your lips even reach his. There is no witness here to mistake patience for virtue, no duty in the movement, no reason for you to turn toward him except that you choose to. 

But then you are closer, and the fire has become a blurred warmth at the edge of his sight, and your mouth is pressed against his. 

The kiss is gentle. Somehow, that is the danger of it. 

There is no urgency in you that he can answer with urgency of his own, no demand he can meet use as proof that he has answered correctly. Your mouth moves against his as if there is time, as if nothing must be proven before the night ends, as if desire may be permitted to exist without first being made useful. 

He wants to believe you, and it feels like the first step into ruination. He wants to believe that this can remain what it is, your hand lifting to his jaw, his fingers in your hair, the quiet breath you. Make against his lips when he dares deepen the kiss by the faintest degree. He wants to believe that this can remain want without demand, nearness without debt. He wants to believe in a warmth that asks nothing more of him than to remain close enough to feel it. 

But wanting has never remained only wanting for long. Not in this place, not in this marriage, and not in him. 

You are his wife. The thought should be tender, but it is not. Or not only. It brings with it every other word and reminder chained to that one: duty, blood, proof, worth. His wife. His duty. 

The hand in your hair tightens by a fraction before he forces it gentle again. He can do this, some panicked, disciplined part of him insists. He can be attentive, he can be careful, he can give what is required and more, if more is what is needed. He can make of want something useful before it makes a fool of him, before it leaves him exposed. 

Useful. The word catches somewhere it should not. 

It is an old word, an ugly one, though there is nothing ugly in you, nothing in the warmth of your kiss or the soft sound that leaves you when his fingers loosen in your hair. Still, the thought has already turned, treacherous and quick, toward another room, another warmth, another woman’s voice made patient by practice rather than kindness. The thought turns to a memory best left forgotten, and his body follows it, tightening against the old sense of being watched, arranged, instructed, made into a thing before he could understand what was being asked of it. 

He forces the thought back before it can take further shape. 

You are here, that is what he tells himself. Aemond sears that thought into his mind as your mouths part and you share a breath. You are here, and this is not then, and his hand is in your hair because you wanted it there, because you turned into him, because your mouth is warm beneath his and no one is laughing, no one is watching, no one telling him what a man ought to know before he has even learned what wanting is supposed to feel like. 

Perhaps you feel the change in the room before he does. Perhaps it is there, in the fraction of tension that returns to his hand, in the way his breath catches and does not quite settle, in the carefulness that comes over him too suddenly to be tenderness. Whatever it is, you draw back for a moment, just enough to look at him. 

Aemond looks away, a movement as quick and sharp it might as well be a flinch. There is no kinder word for it, though pride searches for one quickly enough. A turn of his eye and his face toward the fire, the slight withdrawal of his body form yours, his hand slipping from your hair to the safer ground of your shoulder before it stills there, useless and uncertain again. He knows the truth of what just transpired with a clarity that humiliates him: he had braced for a blow that no hand had lifted to deliver. 

He has watched you for years.  

Longer, perhaps, than either of you have been made to account for. Across feasts where his father’s trembling hope for peace sat as heavy as another guest at the table, across halls and courtyards and the measured cruelties of court, in every passing visit that returned you to King’s Landing only long enough to remind him that the Vale had made something of you no one here quite knew what to do with. 

He has watched you with the safety distance grants. Watched the sharp turn of your smile before some lord realized he had overstepped, watched the careless warmth you gave your brothers, watched the way your hand found Silverwing’s scales. He has looked his fill when looking could be made secret, strategic, controlled, but to be looked at now, with want still warm in his mouth and his hand upon you, is another matter entirely. 

Shame follows so quickly it nearly steadies him. 

No. he makes himself look back at you. 

He has done harder things than this, he thinks, and hates at once the part of himself that makes a contest of it. Still, the thought serves to steady him. Hard things can be endured, difficult things can be mastered, a body may be brought to heel if the will is sharp enough. 

So he kisses you again. 

This time, there is more purpose in it. Too much, perhaps. He means to be gentle and is, but gentleness itself becomes another thing to measure, another discipline to hold in place. His hand leaves your hair for the line of your jaw, his thumb resting where he can feel the warmth of your skin and the small movement of your breath beneath it.  

