cozy anthropomorphism @buchanqn - Tumblr Blog

✦ — JOIN ME IN DEATH ..!

summary: haunted by the memories of his dead wife who died centuries ago, the new maid was the last thing baelor targaryen expected. so was the fact that you wore her face. (9k+)

pairing: baelor targaryen x fem!reader

content: vampire!au, vampire!baelor, maid!reader, reader looks exactly like his dead wife and he is not okay about it, so much yearning, gothic horror romance, slowburn, baelors deceased wife has no name nor any looks described, feeding, blood, smut 18+ (MDNI). it's a heavy fic but i promise its worthy at the end!

You almost didn't take the job.

Not because of the rumours, though there were enough of those floating around the village to give anyone pause. Old money, they said. Strange hours. A lord who nobody had seen in years, maybe longer. A house that went through staff the way other houses went through candles. You had sat with the letter of acceptance in your hands for two full days before you packed your bag, and even then you had told yourself it was only until something better came along.

Something better hadn't come along in eight months, and you needed to eat, so here you were.

The coach broke a wheel three miles out and you walked the rest of it, which meant you arrived at the Targaryen keep with aching feet and a fine coating of road dust and absolutely no patience left for being intimidated by architecture. You looked at it coming up the drive, the towers, the iron-spiked walls, the yew trees grown so tall and dense overhead that the light inside their canopy had gone green and strange.

You lifted the iron knocker, which was shaped like a dragon's head and heavier than it had any right to be, and let it fall.

The sound it made went somewhere deep into the house and kept going.

The woman who opened the door was perhaps sixty, with a face that had aged from gracefulness into something considerably more formidable, dark eyes that missed nothing, and a ring of iron keys at her hip. She opened the door slightly and looked at you and stopped.

Not her feet. She was still standing, still holding the door. But something in her simply stopped, her expression, which had been arranged in the careful neutral of professional appraisal, went through something she couldn't quite contain, a flinch that wasn't quite a flinch, there for two seconds and then locked down behind her eyes and gone.

She looked at your collar. Then your hands. She looked anywhere but your face.

"You're the new girl," she said. Her voice gave nothing at all away.

"Yes, ma'am." You say softly, as she opens the door wider to let you inside.

"Come in. Mind the step."

The entrance hall was vast and dim, the ceiling swallowed in shadow, the walls hung with tapestries so old their colours had bled into a single dark richness. Between two of the torches on the far wall hung a portrait of a dark-haired man painted with the careful attention of someone who expected the portrait to outlast everything around it. He was looking slightly past the viewer, and there was something about the stillness of his expression, the weight behind his eyes, that made it difficult to look at directly.

Every torch in the entrance hall bent sideways at once.

All of them, the same direction, the same moment the flames nearly went out and the shadows went wild across the walls and the tapestries rippled like something had moved through the room very fast. Then the flames straightened once more and the light resettled. Everything was exactly as it had been.

You stood very still.

"The draught," said the woman behind you, not looking up from the small ledger she'd produced. "When the doors open. You'll get used to it."

The doors were closed. You had heard them close behind you.

"Yes, ma'am," you said.

Her name, she told you as she walked you through the house, was Mrs. Calla. She walked through the corridors with her chin held up, her back rigorously straight, and hands clasped in front of her. She walked purposefully, as she showed you the west quarters, where staff slept, the kitchens which were enormous, smelling of that evening’s stew. The laundry, the linen rooms, the great hall under its Holland cloth. She offered nothing the whole time, didn’t ask if you had any questions about the place, the history of its owners, or why people cursed this keep, and the history it came with it.

As she brought you to the east corridor, your footsteps slowed as she slowed her own ahead of you. She stopped at its mouth without entering. The torches were left unlit. The cold coming from it was several degrees below the rest of the house it seemed, and at the far end the darkness was very complete.

"The eastern wing is not for you," she said.

You looked down it. You couldn't see where it ended.

"Not for any of the staff. His Grace keeps his own hours and requires nothing from the household." The keys at her hip went perfectly still. "You will do your work in the rooms I've shown you. You will not come to this side of the house. You will not linger here when you're passing. Is that understood."

"Yes, ma'am." And then, because you had never quite learned to leave things alone: "Does His Grace come through the main house often?"

The pause this time was different from the others.

"His Grace is always in the house," she said. "You will likely never see him. That is how things are meant to be." She turned from the corridor. "Come. I'll show you to your room."

You turned to follow her. And from the far dark end of that passage, something happened to the silence– it changed. It was as though something at the other end of that long dark hall, in some way you couldn't name, become aware that you were there. You walked quickly after Mrs. Calla and didn't look back, ignoring the feeling of being watched.

“Why am I never to see him?” you asked, hurrying to keep pace with her brisk steps.

She did not answer. Whether she had not heard or simply did not care to respond, you could not tell. Her silence felt deliberate.

Your chamber was small and clean with a narrow bed and a window overlooking the kitchen garden. The other bed belonged to a girl named Myrtle, who you met properly the next morning over the basin.

She was pretty in a sharp-featured way, and she smiled readily and showed you the things Mrs. Calla hadn’t covered– which cupboards held the extra cleaning cloths, how Mrs. Calla liked her tea, where the back passage was which would cut ten minutes off the upstairs rounds. SHe was generous with all of it, and you thanked her for it, and she smiled wider, and the whole time something in the back of your mind sat quietly and watched the particular brightness of her attention whenever she asked you a question.

