you are such a good writer i would genuinely read your description of paint drying. will you write some more hurt/comfort with baelor and maekar? maybe like making up after an argument or baelor/maekar hurting reader’s feelings in some way, maybe reuniting after an extended period of time apart? whatever floats your boat. thanks for writing if you do! <3
oh anon, you have awakened something in me that i did not know i possessed *laughs in completely deranged* tysm for this request¡¡ thank you also for your kind words! hopefully my PhD supervisor thinks the same after reading my dissertation. i have decided to start this request with Maekar's piece, as Baelor's has some connections to it that only make sense if you read it in that order
atonement Or how your your husbands beg in different ways for your forgiveness
Includes: Baelor Targaryen x sister-wife!reader and Maekar Targaryen x sister-wife!reader
Warning(s): +18 MDNI, explicit sexual content, AFAB reader, canon typical Targcest, reader insert (no use of y/n). For Baelor: brief emotional hurt, established relationship, hurt/comfort, sex ban, edging, orgasm denial, masturbation, voyeurism, riding, power dynamics, dom/sub undertones. For Maekar: brief emotional hurt, established relationship, hurt/comfort, oral sex (fem receiving), power play (consensual), soft dom reader, sub Maekar), praise kink, degradation kink (light).
A.N.: Maekar's piece is heavily inspired by @hayatistic 's treat (please, please, go read that piece it is absolutely marvelous).
The argument had started the way arguments with Maekar always started — not with a spark but with a pressure that had been building for days, the kind that found its outlet in something small and became immediately about everything else.
You could not even remember what had lit it. Some disagreement about the household, something that should have been resolved in three sentences and instead caught on the particular friction that existed between you and Maekar, the same current that made you magnificent together and catastrophic in opposition. You had pushed. He had pushed back. The words had escalated the way words did when two people knew each other completely and had therefore detailed maps of every vulnerable place.
That was when he had said it.
You had been mid-sentence when it left his mouth — something precise and deliberate and aimed with the accuracy of a man who knew exactly where to look to find the thing that would land hardest. Not a cruelty in the broad sense. Nothing that would read as monstrous to anyone standing outside the room. But he knew you. He had known you since childhood, had grown alongside you, had been given access over years to every private thing — and he had taken something from that private place and used it, quickly and efficiently, the way he used a blade.
The silence afterward was immediate and complete.
You looked at him. He looked back at you, and you watched the moment he registered what he had done — the faint shift in his expression, not regret yet, not quite, but the recognition of it. The knowledge arriving just slightly too late.
You said nothing. You turned and walked out.
He did not come after you.
That was Maekar. He did not chase. He stood in the aftermath of his own damage and let the distance open because some part of him always believed, when he had gone too far, that the distance was what was deserved — that following would be a presumption, that your space was the least he owed you.
What he did instead was spend the remainder of the day in a state that anyone who knew him well would have recognised as punishment. Not the productive severity of a man working through something — the other kind. The kind where he moved through the hours doing everything that was required of him with the mechanical competence of someone whose mind was entirely elsewhere, and the elsewhere was a single sentence said in a room he had already left.
He replayed it with the thoroughness he gave everything. He examined it from every angle. He arrived at the same conclusion each time.
By evening he could not stand himself.
He came to your chambers at the hour when the castle had quieted and the torches had burned to their second wind, the low amber light that meant most of the household had found their beds.
You had not locked the door. He had half expected you to.
You were at the window when he entered, standing with your back to the room, and you did not turn when he came in. He took that in — the set of your shoulders, the particular quality of your stillness, which was not the stillness of someone at peace — and said nothing for a moment.
Then he began.
He was not good at this. He had never been good at this. Maekar, who could draft a military strategy in his sleep, who could read terrain and weather and the disposition of men with a glance, who had opinions about everything and delivered them without hesitation — Maekar when faced with the specific requirement of saying I am sorry and here is why became someone considerably less articulate. The words came out in the wrong order. He started sentences and revised them midway. He explained the argument as though you had not been present for it, backtracked, tried again.
He was somewhere in the middle of a third attempt when he heard the door.