Your hand rises to him in answer, with a certainty that makes him want to flinch more than stiffness or carelessness would have. Your fingers touch the fastenings at the collar of his clothes, then pause. 

“May I?” You ask, because you are cruel enough to notice everything and never pretend otherwise. The question should comfort him, but it does not. It tells him too much. That you want to touch him, that you have chosen to act upon that want. That the hand at his throat is not duty wandering blindly through familiar motions, but desire made careful for his sake. 

Refusal would be easier to survive than this. Refusal would have its uses. A wound he could name, a humiliation he could bury, a coldness that would prove every cruel thing he has ever thought of himself. But your wanting leaves him no such dignity. 

He should say no, or wait, or not yet. Something honest enough to save him from the dread and terror that rise at the thought of your hands undoing even one small part of what keeps him arranged. 

Instead, because refusal would reveal as much as permission, he bows his head in agreement. 

You unfasten only the top clasp, then another. No more than that, and yet the room seems to alter around the small exposure of his throat, the loosened line of his collar, the first place where the day’s armor gives way. 

Your fingers brush the newly bared skin at his throat and Aemond forgets, for one humiliating moment, how to breathe. 

It is not the touch itself, he tells himself that at once, as if naming what it is not might spare him from knowing what it is. The touch is light, warmer than the air, gentler than anything so daunting has any right to be. And that is the problem, for a violent hand would give him something to withstand, a careless one something to resent. But this, your fingers at his throat as though the place beneath his pulse is not a wound, as though there is no disappointment in finding him made of skin and breath and blood, leaves him with nothing to fight. 

Another room presses close again. Not clearly, never clearly if he can help it. Only heat gone stale, laughter beyond a curtain, a hand closing around his wrist to place it where had not chosen to put it. A voice telling him, patient and bored and sickeningly kind, that this is what women liked, that this was what men did, that he need only listen and learn. 

He listened. That has always seemed the worst part of it all. 

Your hand is not that hand. He knows this, he knows this with the same certainty with which he knows the shape of Blackwater Bay from the sky, the weight of a training sword, the sound of Vhagar’s breath before she unleashes dragonfire. 

His body, traitorous and deficient thing that it is, does not know it quickly enough. 

He catches your wrist in his hand before he means to. Not hard, but enough that you still, enough that the feels the delicate bones beneath his fingers and hates himself for the instinct and releases you as if burned. 

“Forgive me.” He says, too quickly. 

You do not pull away. Irrationally, childishly, he finds cruelty in that choice. 

“There is nothing to forgive.” 

And it is that, it is the kindness when he expects rebuke, the permission where he expects injury, the patience where he expects the sharp correction he has seen you give men for far less; all of it gathers somewhere behind his ribs until there is no room left for breath. 

“I-…” The word goes nowhere. There is no sentence ready to follow it, no practiced courtesy, no clean apology, no command sharp enough to make order of what has gone wrong. He looks at your hand, lifts his own to the loosened fastenings of his collar, traces the small strip of skin your touch had made feel more naked than full undress ever had. “I…don’t know how to do this.” 

The words do not sound like his once spoken, they are too plain, too small, to close to pleading for something that should have been mastered long before he took a wife, long before anyone had thought to make a man of him by teaching him what men were meant to know. 

Aemond waits for the shame of it to kill whatever softness had survived between you, but it does not. 

For a breath, you only look at him. Then, with a carefulness he might have missed had he not spent years studying the smallest changes in your face, your mouth curves. Not enough to mock, but just enough, perhaps, to offer him somewhere less terrible to stand. 

“A Princess should say the same, but the ladies at court are awfully descriptive,” You admit, the smile curving at your lips the kind he has started seeing more and more often the longer you spend away from the Vale. “Not to mention your brother’s boasts a-…” 

“That is not what I mean.” He interrupts, but it comes out too quickly, too sharply. The interruption itself is another failure before the first one has even finished unfolding, and shame follows it at once. Shame for the edge in his voice, shame for the flinch he hears in it, shame because even the shape of his brother’s name has brought the old room nearer. 

“I know what is expected,” He says, though each word feels dragged over jagged stone. “I know enough.” 

He doesn’t know what makes him admit to that, insist that he knows enough, that he understands how sex works. Perhaps it is this gnawing fear of you thinking him deficient, lacking, but if you knew, if you knew how it is he learned, why it is he learned, you’d think him something far worse than deficient. 