The other maids were much the same, in their different ways. Bessa kept to herself with a bluntness that wasn't quite rude but left no room for warmth either. Ellen watched you from across the room at mealtimes with the flat curiosity of someone waiting to see what you'd do wrong. The rest acknowledged you when courtesy required it and otherwise moved around you doing they're own chores. It wasn't hostile, exactly, just utterly indifferent.

You had been in worse places. You kept your head down and did your work well and told yourself it would ease in time.

Though it didn't ease. But you stopped expecting it to, which amounted to the same thing.

“What’s he like,” you asked Myrtle one evening, when you’d been there long enough that asking didn’t feel too strange. You were both in the chamber, end of the day, and the question came out lighter than it felt, as if you hadn’t been turning it over since your first night. “His Grace. Nobody ever mentions him.”

Myrtle was brushing out her hair. She met your eyes in the small mirror above the basin, and for a moment something moved in her expression, though once it was there it was gone in an instant.

"He keeps to himself," she said.

"Yes, but what's he—"

"There's nothing to tell." Her voice had flattened in a way it hadn't before, the easy brightness gone out of it. "He's the lord of the house and he keeps to his wing and that's that." She looked back at her own reflection. "I wouldn't go asking the others either. Nobody likes questions about him."

You looked at the back of her head for a moment.

"All right, sorry," you said, not exactly knowing what you even were apologising for, but it felt awkward not too. So you dropped it. But that night you lay awake in the dark and listened to the house settle and thought about the look that had moved through Myrtle's face, quick and unguarded, before she'd shut it away. Not the expression of someone who found the question boring.

The expression of someone who found the question dangerous.

The footsteps started the third night.

You woke for no reason, the way you sometimes did, snapping up out of sleep as though your name had been called, though you would only wake up to find the room dark and quiet and Myrtle a still shape in the other bed.

Then, from directly overhead, footsteps.

Slow and perfectly even, moving from one end of the upper corridor to the other. They had the wrong quality for a person's footsteps. Too light, for one thing, they made no sound on the boards, no creak, no shift of weight. They moved the way sound moves through water, constant and unhurried, and they went to the far end of the corridor and came back, and went again, and came back again, back and forth in their tireless circuit, and you lay in the dark and listened to them with your eyes open and your heart doing something quiet and strange.

You fell asleep to the footsteps eventually. You didn't tell anyone in the morning, you hadn't had a reason to.

A week later you saw him coincidentally.

You were up in the small hours for water, and the corridor outside your room was dark, and at the far end of it near the main staircase there was a figure. Tall, dressed in dark that made him almost part of the shadow behind him. Dark hair, his jaw was unshaven, flecks of grey brushing along the sides like soft scars from time itself. He stood with a quiet strength, not the rigid stillness of someone frozen in place, but the deep calm of a man who had walked long and carried far too much for far too long.

He wasn't looking at you. His face was turned toward the stairs, or toward something above it, or toward nothing at all. He gave no sign that he knew you were there, and yet some part of you was absolutely certain that he did.

Then he moved sideways, unhurried, toward the east corridor, and rounded the corner and was gone.

You stood in the dark with your cup in your hand and your heart doing whatever it was doing, and then you got your water and went back to bed.

You didn't sleep for a long time after.

It was Myrtle who found you the following week, cheerful, arms full of fresh linen, smile already in place.

"Mrs. Calla wants the library in His Grace's wing seen to," she said. "She asked me to pass it on– only I've got my hands full this morning." A small, practised shift of the linens. "You don't mind, do you? East corridor, last door on the left. It'll be unlocked."

You looked at her. The smile. The ready, bright eyes.

You thought about the quality of her face the evening you'd asked about him. The flatness that had come down over it.

"Mrs. Calla asked specifically for me?" you said, your brows drawn together in confusion.

"She said whoever was free." A slight tilt of the head. "You're free, aren't you?"

You stood there for a moment and turned the situation over once in your mind.

Then you thought: you have no proof of anything, only a feeling, and feelings aren't grounds for refusing work.

"All right," you said.

Myrtle's smile got wider. "You're a love."

She went. You watched her go. Then you picked up your cleaning things and turned toward the east corridor and reminded yourself firmly that it was just a library, and went.

You found that the corridor was different when you were walking into it with purpose. It felt less oppressive, or so you told yourself. The darkness at the far end was just a wall and a door, the cold was just a passage that got no sun. You moved through it steadily and didn’t let yourself hesitate.

You passed the portraits on the walls without looking closely. Figures in the clothing of other centuries, some figures with pale blonde-like hair, very few had dark coloured hair. They were the same strong bones repeated across numerous different faces and different eras. Generations of them.

The library door opened easily under your hand.

You stopped in the doorway for a moment because you couldn't help it.

The room was enormous, the walls lined floor to ceiling with books whose spines had cracked and faded into something richer than their original colours. The smell of old paper and leather was thick enough to be almost a taste. Two tall windows let the pale morning light in, though it were still dark as the curtains were drawn slightly closed. There was a wingback chair angled toward the cold fireplace with a book left open on the arm, not placed there carefully, just abandoned, as though whoever had been reading it had stood up mid-thought and hadn't come back.

You stepped inside and got to work.

You were careful with everything. The books you only dusted at their edges, barely touching them. The table you cleared and wiped slowly. The rug you swept with long, gentle strokes. The room had a quality that made you want to move quietly in it, not the imposed quiet of formal rooms but something else, the specific hush of a place that has held a great deal of feeling over a very long time. You moved through it and the work was almost peaceful, and the pale light shifted and the dust moved in it, and you were bent over the far side of the table working at a watermark near the edge when the room changed.

