“commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to your husband's awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.”
jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader
words: 4.7k
notes: jacaerys & reader are aged up to 23. i cut a scene from one of my ongoing fics today & decided to rewrite it for a standalone instead ! hope u enjoy this is severely unedited
warnings: afab reader, married bickering, alcohol consumption, tbh porn with no plot but a lot of dialogue, vague timeline, fluff & romance. ONE gentle & good-natured smack to jace’s head. smut - oral (fem receiving), teasing, hair pulling, sliiiight sub!jace if you squint, he's really teasing, sort of spoiled reader but its bc hes is so in love. be warned this is mostly foreplay.
masterlist
“THEY ARE FOOLS.”
The sound of your husband’s voice comes breathed over a wide-spread map, sent by raven from the Sea Snake and then poached in haste from the hands of a squire as you’d both left the council chambers. Now the parchment sits, spread over the large oak of your shared solar, pinned at one corner with a tallow candle and another with a bowl bearing the remnants of cherries. The hour of Eels approaches upon the high moon out your casements, though inside you are well-lit in torch and company alike.
He has not yet troubled himself to remove his doublet, though he’s shed the heavier dressings of office in the spaces between your shared solar and bedchambers, left discarded across the back of a chair with a sigh. His hair, so often kept neat, has suffered the abuse of his own hands at least twice since since leaving the council chamber; you can see the furrows of it, dark and disordered, and there too lies ink, faint along the side of his palm where he’s already begun marking the map before you’ve even properly closed the door behind you. He does not look at you yet - no, he looks only down at King’s Landing, at the coastline along Massey’s Hook, at all the small failures of an evening he has clearly not finished refighting in his own head. Recalling the incessant irritations of the council, you endure the harrowing thought that his pricked stipulations from this evening might yet haunt you both for some hours to come.
Though, in the spoken words of your husband lives less a true anger and more some worn frustration after such a laborious handful of hours cooped within the war council chambers. “The lot of them.”
You unclasp your own cloak, soothing your skirts as you cross towards your husband. In attempt at jest, you let your lip lift faintly. “You name your Queen a fool?”
A glance over his shoulder coaxes you to relent the daring accusation, sighing as you lift your hands in placation.
“Never,” he still responds in kind to your needling, shaking his head faintly. “Only–”
Though his frustration breaks in his words, and he only sighs. You only watch as he reaches for the cup at his elbow, finds it empty, and reaches instead for the flagon, pouring himself with rather more generosity than the hour calls for. Once near the brim, he pushes it toward you and, in your mild amusement, you smile into the lip of his cup.
He watches you drink, and shakes his head faintly. “Lord Celtigar thought it madness, my mother thought it madness–” he huffs, turning to you sidelong, visage shrouded in golden candlelight. A gesture toward you, as he undoes the buckles of his sword belt and drops it upon the long table beside the map. “Did you note, too, how Lord Bar Emmon thought my proposition madness at such volume he nearly cracked his own voice?”
You laugh before you mean to, wine halfway from your lips. It is a small relief, for you both - so scrupulously dutiful in matters of council and of war - to find some private wickedness reserved only for each other, behind doors no lords nor councilmen may follow you through. And, dramatic as he is prone to be when alone with you, your husband is not wrong to have taken his irritation from an evening so agonizingly wasted.
“He does have a gift for it,” you concede, passing the cup to Jacaerys’ hand. You watch, in turn, as he drinks, and continue: “I counted three occasions upon which he mentioned the same counter.” A gesture of half-exasperated, half-helpless amusement from you, you lean your hip closer to the table to face your husband. “And each time it felt as though it were newly occurring to him. It truly astounds me, in a way.”
Jace conjures the princely decency to appear mournful even as he smirks at your words. “Always about the tides, that one. He is very fond of the tides, have you noticed?” Your husband lifts the half-drunk cup of wine to glare at Lord Corlys’s map over its rim, and you must bite back a fond grin.
“I’m nearly forced to suspect he has no other thoughts at all,” Jace huffs into the cup, “that his mind simply produces ‘the tides, my prince’ whenever pressed on any matter. It pertains to no matters, as it stands, though he proceeds as though only the waters along Massey’s Hook exist for consideration at all.”
Your lips purse in amusement, biting along your grin only for a moment.
“The tides, my prince,” you presently intone, pitching your voice low and pompous in rather unfair imitation.
Jacaerys nearly laughs outright, though it is smothered in some attempt to remain in his ire from council past. Your husband does not deceive you; his lips still waver faintly, his eyes still gleam and dance in the torchlight as they regard your imitation.
It is this which spurs you to press on, “I only consider, my prince, that Vhagar might not read the Maester’s almanacs–”
“Don’t,” your husband interjects in amusement, grinning helplessly as he swallows his sip of wine, “don’t, or I’ll spit this across Corlys’s map.”
“–and so cannot be expected to observe the tides in her own campaigns of war–”
Jace laughs outright now. “Stop,” he insists, coughing faintly from his swallow of wine; and, delighted, he reaches across the edge of the table to cover your mouth with two ink-stained fingers. You promptly bite lightly in retaliation, though this only makes his smile widen.
The Lord Celtigar fares little better a moment later, invoked and verbally torn between the two of you in the same breath; a provocation born of an endless habit of throat-clearing before every single sentence, you exchange poor imitations of the innocent man until the two of you are leaning towards each other across the table, half-drunk on wine and flushed with relief of duty. It is a rare thing, to be nowhere near a council chamber, with no one in the room requiring anything of either of you at all tonight.
“Gods,” Jace murmurs at last, dragging a hand down his face, “You’re quite lucky I haven’t choked.”
You soothe your dress, crossing to perch instead beside him rather than corner; And, the very moment you open your mouth to return the sentiment of relief, he speaks once more.
“The tides, my prince,” he says again.
It absurdly brings you both into laughter once more, wine-loosened and gilded in warm light, muffled by palms and chastened lips as though you both know it is foolish and hardly as amusing as it feels. Though it proves no matter besides, for you and your husband finish your cup of wine and fill it once more before the laughter fully ebbs.
It is once the last sigh has bubbled past your lips that he reaches for you properly, cupping your jaw in his whole palm to kiss you. Your lips find his slow, warm; wine and spice upon the tongue, you lean further into his taste eagerly. A palm skates up your side, sliding back to gather you by waist against him.
“Far better company than the council,” you murmur against his mouth, not quite breaking the kiss to say it. A low hum rolls through his throat, echoing faintly between your mouths.
“Immeasurably,” he agrees, the word half-lost between your lips. Faithfully Jacaerys kisses you, leaning wholly into your space as he keeps himself propped with a palm on the map below. He leans back only a breath then, lips pressed and parting. “Bar Emmon,” he says absurdly, still smiling into the kiss, “does not kiss half as well, I’d wager.”
A sound of displeasure from you as you lean back; disturbed, faintly, at his eagerness to bring back up the man who pestered him so much all evening. “I should hope you’ll never discover for yourself,” you manage, laughing faintly even as his mouth finds yours again, swallowing any such attempts to speak further.
A huff of laughter escapes him despite his mouth upon yours, and it’s in such a sound that chases off whatever glum irritation cast the council had left behind. And so you merely let him laugh, one hand fisting in the front of his doublet to keep him close, solid, yours in a way the council chamber rarely lets him be these days.
After a moment, he pulls away once more. “We should be studying the map,” Jace decides only a few moments later, an observation which causes a roll of your eyes. “The Lord Hand lent it to me with intention of regaining it soon.”
Lips part, only the glossy string of your shared affection connecting you for a moment in the candlelight as you lean faintly against the table, sighing. “Might it wait just for a moment, my Prince?” you suggest.
“It cannot wait,” Jace says, though he certainly makes no move at all to leave you, forehead dropping to your skin instead. His lips brush along your neck as he continues, “the ink is barely dry, wife, and half of it is guesswork besides. Corlys marked the shoals from memory, he said in his raven, and memory seventy years old at that. If I do not commit it to my own hand soon–”
Perhaps it is impatience, or simply confusion as to why your husband has taken up cartographic studies with his grandfather in the midst of war; whatever it is, you only sigh, pressing yourself more firmly to the line of his own warm body, feeling his breath hitch faintly against your throat.
“Commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to his awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.”
And indeed, whatever protest he means to make next is lost entirely as you kiss him again; he, in what might be a surge of either affection or mild frustration, only pushes further into your warmth.
Though his enthusiasm proves too eager, for between the two of you and the oaken table and considerably more enthusiasm than sense, you overbalance together: his knee catches the chair, yours tangle ungracefully in your own skirts, and you tumble in a sudden sprawl backwards across the map itself, parchment crackling and ripping faintly beneath you. It is a faint clatter you hear before you smell the wine spilt over the edge of the table, though neither of you seem particularly rushed to right the fallen cup.
He catches himself above you on one forearm, laughing outright once again, the sound of it rich, startled through your chamber. Your heart still – after all the moons wed to him – flips at the sound.
“Oh,” you tut, shaking your head in faint tease, “And now you’ve just certainly ruined Corlys’ map,” you inform him gravely, one hand still fisted in his doublet, refusing to let him retreat even the small distance his laughter has suddenly put between your mouths. He hums in agreement, though seemingly entirely unrepentant as he glances down to where your shoulder has scuffed clean through some careful notation of the Gullet’s currents. He purses his lips. “I suppose the council will have my head.”
A huff from your lips, tipping your head. “Well, after Aegon and Aemond’s, I imagine there will be little room left on the pike for a head like yours.”
Laugh spills regretfully from full-kissed lips above you. He is wholly pressed against you now, slotted rather wonderfully between your thighs as you lay upon the table, caged by arm and breath. You lips your chin only faintly, just to bump your nose against his own.
“A comforting thought,” his nose brushes yours, dimple deep now, all the solemnity of an hour ago nowhere to be found in him.
You, fought and lost against your own battle of grin, only shake your head. “I suppose you may keep your own in the meantime, then.”
A palm snakes beneath your tresses to cup your head, turning you in kind until he has clear access to the junction of your throat and clavicle. “Generous of you,” he muses dryly, a dimpled grin flashing as leans, shifting closer into you to stir a hitch of excitement through your breast. “And here I thought you were planning to sow my name in disgrace for my impropriety laying you upon this map.”
“Your impropriety,” you scoff in echo, though the word catches somewhere breathless in your throat as his mouth finds the soft skin below your ear. “That itself is rather the whole trouble tonight, seeing as it was you who kissed me first, you who could not be persuaded to leave off Corlys’s precious shoals for even a moment, you who cannot forgive Lord Bar Emmon for his blunder, and you who has now ruined the very map you are so determined to defend–”
Your words, though breathed out quickly, are lost scarce to a shiver of pleasure; for Jace has latched himself upon the tender sensitivity of your throat, and only smiles against the goosepimples rising beneath his tongue. Still, you do not give up, even as teeth scrape along your pulse gently. “So I suppose you’ll–” a breathy sigh, “have to forgive me if I find it difficult to accept the blame for your own temper. It was merely distracting.”
A hum presses along your chest, dragging a fiercely hungry heat through your very core. His lips brush over the neckline of your dress before lifting his chin.
“Was it?” He does not sound remotely remorseful, and indeed his amber eyes melt into the candlelight with mirth. “I shall have to remember that, then, for the next council you find too tedious to bear–”
You lean back, exasperated by half in his mention of council once more.
“Jace.”
He beams; a beautiful man, your husband, and you cannot curb the smile you helplessly give in return. His lips part in echoed tease of your impatience.
“Wife.”
You shove at his shoulder, only half in earnest, and he lets himself be shoved, rolling half onto his elbow beside you amidst the ruin of parchment and spilled wine, both of you grinning now. It is when his mouth finds the junction of your throat once more that the hunger comes back thrice as strong, and you pull him right above you once more even as you glance at the ruined map beneath your sprawled figure, the creeping stains of spilt wine.
“We ought to resolve this mess, I suppose,” you sigh, hoping he will indeed ignore your words and continue the path he makes with his lips now across your chest.
And, it seems, your Prince has a mind to ignore your orders this eve - for he merely continues his own line of thought as though you'd been discussing it all along. “I’m only saying,” he begins, apropos of certainly nothing as he lifts his head enough to look faintly wounded – unconvincing as it is, given the grin still tugging at the corner of his mouth – “A word from you, and he might have folded twice as fast.”
Your head falls back in exasperation, even as his teeth nip at the soft skin of your neck. Back again he’s circled, to the man in the council – as though there lies no other pressing matters he might attend to at present.
“You are meant to be resolving the mess,” you remind him, gesturing at the ruined parchment beneath you both, though your hand finds its way to the back of his neck regardless, pressing him instead closer to where your breasts rise and fall through your dress. His mouth follows willingly, nosing along the neckline to press his lips against your beating skin.
“I am resolving many things at once,” he murmurs, entirely too pleased with himself, and returns his attention to your body once more as though the council chamber has not just risen between you a third time this hour. He huffs only faintly, the breath of which sends a shiver across the valley of your breasts. He begins to speak again: “You might resolve my grievance while you’re at it–”
Your groan of impatience and disbelief ricochets through the solar, though it is drowned by your husband’s incessant prattling even as his tongue dips across the flush of your breasts, pulling at the hem of your dress to reveal more sweet skin to his blabbering lips, “–It would only take a word: ‘Jace was right, and Lord Bar Emmon a tedious old fool, and I shall say so plainly next time for all to hear.’”
With fingers threading through thickened dark curls, you let out a flighty laugh, the desire molten through you despite the unfavorable topic he cannot seem to let go. “You want me to rehearse a speech whilst you ravish me?” You murmur.
That cursed mouth curves against your skin. “I want my wife’s loyalty declared before the whole council,” he leans back only a breath, enough to slip the shoulder from your gown, sliding it gently over your skin to reveal your breasts. Though you nearly gasp at the chill of air, any such discomforts are remedied as his breath fans across such tender skin, lips trailing as he pleases. You sigh softly, fingers tightening within his hair.
Helpless to his charming idiocy, you laugh, tugging gently upon his hair until he lifts his head to look at you properly, mock-solemn amber eyes meeting yours in the candlelight.
“You are dreadfully greedy tonight, husband,” you receive his eager kiss between your words, well aware of how his eyes hook and remain only on the sweet form of your lips as you speak, “for a man who won an argument twice in council over without any help from me at all. You’ve been brooding as though you lost it wholly.”
A pout, one which you can only help to lean forward and kiss; you catch his lower lip between your teeth and drag back, unhurried, until whatever else he meant to say dissolves into a rough, startled groan. He grins around his words, dipping his head once more to nip along the soft of your flesh.
“Well, please forgive me for preferring when you fight at my side. It is far preferable to being left on my own.”
He does not witness the roll of your eyes; though, all the same, for he has endeavored to slowly drag your skirts in a bunch upon your thigh with his palm, slow enough to drive you mad but pressing enough for you to understand his intentions. A tantalizing thing, even as you scoff.
“I was at your side,” you insist, and a soft gasp escapes you as one palm rises from your neck to instead palm along the curve of your breast, a soft thing despite how his teeth catch at your skin. “Though it seems I’ve wounded your pride, seeing as you’ve returned from council only to complain further, even with your wife so willingly beneath you.”
He hums something rather insolent and you only smile, far too indulgent as your hand slides to grip his shoulder and hold on to the warmth there. A sigh leaves your lungs as you purse your lips, “So I suppose I must make it up to you in some way or another.”
A slow grown grin, then, pressed into soft skin beneath your ear; and whatever further words you intend to further dole him scatter from your tongue as he hums low.
“Attend your husband, then,” he whispers, his palm coursing finally from your lifted skirts to the warm flesh of your upper thigh, coaxing your knee to hitch along his hips, “He has endured a rather trying council, and a map now ruined besides, and he would have–”
“He would have,” you cut in, hand sliding from the breadth of his shoulder to fist gently in his hair once more, drawing his face back to yours before he can talk himself further into mischief, “rather less of his own voice, and rather more attention paid to his wife. Yes?”
A hum so near to a moan comes from kiss-bitten lips, warm against your mouth. He nods faintly in some eagerness, biting his lip only faintly as his eyes dance between your own. “As my lady wife commands,” he absconces.
And at last, he holds his tongue of words and endeavors instead – as all good husbands must learn to do – to use it in far more pleasurable ways.
It is mere moments in which his palms grasp at your hips; with a gentle enough tug, he brings you nearest the edge of your table, bare from his hitching of your skirts and dragging of your neckline. A gasp from you, not scandalized as much as jesting at his sudden eagerness, coaxes a small glint of amusement in your husband’s amber gaze. It remains there, flickering in his love and hunger alike for you, as he sinks to his knees right there upon the stone floor.
And, though you’d prefer not to allow such weaknesses, still you let yourself sigh a shaky, flighty thing as the sensation of his lips drag teasing, horribly slow kisses along the inner plush of your thighs.
“Jace,” you sigh, a half-plead half-scold as his eyes glint up at you, the flash of a dark-dragoned signet ring upon his finger disappearing as he bunches your skirts further above your hips. And then he has the gall, it appears, to shush you; a placating thing, a rush of air upon shivered skin. “Shh,” he murmurs into the sweetness of your thigh, and you cannot attempt to feign resentment for the action as it conjures a rush of arousal further through you.
Gathered upon your elbows, you’re helpless to watch as those dark curls glisten in candlelight, wax weeping round your stuttering breaths, the scent of wine heady in the evening air and humming with a terrible anticipation. Cruel, your husband can be, in his teasing. So very cruel indeed.
It is through the anticipation and silence in which you crack.
“Jacaerys–”
You let out a sharp moan instead at the taper of his name, whatever command you had dying on your tongue; for his lips have pressed soundly upon your womanhood, roving a shiver of pleasure through your very core. A canting tilt of your hips arches your spine in surprise, a warm rush of pleasure flooding your whole being.
And he, the horrible man, dares smile against you.
It is with little remaining control that your hand rises to grip through his curled tresses; a trembling thing as his own large palms move to lift your thighs until he is settled firmly between them, humming to himself as your heels come to rest over broadened shoulders. Brushing away strayed curls, you gaze upon your love with some mix of awe and worship as he laves against you, tongue gathering your desire and letting out a low moan of his own at your taste.
Your own breath leaves your lips in gasps; sharp at first, though his ministrations cease suddenly as your husband lifts his chin slightly. A loss of pleasure shutters through your chest and you loosen your grip upon his hair, glancing down at him in half-lidded confusion.
“You've a beauty mark just here,” he murmurs against your inner thigh, tracing it slow with his mouth. “I don't believe I've properly admired before.”
You love him, with your whole soul and being; and yet you might scream; A horrible tease he is, indeed speaking far too much for the promises he’d made to you not moments ago. “You’ve admired it a hundred times,” you get out impatiently, breathless as you are – for he has begun to trail his path of kisses directly to your core once more. A hum from him, as one palm grasps wholly round your thigh to spread you further for him to admire. A shameless thing, perhaps, though the heat of it spreads pleasure along your chest just as warmth kisses your cheeks in droves.
“And I intend to admire it a hundred more, my love,” he murmurs into you at length, rendering you straddled upon that terrible line between pleasure and tease. “Some things bear repeating,” he then decides. And it is as though you see the thought cross his mind through his eyes; though before you can tell him to cease it before it comes past his lips, a soft laugh, half-muffled against your heat, startles you.
“Unlike Lord Bar Emmon’s arguments,” he mutters then, the irritation of which boils suddenly beneath your skin, coaxing your eyes wide with disbelief as he dares continue. “–Which improve with exactly no amount of repetition–”
Your palm smacks lightly across the back of his head, disturbing the gloss of curls at rest between your thighs.
"Jace." You catch a fistful of his hair this time, not ungently, tipping his face properly up to yours. "Cease speaking, entirely, I–I mean it.”
And perhaps it would have come strong from your lips, if not for the shakiness, that trembling desire he’s seemed to coax within you despite his teasing. “Entirely,” he repeats, testing the word as though it truly offends him. You huff out an impatient sigh, well aware of both your impatience and your insatiable desire for your husband at present; though too, you are well aware of your Jacaerys’ predisposition to spoiling you in all aspects of your marriage – and he, quite often, finds it a true struggle to say no to you. He goads you, you know this. WIthin such a handsome visage lies a glint of amusement he gains at your slow torture. “That seems a rather severe–”
“Jacaerys,” you all but whimper, and that does it; something in the word dissolves whatever torturous, inopportune argument he’d been building, and the grin that spreads over his face is helpless now, boyish, all pretense of debate abandoned.
“Alright, yes, mercy. I’ll yield to my pretty wife.” His lips brush against your aching desire, shoulders shaking with amusement. “How horrible,” he then dares utter, as though speaking to himself. “The Prince of Dragonstone, brought low by his own wife, in his own solar, over a map–”
You make to sit up, cheeks hot with the hazy mixture of desire, pleasure, and sheer irritation. “Speak once more about that map, and I swear to you I will leave this chamber.”
At this, he goes rather properly still between your thighs, the teasing drained out of him all at once; and for a few breaths, neither of you moves at all. Candlelight licks along the ruined parchment beneath you both, and the scent of wine is strong enough within the chamber that you imagine it’s breached the edges of the map, too – blooming ruby along the rivers and coasts etched with ink, spreading its tendrils closer as though it, too, wishes to touch the man between your thighs. The torchlight catches its own gold warmth along the line of his jaw, and his eyes are amber gone dark and steady; they flick, searching your face as though to be certain the threat is only half meant. It is, of course.
Still, in the heavy breaths between you, neither you nor Jace look away; a shared thing so deep there are no words, an understanding perhaps only known between two people who have shared a bed and a war and worlds worth of trust between them and know each other too well now to need explaining.
A smile blooms, first across full lips, glistening with desire; then along carved cheekbone, spreading to warm his eyes until the whole chamber feels, for a moment, infinitely warm and gentle. Your own smile creeps along your visage, just as easy as dusk chases sun.
You could not love him more, you think.
“Not another word,” he swears to you then, earnest enough as he is cheeky; he's already smiling against your skin, mouth finding the soft of your thigh in silent apology, one hand splaying warm along your stomach to ease you down again, unhurried and certain as only he could ever be with your body. A warmth spreads through you, that familiar affection that pricks along your cheeks and flutters your heart.
And then, after far too much anticipation, a slow press of his lips; your sigh soothes along the breath of the torches as his fingers gently press into the thick of your thighs, soothing the tense of your muscles. Eyelashes flutter as his tongue laves slowly upon your heat, nudging your bundle of nerves enough to have you keening, whispering his name into the quiet of the chamber. Indeed, you begin quite immediately to quiver at the sensation; A shuttering breath of pleasure exhales from your lips, brows stitching together with a thread of sweet ecstasy. Though after only a few more moments, his lips whisper once more against you. “I’ll be the very picture of silence, I swear it, my love.”
And he is not, quite, what he promises to be; a murmur here, a low hum of arousal there, some fresh and foolish endearment breathed against your skin every time he thinks you've forgotten to scold him for it – but he is close enough, with his mouth upon you and his hands finding each breath of your body they’ve long since memorized, that you let it go entirely.
youse soso talented and creative!! you should make a dj jxce reverse one so shes the one acting sus (shes not a dj tho) and hes like wait what if theres someone else
This is a fun twist for DJ JXCE 😂😂
Enjoy~~
You would think the last time would have been a lesson well learned. Apparently not.
Rain hadn't started yet, but the sky over the city had that heavy grey look that promised it would, sooner or later. You stood at the kitchen counter with your phone screen tilted away from the door, thumb flying over the keyboard, heart doing something ridiculous every time a new message dropped into the group chat.
DJ JXCE Anniversary Ops, it was called, because Cregan had insisted on naming it something that sounded like a military operation, and honestly, at this point, it kind of felt like one.
The plan was simple in theory. Jace's one year anniversary as a DJ was coming up, the secret double life he'd built under the name JXCE, the one only a handful of people knew about, and you wanted to give him something for it. Something real. A party. His people, his music, his memories, all in one room, celebrating a year of him being brave enough to become someone new.
The problem was that Jace was always home. He worked from the apartment most days, and even when he wasn't, he had a habit of appearing at the worst possible moments, like the universe had personally assigned itself to ruining your surprises.
So you'd recruited help. Cregan, his best friend/Manager, endlessly loyal and endlessly incapable of being subtle. Your neighbour, who had access to the apartment building's spare storage room. And Baela, on standby, for whenever Jace needed to be lured out of the apartment for an hour or two.
It should have been simple. It was not simple.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
You heard his key in the lock and your whole body reacted before your brain caught up. You'd been mid sentence in the chat, typing out a question about whether the bakery could do a fondant vinyl record on top of the cake, and the second the lock clicked you fumbled the phone so badly it nearly slid off the counter. You caught it, snapped it face down against your chest, and by the time the door swung open you were standing there with the guilty, too straight posture of someone who has just hidden something and wants very badly for that fact not to be obvious.
It was, of course, obvious.
"Oh," you said, a full octave too bright. "You're home already?"
Jace paused in the doorway, jacket half off one shoulder, keys still dangling from two fingers. Something flickered across his face, not suspicion yet, just the small confusion of a man noticing a chair has been moved an inch to the left without being able to say why it bothers him.
"Already?" he repeated slowly, glancing at his watch like he needed to check. "I live here. It's six."
"Right," you said, way too fast. "Obviously. I just mean, time. Where does it go."
He didn't answer that. His eyes flicked, just briefly, to the phone still clutched to your chest, screen down, and then to the way you hadn't moved from that spot at the counter to greet him as you would, like you were physically blocking something. He didn't say anything about it. He just held your gaze a beat too long before heading toward the bedroom, and you exhaled like you'd been holding your breath for an hour.