He knows enough. That is the horror of it.  

He knows where hands may go, what touch may draw sound from a woman’s throat, what men laugh about when they mistake a boy’s silence for understanding. He knows because someone had once decided he ought to, because ignorance had been made into a jest, then a lesson, then a memory he has spent years pretending belongs to someone else. 

But knowing is not the same as wanting, knowing is not the same as this. 

He does not want his hands on your skin and that room in his mind, does not want your warmth answered by anything learned in coldness, does not want to think of use and instruction and failure when it is you beneath his touch. 

He attempts summoning any of the stillness he commands over his body whenever he is surrounded by others, attempts controlling the restlessness he and his siblings share but he -unlike them- has learned to contain, but finds himself unable to. It dawns on him with the clarity of a beast cornered that somewhere along the way to this moment he has forsaken the masks he has crafted over the years and now finds himself exposed. 

It was not a matter of defenses being torn down, of castle walls destroyed, because those remain intact as far as he is concerned. All that has changed is that suddenly you have appeared on the other side, and the walls that were meant to keep the danger out have trapped him with it. 

Because despite all that might have changed with you, despite the warmth he can almost feel at the tips of his fingers, a hearth offering refuge from the cold if he could just reach out a little further, the walls remain in place and he remains pacing the rafters, preparing for an attack that never came, guarding against a war that never started, far from any hearth or warmth.  

Despite anything else he might want, he doesn’t know how to be anything beyond what duty demands from him. 

You offer no response, but you offer no indication of not believing him either. Instead, you turn your body to his, facing him fully, and tilt your head to the side, your eyes narrowing slightly.  

He thinks he understands how Helaena’s creatures feel inside their glass cages. 

“Is there anything you’d want from me, Aemond?” 

For a moment, Aemond does not understand the question. Not because the words are difficult, they are not, and that is what makes them so treacherous. There is no courtly ambiguity to untangle, no hidden accusation dressed in courtesy, no demand made gentler by the shape of a request. Only want. His, named as if it were something that could be spoken without shame. 

 “What?” 

The word leaves him too bluntly to be polite, but you do not seem offended. If anything, something like understanding passes over your face, there and gone before he can decide whether to brace against it. 

You part your lips as if to say something, before thinking better of it. With a breath, you extend a hand between you, palm turned slightly upward 

Aemond feels the pull to answer before he has understood what is being asked. That, at least, his body knows. A lady offers her hand, a prince takes it; a wife reaches, a husband answers. Courtesy, habit, duty, all the little mercies of a world where movement has meaning, purpose, predictability, before want can make a ruin of it. 

“Do you want to hold my hand?” You ask. 

He looks at your hand. 

It should be a simple thing. Smaller than a kiss, smaller than the loosening of a caollar, than skin beneat fingers, than the duty he has already made of your marriage bed and survived by refusing to look too closely at what came after. 

It is not simple. 

Before he can force an answer past the tightness of his throat, you add, quieter, 

“I’m not asking if you would," Your hand remains between you. Steady, patient. Terrible, daunting. “I am asking if you want to.” 

And with those words, spoken as if they are simple -because perhaps to you they are-, there is no duty left to hide inside, no expectation large enough to make his answer impersonal. No child, no bloodline, no court, no legacy, no marriage debt to stand between the want and the humiliation of being seen with it in his hands. 

Panic moves quicker than truth. 

“If I have not been adequately attentive, I-…” 

“If I were unhappy with you, Aemond, you would know.” 

His name stills him more thoroughly than the interruption. 

A title would have been easier. Husband, if you meant to measure him by duty. Prince, if you meant to recall him to dignity. Even One-Eye would have given him something to stand behind. 

But you say Aemond, as you do only when the world has narrowed to the two of you, and it serves as a reminder. He finds himself bare of rank, bare of history, bare of every hard-won thing he has made of himself. All that is left is the man beneath all of it, and he has never trusted that man to be found worthy in your eyes. 

It should comfort him, perhaps, that you do not reach for the cruelty he has seen you wield so deftly against lesser men, that you do not make of his hesitation an insult, or of his silence a slight to be answered. But there is no comfort in being spared of a blade when one has already braced for the cut. 