Not a sound. Not anything you could point to. Only that the room had been empty and then it wasn't, a shift in the air or the light or something beneath both, and you straightened and turned.

He was in the doorway.

You hadn't heard anything. Not the door, not footsteps in the corridor, nothing. He was simply there, and the stillness of him had a physical weight to it, like the stillness of things that have been still for a very long time. Tall, dark-haired, unshaven, dressed in clothing that seemed to take the light from around it rather than give any back. His nose had been broken, you noticed, the bridge of it slightly off-true. His hands, loose at his sides, were large and scarred in the particular way of a man who had spent his life in armour.

His eyes were mismatched. One a dark, earthly brown, the other a blue, and they were looking at you. They had something in them that made the breath go out of you very quietly. He looked the same from when you had saw him coincidentally days ago, though this time it didn't stop the flutter in your chest when you looked at him properly, only to find him looking directly at you.

It was the look of a man confronted with something impossible. He wasn't frightened, it was something much larger than frightened, something that had too much in it to fit into any single expression. His gaze moved over your face, following the lines of it the way you follow something known by memory so long that the memory has worn grooves, and the rawness in it, the private and completely unguarded rawness, was the most unsettling thing you’d seen since you arrived.

He didn’t breathe, at least it seemed like he didn’t.

The silence of the library made it very clear that he didn’t breathe, and you noticed this, and the noticing of it moved through you cold and slow and you didn’t look at it too directly.

"What are you doing here."

Not a question. The shape of one, gutted out.

"I was told–"

He moved.

You didn't see it. He was in the doorway and then the next second the distance between you had halved and you were looking up at him and your mind was still trying to find the steps that had crossed that distance and couldn't. He was close enough that you had to tilt your chin to hold his eyes, and the quality of his looking had changed– had become something that pressed, that had several hundred years behind it pushing forward all at once.

"Are you her?"

The words barely had sound in them.

"Did the gods send you back."

Your mouth had gone dry. Your heart was in your throat doing something undignified. You opened your mouth to answer and found the beginning of no sentence at all, confusion swarming your head.

"Your Grace, I—"

"Answer me."

His hand came up. It wasn't a decision– you could see that it wasn't, could see the motion happening without his permission, his body acting on something older and more insistent than intention. His fingers stopped just short of your jaw. Close enough that you felt the cold coming off them, the specific cold of things that haven't been warm in a very long time.

"You—" he started, something breaking open at the back of his voice.

"Your Grace." Mrs. Calla's voice from the doorway cut through everything clean.

His hand dropped. Something moved behind his face– not a flinch, he was far too composed for flinching, but a shift inside the composure, like watching something huge quietly absorb a blow. His eyes went carefully, deliberately still.

You turned. Mrs. Calla stood in the doorway with her keys motionless at her hip, looking at you with the expression of someone whose worst suspicion has just been confirmed.

She didn't look at him. Only at you.

"She isn't permitted in this wing," she said. Perfectly even. "I'll see to it that it doesn't happen again."

She crossed the room and took your arm and steered you toward the door, and you went, because there was nothing else to do but get dragged away from him. Your cleaning equipment were still on the table, it stayed completely forgotten.

“I was sent,” you said, the words tumbling out too quickly. “One of the girls told me you asked for the library to be clean, I was merely just doing what I was told.”

Mrs. Calla turned then, slowly. Her eyes moved over you with the same measured distance she gave dirt or to hard to get rid of stains in the walls of the ancient castle. But when her gaze reached your face, it lingered too long.

"You will not come to this side of the castle again," she said. "Under any instruction, from any person in this household other than me. No reason is good enough. Do you hear me girl?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Go."

You went.

You were thirty feet down the corridor when his voice came through the closed door, low and barely carrying, rougher than it had been in the library.

"She looks like–"

Mrs. Calla's voice over it immediately, flat and final as a door swung shut.

"It is mere coincidence, Your Grace. She is nothing but a maid."

Silence then followed, and you can just imagine him creasing his eyebrows together in thought.

You kept walking and did not stop, because stopping meant standing in the corridor with those words settling around you, nothing but a maid, mere coincidence, and thinking about the look on his face. About the way his hand had risen without him deciding to raise it. About the rawness in his voice when he'd said did the gods send you back, like a question he had stopped letting himself ask a long time ago and had asked anyway.

You walked back to the west quarters and you didn't think about any of it.

You were mostly successful.

You were still awake when the scream came.

It tore through the house without warning– high, full, with all the breath behind it a person had, and was swallowed by the walls before it could finish itself, cut off in the specific way sounds are cut off when something stops them rather than when they simply end.

You were sitting up before you'd finished being asleep.

The room came together around you. Ceiling, walls, curtain, the candelabra on the table between the beds.

Though oddly enough you found that Myrtle's bed was empty, which was unusual, as the girl loved sleep, and followed a strict bed-time routine.

Her blanket seemed to have been shoved back sharply, the pillow still dented. Her nightgown still on the chair beside the bed, which meant she hadn't just gone down the corridor. The window was dark. The house was silent.

Your stomach said what it said and you didn't argue with it.

You lit the candelabra with hands that weren't quite steady, pulled your shawl around your shoulders, and went to the door.

You stood there with your hand on the latch and you thought about Mrs. Calla's voice. You will not come to this side of the house. No reason is good enough.

Then you thought about Myrtle's nightgown on the chair and the sound that had come through the walls. Even though she had tried getting you in trouble with Mrs. Calla, you still were quite fond of her.