You didn't notice, because you were too busy sagging with relief, that he paused just past the doorway, out of sight, and stood there a second longer than necessary before continuing on.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
It didn't get better from there.
A few days later Cregan wouldn't stop texting you, a rapid fire string of questions about balloon arch delivery times, and you'd made the mistake of leaving your phone face up on the couch cushion while you went to grab snacks. Jace was sitting close enough to see it light up, over and over, his own show forgotten on the TV in favor of the little rectangle of light flashing insistently beside him.
He told himself not to look, that he trusted you and yet he looked anyway.
Got it.
Don't let him know.
I'll bring everything Friday.
Three messages, three fragments, and his mind, against his own better judgement, began stitching them together into something far more damning than balloons. He was still staring at the screen, jaw tight, when you walked back in with the chip bowl, and he didn't even try to hide that he'd seen it.
"Everything?" he asked, holding the phone up slightly, not accusing exactly, but not nothing either.
Your stomach dropped. You crossed the room fast and plucked the phone out of his hand a little too quickly, a little too much like you were snatching evidence off a table.
"It's nothing," you said.
Jace didn't push, not out loud. But something in his face had gone carefully blank, the blankness of a man deciding not to react in front of you, and you, in a small flash of panic at the silence stretching between you, did the only thing you could think of to shut the moment down before it went any further.
You leaned over and kissed him.
It worked, in the sense that he kissed you back, hand coming up to rest at your jaw like it always did, easy and familiar. But when you pulled back, smiling, hoping the topic had been successfully buried, you missed the flicker that crossed his face before he smoothed it over. Because to you the kiss was just a kiss, a way of saying let's not do this right now. To Jace, in the tender, paranoid corner of his mind that had started quietly building a case against you, it read like something else entirely. Like a distraction. Like something you did because you didn't want him thinking too hard about what he'd just seen.
He told himself that was insane. He kissed you back anyway, and smiled, and said nothing, and hated himself a little for the thought that had crossed his mind in the first place. But it stayed there. Small, and quiet, and rooted.
That night, lying beside you with your back turned to him and your breathing gone slow and even in sleep, he found himself staring at the ceiling, turning the word everything over and over like a stone in his palm, trying to sand it down into something harmless and failing every time.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
The third incident happened at Cregan's apartment, and it was, without question, the worst one yet.
You'd gone over after work to help unpack the last of the party supplies, boxes of fairy lights and folded banners and a cardboard cutout of a DJ booth that someone had ordered as a joke and that had somehow become extremely important to the whole event. Cregan's living room was a warzone of half opened boxes, packing paper, and extension cords by the time you arrived, the low evening light through his blinds throwing everything into long amber stripes.
"Careful," Cregan said absently, not even looking up from the box he was elbow deep in. "I haven't moved the boxes by the table yet."
You did not, in fact, hear this warning in time.
Your foot caught the corner of a box jutting out from under the coffee table, and you pitched forward with a sharp, startled gasp, arms flailing for something, anything, to grab. Cregan moved fast, faster than you expected, catching you by the waist just before you face planted directly into a box of tissue paper pom poms.
"Whoa, hey, easy," he laughed, both hands steady and firm at your sides, holding you upright while your foot found the floor again.
You laughed too, breathless and startled, one hand flat against his chest for balance, and your ankle, which had twisted slightly in the stumble, throbbed enough that you stayed there a second longer, leaning into him while you tested whether it would hold your weight. Cregan, oblivious to anything but the practical matter of keeping you upright, murmured something like "you good? don't put weight on it yet" with his head bent close to yours, which, to anyone walking in cold, looked a great deal like something it was not.
Neither of you heard the front door.
Jace had come by to drop off a spare charger Cregan had been texting him about all week, and he never bothered knocking at Cregan's place, hadn't in years, so the door swung open without warning onto a tableau that, stripped of all context, looked exactly like the thing his brain had been quietly thinking for days. His best friend's hands at your waist, your palm against his chest and Cregan's head dipped close to yours, murmuring something too low to catch. You leaned into him, cheeks flushed, close enough that there was no space between you at all.
The silence that followed lasted only a second, but it stretched inside Jace's chest like something tearing.
You saw him first and the laugh died in your throat, you shoved back from Cregan so fast you nearly caught your bad ankle a second time, stumbling slightly before catching the arm of the couch. Cregan's hands flew up and away from you at the same moment, palms out, like you'd suddenly turned red hot, and the two of you separating that quickly, that guiltily, did more damage than if you'd simply stayed still and let him see the box on the floor.
"You're not supposed to be here," you blurted, and you meant it about the party, about the secret, about anything other than what it must have looked like, but the words came out all wrong, defensive and too fast, like a confession instead of denial.
Jace stood frozen in the doorway, the spare charger still in one hand, rain just beginning to fleck the shoulders of his jacket from the walk over. "...What?"
"This isn't what it looks like," Cregan said, which is, of course, the single worst thing anyone can say in that exact moment.
"I didn't say it looked like anything," Jace said, far too evenly, his eyes moving slowly from Cregan's raised hands to your face to the overturned box at your feet and back to Cregan again.
"Right. Good. Great. Because it's not," Cregan said, in the exact tone of someone who has just made things worse.
You tried to explain, gesturing at the box, at your ankle, but the words tangled and came out half formed, and Jace only nodded slowly, set the charger down on the counter with far more care than the object warranted, and said he had to get back. He was gone before either of you could finish a sentence, the door clicking shut behind him with a quiet, deliberate sound that somehow felt louder than a slam.
You and Cregan stood there in the sudden hush, surrounded by fairy lights and collapsed cardboard, both arriving at the same realization at the same moment.
"...That was not great," Cregan said.
"No," you agreed, staring at the door. "It really wasn't."
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
What you didn't know, what you couldn't know, was the war being fought quietly inside Jace's chest every single day that followed.
Because Jace remembered exactly what it felt like to be on the receiving end of this. He remembered the hollow, sick feeling of being accused of something he hadn't done, the way your own doubt had curdled into something loud and hurt before you'd had all the facts, the long, careful weeks it had taken afterward to rebuild what had cracked open between you. He had told himself, back then, lying awake while you slept with your back to him, that he never wanted you to feel that way. He hadn't expected to be the one standing in it now, on the other side, with the same ugly feeling clawing up his throat.
So this time he told himself he would be different. He would not accuse. He would not spiral out loud where you could see it and be hurt by it, the way he had been hurt by it. He would wait, patiently, rationally, for the obvious explanation to present itself, the way he wished someone had waited for him.
She's not like that, he told himself one night, lying awake with the ceiling for company. There's obviously another explanation. There has to be.
But the universe, cruel and endlessly inventive, kept handing him more evidence instead of less.
You started dressing nicer some mornings, a little more effort in front of the mirror, lipstick you didn't usually bother with on a weekday, because you had a meeting with the bakery about the cake design and wanted to make a good impression on people who took your crazy vinyl idea seriously. Jace only saw the dress, the mirror, the extra five minutes you spent that you never used to spend, and filed it away next to everything else.
You started leaving earlier some mornings and coming home later some nights, because there were florists to negotiate with and printers arguing over banner dimensions and a rental company that could not, for the life of them, confirm a delivery window. Jace only saw the empty side of the bed when he woke, and the tired, oddly luminous smile you wore when you finally did walk through the door, the kind of smile that looked, to his increasingly unreliable eyes, like the smile of someone who had somewhere else she'd rather be.
You whispered on the phone in the hallway, hand cupped around your mouth, because Cregan had called about seating arrangements and you didn't want your voice carrying through the apartment and ruining the surprise. Jace only caught the hushed tone, the way you angled your body toward the wall whenever he passed, the way the call ended abruptly the second you heard his footsteps. You deleted notifications the moment they lit up your lock screen, because half of them said things like cake tasting confirmed for Thursday or Cregan: got the lights, don't panic. Jace only registered the practiced, instant flick of your thumb, the phone going dark before he could so much as glance at it.
Your neighbour, in on the secret and terrified of blowing it, started being strangely, overly friendly to Jace whenever he was around, complimenting his shirt, asking about his day with an intensity that bordered on interrogation, laughing a half second too hard at things that weren't funny. To Jace, it read exactly like guilt wearing a smile, like someone trying too hard to compensate for something.
Worst of all, conversations seemed to die the second he entered a room. You and your friend, mid laugh over a text from Cregan, would go abruptly, suspiciously silent the moment his footsteps sounded in the hall, both of you suddenly very interested in the contents of the fridge.
He noticed every single detail that he would have brushed off without a second thought a year ago, and now each one lodged itself under his skin like a splinter, small, constant, and impossible to leave alone.
Then he noticed Cregan.
Cregan, who was suddenly busy every single time Jace suggested getting a drink, always with some vague excuse about errands he wouldn't elaborate on. Cregan, who kept stepping outside mid conversation to take calls he wouldn't explain, phone pressed close to his ear, voice dropping the second he crossed the threshold. Cregan, who wouldn't quite meet his eyes over dinner one night, laughing a little too loud at his own jokes, filling silences that didn't need filling. Cregan, who Jace had last seen with his hands on your waist and your palm flat against his chest, murmuring something too soft to hear.
Something in Jace's chest went cold and strange.
Not Cregan, he told himself, almost desperately, lying awake yet again. Fourteen years of friendship has to count for something.
A beat.
...Would he?
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
The thought festered for days before Jace finally tried to dig for the truth the only way he knew how, casually, carefully, like a man defusing something he was terrified would go off in his hands the second he touched it.
You were curled up together on the couch one evening, controllers in hand, some racing game throwing colored light across both your faces, when he asked, in a voice he'd practiced sounding indifferent, "You and Cregan been hanging out a lot lately?"
You smiled without looking away from the screen, utterly, blissfully unaware of the way his entire body had gone rigid waiting for your answer.
"Yeah," you said easily, thumb tapping the controller. "He's been helping me loads with some stuff."
Something in Jace quietly died.
You kept smiling, kept your eyes on the road ahead of your little pixelated car, thinking about seating charts and cake flavors and how surprisingly good Cregan had turned out to be at untangling string lights. Jace, beside you, was busy reading an entire tragic betrayal into the shape of your smile, into the warmth still lingering in your voice, into every innocent, ordinary word.
"With what?" he asked, too quickly, before he could stop himself.
"Party stuff, for a mutual friend." you said, which was, of course, entirely true and told him nothing at all. "It's kind of a whole thing right now. I'll explain soon, I promise."
"Right," Jace said, something in his stomach twisting at soon, at the vague, deflecting shape of that sentence. "A whole thing."
He didn't say anything else. He just gripped the controller a little tighter, let his car crash spectacularly into a wall he'd been dodging successfully for the last ten minutes, and when you laughed and told him he seemed distracted tonight, he agreed, hollow, that he must be.
You leaned over and kissed his cheek, quick and easy to comfort him and went back to the race. To you it meant nothing at all, a reflex, an afterthought. To Jace it felt, absurdly, like being handed a consolation prize.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
The night of the party arrived wrapped in the same grey rain that had been threatening all week, finally falling in earnest, streaking down the windows in long silver lines as Jace trudged home from a long, draining day, one he'd spent mostly failing to concentrate on anything other than the low, constant hum of dread sitting behind his ribs.
He'd spent the better part of a week convincing himself, minute by minute, not to think the worst. It had cost him. He felt it in his shoulders, in the tight, tired set of his jaw, in the way he'd barely eaten at lunch because his stomach had been in knots since morning.
He let himself into the apartment. Everything was dark, silent, still.
He dropped his keys onto the little dish by the door, the sound sharp in the quiet, and let out a long, shaking breath that seemed to carry the whole week with it.
"Need sleep," he mumbled to no one, rubbing a hand down his face.
The lights exploded on.
"SURPRISE!"
For one full second, Jace simply stopped existing as a functional human being. He stood frozen in the doorway, rain still dripping steadily from his hair onto the floor, mouth slightly open, staring at the impossible scene unfolding in front of him.
Music was already playing low in the background, something warm and familiar, one of his own old mixes, he realized distantly. Streamers hung from the ceiling in loose silver arcs. A banner stretched across the far wall bearing his DJ logo, the one he'd designed himself in secret over a hundred late nights, blown up huge and glowing under a string of fairy lights. A cake sat on the table with tiny fondant headphones balanced carefully on top, and beside it, unmistakably, a small fondant vinyl record. Photographs were pinned along the wall in a careful, curated line, grainy shots from his very first gig, the one where his hands had shaken so badly he'd nearly dropped the headphones twice.
Everyone was there. Cregan grinning like an idiot by the speaker system, one arm raised in a triumphant wave. Baela laughing openly at the look frozen on his face. Your neighbour holding up a phone, already filming, already capturing the precise moment his brain short circuited.
And you, standing in the middle of it all, glowing, delighted, utterly pleased with yourself.
Jace just stared. Rain dripping steadily onto the floor. Absolutely, completely frozen.
You crossed the room to him, unable to keep the smile off your face. "Happy one year of DJing, DJ Jxce."
His eyes moved slowly around the room. To the banner. To the photographs. To Cregan, standing right there, grinning, entirely innocent, entirely his best friend and nothing else. Back to you.
"...Wait," he said finally.
A long pause.
"...This..."
Another pause, longer this time, like his whole brain was still trying to reboot from scratch.
"...THIS is why you've been sneaking around?"
You laughed, delighted, entirely missing the storm that had been quietly building behind his eyes for a solid week. "...Yeah?"
Jace slowly dragged a hand down his face. Then the other hand joined it, both palms pressed against his eyes as if he could physically push the last seven days out of his skull through sheer pressure. He let out the single biggest sigh of his entire life.
"Seven hells..."
You blinked, your smile faltering just slightly at the edges. "...What?"
He lowered his hands, and there was something so raw, so sheepish, so thoroughly caught out in his expression that it made your stomach flip.
"I thought," he started, then laughed at himself, short and disbelieving, shaking his head slowly. "God, I actually thought you were cheating."
Your smile vanished instantly. "...What?"
Jace pointed, almost helplessly, at Cregan across the room. "With him."
The room went dead silent. Even the music seemed to hold its breath.
Cregan, drink halfway to his mouth, nearly choked on the spot. "WITH ME?"
You stared at Jace. Then at Cregan. Then back at Jace, waiting for the punchline that clearly was not coming. And then you burst out laughing, so hard and so suddenly that actual tears sprang to your eyes.
"Jace." You had to stop and catch your breath. "You thought." You pointed weakly at Cregan, wheezing. "Him?”
Cregan looked deeply, personally offended. "Oi."
Jace groaned, dragging both hands down his face again. "Stop laughing."
You could not. You were bent over now, one hand braced on your knee, laughing so hard your ribs actually ached. "YOU THOUGHT I WAS CHEATING WITH YOUR BEST MATE?"
"In my defense," Jace muttered, ears going faintly red, "you two were doing a lot of very suspicious hand holding at his apartment. And whispering. And you kissed me literally right after I saw his texts, which, by the way, felt very deliberate."
"That was because I panicked, not because I was guilty!"
"I didn't KNOW that at the time!"
"I have known you since we were nine," Cregan said, deeply wounded, to no one in particular. "Nine, Jace."
Eventually, through the tears and the wheezing, you noticed the way his ears had gone properly red now, how he stood there looking somewhere between mortified and miserable despite the party unfolding cheerfully all around him. Your laughter softened. You crossed the last bit of space between you and took his face gently in both hands, tilting it so he had to look at you.
"Why didn't you tell me?" you asked, quieter now.
Jace shrugged, eyes dropping to somewhere around your collarbone. "Because after last time..."
He exhaled slowly, the words coming harder now that the joke had drained out of the room.
"I didn't want to accuse you over nothing. Not after what happened to me. I remember exactly what it felt like being on the other end of that, and I didn't want to do it to you, even quietly, even just in my own head. I kept thinking I'd wake up tomorrow and realize I was just being an idiot, and it would all sort itself out if I just waited it out."
You smiled, a little sad now, a little fond, thumb brushing along his cheekbone. "...You were being an idiot…but your feelings are justified. Cregan and I were a bit suspicious."
"...Yeah," he admitted, and the word came out low, almost a laugh, almost a sigh, all the tension of the last week finally leaving his shoulders in one long breath.
You tapped his forehead lightly with one finger. "You know what would've solved this?"
He winced, already knowing exactly where this was going. "...Communication?"
"Communication," you confirmed, tapping his forehead again for emphasis.
He caught your hand before it could tap a third time, lacing his fingers through yours instead, holding on like he needed the anchor. "...Communication," he repeated softly, like he was trying to make the word stick somewhere permanent this time, somewhere it wouldn't slip loose the next time his imagination got ahead of him.
Then you kissed him, slow and warm despite the rain still clinging to his jacket, despite the party noise swelling happily around you both, despite Cregan loudly announcing to the room that he required an apology in writing.
"Next time your brain starts writing soap operas," you murmured against his mouth, "you come to me first."
He laughed against your lips, the sound finally, fully relieved, all the coiled dread of the last week unspooling at once. "...Deal."
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
He did not get to live it down. Not for a long, long time.
Weeks later, Cregan sauntered into the kitchen while Jace was pouring his coffee and draped an arm over your shoulders, entirely too pleased with himself. "Morning, love."
You leaned into it instantly, batting your eyelashes up at him. "Morning, darling. Sleep well?"
Jace, mug halfway to his mouth, went very still. "...What is happening right now."
"Nothing," you said sweetly, patting Cregan's chest exactly the way you had that day in his apartment, watching Jace's eye twitch in real time. "Cregan was just saying how he doesn't know what he'd do without me."
"Couldn't function," Cregan agreed solemnly, resting his chin on top of your head. "She's been such a comfort to me. All those boxes. All that bonding."
"Stop it," Jace said.
"I brought everything Friday, remember?" Cregan continued, entirely too innocent. "Very intimate logistics, that was."
"I will end both of you."
You gasped, clutching a hand to your chest in mock offense, and turned to Cregan like you needed comforting from the sheer trauma of the threat. Cregan, rising to the occasion, immediately wrapped both arms around you and pulled you into a full, dramatic hug, patting your back consolingly while looking directly at Jace over your shoulder with a grin that could only be described as shameless.
"There, there," Cregan said. "He's just jealous he doesn't appreciate you like I do."
"That's it," Jace said, setting his mug down with a decisive clink. "Cregan. Out. Get out of my house."
"We're bonding, Jace."
"Get out of my house," Jace repeated, already crossing the kitchen, and he peeled you bodily out of Cregan's arms with both hands on your waist, hauling you back against his own chest instead like he was retrieving stolen property. "And as for you." He turned you around to face him, eyes narrowed, fighting visibly against the smile threatening to break through. "Missy. You are coming with me."
"I was just giving him a hug, I don't see the problem, JACE,"
You didn't get to finish the sentence, because he'd already caught your wrist and was hauling you, laughing and stumbling half out of your socks, straight down the hallway toward the bedroom.
"This is emotional abuse!" Cregan called after you both, absolutely delighted, coffee mug (that Jace had abandoned) raised like a toast. "Some of us are just trying to spread love in this household!"
"Find your own household!" Jace shouted back, not stopping, not slowing down, dragging you the entire way with a grip that was somehow both irritated and completely unwilling to let go.
The bedroom door shut with a soft click, and a beat later his voice carried through it, muffled, trying very hard to sound stern and failing completely, something about I swear! You and that man exists purely to make my life difficult dissolving quickly into your laughter and then, a moment after that, into something quieter and warmer, all the mock outrage draining right out of him.
Out in the kitchen, Cregan poured himself a second coffee like he owned the place, thoroughly satisfied with his morning's work, already composing the next round in his head.
summary — while combing the beach for treasures, you stumble upon the unconscious, grievously injured body of a soldier. you decide to help him, but in doing so find love in a man that may never be able to return it. (11.4k)
featured — jacaerys velaryon / fem!reader
content — spoilers! tread carefully, fluff and ANGST, angst w/ a happy ending, hurt/comfort, canon divergent, jace lives, light medical descriptions, reader cares a lot for jace, dual pov!!!, inexplicit mental health struggles (reader’s deceased father), dead vermax ☹, 18+ MDNI implied sexual content/fade-to-black, tw there is a baby
a/n — am i anywhere near caught up with hotd? no. did i write this in spite of that? yes. i'm sorry if things don't make sense or are not in line with canon. the wiki and i did our best!
(cross-posted on ao3)
The cerulean waves lap at the silver beach, ebbing and flowing with the morrow’s breeze. Quiet has finally settled on the shores after a night of war and destruction. A battle beyond these argent sands occurred out in the gullet. All night, the savagery had kept you awake. This morrow, you collect treasures from your fish nets.
You step carefully across the sands, adjusting your silk scarf tighter around your mouth and nose. You bend the knee at the first net.
You heave it onto the shore. Nothing except too-small pieces of fabric and inedible shelled fish are in this one. You empty it and release the fish back to the embrace of the sea.
You stand again, taking a few more steps down. Your mind drifts as you fall into a rhythm of checking these nets, pocketing pretty shells and scraps of metal. Wonder pricks at the back of your neck as you imagine the war. As the lone tenant of this pier, you had never had to consider the rites of the Targaryen rulers. Most of your neighbors had already chosen their sides, even if it did not really matter in the scheme of things—neither of those fighting for the throne cared for their subjects, especially not those at the bottom, like you.
Rulers like these bled the common man dry while claiming it to be an act of love.
You move a little rougher with the next net. Nothing but rocks and debris in this one. You imagine it will be a while until you find a worthy treat. The Gods are usually not as generous on solemn days like these. War makes monsters out of men, and the Gods scorn those who partake.
When you stand again, your eyes drift a little further down the bank. At the edge of the shore, a clump of trees catch your gaze. The water is darker there, cloaked in shadow. The shrubbery bends so far, it almost touches the water. You draw closer, eyebrows furrowed.
A dark lump sits entangled by brush, barely concealed by the cluster of foliage. You draw closer, hesitantly. As your eyes adjust, you realize it is not a lump of debris, but a body. Your breaths quicken.
If the person is alive, would it hurt you? Never trust a soldier, your father had once told you.
You bend your knee just as if you are checking a fish net. Your hands unfurl from your sides, reaching out hesitantly. You can only see his body. It is clothed in thick leather, a quality of which you’ve never seen before. Several arrows stick out of his torso. A pool of blood stains the sand maroon beneath him.
You pull back the shrubbery to see his face. You startle at the sight, falling back onto your bum.
His eyes—they were open—albeit, he did not seem to see much of anything. His skin was not grey and placid like the bodies that you had seen before. Worse, you’d heard something when you held yourself over him. A breath, shuddering through his parted lips.
“Alive,” you whisper in awe. To survive so many arrows, then the tumultuous sea… it would take more than just courage. It would take something otherworldly. You know then that your decision has been made.
A huge piece of driftwood sits beneath him in the sand. You push it aside to straddle him. Gently, you grab his arm and sling it around your neck.
The rest of your journey back to the cabin passes in a frenzied blur. You move quickly, trying to spend as little time as possible forcing the grievously hurt man onto his feet. He lets out little grumbles as you move, head lolling this way and that like a puppet cut from its strings. You make it inside and push open the door that your father used to live, laying him onto his back on the bed.
Blood immediately infiltrates the off-white of the duvet, crimson floating before your vision. He groans continuously as you break the ends off of the arrows—serving as a reminder to the heart that still valiantly pumped beneath his ribs. Once they are off, you are able to slide the armor off.
The tunic comes easily. It seems to be made of a material that deflects water, so when you drop it onto the floor, a puddle of liquid forms in its spot. You struggle a little with his breeches—though, those too come easily with a little pull.
After he is naked, you stare at his body in silence for a moment. You have helped men with injuries before. Arrow injuries just like these, even. But you’d never helped a man with this many.
You reach out to touch his cold cheek. He is so young—had to be your own age. Too young for the cruel, unflinching hold of war. Gently, you close his eyelids, shutting away the dark brown of his unseeing gaze. He did not need to be witness to this.
You steel your nerves and clench your fists a few times to breathe life back into your numb fingers. Reaching into the bedside table, you grab your supplies—bandages, a bottle of rum, a couple cloths, and several blunt blades.
“I’m sorry, if you are awake,” you tell him, poising the knife along the edge of one of the arrow heads. “This will hurt a lot.”
Hours pass quickly under your blade. Each of the five arrows is cut away, sewn with fishing line, disinfected with rum, and bandaged tightly. Sweat falls into your eyes as you step away triumphantly, and you lift a hand to brush it off. As they are levelled with your eyes, you realize your hands are a bloody mess. Your stomach churns and you force the appendages away.
You hover over him a moment longer. You study the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the fluttering of his eyelids. He had a strong nose and jaw, thick dark eyelashes and a head of water-matted brunet hair. By all appearances, he was quite common-looking. He had the complexion and hair of any man you’d pass on the way to town. But something about him—the quality of his armor, the blemishlessness of his skin, it screamed something ethereal.
But even Gods can be killed.
Your mystery man is not out of the woods yet. The chances of any of those arrows not nicking anything inside him is next to none. He’s also lost a lot of blood. The sheets are covered in it, not to mention the amount he was sure to have lost at sea.
You draw the hair sea-slicked to his head away from his forehead. Your hand slides to cup his cheek. He might never wake again. Your kind hand may be the last he knows. You wonder how many people missed him—if they were sitting with baited breaths, waiting for him to write. If only you could ease their worries.
You pull away and leave the room before your eyes can fill with traitorous saltwater tears.
There are few certainties in life. Ever since you were but a child, you had recognized this. Life is tumultuous and unfair. It takes and it takes, until you can give no longer.