It leaves him unbalanced, with nothing to defend himself against or with. 

“Have I ever been merciful enough to let a man mistake my silence for contentment?” 

It should reassure him and, in some dreadful way, it does. 

He has seen enough of you to know the truth of it. You are not a woman made for silent suffering, not one to dress displeasure in patience and call it virtue. If you found him lacking, if his touch repulsed you, if the life he has given you proved too small or too cold or too poorly made to bear, you would not leave him to discover it through whispers and guesses. 

You would tell him. 

Your hand remains between you. Still offered, still waiting. Not withdrawn because of his evasion, not pressed closer to force an answer from him. The patience of it is almost unbearable. 

He looks at it because looking at your face would be worse. Your palm, the curve of your fingers, the faint marks left by years handling dragon reins. A hand he has taken before in public because courtesy allowed it, a hand he has helped into carriages, led through halls, raised once to his mouth before witnesses because that was what husbands and princes could do when watched. 

This is not that. 

The truth rises slowly, dragging shame with it. It is a small thing, that is what makes it indefensible. To want the Kingdoms would be cleaner, to want victory, vengeance, glory, even your body beneath his in the plain, brutal language of what he was taught to call pleasure, all of that could be named and be made grand enough to hide inside. 

But it is only your hand. And only the want to take it because you have offered it, because you are near, because he has missed you, because some starving part of him wants to know what it would mean to hold and not perform, to be welcomed and not measured. 

“I want to.” He answers finally, and the words feel in equal parts spoken and given up.  

Nothing happens. No laughter, no triumph sharpening your mouth, no satisfaction at having dragged the truth from him and laid it between you like a beast presenting a fresh kill. Your hand remains where it is, offered still, and for one terrible moment Aemond understands you will not close that distance for him. 

The mercy is almost crueler. 

“Only if you wish to.” You say, even quieter now. 

His jaw tightens. “You have made that clear.” 

“Have I?” 

He looks at your hand again, but does not move. 

“Painfully.” 

Something like a smile touches at your mouth, there for a breath and then gone. 

“Then I shall endeavor not to repeat myself.” 

His hand moves before he can make a choice of it. Perhaps that is the only reason it moves at all. 

He cannot make himself move with the surety of a prince accepting what is owed to him, nor with the practiced ease of a husband reaching for his wife in the quiet of their own rooms. His fingers cross the small distance between you, instead, with all the ridiculous caution of a man approaching dragonfire. 

Then his hand is in yours. Your palm is warm, your fingers soft. 

“Your expression is quite grave for a man holding his wife’s hand.” 

And humor slips past the uncertainty.  

“It is a grave matter.” 

This time, your smile remains, “So I see.” 

A bared truth even in jest, a quiet moment and even quieter understanding; they offer a moment of reprieve form ever-advancing flames. But a cool breeze makes all the more apparent the gaps in one’s armor, and so Aemond cannot help the instinct that drives him to try and hide them. 

“You are enjoying this.” He accuses, half-braced for a humiliation his own thoughts will flay him with even if you won’t. 

“No. I am taking care not to.” You retort, not without your own edge, your own affront at the accusation. 

The familiarity of it should comfort him, perhaps. It should be enough that you do not laugh, that you do not press the advantage of what he has admitted, that you allow the want to sit between you without immediately making something sharp or shameful of it. Instead, it leaves him with nowhere to place the judgement he had already braced himself to receive, nowhere to set don the accusation that has lived in him so long it has begun to sound like truth. 

“Husband,” He looks up despite himself, with the idle, humiliating thought that even hunting hounds answer to a call to heel more slowly than he just has. “I do not intend to mock you.” 

“You should.” 

The words leave him before pride can make better soldiers of them, and for a moment even the fire seems too loud in the silence that follows. Your thumb stills over his knuckles, not withdrawn, not tightened in warning, only still, and somehow that small pause feels more like a question than anything you could have asked aloud. 

“Should I?” He has no answer that does not shame him further. His jaw works once, uselessly, and the silence that follows is so wretchedly like confession that he nearly pulls his hand from yours to spare himself the sight of it. You do not let him pretend you have missed it, pressing, “I would like to know what offense I am meant to be answering.” 

His mouth tightens, and he looks away for a moment. 

“You know." 

“If I knew, I would not have asked.” 