The keep at half past two was a different house.

Not only darker, nut the corridors also felt longer, the distances between doors stretched somehow, the shadows in the corners heavier than shadows had any right to be, as though they had been there long enough to acquire substance. You moved through the main hall with your candelabra making its small warm circle and your footsteps too loud on the stone, and you stood in the centre of it and listened.

From upstairs, on the east side, a sound followed the dead of the night again.

It wasn't a scream, it was worse than a scream. Lower, wetter, the sound a body makes past the point of screaming, when screaming has been used up and something more fundamental takes over. It hit you in the stomach and lodged there.

Then it stopped.

The silence after it was enormous.

You stood at the bottom of the staircase and you were afraid in the plain, physical way that operates below thought, in the stomach and the knees and the back of the throat. You stood in it and let it be what it was.

You climbed up the stairs without thinking straight of what you would even do when you find the source of the sound. You noticed that the upper east corridor was cold enough at night that your breath showed. You silently confirmed to yourself that you preferred being in the east corridors in the morning.

Portraits lined the walls, the same figures that all had similar features, from downstairs’ portraits, the same bones repeated across generations, the same set of the jaw in different arrangements. Your candelabra made them shift and live as you passed, and you moved through them without slowing.

Aerion, read one brass plate. The face beneath it was beautiful and wrong around the eyes, the kind of wrongness that sits in the arrangement rather than any single feature. Maekar, it looked like they were somehow related, he had a scar along his jaw, something locked-down in his expression that made him look like a man perpetually expecting the worst. And as you walked down the hall you passed others you didn't know, names that meant nothing to you, faces that shared their architecture across centuries.

You moved through them and didn't linger, following the corridor to its slight bend, and turned the corner.

Though your how body turned to cold, the candelabra nearly left your hand.

She was looking back at you.

Not at you– the painted gaze went past you, fixed on some middle distance that no longer existed. But her face. The line of her jaw. The particular shape of her mouth, the way her brows sat, the specific arrangement of features that you had looked at in the glass every single day of your life and knew the way you knew your own handwriting, the way you knew the backs of your own hands.

It was your face.

Your face. In oil paint. In a frame aged dark at the corners, on a woman dressed in clothing of another century, in a portrait that had been hanging on this wall for far longer than your grandmother's grandmother had been alive.

You stood there and your mind did something strange– it simply refused, at first. You stood there and looked and your mind said no very quietly and then said it again, and then the painting kept being what it was and the brass plate beneath it kept reading the date it read, centuries ago, so far back the number looked abstract, and your mind ran out of no's and had to let the thoughts in.

Your hand came up. You didn't decide to raise it. Your fingers moved toward the canvas as though they already knew the way, toward the painted jaw that was your jaw, the painted mouth that was your mouth, and you were thinking– if thinking was even the word for the static hum taking up residence behind your eyes, that you were losing your mind. That this was what losing your mind felt like, this specific and terrible clarity, this moment of standing in a corridor in the dark and recognising yourself in a painting made before anyone you had ever known had been born. You though to yourself that you should leave. That you should turn around right now and go back down the corridor and down the stairs and out of this house and never come back, position or no position, because whatever this was it was not something you were equipped for, it was not something any person was equipped for—

Beside her in the portrait, a man. Dark hair, dark eyes, one hand resting near hers with the care of someone who has learned not to take that nearness for granted. His expression in paint was the quietest thing in the whole corridor– not the locked-down grimness of Maekar, not the beautiful wrongness of Aerion. Just a man looking at something he loved, captured at the exact moment he forgot anyone was watching.

Your fingers nearly reached the canvas.

"I wouldn't touch that."

You spun so fast the flames nearly went out.

He was at the bend of the corridor, and the candlelight found him almost immediately. His hair was slightly disheveled, he seemed the same as when you had saw him in the library, though much different in ways you couldn't name.

His hands were at his sides. His hands, which seemed dark in the shadow, but not shadow-dark, the reddish-brown dark of something dried into the creases of his knuckles, worked into the lines of his fingers, under his nails. At the corner of his mouth, the same stain, smeared like an attempt had been made at wiping it away.

You knew what it was. The knowledge settled into your body before your mind had finished finding words for it, heavy and certain and cold, and everything in you that had any sense at all took a very large step backward inside your own chest.

"Those sounds," you said. Your voice was someone else's, thin and unsteady. "Earlier. The yelling. What–"

"It's done." Quiet. The deliberate, careful quiet of someone managing something. "It has nothing to do with you."

"Where is Myrtle." The question came straight out of you, no preamble. "Her bed is empty. I heard a woman–"

"She's alive."

The flatness of it. The indifference threaded through it, not cruelty exactly but the absence of any particular concern, and the absence was worse than cruelty would have been.

"That isn't—"

"That's all I'm going to tell you."

He stepped toward you.

One step, slow and deliberate, and you stepped back without deciding to, and then again when he took another, until your back found the wall of the corridor and your hand tightened on the candelabra until your knuckles ached. He stopped. He was close enough now that you could see his chest wasn't moving, not the stillness of a man holding his breath, the stillness of a man who had simply stopped needing to. You watched for it and it didn't come and the cold moved through you slow and deep.

"You're frightened," he said. Observing it. Not apologising for it.

"You have blood on your hands." Your voice shook on the last word and you hated it. "On your mouth. I don't know what happened in this castle tonight and you won't tell me and yes, I am frightened, I think that's a reasonable—"

"Look at me."

