Does Katsu get jealous hearing his mom make another date plan for you ?
Camie taps her nails against the countertop. They are the same color they always are -Cajun Shrimp-, but filed into a much softer, shorter length than they were in the past. Katsuki sniffs deep, face scrunched as he picks at the plate of fries between them.
"So," Camie pops him lips apart. "What's the crisis?"
"Why do you assume something fucking wrong?" he shoots back. "Maybe I'm just checking in on you and your fucking issues."
She scoffs, holding back a laugh as she reaches for her drink. It's just cranberry juice poured into a martini glass.
"You only ever hit me up when you're in a sad girl era." Camie pitches her voice high to mimic him. "'Cam-cam-"
"I have never called you that shit in my life."
"Cam-cam, I'm so depressy and unlovable-"
Katsuki pinches his brow together. He could just leave and stop giving her the satisfaction of annoying him.
"I've been seein' a girl. My mom's assistant," he says instead. "Who she specifically banned me from ever touching."
"She banned you," Camie repeats, eyebrow cocked.
"She literally said 'don't even look at that girl or I'll kick your ass.'"
"That's so Mitsuki," Camie laughs. "Why did she say that?"
"Because she likes this girl and the last girl who she liked this much was--" He doesn't want to finish the sentence, but Camie waits for an answer she already knows. "You."
"Okay, work. I'm iconic." She claps her pointer and her thumb together. "But then shouldn't she want you to date her? 'cause she still wants us together."
"She doesnt want me to ruin another girl she loves."
"Number one: fuck you. Number two: fuck you again. Number three: I'm not ruined. I'm just not who I was at twenty." She picks up a fry and squishes it between her nails. "And who cares what your mommy thinks? Aren't you, like, 30? We broke up eight years ago-"
"Has it been eight years? Damn."
"My daughter's seven, so yeah."
"Shit, she's old."
"You're old,' Camie says. "Stop caring about what mommy says and coming to your ex for dating advice. Are you two even dating?"
"Just fucking. I sleep at her place a lot though."
"How often?"
"Whenever she's not sleeping at mine."
There's a long moment when Camie just stares at him.
"You're an idiot." It's her turn to pinch her bridge. "How were we together so long?"
"Because I'm an idiot."
Camie rolls her eyes, throwing down the fry.
"Go put on your big girl panties and ask her out already.
it hits you that your feelings for Katsuki might be romantic. not when he brings you around his friends, not when he kisses you good morning, not when you stay the night without sleeping together-
but the first time you meet his ex wife. She floats into the gathering like a dream and Katsuki immediately stands to greet her, looping his arm over her shoulder. casually, like he's done it a million times, he presses a kiss into her hair before pulling awaym
"This is my mom's intern," he says and it rings hollow in your skull.
Bakugo is halfway off of the couch, ass in the air as he tries to reach for his pants. He had dropped them in the middle of your living room, legs turned inside out and socks jammed inside. He manages to nab them by rolling over your leg, so you sigh again. "Ugh."
"Fuck off."
"Just get up!"
"I'm fucking tired. Someone needed to get dicked down three times-"
A hard shove nearly topples him off of the couch all together. "You liked it."
Katsuki's eyes flicker to your tits, then your eyes, then your tits again and it nearly, nearly, nearly makes you want to climb on him once again. Though, you're afraid if you move, you'll end up staining your couch-
"Don't you work in design? Why does your place look like dogshit?" Katsuki reads your mind. This the third time he's been to your place and it feels more embarrassing each time. His own place is nice, with a feminine touch that makes you feel sour.
"Tell your mom to pay me more."
"Oh, yeah," he rolls his eyes. "Hey, Mitsuki, I'm sick of looking at your interns ugly ass, lumpy couch, when I should be looking at her tits. Can you give her a raise? Also, she does this thing with her tongue that's worth a bonus-"
"Fuck off!"
The toothy smile he gives you is shortlived.
"Listen, we can't tell her. Or anybody. none of my friends can keep a secret." He leans back. "Things are... weird with my ex still."
You sit up, hand flying to cover yourself.
"Did you just cheat on her with me?"
"Fuck no, that's over. It's dead, but the old lady doesn't want it to be dead. She's still friends with her and everything. It's just... Some of my friends feel the same way, I think. It's just weird."
This feels a bit too personal for what you and Katsuki have. Neither of you have ever mentioned your personal lives before, other than your dire love for creampies.
"I'm sorry," you say, because you can think of nothing else. "Wanna see my pussy again? Would that make you feel better?"
when you’re whining and about how deep his cock is and each thrust is practically knocking the wind out of you yet somehow he can find more space to go even deeper plunging so deep inside of you that it really does steal your breath completely
The fabric swatches in your hand -an array of sunset colors- goes ignored. Instead, your boss' attention is locked entirely on you. Her eyes are narrowed, but her lips are pressing thin with a smile.
"Mitsuri," you sigh, still good humored. "Are you trying to set me up with your son?"
"Oh god, no. You're too good for him." Her heel taps against the linoleum as she leans back into her chair. There's a litany of overdue projects strewn about her desk, with an organizational system only the two of you could ever understand, but her work had been at an standstill all day. "But he's got friends and some of them are-"
She pauses, nose wrinkling even harder. "I can't say hot because they are my son's age, but-"
"I get it." You try to push the samples into her hand again, but Mitsuri shakes her head. Her son Katsuki is a frequent topic of conversation and she says equally positive and negative things about the man: he bought a car (she's so proud, but what a waste of money), he's successful in his career (but he could be more successful if he could fix his atttitude) and he's even bought his own apartment (but ever since his divorce, he's been alone in that damn apartment-)
"They're sweet guys," she continues. "One of 'ems this darling lil' teacher, tiny little dimples you just wanna bite-"
"Oh my god-" You throw your fabric over your face. Your single-ness has apparently become infamous. While you and Mitsuri are closer than boss and intern should be, this conversation is making your cheeks go hot.
"Or there's this red head who has biceps that are as big-"
"Mitsuri!"
"Or this beautiful boy with -"
"You're just peddling me to your son's friends!
"I'm peddling them to you! They are nice boys and you need a nice boy!" The last guy you were with was nothing of the sort. "Besides, if they ever do misbehave, I'll tell their mothers!"
With another awkward laugh you give up, just throwing you hand into the air in defeat. Truthfully, it has been... kind of hopeless lately. Dating apps certainly aren't giving you the next great romance you need in your life-
"I'll think about it."
"Think quick, because I'm having a party tonight and you're coming."
You figure out very, very quickly that Mitsuri is wrong. These boys are way too good for you.
Izuku -freckle boy- locks you into a conversation relatively quickly and you realize he's truly the button Mitsuri promised. Every topic he blabs about is dripping with passion and knowledge. On his side is a princely looking guy, who seems very content to simply listen and nod along.
The red head talks to you for a while and seems very, very normal. When your glass is empty, he brings you a refill without being asked. The party is a gaggle of people, just enough that when another person comes in, you can dip away to grab your shoes-
"Sneaking out?"
A voice catches you as you're closing the front door behind you. Mitsuri's house is in a quiet neighborhood, the soft glow of streetlights already kicking on as the sun settles into the horizon. April still has a chill on the breeze, so you pull your jacket close; Bakugo Katsuki wears only a tee shirt.
"Don't tell your mom."
Katsuki barks out a laugh, one a bit too loud. He's pressed against the brick wall that serves as a fence, one leg propped back for balance.
"Fuck, I wish I was leaving," he says, kicking gravel with the toe of his boot. A thin vape is tucked into his palm and you nearly cringe at the sight, but you decide to let him keep that a secret for now. "But it's supposed to be my party, so-"
"That's right. Happy birthday." It doesn't actually seem to be a party focused around him, despite his friends being most of the guests, but you wonder if he prefers it that way. His mother can be... intense. Having her full focus is a heavy weight to bear.
"Thanks."
There's a couple flecks of grey at his temple, accenting the blonde. It's charming, you decide. Ages him in a very attractive way. When his eyes dart to yours, you realize you're been staring at him for a long while.
"So," you clear your throat. "Your mom has no idea Midoriya is gay, huh?"
"Oh, fuck, no idea." He gives you a cock-eyed grin. "Not that she would have a problem with it, the gay thing, they just-- once it's out, it's out."
"She thought he was my 'perfect match,'" you laugh.
"Yeah, if you had a cock and your name was Shouto, you'd be his match." His smile slides a bit. "Listen, sorry the old lady made you come."
"It's okay. She just wants me to get laid."
You're joking, but he doesn't laugh. "Yeah, she bitches about that a lot."
You scoff. "No, she does not."
"Yeah, she does." Katsuki's eyes flicker to your lips. A glimmer of something bubbles in your chest, something that no one else at this party sparked. "'That girl's so smart, but she only sleeps with losers-'"
"No!" Your giggle is so high and girlish that you have to cover your face after it escapes you. "She did not say that."
"I bet she says worse about me."
Oh, yes, she does.
"She loves you a lot," you say instead. "She wants you to get a girlfriend."
"She wants me to fuck my ex."
The word 'fuck' leaves his lips and something thickens in your chest. His eyes flick back to your lips, then to the ground.
"I should get back in there before they notice I'm gone-"
"Or we can leave before they notice."
Katsuki blinks, eyebrows cocked, and you think you've miscalculated.
"You serious?"
"I mean, I-- yeah? If you want-"
"Yeah, duh, yeah." Bewilderment is the only expression he can make. "I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth, fuck."
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your amazing support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Even the most chaotic days can have relaxing moments.
Word Count: 5,1k
Warnings: Explicit language, adult themes, suggestive themes, mentions of blood, periods, medieval era viewpoints on marriage and gender. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Seven hells, he had missed his wife.
When Robb passed through the gates on his horse, with Jon and Theon following him close behind, it was nearly midnight. They had been on the road for nearly three days, and though his visit to Castle Hornwood had been necessary, he was not planning on leaving Winterfell for a while if he could help it; being away from her this past week had been nothing but torment. Judging by the harsh wind for the last two hours, there was going to be a storm soon, so he wasted no time to bid Jon and Theon good night once he dismounted his horse, then made his way into the Inner Keep with Grey Wind following him.
The whole castle was asleep, to no surprise. He climbed the stairs and went down the hallway; the torches his only source of light since the moon was hiding behind the clouds tonight. He walked past his door to approach his wife’s bedchambers but when he peeked his head in, a frown pinched his brows. Not only did the room look completely different than what he remembered—no doubt per her orders to redesign it in his absence—but she was also nowhere to be found.
Where was his lady?
It seemed that he was mistaken to assume she would’ve taken to her own bed like she had the last time he left the castle. Grey Wind curled up at the door when Robb reached his room and opened the door, the sweet flowery scent swirling around him like some sort of invisible magic, warmth caressing his face. His lady, who was perched on the window seat and watching the stormy sky turned her head like she snapped out of a haze, a gasp leaving her.
“You’re back!”
He didn’t even notice the smile pulling at his lips.
“And you’re awake.” He closed the door behind him as she darted across the room and flung herself into his arms, coaxing a chuckle out of him. He lifted her, earning a surprised yelp before he carried her to bed, both of them falling on the mattress with him on top of her.
Her giggle echoed in the room, sweeter than any melody he had ever heard. He couldn’t help but dip his head to kiss her, a sigh leaving her lips when he pulled back to feast his eyes on the sight of her beautiful face.
“Good evening, my lady wife.”
“Good evening, my lord husband,” she played along, tracing the direwolf clasp of his cloak. “I thought you’d be back earlier.”
“So did I,” Robb admitted. “Why are you awake at this hour?”
She pouted. “Sleep evades me.”
“Nightmares?”
“I had a nightmare, but it’s gone now,” she said after a beat while he absentmindedly played with her hair. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad to be back,” he murmured, stealing a kiss from her before his lips trailed down her neck, her sweet scent luring him but she held her breath.
“Robb, we—um, we cannot, I got my moon blood.”
He grinned against the soft skin of her neck.
“A man who’s afraid of getting his sword bloody is no man at all—” he was cut off when she smacked his shoulder with a gasp, laughter rumbling deep in his chest.
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s an old northern proverb.”
“It is not an old northern proverb!” she whined, pushing at his shoulder again when he lifted his head to smirk down at her.
“Aye, it is.”
“It’s not.” She scrunched up at her nose in the most adorable manner. “Proverbs are supposed to be wise.”
“It is very wise,” he argued. “It’s applicable to every moon. What is that if not wise?”
She looked like she was trying her hardest to fight back her laughter, yet a giggle escaped her before she took a deep breath.
“It’s rather uncomfortable,” she admitted, her voice quiet as her smile faded. “The cramps.”
That was enough to make Robb snap out of it.
“You’re in pain?” he asked, his gaze darting over her face. “Did you take any remedy? I can wake Maester Luwin—”
“No,” she cut him off, her hand cradling his cheek as he turned his head to kiss her palm. “No need for that, my love.”
“But are you certain?”
“I am.”
“Is that normal?”
“Very much so, I’m afraid,” she said and swallowed thickly. “Will you just…will you just hold me?”
Robb could swear his heart melted inside his chest. He stared at her for a brief moment, warmth filling his veins before he gave her a chaste kiss on the lips.
“I’ll hold you until the end of time if you wish it so,” he told her as he got off of her to take off his cloak. “Just let me change first.”
It didn’t take him long to change into loose breeches, deciding to forego his nightshirt as usual due to the heat of the room. It was rather hot if he had to admit, yet his lady was not used to the cold of the north, and she liked it that way. Raindrops started pattering on the window, wind outside getting stronger as he slipped into bed, pulling his lady close to him so that she could curl into his side to rest her head on his chest. He nuzzled into her hair, her scent the only remedy that could soothe the ache of being apart from her for days.
“I missed you,” she whispered into the silent room and Robb pressed his lips on top of her head.
“I missed you too,” he muttered. “How was it? Here?”
“Um—” She cleared her throat. “Nothing of importance took place.”
“Bran is still…?”
“Asleep,” she finished his sentence for him. “But Maester Luwin says he will wake up, we just don’t know when.”
He heaved a sigh, exhaustion creeping up on him slowly. “And Rickon?”
“He loves taking care of Frost, you should see him. Every morning we bring her breakfast, he finds it hilarious.”
He huffed out a laugh.
“Better than nightmares, I suppose,” he said. “What was yours about, by the way?”
“Oh, I…” she trailed off. “I don’t remember exactly, but it was painful.”
He let out a hum, his arm tightening around her waist as he kissed her forehead.
“I’m here,” he murmured. “I would never let anything bad happen to you, I swear it.”
Her whole body tensed up, and she went quiet before she pulled away from his grip so that she could sit up in the bed. The room was rather dark; his lady must’ve blown out the candles before, and since the flames in the hearth were the only source of light, he could only see the glimmer in her eyes, rather than her whole expression.
Her voice was calm when she spoke: “Robb?”
“Hm?”
“Would you kill someone for me if I asked you to?”
The lightning flashed outside, illuminating her beautiful face for a brief moment before the darkness claimed the room again, followed by a loud boom. Despite the exhaustion, Robb felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, how did she not know?
The whole north knew at this point.
“Of course.” He frowned when the thought hit him. “Has someone offended you in my absence?”
“No,” she was quick to assure him. “Not at all. I was just thinking about the nightmare, if someone hurt me—”
“That’d be the last thing they ever did before I sent them to the gods, old or new.”
“No matter who?”
“No matter who,” he swore as he reached out to drag his knuckles over her arm before he grinned. “Except your moon blood; that I cannot kill. I can put it to sleep for nine moons though.”
It took him a mere second to understand she was in no mood for a jest, even before she let out a shaky breath like she was on the verge of tears. Robb cussed at himself under his breath and sat up while she sniffled so that he could pull her into his arms. She buried her face to the crook of his neck as he cradled her head with one hand, the other rubbing her back.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered to her temple. “I’m sorry, my love. Was the nightmare that bad?”
She nodded and sniffled again.
“Someone—” She gulped. “Someone hurt me. And I bled out. Alone.”
“That will never happen,” he cooed at her. “I’d never let that happen, lamb. Just a nightmare, it’s not real.”
A curt laugh escaped her and she took a deep breath.
“No,” she murmured after a beat. “No, it’s not real. Just a nightmare, nothing more.”
Though it had taken his lady a while to go to sleep, the next day she woke up in better spirits. The storm continued outside, and Robb’s morning wasn’t so busy for once, so he was able to convince her to stay in bed and have breakfast there. It was rather cozy; the sound of the wind and rain locked away outside while the hearth warmed up the room, Grey Wind taking a nap at the foot of the bed. His lady was wrapped up all snug in his robe while Robb rested his head in her lap, holding one of the ledgers that she had asked him to check above his face, but he could barely focus with the way she was absentmindedly playing with his hair.
It felt so peaceful that Robb wanted to stay like this forever.
“So what do you think?” she urged him and he tried to focus on the numbers on the page.
“I think it looks great.”
She gave him a bright smile, and—much to his displeasure—stopped playing with his hair so that she could grab the pair of earrings that he had forgotten to give her last night off her nightstand.
“They’re so pretty,” she chirped. “I cannot wait to wear them tonight to dinner!”
He blindly reached up to put her hand back in his hair, coaxing a laugh out of her before she buried her hand into his curls and ran her nails over his scalp, making him close his eyes with a sigh.
“Lord Mollen doesn’t like my idea,” she told him, causing him to open his eyes again to look up at her. “Lady Lynara told me as much. Neither of them think it wise.”
“What they think isn’t of importance.” Robb turned the page. “It’s for a good cause, and you want it done, so it will be.”
She shifted her weight as if she was too excited to sit still.
“Thank you!” she said. “I’ll imply it in a polite way tonight if she asks again, let’s see how she will react.”
