all the sun in oldtown
pairing: ser gwayne hightower x wife!reader
word count: 3,4k~4k
genre: fluff, domestic softness, married idiots in love
warnings: none really — one (1) mention of the coming war, some mild kissing, gwayne being insufferable about his hair
summary: a morning in the gardens beneath OldTown, a basket of peaches, and a knight who has never once in his life won an argument with his wife.
(set a year or so before the dance. everyone is alive. everyone is happy. we do not speak of what comes next.)
╭┈◦•◦❥•◦
The gardens of Oldtown were at their best in the hour after dawn, and you had learned in two years of marriage that you were the only person in the whole keep who believed it.
The stone paths were still dark with dew. The bees had not properly woken. Fog came up off the Honeywine in long grey ribbons and caught in the myrtle hedges, and the great tower itself stood behind you with its beacon gone dim and pale, the way a candle looks when someone opens the shutters. Everything smelled of wet earth and lemon blossom and, faintly, of the sea.
You had a basket on your arm, half-full of peaches, and grass stains on the hem of a gown that had cost more than a horse.
"Now, my lady," came a voice from the top of the terrace steps, "I have been told a great many things about you, but no one warned me you were a common orchard thief."
You did not turn around. You had known him by the sound of his boots on the steps for a year and a half now; Gwayne walked like a man who suspected there might be an audience.
"They're my peaches.”
“They are my father's peaches."
"Your father is in King's Landing," you said, choosing another, turning it in the light to check the blush of it. "The peaches have been left in my care. I am inspecting them. Rigorously."
"You've eaten two already."
"How could you possibly know that?"
"Because I've been standing here since the bell," said Ser Gwayne Hightower, coming down the steps in that ambling unhurried way of his, "watching my wife commit crimes."
You turned.
He had come straight from the yard, which meant he had come straight from the yard and then gone somewhere to make himself presentable about it, because his hair was damp and combed back off his brow and his shirt was clean and open at the throat, and no man alive had ever left a morning's swordwork looking like that by accident. There was a bruise blooming just under his jaw. He was grinning about it.
"You've been watching me for an hour," you said.
"A quarter hour."
"An hour, Gwayne. The bell rang at dawn."
He came to a stop in front of you, close enough that you had to tilt your chin, and he did not deny it. He looked down at the basket instead, took out a peach, considered it with the gravity of a maester examining a wound, and bit into it.
"Well," he said, with his mouth full. "Now I'm complicit."
"You're a knight of the Reach."
"I am. And this is the finest fruit in the Reach, and my wife stole it, and I intend to eat the evidence." He wiped his thumb along his lip. "Nobody hangs for a peach."
"Your father might."
"My father would write a letter about it," Gwayne said. "Six pages. With citations."
You laughed before you could help it, and he looked so pleased with himself, the way he always did, like a boy who had just cleared a fence he wasn't sure of. That was the thing nobody told you about him, back when your marriage was still ink and seals and two families shaking hands over your head. They told you he was vain. They told you he was clever and quick and difficult to pin down. Nobody told you he would look at you like that when you laughed, as if the sound were a coin he'd found in the street.
"Come," you said, and hooked your free arm through his. "Walk with me before the fog goes."
The path curved down past the fountain and under the arch of climbing roses that your good-mother had planted before she died, white ones, heavy-headed, dropping petals into the water. Gwayne finished the peach and threw the stone into the hedge with the underhand flick of a man who had spent his life throwing things into hedges.
"That'll grow," you said.
"Then Oldtown will have one more peach tree and my father will have one more thing to be irritated by. Everyone profits."
"You're very cheerful this morning."
"I'm very cheerful most mornings."
"You are cheerful in company," you corrected. "This morning you're cheerful with me, which is different, which means something has happened. Did you win?"
He put a hand to his chest. "You wound me. You think I only smile when I've won."
"Gwayne."
"I won," he admitted immediately. "Twice. Ser Robin has developed a habit of dropping his shoulder before he comes over the top, and I have been very patient about not telling him, and this morning I collected on my patience."
"That's cheating."
"That's observation."
"It's cheating dressed for a feast."
"Which is what all the best things are," he said, and stole a second peach out of your basket without breaking stride.