The latch. The quiet, definitive sound of it catching.
He stopped.
He turned.
You were standing at the closed door with your hand still resting on the latch, and you were looking at him — not the window, not the middle distance, but directly at him — and the expression on your face was not what he had expected. Not the cold anger of this morning. Not forgiveness either.
Something else entirely.
"You," you said quietly, "have been a very bad boy."
The silence that followed had a texture entirely unlike the one this morning.
Maekar stared at you. Every half-constructed apology he had been assembling for the past several hours evaporated simultaneously.
"I—" He stopped. The sentence he had been building had not been designed for this and could not locate its footing. "I was in the middle of—"
"I know what you were in the middle of." You moved away from the door with unhurried steps, crossing the room slowly, and the quality of your movement was something he had not seen from you today — not the wound of this morning, not the retreat. Something considerably more deliberate. "I heard you."
"Then—"
"I didn't say you could speak."
He closed his mouth.
You stopped a few feet from him and looked at him with that calm that was somehow more arresting than anger — the particular stillness of someone who has made a decision and is in no hurry about the execution of it.
"You know what you said," you said.
"Yes." Rough. Immediate.
"And you know what it did."
His jaw tightened. "Yes."
"Then you understand," you said, "that words are not going to be sufficient."
He looked at you. "What do you—"
"On your knees, Maekar."
The words landed in the quiet room with the simple certainty of a command that does not expect to be questioned.
Maekar went entirely still.
He was not a small man. He was not, in any context, a man who could be described as diminished — broad and certain and carrying at all times the particular gravity of someone who had never needed to announce his presence because rooms simply rearranged themselves around it. He had been on his knees before gods and before necessity and before the dead, and on no occasion had it resembled this.
"You are serious," he said. Not a challenge. Genuine reckoning.
"I am always serious." A pause. "I am waiting."
Something moved through his expression — complex and rapid and arriving at an answer he had not fully anticipated. Because the thing about Maekar, the thing you had known since long before tonight, was that he contained multitudes that his public severity worked very hard to keep orderly. And something in those multitudes was responding to this moment in a way that had very little to do with shame and quite a lot to do with something else entirely.
He sank to his knees.
Not with reluctance. Not performing it. With the same decisiveness he gave everything — the choice made and committed to, those violet eyes finding yours from below with an expression that was part contrition and increasingly, unmistakably, part something far warmer.
You looked down at him. The sight of it — all that size, all that contained authority, kneeling on the stone floor of your chambers and looking up at you — did something immediate and significant to your ability to remain entirely cold about this.
You let none of it show. Not yet.
"You know," you said, beginning to move — not toward him, around him, a slow deliberate circuit that made him track you with his eyes because he could not help it, had never been able to help it where you were concerned, "what it is that you said."
"Yes." Lower now.
"And you know that it was beneath you."
A pause in which the pride warred briefly with the truth. "Yes."
"And you came here tonight with a great deal of words," you continued, moving toward the chair beside the fire — high-backed, solid, positioned where the firelight fell warm and gold — "and none of them were quite right, were they."
He said nothing. Which was its own answer.
You reached the chair. You sat.
And then, holding his gaze, you gathered your gown — slowly, deliberately, the fabric whispering as it rose — and drew it to your waist.
Bare beneath it. Completely. The firelight warm across your skin.
The sound Maekar made was immediate and involuntary and nothing like the man who had said something cutting this morning with cold precision. Something that had bypassed dignity entirely.
He moved to rise.
"Stay."
One word. He froze.
The expression on his face was extraordinary — desire and frustration warring openly, his hands flat on his thighs, violet eyes dark and fixed on you with an intensity that had lost every pretence of composure.
"You do not get to simply walk to me," you said pleasantly. "You have not earned that yet."
His jaw tightened. "Then what—"
"I think you know."
The silence stretched.
"You are not serious," he said. His voice had gone rough.
You raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Which was, as he knew perfectly well, confirmation.
Maekar looked at you. He looked at the floor between you. He looked back at you. Every line of him radiating the strain of a man whose pride and his wanting were engaged in a conflict that was becoming increasingly one-sided.