You looked at him instantly. You couldn't stop looking at him, that was half the problem.

"I mean really look." Something shifted in his voice, underneath the quiet of it. "Not at my hands. At me."

You looked. The mismatched eyes, the grey specks across his beard, the face of a man who had been a soldier once and carried it still in the way he stood, in the particular way his grief sat in his expression, not worn on the surface the way fresh grief is worn, but settled deep, the grief of something that has had a very long time to become part of the bone.

He reached up, slowly, and you went rigid, and he stopped. His hand suspended in the air between you, not touching you, giving you every opportunity to move or speak or refuse.

You didn't move.

He reached out slowly and pushed a loose strand of hair from your face, one careful motion, and his fingers didn't linger and his eyes didn't leave yours.

"I have been in this house," he said quietly, "since before anyone alive can remember. I have watched every person I knew and loved so dearly become dust.” His eyes were very steady as his voice calmly said it. "I stopped wanting things a long time ago. I stopped letting myself. It was the only way to get through the years without–" He stopped. Something worked in his jaw. "And then you walked through my door."

"Don't," you said softly.

"You bent every flame in this house toward you when you crossed the threshold." His voice had dropped lower, something private in it now, something that had not been said to anyone before this corridor, this dark, this moment. "I felt you arrive. In three hundred years I have never felt a person arrive, nor did i care that someone had arrived."

"Your Grace." Your voice was barely above a whisper.

"She used to stand exactly the way you were standing in the library." The words came out like they cost him something. "Her head at that angle. The way you turned when you heard me." You watched his adams apple bobble, as he fought to say the words. "I have not seen that in three hundred years and you did it without knowing, and I—" He stopped himself. Breathed in slowly. "I know you're not her. I am not a fool and I am not so far gone that I cannot tell the difference between a ghost and a living woman." His eyes moved across your face, that slow and aching attention. "But you are something. And I find I cannot make myself believe that it is nothing."

You were pressed against the wall and your heart was doing something unreasonable and you were still terrified, the blood on his hands still dark at the edges of your vision, and underneath the terror was something else entirely that you had absolutely no intention of examining.

"I'm afraid of you," you said. Plain and quiet. The only honest thing you had left was said.

Something in his face changed when you said it. Not surprise, something more like pain, the private kind, the kind a person absorbs and doesn't show except in the split second before they manage to hide it.

"I know," he said. "I know you are."

He moved closer.

You pressed harder into the wall. "Don't—"

"I am not going to hurt you." He said almost instantly, his voice dropping to almost nothing. "I need you to understand that the way you understand that you are breathing. Whatever you have heard. Whatever you think you have seen tonight." His jaw tightened. "I would sooner end three hundred more years in this house than put a single bruise on you. Do you hear me."

Not a question.

"I have hurt the only person I—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "I could not keep her. Whatever happened, I could not keep her, and there is not a night in three centuries I haven't stood somewhere in this house and known that." His voice was the quietest thing in the corridor. "I would not survive doing it twice."

The silence was enormous.

Your heart was very loud in it.

His head bent.

Slowly, with the full awareness of what he was doing, he pressed his lips to the side of your throat. Barely any pressure– just the cool fact of his mouth against your skin, cool the way stone is cool in winter, cool the way things are that have not been warm in a very long time. You felt it land and you felt your own pulse jump against it and you heard the smallest sound leave him.

"You're here," he said against your skin. The words barely words at all. "You're here and I can hear your heart."

His jaw dragged slowly upward, the grey-stubbled roughness of it catching the soft skin beneath your ear, and the sound you made was very quiet and deeply, entirely honest.

"Please." Your voice had nothing left to steady it. "Please, you have to stop." Though you didn't want him to stop.

His teeth grazed your pulse. Gentle. So gentle. A question, not a demand, the most careful thing in the world.

You made a sound that answered it completely against your will.

He went still.

Absolutely still, his mouth resting against your pulse, and the corridor was silent and you were breathless and your hands were flat against the wall behind you and you were not pulling away, you were not pulling away, and you hated yourself for it in the most breathless and unconvincing way.

He lifted his head.

He stepped back. Letting the cold in.

He looked at you and you looked back at him and his face was barely contained- the grief and the three hundred years of it and something else pressing right up against the surface, his mismatched eyes very bright in the candlelight.

"Go," he said. Low and rough, stripped bare.

He turned toward the portrait. Toward her face. Toward your face.

"Go back to your room." His hands at his sides, very still, the dried blood dark against his skin. "Before I do something that I won't be sorry for. And you will."

And so you went.

Down the corridor and down the stairs and through the main hall and back to your room, and you didn't look back once, though you felt his gaze on you the entire length of it– unblinking, steady, like light that has been traveling so long it no longer remembers what it left behind, only that it was always meant to find you.

Myrtle's bed was still empty when you returned to your chambers, though you couldn't bring yourself to care, if she hadn't disappeared then you wouldn't have had the interaction with Baelor in the hall. But you wouldn't let yourself admit that. Gods forgive you.

You sat on the edge of yours and let your fingers graze the side of your throat. To the place where his lips had been, still feeling the scratch of his beard against your neck. Your pulse was still going too fast, still loud, still embarrassingly honest.

You told yourself what you felt was relief.

The almost was the problem.

The almost was going to be the problem for a very long time you thought to yourself.

Two weeks passed and Myrtle did not come back.

Nobody said anything about it. That was the part that sat strangest, not the absence itself but the silence around it, the way the other maids moved around the empty bed in your chamber like it was something they all privately agreed not to see.