He stole a glance at her. “Are you sure you can attend dinner tonight? We can eat here if you’re still in pain.”
“No, it’s better now,” she said. “It’s bearable.”
Robb frowned. “Is it ever unbearable?”
“Sometimes, but this is not an appropriate topic for a lord and lady to speak of, you do realize that?”
“We’re man and wife now, we can talk about such things,” he said. “For example, is it as painful as—”
“I’m going to stop you right there because I think you’re going to compare it to something men go through during sparring,” she said. “Yes. It’s more painful than that. Any of that.”
“Any of that, really?”
She puffed up her cheeks and looked up at the ceiling like she was straining her mind for the right words.
“Imagine somebody sets a sword on fire.” She held up a fist, mimicking holding a sword before she slammed the imaginary sword into the mattress. “Then drives it down your spine!”
Robb blinked up at her.
“…I don’t want to imagine that.”
“And while you’re trying to breathe, someone else shoots an arrow through your stomach.”
“That’s—”
“And then they twist both the sword and the arrow, and then yank them both out.”
“Why do I feel like you’re enjoying this very vivid description?”
“And there’s blood everywhere but it matters not, because you’re still expected to attend feasts and jousts and such,” she mused. “And dance and make small talk and smile and entertain people.”
He made a face. “How do women not walk around screaming?”
“Not from a lack of desire to do so, I’ll tell you that much,” she said airily as if they were talking of the weather. “My septa used to say—”
“M’lady?” Her maid knocked on the door. “A raven from Dorne has arrived.”
“Come in Kyra!” she called out and the maid opened the door, then came over to the bed to hand her the scroll, then scurried out of the room while Robb turned his attention to the ledger. His lady broke the unfamiliar seal—it probably belonged to her mother’s house in Dorne—then skimmed the lines.
“Silas?” he asked and she shook her head.
“Perce,” she muttered. “Silas wrote to me the moment he set foot in Dorne.”
“How was their trip?”
“Well, Cliff is an excellent sailor so it—oh he has to be jesting!”
That was enough to pull Robb’s attention away from the ledger.
“What’s happened?”
She threw her head back in exasperation, then frowned down at the scroll.
“Perce wants me to ask Silas about his new lady on my next letter.”
“Hold on.” Robb sat up with a smirk. “Silas has a lady?”
“Mm hm.”
“Already?” he asked. “They’ve been there for what, two weeks?”
“Three.” She pursed her lips. “A young widow, whose husband died under…questionable circumstances.”
“Did they check for a dagger in his chest or was that too questionable?”
“Perce says Silas goes to her castle each night.”
He let out a laugh. “So she’s his mistress?”
“It sounds to me that Silas is her mistress, to be completely honest,” she muttered, her eyes darting over the lines. “Unbelievable.”
“Is it though?” he wondered aloud, earning a slight shove at his arm. “I’m surprised that you’re surprised, Silas is very fond of ladies.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but there was another knock on the door. Robb pushed himself off the bed to make his way there, assuming that it was either Jon or Theon, but instead, it was his youngest brother. Rickon’s eyes widened when he saw him.
“Robb, you’re back!”
“I am,” he said with a small chuckle as Rickon clutched at his leg in an attempt to hug him. “Missed me?”
“A little, but it was only for a week.”
“It was.” Robb ruffled his wild curls. “Are you hiding from Maester Luwin?”
“No.”
“Rickon, if you stuffed a dead crow in your septa’s pillow again just because she hit your knuckles—”
“I did not!”
“Then did you need me for something?”
“Um, not you.” The little boy walked past him to step inside, making Robb look over his shoulder. “Good morrow!”
Robb tilted his head in confusion.
“Good morrow to you too my sweet!” His lady crossed the room, then crouched down to Rickon’s eye level. “How did you sleep?”
“I had a dream with—with me and Shaggy, and we were on a mountain, and then Shaggy was going after another wolf, but then it wasn’t a wolf, because it turned into a bird!”
His lady gasped. “That sounds like a very interesting dream! What sort of bird?”
“A blue one—can we give Frost breakfast, please and thank you?”
“I was away for a week and he says please and thank you now?” Robb asked, getting a reprimanding glare from his lady while Rickon nodded.
“We say please and thank you to ladies,” he pointed out in a very proud manner, and Robb stifled a laugh.
“Do you know what those words mean?”
“I do!”
“Of course he does,” his lady said. “And we can give Frost breakfast after I get ready, thank you for asking so nicely.”
“Wait,” Robb said, the smile wiping off his face in a second. “Now?”
“It’s her breakfast time,” Rickon told him and Robb shook his head.
“You’re nearly a man grown, you can feed her by yourself.”
“But we do it together!” Rickon argued. “We go to the kitchens and get carrots and apples and go to the barn to feed Frost first, and then Silk.”
“Rickon my sweet, can Robb join us today?”
Rickon looked up at the ceiling with a dramatic sigh while Robb frowned at him.
“What, you have to think?”
“He can,” Rickon muttered. “I guess.”
“I appreciate the sacrifice, Rickon.”
“But you cannot leave the castle in this attire,” his lady told his little brother, motioning at his clothes. “You need a cloak, there’s a storm outside. How about Robb takes you to your room so that you can get your cloak, and then we’ll go to the kitchens?”
“Okay!” Rickon rushed to his side. “Let’s go.”
“He knows where—” Robb started, but gave Rickon a little shove when he sunk his teeth into Robb’s hand, tugging at his sleeve. His lady gasped.
“Robb, don’t push him like that!” she chastised him and Rickon gave him a big grin.
“Aye, don’t push me like that!”
“You’re fine,” Robb deadpanned. “You’re more wolf than child.”
His lady shook her head and pointed at the door. “Out.”
“You heard her, Rickon.”
“I’m talking to you!” she insisted. “Go make sure he has a cloak on, and I’ll meet you in the kitchens.”
“Fine, fine…” Robb muttered and grabbed his own cloak to put it on. “You can stay, Grey Wind.”
The direwolf only plopped on his back when his lady approached as if he was asking for belly rubs, and Robb closed the door with a sigh.
“Come on.” He gently pushed Rickon, who wasted no time to jump and grab his arm to hang from it, his cackle echoing in the hallway.
“Onward!”
“See what I meant?” Robb grumbled as he made his way down the hallway, swinging his arm while Rickon cheered. “More wolf than child.”
Much to his displeasure, he barely had any time to see his lady after their little visit to the barn. He went to Bran’s room, but he was soon pulled away from there when Maester Luwin reminded him that there were many scrolls that he had to reply to; a lot of ravens had arrived in Winterfell in his absence from different parts of the north. At least the storm had passed, so once he managed to find some free time, he joined Jon and Theon in the yard to spar with them while his lady attended to her own duties.
But there was something off.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something off.
Perhaps it was because of people’s criticism of her new plan while he was away, or the nightmares keeping her up last night, but judging by how curt her smile was while she was talking to others when he caught a sight of her on his way to the rookery, Robb could swear she wasn’t her happy self in the crowd of ladies surrounding her.
After an hour of sparring, he decided to catch his breath and grab some water while Theon stretched, and Jon sat down beside him on the bench to sharpen his sword.
“I’m so glad to be back,” Theon said. “I don’t like Castle Hornwood.”
“Why not?”
“Everyone is so quiet there.”
“It was a nice change,” Jon said with a grin and Robb scoffed.
“Nah, I missed home too.”
“You missed your lady,” Theon corrected. “More than you missed home. You kept sulking.”
“Aye, you did.”
“I was right to do so, because apparently she—” Robb paused when he saw Lady Jorelle crossing the yard. “Give me a moment. Lady Jorelle?”
She spun around on her heels as he made his way to her.
“Hello.”
“Hello, my lord,” she said. “Welcome back.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I uh…this is going to sound rather strange, but is my lady wife alright?”
She blinked a couple of times, then raised her brows. “Hm?”
“Has something happened while I was away?”
She frowned and looked up as if she was trying to remember, then shook her head.
“Nothing happened,” she said, her voice calm. “Why?”
“She seems rather distressed,” he said. “And she mentioned some people disagreeing with her about her plans for mothers and children for the winter. Has someone disrespected her in my absence? Because she refuses to tell me, but I’d like to put an end to it if such a thing took place.”
“And admirable thought,” she said. “But nothing took place, I assure you. If anything, it was a rather dull week.”
Robb bit inside his cheek, then gave her a curt smile and nodded.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’d better leave you to it then. I appreciate your help.”
“Of course,” Jorelle said and curtsied, then went into the keep while Robb returned to the corner Jon and Theon were watching him from.
“What was that about?” Theon asked and Robb ran a hand through his hair.
“My lady is distressed, and I do not know why.”
“Well, her family is away,” Jon pointed out. “And then you went away. Can’t be easy, being alone in a new place.”
That could explain the nightmare, now that he thought about it.
“But Silas will visit often, he said so himself,” Theon said. “A couple moons after the honeymoon, he said.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Robb said with a shrug. “Silas is rather busy in Dorne with a lady.”
Jon’s head shot up from his sword. “Silas has a lady?”
“Aye, a mistress.” Robb grinned. “A young widow who killed her husband, apparently.”
Theon let out a laugh, and Jon stared at Robb in silence for a couple of seconds, then took a deep breath.
“He—how do you know this?”
“Perceon sent a raven to my lady.” Robb gulped down his water, then put the flask to the side. “Are you ready?”
Jon swallowed thickly, then feigned a cough.
“You go ahead, I’ll uh…” He motioned in the direction of the Godswood. “I’ll find Ghost.”
“Now?” Robb asked but Jon ignored him, making his way through the yard to go into the Godswood. Robb turned to Theon to see whether he knew what was happening, but Theon held up his palms with a shake of his head.
“You two know direwolves better than I.”
Robb looked over his shoulder, then heaved a sigh and grabbed his sword.
“Very well then,” he said. “Come on. I haven’t sparred in days, I must catch up.”
Eventually, he had to go back to his solar to hold audience with some of his vassals, but once Lord Poole left and someone knocked on the door, it wasn’t yet another vassal but his lady wife who peeked her head in.
“Am I interrupting anything?”
“Never,” Robb said, a smile pulling at his lips as he stood up. “Come in!”
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“I know you’ve been busy, but I sent the ledgers with Kyra, and I wanted to ask—”
“They’re over here,” Robb pointed at the top of the pile. “I’ll be done with them by the dinner time, is that alright?”
“More than alright!” She beamed while he rounded the desk to lean back to it, then grabbed her hand to pull her closer. A giggle climbed her throat and she stepped into his embrace, heaving a sigh when he cradled her cheek in his palm and brushed his lips against hers.
“Do you have much to do?” she asked, playing with the laces of his shirt and he nodded.
“A little,” he admitted. “But stay.”
“Gladly,” she said. “I miss you during the day.”
“I miss you too,” he said, caressing her cheekbone. “And are you feeling better? Last night…”
“Oh.” She paused, looking down at the floor before she raised her gaze to his again. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t,” he said in a haste. “Don’t apologize for it. I just want to make sure you’re alright, that’s all.”
“I’m alright,” she assured him. “It was just a nightmare, nothing more.”
“And is…” Robb trailed off. “Is someone driving a burning sword down your spine and shooting arrows into your stomach?”
That coaxed a laugh out of her, the pleasant sound echoing in the room.
“No.”
“No urge to walk around screaming at people?”
“Aside from very specific people, no,” she said. “But ask me again after dinner. I have a feeling the urge will be back then.”
“We can take our dinner in our bedchambers.”
“You just came back,” she reminded him. “We cannot do that I’m afraid. Your vassals want to see you.”
“And I want to see my wife.”
“I’m right here.”
“Aye, but you’re dressed.”
Her jaw dropped and she pushed at his arm. “Robb!”
“What?” He gave her a mischievous grin. “Would you rather if I were dishonest?”
“I would rather if you weren’t so—” she started, but was cut off when someone knocked on the door.
“Lord Mollen, m’lord,” the footman at the door announced and his lady rolled her eyes at the name.
Ah.
The infamous Lord Mollen who did not approve or like her plans.
When the footman opened the door to let him in, his lady made an attempt to step away no doubt to leave the room, but Robb was quick to grab her wrist to tug her back to his side, making her head shoot up.
“You’ll stay,” he muttered and turned to the man. “Lord Mollen. Good afternoon.”
Lord Mollen lingered in his spot, his eyes darting between him and his lady before he bowed his head.
“My lord,” he said. “If you’re busy, I can come at another time.”
“We’re not busy.”
“But the lady—”
“My lady wife will remain here.”
She looked like she was fighting off a smug smile but managed to school her expression into composure.
“Hello Lord Mollen,” she said. “How wonderful to see you. I’ve had the chance to talk to Lady Lynara the other day.”
“She mentioned it, my lady,” Lord Mollen said. “That was actually what I wanted to talk to you about, my lord. This…carpenter business.”
Robb gave a short nod. “I’m listening.”
Lord Mollen cleared his throat.
“It’s clear that your lady wife has a soft heart for children,” he started, “And may the gods grant you both many.”
A shadow crossed his lady’s face, but it was gone as quick as it came.
“However,” the man continued. “Expecting the carpenters to teach the craft to absolute strangers on top of their usual work has caused some unrest between them, at least in my castle. Most of them teach their own children their craft.”
“Orphans don’t have fathers who can teach them anything, Lord Mollen,” she said. “And those carpenters will be compensated for their work. Surely adding one more apprentice cannot hurt. Or do they fear competition?”
Lord Mollen turned his glances to Robb as if he expected him to step in, but Robb stayed quiet for a deliberate couple of seconds before he pushed himself off the desk.
“The question was directed to you, my lord.” He went back to take his seat behind the desk, so that Lord Mollen would have to address his lady while Robb was still present and could glare at him without her noticing. “Not to me.”
“No,” Lord Mollen answered in a rush. “Not competition, but they find it rather trivial. All that work for toys for children, who will mostly come from mountain clans. We have our own people to worry about for the winter, and while I’m sure it’s normal to give such instructions back in the south, in the north—”
“Lord Mollen, there must’ve been a misunderstanding in my absence,” Robb cut him off. “Which is expected, seeing that this is rather new for everyone. But from now on, you can safely assume that whatever instructions my lady wife gives, as polite as she makes them sound, come from me.” He crossed his arms over the desk and leaned forward, his jaw clenched. “And I do not give trivial commands.”
Since his lady was still leaning back to the desk, he couldn’t see her face, but Lord Mollen’s discontent was clear as day. Silence fell upon the room, and Robb let the veiled threat linger in the air without another word while Lord Mollen gulped, then took a deep breath.
“A misunderstanding indeed,” he said, and bowed his head. “I’ll make sure they follow your command, my lord. My lady.”
“Have a nice day, Lord Mollen!” his lady chirped while she walked him to the door, then closed it behind him once he left. Robb threw his head back.
“That prick…” he grumbled while his lady stood there for a moment, her hand still on the handle.
“Do you have some free time?” she asked after a beat, leaning back to the door. Robb ran a hand through his hair.
“I’m supposed to hold meetings with four more people until dinner.”
She let out a hum like she was lost in her own thoughts before she shrugged and bolted the door.
“They’ll wait.”
“What’re you—?” Robb was cut off when she flung herself into his arms for a kiss, letting him pull her into his lap with a squeal. He grabbed the side of her neck to tilt her head, the feeling of her melting under his touch intoxicating as ever when he deepened the kiss, the fire of desire coming to life with a stir.
Gods, it had been so long…
His lips trailed down the column of her throat down to her bosom, her lovely scent filling his lungs, her skin softer than the silk of her pretty gown. Her fingers buried into his curls with a gasp to tug at the roots, drawing a moan out of him as she shifted in his lap, the mere friction against his hardness enough to drive him mad. He blindly reached down to push her skirt up, but she grabbed his hands to entwine their fingers, trying to catch her breath, her lips swollen with his kiss.
“Robb, we cannot do that—”
The sound that left him sounded awfully like a whine. “But…”
“Not that.”
“Does my wife mean to torment me, then?”
A giggle climbed up her throat and she sunk her teeth into her bottom lip, looked over her shoulder at the door, then turned to him again.
“No,” she said, “my husband misunderstands me.”
He could’ve come up with a retort if all the blood in his body hadn’t gone south, but any hope of even half a thought disappeared from his mind when she easily slid off his lap to kneel before him, the realization knocking the breath out of his lungs.