You let him. You had learned to let him. In the first months you had counted every little liberty he took as a battle lost, because you had come into this marriage braced for something; you weren't sure what, only that women told you to brace and it had taken you the better part of a year to understand that Gwayne Hightower was not laying siege to you. He was just like this. He took peaches. He talked through the septon's sermons under his breath. He put his cold feet on your legs in the night and pretended to be asleep when you shoved him. He was the least dangerous man in Westeros and he was armed at all times.
You reached the low wall at the garden's southern edge, where the ground fell away and the whole of the city lay out below you in the mist: the tangle of roofs, the river, the Citadel's blunt towers, the masts down at the harbour crowded together like a burnt forest. Somewhere a dog was barking. Somewhere else, someone was singing badly.
Gwayne set his hands on the wall and breathed out.
"Say it," you said.
"Say what?"
"Whatever you climbed all the way down here to say. You've been circling it since the peaches."
He glanced sideways at you. Green eyes, Hightower green, the same as his sister's, though on Alicent they always looked like a held breath and on him they looked like a joke you hadn't heard yet.
"You're a witch," he said. "I married a witch. My father will write a letter about that too."
"Gwayne."
"There's a letter from King's Landing."
Your stomach did the small ugly drop it always did now. Two years ago the words there's a letter from King's Landing would have meant nothing to you at all. Now everyone said them the way they said there's a storm coming in off the sea; flatly, and while already looking for the shutters.
"From your father."
"From my sister, in fact, which is worse, because my father tells me what to do and my sister tells me how she is." He turned around and leaned back against the wall with his elbows on it, tipping his face up to the thin sun. "She says she is very well. She says the children are very well. She says the king's health is much improved, which is the sort of thing you write when a man cannot hold a spoon."
"Gwayne."
"I know." He shut his eyes. "I know."
You said nothing for a moment. Below, the mist was pulling apart over the river.
"Does she ask you to come?"
"She never asks. That's the trick of her. She writes six pages about the weather and the septs and how Daeron is growing, and then at the very bottom, in a hand so small you'd think she was ashamed of it, she writes, it would gladden me to see you." He opened one eye. "Which is asking. That's my sister asking with both hands."
"And your father?"
"Oh, my father asks like a battering ram. His last letter said, and I quote, I trust the pleasures of Oldtown have not made you soft."
You considered this. "Have they?"
"Grievously," said Gwayne. "I sleep on feathers. I eat three times a day. I have a wife who steals fruit for me. I am the softest man in the Reach and I intend to defend the title."
"Then we shan't go."
He was quiet. That was the thing that told you it was serious; Gwayne Hightower quiet, for the length of three heartbeats, with the sun on his throat.
"Not yet," he said at last. "Not this year, I think."
"Not this year," you agreed.
"They'll want me eventually. When my father runs out of Hightowers who'll answer him and comes back round to the one who won't stop making jokes." He said it lightly, and it landed the way a light thing lands when it's made of iron. "But not this year. This year I'm going to stand in this garden and watch my wife rob an orchard, and if my father wants an accounting of my time, he may have it."
"He'll be delighted."
"He'll be apoplectic," Gwayne said, brightening. "Write it down, would you? Ser Gwayne rose at dawn, defeated Ser Robin twice, ate two peaches he did not pay for, and spent the remainder of the morning being soft at his wife. Send it under seal. Make it look important."
"You are a terrible son."
"I am the firstborn son," he said. "It's practically a vocation."
You made him carry the basket after that, because he was there and because he complained about it in a way that clearly meant he wanted to be asked, and you walked back up through the terraces to the little walled garden your good-mother had called the Quiet Court a square of grass and old fig trees with a bench nobody ever sat on, because it faced the wrong way for the view and the right way for the sun.
You sat on the grass instead. You always sat on the grass. Gwayne dropped down beside you with the graceless thump of a man in his own home, stretched his legs out, crossed them at the ankle, and put his head in your lap without asking, as though it were a chair that belonged to him.
"Comfortable?" you said.
"Extremely. Don't move."
"I have to move eventually."
"No, you don't. I'll have your meals brought."
You snorted, and set your hand in his hair, and he made a small pleased sound in the back of his throat that he would have denied under torture.
The sun was properly up now. It came down warm through the fig leaves and made moving coins of light all over him, over his shirt and his forearms and the bruise under his jaw, and the bees had woken and were going seriously about their business in the lavender, and the whole garden hummed with it. You could hear the Citadel bells, far off. You could hear a maid laughing somewhere up in the keep.
