a night like this @jacaerysvelaryonn - Tumblr Blog

the light you draw by

pairing: jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader (House Tyrell)

word count: 4.9-5.1k

rating: mature (18+, minors do not interact)

summary: You have been wed to the heir of the Iron Throne for four moons and he has never once asked for what he is owed. Tonight, in the firelight of your chambers on Dragonstone, you show him your sketchbook and then you ask him for something yourself.

warnings: established marriage, unconsummated marriage, shy!reader, virginity, hurt/comfort, war-time angst (the Dance looming in the background), soft dom-ish Jace who asks permission for everything, heavy making out, implied/fade-to-black intimacy (nothing explicit on the page), aftercare, tooth-rotting tenderness, Jace is 20 and reader is of age

a/n: i think about the fact that jacaerys velaryon was, by all accounts, a boy raised by a woman who was married young to a man who did not ask. so he asks. that's the whole fic. anyway here are four thousand words about a sketchbook.

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Rain came to Dragonstone the way everything came to Dragonstone without warning, and with teeth.

You had never grown used to it. Four moons on this island and you still flinched at the sound of the sea throwing itself at the cliffs below your window, a hollow boom that came up through the stone and into the soles of your feet. At Highgarden the rain had been a kindness. It fell soft and warm and green-smelling on the orchards, and the gardeners had blessed it, and your mother had opened all the shutters so the smell could come in and sit down with you like a guest. Here the rain arrived sideways. Here it did not fall so much as attack.

You had learned to build a country against it.

The hearth in your chambers was banked high, three logs and a heap of coals, and the heat of it had pushed the damp back to the walls where it belonged. You had dragged the great carved chair closer than the servants approved of. You had a fur across your knees and another folded at your feet, and a cup of hot wine cooling at your elbow with the cloves gone soft in the bottom, and on the little table you had claimed for your own; a table meant for candles and prayer, most likely, before you came m, you had your things.

Charcoal, wrapped in linen so it wouldn't blacken everything it touched. A stub of red chalk from a Lysene trader, precious as a jewel and treated better. Three quills, two of them ruined. A pot of ink stopped with wax. And your book.

You called it your book as if it were a septon's tome and not sixty-odd leaves of coarse paper stitched between two boards by your own clumsy hands, when you were nine and had no better idea how books were made. The stitching had gone crooked halfway through. You had never fixed it. It sat crooked in your lap and you loved it crooked.

You were drawing the sea.

Not the sea as it was; you couldn't see the sea, the shutters were closed and barred and the sea was only a noise, but the sea as it had been that morning, at the hour when the fog broke and everything went silver, and you had stood on the walk above the dragonmont with your hands numb and forgotten to be afraid of anything. That was the trick of it, you had learned. You could draw a thing better from memory than from life. From life your hand cared too much about being right. From memory it only cared about being true.

You were on the third attempt at the horizon line when the door opened.

You knew the sound of it. Every door in the keep had its own voice and yours groaned low on the second hinge, and you knew, too, that he never let the guards announce him at his own wife's chambers, which had scandalized half the household and which he had not changed for them.

"You're still awake," Jacaerys said.

"So are you."

"I'm not allowed to sleep." He got the door shut behind him with his shoulder. "There's a raven from White Harbour and another from the Vale and Grandsire Corlys has opinions about both of them, and he wanted to give them to me at length, and then Rhaena said something clever about it and then he had more opinions—"

He stopped. He looked at the fire, and the furs, and the wine, and you.

"Gods," he said. "It's warm in here."

"I bribed the boy who brings the wood."

"With what?"

"I drew his sister."

Jace laughed; a short, surprised, tired sound, like a man who had forgotten laughing was one of the things his body did. He came the rest of the way in and dropped himself onto the low bench near the hearth without ceremony, which was one of the things you had first noticed about him and had still not stopped noticing: for a prince, for the heir, he sat down like a boy. He kicked one boot off with the toe of the other. He rubbed both hands over his face and left his hair worse than he'd found it.

You had been married to him for four moons and eleven days.

You still could not entirely look at him for very long, in the way you could not look for very long at a bright window.

He was twenty and he did not look it. He looked older around the eyes and younger around the mouth, which you knew because you had drawn him; badly, secretly, seventeen times and drawing a face teaches you it the way nothing else does. He had ridden out three times this moon on Vermax and come back each time with the cold still in him, and there was a new thinness to his cheek that made something in your chest fold over on itself. He was going to be a king, they said. He was going to be a king if his mother's war went well, and he was going to be dead if it did not, and he was going to be twenty-one in the autumn either way, and nobody in the whole of that black-and-red council ever once seemed to think of him as a person who got cold.

"You're wet," you said.

"It's raining."

"I know it's raining, Jace, I can hear it eating the castle." You were already pulling the fur off your knees. "Come here."

He blinked at you. You held the fur out and he looked at it, and then at you, and something went soft and startled across his face and you had to drop your eyes because of it.

"You'll be cold," he said.

"I've been sitting in front of that fire for two hours. I'm nearly a roast." You shook the fur at him. "Jacaerys."

"Oh, now it's Jacaerys." He came. He always came. He took the fur and dropped down onto the rug at the foot of your chair rather than any of the four perfectly good seats in the room, and settled his back against the chair's arm, and drew his knees up, and wrapped himself in the fur like a boy in a story who has been rescued from something. His shoulder came to rest against your shin. "There. I'm being sensible. Are you pleased."

"Very."

"You're a tyrant."

"I'm a Tyrell," you said, "we grow things, and if you die of a chill in my chambers it will be very bad for my family's reputation," and he laughed again properly this time, his head tipping back against the chair and you felt the laugh go through the wood and into you, and you thought: oh no.

You had thought oh no rather a lot, these four moons.

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Here is the thing that everyone in the castle knew and no one said in front of you.

You had been married in the godswood at Dragonstone under a wet grey sky, and there had been no feast worth the name because the realm was coming apart and half the guests had sent regrets that were really allegiances, and you had walked in on your father's arm in a gown the colour of a Highgarden rose. And afterward there had been a chamber, and a bed with the sheets turned down, and half a dozen women who had escorted you there with a great deal of laughing that stopped, one by one, when they saw your face.

You had been so frightened you could not feel your hands.

Not of him. That was what you could never make anyone understand; you were not frightened of Jacaerys Velaryon, you had spoken with him perhaps nine times before the wedding and he had been unfailingly kind in all nine, and once he had noticed you looking at a book of Valyrian maps and had it sent to your rooms without saying anything about it at all. You were frightened the way a person is frightened of a great height. It was not that you thought you would be pushed. It was that the drop existed.

He had come in and shut the door and looked at you sitting rigid on the edge of that bed with your hands in fists in your lap, and you had said, in a voice that came out about the size of a mouse, I am sorry.

And he had said, what in the world for.

And you had not been able to answer, and your eyes had spilled over, which you had promised yourself for a solid moon you would not do and he had crossed the room and not touched you. That was the part you thought about. He had crouched down in front of you at arm's length with his elbows on his knees so that his eyes came below yours, and he had waited until you looked at him, and then he'd said: Nothing happens tonight.

You had said, they'll expect—

They can expect, he had said. They can expect from the other side of that door for as long as you like. I'm not going to be a thing that happens to you.

You had cried harder, then, which had alarmed him considerably.

He had slept on the settle. He slept on the settle for eleven nights, which was ridiculous, since the bed was the size of a small orchard, and on the twelfth night you had said, this is absurd, you're the prince, come and sleep in your own bed, I promise I won't perish, and he had said, and if I— and you had said, you won't, and he hadn't. Not once. Not in four moons. He slept on his side of that great bed with his back a careful handspan from yours and some nights you woke to find your foot against his ankle and did not move it, and neither did he, and neither of you ever said anything about it in the morning.

Somewhere in there you could not name the night it happened the fear had gone quiet. It hadn't left. It had lain down. And what came up in its place was worse, in a way, because it was wanting, and wanting was so much less dignified than fear.

You had begun to notice his hands.

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"What is it tonight," Jace said.

"Hm?"

He tipped his head back to look up at you. From below, with the firelight coming up under his jaw, he looked like something off a coin. "You've had that book out. What is it tonight? Rhaena's dragon eggs again?"

"The sea."

"Which sea. We have so many. All of them are grey."

"This morning's sea," you said, and then, because he was still looking at you and the look had gone gentle and interested and it undid your caution every time, you added, "there was fog, and then there wasn't, and for about the length of a breath the water went entirely silver. Like the inside of a shell. And there was one line, right there—" you drew it in the air with your finger, the horizon, "—that was the only dark thing in the world. And I've been trying for two hours to get it and I can't, because if I make the line dark enough to be true the rest of it looks like nothing, and if I make the rest of it soft enough to be true the line disappears."

You heard yourself. You stopped.

"Sorry," you said. "That's — it isn't interesting."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"That." He shifted around so he was properly facing you, one arm hooked over the arm of your chair, the fur slipping off one shoulder. "That thing where you say a whole beautiful thing and then take it back before I can say anything about it. You've been doing it since Highgarden. You did it about the maps."

"I did not."

"You said the Valyrian cartographers drew coastlines from memory after they'd sailed them, which is why the shapes are wrong but the feeling of them is right, and then you said 'sorry, that's silly,' and I have thought about it approximately once a week ever since." He raised his eyebrows. "Two years, that was. So."

You stared at your book. Your face was very hot and it was not the fire.

"I talk too much when it's this," you admitted. "Drawing. My septa used to count."

"Count what?"

"How long I could go on about it before I noticed no one was listening."

Something moved across his face that you didn't like. "How long."

"Rather a while," you said, and shrugged, and tried to make it light. "In fairness I do go on."

"Go on, then."

"What?"

"Go on." He settled his chin on his forearm. "I'm listening. I'll say so if I stop. I promise I'll say so; I'm a terrible liar, ask my mother, she says my whole face gives it away so you never have to guess with me. Go on about the line."

And you had no defence against that. None. Four moons of careful, quiet, folded-up living and he undid it by putting his chin on his arm and saying go on.

So you went on.

You told him about the line, and about how it wasn't really about the line at all but about the fact that everything in a drawing is a lie about a relationship that a thing is only dark because something beside it is light, and if you make the whole page dark then nothing is dark, and this was, you thought, probably also true of a great many other things. You told him about the charcoal, and how the Highgarden willow made a softer black than anything you could get here, and how you had been rationing your last three sticks like a miser. You told him you had learned by copying the illuminations in your grandmother's psalter until she caught you and swatted you, and then by drawing the dogs, because dogs sleep, and a sleeping thing will hold still for you. You told him the first face you ever got right was the kitchen woman at Highgarden who used to give you the burnt ends of things, and that she had cried, and that you had not known a drawing could do that to a person, and that you had thought about it constantly ever since.

You told him you did not much like drawing gardens, which was a treason so specific to your house that he laughed for a full ten seconds. You told him you liked drawing hands best. You told him hands were harder than faces and better than faces, because a person arranges their face for you but nobody in the history of the world has ever arranged their hands.

At some point in all of this he had come up off the floor and onto the arm of the chair, and then with a slow, careful, thoroughly-telegraphed movement, the way a man approaches a horse he respects into the chair itself, because it was a great ugly Targaryen chair built for a man twice his width and there was room. And you had shifted to make room without thinking about it, and now you were tucked against his side with his arm along the back of the chair behind your shoulders, not around you, behind you, and you were talking about charcoal, and your heart was going like a bird in a box.

"Show me," he said.

You stopped.

"You've shown me the hound," he said. "And the Braavosi ship. And the one of Baela laughing that she stole and refuses to give back. And you've had that book on that table every night for four moons and you shut it when I come in."

"I don't—"

"You did tonight." No accusation in it. Just a fact, laid down gently, the way he laid down everything. "You shut it and you put your hand on it. Like this." He did a small, protective flatten of his palm.

You looked at the crooked stitching.

"There are — " your voice came out thin. "There are private things in it."

"Then don't show me those."

"They're not — " sorted, you wanted to say. They're not sorted, they're all in it together, my whole stupid mind is in it in order. "You would have to look at all of it. It goes in order. From the front."

"All right."

"Jace."

"All right," he said again, and he took his arm off the back of the chair, and folded his hands in his lap, and looked at the fire instead of at you, which was, that was the thing, that was the thing he did, he gave you the room. "Then don't. Truly. I'd rather have you than the book."

And that is how you came to hand it to him.

You would think about that later, when you were very old: that he got everything he ever got out of you by making it entirely possible for you to say no.

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He went slowly. That was the unbearable part. He turned every leaf as if it might tear.

The dogs first; a whole run of them, wobbly, a nine-year-old's dogs, and he did not laugh once, though you told him twice that he could. The orchards. The kitchen woman, who he studied for a long time and then said, "oh," very quietly, as if he'd met her. Your mother's hands with a needle in them. Your brother asleep with his mouth open, which did get a laugh. Twelve attempts at a rose that you told him were failures and which he said were not, and you said they were, and he said, "well, I'm the prince, and I say they're not," and you elbowed him.

Then Dragonstone. You watched him notice the change; the paper coarser, the line harder, everything suddenly all edges and weather.

"It's a different hand," he said.

"It's a different place."

He turned the leaf. Fog on the dragonmont. The bridge with the two crooked stones. A gull, three times. A study of the great hearth in the hall, all its carvings, which had taken you nine days and which he said was the best thing he'd ever seen a person do with a piece of charcoal, and you told him not to be absurd, and he said he was never absurd, which was a lie so enormous you both had to sit with it a moment.

Then a hand.

Then another hand. Then the same hand, three times on one page, and once with a signet ring, and once holding a quill.

Then a jaw, and the shape of a mouth, and a page with nothing on it but the way hair falls when a person has been out in the wind and has raked it back without a glass.

Then his face. Twice. Then his face asleep.

He stopped turning.

The fire spat. The rain went on doing what the rain did. You had gone entirely still with your hands closed around each other in your lap, and you thought, with a strange floating calm, that you might simply die of it, and that would be all right, they could bury you in this chair.

"This is — " His voice had gone rough. He cleared his throat. "This is me."

"Yes."

"Asleep."

"You sleep very still," you said. "Like the dogs. It's… that's a compliment, I don't know why I said it like that—"

"When?"

"Most mornings," you whispered. "You wake at the fourth bell. There's about an hour before that where the light comes in over the top of the shutter and I can see, and I — " You made yourself say it. "I've had rather a lot of practice."

He looked at the page. He looked at it for so long that you began to be truly afraid, and then he turned it over, and there was the last one, the one you had done four nights ago and torn nearly out and then not torn out: him at the council table with his head in his hands, and his crown, the little circlet he hated, set down beside him where he'd pushed it away.

"Gods," Jace said.

"I shouldn't have—"

"No, don't. Don't." He shut the book. He kept his hand flat on it, exactly the way you did, and when he turned to you his eyes were wet and furious and something else you had no name for. "Do you know what everyone else draws me as?"

"Jace—"

"A boy on a dragon. That's it, that's the whole of it; there's a tapestry in the hall, they've been at it a year, and I'm on the dragon and my face is blank, they didn't bother, because it isn't a face, it's a sigil—" He stopped. He breathed. "And you looked at me for four moons and drew me tired."

"You're always tired," you said helplessly. "Someone ought to have noticed."

Jacaerys Velaryon set your book down on the little prayer-table with enormous care, and turned, and took your face in his hands.

He did not kiss you. He stopped, with his palms warm along your jaw and his thumbs not quite touching your cheekbones, close enough that you could feel him breathe, and he said: "May I?"

"Yes," you said, and it came out on a crack, "gods, yes, you have to stop asking—"

"No," he said. "I really don't."

And then he kissed you.

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You had been kissed by him before. Twice, both times chaste once at the wedding, in front of two hundred people who were not really looking at you, and once in the yard when he came back from the Vale and forgot himself in front of the horses.

This was not that.

This was slow. It was so slow it was almost cruel. He kissed you the way you would draw a thing you loved, coming back and back to the same line, learning it, unhurried, as if you had years. You made a small sound into his mouth that horrified you and he made one back that made the horror completely irrelevant, and his hand slid into your hair and cradled the back of your skull like something breakable, and you thought: this is what hands are for. This is what I was drawing.

You do not know how you got from the chair to the bed. You know there was a moment, halfway, where you knocked the wine over and neither of you cared, and you know he stopped at the foot of the bed and put his forehead against yours and said your name like a question with no words in it, and you know what you said.

You said, "I want to."

And he said, "you can change your mind. At any point. At any point, do you understand me, not just now, not just before, during, in the middle, and nothing bad will happen, I'll just hold you and we'll go to sleep and I will not be disappointed in you, not ever, not once in my whole life."

You did not deserve him. You said so. He told you to be quiet and kissed you again.

He asked before everything. Every lace. Every clasp. This? — and your nod — and then his hands, careful and unhurried and shaking very slightly, which you found you loved beyond all reason: that he was frightened too, in his way, that his hands gave him away exactly as you had always said hands do.

There was a long while of only that. Of learning. Of the fire going low and the rain going on and his mouth at your shoulder and your name said into your skin over and over like a prayer he'd only just learned the words to.

And when at last you whispered yes, and please, and don't stop asking me things; he laughed against your throat, and drew the bedcurtain closed with one hand.

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Afterward the rain had stopped.

That was the first thing you noticed, when you came back to noticing things: the silence where the weather had been, so total that it rang. The second thing was that you were warm from your scalp to your feet for the first time since you had come to this island. The third was Jacaerys's hand moving very slowly up and down your spine, over and over, as if he had forgotten he was doing it.

You were lying half on him with your cheek on his chest and your leg thrown over his in a manner your septa would not have survived. Somewhere in the room a candle was drowning in its own wax and throwing shapes.

"Are you all right," he said. Very quietly. Not the first time he'd asked it.

"Mm."

"That isn't a word."

"It's a sound," you said, "sounds are allowed," and you felt him laugh under your ear, which was, you decided, the single best physical sensation available to a living person.

"Are you all right," he said again.

You thought about it honestly, because he deserved honesty and because you had noticed he always waited for the true answer rather than the polite one.

"I'm shaky," you said. "Not, not badly. Like after you've cried, or after you've been very cold and then got warm. And I feel—" You pressed your face into his chest. "I feel like I've been seen, and it's much worse than I expected, and I don't want to stop."

His arm tightened around you. He kissed the top of your head.

"I've got you," he said. "Sleep if you want. I'm not going anywhere. There's a council at the fourth bell and I have decided, personally, as the heir to the Iron Throne, that it can happen without me."

"It cannot."

"It can happen late."

"Corlys Velaryon will have you flayed."

"Corlys Velaryon has been married four decades, he'll understand better than anyone." He said it lightly, and then he was quiet for a while, and his hand went on moving on your back, and when he spoke again it wasn't light at all. "I have to fly out again. Eight days, perhaps ten."

The cold came in at the edges of the warm. You had known. Everyone knew.

"I know."

"I'll come back."

"You'd better," you said, "you're only half finished," and he said what, and you said, "the drawing. Your left hand. I've never got your left hand; you keep putting it under things," and he made a wounded noise and held up his left hand in the candlelight, turning it over, examining it as if it had betrayed him, and then he laid it flat on the sheet beside your face.

"There," he said. "Hostage. Draw it before I go."

"Now?"

"Well, it's there," you said reasonably, and he laughed so hard the bed shook.

You did draw it, in the end. Not then. Later, much later, in that grey hour before the fourth bell when the light came over the shutter the way it always did and he had gone under into the still, boyish sleep you knew better than anyone in the world.

You got up on one elbow. You reached over, quietly, and got your book off the little table and the last stub of Highgarden willow out of its linen, and you turned to a clean leaf, and you looked at him.

He was on his front with his face turned toward your side of the bed and one arm flung out across the space where you had been, palm up, fingers half curled. Reaching. Even asleep, even in the dark, even having got what everyone had been telling him for four moons he was owed reaching, and open, and asking.

You started with the hand.

You had told him, once, that a thing is only dark because something beside it is light. That nothing in a drawing means anything by itself; that it's all relationships, all the way down, and the whole art of it is knowing what to set beside what.

You had lived nineteen years being the light thing beside other people's dark. The quiet one. The Tyrell girl who did not speak at table. The one they'd counted, to see how long she'd go on before she noticed no one listened.

And now here, on this awful wet rock in the middle of a war that was going to try very hard to take him from you, someone had sat down on the floor at your feet with his chin on his arm and said go on, I'm listening, I'll tell you if I stop.

You would draw him a thousand times. You would fill this book and start another, and another, and the stitching would go crooked on all of them, and you would fix it on none. You would draw him crowned and uncrowned, laughing and grieving, on the dragon and off it, tired, always tired, always with his face on because someone had to notice, and it turned out that noticing was the one thing you had ever been extraordinary at.

The fourth bell rang out over the yard.

Jacaerys made a low complaining noise into the pillow, and his hand closed, gently, around nothing, and then went looking.

You put down the charcoal and gave it something to find.

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a/n: the tapestry line is me being unwell about the fact that history remembers him as a rider and not a boy. AND JACE SHOULD HAVE HAD A LITTLE CROWN TOO LIKE JOFF!! thank you for reading!! reblogs and tags are my bread and butter, i live in the tags. if you'd like to be added to a taglist for HOTD stuff, my inbox is open.

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#this is so beautiful #amazi ngamazing #jacaerys velaryon x reader #jacaerys velaryon #hotd