When you had asked Mrs. Calla, and said that Myrtle appeared to be missing, she looked at you for a long moment and said that she had left to attend to a family matter and would not be returning, and the way she said it left absolutely no room for a follow-up.

So you let it close. You went back to your work. You kept your head down and did your rounds and ate your meals in the kitchen with the other girls who did not speak to you, and every night you lay in the room that was now entirely yours and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the east corridor.

You mostly failed.

The dreams were the worst of it. They came every few nights, never quite the same but always connected to each other somehow. It started with the corridor, the candlelight, his lips against your throat. Though in the dreams it didn’t stop where it had stopped. In the dreams his teeth found your pulse point and broke it open, and the feeling of it was not what you expected, it was not pain, it was something else entirely. You woke from those dreams with your hand pressed to the side of your neck and your heart going too fast and a feeling in your chest you refused to name.

You thought about the way he had pushed the hair from your face. One careful motion. Like he already knew the weight of it.

You thought about I would sooner end three hundred more years in this house than put a single bruise on you, said in a voice so quiet it barely existed.

You thought about the sound he had made when his lips touched your throat– barely anything, barely a sound, the sound of a man setting something down that he had been holding for three hundred years.

You thought about all of it more than you should, and you stayed well away from the east corridor, and you told yourself that was the end of it, that it was for the best.

But it wasn't the end of it. You knew it wasn't the end of it. But you could pretend, in the daylight, while you worked, and pretending was something you were good at.

The curiosity was what undid you.

It had been building since the night you’d seen the portrait. Who was she? Not what she was to him, you knew what she was to him, it was written plainly in every line of his face in that painting. But who? What had she been like before she became a grief that had lasted three centuries and showed no sign of ending.

You wanted to see the portrait again. You told yourself that firmly, several times over the course of the evening. Just the portrait. You were not going to the east wing because of him. You were going in spite of him, because you had a right to understand whose face you were carrying through someone else's history.

The portrait corridor received you the same way it always did– cold, still, the unlit torches casting nothing, the painted faces watching you pass. You moved through them steadily. You were getting used to them, which felt like its own kind of warning that you were spending too much time here.

You stood infront of her for a long while. Long enough that the candles burned lower. You looked at the differences this time, all the small ones. From the particular fall of her hair, the way her hands were folded, whether the line of her jaw was truly identical or only close. You still didn’t find what you were looking for.

You looked at him beside her. The man he had been before he knew what was coming.

Then, from somewhere further down the wing, further than you had ever gone– a sound.

You went still, deja-vu haunting you.

It was low. Almost nothing. The kind of sound that a house makes settling, or pipes, or wind finding its way through old stone. You told yourself all of those things in quick succession and stood very still and listened and the sound came again, and it was not the house settling. It was a voice. Two voices, maybe, though one of them had a quality that made it difficult to be certain. The voice were low and rhythmic, almost soothing, the way you'd talk to a frightened animal. The other was a girl's voice, high and soft and fading.

You should have gone back to bed, though you followed the sound.

You walked further in the corridor than you'd ever had before, past the portraits, past the library door, into a part of the wing that had no light at all except yours. The doors here were heavy and dark and closed, and the sound was coming from behind one of them, the third on the left, a thin line of dim light at its base.

You stood outside it.

The girl's voice had stopped.

You put your hand on the door and opened it, not thinking twice of it.

The room beyond was a sitting room, or had been once. Heavy furniture pushed to the walls. A low fire in the grate throwing red light across the floor, across the dark shape of a man kneeling, across the still white arm of a girl lying beneath him, her hair fanned out across the floorboards, her face turned to the side and very, very pale.

He had his mouth at her throat.

You understood what you were looking at and what you were looking at did not stop being what it was no matter how long you stood in the doorway. The firelight caught the dark of his hair, the breadth of his shoulders, the way his hand was braced on the floor beside her, and the sound he made was very quiet and very complete, the sound of something entirely focused on what it was doing.

Your hand opened.

The candelabra hit the floor.

The sound it made was enormous in the silence, brass on stone, the clatter of it ricocheting off the walls, and the flames went out and the room was nothing but firelight, and he stopped.

He went completely still, crouched over her, and the stillness had a different quality than his usual stillness. This was the stillness of something interrupted. Of something that had been very far inside itself and had been pulled out suddenly.

He already knew it was you. You understood that even before he moved. He had known the moment the candelabra left your hand, maybe before, he had known the particular sound of your heartbeat in the corridor, had felt you standing outside the door.

He rose.

Slowly and unhurried, with the complete and terrible composure, unfolding to his full height with his back still to you, and you instinctively took a step backward into the doorframe and your hand found the wood of it and held on it. The girl on the floor did not move. Her chest rose barely, she was alive, you told yourself, her chest was moving, but she had not moved.

He turned then. The firelight hit his face and you made a sound, small and involuntary, and pressed yourself back further.

The blood was not like the night with Myrtle, not dried, not old. It was fresh, dark at his mouth, a streak along his throat where it had run. His mismatched eyes found you immediately, across the room, and the expression in them was not guilt, not shame. It was something far more complicated than either of those things, something that had you in it, specifically you, the way his expressions always had you in them now, like you had become the fixed point everything else organised itself around.

You ran.

You turned and you ran, down the dark corridor the way you'd come, your hands out in front of you because the candelabra was behind you and there was nothing but the thin far light of the portrait corridor ahead, and your feet were loud on the stone and your breath was loud and your heart was—

His hand closed around your wrist.