And then, with the expression of a man making a decision he will never in his life admit to finding anything other than humiliating, he placed his hands on the floor.
And crawled to you.
Gods.
The sight of it nearly undid your composure entirely — that broad, certain body moving across the stone floor toward you with those violet eyes fixed on your face, the flush climbing his neck and jaw, the white hair falling forward. The evidence of what this was doing to him visible and undeniable where his breeches pulled taut.
He was halfway across the room and your thoughts had become extremely simple.
He reached you. Rose up onto his knees before the chair, between your parted thighs, close enough that the warmth of him reached you, and his eyes moved — helplessly, immediately — to where your gown pooled at your waist.
A sound left him that resonated somewhere at the base of your spine.
He reached for you.
Your foot met his shoulder. Not hard. Firm.
He stopped.
His eyes flew to your face with an expression of genuine anguish.
"Beg," you said softly.
"I—" The word came out entirely wrong, stripped of all its usual authority. "You cannot—"
"I can." You tilted your head. "Beg, Maekar. And mean it."
The flush had reached his ears. His hands were pressed flat against his thighs again and you could see the effort of keeping them there — all that coiled wanting held in check by the simple fact of your foot on his shoulder and your eyes on his face and the specific power of this moment that he had not anticipated and could not seem to locate an exit from and was increasingly, you suspected, not looking for one.
"Please." Rough. Immediate. Like it had been waiting just below the surface.
"Please what."
His eyes closed briefly. Opened. Found yours with a nakedness that had nothing to do with the physical. "Please. I am — gods — I am sorry. What I said was—" He stopped. His throat worked. "It was beneath me. It was beneath what you deserve. And I am asking you—" The words seemed to cost him in a way that the crawling, somehow, had not. "I am asking you to let me make it right."
You looked at him for a long moment.
Then you lowered your foot from his shoulder.
He moved forward immediately, his hands finding your thighs with a reverence entirely at odds with the urgency behind it — spreading them wider, thumbs pressing into the soft inner flesh as though taking inventory, as though he intended to be thorough and was announcing that intention with his hands before his mouth had done anything at all.
He looked at you first. That was the thing that nearly broke your composure before he had even begun — Maekar, kneeling between your thighs with his white hair falling forward and his violet eyes dark, looking at you with the focused attention of a man who has been given a specific task and is conducting an assessment. Not tentative. Never tentative. Simply — taking stock. Learning the geography of what he had been given permission to address.
Then he leaned in and put his mouth on you and the sound you made echoed off the stone walls without apology.
He started slow. Deliberately slow, in the way that was not gentleness but control — the same control he applied to everything, here redirected entirely toward your undoing. His tongue moved in long, unhurried strokes, learning you, cataloguing what made your thighs tighten and what made your breath catch and what made your hand find his hair. He filed it all away. Maekar forgot nothing.
Your fingers tangled in his hair.
The sound he made when you gripped — low and rough and pulled from somewhere deep — vibrated against you and made your grip tighten further, reflexive, and he pressed closer in response, the groan that followed rolling through you like weather. His eyes lifted. Violet and blown wide and fixed on your face from below with an expression that had left dignity somewhere across the room.
He adjusted. Whatever the assessment had concluded, he acted on it now — mouth finding your clit with a precision that was almost unfair, working it with the flat of his tongue in a rhythm that was not varied or playful but relentless, the rhythm of a man who had identified the objective and intended to pursue it without deviation. The thoroughness of him. The specific, devastating attention of Maekar when properly directed — usually toward military strategy, toward the defence of something, toward the systematic resolution of a problem — applied here, to this, to you.
One hand moved. His thumb traced down and then pressed in, slow and deliberate, and the sound you made was nothing like composure.
He worked both at once with the same methodical certainty — mouth and hand, each informing the other, adjusting to every sound you made, every tightening of your thighs against his shoulders, every involuntary pull of his hair. There was no performance in it. There never was, with Maekar. Only the application of full attention to a thing he had decided to do well, and the full attention of Maekar was a devastating instrument.
