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by the gods is holy waters giving me life. you are PHENOMENAL. idk if you take requests, but if you do i just really want more Jealous Baelor (and maybe Lady Stark in danger? 👀😏) anyway THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING YOUR TALENTS YOU ARE FABULOUS

⊹ ࣪ ˖ summary: In which a prince made of restraint watches a laughing storm spin his wolf and discovers jealousy burns hotter than dragonfire.

⊹ ࣪ ˖ pairing: baelor "breakspear" targaryen x f!stark!reader, lyonel baratheon x f!stark!reader

⊹ ࣪ ˖ wc: 4k+

⊹ ࣪ ˖ notes/content: stark!reader, baelor's pov, jealous!protective!baelor, lyonel being a little shit, maekar is having the time of his life!!!, ngl the parallels between rhaegar/lyanna/robert go dumb on this one!

This is truly brainrot of all time because how did I just lock in for 4k when I have another series I need to post today? Oopps.

read on ao3. ⊹ series masterlist.

“Careful,” Maekar speaks from beside him, voice low and amused. “You’ll shatter that cup if you keep throttling it like that.”

The words cut through the noise and heat.

Baelor looks down.

His fingers are locked so tight around the stem of his goblet that the delicate silver has bowed under the pressure. Dark red wine trembles against the lip, catching torchlight like blood in a cracked chalice. His knuckles stand out pale against his sun-browned skin; the tendons along the back of his hand are drawn like bowstrings. He uncurls his grip one finger at a time. It feels like prying open someone else’s fist.

The hall is loud with storm weather.

Laughter rolls under the rafters, great peals of it that bounce off carved beams and painted dragons, scattering the softer courtly titters like starlings from a tree. Torches along the walls burn too bright, flames licking at iron brackets, heat slicking the air. Smoke from the hearths curls upward, clinging stubbornly beneath the painted ceiling before escaping through narrow vents.

The long tables below are a chaos of colour and motion. Platters of boar glisten with fat; geese lie breast-up and shining beneath sprigs of rosemary. Someone has overturned a dish of oysters near the lower tables, and the smell of salt and brine threads through roast meat and hot tallow, fighting with the sour-sweet tang of spilt wine. Fresh rushes, strewn thick earlier, are already bruised underfoot, releasing the crushed green smell of herbs trampled into damp straw.

Music leans over it all: a harp’s bright pluck, a fiddle’s keening line, a pipe’s reedy counterpoint. The tune threads through the noise, sometimes almost lost under the human sound, sometimes rising clear as a whistle over a gale.

Lyonel Baratheon’s laugh sits on top of everything.

He has always been appropriately named. Even when he is not drunk, he sounds it. Voice booming, rich, rolling through a room like thunder finding the weak stones. Tonight, he is less sodden than his reputation promises, but no less a tempest. His laughter breaks, then reshapes the noise, and people tilt toward it, toward him, the way trees lean in a prevailing wind.

Baelor feels him before he sees him on the floor. It’s in the way conversations shift, some voices brightening, others sharpening with wariness. In the way eyes turn. The air itself seems to cant a degree in the Baratheon’s direction.

And then he sees why.

The stag has set his sights on his wolf.

You are in grey again, of course—Stark will out, even in southern tailoring. The gown is cut for this heat: fabric finer than you’d tolerate at home, sleeves a touch shorter, the lines simpler than the southern ladies’ flounces but adapted enough not to cause comment. The colour, though, is the North all over: soft wolf-grey, drinking the candlelight instead of reflecting it, broken only by the fine silver thread that edges your collar and cuffs like frost traced along stone.

Your hair is pulled back in a practical knot that looks designed to survive both a blizzard and a brawl, pinned close and sure at the back of your head. The heat of the hall has still managed to coax a few strands loose at your temples; they curl stubbornly against your skin, catching the glow from the nearest candelabra. A faint sheen of sweat glosses the hollow at the base of your throat, just visible above the modest line of your gown.

You stand at the edge of the dance space, just beyond the sweep of the couples, one hand clasped around your own forearm. Your weight is balanced, ready to move, but your face has gone into that particular calm Baelor has learned to recognise. The court is watching you too openly, and you hate it, so you go still. You let their stares hit the winter-plain set of your features and slide off.

