rare as the glimmer of a comet in the sky

✰𝓂𝒸𝓀ℯ𝓃𝓃𝒶 - 20 - she/her

[creganed]

to eat and be eaten | cregan & jace (m)

cregan x jace x ladystark!reader

summary: when the prince of dragonstone visits the north on a diplomatic mission, you begin to notice just how close he and your husband are. the last thing you expect is for him to set his sights on you, and for your husband to be content to let him see.

warnings (mostly in order of appearance): afab!reader, Mallister!reader, canon divergence (no dance, but it comes kind of close), discrimination? (reader is looked down on for not being northern), consumption of alcohol, canon typical views of gender and sexuality, sexual tension, piv sex, fingering, descriptions of m/m, implied emotional affair/leftover feelings between cregan and jace (reader isn’t super jealous and is MOSTLY into it), wet dreams, exhibitionism/voyeurism, threesomes, hot springs sex, dry humping, minor angst as a result of miscommunications (cregan is VERY emotionally repressed and has a hard time vocalizing his feelings as a result), oral sex, cucking, cunnilingus, implied gender envy (jace and reader), three way kissing (challengers style!!), m/m/f, blowjobs, sloppy seconds, perfume oil as lube, anal fingering, anal sex, cum eating, dom!cregan, switch!reader, switch!jace, top!cregan, bottom!jace

word count: 29.6k. don't ask me how.

a/n: alexa, play i want my boyfriends to kiss by ashnikko.

Matters of business and pleasure, Cregan had told you. Diplomacy.

Diplomacy was why Queen Rhaenyra was sending her eldest son to the North for a diplomatic tour on behalf of the crown. Her son, beloved in the North, by virtue of his friendship with your husband.

You had always known of the pair’s close bond. Years ago, when the continent was on the brink of war, Jacaerys had flown to Winterfell in hopes of reinforcing Cregan’s oath to his mother. He had hunted with Cregan and they had exchanged tales of boyhood. They had bonded so fiercely that they had made a blood oath. When Jace left, and the world remained right side up, so did their bond.

You had wed Cregan a year after, and came to know only of his dear Jace in  the form of their correspondences and a scar across Cregan’s left palm. It was endearing, to hear your husband speak so gently of his friend. 

Cregan had been made a man far too soon, in your mind. His tumultuous rise to lordship had yanked him out of being a boy straight into the world of harsh, emotionless Northern men, and had hardened him similarly. You hadn’t seen him smile–truly smile–until 3 months into your marriage. 

But as Jacaerys dismounted Vermax, and strode towards the small crowd of bannermen and servants gathered to greet him, you watched your husband light up. Cregan—who usually demonstrated as much emotion as a wet woolen sock left to freeze solid in the snow—had grinned like a boy, embraced his old friend in a tight bear hug.

And then the prince turned to you. 

His eyes passed you up and down, in a moment that felt both too slow for comfort and too fast to savor. His brow twitched, and then he glanced briefly at Cregan. The expression wasn’t doubt, nor critique. You wouldn’t come to understand the emotion in his gaze until later in his visit.

“Lady Stark,” He said gently, “How lovely it is to at last meet the woman who has warmed my dear friend’s frozen heart.”

He took your gloved hand in his. His gaze didn’t break from yours as he pressed a dedicated kiss to the leather. 

“Prince Jacaerys,” You answered, curtsying, “I could say the same to you. You were there first, after all.”

Genuinely, there had been no jealousy in your reply. How could there be? You loved Cregan as he was, but knew few loved Cregan instead of Lord Stark of Winterfell. Anyone else who saw into the window of Cregan’s soul was a dear friend of yours, no questions asked.

“Please, my lady,” He insisted, “Call me Jace. All of my friends do.”

WEEK ONE.

You noticed the intricacies of their dynamic almost immediately. It was not necessarily hard to miss, not even for the feeblest of minds. Anyone who had spent an hour in the presence of Cregan Stark knew he was a man of few words, with a disposition as icy as his homeland. There were very few things that brought him joy, and even fewer that brought him visible joy.

Jacaerys was one of those things. At his welcome feast, your husband had sat at the front of the room, you at his left, your guest of honor on his right. Feasts were only your strong suit in the planning stage. You ran the household in a highly organized manner and had mobilized the entire castle in preparing for Jacaerys’ welcome. Once the event came, however, you were happy to fade into the background. You were sure others would be happy too.

Tonight, all eyes would be on your visitor. To honor the occasion, you had worn one of your finer gowns for the affair—a warm, heavy silver gown with deep purple embroidery, displaying the joined colors of yours and your husband’s houses.

It was no surprise to you that the prince was happy to lap this attention up. He was heir to the Iron Throne, of course. He had been primed for all eyes pinned on him since birth. He radiated light—a light so bright it was contagious, transmittable only to your husband. 

In the two years of your marriage, you had learned one thing: smiling was rare. It was rare between the two of you, but the absence of a smile did not mean he was displeased with you–a trait you had struggled to cope with in the early days of your union. Cregan was naturally stoic and spent most of his time preoccupied with matters of state and the Wall. His brow and lip were always turned downwards. The weight of responsibility made it hard to do otherwise.

When he smiled, it was small, or it was the consequence of a gentle laugh. It happened most often when he was tired, when he had just woken up, when he was sated, or when he was full of love. They rarely lasted. He would fall asleep or get up, and you would be left trying hopelessly to render the moment immobile.

Smiling from Cregan was rarest in front of everyone. He was a master of composure, born from years of projecting security and worthiness of his claim to be Lord of Winterfell. Jokes did nothing. He did not sing songs with the rest of his men. Cups loosened his shoulders, but not his lips. Not until after he was back in your bedchamber.

And yet, when he stood to make a toast, he smiled graciously. A hush fell over the room as he loomed over the guests of the hall. An unexpected sight indeed.

Some would suspect flattery—but this was Winterfell, not Highgarden. Northerners were hardly men of lip service. Others would suspect graciousness—no, Cregan Stark did not need to flatter his guest, but he did need to show the Prince of Dragonstone that he was welcome in the North.

That would leave only honest, unabashed happiness. From Cregan Stark. Warden of the North. Something few expected. And while you knew the prince was one of your husband’s favorite people, you couldn’t have expected that he would be smiling at his welcome feast during his toast.

“To all gathered here tonight,” Cregan’s voice boomed across the hall, “Let us all raise a toast to our prince, and to his mother. Treat him as you would your fellow Northerner in these coming weeks. Drink, eat, rejoice. Long live the queen!”

“Long live the queen!”

Cups were raised to the future king and his mother. Ensuing cups were filled, and refilled. Once he sat down, Cregan seemed content to sit between his wife and his prince and let them lead the conversation. Jacaerys was incredibly easy to speak to. He regaled you with tales of his correspondence with Cregan, life on Dragonstone, his childhood in the Red Keep. Every now and then, Cregan would interject, with a comment, a rebuttal, or an inside joke, which would send Jace into fits of laughter, especially as the prince sank deeper and deeper into his cups.

Cregan and you continued drinking too, albeit Cregan handled his wine far better than you and Jace. Not that he was impossible to sink. You could see his eyelids growing heavy, his shoulders dropping the tension, his body settling into his chair as the night progressed. Your laughter grew higher in pitch and frequency. The hall was warm and welcoming, something rarely felt this intensely in your home. While you had grown to love Winterfell over the past few years, you knew that its doors opened this widely for a very precious few. This was a welcome that had to be earned.

The party remained lively. The singers took up a spot in a far corner of the room, and the men took women into their arms to prance about the open space.

“Do you indulge Lady Y/N in dance at these feasts often, Cregan?” Jacaerys asked, and you stifled a laugh. 

“He would sooner take the black,” You joked, “And besides, Cregan is a fine warrior, but a terrible dancer.”

Cregan raised an eyebrow, but didn’t argue. “I’m glad you find this insufficiency of mine humorous, wife,” He conceded, before looking at Jacaerys, “I seem to recall you are fond of dancing.”

You smiled, looking at the prince gleefully. “You dance?”

He bobbed his head up and down, noncommittal in his answer. “I wouldn’t call myself a dancer, necessarily. I’ve learned the dances at court.” His expression turned smug. “I am certainly more capable than he is.”

Cregan scoffed, shaking his head. “I should have pledged for Aegon. Look at how you repay me.”

You stiffened at Cregan’s remark, only to relax when Jace burst out laughing. Cregan’s eyes were warm. Swallowing down your nervousness, your gaze flickered between them both. The Year of Tension—the final year of the late King Viserys’s life, and the two moons following his death where the realm teetered between peace and war—had been three years past now. Many still grew awkward when discussing the crisis of succession. Evidently, not Jace, who scoffed right back at your husband.

“And then what?” Jace quipped, “Vermax was right there. We would have made you the warmest Northerner in the history of the Seven Kingdoms.”

The prince moved his eyes back to you. “Come, my lady,” He said, standing and extending a hand, “If my friend will not indulge you in a dance before the night is over, then the pleasure shall be mine.”

You looked at his hand, and recognized a scar matching your husband’s. He led you to the dance floor, with no protests from Cregan. He seemed to watch you both with a deep interest. Jace faced you, and allowed you to come to him. One hand placed itself on his shoulder, and when you lifted your palm, he brought his to yours. A moment later, his hand landed on your waist, a gracious and polite distance between you both. A moment later, the music began.

“Are you happy to be back in the North?” You asked, beginning to move in tandem with him. Jace smiled.

“I am. It is an honor to be received in such a way, especially as an outsider.” 

He said outsider the way most Northerners said it. Like an insult. 

“You understand, yes?”

Shrugging as best as you could amidst the dance, you had to agree. “Many had their doubts when I wed Cregan. That the only woman suitable for Cregan Stark could be one bred by the North. Some were particularly vocal. To some, I’m a Northerner now. I’ve slowly started to think of myself as a Northerner. My children will be Northerners someday, and I will die in the North, most like.”

You paused, thinking about the friction you still came face to face with. “But some will always consider me to be an outsider. It can be admirable, I suppose. How united they are. Gods know they could use the unity down in the Riverlands.”

“Do you miss it?” He asked, breaking eye contact briefly to eye his feet. “Cregan told me you kept the Seven after your marriage. I imagine it must get lonely.”

“It can be.” You did the same, looking down at where your feet fit in between his as the dance continued. “But I am grateful. Many a husband would have demanded I take their gods instead. Not only did he welcome me to keep mine, but he has repurposed use a room in the southern wing of the castle as a room of worship. My own personal sept, if you will.”

“Do you keep a septon?”

“No,” You replied, almost sad, “There are few willing to make the long journey, only fewer wishing to preach to only one. Some visit, and stay for some moons. Not many.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” Jace nodded affirmingly. “I can see to it personally that one be stationed here at Winterfell, if you would like.”

Immediately, you shook your head. “This is the North,” You said resolutely, “Ultimately, I must respect their customs. The servants in the castle are wary of the septons when they visit—they are wont to preach. I’m sure you know.”

He chuckled. “Oh, I do. My brother Lucerys and I were often on the receiving end of the preaching, when we were boys in the Red Keep.”

You smiled at the newfound warmth on his face, different from the happiness at being in Winterfell. A vicarious pride, happy to gush about his family. “How is your brother?”

Jace beamed, ever the proud eldest son. “Luke is well, thank you for asking. He’s soon to be seven and ten, and is likely a constant in the hearts of the young ladies at court. He spends most of his days out on the Velaryon fleet with our grandsire and has become adept at sailing.”

“A true Velaryon, indeed. You must be proud of the man he’s become.” You smiled, “I’m sure he will one day make a grand Lord of the Tides.”

“I agree, and I am proud, as any eldest brother can be. Extremely so,” Jace said wholeheartedly. 

The music swelled. He knew the steps of this dance well, it seemed, and suddenly you seemed inclined to believe he had downplayed his proficiency. He spun you with one hand and grabbed your other hand mid-spin. The two of you were now facing the same direction, Jace guiding you with his hands on yours. 

You looked up, focusing back on Cregan. He was watching you both lazily, one hand around the goblet. Gray eyes shifted ever so slightly, and you knew he was locking eyes with you. He clenched his jaw. Your breath hitched, fighting to maintain your composure and remember the steps to the dance. 

I adore you, you wanted to call from across the room, keep looking at me like that and it will kill me from want, and I will die the happiest woman in the world. 

Jace let go of your hand, finishing the spin, returning to the beginning of the sequence of steps. He had yet to stumble or hesitate. When he pulled you back in, it was closer now. He exhaled, and you felt it on your cheeks.

“You are exceedingly humble, my prince,” You sighed, looking up at him, “You are extremely graceful.”

He hummed, hand landing back on your waist. “You are too kind, Lady Y/N. Besides, someone has to dance with you, yes?”

A giggle fell from your lips. “You say that as if it is the ultimate tell of a marriage—whether a husband will dance with his wife.”

“Not necessarily.” Jace shook his head. He spun you around again, and when you saw his face next, he too was looking at Cregan. “As long as you are suited to each other’s company. As long as his character fits yours—which by the sound of his letters, they do.”

You blinked, watching him watch your husband. He seemed oddly transfixed. “We are quite happy. A-after two years…” 

You craned your neck, searching for your husband. Cregan was still watching. This time, however, his gray eyes held just above you, over you. 

He was watching Jace. And when you looked back at Jace, he was holding his gaze firm. Subtly, his hand tightened against your waist. You hardly noticed, until you began to slow as the music calmed.

“...I believe we understand each other quite well.”

The music ended moments later. The couples around you came to a stop, and when the applause began, Jace finally looked back at you. He smiled, but his eyes were unreadable. 

“It brings me much joy, that you and my friend have a happy marriage. You are very lucky.”

“Thank you, my prince.”

He led you back to the table, and the three of you retook your previous conversation. Cregan had drained another cup by then, a servant stopping by to refill it as you and Jace sat back down. When you sat, his neck craned to stare deeply at you. His gray eyes shone in the candlelight, pupils wide and dilated. You could feel your heart skip a beat, waiting for him to say something.

“Yes?” You asked. He shook his head, raking up and down your figure. 

“Nothing, pet.”

He did this often. Staring just to stare. The closest thing to adoration he would allow himself in front of others. Any man could look at his wife. None of them could look at you the way Cregan did. A profound longing, soliloquizing with a silvery stare all the things he could never bring himself to say out loud.

The conversation picked back up, at Jace’s insistence. You tried your best to continue, to remain active in the conversation, but it was the point of the night where Cregan’s intentions were beginning to bleed through, thanks to the drink.

The most telling of all was when Cregan’s hand moved past his plate, past his cup, beginning to inch towards yours, and by the gods—this tactic of his never failed to hit you like a young maiden. 

How ridiculous it seemed, that he could exert such power over you. His hands rarely ever touched yours on nights like these. He would make a game of drawing his hand near and pulling away before he could ever actually touch you. Coming close and inching away, like waves lapping at the side of a ship.

You’d never have taken Cregan for a tease, when you first married. And you supposed, in a way, he wasn’t truly. Not in the original sense of the word. You rarely had to tell him off, rarely had to shove sneaky hands away. He didn’t grab at you in front of his advisors, for which you were grateful. But small things like these, in a hallway or at supper… 

The unfairly tantalizing push and pull of something as miniscule as whether or not he would touch your hand. A side glance without actually turning his head, one with hooded eyes from either the drink or the suggestion of something more, once he had you all to himself. Anything more than touching was always relegated to the bedchamber.

No, Cregan’s teasing lied mostly in the negative, the promise of more without ever even giving anything in the first place. Not until the only eyes placed upon you were his own. He loved these things, how he could see your pupils dilate or your breath catch. And when the time finally came, when his hands found their way between your legs, he loved the evidence of just how much he affected you.

Where they found themselves inevitably, at the end of the night. Once the lords and ladies had sung their goodnights to the three of you and welcomed Jacaerys back to the North. Cregan had led you up the stairs with a hand at the small of your back and had pressed you up against the door of the bedchamber the second it closed behind you.

Nights with your husband tended to reveal his more brutish nature and true strength, hidden beneath layers of furs. He could be loving and tender every now and again. But often, Cregan seemed to need to prove himself worthy of the Stark name. A wolfish nature would emerge on nights like tonight. Bite marks on your shoulders, breasts, hips.

Even then, he was rougher than usual tonight. You never complained. Not when he drove himself into you with a force that pushed the air from your lungs, using rough hands to push your thighs up to your chest, and slot himself between them. Not when he took a thumb to your pearl and swirled it in circles until you sang so beautifully for him. Not when he bent down to press a bruising kiss to your mouth, giving you a moment to recover before he parted and asked for “just one more, my girl. Let your husband show you how much he loves you.”

When he spilled in you finally, and lay his head on your chest, you racked what was left of your mind to wonder what may have triggered an appearance from the wolf. Whenever he was challenged, he liked to take it out on you. Whether the challenge had been issued by one of his advisors during council gatherings, a lesser lord at an audience, or by you during an argument, Cregan seemed to revel in using your body as an outlet to release his frustrations.

But who had challenged him that night? Everyone had smiled at him all night long, especially with his guest of honor at his side. There were no attempts to provoke him, not in front of Jacaerys.

Which left Jacaerys himself. Jacaerys, who landed just outside of Winterfell atop a hulking bright green dragon, who had temporarily displaced your husband from his pedestal of most important man of the room. You furrowed your eyebrows as you stroked Cregan’s sweaty hair.

“I had not realized the prince triggered such envy in you,” You murmured, looking up at the canopy of your bed.

“Jealousy?” Cregan spoke against the skin of your breast. It briefly sounded as though he was a child caught doing something he should not have been doing. 

“Aye,” You said gently, “You don’t get like this often. Only when you get angry, or jealous. Or if I work you up, which I cannot imagine I did tonight.”

“No, you didn’t,” He hummed, “Very well behaved. And the feast was beautifully planned.”

“Do not coo at me like I were a pup,” You grumbled, pushing gently at his shoulder. “Besides, I was not about to provoke you in front of your friend and our future king. Or do you think so poorly of me?” 

Cregan rolled off of you gently, and you puffed out a sigh when you felt him leave you. He propped his head up on his hand, the other tracing the curve of your breast. 

“No, and I know you wouldn’t. You didn’t work me up, love.”

“Did it anger you when I danced with him?”

“Anger?” Cregan shook his head, frowning as if you had just spoken in tongues. “I was not angry at all. Nor was I jealous.”

You scoffed. “You were looking at each other like two horned deer about to spar. What a fight that would have been.”

Your husband tilted his head. It looked like he was holding back a smile. “Is that what you think it was?”

“Don’t deny it,” You huffed. Cregan smiled now, waving his hand.

“There is nothing to deny, because it is not true. You misunderstand, love. You’ll see.”

And see, you did. But it was not unsettling.

By the end of the first week, none of it seemed strange to you. You didn’t think it strange when Jace accompanied you both on a tour of the armory, and Cregan’s fingers brushed Jace’s when Cregan was showing him how to use a crossbow thought to have belonged to Torrhen Stark’s daughter. Nor when Jace passed by your husband in a small hallway, and instead of waiting for precedent, for Cregan to step to the side for a Prince of the Realm, Jace took it upon himself to brush past, gently nudging Cregan to the side by brushing his hands along Cregan’s waist. 

What befuddled you was that even through all of this, you never felt a drop of jealousy. Even when you noticed the nature of Cregan and Jace’s relationship: the long bouts of eye contact, the unspoken conversations, the laughter, the way they seemed to orbit too close to each other. If anything, it only spurred curiosity. Every movement was now artwork for you to repaint in your mind. Every conversation became a dead man to dissect, and you the maester.

You waited, admittedly, for the twist in your chest, the urge to cling to Cregan, the ugly bloom of green in your heart that would turn your impression of the Prince of Dragonstone ugly and unpleasant. It never came. Instead, you were left with the strangest desire to push them closer. Like when you played with your dolls as a girl, and made your princess kiss her knight. You almost wondered if there was something wrong with you. 

Because there was no knight or princess to be seen here. In their place stood your husband and a prince of the realm. 

You sat with the doubt, but not for very long. Mostly because you had a spectre of a thought, one that could never be put into writing or spoken into words. A hunch. An inkling.

That if you truly were to push them closer, they would not protest.

Your husband was, for all intents and purposes, an emotionless wall of a man. Until it came to you. You could read him like a sailor could the stars. You had lived and learned his tells over the course of your alliance. The twitch of his lips, the flexing of the joints in his fingers. Whenever Jace was in the room, you could feel it. Taste it.

Jace would crack a joke, smug and wry. Bring up an old memory, or something they had discussed in a letter. His head would tilt back with an air of pride expected from the heir to the Iron Throne, and in a moment anyone else would miss, a fraction of a second, Cregan’s eyes would glance down at the span of his neck. 

Every now and then, if Jace veered too close, you could make out the smallest dimpling of Cregan’s right cheek. Immediately you knew what from: gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Because he couldn’t bite down on what he really wanted to. You knew this look—you had been on the receiving end of it at feasts that dragged on for too long, or council meetings that grew too boring.

What you hadn’t anticipated was the prince turning his attention to you.

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

The end of the first week came to a close in Cregan’s private study. Cregan had sent you off to bed without him, and together with Jace, they had opened an old cask distilled in Karhold many years ago. The final day of the first week had been slower, and had left time for the old pair to finally have some time on their own. 

The conversation began as normal as ever. Debriefing the first few days here at Winterfell, rehashing memories, discussing politics and logistics. Until Jace decided to change the subject.

“Your wife is a wonderful woman,” He said genuinely, “Your match was well suited.”

Cregan smiled at his mentioning you. “It did not always feel that way.”

Jace swirled the liquor in his goblet. “Oh? No?”

Cregan sighed. “The arrangement was made before we ever met. We had no time to become familiar before—”

“Before you became familiar.”

“Not—Jacaerys.” Cregan flashed him a look, but it was not threatening in the slightest. Jace snickered, and Cregan felt his chest grow warm. 

How he had missed this. There were few in Winterfell with whom he could simply joke with, like this. He was always the most needed man in the room, here. Everyone wanted something from him, always. Not Jace.

Not in a way Cregan would have complained about, anyway. 

No, here in this room, he could simply be Cregan. No one to lord over or wrench power away from. He supposed all of that fell on his prince’s shoulders. He returned to the question he’d asked himself for years: who took all of that from Jacaerys?

“Lord Tully took it upon himself to arrange the match,” He continued, “I think Y/N’s father was positioning things to have her wed Lord Oscar.”

Jace raised his eyebrows. “He’s around Luke’s age, I’d wager. He was so young back then.”

“Aye,” Cregan agreed, “And not keen on taking a wife at that time, certainly not one several years older than he. No, Oscar Tully wrote to me instead, and one of my men who’d ridden to Riverrun once and held court with them all around that time told me she was beautiful, and I thought it time.”

“I take it Lord Mallister didn’t care which great lord got his eldest daughter, just that a great lord had her,” Jace quipped. Cregan shrugged, somewhat indifferent at the mention of his father in law.

“He seemed overjoyed at her match with the Warden of the North.” Cregan sat down opposite him, lost in thought. When he spoke again, his tone was downturned. Regretful. 

“We had a misunderstanding, the night of the wedding. I believe I’ve told you.”

“You thought you’d frightened her.” Jace crossed his arms, trying to recall the story. “And she thought you resented her.”

Cregan sighed, mournful of the entire affair. He pinched the bridge of his nose, recalling the distance he found in you back then. “Everything went… well enough that night. It was wonderful. Then in the morning I opened my big idiot mouth and said something I should not have. We did not lay together for another three moons after. She looked at me as if I had threatened to bite her head off.”

“You always were such a poet, Lord Stark.”

“And you have always loved to make fun,” Cregan bit back, straightening his posture. Jace finished his drink, and Cregan poured himself another one.

“She seems transfixed with you now,” Jace observed, “Always watching you. She is exceedingly… warm towards you. Though neither of you say it much.”

“Sometimes she is of fewer words than I,” Cregan conceded, “But there can be such joy in a shared silence when there is no pressure to fill it. We speak freely when we want.”

Jace was silent as he mulled over Cregan’s words. The prince looked over to where his friend was sitting, taking note of the fond expression on his face.  He opened his mouth. Hesitated. But pressed on nonetheless.

“I’ll admit, it’s not what I would have expected from you.”

Cregan tilted his head towards Jace, gaze turning firm. “This came because it was expected of me.”

Jace pursed his lips. “I would have expected someone more talkative than you. A bit more willing to push.”

They held each other’s eye, and the air turned tense. The topic was a seal that should have remained unbroken. Cregan took a deep breath. 

“Someone like you?” He asked, in that low gentle tone he took when he already knew the answer to the question he was asking. The seal gave way, peeling Cregan’s walls back until what was left was a man Jace had known much closer, once. Someone he remembered quite frequently, late at night. He lifted the goblet and drank, but did not look away. Cregan squared his shoulders.

“Have you considered that it may have been good for that moment in time,” He said, “But would not have suited me long term?”

“It was never suitable for either of us,” Jace countered, setting down the goblet, “And we did it anyway, Lord Stark.”

“Jacaerys,” Cregan mumbled, “You are being unfair.”

He had misstepped, he realized. “Do you take me for a spurned lover, Cregan?”  

Cregan stared back at him, wordless. Cold gray eyes that had been warm not five minutes ago caused Jace to reevaluate his words. At the realization, Jace shook his head. He held up his hands in truce, offering a small gentle smile to boot. “I do not mean to turn this into a grudge or an argument. Truly. I just wondered…”

He watched Cregan’s jaw clench when he trailed off, feeling something warm and familiar bloom in his chest.

“Wondered what, my prince?” His tone was gruffer, words clipped. This was dangerous territory. In another life, his teasing likely would have burst into something that would have had Jace’s toes curling, legs raised towards the sky.

His smile turned sly. “Your wife is beautiful,” He said, tracing his fingers up and down the intricate details of the goblet, “Any man can see that.”

“Jace.”

The prince licked his lips, watching Cregan’s nostrils flare. Already, he seemed to know what Jace would end up saying. How delightful, he thought. Another opportunity to tantalize him.

“Would you be willing,” He said slowly, “Would she be willing…?”

Cregan’s voice dropped a dangerous octave. “Jacaerys.”

He blinked once, twice. The subtlest fluttering of his lashes. “Yes, my lord?”

Cregan’s knuckles were white against the tip of the armchair. Jace had known those knuckles very well, once. He had committed the ridges of them to memory. He would commission sculptures of them for his own personal collection, if Cregan had allowed it.

A pity. If this was how Cregan reacted to Jace asking him to fuck his wife, he doubted he’d say yes to that.

Cregan drained his cup, standing. “I ask you to leave my lady wife out of this conversation. I would not leave her to the devices of other men in our own bedchamber. She would not allow it.”

Before he could move to leave, Jace stood, making quick work to block Cregan’s path to the door with his own body. Cregan froze, hovering dangerously close.

“Who said anything about our being alone?” Jace shook his head, grinning. “How unimaginative, Cregan. That I want simply to ravish your wife and make a cuckold of you in your own home.”

“Is that not what you’re asking of me?” Cregan said, voice dangerously close to a growl.

At this, Jace shook his head again. His smile widened, showing teeth that would strike if he had the chance, the permission. The permission could not be granted by either person in this room. They both seemed to understand this. It did not mean they wanted it any less.

“I was of the understanding that cuckolds do not participate. I would not want her without you there. I want both of you.”

If Cregan asked him to leave, he would leave. Leave the room, leave Winterfell. He would walk into the snow, climb atop Vermax, and return to Dragonstone at this very moment. If Cregan punched him, he would perhaps also welcome it. He was well aware of how out of turn it sounded, noble hierarchy be damned.

It seemed Cregan had not considered this a possibility. His mouth opened, then closed. He studied Jace’s gaze, seeming to look for any inclination that he may be joking. The entire time, Jace held firm.

When Cregan found none, his eyes travelled down to Jace’s heart-shaped lips. Jace’s heart hammered in his chest.

“One night,” Jace suggested, “The three of us. You and her, as the gods intended it. Her and I, you and me, as we intend it.”

Cregan took a deep breath, brows furrowing. His tone seemed to waver, simmering with apprehension. “Jace…” 

“One night, and I will never ask you anything of the sort again. I know you love your wife,” He insisted, “And ours is long past. But do you not also think back on how we once were? How good we could make each other feel, and wonder whether or not we could ever do it again?” 

“My duty is to my wife.” He looked away, but from here, Jace saw no denial. He craned his neck downwards.

“I would wager gold,” Jace murmured raspily, “That if I were to grab you right now, your cock would be hard.”

Jace didn’t move, but Cregan’s hand shot out to stop him before he could, wrapping against Jace’s slender wrist. Cregan was facing him again, and Jace lifted his head. How close they had drifted in the past few minutes. He could feel Cregan’s body heat radiating off of him. 

Cregan’s hand felt like a brand, heat starting at his skin and melting through his flesh until it burned at his bones. 

“Where has this greed come from, my prince?”

“Search your memories,” Jace answered, “I have always been like this. Only the last time, you bent me over in the middle of the Wolfswood to satisfy me.”

Cregan licked his lips. Jace watched the glide of his pink tongue with the rapt attention of a rabbit suddenly aware of a wolf. 

“Your… idea,” Cregan began, “It interests me. I must admit it.”

Jace smirked, but it was premature. Cregan let go of his wrist, and straightened his posture. He jutted his chin out, probably trying to feel even taller than he already was.

“I have never known my wife to look at another man, however,” He said, sounding rather proud at this. “Her eyes have never wandered, nor have mine. Our vows are resolute.”

Jace swallowed, starting to prepare to apologize, to patch his ego. He wondered how cold it was in the skies at this hour of night. 

“But we have never been issued a challenge of this sort,” Cregan finished, and Jace’s brows began to raise. 

“Challenge?”

Finally, Cregan smiled. It was small, lopsided. Jace felt his heart stutter, wondering how many times Cregan had given you this smile. What a privilege, to be on the receiving end of it for the rest of your days.

“If you can entice my wife,” Cregan murmured, “I will broach the subject with her.” 

“I’ll charm her. Just as I charmed you.”

Cregan shook his head. “You don’t know Y/N like I do. She has a will made of steel.”

“So did you, I recall.” Jace had done this once. He could do it again. He raised a hand slowly, placing it in the center of Cregan’s leather doublet. Jace pressed down, searching eagerly for a restless ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. He found it, feeling the beating of Cregan’s heart against a three-year old scar that spanned the middle of his palm. 

“All it took was some pouting and some wine. And you folded the moment I pressed my lips to yours.”

There it was, Jace realized a moment later. Looking at Cregan, however, he would not have guessed such an uneven pace.

“I will say again,” Cregan said, slowing down his cadence, “You—do—not—know—her.”

Gods, how familiar this felt. Jace loved to push. Years past, Jace would poke and prod at the sleeping wolf, hoping desperately to wake. His antagonizing would lead to a pay off in teeth-clacking kisses, a pleasing soreness in his lower abdomen, and bite marks on his nipples (and once, his left ass cheek).

“No, but I know you.” Jace leaned forward. Cregan smelled of pine and bittersweet liquor. “I know your methods. All I have to do is inspire. Create a fantasy worthy of making her thoughts stray.”

Cregan remained silent. This proximity was dangerous. Jace knew that Cregan could also feel the way the air moved differently at such a short distance. When he tried to meet his brown eyes with Cregan’s gray, he found them turned just below his nose. Jace swallowed.

The Lord of Winterfell watched as Jace’s lips pressed together to hum, then turned upward. 

“Besides,” Jace murmured, wanting so terribly to just lean forward and reunite. “I have already made your eyes wander. And it has not yet been a week since I’ve returned.”

Cregan bit his lower lip, and paused for a beat before stepping away. The sweet moment was gone, torn away, but deep down Jace knew that he had reached the end of this path. They could not pass this wall without crossing into the realm of dishonor. He wondered if Cregan’s heart was beating as hard as his own. 

And still, he grinned hungrily. Bracing. Willing. 

“What more can it be to make hers?”

WEEK TWO.

Whatever initial anxiety you’d had prior to the prince and his dragon touching down in Winterfell seemed to melt away as you became better acquainted with him. The first week had been largely focused on the North as a whole: Jace had met with representatives from the likes of the Dreadfort, White Harbor, and Bear Island. A small envoy had been sent from the Wall to discuss the needs of the Night’s Watch with the prince. One more grand banquet was held that week, the planning leaving you too preoccupied to join your husband and his guests. 

This second week, however, felt more focused on Winterfell. Thus, as the Lady of the household, Jace’s attention turned to you. You walked the grounds with him speaking of the logistics of granaries, food distribution, expectations for your servants.

Many men would scoff or roll their eyes at the womanly duties of running a household. Not Jace. He remained attentive, clearly listening, asking genuine questions. Others, when they made it this far, would take it upon themselves to saddle you with recommendations you did not need. You do not need this many servants to do the washing, they might say. 

And they would turn their lips if you answered genuinely: perhaps not, but I would rather have a few more servants than needed than to deprive these people of coin to feed their families. Winter is hard enough.

Instead, Jace would listen to you speak. He would mull it over, then ask. When you offered your rationale, he would consider it—actually consider it, not pretend that he valued your insight. 

“You are incredibly receptive, Your Grace,” You said, “Some men have very strong opinions on how I run my household.”

“What know I of running households?” He answered, tone tinged with offense on your behalf. “Much less Northern ones at the height of winter.”

“You would be surprised.” Your smile held no joy. “You’d think I was Dornish, the way they think I know nothing about a long winter.”

He tilted his head. “Have you ever challenged their notions?”

You sighed, tracing a piece of embroidery over your skirt. “The septons say grace is of utmost importance. I would rather turn the other cheek than argue.”

Jace frowned. “How heavy it must be, to carry all of it in silence.”

With resignation, you looked at him. The freckles across his cheeks, just below eyes tinged with empathy.

“It can be.”

Jace crossed his arms, rubbing them up and down slowly. Despite the furs draped across his shoulders, he still seemed cold. Or perhaps it was more for comfort. You couldn’t be sure.

“I held back like you, once,” He said after a moment of silent rumination. Brown eyes met yours. His dark, curly, rather un-Valyrian hair fluttered in the wind. 

“When the knife comes for you, holding it by the blade will only you more. There must come a time when you turn it on whoever you’re duelling with.”

You didn’t ask him what he meant by that. You didn’t think you needed to.

There was a refreshing frankness about him, one that was exceptionally rare around these parts. Many Northerners seemed to use honesty as an opportunity for jaggedness. Honest to a fault, particularly brutal at your lowest. Jace’s honesty was nestled in kindness. The intention behind it was entirely different. It was comforting and not reproachful. He did not seek to pick apart your every action and your sex was not immediately discrediting to him.

It was pleasing and surprising. He seemed to be molded by gentleness that you would not expect of a dragon prince, and seemed to genuinely like you as a friend. Not just as the wife of his friend and political ally.

They had to have spoken about you, you assumed. What man did not speak of his wife to his closest friend? What friend did not offer advice or insight in return?

Honesty was never lacking in your husband. He was not normally one to hide things from you, not unless he knew you’d delight in the surprise. That being said, there was a difference between honesty and openness. While Cregan was not lacking in the former, he certainly did the latter. Pulling truth from him was easy. Pulling the whole truth, however, and asking him to lay his emotions bare, was worse than removing an arrow from a wounded man.

So, whenever you wanted his truths laid bare, his heart on his sleeve, you waited until you both returned to the shared intimacy of the bedchamber. Right before it became too late, and Cregan blew out the candles so that you may both rest your heads together.

And so it came when he was sitting on the edge of the bed. Sitting behind him on your knees, brushing out his long, dark hair. His shoulders were slumped and his breathing was slow. 

Lax, your man. At rest from a world that demanded so much of him, with someone who demanded only his full self. Tonight, the latter was not the scarier option. 

“Does he like me?” The peace in the room was so resounding that your murmur felt like yelling into the void. “Do you know what he thinks of me?”

Cregan didn’t turn, seemingly content to let you brush through his hair. His low tone seemed weighed down with sleep. “Who? Jace?”   

“Hmm,” You confirmed, “He has been incredibly kind.”

“Has he, now?” He rumbled mirthfully. You frowned. He knew you had worried over the crown prince’s approval. Why did he seem to be teasing you all of a sudden?

“I… yes.” You worried at your lower lip, lowering the brush. The loss of sensation was what finally made him turn back to you. He had a smile to match his previous tone, but when he saw the unsteadiness in your brow, the nibbling at your mouth, his face changed. His eyes filled with warmth, and a hand came up to caress your cheek.

“Why would he not like you then, love? If he has been so kind, as you are telling me.” 

You looked downward, suddenly unsure. “I don’t know. I just… I want him to like me. I need him to like me, Cregan. He had a spot in your heart before I did. I cannot have us at odds.”

He shifted his position to fully face you now, pulling his legs onto the bed before pulling you into his lap.

“My anxious little wife,” He whispered, “So desperate for the approval she has already been given. One she never would have had to earn.”

“He likes me then?”

He shook his head, but not in denial. “He does. But I wish the opinions of others would not worry you so.”

“I care not for the opinions of others,” You huffed, “I care for the approval of our future king and your dear friend.”

Large hands caressed your sides, warming your skin through the fabric of your nightgown. You wrapped your arms around his neck, analyzing the details of his face. Ones you already knew but would be happy to stare at again and again. A small scar at the top of his cheekbone from sparring in his youth. The soft stubble on his chin. A mole near his jaw. 

“He’s quite taken with you, love,” Cregan whispered, tension in your chest releasing at his admission, “He says you are quite capable at running our home. He considers you gentle. Graceful.”

Your cheeks went warm. “Does he really?”

He nodded. “Beautiful, too.”

“Oh.”

He stifled a laugh. “Are you blushing?”

“I—no.”

“You’re blushing,” Cregan said, boyish and teasing, “I just told you Jacaerys Velaryon thinks you’re beautiful, and you’re blushing.”

You straightened your posture, trying to push yourself off of him. “Well, it is quite late. Let us sleep, husband—”

He finally laughed, and you wanted to smack him. He pulled you in closer, despite your squirming, and gave you a chaste kiss. “Worry not, Y/N. It does not offend me.”

“Enough of this foolishness, Cregan. It is time for bed.”

He laughed, reveling in your bashfulness. “You asked me—”

“Hush. Bed.”

Throughout the week, Jace’s attention remained fixated on you. Walking the grounds with you, engrossing you in conversation on a variety of topics, from history, to your taste in wines, to snickering about your husband’s habits. He seemed to slowly come closer as your bond grew. Standing at a respectful distance at the beginning of his visit. Closing the distance with every passing day.

It did not dawn on you until the end of your third banquet, halfway through the second week. The night grew rather late, again full of dancing, singing and well roasted meat. Drinking games accelerated the chaos of the night. Jace had even convinced Cregan to partake in one—a game of tongue twisters and limericks, which he had inevitably lost. 

By the end of the night, you were swaying on your feet. While Cregan was not, he was clearly not in possession of all his wits. You retired while there were still a few lords and ladies insistent on seeing the rest of the game through, Jace lingering with them.

His touch was innocent enough to the onlookers. Lingering on your hip, steering you up the stairs. A lord gently taking his lady wife to bed. How noble, how chivalrous. As you went up the stairs, yours and his steps seemed to echo a little louder than they usually did. 

And then, once the lull of the party was far away enough, you rounded a corner, and he pinned you up against an alcove in the wall. You froze, unsure what to do. You weren’t going to turn him down, but gods, you couldn’t think of the last time he tried to ravish you in an empty hallway where anyone could walk past. 

“You looked beautiful tonight,” He growled against your neck, “and I am the luckiest man in the world.”

“Cregan—what are you—” 

“What do you think, pet?” A hand slid down your side, finding your hip under your dress and hiking it around his waist. With a finesse you did not usually expect from him, he slipped past the hem of your dress. His touch trailed up your ankle, past your stockings and thigh, searching, searching, and oh, finding…

“Cregan,” You whimpered, trying to stay quiet as his fingers came to glide through your folds. Your hands clung to his back.

“Let me,” He pleaded, restrained and throaty that made you clench around nothing, “I could take you right now, if you let me.”

“They will hear—” He chose your protest to plunge a finger in, thick and teasing.

He brought his mouth up to your ear. “Let them.”

Your head tipped forward, back pressing into the cold stone of the wall. Your lips yearned for the skin of his shoulder, his collarbone, but he was still fully dressed. You chose instead to press your mouth against the fabric of his doublet, trying hard to stifle your keening as he explored your walls.

His fingers began to speed their pace, pleasure rolling up your body, starting at your core and travelling up your torso, down your legs. You let yourself imagine it, a deep shiver taking over your person

His lips took your earlobe into his mouth, suckling gently. You could feel him pressing against your thigh, and you furrowed your brow. Whatever madness had possessed your husband, it had spread to his fingers, and you gasped against the thick gray wool at his shoulder when he pushed another in. 

“Do you want me to?” He pulled you closer with his free hand, and you couldn’t hold back the cry that came with being impaled further on his digits. “To fuck you up against this wall, and let Lord Glover hear how good I make you feel?”

You couldn’t find your words, eyes screwing shut as you imagined what he was suggesting. 

And when you opened your eyes, you found you didn’t need to. Peeking from around the corner, in the dark, you saw him: dark curly hair, slightly dishevelled from a night of drinking. Dark eyes trained on your face. You could feel it, at the base of your spine, and it spiked when you realized who you were looking at.

“Fuck—”

“Tell them, Y/N,” He demanded, free hand digging into your side, as if he wanted to break past the dress and melt his skin into yours, “Tell them who’s going to make you cum like this.”

Jace stepped out from behind the corner, and when your eyes trailed downward, you could see how hard he was. He wanted you. You wanted him.

“I—”

Cregan bit down on your neck, and a cry wrenched from the back of your throat.

“Jace!”

You shot up in your bed, heart threatening to break out of your chest. Cregan stirred by your side, but did not wake. You clutched the blanket to your bare chest, remembering how the night had ended. The three of you had retired together after a third round of drinking games. You and Cregan had walked Jace back to the chamber he was staying in, and then when you returned to your own, Cregan had pinned you to the ground, hiked your skirts up and fucked you until the embers in the hearth burned low.

Your eyes drifted back to your husband, who looked so unbelievably peaceful at your side. He was naked under the covers, and you willed your breath to steady. A hand brushed your hair out of your face. Your voice was trembling as you whispered into the cold air of the bedchamber.

“Father, give me strength.”

You tried to ignore the dream. A figment of your imagination. All the time around your guest and his proximity to your husband had clearly caused a lapse in your subconscious. Yes. Yes, this is what you told yourself.

This was all happening in your mind. Jace was not really closing the distance. It could not be. 

At the end of the week, he took you to meet his dragon. Cregan had ridden to Wintertown that morning to settle a land dispute, and had left you alone in Jace’s company. The pair had joked with each other before your husband’s departure in such a manner that had you peeling your eyes to watch the twitch of gloved fingers against reins, the furling and unfurling of lips.

Gods, how they had crafted a work of art together. A mosaic of seemingly innocuous looks and turns of phrase. How you wondered what the grout that held it all together was made up of. The promises whispered into the tiles as they had dried. And whether there was still room in the center of it all, where you could carve perfectly sized shapes of your flesh and shove them in between.

“Mind your manners, my prince.” Sarcasm from Cregan was seldom heard, but Jace had unfolded corners of your husband you scarcely knew existed. His lips threatened to curl up as his men began to ride off ahead of him.

“Of course, Lord Stark,” Jace had answered, “I know how to share. Do you?” 

Cregan had said nothing. His fingers seemed to tighten their grip on the reins. A breath later, his eyes landed on you. You felt a ball of nerves grow in your chest.

“Take good care of our guest, wife. I’ll be back before dark.”

And then he left.

The guards had shown you where Vermax was resting—a large, empty barn meant to stack provisions tens of feet high into the air, emptied ahead of the prince’s visit to accommodate the large creature. Most days, the beast spent his time flying, stretching his wings, always returning to his rider and the attendants who had ridden up prior to Jace. A devotion you would never know. A blood oath Jace would rather die than live without. 

“Cold then, are you, old friend?” Jace asked Vermax, stroking his snout affectionately. The dragon leaned its head into Jace’s touch, letting loose a sound that sounded like a complaint. 

“Ever spoiled, my Vermax. I know, I know,” Jace cooed, speaking to him as if he were a pet cat and not one of the most powerful creatures in the world, “Only two more weeks, and then we can return to Dragonstone.”

He spoke to the dragon as if they drank together, or were hunting friends. Mouth tipped open in awe, you realized that that was what they were. Brothers spanning species. Metals forged together in the fire, into the ultimate weapon. Jace turned back to look at you, a smile spreading across his face as he took note of your expression.

“Come say hello, Lady Y/N,” Jace suggested, and you eyed the dragon warily. 

Women of the Riverlands knew how to hunt and how to respect the wild animals they hunted. You knew the likes of bears, deer, wolves. Quite literally, this was an entirely different beast. A being bred from blood magic and scales that glittered like emeralds. You had only seen dragons twice before this, and only ever from overhead. This was the closest you had ever come to one.

You took half a step before your body became too tense to move forth. “Y-your grace. Are you sure he’ll let me…”

“He can feel my trust in you,” Jace explained, nodding encouragingly, “We share an emotional bond. I trust anyone he trusts, and he the same.”

Vermax let loose an excited growl, and were your feet not glued to the ground, your bones would have jumped from your skin. Jace tipped his head back, laughing as if Vermax had told the greatest joke Jace had ever had the pleasure of hearing. 

“He can feel your apprehension, which he appreciates.”

Your brows furrowed, looking up at Vermax. His glowing, orange eyes peered back down of you, and you forced yourself to keep his gaze.

“He… appreciates it,” You said flatly, trying hard not to jump back “Well, I’d scarcely take joy in offending him.”

“Dragons consider gentle hesitation as a sign of respect,” Jace continued, still petting Vermax’s side, “Oftentimes those who have never so much as seen a dragon think they can tame them with their touch. It never ends well, I have seen it myself. They are not lap dogs, my lady.”

You wanted to laugh, looking back at Jace. “Are they not? I hadn’t realized.”

The Prince of Dragonstone seemed to be enjoying himself far too much for your comfort. He stepped away from the dragon, in your direction. “There is a fine line, funnily enough. Hubris aggravates them. Excessive displays of fear make them impatient.”

His smile faded, but his expression remained warm. Beckoning you closer. “Come. He won’t harm you while I’m here.”

Moving too suddenly around the dragon, in your opinion, Jace swept forward and closed the gap between you both. He stepped behind you, a hand coming up to the small of your back to guide you. The other traced your arm gently, starting from your elbow and ghosting down until his fingers wrapped themselves around your wrist. 

His touch was light. His palms were cold, calloused from years of dragonriding. He lowered his voice to a murmur, speaking from over your shoulder. 

“Here,” He offered, using his grip to raise your hand, “Let me help you.”

With Jace as your guide, Vermax lowered his head. You could feel the dragon’s hot breath warming the space, being pushed low with his exhales and moving up as the heat from within him expanded before rising up into the rafters of the barn. The smell of smoke filled your nose.

“Slowly.” Jace’s mouth was both too close and too far away from your ear. “Though he’s harmless, right now at least.”

“Is he as gentle as you, my prince?” You asked, and he exhaled–an almost laugh with such a specific sound you didn’t need to see him to know he was smiling again. He sounded closer now.

The emerald dragon was inches from you now, rumbling low. You could feel the sweat beginning to form in your hairline.

Jace’s lip pressed itself to your ear. Your eyes fluttered shut, and his voice lowered itself to a whisper. 

“Whoever said I was gentle, Lady Stark?”

Scales in your palm, pressing up into you. Fingertips at your knuckles, holding tightly. Your eyes opened, and it fell into place for you as you peered up at Vermax, now nuzzling into your palm.

“You are one,” You murmured, awestruck.

Jace nodded proudly, the movement vivid against the side of your head. “He is mine own brother in all but blood. Were one of us to die, the other would feel a hollow in our chest the rest of our days.”

“Does that scare you?”

This time, Jace doesn’t nod. You heard him swallow. He let loose a shaky breath, now too looking at his dragon. His hand prompted yours, and you began to scratch the tip of Vermax’s nose. Vermax let out a pleased huff, but it did little to assuage Jace.

“It is my worst fear,” The prince admitted, “One so strong I’ve lost count of the nightmares it has brought me.”

Your head turned to look at him then. Emotions danced in his eyes—pain, admiration, adoration, all for his dragon. He looked so young, still. Even if it was winter, and the sun was dull and dim, freckles still spanned his sharp cheekbones and angular nose. If you wanted to, you could probably count every single one. Gods, did you want to.

With a purse of your lips you realized just how close he was. Jace wasn’t looking at you, however. And Vermax, despite pressing into your palm, was looking at Jace. 

They have known each other for a thousand years, it would have seemed. There was some sort of conversation happening here you were not physically capable of being privy to. It was all too familiar, you thought, and your lips turned up before you could help it.

This drew Jace’s attention. He raised an eyebrow, smirking. Face to face now, still behind you. Pressing close. Too close. “What?”

“This is a talent of yours, Jace. Holding entire conversations with your eyes.”

He shook his head. “It is a bond between dragon and rider.”

Your eyes widened, gaze curious but not prying. “Oh? Since when is my lord husband your dragon, then?”

Jace looked surprised for a moment, before scanning your face. Dark eyes lingered on your lips a beat too long, causing your breath to hitch.

“Is that jealousy I hear, Lady Stark?”

Now you shook your head with a wry smile. “Not at all. I’m simply curious.”

Jace’s forehead tilted forward, ever playful. His breath fanned your face. “Ask away, then. I am an open book.”

“You may be an open book, Prince Jacaerys,” You murmured, blood roaring in your ears, “Yet my lord husband seals himself shut until you are at his side.”

“What can I say,” He whispered, nose ghosting across yours, “I’ve a gift for opening people up.”

If either of you moved half an inch closer, your lips would touch. This was an exquisite torture. Surely, this was crossing someone’s line. Yours, Jace’s, Cregan’s. At some point they merged. Stopped being lines and curved, woven into a circle. 

You exhaled steadily. Vermax, suddenly disinterested, stepped away. Jace didn’t let go of your hand as you lowered it. His other hand—when had it moved from the small of your back to your hip?

You were warm. The dragon was warm—surely, this was why. You should have stepped away. Jace should have stepped away. This was hardly proper.

“You and my husband share the strangest bond,” You pointed out, “One I’ve seldom seen between men.”

The statement was a question you didn’t need to pose. Jace hummed, raising his eyebrows. Goading. Expecting. The hand on his hip began to rise.

“Is this an accusation, my lady?” His low tone held no malice, hand tightened against your hip. The rise and fall of his chest pressed up against your back told you everything you needed to know. He wanted this as much as you did.

“Not in the slightest, my prince,” A third time, you shook your head, slower. More deliberate. Using the movement to brush the tip of your nose against his. A small smile graced his pretty lips, lips now so close to yours anyone from afar would think the worst of Lady Stark and The Prince of Dragonstone. 

His nose pressed harder into yours. Your mouth tipped open, nearly trembling with anticipation. Every second grew infinite.

“No?” Jace murmured, eyes trained on your parted lips, “What should I take it for, then?” 

He dragged a finger across your wedding band. You felt your mouth go dry.

An invitation, you wanted to say. A door I want you to open.

He would have kissed you. Or you would have kissed him. Someone would have stumbled in the next few seconds, you knew it to be true. Your blood was running too hot and the pupils of his dark eyes were too dilated. You were two objects in unstoppable movement in the direct line of each other’s fire. The collision would have been inevitable and ruinous and you would have welcomed it with open arms.

But then Vermax’s head snapped up, grunting at something behind you. Jace, feeling his dragon’s altered state, split from you. You jumped at both of their movements, perfectly in sync with each other. And when the pair of you turned, your eyes landed on one of your guards, who looked incredibly uncomfortable at the entire ordeal. 

“Y-your grace, Lady Stark,” He said, “Lord Cregan has returned.”

You cleared your throat, hands smoothing out your dress. At your side, the prince clasped his hands behind his back. He clenched his jaw, and any hint of his playfulness was gone. 

“Yes. Yes, of course,” You sighed, heart pounding, “Thank you, Ser Justin.”

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

The whole ordeal left you with an ever growing sense of anticipation and dread. At dinner—tonight a smaller affair between some of the higher ranking lords and ladies who had come to visit—you sat at Cregan’s side. He sat at one head of the table, Jace at the other. 

The table was long enough to where you could easily avoid conversation with him. You hardly spoke a word to him the entire evening. You could hardly speak a word to anyone. Somewhat naively, you hoped to make it through the evening without anyone noticing.

And then Lady Umber opened her mouth.

“You are rather quiet tonight, Lady Stark,” She pointed out, the table quieting to listen to her speak, “I hope you are not fatigued by the large number of guests.”

“Not in the slightest, Lady Umber,” You answered, painting on a smile, “The conversation flows so well amongst you all tonight I am happy to simply listen.”

“How glad I am that we are such a source of entertainment.” Her tone was dripping with knives disguised as niceties. “I take it after all these years we are still novel to you.”

You set your knife down, taking a deep breath. You glanced over at Cregan, who was eyeing Lord Umber with a silent urge to wrangle his lady wife. Lord Umber looked as though he was about to break into a sweat. You felt something take hold of you, starting in your chest and spreading through your shoulders.

Lord Umber stammered, “Wife—”

“Two years is a long time, Lady Miranda,” You said, trying hard not to stumble over your words, “Though I’m sure after all of yours, it feels quite short.”

Silence. Lady Umber’s eyes widened, and for half a moment, she looked like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing with no sound to accompany the movement. The rest of the table grew deathly still. The sound of silverware scraping against plates all but disappeared. 

Your eyes found Cregan’s again. Even he seemed surprised, but not angry. His stare held a subdued wonder, one brow raised in bewilderment. He looked across the table, and you didn’t need to follow his gaze to know who he was looking at. You swallowed, unsure of what to say or do. Everyone’s eyes were suddenly on you as the person who had taken control of the moment. And here you were, unsure of where to take it next. 

Thankfully, you weren’t the one to decide. 

Jace snorted so hard into his goblet of wine that it broke the tension entirely. He was bright red, having held back so hard from laughing. But now, he could no longer handle it, hastily setting the cup down and covering his spluttering with his other hand.

Your mouth fell open, face burning profusely. Then, at your side, the impossible happened. Cregan coughed, looking down at his plate. 

Everyone’s heads turned to look at him. 

He nodded once, clenching his jaw. When he looked back up, eyes trained in the prince’s direction, his mouth twitched. 

And then he laughed. Once, twice, and before you knew it, his shoulders were heaving. 

Awkward laughter erupted at the table. Some unsure, some genuine. Most in disbelief. The chain reaction of your challenge, Jace’s choking, and finally Cregan Stark laughing. Actually laughing. 

When you looked back at Lady Umber, she was clearly fuming. But she had lost.

And perhaps, for the first time, you had pushed back. Refused to turn the other cheek. 

You sat an inch higher for the rest of dinner. And when you finally looked in Jace’s direction, you stared at him until he was the one to break eye contact.

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

“I cannot believe you said that.” Cregan lifted his elbows out of the hot water, resting back on the dry stone not submerged in the hot spring. You shook your head, thinking back on your behavior. 

He didn’t sound upset at all. Rather, he still sounded surprised. In awe. His head craned, the candlelight bathing him in a soft light that stole your breath. 

“I’m proud of you, Y/N. It was about time you bit back. You’re a wolf now, after all.” 

You leaned into his side, giving him a gentle peck on his upper bicep, just below his shoulder. 

“Thank you,” You mumbled against his skin.

You kept your face there, feeling the warmth of the muscle against your cheek and forehead. When your eyes closed, all you could see were a pair of brown eyes and freckles you wanted to map out like the stars. You cleared your throat nervously.

“There is… something I must ask you. About the prince,” You said softly, not meeting his eyes. Rather, you remained buried against his arm. Cregan made a face, brow quizzical.

“Has something happened?” He asked. You didn’t know whether or not to answer his question. When you remained silent, his mouth turned upwards. He considered the possibilities, before making a curious observation.

“You could hardly look at him during dinner. He couldn’t stop looking at you.”

Sometimes you wished he’d remain incurious. A fundamental impossibility, a pipe dream never to come true, considering your husband’s disposition. Much like the wall, nothing got past Cregan. He may well be the end of you one day. 

His lips found the crown of your head. You continued looking at the steam rising up above the water. When he spoke, his voice was low, raspy.

“Ever the seducer, our crown prince.”

Your head snapped in his direction, surprised eyes meeting his knowing ones. He gave a small half-smile. No anger, no joy. If anything, he looked sympathetic. As if Jace had also once pinned Cregan between himself and Vermax and delighted in blurring lines. Chest hollow, you were slowly realizing that it was more likely than not. You swallowed. 

Pity. From Cregan Stark. A rare sight, indeed. Though tonight certainly seemed the occasion.

“Has he made you uncomfortable at all?” Cregan asked, searching your face for fear or discomfort. Half of you wanted to kiss him breathless. The other half was moments away from bursting into tears. Any other husband may well have accused you of temptation. Brazenness. Whorishness. Cregan’s first concern was your own wellbeing. 

“No, not at all,” You said immediately. “He’s very… persuasive.”

At this, his expression morphed from a somewhat-smile to a genuine one. “May I ask what happened between you both today?”

A peace banner. There was no threat of anger from him, you realized, and you relaxed. Your shoulders sagged, guardrails you hadn’t knowingly put in place. He just wanted to know.

“I… We almost kissed,” You admitted, “He was trying to get me to pet Vermax, and he grabbed my hand, and then…”

“Almost?” If you hadn’t known better, you might even think he sounded disappointed. “What stopped you?”

You bit your lip. “Ser Justin came in to announce your return.” 

Cregan reached for your hand under the water. The air was not tense. Awkward, more like. Cregan was never one to talk. You were always the one to coax it out of him. When it was your time to be silent, it rarely proved productive.

“Are you angry?” You asked, placing your free hand on top of his. When you looked up at him, his gaze was warm, and he shook his head.

“Not at all,” He answered, “Were it any other man, maybe. But our prince has always been very… what did you call it? Persuasive. So long as you did not feel coerced, I won’t fault you. He may be our prince, he may be my friend, but you are my wife.”

His reaction was as jarring as it was relieving. You needed to know. You could hold back no longer. “Did you ever…?”

Cregan licked his lips, and hesitated for a beat. Eventually, he replied. “Him and I? …Yes.”

“How many times?”

“Seven. At least.”

Your eyebrows shot up. Cregan looked like he wanted to laugh. 

“Have you ever known me to be sated easily?”

You couldn’t argue with that, even if you wanted to slap that smug look off of his face.

“I suppose I’m just… curious.” You swiped a damp strand of hair off of your neck. “Clearly, you care a great deal for each other. I didn’t realize just how much.”

“He is our future king,” Cregan remarked, “I am Warden of the North.”

He said it as if this was meant to explain all of it. You didn’t want to tell him that you doubted Jace behaved this way with Jason Lannister, Warden of the West. When your face didn’t change, he sighed. 

“When we first met,” Cregan began, “We were on the brink of civil war. You remember.”

You nodded. “I remember when my father received the raven notifying him of Vermax being spotted flying over the Twins.”

“I had become so preoccupied with matters of running everything. All that… all the loss, all the anger, all the fighting. It made me numb. I truly hadn’t realized how it had… hardened me. When he came to Winterfell, I accepted him as my guest, and I renewed my vow to his mother. My men and I invited him to hunt for three nights—it was summer still. How could we not? He was the prince. Impending war be damned.”

You said nothing, waiting for him to continue. “None of us expected any fun. The mood was bleak. We hardly knew him. But he put on his best spirits, and he charmed us all. He was smart, gracious. Humble, which none of us expected from a southern prince.”

Cregan’s mind was seemingly far away, tongue darting out to lick his lips. “And one night, we’d all had too much to drink. Everyone else had gone to bed. The fire was burning low, and he was sat right next to me. He looked so… pretty.”

At this, your eyes softened. “It just happened.”

“It was so easy to speak to him. That never happens—you know my character, love. It didn’t even occur to me that I wanted him until he kissed me. Like I hadn’t even considered it to be an option.”

You thought of Cregan when you’d first met him. He was gruff, closed off, easily the coldest man you’d ever met. You’d been convinced he didn’t even like you until a few months into your marriage, when he stumbled into your bedchamber drunk mumbling, “I missed you today. And I wish I could tell you that without the drink.”

You thought of your husband as a little boy, small and unsure and stifled by an uncle who would rather be rid of him entirely, all for the sake of control of the North. What that did to him, what retaking his birthright would have entailed for a young boy forced to become a man far too early. What all of that and the death of a little brother could do. You pressed a kiss to his hand, and he hummed at the gesture. 

“Do you love him?” The question left you before you could think twice. When it was out in the open, you decided to press. There was no taking it back now. “If he had been the princess of Dragonstone, would you have asked for his hand?”

Cregan looked down at the water, where your hands were joined. He squeezed, gentle but insistent. Affirming. “I suppose… I suppose there may have been a time where I thought myself to be in love with him. I care for him still. Deeply, in ways that I cannot say I’ve ever cared for any other man. But I would not have married him, even if it had been an option.”

You tilted your head, and Cregan acquiesced without you even needing to ask. “I married you out of duty, yes? We’d never met until you arrived at Winterfell.”

“Yes,” You said, “And I thought you hated me.”

He sighed regretfully. “And I’ll spend the rest of my days making it up to you. But Jacaerys and I had different duties at the end of it all. I am Warden of the North. He is our future king. Those two titles cannot merge, not without one of us giving something up—which neither of us would do. Regardless of the circumstances, it would not have worked.”

You swallowed, a lump beginning to grow in your throat. Under the water, his hand with the scarred palm began to burn. “So you married me out of duty. But you love Jacaerys.”

“What? No.” The rebuff was immediate, bitten out. He frowned, and you bit down on your tongue. This had taken a turn you hadn’t wanted it to.

Here it was, you realized. That awful shade of green in your chest you’d wondered so much about, turning your heart from deep red to brown to a bright, flaming green. Suddenly, the image of Cregan and Jace seemed much less enticing. You wished you hadn’t thought about the green so, wished so badly to yank it from the root and toss it into the fire. 

“Gods, I wish I were better at this,” Cregan muttered to himself, before opening his eyes to look at you again. “No, love. You are not a placeholder. You’re my wife, and I love you so differently than how I loved him.”

He moved to be in front of you now, grabbing you by the shoulders. Forcing you to look at him, though the determination in his eyes did little to assuage your confusion.

“I would never have asked Jacaerys to marry me, not if he weren’t heir to the throne, not if he were a woman,” He told you, “Fundamentally, it would not have worked. The only way it would have worked would have been if Jacaerys were a Northern woman born to a noble house, bound to no one but his father. And then he would not have been Jacaerys, would he?”

You blinked. “What?”

“What?”

You opened your mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Officially declaring surrender, completely lost. You wondered if Cregan was more lost than you were—he seemed on the verge of distress. 

“So…” You shook your head, chest clenching. You took a shaky breath, hating the way your voice sounded on the verge of cracking. You started to pull away. “So then would you or would you not have—I… C-Cregan, do you not–?”

His grip tightened on your shoulders, head shaking furiously. “No,” He said with gritted teeth, “No. I love you, Y/N. My soul is yours.”

“But–”

He groaned, the top of his head leaning into your chest. “This isn’t… I don’t mean—fuck, I’m sorry.”

He pulled you into his lap, large hands cradling you gently. A position the two of you had taken a hundred times in this exact same spot. Instinctively, your arms wrapped around his shoulders, ignoring the low heat in your stomach that always pooled there. Your muscles knew what usually came next: joined bodies moving in such a way that caused water to spill onto the floor. Not now. It could wait.

When Cregan met your eyes, he looked pained. Like he wished he’d never spoken. Your husband, who never spoke much to begin with, who guarded his emotions the way a starved wolf guarded a kill. 

He grabbed your arm, then interlaced your fingers. His wedding band glittered in the light. The scar brushed against your palm. You didn’t want to think about how the ring could be taken off.

“I loved Jacaerys differently then, before I loved you. It’s different from the way I love him now,” He explained slowly, clearly searching and painstakingly choosing each word. “A-and both of those forms of love are vastly different from the way I love you, the way I’ve loved you since we married. I can’t quite put it into words. I don’t know that there are enough words in the Common Tongue for me to fully describe it, and I don’t know I’d be able to if there actually were.”

His face scrunched up, trying to articulate his thoughts clearest. Your heart was in your throat the entire time, but you dared not interrupt him.

Finally, his eyes opened, clarity interlaced with fear. He took a deep breath before he placed his final verdict. 

“My vow to him is my sword. My vow to you is my heart. And my heart will always come before my sword.”

Your lips parted, eyes brimming with tears. No longer from jealousy, or the fear that you were nothing to Cregan but a second choice. You brought a hand to his cheek and he pressed into it desperately, longingly. 

“Cregan,” You whispered, smiling, “I love you.”

His eyes closed at your touch, sighing when your forehead touched his. “I love you, and I’m sorry if candor escapes me. I do not mean to dishonor you, wife. It has never been my intention.”

“No,” You cooed, “No, thank you for telling me.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

Sighing, you gave him a gentle, chaste kiss. When you pulled away, you studied him. His gray eyes were darting frantically across your expression, searching for any leftover doubt or anger. A hand slid down his shoulder and landed just above his sternum, pressing into the skin, caressed by the hair on his chest. Underneath, where his heart lay, you could feel it hammering quickly. You almost wanted to laugh.

“Honesty is the only thing that scares you so,” You mumbled, “A wildling horde south of the wall would not cause your heart to falter this way.”

“I can slay a wildling horde,” He whispered, “Matters of my heart, decidedly not.”

Your hand lingered on his chest, the other beginning to scratch at the baby hairs at his nape. He hummed contentedly—this was one of his favorite forms of contact. Deeply soothing, comforting, one he had never known until you taught it to him.

“You needn’t answer if you wish not to tell me,” You began, “But can I ask how it’s different? Not the emotion. Rather…”

You cleared your throat, feeling an awkward heat crawl up your neck, reaching your cheeks and temples rather rapidly. You reached for his hand out of comfort, but grew even warmer when you saw the scar. “I know… how it works, between two men. Did he… did you…?”

It was his turn to watch you struggle for words now, and for all of his struggling earlier, he seemed quite amused to let you writhe like a fish. 

He bit back a grin. “Did I what?”

You scrunched your lips together, unsure of what to say. With every word, his smile grew and grew until he was holding back laughter. “Who… well. Cregan, I’ve no better way of putting it. Who was the scabbard, and who was the swo—?“

At last, he could no longer resist, and a laugh escaped him. He laughed and all the previously tense air evaporated from the room, and then he laughed some more.

“You’re wondering who stuck their cock in who,” He said once he’d settled, “Is that it?”

You gasped, swatting at his chest. He seized your hand, pressing it back into his chest, rubbing over your knuckles. “Vulgar man,” You chided affectionately, but then quickly added, “…Yes.”

“I had no preference. I think I would have enjoyed it.” He answered candidly, “But he seemed rather keen on being bent over. Not quite something you’d expect from a prince.”

“Oh,” You sighed, cheeks burning brightly, “Oh, I see.”

“He tried to kiss you.” Bringing the conversation full circle, his hands slid down to your hips. “And you liked it.”

Wordlessly, you nodded. Cregan huffed, looking as if suddenly everything made sense.

“What if I told you…” He eyed your lips, tongue darting out to wet his own, “The prince… propositioned me, shortly after his arrival?”