“I said we couldn’t do that,” she said, eyes gleaming with mischief as she looked up at him. “I never said we couldn’t do something else.”
tags/cw: soulmates au, red string of fate, set in canon but not akotsk compliant, mean flirt aerion, probably ooc aerion bc he’s not a psychopath, readers conflicted but horny lol
as you sat in the crowd, you felt the invisible thread around your finger tug, pulling taught enough that the digit twitched where your hands sat folded in your lap before settling loose again.
you hid your right hand beneath your left and looked back up at the list field. your father, a lesser lord, sat to your right and your younger brother sat to your left, blocking you in from the crowd of other lords and ladies perched in the stands below the targaryen princes.
the crier stepped out into the mud, stopping at the fence splitting the field, and turned towards prince baelor and his brother with a deep breath. you already knew who he was about to announce. the thread tightened on your finger, choking the flesh and stopping the blood, though when you looked down it was unchanged from that morning. you flexed your hand and rubbed at the joint, your lips pinching at the phantom throb.
aerion.
he took delight in snapping your attention towards him, reminding you of his looming presence, niggling at you from afar.
the closer you got, the stronger the hold he had on your fate tie felt. his reach had its limit however; you’d noticed so after suffering through a week of his childish games during the last tourney but three moons back. the tugging had been insistent and never ending after you’d given your favour to another knight, keeping you up late at night even, only for it to stop suddenly as the distance grew between you when you travelled home.
the relief was immediate, but closely followed by a gaping absence, a throbbing grief for where aerion had burrowed and made himself home in the back of your mind. you were restless for the last portion of the trip home, squeezing your own finger in comfort to try and still your foolish need to move and get close again.
it had been like this for two years almost, dipping in and out of each others’ lives, tasting what it could be like together as aerion somehow got more brazen and clever with each meeting and you tried to ignore your budding fondness for him.
you weren’t sure of the exact date you’d first crossed paths, but you could remember the warmth of kings landing and the last of the preparation for egg’s name day celebration rushing around you as you followed on your mother’s heels, determined not to make a fool of yourself.
it was your first visit there as a lady in your own right, no longer a child, a girl holding tightly to your mother’s dress, but a woman that must make her own connections. it was for this reason that your father was looking after your younger brother, tomas, for the day instead of you or your mother.
you were taking lunch with a group of other lesser houses’ ladies and their daughters outside, sat quietly while the older women gossiped among themselves in between sips of wine. it was hot, as it always seemed to be in king’s landing, and your dress felt too thick. coming from the north, it was difficult to find dresses appropriate for the weather, and you only had so much money to spend on the higher priced tailoring at this end of the kingdoms, but the thick cotton you favoured was a touch too heavy for the heat of blaring sun.
your mother had a dress or two held back from her previous visits across the kingdom with your father, so she was faring better than you were, but you knew she’d run out of dresses made of airy material before the week was done and she’d soon be sweating alongside you.
you swallowed drily, and took a sip of your water, peeking longingly at one of the younger women sat with you as she fanned herself in the steady heat. a single drop of sweat trickled from behind her ear to her collarbone where it soaked into the delicate, twisted braid resting over her shoulder.
you looked back down to your hands and sneakily wiped the condensation from your glass into the folds of your dress, hoping the sweat wouldn’t stain the material too noticeably.
you had brought your embroidery with you; a handkerchief for your father that you’d had to restart three times over so far on your mother’s request. your skills in sewing, practical or decorative, were questionable, though you were determined to improve, so you had thought to take the spare time during the visit to keep practicing, hoping to seize the opportunity to ask your peers for any advice if they seemed friendly enough not to boast over your disadvantage.
just as you were starting on the second of your house’s three flowers, you pricked your finger roughly.
“seven bloody hells,” you swore under your breath, your finger rearing back before you sucked on it. you pulled it from your soft mouth at your mother’s harsh glare and dropped your head, your lips a thin, pinched line of regret even as you wanted to shake your hand out to ease the throbbing.
“hmm. unable to tell where the needle will be?” one of the other ladies spoke up, humming disapproval.
“it can be a terribly tricky thing to get the hang of when you’re first starting, i’m sure,” a second piped up before sipping at her wine with a smirk. “i remember my elissa struggling… when she was little.”
you kept your mouth closed, having no urge to tell them that you’d been learning since you were five as most girls did, you’d just never been able to pick it up quite as quick. the careful hand for fine details escaped you.
“perhaps you should find the maester to look at it if it was so painful as to yell. the walk may steady your hands for when you get back so there are no further accidents,” your mother suggested bluntly, giving you no option to decline.
you tightened your clenched hold on the handkerchief, thread hanging loose and needle discarded on the table beside you, and nodded with a wane smile.
“of course, mother.” you stood and left the garden, following the path back to the castle. when you looked down at the soft silk in your hand you wanted to cry, the tiniest speckles of blood stained the pale material from your finger.
you would try again. perhaps the fifth attempt would be the most fortuitous.
you wiped preemptively at your dry eyes, the familiar ache of building tears enough to have you reflexively reach up while quickening your pace to reach the maester’s working quarters.
“what upsets you, my lady?” a voice called out, pulling you to a temporary stop as you turned to find the man it came from.
his eyes were intrigued as he took in your wobbling pout and wide eyes, but he didn’t seem empathetic in his curiosity. you recognised him as a prince immediately from his pale hair and vivid purple eyes. he carried his grandfather’s targaryen looks proudly.
he raised his eyebrows expectantly when you stayed silent, staring. “well?”
“i pricked my finger, just a silly accident,” you tried to laugh off, your nerves turning into shambles over speaking to a targaryen without chaperone.
he scoffed.
“and so where were you hoping to go? to the maestar, to heal such a damning wound?” he mocked.
your lips pinched as he stepped closer, the cruel twist to his features became more evident, but you didn’t move as he lifted your wrist carelessly to gaze at the single, tiny pearl of blood gathering on the pad of your finger.
he cooed with an insincere sympathy, laughing as you tugged your hand away in barely concealed anger and offence.
“i believe the fresh air of the walk will do me more good than an actual visit to the maesters,” you said sharply, feeling your hand twitch and throb where you held it staunchly by your side. “i’m sure they’re quite busy.”
“quite.” he stared at you, like a brightly coloured insect he’d found beneath a rock. unsure if he wanted to poke and prod, but unwilling to look away. the silent attention pulled taut at your nerves.
“is there something i can help you with?” you finally asked, a little brusque, but more clearly anxious as you picked at the small wound with your nail. your manners left bereft and wanting.
“now, now,” he tutted with a barely contained smile. “do not snap at your prince, not when i was simply extending my concerns to a lady walking alone around the castle grounds.”
your eyes widened once more and you wanted to curse your loose tongue.
“please accept my sincere apology, my prince. it must be the heat that has me acting out of sorts,” you said, ducking into a deep curtsy and quickly turning on your heel. you walked away with speed, biting your lip and praying to the old gods and the new that he didn’t—
your hand tugged back towards him sharply, but when you looked he was still several paces away. aerion’s own hand had risen and he was looking just as confused as you were until his eyes caught on your hand and he tilted his head and closed the distance between you.
you saw a pale flash of red from his hand as he lifted yours once more, gentle this time as he rubbed his thumb over the thread linking your pinkies together.
his jaw was slack, the tip of his pink tongue visible behind his teeth as he tilted his head lower, enraptured by the invisible tie between you slowly developing thicker and stronger.
you ran the tip of your middle finger over his own tie and he shivered, the red grew bold in colour. his eyes darted up to yours and you held your breath.
he lifted your hand higher and took your injured finger in his mouth, pressing his tongue flat and broad against the pad to lap at the burst of blood until you came to your senses and pulled it back and stumbled out of his reach.
you cradled your hand to your chest, flushed and hot and no longer able to blame it on the high sun. you gawped at the smiling prince, unable to find words as he looked at you like he wanted a second taste.
without a word more you ran back to your mother and the other ladies as though he might’ve given chase. you slowed your pace as you got closer and stayed quiet for the rest of the day. though his spit had soon dried upon your skin, the heat of his tongue became unforgettable.
the last few days of the celebration were spent trying to avoid aerion as best you could, hoping the connection would break or grow weak, that the gods would realise their mistake. but it did no such thing and the red thread stayed tied tight and you could feel his eyes on you at all opportunities, sizing you up and seeking you out in the crowds.
you’d catch his lilac gaze across feast tables as he sat with his father and brothers, or over his shoulder, benches apart, as a play was performed in honour of eagon’s ninth name day. he found you at every turn, but made no move to come close, apparently aware of how skittish you were and adapting to it.
you’d thought you had maybe managed to lose his interest by the end of the week, having not spoken to him a second time and resisted with all your might the temptation to play and pull at the thread on your end. you could feel him sometimes, testing its give, but you’d ignored it until you’d gotten back home where you scratched and tugged at the thread freely, easing the urge that had grown recklessly in you every time you saw red in your peripheral.
you weren’t mindless, however, and you’d made sure your parents and little brother never caught you fiddling with what they’d see as air on the journey back.
you’d barely unpacked the evening of your arrival home, so distracted by the tie around your right finger, that you were caught by surprise when your parents called for you.
you left your travel trunk for your handmaid to see to in the morning and met with your mother and father in the small library. your mother pulled you to sit by her side, a warm smile gracing her face as she tucked you in tightly so the warmth of the fire would reach you. you longed for the warmth of the south as the snow of your home bled back into your bones.
“you know we’ve done our best to fend off unwanted proposals over the years,” you mother started as your father stared pensively into the fireplace. “tried to protect you for as long as we could.”
“of course,” you whispered as dread seeped in faster than the cold ever could.
“but it is no longer proper, not for a woman of your age,” you mother said. she stroked a gentle thumb over your round cheek, her touch light and fleeting. mourning.
“we’ve received an offer,” your father spoke up, finally looking at you. his gaze was heavier than it had been that morning, he looked at you differently. “we’re considering it.” your mother cleared her throat and your father sighed heavily and looked away. with a nod seemingly to himself he continued, “i’m going to accept.”
who would this man be? a knight, a lord, a kind man or a cruel one? someone powerful enough to have your father back down, at least. you’d always half-thought he’d push you towards becoming a septa with how he coveted you from other men in the region.
you thought back to aerion and wondered if he would stop this matrimony before it had chance to take place. if he heard news quick enough you thought there was potential; there had been enough rumours around the keep during your visit of his jealousy, enough comparisons of his dragon-like hoarding, that you’d believe he’d do so just to prove he could. a flash of his family’s power and wealth, and his control over even the most inconsequential things.
perhaps he’d do it by sending forth a counter offer your father would be unable to refuse. perhaps—
i’m going to accept.
“what house does he bear, father? do i know him?”
your father’s lips pursed.
“we don’t need to discuss this any further,” your mother interrupted smoothly. she ran a hand down your back comfortingly, but it set your further on edge. “the details have not been struck, you will know all you need to as the time comes. for now, you’ve had a long day or travel, you should go rest, as we should. we will speak in the morning.”
despite your unsatisfaction to her non-answer, you knew you’d get no more from her if you pushed. you nodded and bid them both a good night as you left with your heart racing.
before you reached the stairs, you saw your father’s solar door cracked open. with a brief look behind you, you went inside and thanked the old gods that he’d left a candle burning on his desk.
you couldn’t get his pensive look out of your head, the tense hold of his back as he’d refused to look at you, the grey of his beard glittering sharply in the firelight. and no matter how much your mother had smiled, you had seen the worry buried in the lines around her eyes.
you saw the letter, unfolded and abandoned on the corner of his desk.
“…my apologies for placing this letter among your belongings, lord fenn, it was imperative that we discuss this matter without any further delay. i’d have liked to do so in person but the knowledge of our childrens’ fate tie was only made known to me the morn you were set to ride and so…”
your breath caught and you flipped the top of the folded letter down to find the targaryen seal set in red wax.
slowly you released a thin breath and put the letter back down. you knew what it would say, you didn’t need to keep reading. aerion had told his father about you and your fate tie. he had sealed your lives together without a second thought, you had never lost his interest.
—
you pulled yourself back into the present and looked down to the grounds, letting your eyes drift over the opposing knight first before finding finding aerion’s eyes already set on you from where he sat atop his steed. it felt like he had a sixth sense as to where you were at any point in time with the way he could locate you in a crowd, as though you stood out in any regard.
his wrists were crossed nonchalantly over his saddle’s horn, the reigns loose in his hold as he gazed up at you with a small, patient smile. your lips pursed.
he was leant back in the saddle, satisfied and calm despite the charge he was about to ride. he’d caught you looking at the other man and you knew nothing good would come of it, regardless of it meaning nothing. you tugged discreetly at your thread and watched his smile widen before he trotted forward to face his uncle and father. after a brief look shared with his blood, he lowered his visor and turned back to head to his starting place. you watched anxiously, toes curling in your shoes.
it was a blur as the horses moved, your brows tugged together snugly as you desperately tried to keep your squinting eyes on the two men hurtling towards each other. aerion’s lance dropped low at the last moment and broke off into the knight’s leg.
you bit your tongue at the agonised yell, your face pinching in distaste. you didn’t delight in pain like your fated seemed to. you watched as he trotted along, his visor lifted now as he watched the other knight grasp at his bleeding leg with shaking hands.
his eyes lingered between the man and you, a sick pride flourishing in his chest. he was better.
he urged his horse forward with a subtle shift of his hips.
the knight’s squire stood by the injured knight’s side, just short of the horse’s back, where he tugged too roughly trying to release the lance head from his leg. every spurt of blood was accompanied by a new, sharply bitten swear echoing across the flat grounds. the joust would continue if the man didn’t forfeit or move from his horse and aerion was taking his time heading back towards his own squire and second lance.
the injured knight’s squire saw this and tried to corral the horse and his knight back to their end, desperate to hand him his own lance if he couldn’t relieve the pain.
with your heart beating like thunder you watched as aerion waited for the other knight to hitch his lance with tired arms before kicking his horse into action. you waited for him to drop his forearm again, but tugged at your fate thread hard before he could, flinching his arm off target enough to correct his purposely harmful aim. it still hit the knight in the ribs and knocked him from his horse, and aerion was skimmed at his shoulder, but a second lance was not dug deep into flesh and for that you were grateful. perhaps the knight would have a chance to live now.
“father, did you see that? prince aerion was barely even scathed,” your little brother chittered excitedly by your side, clapping along with the crowd as aerion paraded and peacocked for a moment before leaving the grounds free for the next set of knights.
you watched the injured man get carried off away from the stands and tried not to remember his face or name, the colours on his house flag. it’d be easier to ignore the damage aerion caused if you didn’t notice the man’s absence at the next games.
“one day i’ll be able to best prince aerion in a joust,” your brother continued, his arms flailing as he pretended to thrust an invisible joust forward. your father only hummed.
you sat quietly as another two sets of knights won and lost, their names barely having chance to register as your patience wore thin and your attention was pulled to aerion, out of sight but plucking at your thread. gentle twangs and tugs that felt carefully leading, like he was encouraging you to come find him.
your distraction throughout the next jousts must have not been as well hidden as you’d hoped as your father cleared his throat during a break between competitors.
“perhaps we should congratulate prince aerion on his win,” he suggested.
“and wish him luck for the next,” tomas added eagerly, already taking your hand to lead you from the stands despite your hesitance. your brother was barely seven, but his grip was strong as he tried to push through the crowd to get to aerion sooner, only slowing to look over his shoulder at your father to check he was still headed in the right direction.
you father had stayed silent behind you on the walk, only stepping forward once you reached the pair of kings guards stood outside the bright red tent. they recognised you easily enough, but your father still introduced himself for propriety’s sake.
ser roland crakehall let his eyes linger on you over your father’s shoulder for a moment before he dipped into the tent. you heard soft mutterings before aerion’s voice broke through rudely.
“i don’t want to see any guests, send them away, they can find entertainment with my cousin or daeron if he’s been unable to climb his horse,” he scoffed.
you felt heat rush to your face, anger over embarrassment, and you dropped your brother’s hand temporarily to rub harshly at your finger where your thread hung limp. you tugged it harshly, glaring at the tent and hearing ser roland explain exactly who was outside of aerion’s tent waiting to see him, your name whispered with purpose.
the air seemed to still before suddenly aerion was opening his tent flap with a frown, his thumb rubbing at his own threaded finger irritatedly. his eyes softened at the sight of you; you’d be tempted to call the look fond if his smug smile didn’t ruin it, the way he held his shoulders back full of pride and satisfaction. the caution you’d felt in his tugs not long before had all but disappeared now that you stood before him.
you knew he’d be insufferable about your appearance, and gods help you, you couldn’t help but let a small smile of your own grow; your anger all but fizzled out as quickly as it had grown.
“what a pleasant surprise,” he started, sparing but a glance and a nod for your father before looking back to you. “impressed by the performance so far?”
you wanted to roll your eyes, but a lady would do no such thing. and even with your mother absent from your side, busy with commitments back at home, her voice rang loud and you didn’t forget your manners. instead you opened your mouth to give a neutral review of aerion’s violence, but tomas interrupted first.
“it’s been fantastic, prince aerion, you were spectacular!” his big eyes looked up at aerion like he’d hung the stars and you pursed your lips in worry. aerion wasn’t known for his patience and this would be the first time he’d spoken to your brother since he was a toddler.
“is that so?” he asked, turning his attention down. he knelt, lowering himself to below your brother’s height and you stared on in shock. “and are you after becoming a knight yourself one day?”
tomas nodded enthusiastically, leaning into aerion’s orbit inadvertently.
it was easily done; you’d found yourself doing the same over the years, for as tiring and sharp as aerion was, he could be just as charming and quietly calm.
“then perhaps one day we shall train together, hm?” aerion offered, watching as your brother’s eyes got bigger in awe. you weren’t faring much better, unused to aerion playing so patiently, especially with a child, with someone he couldn’t gain something from. “i’m sure you’ll make a worthy opponent,” he joked. “you could train with me when you come to king’s landing to visit your sister.”
there it was.
you stiffened, your smile thinning out into a pinched grimace you tried to hide as soon as you felt it.
“isn’t that right?” he turned to you directly as he stood back up.
aerion delighted in winding you up; he knew you’d declined the proposal, or would have if you’d had the option, but he also knew your parents had said yes as soon as they’d received maekar’s letter all those years ago. this unfound patience, this slow courting, had been for your benefit to grow used to your bound fate. no matter how protective your parents were, you couldn’t really say no. not to him.
it was the lack of choice that curdled your stomach, though you had known all your life it would be like this. the way aerion liked to remind you of his power and parade your obedience around had you acting out like you were still a girl and not a grown woman.
it wasn’t as though you didn’t want to marry aerion. the gods had willed it and though you may have started this proposal hesitant to be fated to aerion brightflame, and the violence that followed him, he had managed to slowly burrow his way closer to your heart. like a rat in search of a warm, dry home.
there was just a part of you that couldn’t help but want to make it difficult for him as nothing ever had been for him before. your mother would call it petty difficulty, but it wasn’t. there was a fondness to your actions that you couldn’t ignore.
“that’s right, of course you can visit as often as you’d like,” you said to your brother. “though we don’t have to think of that right now, i won’t be leaving home any time soon.”