A wolf in snowlight, pretending to be a statue.

The music swells; a set ends. Couples peel apart with a rustle of silk and brocade, skirts flaring and settling, boots scuffing rushes. A lady in Reach green trips on a hem and stumbles into her partner, laughing too loudly, perfume sharp and floral even from a distance. Two half-drunk Riverland knights argue under their breath about whether the last step was meant to turn or cross, gesturing with their cups and sloshing wine onto the floor.

The space in the centre opens. Lyonel strides into it as if the floor were made for him.

He wears stormland colours—black and gold and the dark, damp green of woods beaten by rain. His doublet is well-cut but not fussy, the fabric pulling cleanly over a lean, hard frame built for sudden movement rather than sheer bulk. He is not huge like some tales make him; he is something worse for a man who might be your enemy one day—lithe, quick, all coiled energy and too sharp eyes.

His antlered sigil brooch, wrought in bright metal and dark enamel, catches firelight every time he moves, antlers flashing like a warning.

His cloak flares behind him like a living banner as he cuts through dancers and servants alike. He is not rude; he does not shove or bark. He simply walks as if everyone else will get out of his way, and the thing is, they do. It’s entitlement, yes, but it’s also the sure knowledge of someone who can charm or break you and hasn’t yet decided which he prefers tonight. Up close, Baelor knows, Lyonel is handsome in a way that makes parents wary and lovers stupid. Rugged rather than polished—his jaw shadowed by a dark stubble that’s edging into a beard, his straight nose bearing the faint crook of an old break, his mouth big and expressive. His eyes are where the danger lives: dark, churning, with something a little wild at the edges, like a cliff path that has no railing but dares you to run it anyway.

Baelor’s fingers still on the stem of his cup.

He watches Lyonel approach you with that deceptively lazy stride, the one that always reads as a man loping his way through the evening until, abruptly, it doesn’t and someone is bleeding on the floor. The Baratheon offers you a bow, surprisingly precise for a man whose laughter can crack a bench, one hand pressed to his own chest.

“Lady Stark,” he calls out cheerfully.

Even over the harp and fiddle and hum of talk, Baelor hears him. Of course he does. Lyonel knows how to lay a voice over chaos, the same way a drummer knows how to find the beat under noise.

“Would you do the storm the honour of letting it chase a wolf for a song or two?”

You answer. Baelor can’t make out the words over the music, but he sees the shape of your mouth, the brief lift at one corner that means you’ve said something drier than is strictly polite. He sees your eyes flick, quick as a dart, to the high table—to the king, to your father, to him.

Barthogan Stark, two seats down from Baelor, doesn’t shift much. The man is a mountain in wolf-grey, broad shoulders swallowing the chair’s carved back. One big hand rests around his cup; the other lies flat on the table, fingers thick and scarred. To most eyes, he has not moved at all.

Baelor, who has been learning to read lords like maps since before his voice broke, sees the tiny nod. The fractional drop of heavy lids. The almost-sigh of a man who knows he must let the young test their own footing on the ice. Daeron’s eyes cut sideways once, quick as a sword-feint. Baelor feels, more than sees, his father take it all in: Storm’s End. Winterfell. The dragon throne above them both. Alliances like stitches in a wound that has only just stopped seeping Blackfyre poison.

Baelor’s grip tightens on his cup until the fine metal bites into his palm.

You place your hand in Lyonel’s.

The dance begins.

You move well. Baelor knows that like he knows the weight of his own sword. He has felt the balance of you, the measured give when his hand settled at your waist, the way you read space and step with a fighter’s instinct for distance.

But there is something different in the way you move with the storm lord.

You are… lighter. Less guarded at the edges. There is a thread of wildness in your step, tonight, as if for the span of this tune you’ve decided to treat the dance less like a duty and more like a dare. Your skirts flare a little higher, your turns hitch closer to the line between correct and reckless.

Lyonel answers that without missing a beat, his teeth flashing in delight.

He leads you down the line with surprising gentleness for a man whose nickname was half-won in taverns. His hand is warm and steady at your back, fingers spread but not clutching, palm following the curve of your spine like he’s mapping it. For all his roaring reputation, his footwork is clean and sharp as any court knight’s. He doesn’t tug or shove. He invites, and you, damn you, accept.