The sea is a comfort. She does not take, she gives. Usually, she gives you more valuable things than a body, but you try not to question her motives.
It’s been a day since you patched him and he still has not woken. His chest continues to move despite this disconcerting sign, and that remains your only comfort. You stood near-vigil at his beside for most of the hours following. Anticipatory nerves fill your every waking second, even at night when you lay awake trying to sleep.
You recognize that the danger has not fully passed for him. He had not had water in who knows how long. Eventually, his organs would fail due to dehydration and blood loss. That is, if the internal bleeding didn’t kill him first.
You also cannot help the hope that blooms in your chest as you gaze upon his face. Perhaps it is the fact that his skin seems more alive as of late. The fact that you have seen his eyes move behind his eyelids more and more often. The fact that you were quite insufferably lonely, and therefore latched onto any individual who came your way—alive or barely, as in the case of this man in your cabin.
You want him to survive because you want to know him. It is a thought that scares you as much as it invigorates you.
By his bedside, after a long morrow of scavenging by the tide, you dump your satchel of goodies on the now-clean duvet. (Now that had been annoying to do—having to move his admittedly quite heavy body over to remove the sheets). You begin to sort through them, cataloging them.
The silence is unsettling, so you begin to speak.
“The sea has been kind this morrow,” you say softly. You pick up a smooth rainbow shell, twisting it this way and that in the light. “These will sell for a couple of silvers.”
You put the shell down and then grab your cloth, gently stroking away sand and debris.
“My father taught me to do this,” you tell the man, “he taught me everything I know.”
Satisfied with its shimmer, you trade the shell for a clam. You pop it open forcefully—apologizing profusely to the creature as you did—and stick your fingers into the dark crevice you created.
“No pearl,” you report when your fingers come up empty. You bring the clam up to your eyes, stroking its now-broken shell. “I’m sorry, friend.”
The last piece had been one you were excited for. You grab the shrapnel of metal gently in your palms, categorizing the weight and feel of it with your hands.
“Probably off a shield,” you decide. “I’m sure a blacksmith would like this.”
You put the metal down and let out a heavy sigh. You stare at the man, worrying your lip between your teeth. Perhaps some foolish part of you had hoped he would wake up to the sound of your voice, like the stories you had read as a girl.
But life is no story, as you had to continually remind yourself. Things like that just didn’t happen.
You go through a few other bits and bobs in silence, mood dampened by reality. A couple of small shells, a nail, and a scrap of maroon fabric. You aren’t sure why you grabbed the fabric—perhaps you’d wanted to try and sew something. It is quite pretty, you decide. It had belonged to someone once.
Once you finish polishing the items, you lift your head up to look at the man. Thoughts and images flash through your mind. What was he like? You wonder. He seems strong, based on his broad shoulders and defined stomach. But he also didn’t have the worn skin of a common man. He didn’t have callouses on his hands or fading scars upon his torso. He had to be a prince, you decide. A prince of a faraway land, hoping to bargain peace between the two feuding Targaryen houses.
You nod, satisfied with that recreation of events. Yes, a prince. A just, altruistic one. Perhaps he knew of the war and wished to come and save the small-folk.
You look down at his pale hand resting lifelessly upon the duvet. You swallow thickly.
“You must wake soon,” you whisper, “the kingdom needs you.”
He does not stir. You sigh and gather your things into your satchel. If he is still not awake by the morrow, you decide, you will return his body to the sea.
That evening, you sit at the table with a plate of roasted fish and a glass of water. The fish is one of two meals you eat regularly. The other was for special occasions, depending on if you were able to procure bread and potatoes at the markets.
You always eat the eye of the fish first. You do not like it looking at you as you eat its flesh. It feels wrong. The eye is not very tasty, though. The odd texture always makes you vaguely nauseous–the gooey, chewy ball. Your father had always laughed at you when you ate fish. He was not of an imaginative mind. He did not see the fish as being once alive, like you did. He did not imagine it swimming beneath the tide, with all its other fishy friends–before it was snared by ruthless hands and suffocated by the open air.
You stare at the vacant chair across from you with an empty feeling in your chest. It had been so long since you had a companion at supper time. Your father had not spoken much, but his presence alone was always enough to keep you happy. He is gone now, like with the ebbing of the tide, and all that is left is the shadow of the person he used to be.
His fishing pole, next to the door. His journal, where he kept extensive notes about what he found out on the sea during the day. His bed that now had a new, warm body sleeping in it.
You wonder what your father would have done, had he found the man. You take another bite of the fish, forcing it down with a thick swallow. Would he have left him? You had never thought of him as being cruel, but you also know he loathed unwelcome responsibility. He had enough of an imagination to conjure horrible images of betrayal and hurt, and so you decide he probably wouldn’t have brought him home to you. He had too much to lose to do so. Everyone did.
And so why did you? Perhaps, you think, you have lost everything that matters most to you already.
You stare down at the limp skeleton of the fish on your plate. You had never seen a person die of dehydration. Your father had once told you a story about a man he knew that had, and it sounded awful.
You pick up your dinner knife, a sharp, clean-edged blade, and hold it in the candlelight. The silver edge catches the light, highlighting the sharp point. Your hand trembles as you study it.
Would it be quick, painless—slitting the sleeping prince’s throat? Or would it be messy and painful? Would it draw him out of sleep and would he gaze upon you with hurting eyes as he clutched the gaping hole in his neck?
Regret gnaws at you. As time draws on, you begin to think that the mercy you had granted your prince had been nothing but a farce. That by saving him for one moment had only just prolonged his suffering.
You put the knife in your satchel and stand. It is cruel, keeping a person alive only to die in a violent manner like this–it is inhumane.
You take quick steps to the bedroom.
You have never killed a person before. Your father had plenty. He always said the eyes, you can hear his voice in your mind now, the eyes are always the worst part.
You can’t eat the prince’s eyes like you can the fish’s. No matter what you did, you would have to see those eyes. And with it, the betrayal. You stand over his prone body now.
A sliver of moonlight streams in from the open window behind you, casting cool light across the heaving chest. He remains impassive, completely unaware of what you were about to do. You do not realize you are crying until you bring the knife up to your eyes and catch a glimpse of your face in the silver.
“I…I am sorry, friend,” you repeat the same mantra you had told so many clams before as you pried your fingers in their mouths, looking for a pearl. “But this is a mercy.”
Your hands tremble like windblown seagrass as you lift the knife against his skin. A moment of hesitation prevents you from acting. And it is just enough for a pale hand to wrap around your own and for dark eyes to snap open.
“Waaa-ter.”
You let out a sharp gasp and yank your hand away. The man watches you, his visage crumpled with pain.
He repeats himself, voice quieter than the first time. “Water, please…”
You move into action. You dart out of the room, hands fumbling with the metal bucket by your door. You run across the moonlit shore to the well that sits on the edge of the woods. Quickly, you fill the bucket. You curse yourself all the while–mind racing in what-ifs and guilt-ridden condemnations.
You heave the bucket back into the house and grab the same goblet you had used with your own water. You take a huge scoop and shuffle back into the bedroom like a child caught with their hand on the sweets plate.
The man is still awake when you re-enter, his eyes wide and eyebrows furrowed. You drop next to him on the bed and angle his head and neck up onto the pillows behind him. Finally, you fulfill his request. He drinks like a man in Essos who has wandered the Red Waste for weeks; heavy, desperate gulps of the liquid. Some fall and drip down his side, which you dab away with a nearby cloth.
When he finally drinks it all, he pulls back, his breaths labored and eyes half-lidded.
“W…Where am I?” he finally says once he has caught his breath. You notice him scanning the room as if trying to find the answer written in the stone.
You decide not to answer honestly. You fear what his reaction will be if he forces himself to recall the battle. Instead you say, “you are safe.”
He stares at you as if only just noticing you. His dark eyes are swallowed almost completely by night, exhausted and ridden with heavy bags. He lifts a hand, as if to touch you, but it falls short. His eyes flutter, and then shut.
He falls unconscious. You touch two hands to his chest to confirm his heart still beats steadily. You let out a breath you had not realized you captured when you find his pulse.
Shame hits you like a tidal wave. You were going to… you were going to kill him. You are shocked at the tears that swim in your eyes. You stand in a hurry–not without remembering to pull the duvet back up to his chest–and stumble out of the room.
The adrenaline has all but worn away now. Tears clog your eyes, slipping down your cheeks. You allow yourself to feel the emotions–all of them. Relief, shame, exhaustion, and fear overwhelm you completely and you can do nothing but sob. On the table in front of you, the skeleton of the fish and the silver knife mock you without having to say a word.
Waking feels like drowning. Fighting against the wave ahead of you, trying to get your head above water. Then when you finally surface, you fall behind the waves again.
Jacaerys wakes to the sun in his eyes and a warmth around his waist. He thinks for a moment, perhaps, he is in a dream. Another barrier between him and wakefulness. Then, the pain hits him. No, dreams don’t feel like this.
The groan stumbles past his lips before he can stop it and his eyes shoot open. Everything is pain. It surrounds him like dragonfire and steals his breath. He trembles as he uses all his strength to cradle his side.
“Gods,” he murmurs. He feels beneath his fingers the familiar texture of a bandage. Someone helped him.
Helped him. Helped him from what? He gasps as memory rolls over him. Drowning. Arrows piercing through skin and muscle. A dragon’s roar of pain. No, not just any dragon—
“Vermax,” he cries out, tears springing to his eyes. No, no, no…
But it was true. His mind had never failed him before. His dragon. His beautiful dragon. Falling to the bottom of the ocean like a ship’s anchor. He tries to move, to jump to his feet, but he can’t. Pain ricochets up his side, and he can literally feel the side of his chest pulling taut.
He stares at the ceiling above him with tears fogging his eyes and coating his tongue in salt. For one long moment, he despairs. Why? Why would he be punished this way? Forced to live without Vermax? The bond between rider and dragon could not—should not be severed. Not by something as futile as war. He can’t breathe, can’t think. Everything is despair.
He should have died. Living is not a gift in this condition. His knuckles go white against the duvet. Anger sweeps over him—hot, potent fury.
He curses everyone who caused this. Aemond, Alicent, Aegon, even fucking Helaena. He doesn’t care. They’ll all pay.
But not like this. He finally shuffles himself into a seated position, cringing at the pain that shoots from every direction. Every small movement feels like another arrow tearing his skin.
His feet are unsteady as he finds his footing. For a second, he fears he might not be able to even walk. Then, he finds himself. He grabs his breeches off the table and slowly, painfully, shrugs them on. He leaves his chest bare—unable to even think about having to lift his arms over his head. He keeps one hand on the wall and the other around his waist as he stumbles across the room.
The place he is in is frighteningly humble. There’s nothing unnecessary here. Everything has a purpose, a function. No gilded armoires, tall candlesticks, or commissioned portraits. Bare, cobblestone walls, sparse furniture (all glaringly handmade and rustic), and cobwebs hanging in every corner.
Jacaerys moves slowly from the room he started in to the short hallway that opens into a tiny living area. A large fireplace is the only comfort to him. A pot of a molten, unappetizing glob bubbles above the waning fire.
There are very few personal effects here. Nothing to propose any kind of hint or insight. Out the window of the front of the ramshackle building, he sees amber light flickering across a wide sea.
His breath shudders out of his lips. He doesn't recognize this place at all. He’s hurt. He has no dragon. He’s never felt worse in his entire life.
All of what energy he summoned flees him in that moment. He practically collapses into a nearby chair and it creaks pathetically under his weight. He hangs his head and a soft sob escapes his lips.
Tears tremble down his cheeks and onto the wood table beneath his hand. His mind races, memory and pain and fury collide in a war of its very own. Vermax, his mind strays. The perfect dragon. Gone. He digs his nails into the grain of the table beneath his hands, trying to recapture something to ground him. Short, hyperventilating breaths escape his lips—his vision fogs.
Then, everything clears. His hands unclench and he leans back in the chair. He stares at the ceiling, measuring his breaths. You are still alive, he tells himself. Therefore you are still useful.
Because perhaps that was his real fear. That he would no longer be of use—that he would no longer be worth fighting for. He’d always measured his worth in terms of what he could provide to his mother. Perhaps the truth is that his worth stretches beyond that.
He hears the sound of crunching footsteps outside. He sits up in the chair, eyes flickering toward the door. Ahead of him, he notices with a jolt, a knife lay discarded on the table. He grabs it before he can think the better of it, brandishing it like he actually could fight his way out of this mess.
He ignores the pain throbbing in his side and pushes himself to stand again. He won’t die now. He can’t.
The door creaks open slowly, and he angles the knife in front of himself protectively.
But the figure that crosses the threshold isn’t what he’d been expecting. Wide eyes and a mouth fallen open into an oval. Hands clutching a satchel of… is that a seashell?
She drops the satchel with immediacy, hands flying into the air. Jacaerys thinks he hears something break inside.
He keeps the arm holding the knife up despite the involuntary tremble that has begun in his arm. A cool sweat travels down his temple. His vision wanes. Despite her… figure (she hadn’t brandished a weapon a day in her life, he thinks), he knows looks can be deceiving.
“You’re up.” She does not immediately acknowledge the weapon in his hand. She’s either brave or simply ignorant. Jace is not sure what he’s more afraid of.
“Who—“ he starts to speak, but he breaks into a coughing fit. His throat feels like it is on fire. She takes a step forward, as if to help or harm him, but he freezes her in place when he turns his gaze back onto her warningly. “Who are you?”
She tells him her name. Then she quickly adds, “you washed up on the beach in front of my cabin. I found you.”
He bends over to clutch his side. He notices her eyes widen.
“Please, I’m not sure you should be up. You sustained massive injuries,” she tells him. “Your body needs rest.”
“I cannot—“ he scoffs, then coughs again. “I cannot simply rest. I must leave. I must…”
A pang in his side makes him gasp and hunch over. The knife falls with a clatter against the floor but he can’t seem to bring himself to retrieve it. Everything feels like it is in slow motion, out of his reach and control.
She grabs him around the waist before he tips over. He stays conscious long enough for her to lead him back to bed, but he falls within the waves again the second his head hits the pillow.
Consciousness returns to him in fragments. The sound of footsteps by his head. A burning pain spreading up his chest, to which he thinks he shouts, but cannot prevent. The feeling of a wet cloth soaking his tears and sweat.
When his eyes finally flutter open, it is dark in the room. A candle burns to a nub on the nightstand next to him, wax coating the wood. Sorrow fills his chest again so quickly it nearly steals his breath.
He sees her slip into the room like a wraith come to haunt him. It is ridiculous, he thinks, that she should be the one to stand over him. On any other day, in any other circumstance, she would not put up much of a fight. Now, he is at her mercy.
“You tore one of your stitches.” Her voice is soft, but it reverberates in his ear drums and skull like a dragon’s final roar. He clenches his jaw and turns his head toward the moon that hangs like a silver noose in the sky. “I had to sew it back while you were resting.”
Jace doesn’t reply. He isn’t sure he would know what to say. How does he encompass all his feelings—or even one of them, into a coherent thought? It isn’t possible.
She draws closer and he tenses. She notices. “Are you going to try and hurt me again?”
He considers her for a moment, then shakes his head.
She pauses, thinking about something, then she settles upon his side of the bed. Jace notices for the first time since she’s entered the room, that she has a bowl of that wretched-looking soup in her hands.
“Here,” she says, outstretching the bowl. He leans back. She pulls away slightly. “Sorry.” She cringes like even she realizes that the soup is nothing to write home about. “It is all I have.”
Jace swallows thickly. He reaches a trembling hand out. She smiles, relieved.
He goes to take the bowl, but his arm feels weak. He pulls back. “Perhaps…” he pauses, clears his throat. “Perhaps you could…”
Asking for help has never come easy to him. Being weak is not something he is accustomed to. His other hand clenches the sheet in his fist.
She nods. He does not have to be explicit. He untenses his hand as she leans forward, a small bit of soup in the wood spoon.
The first bite makes his face twist. She laughs.
“I truly am sorry,” she says. “I know it is probably not what you are used to.”
It takes every bit of his strength to swallow the offending liquid. It is strangely salty. It tastes like the brine that filled his mouth when he—
He cuts the thought short. No need to ruin his own mood again.
“Something happened to you out there,” she says as if she’d read his mind, and although it should be a question, it is not, “something bad.”
He swallows another gulp of the soup. He does not reply.
She must realize he does not want to speak on that, for she does not press the matter. She lifts the spoon again and he forces down another sip.
“The soup has fish and some potatoes—oh, and they had carrots at the market today, so I put those in too. Perhaps those are the disgusting parts. I won’t purchase them again.”
Jace does not have the energy, or perhaps the heart, to tell her it is certainly not the vegetables that have made the soup taste like what sea captains scrape off the bottom of their ships.
She scoops another bit of soup and he forces it down. His mouth had begun to retain that saltiness even when he no longer had the soup in his mouth, like a stain one can’t wash away with soap and water.
She does not speak for a long pause, but Jace suddenly feels a bit antsy. It feels too intimate an act to not be speaking.
He swallows another mouthful, then clears his throat to speak. “Did you catch the fish?” he asks, his voice hoarse.
“Oh, no, no,” she replies to him like it is a preposterous suggestion. Like killing fish is below her standards. “I just buy them.”
He frowns around the spoon in his mouth and hurriedly swallows the liquid. “Then why were you on the shore when you found me?”
She stirs the foul soup around for a moment, thinking hard about something, then she looks up at him. “I collect things. Shells, scrap metal, and fabrics. You would be surprised what comes with the morning tide, and even more what people would pay for them.”
An odd business, Jace can’t help but think. It seems like a hard thing to have to rely solely on the Narrow Sea for food and shelter. The Narrow Sea, he remembers with a sudden clarity. That is near where they fought.
“Are you going to tell your name?” Her head is tilted as she asks this, the soup bowl now empty and forgotten upon her folded legs.
He ponders the question for a moment. He could tell her his full name, but it might backfire, especially if she harbors a grudge against his family. He doesn’t think she has it in her to cause him harm, but he knows that many do not until they are cornered.
“Jace,” he finally tells her. “Just Jace.”
She smiles and her entire face lights up like nothing he’s ever seen before. Something twists in his stomach. “Nice to meet you, Jace.”
One, two, three, four. You count the shells noiselessly as you thread them onto the fishing line. They clink together softly as you pull the line taut around your wrist, measuring the width mentally. You remove the bracelet and add a few more of your little shells.
A few days had passed without much event. Jace drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the day and slept soundlessly through the night. He did not complain, but you had seen his thinly-veiled winces and his shuddering breaths. You know that he is suffering more than he lets on.
It is an odd thing, you think, to be harboring a man in your home that you know next to nothing about, but had inexplicably formed an attachment to. You still know nothing more about Jace than his name and even that had not been an answer easily wrought.
You slide the shells all to one side and swiftly tie a knot at the end of the line, forming a perfect circular bracelet. Putting it to the side, you cut a new piece of fishing line and begin sorting through your shells again.
Just as you go to slide the first shell on, you hear something behind you. The creaking of wood as light footfalls go across.
You turn your head, body tense.
“Jace,” you say, surprised by his appearance. You stand.
He had not been up since he’d ripped that stitch a few days ago, actually heeding your pleas to rest. But a part of you knew even then that the peace would not last long. He is a restless creature, like a bird stuck behind the bars of a cage.
“Do you need something?” You clutch your fingers together across your front, as if doing so could somehow steel your nerves.
He takes a step into the room. You notice his gait seems more steady today. He looks around every bit of the room, his eyes taking in all the pieces that make up your home. You gnaw your lip between your teeth. Did he approve of what he saw?
His voice comes suddenly, a blade cutting through the silence. “What are you doing?”
It is not accusatory nor standoffish, instead it seems almost curious. You grab the bracelet you just finished and hold it out to him.
“A bracelet.”
Jace steps closer, tilting his head. “For what purpose?”
You let out a short laugh. “It has no purpose. It is just pretty.”
“Hm.” He stares at the offending object like he’s never thought about making something just for the sake of making something before. You smile. He averts his eyes to the other side of the room.
“You said you do not fish,” he says, “and yet you have a fishing rod.”
You follow his eyes to where the thing sits near the door. It sits, forgotten, in the corner of the room—there to haunt you and the person you’d never become, you’re sure.
“My father…” you start to say, but something gets caught in your throat. You forcefully swallow past the blockage. “My father used to fish.”
Jace’s accusatory eyes soften around the edges. He hobbles closer and takes the seat across from you at the table. Your father’s seat.
“And your father—“
“He is dead,” you answer curtly, “he has been for two summers now.”
You pick up the bracelet you had only just starteda nd slide a seashell onto the line. Hurt does not fill your chest like a cavity anymore—now all you feel is numbness as it spreads from your lungs to your heart.
Jace turns his head to look out the window at the night sky. “My father is gone too.”
Your eyes leap toward his in a flash. He does not look at you, his hand tracing repetitive shapes on the table. The deep circles beneath his eyes have all but faded now, but the weariness to his expression remains. He possesses the gaze of someone who holds more than they can carry–a gaze your father shared.
Your throat bobs as you force yourself to swallow. You feel hollow, but a bit of warmth has reentered your chest. Two children, you think, without a parent—an awful thing, certainly, but not especially rare in Westeros.
You slide another shell onto the bracelet, fingers trembling. “He went mad.” Telling the truth, those three words, stings like betrayal. “He was a knight before I was born. He never… he never forgot what he had to do. The faces of the men he killed… they haunted him.”
Jace goes pale. His dark eyebrows furrow, the line of his mouth pulling down. “I-I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.”
You nod. Put another two shells on the line. Desperately, you search for a way to change the subject. “He always wanted to teach me,” you say, gesturing to the rod, “but he never did.”
He drags a quick hand through his curly brown hair, then pauses as he gets caught in a tangle. He huffs irritably.
“Perhaps,” he says, onyx eyes catching the amber light of the candle flickering on the table, “if I could summon the strength to get dressed and brush my hair, then I could show you how.”
You swallow thickly. “You do not have to—“
“It is the least I can do,” he murmurs. “You saved my life.”
To smile feels inappropriate, so you avert your eyes and begin to tie a knot in another bracelet.
Jace stares at himself in the mirror that stands in the corner of the bedroom with solemn eyes. His eyes glaze over the bandages that wrap around his chest and lower torso, then the unfamiliar slightness to his shoulders and waist. He feels as though he looks at a person he no longer recognizes, like his mind has been transported into the body of someone much weaker than he used to be.
The old house is quiet in the morrow. Every once in a while, a soft breeze will make the house creak. One may occasionally hear a sea bird calling in the distance. Other than that, everything exists as if completely removed from reality; untouched by the war that rages just beyond the sea’s reaches.
His eyes flick back to the mirror and he sees her standing behind him with a deep green doublet wrapped in her arms.
“It was my father’s,” she says, drawing closer. “It might be a little large on you.”
Jace nods. She hands him the doublet. The material feels like cheap linen, nothing to the quality he had worn before. He does not mind. It would be odd, he thinks, for him to expect anything better.
He lifts the top over his head and she helps guide it over. She seems to be trying not to touch his skin, like she thought he might be made of glass. He clenches his jaw when he feels the familiar tightness in one of his wounds as his arms stretch over his head.
The doublet falls over his body easily, but it does hang on him a bit like the robes a septa might wear.
He hears the sound of muffled laughter from behind him and he turns his head.
“My apologies.” She can barely get it out through her thinly-suppressed amusement. “You do look a bit funny, though.”
Jace feels his lips tug upwards in the first semblance of happiness he’d felt in days. It feels odd and out of place, and so it disappears with his next blink.
“Shall we go?”
Jace nods. He follows her out of the bedroom and into the living area, watching as she bends to grab the fishing pole. He walks behind her as she leads the way outside, too slow to match her pace.
The brush of a briney mist against his skin feels like flying across the humid air on top of Vermax. His chest pangs and he forces the thought away. His eyes brush the swaying grasses that stand cloistered around the sea’s edge, each one caught up in a current of air drifting by. He watches the woman as she strides ahead of him.
She is quite plain. She does not have the dresses of the courts he is used to, nor the manners of a highborn lady. She moves unhindered by corsets and the plumes of expensive dresses. Her soft legs pump quickly across the sands, barefoot, like she has mapped every inch of the shore to near-perfection and knows without looking where she must go.
Seeing her slip ahead, her hair tangled in the sea’s mist, then as she turns over her shoulder with a jovial grin, it feels so different than anything he’s ever known before.
Baela is beautiful. She is poised, and gentle, but with a rough edge that assures him she could—and would—easily hurt him if pushed to it. But his stomach never flipped when she spoke. He never searched for her eyes from across the room. He never grasped her hand and wished he never had to let it go. He had known her for so long, he assumed she was all he’d ever need, that the feeling of content he felt in her presence was love. Now he isn’t so sure.
She reaches the shore and stops when her feet hit the tide.
He meets her gaze as she turns to him. His heart pounds in his ears.
“Is it not wonderful?” She sweeps her arm in a half-arc as she speaks, eyes glimmering beneath the high morrow’s sun.
Jace draws his eyes away from her figure to the open waters. It is wonderful, he thinks. If not wrought with pain and regret.
He forces his gaze away. “Yes.”
“So,” she says, shifting on her heels, “how do we begin?”
Jace steps forward and picks up the rod. He retrieves the little scrap of maroon fabric that she had found a few days back and attaches it to the end of the hook.
“It is always a good idea to have some kind of bait,” he explains, “fish are attracted to movement. If you can find insects or worms, those work even better. But this fabric may do. We will have to see.”