“hmm,” aerion’s mouth pulled down in a moue as he teased, “sooner than you think, perhaps. the gods grow impatient, as do i.”
“i wouldn’t want to test the gods’ patience,” you hummed.
he smiled. “smart girl.” pausing to fully take you in, he smiled as he registered what dress you were wearing. “you look beautiful as always, my lady. that colour suits you.”
“you had it made for me, my prince, i would have hoped you’d pick a colour you thought would flatter,” you said, your tone leaning more teasing than berating. aerion’s tongue poked at the corner of his lips, enjoying your bite, as toothless as it was.
“i won’t have my future wife dressed in anything less than what she deserves. you’re the one that insists on keeping your family crest and colours apparent.”
“we’re not yet married, my prince, it wouldn’t be proper to wear targaryen colours—“
“you could do as you pleased and i would make sure not a word was said about it,” he said decisively.
before you could rebut his push for you to be regaled in red and black, head to toe, every time you stepped foot in king’s landing, your father cleared this throat. aerion dragged his eyes away from you and over to him, barely hiding his immediate switch to impatient boredom at the interruption.
“your skills in jousting flourish each year, my prince.” your father could barely hide his distaste for the unnecessary violence and gore from the fight, but he pushed out the complimentary words nonetheless.
aerion paused, sizing your father up for a moment before looking over at your brother and then back at him. his eyes had dragged up in down in the same lazy way they had to you, but there was no warmth to be found in his gaze now. it instead felt unpleasantly dismissive as opposed to heavily wanting.
“have you spoken to my father today, lord fenn?” the question caught your father off guard and he floundered a for a second before shaking his head and answering no. “hm. you should visit us after the tourney; come back in one of our carriages, im sure your wife will enjoy the sun for a while longer instead of returning to the cold so soon.”
“prince aerion, my wife is not with us on this visit. im not sure—“
“you should discuss it with my father, he has been eager to speak with you on other matters,” aerion said, turning away with a sharp sniff, his nose scrunching as he faced you once more. “he’ll be having lunch with my uncle and cousin in their tent i suppose. you know the way?”
your father pursed his lips at the unsubtle dismissal. he nodded once, stiffly.
“lovely, i’m sure little aegon will be there to entertain the boy,” he gestured down to your brother who had begun to peek inside aerion’s tent. with a sharp whistle from your father tomas moved back to his side with a lowered head, one hand gripping the fabric of your father’s britches behind his knee. when aerion saw your father hesitate, eyes twitching to you, he continued, “not to worry, i can stay with your daughter while you discuss it. it’s not proper to make a lady walk back and forth in the mud and heat, hm? she’ll be in safe keeping with the king’s guard nearby, and i’m sure i can keep her entertained until you return.”
you resented the way you were being spoken about as if you weren’t present, but you’d grown used to it from being young. and you knew tugging on your fated connection would only encourage aerion to do so again in the future to garner a reaction. you almost had to provide attention to him like a treat, reinforcing positive behaviour instead of when you wanted to react in response to his more vile habits.
you watched your father clench his jaw as he realised the trap he was laid in; unable to say no to the prince without upsetting him despite the impropriety of leaving behind his unwed daughter alone with just her fated. it would have every bone in his body screaming in protest, but as the king’s guards shifted on their feet, watching, your father could do nothing but nod silently.
a part of you hated him for it; his cowardice and submission, but as you felt aerion guide you into his tent with a light hand between your shoulders you felt akin with your father. you were not so stupid as to be unaware of the position aerion had placed your family in, even if you were secretly ashamed of how quickly they rolled over for him.
once in the tent, the front flap closed once more and the king’s guard left posted on the other side, aerion surprised you by linking your pinkies.
your eyes darted down to look at where the tie had shortened with your proximity, wrapping and tangling around your fingers tightly to keep them together after being so far apart for so long. seeing your tie act so possessively, so needy, only encouraged aerion you knew. you looked for longer than necessary, entranced by a short, loose drape tickling at your other dangling fingers.
waiting for an explanation or for his next move, you looked back up at him.
“why do you avoid me?” he asked softly, once again doing the opposite of what you’d expected. he stared into your eyes deeply, unwaveringly focused on you in his tenuous grasp.
“i- i don’t, i do not avoid you, m—“
“you do,” he corrected before you could continue to stutter out an excuse. “you’re frightened,” he spoke aloud your secret plainly, offering space for your fear to breath. “you need not fear me, we were made for each other by the gods; old or new, i care not to know. but there is nothing to be afraid of, i know you shall not disappoint me.”
your eyes darted away, his words settling an anxiety deeper into your bones than before.
“you cannot guarantee that,” you whispered. finding a pinch of bravery at your very core, even as you hid from his gaze, you continued in your hushed tone, “and you cannot guarantee you won’t disappoint me.”
he scoffed, like the idea wasn’t worth thinking about.
“you want for compassion,” he said after a brief silence, reading you easier than a book.
he tilted your chin back to face him with his spare hand, his eyes amused, almost kind. you pursed your lips, feeling petulant.
“you will learn to want for your prince and what he gives you.” his hand dropped to your waist, his fingers rubbing at the cooling silk he’d draped you in, rubbing as though hoping to dig through the sleek material to feel your skin instead.
your ‘brows tugged down into a frown at his words, delighting him further as his sly smile grew.
“it’s not wrong to hope for tenderness,” you let the words continue to slip, contrasting the hand reaching towards his belt. the pads of your fingers trailed across the soft, expensive leather, starting from his stomach and ending at his hip.
“aren’t you tired of gentle hands and careful words?” he asked, hushed, his voice placating. “you may enjoy my touch more than you are expecting.”
his fate-tied finger curled unbearably tighter before releasing, his full hand moving instead to hold yours more securely. he brought it up to kiss your knuckles, his pale lashes fluttering over high cheekbones as his lips brushed your soft skin, before he rested your palm over his heart.
“you’re spoiled,” he noted, not unkindly, of your need for sweet handling. “but if i cannot oblige my tenderhearted wife, who am i to bend to?”
“i’m not yet your wife—“
“yet.” his thumb rubbed at your pinky finger laid across his doublet, catching the buzzing, red thread. “but inevitably.”
your gaze dropped to his plush lips, watching the words form on his tongue. you almost wished you felt a cold indifference to the prince, but his touch sent bees swarming between your ribs.
he tilted his head close and nuzzled your noses gently before nudging at your cheek, then finally letting his lightly parted lips brush against yours.
he stayed gentle in the kiss for longer than you’d expected, but the eager brush of your tongue, curious against the gentle curve of his upper lip, had him tugging you forward and curling over you. his hands moved to cradle you close, stilling your nervousness with an arm around your waist and stealing your breath with a hand at the back of your neck.
you were all encompassed. it should’ve felt claustrophobic, it should’ve felt embarrassing knowing his guards were mere feet away, likely listening, barely separated by thick cotton, but it didn’t.
wantonly, you tugged at his doublet, making no real move to escape him. your elbows were tucked in close to your ribs, your hips close to his, and you begged with the gods not to let anyone see how you moaned softly, desperately, into his mouth as he gasped and groaned against yours.
his hand dropped to your backside and your mouth moved to kiss along his jaw, desperate to find the air he was insistent on stealing from your lungs. you quietened your whines with a bite to his shoulder, growing frustrated when he laughed, unable to feel the strength of your teeth through the thick material lining his jacket.
feeling mean, but feeling free of consequences, you dropped one of your hands back to his belt, using it as a guide to find his stiffening cock through his trousers and squeezing it. his laughter broke off into a moan, huffed directly into your ear. the sound so addictive you were ready to do it again until he pushed you back.
your stomach dropped as you stared at him with wide eyes. you’d gone too far, you’d acted like a whore and now he wasn’t interested, you’d—
“how long do you think your father will last with mine before he’s sent back?”
you blinked; aerion’s hands were suddenly dropping to his belt, fiddling with the complicated clasp shaped like a dragon’s head as you tried to catch up. why were you talking about your fathers right now?
“depends,” you huffed, a little out of breath. aerion dipped close to kiss you once more and your eyes closed at the here-and-gone-again feeling. “how badly have you worn away at your father’s patience this morning?”
aerion scoffed, finally pulling his belt free and working at the loose tie to his britches before pausing, a serious look coming over his handsome face. “hm. perhaps we’ve not got long then.”
he tugged you back towards him.
“aerion—“
“the sooner we put a targaryen baby in that belly, the sooner the wedding shall have to be,” he whispered. your heart thumped painfully loud and your stomach lit alight with flutters. you shouldn’t. your mother would kill you, aerion was just testing your strength of will. “no more delaying it, my sweet.”
he kissed your cheek with a wet smack and began lifting your skirt.
you watched him drop to his knees before you, trousers half open and cheeks a ruddy, excitable pink as his hands climbed higher up your thighs, spreading them as you struggled to stay stood steadily beneath his eager pawing. heat spread thickly, like honey, between your legs and the urge to tell aerion to stop disappeared.
your right hand drifted to his blonde hair, tugging at what you could of the short length to keep his eyes up on you.
“it would satisfy the gods?” aerion licked his lips at your question, his eyes flickering to what laid between your spread legs for a moment.
“it will satisfy me,” he answered truthfully. “and i will satisfy you.”
the slow brush of his thumb back and forth across the soft skin of your inner thigh broke your gaze momentarily, a shyness overcoming you, even as you nodded. with a growing smile, you held up the ruffle of your dress skirt at the front and loosened your hold on his hair.
the confidence in his voice that he would please you had you forgetting the precarious position you were both in, and the first hungry lick of his clever tongue to your cunt had your body singing and your voice calling out louder than it should have given the lack of privacy the tent offered.
he’d managed to wring your first orgasm out of you and stood to shove your hand down the front of his open britches by time the familiar sound of your father’s voice returned outside the tent.
you laughed into aerion’s snarling mouth, legs still shaky and sweat clinging to your temples, as your father called for you.
“another time,” you whispered, holding his palm to rest over your belly. you kissed him once more, briefly. “the gods have willed it.”
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your amazing support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Southern ploys can be ruthless.
Word Count: 8k
Check the warnings before you read, please🩷
Warnings: Angst, explicit language, adult themes, suggestive themes, miscarriage, blood, pregnancy, periods, medieval era expectations and medieval era viewpoints on marriage and gender, mentions of childbirth. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Back in the Reach, you had so few responsibilities.
After your education and court training was complete, the only things you and Margaery were expected to do was to represent your houses well whenever there was an outing, and attend every feast, celebration and tourney. Sometimes you found it difficult to choose what gown to wear or what tourney to attend, and often you had to endure your sister-in-law and her comments, but that was the only chaos you had, other than that it was all fun and games.
Winterfell was different.
Lady Stark had left the castle after Bran was attacked, to go to King’s Landing and let Lord Stark know about it, saying that she didn’t trust any messenger, nor anyone else in the Red Keep that could have access to her letters before Lord Stark could see them. She had her suspicions about the royal family considering the dagger that was found on the assassin, but she had asked you and Robb not to share it with anyone else until she was back in Winterfell. So for the last few days, you and Robb had been the lord and the lady of the castle, but now Robb had to visit Lord Hornwood, which meant he would be away for a week, leaving you in charge.
Though the thought of it caused you enough distress to give you nausea, you didn’t want him to worry or think you weren’t ready for such responsibility, so you sat in the bed with the furs wrapped around you, watching him get ready at the earliest light of the day.
“But couldn’t someone else go?”
The question made him look over his shoulder with a grin while he put his doublet on.
“Like who?”
“A messenger. A friendly envoy if you will, just within the north.”
“But who?”
“Someone else,” you said with a shrug. “I don’t know. Theon.”
He huffed out a laugh. “You think Theon, of all people, would be a good envoy?”
“Not really,” you admitted. “He’d be terrible at it, but perhaps he’d get lost on his way there. One could hope.”
“Nah, he’d still find his way back,” he commented, fixing his sleeves. “So we’d just end up disrespecting House Hornwood.”
Your stomach turned again, making you grimace but you cleared your throat, then pulled your knees up to your chest, resting your chin on them.
“Then tell Lord Hornwood he can come here rather than you going there,” you whined, aware of the petulant tone of your voice. “We’ll throw him a feast and such.”
There was a playful glint in his eyes as he made his way to bed and sat on the edge, entwining his fingers with yours before he lifted your hand to press a kiss on the back of it.
“Lord Hornwood is too old for journeys, my love,” he said. “My father visited his banners, now I must in his absence.”
You heaved a dramatic sigh, rolling your eyes.
“Come on,” he cooed. “No sulking.”
You tilted your head, your mood taking a rather strange turn for some reason that remained a mystery to you at least for now. If it were any other time, you would have remembered how Lady Olenna had once told you and Margaery that there was a big line between luring attention and demanding it, and how you were never, ever supposed to demand it in an outright manner. A lady had to be subtle in such mind games so as not to appear needy and walk the line between admiration and nonchalance expertly, however, the words that left your lips were anything but subtle:
“Does this not upset you at all?”
Robb was rather confused at your question. “What?”
“We’ll be away from each other for a week, and you’re very willing to go to Castle Hornwood,” you pointed out, making him let out a chuckle.
“Lamb…”
“I’m just saying, it bothered you before but it appears to me you’re no longer bothered but more willing, as if—” you started but the rest of your sentence was claimed in a kiss, the pestering thought disappearing into the fog in your mind. His hand cradled your cheek while your fingers curled in the front of his shirt, not willing to let him go even when he pulled back to rest his forehead against yours with a smile.
“I am both bothered and very unwilling to go to Castle Hornwood and leave you here,” he assured you, his thumb stroking your cheekbone. “It’s torment to be away from you for an hour, let alone a week. You know this.”
You traced the tip of your finger over the direwolf clasps at the front of his doublet.
“It was different, when my father was here,” he added. “Before, attending to these things was a chore. Now it’s my duty.”
Of course.
How could you forget about the biggest currency in the north along with honor?
Judging by the chuckle that vibrated deep in his chest, he could tell what you felt about duty from your mere expression.
“I’ll miss you every second of it,” he told you, nudging your nose with his before stealing another kiss from you and making you giggle, but your head whipped around when a servant knocked on the door.
“M’lord, your horse is ready.”
Your shoulders dropped as he let out a huff, then kissed you again and got up from the bed. He grabbed his cloak to fasten it while you let yourself fall back on the bed, and the moment he opened the door, Grey Wind darted inside. He jumped on the bed with a whine as if he was complaining about the trip he was being forced to go before he plopped down on you, resting his head on the furs on your stomach.
“I know, I know,” you said softly like you were speaking to a babe, scratching behind his ears. “I’ll miss you too, my sweet.”
“You spoil him too much,” Robb commented while you planted kisses on top of the direwolf’s head.
“He deserves to be spoiled,” you said, earning a yawn that turned into a small ‘awoo’. “Do you not my love? Are you the sweetest baby in the entire realm? Are you?”
“Grey Wind,” Robb said, “come. Time to go.”
The direwolf licked your hand, then jumped down from the bed with a huff to make his way out of the room, but even his gait was sulky, making you bite back a smile. Robb came closer to peck you on the lips.
“Be careful.”
“You too,” you said. “Miss me.”
“You too,” he answered with a grin before he left the bedchambers and closed the door behind him. You pouted, then let out a groan and pulled the furs over you.
“Great,” you muttered to yourself. “Very well. A week, then.”
You couldn’t go back to sleep, so you figured you’d start the day earlier than usual.
By the time you were done with your bath in your own bedchambers and your maid finished helping you with your gown and hair, your nausea was even worse due to distress. You had debated going to Maester Luwin, but you knew he was busy with Bran, so you decided to take care of it yourself and asked your maid for a cup of hot water. After she brought it to you, you gave her leave until it was time for breakfast which was more than an hour away, and put the cup on the table before you made your way to the chest of herbs Arys had brought you.
“Where are you?” you sang to yourself, going through the carefully labelled pouches in his impeccable handwriting. “Where are—yes!”
You skimmed the instructions, then took out a generous amount of mixture of leaves and put them in the cup, the smell making you scrunch up your nose. You still had to go through the ledgers the Winterfell carpenters had given you days ago, which you figured you could do while you waited for the tea to brew, so you grabbed the ledgers and the cup, then went to sit on the bed, carefully placing the cup on your bedside table and opening the ledgers on the bed. It was a rather boring task, but the outcome was going to be so lovely for so many people, so you forced yourself to go through the first couple of pages until you decided the tea was ready. You took another sniff, then held your breath and downed it in one go, grimacing at the aftertaste.
“Gods, Arys…” you grumbled to yourself. “Could’ve put something sweet in it.”
You put the cup back on your bedside, but before you could turn back to the ledgers, small yet rushed footsteps approached before the door opened and Rickon appeared at the threshold, with Shaggydog right behind him.
“Oh good morrow my sweet!” You beamed at him. “You’re awake already? It’s rather early.”
He pouted and took a trembling breath like he was on the verge of tears, causing you to push yourself off the bed to rush to him and crouch down to his eye level.
“What’s happened?”
“Robb left?” he asked, his brows furrowed. “They say he left.”
“Oh, for a week only!” you assured him, gently pinching his chubby cheek. “He’ll be back in a week. Remember how he and Lord Stark left earlier with Jon and Theon? It’ll be like that.”
“Will he see Sansa and Arya?”
“No my sweet, Sansa and Arya are in the south.”
“Will he see mother?”
“She’s also going to the south,” you managed to say. “Robb is right here in the north.”
“Where in the north?” he asked and you pretended to think for a moment.
“Remind me, which house has a bull moose on their flag?”
“House Hornwood!” he exclaimed and you gasped.
“That one, yes!”
“Their flag is orange,” he said, proud of himself for knowing it. “Orange and brown.”