Your grip tightened further. He groaned again — that sound, the particular helpless quality of it, the way being gripped and held and used seemed to travel through him like current — and his rhythm intensified, and you looked down at him and he looked up at you and beneath the contrition, beneath the wanting, beneath everything this evening had already been — what lived in those violet eyes was a promise. Patient and certain and entirely Maekar. The quiet authority that no amount of kneeling or crawling had actually touched, present still, simply redirected.
Later, those eyes said. But first.
Your grip tightened further.
The tension that had been coiling since the moment you latched the door gathered to a point that became unbearable and then broke entirely, your back arching and his name leaving your mouth in a way that was nothing like the cold distance of this morning — nothing like anything except this: the two of you, undone and specific and completely known to each other, in the firelit dark.
Maekar held you through every tremor, mouth and hand and the steady certain presence of him, unhurried, thorough to the last.
When you finally stilled, he pressed his lips to the inside of your thigh. Then another. Slow. The tenderness of it, after everything, nearly cracked your chest open.
He rose up from his knees.
Not crawling now. He rose to his full height in one movement and stood before you, flushed and dishevelled and looking down at you with those violet eyes still dark but the promise in them moved to the foreground now — patient no longer, the debt paid and something else entirely taking its place.
"Well," he said. His voice had not recovered. "Are we even?"
You looked at him.
"Almost," you said.
Something shifted in his expression. The last fragment of contrition dissolving into something that was considerably more familiar — that dark focused quality, the commanding certainty of a man who has been on his knees and is very thoroughly done with it.
"Almost," he repeated.
"You still have some making up to do."
His eyes moved over you — the gown pooled at your waist, the firelight, the expression on your face — and a sound left him that was not quite a laugh and considerably more than one.
"I think," he said, reaching for you, "that I can manage that."
The argument had not announced itself.
That was the thing about Baelor — the thing you had known for years and understood intellectually and still managed to be caught off guard by, because the form his damage took was so much quieter than Maekar's. Maekar came at you like weather. You could see him building, read the pressure in the set of his jaw and the clipped precision of his sentences, and brace accordingly. There was a violence to it that was at least honest.
Baelor simply… withdrew the warmth.
It had been a disagreement about something political — a decision he had made without consulting you, something that touched your family's interests, something that warranted discussion and had not received it. You had raised it. Reasonably, you thought. With the specific calm you employed when you wanted to be heard rather than dismissed.
And Baelor, who was patient with everyone, who was diplomatic to the bone, who had never once in his life spoken to you without the quality of his full attention — had looked up from his correspondence and said, without heat, without cruelty, with the mild tone of a man addressing something that does not require much of him:
"I've handled it. You needn't concern yourself."
The silence that followed was not dramatic. He had already looked back down at his letters.
You needn't concern yourself. As though you were— as though the matter, which concerned your own kin, your own blood, was outside your competence or your purview. As though the three of you did not govern together, sleep together, build everything together. As though you were someone to be managed.
He had not even noticed the silence. That was the part that made something go cold and precise behind your sternum. He had not noticed, because some part of him had meant it — had, in the press of whatever he was managing that week, filed you under not requiring attention and moved on.
You had left the room without a word. He had not looked up.
You told him that evening.
Not with raised voices — that was never how it worked between you and Baelor, who had the diplomat's gift for keeping rooms from becoming fires. You told him quietly, standing in your shared chamber while he stood at the window with that particular stillness that meant he was listening completely, the stillness that normally meant everything and tonight felt like performance.
You told him what it had done. What you needn't concern yourself meant, spoken in that mild tone, about that specific matter. You were precise. You gave him the full architecture of it.
He listened. He turned from the window. He said, with the careful, considered tone of a man who has assembled his response thoughtfully and believes it to be correct: "I didn't mean it the way you've taken it."
Which was perhaps true. And was not, in any sense that mattered, an apology.
"When you can do better than that," you said, "you can touch me."
He blinked. Something shifted in his expression — the first crack in the composure. "What?"
"You heard me."