He hadn't made a sound. He was simply suddenly there, at the bend of the corridor, and his hand was around your wrist and your momentum swung you almost into him and you wrenched back and he let you, he let you try to pull back as if his touch burned you, but he did not let go of your wrist.

"Stop," he said.

It wasn’t a command exactly, it was something more careful than a command, something that was asking as much as it was telling.

You pulled against his grip again. It didn't move. It was not painful, not tight, just utterly immovable, the grip of something that was not going to be dislodged by anything you could do and knew it, and was choosing, regardless, to be gentle about it.

"Look at me."

"Let go of me," you said. Your voice was barely a voice. "Let go, please, I won't — I'm not going to say anything, I swear to you I'm not going to say a word to anyone, just let me—"

"I'm not holding you because I think you'll speak." Still that quiet. Still that careful, deliberate calm. "I'm holding you because you're frightened and I need you to hear me before you go."

"I saw—" Your voice cracked. "That girl, she was—"

"Alive." Firm. "She is alive. She will wake in the morning and remember very little and she will be unharmed." A pause. "I do not kill them. I have not killed anyone in a very long time. What you saw tonight was not— I would not have you think it was what happened to Myrtle."

You stopped pulling. Not because you believed him, or not entirely, because something in the specific plainness of the way he said it landed differently than a reassurance would have.

"Then what happened to Myrtle," you said eyes squinting at him.

"Myrtle," he said carefully, "made a choice to come to that part of the house alone in the middle of the night having been told very clearly not to, and she did so because she had been paid to do so by someone who wished you harm. She encountered something in this wing that was not me and was not gentle." His voice stayed level. "I did not touch Myrtle."

You stood in the dark corridor and looked at him and your wrist was still in his hand and the firelight from the room behind you caught the blood on his face, and you felt very many things simultaneously and could not sort them into any useful order. You didn't understand what he said to you mere seconds ago, it was as if he spoke the words in a riddle.

He moved.

Slowly, giving you every opportunity to understand what was happening, he walked you backward until your back met the wall of the corridor, and he stopped there, close, one hand still around your wrist and the other braced on the stone beside your head. Not trapping you, or not only that. Something else in it. The same quality as every time he had been close to you, the specific focused quality of his attention, like the rest of the world had gone slightly out of his consideration and there was only this.

"I need this to survive." The words came out very quietly, and there was nothing performative in them, no attempt to make them easier to hear than they were. "That is the plain truth of it. I need it the way you need food and water and sleep– not as a want, as a requirement. I did not choose what I am. I have done my best to do it without causing lasting harm." His mismatched eyes were steady on yours. "I need you to understand that before you decide what I am."

You looked at his face. The blood at his jaw. The grey threading through the dark of his beard. The eyes, one darker than the other, both entirely fixed on you.

"I'm afraid of you," you said. It came out smaller than the last time you'd said it.

"I know." His thumb moved, once, across the inside of your wrist. Not quite a caress. Something more like a reflex, like his hands had their own ideas about what to do in proximity to you. "I know you are. You are also still here."

You were. You were still here, back against the wall, heart going at a pace he could certainly hear, and you were not screaming and you were not clawing at his hand and the honest reason for that, the one you were least proud of, was standing approximately twelve inches from your face looking at you like you were the only fixed point in three hundred years of motion.

"Don't,"' you said quietly.

"Don't what."

"Look at me like that."

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. The barest thing. "I'm not certain I know how to stop."

The silence held.

Then suddenly breaking the moment of solace, "Did she send you?"

His voice had changed, dropped into a tone which was more lower and more private, the careful evenness giving way to something rawer underneath. His eyes moved over your face, aching attention that never seemed to be able to get enough of what it found there.

"Did she send you to haunt me." Not accusatory. Something far more broken than accusatory. A question asked into the dark by a man who had been asking versions of it for three hundred years and had never gotten an answer. "Because if she did, I would like to know. I would like to understand if this is a punishment or a mercy. I cannot tell, from where I am standing."

"Your Grace—" you started.

"Baelor."

The word came out quietly but with a weight behind it, a firmness. His eyes had not moved from yours.

"Call me Baelor. I have not heard my own name said by a voice that—" He stopped. "Please."

You looked at him. The blood drying at his jaw. The grey at his beard. The ruined, patient, ancient expression on his face.

"Baelor," you said softly.

Something happened in his face when you had said it. Something that had been held very tightly for a very long time loosened, just slightly, it was painful to witness, not because it was ugly but because it was so clearly involuntary, so clearly a thing that had happened to him rather than something he had chosen.

"I don't know what you're talking about," you said. "I don't know anything about why I look the way I look or what it means. I'm sorry for coming into this part of the house. I'm sorry for opening that door. I wasn't– I was going to the portrait, that was all, and I heard something and I–" You stopped. "I'm sorry. I should not have come. I won't tell anyone. I swear to you I won't tell a living soul."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You think I'm angry about the snooping."

The word snooping, in his voice, with the faintest possible inflection, not quite amusement, though it was something drier than amusement, and was unexpected that it punctured something in the tension between you.

"Aren't you?"

"No." He said it simply. "You could take up residence in this wing and I find I would not manage to mind it very much." His eyes moved over your face again, that slow and helpless inventory. "That is the problem, if you want to know. That is the thing I have been standing in this house with for two weeks. You are not supposed to be here and every time you are I find that I cannot make myself want you to leave."

Your heart was doing something your ribs felt inadequate to contain.