“I’m told they live near,” you said. “And when Robb is back, we’ll have so much to tell him about what Winterfell was like in his absence.”
He looked over his shoulder to Shaggydog, then turned to you.
“I want to go see Frost,” he demanded. “To give her breakfast. She eats funny.”
“We can do that,” you said. “She’s probably awake already. But before we go, do you remember what I said about how we ask for things when speaking to a lady?”
He thought for a moment, a frown pinching his forehead.
“Can we go see Frost…” he mumbled. “Please?”
“Yes!” you exclaimed, clapping your hands together. “That’s such a good job, Rickon! You remember!”
He gave you a toothless smile, his giggle echoing in the room while he jumped in his spot in excitement.
“And thank you!” he added in a haste. “We say please and thank you to ladies.”
Your jaw dropped.
“You are so smart, that’s exactly what we say!” you encouraged him. “I almost forgot about that part, it’s of utmost importance!”
He nodded, his curls bouncing around his head as he did.
“Alright, let’s go to the kitchen to get some carrots,” you said as you stood up and took his small hand into yours. “And then we can go give Frost her breakfast, she’ll be so happy to see you!”
The breakfast passed without any issues, and around noon you sent your ladies-in-waiting to the seamstress because apparently Barbrey’s cousin and her husband were soon coming to Winterfell, and seeing that Barbrey wanted to make her jealous, she needed opinions on her new gown. You stayed in the Great Hall, chatting with some of the guests and listening to their many opinions about your plan to have the carpenters make toys for the children who would come to Wintertown with their mothers.
“Galbert disagrees if I must admit, but I think it’s a great idea,” Lady Erena said. “Orphans get jobs, children get toys, and their mothers get some comfort seeing their children happy.”
“Well, yes but in the upcoming winter…” Lady Lynara heaved a sigh. “My lord husband disagrees as well. He thinks it unnecessary.”
“And what do you think?” you asked her and she hummed.
“I myself think it may offer some comfort to those mothers and children, but will it not interrupt the carpenters' usual work? Teaching the craft takes time and effort. Those orphans will walk in without any skills.”
“The carpenters will be compensated for their time and effort,” you said. “And most of the orphans end up without jobs, I’ve learned. It is hard without a family.”
Lady Lynara scoffed. “Winter is hard, my lady. They must learn the ways of life without you throwing them opportunities.”
You tried not to roll your eyes at her.
“Winter is indeed hard, so it is our responsibility to make life easier to everyone who’s in need,” you said. “Of jobs or comfort or opportunities.”
Lady Erena nodded her head. “I agree wholeheartedly,” she said. “I told Galbert the same thing, we must help. For example, our sons are nearly men grown, they have no need for toys. I’ve already sent a raven back home, all the toys from when they were babes will be given to carpenters in the nearby villages, so that they’ll have an idea of what to create.”
“Thank you, Lady Erena,” you said with a bright smile. “I appreciate it.”
“Of course.”
“My lord husband says it’s a very southern way to approach winter,” Lady Lynara pointed out, and you tried to keep your expression calm.
“It is true that in the south, we don’t have people who have to move from their homes to survive the winter,” you said. “However, I truly think that if we—”
The sudden sharp pain that hit you out of nowhere took your breath away mid-sentence, and something churned in your lower abdomen, the ache familiar and strange at the same time. Lady Erena frowned slightly.
“My lady?”
Your head whipped up, and you tried to smile as if you couldn’t feel the warmth between your legs.
“Forgive me I—um,” you stammered. “I just remembered an urgent letter I must send, if you’ll excuse me.”
You left the Great Hall, walking as fast as you could with small, deliberate steps, praying to the gods that the blood sticking your underclothes to your skin would not drip to the ground until you got to the safety of your bedchambers. If it were any other time, you would have gladly stopped and chatted with multiple people in the hallway but now you could barely nod at the in acknowledgment as you passed by them. The dull throbbing got worse with every second, and it was only when you hurried into your chambers that you realized your hands had balled up into fists, your nails digging into your palms.
How long had it been since you had your last moon blood?
You quickly shed your gown down to your chemise that already had a growing red stain on it, straining your mind to remember when you’d had your last moon blood. The knife that turned in your abdomen made you double up as the wave of pain rippled through you, and you squeezed your legs in a pitiful attempt to block the blood from dripping to the ground, pressing a hand on your stomach. It made no sense, your moon blood had never been as painful on your first day, nor had it been this heavy, it always started light—
The idea crashed down on you like a ton of bricks, making your breath hitch.
…Oh.
This was not your moon blood.
Something sunk its claws into your heart, your whole body freezing in terror. For a moment, you stayed right where you were, bent from the waist, your eyes wide yet unseeing, unblinking. There was an ache at the back of your throat, a sob already forming there, but the cramps snapped you out of it and you forced yourself to take a deep breath, as shaky as it was.
“Okay,” you whispered, forcing yourself to grab at the edge of the table so that you wouldn’t lose your balance, tears burning your eyes. “Okay. You’re okay. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
It was not the tremors that ripped your breath from your lungs this time, but the utter disbelief that it was happening; it was happening to you, right here and right now, miles away from anyone you could call for help. The arm of the sofa supported you for a moment, but as soon as you took another step your legs gave out and you crumpled to the floor, swallowing a sob while you blindly pushed the plush furs aside. A strangled cry ripped itself from your chest when the invisible dagger drove deeper into your guts and you curled up on your knees, one hand shooting up to wipe your nose, the other already stained with blood—
And to your absolute terror, that was when the door opened.
“My lady, I called out but…” Jorelle stopped talking at once when she stepped in, her eyes darting over your collapsed figure and the skirt of your chemise, drenched in blood.
Oh no.
No no no, this could not be happening.
Jorelle was the last person who was supposed to see you like this. She was the one whom the north loved and supported, the one who they thought was the better option for your status; the very same status that was now hanging by a thread, with you bleeding on the floor. Anyone who saw you in this situation would be able to tell what was happening, and the moment the word got out, the moment the north suspected you were unable to provide an heir to House Stark?
It wouldn’t matter how much Robb loved you, or how much you mesmerized him.
You were no fool, you knew very well how it worked. Beyond uniting your families, beyond all those grains and food your family would provide the north in winter and beyond how much House Stark would pull your family up in influence and power and status, this marriage had one, very specific expectation from you and Robb; to make sure the Stark bloodline continued.
An heir and a spare, minimum.
Though there were exceptions, the lack of heirs in a marriage usually came with two options, the annulling of the said marriage, or the husband siring heirs from a mistress and legitimizing them. In both of those options, you and your reputation would be dragged through the mud, and you would either be sent away with the whole realm knowing the reason, or you would turn into a living ghost right here in Winterfell, with no influence, no power, no respect or love.
And those banners and important families of the north would push Jorelle into the picture, especially now that she was the one who had caught you in such position and was surely going to use this to her advantage, as every other lady in the south would have.
It was all but a gift to her by the gods.
If you weren’t rendered speechless by the fear that took your body and mind hostage, you could’ve at least tried to come up with an excuse, as feeble and weak as it would’ve been. Jorelle seemed as frozen as you were, but her head whipped around when the chattering of the servants got louder with approaching footsteps. Her hand shot up to grab the door handle to pull it to herself when it rattled, your eyes widening as you pushed yourself to sit up, your whole body shaking.
“No—” you started but she shushed you, then opened the door just a little to slip through the crack and closed it before anyone could peek inside.
“Would you like to be louder?” She snapped at the servants at the door. “My lady is taking a nap, and she does not want to be disturbed. Shall I tell her whatever you’re talking of is more important than her rest, or would you like to shout into her bedchambers while you’re at it?”
The servants mumbled something you couldn’t hear.
“And Kyra, I expected better from you.”
“I apologize, m’lady. I was just going to check whether—”
“She doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Jorelle repeated. “Nor does she want anyone’s chatter or footsteps in the hallway, her sleep is very light. Make sure everyone stays away from this hallway until she wakes up.”
“Of course, m’lady.”
The sound of footsteps grew faint and Jorelle entered the bedchambers again, bolted the door, and rushed to you.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked. “Do you want me to get Maester Luwin?”
Pain burned down your lower back, and there were tears in your eyes, but that didn’t stop you from gritting your teeth to force yourself to glare at her.
“No,” you managed to say, your voice hoarse as you wiped the sweat off your forehead. “It’s just my moon blood, leave me be.”
Jorelle gave you an exasperated look before she ran to the corner of the room to grab the fresh towels for your morning baths. She helped you up, then slipped the towel under you and gently sat you down, a worried frown pinching her brows while you tried your hardest to mimic Margaery despite the cold sweat dripping down your back.
“If you utter a word of this—”
“I won’t,” she cut you off. “This goes to the grave with me, I swear it by the old gods and the new.”
That made you pause halfway through your threat.
“And so will what you’re going to answer me right now,” she said. “Has anything happened before the wedding? With Lord Robb or anyone else?”
“What? No!”
“If it was conceived on your wedding night, at most it’s been six weeks,” she murmured more to herself. “That’s good. That’s early. Bleeding should stop in a couple of hours, the worst part at least—my castle is quite crowded,” she added when she saw the quizzical look on your face. “You’re not the first woman I’ve seen who’s having a miscarriage.”
You wetted your dry lips. “If anyone hears…”
“They won’t, because once the bleeding lessens, we’ll burn the towels in the hearth,” she said. “Things get lost in a big castle all the time. No one will ever know, including the servants.”
You winced when you tried to shift your weight, your movements rigid and short. She hesitated for a second, her eyes darting over your face before she reached out to take your hand between hers, making your head snap around.
“It’ll help,” she said with an apologetic smile. “Not with the pain I’m afraid, but the rest.”
You opened your mouth and closed it again when no sound came out, so you gulped and tried again.
“Thank you,” you managed to say, and she squeezed your hand in an attempt to assure you.
“It’ll be okay.”
No it wouldn’t.
You knew it wouldn’t, so did she.
But neither of you could do anything but just sit there and stare at the flames in the hearth, waiting for it to pass.
Jorelle was right, the worst part of bleeding was the first hour, and though the deep ache were still there, you were either getting used to it, or it was getting slightly better. Silence filled the room for almost an hour, the only sound your gasps of pain from time to time along with the crackling of wood in the hearth.
But after a while, you forced yourself to swallow the lump in your throat and turned to her.
“You didn’t have to help me.”
“Yes I did.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve been trying to tell you since we met, I have no intention nor desire to be your enemy.”
You would have laughed if you had the energy. “The whole north thinks otherwise.”
“I care not what they think,” she said. “I don’t know why people are under the impression that I’m somehow a rival to you, but I’m not. There was only friendly affection and a promise of potential companionship between me and Lord Robb, and contrary to what everyone seems to think, I am not devastated over our broken arrangement, if you can even call it that. There wasn’t a betrothal.”
“No,” you admitted. “There wasn’t. But you know how these things work, if they wanted to push you...”
“They can push me all they want, I won’t move,” she said. “I won’t. He is in love with you, and you’re in love with him, what others hope for does not matter. Besides, even if you two weren’t in love, I still would not try to jam myself in between, I respect myself way too much to do that.”
Well, that hadn’t crossed your mind before.
This kind of thinking simply didn’t exist in the south. If there was any possibility of more power, no one stopped to think before they stabbed people in the back, personal feelings and pride and respect all came second when one could climb higher in status even at the expense of others.
And most of the time, it was indeed at the expense of others.
“Anyone else in your place would not hesitate,” you couldn’t help but point out, “back in the south.”
“This is not the south,” she said. “Things in the north work a bit differently. For which I’m glad.”
For some reason you doubted that; power was tempting, in the south or the north.
“And your family?”
Jorelle made a face.
“Well, my mother hates you,” she said with a chortle. “I wouldn’t take it personally. Everyone in the north wanted their daughter to wed Lord Robb, she’s no exception, though she was more intense than any other. I used to think she wanted me to wed him more than I wanted to wed him.” She paused for a moment. “Now to think of it, I’d say she wanted to wed him more than I did.”
A burst of hysterical laughter escaped you and echoed in the room, surprising even yourself.
“I’d keep an eye on her if I were you,” she added, a grin playing on her lips. “She is as ambitious as a southron, and she would indeed leave my father for your husband.”
Gods, this was the worst time to be laughing.
Yet, you didn’t seem to be able to stop yourself even though you covered your mouth in an attempt to muffle the sound. You doubled over, resting a hand on the floor to support yourself while your shoulders shook, tears running down your cheeks from amusement or the pain, you could no longer tell. A hiccup escaped you, the ache in your chest as heavy as the one in your abdomen while you tried to breathe through the sobs and Jorelle sat up straighter.
“No no no, we’re not crying right now,” she said in a rush. “We’re not crying, we’re talking of other things—um, so I didn’t tell you because you hated me, but funny thing, speaking of southrons, your brother asked me to be his mistress.”
Your head whipped up, your vision still blurry with tears while she nodded with wide eyes.
“I know,” she said. “I came up with one thousand retorts since he left. I’ve been writing them down, and I think I’ll turn it into a book and send it to Dorne on a ship.”
“Which—what?” you stammered, already distracted. “Which one?”
“Of the ships?”
“Of my brothers!”
“Perceon.”
“Perce?!” you exclaimed and wiped your nose in a haste. “Seven hells, Perce was who you were talking about in the kitchens?”
“Oh yes.”
“But you—I didn’t—” You hiccupped, trying to pick the right words. “I wasn’t aware you two were…”
“I’m as confused as you are, because we were not.” She motioned at you, flailing her arms. “We danced at your wedding, and then at the Harvest Feast, and I thought, well, he is very handsome.” A blush spread over her pale cheeks. “So I didn’t mind him courting me, but he wasn’t courting me. He asked me to be his mistress right after he almost kissed me.”
“Almost kissed you?” You sniffled. “He asked you to be his mistress before you two even kissed?”
“As I’ve said before. The audacity.”
You rolled your eyes.
“The twins came after Arys, so Arys claimed their share of wit in advance,” you said. “That’s why he’s so smart and Perce is an idiot. I apologize for his behavior, I’ll make sure to smack him when I see him again.”
“But is that what southrons do?”
“Things work differently in Dorne, and Perce belongs more in Dorne than the Reach at this point,” you said. “Mistresses in Dorne have official titles, and they have all the luxuries and none of the responsibilities of the wives. And he won’t wed, so he probably thought it was a good offer—though, this is the first time I hear a man asking a lady to be his mistress before a kiss.”
Her cheeks got redder as she fixed her gaze in the hearth.
“I was going to kiss him before that,” she admitted. “I wanted to, but then I got scared because I was worried I’d be, I don’t know, bad at it—gods, you must think me a fool.”
“I don’t,” you assured her, shaking your head. “I wouldn’t. I was terrified of being bad at it too.”
“Was Lord Robb your first kiss?”
That made you scoff a laugh.
“No.” Margaery’s face flashed before your eyes and you tried to focus. “No, I had a lot of…practice—but the Reach is different!” you added in a haste. “We have different customs and education. The North is stricter in such matters, and you have different priorities.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to have some knowledge,” she grumbled, her shoulders dropping. “The south got that right, at least. Some of the north dislikes you yes, but they all agree that Lord Robb is mesmerized by you.”
There was a fist clenching your heart, but you managed to give her a smile.
“Oh, don’t worry,” you rasped out and gestured at the towels you were sitting on, stained in deep red. “I’m on borrowed time.”
She frowned. “That’s untrue.”
“Come on.” You let out a dry laugh. “You know what it means if it started like this.”
“I do know what it means, it means nothing,” she insisted. “My mother lost a babe on her fourth moon before my brother, but she carried my brother very easily, with little to none sickness. My cousin, she had three miscarriages, and now she has twins. Granted they’re little brats, but they’re very healthy, growing like beanstalks.”
You blinked back the tears, swallowing the lump in your throat.
“And how many miscarriages do you think I’d be allowed to have until the north started whispering?” you asked. “Until all the prominent families started pushing Robb for a replacement, for an heir? They already dislike me, already looking for a fault.”
“He loves you—”
“We’re in the north, Jo,” you muttered. “You tell me what’s more important in the north, love or duty?”
“Loyalty,” she answered. “Loyalty is of most importance in the north, it means everything here. And one miscarriage means nothing at all. You and your husband are young and healthy, you apparently conceived on your wedding night, you’ll easily do it again.”
You turned your bracelet around your wrist, your gaze fixed on it as you sniffled.
“You’ll see I speak the truth once the pain passes.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Our maester told my mother to drink water during this, it’s better to be safe.”
She moved about in the room and grabbed the cup that you had drank your tea from earlier to dispose of the pulp, but she stopped dead in her tracks, falling quiet. You looked up from your bracelet and shifted your weight on the towel, pointing at the table.
“There’s another cup over there—”
She cut you off, her voice stern: “Who served you this tea?”
“No one,” you said. “I made it, it’s for nausea.”
Jorelle lifted the cup to her nose to sniff it, then shook her head. “Who told you it was for nausea?”
“My brother Arys brought me many herbs, they’re over there,” you said as she rushed to the chest you were pointing at, then lifted the lid to find the pouch in it. She untied it to spill the crushed leaves into her palm, her frown deepening.
“Did your brother oppose this marriage?”
“No,” you said. “All of them support it. Why?”
“Then you told someone else what was in the chest?”
“No, I—why do you ask?”
“This is not for nausea,” she told you. “This is moon tea.”
Confusion crashed down on you and you stared at her before you huffed out a laugh.
“It’s not,” you argued. “Of course it’s not, it’s for nausea. Arys made sure to write clear instructions on everything, especially after the wedding. He would never make such mistake.”