"You cannot be—"
"Until you understand what you said and why it was wrong and you can tell me that — genuinely, not diplomatically — you don't get to put your hands on me. You don't get to come to my bed. You don't get to reach across the table and touch my hand." You held his gaze. "And you don't get to touch yourself either. I'll know."
The expression on his face completed some internal journey that ended at a place he had not anticipated arriving.
"That is—" He stopped. Reorganised. "That is not a reasonable—"
"Goodnight, Baelor."
He lasted ten days.
You knew, because you counted — not with satisfaction, not cruelly, but with the careful attention of someone who understood exactly what was being waited out. Baelor's particular stubbornness was not Maekar's hot refusal. It was the stubbornness of a man who was accustomed to understanding things, to processing them and arriving at resolution through the application of sufficient thought. He had turned the argument over in his mind — you could see it in him, the way you had always been able to read him, in the slight distraction behind his eyes at dinner, in the way he sometimes stopped mid-sentence with his mouth slightly open as though arriving somewhere unexpected.
He was working on it. Baelor solved things. He would solve this.
What he could not account for was the body.
Four days in, he was distracted in council. You happened to be present; you said nothing, did nothing, simply sat across the room in your place and watched him with the mild attentiveness of a woman with no particular agenda, and you watched him not look at you with the sustained effort of a man who had lost the ability to look at anything else.
Six days in, he came to your chamber — not to your bed, not with that purpose, to talk, he said. He had things to say. Important things. And he sat across from you and said several things that were close to what was needed and none of them quite arrived, like a man reaching for a word in a language he almost spoke, and you listened to all of it with your hands folded in your lap and said, when he finished: "Almost." And he left.
Eight days in, you passed him in the corridor and his hand lifted — automatic, entirely involuntary, the gesture of a decade of habit reaching for your arm — and stopped itself a half-inch from your sleeve. You both looked at the suspended hand. You looked up at his face. He was flushed, and composed, and miserable.
"Almost," you said again. And walked on.
Day ten: you received a message requesting your presence at the Tower of the Hand at your earliest convenience. The handwriting was impeccable and slightly too controlled, the phrasing formally correct in the way of a man who has burned through several drafts.
You went at the evening hour, when the castle had quieted.
He was at his desk.
The Tower of the Hand's study was Baelor's most fully inhabited room — not the bedchamber you shared, not the great hall, but here, where the books were stacked in the particular ordered disorder of a mind that worked constantly, where the candles had burned to different lengths because he replaced them at different intervals rather than all at once, where the whole space carried the specific atmosphere of someone who had been here a long time and thought well within it. His domain. His competence made visible and spatial.
He was writing when you entered, or had been. The quill was in his hand but still when you came through the door, and he looked up at you with mismatched eyes — one brown, one blue, both exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep — and set it down.
He looked, you noted, like a man who had been having a difficult ten days. The composure was present but maintained at a cost. The dark hair with its threads of white was slightly less ordered than usual. There was a quality to his stillness that was not his normal stillness, not the deep settled patience of a man at peace with himself but the stillness of a man holding himself together through the application of will.
He rose when you entered. Stood behind his desk.
"You came," he said.
"You asked." You crossed the room without hurrying. Took the chair across from his desk — not the formal visitor's chair but the smaller one at an angle to it, the one that occupied the warmer quadrant of the room near the brazier, and settled into it with the ease of someone who had all evening. "Sit down, Baelor. You look like you're about to receive a delegation."
Something moved through his face. He sat.
For a moment he said nothing. You watched him locate his prepared opening and lose it, and locate another and find it also insufficient, and the particular pain of watching Baelor — who spoke so well, always, who chose words the way a craftsman chose tools — sit in silence with too many wrong ones was something you allowed yourself to feel.
"I have been thinking," he began.
"Mm."
"About what I said."
"I hope so."
His jaw tightened slightly. "You might allow me to—"
"I am allowing you." You tilted your head. "I am listening. I have been listening for ten days."
The flush that moved up his throat was slow and thorough and entirely at odds with his composure. "What I said was— dismissive. In a way that went past the specific disagreement. In a way that suggested your judgment was— subordinate. Manageable." He stopped. His hands, flat on the desk, pressed briefly harder against the wood. "That is not what I believe. And it is not how we function. And I said it because I was pressed and careless and I— I used your patience against you, in a way. The assumption that you would absorb it." A pause. His eyes found yours, direct, that quality they had in private that was nothing like the diplomatic face: stripped and specific. "I have not been able to stop thinking about your face when you left the room."
The room held the quiet.
"Did you mean any of that?"
"Every word."
"Not diplomatically constructed?"
Something in his expression — raw, suddenly. "I have spent ten days trying to construct it diplomatically and none of it was right. That is what I actually have."
You looked at him for a long moment.
"Alright," you said. His breath released slightly. "That was the apology." You held his gaze. "Now comes the rest of it."
He stilled. "The rest—"
"Stand up. Come around the desk."
He came around the desk. Stood before you, and you looked up at him from the chair — all of him, the height and the breadth of him, the dishevelment of ten careful days, the mismatched eyes — and let the looking be its own thing for a moment.
"Ten days," you said.
"Yes." His voice had changed register.
"You've been very obedient."
A breath. "Not— entirely at ease with it."
"I know, that was the point." You kept your voice pleasant. "Take your breeches off."
The expression that moved through his face then — complex and rapid, landing somewhere between relief and a specific kind of exposed apprehension — was extraordinary on him. Baelor, who was looked at constantly and read nothing to anyone he didn't intend to, suddenly readable.
"Here," he said. Not a challenge. Something more unsteady.
"You are the Hand of the King. I imagine you can lock the door."
He locked the door. He came back. He held your gaze for a moment — something in him assembling and then releasing — and undid the laces and pushed the breeches down and stepped out of them, and stood before you, and he was already hard, flushed and full and aching with ten days of it, and the sight of it hit you somewhere immediate and south and you kept every bit of that off your face.
"Your shirt."
He removed it. The candlelight caught the angles of him, the breadth of his chest, the dark hair, the slight flush that had reached further than his throat now.
He stood before you and the word, the only accurate word, was exposed. Baelor, who attended to everything, who was always watching, always composing, always so carefully attending to you — standing in his study undone and watching your face for something and finding it carefully withheld.
"Touch yourself," you said.
The sound he made was almost imperceptible. Almost. His hand moved to himself — not with the practised ease of a man at leisure but with the tension of someone who had been waiting ten days for any relief at all, and it showed, the way his breath changed immediately on contact, the way his head dropped slightly and then corrected.
"Look at me," you said.
His eyes found yours.
Gods.
The expression on his face — the openness of it, the exposed wanting, those mismatched eyes dark and fixed on you while his hand moved in a slow stroke and his chest rose and fell with the effort of maintaining eye contact while every part of him was pulling toward the release he'd been denied — it went directly through every composed layer of you and landed somewhere purely physical.
You watched him.
He watched you watching him, which was its own unbearable thing — you could see it on his face, the specific quality of being seen doing this, and it was doing something to him that the physical alone hadn't, some additional unravelling.
"Tell me what it's been like," you said. Pleasantly. "The ten days."
A broken sound. His rhythm stuttered. "That is — you cannot expect me to—"
"I can." You settled back slightly in the chair. "Tell me."
His jaw worked. The flush was everywhere now, neck and chest and face. "Unbearable." The word came out like he'd dragged it. "Every — every time you were in the room. Every time you sat at dinner and did not — and I could not—" He stopped. His hand kept moving and his voice had gone rough in a way it almost never was. "I dreamed about you. Every night. And woke up and could not—"
"Couldn't what."
The look he gave you. "You know what."
"I want to hear it."
"Couldn't do anything about it." His control was leaving him in real time, the diplomat dissolving word by word into someone far less managed. "Have been in a state of — sustained — I thought I could wait you out. That was what I told myself. I thought—" He made a sound that was not entirely dignified. "I was wrong."
"Yes," you said. "You were."
You watched the tension climb in him — the rhythm of his hand around his cock, his breathing, the particular tightening around his eyes that you knew very well, had been reading for years — and let it climb, and let it climb, and when he was close enough that the slight hitch in his breathing told you precisely where he was, you said:
"Stop."