That is not entirely true, perhaps. You know enough. He can see it in the stillness of your face, in the way your fingers do not tighten around his, in the care with which you leave him room to withdraw and do not pretend you have not noticed that he wants to. 

“Because this is not all.” He says ay last. The words leave him rougher than intended, almost an accusation, as if you have placed the want in him by naming it, as if he had not carried it long before your hand ever opened between you. 

Your gaze does not stray from his. Not for an instant. 

“No,” You agree quietly, “I did not think it was.” 

His fingers tighten around yours by a fraction. 

“I want you.” 

For a moment, the room seems to empty around the words, around the sound of them spoken plainly enough that no vow, no darkness, no duty can catch them before they fall. He has said less intimate things with his mouth against your skin, done more intimate things beneath the cover of duty, darkness, and the vows that gave his want a lawful shape. There have been nights when he has known the heat of you, the sound of you, the shape of your body beneath his hands, and still none of it felt as obscene as this: the naked naming of the want before it can be made useful, before it can be hidden inside expectation, before he can pretend that the wanting is only another thing required of him. 

You do not look pleased in the way he fears. There is no triumph in you, no coy satisfaction, no delicate pretense that you have not understood the plainness of what he said. If there is pleasure in your face, and there is, it is quieter than victory and far more difficult for Aemond to witness and endure. 

“I know.” You say. The gentleness of it is nearly enough to make him cruel in exchange. 

“Then you know what I have failed to do.” 

Your brows draw together, “You speak as though there was a task set before you.” 

“Was there not?” 

“No.” 

His jaw tightens again, “You are my wife.” 

“I am.” 

“And I am your husband.” 

“You are.” 

“Then do not pretend not to know what that requires.” 

You hold his gaze for a moment, and something in your expression sharpens. Not cruelty, correction. 

“I know what marriage requires of us,” You state. Your fingers remain steady around his. “That is not what I have ever asked of you, or what I am asking of you now.” 

He has no answer for that. What you voice is too clean a division for him to trust. Marriage, duty, want, touch, proof, all of it has lived too closely together in him for too long, tangled until he can no longer tell which thing moved first and which merely followed because it had nowhere else to go. 

“You wanted me,” You continue, quieter, “You wanted to lie with me tonight.” 

The bluntness of it burns more than euphemism would have. 

“And I wanted you to,” You confess. His breath catches, but you continue before he can think of a response. “But wanting it did not make you ready for all that came with it.” 

Affront laps at his insides, a sting that draws from him an instinct, a defensiveness, older than anything else he knows about himself. Aemond draws back, but foolishly, pathetically, he cannot bring himself to pull his hand from your hold. 

“You think me incapable.” Sn accusation. Cold, formal, familiar. 

“No.” 

“Deficient?” The word comes too quickly, too nakedly, and he regrets it almost before it has fully left him.  

Something sharp passes over your face then. Not anger, not quite, but the kind of displeasure Aemond is aware you reserve only for errors too important to leave uncorrected. 

“I think you have mistaken readiness for worth,” His mouth parts, but no answer comes. “Wanting something does not mean you are ready for it.” 

“Hm.” The response is clipped, a refusal to concede forced to face the inability to argue at this moment. 

Your gaze softens by a degree, and you admit, “I heard that often enough in me youth. I hated it less with time. Mostly because it was true.” 

He looks down at your joined hands, at the way your fingers hold his without force and without uncertainty, and hates that even this has become something he does not know how to understand without first asking what it proves, what it requires of him in exchange. 

“You know this.” You say, almost an afterthought.  

His eye lifts back to yours, “What are you saying?” 

“You wanted Vhagar, what she is, what she means, what she proves, before you were ready to carry the weight of her,” The name stills something in him. Brings forth a past, a child, a fear, an emptiness, he’d rather leave buried under damp sand and blood-soaked stone. “That did not make you unworthy.” 

His mouth tightens to a line, “You presume much.” 

“I observe much,” You retort with ease, “There is a difference.” 

He should resent the answer. He nearly does. But your hand remains around his, and there is no cruelty in your gaze, only that terribly daunting precision. 

“And what is it you think I am not ready for?” 

You do not answer at once. He almost wishes you would. A quick answer might be easier to resent, easier to cast aside, easier to make into arrogance or pity or some other uglier thing he knows what to do with. 