“I’ve seen moon tea before, this is moon tea.” She held out her hand to show the herbs in her palm. “One of my maids had to drink it in secret, I was with her. I swear to you, it looks and smells like this. And you’re supposed to take it with honey to help with the pain, you’re not supposed to just brew it and drink it as it is.”
You pushed yourself to your feet, ignoring the warning tone of her voice when she said your name as she took a step towards to catch you in case you fell. The skirt of your chemise was drenched in blood—most of which dried down, sticking the fabric to your skin, making you grimace. The room spun around you, but you forced yourself to focus, blinking away the dots flying in your vision.
If she was not mistaken, if it was moon tea, that meant this was no natural miscarriage. This was not the first sign of a lifelong distress of trying for heirs only to lose them again and again, with the threat of being replaced hanging over your head, this was—
Jorelle’s voice snapped you out of your thoughts. “Who else knew about these herbs?”
“No one,” you said, approaching the chest on shaky legs. “Only my lady maid whom I’d trust with my life. She was here when I ate a sort of root to relax my mind before the wedding, she disagreed but then Eli—”
The thought hit you so hard that your breath caught in your throat and you took a step back, unable to tear your gaze from the chest.
Elinor.
That was what she was doing in your room the morning of their departure, at dawn when everyone else was asleep and you were supposed to be in Robb’s bedchambers. She had seen that chest, she had seen you close it, she could’ve easily sneaked into your bedchambers and…
“Elinor,” you rasped through frozen lips. “My brother Alton’s wife. She did this.”
“But why?”
“Because I—we—” you stammered, the hot rage spreading through your veins like poison. “We had a fight, and I told her I’d ask Robb to march his men to the Reach and root Alton out of his castle to replace him with another brother of mine, and I told her he’d do as I asked. It was a mere bluff because she attacked me and…” you trailed off. “She must have swapped the pouches.”
“She did this because you had a fight?”
“What’s the first sign of pregnancy?” you asked through your teeth. “Nausea. She swapped moon tea with nausea tea, because then I’d be drinking moon tea every single time I got pregnant, and I’d lose it every single time. In front of Robb. Over and over again.”
Her jaw dropped. “What?”
“She wanted to make sure he’d stop loving me, because if he stopped loving me, I’d hold no power,” you managed to say. “All the power I have here goes through him, she knows that. What better way to ensure he wouldn’t be mesmerized by me any longer? Everyone would be asking for an heir and I…”
How dare she?
A snarl twitched your lips, your nails biting into your palms. You squeezed your eyes shut to get rid of the red haze of anger clouding your vision, a thousand needles pricking the top of your head and spreading to your temples. All traces of pain sunk deep under a wave of fury tensing your muscles, the pounding in your ears getting louder and louder until Jorelle spoke.
“I wouldn’t last a day in the south,” she stated, her voice muffled like you were underwater as you opened your eyes again. “This is too much plotting.”
You swayed on your feet for only a second before your spine straightened like a puppet with its strings pulled, as if the southern courtier in you had decided that this was enough slouching with or without the pain; chin up, shoulders squared, a small, yet feral smile baring your teeth. It was clear from Jorelle’s worried gaze on you that you looked rather deranged; the skirt of your chemise drenched in blood, your legs and hands stained red, wisps of hair that were carefully pinned into a braid in the morning now sticking to your forehead with sweat.
When you spoke, your voice didn’t even sound like your own: “Not a good one.”
“Hm?”
“Not a good one,” you repeated. “I’ll survive. She will not.”
“You—”
“I can be patient,” you said, nodding to yourself. “I can and I will be, and I’ll wait for the right time, but I’m going to kill her. I’m going to kill her, and then I’m going to kill Alton if he knew and didn’t tell me.”
“You might not have to lift a finger, when Lord Robb hears—”
“He won’t hear.”
“He won’t hear?” she repeated with a tilt of her head. “I understand not telling anyone else, but you won’t tell him either?”
“No,” you said, a strange calmness settling in your mind like a fog. “There are only two people in the world who I could tell about this, both miles away from me. I love Robb with all my heart, but he is not one of them.”
“He’s your husband.”
“And that’s the reason,” you said. “You wanted to learn about the southern ways to mesmerize someone, did you not? Here’s the first lesson. You cannot do anything to break the illusion. Ever.”
“You must be jesting,” she said. “You love him, surely you trust him.”
“This has nothing to do with love or trust, this is survival.”
“Survival?”
You weighed the words in your mind, then scrunched up your nose.
“I recognize that parenting styles are different in the north and the south,” you said, “but in the Reach, me and Margaery and all my friends, we were all taught one thing from the moment we could walk, something they apparently don’t teach anywhere else in the realm. Every castle that isn’t your home is a trap waiting to swallow you the second you take the wrong step.” You pointed at the cup. “This is the wrong step.”
“But how is this the wrong step?” she asked. “He won’t blame you. This was your sister-in-law’s doing, you couldn’t have known.”
“No,” you admitted. “No I couldn’t have, but it matters not. This is how you play the court game, this is why everyone sleeps with one eye open in the south. Robb loves me yes, he would—he would console me, yes.” You gulped when your voice cracked. “But in the long run, it’s still the wrong step. Love is one thing, heirs are another. And if he…”
Every word was a hot coal burning your throat, but you willed yourself to focus.
“It all comes down to power, I’m afraid,” you murmured. “Once you have it, you sink your teeth and your claws in, and you don’t let go. It’s no different than trying to survive in battle, I just make it look pretty.”
A breath of disbelief left her as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her before, and you dragged the tip of your tongue over your bottom lip.
“I love Robb,” you added. “I do. I genuinely love him, which is more dangerous than any other court scheme. But that doesn’t change the fact that my power here, it’s linked to him. My status, my influence, how involved I am in decisions, it all depends on his feelings for me. That’s why I can’t risk it, I can’t afford any flaws.”
“This is no flaw,” she managed to say, and you shrugged your shoulders.
“No, but this is something he might bring up when he’s angry,” you said. “People say all kinds of things when they’re angry. I’m not going to break the illusion just so that he can use the shards to hurt me.”
A stunned silence fell upon the room and you fixed your hair, ignoring how badly your hand was shaking.
“So, this simply never took place,” you said, making her head whip up. “We will burn the towels as you said, and we will burn my chemise, and I will have the maids draw me a bath. And once that’s done, that’s it.”
“My lady…”
“Nothing happened,” you told her, your eyes locked in hers. “I came here, I took a nap, woke up and had my moon blood. Nothing more.”
It was clear from the expression on her face that she wanted to argue, and though she pursed her lips, it seemed that she still couldn’t stop herself.
“Does it not get tiring?” she blurted out. “Looking at everything that way?”
The simple question pulled your lips into a wry smile and you blinked back the tears, a dull ache making its way to your temples.
“It’s exhausting,” you admitted. “But I don’t have any other windows to look through.”
She held your gaze captive for a moment, the defiant light in her eyes melting into something else entirely; sadness or compassion, you couldn’t tell. An exhale left her, and she shook her head slightly like she couldn’t believe you or herself before she clicked her tongue.
“Very well then,” she ended up saying. “As you wish. Nothing happened.”
You were no stranger to performing.
It was second nature to you at this point. You, Silas, Margaery, Loras, you were all masters at keeping the mask on and not letting it slip, no matter how heavy it got. Even when you were sick, even when Silas was heartbroken, even when Margaery was angry and Loras was frustrated, that teasing courtier smile didn’t falter, nor did the straight posture or playful words.
It’s your armor, Lady Olenna used to say. Only a fool takes off their armor in front of the enemy.
And you were no fool back in the Reach, and you certainly were no fool here in Winterfell, miles away from every member of your family.
So, you did exactly what you said you were going to do. Once the bleeding lessened, you and Jorelle burnt the towels and your chemise, you changed into a new chemise and asked the maids to draw you a scorching hot bath where you spent nearly an hour, scrubbing at your flesh until the water went cold.
It was all without forethought, like you were sleepwalking.
You would’ve thought you were indeed asleep, if it weren’t for the knife turning deep in your abdomen.
You changed into a gown, made sure to put not just one or two, but three folded pieces of linen cloth in your undergarments, then sat in front of the mirror so that your maid could do your hair while your ladies-in-waiting chattered in the room; Wylla and Lyra disagreeing about some northern lady, and Alys and Barbrey talking about Barbrey’s new gown.
Yet, no amount of chatter could distract Jorelle from watching you like a hawk.
She did join the discussion from time to time, whether to make sure Wylla and Lyra’s discussion didn’t escalate, or answering Alys and Barbrey’s questions about Barbrey’s gown and the seamstress’ suggestions on it, but you could tell she was still worried about you. She had suggested you would take your dinner in your bedchambers, saying that sometimes she did the same on the first day of her moon blood because it made her tired, all the girls agreeing with her.
But with everyone away, it fell on you to host the guests and show them good hospitality as the lady of the castle, and attending dinner with them was a way for that.
The pain had mostly subdued. It felt more like your moon blood and less like a miscarriage, but now you had the most painful throbbing in your temples that didn’t even tolerate the candlelight while you walked down the hallway with your ladies-in-waiting around you.
“And as I was saying, she claims blue will look better—”
“It will look better.”
“But purple is more eye-catching. Wylla agrees, do you not Wylla?”
“Deep purple or light purple?”
“Wait, which one do you think is better?”
“Deep purple.”
“But the beads we bought looked better on blue.”
“Jo, what do you think?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” Jorelle brushed Barbrey off, walking beside you. “My lady, I must insist that we cut this dinner short, you have been awake since early hours of the morning, you said.”
“She does have a point, you look rather tired,” Lyra added, brutally honest as always. “Your eyes are bloodshot, perhaps you need some rest.”
You did need rest.
You had no idea whether it was the blood loss or the pain, or the emotional toll of the day, but you felt so tired. Your maid had prepared you a bag full of hot stones that had been in the hearth, so that you could press it on your stomach to help with the cramps, and you had already decided you’d have it with you tonight in bed as well, perhaps that could help you sleep the exhaustion away.
One could hope.
“I’ll retire to my bedchambers afterwards,” you said, your voice calm and composed. “However, we must—”
The hallway spun around you for a moment, making you stop dead in your tracks. Your hand shot up to the wall so that you could support yourself, the voices growing faint with the blood rushing in your ears, heat creeping up your spine while your ladies-in-waiting rushed to you.
“My lady?”
No.
No, you were not going to do that.
You were not going to collapse and give anyone any reason to think you were anything but alright, that was how the whispers started.
You blinked away the black dots flying in your vision and forced yourself to take a breath, your hand slipping from the wall so that you could wipe the cold sweat off your forehead, then cleared your throat.
“I’m alright.”
Wylla and Jorelle exchanged glances.
“Shall I go fetch Maester Luwin?”
“There’s no need for that,” you said, your heart slamming against your ribcage, “thank you.”
“Maybe Jo is right, let’s go back.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying, thank you!”
“Aye, I don’t even like these people.”
“Lyra!”
“Wha—I don’t!”
“We can eat in your bedchambers my lady, I’ll tell one of the maids—”
“No,” you said. “We’re attending dinner here.”
“You look like you’re about to faint,” Lyra insisted while you let yourself linger in your spot for a moment, still swaying on your feet before you took a deep breath.
Nothing had happened.
And nothing was happening.
“I’m perfectly fine,” you managed to say. “Trust me.”
Your legs were still trembling, pain was churning your insides, and your hands were clammy, but you straightened your back, lifted your chin, and plastered that well-trained courtier smile on your face, then walked into the Great Hall.
i think he asks you out after hearing about how someone canceled on you for some outing the group has. maybe a wedding.
"might as well go together," he says. in his mind, he's playing it cool and hoping you can't smell how badly he's sweating right now, because that nervous sweat always makes everything worse and he's afraid to even lift an arm up- "Since neither of us got anything better to do."
there's no response from you for a couple of beats.
"you're really mean sometimes." You gather your things from the desk, head tucked down. "I'm not a fall back plan."
bakugo asks "are you really into that?" and doesn't realize he's stressing the 'that' too much, so it comes off as judgemental, but he really just wants to know
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: There are lines that should not be crossed, even in enmity.
Word Count: 4,8k
Warnings: Explicit language, adult themes, suggestive themes, blood, mentions of wounds. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
It was very, very clear that your house and House Stark were complete opposites.
You had been in Winterfell for just a little over two moons, and you were proven the difference over and over again almost each day. Your house was all about ambition, House Stark was all about honor. Your house had agriculture and fertile lands as its strength, House Stark had military power and loyalty as its. Your house was a vassal house that had to claw its way to power, House Stark was the most ancient and powerful House in the north, with no need or taste for court games and intrigue.
And as you found out very recently, the parenting style of your house and House Stark was no exception to such difference.
“Listen, I get that—”
“Do you really?” you asked, leaning on your hip. “Because from where I’m standing, you do not.”
“Things are different in the south, but I told you,” Robb said, making you narrow your eyes at him. “He cannot run to you crying every single time he’s scared.”
“Because winter is coming?” You mimicked his deep voice with his northern accent. “He’s a child—”
“You’re not his mother.”
You threw your head back with an impatient—and very unladylike—groan, then glared up at him.
“I know very well I’m not his mother, Robb,” you said. “Would you like to be reminded the reason why he runs to me crying?” You pointed at the door of the solar. “Because his actual mother is by his sick brother’s bedside, waiting for him to wake up!”
“Bran will wake up,” he said. “And in the meantime, Rickon needs to understand what is expected of him as a Stark.”
“And are the Stark babes born fully in control of their emotions?” you snarked. “Is that what happens? Did you all come out holding a sword and told the midwife the north remembers?”
“Quite the criticism from the girl whose midwife had to wear silk gloves to tend to her.”
Your mouth fell open with a gasp.
“Those were my nursemaids!”
“My apologies,” he said, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Of course. Your nursemaids.”
“And we’re not talking about me right now, we’re talking about the fact that Rickon is terrified—”
“And he’s going to stay terrified if you keep coddling him.”
“No, he’s going to stay terrified if he feels like he has to deal with this alone.” You crossed your arms. “I understand that things may be different in the north, but mayhaps it’s high time you reconsidered it when it comes to Rickon—”
“I’m doing what my father would have done,” he told you, “if he were here.”
Of course.
Of course Ned Stark could do no wrong in Robb’s eyes as a father, so Robb wanted to walk the path his father carved.
…Except, it was quite obvious that he was refusing to address a very specific situation that had been taking place since Lord Stark’s departure. While ruling in his stead, Robb was making some changes, especially now that Lady Stark was confined to Bran’s chambers and was not seeing any of it.
“You do realize I was trained in politics as well?” you asked. “Do you honestly think I don’t know the reason why Jon is in the room in almost every meeting you hold with the northern lords ever since your father left? Something he didn’t do when he was indeed here?”
A blush spread over his cheeks and reached his ears as he averted his eyes from yours like he was caught doing some mischief.
“My brother being by my side is no politics,” he mumbled way too fast as if he had already practiced the answer in his mind, and you rolled your eyes.
“Robb, come on now...”
“It is not politics.”
“It is if you’re making your vassals perceive his presence,” you taunted him, moving about in the solar. “It is indeed politics if you’re legitimizing his status by your side even if it’s not in name. Which is more than alright, you do that. But don’t pretend it’s not political, when you and I both know what it signals to your vassals about the future.”
“Jon is not who we’re talking about right now,” he insisted, eager to change the subject. “Rickon is. He’s not going to learn the ways of the world if he thinks you’ll be there every—”
He was cut off when someone knocked on the door and a servant’s voice reached inside.
“M’lord, the blacksmiths from Wintertown are in the Great Hall.”
Robb ran a hand through his hair, the familiar gesture almost making you smile before you looked over your shoulder at the door, then turned to him.
“And once you’re done with your duties of the day, you must talk to your mother,” you said. “She hasn’t been out of that room for days now.”
He nodded with a sigh and stood up from his chair. It appeared that Grey Wind decided at that moment that he had been patient enough, because he padded across the room to nudge at you, pushing you back with his snout in the process. You cooed at him and scratched at his head.
“Can we—” Robb started, but this time it was Barbrey who knocked on the door.
“My lady, the carpenters are ready for you.”
“Thank you!” you called out while Robb tilted his head in confusion.
“The carpenters?”
“Oh, I…” You cleared your throat. “When we first visited Wintertown, you said more and more people would arrive there now that the maesters announced the arrival of autumn. Farmers and villagers and mountain clans.”
“Mm hm.”
“And you said they send women and children and the men stay behind, if the winter is hard,” you added. “So I thought um—I thought if children are going to be away from their fathers not even knowing they’ll see them again, even the smallest gesture of hospitality could help them and their mothers feel some comfort. And I came up with a plan.”
“Shocking,” he said, though it seemed he was battling with a smile. “What is it?”
“I— alright, so before you say no,” you said, shifting your weight. “Promise me you’ll listen first.”
A laugh climbed his throat as he rounded the table, then leaned back to it. “What did you do?”
“Regardless of the north or south, all children like toys,” you said. “So I will ask the carpenters to make some toys for the children who will arrive here, or any of the nearby castles. And I’m actually going to hit two birds with one stone, because when I first shared it with my ladies-in-waiting, Alys said the carpenters might need some help with that, and I found a solution to that also!” You bounced on the balls of your feet, pride distracting you from your anger just now. “The carpenters here and in Wintertown will hire the orphans without jobs, so that they can get the help they need, and those poor orphans can learn the tricks of the craft and get paid. They’ll be the ones making the toys. And once all that is done, they’ll have a job that can make it possible for them to earn money not only here, but wherever they want!”
His eyes softened, a smile pulling at his lips.
“I’m told most of the toys—if they have any—pass from sibling to sibling for many smallfolk, so mayhaps having something of their own may cheer them up a little,” you said with a shrug of your shoulders. “I doubt it’ll look perfect, but it’ll be theirs.”