Baelor feels that acceptance twist in his gut.

“Careful,” Maekar grouses again, voice low at his shoulder. “You’ll turn that wine to rubies at this rate.”

Baelor blinks down. The stem creaks faintly under his grip once more. He unclenches his hand with deliberate care and sets the goblet down. The wine inside rocks, then steadies. His fingers hum with the urge to close around something else. A wrist. A collar. The hilt of a sword.

“I was unaware I’d become so transparent,” he says.

Maekar tears off a hunk of bread, drags it through a smear of gravy, and pops it into his mouth with the leisurely air of a man enjoying excellent theatre.

“You’re not,” he replies after chewing. “To anyone else, you look like Baelor the Unshakeable, contemplating some grave and noble matter. Grain levies, perhaps. Fleet repairs. The nature of justice.” He lifts a pale brow. “To me, you look like a man trying to decide whether he wants to break Baratheon’s face or his fingers first.”

On the floor, Lyonel says something that makes you tilt your head up, eyes bright. Whatever it is, it’s audacious; Baelor can see the flash of it in the way Lyonel’s mouth twists, half-dare, half-invitation. You answer without flinching. Your mouth moves quick and sure, shaping words Baelor cannot hear but can almost feel—the clean, cutting weight of your northern humour. Lyonel almost recoils, then laughs loudly, a shorter, sharper sound, hand thumping his own chest as if to say, Well struck, wolf.

Baelor’s blood runs hotter.

Dragon blood, they all call it, like it’s a sort of blessing. Like it’s only about banners and skulls and the right to sit on a throne carved for a conqueror. They never talk about how it burns. He feels it now: wildfire threaded through his veins, pooling in his chest, heat licking along the bone. It coils under his sternum, wanting out. It wants him to stand up in front of half of Westeros, walk the length of the hall, and take you back—not gently, not with the careful courtesies he has shown you, but with his hand around your wrist and his other at your waist, claiming, fitting you back against him and letting the court choke on it.

Baelor keeps his hands exactly where they are.

“You’re steaming,” Maekar notes, lazy as a cat in a sunbeam, eyes sharp as a drawn blade.

Baelor exhales slowly through his nose. The air tastes of hot fat and wine and the faint tang of iron from the sword-belts lining the walls.

“It’s a hot hall,” he answers stiffly.

“The hall was hot before you started glaring holes in it,” Maekar retorts with a snort. “You’re in a mood, brother. It’s very unlike you. I think you’ve frightened three pages and a Lannister already.”

“Only three?” Baelor mutters.

The music lifts, the pattern of the dance tightening into one of those showier figures the court favours. Couples draw closer, steps quickening. Layers of silk and wool swirl, colours blurring into brief storms of green and blue and red. Lyonel’s hand settles more securely at the small of your back as he guides you through the turn. It is an entirely appropriate touch—any dancing master would approve—but his thumb lies a fraction lower than it strictly needs to.

Baelor’s chest constricts.

He knows the arguments. Gods, he has made them in council himself.

Storm’s End held firm for the rightful king when Daemon Blackfyre unfurled his treason. Lyonel’s banners were among the first on the field at Redgrass Ford, his men breaking more than one Blackfyre flank. Baratheon ships guarded the Narrow Sea while the realm bled. A storm-and-snow match would bind two notoriously stubborn regions tighter to the crown. If Daeron asked him for a list of prudent alliances, he would put you and Lyonel in the first third without hesitation.

And yet he watches Lyonel’s fingers flex against the back of your gown as he spins you out, arm lengthening, then draws you in again, and all that careful thought goes to ash.

“You could ask her for the next dance,” Maekar suggests idly around a mouthful of bread. “You did it once, the realm didn’t fall into the sea.”

“No law says I can’t,” Baelor agrees. “There is also no law against stepping into the dragonpit and seeing how many skulls one can balance on one’s head. Wisdom is another matter.”

Maekar scoffs. “Since when have you cared so much for whispers? They’re already calling you half a dozen names because of her.”

Baelor has heard them. Baelor the Wolf-tamer. Baelor Winter’s Hand. The crown prince, who leads the Northern heir out of the crush and dances with her under dragon banners instead of focusing on more politically convenient ladies. Some say it admiringly, some with a curl of the lip, some with the wary tone of men watching the weather turn.

Daeron has not discouraged it. Let them talk, his father had said, eyes on a map littered with carved pieces. Let them think the North favours you. It is useful for them to imagine you have teeth at your back.

Father had not warned him that usefulness and desire could be such close kin under the skin.

On the floor, Lyonel leans in as he guides you through a cross-step. He bends his head close, bringing his mouth to your ear, saying something Baelor cannot hear but feels in his own spine all the same. Baelor’s body reacts before his mind catches up—his jaw tightening, shoulders coiling, the old training that measures distance and threat spinning itself up for a fight that will not, cannot, be allowed.

You blink, then your mouth breaks into something that is not your polite court smile. You laugh. Not the brittle, careful little cracks of sound you use to deflect stupidity. Not the weary huff you give when you’re mocking the south under your breath. A real laugh. Your head tips back for a heartbeat, eyes closing, throat bared in the candlelight. The sound doesn’t reach the high table over the music and the roar of the hall.

Baelor hears it anyway, inside his own skull.

He has made you laugh like that once. Perhaps twice. Both times alone, in smaller spaces, where he could afford to let his own composure loosen without the weight of a hundred eyes. Jealousy slides into him then, cold at the edges, molten at the middle. It is not the quick sting he remembers from boyhood, when Aerys out-argued him in history, or Rhaegel presented some verse the maester praised. This is deeper. It sits under his ribs like a coal that has been there a very long time, flaring now that someone has blown on it.

He takes a breath. And another. And another.

He is not a stripling to sulk because another man has taken one turn on the floor with the woman he—

No.

He does not let the thought finish.

Maekar watches him chew the inside of his cheek and sighs contentedly, like a man settling in to the second act of a very good play.

“You look,” his brother says, “like you swallowed wildfire and it hasn’t decided which way to go yet.”

Baelor lets out a sound that is half laugh, half growl. “I’m fine.”

“You,” Maekar continues like he hasn’t heard him, “are many things. Fine is not one of them. At present you are… let me see.” He tilts his head, pretending to consider. “Smouldering. Still. Badly.”

Baelor reaches for bread and tears it in half without meaning to. The crust cracks; crumbs scatter across his plate like snow over dark earth.

“Perhaps you’d prefer I tore my hair and raved,” he suggests dryly. “Would that make you more comfortable?”

“It would be refreshing,” Maekar tells him blandly. “You never do anything properly scandalous. I’m beginning to worry you’re not really our father’s son. Where is the dragon fire, brother?”

Baelor’s mouth tightens. “Lyonel Baratheon is a good man,” he says quietly. “He’s loyal. Brave despite his brass. Not as drunk as he wants the world to think. He fought where he should have fought. He laughed on the right side.”

“And yet,” Maekar prompts, eyes glinting.

“And yet,” Baelor says, very softly, “his hands are on what is not his.”

Maekar’s brows climb. “Ah,” he says, satisfaction like a knife. “There it is.”

Baelor shuts his eyes for a heartbeat. When he opens them, the hall is the same and not. Torchlight throws wilder shadows; the music feels just a fraction off, too fast, then too slow. The dragon in his blood hisses along his veins, wanting heat, wanting action. He strangles it with the discipline of a lifetime.

On the floor, Lyonel catches your hand and spins you under his arm. Your skirts flare, a wolf-grey storm around your boots. For an instant, the movement bares the strong line of your calves where the fabric parts. More than one man on the edges of the floor looks. Lyonel does too. His gaze flicks down, quick as any man’s, then snaps back to your face, attention anchored there. Some small, unwilling part of Baelor respects him for that.

He still wants to put his fist through the Baratheon’s roguish grin.

The song crests, then slows into its last figure. The fiddles draw out the notes; the pipes soften. Couples draw in for the final turn, bodies aligning closer. Lyonel’s hand slides a little higher on your back as he turns you, bringing you in along the length of his frame for three measured steps.

You step into it, trusting the pattern, the courtesy, the public eyes.

The dragon in Baelor—whatever that really is, old blood, old madness, old pride—thrashes once, hard enough that he has to set both hands flat on the table to steady himself. His fingertips press into the grain of the wood; the ring on his forefinger clicks faintly.