Your eyebrows shot up. “He attempted to seduce you?”

“Not exactly. I wouldn’t have allowed that to happen. No, he suggested the three of us share. That for one night, the three of us indulge in each other. You and I. Him and me. You and him.”

Oh. “A-and what did you say?”

“I wasn’t sure what to say. Ultimately, I told him I would make no attempt to force the idea on my wife unless you seemed interested. It would seem his grace has taken upon itself to lay his plan into motion, with or without me.”

“What a scheme,” You murmured. The heat in your lower stomach had returned now, spurred by the mental images Cregan had built you. Him sprawling Jace across the forest floor. The three of you, together, tangled in bedsheets. And Jacaerys Velaryon, beautiful Jacaerys Velaryon, lips swollen from kissing and covered in sweat.

“How unfairly he plays, and how he underestimates us, love. Do wolves not wander in a pack?”

You furrowed your eyebrows, thinking back to everything that had transpired over the past few weeks, now with the knowledge you’d just acquired. Jace’s history with your husband. His propositioning you and Cregan. 

If his attempt with Cregan had been anything like what he had done with you, you had to agree with Cregan’s choice of words. Unfair. But not necessarily cruel, or manipulative. No, this was a game to Jace, and he was eager for the two of you to play along.

“What say you now, husband?” You searched his face. “Now that his intentions are laid bare.”

He took a deep breath, clenched his jaw, and looked at you for a good long while. Then, his hands, still on your hips, pressed down, water moving around you. 

Your breath hitched, feeling the hardness of his cock catch against your core.

“I believe it speaks for itself,” He replied. “But only if you wish for it, too. You are my wife, and you come first.”

“You like the idea of the three of us together,” You remarked, almost astonished.

“I cannot lie.” His hips shifted upwards, and you gasped at the pressure, of the sensation of him catching against your entrance. “How pretty the two of you would look on your knees, with both of your lips around my cock.”

Your hips responded in kind, hands scrambling to find purchase on his shoulders. “Cregan.”

“Don’t lie to me, Y/N. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it, whether I made him beg while pinning him to the bed, same as I have with you. Which I did. Grabbed him by his hair and made him plead to let him cum.” 

Your breath weighed heavily in your lungs. Out of nowhere, the air seemed to weigh a thousand stones. The heat radiating off of the water was certainly not helping.

“Answer me,” He said softly, firmly. Looking for your voice, you nodded.

“Can you blame me?” Gritted teeth, fluttering eyes—two more things you could pin on Cregan. “You look at each other so lecherously.”

He huffed, eyes locked on your breasts as your hips began grinding down onto him in earnest. “We do not.”

“Oh, you do. I’ve been watching.”

“That’s all you ever do,” He grunted, “Maybe you should do more than just watch.”

“Something—ah—something would need to happen in order for me to do that.”

He grinned, yanking you closer. Before his tongue forced itself into your mouth, he said against your lips, “That can be arranged.”

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

WEEK THREE.

This week was a tour of Wintertown and some other villages nearby, and decidedly more laid back. There were no tourneys to be had, hunts to embark on, or great festivals to curate. Winter was here, and threatened to come for you all if you decided to spend more time outside than remotely necessary. 

Jace and Cregan heard petitions coming from the smallfolk that had travelled in advance to see them both. To speak with the Warden of the North was one thing, to do it while the Prince of Dragonstone was sitting at his side was another thing. They heard petitions for hours, and even insisted on staying an additional two after seeing the amount of people who had yet to be heard.

The week was strangely absent of them, then. You were preoccupied with your daily work and overseeing the planning of Jace’s farewell banquet, the grandest of them all. You saw them in small glimpses. Cregan in the morning or Jace at meals. Glimpses of both of them in the courtyard.

You weren’t sure if Cregan had spoken to Jace. How unfairly he plays, he had said, how he underestimates us. Jace had expected to be playing two different one-on-one games. He didn’t know that he was actually only playing one, and was outnumbered on the turf. 

So when Jace passed you by, you allowed yourself to look. Really look at him, and to let him see that you were looking. And when he noticed you one morning in the middle of an empty hallway, he stopped, stepped forward and took your hand in his. 

“Lady Stark,” he said. He raised your hand to his lips, staring intensely as he pressed a kiss to your glove. “You look lovely today.”

“Thank you, my prince,” You answered, “You look well.”

“I’m beginning to grow accustomed to the cold.” He rolled his shoulders back, seemingly at ease.

“It can be jarring at first.” You thought back to your first few weeks at Winterfell after the wedding. You weren’t sure if you’d ever be warm again, and that was at the end of summer. “We’ll make a Northerner of you yet.”

He laughed, and looked like he wanted to reply. His opportunity was stolen by a maid of yours, who rounded the corner and smiled when she saw you. 

“Milady! Giselle has found the linen napkins you were asking for,” She called, “Shall we have them pressed?”

You gave Jace a regretful nod of your head, before replying, “Thank you, Greta! I’ll be right over to have a look at them.”

It was then that she seemed to realize who she was in the presence of. She noticed Jace, and immediately turned bright red before stumbling into a curtsy.

“My deepest apologies, your grace,” She stammered, “I-I didn’t see—”

“Worry not, my lady,” He said genuinely, “The work of a maid is a never-ending list. Carry on.”

Her eyes flickered nervously between you and Jace. You nodded in agreement. “All is well, Greta. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

She left, clearly still feeling awkward. When she was gone, the air felt lighter. “Thank you for not frightening my staff, Jace.”

“I could never. I’d rather they blush than tear up, and I’ve done the former twice already.” He studied your figure.

“Twice…” You took a steady breath. “Do you plan on teasing my staff any further?”

“Not necessarily. But if we drop the pretense, I might do more than tease you.”

“What pretense?” You gave him a coy smile, tracing the threadwork on your gloves. “Is there a game afoot?”

He stepped forward. You stepped back, eyes never breaking away from his. At this, Jace tilted his head.

“You are so brave, suddenly.”

“And you are so bold, Prince Jacaerys. You are a fountain of temptation.”

He licked his lips. “How pretty it sounds, my name falling from your lips.”

“I’d argue my husband’s name sounds even prettier.” Jace raised his eyebrows, taken aback at your sudden bite. You laced your fingers together, before gracing Jace with a curtsy of your own.

“I must go now, your grace.” You stepped past him, aiming to follow Greta’s direction. You landed a foot away from him, and stopped to lean in close. 

“But perhaps one night you might listen for it before you leave us.”

You did not look back when you walked away. But you could feel him watching.

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

He took you up on it that night. You shouldn’t have been surprised. You had issued a challenge, and Jace had simply taken you up on it.

You were in Cregan’s study, going over some documents regarding the household budget. The fire burning behind you, he had brought you onto his lap to look them over. 

A knock at the door, following the heavy wood swinging open. You scrambled to stand, but widened your eyes when one of Cregan’s hands tightened on your hip, holding you in place. Jace stepped into the room, and for half a moment you wondered if you had been double crossed.

Then you craned your neck to meet Cregan’s eyes, and he nodded. Then, he looked at Jace. You watched his brow twitch subtly as he raked his gaze over the prince, and the grip he had on your side did not loosen. You stiffened, anticipation tinging your senses.

“Your grace,” Cregan greeted, “The hour grows late.”

“I can see that.” Jace jutted his chin in the direction of where you were sitting, zeroing in on Cregan’s hand on your hip. “If you are preoccupied, we can reconvene on the m—”

“Not at all,” Cregan interrupted, shifting you in his lap until you were perched entirely on his right thigh. “We were just finishing our own conversation. Was there something troubling you?”

“Safety, along the Kingsroad.” Jace shook his head and shifted his posture back and forth. “Though it seems you have something different on your mind.”

“Speak freely, my prince,” You murmured, setting the ledger down on the desk in front of you. Jace moved forward, his gait cautious. Still, there appeared to be a silent excitement about him. You looked down at your fingers. Were you trembling or were you just cold?

Cregan studied Jace’s trajectory, and when the prince’s path began to trace around the desk, he shook his head. 

“Sit, Jacaerys.” Cregan took an authoritative tone. He refused to look away as he grabbed your hand and placed it upon his chest. The hand over yours squeezed gently, and you forced your shoulders to loosen. “What can be done about the Kingsroad?”

You attempted to pay attention to what Jace was saying—something about harsher sentences for those caught thieving. You tried to think of what would come next. Something was building, surely. What, you could not be sure. 

This was entirely uncharted territory for you. Cregan had mostly kept everything contained to your bedchamber, as you tended to prefer. You’d had sex in this room once, because Cregan had been very convincing. Up until two weeks ago, you had never considered any man other than your husband. Here the challenger stood in front of you, a dragon prince with a gaze that might as well set you on fire just as much as the beast that had carried him here.

You knew that if you wanted to, if you were to stand up right now, or to push Cregan away, he would understand. He would lay the game to rest and promise to never pick it back up again. There was no threat of coercion or pressure from him. And because you trusted your husband’s judgment so well, you knew that it had to have been the same for Jace. There was not a single hair on your body that doubted the notion.

You could say no. You had every freedom to do so. But did you want to?

You’re a wolf now, Cregan had told you a few nights ago. And that same night, he’d also said, do wolves not wander in a pack?

You were a wolf. You were his Lady Stark, a woman belonging to the North now. Not because you were given to the North or because it had taken you. You had welcomed the becoming of your own volition. 

Before that you had been Y/N Mallister, and while eagles were just as fierce as wolves. But they were solitary birds.

And you and Cregan were one pack. 

Your body relaxed. You leaned into Cregan, who understood immediately. The game moves forward.

Jace continued speaking, but Cregan leaned into you. His eyes closed, and he took a deep inhale against your jugular, taking in the smell of your skin and perfume oils. On instinct, you leaned your head back, letting him take it in. Jace’s voice faltered, trailing off in the middle of talking about a scourge of muggings near the Dreadfort. Cregan opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

“We’re listening.”

Jace interlaced his fingers, fixated on Cregan nosing along the expanse of your neck. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Cregan insisted, closing his eyes again, “There seems to be a network of bandits along the stretch of Kingsroad nearest to the Dreadfort. Go on.”

Jace licked his lips, before lifting his gaze, meeting yours. You wondered whether the look in his eyes was jealousy or impatience. Sliding your hand from Cregan’s chest to the shoulder closest to you, you held firm. Surprisingly, that sensation of jealousy you had felt the night in the hot springs had returned. But you did not shy away from it, did not let it stop you from having your fun. 

You were putting your hands on your husband, you were hoping to convey, and Jace would lay hands on him and on you because you allowed it.

He certainly didn’t seem offended by it. He shifted in the chair, legs parting slightly. Then, he cleared his throat and began speaking again.

“Yes. Lord Bolton had told me when he spoke to me last week…”

Cregan’s lips met the base of your throat, and you inhaled sharply. Another hand gripped his shoulder, and your eyes fell shut. You could hear the crackling of the fire behind you and the depth of Jace’s voice, but the only sensation at the forefront of your mind was Cregan’s gently chapped lips just above your collarbone. He pressed a few kisses around the area before deciding on which spot he preferred best and anchoring there by opening his mouth and biting down. You let out a hmph at this, loud enough to cause Jace to falter once more.

“Lord Cregan,” He glowered, breath growing heavier, “You are forgetting yourself.”

There was no threat in the statement. Bait, more like. 

“I remember myself plenty.” Cregan spoke against your skin before biting even harder. You gasped, reaching for the back of his head to push him closer. “I’m sure you remember me too, my prince.”

You heard Jace shift again in the chair, but did not open your eyes. He asked, “What good is memory when the experience is right in front of me, here in the present?”

Your eyes opened when you heard him get up in the chair. He took one step forward before Cregan sat up straight to look at him dead on.

“No.” You knew this tone. This was Cregan at his most domineering, typically reserved for nights he wished to prolong the most agonizing pleasure you’d ever felt in your life. “No, you watch tonight. You will sit there while I fuck my wife, and you will thank me for it. You will thank her for it.”

You never knew you could feel your cunt jump, but then, you also didn’t know forcing the future king of Westeros to watch you fuck your husband had been an available option to you until about five minutes prior. 

Jace’s mouth fell open. He blinked stupidly. And then he laughed, sitting down. It was just as Cregan said, the near immediacy of his submission to your husband. Not quite something you’d expect from the Prince of Dragonstone.

He let loose a heavy breath, eyes growing darker. “Yes, Cregan.”

Cregan maneuvered you, forcing you to stand, nudging you towards the desk. You placed both hands on the wood, a slight bend to your back. Less than five feet away, Jace sat in the chair, fingers laced back together. His mouth was slightly ajar, tongue darting out to swipe across his lower lips. They were so pink, you wanted to finally kiss him. 

But right now, that was not a call you were allowed to make. Cregan had made the command, and it would hold in stone until he changed his mind. If he changed his mind. 

Cregan pressed his chest to your back, draping his broad shoulders over your frame. A hand snaked up your front, landing in a place where calloused fingers spanned your neck and your chin. He placed a wet, worshipping kiss just below your ear, and his hips rocked against your backside. 

He was halfway to being hard already. His hand slid down your neck, other hand meeting at your chest to fondle your breasts over your dress. His body heat was radiating off of him so intensely you thought the fire would probably be cooler. 

“Did you know I used to bend him over like this, love?” He asked in your ear, loud enough for Jace to hear. “One of the last times I had him, I took him just like this in the Wolfswood.”

Gods, that mental image should not have ignited what it did in you, but it did, and you keened at the thought. Jace chuckled.

“That’s exactly how I felt,” He said, lingering his gaze on Cregan’s hands.

“What a memory,” You panted, pushing your chest into your husband’s hand, “Describe it to me.”

“Why tell you when I could just show you?” Cregan pulled up the back of your skirt, holding it in place with one hand. Your entire body felt like a furnace, dragging your eyes up and down Jace’s person, listening for Cregan’s movements. You tried to conjure up the idea. 

The end of summer. Cregan’s hair had been shorter when you met him. Had his hair been shorter then, when he took Jace up against a tree? Was he just as muscular then? What about Jace? 

You could vaguely imagine two young men exploring each other in the Wolfswood, after weeks of learning and mapping out each others’ bodies. Two young men who had grown into the lords of the realm. The crown prince submitting to the Warden of the North. And if Cregan was truly showing you what had happened between the two of them, you could hear Cregan shuffling onto his knees…

He parted your legs, and your eyes widened when you felt his tongue lick at your slit from behind. He tugged on your dress, and you understood what he wanted. You grabbed the hem of your skirts, clutching the fabric for purchase. His giant hands grabbed your ass cheeks, spreading them apart for better access. You gasped, other hand sliding papers around the desk in search of something to hold you to the earth. You would float out the window otherwise. 

“For someone so terrible with words, he certainly knows how to use his tongue, doesn’t he, Lady Stark?” Jace flashed a smug grin at you as your head fell. He spread his legs again, and you saw it then—the bulge in his pants, and the twitching of his hands on his thighs.

You just watch. You groaned, fully realizing the extent of Cregan’s dominion over Jace, his actions, his body. How quickly he had retaken it.

“Lady Stark?” Jace’s voice rose slightly. “Do you agree? Now that he’s showing you how he prepared me for his cock?”

You nodded, biting back a whimper as Cregan changed the movement of his tongue, delving into you. “S-so good,” You said.

“He licked me just like that. He had some stubble that time. A most pleasant ache.” 

“Oh gods.” The room filled with the sound of your frenzied panting and the wet, insistent sound of Cregan’s mouth against your mound. This was perhaps the most aroused you’d ever felt in your life.

Jace laid back in the chair, eyes hooded. From under your skirts and behind the desk, he probably couldn’t see what Cregan was doing. But your sounds and his own experience had to have been indication enough.

“I bet I’ll be able to hear when he puts a finger in.”

“I wonder if—” You bit back a keen, “–if it feels the same for me as it does for you.”

“Probably not,” Jace mused, “Gods, that I could get wet like you. Poor Cregan’s face was drenched in spit by the time he was done with me. He looked lovely like that. So messy.”

Cregan hummed from behind you at the same time he decided to brush his fingers against your clit. Your voice jumped in pitch, and Jace nodded. 

“I was right.” He sounded so excited about his theory being proven true. He licked his lips. “I always loved how thick his fingers were. Perfectly r–”

“Rough,” You finished for him, nodding in agreement. You pushed your hips back against Cregan’s face, teeth catching your lower lip in hopes of staying quiet. “Gods, Cregan…”

“And when he finally puts his cock in, it’s such a relief, isn’t it? Like an itch you can’t scratch on your own. I swore I could always feel him in my stomach—”

“Fuck!” Your head tossed itself back, feeling a few strands of hair beginning to stick to your forehead.

“What do you want?” Cregan asked, voice muffled from between your legs. He pressed down on your clit even more insistently. The paper under your hands crumpled as your fingers curled. You weren’t quite sure how you were still standing. 

“Tell him,” Jace jeered, almost singing, “Tell your husband what you want him to do to you.” 

You opened your eyes again to look at Jace once more, and your lower lip trembled from the pleasure. Your hips began to rock against Cregan’s face. His other hand squeezed your ass in a manner you knew would leave bruises. You would never shy away from this. 

He shook his head back and forth between your legs, trying his hardest to get in closer. Your knees buckled, crying out his name.

“Tell him.” Jace’s voice was dripping with desire. “Beg him for his cock. Just like I did.”

“Cregan… Cregan, please fuck me.”

He pulled away, giving you a moment to catch your breath. You yelped when he smacked your ass.

“Soon, pet,” He said, too gentle for someone who had just been fucking you with his tongue, “Come for me first.”

And then he stuck his face back into your pussy, beginning to flick your clit in tandem with the rhythm of his tongue. You jolted, unsure if you were moving away one movement from the sheer overwhelm or into the other from the pleasure. You could feel your lower stomach growing taut, a building pressure underneath the tight, tight heat. 

Now, you were fully fucking back onto Cregan’s tongue, whines spilling from your lips. You could feel his hot breath on you. 

Your eyes cracked open and you landed back on Jace. You couldn’t count how many times you had done it already, but every time felt like the first. You would revel in him looking you up and down every single time. How ready he looked to strike had he not been shackled by Cregan’s words alone. 

You swallowed a lump in your throat, eyes fluttering from the pleasure of Cregan lapping at you like a parched hound. Trying your damnedest to hold eye contact and keep them from rolling up into your skull. Your jaw hung slack, searching helplessly for words to string together.

Jace didn’t need to hear them. He seemed to recognize what you wanted to ask for. Perhaps he had struggled to ask for it himself, then, and was taking it upon himself now to be merciful.

“Cum.”

The ecstasy started at the crest of your head and dripped its way down your spine in such a way that it caused your back to curl in on itself. You held back a sob, body trembling at the sensation.

Cregan stroked you through all of it, prolonging your agony. He hummed too, clearly enjoying the tightening of your thighs against his head and your moaning into the hot, heavy air of his study. He kept at it until you were actively trying to run from him, too much to handle.

He squeezed your thighs in reassurance before he stood. When he reappeared behind you, he grabbed you by the chin, smearing your face with your own release. His lips found yours in a sticky sweet kiss, tasting your own musk on his tongue. You moaned into his mouth, pushing back in a redundant effort to bring him closer.

When Cregan parted from your mouth, he smiled triumphantly. His chin was still gleaming.

He nudged your cheek with his nose. “And to think that was only the beginning.”

You almost keeled over. Cregan gripped your chin again, repositioning your head in Jace’s direction.

“You really haven’t moved,” Cregan murmured, almost surprised, “You’ve settled down since then.”

“I had my reasons for restlessness back then,” Jace offered, very much an understatement. He shrugged. “Times have changed.”

The next moment, he tilted his head. “Are you really not going to let me touch her? Or you?”

“If you keep up the act, maybe,” Cregan answered, wrapping his arms around your middle. Palming again at your chest. “If I could get her out of this dress faster, I’d let you suck on her tits. They’re divine.”

Jace hummed imaginatively, and you had to hold yourself back from ripping at your bodice. You rather liked this dress. 

“I told you, she’s beautiful,” Jace eyed your cleavage. He ogled your chest, which was still heaving from Cregan’s mouth, and now his hands.

“Yes, well,” You huffed, growing impatient, “She is right here. Ready and waiting.”

Cregan chuckled against your cheek, kissing the flushed skin before pulling away. “‘M here, pet. I’ve got you.”

His palm met the small of your back to bend you back over the table. Trousers were unlaced, your skirts pulled back up. Your breath hitched. You realized, once more, that this was actually happening. 

His weight returned to your back, slotting himself where he had so many times before. He moved against you like it was a birthright, like he knew this was where he belonged. The main difference was sitting right in front of you, painfully hard. Jace groaned quietly, his hands tightening into fists on his thighs. 

Cregan reached a hand back, and then you felt him at your entrance. Teasing you by sliding his cock up and down your slit. You clenched around nothing, desperate to feel him fill you. 

“Don’t tease,” Jace grunted, taking a deep inhale through his nose. 

And for once, Cregan was the one inclined to obey. His head squeezed through your entrance, and the two of you groaned at the pressure, at your togetherness. Cregan gripped your hips, and your head rolled back onto his shoulder. His eyes found yours, noses bumping gently against each other.

The solace he allowed for this brief moment as he slid into you was an eternity in itself. One hand remained on your hip, the other slid between your stomach and your sternum. Whether it was to hold you up or if it was a subtle show of dominion, possession, you couldn’t be sure. Both. Could it not be both? Darkened gray eyes the same color of a turbulent storm raked over your face, flushed and burning. You mewled softly when he bottomed out, jutting your chin out in search of his lips. 

Here, in this small bubble, it was just him and you. It would always be him and you.

“Cregan,” You sighed, barely above a whisper. He groaned your name softly, seemingly in agreement. 

He jerked his head at the third in the room, and you were reminded of Jace. When he reentered your sight, he did not seem offended at the sudden exclusion. His eyes were full of admiration and reverence, breathing heavily at the erotic intimacy on full display in front of him. 

“You’re beautiful,” He whispered. He was talking about you both.

“Cregan.” Your voice was reedier, insistence dripping off of it.

Cregan grunted again. He placed his mouth by your ear. The warmth of his body was rolling off of him, even despite the fact that you were both still clothed. “You wanted to know how I fucked him, Y/N?”

“Yes.” Your brows scrunched together, nodding frantically. “Please move.”

Cregan drew his hips back, sliding out until only his tip was inside of you. Jace’s tongue slotted itself on the inside of his cheek, the skin stretching as it rested there.

“I let him feel every vein on my cock when I put it in him,” He explained, sliding in at an agonizingly slow pace. “I teased him until he was begging for it. I let him squirm. Almost like you were, just now. He sounded a bit more desperate. ”

He bottomed out again, punching the air out of you. He practically spit the next word out, aimed directly at Jace, who grinned at the sound. 

“Whorish.” The hand on your sternum slid down, just above your womb. Then, he pressed down, and you gasped, feeling him at both sides. “I let him feel me so deep in him, I wanted him to feel me in his throat. I wanted to eat him from the inside out. Tried to fuck back on me, I didn’t let him.”

He held still for a beat. Two. All the air felt sucked out of your lungs, and Cregan’s tongue snaked out to ghost along your earlobe, and then he lowered his voice to the quietest, lowest whisper he’d had all night. 

“Not you, Y/N. You do everything I say. You’re so sweet, my love.” 

He slid out again. And when he fucked back into you, the slow, measured, torturous pace was gone, replaced with a forceful, quick one that filled the room with a wet, obscene plap plap plap as his fat balls slapped against your pussy.

Your body seized in his clutch. “C-Cregan!” 

“I know, pet,” He growled, low tone dripping with faux sympathy, “I’ve got you, little thing.”

You shifted onto your tiptoes, fighting for a better angle. You were fully sweating now, overheating in the warm, thick fabric of your dress. His force continued to wreak havoc on your lungs, and combined with his body lumbering over your back, it almost felt like you were suffocating, choking on your husband’s essence. 

His hand grabbed your chin, forcing you to look back at Jace in the chair, who was clenching his jaw now, nostrils flaring with every deep heave of his breath. You wanted to say something, either to him or to Cregan, it didn’t matter. The pleasure was fogging your brain so beautifully that someone, anyone needed to hear it, but your words were gone.

“Think about him,” Cregan commanded, “Look upon our prince and imagine him taking my place.”

Jace’s eyebrows shot up, arousal so clearly painting his features. He was flushed, hair dishevelled, trousers wrinkling from where he had gripped them so clearly. And he was still so hard, tenting the dark, rich fabric. You wanted it in your mouth. You wanted to tear the fabric from his body and take him into your throat, to let him wrap his fingers in your hair and take and take and take and take—

“Say his name.”

You clenched down so hard on Cregan, his exhale turned into a moan, throaty and hungered. Your hips tried to push back, movement involuntary and animal, but he held you in place.

“No,” He scolded, “No. I held him in place, so I’m holding you in place now too. Now do as you’re told.”

“J—” You choked out, breath coming out short and shallow, “Jace.”

Jace’s head tipped back, groaning quietly into the air. His hips shifted upwards, humping like a dog at something that wasn’t there. A reprieve he was not allowed to receive.

“Y/N,” He murmured, eyes fluttering shut.

“You want her,” Cregan said, “You want me.”

Jace’s words emerged, pulled from behind gritted teeth. “I do.”

“What do you want?”

“Anything—” You’d never heard him sound so desperate. How quickly he’d gone from pretending to be in control to showing that he’d never really had it in him at all. “Everything. Her cunt on my mouth and your cock in my ass and her tongue in my throat and—and—”

“My fingers against that little spot in your hole, yeah? The one that makes you cry like a girl?”

Jace’s hips jerked, and he nodded. “Yes. Gods, yes. I miss you inside me.”

“You’ll get it. Soon. Be patient.”

You moaned, the conversation in you bringing back that sweet shade of green that you’d felt in the hot springs. Except the jealousy wasn’t aimed at Jace, and it didn’t have the bitter aftertaste. The jealousy enveloped them both, a jealousy that you hadn’t been there, that you hadn’t seen them rut against each other in the woods or to watch Cregan fuck Jace with his fingers until tears spilled from his pretty brown eyes. When you spoke, you almost weren’t aware of it. 

“Y-you too, Cregan.”

He twitched inside of you. He seemed to know what you wanted, but needed the confirmation. 

“Me?”

“Say his name too, Cregan. Pretend I’m him.”

At that, they both moaned. Desire. Adoration. Surprise. The melody filled the room and travelled down your diaphragm into your stomach, compounded by the shift in Cregan’s movements. 

Animal instinct seemed to recognize your request first. His thrusting turned brutal and mean, befitting of a spoiled, antagonizing prince that needed to be ground into submission. When his brain caught up to his body, he groaned again, and fisted a hand in your hair. You yelped.

“I—Fuck,” Cregan slurred, “You feel so good, my sweet boy—”

Your cunt clenched unexpectedly. My sweet boy. You could be his sweet boy.

“Jace,” You whined. 

“Jacaerys.” Cregan drew out every syllable, savoring this flavor of his prince’s name, one he had not tasted in a very long time.

The both of you dissolved into each other quickly. Cregan continued to pound into you, and you managed to fuck back onto him, despite his best efforts to hold you back. You reached for your skirts, the movements clumsy and jerking. You searched for the hem, trying madly to reach past it. When you did, you immediately found your clit and swirled your fingers, rutting into the movement like a rabbit.

Jace’s name filled the room until it no longer held meaning, until it sounded abstract, until it rose in pitch, grew throatier, and was cried out by the both of you. All the while, the man whose name it was stood watching, jaw gaping, cock aching, as the two people he’d been yearning for peaked in their shared pleasure. And in that shared pleasure, they shared a single word, a single idea, a single thought: him. Jace, Jace, Jace, Jacaerys, Jace.

He watched your back tilt upwards, pushing against Cregan until you bared your neck and your head fell onto Cregan’s shoulder. Your breasts strained against the neckline of your dress and your skin seemed to glow when the firelight hit the sheen of your sweat just right. He watched Cregan’s lip curl, looking more beast than man, before burrowing into your neck and calling Jace’s name against your carotid artery. 

His eyes sank down, to where you had lifted your skirts to rub at your clit, and where Cregan fucked into you once, twice, before burying himself as deep as he could in you, likely hoping that he would spill right up against your fertile little womb. He remained fixated on the sight, like if he stared hard enough he would be able to see through your skin and watch it happen.

When you came down, you were trembling in Cregan’s arms, his broad chest searing into your back. Your breathing was labored, loud, groans marking your every exhale. You could feel just how much Cregan had filled you, and braced yourself for the walk back to your quarters with his spend dripping down your thighs and stockings. He stayed in you, enjoying your warmth for a little longer.

You cracked your bleary eyes open. Jace shifted in the chair and considered his next action. A few seconds later, he stood, and walked slowly towards the desk. Cregan hadn’t told him he could move. But Cregan seemed almost as ruined as you, hair mussed and fingers curled into the fat of your hips. He lifted his head from your neck ever so slightly to watch the prince approach, and said nothing. Jace seemed willing to take his chances.

He leaned over the desk, finally seeing how Cregan had ruined you up close. The corners of his lips, which were pink and swollen from biting them, turned upwards. One hand came up to trace your face, thumb swiping across the apple of your cheek. His touch felt akin to someone stoking a dying fire. He flashed a glance at Cregan before looking back at your own mouth. 

And then he leaned in, and pressed his lips to yours. The kiss was gentle but deep, like he was trying to drink up any remaining pleasure that might have been left in your body. Your neck craned, chasing after the taste of Jace’s mouth as he swiped his tongue against your lower lip. You folded immediately, mouth falling open and a hand coming up to his chest. Finally, you wanted to say. You’re here. I’ve been waiting for you. 

You heard a sound leave Cregan’s throat, needy and absolutely involuntary. You had never heard him make a sound like this. How new everything felt suddenly. A spot you had never seen before, on a map you had studied a thousand times.

So quickly Jace came and so quickly he was gone, parting from your lips with a fond phantom of a smile. You blinked slowly, finally able to trace his features without fear or apprehension. You watched as his eyes, nearly blown black from how wide his pupils had become, shifted from your face to another just below yours. 

Wordlessly, his neck shifted downwards, brown eyes meeting gray at a closeness now unmarred with risk or potential betrayal. Jace raked his gaze over Cregan’s face, spent, sweaty and flushed with release. A sight he had seen in person years ago, and seen most recently in his dreams when he was at his loneliest. 

Cregan leaned in first. Jace simply met him halfway. 

Your breath caught at the back of your throat as you watched your husband kiss his best friend, chiseled jawlines moving in tandem, tongues lapping at each other. You felt your core pulse, and Cregan groaned into the kiss, brows creasing. Jace’s second hand rose to Cregan’s face, mirroring the position it had taken along your own skin.

They savored each other for longer than Jace had kissed you, and you let it happen. Your chest was full of all of the moments over the past few weeks, every question, every what if. Moments where you had watched them brush against each other or meet each other’s gaze, in such a manner that had you trying to string together a narrative, evidence, a theory, anything, that indicated something like this. 

The proof was right in front of you. And you were happy to catalog every second. 

When Jace pulled away, he flickered his eyes between both of your faces, both so close to his. You watched his brown eyes simmer with something you could not name. Then his gaze turned calculating, and then it turned sly. He applied a gentle pressure to your cheek, at the same time he did to Cregan. Pushing the three of you even closer, which seemed almost impossible.

Cregan made a face. “What—”

“Shh,” Jace whispered, “Let me.”

He pushed again. You would run out of room. Your mind pulsed as it tried to identify what he was trying to do. When the side of your face not held by Jace met Cregan’s, you seemed to understand.

This won’t work, you thought, desperately hoping you were wrong, surely, he can’t mean to—

The corner of your lip met Cregan’s, and then Jace’s mouth descended on you both. 

The sensation was strange. A rhythm you hadn’t quite danced to before. You tried to mimic Jace’s movements, but Cregan was motionless at your side, and you wondered how this was meant to work. 

Jace’s skin was softer. You could feel some stubble off of your husband, the slight dryness from prolonged exposure to the cold.

You would have pulled away. You almost did, worried the moment would turn awkward. 

Until Cregan reached over to grab at the back of Jace’s head, and his other hand reached over to the one the prince had on your face. He pressed the three of you even closer—a difficult feat—and opened his mouth. His tongue darted from your lips to Jace’s. You jolted, realizing that you could feel Cregan’s tongue against Jace’s mouth, because you were there too. 

Something clicked into place. Something frantic, primal, ancient. Jace opened his mouth. You opened yours. And when their tongues touched yours, you understood then why many said good things came in threes.

Three noses bumping into each other. Three pairs of lips navigating a familiar sequence, this time with an entirely new component to it. Best of all, three tongues flicking against each other, two of them licking into the third, then switching places. You and Cregan pushed into Jace, you and Jace pushed into Cregan, they pushed into you. The three of you tangled together in a delicious, frenzied cycle, needing still to be impossibly closer.

You whined against their mouths when you felt Cregan’s cock twitch inside you. You knew what would happen if you kept at it. He would get hard again, and this time, no matter what he said, you would not be able to hold back and demand Jace join, despite how spent you were. They would press you between them, bodies so hot that you would inevitably melt into the two of them, drip down their chins and their throats, and cease to exist as a person. 

This had to end. You did not want it to. While your spirit was willing, you felt your body utterly ruined. You relished it for a few moments longer, before pulling away, lips wet and panting. Your eyes fluttered open, watching them pull away too. 

Cregan was breathing heavily, face bewildered, but not unsettled.

“I–” He licked his lips, trying to commit your combined tastes to memory. “Where the fuck did you learn that?” 

Jace had the audacity to look sheepish in his reply. “Some Lyseni courtesans were guests at court last year. They can be very, well, creative in their pursuits of pleasure.”

You laughed once, breathless and still trying to process what had just transpired.

“You’ll kill me,” You muttered, “Both of you are going to kill me.”

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

The next few days were a blurred build up to the night of Jace’s farewell feast. You were filled with a seemingly perpetual arousal, kept on the precipice of the best kind of waiting. You returned to your host of administrative tasks, but found the occasional sweet reprieve at being cornered by either of them in an empty hallway or disoccupied study. 

“My lady, the napkins have been pressed as you asked.”

At night, the kissing, gods, the kissing. The three of you, late at night after the work was done, would return to Cregan’s study with an excess of Dornish wine. When the three of you were drunk enough, you would sit in one of their laps and do nothing but alternate kissing each other. You would sit in Jace’s lap, brace your hands on his firm chest, and grind yourself down onto him, feeling his hard cock through your smallclothes and his trousers.  Or, you would sit in Cregan’s lap and let him drag his teeth against your neck while Jace claimed your mouth with his own. Regardless, you would be reduced into a whiny stupor from the visual and physical stimuli descending on you.

“Lady Stark, will you still be wearing the violet gown tonight?”

If the hour stretched late enough, one of you would eventually crack, and ask Jace to show you that Lyseni kissing again. You came twice during this, mind hazy from the hours of grinding against them and the drawn out state of arousal they had placed you in. This strange new union was always a forceful push enough that would have you falling apart in someone’s lap. 

“Lady Stark?"

And other times, you would watch, transfixed, as he and Cregan swapped spit lazily for minutes at a time. You had gripped your goblet with such a force that you were positive you would bend the fine metal, unable to look away as your husband and the prince moved mouths and bodies languidly against each other. As if you were analyzing, studying, preparing yourself to reach out and slot yourself between them both—

“Milady?”

You snapped back to where you were standing, in the middle of the banquet hall where preparations were well underway for the farewell feast. You blinked, meeting eyes with the woman who had just been trying to get your attention.

“Hm?” You raised your eyebrows. “Oh. Yes. Yes, thank you, Rose.”

She nodded sheepishly, and walked away. You pursed your lips, trying to forget about it. A fruitless endeavor. You were on the verge of becoming rabid. You had begged and pleaded for more. It never came.

“Please,” You murmured achingly, “Touch me. Both of you.”

Cregan shook his head. 

“He asked for one night. That’s all I’m willing to share you for. You’ll get it when the time is right, pet.”

If not tonight, when? It had to be tonight. Jace was set to leave on the morrow, good weather permitting. They had taken such a hold on your brain that you found yourself retracing parts of your body that they had traced. A hand on your ribcage where Jace had placed his in the barn with Vermax. Tracing your collarbone with your fingers, where Cregan had placed a bruising kiss while you had been sitting in Jace’s lap a few nights ago. Running your tongue across your teeth, where you had felt both of their own tongues tracing the night it had all started. 

Gods bless Lyseni courtesans, you thought distractedly. 

The rest of the evening was spent in a similar daze. You made your rounds in the kitchen, taste testing sauces, soups, and the sweet creams that would be drizzled on the desserts. You headed up to bathe, attended by your maids as you stared into the distance. 

You were dressed in the deep violet gown you had asked them to press for you, with a neckline low enough to garner attention but not too low as to be immodest. They placed silver pins in your hair, and dressed you in your favorite set of jewelry: a silver pendant with amethyst stones inlaid delicately against the metal, with earrings to match. A gift from Cregan for your wedding. 

You met Cregan at the bottom of the stairs. He walked you down the hallway, a hand on the small on your back.

“Thank you for planning everything,” He said, “Everything has been delightful.”

“It’s been busy, but I was happy to do so.”

“Tonight will be exciting.”

You raised an eyebrow. “Will it?”

A voice from behind you replied, “I certainly hope so.”

The pair of you turned to see Jace. He was a vision in crimson velvet, a dark sash draped over his shoulder, pinned in place with a silver dragon pin. His hair was perfectly curled, sword at his hip. The only word that came to mind was regal. When he smiled, his chin turned upward, carrying himself with all the grace and pride befitting the heir to the Iron Throne. 

“Your grace,” Cregan greeted, “Are you ready?”

“I am.” Jace’s eyes landed on you. He raised an eyebrow. “Are you?”

He didn’t need to specify what for. For a second, you glanced at Cregan, who was just as smug. Something you didn’t really see from him.

You took a deep breath. “I… Yes.” 

To say the next few hours were excruciating would have been an understatement. And yet, it made total sense.

The entire night was wrought with an evolution of that initial dynamic you had been so keen to observe when Jace had first arrived. If Jace brushed past you, without fail, he would gently readjust you with delicate fingers on your waist. “Pardon me, Lady Stark,” he whispered every time, loud enough for only you to hear. Your little secret. 

There was no shortage of drinks, of this you had made sure. You had also brought out a gift Jace had sent ahead of time before his visit—several cases of wine from The Reach and The Arbor as a thanks to the lords and ladies of the North for receiving him. At dinner, he raised his cup to the North, its people, and his gracious hosts, Lord and Lady Stark. When Jace mentioned you, Cregan squeezed your thigh under the table, and you grew rigid as a brittle wooden board, ready to snap at any moment. 

As the drinks flowed, they were the final ingredient to a potent and dangerous concoction. The first ingredient had been the heat of the room, the hustle and bustle of the conversation and the music blending together as you took it all in. Next, the pace you had taken all day long, running here and there to make sure everything was perfect and ready to go. Worst of all—strongest, too—had been the mounting expectation of whatever was going to happen once this was over. 

You searched the ballroom for a tall frame draped in dark furs. Dark hair partially tied up. There, speaking with two of Lord Bolton’s sons, he stood tall, poised and elegant like a wolf before a hunt. You held back a sigh. Your husband, your Cregan, your man. He looked beautiful, though he would reject the word outright. Men were not beautiful, he might say.

Or maybe he wouldn’t. Not anymore, you hoped. There was no need to shy away from it now that the truth was out in the open. He was Cregan and he was human and he had been in love with Jace once and he still loved him, but he also loved you. He was capable of holding both of those loves and they were not at odds with each other. Quite the opposite. 

Cregan Stark. Your husband. Lord of Winterfell. Lover of princes and ladies alike. Your heart felt full.

“I told you. You are very lucky.”

Around you, your guests started to pair up. The singers were preparing for another number. Jace looked at you knowingly, and held out a hand.

He raised an eyebrow. “Will you indulge me one last time, Lady Y/N?”

You placed your hand in his. “How could I refuse?”

When he positioned himself, he pulled you closer than he had the first time. Your chests were nearly touching. The music began, and he immediately took the lead. You grinned.

“You know this one.” 

Jace nodded. “It is one of my favorites.”

He moved with you around the hall, not even needing to watch where he was going. Instead, he remained trained on your face. You felt your face grow warm from the attention. 

“Have you enjoyed your time in The North, Jace?” You asked, blinking up at him.

“I have,” he conceded. “I have learned so much more than I did my first time here. And I leave with a new friend. You have been so welcoming to me, my lady.”

He paused, considering his next words. The next time he spoke, he leaned in, lowering his voice. “Especially considering the… behavior I exhibited initially. I imagine that were I a woman, you would have assumed the worst.”

“Your being a man did not matter,” You confessed, “I assumed it within the first few days of your being here.”

This surprised him. “I… You did?”

You laughed. For once, you seemed to have the upper hand with him. “I know my husband. I saw the way he looked at you, and how you looked back. I’m not quiet because I don’t like speaking. But because when you’re silent, you hear every whisper, my prince. Even those that might not be spoken aloud.”

Jace blinked. He seemed stunned, unable to find something to say. The Prince of Dragonstone, words stolen away by Cregan Stark’s meek southern wife. You beamed, triumphant. A moment later, you tilted your head, success giving way to something more genuine.

“Will you miss him?”

Jace lifted his gaze, fixing on one point in the room. You watched his eyes and neck move, coordinating with his feet to keep his eyes on him. You didn’t even need to look to know. Jace watched Cregan with the serenity of someone who had held something once, and come to terms with not being able to hold onto it forever. That was what you saw when they stared at each other, you realized. 

Finally, there was a name for it. Peace. A bond forged from mutual respect and absolution. Whatever had once taken root was no longer there. They would never resent each other for it. If anything, they would care for each other even more. When he looked back at you, you saw yourself reflected in that peace.

“Yes and no,” He answered clearly. “I will miss my friend. But I feel as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders having been here after so long. It was a confirmation I hadn’t realized I’d been searching for. I have you to thank for that, also.”

He spun you around, but you didn’t look away from him as you made a face. “Me?”

Jace nodded, smiling. “I knew coming here how much Cregan loved you. He’s never been good with emotions, but his tone when writing about you was so warm, and… meeting you, spending time with you and him, I see why. I see how he cares for you, and you him. I leave here knowing his heart is safe with you. Just like I know how yours is safe with him.”

You smiled back at this, heart swelling even more. “Thank you, my prince. It has been an honor and a pleasure to be your host, and an even greater pleasure to gain your friendship.” 

The dance slowed to an end. The room burst into applause, and when you looked up, Cregan was watching you both, seemingly ignoring one of the Bolton boys as he attempted to keep Cregan’s attention. The emotion on his face could only be labeled as affection. 

The two of you watched Cregan apologize to the Boltons, brush past them, and cross the room. He seemed to part the onslaught of guests as he walked through them. People would see him, bow their heads, and step to the side. When he landed in front of you both, he held out his arm. You let go of Jace’s hand.

“The night grows long,” Cregan mused, “And the prince has a long journey ahead of him on the morrow. Shall we say our goodbyes and escort him back to his quarters, wife?”

You felt your mouth tip open. It was here. You paused for a beat, then nodded. Jace clenched his jaw, then smirked.

The three of you made a quick round to bid your guests a restful evening. Everyone seemed quite understanding that Jace was feeling tired. The entire time, when you were not speaking, you bit down on your tongue. Lest your teeth rattle with anticipation.

Cregan led you and Jace up the stairs. The ascent was slow, quiet. The symphony of your steps bounced off the stones, echoing throughout the stairwell. 

“The music was lovely,” You murmured innocently. 

“The food was marvelous.” Jace echoed your tone.

Your trio rounded a corner and you found everyone’s slow walk speeding up. Compliments were paid to your organizational choices. Another flight of stairs. Your thighs tensed with exertion and excitement. By the time you hit the top of the staircase, Jace grinned.

He grabbed your hand, then he grabbed Cregan’s. Cregan chuckled quietly, and you found yourself breaking into giggles as well.

“I’ve been waiting for this for weeks,” Jace admitted. Then, he broke into a light jog, taking you and your husband along with him. The drinks, the arousal, the warmth in your chest. All three of these had your head tipping back in joyful, girlish laughter. This was everything you had been wanting, and all of your clothes were still on.

Jace’s door appeared at the end of the hall. He let go of your hands only to open it, and once you were all inside, they pounced on you. How they seemed to move so in sync, you could not say. You had been wound up so tightly you could no longer tell which way was right and which way was left. 

Cregan’s mouth landed on yours, and you immediately opened yourself for him. Pure instinct, letting him lick into your mouth with hot breaths against your mouth. Rough and demanding. He grabbed at your sides, squeezing your hips. Jace stepped behind you, tracing open mouthed kisses along the side of your throat, moving up under your ear. His hands slotted themselves over Cregan’s hands, calloused hands brushing even larger calloused hands. 

You reached behind you to fist Jace’s curls between your fingers, and rubbed Cregan’s chest in front of you. Already, your heart was pounding. Cregan pulled away to nip at your collarbone, and as if reading Jace’s mind, you craned your neck in pursuit of his heart-shaped lips. 

Jace’s kisses were not as aggressive as Cregan’s but they were just as deep. He did not immediately demand you open his mouth to slide his tongue against yours, but rather he spent time courting your lips, then teasing with a quick slide of his tongue against your lower lip. When you bit down on his lower lip, he took that as permission. Only then did his kisses grow faster, humming against your lips when you sucked on his tongue, desperate to get it deeper in your throat. 

His front pressed up against your back, and there, nestled between your buttocks, you could feel something poking you, growing more and more insistent with each passing moment. His hands moved away from Cregan’s at your side and slid up your back, trying to find the laces of your bodice. He parted from your lips to fully concentrate on undoing the problematic knots, and you wrapped both of your arms around your husband’s neck. 

Cregan immediately straightened, moving his hands down to squeeze at your ass. You gasped, scratching lightly at the nape of his neck. 

“Who goes first?” You asked breathlessly. 

“Me,” Cregan responded immediately, “I fuck you first, then Jace fucks you.”

You sighed, bodice becoming looser as Jace successfully undid the laces. “When do you fuck Jace?”

They froze. Cregan gaped at you, then looked at Jace.

Jace cleared his throat. “I–”

Cregan raised an eyebrow. “You–”

“What,” You asked, taken aback at their surprise, “I ask to watch you stick your tongues down each other’s throats, can I not watch my husband stick his c—”

“I didn’t think you’d want to see the… well. The whole of it,” Jace answered. 

Cregan snickered, a hand gripping your chin. “Oh, she wants to see the hole of it, Jace, I promise you.”

“She continues to surprise me.”

“I’m not surprised at all,” Cregan sighed after a moment, rubbing his forehead against yours, “Gods, you greedy little thing.” 

You leaned forward, needing someone desperately. He kissed you again, groaning as you began to unbutton his black jerkin. The vest fell to the floor quickly, leaving him in his thick, gray, cotton doublet. Cregan helped you with the buttons on this one when you pulled away to watch your fingers, which had started to tremble with excitement.

“Easy, pet,” He murmured fondly as his chest was revealed, “We’ve not even touched you yet.

That could not remain true for much longer, you thought, as your bodice and skirts finally gave way thanks to Jace’s ministrations. They pooled at your feet, leaving you in your slip, stockings, and boots. Jace took you by the hand and pushed you back to sit gently on the bed. 

Your boots were unlaced. Two pairs of foreign hands pulled down each stocking, and then they parted your legs. You were left to lift your cotton slip and pull it over your head. It left you the first to be naked, you realized as you laid flat on the bed. Cregan was right behind you, and Jace’s clothes remained in place. 

The pair of them hovered above where you needed. You propped yourself up on your elbows and found yourself with Jace’s eyes dragging slowly up your body, twinkling in the firelight all the meanwhile. 

“You’re unreal,” Jace mumbled, “Sculpted in the image of Mother and Maiden alike.”

“O-oh,” You sighed, a shudder traveling down your spine. You had never been told that before. 

Cregan nipped at your bare thigh, before touching Jace’s cheek. “So this is how you southerners seduce women.”

“Only the exceptionally beautiful ones,” Jace argued, flicking his eyes between you and Cregan, “You use it too much and it becomes blasphemy.”

You licked your lips seeing them both slotted between your legs. “This is already blasphemy enough.” 

“Quite true,” Cregan said, moving his hand to the back of Jace’s head, “And it’s about to be even more so.”

Cregan’s lips wrapped around your pearl. Jace’s mouth landed at your hole, immediately beginning to lap at your wetness as if he hadn’t seen water in days. 

The simultaneous pleasure, courtesy of two of the most powerful men in Westeros kneeling at your feet to worship at your altar. Such a devotional was unlike any other. 

The difference in their kisses translated almost perfectly to this. Cregan enjoyed a bit of force when pinning you down like this. “I know she can take it, she’s taken worse,” was his rationale. Jace, for all of his teasing and mastery of making you want, was as gentle as he was needy. He seemed to understand that this was new to you too, but that this would be his only chance to lap at you. 

They switched places, tongues touching as they moved around your pussy. Jace moaned when it happened, and between watching it happen and feeling the vibration against your core, you cried out, head falling back. Now, it was Jace’s turn to suck softly on your clit, while Cregan decided to stick his tongue inside of you and fuck you with it. You couldn’t make up your mind on where to focus—at this rate your mind was gone, turned to mush, leaking out of your cunt and being soaked up by their mouths.

Cregan’s hands squeezed at your thighs and Jace had one hand on your hip. You were so focused on your own pleasure you didn’t see Jace’s free hand land at the front of Cregan’s trousers, cupping your husband’s hardness with a restrained vigor. Cregan’s hips pushed into Jace’s touch, and he grunted into your pussy as Jace began to squeeze his bulge.

Jace slid his tongue down to where Cregan’s was. He stuck his tongue into your walls as well, holding back a humbling moan when he felt the tightness of your cunt forcing Cregan’s tongue up against his own. He could take it no longer, delving his hands under the dark wool of Cregan’s trousers. 

Jace wrapped his hand around Cregan’s hard cock, remembering the weight of his thick, veiny member, before cupping his fat, heavy balls. Jace’s touch had Cregan groaning into your hole, causing you to gasp out, reaching for both of their heads. Your orgasm was approaching embarrassingly fast, and they got the message when your fists landed in their hair. You hung one leg on their respective outside shoulders, heels digging into their shoulder blades.

Closeness. What a funny word. How could it be that something was too much but never enough?

Cregan’s hand rose up to meet yours in his hair. His index finger tapped your wedding band. Your head rose, face screwed up in pleasure, and saw them both joined together inside of you. A different form of Jace’s Lyseni kiss. The sight was more than enough. You descended into your pleasure, hips bucking against their faces as you demanded for more, for them to stop, for them to keep going, for someone to fuck you, for this night to never end. 

Jace was painfully hard. Between Cregan’s cock in his hand, and now you reaching your peak all over him and your husband’s tongues, he could no longer bear it. As you came down, he realized that he’d be relegated to the side yet again before being allowed to participate. He would not be able to just sit idle while watching the two of you again. 

You lay limp on the bed, staring up at the ceiling as you tried to regain your bearings. They pulled their mouths away, and you let them go. Your eyes fluttered shut for barely half a second, before you heard more kissing, Cregan grunting, Jace gasping. 

You lifted your head with a speed you didn’t think you still had, only to find Jace’s hand in Cregan’s pants while Cregan gripped Jace by the scruff of his neck. Like he was a pup who had just been caught misbehaving. If the hand pumping his cock was the misbehavior, Cregan didn’t seem eager to correct it. You whined at the sight, so ready to watch the prince fall apart on Cregan’s cock. 

Your sound roused them both. Cregan’s movements slowed, and his eyes cracked open. He found you staring at the both of them, chest rising and falling with need. He jerked his hips into Jace’s hand, and for a moment, you almost understood what it was like to be Jace the very first night it had all happened. 

Jace opened his eyes to look back at you, and he bit his lip. He looked at Cregan, who was watching you as well. Jace spit into his other hand, moving to wrap it around Cregan’s member, before leaning over to suck on Cregan’s jugular. Cregan inhaled sharply, hips thrusting into the prince’s hands. 

“Go to her,” Jace murmured against his skin, “Fuck her and I’ll ready myself for you.”

They stood, shedding their remaining clothes as you moved further back on the bed to make room for them both. Soon, the pair were just as naked as you were, moving to the edge of the bed closest to where you were. Standing next to each other, you could not help but compare.

Jace’s muscles were different from your husband’s. Where Cregan was stocky and strong, the muscle was hidden beneath a small layer of plush skin, which was very common in Northern men. Foolish southerners would call it “pudgy”. You called it very, very attractive. His long, thick cock stood at attention, red and willing, hefty balls sagging beneath.

Objectively, Jace was prettier. He was leaner, lighter. Better for riding. His slimness did not necessarily mean fragility—his arms and thighs were well sculpted from years of training, and his shoulders and chest were dotted with freckles too. While his cock was slightly smaller than Cregan’s, it was, like the rest of him, a bit prettier than your husband’s. Pink at the tip, with a generous upward curve that left your mouth watering.

Cregan tilted his head. “Have you had enough of your ogling?” He asked, nodding once. “Lie back.” 

As Cregan crawled onto the bed, Jace walked to the vanity on the far side of the room. He heard you and Cregan kiss as he inspected the vials spread across the grain of the wood, before landing on a vial of perfume oil. He grabbed it before returning to the bed, setting it on a table right next to the mattress. 

When Jace’s head hit the pillow next to yours, Cregan took it as permission to hike your legs around his waist, one hand propping himself up against the headboard. He took himself into his hand, pumped his cock a few times before sliding it up and down your slit, gathering your wetness along his tip.

“Cregan,” Jace said softly, “How many times have I told you not to tease?”

They held each other’s gaze for a moment. Cregan clenched his jaw, and you could finally tell what was being said. So did Jace, who immediately lowered his eyes. 

“Prepare yourself for me,” Cregan said finally, nodding at the vial Jace had grabbed, “Give her something pretty to look at.”

A moment later, Cregan entered you, and did not give you a moment’s reprieve. His pace was immediately fast and rough, and you reached for his arms to find purchase on something. Cregan’s hand gripped your jaw, forcing you to turn your head to where Jace was lying, currently opening the vial.

“Watch him,” He ordered, “You love watching, don’t you, love?”

You nodded as best you could with your head in his grip, eyes pinned to Jace’s form as he came onto his knees, pressing his face against the pillow. His fingers glistened with oil, and a faint smell of jasmine hit your nose. Your mouth fell open as he lifted his fingers up and behind him. From where you were, you couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but the face he made and accompanying sound that escaped him seconds after left nothing to the imagination. 

“Good boy,” Cregan praised, before looking back down at you. You felt yourself clench at his words. Cregan’s pace continued, your hands tracing whatever part of your body you could land your hands on. His broad back and shoulders, hairy chest, or strong plush biceps, you needed something to hold onto as you watched the Prince of Dragonstone finger himself open in preparation for the cock you were currently speared on.

“See normally,” Cregan mumbled into your ear, “I’d have him just like that, but I would be the one to put my fingers in his pink little hole.”

Jace nodded, lip curling up in pleasure. “His f-fingers are quite long,” Jace answered, “Not sure if you’ve noticed.”  

You keened. “Yes,” You agreed, “Quite—ah!—quite talented too.”

Jace groaned. You watched his arm begin to speed up. From atop you, Cregan watched slack-jawed as you both compared notes in front of him. He thrust even harder a few times, desperate to drive the breath from your lungs. The movement pushed you into the pillows, back arching into him.

“C-Cregan,” You cried, whining as the harsh thrusting slowed into deep grinding, “Gods, s-so good.” 

His lips crashed into yours, so bruising and demanding and so very much Cregan, you tightened your legs around his waist. His weight on top of you was almost crushing, but the way he draped himself over you as he moved languidly in and out of you had you enveloped in a blanket of pleasure and veneration radiating off of his being into yours. 

Across from you, Jace was already pressing a second finger into his ass, his other hand wrapping around his cock as he watched Cregan fold you in half. The sound of your cries was soft and needy, but you didn’t complain or try to run from Cregan’s force. You soaked it all up, thirsty and wanting.

When Cregan pulled away, he groaned against your open mouth. “Soon,” He told you, “And after I fill you up, he’ll fuck you too.”

You snaked a hand between you both, rubbing at your nub with a mounting need. You looked back at Jace, moan wrenching from your throat as you watched him, moaning into the pillow, flush covering his delicate freckles. There was a sheen across his forehead and cheekbones, lips forming a delicate little o-shape. Jace’s eyes locked with yours, and you wanted so badly to reach out and touch him. You were rendered immobile beneath your husband’s weight.

You looked down at Jace’s pink cock. He seemed to have found a good rhythm, fucking his cock into his hand and then fucking back onto his fingers. When you realized that he was matching the thrust of his cock into his hand up to the rhythm of Cregan’s hips, your eyes screwed shut, pleasure building impossibly high.

“Cregan,” You called, bucking your hips up into his, “Please.”

“It’s alright, love.” He nodded against your neck, hips beginning to stutter. “Me too. I’ve got you.”

He thrusted a few more times, movements out of rhythm but still so deep inside of you, until his grunts turned into long, drawn out calls of your name. When you felt him spill his hot seed, cock pulsing inside of you, it tipped you over the edge as well, clit pulsating as you pushed your fingers into the sensation. There was always so much, and this time was no different. You looked up at him, vision blurred, to see his hair mussed and a bead of sweat dripping down his nose. It landed on your cheek, and he wiped it away. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you watched Jace shift. He whimpered when his fingers left his hole. He moved closer, eyes trained on where you and Cregan were still connected.

When Cregan pulled out of you, the three of you twisted your necks to watch Cregan’s creamy, white seed spill out of you. You sighed, lower belly warm as he dragged a finger through his release, smearing it across your cunt. He pressed a kiss to your temple.

“Keep them open,” He murmured in your ear, rubbing your thighs. “You’ve been such a good little hostess, wife. How kind of you to gift our prince your tight little cunt.” 

His words caused you to clench down on nothing, and Jace groaned when more cum spilled out. Cregan rolled to your side, letting Jace take his place. Jace’s lips landed on yours, deep but not demanding. His eyes studied your face, the flush of your skin as it travelled down your shoulders and tits.

“My lady,” He whispered, cock poking at your entrance, “Can I? Let me—”

“Yes, fuck.” Your voice was breathy, shifting your hips to catch the head of his cock. The two of you gasped at the sensation. Cregan sighed next to you and both of you shifted to look at him. Your eyes were wide, Jace’s were hooded. Waiting. He had held the reins for most of the operation. Was it any wonder the two of you deferred to him?

Cregan looked between you both, before his lips turned upwards. “Well, go on,” He goaded, “Or does our prince need to tell me where to put his cock?”

Jace swallowed, shaking his head. He grabbed one leg, slinging it over his shoulder. Your chest lurched at the angle, and Jace slid into your pussy. An involuntary sound spilled from his lips, a similar whine coming from yours. You were so—

“So wet, Y/N,” Jace growled, licking up your jawline, “Is that you, or is that his cum?”

“Both,” You said, “It’s both of us.”

Jace’s thrusts were slow and controlled, but still had a way of wrenching soft whimpers from your lips. His lips descended on one of your nipples, and you buried your hands in his hair. You opened your chest to give him better access, nodding desperately as he grazed his teeth delicately across the hard nub. 

His hips tried different angles, each one hitting better than the last, until  he shifted his movement to the left ever so slightly and let out a breathy laugh when you clenched around him and moaned his name. 

“Jace,” You said, “Oh, right there, my prince, please, please, please.”

Jace hit the spot again, experimentally, and he pinned your wrists to the bed to stop you from curling in on yourself. He grinned, groaning softly. 

“No, you’re not going anywhere.” His pace became faster, your head beginning to writhe back and forth on the pillow. You were so sensitive, but Jace was just beginning to let his more merciless nature show. 

“You’ll sit there and take it and show your husband how obedient you are, hmm?”

Your hands balled into fists, unable to touch Jace where you wanted. You wanted your fingers in his mouth. You were sure he would accept them willingly. His pupils were blown so wide his eyes looked more black than brown, and his brows were furrowed in concentration, nose scrunched up ever so slightly as he chased after his own pleasure. He tilted his head, eyes widening.

“Yes? Answer.”

“Yes!” You nodded, unable to deny it. “Yes, yes, I’ll do whatever you want.”

“She always gets desperate when she’s sensitive,” Cregan told Jace. Your head turned, spotting him lying on his side. His cock was half hard, and beginning to swell again. A man starved, his eyes did not settle in one place for very long. Between your face and Jace’s, your tits, where Jace was fucking into you, there was simply too much to take in. “She doesn’t know whether to run from it or let it happen. Isn’t that right, Y/N?”

You chewed on your lip but nodded. The observation was true, but to be teased like this made the faintest shame brew in your chest, and even worse, the shame made your pussy clench. Jace gasped at this, gripping the headboard with one hand and your clit with the other. Your body tensed up as Jace used the headboard for leverage, swiping his fingers across your nub, doubling the sweet anguish traveling through your veins. 

Cregan began to stroke himself again, spurred on by the sudden mania overtaking Jace and being taken out on you. His two favorite people, making each other feel so good right in front of him. The two of you looked so beautiful, your eyes rolling back up into your head as Jace’s head tipped back, revealing the creamy expanse of his neck. He almost wanted to cum again, but knew to save it for what was to come. 

Jace groaning your name, you moaning Jace’s. Gods, what a sight, what a sound. He didn’t think he would ever forget tonight. 

His hand left your clit to grip the leg not propped over Jace’s shoulder, and then he hauled it up to match. The angle allowed him to reach even deeper, and the curve of his cock proved sweet in ramming up against that warm, spongy spot inside of you that had your legs beginning to tremble. This much pleasure could not be good for your body. Surely, you would combust.

“Oh, fuck,” Jace grunted, returning his fingers to between your legs. A fire licked up your mound and shot straight up your spine, fingernails digging into your palms. You bucked against Jace’s movements. He pressed a kiss to one of your ankles before his pace turned harder, rhythm slowing just enough to maintain precision—an effort in vain. 

“Jace, I’m going to—”

“Yes,” He nodded, “Can I—please, inside—”

“Yes,” Your legs slid off his shoulders, immediately wrapping around his waist, heels digging into his ass cheeks, “Yes, Jacaerys, cum in me too.”

Your words pushed him over, paired with the insistence of your legs. Jace could not have escaped even if he wanted to, he realized as his balls tensed up. His arms wrapped around you and yours wrapped around him. His ache crashed into yours, and the two of you hurtled into release, writhing against each other in the aftershocks. 

He buried his face between your breasts, hips bucking wildly as his seed mixed with Cregan’s. The thought had him thrusting weakly as his orgasm died down, trying to extend the sensation in his lower stomach for as long as possible. 

He pulled out of you, cock beginning to soften, and remained draped over you, panting against one of your breasts. He flicked his tongue against your nipple, and you almost shoved him off. You were too weak to actually see it through, twitching against Jace’s lean frame as he pressed kisses into your hairline, damp with sweat.

“Gorgeous,” He whispered into your skin, “Doing so well for us, pretty girl.”

Jace lowered his mouth to yours, lazily tangling his tongue with your tongue in the brief interlude before the final act. You felt Cregan stand from the bed, too engrossed in the taste of Jace’s lips to actually focus on what your husband was doing.

The prince pulled away, and you cracked your eyes open to see Cregan at the foot of the bed, gaze dark, shoulders squared. Jace twisted his head. They exchanged a glance, and then Jace looked back at you. He gave you one final kiss, before crawling backwards until his buttocks met the tops of Cregan’s thighs. You moved to sit up, but Cregan shook his head.

“Come here.”

You raised your eyebrows, eyes darting from side to side. “Me? What are you—”

“Look at the mess his grace made,” Cregan murmured, hand sliding up Jace’s spine. The prince shuddered, eyes falling between your thighs. Your cunt was ruined, he realized, swallowing thickly. Cum was oozing out from your hole, your clit was swollen, and Cregan’s cum, previously dislodged by Jace’s fucking you had smeared across your folds.

“Should he not be made to clean it up?”

Your thighs twitched, mouth gaping. You looked at Jace, who seemed near close to drooling like a hound. When your eyes returned to Cregan’s face, there was no room for argument. Still, you tried.

“I can’t—”

“But you will.” Cregan’s hand nestled into Jace’s hair, giving it a light tug. “And he will be good and clean you up. You can take one more, pet. I know you have it in you. You always do.”

You almost hesitated, before spotting where Cregan’s fingers were tangling themselves in Jace’s hair. Your lower lip found itself pinned down by your teeth, but not out of apprehension. 

A few moments later, you slid down the bed, at the same time as Cregan walked to the nightstand. He took the oil and smeared it over himself. When he stood behind Jace again, he rubbed the remainder all over the prince’s hole. Jace jumped, before craning his hips back. 

Cregan smiled crookedly before applying a gentle pressure against Jace’s hole with his thumb. It gave almost immediately, welcoming Cregan back in greedily. He dipped his thumb in and out too slow for comfort, and Jace’s forehead made contact with one of your parted thighs.

He toyed with Jace’s hole a little longer, gauging whether or not he was ready for Cregan’s cock, now fully hard again. He wasn’t sure how long he would last, having came once already, on top of watching Jace fuck you. When he pulled his thumb out, he also pulled the softest whimper from the back of Jace’s throat. 

“Please,” Jace said, one hand reaching back to spread himself open for Cregan, “Please, I need you.”

Cregan bent down, slotting a wet, open mouthed kiss between Jace’s shoulder blades. He gripped himself, pressing the head of his cock right up against Jace’s asshole. All of the air still in Jace’s body left him, leaving only anticipation that bled from every pore on his skin. 

“Put your mouth on her.” The command was said quietly against Jace’s skin. “Then I’ll fuck you, my sweet boy.”

Jace exhaled shakily at the name. He had not been called that in years. He licked his lips, looking back at your cunt. Your tired eyes were watching him fondly, a hand reaching for his cheek. You took a trembling breath, before falling in line with what Cregan wanted. 

“Eat,” You whispered sweetly, beaming when he pressed his face into your palm, “Be good for us.”

The silver of your wedding band was cold against his cheek. A miniscule oasis from the layer of heat that had blanketed the room. He shut his eyes and allowed himself one more moment to enjoy the cool metal on his skin. Then, he turned, and placed a dedicated kiss on your palm. When he drew away, he lowered his neck, and his tongue lolled out of his mouth to trace a long stripe from your hole to your clit.

The sensitivity was too much. You jumped at the wet warmth of his tongue, and Jace splayed a hand over your lower stomach, pinning you in place. You shivered, scar touching your skin. He licked you again, and then began to dip his tongue into your folds.

“Fuck!”

Jace hummed against your folds, half-hard member twitching at your expletive and the mixed flavor of his own cum and Cregan’s. He canted his hips back, unable to form words anymore. 

Cregan chose mercy. He pushed in, forcing Jace to gasp against your cunt. His eyes burned as he stared unblinking at how he slid into Jace’s tight hole, jaw clenching as he gave Jace a moment to adjust. The prince was still as tight as he remembered him. Jace seemed to disagree with the decision.

“Ngh, move.” This was the most princely he’d sounded since coming into the room, his demand bitten out and gruff. Jace brushed his nose against your clit, and you tangled both hands in his hair. Cregan lifted his eyes, landing on your debauched, sweaty face, and you nodded. 