He moves close to the edge of the water and lets the rod scrape the top of the ocean. “Most fish do not swim right by the shore, so you will need to throw the line out a little ways. Make sure that you do not catch your skin with the hook.”
She nods, eyebrows drawn together in deep contemplation. Jace nearly smiles at the way she’s taking this all so seriously, before he catches himself and schools his expression.
Jace steadies his hand and propels the line out into the ocean. One of the wounds on his side complains at the movement, but he ignores it. He watches the line bob in the water with a softened expression. His memory flits between days spent under the sun at Driftmark and Dragonstone, laughing while he chases Lucerys with a wood sword; Laenor showing him how to fish among the tidepools; a fierce burn from the sun that is soothed by his mother’s affectionate hand.
“Who taught you this?” Her voice breaks through the silence that had settled between them. Her eyes keep steady on the line, lashes squinting against the harsh light.
“My father,” he replies after a moment’s hesitation.
Another pause.
He feels her shift to look over at the side of his face. “I’m sure he would be quite proud of the man you have become.”
Jace’s breath halts in his throat. Hands suddenly feel clammy. His heart hiccups and thuds against his skin. He had not thought of Laenor in a long time, Harwin even longer. It feels like decades had passed since he had seen either of them, a forgotten moment in his life overshadowed by tragedy after tragedy.
“Oh, look,” she says suddenly from beside him. “A conch shell.”
She wields the massive thing toward him. Her entire face is bright with delight as she shows him the object that any normal person would completely disregard. She is anything but normal, though.
“These always sell for a few silvers at the markets,” she informs him, “the rich folk think they are good luck.”
He is not able to reply before his arm suddenly jolts and he is pulled a few inches forward. On the end of the line, something stirs in the water.
“Come,” he orders her urgently. “Something is biting.”
She draws close, her eyes wide. The conch shell drops to the sand. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he says, “here, you hold the rod.”
“What? I don’t know how to catch a fish!”
He thrusts the rod into her hands. “I am too weak to reel it in. You have to.” It is a lie, but she does not seem to recognize it.
Her hands slip all over the rod as she tries to fight the beast at the end of the line. Jace, pitying her struggle, slides behind her and steadies her hands by placing his on top of hers. She freezes for a moment, then begins to pull. Jace clutches her hands gently within his own and he notices that they tremble like seagrass beneath his own.
“Hold it steady,” he says against the shell of her ear, “pull only when you feel it stop fighting. You do not want–”
Suddenly, the pressure is removed from the end of the line and they are both sent stumbling backwards onto the sand. Jace lands on his bum, but she is able to catch herself as she tumbles beside him. The line must have broken. The fish is long gone now.
“Oh Jace, are you okay?” He looks over at her as she crouches beside him. “You did not reopen your wounds, did you?”
The laugh that tumbles out of his lips makes her jolt back. Distantly, he is not sure why he is laughing. The fish got away, he landed on back on the sand, and now one of his cuts hurts. But he had just felt so alive. So unburdened by responsibility, like any man of ten and eight without the entirety of their mother’s empire resting upon their shoulders ought to feel.
The laughter eventually abates, and all that is left is the open sky atop him and the sun beating down on his skin.
“Do you think that the fish I cooked last night was spoiled?” she asks in response to his exuberant mood. “Once, my father caught ill from bad potatoes…”
Jace feels another chuckle escape his lips. “Sorry,” he tells her. “I have… not felt that free in a long time.”
She lets out a soft ‘oh’ and moves to lay next to him in the sand. Far enough away that there is no chance that they will touch, but close enough that Jace can smell the lavender on her skin.
Jace stares at the clear sky ahead of him until he begins to feel his body ache with exhaustion. He pulls himself into a seated position, but she does not move immediately. She looks at him with soft eyes from where she lays against the sand, a small, affectionate smile upon her lips. Her chest rises and falls slowly, hand absentmindedly drawing pictures in the sand.
His stomach churns as he turns away. He stares out at the rippling current with half-lidded eyes.
“How far is the nearest town?” His words are nearly carried away with the next tide that pulls up the shore. She hears him all the same, sliding to sit up next to him.
“Not far,” she replies, a toothy grin on her breath, “would you like to come and help me pick out a fish for dinner tomorrow?”
Jace does not reply. The hope tinged in her words makes something inside him feel rotten. Like he is corrupting the world wherein she lives. As he takes longer and longer to reply, he notices something settle upon her face. A realization that fades into melancholy.
“Oh.” She looks to the sea in an attempt to hide the dewiness in her eyes, but Jace notices all the same. “You wish to leave.”
“My mother,” he says, “she will be looking for me. She will not stop until she finds me.”
She nods.
Something compels him to continue. “I would stay. I would, truly,” he says, “but this is bigger than me. Bigger than this–”
“I understand, Jace.” But Jace is not sure she does. Her lips purse, her eyebrows drawn to form a small wrinkle between them.
“I would at least stay a couple more days,” he tells her, “I need to make sure I do not simply hurt myself again by leaving too soon.”
She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head upon them. “It sounds like a good plan,” she agrees quietly. “Perhaps… Perhaps I could pack you some food as well.”
“Yes,” he says this far too enthusiastically, but he notices her brighten at the joy in his voice and so he continues to smile. “That would be wonderful.”
She nods, pulling at a frayed edge of her dress. “Then it will be done.”
The two of them watch for a few more moments as the red sun burns a hole against the sky and as the water ripples with wrath.
“I will leave on the morrow”--That is what he had told you over dinner the previous evening.
In the morrow, the sky opens and floods them with her tears.
You stand by the window of the cabin looking out at the frightful weather. Rain falls like daggers against the darkened, tumultuous sea. Waves crash against the shore. A crack of lightning makes you flinch.
“The Gods are angry,” you say to the still air of the cabin.
Jace sits halfway over his plate of roasted fish as you say this. Then he straightens, his eyes flickering briefly outside. The dark brown of his irises reflect the grey of the clouds swirling above. “Or they do not grant me leave.”
You force yourself to pull away from the window. Turning your head, another flash of brilliant light comes across the floor, painting everything white. You fall into a silence as you step carefully across the cabin.
You knew that from the moment you found him, that it would not be permanent. Just like the rains that fall from above now, this momentary storm in your life will too pass. You had not even wished for him to stay, initially. You recall that first night, sewing his wounds with fishing line, as your eyes stretched across his alien visage. You had told yourself that his presence would be temporary as a comfort then, now you tell it to ground yourself in reality.
Jace had become more friendly in the past few days. Conversation came easily to him and made the thought of him leaving that much harder. Now you were the one that deflated at the sound of his voice across the hall, the one that shrunk from revealing the parts of yourself that had not seen the light in years.
You are selfish. It is a quality that had always lurked behind your eyes, but had sharpened since your father’s death. It is a survival tactic. Every animal, even humans, wish to hold onto the things they hold dear. It does not matter if it is not much. Everything you have is in some way worth keeping–including Jace.
But you could not fight logic. His mother, his family–they had a higher claim to him than you did. You could not keep him like a bird with clipped wings. It is cruel to even think it.
You scrub the dish in your hands until your hands feel raw and achy. The only light comes from behind you in the smoldering fireplace and the flash of light that illuminates the sky. You hear the clatter of the bowl from behind you as Jace finds his footing–the screech of the chair as it rubs harshly against the floor.
You feel his warmth as he comes to stand beside you. He reaches a hand into the soapy mess over the wood bucket and fetches your hand from the fray.
“You have made yourself bleed,” he observes quietly, a finger stroking over the cuts.
You feel your throat bob under the weight of his probing stare. You slip your hand away from his and turn your back to dip the bowl in the bucket of soapless water.
“Have I done something to upset you?” he murmurs. His words are echoed by a rumble of thunder in the distance.
You still your movements for just a second before continuing. Your cuts throb at the feeling of the cool water cleansing the blood from your hands. “No,” you reply simply.
“Then why have you been so quiet as of late?”
You drop the bowl onto the wood surface in front of you and turn, drying your hands with a near cloth. “I just haven’t had much to say, I suppose.”
Another flash of light. Rain as it beats ceaselessly against the metal roof. You face him, clenching the towel in your fist.
“Shall we remove your stitches?” It had been suggested a few days ago as the first thing he would do before departing, so he would not have to bother with finding someone to do it for him on the road.
Jace looks like he might say something. Then he shakes his head. “On the bed?”
You nod. “That would be easiest.”
You slip behind him as he moves toward the bedroom. On your way, you light the spill near the fireplace and bring it with you. Your eyes find his figure as it slinks through the darkness. He’s healed so much better than you had ever expected he might. He should not have survived his injuries—should not have been able to heal so quickly. You think the Gods must favor his survival much more than they favored the own laws they stipulated.
He slides off his doublet and lounges back into the bed. You let the flame on the end of the spill touch the end of the wick of the candlestick and the room is bathed in a soft glow. You suffocate the flame and put the spill onto the table next to the bed.
Jace watches you as you do this quietly. When your eyes move up to his face, you notice his eyes are lidded, the tips of his ears red. You feel a warmth catch hold of your skin at his gaze and you avert your eyes to his chest.
You begin your work in silence. You lift the knot of each stitch and easily slice through it with the sharp edge of your knife. At the end of your first removal, you are happy to see that the wound has faded to a pinkish stripe.
“Who taught you this?”
You startle at the sound of his voice after several long minutes of silence. It is a deep baritone, rough around the edges. Its unexpected richness has you shifting in your place on the edge of the bed. A flash of white light from out the window bathes his face in color.
“My father.” You do not elaborate further. You think it self explanatory. Your father taught you everything.
“Was he hurt often?”
You cut another knot. “There are no maesters in the far reaches,” you tell him. A hint of bitter frustration lines your words. “I have assisted several people who have needed help in the village.”
“I did not know,” he replies softly, “that is quite kind of you.”
“We all share responsibility here, no one is without duty.” You put another piece of the fishing line to the side. “It is how things function when you do not have the entire Seven Kingdoms at your disposal.”
You notice Jace’s eyebrows furrow. His stomach tenses beneath your hand. “How did you…”
“It is obvious,” you say, “your voice, your cadence, the way you were dressed when I found you… you have no scars, no callouses. You did not offer your house’s name, so I can only assume—“
“Jacaerys Velaryon,” he says, “that is my name.”
You still. Your eyes dart to his, alarm filling your chest and stealing your breath. “Velaryon,” you echo, heart racing. “That is the name of…”
“Perhaps you know of Corlys Velaryon,” he offers, “the Sea Snake. He is my grandfather. Or Rhaenyra Targaryen, my mother—“
You stand, breathing panicked. “You must leave,” you say, “why did you stay so long? The realm… your mother… the Seven Kingdoms need you.”
Jace leans forward to grasp your arm. You allow him only because you fear you may topple over without the stability.
“I am of no use to them in this condition,” he scoffs. You notice a faraway look in his eyes. The same look he sometimes got when he stared upon the ocean or recalled stories of his father to you. “My dragon is dead, my body a wreck. There is nothing left of me for them to scavenge.”
“T-That is not true,” you stutter. “You must at least find out if they are safe. You have been healed for days… you could have left—“
“I stayed for you.” You fall silent at the sincerity in his voice. His hand drifts down the bare skin of your wrist to thread between your fingers. He cups your hand between his own.
“You cannot stay,” you tell him.
“It does not matter if I stay one more day. The realm will not fall today,” he replies, “we cannot travel in this ruinous weather, anyway.”
Your eyes drift to the window, where the wind throws its tears against the pane. You nod slowly and find your seat again.
You grasp the knife from where you sat it on the duvet. You slide the other to rest upon his warm stomach. His breaths quicken beneath your hand as you drag it up to the next wound.
“I almost killed you the day after I found you,” you whisper, “I thought it would be a mercy. The fact that you are here at all… alive, breathing. It is a gift from the Gods.”
He leans forward. “What stopped you?”
Your movements pause from where you had started to cut away another knot. “You did.”
His throat bobs. His hand moves from where it clutches the sheets to where your hand rests upon his sternum. He strokes the skin of your hand gently.
You lean forward without realizing what you are doing. He does not allow you to back away. He brings his other hand to the nape of your neck and leans forward to seal your lips with his.
The kiss is languid. His tongue probes the seal of your lips and you allow it to slip inside. You bring your hand up to cup his jaw and he drags the hand cupping your neck to your hair. You let out a soft moan against his lips and he responds to the noise by pulling you forward onto his chest.
You do not lean your weight onto him in fear of hurting him, but you feel his hands crawl to settle upon your heaving ribs. You gently settle your lower half onto his hips, settling your hand down on a part of his chest that had no injuries.
You and Jace continue to kiss for what feels like hours. It is exhilarating. It feels like flying. Your stomach feels warm and fluttery, and your lips are throbbing.
You shift your hips and Jace lets out a groan. You pull away from the kiss, concerned. His hand moves to grab the flesh of your hip, sliding you back some. There is a hardness beneath you that makes a pleasant chill slide down your spine.
“Are you alright, Jace?”
“Unless you wish for us to have sex,” he grumbles, “you should move off my hips.”
You swallow thickly at the insinuation. Sex. A novel thing. A thing that should be saved for marriage. But marriage seems so far from your mind now, drifting away like a current.
“And what do you wish for us to do?” you murmur. You slide forward an inch and he throws his head back onto the pillows. His chest heaves.
“You know what I wish,” he groans. “Is it not obvious?”
You lean forward so that your lips barely brush his own. “Then take it.”
Sunlight streams through the window ahead of you, branding the side of your face with heat, and your eyelids flutter against the intrusion. You fist your fingers in the sheets and twist your legs close to your body. As you shift, you feel an arm pulling you backwards.
You grasp the hand splayed across your stomach between your trembling fingers.
“Stay,” he murmurs against the shell of your ear. Tears bead in your eyes, but you keep them at bay.
Your thumb finds the pulse that thrums beneath his skin and you count his heart beats. The Gods are cruel, you think. They had kept Jace here long enough for you to miss him when he leaves.
You turn your body over to face him. You are not surprised to see him already staring back at you. His dark curls are a mess on the pillow beneath him. His lips pull upwards at the corners, but do not reach his eyes. He brings his hand up to stroke your cheek.
Your chin wobbles and he blinks away a frown.
“It will not be forever,” he tells you softly, reverently,
“I will return to you one day.”
You bring a hand up to wipe away the stubborn tears. “I suppose you do not know when that will be.”
He leans forward to give you a kiss and you know that is the only way he can possibly tell you no.
Pulling away from the kiss feels like saying good-bye.
You stay in bed as he stands, sluggishly dressing himself as if he was still looking for reasons not to leave. You do not think he finds one. He turns his head to look back at you and his expression falters.
A small smile curls at your lips as you mouth the word—go.
He heeds your instruction and leaves your cabin with a satchel of roasted fish, a map to the nearest town, and a bracelet strung with seashells.
ONE YEAR LATER…
The nets are full this morrow. The tide ebbs and flows, slinking across the silver sands. Birds let out cries of rejoice overhead for the plentiful bounty gifted by the sea.
You bend the knee to heave the first net out of the water. You clutch your chest protectively as you search through the things with the other hand.
“Hm,” you murmur, “a rainbow shell.”
You bring the shell up to the light and small reflections bounce across your vision. Tucking it into your satchel, you search some more. A piece of metal, two scraps of fabric, and a clam.
You pocket the metal and one of the ratty pieces of fabric, but allow the clam to slide back under the tide. You bring your dry hand to rest upon the head of the babe swaddled against your breast.
“Shh,” you whisper to him as he begins to stir. “It is alright, my prince.”
He brings his head up slowly to peer at you. A splatter of sea foam settles on the side of his face, but he does not seem to mind. He gives you a gummy smile and you return it lovingly.
He watches with bleary eyes as you sort through the next net of things. You show him each individual item as you retrieve it. Your heart skips when you feel a familiar shape and weight in the palm of your hand.
“A conch shell,” you inform him with a giddy grin, “these sell for several silvers at the market.”
He stares at the shell with wide eyes. The pattern, a dark brown and white mottling, you think, must confuse or enrapture him by the way he looks at it.
The small of your back has begun to hurt. You straighten up and lift a supportive hand to rest underneath the baby’s bum.
“This will be enough for today,” you decide. “The sea has gifted us more than we need.”
The little boy smacks his lips as if agreeing with the statement. You nod and carry your satchel and the boy up the familiar path to the cabin.
However, your footsteps slow as you grow closer until you stop right before the door. Something is not right. You protectively cradle the back of your son’s head as you touch a hand to the door.
It pushes open with little resistance. You slide the knife you kept on you at all times to your hand in one swift movement as you step inside.
You take not but two steps beyond the threshold before you freeze. The knife clatters to the ground and a gasp shudders from your lips at the sight in front of you.
He stands across from you like he never left. He’s dressed in black gilded leathers, his body a tad leaner and steadier. His face looks older, more mature and shaped by circumstance, just as you imagine yours must too. His mop of dark hair curls around his ears, longer than when you saw him last.
His lips with awe. He stares at you and your face as if trying to map something with his mind.
“Jace,” you say breathlessly. “How…”
“I saw you by the shore as I rode in from town,” he murmurs, taking a hesitant step forward. He lets out a soft laugh that sends your stomach aflutter. “I thought I might surprise you. I guess I am lucky to not have received a knife in my throat.”
Your throat bobs. Mistiness clouds your vision. “You came back for us.”
“For us?” Jace echoes, eyebrows furrowed. He comes so close he can reach out to you with his arm and you know that he has seen him then, by the shock that melts his features.
The boy turns his head to the best of his ability in your swaddle, his eyes searching for the unfamiliar voice. Jace’s mouth comes nearly unhinged, a trembling hand lifting as if to stroke his head, but it falls short.
He forces his eyes to look at you. “He… he’s mine?”
You bite your lip to suppress your smile as you nod. You reach around your neck with one arm while the other supports the baby’s bum. You unravel the swaddle easily, and the chubby baby flails his arms with relief. Never one to like a cage.
You outstretch him toward Jace and he takes him eagerly. He holds him with practiced ease. He supports the baby’s head and bum as he gazes down at him, tracing his forehead to the slope of his nose to the flutter of his lashes with only his eyes.
Jace finally breaks away from the baby long enough to look up at you. “And I just… I just left you. You and my son.”
Your heart skips a beat at the name. Son. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from grinning like a fool.
“You had to,” you say, stepping forward to lay a gentle hand upon his upper arm. “Your family needed you.”
He clenches his jaw. “Nothing we did… nothing we accomplished… equals this.”
He strokes a featherlight touch against the boy’s cheek and he wrinkles his nose.
“Will you…” you pause. You try to steel yourself for the rejection that may very well follow, hands clammy by your sides. “Will you be staying long?”
Jace’s eyes rush to meet yours. He steps forward. The baby whimpers in his arms at the movement.
“I would stay forever if you would have me.”
You feel your heart skip a beat. “What? What of the throne? Of your family?”
He shakes his head. Your stomach drops.
“My brother Aegon will be the next ruler. Wed to his cousin.”
“And you?”
His dark eyes soften as they consider this question carefully. He clutches the lost prince to his chest protectively.
Summary: Jace is suffering from back pain, you offer to help.
Warnings: 18+, Suggestive, Tbh this is kinda smut, Jace is a little subby, Kind of mentions of time period sexism??, Potential Inconsistencies in the tense it’s written in (who is surprised? the answer is no one)
Notes: Hello! I’m so sorry I didn’t post this sooner like I wanted to BUT I am working on many different fics right now for many different ASOIAF characters!! I’ve even begun to draft for my October event so stay tuned!!
This is my first time writing something so suggestive/smutty so please be kind to me!
&& the header is for comedic purpose because… look at him lol
Word Count: 1.3k
MASTER POST , ASOIAF MASTERLIST
———————
You were curled up on the chaise by the fire with a book in your hands. This was your nightly routine. After shedding your heavy gowns, hair pins, and other jewels you would sit and read while in your thin night shift. You would typically do this until Jacaerys joined you in your shared chambers even though he had told you many times that you need not stay up for him.
You had just finished your chapter when he entered the chambers looking exhausted.
“Long day?” you ask as you close your book, standing up.
He nods, rubbing his neck, “I called for the maids to bring water for a bath.”
You make your way towards him before chuckling, “You need it. You smell like Vermax...”
Smiling, he tilts his head at you, “Yes, I was patrolling today.”
There was a knock on the door and maids filtered into the room with buckets of hot water, quickly making their way to the connected bathing room. They were gone just as quickly as they arrived. Jace never liked or wanted the maids washing him. He was perfectly capable of cleaning himself. Not to mention the fact that you had offered to help him many times after you had been wed, just as he would help you.
You sat beside the tub, taking turns telling each other about your day. You told him of your readings and research in the library, he told you of his conversation with Daemon. Jace did not remain in the bath for long, he never did unless you were bathing together, he didn’t find it relaxing and when the water cooled even the slightest bit he began to complain.
As he got dressed for sleep, you made yourself comfortable on your side of the bed. Jace groaned as he walked across the room, one hand clutching his lower back.
“You sound like an old man,” you say teasingly.
He rolls his eyes, groaning more as he sits on the bed with his back to you, “I feel like one. My back aches and my neck is so stiff…”
You sit up, scooting across the bed until you can rest your hands on his shoulders and your knees are touching his lower back. You tilt your head to look at him, a small frown on your face, “Well my love…”
“Well what?” he turns his head towards you.
“I believe it is from your posture.”
“My…posture?”
“Yes, you stand hunched over and sometimes you walk with your head jutted out.”
He looks offended, “I do no such thing.”
“My love,” you run a hand down his back til you reach the center, “you’re even slouching right now,” you push against his back, forcing him up straight causing his back to curve.
Then you return your hands to his shoulders and pull back slightly, putting him in a more proper sitting position. He looks at you again, only this time he appears shocked, horrified, and also relieved.
“How’d…”
“One of the very first things us ladies learn with our septas is how to stand proper. I don’t believe they teach such things to princes and lords. No, the first thing they teach you is how to swing a blade. Standing straight for me is subconscious but for you… it’s something you need to focus on.”
“You mean to tell me that I have been walking around hunched over my entire life and no one has said a thing?” he asks, exasperated.
“Not many people would dare question a prince… although I will say that Luke seems to stand properly, as well as Joff but he’s still little so that could change! Daemon is… well, sometimes I believe he stands with his shoulders too far back and his chest puffed out.”
Jace sighs, rubbing his temples, “My little brothers stand better than I do? What kind of example am I leading…”
You hum and scoot away from him, back to your side of the bed, “It can also come from stress, you carry a great weight on your shoulders Jace. No jest intended. Your back will likely ache for a while even as you adjust to the new posture… but I know something that will help for now, lay down on the bed.”
He gives you a startled look, his face flushing, “My love I don’t think that would help…”
You gasp, “You’re perverted! No! I meant… lay on your stomach, not on your back!”
“Oh.”
“Mhm.”
He complies, and moves to the center of the bed, resting his head in the crook of his arm. You click your tongue, “Put your arms at your sides.”
Jace does and only then do you move. Slowly, you move to straddle his lower back just above his tailbone. You start up by his shoulders, your hands working at tight muscles near the neck.
He immediately lets out a groan and hides his head in the pillows. You smile to yourself, biting your lip to suppress a giggle.
You hum a song while massaging his back, you can feel the tension leaving his body as you work your magic.
It seems as though he is going to fall asleep, completely relaxed as your hands are getting lower on his back. But that would be too easy. His hips began to rock into the bed, subtly at first and then more obvious, before he lets out a quiet moan.
“Love,” he croaks out, “I’m… sorry,” he hides his face entirely, “wait, please…”
You shush him before whispering, “It is natural Jace,” your hands fall to the bed on either side of the man beneath you as you lean forward til you're laying entirely on top of him, breasts pressed against his back.
“Do you wish for me to continue?” your lips brush his ear and he shivers letting out a noise that sounds like a whimper.
“Hm?” you hum, playfully biting his ear making him shudder, “I can not hear you with your face hidden in the pillows.”
Jace turns his head to look back at you. His eyes are dazed and his cheeks red, “Please…”
You smile, pecking his cheek before leaning back and continuing your work. You can’t help but feel pride every time he moans or groans or whimpers when his hips jerk into the bed. You were just about to stop and offer a proper solution to his current predicament when you felt him tense up harder than before.
“Fuck,” he mumbles your name, “‘m sorry…”
You slip off of his back and onto the cool furs on your side of the bed. He attempts to shimmy down the bed but you shake your head and pull him into your arms. Unable to hide his face between your legs, he hides in your breasts. You run your fingers through his curls, “You’ve made a mess of your trousers,” you tease.
He nips at your skin through your shift and you tug at his hair in response. Jace looks up at you and pouts.
“How does your back feel?” you ask, him being in pain being the main thing on your mind.
“Better, much better.”
“Good, we’ll work more on your posture tomorrow okay? I can begin to remind you if you’d like?”
“Please do,” he mutters, still embarrassed by the situation.
You laugh and pull him back to your chest. Just as you’re about to drift off Jace comes to a sudden, horrifying realization. His voice is muffled due to his face being buried in your breasts, “When I asked you to allow me to court you, to be my wife… I was walking like that? Standing like that?”
can we see maybe modern jace getting jealous but like not in a toxic way in a are you honna leave me way. and hes sososo soft and needs cuddles? tnkss
Henllo my lovely lovely reader! This has been pending for a while but thank you for waiting so patiently!! 🫂
Sorry my Alicent lovers, she’s a b*tch in this 🥹
Enjoy~~
Jacaerys Velaryon had always considered himself an unusually secure person, all things considered.
Not arrogant. Never that. Just settled, in the way people are when they've already survived the worst version of a question and come out the other side of it.
He hadn't always been that way, though.
He remembered being eight, sitting on the floor of his bedroom with a split lip and dirt still ground into the knees of his trousers, shoulders shaking with the effort of not crying. He remembered the door opening, and quickly scrubbing his sleeve across his face, and how his mother had known immediately anyway.
I didn't lose, he'd told her.
I never asked if you did.
He'd tried to explain it that some boy at school had said Jace couldn't possibly be Laenor's son, not really, not when he didn't look a thing like him. Rhaenyra had gone very still for a moment, as if deciding how much truth a person could hold.
Then she'd taken his small hands in hers and told him the truth anyway. That his biological father had been a man named Harwin Strong, who had loved him very much, but who had passed away before Jace and his brothers were even old enough to properly remember his face. That Laenor was still his father in every way that mattered, because Laenor was the one who'd stayed awake through nightmares, who'd taught him to swim because he was terrified of the deep end, who had looked at him the day he was born and said, simply, he's beautiful.
Blood doesn't make a father, she'd told him, cupping his tiny face in both hands. Love does.
He had believed her. He still did, thirteen years later. The whispers about his features, brown curls where there should have been silver, ordinary eyes where there should have been that unmistakable Valyrian violet, had eventually faded into something he barely registered anymore.
Or so he'd thought, until the afternoon you brought home a magazine.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
You'd arrived at his flat practically glowing, a glossy issue of Rogue clutched against your chest like you'd just won something.
"I finally found it," you announced, dropping onto the sofa beside him without any warning, already flipping it open across your lap.
Jace looked up from his laptop, smiling before he'd even fully processed what you'd said. "Hm?"
"The newest issue. My favourite actress is on the cover."
You talked while you flipped through the pages, filling the room with easy, unhurried chatter about filming locations in Italy and a rescue dog she'd apparently just adopted and a dress you thought was, in your exact words, criminally good. Jace didn't follow half of it but he liked it anyway, liked the sound of your voice more than the content of what it was saying, liked watching your face light up over things he'd never have cared about on his own.
Then you gasped.
"Oh, I didn't know they interviewed him too."
He glanced over, more out of habit than curiosity, and felt something in his chest go quietly, unpleasantly tight.
A full page spread of his uncle Aegon looked back at him. Expensive tailored suit. Silver blond hair styled to look effortless, which it absolutely was not. Pale lilac eyes catching the studio lighting like the camera had been built specifically to flatter him.
Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the headline read, and privately Jace thought that if anyone in that family had actually earned the title, it was Aemond, who did the real work while his older brother smiled for photographers and accepted the credit.
You didn't know any of that, of course. You just kept scanning the article, murmuring something about how ridiculously photogenic he was, how well that whole family photographed in general, the lighting, the styling, all of it.
Jace stared at the page. Silver hair. Purple eyes. The exact same features that ran through his mother, through Laenor, through nearly everyone he'd ever sat across a dinner table with.
Everyone except him and his brothers.
Alicent's voice surfaced in his memory before he could stop it, unbidden and unwelcome. Such a shame, isn't it. The poor boy didn't inherit any of the family's beauty.
He hadn't thought about that sentence in years. He resented that it had apparently just been waiting for him.
Would someone like her rather have someone who looked like that?
He hated the thought the second it appeared. Hated himself a little for thinking it at all. Before he'd properly decided to do anything, his hand had already reached over, closed the magazine, and sent it flying across the room.
You blinked. "...Did you just throw away my magazine?"
"Maybe."
"I paid 1 silver stag for that."
"I know."
"You just launched it across the room."
"I did."
"Why?"
He opened his mouth but nothing useful came out, because what was he supposed to say. Sorry, I got irrationally jealous of my own uncle because a decade old insecurity just woke up without warning.
"...I panicked," he settled on.
"You panicked… at journalism?"
He nodded, solemnly, as though this were a reasonable answer.
You stared at him for a long moment before you burst out laughing, calling him a weirdo, asking if he'd genuinely been jealous of glossy paper. His ears went pink immediately, which only made you laugh harder. He denied it. You didn't believe him. Eventually you crawled across the sofa, nudged his shoulder with yours, and pinched his cheek.
"My pretty boy," you said.
His heart stumbled slightly. "...Really?"
"Jace. I've been dating you for months. I think that answer should be obvious."
You kissed the corner of his mouth and went back to your magazine, entirely unbothered, and the knot in his chest loosened. Not all the way. Just enough that he could ignore it for a while.
He didn't know yet that it wouldn't be the last time.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
The real trouble started, as most things in that family did, because Rhaenyra forgot to mention one small detail.
"Mother invited us for dinner," Jace said, grabbing his keys off the counter. "Just a quiet evening."
"I'm finally meeting your family properly?"
"You've met Luke and Joffrey."
"They kidnapped me for bubble tea. That barely counts."
"They like you."
"They interrogated me about how I really like you or was it the money."
Jace nearly dropped his keys. "...They what."
"They're sweet," you said, slipping your hand into his as you headed for the door, laughing at his expression. "Terrors, but sweet and making sure I wasn’t some gold digger."
The drive over was easy, your hand resting in his the whole way, music low through the speakers. Neither of you suspected a thing, right up until Jace opened the penthouse door and his smile simply vanished.
"...Oh."
You peered around him and froze.
It wasn't a quiet family dinner. It was the ENTIRE FUCKING family. Viserys settled comfortably in an armchair with a cup of tea. Daemon sprawled across the sofa like he'd personally paid for it. Baela and Rhaena setting the table. Helaena curled by the window with her cat in her lap. Luke and Joffrey wrestling over the remote. Aemond by the balcony doors, absorbed in his phone. Aegon stealing appetizers straight from the kitchen counter. Otto (who the fuck even invited him?) deep in conversation with Viserys about something political. And Alicent, wine glass in hand, wearing the expression of a woman who very much wished she were somewhere, anywhere, else.
"I swear to you," Jace whispered, "I had no idea."
You squeezed his hand. "I know."
"You do?"
"You have the worst poker face I have ever seen in my life."
Relief crossed his face so fast it was almost funny. "Thank you."
Before either of you could retreat back toward the elevator, which you were both, quietly, considering, a voice cut through the apartment like a siren.
"OLDER BROTHER JACE IS HERE!" Joffrey bellowed, pointing dramatically at the two of you. "AND HE BROUGHT HIS GIRLFRIEND!"
Every single head turned at once.
The silence that followed was the kind you could feel in your jaw. You raised your free hand in a small, painfully awkward wave.
"...Hello- Uh- Hi."
Nobody spoke. You considered, briefly and seriously, whether the floor might simply open and swallow you.
Then Rhaenyra blinked, and her whole face transformed. She crossed the room so quickly you barely had time to brace before she'd taken both your hands in hers.
"So you're the lovely girl," she said warmly. "It's wonderful to finally meet you. Jacaerys talks about you far more than he'd ever admit."
"Mother."
"You do," Luke chimed in helpfully.
"Constantly," Joffrey agreed.
"He smiled at his phone for ten minutes yesterday," Luke added. "It was embarrassing."
"It was disgusting," Aegon called from the kitchen, not even looking up from the appetizers.
Jace pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "I'm leaving."
"No you're not," Daemon said lazily, without opening his eyes. "You brought entertainment."
Before Jace could formulate a defense, Baela had already appeared, looping her arm through yours. "There she is. So this is the famous girlfriend."
Rhaena arrived a half second later. Helaena drifted over more quietly, studying your earrings with real interest.
"I like your earrings," she said.
"Oh, thank you."
"They're little stars. They remind me of the night sky. I like stars."
"I noticed," you said, smiling, and Helaena looked pleased in a way that felt like a small, private victory.
Before you'd fully registered what was happening, you had been deposited onto the sofa between Baela and Rhaena, and the questions began arriving from every direction at once.
How did you two meet. Who confessed first. Who kissed who first. Has he written you poetry.
Across the room, Jace groaned. "Oh no."
"Save yourself," Luke advised solemnly. "There is no saving anyone once those three start."
You laughed, a little nervously, and did your best to answer everything while Baela stole your phone to look through your photos and Rhaena gasped theatrically at something on it. Meanwhile Jace had slipped, almost against his will, into older brother mode, standing between Aegon and Luke to prevent whatever low grade argument was brewing between them, even though privately he wanted to throttle Aemond himself for something said twenty minutes earlier that he'd already half forgotten.
A part of you, watching all of this unfold, felt faintly like you'd wandered into a room full of supermodels who happened to also be a family. Every single one of them was, infuriatingly, beautiful.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
Rhaenyra found you again not long after, this time in the kitchen, gently but firmly informing you that guests were not permitted to help with dinner.
"I promise I'm capable of chopping vegetables without losing a finger," you said, already reaching for the knife regardless.
"That's not the point."
"I don't feel like a guest."
Apparently that was the correct answer, because five minutes later the two of you were standing shoulder to shoulder at the counter anyway, Rhaenyra sliding a tray into the oven while you worked through a pile of peppers beside her.
"You know," she said, glancing fondly toward the dining room, where Luke was currently attempting to balance three dinner rolls on top of Joffrey's head, "I've been trying to get my boys to help me cook for years."
"They don't?"
"Oh, they try." She laughed. "They're just enthusiastic."
"That's a diplomatic way of putting it."
"They have good hearts, though." Her expression softened as she watched them. Then, with no real change in tone, as though she were asking about the weather: "So. What do you see in my eldest?"
You nearly choked on your own laugh. "Oh."
"Don't 'oh' me. I'd genuinely like to know."
You looked through the doorway. Jace was still stationed between Aegon and Luke, hands raised placatingly, trying to referee an argument that had apparently escalated to include a butter knife.
"I don't know," you said slowly, and then, more honestly, "everything just feels easy with him. I've never had to pretend to be anything I'm not. He listens. He remembers little things, if I mention I like a certain chocolate once, it just shows up on my desk during exam week without me asking. He always walks on the side closest to the road. He sends me good morning messages every single day, even when he saw me the night before. He pretends he doesn't like horror movies, even though I know he secretly does, because he always asks if we can watch another one right after."
A fond laugh slipped out of you before you could stop it.
"And I've never once doubted that he loves me."
Rhaenyra had gone quiet beside you, her eyes suspiciously bright. "That sounds like my Jacaerys," she said finally, smiling. "He gets that from his father."
You opened your mouth to ask which one she meant, but before you could, Viserys wandered into the kitchen, and the question dissolved into the next moment before you'd found the words.
"There you are," he said kindly.
You straightened instinctively. "Mr. Viserys-"
He waved the title away with mild exasperation. "Oh, enough of that. Viserys is perfectly acceptable."
"It doesn't feel right."
"Then Grandfather."
You blinked. "...Excuse me?"
"If you're important to Jacaerys," he said, patting your shoulder gently, "then you're important to me."
Something in your chest went warm and slightly overwhelmed. "Thank you. Grandfather."
He beamed, patted your head affectionately on his way past, and wandered back toward the dining room looking thoroughly satisfied with himself.
Across the room, Alicent watched the entire exchange over the rim of her wine glass, her mouth pressing into a thin, unreadable line.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
Dinner was chaos, in the fondest possible sense of the word.
It started with Luke and Joffrey arguing over the garlic bread, which somehow evolved into Aegon stealing half the basket, which somehow became Aemond calmly threatening to stab his brother with a butter knife.
"I wouldn't actually stab you," Aemond said, sighing. "It'd be unhygienic."
"See," Aegon grinned. "He loves me."
"I tolerate your existence."
"That's practically affection in your language."
Jace pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can we please have one family dinner where nobody threatens bodily harm?"
Daemon didn't even look up from his wine. "No."
"Fair enough," Jace muttered, and you had to cover your mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
He glanced at you across the table, and the sight of you smiling seemed to visibly loosen something in his shoulders. Without quite thinking about it, his foot found yours under the table. You nudged him back.
Baela noticed immediately. "They're flirting under the table."
"We're sitting right here," Jace said flatly.
"You think we don't notice?"
"We don't."
"You literally just smiled at each other over touching feet."
"We did not."
"They're adorable," Helaena offered dreamily.
"They're embarrassing," Aegon corrected.
Dessert arrived, and for a few merciful minutes, the table went quiet, cake apparently commanding more loyalty than gossip. Then Daemon set his fork down with a particular stillness that Jace recognized immediately as trouble.
"So," Daemon said.
"No," Jace said.
"I haven't even asked anything."
"I know that tone."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
Daemon leaned back in his chair, entirely unbothered. "So. When's the wedding?"
Jace inhaled a piece of cake at exactly the wrong moment and doubled over, coughing. You nearly dropped your fork.
"Uncle, we've only been together a few months."
"So? I was younger."
"We're twenty one."
"Your mother had Lucerys by your age," Daemon pointed out, entirely too pleased with himself.
Rhaenyra rolled her eyes so hard it was audible. "And look how that turned out."
Daemon simply laughed at his nieces suffering, placing a hand over his heart.
"I was aiming lower," Rhaenyra said sweetly, and the whole table dissolved into laughter, even Jace, some of the tension finally easing out of his shoulders.
Then Alicent spoke, calm and almost thoughtful, as though continuing a conversation no one else had realized was happening.
"I suppose there are advantages to waiting," she said, cutting neatly into her dessert without looking up. "After all, when choosing a life partner, appearance does matter. Especially when one hopes for beautiful children." A small, polite pause. "There are certain features that tend to remain within Valyrian blood. It would be a shame to lose them."
The table went completely still.
You frowned, not immediately understanding, but you felt Jace go rigid beside you, watched the color drain slowly from his face as his hand tightened around his fork hard enough that his knuckles went white.
"Alicent," Rhaenyra said, and her voice had turned to ice.
"I simply made an observation."
"It was unnecessary."
"Am I wrong?"
That was it. Jace's hands hit the table hard enough to rattle the plates, his chair scraping violently backward as he stood. He didn't look at anyone. He simply walked out, and by the time you'd scrambled up and mumbled an apology to the table, the elevator doors were already sliding shut behind him.
"There is absolutely nothing for you to apologize for," Rhaenyra said quickly, gently, but you were already moving, grabbing your bag and hurrying after him, catching the elevator just before it closed completely.
The ride down was silent. His hands were trembling, barely, at his sides. You reached for his sleeve. He didn't pull away, but he didn't respond either, and you decided, wisely, to simply stand beside him and wait.
Whatever this was, you understood by now that it had very little to do with a single comment at dinner.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
The drive home was quiet in the wrong way. Not the comfortable silence you two usually shared, the kind filled with idle hand holding at red lights and half finished sentences. This one sat heavy in the car, pressing against your ribs.
Jace's knuckles never once loosened on the steering wheel. You looked at him more than once. Each time, his jaw was tight, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his expression carefully, deliberately unreadable.
You thought about speaking, several times. Each time, something told you he needed the silence first.
When he finally parked outside your building, neither of you moved for a long moment. Then he climbed out, and the driver's door shut harder than he'd clearly intended, the sound echoing through the parking garage. You flinched. He closed his eyes immediately.
"...Sorry."
Even angry, even shaking slightly with whatever he was holding in, he still walked around to your side. Still opened your door. Still waited until you'd stepped out before he let it close.
You offered him a small smile. He couldn't quite return it.
The walk upstairs was just as quiet. Keys jingling. The lock clicking open. You slipped your shoes off by the entrance and settled onto the sofa. He didn't sit. He started pacing instead, kitchen to living room and back, one hand buried in his curls, the other rubbing restlessly at the back of his neck.
You'd seen him stressed before. Exam weeks. Presentation deadlines. The time Luke had nearly set off the fire alarm attempting to make grilled cheese. Never quite like this.
"...Jace."
He hummed, distracted, not stopping. "Mhm."
"Jace." Firmer this time.
He stopped mid step. Turned, slowly. "...What?"
The sharpness in his own voice seemed to surprise him as much as it did you. His face fell almost instantly. "...Sorry."
"I'm not angry at you."
"I know." He dragged a hand over his face. "I'm sorry."
You stood, crossing the room slowly. "What happened tonight?"
"Nothing."
"Jace."
"It was just Alicent."
"No." You shook your head gently. "I know that's not it. You don't storm out over one rude comment. You've dealt with comments like that your whole life. So what actually happened?"
He looked away, toward the window, toward anywhere that wasn't you.
"You don't have to protect me from it," you said quietly.
"I'm not."
"You are."
"I'm fine."
"You've been pacing for ten minutes."
"I'm thinking."
"You're spiralling.”
"I am not spiralling."
"You threw my magazine across the room because I complimented a photoshoot," you said, and watched him blink, caught off guard.
"...You still remembered that."
"I remember everything."
Silence stretched between you, longer this time. Jace finally walked into the kitchen and braced both hands against the island, his head hanging low. You followed, standing close enough that your shoulder nearly touched his, and rested your hand gently over his.
His fingers twitched beneath your palm.
"...Talk to me."
He swallowed hard. When he finally lifted his head to look at you, the anger had drained out of him completely. What remained, underneath it, was fear. Raw and unfamiliar, a version of him you'd genuinely never seen before.
"Do you," he started, voice barely above a whisper, "do you really want to be with me?"
You frowned. "...What?"
He laughed, short and humourless. "Stupid question. I know how it sounds." His hands moved helplessly, searching for words that weren't quite arriving fast enough. "I've never cared. At least, I thought I hadn't. My whole life, people have looked at my family. My mother. My father. My uncles. My cousins. And then they look at me, and they don't even have to say anything. I already know."
He let out a breath that shook slightly on its way out.
"I don't have silver hair. I don't have purple eyes. I don't look like them. And tonight, when Alicent said it, I couldn't stop thinking. What if she's right. What if you deserve someone who actually looks like he belongs in this family."
Before another word could leave him, you stepped forward, placed both hands on his face, and covered his mouth.
"...Mm?"
You stared at him, entirely unimpressed. "Wow. I always thought I was the yapper in this relationship. You are giving me serious competition."
The confusion on his face cracked, just barely, into something almost like a laugh.
"I am not finished," you said, and he nodded obediently, waiting until you lowered your hand.
"The absolute nonsense that just came out of your mouth might genuinely be the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life."
"...Excuse me?"
"You heard me." You poked him firmly in the chest. "Absolute. Poppycock."
"What does that word even mean?”
"It felt appropriate."
Despite himself, the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
You folded your arms. "So. You think you're not handsome because you don't have silver hair."
"That's not exactly-"
"And purple eyes."
"I-“
"And because you don't look like the rest of your family."
He sighed, dragging a hand down his face. "When you say it out loud, it does sound a little ridiculous."
"A little?"
"...Very."
"Good." You reached for both of his hands before he could think about retreating again. "Now answer me something. If I woke up tomorrow with silver hair and purple eyes, would I suddenly be more beautiful to you?"
His answer came so fast it nearly overlapped your question. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're already beautiful as you are.”
"No matter what?"
He squeezed your hands. "No matter what."
"So if I stayed exactly the way I am…”
"I'd still think you're the most beautiful girl in every room I've ever walked into." Jace continued.
You smiled softly. "Exactly. So why," you asked gently, "are you judging yourself by a standard you'd never once judge me by? You don't look at me and wish I had silver hair. You don't wish I had purple eyes. You don't wish I looked more Valyrian."
He shook his head slowly. "I've never once thought that."
"Because you love me."
"...Yes."
"And I love you," you said. "You don't need silver hair for me to think you're handsome. You don't need purple eyes. You certainly don't need to look like Aegon." A small laugh escaped you. "Thank God, honestly."
That, finally, pulled a real laugh out of him, quiet but genuine.
"I happen to like your curly brown hair," you continued, reaching up to run your fingers through it. "I like your freckles. I like the little scar on your chin from when Luke hit you with a cricket bat, which he insists to this day was an accident."
"He maintains his innocence."
"He was absolutely aiming for you."
"He denies it."
"He's lying."
Jace chuckled, some of the tightness finally leaving his shoulders. You cupped his cheek gently.
"I like your smile. I like how your eyes crinkle when you laugh. I like that your nose scrunches up when you're concentrating on something. I like that your hair sticks up every morning because you refuse to dry it properly."
By now he couldn't quite meet your eyes, his cheeks warming visibly.
"And," you said softly, "I like that you're kind. That you remember every little thing I tell you. That you've never once made me feel like I was too much. You listen. You care. You love so quietly that people don't always notice it, but I do. Every single day."
His eyes had begun to shine, suspiciously bright.
"So don't you dare stand there and tell me I deserve someone else," you said, tapping his chest gently. "I already found exactly who I wanted. Not because of what you look like. Because of who you are. And if I had to choose all over again, I would still choose the ridiculously handsome boy standing in front of me."
That was what finally broke him. He stepped forward so suddenly you barely had time to react before his arms wrapped tightly around you, his face pressing into the curve of your neck like he was trying to memorize the shape of you against him. You wrapped your arms around his shoulders, one hand sliding into his hair, and felt him exhale, one long, shaking breath, like he'd been holding it in for years without realizing it.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled into your shoulder.
"What are you apologizing for?"
"I don't know." He laughed weakly. "I think I've just spent so long pretending it never bothered me. It did. So when Alicent said it again tonight, I believed her."
You pulled back just enough to look at him properly.
"No," you said. "You believed the frightened little boy who got teased on the playground. You didn't believe Alicent. You just forgot what your mum told you."
"Blood doesn't make a father," you said quietly. "Love does."
His breath caught. "You remembered that."
"Of course I remembered. You told me that story."
"You really do remember everything."
"I do."
You brushed a stray curl off his forehead. "And your mum was right. You are loved beyond measure."
He closed his eyes, and this time, when he leaned into your touch, it wasn't because he needed convincing anymore. It was because he'd finally, fully embraced himself.
┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈
Later that night, the two of you lay tangled together beneath your duvet, though tangled was perhaps too generous a word, since Jace had somehow managed to occupy roughly ninety percent of the available space, his head resting against your chest, one arm locked securely around your waist. He wore the most spectacular pout you had ever seen on a grown man.
"Feeling better?" you asked.
A muffled noise, which you chose to interpret as yes.
"You know," you said thoughtfully, "I think there's a very easy solution to your whole crisis."
He looked up, immediately and correctly suspicious. "...I don't like that sentence."
"You could always dye your hair."
Silence.
"Platinum blonde," you continued sweetly.
Jace stared at you, utterly betrayed. "I'm sorry?"
"You heard me. I think it'd suit you."
"It absolutely would not."
"We could get you purple contacts too."
His eyes widened in genuine horror. "You wound me."
"I think you'd slay."
"Do not say slay while I am emotionally vulnerable," he gasped, and you burst into laughter, unable to help yourself.
"I'm serious."
"I'm sorry."
"No, you're not."
"I'm a little sorry."
"You're enjoying this far too much."
"I really am," he admitted, and then his eyes narrowed, that mischievous glint returning that you'd learned to be wary of.
"You know what," he said.
"...What?"
"I've decided."
"No."
"I no longer want sympathy."
"...You don't?"
"No. I've decided you deserve punishment. For crimes against your boyfriend."
"You're being dramatic."
"I think I'm being perfectly reasonable."
He lunged before you could brace yourself, and you shrieked, dissolving almost immediately into helpless laughter as his fingers found your sides. "NO! Jace!"
"This is what happens," he declared between your laughter, "when you suggest I bleach my hair!"
"I'M SORRY!"
"I don't believe you!"
"I TAKE IT BACK!"
"You called me slay!"
"I DIDN'T CALL YOU SLAY, I IMPLIED IT! AND YOU STILL SLAY!”
"That's worse!"
He finally relented, collapsing back against the pillows beside you, both of you breathless, your sides aching from laughing. After a moment, he reached over and found your hand in the dark, lacing his fingers through yours, lifting your joined hands to press a slow, lingering kiss against your knuckles.
"So," he said quietly.
"So?"
"...Thank you."
"For what?"
His thumb traced absentminded circles over the back of your hand. "For choosing me."
You didn't answer with words. You leaned over instead, pressed one soft kiss to his forehead, another to the corner of his mouth, and finally rested your forehead gently against his.
"There was never anyone else I wanted," you whispered.
And for the first time all night, Jacaerys Velaryon smiled without a single trace of doubt left in it.
“He has always known you were beautiful. He knew it when he was young and possessed no understanding of why he couldn't stop himself from giggling and hiding his face whenever you smiled at him.”
this was one of my favorite lines in the fic because the image of baby jace giggling and hiding his face whenever she smiled at him is genuinely the cutest thing ever
I MISS WRITING BABY JACE ALREADY THE CUTIE OF ALL TIME … euhuhuhuh he loved her so bad for literally as long as he can remember …. literally her just smiling at him made him feel shy and giggly
I want to write for Jace but to do it well I’d have to understand asoiaf, and to do that I must either read the books or watch the show and knowing what happens to my sweet boy I cannot bring myself to do so oh my goodness
I want to write for Jace but to do it well I’d have to understand asoiaf, and to do that I must either read the books or watch the show and knowing what happens to my sweet boy I cannot bring myself to do so oh my goodness
Hello, how are you? I hope I am not bothering you.
I am writing to you as I am living through the hardest moments of my life. Hashem is slowly dying in front of my eyes and our children. He needs urgent surgery, and I am helpless to save him.
Please, your donation and sharing of our story could be the reason my husband's life is saved. My children deserve not to lose their father.
Verified by @/gazavetters #53
@qamar2026
I’m so sorry to hear that. Please know that while I cannot help financially I will be praying for you and your family. May the Lord be with you always.
You know I’m not really in the fandom you’re writing for rn but you make it seem so interesting so every time your writing pops up it gradually went from “who on earth is that” to ah I still don’t know but now I kinda want to. I’ve also loved your writing for years now so hehe I’m excited (pretty sure I’m still following the Dazai posts I was that fixated. You’re making me love Jace (I literally don’t know the characters outside of your blog) and I’m excited for the next part of as it was jajxjsjs
OMGGGGG YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITED I WAS TO SEE YOU IN MY NOTIFS AGAIN IM SO GLAD TO HAVE DRAGGED YOU INTO JACE HELL WITH ME 🥹🥹🥹🥹 he is just so perfect I will never love a chara as much as I do him I think everybody and their mothers should love him truly
ILYSM IM SO GLAD YOU EVEN REMEMBER ME ACKSJDK I love Jace and might might might not sure if I’m ready for it but I MIGHT start reading/watching asoiaf and just know you’re the one who introduced all of this to me
SUMMARY: A prince washes up on the shore outside your cottage, and you must decide whether you’re going to leave him to his fate or save his life. Either way, you know there will be consequences.
WARNINGS: fem!reader, commoner!reader, eventual dragonseed!reader, jace lives, eventual smut, class differences (jace is obviously a prince and reader is a commoner). Reader is not too fond of him at first because she is from Sharp Point. This is a bit of a mix of show canon and book canon in that Jace went to the Gullet to save his brothers and Rhaena still claimed Sheepstealer
AUTHOR'S NOTES: i HADDDD to do a fic for our beloved boy </3 i miss you jacaerys velaryon, prince of dragonstone, heir to the iron throne. I will truly never move on from this death </3 so we need a world where he does not die. I'm saur excited for this because it's my first time writing a reader who comes from a commoner background, AND I finally get to write the dragons ... originally she was not supposed to be a dragonseed, but I just cannot help myself. If I'm going to be writing a hotd era fic, our girl is going to have a dragon. ANYWAY I hope you guys enjoy! please leave a comment or reblog mwah mwah
You wonder whether it is chance or divine intervention that a Targaryen prince washes ashore beside your cottage.
By the time you get to the edge of the sea after catching a glimpse of the corpse from your porch, it is half buried in the wet sand, lying limp at your feet, and there is a lump in your throat that you cannot seem to swallow away.
You do not know how you didn’t notice the sigil sooner.
It should have been the first thing that caught your eye, considering it was only a fortnight past that the Prince Aemond brought the great dragon Vhagar over the town you were raised in and razed it to the ground. The green and gold banners have been flying over the area since, and soldiers from the Reach have been constantly patrolling the roads, seeking out rebels and sympathizers.
You know better than to involve yourself in the affairs of any man that dons the three-headed dragon, you tell yourself, trying to will yourself to walk away from the corpse before anyone can catch you standing near it.
Red or gold, black or green—it does not matter to you, the wars of nobles are graves for common folk, and you have no desire to meet an early one. You have done well enough for yourself since your father passed. You refuse to squander the life you’ve built because a prince washed up on the shore near your home.
The boy at your feet is young, you cannot help but notice—your age, perhaps—dark of hair and fair of skin. At a distance, he had looked like any other body the sea had decided to return, and your first instinct had been to rush toward him rather than avert your gaze and pretend you had seen nothing.
Your hands tremble at your sides, and you have to forcibly still them as you take in a deep breath.
This is war, you recall the soldiers saying when the survivors demanded to know the reason for the tragedy that took place at Sharp Point—mothers with tears in their eyes and no bodies to bury, fathers who had lost their livelihood and the children for whom they built it, your neighbors, your friends. They say Lord Bar Emmon sits on the usurper’s council, so all of the commonfolk who were unfortunate enough to be born beneath his banners have been made to pay the price of his loyalties, allies of a queen they have never seen and casualties of a war they never chose.
This is war, they will tell you the same as they cut off your head if they see you kneeling beside this corpse and call mercy treason. Because it is always the burden of the commonfolk, paying the price of noble quarrels. Princes speak of honor and succession, of rights and oaths and stolen crowns, and it is fishermen and farmers who have to bury their dead. They will not care to hear what you have to say if they think you're affiliated with the Black queen and her supporters, just as the Prince Aemond did not care whether the people of Sharp Point had declared for the Blacks or merely happened to be born beneath the wrong lord.
But now, a prince lies dead upon your shore, and you wonder if this is how it begins again.
You should leave him.
The thought comes immediately, sensible in light of the circumstances, even if it does make your stomach flip. You should turn around and go home, bolt your door, and tell no one what you saw. The sea will reclaim him, or the crabs will pick his bones clean; maybe the patrol will stumble upon the body before the tide rises, and they can parade it through the streets the same way you heard they did to Princess Rhaenys’s dragon.
By the morning, he will be gone one way or another, and you can move on with your life as though you never saw him at all. He will be somebody else’s misfortune, or more hopefully, no one else’s at all.
It is a corpse, anyway. The boy has not moved since you arrived, and his chest does not seem to be rising and falling. There are two arrows through his shoulder, and a blueness to his lips that you’ve only seen in the dead, so—
As though to mock you, he lets out a wet, ragged cough, water bubbling at his lips, lashes fluttering just enough for you to catch sight of dark, hazy eyes that slip over you once before they slide shut again.
You feel sick to your stomach.
He does not stir again. One side of his face is bruised an ugly purple, his dark hair plastered to his brow with seawater and blood. He cannot be much older than you—the traitorous thought crosses your mind again. There is something terribly young about him, lying there half-drowned in the surf, one hand curled weakly into the sand as though, even unconscious, he is still trying to cling to something.
He does not look like a prince, you think miserably. He looks like a boy who is going to die.
The sea foams around your boots, and his body twitches as it threatens to reclaim him—the only feeble resistance he’s capable of in his state. You do not know how he still breathes—the fires might still burn on the Gullet, but the fighting ended days past. How long has he been floating about, dragged around by vicious currents and tossed by waves? It doesn’t even seem as though it should be possible, as though the Seven themselves intervened and—
—and dropped him on your shore, in your hands, and you are contemplating leaving him to die.
The thought is unpleasant, a heavy stone in your chest in place of your heart.
You are not a cruel person. You have cared for gulls with broken wings, and you leave scraps outside your door for the old orange cat that wanders the area. During the winter three years prior, you spent a fortnight nursing a lamb that did not even belong to you because you could not bear the sound of it crying.
And now there is a boy at your feet—bleeding, drowned, scarcely clinging to life—and because there is a dragon sewn onto his chest, you are trying to convince yourself to let the sea finish what arrows and war could not.
His lashes are dark against his cheek. Young, you think again, even more traitorous than the last, no older than ten and nine, if even. There is salt crusted at the corners of his mouth and blood soaking through his tunic in sluggish, rusty streams that stain the pale sand beneath him.
He looks cold—traitor, traitor, traitor.
He looks like a prince, you try to insist. A dragon prince, fire and blood and ruin, dangerous.
Cold. Hurt. Dying.
You need to walk away, you tell yourself again, desperate this time, because the longer you stand there staring at him, the more you fail to convince yourself of the correct path.
A prince's life is worth more than yours, more than your cottage and your little patch of land and the fishing boat your father left you. It is worth armies and dragons and castles and men willing to kill for a name.
If this boy lives, others will come looking for him.
And if the soldiers discover him in your home, they will not ask questions. They will not care that you found him by chance or that you never bent the knee to Queen Rhaenyra—that you could not even tell anyone why one half of House Targaryen wishes the other dead. They will see the three-headed dragon on his breast and the roof over his head, and that will be enough to condemn you.
Worse, the Prince Aemond and the dragon Vhagar could return. You think of Tom, the miller’s son, pulled from the boiling river after dragonfire reached the gristmill. You think of little Grace’s face as she searched the ashes for her mother. You think of all of your neighbors, all of your friends, who hardly survived the first time fire rained from the sky, and you think of all of those who didn’t.
He is not worth it. He is not worth the risk. A prince is only a man born with a special name, there’s no reason you should save him and condemn countless others—he bleeds the same, he dies the same, and when the Stranger comes for him, he is no more spared than any other man.
Except, he didn’t, did he?
He should be dead—any other man would be dead.
Two arrows through the shoulder, half-drowned, tossed upon the sea for days on end—there is no surviving that. Yet he breathes still, ragged and shallow though it may be, his fingers twitching every now and then.
The Stranger came for him and left empty-handed.
The Stranger came for him and left him with you.
Why?
There are no prophecies in your life, no gods whispering in your ear. You are a fisherman's daughter with a cottage by the sea and enough coin to keep yourself fed through winter if the catch is good. You know little of the gods save for the prayers your father taught you as a child and the candles you light for him on his nameday. The Seven did not save your father or your town; they did not save Tom or Grace’s mother or any of the others who screamed as dragonfire turned their homes to ash.
So why? Why this boy? Why this prince? Why should the gods spare a dragon's son when they had not spared children and fishermen and mothers? Why have they left him for you?
You do not have an answer. The only answer before you is a body on the sand, breathing when it ought not to be.
You stare down at him, furious and distressed and so, so unsure. He looks dead again—still as driftwood, cold and pale, stiff. His lips are blue like the dead, and his chest hardly rises and falls. You wonder if you imagined what you saw before. If your guilt conjured a cough where there had been none, if your conscience simply could not bear the thought of walking away even from a corpse.
Slowly, you sink to your knees beside him, damp sand clinging to your knees, the sea foam wetting your trousers. Your hand is still trembling in spite of all efforts to still it. You lift it to his throat, hesitating only for a moment.
If there is life, you will do what you must.
If there is not, you will turn and walk away.
You have never prayed for someone to be dead before.
Please, you think now miserably. Please.
Your fingers brush the skin of his throat—it is cold. He must be cold. So cold, that for a brief, terrible moment, hope flares in your chest, and then—
There is a flutter—it is weak and uneven, so faint that you almost miss it, but it is there.
Your head hangs forward, and you blink away the tears that prick in your eyes, because you know this action will have consequences. You know that there is no going back once you have entangled yourself with dragons. You know that every story told of House Targaryen ends in blood and fire and ruin for everyone foolish enough to stand too close them.
You know that this boy could be the death of you.
The soldiers could discover him. Your neighbors could discover him—as much as they care for you, they fear Vhagar more. If word spreads that a prince of the black faction lives and is hidden beneath your roof, you could hang for it. They could burn your cottage to the ground. They could drag you through the streets and call you traitor.
Worse still, he could recover.
Because then he would not be a half-dead boy on the sand. He would be a prince again. A son of the house of the dragon. He would leave, and the war would continue, and perhaps one day you would hear his name in some tavern and learn that he had mounted a dragon and burned a town much like your own.
The sea rushes forward again, cold water washing over your boots and his legs alike. He does not move. He is so cold.
“Why did you have to wash up here?” you breathe out—frustrated, angry, resigned, because you have never been one to turn your back on someone in need.
His pulse flutters once more against your fingers, and he does not stir.
Then, because the gods have a cruel sense of humor and because your heart has always been softer than your head, you slide your arms beneath the prince’s shoulders and knees.
With a soft curse and the sea at your heels, you gather the dragon prince into your arms and carry home your ruin.
—————————
He is Jacaerys Velaryon, son of Queen Rhaenyra, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne.
Three days have passed since you found him on the shore, and he has hardly stirred since you dragged him into your cottage. You have been riddled with anxiety since, jumping at every sound and fearing the worst when someone addresses you. It is only a matter of time—whenever a rider passes on the road beyond the trees or the patrol sweeps down your shore, you think they care coming for him. Coming for you.
You spend the first day trying to keep him alive.
You drag him home, soaked to the bone and half-frozen, laying him atop your bed as you get a fire going and wrap him in your blankets. For a while, you can only stand there staring at him, because it is one thing to decide not to leave a boy to die and another entirely to realize you have no idea how to save him.
You have to cut away his tunic to remove it, and it makes it easier to breathe once the three-headed dragon is out of sight, but then you have to address the monstrosity beneath it—bruises darkening one side of his ribs, yellow and purple and black, cuts everywhere, salt crusting his skin and body a ruin of blood.
You wonder how many rocks the currents slammed him into before he finally washed to shore. The sea around Sharp Point is, well, sharp. Jagged rocks and narrow inlets line the coast, and more than one fisherman has vanished into the sea after his boat drifted too close to reefs beneath the tide.
It is a cruel stretch of sea—crueler still to a boy half-dead and alone.
And then there were the arrows.
The shafts protrude from his shoulders at awful angles, the flesh around them angry and swollen. You cry while removing them, because you have never done something like it before, and your hands cannot stop shaking. A part of you wonders if the gods left him for you so that his blood could be on your hands instead, and you cannot fathom what you’ve done to deserve this.
You expect him to wake once you start removing them. At the very least, you expect him to scream. The first shaft pierced cleanly through his shoulder and is easy enough to ease out, but the second lodged itself deep in the flesh, refusing to budge until you brace your foot against the bedframe and pull with both hands.
It should have been agony—any man would have cried out.
The prince does not so much as flinch.
You remember staring at him afterward, the arrow clutched in your hand and your own cheeks wet with tears, wondering if he had died while you were removing it. You press your fingers to his throat with a panic that borders on hysteria, and you aren’t sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when you feel the fluttering pulse still there.
A traitorous part of you wishes that he had died.
A corpse is a tragedy, but a tragedy can be dumped in the sea and abandoned. A tragedy will not bring more war to your ravaged home.
A living prince, on the other hand, is a catastrophe that you do not know what to do with. Your home has already faced ruin once, and the longer he remains in your care, the more at risk you will be of bringing it upon you all again, because if he is captured in your care, then that means war and blood and fire and more dragons. The whole town, all of the survivors, everyone will be branded traitors to the crown.
But the prince lived, so you can only hope that he will heal quick enough and be gone before you have the chance to regret helping him.
The fever comes on the second day, and the corpse in your bed finally gives to life.
You notice it when you are wiping the blood from his face, and your hand brushes his forehead. It’s as though all of the cold of the sea had fled his body at once and left only fire behind. It’s what you expect of a Targaryen prince, really—the burning heat, closer to dragon than man— it feels more natural than the cold, but you are scared anyway.
You do not know much about treating battle wounds, but you do know about fever.
Your younger brother died of it during a long winter a decade past—no matter how hard your mother worked to keep it at bay, he was dead by nightfall. Your mother passed in the same moon, to the same sickness, as did half of the children in Sharp Point, because fever does not care whether you are young or old, rich or poor, prince or peasant.
His skin is flushed, sweat beading along his brow and soaking the dark hair at his temples as he twists in the sheets violently, threatening to reopen the wounds you just stitched close. His breathing changes too—no longer the slow drags of air, shallow and erratic, like he had spent days at sea only to begin suffocating on dry land.
You fetch water from the well until your shoulders ache. You lay cloths upon his brow and change them whenever they grow warm. You feed the fire, then fear you have made him too hot and let it die down, only to panic that he would grow cold again and build it back up.
Every few minutes, you find yourself pressing your hand to his forehead or his throat, checking for fever and pulse alike. There is never a change—still alive and burning, and you don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified.
At one point, he begins muttering. You cannot make out most of it—the words are slurred, little more than broken sounds spilling from fevered lips. Names, you think. Places, maybe. Some do not seem to be spoken in the common tongue.
Once, very clearly, he whispers, "Mother.”
You have to change the cloth on his forehead afterward and pretend your eyes are not stinging with tears. You curse the gods throughout that second day—you wish that you’d never left the cottage at all the morning you found him, you wish you’d left him to die, you wish, you wish, you wish, as though any of it matters anymore.
You sleep little that night, sitting beside your bed and watching him breathe. Terrified every time his breathing slowed, and equally terrified every time it quickened. You count the moments between each breath until dawn creeps through your shutters, and by morning, you feel like you have lived a lifetime in a single night.
The third day—today—you have to make the trek into town.
You have used the last of your willow bark, and there is only a heel of stale bread left, a few onions, and enough drinking water to last another day if you’re careful. You need fruit and vegetables, more barley, and you have a catch that you never got the chance to bring to the market to trade the morning you found the prince.
You cannot put it off any longer, much as you may wish—the prince needs supplies, and unfortunately, so do you.
You do not like going into town. You have never liked going into town—you have always been fond of your neighbors and your friends, but you were not fond of the way they circle and crowd you whenever you make your weekly appearance for trade. You got overwhelmed too quickly, and you didn’t know how to make an exit without seeming rude, so you ended up staying there for hours when there were many chores you had to get done at home.
Now, it is like a graveyard. The destruction following the Prince Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point has yet to be cleared. The soldiers are too busy with war and patrols, and the survivors are too busy trying to salvage what they can of their ruined lives.
When you enter the town, you can still smell charred flesh and death.
The children usually run to you when you arrive, chattering about the games they’ve played and the rumors they’ve heard, if you saw the wild dragon Grey Ghost while you were out on your boat this week, and you smile and nod along with them. But all of the children are dead now, and you are not crowded by friends and neighbors eager to make conversation with you, because most of them are dead now too.
It is in the market when you overhear green-cloaked soldiers talking about the battle that took place in the Gullet, and you finally put a name to the face of the prince in your home. You try to pretend that you’re not eavesdropping, fingers shaking terribly as you sort through the fruits and vegetables that Wylem carted in from his farm, because you need to know if they have figured out what you’ve done, if they know the prince is in your care, under your roof.
But they only laugh as they speak of dead dragons and a mourning pretender queen. They say the Blacks have lost two dragons, and the bastard prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, is dead. Any man who can find his body washed up on the shore to deliver to the King will see unfathomable riches.
Momentarily, you are angry at yourself because the royals brought this war and have caused all of this suffering, but when your lashes flutter shut, for a split second, you can only picture the haunted look on your mother’s face as she held your dead brother in her arms. You think of Miss Ellyn, who tossed herself into the sea when she found out her son had been killed on the Kingsroad. You think of your friend, Marie, who you found screaming, fisting her infant daughter’s ashes after the burning of the town. You think of them, and then you think of the black queen on her throne, and you feel the same lump in your throat.
Then you remind yourself that this is her doing.
Her doing, her half-brother’s doing, the other nobles’ doing. They brought this war to Westeros, they brought death and destruction, fire and blood, and you force yourself to shake your head and push it all away, trading some of the fish you caught for fruits and vegetables and barley with a watery smile that you’re sure Wylem took notice of.
There are more important things to worry about: if there is a bounty on the prince’s body, everybody will be searching for him. Not just soldiers, the people too—your friends, your neighbors, everyone. Many starve, more struggle, so if there is an opportunity for gold, they will all be on the hunt. You need to burn his cloak and tunic when you get back to the cottage, anything that associates him with House Targaryen.
You nearly trip over your own feet racing back to the cottage, second-guessing every conversation you had in the town. Wylem asked you why you were getting twice as much food as you usually get—you do not remember how you responded.
Did you imply that you had a visitor? Why can’t you remember? What excuse did you give? Did the soldiers overhear? Are they following you? Do they know? Why can’t you remember? You’re scared—you do not think you’ve ever been so scared in your entire life.
You look over your shoulder every five steps, worried that they’re going to come charging after you, demanding you to bring them to the Prince Jacaerys before taking your head. You’re not cut out for this—you’re the daughter of a fisherman. There’s no world where you should be worrying whether soldiers are going to hunt you down for saving a prince.
There are tears in your eyes when you make it back to the cottage, and your fingers are trembling around the bags Wylem packed for you. You shut the door behind you, and it takes you three tries to bolt it properly. When you finally do, you rest your forehead against the wood and let out a trembling sigh.
You—
“Who are you?”
There is a knife to your throat.
You stare at the crack in the wood of your door, breath catching, desperately trying not to move lest you risk the knife slicing through your skin. The crack appeared last winter, you remind yourself, trying not to focus too much on the fact that you can feel the cool edge of the blade. Your friend, Evander, was meant to fix before the next, but Evander is dead now, and you may well be too, if the knife at your throat presses any deeper.
“Answer me, who are you? Where am I? Wh—” the prince—Jacaerys Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne—falters suddenly, and you can only breathe again when the knife drops from your neck, and you feel the presence at your back disappear. “You—you are a woman.”
You do not turn to look at him immediately, eyes sliding shut as you fight to steady the frantic beating of your heart, drawing one slow breath after another until your shaking eases enough to trust your legs. Your fingers tighten on the bags cradled in your arms before you force yourself to turn around.
Prince Jacaerys Velaryon stands three paces behind you, one hand braced against the edge of your table, pained, pale, barely conscious. He is bare from the waist up, and the stitches you painstakingly worked through his torn skin have pulled loose, fresh blood soaking the bandages and dripping down his chest and back.
You see more clearly in the light of the afternoon sun just how ruined his body is, bruises and cuts—you think his ribs must be broken, you did not notice just how bad off he was when you had him lying in the dim corner where you keep your bed.
For a moment, you forget that you are face-to-face with a Targaryen prince—it is only the boy you dragged in from the sea and spent hours trying to keep alive.
Your lips curve down into a deep frown, brows knitting together. You exhale as you say, “You reopened your wounds. It took me an hour to get them properly closed.”
The prince stares at you.
As soon as the words fly from your mouth, you remember who it is before you. The son of a queen. The heir to the Iron Throne, if one listens to his mother. A pretender's heir and bastard, if one listens to her enemies. You do not know which of them is right, nor do you particularly care. Such questions belong to lords and knights and people with far too much time to argue over crowns.
To the likes of you, prince is title enough for you to keep your mouth shut and your head bowed.
He does not immediately respond, gaze flicking around your cottage uncertainly. Your bed, stained with his blood. The dying hearth. The table where you left out the last bits of the bread, just in case he awoke while you were gone and was hungry. The bandages you left at his bedside. The basin of pink water you forgot to empty before leaving for town.
His lips, dry and cracked, part as he stares at you and murmurs more to himself than to you, “You tended my wounds.”
You hesitate, then nod, swallowing once. “I found you on the shore a few days past, my prince—” Your Grace? What is the proper way to address a prince? My Lord does not seem grand enough for the heir to a queen. Prince feels the safest—whatever he may be, no one seems inclined to dispute that part. “—I… you should probably be resting.”
“I need to know what happened,” he says instead, stepping closer to you. He is too pale, sweat beads at his forehead, dark curls matted to his skin. His eyes are wide and wild, pupils dilated the same way you’ve seen in men mad with grief or fear or fury, moments before lashing out at the nearest person. You find yourself tensing instinctively. “What do you know of the battle that took place on the Gullet? Did Baela make it back to Dragonstone? And Rhaena—she was on that wild dragon, and—my brothers, did my brothers make it back? How long has it been? Where are we? How far is it to Dragonstone? I must return immediately, I—”
The prince only just seems to realize how you’ve drawn away, back pressed against the door to your own home, arms tightening around the sack in your arms whenever he comes closer. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, gaze flicking to the knife he dropped onto the floor and the fear in your face.
Shame crosses his expression instantly.
“I—” His expression twists as he puts space between the two of you again. You wonder whether it’s from pain or from struggling to force out an apology. Both, likely. He continues, “You have helped me—saved my life, most like—and here I am frightening you. I… I thought I’d been captured. I woke in an unfamiliar place. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was a prisoner or if the battle had been lost. I heard the door open and…”
He trails off, and you stand there awkwardly, tension easing slowly from your shoulders. He is still on guard, but he does not seem so inclined to pull a blade on you again. Your lips part to tell him where he is, what little you know of the battle on the Gullet.
Instead, you ask, “Do most enemy strongholds look like a fisherman’s cottage, my prince?”
You are mortified the moment the question spills from your lips—he is a Targaryen prince, they are known for blood and fire and madness, dragons and crowns, and you speak to him as though he’s one of your peers.
Prince Jacaerys stares at you for a long moment, and then, to your astonishment, his gaze flicks around the inside of your home again, and something suspiciously like embarrassment crosses his face.
“I suppose not.”
The corner of your mouth twitches despite yourself, and you let out a soft puff of air through your nose before making your way across the room to place the sack you’ve carried from town onto the table. You will have to sort all of what you’ve got later; for now, you need to get the prince resettled before he opens up any more of his wounds.
You turn to look at him again, faltering when you see the pained expression that crosses his face, so sudden that it steals all the color from his cheeks. His hand shoots to his side, fingers digging into the bandages wrapped around his ribs.
“My prince?” you ask hesitantly, taking half a step forward, arm only slightly extended. It is one thing to carry him to your cottage and treat his wounds while he’s unconscious; it is different now that he’s awake.
Prince Jacaerys inhales sharply through his teeth. He is swaying on his feet, breath gone shallow—he looks as though he’s moments from collapsing hard onto your wooden floor. Still, his jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck tighten as he draws himself upright through sheer stubbornness.
“I am fine,” he insists.
“You should sit, my prince.”
“I am standing,” he replies with a tight smile, as though a bead of sweat isn’t rolling down his temple from strain to remain upright and his lips aren’t trembling with pain.
“Barely.”
The prince blinks as though caught off guard by the response, casting a look that is partially confused, and mostly offended in your direction. Your lashes flutter shut as you brace yourself for a volatile reaction, because he is a prince and you are a fisherman’s daughter, and you are arguing with him as though he is an equal and not one of those dragon-riding royals people compose songs about. You think you must have lost your wits entirely these past few days.
Instead, he shoots back, with all the dignity he can muster while visibly swaying, "I have endured worse."
You stare at the blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, uncertain if you believe him. You say with less heat, "That is not the same as being well, my prince."
His jaw tightens, and you fight a sigh. Gods, he actually looks as though he is preparing an argument.
You wonder, briefly, what your life has become. Three weeks ago, your greatest concern had been whether the currents would ease up enough for you to take the boat out of the shallows to catch some fish. Now, Sharp Point has burned and you are standing in your cottage, arguing with a dragon prince about his injuries.
The absurdity of it nearly makes you laugh, wondering if perhaps this entire ordeal is some fever dream brought on by bad fish and Leila’s uncle’s dubious ale.
Then, Prince Jacaerys’s left leg buckles.
He reaches for the table and misses, injured shoulder slamming into the edge hard enough to wrench a strangled cry from him, and before you can think better of it, you're moving.
You let go of the sack of fruits and vegetables and barley you were keeping steady on your table; it topples over, and all of your pristine apples go rolling across the floor of your cottage, but you barely notice, panicked when you realize that he careening right toward the hardwood floor.
You catch the prince around the waist just as he starts to fall, but he is heavier than you expect.
You brace yourself, convinced that he is going to take you down with him, but you manage to steer him sideways toward the chair beside the table. He collapses into it heavily, breath hissing through clenched teeth as pain flashes across his face.
Momentum carries you forward with him—far, far too forward.
One hand lands against the uninjured side of his chest to steady yourself, the other gripping the arm of the chair. For a horrifying second, you are practically sprawled across the heir to the Iron Throne’s lap. You jerk away so quickly you nearly trip over one of the escaped apples, face burning and hands shaking.
"Sorry," you blurt, mortified. “Sorry. Sorry, I did not mean—”
“I believe,” Prince Jacaerys begins with a grimace, “that was my fault.”
You do not respond, flustered, trying to put more distance between you to calm yourself down. Your gaze flicks back over to him, but he is too busy grinding his teeth as he glances down at his wounds to pay you any mind. You let out a soft puff of air through your nose before you look at the apples rolling about your floor, and then reach for one still on your table—you might have lost some sense over the past three days with the little sleep you’ve gotten, but you are not about to feed a prince food off your floor.
You make your way back over to him and hold the apple out to him. He blinks once at it before his gaze lifts to yours questioningly.
“I do not know when last you ate—a while, certainly,” you tell him quietly. “You should get something in you while I redress the bandages. I’ll cook some stew once I’m certain you’re not going to bleed out.”
Prince Jacaerys exhales through his nose before he takes the apple from you, rolling it between his fingers. You step past him so that you can move the basin of water closer to where he’s sitting, grabbing a clean rag and the bandages that you left next to your bed.
You come to stand in front of him again, hesitating before you motion to the wounds on his shoulder. You ask, “May I?”
His dark gaze flicks up to yours briefly before he nods, and your throat tightens as you shift closer, fingers fumbling a bit as you grab for the edge of the bandages to unwind them from around him. It is much more intimidating doing this while he’s awake, inches away from you, and eyes tracking your every move.
“I found you three days ago, my prince,” you tell him at last, trying to remember all of the questions he asked earlier so that you can busy your mind with something other than the fact that you can feel his skin hot against yours. “Before that, the fighting died another three. In truth, my prince, I do not know how you survived so long at sea.”
Prince Jacaerys says nothing in response. His attention remains fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind you, expression distant. You suspect he is counting the days since the battle, the hours his family has believed he is dead, the minutes his mother has spent mourning him. You keep your gaze trained on his shoulder as you unwind the last of the bandages and set them down on the table.
You press your lips together when you see that the stitches have loosened at the back of his shoulder—where one of the arrows had dug deep, but not deep enough to pass cleanly through. Pulling it free had torn through muscle and flesh alike, leaving a ragged injury that had taken you nearly an hour to clean, stitch, and stop bleeding.
You exhale as you run the pad of your finger briefly over the stitches, trying to figure out if you can salvage what effort you already put in or if you would have to pull them out and redo them entirely.
“And my family? My younger brothers? Baela and Rhaena? Have you heard what has become of them?” the prince asks, and you glance up just enough to see how his jaw tightens when your finger brushes over the wound. “Did we win the battle?”
“I do not know if anyone can be said to have won that battle, my prince,” you answer quietly, tongue darting out to wet your lips as you finally start to get to work at reclosing the wound. Your gaze slips to the side when he finally starts to eat the apple you passed to him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, as though he’s only just realized how hungry he is. “Both fleets were decimated. The dead still wash up on the northern shore.”
How did Prince Jacaerys make it to your shore, then?
Not for the first time, you have to wonder if the gods themselves placed him directly into your hands.
Most of the rest of the dead have washed up on the northern and western shores of Sharp Point, as it is where the currents run strongest, but the prince somehow made it to where your cottage sits on the eastern shore. If he had washed up anywhere else, the patrol would have certainly found him by now. You've heard they have spent the last several days combing the beaches, hauling bloated corpses from the tide and turning them over with the tips of their spears, searching for the dragon prince they are certain the sea claimed.
Prince Jacaerys’s breath hitches when you tug lightly at the stitches holding the skin of his shoulder together. Already, he’s finished the apple you handed him, absentmindedly turning the core between his fingers while his thoughts remain leagues away.
It is only when the last bite is gone that he seems to notice, and his gaze drifts toward the table. He hesitates, and you think it is almost comical—this is the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragonrider, a prince who has flown into battle, and he looks as though asking for another apple might be an imposition too great to make when he’s been floating at sea for at least a week.
You hold the stitches carefully with your right hand so that you can lean forward and grab another apple from your table to pass to him. His cheeks color slightly when he realizes that you noticed.
“I did not mean to stare,” he murmurs, taking the apple from you and cradling it carefully between his hands. He asks again, “Have you heard what has become of my family?”
You shake your head, focusing on tending to his wounds again. You think that you’ll be able to salvage your work. It is good, you think—you can get him resting and then cook some stew for the two of you. You didn’t eat much yesterday, frazzled by the fever and trying to keep him comfortable, and you’re starting to feel a lightness in your head.
“I’ve only heard what the soldiers say in town, my prince,” you murmur, trying to figure out how to go about speaking the news he certainly won’t take well. The last thing you need is for grief to send him bolting for Dragonstone before he can so much as walk across your cottage without collapsing. If he does not kill himself by straining his body when it is not ready, then the patrols will certainly catch him and have his head—and then yours.
You let out a soft sigh as you tie off the stitches on his shoulder blade and lean down to wet the clean rag before lifting it to his bloody skin. You’re careful around the edges of the wound, trying not to disturb the stitches, working slowly at the dried and wet blood from the curve of his shoulder, over the collarbone, down the length of his back.
You try not to think too hard about what you’re doing.
If you do, it begins to feel far too intimate.
It is one thing to drag an unconscious stranger from the sea. It is another to stand so close that you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, to brush your fingers across the line of his shoulders. You have spent three days tending him without much thought, because there had been no room for embarrassment while the Stranger lingered at his bedside.
Now he is awake and watching you, and every accidental brush of your knuckles against his skin seems to linger a heartbeat too long. He is a prince of the realm, and you are a fisherman’s daughter—people like you are not supposed to touch people like him, and yet—
You exhale through your nose harshly. You busy yourself with the rag, scrubbing a little harder than necessary at a streak of dried blood along his collarbone simply to distract yourself, and his jaw pinches.
“Sorry,” you say quietly.
“It does not hurt,” he replies—a lie, surely, any man would be in agonizing pain. But maybe not; any man also would have died in the sea. Maybe the rumors are true: the Targaryens are closer to god than man; they do not feel pain or have to fear the Stranger the same way people like you ought to. “What have you heard from the soldiers in town? Where are we?”
“Half a league from Sharp Point, my prince,” you answer, still evading the question, which he seems to realize from the way he glances at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and accusing. He knows you are withholding something. You exhale lightly through your nose and then say hesitantly, “They say two dragons fell over the Gullet. I could not tell you which.”
“Two?!” Prince Jacaerys demands, immediately rising to his feet, so quickly that the chair scrapes against the floor, and you fear he might rip back open the stitches. He whirls on you, eyes wide, pupils large as coins, and you almost flinch. “Two dragons?”
You swallow thickly as you nod. “My prince—”
“One must be—” His voice catches. He cannot finish the thought. For the first time since he awoke, real grief overtakes him completely. It drains his face of what little color had returned, leaves him staring at nothing as though he can already see the answer waiting for him. “I need to know the second. Whose was it? Which dragon fell?”
It unsettles you how close he sounds to pleading when moments before, you had been wondering whether the stories of the Targaryens’ deism held some weight, because gods do not look like this. They do not stand in a stranger’s cottage with fear plain on their face, hands trembling as they wait for an answer they already dread.
The same lump forms in your throat now that did when you heard the soldiers mocking a grieving queen and couldn’t help your thoughts from turning to your own mother, to Miss Ellyn, to your friend, Marie. For a moment, he is not a Targaryen prince or a dragonlord; you see a son and an older brother. A boy your age who knows there are only a handful of dragons flying over the Gullet, and every one of them belongs to someone he loves.
“I do not—”
“I need to return home,” he says immediately, as though his face isn’t white with pain and his stitches don’t strain every time he moves. His eyes glaze over you as though you’re not even there, and he takes a step toward the door to your small cottage. “Sharp Point—there must be passage to Dragonstone, there—”
Panic flares in your chest when he makes as though to leave. It is noon, and the patrols have become more frequent along the shores outside your cottage. They’ve spent a week carding through the western and northern shores, and they’ve been sending more and more men to the east—you worry they’re becoming desperate. The longer they go without finding a corpse, the more they may fear that there isn’t one.
If they have an inkling that Prince Jacaerys is still alive, they’ll start kicking down doors, and if they start kicking down doors, they will find him, and your life will be forfeit for harboring him.
“You cannot,” you say before you can think better of it, lunging forward as though to grab his wrist, but you stop yourself before you can make a terrible mistake, stopping a hairsbreadth from brushing his skin.
What is wrong with you? you think furiously. You need to rest tonight before you do something you cannot take back. Already you have gotten snide with and you have argued with a prince of the realm—now you have commanded him and nearly tried to seize him. You would have been lucky to only lose your hand in any other circumstance. Had he been standing in a hall instead of your cottage, surrounded by knights instead of rough-hewn furniture, you might have lost your head.
“I cannot?” Prince Jacaerys turns to you, bafflement momentarily eclipsing the fear that had consumed him only seconds before, as though he cannot quite fathom that someone has just told him no.
“My prince, you can scarcely stand,” you say. His gaze drops to where your hand is still hovering near his arm, head cocking to the side and brows lifting, and you snap it back to your chest immediately, heat flooding your face. “You have lost a lot of blood, you have barely eaten in a week, your wounds have only just been stitched again, and there are patrols searching for you every road between here and the sea.”
He continues to stare at you, disbelief riddling his expression. You have the distinct impression that no one has ever spoken to him this way before—certainly not a fisherman’s daughter. You force yourself to press on while he’s silent, hoping to make your point and rid him of this futile endeavor before he gets you both killed.
“The Prince Aemond burned Sharp Point’s harbor. There are no ships capable of navigating the currents of the Gullet, and the water still burns besides. I do not have a horse for you to ride to Stonedance. You could not get to Dragonstone even if you were not hurt,” you insist. “I will return to town tomorrow to try to get more information, but please, my prince, you mustn’t leave. You will only be putting us both at risk.”
For a long moment, you think that he will invoke his title or duty and insist upon leaving anyway, or maybe he will simply walk out the door despite everything you have said, and there is nothing you could do to stop him.
Then, his expression changes, twisting into something pained as he looks away, a shuddered breath escaping his lips. His shoulders, held tense since the moment you uttered the word two, sink ever so slightly. The panic that had driven him to his feet has nowhere left to go, draining from him all at once, leaving only exhaustion behind.
One hand drops back down to his ribs, pain crossing his face. Whatever strength carried him to his feet abandons him just as quickly as the panic, leaving him swaying where he stands. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them, the panic has been replaced by a type of defeat that is infinitely more difficult to look at.
You step forward cautiously when you see how his body is trembling, hand hovering uncertainly between the two of you, silently asking permission to help him. Prince Jacaerys stares at your outstretched hand, then at the bed on the far side of the room; you think, for a second, that he will attempt to cross on his own, but then his nostrils flare as he exhales, inclining his head just enough to grant you the permission his pride refuses to voice aloud.
Carefully, you slip beneath his uninjured arm, taking care to avoid the fresh bandages. He is warm—still warmer than he ought to be—and you can’t help but wonder if his fever has returned or if this is just how hot dragon prince’s typically run.
He leans into you only slightly, weight settling lightly against your shoulder—you suspect he is trying very hard not to. The journey from the door to your bed is scarcely a dozen paces, but it feels much longer.
“We were supposed to win this victory for her,” Prince Jacaerys says after a moment, voice breaking, the words slip free before he can stop it. You do not think the admission is meant for you, so you stay quiet. His throat works as he swallows. “We were supposed to—”
He cuts himself off, looking away again as you help him ease back down into your bed. As soon as he is seated, something close to relief crosses his face, lashes fluttering; the pain is still there, but not quite as terrible as it was when he was straining on his feet.
“The fact that you are alive at all is a victory, my prince,” you say quietly, even though you do not think the words will be of any reassurance. “You should rest. The sooner you are well, the sooner we can figure out a way to get you home. I’ll cook up a stew and wake you when it’s finished.”
He exhales again, jaw tightening as he looks away with a resigned expression. You turn your back on him to deal with the mess you made of the kitchen area, grimacing slightly at everything spilled across your floorboards and the table.
“What is your name?” Prince Jacaerys asks you suddenly. “I think I ought to know the name of the woman who saved my life.”
You let a soft breath, glancing over your shoulder at him. He is pained still, but there is an earnest look in his eyes that makes you falter—you remember how close you were to leaving him to his fate, and you have to look away again before he can catch the guilt that crosses over your face.
With a shaky exhale, you give the prince your name, and you cannot help but feel as though your life has irrevocably changed, and you do not think for the better.
————————————
The sea is on fire.
Jace cannot tell where the flames end and the water begins. Ships burn around him, masts collapsing into the waves with deafening cracks; men scream as they’re consumed by the fire, and dragons let out terrible shrieks as they dive low to bring down another ship full of Myrish mercenaries.
He tries to focus.
He chases after the rogue dragon, hoping to kill the rider before the dragon can burn any more of the Velayron fleet—or worse, catch Baela and Moondancer. But there is panic clawing at his chest, and smoke and salt clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. He’s screaming at Vermax to fly faster, to kill the rider, and then—then he sees Rhaena.
He sees Rhaena atop the wild dragon, and she is screaming, crying, desperately trying to get it under control, and Jace is confused, reeling as he yells at Vermax to stop at the last second. He and dragon both diving down away from the chase before Vermax could breathe fire on his cousin.
Rhaena does not have a dragon, he thinks, trying to figure out what is happening, and Rhaena is supposed to be with his brothers, and his brothers are captured by the enemy, and he isn’t sure if Stormcloud and Aegon made it to shore, and there is too much going on, and—
—and Vermax is falling.
Vermax is banking hard, being dragged down into the sea, and Jace’s stomach lurches. He’s yelling—begging—Vermax to fly, and Vermax is trying, he’s trying so hard, wings beating smoke through the air. He shrieks as another bolt catches him in the wing, and Jace feels the pain himself—he feels the pain, the primal fear, everything that Vermax does, because Vermax is his, and he is Vermax’s, and they are bonded, and Vermax is drowning, and the water is so cold, and Jace cannot feel his legs or his hands or his face.
He fumbles as he tries to unhook himself from the saddle, choking on water and air, maybe a sob, as Vermax sinks into the sea, a stream of bubbles rising to the surface as he cries for Jace, slowly disappearing into the dark waters. Jace desperately tries to dive after him, as if he has the strength to hold them both above the sea, because Jace has already lost Luke, and he—he cannot lose Vermax.
Not the dragon who had slept beside his cradle before he was old enough to walk, the hatchling he had grown up alongside, whose neck had once fit beneath his arm, whose first uncertain flights had ended with both of them tumbling into the sandy shore of Dragonstone while his mother laughed herself breathless.
Jace does not know a life without him—he does not want to know a life without him. His earliest recollections are not of nursery songs or wooden swords, but of warm green scales beneath tiny hands and the deep, rumbling croon that had lulled him to sleep when he was scarcely more than a babe.
When Jace learned to walk, Vermax learned to fly; when Jace’s voice deepened, Vermax’s roar had too.
There has never been a Jacaerys without Vermax.
But Jace’s lungs are burning, and he cannot see the familiar green scales anymore, and his body is reacting, seizing and spasming because there is no air left in him and water all around. He does not know which way is up and which way is down, the water is too dark and too cold, and he cannot think, but—but he sees the bubbles. He sees the bubbles, and he follows them, and even as Vermax sinks to the bottom of the sea, he saves his rider one final time.
He reaches the surface with a gasp, gulping the smoky air, and everything hurts. His arms ache, his chest is too tight, his eyes burn, and he cannot breathe, because Vermax is gone. He can feel that Vermax is gone; there is a gaping hole in his chest where his dragon used to be, and Jace does not know what to do, he does not know how to live anymore, and he wants—
He wants his mother.
He just wants his mother.
He hears the cheers before he feels the first arrow, gaze lifting to the sky as he searches for Baela and Moondancer—they are not too far, he thinks, she'll come for him.
And then, there’s a dull throb in his shoulder blade as he pulls himself over a floating piece of driftwood, but he hardly takes note of the pain, because everywhere hurts, because Vermax is gone, because he wants his mother. He turns when he hears the cheering, and he sees the men on the ship, and he sees the crossbows and the bows and the Myrish banners, but he does not see anything at all, really, blinking once, staring.
The second arrow catches him closer to the chest.
And then—then all he remembers is sea.
White foam and bubbles, vicious currents and sharp rocks. He thinks he is dead more than he thinks he is alive, but there is so much pain. There is pain and emptiness, and Jace just wants—
“... prince, the stew is ready.”
Jace startles awake, breath hitching in the back of his throat. His body tenses immediately, because he does not remember where he is—he remembers the sea and the waves and rocks and pain and Vermax, but he does not remember…
The cottage. Waking up alone. The door opening, the fear—was he captured? Where is he? Where are his brothers? Where is Baela? What was Rhaena doing on the wild dragon? Mother, mother, mother—
You avert your eyes suddenly, an awkward expression on your face, and Jace suddenly remembers. He remembers you, the apple you passed him as you tended to his wounds; how he held a knife to the throat of a woman who is risking her own life to save his. He remembers that he is stuck bedridden in the bed of a commoner while his mother thinks he’s dead and fights for her throne alone.
He opens his mouth to apologize—to tell you that he will leave as soon as he is able, that he will ensure you’re properly compensated for saving his life—but he falters when he feels something hot and wet drip down his face.
He lifts his hand to his cheek and wipes at his face, looking down at the wetness smeared on his fingertips. For a long moment, he does not understand—seawater, maybe? But he is no longer being tossed around by the sea. He is warm in your cottage, the hearth burns low and your blankets are tangled around him. He blinks once, and another fat droplet of water rolls from his eye down his cheek.
Is he crying?
Heat rushes to his face so quickly he thinks it rivals the fever. He wipes away furiously, not sure if it’s more or less humiliating that you’re pretending not to notice for his sake, turning your back to him to ready the table.
Jace has wept before, more than most ought to—for the father who taught him fishing and sea shanties, and the other who passed before either of them could speak the truth out loud, for the grandfather he never truly knew, for the brother who felt less like a brother and more like his other half—but never, never in front of a stranger.
Jace promptly clears his throat and pulls himself together. He glances at you, praying that his face does not betray him, an excuse on his lips as takes a deep breath. Then he falters, mouth watering instantly, gaze cutting to the side where you are busy ladling stew into two chipped wooden bowls, back politely turned, as though you never noticed anything at all.
Jace doesn't think he’s ever been this hungry. He has dined in castles all his life—roasted swan, lemon cakes, arbor wines. He has consumed the finest meals Westeros has to offer and found them lacking, but he almost feels dizzy with need and pleasure at the scent of the stew you made.
“It—” Jace’s voice is hoarse from sleep. Embarrassed, he clears his throat again to try to even it out. “It smells good.”
You look at him over your shoulder with a small smile and murmur demurely, “I’m sure nothing compared to what you’re used to, my prince.”
“I do not know that,” he says lightly as he forces himself to his feet, grimacing as pain immediately shoots through his body.
Everything aches—his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his arms, his head. In truth, all he wants to do is curl up and sleep more; he cannot bear to keep going. Not now. Not after Vermax, after Luke, after making such a terrible mistake that he might have cost his mother her throne. His stomach flips at the thought, and he fights a shuddered breath.
He needs to keep going—there is no other choice. He needs to get back to Dragonstone as soon as possible.
You pause in the middle of setting the bowls on the table at his words to give him a questioning look. “My prince?”
“I have not tasted it yet,” he tells you, forcing levity into his tone, because you have saved his life, tended to his wounds, and now stand over a pot of stew you cooked for him, worrying that it is not good enough to satisfy a prince. The least he can do is ease your mind. "It would seem unfair to compare a meal I have not eaten yet.”
You blink at him once, and then you smile slightly—it’s a genuine one, not like the small one you forced in his direction just before—and Jace tries his best to return it as he crosses the small room. He shuffles the last few steps toward the table with considerably less grace than he would have liked.
“Perhaps” you reply softly, waiting for him to take a seat at the table before you do as well.
You do not immediately lift your spoon, and Jace hesitates—for a brief moment, an old childhood lesson surfaces. Do not eat until someone else has tasted it. Feasts at King’s Landing and supper at Dragonstone had been meticulous about such things—cups were poured and tasted before his mother, and plates were sampled before any of them took a bite of their food. The paranoia claws at him and disappears as quickly as it comes.
You had dragged him half-dead from the sea, spent days stitching his wounds and breaking his fever, and gave up your bed so he could sleep comfortably. If you wished him dead, you need only have left him on the shore.
“I never thanked you for what you’ve done for me,” he says at last, fingers grazing the wooden spoon dipped into the broth. “When I return to Dragonstone, I shall speak with my mother. She will see you properly rewarded.”
“There is no need,” you murmur, finally taking a sip of the stew when Jace lifts the spoon to his lips.
The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue, but he scarcely notices. It is a simple meal—carrots and celery, chunks of what he thinks is rabbit. It is the plainest thing he has eaten in years, and yet somehow, the best meal he can remember.
His stomach twists painfully as warmth settles into it, and before he can stop himself, he takes another spoonful, then another, the hunger of the past week overwhelming whatever restraint court etiquette had once led him. It is only when half the bowl is gone that he realizes how quickly he is eating.
Embarrassed, he forces himself to slow, lowering the spoon.
“My apologies,” he says, clearing his throat. “I fear I may have forgotten my manners.”
“You haven’t had a meal in over a week, my prince. You’re allowed to be hungry,” you say with a faint smile.
Jace lets out a half-hearted huff of amusement through his nose, though his smile fades as quickly as it came, returning to conversation to try to force himself to slow down and show a modicum of etiquette before he embarrasses himself further.
“There is every need for reward,” he disagrees, leaning forward slightly to look at you. For the first time since he woke in your cottage, he actually observes you—you cannot be much older than he is, beautiful certainly, but there’s a weariness in your expression that Jace cannot help but feel as though is his fault. “You saved the life of the heir to the Iron Throne. You surrendered your bed, tended wounds that would have killed most men, and risked the wrath of the Greens simply by allowing me beneath your roof. I cannot allow that debt to go unanswered.”
You stare at him for a moment, a conflicted expression on your face, and Jace shakes his head slightly as he presses.
“I do not possess enough coin to repay such a debt myself—” nor, he suspects, does anyone “—but my mother will. You needn't live here any longer if you do not wish to. We could see your cottage rebuilt if the fighting has damaged it, or grant you land elsewhere, if that is what you'd prefer. Whatever you ask, so long as it is within my power, I will see it done.”
You are quiet for a long while as Jace finishes off the stew, but he expects hesitation as you mull over what to ask for: gold, land, a better ship, perhaps. Your gaze drifts off to the side, and Jace’s follows it, faltering when he realizes that you’re looking in the direction of what remains of Sharp Point.
That’s right, he remembers—you mentioned your cottage was less than a league away.
From where he sits, he can just see the destruction through the small window. The town is little more than scorched foundations and splintered timbers now, dragonfire having reduced generations of work to ash in the span of a single afternoon. He cannot look at it for long, stomach twisting so unpleasantly that he fears the stew you just cooked him might come right up.
You stay silent for so long that Jace wonders if you have not heard him, and his lips part to repeat himself futilely.
“We used to think they were beautiful, you know?” you say, voice barely over a breath. “We would watch your family fly from King’s Landing and Dragonstone. The children would cheer and call out the names of whatever dragon and royal was passing overhead, even though they knew you could not hear them.” A wistful smile tugs briefly at your lips, and Jace suddenly feels a rock in his stomach, a heaviness that he cannot seem to push away. “There is a wild dragon in these parts—we call him Grey Ghost. He hunts fish along the eastern shore. I see him frequently when I take my father’s boat out. We lived alongside him for years—sometimes he swoops down close when we have a big catch, but he never bothers us. My father always said he was curious—shy, but curious.”
You exhale suddenly as you rise to your feet; Jace wonders if he should ignore the unshed tears in your eyes the same way you politely did for him.
“Then the Prince Aemond and Vhagar came,” you say at last. “The only thing I want, my prince, is for this war to end, but I know you cannot give me that. If you don't mind, I should see to my father's boat before the tide turns. There is more stew in the pot if you would have it. Then you ought to rest. You'll not heal by arguing with your own body.”
Jace opens his mouth.
He does not know what he intends to say, caught between guilt and indignation, because everybody wants the fighting to end—he does, his mother does. Maybe not Daemon, but why do you say it as though he stands opposed to peace? He did not choose this, nor did his mother. It is not his fault that the Greens usurped his mother's throne.
He desperately tries to formulate an answer, but how is he supposed to respond to that? What were they meant to do? Yield to the usurpers? Stand aside while his mother’s birthright was stolen? Let Luke die for nothing? Should he say that he is sorry for your loss? That his mother would never have done this? That Vermax would never have burned a fishing village? That this was all the Greens? That they fight to avenge what happened here?
That dragons are not cruel creatures, he feels the need to tell you when he sees the disdain on your face—it is the people who ride them. It is the Greens. It is Aegon and Aemond, Alicent Hightower and her father.
His lips are parted as though to respond, but he only finds himself staring at you helplessly.
You incline your head politely before slipping out the door, the cool air rushing briefly into the cottage before it shuts behind you once more. Jace remains where he is, staring into the last of his stew until the steam no longer rises from it, the reality of his situation settling over him—Vermax is dead, Luke is dead, and his mother believes them both lost. He does not know whether his brothers and cousins are safe, if his mother still fights for her crown. He is useless, wounded in a fisherman's cottage, alive only because a woman from a town his family failed to protect chose mercy over sense.
He does not think he has ever felt less like the heir to a kingdom.
Jacaerys Velaryon x wife!reader - House of the Dragon
Summary: It starts as something almost laughable: a dragon who prefers his rider’s wife to his rider. But when a dragon decides something is his to guard, the world learns to step carefully around what he has chosen.
Warnings: 16+ morning after, brief nudity, possessive/protective Jace, pregnancy, control/protection, scary dragon and his rider who are both secretly softies, innuendo, non-graphic childbirth, huge time jumps
A/N: This got a lil out of hand, I admit. It was meant to be a short blurb, and yet here we are. Ik people wanted smut, so I added some morning after here, and I plan to write another smut-heavy fic next so dw.
MASTERLIST - REQUESTS (open) - WC: 4.7k
The storm had burned itself out sometime before dawn.
Now all that remained was the steady drip of rain from Dragonstone's black stone walls and the distant crash of waves below the cliffs. Pale morning light slipped through the narrow windows in soft ribbons, washing the chamber in silver.
You wake slowly.
Not necessarily because you're rested, but because you're warm. Far warmer than you ought to be beneath a blanket that had long since been kicked to the foot of the bed.
Jace is wrapped around you as though sometime during the night he'd decided that simply sleeping beside you wasn't close enough. One arm is draped securely across your waist, his face buried against the back of your shoulder, his breathing slow and even. His dark curls are a complete mess, and one bare leg has somehow become tangled with yours beneath the sheets.
You smile to yourself.
"You'll complain about your shoulder later," you murmur.
A sleepy sound, somewhere between a hum and a groan, vibrates against your skin.
"I'll survive." His voice is thick with sleep and his grip tightens just enough to pull you impossibly closer. There's something almost boyish about the way he says it, as though it's a victory in itself.
You turn carefully within the circle of his arms until you're facing him. The movement earns another sleepy complaint, though he makes no effort to let go.
Up close, you can still see the faint flush lingering across his cheeks from the warmth of the room. A thin scratch is visible beneath his collarbone, your own fault no doubt.
You remeber is so clearly, how the rain had battered against the windows, how the candles had guttered low, how his forehead was resting against yours while the storm rolled over Dragonstone. But inside your bed chamber, you'd barely noticed.
"You look terribly pleased with yourself," you say.
One eye opens. "Well, I married you, didn't I?"
"Your point being?"
"It happens to be something I am very pleased about." He studies you for a long moment. "I was thinking..." He continues, thumb brushing lazily over your bare waist. "That I should arrange for more storms."
"Oh?"
"They appear to encourage you to stay in bed."
Outside, somewhere beyond the window, comes the deep, familiar rumble of a dragon.
Jace sighs dramatically without lifting his head. "He's awake."
He presses a kiss to your forehead before finally, reluctantly, releasing you. "If Vermax has flown all the way here simply to interrupt my morning," he declares, "I shall have to remind him who hatched him."
You grin as you reach for the discarded shift lying somewhere beside the bed.
By the time you're both dressed the castle has begun to wake around you.
You trail a step behind Jace, fingers loosely hooked around his sleeve more out of habit than necessity. To be honest, it is a habit you've only recently allowed yourself.
When you first arrived as his wife, you had been painfully conscious of every eye that followed you through the castle.
The princess, the prince's bride. Too young, some had whispered when they thought you were out of earshot. Too sheltered or too soft for Dragonstone.
You had smiled through every greeting, learned every name you could remember, and prayed no one noticed how often you got lost in the twisting corridors of black stone.
Jace had noticed.
Three days after your wedding, he'd quietly taken your hand before supper and walked every hallway, pointing out hidden staircases, quicker routes, which doors stuck in damp weather and which windows gave the best view of Blackwater Bay.
"I cannot believe you've spent an entire afternoon making sure I know my way around the castle." You'd said that evening in your chambers.
"Why can't you believe it?"
"You drew me a map."
"It was an excellent map."
"It had little dragons."
"So you wouldn't get bored."
You laugh. "You named one after Lord Celtigar."
"That one looked particularly grumpy." He grins, a quick flash of satisfaction that softens his usually princely composure, and reaches for your hand.
In your mind, the heir to the Iron Throne ought to be careful, composed, forever aware of watching eyes. But Jace rarely seems to remember, or perhaps he simply doesn't care.
A pair of servants step into the corridor ahead.
The moment they see the two of you, they bow hurriedly. "My prince. Princess."
You smile in greeting, Jace nods once, polite but distracted.
Only after they've passed do you realize he never let go of your hand.
Not even for a moment.
"You know," you tease quietly, "there are people who might think you're terribly devoted."
"They'd be right." He looks at you then with a familiar softness, so unguarded it almost steals your breath.
His thumb brushes absentmindedly across your knuckles. "And I'm not inclined to stop simply because people are looking."
Before you can answer, a deep, resonant rumble rolls across the courtyard outside.
Jace exhales through his nose.
"There he is."
You cross toward one of the narrow windows overlooking the inner yard. Far below, Vermax has landed.
The young dragon stands with his wings half-folded, emerald scales still glistening from the night's rain. A pair of dragonkeepers are speaking to him from what they clearly believe is a safe distance.
Vermax is paying them absolutely no attention. Instead, his great head is tilted upward.
Toward this very window.
You laugh. "I think he's looking for you Jace."
Jace joins you at the window. "No."
He follows the dragon's gaze for a moment before the corners of his mouth twitch. "I think," he says with theatrical resignation, "he's looking for you."
As though to prove his point, Vermax lets out another low, expectant chirr, quieter than his earlier call.
You blink. "Surely not."
Down in the courtyard, Vermax chirrs again.
It becomes impossible to deny by the end of the week. Vermax has decided you belong to him.
"No," Jace says flatly one afternoon, watching the dragon nudge your shoulder with surprising delicacy. "Absolutely not."
You laugh, scratching beneath the smooth ridge of emerald scales where you've discovered he likes it best. "What has he done now?"
"He is stealing my wife."
As if personally offended by the accusation, Vermax lowers his head another inch until the broad curve of his snout is pressed insistently against your side.
Jace stares. "You see?"
"He wants attention."
"I gave him an entire sheep this morning."
You can't help the laugh that escapes you, and it echoes across the training yard, bright enough that even a pair of dragonkeepers glance over with amused smiles.
You and Jace turn to go back inside, but only make it perhaps ten paces before heavy footsteps thud softly behind you.
The dragon has stood and started following.
"Vermax."
He stops, tilting his head.
"You can't come into the castle."
It doesn't stop there.
If you choose to read beneath the old weirwood overlooking the sea, Vermax appears within the hour.
If you wander the beach collecting shells after supper, a shadow passes lazily overhead before circling back toward shore. When you look up, the dragon is gliding against the afternoon sky.
The dragon dips lower, just enough that the rush of displaced air sends your skirts fluttering.
You laugh and wave. High above, Vermax answers with a delighted trill.
One morning you step into the gardens alone, intending only to cut fresh lavender for your chambers. You have barely even filled half the basket when a familiar shadow rolls across the flowers.
Then comes the gentle, unmistakable whuff of warm dragon breath.
You don't even look up.
"Good morning, Vermax." The dragon answers with a contented rumble.
He settles himself just beyond the garden wall, folding his forelegs neatly beneath him.
And there he remains.
When Jace finds you nearly an hour later, basket overflowing with lavender, he stops dead.
"You've got to be joking."
"What?"
He points.
Vermax, his great head rests on crossed forelegs, one eye lazily cracked open just enough to keep you in sight.
You walk over, unable to resist stroking the smooth scales along Vermax's jaw.
Jace follows, and you shake your head, laughing, and slip your free hand into his. Immediately, Vermax opens both eyes.
He watches the joined hands for a long, silent moment. Then, with another deep, satisfied rumble, he closes them again.
A couple weeks later, Dragonstone is hosting a small gathering of sworn lords from the Crownlands. Nothing particularly grand, just an awful lot of petitions, trade disputes, and endless discussions that leave Jace rubbing his temples by supper.
You escape the hall as politely as you can.
"I shall only be a moment," you promise him.
His hand lingers around yours before he lets go. "I know."
"You'll survive without me, Jace, I promise."
The sea air is cooler outside. Rain still clings to the black stone, leaving everything smelling of salt and earth. You breathe deeply, grateful for the quiet after hours of smiling at strangers.
You don't notice the shadow until it passes overhead.
A heartbeat later, Vermax lands beyond the outer wall with enough force to make loose gravel dance across the ground.
"You again?" you laugh.
His answer is a soft chirr as he lowers his head, inviting the familiar scratch beneath his jaw.
You indulge him. "You know," you murmur, "your rider insists you're abandoning him."
You continue scratching him anyway.
The interruption comes quietly. "My princess."
You turn. One of the visiting lords, a pleasant enough man whose name escapes you, has stepped into the courtyard. He offers a courteous bow.
"I hoped I might thank you for your kindness at supper."
"You are very kind, my lord."
He smiles. "I confess Dragonstone is rather less… welcoming than I imagined."
You glance at the dragon. "I imagine it has nothing to do with the fire-breathing beats circling at all times."
The lord laughs and takes a step closer.
Vermax's head lifts. The movement is slow enough that, for a moment, no one notices. Until the rumbling begins. It vibrates through the stone beneath your feet and the lord stops mid-sentence.
His smile falters.
Vermax does not bare his teeth, he does not spread his wings, he simply fixes the man with one unblinking emerald eye.
The rumble deepens.
"My lady," the lord corrects takes an instinctive step backward.
The sound stops.
You blink.
"…That was odd."
The lord laughs a little too loudly. "I believe… I shall return inside."
You think little of it.
Until it happens again, and again, and again. Not only with strangers, but with servants and guards. Even dragonkeepers he has known since hatching.
If someone approaches you too quickly, Vermax appears.
If voices grow heated nearby, he materialises as though summoned by instinct alone. He has become a living wall of green scales between you and the rest of the world.
A fortnight passes.
The castle settles into its familiar rhythm, though Vermax never quite returns to his old habits.
If anything, he grows bolder.
By now, even the servants have stopped remarking upon it.
"Your shadow awaits you, Princess," one maid says one morning with a knowing smile.
You peer from the window. Sure enough, a pair of emerald eyes are already fixed expectantly on the tower.
You laugh. "I do believe I've been adopted."
That afternoon, the weather is fair.
Jace has escaped the council chambers looking thoroughly exhausted, finding you exactly where he expected, beneath the old windswept tree overlooking the cliffs, a book forgotten in your lap while Vermax dozes nearby.
Or appears to.
His eyes are closed.
One wing lies stretched lazily across the grass, shimmering green beneath the sun.
Jace watches while walking towards you, finally bending to kiss the top of your head. Then, without thinking, he reaches a hand toward you.
Vermax's eyes snap open.
The dragon rises in one smooth motion, slipping between you and Jace with astonishing precision. His great neck curves across the narrow space, not striking, not threatening, but blocking.
Jace freezes.
For one suspended heartbeat, neither moves.
The dragon's head turns slightly, one brilliant green eye fixed on his rider, Jace stares back.
"...Vermax."
The dragon lets out a low sound, as though asking something only he understands. Then, just as suddenly, he steps aside.
You blink. "What on earth was that?"
Jace doesn't answer, he is still looking at Vermax.
"I've never..." he murmurs.
"What?"
"He has never stood between us."
By evening, Jace has sought out the dragonkeepers; he wants an explanation.
The oldest among them is already waiting when Jace reaches the caverns.
He bows deeply.
"My prince."
"You've noticed." It is not a question.
The old man is silent for a long moment. "...Yes."
"Then tell me."
Another pause.
"There are tales." The dragonkeeper folds weathered hands before him. "And the tales are all I have."
Jace says nothing, but his jaw tightens.
The old man continues carefully. "Dragons know certain things before men do, sometimes."
"What things?"
"Danger." Jace nods once. "Weather." Another nod. "And..." The man hesitates. "Life."
Jace blinks. "...What do you mean?"
"There are old records. Rare ones. A dragon becoming unusually protective of a rider's wife. Of a queen. Of a princess."
"Protective?"
"They guard." The dragonkeeper's gaze drifts toward the mouth of the cavern, where Vermax sleeps beyond the fading light.
Jace remembers every strange moment of the past weeks and his heartbeat quickens.
"No."
"It is only a possibility."
"No."
"Has the princess been unwell?"
"...No."
"Has she been unusually tired?"
Jace opens his mouth. Closes it again.
"And..." the dragonkeeper says gently, "when did the dragon's behavior begin?"
Jace's mind races backwards until he finally remembers the storm. How Vermax had refused to leave the castle, had hovered outside their chambers, nudging him toward the tower when he'd intended to return to his studies.
He'd laughed. "Apparently, he has plans for us."
Three months, almost exactly.
The dragonkeeper watches the realisation settle over his prince's face. Quietly, he says, "I believe... it may be time to send for the maester."
Jace finds you in your solar not five minutes later. You look up from the embroidery in your lap, smiling the moment he steps through the door, but the smile falters almost immediately.
"Jace?"
His hair is windblown from crossing the castle at nearly a run, his expression unreadable in a way you've never quite seen before. He closes the door behind him without a word and simply looks at you, searching your face as though expecting to find something different.
"What is it?"
He crosses the room in three long strides and kneels before your chair, taking both your hands in his. "Have you felt unwell?"
You blink. "...No."
"Not at all?"
"A little tired, perhaps, but you've been working me through every feast and council dinner on Dragonstone." You smile faintly. "I assumed being a princess was simply quite exhausting."
His thumb traces absent circles across your knuckles. "And nothing else?"
"I've slept later than usual."
"You've always liked sleeping late."
You grin, leaning forward to whisper, "I do when my husband keeps me awake half the night."
The corner of his mouth twitches despite himself, though the smile never quite reaches his eyes. "When was your last moon's blood?"
You stare at him. "What?"
He doesn't repeat himself, and slowly, your own amusement fades. You set the embroidery aside. "I..." You pause, thinking. "I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I've never had reason to count the days so carefully, Jace."
Silence settles between you. You begin counting backwards in your head, tracing feasts, journeys, the passing weeks. Your brows knit together. "A couple of weeks, maybe," you murmur. "I'm not sure."
His expression answers before he speaks. "The dragonkeepers believe Vermax sensed it."
You let out a disbelieving laugh. "Jace."
"They've seen it before."
"Surely they haven't."
"They swear they have."
You shake your head, trying to make sense of it. "So... because Vermax has decided to follow me everywhere..."
"And because he stood between us."
"...he thinks I'm carrying a child?"
"Yes."
You both fall quiet.
"Oh."
It is the only word you can manage, and Jace squeezes your hands.
"I've sent for the maester."
"You've... already?"
"He'll be here shortly."
The maester, when he finally arrives, is kind and discreet, far too accustomed to royal nerves to comment on the tension hanging in the room. He asks a handful of careful questions, his expression growing steadily more thoughtful with each answer.
When he rises from his examination, he folds his hands inside his sleeves and smiles.
"My prince."
Jace has been standing by the window the entire time.
"So?"
The old man inclines his head. "My congratulations."
The room falls completely still. You look at Jace. He looks at you. Neither of you speaks.
The maester continues, almost gently. "If my calculations are correct, Her Grace is nearing the end of her third month."
He leaves you with instructions about rest, diet, and avoiding undue strain, but you hear almost none of it, too focused on the way the room seems to have shrunk around you.
The door clicks shut.
Then Jace crosses the room so quickly that you barely have time to stand before his arms are around you. He buries his face against your hair, holding you so tightly it almost hurts.
You laugh through the tears threatening your eyes.
"I think..." Your voice catches. "I think we're going to have a baby."
He nods once against your shoulder, voice barely a whisper. "I know."
Jace's spiral into overprotectiveness begins with the reasonable things.
"No more riding."
You open your mouth to argue, but are stopped before any sound escapes by a single raised eyebrow.
The maester, entirely unhelpfully, agrees with him.
Then come the stairs.
"If no one is with you."
"Jace."
"They're uneven."
"They have been uneven for a hundred years."
He insists on taking your arm every time you descend them after that.
By the time your gowns no longer sit quite as they used to, he has become impossible.
Servants carry anything heavier than a book. Meals appear in your chambers if the Great Hall is too crowded. Councils are moved rather than asking you to cross the castle, and if you so much as mention feeling tired, Jace is already leading you back toward your rooms before you've finished the sentence.
"You know women have been having children since the beginning of time?"
"I am aware, yes."
"They don't all require an escort to the library."
"I don't care, because you will have one.
Once, you disappear for nearly an hour.
Jace finds you asleep in the late afternoon sun, curled against the warm curve of Vermax's foreleg with a book lying open across your lap.
The dragon is awake. His head rests protectively around you, just close enough to shelter you from the wind without touching.
At Jace's approach, one emerald eye opens. For a long moment, dragon and rider simply look at one another. Then Vermax lowers his head again.
You stir at the sound of footsteps, blinking sleepily up at your husband.
"There you are."
"I've been looking everywhere."
"I was comfortable."
"I can see that."
By the eighth month, you start to begrudingly appreciate Jace's over-the-top efforts.
"I cannot reach my boots."
Jace looks up from the letter he'd been pretending to read. "You reached them yesterday."
"I was smaller yesterday."
He watches you glare down at the impossible curve of your stomach as though sheer determination might convince it to move. After another unsuccessful attempt, you huff dramatically and fold your arms.
"This child is already causing problems."
"Our child," Jace corrects.
"Our child," you sigh, "has stolen my feet."
A smile threatens at the corners of his mouth. With the patience of a man who has accepted this as his fate, he sets the letter aside and kneels in front of you.
"Oh, don't you dare."
"You said you couldn't reach."
"I did not ask you to-"
"You were about to."
He lifts one foot gently onto his knee and makes quick work of the laces.
"Jace, you don't have to do everything you know."
"I know."
"So why do you?"
He finishes tying the second boot before looking up at you. "Because I like taking care of my wife."
A number of weeks later the castle wakes before dawn to the sound of a dragon.
Not roaring; pacing.
The heavy scrape of claws against stone echoes through the courtyard, followed by a low, restless rumble that seems to vibrate through the walls of Dragonstone itself.
You stir beneath the blankets, still half asleep. "...He's at it again."
Beside you, Jace groans into his pillow. "If he has frightened another stableboy, I swear on all that is holy-"
Another rumble.
Closer this time. Longer, almost a whine in nature.
Jace sits up. "...That's odd."
For the past several months Vermax has scarcely left the courtyard beneath your chambers, but he has always been quiet. Content simply to stand and watch.
The windows rattle faintly as his tail sweeps across the stone.
Jace is already pulling on a tunic. "I'll see what's wrong."
You nod, pushing yourself upright with considerably more effort than dignity. He smiles over his shoulder as he ducks out of the room, but it doesn't quite reach his eyes.
The courtyard is in chaos.
Dragonkeepers stand well back from Vermax, speaking to him in soothing High Valyrian that goes utterly ignored. The dragon paces in tight circles, wings half-spread, head swinging constantly toward the tower above.
One keeper catches sight of Jace.
"My prince."
"What happened?"
"We don't know."
Vermax notices his rider. Instead of calming, the dragon lets out another deep, agitated rumble and immediately turns toward the tower again, toward your chambers. Then, he stamps a forefoot. Hard enough that dust shakes from the walls.
Up in the tower, you're sitting and waiting for Jace when pain tightens unexpectedly across your abdomen.
You stop halfway across the chamber, one hand finding the edge of the table. "...Hm."
The feeling passes as quickly as it came.
Outside, Vermax lets out the loudest cry you've ever heard him make. It rolls across the cliffs and back again.
You freeze before calling out. "...Jace?"
He is already taking the stairs two at a time. He bursts through the chamber doors moments later, slightly out of breath.
Before he can speak, another wave rolls through you. Your hand flies instinctively to your stomach.
Jace's face drains of colour. "What is it?"
"I..." You breathe carefully. "I think..."
Another pause. Then, despite yourself, you laugh. "I think Vermax has solved another mystery."
For one heartbeat Jace simply stares.
Then his eyes widen.
"No."
"I think so."
As if the universe itself objects to his denial, another wave steals your breath. You grip the bedpost but Jace is at your side before you can blink, one arm already around your waist.
"The maester."
His voice comes out far calmer than his expression.
"Someone fetch the maester!"
Outside, Vermax finally stops pacing.
He lowers himself heavily onto the black stone directly beneath your windows, refusing every attempt by the dragonkeepers to coax him away.
His head remains lifted toward the tower.
After hours of pain and effort the world slowly comes back into focus in pieces.
Sound first; soft voices, the distant rush of the sea, the occasional crackle of the hearth. Then warmth pressed against your side. You blink against the haze of exhaustion and find yourself surrounded by dim candlelight and movement that feels almost too gentle for how loud everything had just been.
Jace is here.
He’s sitting half on the edge of the bed, hair dishevelled, sleeves rolled up wrong, a smear of something dark on his cuff that you vaguely decide not to think about too hard. His eyes are fixed on you with a kind of stunned intensity, as if he’s afraid that if he looks away for even a second, this will all vanish.
“You’re shaking,” you murmur, though your own voice barely holds together.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
A beat of silence passes between you before he exhales and finally lets himself lean forward, pressing a careful kiss against your forehead.
“And him?” he asks, like he’s been holding the question in his teeth for hours.
You don’t even need to answer. The little bundle in your arms shifts slightly, a tiny sound breaking through the quiet and Jace goes utterly still. His gaze drops to the child as though he’s afraid it might disappear if he stares too hard.
“He's beautiful,” he says finally.
You adjust the blanket slightly, and the baby nestles closer, face scrunching briefly before settling again. Jace makes a sound that is halfway between a laugh and something dangerously close to breaking.
“I don’t-” he starts, then stops, swallowing. “I didn’t think it would feel like this.”
“You thought it would feel like what?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His hand hovers near the bundle, stops short, then retreats again like he’s not sure he’s allowed.
“Louder,” he admits.
You huff a weak laugh. “I'm not sure it'll stay this quiet, so we should probably try to enjoy it while it lasts.”
He finally looks at you again, and there’s something undone in his expression that you’ve never seen before. “I need to see him,” he says.
You tilt your head slightly. “You’ve been staring at him for an hour.”
“Alright, I need to hold him.”
You carefully shift the baby into his arms. It’s awkward at first, Jace holding himself too rigid, like he’s afraid of doing it wrong, like one wrong breath might undo everything, but then the child settles against him and something in his shoulders breaks open.
He exhales, slow and unsteady. There’s a long silence where he doesn’t say anything at all.
Jace looks down again, thumb brushing so lightly over the baby’s cheek it’s almost not there. “He looks…” He pauses, helpless. “He looks like he knows things already.”
“That’s probably just you projecting.”
Outside the window, a deep sound rolls through the cliffs. Jace’s head lifts instantly.
“Oh.”
Jace carefully adjusts his grip on the baby, like he’s handling something far more fragile than steel and fire could ever be.
“I should-” he starts.
You raise an eyebrow. “You should what?”
He’s already standing. “I should show him.”
You blink at him. “Jace.”
But he’s not really listening anymore. Not in the way he used to, at least. This is something else, instinctive and almost urgent.
“Jace, it’s freezing outside.”
“I’ll be quick.”
So you watch him wrap a cloak around himself and the baby like it’s the most natural thing in the world, then walk out of the room.
By the time he reaches the courtyard, Vermax is already there.
The dragon is enormous against the grey morning sky, wings folded, tail curled tightly around the stone like he’s been rooted there for hours. When he sees Jace, he doesn’t move at first.
Then Jace steps into the open.
Vermax’s head lowers immediately.
Jace stops a few paces away, breathing uneven, then lifts the bundle higher against his chest.
“This is my son.”
Vermax steps forward, so carefully. The ground still trembles slightly beneath the weight of him, but he is impossibly gentle as he lowers his head until he’s level with Jace’s arms. One massive eye focuses on the tiny face within the blanket.
For a long moment, he does nothing.
Then he exhales. Warm air, slow and careful, brushes over the child like a blessing.
The baby stirs, and Vermax freezes instantly.
Jace laughs under his breath, disbelieving and wrecked all at once. “It’s alright,” he murmurs. “He’s yours too, apparently.”
The dragon makes a soft, almost questioning sound, then lowers himself further until his forehead rests against the stone directly in front of them, as if offering something wordless and absolute.
Jace finally looks up at him properly, smiling.
“Say hello,” he whispers.
Vermax answers with a quiet, reverent rumble that rolls out across Dragonstone.
this was too cute, idk where the idea came from but i needed some vermax jace fluff