“What do you intend to do?” Maekar asks, unhurried, as if they’re discussing hunting plans. “Anything foolish?”

“No,” Baelor replies promptly.

“Do you wish to?”

“Yes,” Baelor says, before his instincts can bite down on the word.

Maekar bares his teeth in a grin. “Good. It’s when you stop wishing for that I’ll start worrying.”

The song ends. The last chord hangs, shivers, and breaks like a wave on rock. Lyonel bows over your hand, but he does not kiss it. He’s not quite that drunk, not in front of the king, not with Barthogan Stark’s gaze on the back of his neck, old wolf’s jaws ready to close around his throat should he overstep.

But his thumb lingers, for one extra heartbeat, stroking once along your knuckles before he lets go.

Baelor counts that heartbeat.

You step back, skirts whispering over the stone and rushes, and speak the expected courtesies. Lyonel answers with another easy grin and a shallow bow, then spins away, cloak flaring, already letting his eyes skim the hall for the next thing to amuse him.

You turn off the floor. You shift instead toward your father, toward the shadowed edge of the hall, toward the high table.

Your eyes find Baelor’s.

It is nothing. It is everything. Half a heartbeat, no more; if you held longer, it would become a scene.

He doesn’t know what you see.

He hopes you see the prince the realm needs: composed, steady, the man who sits at his father’s right hand and weighs war and peace with the same careful scales. The Hand of the King. Aegon’s blood. The dutiful son who will carry Daeron’s hard-won peace forward.

He fears you see the other thing.

The man with dragon blood snapping at his bones. The man who nearly rose from his seat to reclaim you from a stag’s arms in front of half of Westeros. The man who is remembering, with humiliating clarity, the exact weight of your waist beneath his hand, the warmth of your body when he guided you through a crush, and who would very much like to remind the hall whose palm rested there first.

Your mouth moves, the tiniest shift. Neither a full smile nor displeasure. A small, wry acknowledgement, something like: I see you.

Then you incline your head, just enough to be courteous to the high table as a whole, and the moment snaps. Another lord has already bowed before you, hand outstretched for his own turn in the pattern.

Baelor realises his cup is in his hand again. He has no memory of picking it up.

“Terrible,” Maekar notes conversationally.

Baelor takes a swallow. The wine is rich and thick, and it scorches his throat on the way down as if it were something much rougher.

“My wine?” he asks.

“Your mood,” Maekar says. “It’s dreadful. I’d say it doesn’t suit you, but it’s almost charming. Like watching Father misplace a document.”

Baelor exhales, a sound like flint scraping stone. “I will apologise to the pages and the minstrel tomorrow,” he says.

“You’ll have to,” Maekar agrees. “In the meantime…” He leans back a little, eyeing the hall with a soldier’s detached interest. “Remember, brother—stags gore from the front. Wolves from all angles. Stand too close when either of them lowers their head, and you don’t get to complain when you’re the one carried off on the antlers.”

Baelor follows his gaze.

Lyonel has claimed another partner—the Westerling girl this time, all dimples and pale silk, looking up at him like he’s some dangerous joke she’s not sure she should laugh at. His grin is bright, a shade more feral now that the wine has sunk deeper.

You have retreated to the edge beside your father, profile turned towards the high table. Barthogan says something low; you answer without turning your head, shoulders making that minute, familiar shift Baelor recognises as stubbornness pressing against duty. He wonders if you enjoyed the dance. Truly enjoyed it, the way your laugh suggested, or if you simply endured it with more grace than usual because you know you must.

He wonders if Lyonel noticed the small things Baelor does: the way your fingers tighten briefly before you step into a crowded space, the little notch that appears between your brows when you’re weighing risk, the fraction of a second before you decide to trust anyone’s hand on your back.

He wonders what you would do if he rose now. If he set his cup down, walked down the steps, through the heat and noise and gossip, and held out his hand for the next song. The dragon under his skin surges at the thought. Heat licks at his ribs, wanting out, wanting to brand something invisible and undeniable across the space between you: mine, it wants to say, for as far as the gods allow it.

Baelor sets the cup down.

He smiles, and it feels like a wound.

Duty first. Always duty first.

His heart, damn it, has not yet learned the order.

an: something about honourable men with self restraint feeling sick with desire and battling the UrgesTM.......

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