“I think you want me,” You whisper, and though he has already admitted it, though the words came from his own lips, hearing them from yours still leaves him unnervingly still, feeling so unbearably exposed his very skin seems to crawl uncomfortably. Your thumb moves once over the back of his hand, and you continue, “I think you want to touch me. 

Your hand turns his over with ease, for the first time since your hands joined taking control of the way contact between the two of you is to happen. You turn his palm upwards, and your fingers trap his in their spot with delicate strength, while your thumb rests with precision over his pulse point. 

Aemond’s breath hitches, and in the quiet of the room it sounds as loud as any words that you have just stolen from him could have been. 

Quietly, you finish, “And I think you want me to touch you.” 

The last of it strikes too close to the loosened fastenings at his throat, to the small place where your fingers had found skin and made nakedness out of almost nothing. 

For a moment, some frantic part of him searches for the fault in what you have said. Not because it is false, but because it is not false enough. Because if he can find arrogance in it, presumption, some insult hidden in the care with which you have spoken, then he can make distance of it. He can make a door. 

A trapped animal will gnaw through its own leg if the alternative is remaining caught, and Aemond understands the impulse all too well. 

“Do not presume to know every want in me.”  

He hears the edge in his own voice and knows, with a disgust too tired to become correction, that he has placed it there on purpose. There is no wound made by your question, no insult hidden beneath the care of it, and still he reacts, because some cornered thing in him would rather make a wound of this than stand undefended before your attention. 

“I do not,” Your answer is immediate, “That is why I am asking.” 

He looks away, but it is not a flinch this time. Not so sharp, not so sudden. It is something slower, heavier, as if the shame has tired him enough that even retreat has lost its old precision. 

With your point already made, with your hold over him already proven, you maneuver both your hands again, returning to the familiarity of your previous hold. 

“It…It does not…remain itself.” 

Your fingers tighten around his, “What doesn’t?” 

“This,” His hand tightens in exchange once, then loosens, because for a moment even holding you as you hold him risks proving the point. “Want, t-touch. It becomes something else before I can stop it.” 

“Duty?” 

“Yes.” 

“A test?” His silence answers before he does. A breath, and quieter, uncharacteristically tentative, you ask, “A lesson?” 

He closes his eye. It feels like defeat. 

“I…think too much,” Aemond admits, too late realizing that he has just repeated another’s words, words he had whispered into his ear as a woman whose voice dripped of falseness in a place stinking of incense and sweat tried to entice his body to respond in a way it refused to. He forces himself to continue, “Where my hands are, or where they ought to be. What is expected, or…enough.” 

He swallows, forces words past a tight throat, and he attempts to pretend the words are not his, that he is not the one baring himself, exposing more than flesh. 

“Whether you are pleased, or only kind. Whether I learned any of it…wrong,” His hand tightens around yours, not enough to hurt, only enough to prove he is still holding something real. “I do not know how to want you without making it another place to fail you.” 

For a long moment, an unbearable moment, you say nothing. 

Then your hand turns beneath his until your fingers can lace with his own, the gesture slow enough that he may stop it and gentle enough that he wouldn’t dare to. 

“Then what if you did not have to?” 

His gaze returns to yours. 

“Have to what?” 

“Touch me,” You answer. The words settle between you with a weight he does not understand at first. Your thumb moves once against the back of his hand. “Or think.” 

There is a part of him that still looks for the wound in it. Some last, faithful instinct of a beast that would rather cut its own maws on an approaching spear than accept there may be no blow coming, no enemy hidden in the mercy of your hand. Some cornered thing desperate enough for blood that it would make the blood its own, if only to prove there had been danger after all.  

But even that instinct is tired. 

His breath catches. 

He should take offense, perhaps. Some sharper, prouder part of him waits for it, waits for indignation to rise and save him from the terrible mercy of what you are offering. 

It does not come. 

There is only the thought of being spared, for once, the endless, wretched work of turning his own body into something that can be of use to you, that cannot fail you. 

“What if you did not have to touch me?” You offer, eyes dark and voice catching on something like desire. “What if you did not have to think?” 

Aemond has no answer. 

For the first time in the entire night, perhaps in much longer, the absence of one does not feel like failure.

Thank you for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts!