I have an ongoing series centered on Adam Dalgliesh (a character who has bewitched me, body and soul) that started as something purely self-indulgent and has become my favourite work to date 🧡
The amount of love I have been pouring into this is, if I can say so myself, truly unmatched (at least in my humble opinion). So please, if you enjoy reading a slow burn, slice-of-life kind of work with a lot of feels and a happy ending (we'll get there!) be sure to check this one out!
GIF by @/jagiellonczyk / Dividers by @/saradika-graphics
↪︎ they sing their dearest songs directory
SUMMARY: the grief he carried alone for years finally had somewhere to go — straight into a family he never let himself imagine
Pairing: Adam Dalgliesh x f!reader
A.N.: am I pouring all the love I have for Adam's character on these last chapters? You can bet I am...
Chapter 6
The first thing he changed was the coffee.
You'd mentioned, once, in passing, that the smell of it had turned difficult in the mornings — one of the many small betrayals the second month specialised in, arriving without warning and departing on no schedule you could predict — and the very next morning the coffee had vanished from the counter. In its place: a neat row of teas, arranged with the same precise attention he brought to everything, including, you noted, the particular chamomile blend you'd mentioned once months ago, in a completely unrelated conversation.
"You didn't have to do that," you told him, the first morning you found it.
"I know," he said, and handed you the cup, and pressed his mouth briefly to your temple before he let you have it — an addition to the ritual that hadn't been there a month ago and that you'd noticed, gladly, becoming permanent.
The second thing was his hands.
Like small evidence gathering itself into a pattern. He had always touched you with intention rather than reflex, the deliberateness of a man for whom contact was a considered act rather than an idle one. But something had shifted since that morning, since the test lying face-up between you and his face doing what it had done, and the shift showed itself now in ways that had nothing to do with restraint.
He couldn't seem to stay very far from you for very long.
It wasn't dramatic. He still went to the Yard, still vanished into files and cases with his usual complete concentration. But the moment he was near you, some part of him reoriented. A hand at the small of your back while you stood at the counter. His shoulder against yours on the sofa when there was a whole cushion of space going spare. Reading in separate chairs had quietly stopped being how the evenings went; somewhere in the second month he'd simply started sitting closer, and neither of you had remarked on it, and it had become, without ceremony, how things were now.
His hand found your stomach with the same quiet frequency, and increasingly without his appearing to notice he was doing it. Reading on the sofa, his palm would migrate from your waist to the new, barely-there curve of you and simply rest, warm and still, while his eyes stayed on the page. Standing at the stove, his arms would come around you from behind and settle low, and he'd say nothing about it, as though the gesture required no comment because it was simply where his hands belonged now.
One afternoon in that same stretch of weeks, worn thin by a morning spent at the faculty, you lay down on the sofa for what you'd meant to be twenty minutes and did not resurface for the better part of two hours.
You woke slowly, coming up through layers of sleep toward warmth and a voice — low, threading somewhere near you before you'd assembled enough of yourself to place it.
Adam’s hand was warm at your stomach; you understood that before you understood anything else, some permanent and unquestioning part of you having decided, weeks ago, that this hand in this place required no separate acknowledgment. It moved in slow circles, patient, keeping time with whatever he was saying.
You kept your eyes closed.
He was reading. The special cadence he used only for poetry — careful with the line breaks, giving each its small owed pause — and it took you a moment, still mostly inside the doze, to place it, and longer still to understand he hadn't chosen one of the ones you'd have expected of him.
"Love is, yea, a great thing," his voice said, quiet enough that you understood at once he hadn't meant it for you — not this particular reading, not this particular moment. This one belonged to somebody smaller, currently residing somewhere beneath his palm, who could not yet object to Hardy on the grounds of unfamiliarity, or, for that matter, on any grounds whatsoever. "A great thing to me. When, having drawn across the lawn, in darkness silently—"
He paused. His hand kept moving.
"I don't generally choose that one," he said, to the room, you thought, in the low and private register you'd only ever heard him use for the two of you together. "Most of what I know by heart is elegy. I don't suppose that's the best foundation for someone who hasn't even arrived yet. I thought we might start you on something kinder."
Something in your chest did something helpless and complete, and despite every effort to keep your breathing even, some small sound escaped you — not quite a laugh, an exhale with feeling caught in it — and his hand stilled.
"You're awake," he said. Not embarrassed. Simply registering it, adjusting.
"Only just," you answered, keeping your eyes closed a moment longer. "Don't stop on my account."
A pause, and then his hand resumed its slow circling, though his voice had lost the murmur meant for smaller ears and returned, gently, to its ordinary register. "I don't imagine I could reproduce it convincingly a second time."
"You could try."
"You'd know," he said, a smile appearing on his lips. "You always know when I'm performing something rather than meaning it."
You opened your eyes. He was watching you now instead of the page, the book still open on his knee, his hand spread wide and unhurried against you.
"Why that one?" you asked. "Out of everything you own."
He was quiet a moment, his thumb tracing one slow arc. "I found I didn't want grief to be the first thing to be known by this little one," he said, plainly, no defensiveness in it at all. "I thought — something with joy in it, for once. Cyder, and dancing, and a girl slipping across a lawn in the dark. It seemed a better foundation than the alternative."
You reached for his free hand and he gave it without hesitation, lacing his fingers through yours, and you lay there in the last of the afternoon light with his voice still faintly caught somewhere in your chest, thinking that you had never loved anyone the way you loved this particular man — choosing joy for a person he hadn't met yet, because he'd decided, quietly and without being asked, that grief had had enough of his attention.
"Read the rest," you said. "I'm listening properly now."
He looked at you for a long moment — the kind of look that still, after almost three years, found something in you it hadn't accounted for — and then, his hand never leaving you, he read the rest of it to both of you, and didn't seem to mind the larger audience at all.
The tiredness arrived properly in the third month, with a thoroughness you hadn't been prepared for. You'd read about it and understood it in the abstract and were unprepared for the specific reality, which was less like ordinary fatigue and more like being intermittently and without warning replaced by a version of yourself constructed entirely from lead.
You came home from the library one evening and made it as far as the sofa before your body simply declined to negotiate further.
He found you there twenty minutes later, half-upright, a stack of marking abandoned at an angle across your knee.
"Stay there," he said, before you could attempt to gather yourself into something more presentable.
"I'm fine."
"You are visibly not fine, and I've missed you rather a lot today, so you may as well let me be useful about it." He was already moving — a pillow retrieved from the bedroom, positioned with brisk efficiency, and then he was settling at the other end of the sofa and lifting your feet into his lap, which had long since stopped being something he felt he needed to request permission for.
His thumbs found the arch of one foot and pressed, and you lasted about half a minute before abandoning any pretence of protest.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," he said, in the tone that meant the sentence had been raised and gently dismissed on several previous occasions and would go on being dismissed.
His hands worked with unhurried, methodical attention, and by the time he'd finished both feet the weight that had settled somewhere in your lower legs had loosened entirely.
"Better?"
"Considerably." You looked at him properly. "You've been practising."
"I've been reading," he admitted — which was as close as he generally came to a confession — and you understood, without needing to search for it, that there was a book somewhere in the flat on the subject that he had acquired without mentioning and would continue not mentioning, and that this was, in its way, one of the more devastatingly Adam things about him.
The soup arrived the same week.
It came from nowhere obvious — a specific and categorical craving that announced itself one Thursday morning as an absolute biological law, exact in every particular: the potato soup your mother had made throughout your childhood, the consistency of it, the cream added at the right moment, the exact quantity of white pepper no recipe of your own matched.
You mentioned it once, in passing, not as a request at all.
That evening the soup was on the table.
Not from memory. You discovered this only afterward, and only because you noticed a piece of paper on the kitchen table with a very well-known number on it — he had telephoned your mother. And had, apparently, taken careful notes.
"You telephoned my mother."
"She was very helpful," he said. "She sends her love."
The soup, unsurprisingly, was exactly right.
After that a quiet system established itself, entirely unannounced and entirely characteristic — things you'd mentioned once, idly, began appearing in the flat with a reliability that suggested he retained every offhand comment you made with the same thoroughness he brought to case files. A particular biscuit. A brand of ginger tea. A variety of apple that required, you eventually worked out from the bag, an entirely different shop than the one on the corner.
"You're going to two shops now," you quietly pointed out to him once.
"The other doesn't carry them," he said, with the mild unconcern of a man discussing an unremarkable logistical fact.
"Adam."
"They're better from the second shop," he answered, and returned to whatever he'd been doing — though not before you caught, in the set of his shoulders, something that suggested there was rather more to the apple logistics than he was volunteering. You didn't press. You had a suspicion you'd get the fuller story out of Daniel eventually, as you generally did.
You crossed the kitchen and put your arms around him anyway, because there was, in the end, nothing else adequate to do with the specific tenderness his two-shop apple policy produced in you.
The backache found you properly in the fourth month. A low, persistent ache at the base of your spine that turned the library's chairs, never generous to begin with, actively unkind. You adjusted your posture and took the slow walks and said nothing to him about it, on the grounds that there was nothing to be done and he was already, by any reasonable measure, doing more than enough.
He noticed anyway, as you knew he always did.
You were at the study desk on a Sunday evening, a stubborn revision refusing to resolve, your posture having deteriorated by degrees into something that told anyone paying attention exactly how your lower back felt about the situation. You hadn't heard him come in.
His hands landed on your shoulders, and the sound that left you was embarrassingly close to relief made audible.
He worked at the tension with the same patient thoroughness he brought to every form of care he extended you, his thumbs finding the base of your skull, the heels of his hands moving down along your spine with a precision that made your eyes close of their own accord.
"Why didn't you say?" he asked, kneading a particular rough spot that had you almost moaning.
"It's nothing that can be helped, my love."
"A great deal can be helped, generally," he said, his hands finding the exact source of the ache. "That is, in point of fact, precisely the place."
"How do you know that?"
"I pay attention," he voiced simply and pressed his mouth briefly to the top of your head, as if the sentence needed the gesture to be properly true.
The evening that followed involved a bath he suggested before you'd thought to ask for it — the water exactly right, the salts your doctor had recommended already dissolved into it, sourced, you learned only later, from a pharmacy on the far side of London he'd visited without mentioning. You lay in the warm water while he made tea in the kitchen and thought, not for the first time, about the well-appointed dark he'd once prepared a room against, and what that room had eventually become.
He brought the tea to the bathroom door.
"You telephoned my mother about soup," you started numbering, when he sat on the edge of the bath. "You go to two shops for apples. You've sourced pharmacy salts from across London."
"We've already established this," he answered. "You know I don’t mind. In fact, I am happier doing this for you knowing everything you are enduring."
"I love you," you said. "Enormously. Without any reservation whatsoever."
He took the hand you weren't using to hold your cup and held it, and something in his face eased entirely.
"I know," he said, quietly, a smile grazing his lips. "I love you the same way."
By the fifth month the pregnancy had become visible enough that no coat entirely disguised it, and the Yard, when you visited, had opinions about it that no one voiced directly in Adam's presence.
Daniel had opinions he voiced immediately, however.
"Doctor." He met you at the stairs with the particular brightness he reserved for good news, his eyes dropping to the curve of you before returning, with visible effort at composure, to your face. "You look well."
"I feel like a ship," you told him.
"A very distinguished one," he said, falling into step beside you. "A flagship, really. The kind with—"
"Has Adam told you about the apples?" you asked, as you crossed the incident room floor.
Daniel's face did the thing it did when he had a story he'd been saving.
"There's rather more to it than two shops, in fact," he said, delighted. "Three weeks ago we were mid-interview — properly mid-interview, caution given, solicitor present, the whole formal apparatus — and he passes me a note. An actual note. Folded, like we were at school." His grin widened. "It said: the shop on Marchmont Street. The Braeburns, not the Coxes. Ten minutes, if you can manage it. No please. No explanation. I had to excuse myself from an active police interview to go and fetch apples, and when I got back he took the bag like it was chain-of-custody evidence and didn't say another word about it for the rest of the afternoon."
"He didn't thank you?" you asked as you made your way up the stairs into the upper floor in which Adam’s office was. Daniel helped you by holding your arm when he noticed how the flight of stairs tired you.
"He nodded," Daniel said, with the air of a man still nursing the injustice. "But I want it on record that I have never once been thanked adequately for the apples."
Through the glass, Adam looked up — the timing entirely too precise to be coincidence, which meant he'd almost certainly heard the tail end of it — and something in his expression suggested he had no intention of offering the missing thanks even now.
"You'll get your commendation eventually," you assured him.
"I'd settle for a mention in your upcoming book," Daniel said, brightening considerably, and you laughed, and filed the whole exchange away as one of the more perfect distillations of the two of them you'd yet collected.
"Are you running a book on this baby?" you asked, once you'd recovered, the thought appearing out of thin air in your brain.
A pause — the pause of a man deciding how much honesty the moment could bear. "A small one," he admitted. "Very small. Informal."
"What's your position?"
He drew himself up with the gravity of a man delivering a considered professional judgement. "I think the boss would be extraordinary with a little girl. I don't have scientific grounds for that. I just think it."
You looked through the glass at Adam, who had returned to his file but whose eyes found you again within the space of a breath, the way they always did now, an orbit he'd apparently stopped trying to resist.
You thought of his hands on your stomach every morning. The two shops. The pharmacy salts. The reading, unashamed now, to somebody smaller than the two of you.
"Yes," you said, smiling somewhat dumbly. "I think he would."
He asked you in the sixth month.
It was an ordinary Sunday — you with the manuscript spread across your knee, working through the second reader's report line by line, a pencil tucked behind your ear you kept forgetting was there; him beside you with a book he'd stopped pretending to read some minutes earlier, his socked foot hooked loosely over yours, the lamp lit against the grey outside, the record turning quietly through something unhurried.
You became aware, gradually, that he had gone somewhere else.
Not far — his foot was still against yours, his eyes occasionally finding your face before sliding away again — but somewhere behind his usual stillness something was turning over, restless in the way you'd learned, across the years, to recognise and leave alone. He was circling. He always circled before he arrived.
You turned a page. Didn't press him.
He eventually set the book down.
Properly down — closed, no finger marking his place, which was unlike him enough that you looked up despite yourself — and shifted along the sofa until there was no longer any careful, sociable distance between you at all, gathering you fully against his side instead, one arm around your shoulders, the other coming to rest against the curve of your stomach, his thumb already moving in the slow arc that had become, this past month, simply how his hand behaved whenever it found you.
"I keep talking to her," he said. Quietly. Because apparently he had heard about the bet that circled the Yard and had agreed with the odds.
"I know," you said, waiting for him to make his point.
"I've said things to her I don't believe I've said properly to you. Not in so many words." He was looking at his own hand rather than your face, and something in the set of his jaw told you this had cost him some deliberate effort to start. "I find it considerably easier to be plain with someone who can't yet hold me to it."
You said nothing. You knew exactly how much space this required.
"I love you," he said. "I've told you that, and meant it every time, and I don't think I've ever managed to tell you the size of it. Not properly. I keep reaching for the poems instead — the meter, the form, all the things I've spent my life hiding behind — because the plain version has always felt too large to simply say."
His hand at your stomach tightened, just slightly. Present and entirely certain.
"I don't want to hide behind it tonight," he said.
You turned to look at him properly and found his eyes weren't composed at all — not the careful, contained brightness you'd seen across his desk over a small plastic test, but something rawer, something that had clearly been building since long before this Sunday.
"I want to marry you." The words didn't arrive in the measured cadence he generally reserved for the things that mattered most; they came out slightly too fast, slightly ahead of him, as though he'd been holding them so long they'd stopped waiting for his permission. "I've wanted it for months. I bought a ring three weeks ago and haven't yet found a single evening in which I am not tense about giving it to you, which I recognise is somewhat absurd for a man who interviews murderers for a living without difficulty."
Your breath caught. "You already—"
"It's in the desk drawer. Under the case files, which I'm aware isn't romantic, but I couldn't leave it anywhere you might find it by accident, and then I couldn't decide on an evening that felt adequate to it, and then tonight you were reading the report with your pencil behind your ear and I simply—" He stopped, acknowledging he was spiralling. His hand came up from your stomach to your face, his thumb tracing your cheekbone with a care that had nothing composed left in it. "I simply didn't want to wait any longer to say it properly."
"Adam—"
"Let me finish." There was something almost pleading in it, so unlike him that you closed your mouth and let him. "I'm not a religious man. I don't need the church, or any version of this that requires witnesses beyond the people who actually matter to us. What I need—" his voice caught, actually caught, and he had to stop and breathe before he could go on, his forehead dropping to rest against yours, his hand still at your face, "—what I need is the word for it. To call you my wife and have it be true in every sense the word can carry. I have needed that for longer than I've been willing to admit even to myself."
You reached up and covered his hand with yours where it lay against your cheek.
"Do you remember the thing with the shelves?" he asked, quieter now, his forehead still against yours, his breath unsteady in a way that undid you completely. "I have wanted this — wanted you, permanently — for very much longer than I've had the courage to say so, and I find I'm finished waiting for the courage to arrive on its own. I would like to marry you. Not now, if you'd rather wait until after she's here — whenever you like, however you like. I only find I can no longer bear not having asked."
You were crying before he'd finished, and so, you realised, was he — not dramatically, nothing about him was ever dramatic, but there were tears caught at the corners of his eyes that he made no attempt to hide, which was, in its way, more devastating than anything he'd said.
"Yes," you said.
"You haven't even seen the ring," he said, half a laugh breaking through the unsteadiness. "I feel I ought to at least show you the ring before—"
"I don’t need to, Adam," you said again, and took his face in both hands, and kissed him — his mouth, and then, when you drew back only far enough to breathe, his jaw, his cheekbone, the corner of his eye where a single tear had actually escaped and which you kissed away without comment — and felt his arms come around you properly, both of them, his hand leaving your stomach only to circle your back instead, holding you as close as your bodies currently allowed, his face pressed into your hair.
"I love you," he said again, into your hair, as though the first time hadn't been sufficient and he intended to keep saying it until it was. "I should have told you properly months ago."
"You've been telling me properly every single day," you said. "The tea. The two shops. Reading Hardy to her almost every day. I've never once doubted it, Adam. I have never doubted you."
He drew back enough to look at you, his eyes still bright, his hand coming up to brush away the last of your own tears with a tenderness that had nothing careful or composed about it at all.
"Then let me have the word as well," he said. "I find I want both. The daily proof and the word for it."
"You have both," you tearily smiled. "You've had both for longer than you've let yourself believe."
He kissed you again — slower now, steadier, though his hand shook very slightly where it rested against your jaw, which you noticed and loved him for and said nothing about — and when he finally drew back he got up, unhurried despite everything, and crossed to the desk, and returned with a small box he opened with hands that were, for the first time in the whole of your acquaintance with him, visibly trembling.
The ring was simple. He would have chosen simple; you'd have been surprised by anything else.
"I had a great many things prepared to say about it," he admitted, sliding it onto your finger with careful, deliberate slowness, his eyes moving between the ring and your face as though needing to witness both at once. "About the stone, and why I chose it. But I’m afraid I've forgotten every word of it."
"Tell me whenever you remember," you said. "It doesn’t matter."
Adam smiled and drew you back against his side, both arms around you now, one hand returning at last to your stomach as though it had simply been waiting for the rest of him to catch up.
You stayed there a long while, the lamp steady, the record turning through its last unhurried song, his lips finding your hair and then your temple and then, when you tipped your face up to meet them, your mouth again.
By the seventh month the flat had rearranged itself around you both in a hundred small, unremarked ways — a shelf that had been Hardy criticism now given over to something else entirely, a chair by the window that had become, without discussion, where he sat to read the case files he brought home, close enough that his foot could always find yours beneath the ottoman.
He stopped being subtle about the times he read to her. You caught him at it more often now, and neither of you pretended otherwise anymore.
"You'll spoil her," you told him one such evening, your hand over his where it rested against you, the new ring catching the lamplight when you moved. "Talking to her like she already has opinions."
"She’s like her mother. She already kicks at Hardy specifically," he said, with perfect seriousness. "I consider that an opinion."
"That's indigestion."
"It's discernment and a dashing good taste," he said, and pressed his lips, briefly and without ceremony, to the curve of you, and then, straightening, to your mouth, the kiss of a man who no longer needed to circle anything before he arrived at it.
You sat together afterward in the lamplight with the whole quiet, unhurried evidence of what you were building settled warm between you — his ring on your hand, his hand on your stomach, his voice still finding its way to both of you in whatever form the evening allowed — and thought that you had never, in your life, imagined a happiness with quite this particular shape.
A.N.: the lines of the poem Adam reads to sleepy reader are from Hardy's Great Things.
Warning(s): modernAU, +18 MDNI, established relationship, age gap, AFAB reader (no use of y/n), momentary erectile dysfunction because of stress, handjob, oral sex (m receiving), pinv sex.
A.N.: this work has some references to another small fic. This one can be read as a standalone, but it works better if you read this one first <3
He didn't notice at first.
That was the thing about stress with Maekar — it was the default condition, the water he swam in, he had been in for twenty-five years. A site inspection that had gone badly. A supplier who'd missed a deadline twice. One of his children in some low-grade crisis that required forty minutes on the phone and produced no resolution.
It was all just like a bad Monday. It had been fucking Monday for two decades.
So when it happened, he genuinely didn't clock the cause.
You'd come out of his bathroom entirely naked, hair damp, in the unselfconscious way you'd been doing for months now, and crossed the bedroom to find your clothes, and he'd looked up from the bed and thought — as he always did — that you were extraordinary.
And nothing else happened.
He noticed the nothing about four seconds later. It landed strangely. Not alarming exactly, just — wrong, in the way a familiar mechanism failing to engage is wrong.
He'd been looking at you naked for a long while. There had never once been a delay. There had never once been a question. His body had opinions about you that were louder and more immediate than any thought he'd ever had, and tonight the opinions were simply not there.
He said nothing. You pulled on one of his shirts and got into bed and fell asleep against his chest within ten minutes, and he lay awake for considerably longer than that, staring at the ceiling, doing math he did not want to be doing.
Forty.
That was the number. Forty. Which was not old. Which was demonstrably not old. He could still do a full day on site, still boxed, still carried you up a flight of stairs without noticing the effort. Forty was nothing.
Except that Aerion's joke about him being underwhelming, which he had thought he'd put down long ago after a very stupid month of pulling away, apparently had not been put down at all. It had simply been waiting for a piece of evidence.
He was fine for four days. Or rather, he was normal for four days, which was different.
He made coffee. Went to work. Fixed the tap in your flat that had been dripping for a fortnight. Answered your texts in his usual way. And thought about it approximately nine hundred times per day.
And then Friday happened.
You'd come over after class, and you'd kissed him hello in the kitchen the way you always did, and then you'd kept kissing him — the escalating kind, your hands sliding under his shirt, your mouth moving to his throat, that particular spot below his ear you'd learned about and had been weaponizing every time you had access to it.
And Maekar, who had never in his life failed to respond to that, felt his entire nervous system seize with something that was not arousal.
Panic, his brain supplied, unhelpfully.
He kissed you back. Kept his hands on your waist. But did not, as he normally would have, immediately reverse the situation and press you back against the counter and take charge of the entire proceeding, because his body was busy conducting an urgent internal audit and coming back with results he did not want.
You noticed. You'd been paying attention to this man for too long and the thing about Maekar was that he was predictable in exactly one context: he always, without exception, tried to take control. Always. A single minute to find you in a room, thirty seconds to have you against something once he had. That was the Maekar you knew.
And he wasn't doing it, so you pulled back and looked at him.
"Hey," you tried to get his attention.
"Mm," he said, which was not a word.
"What's going on?"
"Nothing," he said, too fast.
"Maekar."
"Long week," he said, and disentangled himself from you to reach for the kettle, which — for a man who had never once chosen making tea over having you on a kitchen counter — was so transparently, catastrophically suspicious that you actually laughed.
"You're making tea," you pointed out.
"I want tea."
"You have never wanted tea in your life."
"I want tea now," he said, with the flat dignity of a man drowning.
You crossed the kitchen, took the kettle out of his hand, and set it down.
"Talk to me," you said, trying to search for his eyes.
He didn't. He looked at the counter as his jaw worked. You waited, because you had learned over time that Maekar arrived at things in his own time and pushing rarely helped, but he was clearly not arriving anywhere on his own tonight.
"You've been off since Monday," you said, getting closer to him again. "You fixed my tap. You never fix things without being asked and then not mentioning it. You always mention it."
"That's not—"
"You've been weird," you said. "And now you want tea, Maekar."
Another long silence.
"Last week," he said, finally, to the counter and not to you, "you came out of the shower." You waited for him to elaborate. "And I looked at you, and nothing happened."
It took you a second to understand.
"Nothing?" you asked carefully.
"Nothing," he said, and the flat controlled fury in it wasn't aimed at you, was aimed entirely inward, and something in your chest went soft and careful at once. "I physically crave you every time I look at your body. And now nothing. And I've been—" his jaw locked and he finally looked at you. "I'm forty."
"You are forty," you nodded and agreed.
"That's not old."
"It isn't."
"It's not old," he said again, louder, to nobody but himself, and there it was the whole thing, the one that had never really gone anywhere since Aerion's stupid joke and the month he'd spent trying to remove himself from your life for your own good.
You didn't laugh. You wanted to, slightly, not at him but at the situation, but you didn't, because his face was doing something you'd only seen once before and it had ended with him disappearing for a month.
"Okay," you said instead. "Come with me."
"I don't need—"
"Maekar. Come with me."
You got him to the bedroom without much resistance, which was itself unusual, and pushed him gently to sit on the edge of the bed.
"Here's what's happening," you said, standing between his knees, your hands framing his face. "You've been stressed for three weeks. The work, Aemon's thing with his grades, the supplier who keeps missing dates. You've been running on four hours a night."
"That's not—"
"Stress does this," you continued regardless. "It's the single most common cause. It's not age. It's not me. It's not you being anything." You held his gaze. "It's your body being tired and your brain being loud."
He said nothing, but something in his jaw eased fractionally.
"So here's what we're going to do," you said. "You're going to lie back. You're going to close your eyes. And you're going to stop thinking, which I know is the hardest part for that stubborn, beautiful brain of yours," you tapped his forehead gently a few times with your index finger.
"I don't—"
"Lie back," you almost pushed him.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he lay back and you took your time with him. Started with his shirt, working it up and off, your hands smoothing over his chest, the scales at the side of his ribs, the dragon disappearing beneath him where he lay. His eyes were closed, his jaw still tight, his whole body carrying the tension of a man being observed and hating it in this moment.
"Relax," you said quietly.
"I am relaxed."
"Your shoulders are up around your ears."
A pause. His shoulders came down approximately one centimetre.
"Better," you allowed, and pressed your mouth to his sternum.
You went slowly. Kissed along his collarbone, down the centre of his chest and over the soft hair there, taking your time with a man who had spent all your relationship never once giving you the chance to take your time with him. Your hands worked his belt open, his jeans down, and you felt him tense.
"Stop thinking," you reminded him, against his stomach.
"I'm not—"
"You are. I can hear it." You kissed his hip. "There is nothing to think about. There is no test. I'm going to do this for as long as I feel like doing it, and if nothing happens, we'll go to sleep, and it will genuinely not matter to me even slightly."
Something in him shifted at that — a breath going out of him, the kind of release of a man who had been braced for the possibility of your disappointment and had just been told, plainly, that it did not exist.
"Okay," he allowed himself. Quietly.
"Eyes closed," you said. "Hands off. Let me work my magic."
You started with your tongue first at the soft weight of him, unhurried, no goal in it, your free hand tracing slow patterns along his inner thigh. Kissed him there. Took him into your mouth soft, tongue moving lazily, less about building anything and more about the simple warm fact of him and the fact that you wanted him regardless of what his body was or wasn't doing about it.
You felt his breathing change first. Then, about forty seconds in, the rest of him caught up.
You felt it happen — the thickening against your tongue, gradual and then not gradual, his cock filling in your mouth exactly the way it had every single time — and you couldn't help it: you laughed, a low warm chuckle around him that made his hips jerk.
"Don't," he said, rough, eyes still closed.
"I'm not laughing at you," you defended yourself, pulling off just enough to speak, your hand taking over. "I'm laughing because you spent four days panicking when you could have told me you needed a hand."
"It’s not something I’d—"
"Excuses," you sighed theatrically, and took him back into your mouth properly now, working him with intent, and the groan that came out of him was the first genuine one you'd heard all week.
You worked him thoroughly — your hand at the base where your mouth couldn’t reach, your lips around his thickness, tongue dragging along the underside of him with the pressure you'd learned by heart — and felt him go from tentative to fully hard in under a minute, his hand finally coming down to find your hair.
"Fuck," barely voiced.
"There you are" you said, pulling off, looking up at him through your lashes.
His eyes were open now. Dark. Looking at you with an expression that had lost every trace of the last four days.
"Come here," he said.
"I'm working."
"Come here," he repeated, and his hands closed around your arms and hauled you up the bed with the effortless certainty that had been entirely absent since Monday, and you laughed as he rolled you under him, and he swallowed the laugh with his mouth.
"Will you ask me directly if it happens again?" You asked against his mouth.
"Yeah," he agreed, entirely unrepentant, already working your jeans open and almost jerking them off of you. "Yeah."
You moaned at his roughness. "It’s very cute that you panicked when you thought about the possibility of losing this pussy," you teased him.
"Oh, I am not losing anything, princess," he said, and pushed two fingers into your wet entrance and you stopped teasing him altogether.
He took you apart with the focused, methodical thoroughness of a man reasserting something to himself, his mouth at your throat, his hand working you until you were gasping his name, and when he finally pushed his cock inside you it was hard and deep and entirely certain, no hesitation left anywhere in him.
"There," he said, low and satisfied, his forehead dropping to yours. "Fuck."
"Told you it still worked," you managed a moaning laugh.
"Don't," he said, and set a pace that made further conversation entirely impossible.
BFFs dad Maekar losing his mind because he is suffering from a stint of erectile dysfunction. Trying so hard to hide it from reader but winds up just making himself seem soooooo suspicious!
This was so much fun to write. Imagining Maekar spiraling because of not being able to get it up once and panicking (just to have a happy ending don't worry) was so funny. Thank you for making this request!!
You can find this work here!!
As a side note, the absolute queen of erectile dysfunction!Baelor and erectile dysfunction!Maekar is @/breakspearz. I highly recommend all of you to go read her works:
WHEN YOU CALL MY NAME, IT'S LIKE A LITTLE PRAYER (modern!Baelor x f!reader)
AND SAVE A PRAYER ('TIL THE MORNING AFTER)
And this beautiful thought she had about erectile dysfunction!Maekar
I desperately want to know how the bffdads would react if someone mistakes reader for their daughter instead of their girlfriend omg
Oh, this sparked a brilliant idea for a pair of drabbles!! TYSM anon 🧡
You were tucked into a corner table at a small café on a quiet side street, the kind of place with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and the low murmur of a slow afternoon, when the waiter arrived with your order. A young man, clearly nearing the end of a long shift. He set the coffees down between you, glanced between your faces with the mild, automatic friendliness of someone doing their job, and said, entirely without malice or forethought:
"There you go — and can I get your daughter anything else?"
Baelor went completely, utterly silent.
Not flustered, exactly. You knew him well enough by now to recognize the difference, the stillness that settled over him whenever he encountered something requiring careful evaluation before he committed to a response. His eyes moved once, briefly, to you, and then back to the waiter, and the silence stretched out long enough that the young man's easy smile began, almost imperceptibly, to falter at the edges at the wait.
"Ah," Baelor said finally. "No — she's my student, actually."
The waiter blinked, his pen hovering uncertainly over his notepad.
"I have to do extracurricular work," you said, matching his tone exactly, without so much as a flicker of hesitation, "to pass the exam, you see?"
You had expected, reasonably, that this would be the end of it: a brief, absurd exchange, a shared laugh once the waiter was out of earshot. It was not the end of it. Baelor, as it turned out, had no intention of stopping there.
"She's struggling with some materials," he continued, unfolding his napkin across his lap with an entirely straight face. "I find one-on-one instruction tends to be more effective than the standard lecture format. Thorough, but effective."
"Very thorough and detailed," you agreed solemnly, folding your hands on the table like a diligent pupil awaiting further instruction. "I've learned so much this semester already."
The waiter's smile had by now gone entirely rigid, fixed in place with the weight of someone trying to determine whether he had wandered into an elaborate joke or something considerably stranger. "That's — that's great," he managed. "Can I get you two anything else?"
"Office hours do tend to run rather late these days," Baelor said, turning to address this remark to you directly, as though continuing a private conversation the poor waiter had simply had the misfortune to overhear. "I don't mind, personally. I find the truly dedicated students are always worth the extra time."
"I'm very dedicated, right?" you said, with the utmost gravity.
"She is," Baelor confirmed, turning back to the waiter now, his expression a masterclass of academic sincerity. "Top of the class, actually."
By now the waiter's pen had stopped moving against the notepad altogether, hovering uselessly in mid-air, and at the table beside you an elderly woman had lowered the corner of her newspaper by perhaps two inches, listening with an expression of open, delighted horror that she was making absolutely no effort to disguise.
"I might — I should probably go check on another table," the waiter said, already taking one slow, careful step backward, his eyes darting between the two of you as though reassessing an exit route.
"Of course," Baelor said graciously, entirely unbothered, reaching for his coffee at last. "Do let us know if you ever want to research anything. I write excellent letters of recommendation, right?"
"He does," you said, and because you wanted to see the world burn for a moment, accompanied the sultry tone of your voice with a bite to your lower lip.
The elderly woman made a small, strangled sound from behind her newspaper that might have been a cough and was very clearly not a cough.
That, in the end, was what finally undid him completely — not the waiter's increasingly panicked expression, not your own valiant and rapidly failing effort to keep a straight face, but the sound of a total stranger visibly losing her composure over an entirely fabricated academic scandal that neither of you had ever intended to construct with quite this much detail.
Baelor's mouth twitched once, twice, and then failed him entirely, and he dropped his forehead into one hand, his shoulders shaking with the real laugh — low, helpless, completely undone, the kind that took him a genuinely long moment to recover from.
The waiter took the opportunity to retreat without further comment, his notepad still entirely blank.
"Letters of recommendation," you said, delighted, watching him disappear toward the kitchen at considerably more speed than the job strictly required. "You actually offered him letters of recommendation."
"I panicked initially," he admitted, still laughing, wiping at the corner of one eye. "After that, I simply — committed to the joke."
"You've clearly been sitting on the material for years."
"Two decades in academia," he said, gradually recovering himself, though the smile hadn't fully left his face, "and absolutely no useful external outlet for it whatsoever until now."
"That woman over there is going to report you to a department that doesn't exist."
"Let her try," Baelor said, still grinning, reaching across the table to take your hand in his. "Honestly — it's the most fun I've had at office hours in my entire career."
You were deep in the lumber and tile section of Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon, arms gradually filling with the small unglamorous purchases a bathroom retile required when you finally managed to flag down a clerk. He looked barely nineteen, visibly exhausted in the way of someone working a retail shift squeezed between morning classes and whatever came after, his name tag slightly crooked, his enthusiasm running on fumes.
"Yeah, I can point you and your daughter to the aisle you're looking for," he said, already turning on his heel to lead the way, entirely unaware of what he'd just set in motion.
For a second, nothing happened at all. Then you turned slowly to look at Maekar, and found his jaw working in that specific way it did right before something in him decided whether or not it was going to be reasonable about a situation; a slow, visible tightening that you found, privately, almost unbearably funny, and that the clerk, several feet ahead and still oblivious, was about to discover was considerably less funny from his end of things.
"Does she look like my fucking daughter to you, boy?" Maekar said, and his voice had dropped into something flat and low and entirely without warmth.
The clerk froze mid-stride.
You watched the realization move across his face in real time — the dawning, horrified understanding that he had badly misjudged something, followed immediately by the desperate scramble of a nineteen-year-old trying to locate an exit from a conversation that had become genuinely dangerous.
He opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again, and in the way of someone who has already lost control of what's about to come out of him, said the single worst sentence available to him in that moment.
"N-no, sir," he stammered. "She's really pretty."
The silence that followed had actual weight to it — the kind you could feel settling over the aisle, thick enough that a woman two shelves over paused with a box of tile spacers halfway into her cart, sensing something was happening without quite understanding what.
"Maekar," you said quickly, stepping neatly into the narrow space between him and the clerk, one hand flattening against his chest, feeling the tension coiled there like something physical. "He's nineteen. He's had a long day. I'm sure nobody needs to end up in prison over grout sealant."
Maekar didn't move. His eyes stayed fixed on the clerk, who had gone very still in the particular way of prey that has just understood, with total clarity, exactly how much danger it's in.
"I'm gonna need you to keep talking," Maekar said, to you, without once looking away from the boy in front of him, "Keep talking to me right now, because I'm having a difficult time not doing something I can't take back."
"We are buying tile," you described, the way you'd talk someone down from a ledge. "That is the entire scope of what's happening in this store today. We're gonna buy beautiful tile and install it together. And then we can order some pizza, just the one you like with extra pepper."
"He said you were pretty," Maekar said, your words clearly not working, "like that was supposed to help his fucking case. Like that was the defense."
"I am pretty," you offered. "That part technically wasn't inaccurate."
"That was never the part I had a problem with," Maekar said, and something in his tone made the clerk take an involuntary half-step backward, bumping into a display of caulk guns hard enough that two of them clattered to the floor.
Nobody moved to pick them up.
The clerk, apparently deciding that silence was his best remaining strategy, simply raised one trembling arm and pointed wordlessly toward aisle twelve, and did not attempt eye contact with either of you again for the remainder of the your stay at the store.
You made it to the car eventually, bags loaded, and Maekar dropped the box of tile into the trunk with considerably more force than the tile required, the whole car rocking slightly with the impact. You had to silently admit that it turned you on, just slightly.
"You good?" you asked, moving to the passenger seat.
"Fine," he basically barked.
"Maekar?"
"Fine," he repeated, slamming the trunk shut, and then, after a pause that suggested fine was very much not the operative word and with the exact same cadence the clerk had used: "She's really pretty. Like that was going to save him."
"He's a teenager. He panicked."
"So did I," Maekar admitted, coming around to the driver's side. "Difference is I didn't say anything stupid."
"You told a teenager you were having a difficult time not doing something you couldn't take back."
"That was not a threat. It was a statement of fact."
"You said it with your whole body, Maekar. You looked at him like a predator."
He got into the car. Sat there a moment, jaw still working, before muttering, mostly to himself, staring straight ahead through the windshield: "Daughter. We've got some years between us, fair. But not an entire fucking generation."
You suppressed the actual want of telling him that you were actually Daeron's age, but settled for an understandable: "I know."
"Kid needs glasses. And actual psychological attention," he started muttering.
"Yeah, drive daddy. I'm starving."
Maekar gave you a look that could have actually passed for a death sentence, but there was something underneath it that made you file it away for further inspection.
He finally started the engine and drove and it took the better part of twenty minutes on the road home before the tension fully left his shoulders — his hand finding yours at every red light along the way, like he needed the small, repeated confirmation that the afternoon had, in fact, ended without incident.
Idk why but I was reading the reader in the bffsdad verse and I kept thinking about reader and rhae being essentially a version of uptown girls, like not necessarily mother/daughter but something similar ish where thats just her tiny bestie and she loves her
Oh, absolutely. Here's the thing. As you said, this is not something maternal: nobody is trying to replace Dyanna; this is a genuine sisterhood build entirely upon honest affection and the need to drive Maekar a little bit more mad each day.
See, Maekar has never been able to say no to Rhae in isolation. She's the apple of his eye and one look from that girl is enough to undone decades of a man who otherwise runs his household like a well-managed site. But even that was manageable: one determined, stubborn like his father toddler against one very large and very soft-hearted father. Manageable odds.
Two of them together? Well, that's an entirely different equation.
Because now it's not just Rhae's pouts doing the work. It's her and his girlfriend's, entirely coordinated. Extra ten minutes before bed, another episode of the series they both like, a dessert that Maekar had bought for himself and that he now had to watch being eaten by two different spoons, neither his... The man never really stood a chance once they met and started acting in unison.
And then there's the part that he doesn't admit out loud. On the weekends in which Rhae is staying with him, Maekar never gets his girlfriend's evening. He gets her presence in the house (her voice down the hall, occasional passing affection...), but the fully-engaged version of her belongs entirely to his six year old, and Maekar finds himself standing in the kitchen, mindlessly making coffee while waiting for his turn behind his youngest, who is objectively winning.
Any trace of irrational jealousy is quickly gone the moment he watches his daughter's face light up the second she hears a second pair of footsteps in the driveway, or when he watches as the two of them vanish into some elaborate scheme he's not invited to and won't understand even if he were.
Underneath that mild, ridiculous jealousy sits something else that his heart is very much elated with: that this is proof, realer than anything he could have ever arranged himself, that she's not just with him. She's completely in; the whole family, down to the smallest of its members.
Maekar gladly takes being briefly, comically outranked by his six year old for that feeling.
This is actually them plotting to drive Maekar mad, by the way:
The Fun Aunt (Baelor Targaryen x Wife!reader, Egg x Aunt!reader)
Request
A/N: I was originally going to make this an Egg x Step Mother!reader fic, but I thought this might be a slightly more fun twist!
Summary: When Maekar and family come to visit the Red Keep, there is always joyful chaos in the halls!
Word count: ~1.6k
Tags: 18+/MDNI, AFAB reader, (significant) age gap, younger!reader (20s), maternal/platonic relationship with Egg, just lots of fluff and cuteness, never proofread, (please let me know if I missed any)
“You little monkey!” The high pitched shout echoed through the halls to the solar in which Baelor worked diligently alongside his brother.
Maekar and his brood had come to Kingslanding upon Baelor’s own behest. It was to be his wife’s nameday in a few day’s time, and though the occasion did not usually necessitate such a grand visit, Baelor knew how fond his wife was of her younger nieces and nephews, and he himself would take any excuse to see his brother again.
Maekar looked up and met Baelor’s questioning eyes, his own eyebrow raising at the commotion. The sound of running feet echoed distantly, the slapping of boots and slippers on stone, and the loud mischievous laugh of Maekar’s youngest son followed by your own girlish giggle.
“You can’t catch me!” Egg called, the shout closer than before, and Maekar sighed, dropping his head with a shake, pressing his hand to his face. But Baelor only smiled, feeling a deep satisfaction at having the Keep so full of joyful noise.
Just as both men began to turn back to their work, the door burst open and a little bald head came rushing in. Egg skidded to a stop right in the centre of the solar, just shy of tripping over the edge of the rug, and stared wide eyed at both his father and uncle. Maekar was already scowling, one eyebrow rising dangerously, and though his uncle’s eyebrow mirrored it, he was far more amused than anything else.
Before anyone could say anything, the sound of hurried footsteps along the corridor reached them, and Egg jumped into action once more, rushing towards Baelor and rounding his desk just as you came sprinting through the open door.
You were a windswept vision. Your hair flew about and remained relatively contained only because of the intricate braids you kept. Your face was shiny, cheeks puffed from exertion, but your eyes were bright and alive, your face alight with the most beautiful smile.
“There you are! You silly silly goose!” You exclaimed, walking into the solar with a loud laugh.
“What the fuck is going on?” Maekar grumbled, glancing between his son (who was peeking out from behind Baelor’s chair with a bright smile and mischievous eyes) and his sister-in-law (who was pointing accusingly at his son).
“The little rascal and I were playing a lovely game of cyvasse - which I was winning might I add - when he swept all the pieces up into his arms and ran off!”
“You can’t win if there are no pieces!” Egg exclaimed, giggling brightly and hiding behind Baelor’s chair once more. He clutched the edge of his tunic up against his chest, creating a little pouch where many of the game pieces now resided (though many had also fallen along the way as he ran).
Baelor leaned back in his seat, settling comfortably as he watched you with a loving smile. You offered him one in return, blowing him a kiss before refocusing on Egg.
“That is called cheating!” You accused, pointing a finger at him as you moved forward to block his possible path around the other side of the desk. Egg only leaned around the side of Baelor’s chair and stuck his tongue out at you, giggling once more when you let out an exaggerated gasp and labelled him insolent.
“She is right, Aegon,” Baelor finally said, “it is cheating to steal away the pieces.” But before Egg could respond, Baelor reached around his chair with both hands and grasped onto the little boy. He dug his fingers into his sides, and though the angle was awkward, tickled the boy mercilessly.
“Uncle!” Egg yelled, squirming and squealing as he attempted to escape Baelor’s relentless grasp. You exclaimed triumphantly and quickly ran forward to join the onslaught, wrapping one arm around the boy and using the other hand to tickle at his stomach and ribs. All the pieces fell from his tunic and clattered on the floor, but the boy was too busy attempting to evade the hands grasping at him.
Maekar watched silently from the other side of Baelor’s desk. Though he did not smile overtly, there was something soft in his face. He watched Baelor smile as he leant around the side of his chair to watch you with Egg, he watched how his brother beamed at you and the boy. He watched how you wrapped Egg up in a hug and how your laughter flowed freely, how your smile was as bright as his brother’s. And he saw Egg, sweet little Egg who remained an absolute nuisance to his father, but looked so full of joy now. He had not seen Egg so free, so relaxed and… happy. He had not seen his boy happy in so long.
The scene reminded Maekar of his own youth, of all the moments spent playing with Baelor before they were both grown. He remembered such moments with Baelo when one chased the other through the halls of the Keep, or when Baelor was merciless with his ticklish onslaught, only yielding when Maekar had gone red in the face and could neither breathe nor speak. Those were some of the happiest memories Maekar possessed.
“I yield! I yield!” Egg finally called, panting and breathless, curled in on himself to escape the onslaught.
You and Baelor finally let go of the boy, the two of you falling into a heap beside Baelor’s chair, breathless and still laughing a little. You rubbed a hand over the top of Egg’s head and he shoved it away lightheartedly, slumping against the wall so he could catch his breath.
Baelor reached down and gently pushed a sweaty strand of hair out of your face, caressing your cheek with his thumb for a moment. You turned your head and kissed the inside of his palm without thinking about it, leaning your head into his hold and fluttering your eyes shut for a second before returning to the world around you.
“You’ve tired me out so early in the day,” you huffed, mock-glaring at Egg. He let out a breathless laugh, shrugging as if it could not be helped, and you reached out and lightly flicked him on the arm. “Oh!” You perked up with an idea then, offering Egg a conspiratorial and mischievous smile. “I’ve had rather a good idea, why don’t you and I go sneak some cake from the kitchens? I’m quite sure they’ve been practicing for my nameday feast, no doubt they will have scraps to offer us.”
Egg nodded enthusiastically then jumped up, practically buzzing with excitement again. He offered you a hand up, and you smiled kindly in thanks, taking one of his and the one that Baelor too offered you. You were careful to not step on the inside of your dress, and you petted the top of Egg’s head in thanks. The boy quickly made his way to the door but you remained at Baelor’s side.
“Would you like some secret cake?” You asked your husband cheekily, and he only huffed a chuckle in response. Baelor draped his arm around your waist and dragged you a little closer to the chair he was sitting in. He tilted his head back to look up at you and his eyes shined with love.
“I shall wait to enjoy it legally,” he answered teasingly, and you scoffed, murmuring about how he was no fun at all, but your smile betrayed you. You leaned down and cupped Baelor’s cheek, rubbing a little at the scruff of his beard, then gently pressed your lips to his, kissing him once and then twice until both of you were smiling into it and you could hear a grumble from Maekar and a loud “ew!” from Egg.
“Kissing my husband is not ‘ew’,” you responded petulantly, draping one arm over Baelor’s shoulders and turning to look at Egg who stood behind his father and scowled at you.
“Yes it is, you’re kissing my uncle. It’s disgusting,” he answered firmly, sneering a little.
“It is not ‘disgusting’!” You exclaimed even louder, then just to annoy him, you leant down again and pressed another kiss to Baelor’s lips (who could only chuckle and lightly shake his head at your antics).
“Eugh, it is,” Egg repeated once more, shaking his head and looking at you with exaggerated disdain.
“The boy is right, it’s fucking disgusting,” Maekar grumbled, shaking his head and looking back down at his papers, but you scoffed and let out a sound of indignation. But you could see right through the grump and knew that he was happy to see his family happy.
“I care not for your weak little constitutions,” you dismissed then, waving your hand in the air. “I will kiss my husband freely!” Baelor chuckled and patted your side, but Egg only stuck his tongue out at you, reaching for the door knob.
“Come along Auntie!” He finally called, tiring of your teasing and desperate to get back on the mission for cake. “Or I shall go have it all for myself and tell them to give you none!” Then he rushed through the door with a giggle. You scoffed and smiled in disbelief at Baelor, laughing loudly.
“The little rascal! He forgets that I am married to the Crown Prince, and that it is my nameday that the cake is being made for!” You smiled cheekily, pressed another kiss to Baelor’s cheek, then ran out after the boy, yelling something along the lines of “wait for me you cheeky monkey! I want raspberry jam with mine!”
guys. Guys please you're allowed to say big boy words. please we cannot keep just rolling with the sanitization of every space on the internet ok. you're allowed to say suicide. you're allowed to say porn. they're not bad words, they're just words.
also by ''censoring'' the words with silly spellings you're actually making it much harder for people to filter out. please just say Sex you don't have to call it woohoo like it's the fucking sims. i promise the Word Police aren't going to arrest you
Like, the men know she can afford it, but they want to take care everything whenever the bill comes up
Hi there! I think it's safe to say that neither of them would take genuine offense, but "not offended" covers a wide range of reactions that both Baelor and Maekar would have.
Baelor would laugh it off, essentially. Not dismissively — he'd never make her feel silly for offering — but there's a real, warm amusement underneath his response, because splitting the bill has simply never registered to him as the kind of thing that needs negotiating. He'd hear the offer, do the thing where his mouth twitches like he's deciding whether to take it seriously, and then just... continue reaching for the card, mid-conversation, like she'd made an observation about the weather rather than a genuine proposal.
If she pushed — actually pushed, not just offered once for politeness — he'd engage with it properly rather than just overriding her, because he takes her seriously enough to actually answer instead of deflect. Something like: I know you can afford it. That was never the question. Delivered gently, because for him this was never about her financial competence at all (there's a whole thought exactly on this matter for both Baelor and Maekar).
For Baelor, this is the same instinct that has him making her tea before she said she wants any, leaving the right book on the table without a note, noticing the small things and handling them quietly. Paying is just one more form of that. It doesn't cost him anything to let her contribute in other ways — and she does, constantly, just not usually across a restaurant table — so this specific hill was never one he needed to defend.
He'd just gently take it off her hands and keep talking about whatever they'd been discussing before, entirely unbothered, faintly delighted she'd offered at all.
Maekar is a completely different version of not-quite-offended, and it's very much the "I am not some scrawny kid who splits the bill with his girlfriend" energy, except he'd never phrase it like that; he'd just go slightly flat and slightly affronted, like she'd suggested something faintly insulting to his whole operating system, and pay anyway.
Again, it's not about her ability to pay, it's something closer to a matter of principle, wired in from a much older place than this relationship. Taking care of the bill isn't romance to him so much as it's just category; this is what he does for people he's responsible for, and yes, "responsible for" is doing a lot of quiet, possessive work in that sentence, and yes, he would absolutely bristle slightly at the idea that this particular form of care was up for negotiation, because for him it is definitely not.
If she pushed, he wouldn't really explain himself — that's not really how he operates — he'd just get a little terser, hand already moving for his wallet, something like don't, flat, never unkind to her, but definitely final. If she pushed past that, actually made it a whole conversation, he'd eventually get to something more honest and more grudging like I take care of what's mine. That's not up for discussion. Which sounds more clipped than it is, because underneath the bluntness it's really just Maekar's entire love language, just wearing a slightly gruffer coat this time because his pride's mixed up in it too.
Where it actually gets interesting is what happens on the rare occasion each of them lets her pay anyway.
Baelor would let it happen easily if she really wanted to. He doesn't need to be the one taking care of things every time to feel secure in what they are, so on a night she insists, he'd just say thank you, mean it, and move on, entirely charmed she'd wanted to.
Maekar would need a reason. Not from her, but from himself. A birthday, some specific occasion he can privately file as the one time that made sense, because the general rule staying intact matters to him more than any single bill ever could, and letting an exception happen without a good reason would feel less like flexibility and more like losing the thread of something he's not willing to lose.
Neither of them is actually bothered by her offering, in the end. They're just both, in their own very different registers, telling her the same thing underneath it: this is how I show you I've got you. Let me keep doing it.