"Tell me something," you said.
"Anything. I have a great many opinions."
"When they told you who you were marrying… what did you think?"
He opened his eyes. "That's a dangerous question."
"It's a very safe question. You're lying in my lap. I have all the power here."
"You have all the power," he agreed, "at all times, in all places, which is a matter I intend to raise with the septons." He was quiet a moment, and then, in a slightly different voice: "I thought, well, that's that, then."
"Charming."
"No — listen." He shifted so he could look up at you properly. "You must understand what it is to be the firstborn son of Otto Hightower. Everything about my life was decided by other people in rooms I wasn't in. My sister was decided. My name, my knighting, my horse was decided. So when they said you will marry her, I thought: well, that's that, then. Another thing that happened to me."
"That's worse than charming. That's tragic."
"And then," he went on, ignoring you entirely, "you came to Oldtown, and on your third night here you told me at table, in front of my septa that my hair was too long for a fighting man and that vanity was one of the seven kinds of sin, though you couldn't recall which."
You winced. "I was nervous."
"You were magnificent. My septa choked on her wine. And I sat there and I thought, oh no." He grinned. "Oh no. She's going to be the great catastrophe of my life."
"And was I?"
"You are," he said. "Ongoing. Sustained. No end in sight."
You looked down at him for a moment, at the sun-coins sliding over his stupid handsome face, and then you leaned over and kissed him, upside down and badly, and he laughed into it and caught the back of your neck with one hand as if to say yes, that, do that again.
When you sat up your hair had come loose on one side. He looked immensely satisfied about it.
"Your hair is still too long," you said.
"My hair is perfect."
"It's not."
"It is better than yours."
"Gwayne."
"I'm sorry, my love, but it simply is. The gods gave me one gift and I am obliged to be a good steward of it." He settled back down. "Criston Cole wears his cropped like a scullion and look at the state of the man's disposition."
"You've never met Criston Cole."
"I've heard about Criston Cole. That's worse."
You said nothing. You reached over, very quietly, and picked a stem of lavender.
Gwayne, eyes closed, said, "What are you doing."
"Nothing."
"You're doing something. I can hear you doing something."
"You cannot hear nothing."
"I've been married two years," he said. "I can hear nothing better than any man in the Seven King— don't."
You had already begun. You took a thin section of hair at his temple and started plaiting the lavender into it, and he made a noise of pure theatrical anguish and did not, you noticed, move his head one inch off your lap.
"This is an assault," he informed the fig trees. "This is an assault upon my person."
"Hold still."
"On the honour of House Hightower."
"You'll look lovely."
"I will look like a hedge—"
"Gwayne."
He held still.
You worked slowly, because it was slow work and because there was no reason on earth to hurry. Lavender, then a sprig of rosemary because it smelled good, then three of the little white roses from the arch, snapped off short. His hair was fine and slippery and hard to keep hold of, which he would have been delighted to hear, so you didn't say it. Somewhere in the middle of it his breathing went long and even, and you thought he'd genuinely fallen asleep until he said, without opening his eyes.
"Are you happy?"
Your hands paused. "That's a dangerous question," you said.
"It's a very safe question. My head's in your lap. You have all the power."
You looked down at him. There were fine lines at the corners of his eyes now that hadn't been there when you married from squinting into the sun, from laughing, from a life spent mostly outdoors and mostly amused. There was a white knot of a scar through one eyebrow that he claimed was from a boar and that his squire claimed was from a door.
"Yes," you said.
He waited.
"Truly, yes," you said. "Which frightens me a little."
"Why?"
"Because I've read enough songs to know that no one's happy in the middle of a song."
Gwayne opened his eyes. "Then we shan't be in one," he said.
"You can't decide that."
"I can decide a great deal. I've decided about the peaches. I've decided about my father." He reached up and caught your wrist gently, his thumb over the small bones of it and held it there against his chest, where you could feel his heart going along steady and unbothered underneath. "Listen. Somewhere out east there are dragons and there are men writing letters about dragons, and one day someone will come up that road and knock on that door and I will have to go and be a Hightower at them. I know it. You know it. My father has known it since before I was born, I expect; he's a man who plans that far ahead."