"Baelor–"

"You look exactly like her." He said it very quietly, like a confession. "Every angle of you. Every—" He lifted his free hand and his fingers brushed your jaw, just barely, the backs of them, a touch so light it barely registered except that it registered everywhere. "I have spent years with her face in my memory and you are standing in front of me and I cannot– my memory and my eyes cannot be reconciled and it is–" He stopped. His jaw was tight. "It is a very specific kind of madness."

You were not breathing correctly.

His thumb was still on the inside of your wrist, over your pulse, and the touch was so light and so still and so entirely focused that it felt like the loudest thing in the room.

"I look at you," he said, lower, "and I wonder."

"Wonder what," you said, barely sound.

His eyes dropped to your mouth.

"She looked the same as you." His voice was the quietest thing in the corridor. "Every feature, every—" His gaze came back up to yours slowly.

“Yet I wonder if you taste the same.”

The words landed and stayed.

You should have said something sensible. You were aware, distantly, that a sensible thing existed to be said– some response that involved the girl in the other room, or the blood still drying at his jaw, or the very reasonable fear that had driven you out of that room and down this corridor not ten minutes ago.

You didn't find it in time.

His head bent and his mouth found yours and the first thing you tasted was the blood. Copper-dark, faint but unmistakable, spreading across your tongue before you could decide what to do about it. You made a sound against his mouth that was not dignified. He went still, pulling back a fraction, giving you every opportunity to use the space.

You closed it again.

He made a sound low in his chest when you did, something that had been held in for a very long time coming loose at a single point, and then his hand was at your jaw, tilting your face up, and he kissed you the way a man kisses something he has been trying not to want– with the full weight of the trying in it, three hundred years of restraint collapsed into this, messy and graceless and real. All tongue and the faint scrape of his teeth and his beard rough against your mouth and the copper taste of him that you could not stop chasing.

His other hand found your waist pressing you in, and you felt the full weight of him and pulled at the front of his shirt because your hands needed something to do with themselves. He let you. He let you pull and he came willingly and his thigh pressed between yours against the wall and you gasped into his mouth and he swallowed it.

"Baelor—"

"I know." His lips dragged to your jaw. "I know."

He was not rushing. That was the thing– the absolute, devastating patience of him, like he had all the time there was and intended to use it. His mouth moved down the side of your throat and you let your head fall back against the stone because there was nothing else to do with it, because the alternative was watching his face and you were not certain you could survive that right now.

His teeth grazed your pulse point.

Not breaking the skin. A question. The same question he had asked before, in this same corridor, against this same pulse, and the answer you gave now was the same one you had given then, the sharp catch of your breath, the way your fingers twisted in his shirt, your hips pressing forward against the thigh he had put between yours without entirely meaning to.

He groaned against your throat. A quiet thing, rough, and it unmade you completely.

"You don't taste the same," he said, into your neck. The words dragged warm against your skin. "You taste like yourself." His hands were at your waist, your ribs, deliberate and slow, learning the shape of you through the thin fabric of your nightgown. "I have been trying to decide if that is worse or better."

"And?" you managed, though your voice had lost any pretence of composure.

He lifted his head, and looked at you.

The firelight from the open room behind you caught the blood on his mouth, on yours, smeared now and shared, and his mismatched eyes were dark and entirely certain and fixed on your face with an attention that felt like pressure, like standing too close to a fire.

"Better," he said. Simply. "Considerably."

He kissed you again and this time it was different, less careful, something under the patience finally surfacing, his hands moving with more intent and yours in his hair and your back arching off the wall toward him. His mouth was at your throat again and you said his name in a way that was not a sentence and he answered it, mouth open against your pulse, the faint graze of his teeth and the warmth of his breath and the specific focused quality of his attention that made you feel like the only thing in the world that existed.

"Tell me to stop," he said against your throat.

You didn't.

His hands moved and you made a sound that echoed in the corridor, a sound that had no pretence in it whatsoever, and he pressed his forehead to your temple and breathed you in and you felt the three hundred years of him in how still he went, like he was committing this to a memory that had been keeping things for centuries.

"Tell me to stop," he said again, quieter. More ragged.

"I don't want you to stop," you said. Honest. No qualifier, no apology for the honesty.

Something moved through his face that was almost painful to witness.

He pressed one long, deliberate kiss to the side of your throat, open-mouthed, his teeth just grazing the skin without breaking it, and the sound that left you was embarrassingly frank about what it was. His hands were still, suddenly, firmly, holding you rather than exploring, and he lifted his head and looked at you and his jaw was tight with the effort of something.

"Not here," he said. Low, rough, the composure in pieces. "Not in this corridor with her—" He stopped. His eyes moved briefly to the portrait behind you. Back to your face. "Not like this. Not the first time."

You looked at him. Breathing hard. The blood on both your mouths. His hands at your waist, not releasing you.

"The first time?" You repeated softly, cheekily almost.

Something in his expression shifted, the tightness giving way, fractionally, to something that was almost wry if wry could coexist with three centuries of grief.

"I am attempting," he said carefully, "to be honourable."

"How is it going?"

"Poorly," he said. "But I am attempting it."

You laughed. Small and unsteady, and he went still when you did it in that way he always went still, the ghost of her moving through the space between you, and you felt it and you let it be there and you held his gaze anyway.

You reached up and wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with your thumb. He watched you do it, very still, his eyes on your face.

"First time," you said quietly. "So there's a second."

It was not a question.

He turned his face slightly into your hand, just barely, his jaw against your palm.

"If you'll have it," he said.

And have it you did.