SUMMARY: the only thing worse than falling for your best friend's dad was realizing he might actually feel the same way
modern!BFF's dad!Baelor Targaryen x f!reader // modern!BFF's dad!Maekar Targaryen x f!reader
look at your dad (such a dork) ♥︎/♦︎
an almost date with dada? ♥︎/♦︎
best friend's dad syndrome ♦︎♦︎
would you hate me if i sexted your dad? ♦︎♦︎
front row for my BFF's dad (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
wanted a pic with dada <3 (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
dada asked about my hobby (big mistake) (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
can you come pick me up, dada? ♥︎
property of the dragon ♥︎/♦︎
↪︎general thoughts of the AU
money dynamic
the relationship through the years
getting pegged?
regarding Daeron and his BFF
if reader had an STD
if reader got pregnant
↪︎ more thotsthoughts on pregnant!reader
↪︎ maekar and the unknown lactation kink he discovers by helping reader out
↪︎ the challenges that come with pregnancy and pp
brat tamer baelor? (not really a thought but a filthy scenario) ♦︎♦︎
maekar and porn
baelor's reader and jealousy (thought + scenario) ♦︎♦︎
differences between jealous!maekar and jealous!baelor
baelor and grief
maekar calling you a snack? (scenario) ♥︎
hearing how you praise them with your friends (scenario) ♥︎
guilty pleasures (SFW and NSFW)
teasing maekar at a party (scenario) ♦︎♦︎
brat tamer maekar
the cat they definitely didn't want
how the baelorings and maekarlings react to their dad's new gf
↪︎prompts from the grateful list
bathtub sex (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
romantic evening (Baelor) ♥︎
spanking (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
office sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
calming the other's anger with sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
calming the other's anger with sex (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
webcam sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
flirting (Maekar) ♥︎
break up/make up sex (Baelor) ♥︎/♦︎♦︎
daddy kink (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
double penetration (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
discovering boundaries/no foreplay (Maekar) ♥︎/♦︎♦︎
loud sex/getting caught (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
trying something new (object insertion) (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
comfort sex/discovering boundaries (Baelor) ♥︎ /♦︎♦︎
trying something new/anal sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
i love you (Maekar) ♥︎
bulge kink (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
↪︎ squirting (followup)(Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
(pre AU era) Silly, giggly sex (Daeron) ♥︎ /♦︎♦︎
↪︎ what dad and i have in common (followup) (Maekar) ♥︎
clubbing (Maekar) ♥︎ /♦︎
morning sex (Baelor) ♥︎ /♦︎♦︎
dancing (Maekar) ♥︎ /♦︎♦︎
inappropriate location (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
break up/make up sex (Maekar) ♥︎/♦︎♦︎
How would the other kids (Matarys for Baelor and the other 5 for Maekar) react when they find out about/meet their dad's young gf? especially since they're friends with their eldest siblings?
I can imagine that Maekar's daughters would like a woman in their life, but Aerion wouldn't be happy about it
I have been dying to tackle this one (you can see by the length that it has been sitting in my head for a long while)!!! It was actually so much fun imagining the ruckus of Maekar's home at the news of his father dating again. But let's go step by step.
On Baelor's side:
Valarr is already fully covered ground, but worth the one-line recap for contrast: warm, delighted, accidentally engineered the entire relationship by sending his dad to a bookshop. The easiest reaction on this list by a wide margin (except for the first time he clocked you were fucking his dad, that took him some time to adjust to)
Matarys is the real new territory, and he needs to be handled carefully, because his caution isn't about her at all.
He was very young when Jena died — young enough that most of what he has of her is secondhanded, told to him rather than remembered — and he has always processed new people the way his father does: politely but turning them over before deciding what to do with them. He's not suspicious of her at first. He's just not quick to let anyone in.
So the first few times she's around, he's polite and quiet and watches more than he talks, and it would be easy to read that as reluctance if you didn't know him. It isn't. That’s just Matarys.
What actually shifts it is small: she's there on an ordinary evening, he's got his plush toy tucked under one arm the way he still does at twelve and pretends he doesn't (it helps him regulate), and instead of making anything of it she just asks him what the toy's name is, and listens properly to the answer, and doesn't laugh. That's all it takes for Matarys. Within a few weeks he's the one seeking out the cuddles, curling into her side on the sofa the same unselfconscious way he does with his father, and Baelor watches this happen with an expression he doesn't fully manage to keep composed.
He asks Valarr, once, very seriously, whether this means she's going to be around a lot. Not anxious about it, just needing to know. Valarr tells him yes and Matarys nods, satisfied, and goes back to his book.
On Maekar's side:
Daeron is also already extensively covered, so briefly: complicated, mostly happy (never says the complicated part out loud), becomes the family's most enthusiastic and least subtle supporter once he's made his peace with it (he still has his moments, though).
Aerion, as you said correctly, is the complicated one. Aerion doesn't warm to people. That's not new information about him and it has very little to do with her specifically, because he's cold with most of the family's outside connections. What he doesn't like isn't her as a person so much as what her presence represents: his father, softer than Aerion has ever seen him, visibly happy in a way that Aerion — who has never been able to locate that kind of ease in himself — finds difficult to watch without some ugly feeling surfacing that he'd rather not examine.
His behaviour comes out sideways, but subtle enough — a comment about Maekar being with someone half his age, delivered with just enough charm that it could pass as a joke if you weren't paying attention. She knew it wasn't a joke. Maekar heard the real shape of it immediately and spent a month pulling away from her because of it, convinced he was doing her a favor. Aerion has never apologized for this, and probably never will, because apologizing would require admitting the comment meant something, and admitting that would require admitting quite a lot else besides.
He's civil to her now. Correct, even. He simply doesn't let her past a certain point, and everyone in the family has quietly agreed not to force it.
Aemon's version of acceptance looks different from everyone else's on this list, because he doesn't really do enthusiasm as a register; he does attention. He's the one who asks her real questions rather than small talk: what she studied, what her father did for work, why she's apparently the only person Maekar's ever let near his tools without a full safety briefing first. He listens to the answers properly, filing them away rather than letting them pass through him.
What actually settles it for him isn't one moment so much as an accumulation — watching her crouch down to Rhae's level without being asked, watching her hold her ground against Egg's teasing without ever making him feel small for trying it, watching her stay patient with Aerion in a way Aemon privately suspects he doesn't deserve. Responsibility is the frame Aemon understands the world through at his young age, and what he sees, watching her, is someone who shows up for the family the same steady way he is trying to, and that's enough for him.
Daella was always going to be the easy one, and you anon are completely right that it's partly about wanting another woman in a house this heavily outnumbered by men. She's not meeting a stranger and deciding whether to like her (she has been dying to have another woman on her side, and learning that his dad's girlfriend knows exactly how to tease Maekar as well wins her completely). She's already decided, months ago, and has simply been waiting for an excuse to make it official.
She loves to document everything. Every embarrassing moment Maekar doesn't know is being photographed becomes evidence in a running archive Daella maintains with the specific dedication of someone building a case file, and she will absolutely show it to her dad's girlfriend at some point, unprompted, entirely delighted with herself and with the reaction it has on him.
Egg takes about four minutes to decide he approves, mostly because he takes about four minutes to decide most things, and mostly on the basis of whether someone is fun to needle. She holds her own against his teasing instead of getting flustered by it, which he respects immediately and completely. He tests her a little at first — small pranks, questions designed to catch her off guard — and when she gives as good as she gets and even retorts, that's that, he's hers.
What people miss about Egg, because he's mischievous first and it's the loudest thing about him, is that he's genuinely paying attention underneath it. He's the one who notices if something Aerion said landed wrong. He doesn't always say anything, but he notices, and more than once he's the one who quietly changes the subject or redirects the room before anyone else clocks that it needed redirecting.
He and Daella argue constantly about who his father's girlfriend prefers, which is not actually a real argument, since the answer changes daily depending on who annoyed her most recently, and both of them know it, and neither will let it go.
Rhae is the simplest reaction on the whole list, because she's the only one young enough to have no complicated feelings whatsoever to sort through. She doesn't process this as dad's girlfriend. She processes it as someone new who is nice to me and also here a lot, and that's a category she has exactly one response to, which is total, immediate attachment.
She's the apple of Maekar's eye and everyone in the family knows it, which means the fastest way to Maekar's whole heart, faster than anything else on this list, was never going to be complicated at all. It was always just going to be Rhae, deciding within about a week that this was her person too, and saying so, loudly (just as her father is), to anyone who'd listen.
I just know that Maekar got his brat taming patience from raising Aerion
You can bet your ass that little shit was his testing ground. It helped Maekar being a more patient person (which was something he could have never imagined being) and now he's such a good brat tamer lol
It also helped him understand that he himself is (and has been all his life) a brat as well... He could definitely recognise some behavioural patterns from his childhood in Aerion. He even called his mother one time to tell her he was sorry 😂