"Gwayne—"
"But that's not today," he said. "Today there's fog on the river and my wife has put a garden in my hair and I have eaten two stolen peaches and won two bouts, and if this is the middle of the song then it's the best part and I refuse to hurry it." He kissed the inside of your wrist, quick, careless, like it was nothing. "That's all. That's my whole philosophy. I've been working on it for years."
"It's a very short philosophy."
"It's a very efficient philosophy," he said. "You could have married a man with a long one and been bored to death by midwinter."
You laughed, and your eyes stung a little, and you covered it by tugging his hair.
"Ow."
"Hold still. I'm nearly done."
When you were done he sat up and shook his head like a dog, and about half of it fell out, which was frankly less than you'd expected.
"Well?" he said, turning his face to give you the good side, which was the same as the other side. "Tell me honestly. Ruined?"
You looked at him. Lavender and rosemary and three white roses, sun through the leaves, grass on his shoulder, that bruise going purple under his jaw.
"You look," you said, "like a maiden in a song."
"Excellent. Which one?"
"The one who gets carried off."
"By whom?"
"By her husband, in a moment, if she doesn't stop talking."
He grinned so wide it must have hurt. "Threats. In my garden."
"My garden. You said so yourself. You've told everyone in Oldtown it's my garden since the day I asked for it."
"I have," he admitted, "because when I say my wife's garden the maesters look at me as though I've done something worthwhile, and I've found I like the feeling." He plucked one of the roses back out of his hair and, with great ceremony, tucked it behind your ear. "There. Now we match. Now nobody can say anything."
"Everybody will say something."
"Let them," said Gwayne Hightower, and kissed you.
It was a slow one this time, unhurried, one hand at your jaw and the other braced in the grass, and you tasted peach and he smelled of lavender and clean linen and horse, and above you the fig leaves shifted and the light moved and the bees kept up their work in the lavender, entirely unimpressed. You had a fistful of his shirt. You did not remember deciding to take it.
Which of course was the exact moment that somebody came through the gate at the far end of the Quiet Court.
"Ser — oh. Oh. Ser, I— the master-at-arms says—"
Gwayne did not let go of you. He turned his head, with the rosemary sticking out over his ear, and regarded his squire with the calm of a man who had been interrupted in gardens by squires his entire adult life.
"Yes, Willem."
"The master-at-arms says you're wanted in the yard," said Willem, aged fourteen, magenta from the collar up, examining the sky. "He says. He says you promised him. He says you swore."
"Did I swear?"
"You swore on your sword, ser."
"That does sound like me." Gwayne sighed and let his forehead drop against yours for a moment. "The trouble with being charming," he murmured, "is that you make so very many promises."
"Go," you said.
"I don't want to."
"You'll want to in ten minutes. You'll want to enormously. You'll come back at noon and tell me about it at extraordinary length."
"...That's true," he said, wounded by the accuracy of it, and got up.
He brushed the grass off, and put a hand up to his hair, and stopped; you watched him remember what was in it. You watched him weigh it. You watched, delighted, as Ser Gwayne Hightower, first born son of the Hand of the King, decided.
"Willem," he said. "How do I look?"
The boy, trapped, said: "...Very well, ser."
"Very well," Gwayne repeated. "You hear that? Very well. The lad has an eye." He pointed at you as he backed toward the gate. "Noon. Don't eat all the peaches."
"I make no promises."
"You never do. It's the worst thing about you." He was at the gate. He turned, one hand on the stone, sun in his eyes, lavender in his hair, and for a moment; a small one, a moment you would take out and hold a great many times in the years that came after, on the road, in the dark, in rooms full of men shouting about dragons; he just looked at you across the grass, and didn't say anything clever at all.
Then he said, "I love you, my wife," in the offhand way he said everything that mattered, and was gone down the steps two at a time with his squire trotting after him.
You sat back in the grass with the basket in your lap and the rose behind your ear.
The bees went on. The fog burned off the river. Above you the Hightower stood white and enormous against a sky going properly blue at last, and somewhere far away in King's Landing a sick king was being helped to sit up in bed, and a queen was writing six pages about the weather, and none of it, this morning, had reached the gardens.
You ate another peach.
a/n: no i will not be writing the sequel. gwayne stays in the garden. gwayne stays in the garden forever. reblogs and tags are my bread and butter 🤍