He took a deep breath, then reached out to grab your hand so that he could pull you closer to him, his thumb caressing the back of your hand while he wrapped an arm around your waist.
“We can argue about it,” you informed him, making him huff out a laugh. “But we’re expected, so it’ll have to—”
“I think it’s a great idea,” he told you and your eyes shot up to his.
“You do?”
“Mm hm.”
“No arguments? Because I practiced.”
“You practiced for arguments?” he asked with a confused frown, but before you could answer, Barbrey knocked on the door again.
“My lady.”
“I’m coming!” you called out and stepped out of his arms much to his displeasure, walking backwards to the door. “And I meant what I said about Rickon.”
He shot you a look. “So did I.”
“I suppose we’ll have to argue about that instead,” you pointed out and gave Grey Wind a quick peck on his head. “Lucky for me, I practiced for that too. I’ll find you later.”
With that, you pulled open the door and walked out of the room to make your way down the hallway with Barbrey following you in a haste.
Your conversation with the carpenters took longer than you had expected. After it was done, you and your ladies-in-waiting had spent some time with Rickon playing the games he wanted until Maester Luwin came to take him away, and it was only then you realized just how tired you were. You figured you could take a short nap but visiting Lady Stark in Bran’s room before that sounded like a good idea, so you gave your ladies-in-waiting leave until dinner time while you made your way to Bran’s room, but before you could reach his door, you heard your maid Kyra’s voice.
“M’lady!” She rushed through the hallway, holding a cup. “Your tea.”
“Oh thank you Kyra, you’re the sweetest.” You took the cup from her as the door opened and another maid stepped outside, carrying an untouched plate of food that no doubt was supposed to be Lady Stark’s breakfast. The smell of eggs turned your stomach, making you grimace and you held your breath until she walked away with the plate. You lifted the cup to inhale the sweet scent of your tea before you took a sip, then smiled at Kyra.
“I’ll take a nap after this,” you whispered, approaching the door. “So you can take the time off until dinner.”
“Thank you m’lady.”
You took another sip in an attempt to settle your stomach, knocked on the door and stepped in, Kyra helpfully closing the door behind you.
“Good afternoon, Lady Stark.”
Gods, she was a mess.
And rightfully so. You couldn’t even imagine being in her place right now, with her little boy lying there asleep for weeks and her husband gone with both of her daughters, miles away from her. She was weaving a sort of a talisman, and she only raised her head from it for a second to look at you, her blue eyes red-rimmed with tears and lack of sleep.
“Good afternoon,” she rasped out and you put your tea aside, then took a step towards her after stealing a look at little Bran who laid asleep in his bed with his wolf Summer at the foot of the bed.
“Forgive me for disturbing you, I just wanted to see if you or Bran need anything?”
She shook her head, her whole attention on the talisman again. “No, thank you.”
“I’ve been told I’m quite good at crafts,” you offered. “I imagine you must be tired. I could do that for you if you would like?”
She shook her head again.
“It’s for protection of a child,” she whispered. “Only a mother can make it.”
“Oh,” you said after a beat. “I am not familiar with it, I’m afraid.”
“And I hope you won’t have to learn it,” she said. “I hope your and Robb’s children never need it.”
There wasn’t much you could say to that, so you offered her a small smile, your gaze darting around the room.
“How is he?” she asked, making your head whip up.
“Robb?” you asked back and cleared your throat. “He’s alright. He’s doing a great job ruling in Lord Stark’s stead. But he’s also worried about you and Bran, the whole castle is.”
She nodded slowly.
“Rickon is alright as well,” you added in a haste. “My ladies-in-waiting and I just played hide-and-seek with him. I’m the least familiar with the layout of the castle so I always get caught first, and it amuses him a lot.”
You decided against mentioning Rickon’s nightmares, the poor woman didn’t have to worry about that on top of everything right now.
“And I wrote to my brother,” you said. “Arys. He’s studying to be a maester at the Citadel as you know, and he’s incredibly smart. Perhaps he’ll have some ideas as to how we can help Bran.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that.”
“Of course.”
A silence fell upon the room, and you fidgeted with your bracelet before taking a deep breath.
“Lady Stark, if you would like to rest—”
“I cannot,” she cut you off, her voice hoarse. “Bran needs me.”
“And I will send for you immediately if—when he wakes up,” you corrected yourself. “If he wakes up in your absence. But you must think of your own health as well, not just Bran’s.”
Even you could tell she was deaf to your suggestions, as you knew she would be. You looked from her to Bran and opened your mouth to insist, then changed your mind and forced yourself to smile.
“Please send for me if you change your mind,” you said. “Have a good day, Lady Stark.”
You grabbed your cup on your way out and shut the door behind you, then leaned back to it and let out a breath, closing your eyes.
Robb really needed to talk to her.
You opened your eyes again, then pushed yourself off the door, took a huge sip of your tea, and walked down the hallway to get to stairs so that you could go to your room for a much needed nap.
You were supposed to wake up before dinner.
And this nap was supposed to help you regain some energy.
Neither had happened.
When Robb’s gentle touch on your cheek and his lips on your forehead pulled you out of the depth of sleep, it took you more than just a couple of seconds to get rid of the haze. You let out a small whine that made him chuckle as he pulled back to look down at you.
“Well hello there,” he said, his thumb caressing your cheek. “Are you alright?”
You blinked groggily, now noticing how the room was completely dark.
“What…” you rasped out, kicking the fur covers off of you. “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
Your eyes widened. “What?”
“I wasn’t in the hall for dinner, did you eat?”
You shook your head, hunger clawing at your stomach at the mention of dinner. He pressed his palm on your forehead.
“I can’t tell if it’s fever or it’s because the room is boiling.”
“It’s not fever,” you assured him, pulling yourself to sit up in the bed. “I’m not sick, I…Gods, I wasn’t supposed to sleep the dinner away. My apologies.”
“Don’t apologize,” he said gently. “Rickon has been keeping both of us up for three nights now, you needed it.”
You yawned, rubbing at your eyes.
“Where is he anyway?”
“Rickon?” he asked. “He’s asleep in his own room.”
You dropped your hands to shoot him a look.
“Did you tell him to?”
“No, I just asked Jon and Theon to keep him busy while you were occupied, so he’s been running around the Godswood for the last couple of hours. He should be tired enough to sleep throughout the night.”
A scoff of laughter escaped you. “Robb!”
“I had to find a solution!” he defended himself as he easily got on top of you to settle between your legs, making you giggle. “I haven’t had my wife in ages—”
“Three nights,” you corrected him with a grin and he made a noise of disagreement, cradling your cheek to steal a kiss from you.
“It’s the same thing.”
“And we must—” You swallowed thickly when his lips found your throat. “Um, we— we must fight first because I practiced for it.”
“We’ll fight all you want after this,” he muttered into your neck, his touch making your breath hitch before you grabbed his wrist.
“But I’m hungry.”
That made him pause.
“…Now?”
You nodded your head when he pulled back to see you better.
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” you whined. “Surely you don’t want me to perish.”
“No!” He was quick to assure you. “Of course not, but…”
“But nothing, I’m starving!”
You would’ve been lying if you said the sight of utter torment on his face at the mention of waiting to have you didn’t make you giddy. Lady Olenna had always said being married didn’t mean you couldn’t play with your husband’s patience, and it filled you with a strange sense of pride to see that even though it had been a month after your wedding and he laid with you almost each night since then, he still craved you. You pushed him a little and he got off of you to fall back on the bed with a dramatic groan while you crossed the room to grab your dressing gown to put it on.
“Just tell one of the servants,” he said from the bed and you shook your head.
“I don’t wish to disturb them,” you said. “And I don’t even know what I want to eat yet, I’ll decide it in the kitchens—by the way, did you talk to your mother?”
His hesitation was all the answer you needed, and you spun around on your heels.
“Robb.”
“I didn’t have time.”
“You have time now,” you said. “While I go get myself something to eat. Go talk to her, I’m certain she’s awake.”
“And say what?” he asked, sulking. “She doesn’t listen.”
“I talked to her today.”
He raised his brows. “And did she listen?”
“The point is not whether she listens or not,” you told him as you made your way to him, and he reached out to wrap his arms around your waist, nuzzling to your chest. “The point is that we must talk to her until she hears it. She needs to get out of that room, it won’t...” You trailed off. “It won’t do her any good if she spends her days there.”
“It won’t do anyone any good,” he muttered into your skin and raised his head to rest his chin there. You ran your nails over the nape of his neck, and he closed his eyes for a moment, relaxing under your touch.
“She asked me about you.”
That made him open his eyes again to roll them.
“What for?” he grumbled. “She knows where I have been since my father left.”
…Oh.
Oh you were an idiot for not seeing it sooner, Lady Olenna would’ve been disappointed.
Robb was trying to step into his role as Lord Stark, and this was the first time for him to be able to prove himself as the future Warden of the North, and he was doing a great job but—
But Lady Stark hadn’t even acknowledged it with so much as a word, too worried to leave Bran’s side.
You had to be very careful, because you knew very well that the moment Robb so much as sensed that you could tell he wanted approval, he would refuse to listen and insist that he didn’t need it in the most northern manner. People in the north thought even mere children had to deal with their fears alone with no help or comfort from anyone else, you could already tell the rules were even stricter when it came to grown-ups.
Which was nonsense to you.
But from Robb’s perspective, he had to be the perfect heir and the future Lord of Winterfell, and praise, comfort and reassurance was for southerners, not for the Warden of North.
“I think she was worried,” you said, still playing with his hair. “But I told her not to. Not to sound arrogant, but I was very convincing with the way I was singing your praises.”
Confusion flashed over his handsome features. “Hm?”
“Mayhaps you don’t realize it my love, but you’re doing a wonderful job ruling in your father’s stead,” you said gently. “It’s no easy task, but I think the whole north sees that they have nothing to worry about once the title eventually falls on you for good.”
The light in his eyes softened before he lowered his head so that you wouldn’t see the fire burning his cheeks, but you could see the tips of his ears growing pink, making you bite back a proud smile.
Aw, the big bad Young Wolf Robb Stark blushed at flattery.
You were going to have fun with that information.
He cleared his throat and stood up from the bed, adapting the solemn expression of the north, a frown pinching his brows.
“Aye, it’s—” he said gruffly as if he was trying to pull himself together, though the sight of pink on his cheeks betrayed him. “It’s duty.”
“I’m aware it’s duty,” you said, your voice airy. “And I would’ve loved you if you were Benjen the servant just as I love you as the future Lord of Winterfell who’s already proving himself to the north.”
A playful grin curled his lips. “Is that right?”
“Very much so. That’s why I’m not quite certain if what I say counts here,” you stated, “but I still think it’s important for you to know that you’re doing so well. Duty or not, I’m so proud of you.”
He gawked at you and blinked a couple of times, his cheeks getting even redder.
“It’s my—I—” he stammered. “Are you doing this on purpose?”
Your expression was completely innocent.
“I have no idea what you speak of,” you said, then gave him a bright smile. “Though, you do look so sweet blushing.”
“I don’t blush!” he defended himself, coaxing a laughter out of you as he spun you around to gently shove you in the direction of the door with him following you. “Go eat and come back as fast as you can.”
“But—” you were cut off when he smacked your butt, making you gasp and turn around at the door.
“Scandalous behavior!” you accused him, pointing a finger at him but he grabbed your wrist, that mischievous light glimmering in his eyes.
“You’ll see what scandalous behavior is when you come back,” he told you. “Go.”
“Talk to Lady Stark while I’m in the kitchens!” you called out as you rushed down the hallway, aware of his glances on you until you turned the corner. A giggle escaped you as you went downstairs and made your way to the kitchens, the whole castle asleep as you guessed.
However, your guess turned out to be inaccurate.
You stopped dead in your tracks when you caught the sight of Jorelle who whirled around on her heels the moment she heard you, holding a plate with a piece of cake.
“Hello,” she said after a beat. “I uh…I couldn’t sleep, and I got hungry. What are you doing here?”
“Slept too much and got hungry,” you answered, shifting your weight. “Are those lemon cakes?”
She nodded and turned around to grab a piece, then put it on another plate with a fork and held it out for you.
“Oh.” You took the plate from her and went to sit on the table while she leaned back to one of the counters. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” She waved her fork dismissively. “We were going to wake you up, then Lyra said maybe we shouldn’t. Do you feel alright?”
You nodded your head, pushing your fork into the cake.
“I feel groggy,” you admitted and took your fork into your mouth, closing your eyes at the tart yet sweet taste of the spongey cake for a moment. “Gods, this is the best remedy.”
Sometimes you wondered what kind of friends you and Jorelle would’ve made if you met in different circumstances. You were quite certain you would have been close with her, if it weren’t for…
Well.
Everything.
Her family pushing her, the whole north being ready to rally behind her, thinking that she would’ve been better at being the future Lady of the North.
Perhaps the worst part was that you knew very well she would’ve been great at it. She was the personification of the north with her cold and distant beauty even now in the middle of the night with no embellishments; her dark hair cascading down her back in soft waves, her gray eyes gleaming in the dimly lit kitchen.
“Are you certain you feel alright?”
You snapped out of your own thoughts and offered her a small smile.
“Of course,” you said. “How about you? Why couldn’t you sleep?”
“Ruminating, I suppose.”
You knew you were supposed to keep distant, Margaery would have advised you to keep distant, yet you couldn’t help but ask:
“About what?”
She looked like she was battling herself not to say anything, but then she exhaled through her nose.
“Are—” She stopped herself, then gritted her teeth. “Are southern men always so…full of audacity?”
A huff of laughter you couldn’t stop escaped you, and you nodded your head in a solemn manner.
“I’m afraid so.”
“I thought they were all courteous and knightly in the south.”
You made a noise of disagreement.
“They’re supposed to be,” you admitted. “But being knighted doesn’t mean a man is in fact knightly. What’s happened?”
“Your—one of the southern guests,” she corrected herself mid-sentence, “he disrespected me.”
Your heart skipped a painful beat.
“When you say disrespect…?” you asked and she frowned, then shook her head vigorously.
“Oh no, with words,” she assured you in a haste, making you let out a relieved breath. “Nothing happened. Just a very disrespectful statement.”
“Like what?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Who?”
“I’d rather not say that also.”
You hummed while you chewed on your bite, then swallowed it.
“Well, Silas is unfortunately in Dorne,” you said. “Had you told me before, we could’ve asked him to beat up whoever it was for his disrespect.”
She raised her brows. “You would’ve done that?”
A knowing smile curled your lips and you put your plate aside with a sigh.
“I’m well aware what the north thinks of you and me,” you said. “But there’s still a line. I wouldn’t let you or any other woman be disrespected by a man, no matter how we might feel about each other.”
She stared at you in silence for a couple of seconds like she was at a loss for words, but before she could say anything, hurried footsteps approached the kitchens and Theon appeared at the door, making you frown.
“What is it?”
“There’s a fire,” he said breathlessly. “In the library tower.”
You jumped on your feet, your stomach churning in worry. “Is everyone alright?”
“Aye, but Robb asked me to take you to safety.” Theon’s eyes found Jorelle over your shoulder. “You too, my lady.”
You grabbed Jorelle’s wrist to rush out of the kitchens with her, now hearing the wolves howling outside along with people shouting. Someone started ringing the bell, the sound echoing through the yard and reaching the halls while some of the servants ran past you. You took a look outside the window, the flames shooting from the windows of the library catching your eye and making your breath hitch.
“Gods,” you murmured, “all those books…”
Jorelle tugged at your hand to get you away from the window and you all turned a corner, your head shooting up with the sudden thought hitting you out of nowhere.
“Theon wait, has anyone told Lady Stark?”
“She knows, Robb was with him just now,” he answered while you all approached Bran’s open door. “Either way, it’s—get back!”
He drew his sword and stepped in front of you at the same time Jorelle pushed you behind her with a gasp. Your hands shot up to your mouth at the sight of Lady Stark standing in the middle of the room with blood pouring from the gashes in her palms, and Bran’s wolf Summer standing over a man who laid dead in the corner of the room with his throat torn out, his knife beside him.
“Lady Stark?” Theon stepped into the room with his sword at ready, and she raised her gaze from her hands, still stunned.
“I’ll get Maester Luwin,” Jorelle said and darted, her footsteps echoing in the hallway while you rushed to Lady Stark, your heart beating in your ears.
“I’m unharmed, so is Bran,” she said and you stole a look at Bran who still laid asleep in his bed, then grabbed the handkerchief on the table beside the untouched plate of food to press it on her bleeding palms.
“I’m sorry,” you said in a haste when she hissed. “I’m sorry, we must stop the blood—what happened?”
Her eyes snapped to yours.
“Someone—” she rasped out, then took a shaky breath. “Someone tried to kill Bran.”
Author's note 2 : Thank you so much for reading my loves! This is a friendly reminder that the next chapter will include certain topics that may be triggering, so please make sure to check the warnings. Love you! 🩷
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: The north and the south have different approaches to nightmares.
Word Count: 4,4k
Warnings: Explicit language, mentions of pregnancy, adult themes, suggestive themes. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Days after Bran’s fall, he still wasn’t awake.
And once again, you were seeing just how different the north was to south.
Though none had been as serious as Bran’s case, you were no stranger to falling ill when you were little. And whenever you did fall ill, every single time, the life in the castle would all but stop; your father would always assign someone else to handle his duties so that he could be by your side while the maesters treated you, just like Silas who would refuse to leave the room no matter how much your father insisted.
That hadn’t been the case in Winterfell.
Granted, Lady Stark hadn’t left Bran’s room ever since that morning. She was a mess, anyone could see that, and you couldn’t even decide whether your heart broke more for Bran or her. She didn’t sleep, she barely ate, and though you had tried your hardest to offer words of comfort, you were quite certain she was deaf to all.