Cregan bottomed out, reaching for Jace’s slender waist. He was going to need the leverage. He held Jace in place as he slid out, and then began to fuck the prince with an abandon Cregan hadn’t expected of himself.

The three of you were falling apart. This drawn out session had stripped the three of you to your most animal senses. Humping, grabbing, moaning, licking. Titles were seemingly gone, and what was left were three sweaty lovers in search of a reverie so prolonged it verged on painful, still delicious enough to keep at the pursuit. 

Cregan’s hands tightened around Jace’s waist. Jace groaned, hoping desperately he’d have bruises to further commit the night to memory. He angled his hips upward, knowing how close Cregan he was to his prostate. He knew Cregan was looking for it too. All Jace had to do was guide the way. 

When he found it, Jace’s voice cracked. The timbre of his voice gave way, leaving a whiny mess still dipping his tongue into your hole. His whimpering and the accompanying vibration had you crying out too. The praise spilled out of you, a woman possessed. 

“That’s it,” You said, “Take it, Jace. I know you can do it, darling. Take it like I did.”

Cregan, yearning for that mythical closeness, rested his knees against the mattress, stomach pressing against Jace’s lower back. He began mouthing at Jace’s shoulders, showering him with affirmations every time his lips were detached from his skin long enough. Cregan’s hips never let up.

“Just as tight as I remember, sweet boy,” He growled, “‘M going to fuck you until you’re begging me to stop.”

“Never stop,” Jace pleaded, lapping at your clit, “Don’t want you to.” 

“No?” Cregan’s hands slid to his front, tweaking at Jace’s nipples, before sliding a hand down to grip Jace’s twitching, ruddy member. “Even like this?”

Jace cried out again, wrapping his lips around your clit. Your back arched off the bed, tugging so intensely at Jace’s pretty locks that his scalp ached sweetly. Your entire body was trembling now. Jace was wrecked, pinned between you and your husband as Cregan took and you were made to give. 

The three of you, connected. You and Cregan, slowly suffocating Jace with your love. And Jace, in the middle of it all, unable to do anything but accept it all. Even as his a knot began to form in his lower stomach, ass tightening with Cregan still inside. When he clenched down on Cregan, Cregan’s hips bucked, before retaking the rhythm he was still trying to hold onto. 

“Feel too good, Jace,” He groaned, “‘M not gonna last.”

“Cum in me,” Jace demanded, lifting his mouth off of you, “Let me feel you in me when I leave.”

Cregan drove himself into Jace even harder, final orgasm now in view. He cupped Jace’s balls, squeezing, as if attempting to coax Jace’s cum out of them. Jace reattached his tongue to your clit, two fingers sliding into your painfully sensitive hole, trying to find more of the sticky, creamy cum they had both placed so lovingly in you. Your body was no longer your own, you realized with a pleased satisfaction. They had taken control of it and decided how to position it, how to fill it, when you’d had enough.

“And you,” Jace murmured breathlessly into your skin, “I want to feel your pussy squeeze around my fingers one more time.”

His words triggered an avalanche, starting with you and ending with Cregan. Your vision turned white, body stiffening for a beat. Then, your body jolted, cunt clenching helplessly around Jace’s digits. He suckled on your clit through every single wave of painful pleasure, until you were sobbing, trying weakly to push his head away. 

Jace let his head fall back on your soft thigh. He couldn’t tell if you were the one trembling or he was. His eyes squeezed shut, feeling the familiar tug in his balls. He bit down on your thigh when he came again, cum spilling over Cregan’s fist, his own walls fluttering against Cregan’s incessant pounding. 

Finally, Cregan wrapped himself on Jace, burying himself the deepest he’d been in the prince all night, shuddering on top of him as he spilled more of his warm, sticky cum into the heir to the Iron Throne.

The three of you rode out the final waves until it hurt, room smelling of sweat, sex, and funnily enough, jasmine. The only sounds were those of the crackling wood of the hearth and three different staccatos of breath. 

Carefully, Cregan pulled himself out of Jace. Jace, boneless, fell forward, nuzzling into your thigh. You carded a hand through his sweaty curls, attempting to soothe after all of your yanking. You felt the mattress dip behind you. Cregan had slid onto your side of the bed, lying behind you. He pressed a gentle kiss to your shoulder. He looked utterly spent, heart still hammering just under his sweaty chest. 

When Jace had regained his bearings, he crawled up to be level with you and Cregan. He wrapped his hands around your waist, and looked at you both. Cregan had one hand splayed across your lower back, and used the other to slide up Jace’s arm. All your touches had turned tender, now. Any tension or desire had bled into each other late into the night, leaving only fondness and a feeling of completion. A circle being closed.

“If Aegon the Conqueror had done this instead,” Jace decided, “I believe the North would have fallen much faster.”

Cregan swatted his arm. Jace caught his hand, scars brushing. You giggled, sleep beginning to settle over your body. 

“I mean it. If he’d just bent over for Torrhen Stark–”

“Jacaerys.”

As your eyes fluttered shut, you smiled between their bodies. It was cold outside, but you had your husband at your back, and a prince of dragon blood at your front.

For the rest of the night, there would be no cold to be spoken of.

•❆·.　❆　　.•　·•　❅　·❆.

minors dni. if i didn't tag you, it was because i couldn't see an age anywhere on your blog <3

tag list: @goldenhoneyedwine / @jams-alcove / @claerysa / @leeahl / @min1k1ssr / @monbebe-monstax / @mousedit / @halflife-blueline / @kati3noth3r3 / @inkyvigil / @scarletraine / @thorins-queen-of-erebor / @tweekdoescosplay / @sevslover / @phoebeselwyn / @munchingonthatass / @dano-png / @juninnyxriddle / @coco-goat-milk / @local-crybaby / @somid / @breakspearsgirl / @targlocket / @dreamfyr-e / @kaz3tora / @mornwrites / @hounded-dog

[sylasthegrim]

An Ember in the Ashes ✢ Chapter 2

Pairing ✢ King Jacaerys x Targtower Reader

Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending

Wordcount ✢ 3,745

Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.

Jacaerys Masterlist

Chapter Two ✢ Sealed in Blood

The valley of the Kingswoods was plunged into near darkness even though it was the mid-morrow, the sky low and heavy, thick clouds coming in from the Narrow Sea, brought by the sharp winds that danced with the tide. 

Near the edge of the cliff, where Jacaerys had learned Queen Aemma and Prince Baelon had been put to rest as well, two pyres were waiting, side by side like allies, when in truth they had been foes. Under the blanket of this dark sky, Aegon and Rhaenyra would bid farewell one last time and returned to ashes, to be buried together. While the gesture weighed heavily on Jace’s mind, he knew it was the right one if he wished to be known as a merciful, peaceful ruler.

This time there would be no dragon upon the hill to cast its fire—Rhaena’s Morning was still too small, and the only grown dragon that remained, Silverwing, was riderless once more. The Council had made a suggestion, that perhaps Jace could travel to Dragonstone and attempt to claim her, to add a strong symbol of legitimacy to the start of his reign, but the prospect of riding another than Vermax made him nauseous.

At his side where Lucerys and Joffrey ought to have been, Jacaerys was instead escorted by Cregan Stark and Baela, who had made the journey from Driftmark, taking the risk to leave her grandsire so close to the Stranger’s door. While those were the two people he trusted more than anyone in this world, the absence of his brothers ached fiercely, as much as the loss of his mother. 

Torch in hand, he could hardly raise his arm to light the pyres, and where a word from him would have been expected, he could not summon his words. Instead the Maester recited a prayer in High Valyrian that he did not hear over the rush of his own blood in his ears. 

“All eyes are on you, my king,” Cregan murmured once silence had returned to the assembly, not as a stern reminder, but as encouragement. 

With a reassuring glance over his shoulder, to the nobles that had gathered, along with the Rivermen and the Northerners, as well as the Dragonkeepers, Jacaerys finally took the step forward. As he lit the pyres one by one, he prayed that wherever she was, his mother forgave him for his perceived sins. 

Despite his reason knowing it was the order of things, there was no escaping the feeling that he had stolen the crown from her. It was unfair, against the very laws of nature, he would argue, that he would be king when she never had the chance to reign.

The assembly watched the pyres go up in flame, the smoke adding to the heavy sky above their heads.

“She would be proud of you,” Baela said in a whisper, meant only for him and Cregan to hear, but he could not accept the praise.

Instead he walked away without a word, dismissing the Kingsguard that offered to open the door to the litter for him. He mounted his horse, choosing the path that would lead him through the city unguarded, but he refused to be scared of his own people. Cregan and Baela followed on their own horses, flanking him as they had done all day, two pillars holding him up. 

Once he would have crossed the gates of the Red Keep, he would have to disappear once more, instead replaced by the crown, the monarch, and there would be no time to mourn. 

“All day long I am plagued by demands and advice that often contradict one another, how am I to know which decision is right?” he lamented as the party made their way back to the city's gate. “They all expect me to guide them, but how might I know that I am not leading this realm into war, once again?”

“Surround yourself with counselors you trust, who look out for the interests of this realm and not their own,” Baela advised, and he regretted that she could not stay, but he understood her reasons for returning to Driftmark. He knew that before long, the matter of the succession to the Driftwood throne would arise.

“I should dismiss Unwin Peake, then,” he spat, then once the vitriol had been spoken, came to a wiser, more useful conclusion. “I shall write to my mother's cousin, Jeyne Arryn. I will need a trusted Hand once you have gone back to the North,” he said, glancing at Cregan.

The young man frowned, but gave a nod of agreement. “I hope you do not see this as disloyalty,” he said.

Jacaerys almost laughed, a mirthless exhale pushing past his lips again. “There hasn’t lived a man as loyal as you, Cregan.”

“I shall stay and serve as your justice until it is done,” his friend promised, and he was grateful for such a strong presence at his side—it also comforted him in his decision that Jeyne would be an apt replacement. She was kind to her kin, in her own way, but stern and unyielding towards other matters, and that was what he needed.

“And I shall answer any call,” Baela reminded him firmly. “I am only across the Bay.”

Jacaerys looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, taking in her kind smile and earnest eyes, the strength he knew she carried in her body and spirit. In another life, perhaps, she would have made a good queen.

For a fortnight you remained a distant spectator to the start of Jacaerys’ reign, and as he had promised, no harm came to you while you waited to know whether your blood would come, or you would be burdened with Aegon’s child. The prospect of carrying a contender for the throne was one you feared, and even though you knew many were still loyal to your bloodline, the truth of the matter was that you remained a woman, and would only gather support in a son’s name.

Were you to bear Aegon’s son, you would be raising him to be at war with his own family, while Jacaerys had offered you a crown and a promise of peace.

The trials saw many men executed or sentenced to the Wall, when Cregan Stark seemingly judged there still remained enough strength and honor in them. In some ways you wondered whether the Northerner was ruling as he pleased, instead of acting on the orders of his king.

In a gesture of good will and mercy, Jacaerys had allowed you to visit your mother for a half hour, and while you were escorted to a small chamber deep inside Maegor’s Holdfast, you felt as though you were being led to the jails. The chamber was plunged into darkness even though it was afternoon, heavy curtains drawn against the sun, and the whole room smelled of prayer incense. The stones were cold under your feet, even through your slippers and the carpet.

When you had first crossed the threshold, Alicent had held you long and tight. She was dressed almost as a Septa, in black clothes that made her look thinner and more frail than she was. Gone was the woman who had welcomed you to the capital nearly three months prior, dressed as was proper for the Queen Dowager, and confident the war was being won.

Since then Aegon had died, poisoned by those he kept close, and so had Rhaenyra, her wounds festering until a fever took her, and a boy now sat the throne. “What is happening out there?” she asked, leading you further into her room. “I am not allowed to know any of it. Are we to stand trial as well?”

“I do not know, mother,” you said. “Many men have been put to the sword, or sent North, but it seems even Jacaerys isn’t certain of our fate.”

Something dark crossed your mother’s face then. “My son should be sitting the throne, not this—” Alicent nearly whimpered, clutching the rosary she carried everywhere these days, the points of the star digging into her palm. 

She cut herself off, but you knew what words lurked beneath the surface. “All things considered, he has been merciful, mother,” you protested weakly, knowing full well you could have suffered terrible consequences for your confession. 

“He might be merciful, but that doesn’t make him true. If there is a rightful king it should be Daemon’s son, the little Aegon,” she accused, the name sounding awful in her mouth.

You said nothing for a while as Alicent sat in an armchair, the weight of their downfall visible on her shoulders and in the lines of her face. You poured the bitter tea your mother preferred into two cups, watching the fragrant steam rise. “On advice of his council, he has offered me his hand in marriage,” you finally said, setting the strainer aside and putting the lid back on the pot.

“Oh, my daughter, you would be queen?” Alicent asked, rising once more and rushing to you. “In those circumstances, it would be well to use this to your advantage. Men are easily swayed by beauty, if you know how to work your charms,” she explained in a hushed tone, taking your hands into hers.

“Do you mean for me to seduce him?” you asked.

Alicent shook her head. “He is young and still malleable. He has just acceded to the throne, and his council and courtiers hold the power now, but you may influence him as well. Be agreeable to him and he will come to trust you, and listen to you, eventually.”

“I understand,” you nodded—it all seemed logical to you, in a sense.

Alicent looked nearly mad in the low light of the candles, her eyes blown wide and her hands trembling where she was clutching you. “And when the time comes, he will bare his back, and we will have our revenge,” she whispered. “You may still light the way for us.”

Alicent’s words ringing in your head, you made your way back to your chambers once the half hour had come to an end, wondering what path would be yours to take, muttering prayers as you climbed the stairs, pleading for a sign of what was right. 

The Gods seemed to hear your desperate pleas, and as you reached the top of the staircase, a sudden ache in your core speared you into place. Gasping, you rushed to your chambers, heart in your throat, and slamming the door behind you, took a handkerchief that you wiped between your thighs. 

The white linen came wet with a bright red smear.

You did not know whether to be relieved or devastated—one way or another,your fate was nearly sealed.

Late at night was the only moment in the day Jace was able to have some solace—or perhaps in the early seconds of the morning before he fully woke, still on the edge of slumber, when the whole world was at peace and he was not king yet, just a young man clinging to his dreams. 

He spent most of his evenings at his desk, answering his private correspondence or writing in his journals, reading the diaries of former Maesters and lords, educating himself on the preceding reigns. He had taken to learn everything he could about his great-grandsire, Jaehaerys—the way he had built a strong, powerful reign, and the way his legacy had collapsed within the next three decades following his passing. 

Jace was eager to learn from the past, and not repeat its mistakes. 

To his relief, his mother’s cousin Jeyne Arryn had acceded to his request, and was now on her way to the capital, leaving her young nephew behind to regent the Vale. She had already proven herself, ruling the Vale for the last decade and a half while bearing the burden of being a woman, and such was the sort of advice he needed.

A sharp knock at the door came to interrupt him—he pressed the seal into the freshly poured wax, waiting until it hardened before peeling it back, and then called the visitor in. Ser Adrian Redfort, a white cloak personally chosen by the Lord Commander to protect Rhaenyra, stepped into the room. 

“My king,” the man greeted. “The princess is requesting an audience.”

Jacaerys discarded his letter and waved for him to let you in, suddenly wary that an unfortunate news was to come. He remained seated as you entered, crossing his trembling hands at his lap, partially hidden by the tabletop. The look on your face was grave, but you did not waste any time before you spoke, putting an end to his torment.

“My blood has come,” you said, almost too quiet to hear, and he had never been so relieved to hear of blood. “I am not with child.”

Seated behind his desk, the young king seemed relieved, though he attempted to hide it, but you could see the way his frown smoothed over, and the corners of his mouth eased slightly. “Very well,” he replied.

“I have thought of your proposal,” you said. “I will marry you for the sake of the realm.” 

“Before you agree, there are terms you should be aware of,” Jacaerys immediately answered, his gaze lowering to the desk in front of him where various letters were scattered over a map of the Reach.

“I am listening,” you said, your own eyes lingering to the coast where Oldtown sat, heart aching at the memory of your youth in the sun, far from the schemings of the capital.

“Lord Lyonel, your cousin’s son and heir, now rules House Hightower,” Jacaerys said, allowing you time to respond.

“I know him well, we were children together,” you replied, crossing your wrists at your belly, trying to gather some composure at the terms you would next be offered—all the while knowing you had no choice in the matter, and those would be orders instead of proposals.

“He is on his way to King’s Landing to treat with me,” Jacaerys explained, rising slowly until you were face to face, the large mahogany tabletop standing between the two of you . “He could treat with us together instead, if you could guarantee to think of the good of the realm instead of pride.”

Closing your eyes for a moment, you dropped your chin to your chest, reminding yourself of your mother’s words. “The realm has too long been at war,” you murmured. 

“Neither of us will ever convince the other of their good right, but together we have a chance to put an end to this,” he said, so earnestly you raised your gaze to him again. You understood then that he truly believed it, and you wanted to laugh in the face of such blatant optimism.

“While the overwhelming advice is that I wed you for the common good, I would not bring an enemy into my bed,” he continued, and the menacing glint in his eyes made you shiver.

“No matter my thoughts on your legitimacy, you now hold the power,” you admitted bitterly.

“As queen, you would have power as well,” Jacaerys assured you, slowly walking the desk until he was standing so close you could see the flickering candles reflecting in his dark eyes. “Convince Lyonel to stand down and bend the knee, and I will grant you my trust. I don’t intend to keep my queen in chains.”

While you had never been an outward romantic, and you had always known you would marry for political gain or alliance, you had never thought you would one day be a pawn to bridge the chasm left by war. It was unfair, in many ways, on both you and Jacaerys, to be sacrificing yourselves for the good of the realm, but you supposed it was the role of both king and queen.

It did not feel right to be called queen when that title belonged to your mother and your departed sister, but Alicent had been right. This was the only way you could take back some authority, yield some political influence and perhaps, restore what had been stolen. You were the way to put Hightower blood back on the throne—Gods willing you would have a son, and then perhaps honor would be restored.

A royal wedding should have been a cause for celebration and rejoicing, instead it was a solemn ceremony held under the eyes of all in the city, nobles and commoners alike, a show of unity and reconciliation. Soon word would spread in the realm and all would know that the two lineages born of Viserys were one, and the conflict was well and truly over, or so Jacaerys seemed to hope.

Tradition was to be upheld, insisted both the Council and the Faith, but Jacaerys asserted that there would be no bedding ceremony of any kind. “I will not have anyone in this room. The Maester may come in once it is done,” he admonished, closing the doors to the king’s quarters in the court’s face once you had been escorted to his chambers. 

“Thank you for that,” you whispered once the two of you were alone. 

“I did it for my sake as well,” he confessed, looking nervous. 

You did not answer and instead walked to the bed, ready to once again lay on your back and allow your husband to claim you as was his right. It would be the second time you would look at the moldings on the ceiling and forget about your own body until a man was done with it.

However, Jacaerys stopped your endeavor. “No,” he called, and you tilted your head in a silent question, confused as to what he expected from you. “I would not share your bed by force. I would not touch you until you wanted me to.”

“It is your right as husband and king,” you reminded him, a mirthless laugh on your lips.

Jacaerys went to his desk where a pitcher and cups sat, and swallowed a mouthful of wine, desperate for composure, loath to be in such a vulnerable position. “I have never been with a woman, and I would not have the first night I am to be a forceful occasion,” he confessed, and you could hardly understand how it was relevant. 

“I am your wife, to do with as you see fit, you cannot force yourself upon me,” you replied, and it made him nauseous.

“We shall disagree on this, then,” he said, setting the wine aside, the sweet taste of grape turning sour in his mouth. “It will not be our last disagreement.”

Fear struck you then, as you remembered your mother’s words vividly. Your position would not be safe until you truly were the wife to the king, the rightful queen. The future of your blood rested in your hands, and no matter how honorable he was, you could not allow him to compromise your position. 

Without a word you came to him and reached for the clasps of his doublet, undoing them swiftly, but he stopped you once more, grabbing both your wrists gently. “Please, your hands are shaking,” he said gently. “Is this what you truly want?”

You hated to admit it, but he had been honest towards you since the beginning, and thus you could not find it in yourself to lie. “No,” you said quietly, your eyes still fixed on the dragon brooch at his shoulder.

“Then you shall not lay a hand on me nor I on you,” he said firmly, letting go of you. 

Your arms fell to your sides, defeated. “The Maester will know and our marriage will be invalid,” you protested. 

“Leave that with me,” he said, gesturing to the armchairs in front of the fire. Uneasy, you still complied and sat where he wished, staring at the flames and wondering what other foolish ideas he had, if you had put yourself in danger by complying, if instead you should be the one to force his hand—he seemed unsure of himself at times, perhaps you could convince him.

You heard the sounds of a belt coming undone, then the ruffle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath. For a moment too long you sat there, listening to the rhythmic ruffles and short breaths, and it took you a minute to realize what was occurring, and when you did, you felt yourself flush in embarrassment.

Time stretched and his panting grew more frantic, until Jacaerys cursed under his breath. “Should I help?” you asked, biting your lip.

“No,” came the sharp answer. Finally, after a minute more, another sharp intake of breath pierced the air, a bitten groan that reminded you too well of your first wedding night. 

You heard him undress, then wash his hands in the basin. “It is done,” he said. When you rose again, his doublet was discarded and his shirt as well. He had put on a robe over his bare chest—he looked flushed, his high cheekbones tainted with red. His hair looked as though he had raked his fingers through his curls, giving them an unruly look.

Jacaerys felt your eyes on him as he picked up a small knife from his desk, a seal opener, and cut the inside of his arm near the crease of his elbow. It would be easily hidden by a sleeve, and none would be the wiser. He smeared some of the blood on his palm, then wiped it on the mattress where the evidence of his solitary act laid. 

“What is it?” you asked when he went back to staring at you. 

“Your hair,” he answered, almost embarrassed. “It is too… tidy.”

“Oh,” you breathed, then reached for the braid and undid it, raking a hand through your mane. You were obviously embarrassed as well, and he thought it served him well.

As Jacaerys opened the doors to his chambers once more, and both the Septon and the Maester came into the room, you were reminded of the night of your first marriage. For the second time your humiliation was to be witnessed, your virtue publicly claimed by a man you did not love ; tears came to your eyes and you wished that Jacaerys would send you away soon, to pray for guidance and plan your revenge.

Now you had been queen twice, and yet you felt as powerless as you ever had without the crown.

Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Thank you so much for the amazing feedback on the first chapter, it went straight to my heart. Chapter three will be posted next Saturday, July 18th.

Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239

@thegirlwithoutaname87 @harryssattelitestomper @rtyuy1346 @kplatzman @neenieweenie

@cinnamoonfairy @g0oshtt @orchidsinthesun @darling-darling3 @pookynknowntranger

@cloudyzip @softlittlevigil @at-a-rax-ia @noneedtosearch @darkrion

@tappyj @tojisprincess @strangersunghoon @devil-on-acid @minaridior

@mimrntgx @chimmysoftpaws @soleil-lei @dreamybarbarianprophecy @fa0nz6ain

[lady-ashfade]

༢ུ　ྀུ　— What is yours. What is ours.

Jacaerys Velaryon x Fem!Betrothed!Reader [Both of theses are dark, and have yandere themes]

₊˚𓂃 The Prince is rage and cold. His lover however, is hardly glum about her bloodshed.

₊˚𓂃 words: 1k

₊˚𓂃 warnings: first real suggestive fic, undoing clothes, dark!couple vibes, glum chaos x happy chaos, reader likes to kill for her prince and queen, angry/show jace! Jace and reader being 20! Like the actor!

THE PRINCE Jacaerys was known for his ability to argue with his mother. When the war started he became unliked the boy Dragonstone raised and was replaced with a hot headed man, much like the rogue prince himself. When he walked into a room people would bow their heads, never stare to long before he catches whiff.

And yet, when he told of his ideas and defenses against the greens and their army, he was turned away by his mother for being too young to understand. He knew what he was, what the council thought of him. A bastard unfit to ruin, just a boy that knew nothing of the cold winds of the world.

He chose anger.

But, his lover chose violence. Chose to relish in chaos, hunt and protect. Happy to do so.

Perhaps it was unfitting of a princes betrothed to be so cruel, so blood thirsty. Whispers of women being soft, submissive and the perfect wife was always something your mother tried to push into you. You hated it. Why couldn't you be soft, but harden when it mattered? Why couldn't you spill blood such as a man does?

Queen Rhaenyra however, took you in just after your first blood and raised you up. Never putting you down for training with her sons, never once punished you for striking down someone who insulted her sons. Because she knew where she could not protect Jace. You'd do just fine.

"You looked troubled," You gazed upon your betrothed, his dark curls turning a lighter shade of brown from the candle light. Here within theses walls, you aren't seen as crazed and untamed. With him, your chaos and stability met and harmonized.

“Perhaps. It is late.” His voice was strained and low. All the happiness had recently left him since the news of his brother. Him smiling and being comfortable was a pleasure but rare moment.

Walking up to him, you wrap your arms around his neck and resting your head on his. He leaned back against you, exhaling and closing his eyes. “What if you get some rest, you never know what tomorrow brings. All these books around you makes a boring night,” you lean down you kiss just beside his ear.

“If I could just find one thing, anything to prove myself and my mother’s claim — Perhaps the whispering of my legitimacy would stop, and the fucking stares.” He sighed while tightening his jaw. His voice was now growling, angry but also desperate, a mix you learned well.

Humming, you let go of him and took your place beside his chair. Jace opened his eyes again and looked up, seeing your loving gaze and soft eyes. Something only reserved for him, or his family. Every part of you had him in chains since your youth, your spiteful actions and rage so loud it normal ended in bloodshed. But he loved that you let your guard down, that you aren’t afraid to be gentle with him. That you felt safe with him.

“You deserve the title of heir just as much as anyone who sat the throne before your mother. A son of the tided and fire.” your hand reached up to stroke his pale cheeks. His skin so soft beneath your caressing thumb, “You are her son. First born son, she was and is the true heir. Who your father is doesn’t matter, you are named heir for a reason. A perfect prince who loves his people, who fights for what is rightful his.”

He could only respond with raising his knees and coming to clash his lips onto yours. You smiled against his lips and found your arms being thrown once again upon his neck, pulling him closer. “Jace,” your voice came as only a slight warning as he moved you up against the stone table, reaching behind you to move the spread of books laid out.

“You are loyal, my loyal woman.” His hands reached your hips and helped you sit on top of the surface, his hands then moving to the low him of your shirts.

You push him back, a wicked smile creeping upon your lips and lean back slightly. “A loyal wife soon, but you know I’m so much more than a woman,” you reach up to tug at his dark locks, and with your other hand resting on his chest.

“Loyal blade more like it, hmm? I have killed for you, beaten and maimed for you.” he nodded in agreement, leaning his head back while you tug and scratch the back of his head.

“My love, you give me fire to keep going. The flame in my heart,” you chuckled slightly at his words, very heartfelt but more like a poem from songs. Unbelievably corny.

You let him kiss you once again, harder and more desperate this time for your affection. You have no will to stop it, you liked the heat that burned your skin when he touched you. And he told you just how much he needs you, in every way possible.

“I’ll kill everyone,” you whisper when he pulls away, bowing his head to take interest with the skin of your neck. “Everyone who has wronged you, has raised an army against your mother.” he hummed against your neck, satisfied with your words losing its strength from heavy breathing.

“To see you in battle from the skies, would be a thrilling tale. Covered in red, screaming and slaying trailers.” Jace agreed, his fingers working up the back of your dress, trying to grab the laced strings.

Your hands begin to find his clothings, unhooking every accessory and his sword. “Would you believe I’d kill the green bitch dragon? Her and her cunt of a rider.”

It was uncertain why your heart skipped an unusual beat when he pulled away, you wondered if he was offended. If mentioning killing the symbol of his house wounded him and his pride, something you didn’t want.

“Aemond hides in the skies, but if we meet him there…” his words trail off, smiling as he finally unhooks your fabric and it slowly looses around your shoulders.

“Then with blood we will win the war. We will have what’s rightfully ours.”

[eldrith]

spilt wine jacaerys velaryon

“commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to your husband's awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.” 

jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader words: 4.7k notes: jacaerys & reader are aged up to 23. i cut a scene from one of my ongoing fics today & decided to rewrite it for a standalone instead ! hope u enjoy this is severely unedited warnings: afab reader, married bickering, alcohol consumption, tbh porn with no plot but a lot of dialogue, vague timeline, fluff & romance. ONE gentle & good-natured smack to jace’s head. smut - oral (fem receiving), teasing, hair pulling, sliiiight sub!jace if you squint, he's really teasing, sort of spoiled reader but its bc hes is so in love. be warned this is mostly foreplay.

masterlist

“THEY ARE FOOLS.”  

The sound of your husband’s voice comes breathed over a wide-spread map, sent by raven from the Sea Snake and then poached in haste from the hands of a squire as you’d both left the council chambers. Now the parchment sits, spread over the large oak of your shared solar, pinned at one corner with a tallow candle and another with a bowl bearing the remnants of cherries. The hour of Eels approaches upon the high moon out your casements, though inside you are well-lit in torch and company alike. 

He has not yet troubled himself to remove his doublet, though he’s shed the heavier dressings of office in the spaces between your shared solar and bedchambers, left discarded across the back of a chair with a sigh. His hair, so often kept neat, has suffered the abuse of his own hands at least twice since since leaving the council chamber; you can see the furrows of it, dark and disordered, and there too lies ink, faint along the side of his palm where he’s already begun marking the map before you’ve even properly closed the door behind you. He does not look at you yet - no, he looks only down at King’s Landing, at the coastline along Massey’s Hook, at all the small failures of an evening he has clearly not finished refighting in his own head. Recalling the incessant irritations of the council, you endure the harrowing thought that his pricked stipulations from this evening might yet haunt you both for some hours to come.

Though, in the spoken words of your husband lives less a true anger and more some worn frustration after such a laborious handful of hours cooped within the war council chambers. “The lot of them.” 

You unclasp your own cloak, soothing your skirts as you cross towards your husband. In attempt at jest, you let your lip lift faintly. “You name your Queen a fool?” 

A glance over his shoulder coaxes you to relent the daring accusation, sighing as you lift your hands in placation.

“Never,” he still responds in kind to your needling, shaking his head faintly. “Only–” 

Though his frustration breaks in his words, and he only sighs. You only watch as he reaches for the cup at his elbow, finds it empty, and reaches instead for the flagon, pouring himself with rather more generosity than the hour calls for. Once near the brim, he pushes it toward you and, in your mild amusement, you smile into the lip of his cup. 

He watches you drink, and shakes his head faintly. “Lord Celtigar thought it madness, my mother thought it madness–” he huffs, turning to you sidelong, visage shrouded in golden candlelight. A gesture toward you, as he undoes the buckles of his sword belt and drops it upon the long table beside the map. “Did you note, too, how Lord Bar Emmon thought my proposition madness at such volume he nearly cracked his own voice?”  

You laugh before you mean to, wine halfway from your lips. It is a small relief, for you both - so scrupulously dutiful in matters of council and of war - to find some private wickedness reserved only for each other, behind doors no lords nor councilmen may follow you through. And, dramatic as he is prone to be when alone with you, your husband is not wrong to have taken his irritation from an evening so agonizingly wasted. 

“He does have a gift for it,” you concede, passing the cup to Jacaerys’ hand. You watch, in turn, as he drinks, and continue: “I counted three occasions upon which he mentioned the same counter.” A gesture of half-exasperated, half-helpless amusement from you, you lean your hip closer to the table to face your husband. “And each time it felt as though it were newly occurring to him. It truly astounds me, in a way.”  

Jace conjures the princely decency to appear mournful even as he smirks at your words. “Always about the tides, that one. He is very fond of the tides, have you noticed?” Your husband lifts the half-drunk cup of wine to glare at Lord Corlys’s map over its rim, and you must bite back a fond grin. 

“I’m nearly forced to suspect he has no other thoughts at all,” Jace huffs into the cup, “that his mind simply produces ‘the tides, my prince’ whenever pressed on any matter. It pertains to no matters, as it stands, though he proceeds as though only the waters along Massey’s Hook exist for consideration at all.” 

Your lips purse in amusement, biting along your grin only for a moment. 

“The tides, my prince,” you presently intone, pitching your voice low and pompous in rather unfair imitation.

Jacaerys nearly laughs outright, though it is smothered in some attempt to remain in his ire from council past. Your husband does not deceive you; his lips still waver faintly, his eyes still gleam and dance in the torchlight as they regard your imitation.

It is this which spurs you to press on, “I only consider, my prince, that Vhagar might not read the Maester’s almanacs–”  

“Don’t,” your husband interjects in amusement, grinning helplessly as he swallows his sip of wine, “don’t, or I’ll spit this across Corlys’s map.” 

“–and so cannot be expected to observe the tides in her own campaigns of war–” 

Jace laughs outright now. “Stop,” he insists, coughing faintly from his swallow of wine; and, delighted, he reaches across the edge of the table to cover your mouth with two ink-stained fingers. You promptly bite lightly in retaliation, though this only makes his smile widen. 

The Lord Celtigar fares little better a moment later, invoked and verbally torn between the two of you in the same breath; a provocation born of an endless habit of throat-clearing before every single sentence, you exchange poor imitations of the innocent man until the two of you are leaning towards each other across the table, half-drunk on wine and flushed with relief of duty. It is a rare thing, to be nowhere near a council chamber, with no one in the room requiring anything of either of you at all tonight. 

“Gods,” Jace murmurs at last, dragging a hand down his face, “You’re quite lucky I haven’t choked.” 

You soothe your dress, crossing to perch instead beside him rather than corner; And, the very moment you open your mouth to return the sentiment of relief, he speaks once more. 

“The tides, my prince,” he says again. 

It absurdly brings you both into laughter once more, wine-loosened and gilded in warm light, muffled by palms and chastened lips as though you both know it is foolish and hardly as amusing as it feels. Though it proves no matter besides, for you and your husband finish your cup of wine and fill it once more before the laughter fully ebbs. 

It is once the last sigh has bubbled past your lips that he reaches for you properly, cupping your jaw in his whole palm to kiss you. Your lips find his slow, warm; wine and spice upon the tongue, you lean further into his taste eagerly. A palm skates up your side, sliding back to gather you by waist against him.

“Far better company than the council,” you murmur against his mouth, not quite breaking the kiss to say it. A low hum rolls through his throat, echoing faintly between your mouths. 

“Immeasurably,” he agrees, the word half-lost between your lips. Faithfully Jacaerys kisses you, leaning wholly into your space as he keeps himself propped with a palm on the map below. He leans back only a breath then, lips pressed and parting. “Bar Emmon,” he says absurdly, still smiling into the kiss, “does not kiss half as well, I’d wager.” 

A sound of displeasure from you as you lean back; disturbed, faintly, at his eagerness to bring back up the man who pestered him so much all evening. “I should hope you’ll never discover for yourself,” you manage, laughing faintly even as his mouth finds yours again, swallowing any such attempts to speak further. 

A huff of laughter escapes him despite his mouth upon yours, and it’s in such a sound that chases off whatever glum irritation cast the council had left behind. And so you merely let him laugh, one hand fisting in the front of his doublet to keep him close, solid, yours in a way the council chamber rarely lets him be these days.

After a moment, he pulls away once more. “We should be studying the map,” Jace decides only a few moments later, an observation which causes a roll of your eyes. “The Lord Hand lent it to me with intention of regaining it soon.” 

Lips part, only the glossy string of your shared affection connecting you for a moment in the candlelight as you lean faintly against the table, sighing. “Might it wait just for a moment, my Prince?” you suggest. 

 “It cannot wait,” Jace says, though he certainly makes no move at all to leave you, forehead dropping to your skin instead. His lips brush along your neck as he continues, “the ink is barely dry, wife, and half of it is guesswork besides. Corlys marked the shoals from memory, he said in his raven, and memory seventy years old at that. If I do not commit it to my own hand soon–”

Perhaps it is impatience, or simply confusion as to why your husband has taken up cartographic studies with his grandfather in the midst of war; whatever it is, you only sigh, pressing yourself more firmly to the line of his own warm body, feeling his breath hitch faintly against your throat. 

“Commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to his awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.” 

And indeed, whatever protest he means to make next is lost entirely as you kiss him again; he, in what might be a surge of either affection or mild frustration, only pushes further into your warmth.

Though his enthusiasm proves too eager, for between the two of you and the oaken table and considerably more enthusiasm than sense, you overbalance together: his knee catches the chair, yours tangle ungracefully in your own skirts, and you tumble in a sudden sprawl backwards across the map itself, parchment crackling and ripping faintly beneath you. It is a faint clatter you hear before you smell the wine spilt over the edge of the table, though neither of you seem particularly rushed to right the fallen cup. 

He catches himself above you on one forearm, laughing outright once again, the sound of it rich, startled through your chamber. Your heart still – after all the moons wed to him – flips at the sound. 

“Oh,” you tut, shaking your head in faint tease, “And now you’ve just certainly ruined Corlys’ map,” you inform him gravely, one hand still fisted in his doublet, refusing to let him retreat even the small distance his laughter has suddenly put between your mouths. He hums in agreement, though seemingly entirely unrepentant as he glances down to where your shoulder has scuffed clean through some careful notation of the Gullet’s currents. He purses his lips. “I suppose the council will have my head.”

A huff from your lips, tipping your head. “Well, after Aegon and Aemond’s, I imagine there will be little room left on the pike for a head like yours.” 

Laugh spills regretfully from full-kissed lips above you. He is wholly pressed against you now, slotted rather wonderfully between your thighs as you lay upon the table, caged by arm and breath. You lips your chin only faintly, just to bump your nose against his own. 

“A comforting thought,” his nose brushes yours, dimple deep now, all the solemnity of an hour ago nowhere to be found in him. 

You, fought and lost against your own battle of grin, only shake your head. “I suppose you may keep your own in the meantime, then.” 

A palm snakes beneath your tresses to cup your head, turning you in kind until he has clear access to the junction of your throat and clavicle. “Generous of you,” he muses dryly, a dimpled grin flashing as leans, shifting closer into you to stir a hitch of excitement through your breast. “And here I thought you were planning to sow my name in disgrace for my impropriety laying you upon this map.” 

“Your impropriety,” you scoff in echo, though the word catches somewhere breathless in your throat as his mouth finds the soft skin below your ear. “That itself is rather the whole trouble tonight, seeing as it was you who kissed me first, you who could not be persuaded to leave off Corlys’s precious shoals for even a moment, you who cannot forgive Lord Bar Emmon for his blunder, and you who has now ruined the very map you are so determined to defend–” 

Your words, though breathed out quickly, are lost scarce to a shiver of pleasure; for Jace has latched himself upon the tender sensitivity of your throat, and only smiles against the goosepimples rising beneath his tongue. Still, you do not give up, even as teeth scrape along your pulse gently. “So I suppose you’ll–” a breathy sigh, “have to forgive me if I find it difficult to accept the blame for your own temper. It was merely distracting.” 

A hum presses along your chest, dragging a fiercely hungry heat through your very core. His lips brush over the neckline of your dress before lifting his chin.

“Was it?” He does not sound remotely remorseful, and indeed his amber eyes melt into the candlelight with mirth. “I shall have to remember that, then, for the next council you find too tedious to bear–” 

You lean back, exasperated by half in his mention of council once more. 

“Jace.” 

He beams; a beautiful man, your husband, and you cannot curb the smile you helplessly give in return. His lips part in echoed tease of your impatience. 

“Wife.” 

You shove at his shoulder, only half in earnest, and he lets himself be shoved, rolling half onto his elbow beside you amidst the ruin of parchment and spilled wine, both of you grinning now. It is when his mouth finds the junction of your throat once more that the hunger comes back thrice as strong, and you pull him right above you once more even as you glance at the ruined map beneath your sprawled figure, the creeping stains of spilt wine. 

“We ought to resolve this mess, I suppose,” you sigh, hoping he will indeed ignore your words and continue the path he makes with his lips now across your chest. 

And, it seems, your Prince has a mind to ignore your orders this eve - for he merely continues his own line of thought as though you'd been discussing it all along. “I’m only saying,” he begins, apropos of certainly nothing as he lifts his head enough to look faintly wounded – unconvincing as it is, given the grin still tugging at the corner of his mouth – “A word from you, and he might have folded twice as fast.” 

Your head falls back in exasperation, even as his teeth nip at the soft skin of your neck. Back again he’s circled, to the man in the council – as though there lies no other pressing matters he might attend to at present. 

“You are meant to be resolving the mess,” you remind him, gesturing at the ruined parchment beneath you both, though your hand finds its way to the back of his neck regardless, pressing him instead closer to where your breasts rise and fall through your dress. His mouth follows willingly, nosing along the neckline to press his lips against your beating skin. 

“I am resolving many things at once,” he murmurs, entirely too pleased with himself, and returns his attention to your body once more as though the council chamber has not just risen between you a third time this hour. He huffs only faintly, the breath of which sends a shiver across the valley of your breasts. He begins to speak again: “You might resolve my grievance while you’re at it–” 

Your groan of impatience and disbelief ricochets through the solar, though it is drowned by your husband’s incessant prattling even as his tongue dips across the flush of your breasts, pulling at the hem of your dress to reveal more sweet skin to his blabbering lips, “–It would only take a word: ‘Jace was right, and Lord Bar Emmon a tedious old fool, and I shall say so plainly next time for all to hear.’”  

With fingers threading through thickened dark curls, you let out a flighty laugh, the desire molten through you despite the unfavorable topic he cannot seem to let go. “You want me to rehearse a speech whilst you ravish me?” You murmur. 

That cursed mouth curves against your skin. “I want my wife’s loyalty declared before the whole council,” he leans back only a breath, enough to slip the shoulder from your gown, sliding it gently over your skin to reveal your breasts. Though you nearly gasp at the chill of air, any such discomforts are remedied as his breath fans across such tender skin, lips trailing as he pleases. You sigh softly, fingers tightening within his hair.

Helpless to his charming idiocy, you laugh, tugging gently upon his hair until he lifts his head to look at you properly, mock-solemn amber eyes meeting yours in the candlelight.

“You are dreadfully greedy tonight, husband,” you receive his eager kiss between your words, well aware of how his eyes hook and remain only on the sweet form of your lips as you speak, “for a man who won an argument twice in council over without any help from me at all. You’ve been brooding as though you lost it wholly.” 

A pout, one which you can only help to lean forward and kiss; you catch his lower lip between your teeth and drag back, unhurried, until whatever else he meant to say dissolves into a rough, startled groan. He grins around his words, dipping his head once more to nip along the soft of your flesh. 

“Well, please forgive me for preferring when you fight at my side. It is far preferable to being left on my own.” 

He does not witness the roll of your eyes; though, all the same, for he has endeavored to slowly drag your skirts in a bunch upon your thigh with his palm, slow enough to drive you mad but pressing enough for you to understand his intentions. A tantalizing thing, even as you scoff. 

“I was at your side,” you insist, and a soft gasp escapes you as one palm rises from your neck to instead palm along the curve of your breast, a soft thing despite how his teeth catch at your skin. “Though it seems I’ve wounded your pride, seeing as you’ve returned from council only to complain further, even with your wife so willingly beneath you.” 

He hums something rather insolent and you only smile, far too indulgent as your hand slides to grip his shoulder and hold on to the warmth there. A sigh leaves your lungs as you purse your lips, “So I suppose I must make it up to you in some way or another.” 

A slow grown grin, then, pressed into soft skin beneath your ear; and whatever further words you intend to further dole him scatter from your tongue as he hums low. 

“Attend your husband, then,” he whispers, his palm coursing finally from your lifted skirts to the warm flesh of your upper thigh, coaxing your knee to hitch along his hips, “He has endured a rather trying council, and a map now ruined besides, and he would have–” 

“He would have,” you cut in, hand sliding from the breadth of his shoulder to fist gently in his hair once more, drawing his face back to yours before he can talk himself further into mischief, “rather less of his own voice, and rather more attention paid to his wife. Yes?”  

A hum so near to a moan comes from kiss-bitten lips, warm against your mouth. He nods faintly in some eagerness, biting his lip only faintly as his eyes dance between your own. “As my lady wife commands,” he absconces. 

And at last, he holds his tongue of words and endeavors instead – as all good husbands must learn to do – to use it in far more pleasurable ways. 

It is mere moments in which his palms grasp at your hips; with a gentle enough tug, he brings you nearest the edge of your table, bare from his hitching of your skirts and dragging of your neckline. A gasp from you, not scandalized as much as jesting at his sudden eagerness, coaxes a small glint of amusement in your husband’s amber gaze. It remains there, flickering in his love and hunger alike for you, as he sinks to his knees right there upon the stone floor. 

And, though you’d prefer not to allow such weaknesses, still you let yourself sigh a shaky, flighty thing as the sensation of his lips drag teasing, horribly slow kisses along the inner plush of your thighs. 

“Jace,” you sigh, a half-plead half-scold as his eyes glint up at you, the flash of a dark-dragoned signet ring upon his finger disappearing as he bunches your skirts further above your hips. And then he has the gall, it appears, to shush you; a placating thing, a rush of air upon shivered skin. “Shh,” he murmurs into the sweetness of your thigh, and you cannot attempt to feign resentment for the action as it conjures a rush of arousal further through you.  

Gathered upon your elbows, you’re helpless to watch as those dark curls glisten in candlelight, wax weeping round your stuttering breaths, the scent of wine heady in the evening air and humming with a terrible anticipation. Cruel, your husband can be, in his teasing. So very cruel indeed. 

It is through the anticipation and silence in which you crack. 

“Jacaerys–” 

You let out a sharp moan instead at the taper of his name, whatever command you had dying on your tongue; for his lips have pressed soundly upon your womanhood, roving a shiver of pleasure through your very core. A canting tilt of your hips arches your spine in surprise, a warm rush of pleasure flooding your whole being. 

And he, the horrible man, dares smile against you. 

It is with little remaining control that your hand rises to grip through his curled tresses; a trembling thing as his own large palms move to lift your thighs until he is settled firmly between them, humming to himself as your heels come to rest over broadened shoulders. Brushing away strayed curls, you gaze upon your love with some mix of awe and worship as he laves against you, tongue gathering your desire and letting out a low moan of his own at your taste. 

Your own breath leaves your lips in gasps; sharp at first, though his ministrations cease suddenly as your husband lifts his chin slightly. A loss of pleasure shutters through your chest and you loosen your grip upon his hair, glancing down at him in half-lidded confusion. 

“You've a beauty mark just here,” he murmurs against your inner thigh, tracing it slow with his mouth. “I don't believe I've properly admired before.”

You love him, with your whole soul and being; and yet you might scream; A horrible tease he is, indeed speaking far too much for the promises he’d made to you not moments ago. “You’ve admired it a hundred times,” you get out impatiently, breathless as you are – for he has begun to trail his path of kisses directly to your core once more. A hum from him, as one palm grasps wholly round your thigh to spread you further for him to admire. A shameless thing, perhaps, though the heat of it spreads pleasure along your chest just as warmth kisses your cheeks in droves. 

“And I intend to admire it a hundred more, my love,” he murmurs into you at length, rendering you straddled upon that terrible line between pleasure and tease. “Some things bear repeating,” he then decides. And it is as though you see the thought cross his mind through his eyes; though before you can tell him to cease it before it comes past his lips, a soft laugh, half-muffled against your heat, startles you. 

“Unlike Lord Bar Emmon’s arguments,” he mutters then, the irritation of which boils suddenly beneath your skin, coaxing your eyes wide with disbelief as he dares continue. “–Which improve with exactly no amount of repetition–” 

Your palm smacks lightly across the back of his head, disturbing the gloss of curls at rest between your thighs. 

"Jace." You catch a fistful of his hair this time, not ungently, tipping his face properly up to yours. "Cease speaking, entirely, I–I mean it.” 

And perhaps it would have come strong from your lips, if not for the shakiness, that trembling desire he’s seemed to coax within you despite his teasing. “Entirely,” he repeats, testing the word as though it truly offends him. You huff out an impatient sigh, well aware of both your impatience and your insatiable desire for your husband at present; though too, you are well aware of your Jacaerys’ predisposition to spoiling you in all aspects of your marriage – and he, quite often, finds it a true struggle to say no to you. He goads you, you know this. WIthin such a handsome visage lies a glint of amusement he gains at your slow torture. “That seems a rather severe–” 

“Jacaerys,” you all but whimper, and that does it; something in the word dissolves whatever torturous, inopportune argument he’d been building, and the grin that spreads over his face is helpless now, boyish, all pretense of debate abandoned.

“Alright, yes, mercy. I’ll yield to my pretty wife.” His lips brush against your aching desire, shoulders shaking with amusement. “How horrible,” he then dares utter, as though speaking to himself. “The Prince of Dragonstone, brought low by his own wife, in his own solar, over a map–” 

You make to sit up, cheeks hot with the hazy mixture of desire, pleasure, and sheer irritation. “Speak once more about that map, and I swear to you I will leave this chamber.” 

At this, he goes rather properly still between your thighs, the teasing drained out of him all at once; and for a few breaths, neither of you moves at all. Candlelight licks along the ruined parchment beneath you both, and the scent of wine is strong enough within the chamber that you imagine it’s breached the edges of the map, too – blooming ruby along the rivers and coasts etched with ink, spreading its tendrils closer as though it, too, wishes to touch the man between your thighs. The torchlight catches its own gold warmth along the line of his jaw, and his eyes are amber gone dark and steady; they flick, searching your face as though to be certain the threat is only half meant. It is, of course. 

Still, in the heavy breaths between you, neither you nor Jace look away; a shared thing so deep there are no words, an understanding perhaps only known between two people who have shared a bed and a war and worlds worth of trust between them and know each other too well now to need explaining. 

A smile blooms, first across full lips, glistening with desire; then along carved cheekbone, spreading to warm his eyes until the whole chamber feels, for a moment, infinitely warm and gentle. Your own smile creeps along your visage, just as easy as dusk chases sun. 

You could not love him more, you think. 

“Not another word,” he swears to you then, earnest enough as he is cheeky; he's already smiling against your skin, mouth finding the soft of your thigh in silent apology, one hand splaying warm along your stomach to ease you down again, unhurried and certain as only he could ever be with your body. A warmth spreads through you, that familiar affection that pricks along your cheeks and flutters your heart.

And then, after far too much anticipation, a slow press of his lips; your sigh soothes along the breath of the torches as his fingers gently press into the thick of your thighs, soothing the tense of your muscles. Eyelashes flutter as his tongue laves slowly upon your heat, nudging your bundle of nerves enough to have you keening, whispering his name into the quiet of the chamber. Indeed, you begin quite immediately to quiver at the sensation; A shuttering breath of pleasure exhales from your lips, brows stitching together with a thread of sweet ecstasy. Though after only a few more moments, his lips whisper once more against you. “I’ll be the very picture of silence, I swear it, my love.” 

And he is not, quite, what he promises to be; a murmur here, a low hum of arousal there, some fresh and foolish endearment breathed against your skin every time he thinks you've forgotten to scold him for it – but he is close enough, with his mouth upon you and his hands finding each breath of your body they’ve long since memorized, that you let it go entirely.

[kenna-the-cosmic]

perfectly encapsulates how i imagine jace would be with a wife. utterly devoted, but still devious.

[kenna-the-cosmic]

i would very much like to see daemon go to asshai or sothoryos and see how he fares

on a side note, it’s really funny how all the books and shows pretty much revolve around the iron throne, meanwhile lovecraftian horrors are going on in the background. like wtf happened to aerea targaryen? and with yeen?

[sylasthegrim]

Stills of Rhaenyra and Jacaerys.

[kenna-the-cosmic]

people cheering corlys for telling a woman, who’s sons have died, (one just one or two days prior) that they lived and died as bastards. mind you, rhaenyra and laenor tried to have legitimate children, and despite corlys knowing laenor was gay, pushed him into this position. and he himself sired bastards, so who is he to judge?

also rhaenyra did not even fully deny him. she’s clearly struggling as she is in mourning, she’s come back to a kingdom that is free falling, and she only has a few advisors (one who is daemon basically telling her to conquer people and let poor people die). like no duh she’s going to wait before making decisions that directly affect her house. she’s overwhelmed.

obviously rhaenyra is not blameless in all of this, but i think it’s incredibly dumb to support such poor writing from the show runners.

(in the books rhaenyra had no problem legitimizing them and corlys never questions his grandsons legitimacy.)

overall i just think it’s character assassination for corlys and rhaenyra.

[sylasthegrim]

An Ember in the Ashes ✢ Chapter 1

Pairing ✢ King Jacaerys x Targtower Reader

Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending

Wordcount ✢ 3,515

Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.

Jacaerys Masterlist

Chapter One ✢ King of the Ashes

The Great Hall had once been a symbol of power, of the supremacy of the House of the Dragon, however now it felt as though it carried the weight of a dynasty in ruins.

On the day after the morrow they would burn two enemies side by side, returning them to the ashes in which dragons made their nests, as was appropriate for two children of House Targaryen—Rhaenyra and Aegon would rest underground in the Sept, a symbol of what war could bring.

While the prospect of his mother sleeping her eternal sleep under the same floor as her treacherous brother enraged Jacaerys, he knew it was a show of honor the like was expected of a true, wise king.

Never in his ten and nine years of life had Jacaerys thought much about the sort of king he would make. After all, he had thought the crown was decades away, a lifetime, when his own children would have been grown and his mother would have been trembling and frail, passing into the mercy of the Gods. 

Instead the Stranger had taken her in her prime, through dragon fire that had burned her flesh and rotted her core until she had eventually succumbed to it. Or perhaps it was the grief of losing another son, that in the end had been too much to bear. Many in the Red Keep suspected that the loss of Queen Helaena and their youngest son had been what had driven Aegon to madness, until his own men had taken pity. 

Only the Gods knew the truth of it, now all there was for Jacaerys to understand was that the two rulers, legitimate and usurping, who had sat the throne after Viserys were now dead, and the crown had landed on his head. 

Under the looming presence of the Iron Throne, Jacaerys paced the marble floors, attempting to make sense of the utter devastation around him. The high ceilings now felt suffocating, as though the very sky was crumbling over his head. 

“I should not be there,” he said outloud, almost to himself, or perhaps to the Gods, but his faithful friend Cregan Stark still answered his call of anguish. 

Wrists resting atop the pommel of Ice, which he carried at his waist these days, the young lord was watching over him as Kingsguard would, with the sort of silent presence that reminded Jacaerys that he was not alone in carrying his grief. 

“This is your rightful place, my prince,” he reminded him with the steadfastness he had come to expect from the northerner. 

“No it is not. It shouldn’t be, not by decades at least,” he resisted, and Cregan knew him to be right. 

Upon answering the call of the Dragon Queen, never would he have imagined that he would see a great dynasty fall to its knees in such a short time. Dragon riders had risen and fallen as quickly as the tide and as unpredictably, and he feared that it was only through sheer fate that one legitimate heir remained.

While it was not in his character to contemplate potential ruin, he knew the face of the crown could have been a child not even a decade old, would Jacaerys have drowned along with his dragon at the Gullet.

“Why have the Gods allowed it? Why allow my mother to die but me to survive?” Jacaerys lamented, the healed wound in his shoulder throbbing then, a pulsing burn from an arrow that had scarcely missed his heart—in that instant he almost wished it had not, and had allowed him to rest at the bottom of the sea with Vermax, instead of standing to inherit ruins.

“It is not for us to know,” Cregan replied, knowing it was no comfort. Then he cleared his throat, meaning to lead the young king to where he was expected. “They are waiting for you.”

Jacaerys turned to him then, his eyes rimmed with red and his face gaunter than a man of his age should be, the face of a man who had seen the Stranger many a time. “I cannot rule.”

Cregan stepped forward and put a heavy hand on his shoulder—still, the touch felt like the comfort of a brother, the sort Jacaerys sorely missed, and he leaned into it for support. “Then allow me to counsel you. We have been friends, haven’t we?”

Jacaerys nodded, swallowing heavily—the battlefield forged strong friendships, bonds of brotherhood the like he would have never imagined beforehand. “We have,” he confirmed. “There is no one else I trust.”

“Then believe me when I say, you will be a fine king,” Cregan replied, and it planted the seed of an idea in him, that perhaps not all of it was a curse—perhaps this was the call of destiny, no matter how painful, and he only had to answer it. “One I will gladly bend the knee to.”

The Red Keep had been your birth place, and now you were certain it would be your resting place. It had now been a fortnight since Rhaenyra had taken the Iron Throne once more, returning to King’s Landing with an army several thousands strong, made of Rivermen and Northerners, only to find that the revenge she sought had already been taken from her. Aegon laid cold in his bed, and she followed mere days later. 

You had been confined to Maegor's Holdfast, kept under close watch in your rooms most days, as though you were more than you were, more than a woman and instead a danger to the unlikely king now wearing the crown. You had never had to think of yourself as a political pawn until your brother Aegon, having taken the throne once more, had summoned you to the capital. You had obeyed your king, but in the span of a few weeks, he had perished and left you and your mother to face the consequences of his actions.

You loathed him as much as you loathed Rhaenyra and her brood. It was a cruel turn of fate, almost a cruel sort of poetry, that both pretenders to the throne had perished in the pursuit of it, leaving their heirs to scrub their blood from the stone floors and rebuild the dynasty they had destroyed, or pay the price of their pride in their own blood. 

All those that had betrayed Rhaenyra’s faction were now facing justice, and you feared you were only waiting for the executioner’s blade. You wondered whether your nephew’s own sword would do it, or if he would entrust the task to his most loyal man, Cregan Stark. Perhaps they would show mercy and send you into exile, to become a Silent Sister. 

Death or eternal silence,you knew what you would rather endure. 

Thus you waited for the Stranger in the room that had seen your childhood and little else, as you had been sent to Oldtown for your education once the first spring of your womanhood had bloomed. The Faith of the Seven now rooted you and guided you, and you clung to prayers as not to fall into madness.

On the third night of his reign, it was not the hand nor the blade of justice that came to you, but Jacaerys himself, and you wondered whether the following morrow would be the last dawn you would see. 

You stood abruptly as he entered, glancing towards the guard at the door with dread. “Rest easy, you have nothing to fear from me,” Jacaerys assured you. He was dressed in regal clothing made of black, the velvet layer on the inside of his cape a deep red. His hair fell to his shoulders in dark curls, nearly black in the low light of the candles. 

“Don’t I?” you asked, openly weary and hostile. “Where are my niece, and my mother?”

“Confined to their own rooms,” the young man replied with what seemed to you as regret. 

You noticed that he was not wearing the crown, but his head was bowed as though it was weighing on his neck, a constant presence. “Might I see them?” you inquired, but it sounded more like an order you were giving him.

“Your niece, yes,” Jacaerys conceded. 

“She’s a motherless child. Surely you would not have her be confined alone,” you insisted, and it seemed to convince him.

“You will be escorted to see her,” he offered, but it did little to appease you.

You approached him in careful steps until he could see the unshed tears glimmer in your eyes, your brow furrowed in concealed anger. You were trembling, ever so slightly, and when he searched your face for any familiar flicker, he found none—you were his blood, and yet nothing tied the two of you together but hatred.

“What will happen to us, now?” you inquired, gauging him. Standing face to face, you were reminded then of the years of your childhood, and you wondered whether the boy you had known then was still within reach, or if he had perished alongside his kin, replaced by a man you did not know.

“Nothing, for the time being. You are to be confined until trials have been run,” he explained.

Hope burst in your chest then, a starving dragon freed from its chains taking to the skies, ready to burn the lands around it. “And after that?”

Jacaerys looked pained then, a frown between his brows. “I do not know,” was all he answered, and he looked like a child, frightened by his own crown and unable to yield the power he possessed, and you hated him for it. 

“Why have you come, then, if you do not know of my fate?” you accused, your burning tears pearling at the corners of your eyes, your simmering rage like a silent sob caught in your chest, and he did not have any more answers for you.

Once Jacaerys had left, leaving more doubts and fears behind, you realized you had only addressed him in questions. There was a rage inside of you, and a primal fear that was no doubt similar to that of a beast caught in a trap, forced to eat through its own leg to free itself. 

You only had blunt teeth, but you still hoped you could sharpen them in due time.

Over the last pair of years, Jacaerys had sat at many a council of war, at the Painted Table in Dragonstone, but always as a councilor himself, advising his mother—it was only now that he realized how comfortable such a position was, making the decisions without having to enforce them, or without having to consider their consequences.

Now he was the one standing at the head of the table, leading men that sat in front of their marble ball as though they had paid a price for it and ought to claim them with pride, when in truth they had been named because they were alive and breathing. 

Corlys Velaryon was still abed from his wounds, but the men who had advised his mother during her last days were now serving him, waiting for him to name his council as he wished. All of them were taking their orders from a king young enough to be their son or grandson, one or two failing to conceal their contempt for that fact, and Jace wondered if such was the fate of all the kings that had preceded him. 

However what Jace lacked in years lived, he made up for in the devastation he had seen. In many ways grief was his experience, more so than strategy and governance, and he supposed it forged a man just as well.

Before the war he had never realized what came with being king—the grief, knowing the crown had only been passed on because the previous monarch had perished. It was all the more burdensome knowing his mother had barely reigned, and never over peace.

Since Cregan’s declaration of devotion, he had had the time to contemplate the sort of king he would want to be, the sort of legacy he would want to leave behind, whether his reign would be long or short. What mattered to him most was not to assert his authority or to be admired—he needed to rebuild and to leave the crown strong for his heirs. His reign would not be for himself, but for those who come after. 

With such a conclusion he sat before his council that morning, Cregan at his right where the Hand would usually be.

Roland Westerling, an older man with a calm disposition, handed a roll of parchment to Jacaerys, the seal of which had already been broken, a golden stag. “Lady Elenda Baratheon has accepted your terms of peace,” he informed the council as soon as they were all seated. 

“Nearly half of the great houses in the land are now ruled by babes and their mothers as regents,” Unwin Peake commented, as though this simple fact held an inherent flaw.

“I will gladly deal with these women. They might make wiser rulers than their husbands, who took to arm against my mother,” he said, unrolling the parchment and reading it over quickly before passing it along to Cregan. “Lord Roland, your daughter Joanna now rules House Lannister, does she not?”

“Indeed,” Roland answered with a slight smile of pride. “Loreon is a boy of barely five.”

Once great, powerful houses with proud men at their helm, the Lannisters and the Baratheons were now led by women, mothers of their heirs who would now lead the very men that had marched to war refusing to bow to a queen, and Jacaerys would laugh at their fate if he could summon the mirth. 

“There is still unrest in the Reach, I’m afraid,” Thaddeus Rowan said. “Those who remain loyal to the Greens are loath to settle, however the Hightowers are now ruled by a boy of seven and ten. He might easily be reasoned with.”

“Summon him to King’s Landing. I will receive him,” Jacaerys decided, to which Roland took note.

“He has made a rather unusual request to the High Septon,” Thaddeus continued with an appalled expression on his face. “He has asked for permission to wed his own father’s second wife, Lady Samantha Tarly.”

Jacaerys frowned—while there was no blood between a boy and his step-mother, it was still highly unusual and perhaps distasteful, especially since Oldtown was the cradle of the Faith. “How do you know of this, my lord?”

“Lady Sam is my niece, by my sister,” Thaddeus supplied. 

Without a word, Cregan gave Jacaerys a slow tilt of his head. “The Tarlys supported my mother, as did your house, did they not?” Jacaerys asked Lord Roland. “Did Lady Sam’s loyalties lie with my mother?”

Thaddeus observed Jacaerys for a moment. “Indeed.”

“Write to the High Septon in my name,” Jacaerys then decided. “Have him grant the marriage.”

As soon had he given the order, barely breathing after his words, that Unwin Peake cleared his throat. “While we are speaking of marriage, your grace, there is a matter we must discuss,” the man said, sharing a look with the other lords that spoke of a preceding agreement. “I loathe to be the one to say it, but a young king shall need a queen and heirs.”

“My brothers are my heirs,” Jacaerys protested. 

“The future of the realm partly rests on you securing a long-lasting peace,” Roland said. “While we have come to understand that an informal betrothal was made in childhood between yourself and Lady Baela Velaryon, she might not be the wisest match.”

Baela and himself had been children together, and while the expectation had been for them to marry, he cherished her friendship and had rarely considered the prospect. “A marriage is an alliance, a political calculation,” he continued.

Cregan crossed his hands atop the table and leaned forward. “What do you suggest?” he asked, but Jace could tell he already knew what point they were about to make, and he braced himself.

“The breach between the two branches of House Targaryen may be mended,” Thaddeus offered carefully. “Were his grace to wed the remaining child of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower.”

Horror rose from the pit of his stomach, settled only when he caught eyes with Cregan, whose gaze was calm and direct—without a word needed between them, the northerner gave him a slow nod, and with that, his fate was sealed.

Evening was falling, a heavy veil over the Red Keep, made of darkness and cold wind. Winter was settling and the days were darker and shorter, plunging the castle in a grim atmosphere that lasted from the end of the afternoon to the late morrow.

Supper was still an hour away when you were summoned to the king’s quarters. The room was brightly lit with candles and a fire, perhaps even more than was comfortable, as though Jacaerys was attempting to keep the darkness at bay. You stood near the threshold while he remained further into the room, arms clasped behind his back like a soldier at attention.

“I have asked you here to present to you a proposal I hope you will agree to,” he announced, the words sounding rehearsed, empty of all sincerity. “The realm is shattered and House Targaryen is in ruins, but together we might unite it.”

As soon as the words had left his mouth, you knew you had come to hear. “Will you wed me, and put an end to this bloodshed once and for all?”

Your answer came like the crack of a whip. “I may not.”

“I understand that this is not what you would have wanted, however—” Jacaerys prepared his arguments, but you did not let him speak.

With a raised hand, you silenced him. “You misunderstand me. This has nothing to do with what I want, but what I can do,” you explained, your face contorting in anguish.

“I don’t understand,” he said, cutting you off as though he suspected what was coming and desperately wanted to keep it at bay, but he could not have known, you thought.

Rage rose in your throat, acrid and burning, but you swallowed it down. You wanted to curse your brother out for putting you in such a vulnerable position, but damning the dead would do you no good, and you did not wish to betray your king’s memory in front of the man who had replaced him.

“A few days before Aegon died, he took me to wife in a secret ceremony,” you admitted, tears clouding your eyes, and Jace’s heart ached in sudden pity. “Ask the Septon and he shall confirm.”

“Aegon is dead, a widow is permitted to remarry,” he countered, and he could tell from your face how impatient you were becoming with him.

“I have not bled since,” you clarified. It had been two moons now, but the Maester could not say with certainty until the quickening, and your morrows remained without any sickness, yet you doubted, dreading the child that might be inside of you.

Jacaerys blamed his naiveness. “Are you implying—”

You looked upon him severely. “I may be carrying Aegon’s child, yes,” you said, and this simple but devastating truth rang loud in the room—it could be your salvation, as much as your downfall. 

“This changes everything,” Jacaerys whispered, and upon noticing the subtle way you were trembling, once more inhabited by fear in his presence, quickly made his promise. “No harm will come to you, you have my word. I shall keep your secret until you are certain either way.”

You knew you should have been grateful, but you hated the mere thought of owing him any sort of gratitude. It was just as well that he ignored your tears, much as he had done the day prior, as though he sought you out not to converse with you, but to shout into a void that echoed back to him. 

Jacaerys waved you away, crumbling once the doors shut and he was alone once more. He might have been young and uncertain of himself, but he knew what would happen if you were to birth a son.

Aegon’s supporters were still many, and his reign was still too fragile. Power often turned loyal men into self-serving traitors ; he could still easily be toppled, be murdered in this very room as Aegon had, and a babe placed upon the throne in his stead. 

Unable to bear the storm inside of him he took hold of the crown resting atop the mantle of the hearth and threw it at the wall, wailing until his voice broke. 

Grief held him by the throat, an invisible hand that felt like that of the Stranger choking his breath from his very neck. The wounds on his shoulders ached and throbbed anew, as fresh in his mind as the day they had been inflicted.

“What should I do, mother?” he pleaded to the night. “What would you have me do?”

Alone and broken, the young king wept. 

Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Feedback is always appreciated. Ask in the comments if you want to be tagged in the next chapters. Chapter two will be posted next Saturday, July 11th.

[kenna-the-cosmic]

this fic, the light she gave, by authors_bane is probably the best jacaerys long fic i’ve read. kudos to the author and here’s the link if anyone wants a long fic to dive into. it’s a no dance au, but that in no way detracts from the fic imo. also the mc is a targtower.

i feel like i’m writing a yelp review, but i’ve suffered the jace fic drought and felt like if anyone needed a recommendation, this is mine.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[stinglessnettles]

just once give me a mama’s boy with dark curls and pretty eyes that doesn’t just fucking die? please?

[fireflyflashliight]

𝓗𝓪𝓾𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓫𝔂 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓹𝓱𝓮𝓬𝓲𝓮𝓼

{Jacaerys Velaryon x OC}

𝒮𝓊𝓂𝓂𝒶𝓇𝓎

After an unexpected death on the usurpers side, the blacks storm the castle in search of their claim. As an attempt to thaw the ice between the two sides of the war, a marriage between a descendent on each is arranged. With hatred storming behind their eyes Alaenys and Jacaerys must learn to work through their new forced bond.

𝐼𝒩 𝒫𝑅𝒪𝒢𝑅𝐸𝒮𝒮

On Ao3

𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓅𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓈

Prologue - out now

I - out now

II - out now

III - out now

[lena-luthor]

[targlocket]

THE SEA SHALL NOT HAVE ME, FOR I AM ALREADY YOURS

jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader

cw: hotd season 3 spoilers, fix-it fic!, heavy angst, hurt/BIG comfort, fluff so much fluff, mention of violence, mourning but no death, yearning, kissing, jacaerys loves his wife more than anything, (3.8kw).

synopsis: He promised. To you, to himself, right before giving the order. "I will come back to you," Jacaerys whispered, pressing warm lips to wood, as if sealing his silent vow through the door.

a/n: mama will hold ur hand through this. it'll ALL be okay! bawled my eyes out at this but god i needed it. translations for the high valyrian used at the end!

He had never felt so cold before.

A chill seeping into the marrow of his bones and encrusting muscle and tissue, making it hard to move; to breathe.

His eyes battled the shroud of darkness, yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t halt the certainty, which in that instant appeared like his end. Not slumber, not unconsciousness, but his demise’s unyielding grip curled around him like a serpent and squeezed until it wrung every bit of life out of him.

Jacaerys felt the bite of the arrows like a brand, pulsing like another denominator of what was to come, to swallow him whole. One in his neck, one near his heart, and others in places he couldn’t name, but remembered your hands and mouth touching countless times before.

The Gods were cruel to punish him right where your sweetness had been, where your love had touched and imprinted itself onto him, now stained by sharp steel and blood.

He hopes you’ll have it in your heart to forgive him, for he cannot do so for himself. The more the world feels like a distant memory, the more his heart aches, its beating slowing, as if trying to mimic the syllables of your name one last time before it inevitably stops. One last call out to you, willing to see if you would answer, even if he knows that to be impossible.

Would you cry, he wonders, as if he doesn’t already know the answer. Would you curse him? Would you hate him? Would you damn every moment you’ve spent together, turning it into poison and ash?

Jacaerys would not fault you if you did, but his chest feels hollow at the prospect of causing such vile emotions to bloom in your tender heart, most of all towards him.

You are his most precious jewel, and losing his life is one thing, but knowing that means losing you as well? It tears at him more than those arrows have.

He thinks of his mother, who was so delighted knowing he had found someone to love, and someone to be loved by in return, truthfully and wholeheartedly. You two were meant to have a Valyrian wedding in a few moons, as it is custom, and he had been ardently awaiting to see how beautiful you would look in traditional garments. Trying to imagine it now, just as he had many times before, feels like another arrow aimed straight at his heart, plunging deep. Now, he will never get to teach you how to recite the vows in High Valyrian, won’t get to see the sparkle of joy in your eyes when you’re face to face, exchanging them, binding your destinies together for all eternity, even in death.

Death. Jacaerys supposes that if he dies without binding his soul to yours before his ancestors, he won’t have any pieces of himself that he knows will certainly be kept in the sanctity of your heart.

But maybe it is better this way, for you will not have to carry such a heavy burden ensnared in the crevices of your chest, reminding you of all you’ve lost; of all he’s made you lose.

It might seem callous of him to think so, but the thought of you mourning him brings warmth to his veins, even through the chill of the sea. Knowing you have loved him enough to let tears fall from those pretty eyes of yours makes the inevitable hurt a little less.

Someone had cared for him and felt strongly enough to weep at his departure. That, in itself, is a gift. One of the many you had given him. You yourself have been the greatest one, blessing his days and easing his worries with nothing but a look, a word, a kiss. It had come like breathing to you, and he had never felt like he was out of air until now.

The sea is seldom merciful, and no matter how much he tries to beg the Gods to spare him, Jacaerys knows this time it might be in vain.

But how can he not beg? How can he not plead? If not with his voice, then with the remaining beatings of his heart, with the last vestiges of the memories he has of you.

He wishes he would’ve said I love you more often, for it seems like he had been scarce in his vocalization of it. Now, every day doesn’t feel like enough, because no matter how hard he tries, his throat is clogged with water and the words he means to say, if only for the last time. He would’ve hoped it enough to ease the grievances he knows you would feel upon hearing of his demise.

Jacaerys wonders if you would eventually surrender yourself to another. If there would come a day where another man would sweep you off your feet, chipping away at all the parts of Jace burrowed deep in your flesh and blood. The thought makes him want to weep. You forgetting him, replacing the memories you have of him with those of another, as if painting anew on an old canvas one has no use of anymore.

If his promise would’ve rung true, Jace would be by your side now, celebrating the victory at the Gullet, hugging his mother, then you so tight it would’ve knocked the air out of you both. He would’ve twirled you around while laughing, leaning in to press a multitude of kisses onto every patch of skin he could reach, knowing it’ll make you laugh, cheeks flushed, looking at him like he’s your whole world.

May that be the last thing he wishes for before the sea takes him. May your face be the last thing on his mind before there is nothing but darkness, engulfing every bit of light that was you. May he always remember you, even when buried beneath the sea and the sand, wishing for nothing than to hear your voice saying his name one last time, your gaze softening upon looking at him, and maybe, if the Gods allow him one last mercy, the feel of your soft lips upon his own.

He knows he is not worthy, for if he were, Jacaerys would’ve held onto his promise to come back to you, to his mother, to the Realm. But he couldn’t. The Gods were ever cruel and took from him the very essence of his being, cursed to wait for his impending doom.

And wait, he had. Was it another punishment to still feel like he was hanging on but never sinking deep enough? To will him to replay every single memory of you and imagine thousands of others? To feel so close but so far away from the object of all his affections and desires?

Jacaerys would know you anywhere, he thinks. Even blind, hard of hearing, or sinking into nothingness, he would not fail to know you are close.

So why does it feel like you are? Is this another cruel trick before the ancestors welcome him to them? He swears he can feel the soft lilt of your voice somewhere in his vicinity, and it makes him want to move, to lean towards it and taste it. Make sure it’s real.

Please let it be real. To the Old Gods and the New, let it be real. Don’t dangle such hope in front of him only to take it away, for it would feel like getting speared with arrows again and again and—

“I shall watch him,” your voice sounded, just as sweet and lovely as he remembered, but also tired, croaky at the edges. What had happened? Why were you — “You need rest, my queen. Let me, for now.”

My Queen? Mother?

The sounds were a bit muted, but he could hear footsteps, then the creaking hinges of a door, followed by a thud.

A long, hitched sigh followed, the one people do when they try not to let it show they were hurting, right before the tears inevitably fall.

Were you crying? He couldn’t bear when you were. That pretty face he loved so much, marred by tears, undid him every time.

Jacaerys had to see, had to make sure you were okay, that nothing had befallen you too, that the Gods had been merciful to an angel such as you.

He was struggling. His body was not responding the way it should, barely able to feel his hands and feet properly. But that didn’t matter now, for he only needed his eyes to will open so he could glimpse you, even if it was all a cruel fiction of his imagination, probably allowing him one more wish before taking him to the depths forever.

Please.

Please let him see his wife. His lady. His love.

Please.

One last time is all he asks.

If the Gods had ever looked down upon him and smiled, let them look down and smile once more. Grant him this one mercy. Just this once. Only this once.

He knows he’s begging, but what is there to do other than implore with all the strength left in him for one last look at you? In case he is to meet his end soon, let the sight of you be what he goes down feasting upon.

Blessed be The Mother, for I beg for one last mercy, for I shall gaze upon the one I hold most dear before my death and meet my end with a settled heart—

Jacaerys wonders if you are wearing one of your soft gowns, the ones he loves most, for you look like a Fae from the library tomes you so love. Would you still wear the necklace he had given you, or have you thrown it away in a fit of grief and anger because of his recklessness? He wouldn’t fault you for it. Just wished he could give you another to atone for his many sins, for how much sorrow he must’ve brought you.

But he is wrong.

You are wearing the pendant. Your fingers are wrapped around it, settled at the base of your throat, holding so tight your hand shakes, lips pressed to it, murmuring to yourself, eyes closed in prayer.

Are you praying for him to come back to you, just as he was? The thought makes warmth bloom beneath his ribs, licking upwards towards his chest, weaving until it finds his heart, willing it to beat faster. Even so close to dying, he supposes, you still manage to affect him just the same.

If this is but a dream, he hopes he never wakes up. Because standing here, looking at you, just as beautiful as the day he lost you, brings him more peace than any prayer he could’ve uttered. You are so pretty. His pretty girl. Always, always so very pretty. Even now, looking worn out, expression pinched, and hands shaking.

He wants to see your eyes, at least once, before he can't do so again.

"M-may you look at me, my love? For I want to—"

Jacaerys is startled from finishing his sentence by the loud gasp you let out, body jumping beside him, startled and alert, like a doe sensing hunters on its tail. Your eyes are so, so wide with disbelief, watching him with the sort of bewilderment one would when seeing a creature unknown or some oddity come to life. Why were you looking at him like that? If this were but a dream, then why—

"Jace," you whisper, shaky and soft, like a petal swept by the wind, hands trembling so hard the pendant slips through your fingers. "Jace," he hears you repeat, as if the sound of his name in your mouth is something foreign you have to taste again. "Gods, Jace!" Your voice cracks along the syllables of his name, before moving closer, gazing at him with those pretty eyes he near plead to see, now teary and wide, sweeping over him as if checking to see if he's whole. He knows he isn't, for the battle must've left him with more than grievances and a hollowness in his chest that could only be filled if he still had a chance to live.

Your movements are shaky and hesitant, wanting to reach for him but shackled by a fear he does not know yet. Why won't you touch him? He can tell you want nothing more than to feel him beneath your palms, and yet you waver. Why? If this is to be the last mercy before his death, why is he imagining his beloved faltering instead of pressing close, so close and grasping at him like the air one needs to breathe?

Jacaerys tries to lift a hand, grimacing when his body again does not count him as its master, and makes it hard to move properly, feeling a sharp pain lance through his forearm, pulling a hiss from between his teeth. One to which you react instantly, shaking your head as you plead with him not to move, cradling his hand between both of yours, letting Jace feel the softness of your skin again. "No, no, my love, do not move," you sniffle, blinking back those stubborn tears lining your pretty eyelashes. "Please, you must rest. The Maesters said you are not to tire yourself any further."

The Maesters? What ever could you mean?

Blinking his eyes rapidly to dwindle the fog clinging to his vision, Jacaerys's breath catches when your own room comes into view, surrounding both of you. He supposes his imagination could not help but want to remember you in the place where you felt most at ease, the one where you shared your first kiss, first bedding, and many, many other milestones that now feel like a vice around his heart, squeezing tight. Will this be the last time he gets to pine for what once was and for what could never be again?

"H-how do you feel?" Your voice shakes again, snapping him out of his reverie, gaze finding its way back to yours, feeling himself melt just at the sight of you anew. Gods, you couldn't be more gorgeous. "You had been asleep for half of a fortnight. We didn't know if you would ever wake—"

And oh, his heart shatters into pieces when your words trail off into hiccuped sobs, soft chin wobbling, not being able to hold the weight of your grief and sorrow. His sweet wife was crying beside him because of his own foolishness, and there was no punishment severe enough for his transgressions. He could be put to the sword, and it would never erase the guilt in his chest at making you shed even a tear.

It takes him but a few moments to rear his mind from blame to the words you spoke, eyes widening in bewilderment as he registers the information you bestowed upon him. "Asleep?"

His voice is rough and unpolished from disuse, and he's watching you like you brought both salvation and perdition to his door.

But you only nod, squeezing his hand tighter, bringing it up to your mouth to press warm lips upon his skin, feverish and lingering, before cradling the back of his hand against your tear-streaked, warm cheek. "Yes, my love," you confirm, tone lightening with pure relief. "The Gods were watching over you, breathing life into you anew, just like we prayed for."

Breathing life back into you.

Does that mean—

But he cannot hope yet. What if this is nothing but another trickery? The cruelest way to tear his heart asunder by making him believe he escaped from the unforgiving claws of the sea and is now granted another chance at spending a lifetime with you?

Jacaerys can feel a lump form in his throat, near choking him, his lashes dampening rapidly. "Do not forsake me, please," he pleads, willing his hand to clutch at your fingers again, with what little strength he has. "I cannot bear knowing this is but a dream." It is hard to speak as his chest heaves, blubbering like a child as he begs for a miracle from you, who he now hopes is all flesh and bones and not smoke and ash in front of him.

Your expression pinches, studying him carefully, as you so often used to do with your tomes and books in the low candlelight before bed, thumbing each page as you uncovered the secrets written through the dried ink. He feels like one now, as your eyes narrow, before those soft lips part in a round shape, understanding dawning on you.

"Oh, my sweet prince," you whisper, voice damp from your tears, but then the sweetest sound of all accompanies the wetness of your eyes.

A laugh.

Amidst all this confusion, all this befuddling turmoil between dream and reality, you laugh as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, and your mouth dared to form the shape of happiness again.

You turn your head to press a fervent kiss to his hand before moving closer, cradling his face between your palms. Thumbs soften the traces of tears onto his own pale cheeks from being under slumber for so long, willing to see a flush to them soon. "I am flesh and bone, not a mere mirage," you assure, another soft, disbelieving laugh tinkling between you, as if the mere thought of him believing this to be a play of the mind is ridiculous. "The Gods brought you back to me, just as I wished for, my love."

Gods, he thought he'll never get to hear that sound fall from your lips again. It makes his vision blur with tears, lips trembling as he chokes back from babbling again like a babe, but eager to quiet the ghosts of his mind that insist this is a delusion.

"P-prove it to me," he hiccups wetly, no longer preoccupied with how weak he must look, nothing like a prince and all like a man at the end of his hope, begging you to pull him towards salvation. "Please, ñuha jorrāeliarzy," his tongue wraps around the endearment like it never forgot it, full of longing and desperation. "Show me I still have you, for I cannot bear the thought of losing you again—"

He feels his heart breaking and mending itself back together over and over, waiting for you to grant him this one certainty in his hopelessness.

And Gods, you do.

Your lips are on his before he can blubber another supplication, palms tilting him the way you want to as you slot your mouths together so, so tenderly, like two wings of a butterfly touching while they flutter.

He feels it. He tastes it. Your tears, his tears, your promise, his desperation.

Jacaerys wishes he were stronger, for his body is weakened by the tragedy that befell him, not being able to grasp you as fiercely as he would if his limbs had not forsaken him. He can only will his fingers to brush against the folds of your skirts onto the bed, curling into the material until his hand shakes with the ardent want of closeness; of wanting to do more but being cursed into only hoping.

"You have me," you whisper against his mouth, branding the truth on his lips as you continue kissing him. He can feel you smiling into it, and it is unbecoming of him how that only makes him weep harder, his own tears trailing down your cheeks and chin now, too, from how close your faces are pressed together, smushed in your eagerness to prove what he so feared was nothing but a cruel twist of his mind. "And I have you, dārilaros ñuha."

Gods, your tongue tangles around the words so clumsily, no matter how many times he had patiently taught you the right way before, and still, he would never trade it for the world. Jacaerys wants to hear it a thousand times more, and then tenfold that, for the rest of his days.

He's overwhelmed. All the hopelessness he felt before, thinking he would never get to hear the sound of your voice, taste the sweetness of your lips, feel the warmth of your love. And now you are offering him all of those and more, and he feels like he cannot breathe if you dare stop for even a moment.

"Avy jorrāelan, " he sobs, trembling lips barely able to return the soft kisses you so kindly confer to him still. "Avy jorrāelan. Always," the words tumble from his mouth, choked and utterly devout. "Not a moment went by when I did not plead with the Gods to bring me back to you. I curse the sea for trying to wrench me from your side. For its greed and its cruelty, for—"

But you silence him with a firmer press of lips, swallowing the last of his blubbering with the sweetness of your mouth, tasting salt and love and life. You exhale shakily, drawing back so your gazes meet, lips brushing, leaning to nuzzle your noses together as you whisper, voice fervent with conviction. "No more talk of misfortune," you say, nudging his cheek in reprimand with the tip of your nose. "Let me rejoice in having you again."

Jacaerys had always been weak to your whims, never one to deny you anything, least of all when spoken with such longing, such relief, bodies close and shaking with lingering grief and solace alike.

He nods, gathering strength enough to nuzzle you back, eyes fluttering at the feeling, to which you shakily let out another one of those honeyed laughs as you whisper. "But do not think I shall forgive you for trapping me in mine own chambers before rushing to battle with such recklessness."

Oh.

In the midst of all this, he forgot the events that led him to this whole predicament. Closing his mother's door, then yours, vowing to come back in the end, no matter the cost.

"But I have—"

"Coming back in such a state is hardly enough for me to count this as you honoring your vow," you say, eyes narrowing, even teary and full of adoration as they were. And he couldn't find it in himself to feel anything, but the fullness of his chest as it filled with so much love for you, it damn near burst open. "We shall discuss more of this when you've healed properly."

"Yes, my lady," he whispers, having the gall to look a bit sheepish, but alas, a small smile curls at his lips, the normalcy of your reprimand willing his senses into solace.

You harrumph, trying to show displeasure, but he knows there is too much relief blooming between you two now, softening even this attempt at being stern.

He makes an effort to tilt his chin up until his lips brush your tear-streaked, warm cheek, kissing it softly, not moving for a very, very long time.

"I'm sorry," is pressed against the damp skin, and he knows it'll take time and an exuberant amount of grovelling to will you to forgive him, but he wouldn't have it any other way.

Now that he has escaped death's grasp, he has a lifetime ahead of him to try to gain your favour.

And Gods, what a fortunate way to live out the rest of his days.

tag list: @silkaurum @oldtowrs @mademoisellepetite @dreamgirlevill @0nlybitt3r4may @rhaenyras-crown @ghostlybfgf @pinkdoeweirdo

ñuha jorrāeliarzy — my love

dārilaros ñuha — my prince

Avy jorrāelan — i love you

[eldrith]

shark smile jacaerys velaryon

“i was told sirens drag men to their deaths.” “we do.”

jacaerys velaryon x fem!siren!reader words: 23.2k notes: this was written before s3e1, but still contains major spoilers. non canon compliant. i have a lot of new followers since i last posted & im v happy to be back writing here; pls feel free to stop by my inbox to chat or request something <3 description of reader is intended to avoid physical features, including skin tone. this is relatively unedited so sorry for any errors. warnings: heavy discussion of death. fear. angst/grief. graphic injuries, mild horror & gore, vomiting, allusions to blood eating. fluff tho! reader is a siren and not human so (?). sex - piv, nudity. light praise kink, inexperienced jace, experienced (?) reader. light power dynamics but relatively tame smut. fluff & a surprisingly happy ending for me !

WHEN HE FALLS FROM THE SKY, THE SEA DOES NOT CARE THAT HE IS A PRINCE.

In fact, it does not care that he is the story of the sky and the sea both, nor that he carries within him both a line of an old empire and a claim to a kingdom. No, the sea does not care that Jacaerys is a prince; it takes him all the same. 

Scorched by a burn down the throat of Dragonfire – though not in flame, but the aftertaste of it, he sinks; orange veins through black, smoke threaded deep into his lungs with the craning roar of Vermax long since vanishing from his ears through the crushing depths around him.

There is no color left now, not enough to discern banner from banner or hull from hull, scale from scale. Bizarrely, what remains is red, and it lingers both in the water and his mouth; And soon, true as the gods and their cruelties, it is also drifting in thick ribbons from his shoulder.

Though he is well submerged in water, in an instinct at the basest of his kind’s nature, Jacaerys inhales.  

Choked immediately by the force of salt down into his very being, Jacaerys tastes iron and brine and something scorchingly distant, the residue of dragonfire made to liquid, swallowed back down into the deep as it tugs at himself, too; rolling in fizzing bubbles of fire and thundering waves overtop his back. 

He does not remember the fall, and he hardly remembers the splitting of both sky and earth; Only that glassy world between the two, reflecting in depths and in minds alike, echoing the sound of groaning hulls and roaring beasts and the warbled screams of dying men. 

It is a deep descent, crushing with a searing pain that emanates in the ribbons of red that float out from him, flying leathers heavy, dragging him down, down, down. 

He is learned enough to cease his useless inhales as the salt hardens and grows deeper, meeting that which flows through his veins, dizzying his mind until water and salt and blood are all he tastes. The fire of war becomes a distant thing high above his sinking body as his consciousness loses him for what might be the last time. 

Indeed, he hardly feels it when the sudden, ripping jerk tugs his body; up, or sideways, or some elsewhere – through something darker than anything he’s ever known.

WHEN HE WAKES, JACAERYS BLINKS AGAINST A SKY FAR TOO VAST. 

The smoke of battle has thinned into a distant smear upon the horizon, a notion he gathers only after coming to and completely emptying his stomach of kelped water, scraped with barnacles and blood and shipwreckage splintered into his throat in their ascent from his guts.  

A length of broken timber presses beneath his spine, which is his second gathering; Perhaps a spar from his grandsire’s fleet, or perhaps merely the rib of some lesser ship cracked open like a carcass to be feasted by the vulturous gulls of the Narrow Sea. 

When at last, sluggish and stinging, his eyes open – they do so with a fluttering knot of long lashes, and he must squint into the vastness above and around him, feeling the wilt of hope dying like a low wyck in his chest. There are no sails near him now; nor cries, nor banners. 

Jacaerys well and truly and fully floats alone. 

He lets himself stare, just for a moment, to gather himself. A fine day, by any standards less measured with the smoke and searing screams of both sky and sea, the sun hanging upon its bright band in the heavens and oppressive enough to give Jacaerys need to close his lids once more. Gulls circle lazily in the distance, a sole sign of life in a deserted plane of rocking water.  

Well, then. He is far from the Gullet now. 

Indeed, he is far from anything, as indicated by squint of his eye; The sea rocks him on his raft like the cradle of a cherished babe, horrible but lulling as his mind drifts further than his body. He lies flat upon it, cradled by splintered wood that dips and sways with the sigh of the sea. 

Perhaps it would be a gentle thing, if not for the arrows lodged deep through the flesh of his shoulder and chest.

He had not felt their strikes, though now he indeed feels them. Each shift of tide drives the shaft in his shoulder deeper, grinding splintered wood and barbed iron into bone and muscle alike, a searing ache that permeates each stretch of his being. The shallower one, Gods be true, lies in the fleshy muscle of his chest, lodged but loose enough to flounder like a babe newly-horsebacked with each shift of wave. Because of this, breath fractures into something ugly and thinly agonized, pressed by cheek against the splintered wood beneath him. 

He does not give himself more than a moment with this unceasing pain; instead a hand rises, weakened and trembling and searing with the protest of barbed metal against bone, to tug at the wood protruding from his chest. The shoulder, he knows, is no use to try and save now; but the nearly insouciant rhythm of the shallow arrow upon his chest mocks him with its pulsing agony, and thus he tugs at it with all the dwindling strength he may remain. A roar rips from chapped lips, burning with the taste of bile and dragonsmoke; and still he pulls, the sinewy rip of arrowhead as it dislodges itself from its shallow grave and frees, violently, into the salty air. Jacaerys lets out no more than a whimper at the gaping, pulsing pain now ebbing from his wound; the arrow in his grasp is listlessly cast from his palm, down into whatever depths now lie below him.

The wound pulses with every faint heartbeat, and though he should surely press it to fend too much loss, he finds himself weakened with agony and exhaustion. Water still lives there, salty and ancient, in his lungs; he feels it with each inhale he takes. A warmth both viscous and determined seeps sluggishly down his side and crawls into the dip of his collarbone and throat, pooling in a glistening ruby shimmer before diluting pink into the endless blue beneath him. 

Jacaerys watches the darkest parts of him go with not so much a single sound besides wafery breaths delivered sparsely between groans of aching ribs and short, wet coughs.  

A prince should not bleed so quietly, he thinks. 

Though it is for hours Jacaerys floats like this – if he is so to believe the lies spun by the sun in the sky – shifting upon agonizing weight every few moments, feeling the life of him seep out with every weak pump of his tremored soul. He floats limply, one weakened boot dragging in the cold water beneath his torrid liferaft of broken war.  

It is too lonesome for a boy like him, perhaps. All that emanates from his brain is an ache of heart, the memory of screeching; of the jerking strike and dragging descent, such a slow death. Jacaerys floats for hours and hears wailing; sees the final glance of his lifelong companion, his truest friend; feels the sinking again, the horrible moment when he and his Vermax were swallowed beneath the surface. He wonders, in that dim place between consciousness and sleep, if there are those looking for him. If Rhaena and that wild beast are back on land; if Corlys and Baela and the rest are safe, dry perhaps, unscathed; if his mother remains still untouched by danger. It was a fair trade, he thinks. Their lives for his own. 

The agony in his chest and shoulder grows as the sun slips into a smoky horizon. He is blistered by the sun and drained of half his life, memories of his drowning roving sluggishly in his mind more as sensation than coherence: A sharp tugging, far less than natural, from the very depths of the sea. He recalls, only faintly and through some hazy delirience, that he did not resurface, nor did he pull himself rightwards onto this very raft; He has hardly the strength to move his arm at all, and knows best that he did not, indeed, save himself from the death that found him just hours ago in the Gullet. A horrible thought pulses just beyond coherence; the sensation of wrongness permeates the prince as he lies, motionless and alone, in the middle of a silent sea. 

Jacaerys falls in and out of the world with heavy, tear-laced eyelids and a ceaseless ache in his torso.

WHEN HE NEXT FINDS HIS CONSCIOUS, THE SUN HAS BEGUN TO DANCE VIOLET AND ORANGE ALONG THE GLISTENING RIPPLES OF SEA. 

He stirs not from pain nor hunger nor any kind of distant tremoring sound; instead, he is roused by the sensation of something brushing his ankle. 

Unable to do much else, he only stiffens; The water beneath him is darker than it ought to be, sheared in half by a bright and burning glint reflecting from the horizon, a shifting pane of glass so v ery fathomless and swallowing in its wholeness. He squints at the burning orange searing the water and lives, for a blissful for moments, in the belief that it is only delirium of a dying man that makes him feel the brush against his boot, surely only the blood clotting his sight into the watery depths which his leg splays into. 

But then he sees a flicker. 

Silver, or perhaps its more shyly shimmering cousin; some reflective thing which catches the light, winking like ancient dragoncoin beneath sand, glinting against the oppressive glare of dying sun splitting his vision in half. 

Blinking salt and dying sun from his gaze, he lulls his cheek back upon the raft, tasting his blood as it resides within the grain of wood and the split of his lips alike. His wounds are near dried now, though he is no fool. He suspects the Stranger will visit him quite soon. 

But then, a drifting, long-winding vision once more through the water, near his boot beneath the shifting of his splintered raft. Long and swirling like weeds at sea, it coils and slinks just out of sight; though still, Jacaerys is given a startled pause. 

Hair?  

A squint against the sting of salt in lashes, hazeled eyes catch not the jerking dart of fish, nor the rolling glide of a seal or any such beast. It is real – perhaps only in the way visions might be real to one on the brink of death – though real all the same as the arrow through his shoulder or the wound in his chest. 

Whatever it is, it circles.

His pulse thunders weakly, and in a delirious moment recalls stories of pirates across the sea who leak from the cracks of the Stepstones and surface from the sea itself; men who swim upon unattended boats to thieve the pockets of men who lie shipwrecked. 

“Go,” he rasps madly, though his voice is hardly more than wind over broken mast, matted with pain and expiring life. It takes the last of his very soul, the raw and trembling memory of green scales sinking into the sea, that he presses.  “Please. I’ve…I’ve nothing left to steal.”

And a tragic truth his words are. The sea answers the Prince with a soft lap against wood, echoing gently as a kiss against his cheekbone; and then, as though relenting, the shape vanishes. 

Wildly, perhaps madly, Jacaerys laughs once; though the salt and brine have made a home in his lungs, and blood slicks his lip now. Yes, death will find him quite soon, it seems. He tastes himself again, metallic and fading. If this is death, he thinks, it is far quieter than he imagined.

He lets his head fall back, and the sky blurs.

HE DREAMS OF WINGS BURNING.

Or something of the sort. Scales which rot, boys with laughter like bubbles in the depths, a garden with a rusting gate and a fog that seeps into his mind and twists his feet until his boots are gnarled roots; he dreams of dragons sweeping in from the skies, of an ancient beast swallowing an entire dragon in its maw, of fire upon fire, claws tearing and blood weeping over entire ships until the whole ocean lay rubied and burning. He sees odd things, indeed, in his dreamy death: girls trapped under ice, brides kneeling at empty graves, men growing into trees; he sees moons and suns dance, he sees women with sharp teeth and soft skin, he sees tears that fall like moonlight. He sees poisoned teacups, singed butterflies fluttering out of spiderwebs; black cats slinking like shadows around breathing roots. 

It is peculiar, perhaps, that he dreams so many deaths so vividly, and yet Jacaerys wakes only after their horrors subside. 

He jolts to consciousness violently to find that the sky is enormous above him, a vault of black pricked with viciously indifferent stars. His wake comes body-first, mind trailing behind as the residue of sleep melts away, fading thoughts of smooth skin giving way to coyish glints and roaring waters and sighing voices. 

And there, nearly indistinguishable from above or below, the sky’s twin yawns in a stretch, that dark mirror – the sea. He watches that glassy expanse breathe slow, tidal sighs against the splintered timber that keeps him from sinking. 

For a moment he does not remember where he is, only that the world is vast and he is very small within it. 

But then it is when he takes a breath, and in such a daring intake, shifts his shoulder just partially; then true, raw agony explodes down his arm and across his chest. A broken noise spills from him before he can swallow it back, dampened only by the largess of the world around him, the depths swallowing the pain of one mere boy. 

The pain, it seems, tears more than breath from him. Memory follows, from the expiring mind: of smoke and fire and ships and men dying and women screaming on dragonback. The moment comes to him far too soon and with it, a wash of agony so raw and true that he suspects the last time he felt such a way was when he lost his brother. 

“Vermax,” he calls, throat raw and cracking, and like a boy he waits, tears slipping and burning against his sun-scorched visage, staring up as though a shadow might pass over the stars. As though green wings might descend from the heavens or surge up from the starry depths below. He knows, though, that even beyond the horizon – beyond wherever he is, now – there does not remain a dragon searching for him. 

The sob which escapes him is restrictedly delved in searing pain from his wounds; his cries die on the water, so unlike a prince, as he whispers the name once more into the dark, followed only by a weak call for his mother.

The name is swallowed there, along the starry water, as is his grief. 

In a turn of mercy, the pain surpasses enough to render him lack of thought; after only a final hitching breath, Jacaerys is stricken mind-numbed with a plaguing grief, tamped only by the unending agony haunting his form. A turn of cheek presses a metallic mouthful of seawater through sunscorched lips, and he coughs it back out into the deep with tormented effort. 

The glint strikes him, then, as he coughs his blood back into the sea. 

Across the glassy pane of stars, just an arm’s reach away: A lurking thing, reflecting back whatever meek light survives the night’s breath across the sky. 

He cannot make it out fully, but it ceases his mind cold with a sharp turn of familiarity, that lingering horror of nails trailing down the back of one’s nape or the draught of chill in an empty graveyard. 

Jacaerys blinks at it with that same low strike of horror; At first he deems it merely the moon fracturing the water’s skin, some trick of depth and distance. He blinks once, slow and heavy, as if that might wash the vision clean; But the shape does not break. It lingers there until the doubt in him thins, until even his certainty of illusion begins to feel like a falsity he has begun to assure himself for the sake of breathing; and only then, in that false security, does he come to understand what the shape truly is.  

Eyes. 

Eyes, true as the gods, fixed upon him and tilted upward from the depths below, bewilderingly catching the moonlight instead of merely catching it. As the raft dips in a slow wave and relevels, he catches the curve of a forehead, too – and then, gods, the slow inky spread of salt-threaded hair; he sees it then, flowing out its tendrils like weeds of the sea towards the measly splinter of wood upon which he lies. 

Panic surges up raw and ancient in Jacaerys; older than any crown or dragon or war, something buried deep in marrow that recognizes the shape of a predator in the basest part of a man before his mind might dress it in the common tongue. 

There is a woman in the water, a strange thought comes to him, lucid in its stillness, and he begins to wonder whether delirium has perhaps granted him some courtesy of idiocy. A woman, where no woman should be.

A lurch of the body, called upon by sole instinct; Every lesson beaten into him since boyhood demands that he rise and reach for a sword no longer hanging at his hip, that he make himself larger than his fear and meet such danger standing rather than waiting for it to devour him. 

Instead, agony flowers white through his shoulder and chest, so bursting and complete that his limbs answer with little more than a miserable tremor, feverish and vitiated, and his near-valiant effort dies unborn. Among the shards of moonlight glass shattering the sea, he is pinned not by rope or chain, but by his own ruined flesh and the arrow lodged deep within it. Should this woman – this creature – wish to come for him, there is naught left with which to refuse her. 

His eyes, ambered in the brightest of his days but now sooted with the grim ash of war and loss, do the only thing left to do; stare back. And this creature, this nightmare, this woman – whomever she may be, she remains there in her pool of ink and watches him in patient return.

And so, time sifts. 

The moon lays a narrow road of silver across the water, and in that thin illumination he conjures only fragments of her horror as she finally nears; the smooth curve of forehead breaking the surface, a sharpened gleam fixed upon him, so unnerving in its patience; the breath of cheekbone and brow, far too fine to belong to any storm-battered sailor’s daughter. When the sea parts, next come her tresses, which fan outward along the surface like ink spilled in the dark night, water-darkened tendrils drifting and coiling as the lulling coax of kelp swaying in the tides. 

Perhaps Jacaerys has gone mad. For, as he stares helpless as a babe unto a descending knife, he comes to understand that she is beautiful. 

A vision of moonlight upon ruins: she is jagged, obscured and sharpened only where soft sighs hide themselves away; though he is not a man wholly mad-made yet, for her beauty – however intrinsic it might be – does not beget the wrongness of her presence, the impossibility of eyes at this hour, in this emptiness, so far from shores that even gulls have long abandoned him. 

His pulse stammers painfully against his ribs, and the sharded arrow in his shoulder throbs in time with it, each beat threatening to unmoor him from the fragile raft entirely. Though fear licks itself in shivers of agony across his spine, he dares not move again. 

Eyes – those glinting coins so mad under the grace of moon – do not blink once. 

The prince swallows against a throat flayed raw by salt and smoke and swallowed seawater, and his lengthed voice is scarcely more than wind dragged over broken wood.

“Are you real?”

A question which drifts uselessly into the air, swallowed by stars both hanging in the sky and swallowed in the depths below; she nor the sea answers his question, only rippling and sighing, only her eyes ever-staring, unceasing. 

She remains still for so long that Jacaerys begins to blink out the thought of the eyes at all, wondering if his mind had tricked him into conjuring up company in the middle of the world where there is none. 

Perhaps that is all there is to death, Jacaerys thinks: some slow unspooling of the mind, a final merciful trick where pain and terror are softened into symbols and story until what remains is merely a dream stitched together from drowning thought and fading blood. 

What strange mercy, he thinks distantly as consciousness slips from him, that the mind, standing upon the threshold of oblivion, should choose not horror but a beautiful woman waiting beneath the water.

HIS DREAMS, IT SEEMS, DO NOT CEASE EVEN ONCE HE WAKES. 

When he stirs again, it is to a sky rinsed pale and enormous above him. And, he registers in turn, to her.

A startled jerk drives a battered back to jerk faintly against waterlogged wood; an agony of dying-man’s pain ripples from sunscorched lips which part in raw, pulsing horror. Fire explodes through his shoulder; his ribs protest with a sickening ache; his vision burst in lurching lashings of white, until sea and sky become one blinding smear which remains even when his lids sew shut. 

He breaths out a disbelieved sigh. Cursed as they are, Jacaerys always thought dreams to be faithless things, ones which vanish with coming daylight. Though here one lies, lurking in the dredges of nightmarish deep waters even in the forgiving breath of day. 

A petrifying thought, which permeates his sleep-laced mind with a strike of cold deeper than the sea itself: She remains here, in the silver light of dawn, as though she had kept watch through every pained unconscious hour. 

He finds the strange woman half-emerged from the deep blue waters, elbows resting lightly upon the broken spar of wreckage which keeps him from the deep. Her chin is balanced upon interlaced fingers in a posture nearly – gods preserve him – nearly girlish; the pose occurs so absurdly innocuous that, in any other place or perhaps upon any other woman, he might have mistaken it for idle curiosity. 

Though there is nothing idle about this creature, no thing innocent at all in the incessant bore of her gaze; a luminous thing, glowing like mother-of-pearl and flashing deep as his stare of horror meets her own hungered one. 

Then, with the flow of tresses across a bared shoulder and the sharp flash of a blinding, pearly smile, she speaks. 

“Am I real?” 

The fear finds its home burrowed beneath the wounds of his chest, the splintered wounds seeming suddenly to send dark roots through his body, tendrils of fever and terror winding together in a spreading, helpless dread. He stares, and stares, and stares; a gaping thing, a helpless thing, marooned upon a floating shard of war with a woman he believes is far too beautiful to belong anywhere land might dare reach. 

Jacaerys finds no words to offer; instead a gaze skitters in disbelief, lower and lower, until it dares the water itself. 

The tide, it seems, remains loath to surrender her entirely from its foamy grasp; yet the dawn has stripped away the moon’s deceptions. Jacaerys sees, in its bareness, the horrible line where soft flesh churns into something iridescent and blooming; a vision of scales delicately breathing down curve of hip, only to vanish beneath the shifting blue. Light fractures there, living colors or breath – silvered coin to heavy moss to bruised violet; it is the sight of crushed old jewels and of forgotten gods, a thing from so deep it seems to swallow the sun. 

Within his ruined chest, a fevered breath snags. 

The stories conjure to him in a half-breath’s moment, swirling in his mind with the faintness of memory; His father's voice upon the deck of a ship as he taught his sons to read the currents and to never hearken singing over open water. 

His grandsire’s grim tales at Driftmark, softened by the spray of ocean as he told how the sea keeps daughters as well as tides. There too had been stern faces of septas beneath vaulted ceilings of that keep of Red, with their hands folded within sleeves and eyes far too sharp for jest. There are creatures whom the Stranger did not intend for the land.

There were things in the sea, they all said; things older than the kingdoms who watched ships and learned of the longing which laced itself into the weak fabrication of human hearts. 

Old stories shake loose from childhood until they drift before him like wreckage: Sirens whose bellies hung swollen with the flesh of drowned men; whose true faces, septas insisted, belonged only to the daylight: slack with rot, mouths split too wide for any mortal smile, eyes filmed pale by the abyss; and yet when the moon pours itself across the sea, that same cold light becomes their greatest deceit, veiling evil beneath impossible loveliness until lonely sailors mistake hunger for some kind of beauty. 

He remembers an old captain, spoken of as though he had once truly lived, who abandoned his helm to answer a woman's laughter floating over calm water; how weeks later they found him cast upon the strand, tangled in flowering kelp with his body bloated white and his eyes pecked hollow by gulls unwilling to look too long upon whatever he had seen beneath the waves. 

There were darker tales still: Of fishermen, taken whole into the green-black depths, where the sunlight and the Seven alike surrendered their potency; of merchant princes lured ashore into hidden coves by women whose songs promised warmth and whose mouths promised kisses, until those same hands opened a man from throat to belly and peeled apart their ribs like the bars of a cage. 

It was said, too, that sirens slept inside the hollowed remains; nesting deep within the boned ruins of the men they lured. 

There had been a time that Jacaerys had laughed at such tales. After all, there is little room for fear of monsters in the heart of a boy who commands one of his own; though now, upon a broken raft with death bleeding slowly through his flesh, he finds the old tales returning with only sufferance. 

He lifts his eyes to her once more. 

But he finds that, despite the tall tales which ebb and flow within his fevered mind, she is not the grotesque nightmare promised by septas; he finds no slack-jawed carrion thing crowned in weeded sea nor whale bone.

Indeed if anything, the dawn is crueler still – for it reveals that her beauty belongs only to her. 

Her hair, lighter now with the glint of early sun and lacking in distortion of depth, spills over her shoulders, threaded with strands that catch silvery and oddly pearlescent when the light tilts just so; wet tresses cling to the graceful hollow of her throat, to the slope of her collarbones, garnering affection from the droplets of seawater which gather there greedily before falling one by one upon the weathered timber. Her eyes are clear, no longer luminescent but merely intent, fixed upon him with an unwavering and unsettling stillness.

Jacaerys stares at this creature because he cannot do otherwise. 

She is the only solid thing in a world that hours ago dissolved into blood and brine; and those eyes, wide and reflecting and sweet and hungry, watching him back without embarrassment, without coyness, as though he is the creature newly risen from myth and she has been only patiently waiting; stilled in predatory wait for centuries, to examine him. Perhaps he should feel stronger fear than has settled into his bones; Perhaps he should scream, or merely attempt as much, with what little life he has left to fight.  

“I’ve died,” he says instead. 

His voice is thin, scraped raw by salt and disbelief, and it falls along the flat plane of sea that stretches around him farther than the eye can strain. From his rather blunt observation blooms the faintest crease between her brows, a consideration almost scholarly in its descent over so sinless a visage. For a moment her eyes travel along the span of his ravaged, waterlogged riding leathers, the ripped remnants of war – then up to the lick of his exposed, blood-beating skin; Her gaze deepens. He feels his heart, a slow-march but suredly still there, thump within the mass of his chest’s swollen flesh. 

But then a slight intake of breath breaks loose from her parted lips in a sudden laugh. 

The sound is the quick silvered cry of a gull cutting across morning air, not dissimilar to those harkenning echoes of song which wailed across the sea in the darkest hours of night past. Shivers rise beautifully along Jace’s chest at the sound and he watches her eyes follow their trail over the exposed skin of his neck. The echo of her laugh stills the salt air and cloudless sky high above; and, though it fractures the heaviness between them, it does not fully dispel it – for it rings chillingly and yet entirely captivating nonetheless, a note plucked from the sweetest, coldest reaches of the sea itself. 

“No,” she sighs just then, a tilt of head to expose a curve of throat, the water which lives there so sweetly in the junction of neck and chest. The water pearls, too, where her palms cradle her chin. Her eyes do not blink. “Though… you nearly did.”

Her voice is wrong, he thinks, for a nightmare; for it falls so incredibly soft, so full of wonder and voracious low-buried hunger, and he finds himself more unsettled by it than any shriek might have rendered him – though still, some low-reaching part of his gut shivers in an expression less than fearful. Hungry, he thinks faintly. 

And she is wrong, he thinks; indeed, the proof of it is there, in the souring wound of his chest, in the blood which has begun to seep once more from the arrow lodged firm in his shoulder upon his startling wake and the feverish haze which has crept through base of skull to linger front-of-mind. No man survives such wounds. 

No man survives drowning.

Breath grows shallow from both injury and the vastness of what he does not understand – and then comes the growing churn of unease within his stomach that might possibly be starvation, too. Might a dead man starve? 

“What are you?” he asks faintly; the question trembles upon that string of reverence and accusation and she studies him with an unsettling seriousness, lonely only to the wake of lapping waves. It is too quiet for far too long in that solace of sights, rocking upon his death. 

“Hungry,” she answers at last.

The word slips into him and coils low in his gut once more, birthing a horrid sensation which is not wholly fear but perhaps something darker and more unknown, the basest of human instinct sacrificed to churn instead some anticipation he knows not how to tame. 

Though accompanied with a bitter, half-delirious laugh, his voice carries a fragility; the cadence of a man who has already crossed one threshold and suspects another waits nearby. 

“Have you eaten me, then?” 

That same laugh touches her mouth again, soft enough to be swallowed by the very foam of the sea which cradles her, and it sends a new jolt of shivers through his whole being; though seared pain chases those quivers immediately. The moan of suffering he lets out at the shifting of his shoulder draws her gaze to the faint rust-colored pond of the junction of his throat, where his blood has pooled and since half-dried into a congealed offering before the sea might fully claim it. 

Her head tilts with the rocking of the raft. “Not yet.”

It is a thing that would make a sane man recoil. 

He knows he ought to perhaps demand whether her teeth hide long and sharp behind that gentle curve of lip – whether she means to devour him and take his bones to whatever cathedral of wreckage lies beneath her domain; But the sea around them is impossibly calm, stretched glassy and infinite to a horizon so distant it seems to play more of a trick of eye than any such reality, emptied of sails and smoke and war and left only in calm. 

There is nothing but the prince and the siren and the fragile slab of driftwood that, in this moment of death and between, binds them bizarrely together. 

Perhaps from his startle, blood has begun to leave him once more in streams; little rivulets this time, which twist down and drip in lurches onto salt-swelled wood. Jacaerys’ head grows heavy, and the dizziness comes creeping through like fog at the corner of garden gates, slinking through the darkening edges of his mind, rendering him aired and heavy in the same labored breath. 

“It was you, then.” The words come as wreckage to rocky shore, splintered into odd sensations of memory into near-coherence, laced with strange visions of women with teeth lodged within their cheeks and talons long as his own sword; of bubbles swallowing a massive beast and the shock of sharp chill as his own body sunk to a watery grave in the Gullet’s roar. “You pulled me from the deep.” 

When his eyes open once more, he finds hers resting upon him with that same patient stillness.  “No.”

A crease grows upon his brow. His neck slackens against the splintered timber, too weary now to hold itself upright, landing below with a weak breath of expiring life. Above him the sky yawns open without end; he imagines it swallowing him whole.

“I promise you,” her voice comes, a soothing balm, so very cool where the sun has left him burning. “I kept you from it.” 

He might have responded, in another life. Though now, pain has ceased to belong to any single wound; It wanders him now, crawling beneath skin – living fire, it finds fresh places to bloom and scorch until he can no longer remember what it felt like to possess a body untouched by suffering. 

Somewhere beneath the fever, Jacaerys accepts that his consciousness will soon be lost; to either the tide, or the Stranger himself. 

The knowledge, as it comes, is strangely peaceful. So in his last moments, Jacaerys lets himself mourn as he stares at the strangely beautiful woman in the water, at the dawning sky and stretching sea behind her.  

His mother's face comes first, as it always has; followed by his brothers, blurred by memory until laughter and quarrels and childhood become indistinguishable in his slogging mind: and Baela, Rhaena, Joffrey, Aeg and Viserys; all of them, in the breath of a moment. The sea rocks him in agony as he thinks of Dragonstone rising black from the sea, of Vermax banking through cloud and soaring through breathless air; of the long hall of the Keep, of the salt upon Driftmark’s shores; of the gleam of Ser Steffon’s blade when Jacaerys squired for him in that final tourney; of his grandsire’s knee, upon which he perched on that throne of swords and heard the promises he’d been deigned since birth. 

Whole kingdoms rise and vanish behind his closed eyes; wars begin and end, lives he has lived and those which he will never reach – hundreds of deaths and hundreds of lives split apart and seal themselves in the seams of his mind, all in the space of a single trembling breath, before dissolving into the tide.

His cheek settles once more upon the weathered wood, eyes drowsy in the pale-lilac of early morning. You pulled me from the deep. The fight in him is nearly gone; only one question remains upon his tongue. 

“Why?”

A shift below the depths as she pushes upon the raft with flattened palms, and Jacaerys watches in awe how water yields so willingly round the soft flesh holding her ribs; the sensation of the war-battered raft tilting him down, tantalizingly closer to those singing depths hardly breathes across his mind. 

A tongue passes thoughtfully across glossy lips. “You were sweet,” she murmurs at last, a chill of breath crossing over his own cheeks, loosing a wave of shivers through his spine. He can only watch as her arms give way once more to sink down, as the sea – so resentful to lend even this much of her to daylight – claims all but her shoulders and head.

There is blood in his mouth now; he tastes iron upon tongue as his eyes fall shut, a spinning sensation conjuring to his mild the felled taper of a feather, fluttering to lie at rest upon a pond. An odd death for a prince, indeed. His voice escapes him as little more than a frayed whisper. “S-sweet?” 

He can think of no stranger a word to be labeled in those last moments of battle. Sweet. His eyes slide beneath their lids, a slogging thing in their sun-dried, salted shells, laced shut with exhaustion and perhaps delirium. 

“Your blood,” her voice murmurs, and it has become near enough now that he can hear the movement of water bubbling when she breathes; a lulling sweetness which sticks to his teeth and dances upon his tongue. Just a taste, he thinks just then, rather absurdly. 

“It tasted of the sky,” comes that voice once more, a bubbling wet sound as though her mouth has descended to taste whatever now leaks into the water. “And… I wished to know you.” 

Nausea finds him at the thought. “You tasted me,” he grunts through pain-wired teeth, delirious, odd visions of swimming scales and lace-frilled fins skittering from outreached hands. He imagines that river of blood seeping from him now, flowing into an open, hungered mouth. 

“I did.” 

This pain is too much for life, he believes. It consumes him, so intense it has numbed him, bled a fever into his mind and stretched the tendrils of infection through each last vein in his body. 

“Then I am dead,” he decides quietly. For what else would he be? 

The water stirs, and when he feels her presence once more his gaze strains to return, blurry and searing when he pries his lashes apart. 

She leans close enough once more, close enough that he might smell the sweetness of her, something so peculiar for mid-sea; breeze and softness and shadowherbs lace through his inhale and stir some hollow hunger in his gut, a piercing, ravaged thing that brings a bout of nausea to return. 

“If you were dead,” her lips are glossed with the sea, “you would be far below me.”

His pulse answers in a hare’s pace, quickening beneath skin rotting and infected and plagued with a slow death. “Then,” his tongue darts out to soothe the pain upon sunscorched lips, but instead is met with dry air and dripping blood, slicking from his mouth. Her eyes glint at the sight, an observation which twists unease deeper within his gut. “...Where am I now?” 

The smallest smile touches her mouth – a thing soft enough that once more, upon another countenance, it might almost have nearly been kind.“The sea,” she says. “Of course.”

Of course. Heavied, his head falls once more against the weathered timber, a movement slow and borne from exhaustion; drowsy eyes gaze into the endless blue where sky and water seem forever to pursue one another without meeting. Here he lies suspended between them all the same: neither upon the land nor surrendered to the abyss, neither wholly living nor yet claimed by death, merely adrift upon that trembling boundary where one world dissolves into the next.

The woman watches him stare out at the expanse for another long while before speaking again.

“You must rest, Prince.”

The title bears itself foreign upon her tongue; Jacaerys wonders, with a rather dislocated peculiarity, how she might know it belongs to him at all. In three-and-twenty years, he has never once heard a tale in which a siren urged a man to sleep for any purpose save to ease his passage into her hunger; though still, true as the gods, fever laps at the edges of his thoughts. 

His eyelids descend by degrees, each blink lingering longer than the last against the shimmering yawn of morning, until the daylight begins to disappear between his lashes, swallowed by that other abyss. “If I do,” his breath utters weakly, wondering to himself whether he asks from futile hope or some simply morbid curse of curiosity. “Will I ever wake?” 

His vision is betrayed; all which he knows are the steady rock of his rotting raft and the ache of his agonized body. The plaguing sun scorches one side of his visage whilst the sea cools the other; and he thinks, as his lashes flutter again sun-oranged lids, that he hears a voice once more through the waters: 

“Perhaps.”

THROUGH HIS UNCONSCIOUSNESS, JACAERYS STILL FEELS. 

Peculiar enough that his mind churns even as it once did when he lived on land and rode through the sky; And yet it is more peculiar still that he so faintly in his fever registers himself being turned; dips with the wreckage as it tilts beneath him, feels the lick of sea shift its grasp upon his failing, limp body. An interruption of the boiling heat; some chilling presence pressing firm against his chest and splaying over the slow, weakened pulse of his heart. Agony is a memory, a faint pulse like the outer ridge of a bruise or rime over spring fields in the Vale. 

While Jacaerys dreams of a hundred deaths, he dreams, too, that the arrow in his shoulder leaves him without the violence of pain. 

There is no fresh burst of agony as when he’d expelled the first one, no sharp white flare behind the eyes; It is as though the wound inhales and exhales and then merely forgets its own carved carnage, the blood that had been pulsing from him like a rubied river beginning to reverse its direction. 

The deaths come to him in fits not unlike the rolling pangs of arrow wounds: He dreams of Vermax dragged from the sky, of Luke swallowed by stormy sea; of his mother’s crown dripping and glinting red as fresh meat. 

Most peculiar yet in this sluggish purgatory between slumber and awake, he feels something freezing and dragging against his throat; lapping, like the waves upon the shore. He feels, too, how that chilling sweetness spreads within him in a foreign rush, coming as nothing so familiarly savage as dragonfire – that blaze he has known since childhood – but instead as something slower and stranger, a cooling calm which seeps instead of burns, which travels along his veins like tides instead of flames.  

Only then does he wake once more. 

THE SUN, THAT GREAT OPPRESSOR, HANGS MIDDAY WHEN HIS EYES OPEN. 

For several moments Jacaerys mistakes waking for dying once again; Light pours over him, molten vast sheets which strike the water until the sea becomes a field of shattered mirrors, the sky above a merciless blue, immense and empty as eternity. He lies upon the slab of rotting wood and wonders if this is what remains after death has finished with a man. 

Though grief, such a fickle thing, sneaks itself back through his weary bones, tearing with a force that casts his mind about and settles where fever once lived. Only then does he become aware of his body: a shift in his chest as he lets a small sound escape him, ragged as he wakes. 

He swallows, bracing instinctively for the agony of grinding iron lodged in bone; but there is nothing. 

It occurs then that his shoulder is bare to the slight seabreeze, and wholly unburdened. The arrow is gone; the wounds which had poured him into the sea exist now only as faint blushes of new skin, smoothed and unbroken with the passing of months which could not have passed in the space of a single night. Even the salt-burn that had left his skin raw and flayed has disappeared, flesh warm and sun-browned rather than blistered and fevered. 

Impossible. His riding leathers are gone; everything above his waist has vanished entirely – save for the leather riding boots which sit propped sidelong near his breezed, salt-laced trousers – left only in bared skin and a scattering of freshly silvering scars. Wonder and horror mix within his gut as fingers flex experimentally, braced for pain which never comes, save for a faint weariness of tightened muscle. 

It does not occur to him that this was anything else but the work of that creature from the water. And so, habit asserts itself; for he is still Prince as much as he is castaway, it seems, and dragonlord still before any such prey. 

“Show yourself,” he commands to the shards of mirrored ocean, voice hardened with some falsity of health he has yet to fully take to mind – for he knows, indeed, that this was no immaculate recovery of mercy from the gods. 

Though the fever has left him, weakness remains; he cannot yet sit wholly upright, the cords of his stomach quivering with an insatiable hunger and exhaustion. 

The day lives on silently, for a moment, and within him grows an impatience sprouted by nerves; he is healed, miraculously so – and in those odd, faint memories of dying rest, did he not feel touch, feel that chilled drag laving over his very skin as a parched hound might a fresh pond? 

The sea stirs and then, only after another moment, she surfaces several yards away. 

With her comes no violent breach of the surface nor shrieking gulls; she comes to the glassy glint of eye with the sea parting its dark skirts, water streaming from her in glistening threads to cling to the lengths of long tresses and running in shining rivulets over bare skin of sunbreathed beauty. A sight to be seen – particularly for a prince so lonely. 

Jacaerys stares once more, stripped of every certainty and left with only wonder and dread to keep him company. A wonder it is, her bareness hinted only by the breaking surface of reflected pools at the soft turn of her chest; and Jacaerys draws away his eyes in some gathered lucidity of shame, no longer coaxed to desire by fever. He swallows back a hoarse laugh, cheeks heated by not merely the sun’s glare but her beauty so raw and unmodest in front of him. 

She waits for him, all those reaches away, watching with a peculiar apprehension as though he might perhaps take her down to the depths instead to give some odd, murky end to her own life. 

“You healed me,” he says at length, accusation and gratitude so closely twined in his words that neither might be separated from the other. The sea seems to breathe for her, and it trembles with some unknown nerves. 

Her head inclines by the smallest degree, that odd glint in her gaze once more. “Yes.”

The simplicity of it disturbs him, he believes, far more than denial might have done. “You admit it so easily,” he says then, because he can think of little else to say. 

A flash of a pearled, glinting grin that brings even the sun-kissed sea to shame. “You wished to know.” 

As though this were answer enough; As though all truths are equally plain to her and require no ornament nor human ceremony of explanation. Jacaerys draws a slow breath, tasting salt and sunlight and the faint metallic tang of his own fear lingering upon his tongue. 

“I was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”

She, it is no denying, has floated closer to his small raft of living death. Her eyes watch unblinkingly; a chin tips until only the soft peaks of shoulder and bottom lip peak out from the murky sea. Her visage has gone dark with some horrible hunger. 

“We do.”

There comes no hesitation in her reply, nor turn of trick, and the honesty of it brings him no refuge in disbelief. His stomach seems to fall away beneath him; for it rings with it the realization that he is alive, indeed. He is alive, yes, only stranded – a castaway clinging to a forgotten shard of war in the middle of an endless sea; alive only because a creature of the deep has chosen, for reasons he cannot yet fathom, to keep him so.  

It leaves him strangely breathless. “Why?” he asks, roughened by salt and disuse. “I was – I was dying. Y-you could have taken me.” He is unsure what compels him to remind her of her own nature, though fear laces itself tight around his abdomen. 

For several heartbeats she only regards him, and in that silence there is something so old and fathomless that it makes the skin along his arms prickle. Then, at last, she speaks.

“I’ve known of your war for some time,” her voice comes low. “One drowned sun past, I watched your great beast’s fire swallow the men who have hunted me and my sisters for eons. I watched you kill those men and leave them for my sisters below.” Silence comes between them, save for the gentle dripping cascade of water from her countenance to return to the sea. “And I saw you as you fell.” 

Jacaerys’ eyelashes flutter in a sudden sting of salt and memory, though he dares not speak. 

Her tongue sweeps once more over glossed lips. “The cries of the men upon the hippocampi ships said that you are a prince,” she murmurs, leaning closer as though a thought too reverent to speak aloud, “a son of both salt, and fire.”  

How wrong she might be, he thinks – for he is not son of salt; Velaryon blood runs not through his strong veins, though still the words are cold water poured over a fevered brow, spoken with a strange and almost reverent note. 

“My sisters have told stories of your kind,” she says, and her eyes drift briefly toward the horizon as though somewhere beneath it lay the endless kingdom from which she had come. “Those humans whose blood carries flame, who ride the sky upon winged beasts. We have watched them for longer than your kingdoms have stood.” 

A faint smile ghosts across her lips, and it is haunting as it is ethereal, glinting in the sharp edge of teeth. “I had never seen one close enough to taste.” 

Her eyes glint, and he feels the familiar churn of unease. “I wondered” A tilt of her head, studying his bared chest and visage with a curiosity so untouched by human shame. “If the sea claimed a son of fire,” Her gaze drops briefly to where the arrow once buried in his shoulder, “...would he burn beneath the water?” 

Despite himself, despite the bewilderment and discomfort threatening to steal him away once more, a breath quite near a laugh escapes him. “I’ve disappointed you, then.”

She, it seems, is quite unfamiliar with the mortal crutch of humor. “You’ve done no such thing,” she assures dazedly, though her gaze has unsettlingly drifted toward the bare expanse of his chest once more. Jacaerys stiffens in nature, his own hand rising without thought to his throat; The touch of something wet and careful in memory, the blood which had gathered at his neck and collarbone, laved away, cleaned with a voracity which only bordered on tender. 

He nearly recoils at the thought. It had been her, indeed, who tasted him again. With it comes another bout of nausea; though quieter, and more treacherous still, is the hungry and awed way in which he cannot cease his staring. 

She is beautiful – in the line of flesh so cool beneath the water, such swirling, glinting eyes and gentle turn of cheek; that glint far below, silvered as mother-of-pearl and strange iridescence as she moves with the tide. 

It is perhaps this trance, this pull of fate or of fools, in which he extends his fingers – weak still despite their healed wounds – towards the very water which clings to her shoulder. There are glinting marks there, some half-scaled beauty, and he moves slow enough for her to vanish into the depths if she wishes. 

She does not move – only watches him nearer with a stillness so harrowingly unnatural. 

His fingertips brush her shoulder, so very cool to the touch; enough so, such a respite from the beating oppression of the midday sun, that Jace lets some strangled breath loose from his throat, a half-relief at the sensation of cooled, glinting flesh so sweet against his burning palm. 

She, in turn, leases a short inhale, chilling enough to send ridges of thrill across his bare spine. The noise which leaves her is none he has known of man nor beast; a sound of glistening shores and soaring seas, of sunkissed reaches and tidepools swirling in slow wakes. 

A jolt from his touch, swallowed of regret and instead burgeoned by a sharp motion, her fingers perhaps tightening somewhere below the greened depths of the mirrored sky. Glossed lips then tremble, eyes flicking to his and down to the slip of wood which separates his warm shoulder from her sea. 

“I’ve brought you something,” she says gently, and when her elbows beach themselves as they had yesterday upon the edge of his raft, he finds her palms abound with bounty. 

In one hand comes a small, dripping bundle of greenery – dark fronds and pale, tender shoots which look as though they sprouted from some moonlit cavern far beneath the waves; in the other she bears a cluster of oysters and other mollusks, their shells slick with salt and glinting beautifully in the sun’s breath. 

Jacaerys watches in startled awe as she lays them before him upon the raft, visage painted with some odd, nearly unnatural shyness about her. His lips part, though the tearing, churning hunger persists violently within his stomach; she offers food to him now, as she keeps him alive and afloat. “You must eat.” 

Her voice is a sound which bubbles gently against the lapping of water over her elbows, bare skin warmed only by the sun. 

Jacaerys does not waste a moment more. 

It is an effort, indeed, to rise himself to his elbows; hauling himself upon rippling, quivering muscles into a position where he might grasp the kelp and seaweed by the handfuls and tear at their stringy flesh with his teeth. He eats them handful by starving handful. 

A savage, he must be; for he does not so much as turn his mind over as he swallows the pale stalks tasting of pepper and brine, nor do his lashes flutter in the slightest when she bends her head and, with the sharp glint of nails he hardly glances, pries open the shells one by one. 

The meat of them lie glistening and large, singing with a gentle grace of saviour to his ears as he finishes the greenery in mere minutes. 

Her nails, nearly claws, rip through shell seams as though they’re merely sheaths of parchment; the sound of it sends shivers through him and goosepimples along his flesh, lets his voice splinter in a half-moan of hunger as she pierces into them as though shell and flesh alike are no obstacle to her will. 

In her clutch comes the first scallop, offered to his lips. 

He eats from her grasp as though he has not tasted food in weeks, perhaps longer; he tears at the meat with a hunger never felt before, brine running down his chin and slpping onto his chest. Still he scarcely pauses, too ravenous to care for such things as propriety, and all the while two glinting eyes watch him with such concentration it nearly feels like a touch. 

For a long while they remain suspended between sea and sky as the prince gathers strength one careful mouthful at a time; the siren only lingers beside the raft, elbows anchored lightly upon the weathered timber. The tide whispers in patient breaths as sunlight wanders across the waves, reaching her face and fracturing into shifting gold upon her damp skin. 

“Gods,” his voice nearly cracks only once the remains of broken shells and the trails of oysterjuice track down the sun-browed skin of his chest. His finger graces over the oystershell nearest his knee as he half-sits, energized from the sustenance. “Thank you.” 

She smiles at this; a bizarre yet gentle thing, just a breath away, with her own elbows perched upon the raft. His fingers brush the shell again, tracing the smooth curve worn soft by the endless overchurn of the sea. 

“It is a shame,” he finds himself murmuring absently, “that there was no pearl within.” With his words come a strange bashfulness, an emotion so foreign upon him that he’s struck to hear it at all. There is little left of the prince in his voice now; Only a boy adrift upon broken wood, speaking to a creature who should belong only to nightmares. “I would have had something to give you in return.”

A dip of brows upon her ethereal visage; an expression enough to rouse a dusting of heat to his cheeks. 

“We give pearls as gifts,” he explains quietly, watching the blank confusion linger across her countenance. “To those who are…special.” The words catch faintly, tumbling in sheer awkwardness as he wonders faintly if the fever ever truly left his mind. “I suppose it is not the same for your kind.” 

The sea dips them; her coiled hair, shining with the remnants of the deep, curls over the broken timber where the ship’s remains have since become the expanse of this strange world. His hand rests near it, close enough that the strands occasionally brush against his fingers when the sea moves. 

She stares at him, always so watchful; Even as saltwater slips over her lashes and gathers upon her gleaming eyes, she does not blink.

“Have you gifted pearls before, my Prince?”

Heat touches his face, caught entirely unprepared. He looks away with a faint, embarrassed breath that might have once belonged to some other boy – some boy who’d not fallen from the sky, nor stared at the starry sea of death and found a woman waiting beneath the waves.

“No,” his voice is far softer than he’d endeavored. “I’ve not.” 

This, it seems, affects her. A strange flicker warms her expression, fleeting as first light of dawn; not human, but recognizable in itself as Jace watches her lashes dip over her pearled eyes. Shyness, he thinks wondrously. A creature who could drag ships beneath the waves and rip men open whole; and she is shy. 

I’ve gone mad, he thinks, and the vision of her is so impossible under the midday sun that he nearly smiles. The sea rocks them gently upon the raft, the movement drawing her hair away from her shoulders which gather sunlight in soft, golden sighs; Jacaerys realizes he’s been staring for farr too long and casts his gaze upward, half-closing his eyes to feel the sun true and warm upon his countenance once more. 

For some time, they remain like this: the prince regaining his strength, the siren floating beside the raft, the smell of the seabreeze between; The water whispers around them in secret sounds, and when Jacaerys tips his gaze to levy her once more, he finds the sunlight trembling over her features, rendering her unreal in the golden shimmer of warmth. At last, very quietly, he speaks.

“You are quite kind, I think.”

The words seemed to startle her even more than his touch had; her eyes dart, skittish things, from his propped elbow and down towards some unseeing depths which linger far beneath them. Still, he continues. “You saved me. You healed me, fed me.”

Marked by the silence of the sea, Jacaerys lets his head fall back to hang upon a stretched neck, exposing his throat to the open air, to the sun, to the salt; there is a prickling awareness there, of her gaze upon the pulse beneath his flesh, though he does not, for once, return her stare. 

“If you mean to drag me beneath the waves one day,” he continues – and he is mad, surely, for there is now a faint, unsteady amusement in the curve of his mouth, “then perhaps I am a fool.” 

He glances back toward her to find surprise glinting so slight and fleeting over her visage; a small trace of humor lingering in her own curve of cheek.  

He shrugs, a half-boyish thing belonging to another lifetime. “But you are kind nonetheless.”

The silence which follows swallows; it is full of her watching, and of the sea breathing around them. Kind, that word conjured once more – she acts as though perhaps she’s unfamiliar; As though no one has ever looked upon her and chosen any name but monster.

Then, for the first time since he had seen her rise from the depths of the murkiness the night past, she truly looks away – and before he can ask what he has done, she slips beneath the surface entirely. 

The water closes over her, merely a shadow of shoulder and hair lingering like shadow before it is all swallowed by the blue – a final glimmer of silver follows, that glint of treasured coin; and then she is gone. She leaves behind only the trembling of ripples and the bright, indifferently gilded sunlight scattered across the vast expanse of sea, a blinding thing now that there is no beauty to obstruct its harshness. 

The tide shifts beneath his raft, and for the first time since he fell into the water, Jacaerys is well and truly alone.

HIS SIREN, SHY AS SHE MIGHT BE, RETURNS WITH THE SUN THE NEXT DAY. 

And, indeed, the same time the day following. Habit grows within this drifting life so quietly that Jacaerys notices it not until it has rooted itself far within him; for three days pass in the very same rhythm, churning with the slow grace of heat and then chill, shivering and sweltering, some warmth in his skin which bleeds not and sheds not but always persists in hunger, if not for sustenance than company, or its more wretched and unknown twin. 

The sea becomes his tell of time; tides mark the hours better than bells ever had, and somewhere in those long hours between sunset and moonrise, she always appears. 

Sometimes he finds her instantly; that coy shape glittering in sharp glints beneath dark water, silvered scales catching and vanishing amongst the waves. Sometimes she watches him first, a sensation which comes to him as a strange awareness upon the nape of his neck and deep below his stomach, lingering as though some odd thing awaits for him across the water. 

Always, though, she brings him food. Bounties of shellfish, mollusks, fish gleaming like polished coin, strange seafruits and vegetation which taste of figs and peppers and salt and brine; once she returns with an odd brown-haired hard shell, which contains within it not only a sweetly hardened white fruit but also water – a sugary kind, which drips itself across his thirsted flesh and dries tacky until the next morning he wakes to his skin laved fresh and clean once more. 

There are many things he learns during this time. Most of all, he learns that questions mean very little to her; and answers, perhaps, mean even less. 

When he asks how far they are from land, one morning as the sun rises soft and pale over the endless blue, she only tilts her head. “The sea touches many lands,” she provides in response, a notion which is incredibly uneasy as it is exacerbating. Jacaerys discovers then that the creatures of the sea do not measure distance as men do; They do not count leagues or days or the fading hope of a distant horizon finally appearing, for the ocean is no obstacle to them, but a home.

There are other times in which her companionship is close as he can remember to any other; She learns of him through the little movements of his human visage – captured things, the pull of amusement at his lips and the lowering of sadness at his eyelids. He catches her watching him often, studying these small betrayals of emotion; One afternoon, as the sun dances upon her bared back, she attempts to replicate his amusement upon her own ethereal reflection. 

A near imitation of a smile grows too intentional and solemn, reflecting a study of joy yet not yet a true wielder of it in the flesh. The sight pulls a laugh from him, boyishly bright, doubling him from the waist in amusement. 

She, at his outburst, reflects a ture smile – not forced or painted but merely grown of inordinate pride that she might create something so bright within him. It is the first instance, perhaps of many, in which he finds himself watching her lips with a very specific intention of curiosity. 

Days pass, or weeks; Time behaves strangely upon the sea, and he watches suns rise and fall, tides come and go, no stretch of land or ship or life in any distance. 

THough each day and evening she returns, and eventually he learns the sound of what passes for a name amongst her kind. It is a sequence of beautiful notes which his human throat cannot wholly reproduce; and each time he attempts it, she only laughs, a sound somehow more beautiful than what she is called, and it rises and falls like water spilling through caverns. Eventually, with some fond exasperation, she allows him a shortened thing, a simpler name which his tongue can manage. In return, she learns his; and she calls him Jacaerys in that watery lilt of hers, so low and fresh and pulling. 

One night, as she brings him a supper of squid and weeded sea, she requests something of him in return. 

“Tell me of your kind.”

He looks up from the small task of fastening reeds and torn netting together, a distraction made for himself to tear his eyes away, for at least a moment, from her cloyingly alluring countenance. His nose scrunches against sun-kissed freckles, tipping his head. “Men, you mean?” 

Her tresses are floating tendrils in the near-dead sun, so different from their glimmer of day, and he watches in entrancement as she shakes her head; Another human instinct she’d learned from him in days past. “Your kind,” she repeats, coming closer to the raft. He no longer recoils at her proximity; now, when she approaches, his first instinct is dizzying anticipation instead of fear. “The ones whose blood tastes of fire.”  

His stomach finds a chill at her words, though he only leans back upon calloused palms and glances up and the nail-sliver of moon peeking through bruise-crushed curtains of sky. 

He tells her, then, of Old Valyria; of dragons filling the sky and empires of families, the dredges left of them who crossed both Doomed ash-shores and poisoned seas, carrying the last embers of a dying civilization. When he thinks he’s finished, or that she might tire of his voice, she only asks more – starry eyed and curious, leaning her head against the wood and asking how it feels to fly upon the sky. 

It’s only after the sheer blackness of night has found the sea that he speaks of Dragonstone. He murmurs of his own family, too; he tells her of soaring towers black as dragonglass and fields of lurching green which become swallowed up by jagged volcanic breath, of his mother and the war in her name. He whispers of his Usurper uncle; of Luke and Arrax – and that is when words truly start to tremble. He does not realize he weeps until he tastes the salt of them, until she lifts a cool finger to wipe them away and taste them instead upon her own tongue. 

He whispers the rest – of Meleys and her rider; then of Vermax and of the end in the Gullet. And when he finishes, she remains silent for a long while.

Her voice comes in the watery traces of a whisper. “You have been lonely.” 

He does not respond to her. 

He couldn’t have, even if he’d wished to; there are truths too large for the mouth to carry, and this is one of them. 

So he turns his face away, letting his gaze drift over the restless dark of the sea, over the silvered shiver of moonlight trembling upon the water’s skin. But she has watched him long enough to understand despite this, and the glint of her is dimmed under the blackness of the sky, that mirrored world broken only by her sweet form half in the glassy depths. 

“I have sisters,” she says then. “I know I’ve spoke of them to you before.” 

And though she’d indeed mentioned it days past, still it is odd to think a woman like her – if she is to be labeled such a thing, so swathed in tide and shadow – might have a family at all; His eyes find her and try to conjure the thought of a life down below. Within him he finds something curious and tender. “Do you have many?” he asks, because it is the easiest of his questions.  

She nods, a spill of hair along her shoulders. “Yes.” 

“How many?” he asks then, shifting upon the raft to lie closer along the edge, his bared shoulders freckled even beneath moonlight, their faces so very close. 

And so with a dip of her chin, she tells him in turn of the hundreds of sisters which live down in the depths, of the Mother-sister which birthed them and watches them, and of the ribbed-world of bleached bone and darkness which she came from. He asks her of her childhood, and of her people; and when she gives him all in kind, he finds himself pondering – with a distant recall of dragonseeds and countless nameless silver-haired visitors to the island – how abundance itself can be another kind of exile.

ON THE EVENING FOLLOWING, SHE COMES TO HIM WOUNDED.

He had waited for her through the expanse of the day. It was a strange thing, he thinks now, how he had once every morning begun with thoughts of war and strategy, of what ravens might arrive and what battles might be waiting beyond the horizon. Now, he wakes with the sun and listens for the sound of water changing. 

He’d fashioned something resembling a task for himself; a crude thing, a boy’s invention against the endless boredom alone at sea; With reeds and pieces of his torn trousers and the remnants of salvaged seanet, he has rigged a small tether, a foolish little snare which occasionally lures fish close enough for him to catch if his hands are quick and his luck is kinder. Still; after exhausting himself upon the empty bounty of fish his game provided him, he’d waited for her for far too long. 

When she comes, it is in the glint of moonlight which catches red upon the curve of skin, and his heart thuds once within the cave of his chest when he finds the long, horrid lacerations crossing one shoulder like clawmarks across her flesh. 

“What did that?” he asks her sharper than intended. She only watches him; She has brought him a handful of shells, gathered carefully in her torn and bloodied fingers, a sight which churns painfully in his chest. She has come to him injured, and still carrying gifts. “Are you all right?” he attempts again, kinder this time. 

It is silent for far too long as she dips her head, working open the few shells for him with jagged nails, which he takes hungrily, though not distracted enough to forgive the strained stiffness of her normally voracious movements. At length her voice comes in a quiet tense, low as a groan. 

“My sisters are displeased.” 

It is enough for Jacaerys to study her, those lacerations and such sweet skin ripped apart, and understand enough that the wounds have something to do with him and, indeed, with the food she brings to the surface each turn of sun. Perhaps, too, with the sheer notion that he still breathes at all. 

“Because of me,” he whispers, and she says naught but a small trembling sigh; though when his knuckles raise to tenderly trace along the marred flesh of her shoulder, she does not turn away. A churn of water, she keens to his touch, coming nearer until and she is close enough to drop a weary, shivering cheek upon the cloth of his thigh. Heat burns there, roving from the seeping chill of her bare cheek upon his pant. She gazes up at him once more from his lap, a reflective but morose thing, as though she doesn’t quite understand why he sees her suffering as so horrible; as though perhaps it is merely the price of wanting something and keeping it. 

He whispers to her then, when she asks – tales of Princely youth and sailing upon the sea with his father; and she whispers quietly of her own life, of the schools of fish which keep her company and guide her to the most treasurous depths of the sea. 

And that night, after she leaves, he lies awake and watches the stars. 

They are cruel things, stars – so beautiful and yet unreachable. And the songs, as they always do, begin sometime past the hour of Ghosts, reaching him across the water from the odd-hazed distance; the song of her sisters, he’s come to understand. He lies upon his raft and wonders if she will return tomorrow – and then, if she might one day decide he is no longer worth the trouble, worth her pain.

He thinks then of his mother, and of Dragonstone, and all those who must believe him dead; who have likely carried on in the war that he has so reluctantly left behind. 

And beneath it all, in that endless sky of stars, there remains one true wish upon his tongue: that his siren might come back unharmed.

TWO DAYS PAST, AT THE EDGE OF THE BAT’S HOUR, SHE FINALLY RETURNS TO HIM. 

She reveals to him in a depth of shimmer, dancing upon a surface of purple and orange which streaks his tanned skin and curls his hair with salt and warmth, still in the early eve of the day. Water warms him; the sunset bleeds crimson across the horizon and Jacaerys sits at the edge of the wreckage with both legs dangled within the sea. 

She surfaces soundlessly between his knees, an appearance so sudden he nearly startles back; with a glint of amusement she stares, brows ticking upwards in an impossibly human expression. Jacaerys, warmed through his unease shock, lets his lips curl in a fond relief. 

In an urge so boyish; a thing laced with sheer hope and solace, he forgets himself and, indeed, the weakened state in which she’d appeared to him two long nights past. 

“Hoping to drown yourself?” he jests before he remembers himself. 

She – having since learned the human habit of jesting and recently found herself one for the same sharp wit he often bears – only tips her glinting, glimmering eyes skyward in a roll of vexation, a thing she’s also long learned from him to do. 

“I cannot drown,” she chides, voice like seafoam, amusement leaked so warmly through her mouth that he nearly forgets the glint of teeth which live just beyond those sweet lips. 

“No,” he, solace at last to have his siren returned unharmed, only smiles. “I suppose you cannot.” 

Her hands settle upon the timber, mere breaths from the outer line of his thighs as he leans back upon palms to regard her fully. “Are you well?” He wonders – and then, with a faint heat upon his cheeks that grows not only due to the dying sun, “I worried for you.” 

It casts something bright upon her eyes and twitches the coltish smile which belies her lips; and the shimmering is there once more, so evergreen in her beauty as she pushes only closer to him, her cheek ghosting that giving fabric which clothes his inner knee. 

For a moment he merely gazes down upon her visage, raining with beauty and dripping still with that unsettling stillness. Her eyes glint only faintly in the dying day, so beautifully lit between his thighs. 

“You should come in,” she says in response. 

To this, Jacaerys laughs. It is not the first offer; indeed it is a thing she’s supplied in more than a handfuls – when the sun reached its blistering peak and he winced at the searing upon his flesh, when the moon made whatever hides below her hips in the depths glow, even when the breath of conversation dwindled in the easy laze of the heat, the water so inviting as it kissed over her skin. 

And Jacaerys might, these days, be a mindsick – or lovesick – fool; but still, he knows better. 

“You hide it well,” he murmurs, only partial in his jest though some lace in the back of his mind truly yearns to yank himself from the pull of those depths, to coil away in fear of the creature between his legs. “But you cannot trick me, siren.” 

She does not particularly enjoy the name; though still she only tilts her head, a coy thing he resents only so far as it makes the urge to slip into the water even stronger, to feel her skin between the warmth of the water and his own salted skin, cooled by the depths below. 

“I only wish for you to join me,” the words rise from her with the hush of tidewater slipping through black stone, soft and inexorable, the sea itself speaking so longingly through her mouth.

There is little mirth in the laugh he gives once more. He mirrors the tilt of her head boyishly, curls tangling with lashes. “And be dragged into the depths?”

The levied gaze upturned against the glint of dying day did not waver from his visage; in the dimming light her eyes held such strange, fathomless brightness, submerged stars peering at him through leagues of darkened water. “ I would not drag you.” 

It is so sweet, the lie; and perhaps it is not inherently such a thing, but instead borne from those odd, coiling natures which juxtapose your very being – to tear flesh and to soothe it, to lave upon fear and to charm it away. She is kind, and she is, despite it all, sweet – though yet, Jacaerys remains uneager to discover yet whether her self restraint survives immersion into the sea. 

Nonetheless, he cannot help his faint tick of a grin, amused perhaps only at the absurdity of it all. 

“I am not eager to test your limits,” he confesses. 

A ribboned smile, lurking against the water as her hands grasp the wood beside his knees. Something in the depths brushes his ankle; boot against something stronger, faint and fluttering though still startling enough to ridge his bare spine. She hums. “Do you think so little of me, Jacaerys?”

It is a song, to hear his name from such lips. The sea rocks impatiently, and he feels the leverage of his hips tilt just so against the tides. She rocks with them, a gentle flow that splays tendrils of hair across bare shoulders, glimpses of sweet skin lower than his eyes dare dip. “I think,” he says with a wettened lip, “you have already admitted to dragging men beneath the waves.” 

She finds amusement in this, it seems, and she gives a small tilt of head. “Men.” Such emphasis comes with a tightened flutter across his chest, and his brow lifts, emboldened so as to lean forward until their breaths meet the same stretch of salted air. 

“Am I no man to you?” he wonders. 

Her eyes, those unblinking lives of dying stars through the last breath of day, flare with some kind of heat from the expiring sun. “You’re far more than that.” 

In her wake washes aboard his wooden raft a fresh kiss of sea, straining her bare chest against the expanse of plank between his thighs; the movement is a gentle rocking, though it brings them keenly close, so close indeed that Jacaerys is rendered dizzied by the sweet smell of her once more, of the cloying honesty in those deepened, reflective eyes. 

Jacaerys has lived a life told of titles and beings; prince, son, rider, piece upon the board of kings and queens, bastard and heir, all of the muddled things which lie between old bloodlines indistinguishable from myth. 

He watches that myth now, splayed before him, and silently marvels at her tangibility. So he says her name, her common-tongued name, and tips his head boyishly. “You say such strange things,” he murmurs. 

Her head tilts in a mirror, one which makes his heart skip over itself faintly, the lick of warm sea against his knees lapping over the salted air. Her skin glows under the red-streaked sun, a thing of marvel and unconfounded beauty. “As do you, prince.”

A laugh escapes him, bubbled from the space between them as it rocks, the sea yearning for the two hearts which beat not together nor on the same natural track but instead in some odd counterbeat of each other; and Jacaerys lets the water dip him forward just so, enough to see the iridescent lines shimmering upon her cheeks. Her face is so very pure in the setting death of sun. 

He tips his head sidelong, somewhat intrigued by her words. “And what strange things have I said to you?”

She, who never blinks, is overcome with some minute breath of shyness, a mirror memory of nights before, and her gaze drops to the fire-streaked water before looking to him once more. “You call me kind.”

Of all things, the prince thinks; Of all the impossible, absurd madman things she has witnessed him do: speak of dragons, bleed upon the sea, command her to rise from the depths as though he still possessed a court and the shadow of a crown to succeed – this is what remains with her.

“You find that so strange?” he shakes his head faintly, letting his lip lift slightly. “You have spent every day proving it.”

She says nothing; The silence between them is no longer the terrible silence of their first meeting, for it is now laced through with those more sweet things, a vulnerability shared through salt-laced glances and small smiles.  

“You healed me,” he continues quietly when her voice still shies away from sound. “When there was no reason to. And you fed me when your own kind would sooner have fed upon me. You listen when I speak, though I imagine my life must sound terribly unexciting beside yours.” 

This, at last, coaxes a small curve of glossed lip to her visage. 

His smile is slight, too, though still he continues. “And when I grieve...” He lowers his eyes toward the darkening glass slipping between the broken planks, thinking of ancient wings and smoldering waters. “...you still care, even if my troubles seem so minute to you.” 

The sea breathes around them in spilling sighs of waves; She studies him with that unnerving patience once more, until she asks, in a voice so soft he almost mistakes it for the tide, “is that truly kindness?”

His brow knits, struck at once by both her honest bewilderment and, too, her capacity for tenderness. The breath which slips his lips is one of wonder.  “What else would it be?”

Her gaze drifts beyond him, toward the place where the sun has nearly drowned itself beneath the world’s edge, and her head tilts in that learned habit, a small mirror of his own. 

“My sisters sing until men forget they are afraid. And then they feed.” she says after a long while. Her fingers trail idly through the water, and the sea bends around them as though eager for the touch. “When I first saw you upon your beast,” Her eyes lift to meet his once more, startlingly bright. “I thought I might do the same.” 

His heartbeat stumbles; a thought which should bring terror but, in its absence, only reminds him how very alive he still is. She speaks before he can dare. 

“I do not know why I did not.” A draw comes upon her brow, a tremble of her lips. “I only know that when you sleep...” she murmurs, almost wonderingly, “...I do not wish to leave you.” Her fingers curl and he watches them catch upon the pearl of sea. “When you laugh, I wish to hear it again, and when you hurt...” Her voice catches upon something. “...There is… pain in me, also.” A shake of tresses, bewildered. “I have never known that before.”

A burgeoning warmth spreads across the very fibers of his being. The last breath of day lingers across the water between them, red as banked embers beneath ash, and Jacaerys stares at the woman who saved his life, wondering how she has gone a whole life without ever hearing a gentle name spoken of herself.  

“I should think,” he says softly, scarcely above the whisper of the tide, “that whatever name your sisters would give such a feeling…” His heart skips its own beat within his chest, watching how her eyes dance with the light of late eve, “…among my people, we would simply call it affection.”

The evening deepens around them; she does not respond but instead leans closer to him, just slightly so, her bared beauty brought higher momentarily. The sun has nearly swallowed itself unto the horizon, leaving only the last remnants of gold bleeding beneath the line between sky and sea; the water beneath his knees is dark and glassy, reflecting the first early stars as they begin to appear one by one. 

“Affection,” she repeats, a sweet thing from lips so parted, wondering. Warmth spreads boyishly across Jacaerys’ visage, and he only nods gently. 

It is this very moment that she chooses to spill her grace onto the palms steadying her between his legs; he watches her rise higher from the sea, arching until the water gives way to the scaled glow beginning below her hips. 

Early moonlight pours over her as though it has waited all evening for this very purpose; and his gaze follows the hush of young moon over the sky of deepening violet, tracing how beauty glows through the curve of her breasts as she breathes shakily in the salted air. Lower still, with heated cheeks, his eyes fall – down where human shape surrenders into luminous impossibility. 

He must have stared too long, for her mouth parts in a chilling breath. “You stare at me often, Jacaerys.” 

“You are difficult not to.” It comes from his lips with no such reservation of courtly politeness nor intent to charm; it is a simply known truth, one he’d likely repeat with each breath, if she so wished to hear. “Surely, you know such things.” 

Seabreeze breathes the wet strands of her hair in damp kisses across her cheek; the sea rocks gently beneath them as though to lull him closer – though he needs no more encouragement than the sight of her alone.  

“I truly wish you would come in,” she chides, and her voice – a thing nearly lost beneath the hush of the water and the gentle streaks of dead sun; a confession of sorts, some private form of longing which spills from glossed lips into the air of hunger between them. 

Her breath ghosts upon his cheek as she leans impossibly closer between his thighs. “Though, I suppose I must come to you instead, prince of the sky.” 

A quiet smile ghosts across his mouth, a jilted thing borne from nerves and, perhaps, fate; If such there is a thing. And there, beneath the youngest stars of the sea’s early night – after days of floating in the wide expanse of nothing – he kisses her. 

Her lips are cool as water beneath shade; rainfall upon fevered skin, and from sugary lips comes the faintest breath of her surprise. She presses against him with an eagerness bolstered by uneven weight, a lamb unstable upon fresh legs, some sweet hunger that calls to him louder than the songs of her sisters which have already begun to leak over the surface of the horizon. 

Lips shift, sliding salty and sweetened with hunger. The raft shifts beneath them at her eager lurch; Jacaerys’ hand comes to steady himself upon the wood as his hips cant, slipping further towards the edge of that abyssal water, and still he does not resist, he merely lets his other palm, the one so hungrily pressed to the flesh of her collarbone, slide upon wet skin. Her own ripple upwards like waves upon shores, threading like rivulets through his curls and the other casting her chilled palm over the warmth of his pounding bare chest. Webbed, he thinks faintly, as her fingers splay over his skin; The stars above seem to tremble upon the water in her rippling wake as she presses closer still. 

Tongues prod and slide, a slow dance neither is particularly familiar with though the beat alone brings them closer, breaths melting into soft sighs and gentle hiccups of need. Her lips are of brine and sweet seafruit, and he finds himself insatiable to the taste. 

His hand, hungry and of its own mind, slides past supple flesh; he squeezes only where her sighs come out with faint sounds of enticement – exploring where the deepest keening of her throat meet his own, whilst her own exploration tugs at his scalp and grasps sharply at his warm skin. Hunger and that deeper urge mix deliciously within the basest instincts of his manhood; though his hand pauses at the place where her skin changes, where the familiar ends and the sea wholly begins. Perhaps, days ago, he’d have recoiled at such a sensation – though the man he is now only feels wonder. 

And so he pulls her closer, close enough to taste the brightness of her tongue, so cool and familiar in his memories of his bloodied flesh, so hungered and placant still. And when she pulls back, hardly enough to breathe, her forehead presses cool against his. 

“You taste of fire,” she whispers, a trembling and insatiable thing. 

A smile touches his mouth, and he imagines she can feel it all upon her own lips. “And you of salt.”

For the first time, she laughs against his mouth; and the sea, ancient and endless, carries the sound away. 

JACAERYS IS NOT LOOKING WHEN THE WORLD RETURNS. 

Indeed – as has become the quiet habit of these strange and borrowed days – his gaze has long since abandoned the horizon in favour of the creature beside him. The world has narrowed these days to a single pair of luminous eyes and a curve of shoulder which rises with the tide; to the silvered wake she leaves whenever she slips, laughing, beneath the glassy panes of water and vanishes into whatever hidden depths lie beneath the waves. He watches her instead, the compass by which all mornings begin and all nights fall. 

Seamist sighs over the Narrow Sea in wandering veils, drifting along the horizon and stitching the heavens to the waters with threads of pearl; The sun has drowsily set itself an ascent, still seeping pale across the panes of water, when she grows suddenly still.

“What is it?” He inquires, voice still syrupy with the dredges of sleep. He lies upon the swollen and salt-rotted board, one arm draped lazily over the edge of the raft, fingers absently threaded through the cool silk of her hair so unable to ever fully dry from the cloying breath of sea. 

She does not look at him, nor answer; a glossed gaze remains fixed upon the immeasurably distant horizon. Perhaps, if he were not drunk with the drowsiness of morning laze and early heat – if he’d not given up the hope of such sights days ago – he’d have turned and looked with her. 

Only after so long a silence that he almost repeats himself do her lips part.

“Land.”

This, indeed, sobers the prince entirely. He rises at once, the raft pitching beneath him as he lurches quickly upon one knee. Fingers, still caught amongst her hair, loosen hurriedly lest he pull her with him; He shades his eyes against the low morning light. 

Afar stretches the same rolling sea, thick with mist and silent as a phantom, that horrible blue which has swallowed days and weeks from his life. His eyes strain, a sharp sting of salt and sun, though still he soon makes it out.

It’s a far distant thing – far beyond the rolling waves, hardly more than a shadow painted against the morning; despite such meager an observation, Jacaerys lets out a breath through laced teeth. A miracle, a blessing answered by the gods who had watched him drown and then live in the same eve. 

How many nights had he whispered it into darkness? When his fever burned, and the sea seemed endless, when the empty sky swallowed the empty sea and rocked him, lonely and stranded, in a cold nothingness. 

Land.

For the first time in what could be weeks, or months – or perhaps merely some strange lifetime lived entirely between one sunrise and the next – Jacaerys feels the world opening again, yawning back into a wide berth of cliffs and coves and spine-ridges mountains, of valleys and lakes and beaches and forests. 

And an odd thing passes him, then. Jacaerys has now lived so long suspended in this place, so far between water and sky, between continents, between worlds; how odd to remember a life, as though peeking into a jarred, seaside old bottle-scroll of another man’s dream. 

When he lowers himself again, it is not the distant shore that once more first claims his attention. 

She has drifted nearer without his noticing, borne gently upon the breathing swell until her face nears the side of the raft, a glint of silvery tendrils curling just beneath the sun-shattered surface. His boots, which lie at the end of the disintegrating raft, dry in the early morn; she leans a cheek drowsily upon the sun-warmed wood near his knees, and he has a mind to trace the soft curve of her there, that sweet expanse of skin. Though her words come before he might even think to lift his palm. 

“I will bring you there.”

The words are gentle, and only after he takes time to study her face does he discern it: Shine glistens there, upon her cheeks – no seawater nor salted spray, but some pooling glisten of silvery glum. It pools there, clinging to her lashes for a final moment before it slips soundlessly along the delicate slope of her cheek, falling unto the weathered timber between them where it shines for one heartbeat before the thirsty wood drinks it away. Another follows, then another. She is crying.

The sight unmakes him. 

Though not one to ever endure the tears of any woman so disheartened, this proves impossibly more grievous: This creature of the deep, born of sea and darkness, who he once believed belonged only in stories meant to frighten babes – weeps now with all the helplessness of any mortal girl. The tears which fall from her eyes catch the light of morning; pieces of the moon itself, dissolving upon her skin.

A man at his very core, his words come foolish, perhaps. “Why do you weep?” His hand rises to instinctively brush away the shining path glittering beneath her eye. 

“It is foolish,” she murmurs, a thing so nearly human that Jace forgets himself; wrought, momentarily, with visions of some garden back on his Island, of curling tresses and sweet fruits and quiet whispers and gentle laughter. 

“You’re no fool,” he insists with a whisper of her name, quiet as the waves coaxing them closer to that distant promise on the horizon. Jacaerys soothes beneath her eye as one rescues dew from the petal of a flower; his signet glinting upon his thumb though he possesses neither dragon nor kingdom here. Touch has grown familiar now, a thing he’s been gifted to explore for the better of four passed days together, natural as the sunrise. 

“There are those who still wait for me,” he says quietly, a sprout of hope tugging at his chest at his own words; and though her visage remains sweet as the sunlight, lashes tangle and loosen a small wave of silvered sorrow onto the wood. He leans upon elbow now, so close he might feel her chilled breath upon his own lips. “My mother, m-my family, my people, my… my home.” 

At this, her eyes flutter open, kind as she is understanding. “You belong to the land, Jacaerys.” her lips wilt with the beautiful breath of shared sorrow. “I have long known this.” 

He, unable to help himself, searches her face; a twinge of desperation, that old thing, tugs within his chest. His eyes sting. “And you?” 

A curious sadness enters her expression then, a flicker of some emotion Jacaerys thinks is, perhaps, not fully known to man. She says nothing again, and in this silence, his gaze flickers toward the scars that still cross her shoulder – though the wounds have begun to close beneath whatever strange grace lives within her blood, they remain angry against her skin. 

The sea moves around them and it churns restless, unhappy; dangerous as the land in the distance, roving and hungry as those ancient creatures who lie in wait, far beneath. His lips part in a horrible fear. “Your sisters.” 

At the flinch of her visage, he only cradles her further in his palm, tipping his face to find her gaze watery, silvered even in the breath of morning. His own gaze swims with tears. “Will they hurt you, for what you’ve done?” 

Her gaze remains on his, and the reflection of them brings a small mirror of his own sorrow. “There will be no place beneath the water for me as there was before,” she breathes, as though exile is merely another current she must learn to swim against. “Though I knew this the moment I chose to take you.” 

The words ache all through his marrow, coiling tenderly in the notches where once arrows had struck through him. She speaks of it as though kindness is a betrayal; some selfish thing instead of the most selfless thing a creature might ever do.

It is a horrible moment in which Jacaerys looks toward the distant shore, voice imbued once more with the memory of smoke and fire, of burning ships and dragons swooping from clouds. A lifetime, it seems, has passed. 

He takes her hand, that webbed softness which boasts tender flesh and frilled wonders of silver, and when she takes him in kind, the feeling is still just as strange and wonderful as the first time he felt her under his palm. 

“I cannot remain upon the sea forever,” he says. “There is a war waiting for me. A life.” The taste of salt upon his lip; in the distance, a swooping shadow dives toward the pane of sea, and Jacaerys sees the first gull he’s seen in days. “But..” he murmurs, and a faint smile touches his lips. “There could be a life waiting for you, too.” 

There is some gleam in her eye, a terribly sad thing. Her cheek lifts from the wood to near his own visage, sweet and chilled by the breath though none the less warm in her unending kindness. 

Her lips curve into a watery smile. “You promise impossible lives, Prince Jacaerys.” 

“I promise the only one I possess.” He only pulls her closer, lifting her hand between both of his. "Dragonstone rises from the sea; Every stone of it knows the tide. If there is a place in this world where sea and fire have ever learned to live beside one another…” His smile, though weary and water-laced, has found him at last. “...Surely it is there.” 

Hope is perhaps too dangerous a thing for a creature such as her to possess. He wonders, fleetingly, whether she has ever known it at all. She looks at him then, and he finds not hope within her gaze but something gentler, infinitely sadder: the aching desire to believe him, shining there with its silvery terrible nakedness. Very quietly, she asks, “And if the sea wishes for me back?” 

Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers, and her skin carries with it the scent of salt and deep places untouched by sun. His own lashes flutter shut. 

“Then it may ask.” A faint shake of his head, voice scarcely stirring the morning seabreeze. “It has taken enough from me.” 

He feels the tremble of something across her lips; and then, before the shore can steal another heartbeat from them, she rises just enough for her lips to find his. 

He turns instinctively to meet her, his mouth yielding beneath the cool sweetness of hers, tasting of salt and seafruits and sweet residual of those peculiar sweetwater shells. Her hand comes to rest against his chest, splayed lightly over the place where once an arrow had sought his heart; his own disappears into the silken weight of her hair, drawing her nearer. A sighing thing, the sea, as it lifts their joint mouths and sways Jacaerys closer still to the depths she hales. Wood sighs beneath their joint weight, small waves claiming its splintered sides; the morning is still, water softly hushing around them. There are no birds in the sky. 

Jacaerys thinks, for a moment, that if the world were to end now, it would do so quite gently.

WHEN LAND FINALLY CLOSES AROUND THE RAFT, IT SWALLOWS THEM WITH A FUNEREAL QUIET. 

In the very last stretch of current, spurred by both tide and whatever ethereal tail lies below her hips, the sea narrows gradually; great walls of black stone rise from either side as they float nearer to the shore, until the open world is swallowed behind them into a small opening, a breath of sunlight through the keyhole of some grand door. Jace sits upon the wreckage, watching the horizon as that endless breathing vastness that had carried them for so many days retreats into a distant strip of silver; When the land swallows the last of the abyssal sky, he is finally welcomed by the first breath of shaded light he has felt in what might be ages.

It is a balm to his being. 

An old-born tyrant, weeks beneath the sun’s gaze has tanned and chapped him; Salt lives in every crease of him, wind has carved into his bones. A sigh of seeping shade crossing overhead, the looming shadows of the cliffs are cool, rich with the scent of stone and moss, and Jace draws a breath so deep it begins to ache in those places where the arrows once lived.

Passing into the mouth of a cave the size of a small ship, the rock shoots high overhead, blacker than any rock he’s yet to see in his three-and-twenty years; The slate slices sharp from the water, scarred and riddled with smaller caves whose mouths yawn open toward an emptier abyss further within the dark. Some are no larger than doorways, though others crack open high to the heavens, large enough to swallow entire fleets. 

Jacaerys finds himself staring at their scars; the sea has gnawed these caves for a thousand years, and its teeth marks rake through sharp stone everywhere. 

Soon, the cove opens around them, and the water becomes clear; and there, so close he could perhaps dive and swim to it, the water yields to a rocked edge of beach. 

Breath catches within his throat; a stretch of black beach, soft as velvet to the eye for a slope which turns flat with slabbed black rocks, warmed by the breath of sun but cooled by the deep cavernous chill. Pools gather within them in fragments of captured sky; He looks into them and feels a tremendous relief. 

It is only then, that his gaze falls upon the bones.

Lying strewn among the rocks is a whale’s skeleton, half-entombed, the great spine twisted through the stones; ribs arch upward in weather-worn curves, bleached white as old moonbone. The wind moves through them with a hollow music, a sound so mournful it brings shivers cascading down Jacaerys’ bare spine. 

As they near the cove’s shore, there reveals more bones beyond the whale’s shattered being – and these are not the bones of beasts. With the creeping dread of a fever dream, the cave peels back its own skin: A skull half-buried in stone, empty sockets filled with shadow and crystallized salt; A yellowed hand thrust up through the earth, still crawling itself towards the spot of dripping sunlight from high above; Fragments of a spine tangled in driftwood and root. Jacaerys feels that cold thing so long past creep over his chest once more. Death has not passed through here and moved on; indeed, it has become one and the same with the cove – one with the rocks and caves and tide pools. 

His breath only ceases entirely when he finds the skeleton laid beneath the nearest cavemouth. Ribs have been forced apart; shattered not by storm nor time but instead pried wide apart with care, a doorway of the corpse, a nest. 

A gaze lies upon its mangled shape in horror as those same old stories of youth now rise in him like bile; His stomach tightens, mouth stuffed of cotton and pulse pounding within his chest. 

Nearby – scattered among the rocks as though left by pilgrims or fools, lie offerings of silvered halfgroats and Tyroshi copper, greened with age; strings of fine stones dulled by salt, salt-rotted silk, fragments of pottery, even a rusted gilded dagger. 

Jacaerys feels, once more, impossibly small upon the broken raft. How many men have stood where he stands now, trembling before the dark; How many had crossed black waters with pockets heavy from gold and bellies full of fear, believing that beauty might yet bargain with death? 

With a flick of fear, his eyes shift to the glistening clear waters. Beside him still, she watches from the shallows, and he finds that she remains beautiful as the sea when it means to kill a man; floating in the clear waters, visage kissed from pearled ripples, entirely at home among the bones as though she has spent all her life here with the dead to keep her company. Perhaps she has. 

Old as it is, still the fear returns to him, surging to his throat at the sight of the pried ribs, to the trail of finger-bones littering the nearest tidepool, to her. And, after all, Jacaerys is only a man. 

“Are you going to eat me?” His voice calls out quiet, but in the wake of silence, it rebounds through the cave – a sonorous thing, not trembling though surely frightened the same: eat me, eat me, eat me. It falls dead after its repetition, laying to his expanse of bare back a cool whistle of breeze which sets the hair upon his nape on end. 

Her eyes still in the water, as still as the day he first caught glimpse of her. What comes next is a minute shift; a fall of gaze, some learned softness drawing away as a crab takes to its shell, and the cove falls still. Even the water ceases, for a breath, its incessant lapping at the black-beached shore. 

“The death of so many suns,” comes her voice at last; a thing scarcely louder than water finding a path along the sand. “And birth of so many moons.” Her eyes lift, and within those wisps of lashes, so sweet and salt-clinging, he finds only that very moon she speaks of, reflected so deep, so sharp and luminescent. “And still, you fear my mouth.”  

Jacaerys opens his own to answer; though worse still is the breathless thievery of his chest – the lack of words which crawl to his throat yet remain perched upon his tongue. Words gather there, frightened birds against the bars of his ribs, yet refuse to fly – because he knows not what he might say. 

For he has spent weeks dying in the water with her hands upon his skin, her voice in his ears, her lips upon his own; with her keeping breath inside his ruined body. And perhaps he could tell her that still, beneath all such tenderness, a frightened boy remains – that the songs of his childhood are carved too deeply into him; that men are weak creatures who inherit fear long before they inherit wisdom. Silence answers for him instead. 

His gaze returns to her, then. 

And he finds that here, in the lucid water of the cove, nothing is so softened by darkness; the sea renders her wholly to him now, silver scales glinting as hammered mail and stitched from both woman and abyss alike. Fins, a near translucent thing, taper along the delicacy of hips and fold in the current of a dreadful languor of tail; a strong shing, a terribly powerful thing which scatters ribbons of light across the cave walls as she shifts. 

Her gaze rests upon him, so eternally unblinking, and a faint smile touches her mouth then – a smile made of frost and moonlight, beautiful and dangerous and far too sad to any longer be called kind. “I could have eaten you when your blood first touched the tide.” 

The sea stirs around her hips as she shifts. Her gaze does not leave his own. “I could have eaten you when your fever took your senses and you hardly knew your own name, when all you could do was cry out in the dark.” Tresses curl, tendrils cloying towards the edge of the wood. “I could have eaten you when I drew the wounds from your flesh and cleaned your blood.” 

Eyelashes burn as Jacaerys watches her, helplessly foolish to hois own nature; he traces how her visage shifts under the reflections of the shimmering waters. 

“I could have eaten you when you first laid your mouth on mine.” 

His breath catches in a shamed flush to his cheeks, for memory betrays him all at once: her laughter beneath the stars, the cool sweetness of her lips, the shy turn of a smile after a handful of shells were deposited upon his lap. That she should speak of it all now, with such resentful sorrow – a horrible emptiness within him gapes further. 

“But you ask now,” eyes lift to him once more, moonlit and wounded even in the light of day. “even after I have done each kind thing you once praised of me?”

Regret coils ugly within him. He lurches toward the water without thinking, knees upstable upon the disintegrating salt-logged wood. “Wait,” he calls, hand outstretching in some boyish fit of desperation, as though command might counter the hurt he’d levied. 

She only slinks away, velveted water swallowing more and more of her. 

Sorrow, that horrible thing, falls deep within him at the sight. “Please.” The word breaks from him then, raw with a desperation he cannot hide; The cliffs catch it and throw it back at him once more in a hundred dying echoes – please, please, please – the cove lamenting his grief. 

Her eyes shimmer with unspilled silver. “I know you do not wish to fear me.”

It is then that she lets herself fall back into the sea. Scarcely a small sigh of water; Jacaerys is helpless to himself as the dark swallows her, absorbing the shape of her glinting scales as completely as though she had never existed at all. 

He is left quite alone. 

Silence occupies not just the ear but his bones themselves; Jacaerys remains kneeling where she vanished for some time, a hand suspended foolishly above the water in hopes the tide might, struck by some late compassion, yet choose to return what it has taken from him. Water kisses the edges of his boots and the splintered ruin he floats upon, and only when the last warmth of day has wholly bled from the cliffs lining the mouth of the cove does he at last force himself to move.

His limbs, it seems, have long forgotten the labor of belonging to him; For weeks they had been sustained by the cool touch of her palms against burning skin in the dead of night – that curious miracle by which each waking day found him a little less dead than the evening before. 

Rising upon his feet calls forth a strength he’s not attempted in what feels like true moons. 

Boots sink into the black sand; Solid earth has haunted his prayers through endless nights upon the water, yet now it feels strangely faithless and wholly dead with its lack of sway and ease. He walks because standing still becomes unbearable in both his limbs and mind. 

Slowly the prince wanders the little cove she had chosen for him. He threads first between the vast white arches of whale skeletons; then, fingertips drift across stone polished smooth by centuries of tides. Here and there the sea has driven whole ships into the stone, timber petrified into the bones of the earth; Human skulls peer from beds of mussels, seagrass growing through the hollows of their eyes; And yet nowhere among these countless things might he find the single thing he seeks. 

In time, night paints the caves into a black mouth, moonlight catching to glow horribly upon saltbleached bones. Jacaerys could leave; There is land beneath his feet, a miracle for which he once would have traded kingdoms, and somewhere beyond these cliffs there must surely be roads or villages with harbors and living men.

He does not go.

Instead he returns to the water’s edge and lowers himself among the abyssal sand, and tells himself that he will wait only until morning, when either his siren returns or daylight might reveal some path for him inland. He makes no fire, for the darkness feels less lonely when it remains unbroken; hips upon land and back against sharp rock, Jacaerys stares at the shifting current with broken regret. 

And when dawn finally begins to silver the eastern rim of the cave, washing the black water pale as beaten steel once more, bleeding with that softened lilac, Jacaerys is still there, watching with sunscorched eyes for any hint of silver within the waves. 

JACAERYS WAKES TO COLD. 

No chill which lives in the memory of his bones – not that of blood seeping from a dying body; he wakes to the roll of the frigid tide reaching calves, just where he’d collapsed upon the sand. Water laps over his boots and retreats again, a chilled thing as eyelashes unlace themselves from their salted hold upon his consciousness. 

For several breaths he reposes where he is, suspended in that memory of sleep and waking. A turn of head, pressing cheek to softened volcanic sand; and then his eyes open in memory, a lurch of disorientation at the sensation of land beneath him. 

What he finds, instead, are eyes. 

They are waiting for him from beyond the dark shelf of rock where the cove deepens suddenly into black water, faintly luminous now beneath the gentling dawn. He is struck with such immense relief that he laughs before he knows he has done so.

He croaks out your name, carrying with it all the lonely hours of the night between them as he rises swiftly, stiffness of limb protesting with the neglection of weeks upon the raft. His balance falters upon the uneven stones, though he crosses the cove as swiftly as the gods allow, ducking through whale ribs to where she waits where the black stone falls sheer into fathomless water, only her shoulders and head above the tide, hair spreading behind her. 

Jacaerys lowers himself carefully onto the warm volcanic rock, stretching close so he might lie upon his stomach along its edge, one arm hanging over the precipice towards her watchful countenance. The tide slips lazily between her tresses, coiling shyly.

“I was cruel.” He murmurs, gentler than the lick of tide which coaxed him awake though the words scrape against his throat. “I have no excuse.” 

She studies him without expression, unsettling enough that he cannot tell whether she means to forgive him or leave him once more. 

“I am so sorry,” he whispers, one last offering cast into the cove alongside the coins and daggers and futile silks of drowned things long past. Nothing answers him but the crashing wave, coaxing the glint of purpled crabs alongside the underbelly of his rock. 

Only then does her arm emerge from the water; with an upward reach, she glances up at him – and there he finds a bewildered heartbeat of hope that she might touch him again. Instead, her fingers unfold; in the glint of morning glare, Jacaerys blinks upon her palm, leaning further once more to find there, resting in the center, something shining. 

A pearl, fresh and small enough to disappear beneath his thumb. Morning gathers itself there upon its surface, a stolen captured piece of dawn pale as milk and luminous as mist-laced moon. 

Lashes flicker momentarily as the breath catches within his chest, a small laugh of absurd affection rising sweet and sharp in his throat as his eyes burn with emotion. 

Hesitation sits so strangely upon so beautiful a creature; her eyes glisten with those silvery tears, too, as her lip trembles. Her voice comes between pressed lips, a rather bashful countenance among the waves. “I wished to bring you one before you left me.” 

Her palm, he registers, trembles with the small thing, a glinting haze of the cave; affection burns bright through him as Jacaerys takes her palm with his own, closing her fingers gently around the pearl. 

“I don’t wish to leave you,” he says instead, and the confession comes before pride can catch it, before the careful walls built by a lifetime of crowns and expectations can remind him that princes are not meant to plead with the sea. His fingers remain around hers, warm against the strange coolness of her skin, the pearl hidden between their palms as though they have together captured some tiny fragment of the moon itself. “I wish to stay with you,” he whispers wetly. 

Her eyes swim just as the ancient, beautiful tail of shimmering silver does beneath the waves; currents curl and fold, and she remains utterly quiet for one moment, hand trembling within his own. Her gaze lowers briefly to the pearl still enclosed between them, then lifts again.

“The place you spoke of,” her voice ripples along the whisper of the tide. “The stoned castle that watches the sea, the home you say waits for you beside the water.” A lip trembles before it is speared with sharpened, pearled teeth. “You would truly bring me there?”

Dragonstone. He thinks of black towers rising from volcanic earth and halls warmed by fire, his mother’s chambers and dragons circling above cliffs where the wind wails. 

“Yes,” he says, lacking any such hesitation of a prince with the duty of war still looming upon his back. “I meant it. Truly.”

Something changes in her face then, though still he leans closer, lowering himself further over the stone until the water nearly reaches his bared visage, nearly kisses his chest. But before he might let his body follow that burning instinct of his heart to slip into the water after her, her hand slips from his own to disappear into the water. 

The pearl lies in his own palm; He watches her once more leave him. 

“Wait,” his voice tapers, though his disconcertion grows so completely that he remains frozen upon the rock, watching as the sea carries her not away this time, but instead towards the shore. 

It is only once she reaches the sand, long taloned things grasping in wounds through the dark, that the prince snaps upwards, heartbeat thundering upon his throat. A grieving veil, the dark water shifts and folds along her body, so unwilling to surrender what it has kept for longer than most men have had names for their gods; glassy folds climb her skin and slip over the silvering scales which remain among her sun-breathed skin. 

The unnatural grace begins in a wail of tide; a large crash of seafoam submerges Jace, his lungs filled once more with burning salt and unforgiving sting; when he surges to, upon his knees against sharp rock, he hears it: a wailing horror, splintered as shards of bone snap against echoing cave walls. His siren screams. 

Salt slides in drips from his vision, though still he finds the horror, a darkened sea of shimmering deep – no color of mortal blood, but perhaps an open vein in the ocean itself which spills a piece of its darkness upon the sand. 

The stories return once more of the she-creatures coming to land to nest; and, for the first time, the sound that leaver her is not some haunting sweetness meant to lure men closer. 

It is sheer agony, and it jolts him to action quicker than any war bell. 

Screams echo through the cavern, horrible and dragging; and hands catch the sharp of rock as Jacaerys descends, a scrambling desperation of fear as his knees strike the cold sand and stumble twice. The strength that has carried this far was never his own; it has always belonged to her and the breath she gave him, the kindness of a creature he once feared. Now, he spends what remains of it reaching her. 

He rears the largest rock just as the last of the blooded dark water retreats; waking itself only in foam and silver upon the shore. 

And just there: His siren lies still upon the sand. 

Upon reaching her, he falls to his knees. He finds, in trembling breaths, the sea’s remains upon her: laces of that old magic, shimmering scales along her skin; a strange elegance to her form, a brightness reflecting in her gaze, so akin to mother-of-pearl. 

She is no ordinary woman, but his woman.  

A trembling palm rises to brush away the remnants of foam and weeded sea, clinging to her as a dying man might his lover; and she only meets his own watery gaze, a small puff of air passing her lips. “I told you, I wished for you to come in.” 

The words undo him, loosing a laugh helpless in its wonder and grief, watery in bewilderment. Glossed lips curl, that same old glimmer in her eyes as she whispers next: “I suppose I once again had to come to you instead.”  

A hitch of his breath, swallowed in a rush of thrill as a palm comes to cup his own jaw, soothing as fingers spread along the curve of his cheek. “My prince of the sky,” she chides, her eyes carrying pools of the very same, that broke-open expanse of light high above the cavernous dark. Fingers brush away his salt-laced curls. 

He gathers her to him wholly, and she comes so very willingly, no longer divided by anything so  distant and unknowable as the sea.

A simple miracle; for she is warming, a living thing against him, breath trembling and falling in ripples of warmth along the bare of his shouldered back. Here she is, in his arms. 

Jacaerys presses his face against damp tresses and closes his eyes, overcome by the strangeness of the world having allowed such a thing to happen; and she in turn tightens her grasp round him in a gesture so truly human that it nearly brings the sting of tears to eye. The cove roars louder now, perhaps distraught with its loss; the water thunders along their bared legs, and at length, Jacaerys slowly pulls back. 

Slow, his gaze drops to her legs – the unfamiliar grace of twitching tissue and flesh and muscle and bone beneath the morning light; concern touches his heart and perhaps, too, his visage.

“Do they hurt?” he asks softly, tipping his head to catch her eyes. “Your legs.”

She looks down as though considering a question yet to be occurred within her mind; and then at length, she lifts one supple foot and nudges his side with a shy, almost playful firmness. A gesture moves through him, lips curling in a gentle affection at her nudge. 

“I have had them before,” she reminds him then, in hint of faint pride and amusement. He only smiles, no longer afraid of what she has been before him, what she is. For she is his, too – and he, hers. 

“Does it feel the same?” he wonders, gaze lingering over each sweet part of her, so real upon the shore. 

For the first time since she came ashore, she falters nearly unconfident; a startling transformation which renders Jacaerys marveled at such bashfulness. Her gaze slips away from his, and when she answers, her voice is barely above the whisper of the tide.

“No,” she hums, a small thing; and her fingers tighten faintly against his bared shoulder, nails blunt but sharp still. He can see how warmth touches her cheeks, how her lip catches upon sharp teeth. “This… feels far better.”

Jacaerys smiles then, a hand falling tenderly upon her face. A thumb brushes the dampness at her cheekbone, the silver traces still glimmering there like moonlight caught so stark against the real nature of her skin. 

And then he kisses her, slow as fate; a warmed mouth lingers against hers, patient and gentle, her hands rise to his back solidly to grasp at his warm flesh; the sea groans behind them, and the wind howls through the bones along the shore. 

Her breath catches when his hand slides to the sides of her – and he feels the shiver that passes through her then, not of fear but of sensation, an old recognition of something newly awakened. It answers in him at once, too, so low and bright and aching.

She leans closer once more, and he meets her there. 

The kiss deepens unhurried and tender; fingers curl in the muscle of his back, his own palm reaching the strange, living warmth of her skin, the quickening pulse there, the breath of her body now made real in his world. When she makes a small sound against his mouth, soft and startled by her own response, he draws back only enough to look at her. Her eyes are wide in a dawning tide of astonishment, swimming with the same heated thing that kisses across that sweet skin which once never knew the true touch of warmth. 

Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers and smiles, his own breath uneven now, his heart no calmer than her own within their beating cages. “Are you alright?” he murmurs.

Her answer is to kiss him first. Jacaerys makes a low sound against her mouth and gathers her closer once more, one hand at the nape of her neck, the other spreading along her waist, feeling the tremor there as though her body is remembering itself once more upon land. It is a sweet thing, a tangle of tongues languid, enough to perhaps remind her that tenderness can be just as fierce as hunger.

She moves against him with a wonder that undoes him; She has known desire, he can see that in the way she breathes, in the way her fingers tighten at his shoulders, in the bright, startled heat of her gaze, the memory of muscles when he shifts to press himself hard along the line of her own wanting body. Indeed, she is not one who hesitates; She knows the language of wanting better than he does, and he is not ashamed to learn from her now. 

When he draws away only enough to look at her, her lips are parted, her eyes dark with a confusion that is almost pain. 

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says softly, the words trembling with nerves that guide her closer to him still. “T-tell me if you do not want this, please.”

Her hand rises to his face, and the touch warms across him, spreading down trembling throat and quivering chest, far lower, igniting some spark within him. 

Her thumb brushes his mouth, and there is a smile which graces across her own. “I want,” she says, and the ocean crashes itself against their shore, folding over their hips as though it, too, wants.

He swallows, his body already hard with his own wanting; his voice comes lower, hungry for the sweet softness beneath his palms. “What do you want?” 

Her gaze holds his. “You,” she says, helpless to the unnatural flow of tresses which still seem to float gently round her beauty even left of the tide. “Only you, Jacaerys.”

Eyes shut for a heartbeat, if only in effort to steady himself; and when they open she still watches him in that patient, unsettling way.  

“Please, let me be careful with you,” he whispers, nearly desperate. She only nods, so ethereal under the breath of faraway sunlight, and her words come in the same tremble of needed breath. “Let us learn of each other.” 

And so he leads her from the waterline of the softer black sand and up where the dawn has begun to warm the flatter, kinder stones. And there, beneath the pale opening sky, he eases the salt and cold from them both. 

Fabric, fear, distance - one by one they fall away from their entwined forms until there is nothing left between them but breath and the bright, trembling ache of wanting. He lays her down with care, and when he follows her onto the sand, his mouth finds her throat first, then the hollow beneath her ear, then the place where her pulse leaps beneath the skin. She arches into him at once, a soft gasp breaking from her when his hand slides over her waist, then lower, learning her with a cruel patience.

“Jacaerys,” she breathes, a plea, a praise which makes him shudder. He answers only by kissing her harder, one hand threading through her hair, the other braced beside her head as he lowers himself over her. Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, then rake along his back, unsure whether to pull him closer or hold herself steady; He gives her both – indeed, he gives her everything he can. 

His mouth moves over hers, then down again, tasting salt and warmth and the faint sweetness of her breath, ghosting over the tantalizing flush of skin upon her breast, teeth scraping only softly. When she trembles, he stills at once, looking upon her with salt-kissed lashes. “Too much?” he inquires gently.

Her eyes are dark, her lips swollen from his kisses, and she looks nearly frenzied at the though of ceasing. 

“No.” The answer is breathlessly hungry and he smiles against her skin, slower now only because he wants her to feel every stroke of his hands, every tendered bite of teeth, every careful press of his body against hers. Her hips lift to meet him; it sends a sharp pulse of heat through him which coaxes a soft groan, lost to the plush of her skin, and she startles – perhaps at the effect she has on him. 

“Again,” he begs, guiding her with his hands though his lips leave their marks upon silver flakes along her skin. 

She moves once more; the black sand clings to their skin and the morning wind cools the sweat at their backs. 

And when he finally joins her, it is with a groan that feels torn from somewhere deep in his chest; she tightens around him in a surprised thing, melting into wanting, then wholly his in that moment. He pauses only long enough to look at her, to make sure she is with him; and when she nods, brow knit with a pleasured desperation, with her fingers digging into his shoulders and drawing half-moons of red, he presses into her warmth nearer to worship than any prayer that’s ever left his lips. 

First, with the wash of waves, it is a slow thing of breaths and shaking laughter and trembling moans – though it grows deeper, growing a heat that builds and builds until the air between them seems to crackle with it, until his pleasure rolls over him in heavy immense pressure, until her own gasps sharpen and their fingers fall, entwined together, to find the spot upon her which coaxes her eyes back in ecstasy. 

Her head falls back against the sand and lips part upon a sound that is half-gasp, half-plea. He drinks the song, kisses the line of her throat, the curve of her breast; finger turn, pressing gently in a caress along the trembling place where her body meets his, and each touch draws another shiver from her. She is beautiful like this, so flushed and undone by pleasure and trust alike; the sight of her makes him impossibly harder still, makes him want to give her everything, makes him want to keep her here in this moment forever or keep her upon a throne or wherever she might wish to be. 

“Look at me,” he begs, a broken sound.

And the sight of her eyes on his, dark and dazed and full of him, is enough to make him lose the last of his restraint. He moves with a steadier rhythm then, one hand at her hip, the other braced beside her head, grasping along the smooth rock, his mouth returning to hers whenever he can bear to leave her skin. She meets him with such growing fervor, hands roaming, learning the planes of his muscled back, the line of his jaw, the taper of his hips, the damp hair at his temples. 

Pleasure gathers tighter and tighter between them; The sea roars in the sonorous echo of two exiles making a home of one another. It is only then, as she pulls his chest upon hers and lets out a soft tremble of sigh, that they find the peak of their ecstasy in harmony. 

It rolls within him as tide turns stones upon the shore – sun-drenches and ebbing, his pleasure tumbles, his groan falls into a taper of her name, or that which his tongue can form; and she, in turn, with trembling legs and wettened eyes, smiling at the bewilderment of such earthly delights. When he comes to lie beside her, when their sweat and sand-laced skin sticks gently to one another in a lazy, sweet whispering sigh of exhaustion, her eyes meet his once more. 

A shared laugh, one of relief and bubbled affection, curls around their small cove. It is not untouched by grief, nor lacking in the gods’ cruelty – though it drifts out still across the water, and echoes only in sweetness as their foreheads press.  

And when at last he draws her down with him, when the last of the morning light spills over them and the cove becomes all hush and salt and the soft ruin of restraint, it is not hunger that remains between them but love – deep, astonished, and newly named. 

For some time, the waves come and go. 

It is when the sun fully glints through the clear tidepools that his siren rises, and offers her palm. When they gather themselves from the rocks and sand, pearl stowed within the pocket of battered sunbleached riding leathers, Jacaerys finds pieces of old silks among the bones; he wraps her in them, a first garment for a woman who crossed from one world to another. 

She laughs when he fusses over the tie of her new dressing, attempting in gentle adjustments to ensure it bothers not the scars which still stretch across her shoulder; the sound of her laughter follows them as they move away from the shore. 

The path upward out of the cove is narrow and ancient, carved through stone by years of rain and wind and the endless pummel of waves. They walk slowly, dually unsteady beneath the unfamiliar weight of land, rendering both their bodies unsure; for once, neither belonging to this world but both traversing it, sharing in stumbles and laughs and small conversation. 

At the top of the path sunlight finds their skin, and the world opens; horizon stretches wide before them so endless. In the breath of the world once more around him, grief and death melt; water dries upon warm skin and his siren lets out a breath of shock, of wonder. Jacaerys holds her palm as her other runs over the tall wildgrass swaying around them in a tide of seabreeze, holds her tightly as she throws her arms round him with bubbling laughter. 

It is only then that the shadow passes in the distance. His breath catches, her own coming only a moment later; For far along the coast, beyond the cliffs and the rolling sea mist, something enormous moves through the sky, massed and raining shadow upon the earth. Even at a distance, even as only a shape against the morning for, he knows. 

He remembers the curve of the wings and the weathered roar even before it meets their ears; knows the glint of faint gold and rubied heart along the breast of the great beast as he knows the back of his palm.

His mother’s dragon.

And so together, with splintered breaths and wettened eyes, hand in hand, Jacaerys and the siren run toward the shadows in the distance, unaware of the rising smoke and distant screams beneath it.

whew! that was long requests open. starting new taglist; pls lmk if you'd like to be on it. masterlist

[kenna-the-cosmic]

eldrith out here being a modern day poet. do not sleep on this fic

[osarina]

LIFE IS STRANGE

FEATURING: Jacaerys Velaryon x fem!reader

SUMMARY: A prince washes up on the shore outside your cottage, and you must decide whether you’re going to leave him to his fate or save his life. Either way, you know there will be consequences. 

WARNINGS: fem!reader, commoner!reader, eventual dragonseed!reader, jace lives, eventual smut, class differences (jace is obviously a prince and reader is a commoner). Reader is not too fond of him at first because she is from Sharp Point. This is a bit of a mix of show canon and book canon in that Jace went to the Gullet to save his brothers and Rhaena still claimed Sheepstealer

AUTHOR'S NOTES: i HADDDD to do a fic for our beloved boy </3 i miss you jacaerys velaryon, prince of dragonstone, heir to the iron throne. I will truly never move on from this death </3 so we need a world where he does not die. I'm saur excited for this because it's my first time writing a reader who comes from a commoner background, AND I finally get to write the dragons ... originally she was not supposed to be a dragonseed, but I just cannot help myself. If I'm going to be writing a hotd era fic, our girl is going to have a dragon. ANYWAY I hope you guys enjoy! please leave a comment or reblog mwah mwah

You wonder whether it is chance or divine intervention that a Targaryen prince washes ashore beside your cottage.

By the time you get to the edge of the sea after catching a glimpse of the corpse from your porch, it is half buried in the wet sand, lying limp at your feet, and there is a lump in your throat that you cannot seem to swallow away. 

You do not know how you didn’t notice the sigil sooner.

It should have been the first thing that caught your eye, considering it was only a fortnight past that the Prince Aemond brought the great dragon Vhagar over the town you were raised in and razed it to the ground. The green and gold banners have been flying over the area since, and soldiers from the Reach have been constantly patrolling the roads, seeking out rebels and sympathizers.

You know better than to involve yourself in the affairs of any man that dons the three-headed dragon, you tell yourself, trying to will yourself to walk away from the corpse before anyone can catch you standing near it.

Red or gold, black or green—it does not matter to you, the wars of nobles are graves for common folk, and you have no desire to meet an early one. You have done well enough for yourself since your father passed. You refuse to squander the life you’ve built because a prince washed up on the shore near your home.

The boy at your feet is young, you cannot help but notice—your age, perhaps—dark of hair and fair of skin. At a distance, he had looked like any other body the sea had decided to return, and your first instinct had been to rush toward him rather than avert your gaze and pretend you had seen nothing.

Your hands tremble at your sides, and you have to forcibly still them as you take in a deep breath.

This is war, you recall the soldiers saying when the survivors demanded to know the reason for the tragedy that took place at Sharp Point—mothers with tears in their eyes and no bodies to bury, fathers who had lost their livelihood and the children for whom they built it, your neighbors, your friends. They say Lord Bar Emmon sits on the usurper’s council, so all of the commonfolk who were unfortunate enough to be born beneath his banners have been made to pay the price of his loyalties, allies of a queen they have never seen and casualties of a war they never chose.

This is war, they will tell you the same as they cut off your head if they see you kneeling beside this corpse and call mercy treason. Because it is always the burden of the commonfolk, paying the price of noble quarrels. Princes speak of honor and succession, of rights and oaths and stolen crowns, and it is fishermen and farmers who have to bury their dead. They will not care to hear what you have to say if they think you're affiliated with the Black queen and her supporters, just as the Prince Aemond did not care whether the people of Sharp Point had declared for the Blacks or merely happened to be born beneath the wrong lord.

But now, a prince lies dead upon your shore, and you wonder if this is how it begins again. 

You should leave him.

The thought comes immediately, sensible in light of the circumstances, even if it does make your stomach flip. You should turn around and go home, bolt your door, and tell no one what you saw. The sea will reclaim him, or the crabs will pick his bones clean; maybe the patrol will stumble upon the body before the tide rises, and they can parade it through the streets the same way you heard they did to Princess Rhaenys’s dragon.

By the morning, he will be gone one way or another, and you can move on with your life as though you never saw him at all. He will be somebody else’s misfortune, or more hopefully, no one else’s at all. 

It is a corpse, anyway. The boy has not moved since you arrived, and his chest does not seem to be rising and falling. There are two arrows through his shoulder, and a blueness to his lips that you’ve only seen in the dead, so—

As though to mock you, he lets out a wet, ragged cough, water bubbling at his lips, lashes fluttering just enough for you to catch sight of dark, hazy eyes that slip over you once before they slide shut again.

You feel sick to your stomach.

He does not stir again. One side of his face is bruised an ugly purple, his dark hair plastered to his brow with seawater and blood. He cannot be much older than you—the traitorous thought crosses your mind again. There is something terribly young about him, lying there half-drowned in the surf, one hand curled weakly into the sand as though, even unconscious, he is still trying to cling to something.

He does not look like a prince, you think miserably. He looks like a boy who is going to die.

The sea foams around your boots, and his body twitches as it threatens to reclaim him—the only feeble resistance he’s capable of in his state. You do not know how he still breathes—the fires might still burn on the Gullet, but the fighting ended days past. How long has he been floating about, dragged around by vicious currents and tossed by waves? It doesn’t even seem as though it should be possible, as though the Seven themselves intervened and—

—and dropped him on your shore, in your hands, and you are contemplating leaving him to die.

The thought is unpleasant, a heavy stone in your chest in place of your heart.

You are not a cruel person. You have cared for gulls with broken wings, and you leave scraps outside your door for the old orange cat that wanders the area. During the winter three years prior, you spent a fortnight nursing a lamb that did not even belong to you because you could not bear the sound of it crying.

And now there is a boy at your feet—bleeding, drowned, scarcely clinging to life—and because there is a dragon sewn onto his chest, you are trying to convince yourself to let the sea finish what arrows and war could not. 

His lashes are dark against his cheek. Young, you think again, even more traitorous than the last, no older than ten and nine, if even. There is salt crusted at the corners of his mouth and blood soaking through his tunic in sluggish, rusty streams that stain the pale sand beneath him.

He looks cold—traitor, traitor, traitor.

He looks like a prince, you try to insist. A dragon prince, fire and blood and ruin, dangerous. 

Cold. Hurt. Dying.

You need to walk away, you tell yourself again, desperate this time, because the longer you stand there staring at him, the more you fail to convince yourself of the correct path. 

A prince's life is worth more than yours, more than your cottage and your little patch of land and the fishing boat your father left you. It is worth armies and dragons and castles and men willing to kill for a name. 

If this boy lives, others will come looking for him. 

And if the soldiers discover him in your home, they will not ask questions. They will not care that you found him by chance or that you never bent the knee to Queen Rhaenyra—that you could not even tell anyone why one half of House Targaryen wishes the other dead. They will see the three-headed dragon on his breast and the roof over his head, and that will be enough to condemn you.

Worse, the Prince Aemond and the dragon Vhagar could return. You think of Tom, the miller’s son, pulled from the boiling river after dragonfire reached the gristmill. You think of little Grace’s face as she searched the ashes for her mother. You think of all of your neighbors, all of your friends, who hardly survived the first time fire rained from the sky, and you think of all of those who didn’t. 

He is not worth it. He is not worth the risk. A prince is only a man born with a special name, there’s no reason you should save him and condemn countless others—he bleeds the same, he dies the same, and when the Stranger comes for him, he is no more spared than any other man.

Except, he didn’t, did he? 

He should be dead—any other man would be dead.

Two arrows through the shoulder, half-drowned, tossed upon the sea for days on end—there is no surviving that. Yet he breathes still, ragged and shallow though it may be, his fingers twitching every now and then.

The Stranger came for him and left empty-handed.

The Stranger came for him and left him with you. 

Why?

There are no prophecies in your life, no gods whispering in your ear. You are a fisherman's daughter with a cottage by the sea and enough coin to keep yourself fed through winter if the catch is good. You know little of the gods save for the prayers your father taught you as a child and the candles you light for him on his nameday. The Seven did not save your father or your town; they did not save Tom or Grace’s mother or any of the others who screamed as dragonfire turned their homes to ash.

So why? Why this boy? Why this prince? Why should the gods spare a dragon's son when they had not spared children and fishermen and mothers? Why have they left him for you?

You do not have an answer. The only answer before you is a body on the sand, breathing when it ought not to be.

You stare down at him, furious and distressed and so, so unsure. He looks dead again—still as driftwood, cold and pale, stiff. His lips are blue like the dead, and his chest hardly rises and falls. You wonder if you imagined what you saw before. If your guilt conjured a cough where there had been none, if your conscience simply could not bear the thought of walking away even from a corpse.

Slowly, you sink to your knees beside him, damp sand clinging to your knees, the sea foam wetting your trousers. Your hand is still trembling in spite of all efforts to still it. You lift it to his throat, hesitating only for a moment. 

If there is life, you will do what you must.

If there is not, you will turn and walk away. 

You have never prayed for someone to be dead before. 

Please, you think now miserably. Please.

Your fingers brush the skin of his throat—it is cold. He must be cold. So cold, that for a brief, terrible moment, hope flares in your chest, and then—

There is a flutter—it is weak and uneven, so faint that you almost miss it, but it is there.

Your head hangs forward, and you blink away the tears that prick in your eyes, because you know this action will have consequences. You know that there is no going back once you have entangled yourself with dragons. You know that every story told of House Targaryen ends in blood and fire and ruin for everyone foolish enough to stand too close them.

You know that this boy could be the death of you.

The soldiers could discover him. Your neighbors could discover him—as much as they care for you, they fear Vhagar more. If word spreads that a prince of the black faction lives and is hidden beneath your roof, you could hang for it. They could burn your cottage to the ground. They could drag you through the streets and call you traitor.

Worse still, he could recover.

Because then he would not be a half-dead boy on the sand. He would be a prince again. A son of the house of the dragon. He would leave, and the war would continue, and perhaps one day you would hear his name in some tavern and learn that he had mounted a dragon and burned a town much like your own.

The sea rushes forward again, cold water washing over your boots and his legs alike. He does not move. He is so cold.

“Why did you have to wash up here?” you breathe out—frustrated, angry, resigned, because you have never been one to turn your back on someone in need. 

His pulse flutters once more against your fingers, and he does not stir. 

Then, because the gods have a cruel sense of humor and because your heart has always been softer than your head, you slide your arms beneath the prince’s shoulders and knees.

With a soft curse and the sea at your heels, you gather the dragon prince into your arms and carry home your ruin.

—————————

He is Jacaerys Velaryon, son of Queen Rhaenyra, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne. 

Three days have passed since you found him on the shore, and he has hardly stirred since you dragged him into your cottage. You have been riddled with anxiety since, jumping at every sound and fearing the worst when someone addresses you. It is only a matter of time—whenever a rider passes on the road beyond the trees or the patrol sweeps down your shore, you think they care coming for him. Coming for you. 

You spend the first day trying to keep him alive. 

You drag him home, soaked to the bone and half-frozen, laying him atop your bed as you get a fire going and wrap him in your blankets. For a while, you can only stand there staring at him, because it is one thing to decide not to leave a boy to die and another entirely to realize you have no idea how to save him.

You have to cut away his tunic to remove it, and it makes it easier to breathe once the three-headed dragon is out of sight, but then you have to address the monstrosity beneath it—bruises darkening one side of his ribs, yellow and purple and black, cuts everywhere, salt crusting his skin and body a ruin of blood. 

You wonder how many rocks the currents slammed him into before he finally washed to shore. The sea around Sharp Point is, well, sharp. Jagged rocks and narrow inlets line the coast, and more than one fisherman has vanished into the sea after his boat drifted too close to reefs beneath the tide.

It is a cruel stretch of sea—crueler still to a boy half-dead and alone. 

And then there were the arrows. 

The shafts protrude from his shoulders at awful angles, the flesh around them angry and swollen. You cry while removing them, because you have never done something like it before, and your hands cannot stop shaking. A part of you wonders if the gods left him for you so that his blood could be on your hands instead, and you cannot fathom what you’ve done to deserve this.

You expect him to wake once you start removing them. At the very least, you expect him to scream. The first shaft pierced cleanly through his shoulder and is easy enough to ease out, but the second lodged itself deep in the flesh, refusing to budge until you brace your foot against the bedframe and pull with both hands. 

It should have been agony—any man would have cried out. 

The prince does not so much as flinch.

You remember staring at him afterward, the arrow clutched in your hand and your own cheeks wet with tears, wondering if he had died while you were removing it. You press your fingers to his throat with a panic that borders on hysteria, and you aren’t sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when you feel the fluttering pulse still there. 

A traitorous part of you wishes that he had died. 

A corpse is a tragedy, but a tragedy can be dumped in the sea and abandoned. A tragedy will not bring more war to your ravaged home.

A living prince, on the other hand, is a catastrophe that you do not know what to do with. Your home has already faced ruin once, and the longer he remains in your care, the more at risk you will be of bringing it upon you all again, because if he is captured in your care, then that means war and blood and fire and more dragons. The whole town, all of the survivors, everyone will be branded traitors to the crown.

But the prince lived, so you can only hope that he will heal quick enough and be gone before you have the chance to regret helping him.

The fever comes on the second day, and the corpse in your bed finally gives to life. 

You notice it when you are wiping the blood from his face, and your hand brushes his forehead. It’s as though all of the cold of the sea had fled his body at once and left only fire behind. It’s what you expect of a Targaryen prince, really—the burning heat, closer to dragon than man— it feels more natural than the cold, but you are scared anyway. 

You do not know much about treating battle wounds, but you do know about fever. 

Your younger brother died of it during a long winter a decade past—no matter how hard your mother worked to keep it at bay, he was dead by nightfall. Your mother passed in the same moon, to the same sickness, as did half of the children in Sharp Point, because fever does not care whether you are young or old, rich or poor, prince or peasant.

His skin is flushed, sweat beading along his brow and soaking the dark hair at his temples as he twists in the sheets violently, threatening to reopen the wounds you just stitched close. His breathing changes too—no longer the slow drags of air, shallow and erratic, like he had spent days at sea only to begin suffocating on dry land.

You fetch water from the well until your shoulders ache. You lay cloths upon his brow and change them whenever they grow warm. You feed the fire, then fear you have made him too hot and let it die down, only to panic that he would grow cold again and build it back up.

Every few minutes, you find yourself pressing your hand to his forehead or his throat, checking for fever and pulse alike. There is never a change—still alive and burning, and you don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. 

At one point, he begins muttering. You cannot make out most of it—the words are slurred, little more than broken sounds spilling from fevered lips. Names, you think. Places, maybe. Some do not seem to be spoken in the common tongue.

Once, very clearly, he whispers, "Mother.”

You have to change the cloth on his forehead afterward and pretend your eyes are not stinging with tears. You curse the gods throughout that second day—you wish that you’d never left the cottage at all the morning you found him, you wish you’d left him to die, you wish, you wish, you wish, as though any of it matters anymore. 

You sleep little that night, sitting beside your bed and watching him breathe. Terrified every time his breathing slowed, and equally terrified every time it quickened. You count the moments between each breath until dawn creeps through your shutters, and by morning, you feel like you have lived a lifetime in a single night.

The third day—today—you have to make the trek into town.

You have used the last of your willow bark, and there is only a heel of stale bread left, a few onions, and enough drinking water to last another day if you’re careful. You need fruit and vegetables, more barley, and you have a catch that you never got the chance to bring to the market to trade the morning you found the prince. 

You cannot put it off any longer, much as you may wish—the prince needs supplies, and unfortunately, so do you.

You do not like going into town. You have never liked going into town—you have always been fond of your neighbors and your friends, but you were not fond of the way they circle and crowd you whenever you make your weekly appearance for trade. You got overwhelmed too quickly, and you didn’t know how to make an exit without seeming rude, so you ended up staying there for hours when there were many chores you had to get done at home.

Now, it is like a graveyard. The destruction following the Prince Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point has yet to be cleared. The soldiers are too busy with war and patrols, and the survivors are too busy trying to salvage what they can of their ruined lives. 

When you enter the town, you can still smell charred flesh and death. 

The children usually run to you when you arrive, chattering about the games they’ve played and the rumors they’ve heard, if you saw the wild dragon Grey Ghost while you were out on your boat this week, and you smile and nod along with them. But all of the children are dead now, and you are not crowded by friends and neighbors eager to make conversation with you, because most of them are dead now too.

It is in the market when you overhear green-cloaked soldiers talking about the battle that took place in the Gullet, and you finally put a name to the face of the prince in your home. You try to pretend that you’re not eavesdropping, fingers shaking terribly as you sort through the fruits and vegetables that Wylem carted in from his farm, because you need to know if they have figured out what you’ve done, if they know the prince is in your care, under your roof.

But they only laugh as they speak of dead dragons and a mourning pretender queen. They say the Blacks have lost two dragons, and the bastard prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, is dead. Any man who can find his body washed up on the shore to deliver to the King will see unfathomable riches. 

Momentarily, you are angry at yourself because the royals brought this war and have caused all of this suffering, but when your lashes flutter shut, for a split second, you can only picture the haunted look on your mother’s face as she held your dead brother in her arms. You think of Miss Ellyn, who tossed herself into the sea when she found out her son had been killed on the Kingsroad. You think of your friend, Marie, who you found screaming, fisting her infant daughter’s ashes after the burning of the town. You think of them, and then you think of the black queen on her throne, and you feel the same lump in your throat.

Then you remind yourself that this is her doing. 

Her doing, her half-brother’s doing, the other nobles’ doing. They brought this war to Westeros, they brought death and destruction, fire and blood, and you force yourself to shake your head and push it all away, trading some of the fish you caught for fruits and vegetables and barley with a watery smile that you’re sure Wylem took notice of. 

There are more important things to worry about: if there is a bounty on the prince’s body, everybody will be searching for him. Not just soldiers, the people too—your friends, your neighbors, everyone. Many starve, more struggle, so if there is an opportunity for gold, they will all be on the hunt. You need to burn his cloak and tunic when you get back to the cottage, anything that associates him with House Targaryen. 

You nearly trip over your own feet racing back to the cottage, second-guessing every conversation you had in the town. Wylem asked you why you were getting twice as much food as you usually get—you do not remember how you responded. 

Did you imply that you had a visitor? Why can’t you remember? What excuse did you give? Did the soldiers overhear? Are they following you? Do they know? Why can’t you remember? You’re scared—you do not think you’ve ever been so scared in your entire life. 

You look over your shoulder every five steps, worried that they’re going to come charging after you, demanding you to bring them to the Prince Jacaerys before taking your head. You’re not cut out for this—you’re the daughter of a fisherman. There’s no world where you should be worrying whether soldiers are going to hunt you down for saving a prince. 

There are tears in your eyes when you make it back to the cottage, and your fingers are trembling around the bags Wylem packed for you. You shut the door behind you, and it takes you three tries to bolt it properly. When you finally do, you rest your forehead against the wood and let out a trembling sigh.

You—

“Who are you?”

There is a knife to your throat.

You stare at the crack in the wood of your door, breath catching, desperately trying not to move lest you risk the knife slicing through your skin. The crack appeared last winter, you remind yourself, trying not to focus too much on the fact that you can feel the cool edge of the blade. Your friend, Evander, was meant to fix before the next, but Evander is dead now, and you may well be too, if the knife at your throat presses any deeper. 

“Answer me, who are you? Where am I? Wh—” the prince—Jacaerys Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne—falters suddenly, and you can only breathe again when the knife drops from your neck, and you feel the presence at your back disappear. “You—you are a woman.”

You do not turn to look at him immediately, eyes sliding shut as you fight to steady the frantic beating of your heart, drawing one slow breath after another until your shaking eases enough to trust your legs. Your fingers tighten on the bags cradled in your arms before you force yourself to turn around.

Prince Jacaerys Velaryon stands three paces behind you, one hand braced against the edge of your table, pained, pale, barely conscious. He is bare from the waist up, and the stitches you painstakingly worked through his torn skin have pulled loose, fresh blood soaking the bandages and dripping down his chest and back. 

You see more clearly in the light of the afternoon sun just how ruined his body is, bruises and cuts—you think his ribs must be broken, you did not notice just how bad off he was when you had him lying in the dim corner where you keep your bed. 

For a moment, you forget that you are face-to-face with a Targaryen prince—it is only the boy you dragged in from the sea and spent hours trying to keep alive. 

Your lips curve down into a deep frown, brows knitting together. You exhale as you say, “You reopened your wounds. It took me an hour to get them properly closed.”

The prince stares at you. 

As soon as the words fly from your mouth, you remember who it is before you. The son of a queen. The heir to the Iron Throne, if one listens to his mother. A pretender's heir and bastard, if one listens to her enemies. You do not know which of them is right, nor do you particularly care. Such questions belong to lords and knights and people with far too much time to argue over crowns. 

To the likes of you, prince is title enough for you to keep your mouth shut and your head bowed.

He does not immediately respond, gaze flicking around your cottage uncertainly. Your bed, stained with his blood. The dying hearth. The table where you left out the last bits of the bread, just in case he awoke while you were gone and was hungry. The bandages you left at his bedside. The basin of pink water you forgot to empty before leaving for town.

His lips, dry and cracked, part as he stares at you and murmurs more to himself than to you, “You tended my wounds.”

You hesitate, then nod, swallowing once. “I found you on the shore a few days past, my prince—” Your Grace? What is the proper way to address a prince? My Lord does not seem grand enough for the heir to a queen. Prince feels the safest—whatever he may be, no one seems inclined to dispute that part. “—I… you should probably be resting.”

“I need to know what happened,” he says instead, stepping closer to you. He is too pale, sweat beads at his forehead, dark curls matted to his skin. His eyes are wide and wild, pupils dilated the same way you’ve seen in men mad with grief or fear or fury, moments before lashing out at the nearest person. You find yourself tensing instinctively. “What do you know of the battle that took place on the Gullet? Did Baela make it back to Dragonstone? And Rhaena—she was on that wild dragon, and—my brothers, did my brothers make it back? How long has it been? Where are we? How far is it to Dragonstone? I must return immediately, I—”

The prince only just seems to realize how you’ve drawn away, back pressed against the door to your own home, arms tightening around the sack in your arms whenever he comes closer. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, gaze flicking to the knife he dropped onto the floor and the fear in your face. 

Shame crosses his expression instantly.

“I—” His expression twists as he puts space between the two of you again. You wonder whether it’s from pain or from struggling to force out an apology. Both, likely. He continues, “You have helped me—saved my life, most like—and here I am frightening you. I… I thought I’d been captured. I woke in an unfamiliar place. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was a prisoner or if the battle had been lost. I heard the door open and…”

He trails off, and you stand there awkwardly, tension easing slowly from your shoulders. He is still on guard, but he does not seem so inclined to pull a blade on you again. Your lips part to tell him where he is, what little you know of the battle on the Gullet. 

Instead, you ask, “Do most enemy strongholds look like a fisherman’s cottage, my prince?” 

You are mortified the moment the question spills from your lips—he is a Targaryen prince, they are known for blood and fire and madness, dragons and crowns, and you speak to him as though he’s one of your peers. 

Prince Jacaerys stares at you for a long moment, and then, to your astonishment, his gaze flicks around the inside of your home again, and something suspiciously like embarrassment crosses his face. 

“I suppose not.”

The corner of your mouth twitches despite yourself, and you let out a soft puff of air through your nose before making your way across the room to place the sack you’ve carried from town onto the table. You will have to sort all of what you’ve got later; for now, you need to get the prince resettled before he opens up any more of his wounds.

You turn to look at him again, faltering when you see the pained expression that crosses his face, so sudden that it steals all the color from his cheeks. His hand shoots to his side, fingers digging into the bandages wrapped around his ribs.

“My prince?” you ask hesitantly, taking half a step forward, arm only slightly extended. It is one thing to carry him to your cottage and treat his wounds while he’s unconscious; it is different now that he’s awake.

Prince Jacaerys inhales sharply through his teeth. He is swaying on his feet, breath gone shallow—he looks as though he’s moments from collapsing hard onto your wooden floor. Still, his jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck tighten as he draws himself upright through sheer stubbornness.

“I am fine,” he insists.

“You should sit, my prince.”

“I am standing,” he replies with a tight smile, as though a bead of sweat isn’t rolling down his temple from strain to remain upright and his lips aren’t trembling with pain.

“Barely.”

The prince blinks as though caught off guard by the response, casting a look that is partially confused, and mostly offended in your direction. Your lashes flutter shut as you brace yourself for a volatile reaction, because he is a prince and you are a fisherman’s daughter, and you are arguing with him as though he is an equal and not one of those dragon-riding royals people compose songs about. You think you must have lost your wits entirely these past few days. 

Instead, he shoots back, with all the dignity he can muster while visibly swaying, "I have endured worse."

You stare at the blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, uncertain if you believe him. You say with less heat, "That is not the same as being well, my prince."

His jaw tightens, and you fight a sigh. Gods, he actually looks as though he is preparing an argument. 

You wonder, briefly, what your life has become. Three weeks ago, your greatest concern had been whether the currents would ease up enough for you to take the boat out of the shallows to catch some fish. Now, Sharp Point has burned and you are standing in your cottage, arguing with a dragon prince about his injuries. 

The absurdity of it nearly makes you laugh, wondering if perhaps this entire ordeal is some fever dream brought on by bad fish and Leila’s uncle’s dubious ale. 

Then, Prince Jacaerys’s left leg buckles. 

He reaches for the table and misses, injured shoulder slamming into the edge hard enough to wrench a strangled cry from him, and before you can think better of it, you're moving.

You let go of the sack of fruits and vegetables and barley you were keeping steady on your table; it topples over, and all of your pristine apples go rolling across the floor of your cottage, but you barely notice, panicked when you realize that he careening right toward the hardwood floor.  

You catch the prince around the waist just as he starts to fall, but he is heavier than you expect.

You brace yourself, convinced that he is going to take you down with him, but you manage to steer him sideways toward the chair beside the table. He collapses into it heavily, breath hissing through clenched teeth as pain flashes across his face.

Momentum carries you forward with him—far, far too forward.

One hand lands against the uninjured side of his chest to steady yourself, the other gripping the arm of the chair. For a horrifying second, you are practically sprawled across the heir to the Iron Throne’s lap. You jerk away so quickly you nearly trip over one of the escaped apples, face burning and hands shaking.

"Sorry," you blurt, mortified. “Sorry. Sorry, I did not mean—”

“I believe,” Prince Jacaerys begins with a grimace, “that was my fault.”

You do not respond, flustered, trying to put more distance between you to calm yourself down. Your gaze flicks back over to him, but he is too busy grinding his teeth as he glances down at his wounds to pay you any mind. You let out a soft puff of air through your nose before you look at the apples rolling about your floor, and then reach for one still on your table—you might have lost some sense over the past three days with the little sleep you’ve gotten, but you are not about to feed a prince food off your floor.

You make your way back over to him and hold the apple out to him. He blinks once at it before his gaze lifts to yours questioningly.

“I do not know when last you ate—a while, certainly,” you tell him quietly. “You should get something in you while I redress the bandages. I’ll cook some stew once I’m certain you’re not going to bleed out.”

Prince Jacaerys exhales through his nose before he takes the apple from you, rolling it between his fingers. You step past him so that you can move the basin of water closer to where he’s sitting, grabbing a clean rag and the bandages that you left next to your bed. 

You come to stand in front of him again, hesitating before you motion to the wounds on his shoulder. You ask, “May I?”

His dark gaze flicks up to yours briefly before he nods, and your throat tightens as you shift closer, fingers fumbling a bit as you grab for the edge of the bandages to unwind them from around him. It is much more intimidating doing this while he’s awake, inches away from you, and eyes tracking your every move.

“I found you three days ago, my prince,” you tell him at last, trying to remember all of the questions he asked earlier so that you can busy your mind with something other than the fact that you can feel his skin hot against yours. “Before that, the fighting died another three. In truth, my prince, I do not know how you survived so long at sea.”

Prince Jacaerys says nothing in response. His attention remains fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind you, expression distant. You suspect he is counting the days since the battle, the hours his family has believed he is dead, the minutes his mother has spent mourning him. You keep your gaze trained on his shoulder as you unwind the last of the bandages and set them down on the table. 

You press your lips together when you see that the stitches have loosened at the back of his shoulder—where one of the arrows had dug deep, but not deep enough to pass cleanly through. Pulling it free had torn through muscle and flesh alike, leaving a ragged injury that had taken you nearly an hour to clean, stitch, and stop bleeding.

You exhale as you run the pad of your finger briefly over the stitches, trying to figure out if you can salvage what effort you already put in or if you would have to pull them out and redo them entirely. 

“And my family? My younger brothers? Baela and Rhaena? Have you heard what has become of them?” the prince asks, and you glance up just enough to see how his jaw tightens when your finger brushes over the wound. “Did we win the battle?”

“I do not know if anyone can be said to have won that battle, my prince,” you answer quietly, tongue darting out to wet your lips as you finally start to get to work at reclosing the wound. Your gaze slips to the side when he finally starts to eat the apple you passed to him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, as though he’s only just realized how hungry he is. “Both fleets were decimated. The dead still wash up on the northern shore.”

How did Prince Jacaerys make it to your shore, then? 

Not for the first time, you have to wonder if the gods themselves placed him directly into your hands. 

Most of the rest of the dead have washed up on the northern and western shores of Sharp Point, as it is where the currents run strongest, but the prince somehow made it to where your cottage sits on the eastern shore. If he had washed up anywhere else, the patrol would have certainly found him by now. You've heard they have spent the last several days combing the beaches, hauling bloated corpses from the tide and turning them over with the tips of their spears, searching for the dragon prince they are certain the sea claimed.

Prince Jacaerys’s breath hitches when you tug lightly at the stitches holding the skin of his shoulder together. Already, he’s finished the apple you handed him, absentmindedly turning the core between his fingers while his thoughts remain leagues away. 

It is only when the last bite is gone that he seems to notice, and his gaze drifts toward the table. He hesitates, and you think it is almost comical—this is the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragonrider, a prince who has flown into battle, and he looks as though asking for another apple might be an imposition too great to make when he’s been floating at sea for at least a week. 

You hold the stitches carefully with your right hand so that you can lean forward and grab another apple from your table to pass to him. His cheeks color slightly when he realizes that you noticed.

“I did not mean to stare,” he murmurs, taking the apple from you and cradling it carefully between his hands. He asks again, “Have you heard what has become of my family?” 

You shake your head, focusing on tending to his wounds again. You think that you’ll be able to salvage your work. It is good, you think—you can get him resting and then cook some stew for the two of you. You didn’t eat much yesterday, frazzled by the fever and trying to keep him comfortable, and you’re starting to feel a lightness in your head. 

“I’ve only heard what the soldiers say in town, my prince,” you murmur, trying to figure out how to go about speaking the news he certainly won’t take well. The last thing you need is for grief to send him bolting for Dragonstone before he can so much as walk across your cottage without collapsing. If he does not kill himself by straining his body when it is not ready, then the patrols will certainly catch him and have his head—and then yours. 

You let out a soft sigh as you tie off the stitches on his shoulder blade and lean down to wet the clean rag before lifting it to his bloody skin. You’re careful around the edges of the wound, trying not to disturb the stitches, working slowly at the dried and wet blood from the curve of his shoulder, over the collarbone, down the length of his back. 

You try not to think too hard about what you’re doing. 

If you do, it begins to feel far too intimate. 

It is one thing to drag an unconscious stranger from the sea. It is another to stand so close that you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, to brush your fingers across the line of his shoulders. You have spent three days tending him without much thought, because there had been no room for embarrassment while the Stranger lingered at his bedside.

Now he is awake and watching you, and every accidental brush of your knuckles against his skin seems to linger a heartbeat too long. He is a prince of the realm, and you are a fisherman’s daughter—people like you are not supposed to touch people like him, and yet—

You exhale through your nose harshly. You busy yourself with the rag, scrubbing a little harder than necessary at a streak of dried blood along his collarbone simply to distract yourself, and his jaw pinches.

“Sorry,” you say quietly.

“It does not hurt,” he replies—a lie, surely, any man would be in agonizing pain. But maybe not; any man also would have died in the sea. Maybe the rumors are true: the Targaryens are closer to god than man; they do not feel pain or have to fear the Stranger the same way people like you ought to. “What have you heard from the soldiers in town? Where are we?”

“Half a league from Sharp Point, my prince,” you answer, still evading the question, which he seems to realize from the way he glances at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and accusing. He knows you are withholding something. You exhale lightly through your nose and then say hesitantly, “They say two dragons fell over the Gullet. I could not tell you which.”

“Two?!” Prince Jacaerys demands, immediately rising to his feet, so quickly that the chair scrapes against the floor, and you fear he might rip back open the stitches. He whirls on you, eyes wide, pupils large as coins, and you almost flinch. “Two dragons?”

You swallow thickly as you nod. “My prince—”

“One must be—” His voice catches. He cannot finish the thought. For the first time since he awoke, real grief overtakes him completely. It drains his face of what little color had returned, leaves him staring at nothing as though he can already see the answer waiting for him. “I need to know the second. Whose was it? Which dragon fell?”

It unsettles you how close he sounds to pleading when moments before, you had been wondering whether the stories of the Targaryens’ deism held some weight, because gods do not look like this. They do not stand in a stranger’s cottage with fear plain on their face, hands trembling as they wait for an answer they already dread. 

The same lump forms in your throat now that did when you heard the soldiers mocking a grieving queen and couldn’t help your thoughts from turning to your own mother, to Miss Ellyn, to your friend, Marie. For a moment, he is not a Targaryen prince or a dragonlord; you see a son and an older brother. A boy your age who knows there are only a handful of dragons flying over the Gullet, and every one of them belongs to someone he loves.

“I do not—”

“I need to return home,” he says immediately, as though his face isn’t white with pain and his stitches don’t strain every time he moves. His eyes glaze over you as though you’re not even there, and he takes a step toward the door to your small cottage. “Sharp Point—there must be passage to Dragonstone, there—”

Panic flares in your chest when he makes as though to leave. It is noon, and the patrols have become more frequent along the shores outside your cottage. They’ve spent a week carding through the western and northern shores, and they’ve been sending more and more men to the east—you worry they’re becoming desperate. The longer they go without finding a corpse, the more they may fear that there isn’t one.

If they have an inkling that Prince Jacaerys is still alive, they’ll start kicking down doors, and if they start kicking down doors, they will find him, and your life will be forfeit for harboring him. 

“You cannot,” you say before you can think better of it, lunging forward as though to grab his wrist, but you stop yourself before you can make a terrible mistake, stopping a hairsbreadth from brushing his skin. 

What is wrong with you? you think furiously. You need to rest tonight before you do something you cannot take back. Already you have gotten snide with and you have argued with a prince of the realm—now you have commanded him and nearly tried to seize him. You would have been lucky to only lose your hand in any other circumstance. Had he been standing in a hall instead of your cottage, surrounded by knights instead of rough-hewn furniture, you might have lost your head. 

“I cannot?” Prince Jacaerys turns to you, bafflement momentarily eclipsing the fear that had consumed him only seconds before, as though he cannot quite fathom that someone has just told him no. 

“My prince, you can scarcely stand,” you say. His gaze drops to where your hand is still hovering near his arm, head cocking to the side and brows lifting, and you snap it back to your chest immediately, heat flooding your face. “You have lost a lot of blood, you have barely eaten in a week, your wounds have only just been stitched again, and there are patrols searching for you every road between here and the sea.”

He continues to stare at you, disbelief riddling his expression. You have the distinct impression that no one has ever spoken to him this way before—certainly not a fisherman’s daughter. You force yourself to press on while he’s silent, hoping to make your point and rid him of this futile endeavor before he gets you both killed. 

“The Prince Aemond burned Sharp Point’s harbor. There are no ships capable of navigating the currents of the Gullet, and the water still burns besides. I do not have a horse for you to ride to Stonedance. You could not get to Dragonstone even if you were not hurt,” you insist. “I will return to town tomorrow to try to get more information, but please, my prince, you mustn’t leave. You will only be putting us both at risk.”

For a long moment, you think that he will invoke his title or duty and insist upon leaving anyway, or maybe he will simply walk out the door despite everything you have said, and there is nothing you could do to stop him. 

Then, his expression changes, twisting into something pained as he looks away, a shuddered breath escaping his lips. His shoulders, held tense since the moment you uttered the word two, sink ever so slightly. The panic that had driven him to his feet has nowhere left to go, draining from him all at once, leaving only exhaustion behind. 

One hand drops back down to his ribs, pain crossing his face. Whatever strength carried him to his feet abandons him just as quickly as the panic, leaving him swaying where he stands. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them, the panic has been replaced by a type of defeat that is infinitely more difficult to look at.

You step forward cautiously when you see how his body is trembling, hand hovering uncertainly between the two of you, silently asking permission to help him. Prince Jacaerys stares at your outstretched hand, then at the bed on the far side of the room; you think, for a second, that he will attempt to cross on his own, but then his nostrils flare as he exhales, inclining his head just enough to grant you the permission his pride refuses to voice aloud.

Carefully, you slip beneath his uninjured arm, taking care to avoid the fresh bandages. He is warm—still warmer than he ought to be—and you can’t help but wonder if his fever has returned or if this is just how hot dragon prince’s typically run. 

He leans into you only slightly, weight settling lightly against your shoulder—you suspect he is trying very hard not to. The journey from the door to your bed is scarcely a dozen paces, but it feels much longer. 

“We were supposed to win this victory for her,” Prince Jacaerys says after a moment, voice breaking, the words slip free before he can stop it. You do not think the admission is meant for you, so you stay quiet. His throat works as he swallows. “We were supposed to—”

He cuts himself off, looking away again as you help him ease back down into your bed. As soon as he is seated, something close to relief crosses his face, lashes fluttering; the pain is still there, but not quite as terrible as it was when he was straining on his feet.

“The fact that you are alive at all is a victory, my prince,” you say quietly, even though you do not think the words will be of any reassurance. “You should rest. The sooner you are well, the sooner we can figure out a way to get you home. I’ll cook up a stew and wake you when it’s finished.”

He exhales again, jaw tightening as he looks away with a resigned expression. You turn your back on him to deal with the mess you made of the kitchen area, grimacing slightly at everything spilled across your floorboards and the table. 

“What is your name?” Prince Jacaerys asks you suddenly. “I think I ought to know the name of the woman who saved my life.”

You let a soft breath, glancing over your shoulder at him. He is pained still, but there is an earnest look in his eyes that makes you falter—you remember how close you were to leaving him to his fate, and you have to look away again before he can catch the guilt that crosses over your face.

With a shaky exhale, you give the prince your name, and you cannot help but feel as though your life has irrevocably changed, and you do not think for the better. 

————————————

The sea is on fire.

Jace cannot tell where the flames end and the water begins. Ships burn around him, masts collapsing into the waves with deafening cracks; men scream as they’re consumed by the fire, and dragons let out terrible shrieks as they dive low to bring down another ship full of Myrish mercenaries. 

He tries to focus.

He chases after the rogue dragon, hoping to kill the rider before the dragon can burn any more of the Velayron fleet—or worse, catch Baela and Moondancer. But there is panic clawing at his chest, and smoke and salt clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. He’s screaming at Vermax to fly faster, to kill the rider, and then—then he sees Rhaena. 

He sees Rhaena atop the wild dragon, and she is screaming, crying, desperately trying to get it under control, and Jace is confused, reeling as he yells at Vermax to stop at the last second. He and dragon both diving down away from the chase before Vermax could breathe fire on his cousin.

Rhaena does not have a dragon, he thinks, trying to figure out what is happening, and Rhaena is supposed to be with his brothers, and his brothers are captured by the enemy, and he isn’t sure if Stormcloud and Aegon made it to shore, and there is too much going on, and—

—and Vermax is falling. 

Vermax is banking hard, being dragged down into the sea, and Jace’s stomach lurches. He’s yelling—begging—Vermax to fly, and Vermax is trying, he’s trying so hard, wings beating smoke through the air. He shrieks as another bolt catches him in the wing, and Jace feels the pain himself—he feels the pain, the primal fear, everything that Vermax does, because Vermax is his, and he is Vermax’s, and they are bonded, and Vermax is drowning, and the water is so cold, and Jace cannot feel his legs or his hands or his face.

He fumbles as he tries to unhook himself from the saddle, choking on water and air, maybe a sob, as Vermax sinks into the sea, a stream of bubbles rising to the surface as he cries for Jace, slowly disappearing into the dark waters. Jace desperately tries to dive after him, as if he has the strength to hold them both above the sea, because Jace has already lost Luke, and he—he cannot lose Vermax. 

Not the dragon who had slept beside his cradle before he was old enough to walk, the hatchling he had grown up alongside, whose neck had once fit beneath his arm, whose first uncertain flights had ended with both of them tumbling into the sandy shore of Dragonstone while his mother laughed herself breathless.

Jace does not know a life without him—he does not want to know a life without him. His earliest recollections are not of nursery songs or wooden swords, but of warm green scales beneath tiny hands and the deep, rumbling croon that had lulled him to sleep when he was scarcely more than a babe. 

When Jace learned to walk, Vermax learned to fly; when Jace’s voice deepened, Vermax’s roar had too. 

There has never been a Jacaerys without Vermax.

But Jace’s lungs are burning, and he cannot see the familiar green scales anymore, and his body is reacting, seizing and spasming because there is no air left in him and water all around. He does not know which way is up and which way is down, the water is too dark and too cold, and he cannot think, but—but he sees the bubbles. He sees the bubbles, and he follows them, and even as Vermax sinks to the bottom of the sea, he saves his rider one final time. 

He reaches the surface with a gasp, gulping the smoky air, and everything hurts. His arms ache, his chest is too tight, his eyes burn, and he cannot breathe, because Vermax is gone. He can feel that Vermax is gone; there is a gaping hole in his chest where his dragon used to be, and Jace does not know what to do, he does not know how to live anymore, and he wants—

He wants his mother.

He just wants his mother. 

He hears the cheers before he feels the first arrow, gaze lifting to the sky as he searches for Baela and Moondancer—they are not too far, he thinks, she'll come for him.

And then, there’s a dull throb in his shoulder blade as he pulls himself over a floating piece of driftwood, but he hardly takes note of the pain, because everywhere hurts, because Vermax is gone, because he wants his mother. He turns when he hears the cheering, and he sees the men on the ship, and he sees the crossbows and the bows and the Myrish banners, but he does not see anything at all, really, blinking once, staring.

The second arrow catches him closer to the chest.

And then—then all he remembers is sea. 

White foam and bubbles, vicious currents and sharp rocks. He thinks he is dead more than he thinks he is alive, but there is so much pain. There is pain and emptiness, and Jace just wants—

“... prince, the stew is ready.”

Jace startles awake, breath hitching in the back of his throat. His body tenses immediately, because he does not remember where he is—he remembers the sea and the waves and rocks and pain and Vermax, but he does not remember…

The cottage. Waking up alone. The door opening, the fear—was he captured? Where is he? Where are his brothers? Where is Baela? What was Rhaena doing on the wild dragon? Mother, mother, mother—

You avert your eyes suddenly, an awkward expression on your face, and Jace suddenly remembers. He remembers you, the apple you passed him as you tended to his wounds; how he held a knife to the throat of a woman who is risking her own life to save his. He remembers that he is stuck bedridden in the bed of a commoner while his mother thinks he’s dead and fights for her throne alone.

He opens his mouth to apologize—to tell you that he will leave as soon as he is able, that he will ensure you’re properly compensated for saving his life—but he falters when he feels something hot and wet drip down his face.

He lifts his hand to his cheek and wipes at his face, looking down at the wetness smeared on his fingertips. For a long moment, he does not understand—seawater, maybe? But he is no longer being tossed around by the sea. He is warm in your cottage, the hearth burns low and your blankets are tangled around him. He blinks once, and another fat droplet of water rolls from his eye down his cheek.

Is he crying?

Heat rushes to his face so quickly he thinks it rivals the fever. He wipes away furiously, not sure if it’s more or less humiliating that you’re pretending not to notice for his sake, turning your back to him to ready the table. 

Jace has wept before, more than most ought to—for the father who taught him fishing and sea shanties, and the other who passed before either of them could speak the truth out loud, for the grandfather he never truly knew, for the brother who felt less like a brother and more like his other half—but never, never in front of a stranger. 

Jace promptly clears his throat and pulls himself together. He glances at you, praying that his face does not betray him, an excuse on his lips as takes a deep breath. Then he falters, mouth watering instantly, gaze cutting to the side where you are busy ladling stew into two chipped wooden bowls, back politely turned, as though you never noticed anything at all.

Jace doesn't think he’s ever been this hungry. He has dined in castles all his life—roasted swan, lemon cakes, arbor wines. He has consumed the finest meals Westeros has to offer and found them lacking, but he almost feels dizzy with need and pleasure at the scent of the stew you made.

“It—” Jace’s voice is hoarse from sleep. Embarrassed, he clears his throat again to try to even it out. “It smells good.”

You look at him over your shoulder with a small smile and murmur demurely, “I’m sure nothing compared to what you’re used to, my prince.”

“I do not know that,” he says lightly as he forces himself to his feet, grimacing as pain immediately shoots through his body. 

Everything aches—his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his arms, his head. In truth, all he wants to do is curl up and sleep more; he cannot bear to keep going. Not now. Not after Vermax, after Luke, after making such a terrible mistake that he might have cost his mother her throne. His stomach flips at the thought, and he fights a shuddered breath.

He needs to keep going—there is no other choice. He needs to get back to Dragonstone as soon as possible.

You pause in the middle of setting the bowls on the table at his words to give him a questioning look. “My prince?”

“I have not tasted it yet,” he tells you, forcing levity into his tone, because you have saved his life, tended to his wounds, and now stand over a pot of stew you cooked for him, worrying that it is not good enough to satisfy a prince. The least he can do is ease your mind. "It would seem unfair to compare a meal I have not eaten yet.”

You blink at him once, and then you smile slightly—it’s a genuine one, not like the small one you forced in his direction just before—and Jace tries his best to return it as he crosses the small room. He shuffles the last few steps toward the table with considerably less grace than he would have liked.

“Perhaps” you reply softly, waiting for him to take a seat at the table before you do as well. 

You do not immediately lift your spoon, and Jace hesitates—for a brief moment, an old childhood lesson surfaces. Do not eat until someone else has tasted it. Feasts at King’s Landing and supper at Dragonstone had been meticulous about such things—cups were poured and tasted before his mother, and plates were sampled before any of them took a bite of their food. The paranoia claws at him and disappears as quickly as it comes.

You had dragged him half-dead from the sea, spent days stitching his wounds and breaking his fever, and gave up your bed so he could sleep comfortably. If you wished him dead, you need only have left him on the shore. 

“I never thanked you for what you’ve done for me,” he says at last, fingers grazing the wooden spoon dipped into the broth. “When I return to Dragonstone, I shall speak with my mother. She will see you properly rewarded.”

“There is no need,” you murmur, finally taking a sip of the stew when Jace lifts the spoon to his lips. 

The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue, but he scarcely notices. It is a simple meal—carrots and celery, chunks of what he thinks is rabbit. It is the plainest thing he has eaten in years, and yet somehow, the best meal he can remember.

His stomach twists painfully as warmth settles into it, and before he can stop himself, he takes another spoonful, then another, the hunger of the past week overwhelming whatever restraint court etiquette had once led him. It is only when half the bowl is gone that he realizes how quickly he is eating.

Embarrassed, he forces himself to slow, lowering the spoon.

“My apologies,” he says, clearing his throat. “I fear I may have forgotten my manners.”

“You haven’t had a meal in over a week, my prince. You’re allowed to be hungry,” you say with a faint smile.

Jace lets out a half-hearted huff of amusement through his nose, though his smile fades as quickly as it came, returning to conversation to try to force himself to slow down and show a modicum of etiquette before he embarrasses himself further. 

“There is every need for reward,” he disagrees, leaning forward slightly to look at you. For the first time since he woke in your cottage, he actually observes you—you cannot be much older than he is, beautiful certainly, but there’s a weariness in your expression that Jace cannot help but feel as though is his fault. “You saved the life of the heir to the Iron Throne. You surrendered your bed, tended wounds that would have killed most men, and risked the wrath of the Greens simply by allowing me beneath your roof. I cannot allow that debt to go unanswered.”

You stare at him for a moment, a conflicted expression on your face, and Jace shakes his head slightly as he presses.

“I do not possess enough coin to repay such a debt myself—” nor, he suspects, does anyone “—but my mother will. You needn't live here any longer if you do not wish to. We could see your cottage rebuilt if the fighting has damaged it, or grant you land elsewhere, if that is what you'd prefer. Whatever you ask, so long as it is within my power, I will see it done.”

You are quiet for a long while as Jace finishes off the stew, but he expects hesitation as you mull over what to ask for: gold, land, a better ship, perhaps. Your gaze drifts off to the side, and Jace’s follows it, faltering when he realizes that you’re looking in the direction of what remains of Sharp Point.

That’s right, he remembers—you mentioned your cottage was less than a league away. 

From where he sits, he can just see the destruction through the small window. The town is little more than scorched foundations and splintered timbers now, dragonfire having reduced generations of work to ash in the span of a single afternoon. He cannot look at it for long, stomach twisting so unpleasantly that he fears the stew you just cooked him might come right up. 

You stay silent for so long that Jace wonders if you have not heard him, and his lips part to repeat himself futilely. 

“We used to think they were beautiful, you know?” you say, voice barely over a breath. “We would watch your family fly from King’s Landing and Dragonstone. The children would cheer and call out the names of whatever dragon and royal was passing overhead, even though they knew you could not hear them.” A wistful smile tugs briefly at your lips, and Jace suddenly feels a rock in his stomach, a heaviness that he cannot seem to push away. “There is a wild dragon in these parts—we call him Grey Ghost. He hunts fish along the eastern shore. I see him frequently when I take my father’s boat out. We lived alongside him for years—sometimes he swoops down close when we have a big catch, but he never bothers us. My father always said he was curious—shy, but curious.”

You exhale suddenly as you rise to your feet; Jace wonders if he should ignore the unshed tears in your eyes the same way you politely did for him.

“Then the Prince Aemond and Vhagar came,” you say at last. “The only thing I want, my prince, is for this war to end, but I know you cannot give me that. If you don't mind, I should see to my father's boat before the tide turns. There is more stew in the pot if you would have it. Then you ought to rest. You'll not heal by arguing with your own body.”

Jace opens his mouth.

He does not know what he intends to say, caught between guilt and indignation, because everybody wants the fighting to end—he does, his mother does. Maybe not Daemon, but why do you say it as though he stands opposed to peace? He did not choose this, nor did his mother. It is not his fault that the Greens usurped his mother's throne.  

He desperately tries to formulate an answer, but how is he supposed to respond to that? What were they meant to do? Yield to the usurpers? Stand aside while his mother’s birthright was stolen? Let Luke die for nothing? Should he say that he is sorry for your loss? That his mother would never have done this? That Vermax would never have burned a fishing village? That this was all the Greens? That they fight to avenge what happened here? 

That dragons are not cruel creatures, he feels the need to tell you when he sees the disdain on your face—it is the people who ride them. It is the Greens. It is Aegon and Aemond, Alicent Hightower and her father.

His lips are parted as though to respond, but he only finds himself staring at you helplessly. 

You incline your head politely before slipping out the door, the cool air rushing briefly into the cottage before it shuts behind you once more. Jace remains where he is, staring into the last of his stew until the steam no longer rises from it, the reality of his situation settling over him—Vermax is dead, Luke is dead, and his mother believes them both lost. He does not know whether his brothers and cousins are safe, if his mother still fights for her crown. He is useless, wounded in a fisherman's cottage, alive only because a woman from a town his family failed to protect chose mercy over sense.

He does not think he has ever felt less like the heir to a kingdom.

[eldrith]

shark smile jacaerys velaryon

“i was told sirens drag men to their deaths.” “we do.”

jacaerys velaryon x fem!siren!reader words: 23.2k notes: this was written before s3e1, but still contains major spoilers. non canon compliant. i have a lot of new followers since i last posted & im v happy to be back writing here; pls feel free to stop by my inbox to chat or request something <3 description of reader is intended to avoid physical features, including skin tone. this is relatively unedited so sorry for any errors. warnings: heavy discussion of death. fear. angst/grief. graphic injuries, mild horror & gore, vomiting, allusions to blood eating. fluff tho! reader is a siren and not human so (?). sex - piv, nudity. light praise kink, inexperienced jace, experienced (?) reader. light power dynamics but relatively tame smut. fluff & a surprisingly happy ending for me !

WHEN HE FALLS FROM THE SKY, THE SEA DOES NOT CARE THAT HE IS A PRINCE.

In fact, it does not care that he is the story of the sky and the sea both, nor that he carries within him both a line of an old empire and a claim to a kingdom. No, the sea does not care that Jacaerys is a prince; it takes him all the same. 

Scorched by a burn down the throat of Dragonfire – though not in flame, but the aftertaste of it, he sinks; orange veins through black, smoke threaded deep into his lungs with the craning roar of Vermax long since vanishing from his ears through the crushing depths around him. There is no color left now, not enough to discern banner from banner or hull from hull, scale from scale. 

There is no color left now, not enough to discern banner from banner or hull from hull, scale from scale. Bizarrely, what remains is red, and it lingers both in the water and his mouth; And soon, true as the gods and their cruelties, it is also drifting in thick ribbons from his shoulder.

Though he is well submerged in water, in an instinct at the basest of his kind’s nature, Jacaerys inhales.  

Choked immediately by the force of salt down into his very being, Jacaerys tastes iron and brine and something scorchingly distant, the residue of dragonfire made to liquid, swallowed back down into the deep as it tugs at himself, too; rolling in fizzing bubbles of fire and thundering waves overtop his back. 

He does not remember the fall, and he hardly remembers the splitting of both sky and earth; Only that glassy world between the two, reflecting in depths and in minds alike, echoing the sound of groaning hulls and roaring beasts and the warbled screams of dying men. 

It is a deep descent, crushing with a searing pain that emanates in the ribbons of red that float out from him, flying leathers heavy, dragging him down, down, down. 

He is learned enough to cease his useless inhales as the salt hardens and grows deeper, meeting that which flows through his veins, dizzying his mind until water and salt and blood are all he tastes. The fire of war becomes a distant thing high above his sinking body as his consciousness loses him for what might be the last time. 

Indeed, he hardly feels it when the sudden, ripping jerk tugs his body; up, or sideways, or some elsewhere – through something darker than anything he’s ever known.

WHEN HE WAKES, JACAERYS BLINKS AGAINST A SKY FAR TOO VAST. 

The smoke of battle has thinned into a distant smear upon the horizon, a notion he gathers only after coming to and completely emptying his stomach of kelped water, scraped with barnacles and blood and shipwreckage splintered into his throat in their ascent from his guts.  

A length of broken timber presses beneath his spine, which is his second gathering; Perhaps a spar from his grandsire’s fleet, or perhaps merely the rib of some lesser ship cracked open like a carcass to be feasted by the vulturous gulls of the Narrow Sea. 

When at last, sluggish and stinging, his eyes open – they do so with a fluttering knot of long lashes, and he must squint into the vastness above and around him, feeling the wilt of hope dying like a low wyck in his chest. There are no sails near him now; nor cries, nor banners. 

Jacaerys well and truly and fully floats alone. 

He lets himself stare, just for a moment, to gather himself. A fine day, by any standards less measured with the smoke and searing screams of both sky and sea, the sun hanging upon its bright band in the heavens and oppressive enough to give Jacaerys need to close his lids once more. Gulls circle lazily in the distance, a sole sign of life in a deserted plane of rocking water.  

Well, then. He is far from the Gullet now. 

Indeed, he is far from anything, as indicated by squint of his eye; The sea rocks him on his raft like the cradle of a cherished babe, horrible but lulling as his mind drifts further than his body. He lies flat upon it, cradled by splintered wood that dips and sways with the sigh of the sea. 

Perhaps it would be a gentle thing, if not for the arrows lodged deep through the flesh of his shoulder and chest.

He had not felt their strikes, though now he indeed feels them. Each shift of tide drives the shaft in his shoulder deeper, grinding splintered wood and barbed iron into bone and muscle alike, a searing ache that permeates each stretch of his being. The shallower one, Gods be true, lies in the fleshy muscle of his chest, lodged but loose enough to flounder like a babe newly-horsebacked with each shift of wave. Because of this, breath fractures into something ugly and thinly agonized, pressed by cheek against the splintered wood beneath him. 

He does not give himself more than a moment with this unceasing pain; instead a hand rises, weakened and trembling and searing with the protest of barbed metal against bone, to tug at the wood protruding from his chest. The shoulder, he knows, is no use to try and save now; but the nearly insouciant rhythm of the shallow arrow upon his chest mocks him with its pulsing agony, and thus he tugs at it with all the dwindling strength he may remain. A roar rips from chapped lips, burning with the taste of bile and dragonsmoke; and still he pulls, the sinewy rip of arrowhead as it dislodges itself from its shallow grave and frees, violently, into the salty air. Jacaerys lets out no more than a whimper at the gaping, pulsing pain now ebbing from his wound; the arrow in his grasp is listlessly cast from his palm, down into whatever depths now lie below him.

The wound pulses with every faint heartbeat, and though he should surely press it to fend too much loss, he finds himself weakened with agony and exhaustion. Water still lives there, salty and ancient, in his lungs; he feels it with each inhale he takes. A warmth both viscous and determined seeps sluggishly down his side and crawls into the dip of his collarbone and throat, pooling in a glistening ruby shimmer before diluting pink into the endless blue beneath him. 

Jacaerys watches the darkest parts of him go with not so much a single sound besides wafery breaths delivered sparsely between groans of aching ribs and short, wet coughs.  

A prince should not bleed so quietly, he thinks. 

Though it is for hours Jacaerys floats like this – if he is so to believe the lies spun by the sun in the sky – shifting upon agonizing weight every few moments, feeling the life of him seep out with every weak pump of his tremored soul. He floats limply, one weakened boot dragging in the cold water beneath his torrid liferaft of broken war.  

It is too lonesome for a boy like him, perhaps. All that emanates from his brain is an ache of heart, the memory of screeching; of the jerking strike and dragging descent, such a slow death. Jacaerys floats for hours and hears wailing; sees the final glance of his lifelong companion, his truest friend; feels the sinking again, the horrible moment when he and his Vermax were swallowed beneath the surface. He wonders, in that dim place between consciousness and sleep, if there are those looking for him. If Rhaena and that wild beast are back on land; if Corlys and Baela and the rest are safe, dry perhaps, unscathed; if his mother remains still untouched by danger. It was a fair trade, he thinks. Their lives for his own. 

The agony in his chest and shoulder grows as the sun slips into a smoky horizon. He is blistered by the sun and drained of half his life, memories of his drowning roving sluggishly in his mind more as sensation than coherence: A sharp tugging, far less than natural, from the very depths of the sea. He recalls, only faintly and through some hazy delirience, that he did not resurface, nor did he pull himself rightwards onto this very raft; He has hardly the strength to move his arm at all, and knows best that he did not, indeed, save himself from the death that found him just hours ago in the Gullet. A horrible thought pulses just beyond coherence; the sensation of wrongness permeates the prince as he lies, motionless and alone, in the middle of a silent sea. 

Jacaerys falls in and out of the world with heavy, tear-laced eyelids and a ceaseless ache in his torso.

WHEN HE NEXT FINDS HIS CONSCIOUS, THE SUN HAS BEGUN TO DANCE VIOLET AND ORANGE ALONG THE GLISTENING RIPPLES OF SEA. 

He stirs not from pain nor hunger nor any kind of distant tremoring sound; instead, he is roused by the sensation of something brushing his ankle. 

Unable to do much else, he only stiffens; The water beneath him is darker than it ought to be, sheared in half by a bright and burning glint reflecting from the horizon, a shifting pane of glass so v ery fathomless and swallowing in its wholeness. He squints at the burning orange searing the water and lives, for a blissful for moments, in the belief that it is only delirium of a dying man that makes him feel the brush against his boot, surely only the blood clotting his sight into the watery depths which his leg splays into. 

But then he sees a flicker. 

Silver, or perhaps its more shyly shimmering cousin; some reflective thing which catches the light, winking like ancient dragoncoin beneath sand, glinting against the oppressive glare of dying sun splitting his vision in half. 

Blinking salt and dying sun from his gaze, he lulls his cheek back upon the raft, tasting his blood as it resides within the grain of wood and the split of his lips alike. His wounds are near dried now, though he is no fool. He suspects the Stranger will visit him quite soon. 

But then, a drifting, long-winding vision once more through the water, near his boot beneath the shifting of his splintered raft. Long and swirling like weeds at sea, it coils and slinks just out of sight; though still, Jacaerys is given a startled pause. 

Hair?  

A squint against the sting of salt in lashes, hazeled eyes catch not the jerking dart of fish, nor the rolling glide of a seal or any such beast. It is real – perhaps only in the way visions might be real to one on the brink of death – though real all the same as the arrow through his shoulder or the wound in his chest. 

Whatever it is, it circles.

His pulse thunders weakly, and in a delirious moment recalls stories of pirates across the sea who leak from the cracks of the Stepstones and surface from the sea itself; men who swim upon unattended boats to thieve the pockets of men who lie shipwrecked. 

“Go,” he rasps madly, though his voice is hardly more than wind over broken mast, matted with pain and expiring life. It takes the last of his very soul, the raw and trembling memory of green scales sinking into the sea, that he presses.  “Please. I’ve…I’ve nothing left to steal.”

And a tragic truth his words are. The sea answers the Prince with a soft lap against wood, echoing gently as a kiss against his cheekbone; and then, as though relenting, the shape vanishes. 

Wildly, perhaps madly, Jacaerys laughs once; though the salt and brine have made a home in his lungs, and blood slicks his lip now. Yes, death will find him quite soon, it seems. He tastes himself again, metallic and fading. If this is death, he thinks, it is far quieter than he imagined.

He lets his head fall back, and the sky blurs.

HE DREAMS OF WINGS BURNING.

Or something of the sort. Scales which rot, boys with laughter like bubbles in the depths, a garden with a rusting gate and a fog that seeps into his mind and twists his feet until his boots are gnarled roots; he dreams of dragons sweeping in from the skies, of an ancient beast swallowing an entire dragon in its maw, of fire upon fire, claws tearing and blood weeping over entire ships until the whole ocean lay rubied and burning. He sees odd things, indeed, in his dreamy death: girls trapped under ice, brides kneeling at empty graves, men growing into trees; he sees moons and suns dance, he sees women with sharp teeth and soft skin, he sees tears that fall like moonlight. He sees poisoned teacups, singed butterflies fluttering out of spiderwebs; black cats slinking like shadows around breathing roots. 

It is peculiar, perhaps, that he dreams so many deaths so vividly, and yet Jacaerys wakes only after their horrors subside. 

He jolts to consciousness violently to find that the sky is enormous above him, a vault of black pricked with viciously indifferent stars. His wake comes body-first, mind trailing behind as the residue of sleep melts away, fading thoughts of smooth skin giving way to coyish glints and roaring waters and sighing voices. 

And there, nearly indistinguishable from above or below, the sky’s twin yawns in a stretch, that dark mirror – the sea. He watches that glassy expanse breathe slow, tidal sighs against the splintered timber that keeps him from sinking. 

For a moment he does not remember where he is, only that the world is vast and he is very small within it. 

But then it is when he takes a breath, and in such a daring intake, shifts his shoulder just partially; then true, raw agony explodes down his arm and across his chest. A broken noise spills from him before he can swallow it back, dampened only by the largess of the world around him, the depths swallowing the pain of one mere boy. 

The pain, it seems, tears more than breath from him. Memory follows, from the expiring mind: of smoke and fire and ships and men dying and women screaming on dragonback. The moment comes to him far too soon and with it, a wash of agony so raw and true that he suspects the last time he felt such a way was when he lost his brother. 

“Vermax,” he calls, throat raw and cracking, and like a boy he waits, tears slipping and burning against his sun-scorched visage, staring up as though a shadow might pass over the stars. As though green wings might descend from the heavens or surge up from the starry depths below. He knows, though, that even beyond the horizon – beyond wherever he is, now – there does not remain a dragon searching for him. 

The sob which escapes him is restrictedly delved in searing pain from his wounds; his cries die on the water, so unlike a prince, as he whispers the name once more into the dark, followed only by a weak call for his mother.

The name is swallowed there, along the starry water, as is his grief. 

In a turn of mercy, the pain surpasses enough to render him lack of thought; after only a final hitching breath, Jacaerys is stricken mind-numbed with a plaguing grief, tamped only by the unending agony haunting his form. A turn of cheek presses a metallic mouthful of seawater through sunscorched lips, and he coughs it back out into the deep with tormented effort. 

The glint strikes him, then, as he coughs his blood back into the sea. 

Across the glassy pane of stars, just an arm’s reach away: A lurking thing, reflecting back whatever meek light survives the night’s breath across the sky. 

He cannot make it out fully, but it ceases his mind cold with a sharp turn of familiarity, that lingering horror of nails trailing down the back of one’s nape or the draught of chill in an empty graveyard. 

Jacaerys blinks at it with that same low strike of horror; At first he deems it merely the moon fracturing the water’s skin, some trick of depth and distance. He blinks once, slow and heavy, as if that might wash the vision clean; But the shape does not break. It lingers there until the doubt in him thins, until even his certainty of illusion begins to feel like a falsity he has begun to assure himself for the sake of breathing; and only then, in that false security, does he come to understand what the shape truly is.  

Eyes. 

Eyes, true as the gods, fixed upon him and tilted upward from the depths below, bewilderingly catching the moonlight instead of merely catching it. As the raft dips in a slow wave and relevels, he catches the curve of a forehead, too – and then, gods, the slow inky spread of salt-threaded hair; he sees it then, flowing out its tendrils like weeds of the sea towards the measly splinter of wood upon which he lies. 

Panic surges up raw and ancient in Jacaerys; older than any crown or dragon or war, something buried deep in marrow that recognizes the shape of a predator in the basest part of a man before his mind might dress it in the common tongue. 

There is a woman in the water, a strange thought comes to him, lucid in its stillness, and he begins to wonder whether delirium has perhaps granted him some courtesy of idiocy. A woman, where no woman should be.

A lurch of the body, called upon by sole instinct; Every lesson beaten into him since boyhood demands that he rise and reach for a sword no longer hanging at his hip, that he make himself larger than his fear and meet such danger standing rather than waiting for it to devour him. 

Instead, agony flowers white through his shoulder and chest, so bursting and complete that his limbs answer with little more than a miserable tremor, feverish and vitiated, and his near-valiant effort dies unborn. Among the shards of moonlight glass shattering the sea, he is pinned not by rope or chain, but by his own ruined flesh and the arrow lodged deep within it. Should this woman – this creature – wish to come for him, there is naught left with which to refuse her. 

His eyes, ambered in the brightest of his days but now sooted with the grim ash of war and loss, do the only thing left to do; stare back. And this creature, this nightmare, this woman – whomever she may be, she remains there in her pool of ink and watches him in patient return.

And so, time sifts. 

The moon lays a narrow road of silver across the water, and in that thin illumination he conjures only fragments of her horror as she finally nears; the smooth curve of forehead breaking the surface, a sharpened gleam fixed upon him, so unnerving in its patience; the breath of cheekbone and brow, far too fine to belong to any storm-battered sailor’s daughter. When the sea parts, next come her tresses, which fan outward along the surface like ink spilled in the dark night, water-darkened tendrils drifting and coiling as the lulling coax of kelp swaying in the tides. 

Perhaps Jacaerys has gone mad. For, as he stares helpless as a babe unto a descending knife, he comes to understand that she is beautiful. 

A vision of moonlight upon ruins: she is jagged, obscured and sharpened only where soft sighs hide themselves away; though he is not a man wholly mad-made yet, for her beauty – however intrinsic it might be – does not beget the wrongness of her presence, the impossibility of eyes at this hour, in this emptiness, so far from shores that even gulls have long abandoned him. 

His pulse stammers painfully against his ribs, and the sharded arrow in his shoulder throbs in time with it, each beat threatening to unmoor him from the fragile raft entirely. Though fear licks itself in shivers of agony across his spine, he dares not move again. 

Eyes – those glinting coins so mad under the grace of moon – do not blink once. 

The prince swallows against a throat flayed raw by salt and smoke and swallowed seawater, and his lengthed voice is scarcely more than wind dragged over broken wood.

“Are you real?”

A question which drifts uselessly into the air, swallowed by stars both hanging in the sky and swallowed in the depths below; she nor the sea answers his question, only rippling and sighing, only her eyes ever-staring, unceasing. 

She remains still for so long that Jacaerys begins to blink out the thought of the eyes at all, wondering if his mind had tricked him into conjuring up company in the middle of the world where there is none. 

Perhaps that is all there is to death, Jacaerys thinks: some slow unspooling of the mind, a final merciful trick where pain and terror are softened into symbols and story until what remains is merely a dream stitched together from drowning thought and fading blood. 

What strange mercy, he thinks distantly as consciousness slips from him, that the mind, standing upon the threshold of oblivion, should choose not horror but a beautiful woman waiting beneath the water.

HIS DREAMS, IT SEEMS, DO NOT CEASE EVEN ONCE HE WAKES. 

When he stirs again, it is to a sky rinsed pale and enormous above him. And, he registers in turn, to her.

A startled jerk drives a battered back to jerk faintly against waterlogged wood; an agony of dying-man’s pain ripples from sunscorched lips which part in raw, pulsing horror. Fire explodes through his shoulder; his ribs protest with a sickening ache; his vision burst in lurching lashings of white, until sea and sky become one blinding smear which remains even when his lids sew shut. 

He breaths out a disbelieved sigh. Cursed as they are, Jacaerys always thought dreams to be faithless things, ones which vanish with coming daylight. Though here one lies, lurking in the dredges of nightmarish deep waters even in the forgiving breath of day. 

A petrifying thought, which permeates his sleep-laced mind with a strike of cold deeper than the sea itself: She remains here, in the silver light of dawn, as though she had kept watch through every pained unconscious hour. 

He finds the strange woman half-emerged from the deep blue waters, elbows resting lightly upon the broken spar of wreckage which keeps him from the deep. Her chin is balanced upon interlaced fingers in a posture nearly – gods preserve him – nearly girlish; the pose occurs so absurdly innocuous that, in any other place or perhaps upon any other woman, he might have mistaken it for idle curiosity. 

Though there is nothing idle about this creature, no thing innocent at all in the incessant bore of her gaze; a luminous thing, glowing like mother-of-pearl and flashing deep as his stare of horror meets her own hungered one. 

Then, with the flow of tresses across a bared shoulder and the sharp flash of a blinding, pearly smile, she speaks. 

“Am I real?” 

The fear finds its home burrowed beneath the wounds of his chest, the splintered wounds seeming suddenly to send dark roots through his body, tendrils of fever and terror winding together in a spreading, helpless dread. He stares, and stares, and stares; a gaping thing, a helpless thing, marooned upon a floating shard of war with a woman he believes is far too beautiful to belong anywhere land might dare reach. 

Jacaerys finds no words to offer; instead a gaze skitters in disbelief, lower and lower, until it dares the water itself. 

The tide, it seems, remains loath to surrender her entirely from its foamy grasp; yet the dawn has stripped away the moon’s deceptions. Jacaerys sees, in its bareness, the horrible line where soft flesh churns into something iridescent and blooming; a vision of scales delicately breathing down curve of hip, only to vanish beneath the shifting blue. Light fractures there, living colors or breath – silvered coin to heavy moss to bruised violet; it is the sight of crushed old jewels and of forgotten gods, a thing from so deep it seems to swallow the sun. 

Within his ruined chest, a fevered breath snags. 

The stories conjure to him in a half-breath’s moment, swirling in his mind with the faintness of memory; His father's voice upon the deck of a ship as he taught his sons to read the currents and to never hearken singing over open water. 

His grandsire’s grim tales at Driftmark, softened by the spray of ocean as he told how the sea keeps daughters as well as tides. There too had been stern faces of septas beneath vaulted ceilings of that keep of Red, with their hands folded within sleeves and eyes far too sharp for jest. There are creatures whom the Stranger did not intend for the land.

There were things in the sea, they all said; things older than the kingdoms who watched ships and learned of the longing which laced itself into the weak fabrication of human hearts. 

Old stories shake loose from childhood until they drift before him like wreckage: Sirens whose bellies hung swollen with the flesh of drowned men; whose true faces, septas insisted, belonged only to the daylight: slack with rot, mouths split too wide for any mortal smile, eyes filmed pale by the abyss; and yet when the moon pours itself across the sea, that same cold light becomes their greatest deceit, veiling evil beneath impossible loveliness until lonely sailors mistake hunger for some kind of beauty. 

He remembers an old captain, spoken of as though he had once truly lived, who abandoned his helm to answer a woman's laughter floating over calm water; how weeks later they found him cast upon the strand, tangled in flowering kelp with his body bloated white and his eyes pecked hollow by gulls unwilling to look too long upon whatever he had seen beneath the waves. 

There were darker tales still: Of fishermen, taken whole into the green-black depths, where the sunlight and the Seven alike surrendered their potency; of merchant princes lured ashore into hidden coves by women whose songs promised warmth and whose mouths promised kisses, until those same hands opened a man from throat to belly and peeled apart their ribs like the bars of a cage. 

It was said, too, that sirens slept inside the hollowed remains; nesting deep within the boned ruins of the men they lured. 

There had been a time that Jacaerys had laughed at such tales. After all, there is little room for fear of monsters in the heart of a boy who commands one of his own; though now, upon a broken raft with death bleeding slowly through his flesh, he finds the old tales returning with only sufferance. 

He lifts his eyes to her once more. 

But he finds that, despite the tall tales which ebb and flow within his fevered mind, she is not the grotesque nightmare promised by septas; he finds no slack-jawed carrion thing crowned in weeded sea nor whale bone.

Indeed if anything, the dawn is crueler still – for it reveals that her beauty belongs only to her. 

Her hair, lighter now with the glint of early sun and lacking in distortion of depth, spills over her shoulders, threaded with strands that catch silvery and oddly pearlescent when the light tilts just so; wet tresses cling to the graceful hollow of her throat, to the slope of her collarbones, garnering affection from the droplets of seawater which gather there greedily before falling one by one upon the weathered timber. Her eyes are clear, no longer luminescent but merely intent, fixed upon him with an unwavering and unsettling stillness.

Jacaerys stares at this creature because he cannot do otherwise. 

She is the only solid thing in a world that hours ago dissolved into blood and brine; and those eyes, wide and reflecting and sweet and hungry, watching him back without embarrassment, without coyness, as though he is the creature newly risen from myth and she has been only patiently waiting; stilled in predatory wait for centuries, to examine him. Perhaps he should feel stronger fear than has settled into his bones; Perhaps he should scream, or merely attempt as much, with what little life he has left to fight.  

“I’ve died,” he says instead. 

His voice is thin, scraped raw by salt and disbelief, and it falls along the flat plane of sea that stretches around him farther than the eye can strain. From his rather blunt observation blooms the faintest crease between her brows, a consideration almost scholarly in its descent over so sinless a visage. For a moment her eyes travel along the span of his ravaged, waterlogged riding leathers, the ripped remnants of war – then up to the lick of his exposed, blood-beating skin; Her gaze deepens. He feels his heart, a slow-march but suredly still there, thump within the mass of his chest’s swollen flesh. 

But then a slight intake of breath breaks loose from her parted lips in a sudden laugh. 

The sound is the quick silvered cry of a gull cutting across morning air, not dissimilar to those harkenning echoes of song which wailed across the sea in the darkest hours of night past. Shivers rise beautifully along Jace’s chest at the sound and he watches her eyes follow their trail over the exposed skin of his neck. The echo of her laugh stills the salt air and cloudless sky high above; and, though it fractures the heaviness between them, it does not fully dispel it – for it rings chillingly and yet entirely captivating nonetheless, a note plucked from the sweetest, coldest reaches of the sea itself. 

“No,” she sighs just then, a tilt of head to expose a curve of throat, the water which lives there so sweetly in the junction of neck and chest. The water pearls, too, where her palms cradle her chin. Her eyes do not blink. “Though… you nearly did.”

Her voice is wrong, he thinks, for a nightmare; for it falls so incredibly soft, so full of wonder and voracious low-buried hunger, and he finds himself more unsettled by it than any shriek might have rendered him – though still, some low-reaching part of his gut shivers in an expression less than fearful. Hungry, he thinks faintly. 

And she is wrong, he thinks; indeed, the proof of it is there, in the souring wound of his chest, in the blood which has begun to seep once more from the arrow lodged firm in his shoulder upon his startling wake and the feverish haze which has crept through base of skull to linger front-of-mind. No man survives such wounds. 

No man survives drowning.

Breath grows shallow from both injury and the vastness of what he does not understand – and then comes the growing churn of unease within his stomach that might possibly be starvation, too. Might a dead man starve? 

“What are you?” he asks faintly; the question trembles upon that string of reverence and accusation and she studies him with an unsettling seriousness, lonely only to the wake of lapping waves. It is too quiet for far too long in that solace of sights, rocking upon his death. 

“Hungry,” she answers at last.

The word slips into him and coils low in his gut once more, birthing a horrid sensation which is not wholly fear but perhaps something darker and more unknown, the basest of human instinct sacrificed to churn instead some anticipation he knows not how to tame. 

Though accompanied with a bitter, half-delirious laugh, his voice carries a fragility; the cadence of a man who has already crossed one threshold and suspects another waits nearby. 

“Have you eaten me, then?” 

That same laugh touches her mouth again, soft enough to be swallowed by the very foam of the sea which cradles her, and it sends a new jolt of shivers through his whole being; though seared pain chases those quivers immediately. The moan of suffering he lets out at the shifting of his shoulder draws her gaze to the faint rust-colored pond of the junction of his throat, where his blood has pooled and since half-dried into a congealed offering before the sea might fully claim it. 

Her head tilts with the rocking of the raft. “Not yet.”

It is a thing that would make a sane man recoil. 

He knows he ought to perhaps demand whether her teeth hide long and sharp behind that gentle curve of lip – whether she means to devour him and take his bones to whatever cathedral of wreckage lies beneath her domain; But the sea around them is impossibly calm, stretched glassy and infinite to a horizon so distant it seems to play more of a trick of eye than any such reality, emptied of sails and smoke and war and left only in calm. 

There is nothing but the prince and the siren and the fragile slab of driftwood that, in this moment of death and between, binds them bizarrely together. 

Perhaps from his startle, blood has begun to leave him once more in streams; little rivulets this time, which twist down and drip in lurches onto salt-swelled wood. Jacaerys’ head grows heavy, and the dizziness comes creeping through like fog at the corner of garden gates, slinking through the darkening edges of his mind, rendering him aired and heavy in the same labored breath. 

“It was you, then.” The words come as wreckage to rocky shore, splintered into odd sensations of memory into near-coherence, laced with strange visions of women with teeth lodged within their cheeks and talons long as his own sword; of bubbles swallowing a massive beast and the shock of sharp chill as his own body sunk to a watery grave in the Gullet’s roar. “You pulled me from the deep.” 

When his eyes open once more, he finds hers resting upon him with that same patient stillness.  “No.”

A crease grows upon his brow. His neck slackens against the splintered timber, too weary now to hold itself upright, landing below with a weak breath of expiring life. Above him the sky yawns open without end; he imagines it swallowing him whole.

“I promise you,” her voice comes, a soothing balm, so very cool where the sun has left him burning. “I kept you from it.” 

He might have responded, in another life. Though now, pain has ceased to belong to any single wound; It wanders him now, crawling beneath skin – living fire, it finds fresh places to bloom and scorch until he can no longer remember what it felt like to possess a body untouched by suffering. 

Somewhere beneath the fever, Jacaerys accepts that his consciousness will soon be lost; to either the tide, or the Stranger himself. 

The knowledge, as it comes, is strangely peaceful. So in his last moments, Jacaerys lets himself mourn as he stares at the strangely beautiful woman in the water, at the dawning sky and stretching sea behind her.  

His mother's face comes first, as it always has; followed by his brothers, blurred by memory until laughter and quarrels and childhood become indistinguishable in his slogging mind: and Baela, Rhaena, Joffrey, Aeg and Viserys; all of them, in the breath of a moment. The sea rocks him in agony as he thinks of Dragonstone rising black from the sea, of Vermax banking through cloud and soaring through breathless air; of the long hall of the Keep, of the salt upon Driftmark’s shores; of the gleam of Ser Steffon’s blade when Jacaerys squired for him in that final tourney; of his grandsire’s knee, upon which he perched on that throne of swords and heard the promises he’d been deigned since birth. 

Whole kingdoms rise and vanish behind his closed eyes; wars begin and end, lives he has lived and those which he will never reach – hundreds of deaths and hundreds of lives split apart and seal themselves in the seams of his mind, all in the space of a single trembling breath, before dissolving into the tide.

His cheek settles once more upon the weathered wood, eyes drowsy in the pale-lilac of early morning. You pulled me from the deep. The fight in him is nearly gone; only one question remains upon his tongue. 

“Why?”

A shift below the depths as she pushes upon the raft with flattened palms, and Jacaerys watches in awe how water yields so willingly round the soft flesh holding her ribs; the sensation of the war-battered raft tilting him down, tantalizingly closer to those singing depths hardly breathes across his mind. 

A tongue passes thoughtfully across glossy lips. “You were sweet,” she murmurs at last, a chill of breath crossing over his own cheeks, loosing a wave of shivers through his spine. He can only watch as her arms give way once more to sink down, as the sea – so resentful to lend even this much of her to daylight – claims all but her shoulders and head.

There is blood in his mouth now; he tastes iron upon tongue as his eyes fall shut, a spinning sensation conjuring to his mild the felled taper of a feather, fluttering to lie at rest upon a pond. An odd death for a prince, indeed. His voice escapes him as little more than a frayed whisper. “S-sweet?” 

He can think of no stranger a word to be labeled in those last moments of battle. Sweet. His eyes slide beneath their lids, a slogging thing in their sun-dried, salted shells, laced shut with exhaustion and perhaps delirium. 

“Your blood,” her voice murmurs, and it has become near enough now that he can hear the movement of water bubbling when she breathes; a lulling sweetness which sticks to his teeth and dances upon his tongue. Just a taste, he thinks just then, rather absurdly. 

“It tasted of the sky,” comes that voice once more, a bubbling wet sound as though her mouth has descended to taste whatever now leaks into the water. “And… I wished to know you.” 

Nausea finds him at the thought. “You tasted me,” he grunts through pain-wired teeth, delirious, odd visions of swimming scales and lace-frilled fins skittering from outreached hands. He imagines that river of blood seeping from him now, flowing into an open, hungered mouth. 

“I did.” 

This pain is too much for life, he believes. It consumes him, so intense it has numbed him, bled a fever into his mind and stretched the tendrils of infection through each last vein in his body. 

“Then I am dead,” he decides quietly. For what else would he be? 

The water stirs, and when he feels her presence once more his gaze strains to return, blurry and searing when he pries his lashes apart. 

She leans close enough once more, close enough that he might smell the sweetness of her, something so peculiar for mid-sea; breeze and softness and shadowherbs lace through his inhale and stir some hollow hunger in his gut, a piercing, ravaged thing that brings a bout of nausea to return. 

“If you were dead,” her lips are glossed with the sea, “you would be far below me.”

His pulse answers in a hare’s pace, quickening beneath skin rotting and infected and plagued with a slow death. “Then,” his tongue darts out to soothe the pain upon sunscorched lips, but instead is met with dry air and dripping blood, slicking from his mouth. Her eyes glint at the sight, an observation which twists unease deeper within his gut. “...Where am I now?” 

The smallest smile touches her mouth – a thing soft enough that once more, upon another countenance, it might almost have nearly been kind.“The sea,” she says. “Of course.”

Of course. Heavied, his head falls once more against the weathered timber, a movement slow and borne from exhaustion; drowsy eyes gaze into the endless blue where sky and water seem forever to pursue one another without meeting. Here he lies suspended between them all the same: neither upon the land nor surrendered to the abyss, neither wholly living nor yet claimed by death, merely adrift upon that trembling boundary where one world dissolves into the next.

The woman watches him stare out at the expanse for another long while before speaking again.

“You must rest, Prince.”

The title bears itself foreign upon her tongue; Jacaerys wonders, with a rather dislocated peculiarity, how she might know it belongs to him at all. In three-and-twenty years, he has never once heard a tale in which a siren urged a man to sleep for any purpose save to ease his passage into her hunger; though still, true as the gods, fever laps at the edges of his thoughts. 

His eyelids descend by degrees, each blink lingering longer than the last against the shimmering yawn of morning, until the daylight begins to disappear between his lashes, swallowed by that other abyss. “If I do,” his breath utters weakly, wondering to himself whether he asks from futile hope or some simply morbid curse of curiosity. “Will I ever wake?” 

His vision is betrayed; all which he knows are the steady rock of his rotting raft and the ache of his agonized body. The plaguing sun scorches one side of his visage whilst the sea cools the other; and he thinks, as his lashes flutter again sun-oranged lids, that he hears a voice once more through the waters: 

“Perhaps.”

THROUGH HIS UNCONSCIOUSNESS, JACAERYS STILL FEELS. 

Peculiar enough that his mind churns even as it once did when he lived on land and rode through the sky; And yet it is more peculiar still that he so faintly in his fever registers himself being turned; dips with the wreckage as it tilts beneath him, feels the lick of sea shift its grasp upon his failing, limp body. An interruption of the boiling heat; some chilling presence pressing firm against his chest and splaying over the slow, weakened pulse of his heart. Agony is a memory, a faint pulse like the outer ridge of a bruise or rime over spring fields in the Vale. 

While Jacaerys dreams of a hundred deaths, he dreams, too, that the arrow in his shoulder leaves him without the violence of pain. 

There is no fresh burst of agony as when he’d expelled the first one, no sharp white flare behind the eyes; It is as though the wound inhales and exhales and then merely forgets its own carved carnage, the blood that had been pulsing from him like a rubied river beginning to reverse its direction. 

The deaths come to him in fits not unlike the rolling pangs of arrow wounds: He dreams of Vermax dragged from the sky, of Luke swallowed by stormy sea; of his mother’s crown dripping and glinting red as fresh meat. 

Most peculiar yet in this sluggish purgatory between slumber and awake, he feels something freezing and dragging against his throat; lapping, like the waves upon the shore. He feels, too, how that chilling sweetness spreads within him in a foreign rush, coming as nothing so familiarly savage as dragonfire – that blaze he has known since childhood – but instead as something slower and stranger, a cooling calm which seeps instead of burns, which travels along his veins like tides instead of flames.  

Only then does he wake once more. 

THE SUN, THAT GREAT OPPRESSOR, HANGS MIDDAY WHEN HIS EYES OPEN. 

For several moments Jacaerys mistakes waking for dying once again; Light pours over him, molten vast sheets which strike the water until the sea becomes a field of shattered mirrors, the sky above a merciless blue, immense and empty as eternity. He lies upon the slab of rotting wood and wonders if this is what remains after death has finished with a man. 

Though grief, such a fickle thing, sneaks itself back through his weary bones, tearing with a force that casts his mind about and settles where fever once lived. Only then does he become aware of his body: a shift in his chest as he lets a small sound escape him, ragged as he wakes. 

He swallows, bracing instinctively for the agony of grinding iron lodged in bone; but there is nothing. 

It occurs then that his shoulder is bare to the slight seabreeze, and wholly unburdened. The arrow is gone; the wounds which had poured him into the sea exist now only as faint blushes of new skin, smoothed and unbroken with the passing of months which could not have passed in the space of a single night. Even the salt-burn that had left his skin raw and flayed has disappeared, flesh warm and sun-browned rather than blistered and fevered. 

Impossible. His riding leathers are gone; everything above his waist has vanished entirely – save for the leather riding boots which sit propped sidelong near his breezed, salt-laced trousers – left only in bared skin and a scattering of freshly silvering scars. Wonder and horror mix within his gut as fingers flex experimentally, braced for pain which never comes, save for a faint weariness of tightened muscle. 

It does not occur to him that this was anything else but the work of that creature from the water. And so, habit asserts itself; for he is still Prince as much as he is castaway, it seems, and dragonlord still before any such prey. 

“Show yourself,” he commands to the shards of mirrored ocean, voice hardened with some falsity of health he has yet to fully take to mind – for he knows, indeed, that this was no immaculate recovery of mercy from the gods. 

Though the fever has left him, weakness remains; he cannot yet sit wholly upright, the cords of his stomach quivering with an insatiable hunger and exhaustion. 

The day lives on silently, for a moment, and within him grows an impatience sprouted by nerves; he is healed, miraculously so – and in those odd, faint memories of dying rest, did he not feel touch, feel that chilled drag laving over his very skin as a parched hound might a fresh pond? 

The sea stirs and then, only after another moment, she surfaces several yards away. 

With her comes no violent breach of the surface nor shrieking gulls; she comes to the glassy glint of eye with the sea parting its dark skirts, water streaming from her in glistening threads to cling to the lengths of long tresses and running in shining rivulets over bare skin of sunbreathed beauty. A sight to be seen – particularly for a prince so lonely. 

Jacaerys stares once more, stripped of every certainty and left with only wonder and dread to keep him company. A wonder it is, her bareness hinted only by the breaking surface of reflected pools at the soft turn of her chest; and Jacaerys draws away his eyes in some gathered lucidity of shame, no longer coaxed to desire by fever. He swallows back a hoarse laugh, cheeks heated by not merely the sun’s glare but her beauty so raw and unmodest in front of him. 

She waits for him, all those reaches away, watching with a peculiar apprehension as though he might perhaps take her down to the depths instead to give some odd, murky end to her own life. 

“You healed me,” he says at length, accusation and gratitude so closely twined in his words that neither might be separated from the other. The sea seems to breathe for her, and it trembles with some unknown nerves. 

Her head inclines by the smallest degree, that odd glint in her gaze once more. “Yes.”

The simplicity of it disturbs him, he believes, far more than denial might have done. “You admit it so easily,” he says then, because he can think of little else to say. 

A flash of a pearled, glinting grin that brings even the sun-kissed sea to shame. “You wished to know.” 

As though this were answer enough; As though all truths are equally plain to her and require no ornament nor human ceremony of explanation. Jacaerys draws a slow breath, tasting salt and sunlight and the faint metallic tang of his own fear lingering upon his tongue. 

“I was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”

She, it is no denying, has floated closer to his small raft of living death. Her eyes watch unblinkingly; a chin tips until only the soft peaks of shoulder and bottom lip peak out from the murky sea. Her visage has gone dark with some horrible hunger. 

“We do.”

There comes no hesitation in her reply, nor turn of trick, and the honesty of it brings him no refuge in disbelief. His stomach seems to fall away beneath him; for it rings with it the realization that he is alive, indeed. He is alive, yes, only stranded – a castaway clinging to a forgotten shard of war in the middle of an endless sea; alive only because a creature of the deep has chosen, for reasons he cannot yet fathom, to keep him so.  

It leaves him strangely breathless. “Why?” he asks, roughened by salt and disuse. “I was – I was dying. Y-you could have taken me.” He is unsure what compels him to remind her of her own nature, though fear laces itself tight around his abdomen. 

For several heartbeats she only regards him, and in that silence there is something so old and fathomless that it makes the skin along his arms prickle. Then, at last, she speaks.

“I’ve known of your war for some time,” her voice comes low. “One drowned sun past, I watched your great beast’s fire swallow the men who have hunted me and my sisters for eons. I watched you kill those men and leave them for my sisters below.” Silence comes between them, save for the gentle dripping cascade of water from her countenance to return to the sea. “And I saw you as you fell.” 

Jacaerys’ eyelashes flutter in a sudden sting of salt and memory, though he dares not speak. 

Her tongue sweeps once more over glossed lips. “The cries of the men upon the hippocampi ships said that you are a prince,” she murmurs, leaning closer as though a thought too reverent to speak aloud, “a son of both salt, and fire.”  

How wrong she might be, he thinks – for he is not son of salt; Velaryon blood runs not through his strong veins, though still the words are cold water poured over a fevered brow, spoken with a strange and almost reverent note. 

“My sisters have told stories of your kind,” she says, and her eyes drift briefly toward the horizon as though somewhere beneath it lay the endless kingdom from which she had come. “Those humans whose blood carries flame, who ride the sky upon winged beasts. We have watched them for longer than your kingdoms have stood.” 

A faint smile ghosts across her lips, and it is haunting as it is ethereal, glinting in the sharp edge of teeth. “I had never seen one close enough to taste.” 

Her eyes glint, and he feels the familiar churn of unease. “I wondered” A tilt of her head, studying his bared chest and visage with a curiosity so untouched by human shame. “If the sea claimed a son of fire,” Her gaze drops briefly to where the arrow once buried in his shoulder, “...would he burn beneath the water?” 

Despite himself, despite the bewilderment and discomfort threatening to steal him away once more, a breath quite near a laugh escapes him. “I’ve disappointed you, then.”

She, it seems, is quite unfamiliar with the mortal crutch of humor. “You’ve done no such thing,” she assures dazedly, though her gaze has unsettlingly drifted toward the bare expanse of his chest once more. Jacaerys stiffens in nature, his own hand rising without thought to his throat; The touch of something wet and careful in memory, the blood which had gathered at his neck and collarbone, laved away, cleaned with a voracity which only bordered on tender. 

He nearly recoils at the thought. It had been her, indeed, who tasted him again. With it comes another bout of nausea; though quieter, and more treacherous still, is the hungry and awed way in which he cannot cease his staring. 

She is beautiful – in the line of flesh so cool beneath the water, such swirling, glinting eyes and gentle turn of cheek; that glint far below, silvered as mother-of-pearl and strange iridescence as she moves with the tide. 

It is perhaps this trance, this pull of fate or of fools, in which he extends his fingers – weak still despite their healed wounds – towards the very water which clings to her shoulder. There are glinting marks there, some half-scaled beauty, and he moves slow enough for her to vanish into the depths if she wishes. 

She does not move – only watches him nearer with a stillness so harrowingly unnatural. 

His fingertips brush her shoulder, so very cool to the touch; enough so, such a respite from the beating oppression of the midday sun, that Jace lets some strangled breath loose from his throat, a half-relief at the sensation of cooled, glinting flesh so sweet against his burning palm. 

She, in turn, leases a short inhale, chilling enough to send ridges of thrill across his bare spine. The noise which leaves her is none he has known of man nor beast; a sound of glistening shores and soaring seas, of sunkissed reaches and tidepools swirling in slow wakes. 

A jolt from his touch, swallowed of regret and instead burgeoned by a sharp motion, her fingers perhaps tightening somewhere below the greened depths of the mirrored sky. Glossed lips then tremble, eyes flicking to his and down to the slip of wood which separates his warm shoulder from her sea. 

“I’ve brought you something,” she says gently, and when her elbows beach themselves as they had yesterday upon the edge of his raft, he finds her palms abound with bounty. 

In one hand comes a small, dripping bundle of greenery – dark fronds and pale, tender shoots which look as though they sprouted from some moonlit cavern far beneath the waves; in the other she bears a cluster of oysters and other mollusks, their shells slick with salt and glinting beautifully in the sun’s breath. 

Jacaerys watches in startled awe as she lays them before him upon the raft, visage painted with some odd, nearly unnatural shyness about her. His lips part, though the tearing, churning hunger persists violently within his stomach; she offers food to him now, as she keeps him alive and afloat. “You must eat.” 

Her voice is a sound which bubbles gently against the lapping of water over her elbows, bare skin warmed only by the sun. 

Jacaerys does not waste a moment more. 

It is an effort, indeed, to rise himself to his elbows; hauling himself upon rippling, quivering muscles into a position where he might grasp the kelp and seaweed by the handfuls and tear at their stringy flesh with his teeth. He eats them handful by starving handful. 

A savage, he must be; for he does not so much as turn his mind over as he swallows the pale stalks tasting of pepper and brine, nor do his lashes flutter in the slightest when she bends her head and, with the sharp glint of nails he hardly glances, pries open the shells one by one. 

The meat of them lie glistening and large, singing with a gentle grace of saviour to his ears as he finishes the greenery in mere minutes. 

Her nails, nearly claws, rip through shell seams as though they’re merely sheaths of parchment; the sound of it sends shivers through him and goosepimples along his flesh, lets his voice splinter in a half-moan of hunger as she pierces into them as though shell and flesh alike are no obstacle to her will. 

In her clutch comes the first scallop, offered to his lips. 

He eats from her grasp as though he has not tasted food in weeks, perhaps longer; he tears at the meat with a hunger never felt before, brine running down his chin and slpping onto his chest. Still he scarcely pauses, too ravenous to care for such things as propriety, and all the while two glinting eyes watch him with such concentration it nearly feels like a touch. 

For a long while they remain suspended between sea and sky as the prince gathers strength one careful mouthful at a time; the siren only lingers beside the raft, elbows anchored lightly upon the weathered timber. The tide whispers in patient breaths as sunlight wanders across the waves, reaching her face and fracturing into shifting gold upon her damp skin. 

“Gods,” his voice nearly cracks only once the remains of broken shells and the trails of oysterjuice track down the sun-browed skin of his chest. His finger graces over the oystershell nearest his knee as he half-sits, energized from the sustenance. “Thank you.” 

She smiles at this; a bizarre yet gentle thing, just a breath away, with her own elbows perched upon the raft. His fingers brush the shell again, tracing the smooth curve worn soft by the endless overchurn of the sea. 

“It is a shame,” he finds himself murmuring absently, “that there was no pearl within.” With his words come a strange bashfulness, an emotion so foreign upon him that he’s struck to hear it at all. There is little left of the prince in his voice now; Only a boy adrift upon broken wood, speaking to a creature who should belong only to nightmares. “I would have had something to give you in return.”

A dip of brows upon her ethereal visage; an expression enough to rouse a dusting of heat to his cheeks. 

“We give pearls as gifts,” he explains quietly, watching the blank confusion linger across her countenance. “To those who are…special.” The words catch faintly, tumbling in sheer awkwardness as he wonders faintly if the fever ever truly left his mind. “I suppose it is not the same for your kind.” 

The sea dips them; her coiled hair, shining with the remnants of the deep, curls over the broken timber where the ship’s remains have since become the expanse of this strange world. His hand rests near it, close enough that the strands occasionally brush against his fingers when the sea moves. 

She stares at him, always so watchful; Even as saltwater slips over her lashes and gathers upon her gleaming eyes, she does not blink.

“Have you gifted pearls before, my Prince?”

Heat touches his face, caught entirely unprepared. He looks away with a faint, embarrassed breath that might have once belonged to some other boy – some boy who’d not fallen from the sky, nor stared at the starry sea of death and found a woman waiting beneath the waves.

“No,” his voice is far softer than he’d endeavored. “I’ve not.” 

This, it seems, affects her. A strange flicker warms her expression, fleeting as first light of dawn; not human, but recognizable in itself as Jace watches her lashes dip over her pearled eyes. Shyness, he thinks wondrously. A creature who could drag ships beneath the waves and rip men open whole; and she is shy. 

I’ve gone mad, he thinks, and the vision of her is so impossible under the midday sun that he nearly smiles. The sea rocks them gently upon the raft, the movement drawing her hair away from her shoulders which gather sunlight in soft, golden sighs; Jacaerys realizes he’s been staring for farr too long and casts his gaze upward, half-closing his eyes to feel the sun true and warm upon his countenance once more. 

For some time, they remain like this: the prince regaining his strength, the siren floating beside the raft, the smell of the seabreeze between; The water whispers around them in secret sounds, and when Jacaerys tips his gaze to levy her once more, he finds the sunlight trembling over her features, rendering her unreal in the golden shimmer of warmth. At last, very quietly, he speaks.

“You are quite kind, I think.”

The words seemed to startle her even more than his touch had; her eyes dart, skittish things, from his propped elbow and down towards some unseeing depths which linger far beneath them. Still, he continues. “You saved me. You healed me, fed me.”

Marked by the silence of the sea, Jacaerys lets his head fall back to hang upon a stretched neck, exposing his throat to the open air, to the sun, to the salt; there is a prickling awareness there, of her gaze upon the pulse beneath his flesh, though he does not, for once, return her stare. 

“If you mean to drag me beneath the waves one day,” he continues – and he is mad, surely, for there is now a faint, unsteady amusement in the curve of his mouth, “then perhaps I am a fool.” 

He glances back toward her to find surprise glinting so slight and fleeting over her visage; a small trace of humor lingering in her own curve of cheek.  

He shrugs, a half-boyish thing belonging to another lifetime. “But you are kind nonetheless.”

The silence which follows swallows; it is full of her watching, and of the sea breathing around them. Kind, that word conjured once more – she acts as though perhaps she’s unfamiliar; As though no one has ever looked upon her and chosen any name but monster.

Then, for the first time since he had seen her rise from the depths of the murkiness the night past, she truly looks away – and before he can ask what he has done, she slips beneath the surface entirely. 

The water closes over her, merely a shadow of shoulder and hair lingering like shadow before it is all swallowed by the blue – a final glimmer of silver follows, that glint of treasured coin; and then she is gone. She leaves behind only the trembling of ripples and the bright, indifferently gilded sunlight scattered across the vast expanse of sea, a blinding thing now that there is no beauty to obstruct its harshness. 

The tide shifts beneath his raft, and for the first time since he fell into the water, Jacaerys is well and truly alone.

HIS SIREN, SHY AS SHE MIGHT BE, RETURNS WITH THE SUN THE NEXT DAY. 

And, indeed, the same time the day following. Habit grows within this drifting life so quietly that Jacaerys notices it not until it has rooted itself far within him; for three days pass in the very same rhythm, churning with the slow grace of heat and then chill, shivering and sweltering, some warmth in his skin which bleeds not and sheds not but always persists in hunger, if not for sustenance than company, or its more wretched and unknown twin. 

The sea becomes his tell of time; tides mark the hours better than bells ever had, and somewhere in those long hours between sunset and moonrise, she always appears. 

Sometimes he finds her instantly; that coy shape glittering in sharp glints beneath dark water, silvered scales catching and vanishing amongst the waves. Sometimes she watches him first, a sensation which comes to him as a strange awareness upon the nape of his neck and deep below his stomach, lingering as though some odd thing awaits for him across the water. 

Always, though, she brings him food. Bounties of shellfish, mollusks, fish gleaming like polished coin, strange seafruits and vegetation which taste of figs and peppers and salt and brine; once she returns with an odd brown-haired hard shell, which contains within it not only a sweetly hardened white fruit but also water – a sugary kind, which drips itself across his thirsted flesh and dries tacky until the next morning he wakes to his skin laved fresh and clean once more. 

There are many things he learns during this time. Most of all, he learns that questions mean very little to her; and answers, perhaps, mean even less. 

When he asks how far they are from land, one morning as the sun rises soft and pale over the endless blue, she only tilts her head. “The sea touches many lands,” she provides in response, a notion which is incredibly uneasy as it is exacerbating. Jacaerys discovers then that the creatures of the sea do not measure distance as men do; They do not count leagues or days or the fading hope of a distant horizon finally appearing, for the ocean is no obstacle to them, but a home.

There are other times in which her companionship is close as he can remember to any other; She learns of him through the little movements of his human visage – captured things, the pull of amusement at his lips and the lowering of sadness at his eyelids. He catches her watching him often, studying these small betrayals of emotion; One afternoon, as the sun dances upon her bared back, she attempts to replicate his amusement upon her own ethereal reflection. 

A near imitation of a smile grows too intentional and solemn, reflecting a study of joy yet not yet a true wielder of it in the flesh. The sight pulls a laugh from him, boyishly bright, doubling him from the waist in amusement. 

She, at his outburst, reflects a ture smile – not forced or painted but merely grown of inordinate pride that she might create something so bright within him. It is the first instance, perhaps of many, in which he finds himself watching her lips with a very specific intention of curiosity. 

Days pass, or weeks; Time behaves strangely upon the sea, and he watches suns rise and fall, tides come and go, no stretch of land or ship or life in any distance. 

THough each day and evening she returns, and eventually he learns the sound of what passes for a name amongst her kind. It is a sequence of beautiful notes which his human throat cannot wholly reproduce; and each time he attempts it, she only laughs, a sound somehow more beautiful than what she is called, and it rises and falls like water spilling through caverns. Eventually, with some fond exasperation, she allows him a shortened thing, a simpler name which his tongue can manage. In return, she learns his; and she calls him Jacaerys in that watery lilt of hers, so low and fresh and pulling. 

One night, as she brings him a supper of squid and weeded sea, she requests something of him in return. 

“Tell me of your kind.”

He looks up from the small task of fastening reeds and torn netting together, a distraction made for himself to tear his eyes away, for at least a moment, from her cloyingly alluring countenance. His nose scrunches against sun-kissed freckles, tipping his head. “Men, you mean?” 

Her tresses are floating tendrils in the near-dead sun, so different from their glimmer of day, and he watches in entrancement as she shakes her head; Another human instinct she’d learned from him in days past. “Your kind,” she repeats, coming closer to the raft. He no longer recoils at her proximity; now, when she approaches, his first instinct is dizzying anticipation instead of fear. “The ones whose blood tastes of fire.”  

His stomach finds a chill at her words, though he only leans back upon calloused palms and glances up and the nail-sliver of moon peeking through bruise-crushed curtains of sky. 

He tells her, then, of Old Valyria; of dragons filling the sky and empires of families, the dredges left of them who crossed both Doomed ash-shores and poisoned seas, carrying the last embers of a dying civilization. When he thinks he’s finished, or that she might tire of his voice, she only asks more – starry eyed and curious, leaning her head against the wood and asking how it feels to fly upon the sky. 

It’s only after the sheer blackness of night has found the sea that he speaks of Dragonstone. He murmurs of his own family, too; he tells her of soaring towers black as dragonglass and fields of lurching green which become swallowed up by jagged volcanic breath, of his mother and the war in her name. He whispers of his Usurper uncle; of Luke and Arrax – and that is when words truly start to tremble. He does not realize he weeps until he tastes the salt of them, until she lifts a cool finger to wipe them away and taste them instead upon her own tongue. 

He whispers the rest – of Meleys and her rider; then of Vermax and of the end in the Gullet. And when he finishes, she remains silent for a long while.

Her voice comes in the watery traces of a whisper. “You have been lonely.” 

He does not respond to her. 

He couldn’t have, even if he’d wished to; there are truths too large for the mouth to carry, and this is one of them. 

So he turns his face away, letting his gaze drift over the restless dark of the sea, over the silvered shiver of moonlight trembling upon the water’s skin. But she has watched him long enough to understand despite this, and the glint of her is dimmed under the blackness of the sky, that mirrored world broken only by her sweet form half in the glassy depths. 

“I have sisters,” she says then. “I know I’ve spoke of them to you before.” 

And though she’d indeed mentioned it days past, still it is odd to think a woman like her – if she is to be labeled such a thing, so swathed in tide and shadow – might have a family at all; His eyes find her and try to conjure the thought of a life down below. Within him he finds something curious and tender. “Do you have many?” he asks, because it is the easiest of his questions.  

She nods, a spill of hair along her shoulders. “Yes.” 

“How many?” he asks then, shifting upon the raft to lie closer along the edge, his bared shoulders freckled even beneath moonlight, their faces so very close. 

And so with a dip of her chin, she tells him in turn of the hundreds of sisters which live down in the depths, of the Mother-sister which birthed them and watches them, and of the ribbed-world of bleached bone and darkness which she came from. He asks her of her childhood, and of her people; and when she gives him all in kind, he finds himself pondering – with a distant recall of dragonseeds and countless nameless silver-haired visitors to the island – how abundance itself can be another kind of exile.

ON THE EVENING FOLLOWING, SHE COMES TO HIM WOUNDED.

He had waited for her through the expanse of the day. It was a strange thing, he thinks now, how he had once every morning begun with thoughts of war and strategy, of what ravens might arrive and what battles might be waiting beyond the horizon. Now, he wakes with the sun and listens for the sound of water changing. 

He’d fashioned something resembling a task for himself; a crude thing, a boy’s invention against the endless boredom alone at sea; With reeds and pieces of his torn trousers and the remnants of salvaged seanet, he has rigged a small tether, a foolish little snare which occasionally lures fish close enough for him to catch if his hands are quick and his luck is kinder. Still; after exhausting himself upon the empty bounty of fish his game provided him, he’d waited for her for far too long. 

When she comes, it is in the glint of moonlight which catches red upon the curve of skin, and his heart thuds once within the cave of his chest when he finds the long, horrid lacerations crossing one shoulder like clawmarks across her flesh. 

“What did that?” he asks her sharper than intended. She only watches him; She has brought him a handful of shells, gathered carefully in her torn and bloodied fingers, a sight which churns painfully in his chest. She has come to him injured, and still carrying gifts. “Are you all right?” he attempts again, kinder this time. 

It is silent for far too long as she dips her head, working open the few shells for him with jagged nails, which he takes hungrily, though not distracted enough to forgive the strained stiffness of her normally voracious movements. At length her voice comes in a quiet tense, low as a groan. 

“My sisters are displeased.” 

It is enough for Jacaerys to study her, those lacerations and such sweet skin ripped apart, and understand enough that the wounds have something to do with him and, indeed, with the food she brings to the surface each turn of sun. Perhaps, too, with the sheer notion that he still breathes at all. 

“Because of me,” he whispers, and she says naught but a small trembling sigh; though when his knuckles raise to tenderly trace along the marred flesh of her shoulder, she does not turn away. A churn of water, she keens to his touch, coming nearer until and she is close enough to drop a weary, shivering cheek upon the cloth of his thigh. Heat burns there, roving from the seeping chill of her bare cheek upon his pant. She gazes up at him once more from his lap, a reflective but morose thing, as though she doesn’t quite understand why he sees her suffering as so horrible; as though perhaps it is merely the price of wanting something and keeping it. 

He whispers to her then, when she asks – tales of Princely youth and sailing upon the sea with his father; and she whispers quietly of her own life, of the schools of fish which keep her company and guide her to the most treasurous depths of the sea. 

And that night, after she leaves, he lies awake and watches the stars. 

They are cruel things, stars – so beautiful and yet unreachable. And the songs, as they always do, begin sometime past the hour of Ghosts, reaching him across the water from the odd-hazed distance; the song of her sisters, he’s come to understand. He lies upon his raft and wonders if she will return tomorrow – and then, if she might one day decide he is no longer worth the trouble, worth her pain.

He thinks then of his mother, and of Dragonstone, and all those who must believe him dead; who have likely carried on in the war that he has so reluctantly left behind. 

And beneath it all, in that endless sky of stars, there remains one true wish upon his tongue: that his siren might come back unharmed.

TWO DAYS PAST, AT THE EDGE OF THE BAT’S HOUR, SHE FINALLY RETURNS TO HIM. 

She reveals to him in a depth of shimmer, dancing upon a surface of purple and orange which streaks his tanned skin and curls his hair with salt and warmth, still in the early eve of the day. Water warms him; the sunset bleeds crimson across the horizon and Jacaerys sits at the edge of the wreckage with both legs dangled within the sea. 

She surfaces soundlessly between his knees, an appearance so sudden he nearly startles back; with a glint of amusement she stares, brows ticking upwards in an impossibly human expression. Jacaerys, warmed through his unease shock, lets his lips curl in a fond relief. 

In an urge so boyish; a thing laced with sheer hope and solace, he forgets himself and, indeed, the weakened state in which she’d appeared to him two long nights past. 

“Hoping to drown yourself?” he jests before he remembers himself. 

She – having since learned the human habit of jesting and recently found herself one for the same sharp wit he often bears – only tips her glinting, glimmering eyes skyward in a roll of vexation, a thing she’s also long learned from him to do. 

“I cannot drown,” she chides, voice like seafoam, amusement leaked so warmly through her mouth that he nearly forgets the glint of teeth which live just beyond those sweet lips. 

“No,” he, solace at last to have his siren returned unharmed, only smiles. “I suppose you cannot.” 

Her hands settle upon the timber, mere breaths from the outer line of his thighs as he leans back upon palms to regard her fully. “Are you well?” He wonders – and then, with a faint heat upon his cheeks that grows not only due to the dying sun, “I worried for you.” 

It casts something bright upon her eyes and twitches the coltish smile which belies her lips; and the shimmering is there once more, so evergreen in her beauty as she pushes only closer to him, her cheek ghosting that giving fabric which clothes his inner knee. 

For a moment he merely gazes down upon her visage, raining with beauty and dripping still with that unsettling stillness. Her eyes glint only faintly in the dying day, so beautifully lit between his thighs. 

“You should come in,” she says in response. 

To this, Jacaerys laughs. It is not the first offer; indeed it is a thing she’s supplied in more than a handfuls – when the sun reached its blistering peak and he winced at the searing upon his flesh, when the moon made whatever hides below her hips in the depths glow, even when the breath of conversation dwindled in the easy laze of the heat, the water so inviting as it kissed over her skin. 

And Jacaerys might, these days, be a mindsick – or lovesick – fool; but still, he knows better. 

“You hide it well,” he murmurs, only partial in his jest though some lace in the back of his mind truly yearns to yank himself from the pull of those depths, to coil away in fear of the creature between his legs. “But you cannot trick me, siren.” 

She does not particularly enjoy the name; though still she only tilts her head, a coy thing he resents only so far as it makes the urge to slip into the water even stronger, to feel her skin between the warmth of the water and his own salted skin, cooled by the depths below. 

“I only wish for you to join me,” the words rise from her with the hush of tidewater slipping through black stone, soft and inexorable, the sea itself speaking so longingly through her mouth.

There is little mirth in the laugh he gives once more. He mirrors the tilt of her head boyishly, curls tangling with lashes. “And be dragged into the depths?”

The levied gaze upturned against the glint of dying day did not waver from his visage; in the dimming light her eyes held such strange, fathomless brightness, submerged stars peering at him through leagues of darkened water. “ I would not drag you.” 

It is so sweet, the lie; and perhaps it is not inherently such a thing, but instead borne from those odd, coiling natures which juxtapose your very being – to tear flesh and to soothe it, to lave upon fear and to charm it away. She is kind, and she is, despite it all, sweet – though yet, Jacaerys remains uneager to discover yet whether her self restraint survives immersion into the sea. 

Nonetheless, he cannot help his faint tick of a grin, amused perhaps only at the absurdity of it all. 

“I am not eager to test your limits,” he confesses. 

A ribboned smile, lurking against the water as her hands grasp the wood beside his knees. Something in the depths brushes his ankle; boot against something stronger, faint and fluttering though still startling enough to ridge his bare spine. She hums. “Do you think so little of me, Jacaerys?”

It is a song, to hear his name from such lips. The sea rocks impatiently, and he feels the leverage of his hips tilt just so against the tides. She rocks with them, a gentle flow that splays tendrils of hair across bare shoulders, glimpses of sweet skin lower than his eyes dare dip. “I think,” he says with a wettened lip, “you have already admitted to dragging men beneath the waves.” 

She finds amusement in this, it seems, and she gives a small tilt of head. “Men.” Such emphasis comes with a tightened flutter across his chest, and his brow lifts, emboldened so as to lean forward until their breaths meet the same stretch of salted air. 

“Am I no man to you?” he wonders. 

Her eyes, those unblinking lives of dying stars through the last breath of day, flare with some kind of heat from the expiring sun. “You’re far more than that.” 

In her wake washes aboard his wooden raft a fresh kiss of sea, straining her bare chest against the expanse of plank between his thighs; the movement is a gentle rocking, though it brings them keenly close, so close indeed that Jacaerys is rendered dizzied by the sweet smell of her once more, of the cloying honesty in those deepened, reflective eyes. 

Jacaerys has lived a life told of titles and beings; prince, son, rider, piece upon the board of kings and queens, bastard and heir, all of the muddled things which lie between old bloodlines indistinguishable from myth. 

He watches that myth now, splayed before him, and silently marvels at her tangibility. So he says her name, her common-tongued name, and tips his head boyishly. “You say such strange things,” he murmurs. 

Her head tilts in a mirror, one which makes his heart skip over itself faintly, the lick of warm sea against his knees lapping over the salted air. Her skin glows under the red-streaked sun, a thing of marvel and unconfounded beauty. “As do you, prince.”

A laugh escapes him, bubbled from the space between them as it rocks, the sea yearning for the two hearts which beat not together nor on the same natural track but instead in some odd counterbeat of each other; and Jacaerys lets the water dip him forward just so, enough to see the iridescent lines shimmering upon her cheeks. Her face is so very pure in the setting death of sun. 

He tips his head sidelong, somewhat intrigued by her words. “And what strange things have I said to you?”

She, who never blinks, is overcome with some minute breath of shyness, a mirror memory of nights before, and her gaze drops to the fire-streaked water before looking to him once more. “You call me kind.”

Of all things, the prince thinks; Of all the impossible, absurd madman things she has witnessed him do: speak of dragons, bleed upon the sea, command her to rise from the depths as though he still possessed a court and the shadow of a crown to succeed – this is what remains with her.

“You find that so strange?” he shakes his head faintly, letting his lip lift slightly. “You have spent every day proving it.”

She says nothing; The silence between them is no longer the terrible silence of their first meeting, for it is now laced through with those more sweet things, a vulnerability shared through salt-laced glances and small smiles.  

“You healed me,” he continues quietly when her voice still shies away from sound. “When there was no reason to. And you fed me when your own kind would sooner have fed upon me. You listen when I speak, though I imagine my life must sound terribly unexciting beside yours.” 

This, at last, coaxes a small curve of glossed lip to her visage. 

His smile is slight, too, though still he continues. “And when I grieve...” He lowers his eyes toward the darkening glass slipping between the broken planks, thinking of ancient wings and smoldering waters. “...you still care, even if my troubles seem so minute to you.” 

The sea breathes around them in spilling sighs of waves; She studies him with that unnerving patience once more, until she asks, in a voice so soft he almost mistakes it for the tide, “is that truly kindness?”

His brow knits, struck at once by both her honest bewilderment and, too, her capacity for tenderness. The breath which slips his lips is one of wonder.  “What else would it be?”

Her gaze drifts beyond him, toward the place where the sun has nearly drowned itself beneath the world’s edge, and her head tilts in that learned habit, a small mirror of his own. 

“My sisters sing until men forget they are afraid. And then they feed.” she says after a long while. Her fingers trail idly through the water, and the sea bends around them as though eager for the touch. “When I first saw you upon your beast,” Her eyes lift to meet his once more, startlingly bright. “I thought I might do the same.” 

His heartbeat stumbles; a thought which should bring terror but, in its absence, only reminds him how very alive he still is. She speaks before he can dare. 

“I do not know why I did not.” A draw comes upon her brow, a tremble of her lips. “I only know that when you sleep...” she murmurs, almost wonderingly, “...I do not wish to leave you.” Her fingers curl and he watches them catch upon the pearl of sea. “When you laugh, I wish to hear it again, and when you hurt...” Her voice catches upon something. “...There is… pain in me, also.” A shake of tresses, bewildered. “I have never known that before.”

A burgeoning warmth spreads across the very fibers of his being. The last breath of day lingers across the water between them, red as banked embers beneath ash, and Jacaerys stares at the woman who saved his life, wondering how she has gone a whole life without ever hearing a gentle name spoken of herself.  

“I should think,” he says softly, scarcely above the whisper of the tide, “that whatever name your sisters would give such a feeling…” His heart skips its own beat within his chest, watching how her eyes dance with the light of late eve, “…among my people, we would simply call it affection.”

The evening deepens around them; she does not respond but instead leans closer to him, just slightly so, her bared beauty brought higher momentarily. The sun has nearly swallowed itself unto the horizon, leaving only the last remnants of gold bleeding beneath the line between sky and sea; the water beneath his knees is dark and glassy, reflecting the first early stars as they begin to appear one by one. 

“Affection,” she repeats, a sweet thing from lips so parted, wondering. Warmth spreads boyishly across Jacaerys’ visage, and he only nods gently. 

It is this very moment that she chooses to spill her grace onto the palms steadying her between his legs; he watches her rise higher from the sea, arching until the water gives way to the scaled glow beginning below her hips. 

Early moonlight pours over her as though it has waited all evening for this very purpose; and his gaze follows the hush of young moon over the sky of deepening violet, tracing how beauty glows through the curve of her breasts as she breathes shakily in the salted air. Lower still, with heated cheeks, his eyes fall – down where human shape surrenders into luminous impossibility. 

He must have stared too long, for her mouth parts in a chilling breath. “You stare at me often, Jacaerys.” 

“You are difficult not to.” It comes from his lips with no such reservation of courtly politeness nor intent to charm; it is a simply known truth, one he’d likely repeat with each breath, if she so wished to hear. “Surely, you know such things.” 

Seabreeze breathes the wet strands of her hair in damp kisses across her cheek; the sea rocks gently beneath them as though to lull him closer – though he needs no more encouragement than the sight of her alone.  

“I truly wish you would come in,” she chides, and her voice – a thing nearly lost beneath the hush of the water and the gentle streaks of dead sun; a confession of sorts, some private form of longing which spills from glossed lips into the air of hunger between them. 

Her breath ghosts upon his cheek as she leans impossibly closer between his thighs. “Though, I suppose I must come to you instead, prince of the sky.” 

A quiet smile ghosts across his mouth, a jilted thing borne from nerves and, perhaps, fate; If such there is a thing. And there, beneath the youngest stars of the sea’s early night – after days of floating in the wide expanse of nothing – he kisses her. 

Her lips are cool as water beneath shade; rainfall upon fevered skin, and from sugary lips comes the faintest breath of her surprise. She presses against him with an eagerness bolstered by uneven weight, a lamb unstable upon fresh legs, some sweet hunger that calls to him louder than the songs of her sisters which have already begun to leak over the surface of the horizon. 

Lips shift, sliding salty and sweetened with hunger. The raft shifts beneath them at her eager lurch; Jacaerys’ hand comes to steady himself upon the wood as his hips cant, slipping further towards the edge of that abyssal water, and still he does not resist, he merely lets his other palm, the one so hungrily pressed to the flesh of her collarbone, slide upon wet skin. Her own ripple upwards like waves upon shores, threading like rivulets through his curls and the other casting her chilled palm over the warmth of his pounding bare chest. Webbed, he thinks faintly, as her fingers splay over his skin; The stars above seem to tremble upon the water in her rippling wake as she presses closer still. 

Tongues prod and slide, a slow dance neither is particularly familiar with though the beat alone brings them closer, breaths melting into soft sighs and gentle hiccups of need. Her lips are of brine and sweet seafruit, and he finds himself insatiable to the taste. 

His hand, hungry and of its own mind, slides past supple flesh; he squeezes only where her sighs come out with faint sounds of enticement – exploring where the deepest keening of her throat meet his own, whilst her own exploration tugs at his scalp and grasps sharply at his warm skin. Hunger and that deeper urge mix deliciously within the basest instincts of his manhood; though his hand pauses at the place where her skin changes, where the familiar ends and the sea wholly begins. Perhaps, days ago, he’d have recoiled at such a sensation – though the man he is now only feels wonder. 

And so he pulls her closer, close enough to taste the brightness of her tongue, so cool and familiar in his memories of his bloodied flesh, so hungered and placant still. And when she pulls back, hardly enough to breathe, her forehead presses cool against his. 

“You taste of fire,” she whispers, a trembling and insatiable thing. 

A smile touches his mouth, and he imagines she can feel it all upon her own lips. “And you of salt.”

For the first time, she laughs against his mouth; and the sea, ancient and endless, carries the sound away. 

JACAERYS IS NOT LOOKING WHEN THE WORLD RETURNS. 

Indeed – as has become the quiet habit of these strange and borrowed days – his gaze has long since abandoned the horizon in favour of the creature beside him. The world has narrowed these days to a single pair of luminous eyes and a curve of shoulder which rises with the tide; to the silvered wake she leaves whenever she slips, laughing, beneath the glassy panes of water and vanishes into whatever hidden depths lie beneath the waves. He watches her instead, the compass by which all mornings begin and all nights fall. 

Seamist sighs over the Narrow Sea in wandering veils, drifting along the horizon and stitching the heavens to the waters with threads of pearl; The sun has drowsily set itself an ascent, still seeping pale across the panes of water, when she grows suddenly still.

“What is it?” He inquires, voice still syrupy with the dredges of sleep. He lies upon the swollen and salt-rotted board, one arm draped lazily over the edge of the raft, fingers absently threaded through the cool silk of her hair so unable to ever fully dry from the cloying breath of sea. 

She does not look at him, nor answer; a glossed gaze remains fixed upon the immeasurably distant horizon. Perhaps, if he were not drunk with the drowsiness of morning laze and early heat – if he’d not given up the hope of such sights days ago – he’d have turned and looked with her. 

Only after so long a silence that he almost repeats himself do her lips part.

“Land.”

This, indeed, sobers the prince entirely. He rises at once, the raft pitching beneath him as he lurches quickly upon one knee. Fingers, still caught amongst her hair, loosen hurriedly lest he pull her with him; He shades his eyes against the low morning light. 

Afar stretches the same rolling sea, thick with mist and silent as a phantom, that horrible blue which has swallowed days and weeks from his life. His eyes strain, a sharp sting of salt and sun, though still he soon makes it out.

It’s a far distant thing – far beyond the rolling waves, hardly more than a shadow painted against the morning; despite such meager an observation, Jacaerys lets out a breath through laced teeth. A miracle, a blessing answered by the gods who had watched him drown and then live in the same eve. 

How many nights had he whispered it into darkness? When his fever burned, and the sea seemed endless, when the empty sky swallowed the empty sea and rocked him, lonely and stranded, in a cold nothingness. 

Land.

For the first time in what could be weeks, or months – or perhaps merely some strange lifetime lived entirely between one sunrise and the next – Jacaerys feels the world opening again, yawning back into a wide berth of cliffs and coves and spine-ridges mountains, of valleys and lakes and beaches and forests. 

And an odd thing passes him, then. Jacaerys has now lived so long suspended in this place, so far between water and sky, between continents, between worlds; how odd to remember a life, as though peeking into a jarred, seaside old bottle-scroll of another man’s dream. 

When he lowers himself again, it is not the distant shore that once more first claims his attention. 

She has drifted nearer without his noticing, borne gently upon the breathing swell until her face nears the side of the raft, a glint of silvery tendrils curling just beneath the sun-shattered surface. His boots, which lie at the end of the disintegrating raft, dry in the early morn; she leans a cheek drowsily upon the sun-warmed wood near his knees, and he has a mind to trace the soft curve of her there, that sweet expanse of skin. Though her words come before he might even think to lift his palm. 

“I will bring you there.”

The words are gentle, and only after he takes time to study her face does he discern it: Shine glistens there, upon her cheeks – no seawater nor salted spray, but some pooling glisten of silvery glum. It pools there, clinging to her lashes for a final moment before it slips soundlessly along the delicate slope of her cheek, falling unto the weathered timber between them where it shines for one heartbeat before the thirsty wood drinks it away. Another follows, then another. She is crying.

The sight unmakes him. 

Though not one to ever endure the tears of any woman so disheartened, this proves impossibly more grievous: This creature of the deep, born of sea and darkness, who he once believed belonged only in stories meant to frighten babes – weeps now with all the helplessness of any mortal girl. The tears which fall from her eyes catch the light of morning; pieces of the moon itself, dissolving upon her skin.

A man at his very core, his words come foolish, perhaps. “Why do you weep?” His hand rises to instinctively brush away the shining path glittering beneath her eye. 

“It is foolish,” she murmurs, a thing so nearly human that Jace forgets himself; wrought, momentarily, with visions of some garden back on his Island, of curling tresses and sweet fruits and quiet whispers and gentle laughter. 

“You’re no fool,” he insists with a whisper of her name, quiet as the waves coaxing them closer to that distant promise on the horizon. Jacaerys soothes beneath her eye as one rescues dew from the petal of a flower; his signet glinting upon his thumb though he possesses neither dragon nor kingdom here. Touch has grown familiar now, a thing he’s been gifted to explore for the better of four passed days together, natural as the sunrise. 

“There are those who still wait for me,” he says quietly, a sprout of hope tugging at his chest at his own words; and though her visage remains sweet as the sunlight, lashes tangle and loosen a small wave of silvered sorrow onto the wood. He leans upon elbow now, so close he might feel her chilled breath upon his own lips. “My mother, m-my family, my people, my… my home.” 

At this, her eyes flutter open, kind as she is understanding. “You belong to the land, Jacaerys.” her lips wilt with the beautiful breath of shared sorrow. “I have long known this.” 

He, unable to help himself, searches her face; a twinge of desperation, that old thing, tugs within his chest. His eyes sting. “And you?” 

A curious sadness enters her expression then, a flicker of some emotion Jacaerys thinks is, perhaps, not fully known to man. She says nothing again, and in this silence, his gaze flickers toward the scars that still cross her shoulder – though the wounds have begun to close beneath whatever strange grace lives within her blood, they remain angry against her skin. 

The sea moves around them and it churns restless, unhappy; dangerous as the land in the distance, roving and hungry as those ancient creatures who lie in wait, far beneath. His lips part in a horrible fear. “Your sisters.” 

At the flinch of her visage, he only cradles her further in his palm, tipping his face to find her gaze watery, silvered even in the breath of morning. His own gaze swims with tears. “Will they hurt you, for what you’ve done?” 

Her gaze remains on his, and the reflection of them brings a small mirror of his own sorrow. “There will be no place beneath the water for me as there was before,” she breathes, as though exile is merely another current she must learn to swim against. “Though I knew this the moment I chose to take you.” 

The words ache all through his marrow, coiling tenderly in the notches where once arrows had struck through him. She speaks of it as though kindness is a betrayal; some selfish thing instead of the most selfless thing a creature might ever do.

It is a horrible moment in which Jacaerys looks toward the distant shore, voice imbued once more with the memory of smoke and fire, of burning ships and dragons swooping from clouds. A lifetime, it seems, has passed. 

He takes her hand, that webbed softness which boasts tender flesh and frilled wonders of silver, and when she takes him in kind, the feeling is still just as strange and wonderful as the first time he felt her under his palm. 

“I cannot remain upon the sea forever,” he says. “There is a war waiting for me. A life.” The taste of salt upon his lip; in the distance, a swooping shadow dives toward the pane of sea, and Jacaerys sees the first gull he’s seen in days. “But..” he murmurs, and a faint smile touches his lips. “There could be a life waiting for you, too.” 

There is some gleam in her eye, a terribly sad thing. Her cheek lifts from the wood to near his own visage, sweet and chilled by the breath though none the less warm in her unending kindness. 

Her lips curve into a watery smile. “You promise impossible lives, Prince Jacaerys.” 

“I promise the only one I possess.” He only pulls her closer, lifting her hand between both of his. "Dragonstone rises from the sea; Every stone of it knows the tide. If there is a place in this world where sea and fire have ever learned to live beside one another…” His smile, though weary and water-laced, has found him at last. “...Surely it is there.” 

Hope is perhaps too dangerous a thing for a creature such as her to possess. He wonders, fleetingly, whether she has ever known it at all. She looks at him then, and he finds not hope within her gaze but something gentler, infinitely sadder: the aching desire to believe him, shining there with its silvery terrible nakedness. Very quietly, she asks, “And if the sea wishes for me back?” 

Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers, and her skin carries with it the scent of salt and deep places untouched by sun. His own lashes flutter shut. 

“Then it may ask.” A faint shake of his head, voice scarcely stirring the morning seabreeze. “It has taken enough from me.” 

He feels the tremble of something across her lips; and then, before the shore can steal another heartbeat from them, she rises just enough for her lips to find his. 

He turns instinctively to meet her, his mouth yielding beneath the cool sweetness of hers, tasting of salt and seafruits and sweet residual of those peculiar sweetwater shells. Her hand comes to rest against his chest, splayed lightly over the place where once an arrow had sought his heart; his own disappears into the silken weight of her hair, drawing her nearer. A sighing thing, the sea, as it lifts their joint mouths and sways Jacaerys closer still to the depths she hales. Wood sighs beneath their joint weight, small waves claiming its splintered sides; the morning is still, water softly hushing around them. There are no birds in the sky. 

Jacaerys thinks, for a moment, that if the world were to end now, it would do so quite gently.

WHEN LAND FINALLY CLOSES AROUND THE RAFT, IT SWALLOWS THEM WITH A FUNEREAL QUIET. 

In the very last stretch of current, spurred by both tide and whatever ethereal tail lies below her hips, the sea narrows gradually; great walls of black stone rise from either side as they float nearer to the shore, until the open world is swallowed behind them into a small opening, a breath of sunlight through the keyhole of some grand door. Jace sits upon the wreckage, watching the horizon as that endless breathing vastness that had carried them for so many days retreats into a distant strip of silver; When the land swallows the last of the abyssal sky, he is finally welcomed by the first breath of shaded light he has felt in what might be ages.

It is a balm to his being. 

An old-born tyrant, weeks beneath the sun’s gaze has tanned and chapped him; Salt lives in every crease of him, wind has carved into his bones. A sigh of seeping shade crossing overhead, the looming shadows of the cliffs are cool, rich with the scent of stone and moss, and Jace draws a breath so deep it begins to ache in those places where the arrows once lived.

Passing into the mouth of a cave the size of a small ship, the rock shoots high overhead, blacker than any rock he’s yet to see in his three-and-twenty years; The slate slices sharp from the water, scarred and riddled with smaller caves whose mouths yawn open toward an emptier abyss further within the dark. Some are no larger than doorways, though others crack open high to the heavens, large enough to swallow entire fleets. 

Jacaerys finds himself staring at their scars; the sea has gnawed these caves for a thousand years, and its teeth marks rake through sharp stone everywhere. 

Soon, the cove opens around them, and the water becomes clear; and there, so close he could perhaps dive and swim to it, the water yields to a rocked edge of beach. 

Breath catches within his throat; a stretch of black beach, soft as velvet to the eye for a slope which turns flat with slabbed black rocks, warmed by the breath of sun but cooled by the deep cavernous chill. Pools gather within them in fragments of captured sky; He looks into them and feels a tremendous relief. 

It is only then, that his gaze falls upon the bones.

Lying strewn among the rocks is a whale’s skeleton, half-entombed, the great spine twisted through the stones; ribs arch upward in weather-worn curves, bleached white as old moonbone. The wind moves through them with a hollow music, a sound so mournful it brings shivers cascading down Jacaerys’ bare spine. 

As they near the cove’s shore, there reveals more bones beyond the whale’s shattered being – and these are not the bones of beasts. With the creeping dread of a fever dream, the cave peels back its own skin: A skull half-buried in stone, empty sockets filled with shadow and crystallized salt; A yellowed hand thrust up through the earth, still crawling itself towards the spot of dripping sunlight from high above; Fragments of a spine tangled in driftwood and root. Jacaerys feels that cold thing so long past creep over his chest once more. Death has not passed through here and moved on; indeed, it has become one and the same with the cove – one with the rocks and caves and tide pools. 

His breath only ceases entirely when he finds the skeleton laid beneath the nearest cavemouth. Ribs have been forced apart; shattered not by storm nor time but instead pried wide apart with care, a doorway of the corpse, a nest. 

A gaze lies upon its mangled shape in horror as those same old stories of youth now rise in him like bile; His stomach tightens, mouth stuffed of cotton and pulse pounding within his chest. 

Nearby – scattered among the rocks as though left by pilgrims or fools, lie offerings of silvered halfgroats and Tyroshi copper, greened with age; strings of fine stones dulled by salt, salt-rotted silk, fragments of pottery, even a rusted gilded dagger. 

Jacaerys feels, once more, impossibly small upon the broken raft. How many men have stood where he stands now, trembling before the dark; How many had crossed black waters with pockets heavy from gold and bellies full of fear, believing that beauty might yet bargain with death? 

With a flick of fear, his eyes shift to the glistening clear waters. Beside him still, she watches from the shallows, and he finds that she remains beautiful as the sea when it means to kill a man; floating in the clear waters, visage kissed from pearled ripples, entirely at home among the bones as though she has spent all her life here with the dead to keep her company. Perhaps she has. 

Old as it is, still the fear returns to him, surging to his throat at the sight of the pried ribs, to the trail of finger-bones littering the nearest tidepool, to her. And, after all, Jacaerys is only a man. 

“Are you going to eat me?” His voice calls out quiet, but in the wake of silence, it rebounds through the cave – a sonorous thing, not trembling though surely frightened the same: eat me, eat me, eat me. It falls dead after its repetition, laying to his expanse of bare back a cool whistle of breeze which sets the hair upon his nape on end. 

Her eyes still in the water, as still as the day he first caught glimpse of her. What comes next is a minute shift; a fall of gaze, some learned softness drawing away as a crab takes to its shell, and the cove falls still. Even the water ceases, for a breath, its incessant lapping at the black-beached shore. 

“The death of so many suns,” comes her voice at last; a thing scarcely louder than water finding a path along the sand. “And birth of so many moons.” Her eyes lift, and within those wisps of lashes, so sweet and salt-clinging, he finds only that very moon she speaks of, reflected so deep, so sharp and luminescent. “And still, you fear my mouth.”  

Jacaerys opens his own to answer; though worse still is the breathless thievery of his chest – the lack of words which crawl to his throat yet remain perched upon his tongue. Words gather there, frightened birds against the bars of his ribs, yet refuse to fly – because he knows not what he might say. 

For he has spent weeks dying in the water with her hands upon his skin, her voice in his ears, her lips upon his own; with her keeping breath inside his ruined body. And perhaps he could tell her that still, beneath all such tenderness, a frightened boy remains – that the songs of his childhood are carved too deeply into him; that men are weak creatures who inherit fear long before they inherit wisdom. Silence answers for him instead. 

His gaze returns to her, then. 

And he finds that here, in the lucid water of the cove, nothing is so softened by darkness; the sea renders her wholly to him now, silver scales glinting as hammered mail and stitched from both woman and abyss alike. Fins, a near translucent thing, taper along the delicacy of hips and fold in the current of a dreadful languor of tail; a strong shing, a terribly powerful thing which scatters ribbons of light across the cave walls as she shifts. 

Her gaze rests upon him, so eternally unblinking, and a faint smile touches her mouth then – a smile made of frost and moonlight, beautiful and dangerous and far too sad to any longer be called kind. “I could have eaten you when your blood first touched the tide.” 

The sea stirs around her hips as she shifts. Her gaze does not leave his own. “I could have eaten you when your fever took your senses and you hardly knew your own name, when all you could do was cry out in the dark.” Tresses curl, tendrils cloying towards the edge of the wood. “I could have eaten you when I drew the wounds from your flesh and cleaned your blood.” 

Eyelashes burn as Jacaerys watches her, helplessly foolish to hois own nature; he traces how her visage shifts under the reflections of the shimmering waters. 

“I could have eaten you when you first laid your mouth on mine.” 

His breath catches in a shamed flush to his cheeks, for memory betrays him all at once: her laughter beneath the stars, the cool sweetness of her lips, the shy turn of a smile after a handful of shells were deposited upon his lap. That she should speak of it all now, with such resentful sorrow – a horrible emptiness within him gapes further. 

“But you ask now,” eyes lift to him once more, moonlit and wounded even in the light of day. “even after I have done each kind thing you once praised of me?”

Regret coils ugly within him. He lurches toward the water without thinking, knees upstable upon the disintegrating salt-logged wood. “Wait,” he calls, hand outstretching in some boyish fit of desperation, as though command might counter the hurt he’d levied. 

She only slinks away, velveted water swallowing more and more of her. 

Sorrow, that horrible thing, falls deep within him at the sight. “Please.” The word breaks from him then, raw with a desperation he cannot hide; The cliffs catch it and throw it back at him once more in a hundred dying echoes – please, please, please – the cove lamenting his grief. 

Her eyes shimmer with unspilled silver. “I know you do not wish to fear me.”

It is then that she lets herself fall back into the sea. Scarcely a small sigh of water; Jacaerys is helpless to himself as the dark swallows her, absorbing the shape of her glinting scales as completely as though she had never existed at all. 

He is left quite alone. 

Silence occupies not just the ear but his bones themselves; Jacaerys remains kneeling where she vanished for some time, a hand suspended foolishly above the water in hopes the tide might, struck by some late compassion, yet choose to return what it has taken from him. Water kisses the edges of his boots and the splintered ruin he floats upon, and only when the last warmth of day has wholly bled from the cliffs lining the mouth of the cove does he at last force himself to move.

His limbs, it seems, have long forgotten the labor of belonging to him; For weeks they had been sustained by the cool touch of her palms against burning skin in the dead of night – that curious miracle by which each waking day found him a little less dead than the evening before. 

Rising upon his feet calls forth a strength he’s not attempted in what feels like true moons. 

Boots sink into the black sand; Solid earth has haunted his prayers through endless nights upon the water, yet now it feels strangely faithless and wholly dead with its lack of sway and ease. He walks because standing still becomes unbearable in both his limbs and mind. 

Slowly the prince wanders the little cove she had chosen for him. He threads first between the vast white arches of whale skeletons; then, fingertips drift across stone polished smooth by centuries of tides. Here and there the sea has driven whole ships into the stone, timber petrified into the bones of the earth; Human skulls peer from beds of mussels, seagrass growing through the hollows of their eyes; And yet nowhere among these countless things might he find the single thing he seeks. 

In time, night paints the caves into a black mouth, moonlight catching to glow horribly upon saltbleached bones. Jacaerys could leave; There is land beneath his feet, a miracle for which he once would have traded kingdoms, and somewhere beyond these cliffs there must surely be roads or villages with harbors and living men.

He does not go.

Instead he returns to the water’s edge and lowers himself among the abyssal sand, and tells himself that he will wait only until morning, when either his siren returns or daylight might reveal some path for him inland. He makes no fire, for the darkness feels less lonely when it remains unbroken; hips upon land and back against sharp rock, Jacaerys stares at the shifting current with broken regret. 

And when dawn finally begins to silver the eastern rim of the cave, washing the black water pale as beaten steel once more, bleeding with that softened lilac, Jacaerys is still there, watching with sunscorched eyes for any hint of silver within the waves. 

JACAERYS WAKES TO COLD. 

No chill which lives in the memory of his bones – not that of blood seeping from a dying body; he wakes to the roll of the frigid tide reaching calves, just where he’d collapsed upon the sand. Water laps over his boots and retreats again, a chilled thing as eyelashes unlace themselves from their salted hold upon his consciousness. 

For several breaths he reposes where he is, suspended in that memory of sleep and waking. A turn of head, pressing cheek to softened volcanic sand; and then his eyes open in memory, a lurch of disorientation at the sensation of land beneath him. 

What he finds, instead, are eyes. 

They are waiting for him from beyond the dark shelf of rock where the cove deepens suddenly into black water, faintly luminous now beneath the gentling dawn. He is struck with such immense relief that he laughs before he knows he has done so.

He croaks out your name, carrying with it all the lonely hours of the night between them as he rises swiftly, stiffness of limb protesting with the neglection of weeks upon the raft. His balance falters upon the uneven stones, though he crosses the cove as swiftly as the gods allow, ducking through whale ribs to where she waits where the black stone falls sheer into fathomless water, only her shoulders and head above the tide, hair spreading behind her. 

Jacaerys lowers himself carefully onto the warm volcanic rock, stretching close so he might lie upon his stomach along its edge, one arm hanging over the precipice towards her watchful countenance. The tide slips lazily between her tresses, coiling shyly.

“I was cruel.” He murmurs, gentler than the lick of tide which coaxed him awake though the words scrape against his throat. “I have no excuse.” 

She studies him without expression, unsettling enough that he cannot tell whether she means to forgive him or leave him once more. 

“I am so sorry,” he whispers, one last offering cast into the cove alongside the coins and daggers and futile silks of drowned things long past. Nothing answers him but the crashing wave, coaxing the glint of purpled crabs alongside the underbelly of his rock. 

Only then does her arm emerge from the water; with an upward reach, she glances up at him – and there he finds a bewildered heartbeat of hope that she might touch him again. Instead, her fingers unfold; in the glint of morning glare, Jacaerys blinks upon her palm, leaning further once more to find there, resting in the center, something shining. 

A pearl, fresh and small enough to disappear beneath his thumb. Morning gathers itself there upon its surface, a stolen captured piece of dawn pale as milk and luminous as mist-laced moon. 

Lashes flicker momentarily as the breath catches within his chest, a small laugh of absurd affection rising sweet and sharp in his throat as his eyes burn with emotion. 

Hesitation sits so strangely upon so beautiful a creature; her eyes glisten with those silvery tears, too, as her lip trembles. Her voice comes between pressed lips, a rather bashful countenance among the waves. “I wished to bring you one before you left me.” 

Her palm, he registers, trembles with the small thing, a glinting haze of the cave; affection burns bright through him as Jacaerys takes her palm with his own, closing her fingers gently around the pearl. 

“I don’t wish to leave you,” he says instead, and the confession comes before pride can catch it, before the careful walls built by a lifetime of crowns and expectations can remind him that princes are not meant to plead with the sea. His fingers remain around hers, warm against the strange coolness of her skin, the pearl hidden between their palms as though they have together captured some tiny fragment of the moon itself. “I wish to stay with you,” he whispers wetly. 

Her eyes swim just as the ancient, beautiful tail of shimmering silver does beneath the waves; currents curl and fold, and she remains utterly quiet for one moment, hand trembling within his own. Her gaze lowers briefly to the pearl still enclosed between them, then lifts again.

“The place you spoke of,” her voice ripples along the whisper of the tide. “The stoned castle that watches the sea, the home you say waits for you beside the water.” A lip trembles before it is speared with sharpened, pearled teeth. “You would truly bring me there?”

Dragonstone. He thinks of black towers rising from volcanic earth and halls warmed by fire, his mother’s chambers and dragons circling above cliffs where the wind wails. 

“Yes,” he says, lacking any such hesitation of a prince with the duty of war still looming upon his back. “I meant it. Truly.”

Something changes in her face then, though still he leans closer, lowering himself further over the stone until the water nearly reaches his bared visage, nearly kisses his chest. But before he might let his body follow that burning instinct of his heart to slip into the water after her, her hand slips from his own to disappear into the water. 

The pearl lies in his own palm; He watches her once more leave him. 

“Wait,” his voice tapers, though his disconcertion grows so completely that he remains frozen upon the rock, watching as the sea carries her not away this time, but instead towards the shore. 

It is only once she reaches the sand, long taloned things grasping in wounds through the dark, that the prince snaps upwards, heartbeat thundering upon his throat. A grieving veil, the dark water shifts and folds along her body, so unwilling to surrender what it has kept for longer than most men have had names for their gods; glassy folds climb her skin and slip over the silvering scales which remain among her sun-breathed skin. 

The unnatural grace begins in a wail of tide; a large crash of seafoam submerges Jace, his lungs filled once more with burning salt and unforgiving sting; when he surges to, upon his knees against sharp rock, he hears it: a wailing horror, splintered as shards of bone snap against echoing cave walls. His siren screams. 

Salt slides in drips from his vision, though still he finds the horror, a darkened sea of shimmering deep – no color of mortal blood, but perhaps an open vein in the ocean itself which spills a piece of its darkness upon the sand. 

The stories return once more of the she-creatures coming to land to nest; and, for the first time, the sound that leaver her is not some haunting sweetness meant to lure men closer. 

It is sheer agony, and it jolts him to action quicker than any war bell. 

Screams echo through the cavern, horrible and dragging; and hands catch the sharp of rock as Jacaerys descends, a scrambling desperation of fear as his knees strike the cold sand and stumble twice. The strength that has carried this far was never his own; it has always belonged to her and the breath she gave him, the kindness of a creature he once feared. Now, he spends what remains of it reaching her. 

He rears the largest rock just as the last of the blooded dark water retreats; waking itself only in foam and silver upon the shore. 

And just there: His siren lies still upon the sand. 

Upon reaching her, he falls to his knees. He finds, in trembling breaths, the sea’s remains upon her: laces of that old magic, shimmering scales along her skin; a strange elegance to her form, a brightness reflecting in her gaze, so akin to mother-of-pearl. 

She is no ordinary woman, but his woman.  

A trembling palm rises to brush away the remnants of foam and weeded sea, clinging to her as a dying man might his lover; and she only meets his own watery gaze, a small puff of air passing her lips. “I told you, I wished for you to come in.” 

The words undo him, loosing a laugh helpless in its wonder and grief, watery in bewilderment. Glossed lips curl, that same old glimmer in her eyes as she whispers next: “I suppose I once again had to come to you instead.”  

A hitch of his breath, swallowed in a rush of thrill as a palm comes to cup his own jaw, soothing as fingers spread along the curve of his cheek. “My prince of the sky,” she chides, her eyes carrying pools of the very same, that broke-open expanse of light high above the cavernous dark. Fingers brush away his salt-laced curls. 

He gathers her to him wholly, and she comes so very willingly, no longer divided by anything so  distant and unknowable as the sea.

A simple miracle; for she is warming, a living thing against him, breath trembling and falling in ripples of warmth along the bare of his shouldered back. Here she is, in his arms. 

Jacaerys presses his face against damp tresses and closes his eyes, overcome by the strangeness of the world having allowed such a thing to happen; and she in turn tightens her grasp round him in a gesture so truly human that it nearly brings the sting of tears to eye. The cove roars louder now, perhaps distraught with its loss; the water thunders along their bared legs, and at length, Jacaerys slowly pulls back. 

Slow, his gaze drops to her legs – the unfamiliar grace of twitching tissue and flesh and muscle and bone beneath the morning light; concern touches his heart and perhaps, too, his visage.

“Do they hurt?” he asks softly, tipping his head to catch her eyes. “Your legs.”

She looks down as though considering a question yet to be occurred within her mind; and then at length, she lifts one supple foot and nudges his side with a shy, almost playful firmness. A gesture moves through him, lips curling in a gentle affection at her nudge. 

“I have had them before,” she reminds him then, in hint of faint pride and amusement. He only smiles, no longer afraid of what she has been before him, what she is. For she is his, too – and he, hers. 

“Does it feel the same?” he wonders, gaze lingering over each sweet part of her, so real upon the shore. 

For the first time since she came ashore, she falters nearly unconfident; a startling transformation which renders Jacaerys marveled at such bashfulness. Her gaze slips away from his, and when she answers, her voice is barely above the whisper of the tide.

“No,” she hums, a small thing; and her fingers tighten faintly against his bared shoulder, nails blunt but sharp still. He can see how warmth touches her cheeks, how her lip catches upon sharp teeth. “This… feels far better.”

Jacaerys smiles then, a hand falling tenderly upon her face. A thumb brushes the dampness at her cheekbone, the silver traces still glimmering there like moonlight caught so stark against the real nature of her skin. 

And then he kisses her, slow as fate; a warmed mouth lingers against hers, patient and gentle, her hands rise to his back solidly to grasp at his warm flesh; the sea groans behind them, and the wind howls through the bones along the shore. 

Her breath catches when his hand slides to the sides of her – and he feels the shiver that passes through her then, not of fear but of sensation, an old recognition of something newly awakened. It answers in him at once, too, so low and bright and aching.

She leans closer once more, and he meets her there. 

The kiss deepens unhurried and tender; fingers curl in the muscle of his back, his own palm reaching the strange, living warmth of her skin, the quickening pulse there, the breath of her body now made real in his world. When she makes a small sound against his mouth, soft and startled by her own response, he draws back only enough to look at her. Her eyes are wide in a dawning tide of astonishment, swimming with the same heated thing that kisses across that sweet skin which once never knew the true touch of warmth. 

Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers and smiles, his own breath uneven now, his heart no calmer than her own within their beating cages. “Are you alright?” he murmurs.

Her answer is to kiss him first. Jacaerys makes a low sound against her mouth and gathers her closer once more, one hand at the nape of her neck, the other spreading along her waist, feeling the tremor there as though her body is remembering itself once more upon land. It is a sweet thing, a tangle of tongues languid, enough to perhaps remind her that tenderness can be just as fierce as hunger.

She moves against him with a wonder that undoes him; She has known desire, he can see that in the way she breathes, in the way her fingers tighten at his shoulders, in the bright, startled heat of her gaze, the memory of muscles when he shifts to press himself hard along the line of her own wanting body. Indeed, she is not one who hesitates; She knows the language of wanting better than he does, and he is not ashamed to learn from her now. 

When he draws away only enough to look at her, her lips are parted, her eyes dark with a confusion that is almost pain. 

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says softly, the words trembling with nerves that guide her closer to him still. “T-tell me if you do not want this, please.”

Her hand rises to his face, and the touch warms across him, spreading down trembling throat and quivering chest, far lower, igniting some spark within him. 

Her thumb brushes his mouth, and there is a smile which graces across her own. “I want,” she says, and the ocean crashes itself against their shore, folding over their hips as though it, too, wants.

He swallows, his body already hard with his own wanting; his voice comes lower, hungry for the sweet softness beneath his palms. “What do you want?” 

Her gaze holds his. “You,” she says, helpless to the unnatural flow of tresses which still seem to float gently round her beauty even left of the tide. “Only you, Jacaerys.”

Eyes shut for a heartbeat, if only in effort to steady himself; and when they open she still watches him in that patient, unsettling way.  

“Please, let me be careful with you,” he whispers, nearly desperate. She only nods, so ethereal under the breath of faraway sunlight, and her words come in the same tremble of needed breath. “Let us learn of each other.” 

And so he leads her from the waterline of the softer black sand and up where the dawn has begun to warm the flatter, kinder stones. And there, beneath the pale opening sky, he eases the salt and cold from them both. 

Fabric, fear, distance - one by one they fall away from their entwined forms until there is nothing left between them but breath and the bright, trembling ache of wanting. He lays her down with care, and when he follows her onto the sand, his mouth finds her throat first, then the hollow beneath her ear, then the place where her pulse leaps beneath the skin. She arches into him at once, a soft gasp breaking from her when his hand slides over her waist, then lower, learning her with a cruel patience.

“Jacaerys,” she breathes, a plea, a praise which makes him shudder. He answers only by kissing her harder, one hand threading through her hair, the other braced beside her head as he lowers himself over her. Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, then rake along his back, unsure whether to pull him closer or hold herself steady; He gives her both – indeed, he gives her everything he can. 

His mouth moves over hers, then down again, tasting salt and warmth and the faint sweetness of her breath, ghosting over the tantalizing flush of skin upon her breast, teeth scraping only softly. When she trembles, he stills at once, looking upon her with salt-kissed lashes. “Too much?” he inquires gently.

Her eyes are dark, her lips swollen from his kisses, and she looks nearly frenzied at the though of ceasing. 

“No.” The answer is breathlessly hungry and he smiles against her skin, slower now only because he wants her to feel every stroke of his hands, every tendered bite of teeth, every careful press of his body against hers. Her hips lift to meet him; it sends a sharp pulse of heat through him which coaxes a soft groan, lost to the plush of her skin, and she startles – perhaps at the effect she has on him. 

“Again,” he begs, guiding her with his hands though his lips leave their marks upon silver flakes along her skin. 

She moves once more; the black sand clings to their skin and the morning wind cools the sweat at their backs. 

And when he finally joins her, it is with a groan that feels torn from somewhere deep in his chest; she tightens around him in a surprised thing, melting into wanting, then wholly his in that moment. He pauses only long enough to look at her, to make sure she is with him; and when she nods, brow knit with a pleasured desperation, with her fingers digging into his shoulders and drawing half-moons of red, he presses into her warmth nearer to worship than any prayer that’s ever left his lips. 

First, with the wash of waves, it is a slow thing of breaths and shaking laughter and trembling moans – though it grows deeper, growing a heat that builds and builds until the air between them seems to crackle with it, until his pleasure rolls over him in heavy immense pressure, until her own gasps sharpen and their fingers fall, entwined together, to find the spot upon her which coaxes her eyes back in ecstasy. 

Her head falls back against the sand and lips part upon a sound that is half-gasp, half-plea. He drinks the song, kisses the line of her throat, the curve of her breast; finger turn, pressing gently in a caress along the trembling place where her body meets his, and each touch draws another shiver from her. She is beautiful like this, so flushed and undone by pleasure and trust alike; the sight of her makes him impossibly harder still, makes him want to give her everything, makes him want to keep her here in this moment forever or keep her upon a throne or wherever she might wish to be. 

“Look at me,” he begs, a broken sound.

And the sight of her eyes on his, dark and dazed and full of him, is enough to make him lose the last of his restraint. He moves with a steadier rhythm then, one hand at her hip, the other braced beside her head, grasping along the smooth rock, his mouth returning to hers whenever he can bear to leave her skin. She meets him with such growing fervor, hands roaming, learning the planes of his muscled back, the line of his jaw, the taper of his hips, the damp hair at his temples. 

Pleasure gathers tighter and tighter between them; The sea roars in the sonorous echo of two exiles making a home of one another. It is only then, as she pulls his chest upon hers and lets out a soft tremble of sigh, that they find the peak of their ecstasy in harmony. 

It rolls within him as tide turns stones upon the shore – sun-drenches and ebbing, his pleasure tumbles, his groan falls into a taper of her name, or that which his tongue can form; and she, in turn, with trembling legs and wettened eyes, smiling at the bewilderment of such earthly delights. When he comes to lie beside her, when their sweat and sand-laced skin sticks gently to one another in a lazy, sweet whispering sigh of exhaustion, her eyes meet his once more. 

A shared laugh, one of relief and bubbled affection, curls around their small cove. It is not untouched by grief, nor lacking in the gods’ cruelty – though it drifts out still across the water, and echoes only in sweetness as their foreheads press.  

And when at last he draws her down with him, when the last of the morning light spills over them and the cove becomes all hush and salt and the soft ruin of restraint, it is not hunger that remains between them but love – deep, astonished, and newly named. 

For some time, the waves come and go. 

It is when the sun fully glints through the clear tidepools that his siren rises, and offers her palm. When they gather themselves from the rocks and sand, pearl stowed within the pocket of battered sunbleached riding leathers, Jacaerys finds pieces of old silks among the bones; he wraps her in them, a first garment for a woman who crossed from one world to another. 

She laughs when he fusses over the tie of her new dressing, attempting in gentle adjustments to ensure it bothers not the scars which still stretch across her shoulder; the sound of her laughter follows them as they move away from the shore. 

The path upward out of the cove is narrow and ancient, carved through stone by years of rain and wind and the endless pummel of waves. They walk slowly, dually unsteady beneath the unfamiliar weight of land, rendering both their bodies unsure; for once, neither belonging to this world but both traversing it, sharing in stumbles and laughs and small conversation. 

At the top of the path sunlight finds their skin, and the world opens; horizon stretches wide before them so endless. In the breath of the world once more around him, grief and death melt; water dries upon warm skin and his siren lets out a breath of shock, of wonder. Jacaerys holds her palm as her other runs over the tall wildgrass swaying around them in a tide of seabreeze, holds her tightly as she throws her arms round him with bubbling laughter. 

It is only then that the shadow passes in the distance. His breath catches, her own coming only a moment later; For far along the coast, beyond the cliffs and the rolling sea mist, something enormous moves through the sky, massed and raining shadow upon the earth. Even at a distance, even as only a shape against the morning for, he knows. 

He remembers the curve of the wings and the weathered roar even before it meets their ears; knows the glint of faint gold and rubied heart along the breast of the great beast as he knows the back of his palm.

His mother’s dragon.

And so together, with splintered breaths and wettened eyes, hand in hand, Jacaerys and the siren run toward the shadows in the distance, unaware of the rising smoke and distant screams beneath it.

whew! that was long requests open. starting new taglist; pls lmk if you'd like to be on it. masterlist

[mariposium]

➶ : THE LOST PRINCE — jacaerys velaryon

summary — while combing the beach for treasures, you stumble upon the unconscious, grievously injured body of a soldier. you decide to help him, but in doing so find love in a man that may never be able to return it. (11.4k)

featured — jacaerys velaryon / fem!reader

content — spoilers! tread carefully, fluff and ANGST, angst w/ a happy ending, hurt/comfort, canon divergent, jace lives, light medical descriptions, reader cares a lot for jace, dual pov!!!, inexplicit mental health struggles (reader’s deceased father), dead vermax ☹, 18+ MDNI implied sexual content/fade-to-black, tw there is a baby

a/n — am i anywhere near caught up with hotd? no. did i write this in spite of that? yes. i'm sorry if things don't make sense or are not in line with canon. the wiki and i did our best!

(cross-posted on ao3)

The cerulean waves lap at the silver beach, ebbing and flowing with the morrow’s breeze. Quiet has finally settled on the shores after a night of war and destruction. A battle beyond these argent sands occurred out in the gullet. All night, the savagery had kept you awake. This morrow, you collect treasures from your fish nets.

You step carefully across the sands, adjusting your silk scarf tighter around your mouth and nose. You bend the knee at the first net.

You heave it onto the shore. Nothing except too-small pieces of fabric and inedible shelled fish are in this one. You empty it and release the fish back to the embrace of the sea.

You stand again, taking a few more steps down. Your mind drifts as you fall into a rhythm of checking these nets, pocketing pretty shells and scraps of metal. Wonder pricks at the back of your neck as you imagine the war. As the lone tenant of this pier, you had never had to consider the rites of the Targaryen rulers. Most of your neighbors had already chosen their sides, even if it did not really matter in the scheme of things—neither of those fighting for the throne cared for their subjects, especially not those at the bottom, like you.

Rulers like these bled the common man dry while claiming it to be an act of love.

You move a little rougher with the next net. Nothing but rocks and debris in this one. You imagine it will be a while until you find a worthy treat. The Gods are usually not as generous on solemn days like these. War makes monsters out of men, and the Gods scorn those who partake.

When you stand again, your eyes drift a little further down the bank. At the edge of the shore, a clump of trees catch your gaze. The water is darker there, cloaked in shadow. The shrubbery bends so far, it almost touches the water. You draw closer, eyebrows furrowed.

A dark lump sits entangled by brush, barely concealed by the cluster of foliage. You draw closer, hesitantly. As your eyes adjust, you realize it is not a lump of debris, but a body. Your breaths quicken.

If the person is alive, would it hurt you? Never trust a soldier, your father had once told you.

You bend your knee just as if you are checking a fish net. Your hands unfurl from your sides, reaching out hesitantly. You can only see his body. It is clothed in thick leather, a quality of which you’ve never seen before. Several arrows stick out of his torso. A pool of blood stains the sand maroon beneath him.

You pull back the shrubbery to see his face. You startle at the sight, falling back onto your bum.

His eyes—they were open—albeit, he did not seem to see much of anything. His skin was not grey and placid like the bodies that you had seen before. Worse, you’d heard something when you held yourself over him. A breath, shuddering through his parted lips.

“Alive,” you whisper in awe. To survive so many arrows, then the tumultuous sea… it would take more than just courage. It would take something otherworldly. You know then that your decision has been made.

A huge piece of driftwood sits beneath him in the sand. You push it aside to straddle him. Gently, you grab his arm and sling it around your neck.

The rest of your journey back to the cabin passes in a frenzied blur. You move quickly, trying to spend as little time as possible forcing the grievously hurt man onto his feet. He lets out little grumbles as you move, head lolling this way and that like a puppet cut from its strings. You make it inside and push open the door that your father used to live, laying him onto his back on the bed.

Blood immediately infiltrates the off-white of the duvet, crimson floating before your vision. He groans continuously as you break the ends off of the arrows—serving as a reminder to the heart that still valiantly pumped beneath his ribs. Once they are off, you are able to slide the armor off. 

The tunic comes easily. It seems to be made of a material that deflects water, so when you drop it onto the floor, a puddle of liquid forms in its spot. You struggle a little with his breeches—though, those too come easily with a little pull.

After he is naked, you stare at his body in silence for a moment. You have helped men with injuries before. Arrow injuries just like these, even. But you’d never helped a man with this many. 

You reach out to touch his cold cheek. He is so young—had to be your own age. Too young for the cruel, unflinching hold of war. Gently, you close his eyelids, shutting away the dark brown of his unseeing gaze. He did not need to be witness to this.

You steel your nerves and clench your fists a few times to breathe life back into your numb fingers. Reaching into the bedside table, you grab your supplies—bandages, a bottle of rum, a couple cloths, and several blunt blades.

“I’m sorry, if you are awake,” you tell him, poising the knife along the edge of one of the arrow heads. “This will hurt a lot.”

Hours pass quickly under your blade. Each of the five arrows is cut away, sewn with fishing line, disinfected with rum, and bandaged tightly. Sweat falls into your eyes as you step away triumphantly, and you lift a hand to brush it off. As they are levelled with your eyes, you realize your hands are a bloody mess. Your stomach churns and you force the appendages away.

You hover over him a moment longer. You study the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the fluttering of his eyelids. He had a strong nose and jaw, thick dark eyelashes and a head of water-matted brunet hair. By all appearances, he was quite common-looking. He had the complexion and hair of any man you’d pass on the way to town. But something about him—the quality of his armor, the blemishlessness of his skin, it screamed something ethereal.

But even Gods can be killed. 

Your mystery man is not out of the woods yet. The chances of any of those arrows not nicking anything inside him is next to none. He’s also lost a lot of blood. The sheets are covered in it, not to mention the amount he was sure to have lost at sea.

You draw the hair sea-slicked to his head away from his forehead. Your hand slides to cup his cheek. He might never wake again. Your kind hand may be the last he knows. You wonder how many people missed him—if they were sitting with baited breaths, waiting for him to write. If only you could ease their worries.

You pull away and leave the room before your eyes can fill with traitorous saltwater tears.

There are few certainties in life. Ever since you were but a child, you had recognized this. Life is tumultuous and unfair. It takes and it takes, until you can give no longer. 

The sea is a comfort. She does not take, she gives. Usually, she gives you more valuable things than a body, but you try not to question her motives.

It’s been a day since you patched him and he still has not woken. His chest continues to move despite this disconcerting sign, and that remains your only comfort. You stood near-vigil at his beside for most of the hours following. Anticipatory nerves fill your every waking second, even at night when you lay awake trying to sleep.

You recognize that the danger has not fully passed for him. He had not had water in who knows how long. Eventually, his organs would fail due to dehydration and blood loss. That is, if the internal bleeding didn’t kill him first.

You also cannot help the hope that blooms in your chest as you gaze upon his face. Perhaps it is the fact that his skin seems more alive as of late. The fact that you have seen his eyes move behind his eyelids more and more often. The fact that you were quite insufferably lonely, and therefore latched onto any individual who came your way—alive or barely, as in the case of this man in your cabin.

You want him to survive because you want to know him. It is a thought that scares you as much as it invigorates you.

By his bedside, after a long morrow of scavenging by the tide, you dump your satchel of goodies on the now-clean duvet. (Now that had been annoying to do—having to move his admittedly quite heavy body over to remove the sheets). You begin to sort through them, cataloging them.

The silence is unsettling, so you begin to speak.

“The sea has been kind this morrow,” you say softly. You pick up a smooth rainbow shell, twisting it this way and that in the light. “These will sell for a couple of silvers.”

You put the shell down and then grab your cloth, gently stroking away sand and debris.

“My father taught me to do this,” you tell the man, “he taught me everything I know.”

Satisfied with its shimmer, you trade the shell for a clam. You pop it open forcefully—apologizing profusely to the creature as you did—and stick your fingers into the dark crevice you created.

“No pearl,” you report when your fingers come up empty. You bring the clam up to your eyes, stroking its now-broken shell. “I’m sorry, friend.”

The last piece had been one you were excited for. You grab the shrapnel of metal gently in your palms, categorizing the weight and feel of it with your hands. 

“Probably off a shield,” you decide. “I’m sure a blacksmith would like this.”

You put the metal down and let out a heavy sigh. You stare at the man, worrying your lip between your teeth. Perhaps some foolish part of you had hoped he would wake up to the sound of your voice, like the stories you had read as a girl.

But life is no story, as you had to continually remind yourself. Things like that just didn’t happen.

You go through a few other bits and bobs in silence, mood dampened by reality. A couple of small shells, a nail, and a scrap of maroon fabric. You aren’t sure why you grabbed the fabric—perhaps you’d wanted to try and sew something. It is quite pretty, you decide. It had belonged to someone once.

Once you finish polishing the items, you lift your head up to look at the man. Thoughts and images flash through your mind. What was he like? You wonder. He seems strong, based on his broad shoulders and defined stomach. But he also didn’t have the worn skin of a common man. He didn’t have callouses on his hands or fading scars upon his torso. He had to be a prince, you decide. A prince of a faraway land, hoping to bargain peace between the two feuding Targaryen houses.

You nod, satisfied with that recreation of events. Yes, a prince. A just, altruistic one. Perhaps he knew of the war and wished to come and save the small-folk.

You look down at his pale hand resting lifelessly upon the duvet. You swallow thickly. 

“You must wake soon,” you whisper, “the kingdom needs you.”

He does not stir. You sigh and gather your things into your satchel. If he is still not awake by the morrow, you decide, you will return his body to the sea.

That evening, you sit at the table with a plate of roasted fish and a glass of water. The fish is one of two meals you eat regularly. The other was for special occasions, depending on if you were able to procure bread and potatoes at the markets. 

You always eat the eye of the fish first. You do not like it looking at you as you eat its flesh. It feels wrong. The eye is not very tasty, though. The odd texture always makes you vaguely nauseous–the gooey, chewy ball. Your father had always laughed at you when you ate fish. He was not of an imaginative mind. He did not see the fish as being once alive, like you did. He did not imagine it swimming beneath the tide, with all its other fishy friends–before it was snared by ruthless hands and suffocated by the open air.

You stare at the vacant chair across from you with an empty feeling in your chest. It had been so long since you had a companion at supper time. Your father had not spoken much, but his presence alone was always enough to keep you happy. He is gone now, like with the ebbing of the tide, and all that is left is the shadow of the person he used to be.

His fishing pole, next to the door. His journal, where he kept extensive notes about what he found out on the sea during the day. His bed that now had a new, warm body sleeping in it.

You wonder what your father would have done, had he found the man. You take another bite of the fish, forcing it down with a thick swallow. Would he have left him? You had never thought of him as being cruel, but you also know he loathed unwelcome responsibility. He had enough of an imagination to conjure horrible images of betrayal and hurt, and so you decide he probably wouldn’t have brought him home to you. He had too much to lose to do so. Everyone did.

And so why did you? Perhaps, you think, you have lost everything that matters most to you already.

You stare down at the limp skeleton of the fish on your plate. You had never seen a person die of dehydration. Your father had once told you a story about a man he knew that had, and it sounded awful. 

You pick up your dinner knife, a sharp, clean-edged blade, and hold it in the candlelight. The silver edge catches the light, highlighting the sharp point. Your hand trembles as you study it.

Would it be quick, painless—slitting the sleeping prince’s throat? Or would it be messy and painful? Would it draw him out of sleep and would he gaze upon you with hurting eyes as he clutched the gaping hole in his neck?

Regret gnaws at you. As time draws on, you begin to think that the mercy you had granted your prince had been nothing but a farce. That by saving him for one moment had only just prolonged his suffering.

You put the knife in your satchel and stand. It is cruel, keeping a person alive only to die in a violent manner like this–it is inhumane. 

You take quick steps to the bedroom. 

You have never killed a person before. Your father had plenty. He always said the eyes, you can hear his voice in your mind now, the eyes are always the worst part. 

You can’t eat the prince’s eyes like you can the fish’s. No matter what you did, you would have to see those eyes. And with it, the betrayal. You stand over his prone body now. 

A sliver of moonlight streams in from the open window behind you, casting cool light across the heaving chest. He remains impassive, completely unaware of what you were about to do. You do not realize you are crying until you bring the knife up to your eyes and catch a glimpse of your face in the silver.

“I…I am sorry, friend,” you repeat the same mantra you had told so many clams before as you pried your fingers in their mouths, looking for a pearl. “But this is a mercy.”

Your hands tremble like windblown seagrass as you lift the knife against his skin. A moment of hesitation prevents you from acting. And it is just enough for a pale hand to wrap around your own and for dark eyes to snap open.

“Waaa-ter.”

You let out a sharp gasp and yank your hand away. The man watches you, his visage crumpled with pain.

He repeats himself, voice quieter than the first time. “Water, please…”

You move into action. You dart out of the room, hands fumbling with the metal bucket by your door. You run across the moonlit shore to the well that sits on the edge of the woods. Quickly, you fill the bucket. You curse yourself all the while–mind racing in what-ifs and guilt-ridden condemnations. 

You heave the bucket back into the house and grab the same goblet you had used with your own water. You take a huge scoop and shuffle back into the bedroom like a child caught with their hand on the sweets plate.

The man is still awake when you re-enter, his eyes wide and eyebrows furrowed. You drop next to him on the bed and angle his head and neck up onto the pillows behind him. Finally, you fulfill his request. He drinks like a man in Essos who has wandered the Red Waste for weeks; heavy, desperate gulps of the liquid. Some fall and drip down his side, which you dab away with a nearby cloth.

When he finally drinks it all, he pulls back, his breaths labored and eyes half-lidded.

“W…Where am I?” he finally says once he has caught his breath. You notice him scanning the room as if trying to find the answer written in the stone.

You decide not to answer honestly. You fear what his reaction will be if he forces himself to recall the battle. Instead you say, “you are safe.”

He stares at you as if only just noticing you. His dark eyes are swallowed almost completely by night, exhausted and ridden with heavy bags. He lifts a hand, as if to touch you, but it falls short. His eyes flutter, and then shut.

He falls unconscious. You touch two hands to his chest to confirm his heart still beats steadily. You let out a breath you had not realized you captured when you find his pulse.

Shame hits you like a tidal wave. You were going to… you were going to kill him. You are shocked at the tears that swim in your eyes. You stand in a hurry–not without remembering to pull the duvet back up to his chest–and stumble out of the room. 

The adrenaline has all but worn away now. Tears clog your eyes, slipping down your cheeks. You allow yourself to feel the emotions–all of them. Relief, shame, exhaustion, and fear overwhelm you completely and you can do nothing but sob. On the table in front of you, the skeleton of the fish and the silver knife mock you without having to say a word.

Waking feels like drowning. Fighting against the wave ahead of you, trying to get your head above water. Then when you finally surface, you fall behind the waves again.

Jacaerys wakes to the sun in his eyes and a warmth around his waist. He thinks for a moment, perhaps, he is in a dream. Another barrier between him and wakefulness. Then, the pain hits him. No, dreams don’t feel like this.

The groan stumbles past his lips before he can stop it and his eyes shoot open. Everything is pain. It surrounds him like dragonfire and steals his breath. He trembles as he uses all his strength to cradle his side.

“Gods,” he murmurs. He feels beneath his fingers the familiar texture of a bandage. Someone helped him.

Helped him. Helped him from what? He gasps as memory rolls over him. Drowning. Arrows piercing through skin and muscle. A dragon’s roar of pain. No, not just any dragon—

“Vermax,” he cries out, tears springing to his eyes. No, no, no…

But it was true. His mind had never failed him before. His dragon. His beautiful dragon. Falling to the bottom of the ocean like a ship’s anchor. He tries to move, to jump to his feet, but he can’t. Pain ricochets up his side, and he can literally feel the side of his chest pulling taut. 

He stares at the ceiling above him with tears fogging his eyes and coating his tongue in salt. For one long moment, he despairs. Why? Why would he be punished this way? Forced to live without Vermax? The bond between rider and dragon could not—should not be severed. Not by something as futile as war. He can’t breathe, can’t think. Everything is despair.

He should have died. Living is not a gift in this condition. His knuckles go white against the duvet. Anger sweeps over him—hot, potent fury.

He curses everyone who caused this. Aemond, Alicent, Aegon, even fucking Helaena. He doesn’t care. They’ll all pay.

But not like this. He finally shuffles himself into a seated position, cringing at the pain that shoots from every direction. Every small movement feels like another arrow tearing his skin. 

His feet are unsteady as he finds his footing. For a second, he fears he might not be able to even walk. Then, he finds himself. He grabs his breeches off the table and slowly, painfully, shrugs them on. He leaves his chest bare—unable to even think about having to lift his arms over his head. He keeps one hand on the wall and the other around his waist as he stumbles across the room. 

The place he is in is frighteningly humble. There’s nothing unnecessary here. Everything has a purpose, a function. No gilded armoires, tall candlesticks, or commissioned portraits. Bare, cobblestone walls, sparse furniture (all glaringly handmade and rustic), and cobwebs hanging in every corner. 

Jacaerys moves slowly from the room he started in to the short hallway that opens into a tiny living area. A large fireplace is the only comfort to him. A pot of a molten, unappetizing glob bubbles above the waning fire. 

There are very few personal effects here. Nothing to propose any kind of hint or insight. Out the window of the front of the ramshackle building, he sees amber light flickering across a wide sea.

His breath shudders out of his lips. He doesn't recognize this place at all. He’s hurt. He has no dragon. He’s never felt worse in his entire life.

All of what energy he summoned flees him in that moment. He practically collapses into a nearby chair and it creaks pathetically under his weight. He hangs his head and a soft sob escapes his lips. 

Tears tremble down his cheeks and onto the wood table beneath his hand. His mind races, memory and pain and fury collide in a war of its very own. Vermax, his mind strays. The perfect dragon. Gone. He digs his nails into the grain of the table beneath his hands, trying to recapture something to ground him. Short, hyperventilating breaths escape his lips—his vision fogs.

Then, everything clears. His hands unclench and he leans back in the chair. He stares at the ceiling, measuring his breaths. You are still alive, he tells himself. Therefore you are still useful.

Because perhaps that was his real fear. That he would no longer be of use—that he would no longer be worth fighting for. He’d always measured his worth in terms of what he could provide to his mother. Perhaps the truth is that his worth stretches beyond that.

He hears the sound of crunching footsteps outside. He sits up in the chair, eyes flickering toward the door. Ahead of him, he notices with a jolt, a knife lay discarded on the table. He grabs it before he can think the better of it, brandishing it like he actually could fight his way out of this mess.

He ignores the pain throbbing in his side and pushes himself to stand again. He won’t die now. He can’t.

The door creaks open slowly, and he angles the knife in front of himself protectively. 

But the figure that crosses the threshold isn’t what he’d been expecting. Wide eyes and a mouth fallen open into an oval. Hands clutching a satchel of… is that a seashell? 

She drops the satchel with immediacy, hands flying into the air. Jacaerys thinks he hears something break inside.

He keeps the arm holding the knife up despite the involuntary tremble that has begun in his arm. A cool sweat travels down his temple. His vision wanes. Despite her… figure (she hadn’t brandished a weapon a day in her life, he thinks), he knows looks can be deceiving. 

“You’re up.” She does not immediately acknowledge the weapon in his hand. She’s either brave or simply ignorant. Jace is not sure what he’s more afraid of.

“Who—“ he starts to speak, but he breaks into a coughing fit. His throat feels like it is on fire. She takes a step forward, as if to help or harm him, but he freezes her in place when he turns his gaze back onto her warningly. “Who are you?”

She tells him her name. Then she quickly adds, “you washed up on the beach in front of my cabin. I found you.”

He bends over to clutch his side. He notices her eyes widen.

“Please, I’m not sure you should be up. You sustained massive injuries,” she tells him. “Your body needs rest.”

“I cannot—“ he scoffs, then coughs again. “I cannot simply rest. I must leave. I must…” 

A pang in his side makes him gasp and hunch over. The knife falls with a clatter against the floor but he can’t seem to bring himself to retrieve it. Everything feels like it is in slow motion, out of his reach and control.

She grabs him around the waist before he tips over. He stays conscious long enough for her to lead him back to bed, but he falls within the waves again the second his head hits the pillow.

Consciousness returns to him in fragments. The sound of footsteps by his head. A burning pain spreading up his chest, to which he thinks he shouts, but cannot prevent. The feeling of a wet cloth soaking his tears and sweat. 

When his eyes finally flutter open, it is dark in the room. A candle burns to a nub on the nightstand next to him, wax coating the wood. Sorrow fills his chest again so quickly it nearly steals his breath.

He sees her slip into the room like a wraith come to haunt him. It is ridiculous, he thinks, that she should be the one to stand over him. On any other day, in any other circumstance, she would not put up much of a fight. Now, he is at her mercy.

“You tore one of your stitches.” Her voice is soft, but it reverberates in his ear drums and skull like a dragon’s final roar. He clenches his jaw and turns his head toward the moon that hangs like a silver noose in the sky. “I had to sew it back while you were resting.”

Jace doesn’t reply. He isn’t sure he would know what to say. How does he encompass all his feelings—or even one of them, into a coherent thought? It isn’t possible.

She draws closer and he tenses. She notices. “Are you going to try and hurt me again?” 

He considers her for a moment, then shakes his head.

She pauses, thinking about something, then she settles upon his side of the bed. Jace notices for the first time since she’s entered the room, that she has a bowl of that wretched-looking soup in her hands.

“Here,” she says, outstretching the bowl. He leans back. She pulls away slightly. “Sorry.” She cringes like even she realizes that the soup is nothing to write home about. “It is all I have.”

Jace swallows thickly. He reaches a trembling hand out. She smiles, relieved.

He goes to take the bowl, but his arm feels weak. He pulls back. “Perhaps…” he pauses, clears his throat. “Perhaps you could…”

Asking for help has never come easy to him. Being weak is not something he is accustomed to. His other hand clenches the sheet in his fist.

She nods. He does not have to be explicit. He untenses his hand as she leans forward, a small bit of soup in the wood spoon.

The first bite makes his face twist. She laughs.

“I truly am sorry,” she says. “I know it is probably not what you are used to.”

It takes every bit of his strength to swallow the offending liquid. It is strangely salty. It tastes like the brine that filled his mouth when he— 

He cuts the thought short. No need to ruin his own mood again.

“Something happened to you out there,” she says as if she’d read his mind, and although it should be a question, it is not, “something bad.”

He swallows another gulp of the soup. He does not reply. 

She must realize he does not want to speak on that, for she does not press the matter. She lifts the spoon again and he forces down another sip.

“The soup has fish and some potatoes—oh, and they had carrots at the market today, so I put those in too. Perhaps those are the disgusting parts. I won’t purchase them again.”

Jace does not have the energy, or perhaps the heart, to tell her it is certainly not the vegetables that have made the soup taste like what sea captains scrape off the bottom of their ships.

She scoops another bit of soup and he forces it down. His mouth had begun to retain that saltiness even when he no longer had the soup in his mouth, like a stain one can’t wash away with soap and water.

She does not speak for a long pause, but Jace suddenly feels a bit antsy. It feels too intimate an act to not be speaking.

He swallows another mouthful, then clears his throat to speak. “Did you catch the fish?” he asks, his voice hoarse.

“Oh, no, no,” she replies to him like it is a preposterous suggestion. Like killing fish is below her standards. “I just buy them.”

He frowns around the spoon in his mouth and hurriedly swallows the liquid. “Then why were you on the shore when you found me?”

She stirs the foul soup around for a moment, thinking hard about something, then she looks up at him. “I collect things. Shells, scrap metal, and fabrics. You would be surprised what comes with the morning tide, and even more what people would pay for them.”

An odd business, Jace can’t help but think. It seems like a hard thing to have to rely solely on the Narrow Sea for food and shelter. The Narrow Sea, he remembers with a sudden clarity. That is near where they fought.

“Are you going to tell your name?” Her head is tilted as she asks this, the soup bowl now empty and forgotten upon her folded legs.

He ponders the question for a moment. He could tell her his full name, but it might backfire, especially if she harbors a grudge against his family. He doesn’t think she has it in her to cause him harm, but he knows that many do not until they are cornered.

“Jace,” he finally tells her. “Just Jace.”

She smiles and her entire face lights up like nothing he’s ever seen before. Something twists in his stomach. “Nice to meet you, Jace.”

One, two, three, four. You count the shells noiselessly as you thread them onto the fishing line. They clink together softly as you pull the line taut around your wrist, measuring the width mentally. You remove the bracelet and add a few more of your little shells.

A few days had passed without much event. Jace drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the day and slept soundlessly through the night. He did not complain, but you had seen his thinly-veiled winces and his shuddering breaths. You know that he is suffering more than he lets on. 

It is an odd thing, you think, to be harboring a man in your home that you know next to nothing about, but had inexplicably formed an attachment to. You still know nothing more about Jace than his name and even that had not been an answer easily wrought.

You slide the shells all to one side and swiftly tie a knot at the end of the line, forming a perfect circular bracelet. Putting it to the side, you cut a new piece of fishing line and begin sorting through your shells again.

Just as you go to slide the first shell on, you hear something behind you. The creaking of wood as light footfalls go across.

You turn your head, body tense.

“Jace,” you say, surprised by his appearance. You stand.

He had not been up since he’d ripped that stitch a few days ago, actually heeding your pleas to rest. But a part of you knew even then that the peace would not last long. He is a restless creature, like a bird stuck behind the bars of a cage.

“Do you need something?” You clutch your fingers together across your front, as if doing so could somehow steel your nerves.

He takes a step into the room. You notice his gait seems more steady today. He looks around every bit of the room, his eyes taking in all the pieces that make up your home. You gnaw your lip between your teeth. Did he approve of what he saw?

His voice comes suddenly, a blade cutting through the silence. “What are you doing?” 

It is not accusatory nor standoffish, instead it seems almost curious. You grab the bracelet you just finished and hold it out to him.

“A bracelet.”

Jace steps closer, tilting his head. “For what purpose?”

You let out a short laugh. “It has no purpose. It is just pretty.”

“Hm.” He stares at the offending object like he’s never thought about making something just for the sake of making something before. You smile. He averts his eyes to the other side of the room.

“You said you do not fish,” he says, “and yet you have a fishing rod.”

You follow his eyes to where the thing sits near the door. It sits, forgotten, in the corner of the room—there to haunt you and the person you’d never become, you’re sure.

“My father…” you start to say, but something gets caught in your throat. You forcefully swallow past the blockage. “My father used to fish.”

Jace’s accusatory eyes soften around the edges. He hobbles closer and takes the seat across from you at the table. Your father’s seat.

“And your father—“

“He is dead,” you answer curtly, “he has been for two summers now.”

You pick up the bracelet you had only just starteda nd slide a seashell onto the line. Hurt does not fill your chest like a cavity anymore—now all you feel is numbness as it spreads from your lungs to your heart. 

Jace turns his head to look out the window at the night sky. “My father is gone too.”

Your eyes leap toward his in a flash. He does not look at you, his hand tracing repetitive shapes on the table. The deep circles beneath his eyes have all but faded now, but the weariness to his expression remains. He possesses the gaze of someone who holds more than they can carry–a gaze your father shared.

Your throat bobs as you force yourself to swallow. You feel hollow, but a bit of warmth has reentered your chest. Two children, you think, without a parent—an awful thing, certainly, but not especially rare in Westeros.

You slide another shell onto the bracelet, fingers trembling. “He went mad.” Telling the truth, those three words, stings like betrayal. “He was a knight before I was born. He never… he never forgot what he had to do. The faces of the men he killed… they haunted him.”

Jace goes pale. His dark eyebrows furrow, the line of his mouth pulling down. “I-I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.”

You nod. Put another two shells on the line. Desperately, you search for a way to change the subject. “He always wanted to teach me,” you say, gesturing to the rod, “but he never did.”

He drags a quick hand through his curly brown hair, then pauses as he gets caught in a tangle. He huffs irritably.

“Perhaps,” he says, onyx eyes catching the amber light of the candle flickering on the table, “if I could summon the strength to get dressed and brush my hair, then I could show you how.”

You swallow thickly. “You do not have to—“

“It is the least I can do,” he murmurs. “You saved my life.”

To smile feels inappropriate, so you avert your eyes and begin to tie a knot in another bracelet.

Jace stares at himself in the mirror that stands in the corner of the bedroom with solemn eyes. His eyes glaze over the bandages that wrap around his chest and lower torso, then the unfamiliar slightness to his shoulders and waist. He feels as though he looks at a person he no longer recognizes, like his mind has been transported into the body of someone much weaker than he used to be.

The old house is quiet in the morrow. Every once in a while, a soft breeze will make the house creak. One may occasionally hear a sea bird calling in the distance. Other than that, everything exists as if completely removed from reality; untouched by the war that rages just beyond the sea’s reaches.

His eyes flick back to the mirror and he sees her standing behind him with a deep green doublet wrapped in her arms. 

“It was my father’s,” she says, drawing closer. “It might be a little large on you.”

Jace nods. She hands him the doublet. The material feels like cheap linen, nothing to the quality he had worn before. He does not mind. It would be odd, he thinks, for him to expect anything better.

He lifts the top over his head and she helps guide it over. She seems to be trying not to touch his skin, like she thought he might be made of glass. He clenches his jaw when he feels the familiar tightness in one of his wounds as his arms stretch over his head.

The doublet falls over his body easily, but it does hang on him a bit like the robes a septa might wear.

He hears the sound of muffled laughter from behind him and he turns his head.

“My apologies.” She can barely get it out through her thinly-suppressed amusement. “You do look a bit funny, though.”

Jace feels his lips tug upwards in the first semblance of happiness he’d felt in days. It feels odd and out of place, and so it disappears with his next blink.

“Shall we go?” 

Jace nods. He follows her out of the bedroom and into the living area, watching as she bends to grab the fishing pole. He walks behind her as she leads the way outside, too slow to match her pace.

The brush of a briney mist against his skin feels like flying across the humid air on top of Vermax. His chest pangs and he forces the thought away. His eyes brush the swaying grasses that stand cloistered around the sea’s edge, each one caught up in a current of air drifting by. He watches the woman as she strides ahead of him.

She is quite plain. She does not have the dresses of the courts he is used to, nor the manners of a highborn lady. She moves unhindered by corsets and the plumes of expensive dresses. Her soft legs pump quickly across the sands, barefoot, like she has mapped every inch of the shore to near-perfection and knows without looking where she must go.

Seeing her slip ahead, her hair tangled in the sea’s mist, then as she turns over her shoulder with a jovial grin, it feels so different than anything he’s ever known before.

Baela is beautiful. She is poised, and gentle, but with a rough edge that assures him she could—and would—easily hurt him if pushed to it. But his stomach never flipped when she spoke. He never searched for her eyes from across the room. He never grasped her hand and wished he never had to let it go. He had known her for so long, he assumed she was all he’d ever need, that the feeling of content he felt in her presence was love. Now he isn’t so sure. 

She reaches the shore and stops when her feet hit the tide.

He meets her gaze as she turns to him. His heart pounds in his ears.

“Is it not wonderful?” She sweeps her arm in a half-arc as she speaks, eyes glimmering beneath the high morrow’s sun.

Jace draws his eyes away from her figure to the open waters. It is wonderful, he thinks. If not wrought with pain and regret.

He forces his gaze away. “Yes.”

“So,” she says, shifting on her heels, “how do we begin?”

Jace steps forward and picks up the rod. He retrieves the little scrap of maroon fabric that she had found a few days back and attaches it to the end of the hook. 

“It is always a good idea to have some kind of bait,” he explains, “fish are attracted to movement. If you can find insects or worms, those work even better. But this fabric may do. We will have to see.”

He moves close to the edge of the water and lets the rod scrape the top of the ocean. “Most fish do not swim right by the shore, so you will need to throw the line out a little ways. Make sure that you do not catch your skin with the hook.”

She nods, eyebrows drawn together in deep contemplation. Jace nearly smiles at the way she’s taking this all so seriously, before he catches himself and schools his expression.

Jace steadies his hand and propels the line out into the ocean. One of the wounds on his side complains at the movement, but he ignores it. He watches the line bob in the water with a softened expression. His memory flits between days spent under the sun at Driftmark and Dragonstone, laughing while he chases Lucerys with a wood sword; Laenor showing him how to fish among the tidepools; a fierce burn from the sun that is soothed by his mother’s affectionate hand.

“Who taught you this?” Her voice breaks through the silence that had settled between them. Her eyes keep steady on the line, lashes squinting against the harsh light.

“My father,” he replies after a moment’s hesitation. 

Another pause. 

He feels her shift to look over at the side of his face. “I’m sure he would be quite proud of the man you have become.”

Jace’s breath halts in his throat. Hands suddenly feel clammy. His heart hiccups and thuds against his skin. He had not thought of Laenor in a long time, Harwin even longer. It feels like decades had passed since he had seen either of them, a forgotten moment in his life overshadowed by tragedy after tragedy.

“Oh, look,” she says suddenly from beside him. “A conch shell.” 

She wields the massive thing toward him. Her entire face is bright with delight as she shows him the object that any normal person would completely disregard. She is anything but normal, though.

“These always sell for a few silvers at the markets,” she informs him, “the rich folk think they are good luck.”

He is not able to reply before his arm suddenly jolts and he is pulled a few inches forward. On the end of the line, something stirs in the water. 

“Come,” he orders her urgently. “Something is biting.”

She draws close, her eyes wide. The conch shell drops to the sand. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, “here, you hold the rod.”

“What? I don’t know how to catch a fish!”

He thrusts the rod into her hands. “I am too weak to reel it in. You have to.” It is a lie, but she does not seem to recognize it.

Her hands slip all over the rod as she tries to fight the beast at the end of the line. Jace, pitying her struggle, slides behind her and steadies her hands by placing his on top of hers. She freezes for a moment, then begins to pull. Jace clutches her hands gently within his own and he notices that they tremble like seagrass beneath his own. 

“Hold it steady,” he says against the shell of her ear, “pull only when you feel it stop fighting. You do not want–”

Suddenly, the pressure is removed from the end of the line and they are both sent stumbling backwards onto the sand. Jace lands on his bum, but she is able to catch herself as she tumbles beside him. The line must have broken. The fish is long gone now.

“Oh Jace, are you okay?” He looks over at her as she crouches beside him. “You did not reopen your wounds, did you?”

The laugh that tumbles out of his lips makes her jolt back. Distantly, he is not sure why he is laughing. The fish got away, he landed on back on the sand, and now one of his cuts hurts. But he had just felt so alive. So unburdened by responsibility, like any man of ten and eight without the entirety of their mother’s empire resting upon their shoulders ought to feel. 

The laughter eventually abates, and all that is left is the open sky atop him and the sun beating down on his skin.

“Do you think that the fish I cooked last night was spoiled?” she asks in response to his exuberant mood. “Once, my father caught ill from bad potatoes…”

Jace feels another chuckle escape his lips. “Sorry,” he tells her. “I have… not felt that free in a long time.”

She lets out a soft ‘oh’ and moves to lay next to him in the sand. Far enough away that there is no chance that they will touch, but close enough that Jace can smell the lavender on her skin.

Jace stares at the clear sky ahead of him until he begins to feel his body ache with exhaustion. He pulls himself into a seated position, but she does not move immediately. She looks at him with soft eyes from where she lays against the sand, a small, affectionate smile upon her lips. Her chest rises and falls slowly, hand absentmindedly drawing pictures in the sand.

His stomach churns as he turns away. He stares out at the rippling current with half-lidded eyes. 

“How far is the nearest town?” His words are nearly carried away with the next tide that pulls up the shore. She hears him all the same, sliding to sit up next to him.

“Not far,” she replies, a toothy grin on her breath, “would you like to come and help me pick out a fish for dinner tomorrow?”

Jace does not reply. The hope tinged in her words makes something inside him feel rotten. Like he is corrupting the world wherein she lives. As he takes longer and longer to reply, he notices something settle upon her face. A realization that fades into melancholy.

“Oh.” She looks to the sea in an attempt to hide the dewiness in her eyes, but Jace notices all the same. “You wish to leave.”

“My mother,” he says, “she will be looking for me. She will not stop until she finds me.”

She nods.

Something compels him to continue. “I would stay. I would, truly,” he says, “but this is bigger than me. Bigger than this–”

“I understand, Jace.” But Jace is not sure she does. Her lips purse, her eyebrows drawn to form a small wrinkle between them. 

“I would at least stay a couple more days,” he tells her, “I need to make sure I do not simply hurt myself again by leaving too soon.”

She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head upon them. “It sounds like a good plan,” she agrees quietly. “Perhaps… Perhaps I could pack you some food as well.”

“Yes,” he says this far too enthusiastically, but he notices her brighten at the joy in his voice and so he continues to smile. “That would be wonderful.”

She nods, pulling at a frayed edge of her dress. “Then it will be done.”

The two of them watch for a few more moments as the red sun burns a hole against the sky and as the water ripples with wrath.

“I will leave on the morrow”--That is what he had told you over dinner the previous evening. 

In the morrow, the sky opens and floods them with her tears. 

You stand by the window of the cabin looking out at the frightful weather. Rain falls like daggers against the darkened, tumultuous sea. Waves crash against the shore. A crack of lightning makes you flinch.

“The Gods are angry,” you say to the still air of the cabin. 

Jace sits halfway over his plate of roasted fish as you say this. Then he straightens, his eyes flickering briefly outside. The dark brown of his irises reflect the grey of the clouds swirling above. “Or they do not grant me leave.”

You force yourself to pull away from the window. Turning your head, another flash of brilliant light comes across the floor, painting everything white. You fall into a silence as you step carefully across the cabin.

You knew that from the moment you found him, that it would not be permanent. Just like the rains that fall from above now, this momentary storm in your life will too pass. You had not even wished for him to stay, initially. You recall that first night, sewing his wounds with fishing line, as your eyes stretched across his alien visage. You had told yourself that his presence would be temporary as a comfort then, now you tell it to ground yourself in reality.

Jace had become more friendly in the past few days. Conversation came easily to him and made the thought of him leaving that much harder. Now you were the one that deflated at the sound of his voice across the hall, the one that shrunk from revealing the parts of yourself that had not seen the light in years.

You are selfish. It is a quality that had always lurked behind your eyes, but had sharpened since your father’s death. It is a survival tactic. Every animal, even humans, wish to hold onto the things they hold dear. It does not matter if it is not much. Everything you have is in some way worth keeping–including Jace.

But you could not fight logic. His mother, his family–they had a higher claim to him than you did. You could not keep him like a bird with clipped wings. It is cruel to even think it. 

You scrub the dish in your hands until your hands feel raw and achy. The only light comes from behind you in the smoldering fireplace and the flash of light that illuminates the sky. You hear the clatter of the bowl from behind you as Jace finds his footing–the screech of the chair as it rubs harshly against the floor.

You feel his warmth as he comes to stand beside you. He reaches a hand into the soapy mess over the wood bucket and fetches your hand from the fray. 

“You have made yourself bleed,” he observes quietly, a finger stroking over the cuts. 

You feel your throat bob under the weight of his probing stare. You slip your hand away from his and turn your back to dip the bowl in the bucket of soapless water.

“Have I done something to upset you?” he murmurs. His words are echoed by a rumble of thunder in the distance.

You still your movements for just a second before continuing. Your cuts throb at the feeling of the cool water cleansing the blood from your hands. “No,” you reply simply.

“Then why have you been so quiet as of late?”

You drop the bowl onto the wood surface in front of you and turn, drying your hands with a near cloth. “I just haven’t had much to say, I suppose.”

Another flash of light. Rain as it beats ceaselessly against the metal roof. You face him, clenching the towel in your fist.

“Shall we remove your stitches?” It had been suggested a few days ago as the first thing he would do before departing, so he would not have to bother with finding someone to do it for him on the road. 

Jace looks like he might say something. Then he shakes his head. “On the bed?”

You nod. “That would be easiest.” 

You slip behind him as he moves toward the bedroom. On your way, you light the spill near the fireplace and bring it with you. Your eyes find his figure as it slinks through the darkness. He’s healed so much better than you had ever expected he might. He should not have survived his injuries—should not have been able to heal so quickly. You think the Gods must favor his survival much more than they favored the own laws they stipulated.

He slides off his doublet and lounges back into the bed. You let the flame on the end of the spill touch the end of the wick of the candlestick and the room is bathed in a soft glow. You suffocate the flame and put the spill onto the table next to the bed.

Jace watches you as you do this quietly. When your eyes move up to his face, you notice his eyes are lidded, the tips of his ears red. You feel a warmth catch hold of your skin at his gaze and you avert your eyes to his chest.

You begin your work in silence. You lift the knot of each stitch and easily slice through it with the sharp edge of your knife. At the end of your first removal, you are happy to see that the wound has faded to a pinkish stripe.

“Who taught you this?” 

You startle at the sound of his voice after several long minutes of silence. It is a deep baritone, rough around the edges. Its unexpected richness has you shifting in your place on the edge of the bed. A flash of white light from out the window bathes his face in color. 

“My father.” You do not elaborate further. You think it self explanatory. Your father taught you everything.

“Was he hurt often?” 

You cut another knot. “There are no maesters in the far reaches,” you tell him. A hint of bitter frustration lines your words. “I have assisted several people who have needed help in the village.”

“I did not know,” he replies softly, “that is quite kind of you.”

“We all share responsibility here, no one is without duty.” You put another piece of the fishing line to the side. “It is how things function when you do not have the entire Seven Kingdoms at your disposal.”

You notice Jace’s eyebrows furrow. His stomach tenses beneath your hand. “How did you…”

“It is obvious,” you say, “your voice, your cadence, the way you were dressed when I found you… you have no scars, no callouses. You did not offer your house’s name, so I can only assume—“

“Jacaerys Velaryon,” he says, “that is my name.”

You still. Your eyes dart to his, alarm filling your chest and stealing your breath. “Velaryon,” you echo, heart racing. “That is the name of…”

“Perhaps you know of Corlys Velaryon,” he offers, “the Sea Snake. He is my grandfather. Or Rhaenyra Targaryen, my mother—“

You stand, breathing panicked. “You must leave,” you say, “why did you stay so long? The realm… your mother… the Seven Kingdoms need you.”

Jace leans forward to grasp your arm. You allow him only because you fear you may topple over without the stability.

“I am of no use to them in this condition,” he scoffs. You notice a faraway look in his eyes. The same look he sometimes got when he stared upon the ocean or recalled stories of his father to you. “My dragon is dead, my body a wreck. There is nothing left of me for them to scavenge.”

“T-That is not true,” you stutter. “You must at least find out if they are safe. You have been healed for days… you could have left—“

“I stayed for you.” You fall silent at the sincerity in his voice. His hand drifts down the bare skin of your wrist to thread between your fingers. He cups your hand between his own.

“You cannot stay,” you tell him.

“It does not matter if I stay one more day. The realm will not fall today,” he replies, “we cannot travel in this ruinous weather, anyway.”

Your eyes drift to the window, where the wind throws its tears against the pane. You nod slowly and find your seat again.

You grasp the knife from where you sat it on the duvet. You slide the other to rest upon his warm stomach. His breaths quicken beneath your hand as you drag it up to the next wound.

“I almost killed you the day after I found you,” you whisper, “I thought it would be a mercy. The fact that you are here at all… alive, breathing. It is a gift from the Gods.”

He leans forward. “What stopped you?”

Your movements pause from where you had started to cut away another knot. “You did.”

His throat bobs. His hand moves from where it clutches the sheets to where your hand rests upon his sternum. He strokes the skin of your hand gently.

You lean forward without realizing what you are doing. He does not allow you to back away. He brings his other hand to the nape of your neck and leans forward to seal your lips with his.

The kiss is languid. His tongue probes the seal of your lips and you allow it to slip inside. You bring your hand up to cup his jaw and he drags the hand cupping your neck to your hair. You let out a soft moan against his lips and he responds to the noise by pulling you forward onto his chest.

You do not lean your weight onto him in fear of hurting him, but you feel his hands crawl to settle upon your heaving ribs. You gently settle your lower half onto his hips, settling your hand down on a part of his chest that had no injuries.

You and Jace continue to kiss for what feels like hours. It is exhilarating. It feels like flying. Your stomach feels warm and fluttery, and your lips are throbbing.

You shift your hips and Jace lets out a groan. You pull away from the kiss, concerned. His hand moves to grab the flesh of your hip, sliding you back some. There is a hardness beneath you that makes a pleasant chill slide down your spine.

“Are you alright, Jace?” 

“Unless you wish for us to have sex,” he grumbles, “you should move off my hips.”

You swallow thickly at the insinuation. Sex. A novel thing. A thing that should be saved for marriage. But marriage seems so far from your mind now, drifting away like a current.

“And what do you wish for us to do?” you murmur. You slide forward an inch and he throws his head back onto the pillows. His chest heaves.

“You know what I wish,” he groans. “Is it not obvious?”

You lean forward so that your lips barely brush his own. “Then take it.”

Sunlight streams through the window ahead of you, branding the side of your face with heat, and your eyelids flutter against the intrusion. You fist your fingers in the sheets and twist your legs close to your body. As you shift, you feel an arm pulling you backwards.

You grasp the hand splayed across your stomach between your trembling fingers.

“Stay,” he murmurs against the shell of your ear. Tears bead in your eyes, but you keep them at bay.

Your thumb finds the pulse that thrums beneath his skin and you count his heart beats. The Gods are cruel, you think. They had kept Jace here long enough for you to miss him when he leaves.

You turn your body over to face him. You are not surprised to see him already staring back at you. His dark curls are a mess on the pillow beneath him. His lips pull upwards at the corners, but do not reach his eyes. He brings his hand up to stroke your cheek.

Your chin wobbles and he blinks away a frown.

“It will not be forever,” he tells you softly, reverently,

“I will return to you one day.”

You bring a hand up to wipe away the stubborn tears. “I suppose you do not know when that will be.”

He leans forward to give you a kiss and you know that is the only way he can possibly tell you no. 

Pulling away from the kiss feels like saying good-bye.

You stay in bed as he stands, sluggishly dressing himself as if he was still looking for reasons not to leave. You do not think he finds one. He turns his head to look back at you and his expression falters. 

A small smile curls at your lips as you mouth the word—go.

He heeds your instruction and leaves your cabin with a satchel of roasted fish, a map to the nearest town, and a bracelet strung with seashells.

ONE YEAR LATER…

The nets are full this morrow. The tide ebbs and flows, slinking across the silver sands. Birds let out cries of rejoice overhead for the plentiful bounty gifted by the sea. 

You bend the knee to heave the first net out of the water. You clutch your chest protectively as you search through the things with the other hand. 

“Hm,” you murmur, “a rainbow shell.” 

You bring the shell up to the light and small reflections bounce across your vision. Tucking it into your satchel, you search some more. A piece of metal, two scraps of fabric, and a clam.

You pocket the metal and one of the ratty pieces of fabric, but allow the clam to slide back under the tide. You bring your dry hand to rest upon the head of the babe swaddled against your breast.

“Shh,” you whisper to him as he begins to stir. “It is alright, my prince.”

He brings his head up slowly to peer at you. A splatter of sea foam settles on the side of his face, but he does not seem to mind. He gives you a gummy smile and you return it lovingly.

He watches with bleary eyes as you sort through the next net of things. You show him each individual item as you retrieve it. Your heart skips when you feel a familiar shape and weight in the palm of your hand.

“A conch shell,” you inform him with a giddy grin, “these sell for several silvers at the market.”

He stares at the shell with wide eyes. The pattern, a dark brown and white mottling, you think, must confuse or enrapture him by the way he looks at it.

The small of your back has begun to hurt. You straighten up and lift a supportive hand to rest underneath the baby’s bum.

“This will be enough for today,” you decide. “The sea has gifted us more than we need.”

The little boy smacks his lips as if agreeing with the statement. You nod and carry your satchel and the boy up the familiar path to the cabin.

However, your footsteps slow as you grow closer until you stop right before the door. Something is not right. You protectively cradle the back of your son’s head as you touch a hand to the door.

It pushes open with little resistance. You slide the knife you kept on you at all times to your hand in one swift movement as you step inside.

You take not but two steps beyond the threshold before you freeze. The knife clatters to the ground and a gasp shudders from your lips at the sight in front of you.

He stands across from you like he never left. He’s dressed in black gilded leathers, his body a tad leaner and steadier. His face looks older, more mature and shaped by circumstance, just as you imagine yours must too. His mop of dark hair curls around his ears, longer than when you saw him last.

His lips with awe. He stares at you and your face as if trying to map something with his mind. 

“Jace,” you say breathlessly. “How…”

“I saw you by the shore as I rode in from town,” he murmurs, taking a hesitant step forward. He lets out a soft laugh that sends your stomach aflutter. “I thought I might surprise you. I guess I am lucky to not have received a knife in my throat.”

Your throat bobs. Mistiness clouds your vision. “You came back for us.”

“For us?” Jace echoes, eyebrows furrowed. He comes so close he can reach out to you with his arm and you know that he has seen him then, by the shock that melts his features.

The boy turns his head to the best of his ability in your swaddle, his eyes searching for the unfamiliar voice. Jace’s mouth comes nearly unhinged, a trembling hand lifting as if to stroke his head, but it falls short.

He forces his eyes to look at you. “He… he’s mine?”

You bite your lip to suppress your smile as you nod. You reach around your neck with one arm while the other supports the baby’s bum. You unravel the swaddle easily, and the chubby baby flails his arms with relief. Never one to like a cage.

You outstretch him toward Jace and he takes him eagerly. He holds him with practiced ease. He supports the baby’s head and bum as he gazes down at him, tracing his forehead to the slope of his nose to the flutter of his lashes with only his eyes.

Jace finally breaks away from the baby long enough to look up at you. “And I just… I just left you. You and my son.”

Your heart skips a beat at the name. Son. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from grinning like a fool.

“You had to,” you say, stepping forward to lay a gentle hand upon his upper arm. “Your family needed you.”

He clenches his jaw. “Nothing we did… nothing we accomplished… equals this.”

He strokes a featherlight touch against the boy’s cheek and he wrinkles his nose.

“Will you…” you pause. You try to steel yourself for the rejection that may very well follow, hands clammy by your sides. “Will you be staying long?”

Jace’s eyes rush to meet yours. He steps forward. The baby whimpers in his arms at the movement. 

“I would stay forever if you would have me.”

You feel your heart skip a beat. “What? What of the throne? Of your family?”

He shakes his head. Your stomach drops.

“My brother Aegon will be the next ruler. Wed to his cousin.”

“And you?”

His dark eyes soften as they consider this question carefully. He clutches the lost prince to his chest protectively.

“I am right where I want to be.”

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