He immediately came to a halt.
The sound he made was involuntary and wrecked and all the composure of the past ten days disintegrated into a single, devastated exhale. His hand stilled. He stood very still, chest heaving, flushed from forehead to chest, eyes closed.
"Baelor."
He opened them.
"Look at me."
He looked. The expression on his face — the absolute, specific suffering of a man held one breath from the edge — went through you like heat.
You stood.
He watched you — those wrecked mismatched eyes tracking every movement with the fixed attention of a man who has run out of composure entirely and is operating on something far more fundamental. You reached for the lacing of your gown. Undid it without haste. Let it fall.
Baelor's breath left him audibly.
You crossed to him. He reached for you immediately and you caught his wrist — gently, just a touch — and his eyes flew to your face.
"Sit," you said. "In the chair."
He sat. He looked up at you from it with those eyes and that expression and you stood before him for a moment and let yourself be looked at — let him have it, the looking, the full undivided wanting that he'd been rationing for ten days — and then you moved forward and placed your knee on the chair beside his hip and swung your other knee to his other side and settled over him, and the sound he made when you reached down and positioned him against your dripping cunt and sank onto him was the most unguarded thing you had ever heard from his mouth.
Unguarded. That was the word. Every version of Baelor — the diplomat, the Crown Prince, the patient careful man who attended to everything — was entirely absent. What was present was only this: flushed and wrecked and buried in you and looking up at your face with those mismatched eyes like the sight of you was the only coherent thing in the room.
You didn't move immediately. You sat. You held him there and watched him experience it, and the sound he made — low and sustained and desperate — reverberated at the base of your spine.
"Please." The word left him without any of the consideration he usually applied to speech. Raw and immediate and already unravelled. "Please — gods — please—"
You began to move.
Whatever composure had survived until that moment did not survive this. His head dropped to your shoulder, his hands found your hips with the reverence that was specific to him and the urgency that was specific to tonight and the particular quality of ten days' waiting that made all of it—
He was gone.
You rode him in the firelit study of the Tower of the Hand with his face pressed to your neck and his hands gripping you like anchor points and the sounds he was making against your skin entirely unlike anything any council had ever heard from him, entirely unlike anything he was anywhere except here, entirely his. The rhythm built and you felt him gathering — felt the tension in him, the almost, the held breath — and this time you gave him no instruction.
This time you moved harder, and faster, and his hands tightened on your hips and his voice broke open against your shoulder in a sound that had no diplomacy in it at all and he shuddered beneath you, and held you, and spent himself with his whole body and his whole attention and every bit of the ten days.
You followed him. Not gently.
For a long while afterward neither of you moved. His face still against your neck, your hands in his hair, the fire burned low and amber around you. The study quiet. The castle quiet.
His breathing slowed.
"Well," he said, into your neck. His voice was demolished. "How have I managed it?"
You considered.
"You came very close to begging," you observed.
A pause. "I actually did beg."
"Yes. That part was very good."
Another pause, in which you could feel against your skin the specific quality of Baelor trying to locate his dignity and finding it somewhat mislaid. "I am choosing to take that as a compliment."
"You should." You drew back slightly to see his face — the flushed, dishevelled, entirely undone face of the Crown Prince of the Seven Kingdoms, looking up at you from the wreckage of his composure with those mismatched eyes. "It was extremely persuasive."
Something moved through his expression — the dry, hidden warmth of him, showing through the cracks of the evening. "I will have that in mind," he said, "the next time I am inclined to be dismissive."
"See that you do."
He turned his head. Pressed his lips to the inside of your wrist, where the pulse was. The gesture slow and exact and entirely, specifically his.
"Ten days," he said quietly, against your skin.
"Ten days," you confirmed.
"I do not recommend it."
"Then you know what to do to avoid it."
His eyes lifted to yours. That particular quality in them, the one that had nothing to do with crowns or councils — the one that had been present since childhood and had never once changed — private and exact and undivided.
"Yes," he said. "I do."
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