However, not everyone had taken the same approach to such tragedy.
“What do you mean, your father is still leaving?”
Robb heaved a sigh, looking over his shoulder to the window to Bran’s room in the keep before he turned to you, drumming his fingertips on the table.
“He gave his word to the king that he would be the Hand.”
If it were any other person in the south, you would’ve assumed it was the ambition that dragged him away from his sick son and already mourning wife, but Lord Stark was the last person to do that. Your brows furrowed while you tried to wrap your head around the idea, staring at him.
“But if Bran…”
“He won’t die,” he cut you off, his voice determined like thought he could force the reality to bend to his words if he said them with enough conviction. “He’ll wake soon, and he’ll be fine.”
You blinked a couple of times, then nodded fervently.
“Oh I know.”
No you didn’t.
Neither did Robb. Neither did anyone.
“I just think—” You licked your lips. “Will your mother not be upset that he’s leaving at such time?”
“He gave his word,” Robb repeated. “It’s a matter of honor and duty. She will understand.”
You wouldn’t.
Gods forbid, if you found yourself in such state; if someday your child was fighting for his life and Robb left to ‘do his duty’?
You were not like Lady Catelyn, honor and duty would have to wait.
Robb raised his hand to wave at Jon who lingered by the entrance of the keep for a moment, then made his way to you.
“Good morrow,” he said. “Robb, father wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Aye.”
“Did you talk to him yet?”
“Not yet,” Jon answered as you looked between them. “Tonight, perhaps.”
Robb bit inside his cheek. “And you’re sure about this?”
“About what?” you asked and Robb ran a hand through his curls.
“Jon is thinking of joining the Night’s Watch.”
Your eyes widened.
“What?” you squealed, your stomach doing a painful flip. “Jon, you must be jesting.”
“It’s a great honor.”
Alright, you had it up there with northerners and their honor, and it wasn’t even noon yet.
“I’ll be back,” Robb said and pressed a kiss on top of your head, then crossed the yard to enter the keep. You gawked at Jon who motioned at the seat as if asking for your permission and you nodded.
“Please,” you said in a rush and he sat down. “You cannot be serious.”
“It’s—”
“A great honor, I heard you the first time,” you finished his sentence, too impatient to wait. “The Wall is far from Winterfell.”
“That’s the idea.”
You pulled back a little when it dawned on you. “Jon…”
“Me being there will put a lot of people’s hearts at ease.”
No actually, it was going to put only one person’s heart at ease.
Lady Stark.
You were guessing Lord Stark’s departure was related to this. He was the one who had a soft spot for Jon, unlike Lady Stark who disliked his presence, and made no attempt to hide it. You couldn’t blame Jon for wanting to be out of her sight, but spending his life at the Wall as a soldier did not sound like the perfect solution to that.
Not to mention, Silas would never forgive you if you let his affair go off to the Wall to spend the rest of his life celibate and frozen.
“Not any of your siblings’ hearts.”
“Sansa and Arya will be in the south.”
“Robb will be here,” you reminded him. “So will Bran, who I’m sure would be devastated if he woke up and couldn’t find you here. And Rickon.”
“They’ll understand,” he said. “With my father in the Capital, Lady Stark will rule in his stead as the Lady of Winterfell—”
“Current,” you corrected him, making him tilt his head like a confused puppy, a gesture you had seen Robb do multiple times.
“Hm?”
“Current Lady of Winterfell. Funny how titles work, because as Robb likes to remind me, I’m to be the future Lady of Winterfell, and I’d very much like to have you here,” you said. “And I’m afraid you’re mistaken. With your father in the Capital, Robb will be ruling in his stead, and he wants you here as well.”
A frown pinched his forehead while he stayed silent, and you reached out to squeeze his forearm in an assuring manner.
“Please,” you said. “Stay, at least for a while. If you still think the same in a year, I swear I’ll embroider you a handkerchief that says the Lord of Night’s Watch for you to take it with you—”
“The Night’s Watch doesn’t have lords,” he stated, although your jest seemed to twitch his lips into a tiny smile. “It’s a brotherhood.”
“Whatever it is that they have over there.” You waved a hand dismissively. “But Jon, come on. You’re the only person I can talk to here, and Robb is going to be so busy. I’d like to have someone who I can trust, gods know I lack those here.”
Jon swallowed thickly, lowering his gaze to his hands.
“My whole family is away,” you reminded him. “And I already see you as one of my brothers. It’d put my heart at ease to have you here, as I know it would Silas’. You are one of the very few people whom he trusts.”
When his eyes snapped up to yours again, the stubborn light in them softened albeit in hesitance. You couldn’t help but smile at the unfamiliar sight, and he blinked a couple of times like he was trying to pull himself together, letting out a breath.
“You’d still have Theon,” he joked, making you grimace.
“Gods, even more reason for you to stay,” you muttered. “Can he not join the Night’s Watch?”
Jon bit back his grin. “I doubt he would.”
“Can we not offer his name?” you asked, and for once that managed to make Jon burst into laughter while you giggled. “No I’m serious—Jon listen, we can write a letter of recommendation, I’m quite good at those!”
On the day of departure, Lady Stark didn’t come out of Bran’s room to see Lord Stark and the girls off, they went there instead. You were almost certain that it was because she was angry at the fact that Lord Stark was leaving for the south, but it wasn’t as if you could ask her, or anyone else. On happier news for you, Robb had told you that Jon decided to wait a little before he joined the Night’s Watch, and though you knew it would’ve made Lady Stark upset if she knew you had made him change his mind, you were glad for it either way, and so was Robb.
Right after breakfast, while the squires readied the horses, you gifted Sansa two of your silk gowns that you had asked the seamstress alter for her. She hugged you tight, telling you all her plans to become the best queen the realm had ever seen, and even though you still weren’t sure about Prince Joffrey, you made sure to share her enthusiasm, promising her that you’d come to see her in King’s Landing before her wedding. You also told her to make friends and stay close to Margaery as much as she could, hoping that she would listen.
Arya, on the other hand, wasn’t as easy to give advice, or presents.
“I have been straining my mind to find out what to gift you,” You plopped down next to her on the stairs while the servants carried the chests into carriages, her direwolf Nymeria curled up at her feet. “And I’m told Jon already gave you a sword?”
Arya grinned at you.
“He did! I named it Needle.”
“A very fitting name.”
“And you don’t have to gift me anything,” she added. “I don’t need silk gowns.”
You hummed.
“Do you have no trust in me at all?” you asked and held out the small package, Arya’s face lighting up. She tore the paper open, then held her breath when she saw the armguard that you embroidered with direwolves. “Consider it my thank you for teaching me how to shoot arrows. Even though I’m not quite as good as you at that just yet.”
She threw herself into your arms, making you let out a laugh and hug her tight.
“Thank you!”
“Of course, my sweet,” you said when she pulled back. “And I have another thing for you.”
You placed the small gold medallion into her palm, making her frown as she lifted it to inspect it.
“What is this?”
“That is a special medallion that Cliff gave all of my brothers and I,” you said and paused for a second, then took a deep breath. “Arya, King’s Landing can be a very dangerous place. And I know how adventurous you are, so you might find yourself in trouble away from the Red Keep. If that happens…” you trailed off. “Find a harbour. Tell a captain there you’re Cliff Greensted’s sister, and show them this. They’ll take you to him, and he’ll bring you to safety. No matter what.”
She shifted her weight. “Will he teach me how to be a pirate if I do that?”
A small burst of laughter escaped you.
“We’ll see,” you said. “Keep this with you all the time, promise?”
“Promise. But think about it, I could be a great pirate.”
“If there’s anyone in the realm who could be anything they want, it’s you,” you told her. “And it’s a good thing you have a lot of time to decide what it is.”
“If I were a pirate like Cliff,” she mused, “I’d go on so many adventures, and come back with many stories.”
“He has great stories, does he not?”
“And I’d bring your babe things from all over the realm too.”
Your head shot up. “Hm?”
“Your and Robb’s I mean,” she said as if that wasn’t clear, and you tried to ignore the way your heart skipped a beat.
“We don’t have a babe, my sweet.”
“Sansa thinks you will.” She shrugged her shoulders. “So do your ladies-in-waiting, I heard them talking.”
“Only the gods know those things,” you managed to say. “In the meantime, promise me you’ll use that medallion when you need it, not when being a pirate sounds like a fun idea.”
“Fine, fine…” she mumbled and stole a look at you. “Do you mean it?”
“Mean what?”
“That I could be what I want to be.”
Well, that was a complicated question; the realm didn’t offer many options to girls. While your brothers got to be whatever they wanted to be, you yourself had always known you’d wed one day and become a lady of a castle. Thankfully your father and Silas protected you from the fate that many unfortunate women faced and made sure you wed someone who was handsome, kind and honorable who turned out to be the love of your life, but at the end of the day, marriage was one of the very limited options you had as a woman.
The other was becoming a septa.
But you weren’t going to tell Arya that. Instead, in the future, when her father—and Robb— decided it was time for her to be betrothed, you were going to make sure to find someone who would be to her liking.
And who knew, really? Arya’s family loved her, and times were changing.
Perhaps she could indeed be something else other than a lady of the castle.
“All my brothers chose their own paths,” you commented. “It can’t be that hard if they did it.”
She frowned in deep thought. “Did you choose yours?”
“Not in the sense my brothers did,” you admitted. “But I’m very lucky either way, and very happy.”
“You’ve always wanted to wed Robb?”
“I’ve known him for two moons, my sweet,” you told her with a laugh. “I didn’t even know he existed until I was informed of our betrothal. I…” You paused for a moment, then reached out to hold her hand. “I think there’s nothing wrong with having different goals. Mine were quite similar to my friends’ when I was your age, yours are not. It doesn’t mean either of us are in the wrong; everyone’s happiness looks different, simple as that.”
She heaved a deep sigh, then turned your head when Sansa’s voice reached you both from the yard.
“Arya, time to go!”
“Coming!” she called out and you both got up from the stairs, then made your way to the yard with Nymeria following you behind. Sansa and her wolf Lady were already by the carriages, and it seemed that the whole family except Lady Stark and Bran were in the yard to see them off. Arya went directly to Jon and Robb, and you curtsied at the king and the queen before approaching Lord Stark.
“I wish you and the girls a safe trip, Lord Stark.”
“Thank you, my lady,” he said and his eyes found Robb over your shoulder. “Make sure he doesn’t throw himself into another duel if anyone from the south comes by?”
A laugh climbed your throat.
“I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“And uh—” He cleared his throat. “If Bran…”
“Robb will send you a raven as soon as he wakes up,” you assured him. “And I’ll make sure to help Lady Stark in the meantime. Do not worry about here, Robb and I already talked of what to do in your absence.”
That managed to make him smile, even if it was a little.
“I appreciate that.”
“And I haven’t got the chance to thank you before,” you added. “For agreeing to our union. I recognize the rest of the north hoped for something different, but I love Robb, and I’ll be grateful to you my whole life.”
“I gave him the same advice yesterday, but he stops listening whenever you’re anywhere within his sight,” he said, a fire awakening under your cheeks. “I’m glad you two are happy, but a marriage takes more effort than just depending on love. With all these new responsibilities on both of you, do keep that in mind.”
“I will.”
“Let’s go!” the king’s loud voice rang in the yard, and you rushed to bid the girls goodbye, then went over to Robb’s side. Rickon was clinging to his leg, Shaggydog by Grey Wind and Ghost’s side while Robb nodded at his father in acknowledgment, no trace of worry on his face in such northern manner. Lord Stark mounted on his horse and turned his head, his eyes stopping on Bran’s window. For a moment you wondered whether Lady Stark was looking out the window, but you forced yourself not to check seeing that it would’ve been rather intruding, so you smiled at Rickon instead, whose brows were furrowed in worry. He blinked back the tears when his father turned his horse around and followed the king out of the yard, and Robb ruffled his hair.
“You’re alright,” he told him, more of a statement than a question while Maester Luwin approached Robb to mutter something into his ear.
“I’ll be right there,” Robb told him, and you tilted your head.
“What is it?”
“There are some petitions I must listen to,” he said and pressed a kiss on your temple. “I’ll find you later. Jon, I need you in the room as well.”
Jon nodded his head and they both walked away from you and Rickon, who lingered in his spot as if he didn’t know what to do. You could see your ladies-in-waiting by the entrance of the keep and Wylla motioned at you as if asking you whether you needed anything, but you shook your head, then crouched down get to Rickon’s eye level.
“Rickon my sweet,” you said, reaching to push his hair out of his eyes, noting once again that just like most of his siblings, he took after his mother in looks. “May I ask something of you and Shaggydog?”
He nodded in silence.
“You’ve met Frost, have you not?”
His hand shooting up to his mouth so that he could bite at his thumb. “Yes.”
“I’ll go to the stables to check on her and give her some treats,” you said. “And then I’ll visit my horse Silk to do the same. Do you mind helping me?”
He looked up at you with wide eyes. “Me?”
“Of course,” you said. “And Shaggydog can wait at the door to protect us, how does that sound?”
He held his breath and nodded fervently, an adorable look of determination settling on his face as if you had just given him the most important duty in the realm.
“He will!” he said. “Shaggy already knows not to hurt Frost. And I’ll help you!”
“Wonderful,” you said and straightened up, then took his small hand into yours. “Now come. We need to get treats from the kitchens, Frost loves carrots, and Silk loves green apples.”
You had spent the entire day with Rickon; at first letting him feed Frost and Silk, and then you and the rest of your ladies-in-waiting made sure to keep an eye on him. Lyra had volunteered to be a monster to spar with him with wooden swords while Jorelle and Wylla pretended to be maidens he had to save until dinner time, the simple game managing to distract him from Bran and his mother, and the rest of the family who had left for the Capital.
With Lady Catelyn nowhere in sight, it had fallen upon you to converse with the other northern guests and be the lady of the castle, despite them being more familiar with Winterfell than you. The irony wasn’t lost on you or them, but surprisingly no one had commented on it, and you couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because Robb was in charge of the castle and by extension the north now. Robb had sent you word with a servant that he wouldn’t be joining dinner, and he had been busy with some northern lords in his father’s solar—or his solar now, if you had to guess—until after you retired to your and his bedchambers. You took a bath, got into your nightgown and were just in the process of writing a letter to Silas when Robb entered the room and flung himself on the bed facedown. You looked up from your scroll, biting back a smile.
“I take it you’ve had a very peaceful day.”
Robb groaned into the pillow before he reached to open and close his hand as if grasping air without lifting his head from the pillow. You raised your brows.
“Am I supposed to understand—”
“Come here,” he said, raising his head a little so that you could make out what he was saying, and you repressed a grin.
“Am I being commanded?”
“Implored,” he whined. “Please?”
You took your time crossing the room with deliberately slow steps, and the moment you reached bed Robb sat up so that he could wrap his arms around your waist, pulling you to his lap in haste. A giggle climbed your throat while he buried his face to the deep plunge of your cleavage, his beard scratching at your skin in the most pleasant way.
“They are so vexing,” Robb’s voice came out muffled while you played with his auburn curls, tension washing off his shoulders. “And unreasonable.”
You hummed, running your nails over his scalp and down to the nape of his neck.
“Gods, you smell amazing,” he mumbled into your skin, coaxing a smile out of you.
“If you think flattery will make me forget that I couldn’t see you whole day…” you teased him and he lifted his head to look at you with heavy lids, the sight making your heart skip a happy beat. The rest of what you were going to say long forgotten, you leaned in to brush your lips against his, but you both snapped out of it when someone knocked on the door, making your stomach drop.
Gods, if it was this late at night…
You slipped off his lap and put on your dressing gown, your heart slamming against your ribcage while Robb made his way to the door with a frown on his face, but the moment he opened it, Rickon rushed inside to clutch at his leg.
“I had a nightmare!”
You pressed a hand on your chest and let out a breath, thanking the gods that it wasn’t bad news about Bran.
“Rickon…” Robb said with a tired sigh and crouched down while Rickon sniffled, clutching his direwolf toy to his chest.
“I had a nightmare, father was dead and they put him in the crypts—”
“Father is on his way to King’s Landing,” Robb told him while you crossed the room, and Rickon’s big tearful eyes snapped up to you, your heart clenching at the sight of fear in them. “He’s not in the crypts, and he’s most certainly not dead.”
“But he was!” Rickon insisted as you crouched down as well, reaching out to hold his little hand. “He was, I swear it!”
“It was just a nightmare, that’s all,” Robb said, wiping the tears off Rickon’s chubby cheeks. “Come on now. You’re a northman, and a Stark. We don’t cry.”
You frowned at Robb, then turned to Rickon to give him a smile.
“Nightmares can be very scary,” you told him while he hiccupped. “Would you like to sleep between us tonight, my sweet?”
“Wait, what?” Robb asked incredulously, then shook his head. “No. Rickon, go back to your own room. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
You narrowed your eyes at him.
“Robb, would you mind stepping out with me for a moment?” you asked and straightened up, then grabbed his wrist to lead him out of the room into the hallway where Grey Wind was curled up by the door, but this time he was accompanied by Shaggydog. You stepped away from the door so that Rickon wouldn’t hear you, then whirled around on your heels to glare up at Robb. “Is this your first time hearing what a nightmare is?”
“He’s not sleeping between us just because he had a nightmare,” he said. “He’s a northerner, and a Stark.”
“He’s a child,” you reminded him, pointing back at the room, “and he’s terrified!”
“He won’t be a child forever,” Robb insisted. “And he must learn to face his fears.”
“He can’t expect to be soothed whenever he’s scared.”
“And you think he must learn to face his fears at this moment, when his brother is sick, half of his family have left, and his mother is too worried to leave Bran’s room?”
Robb’s jaw clenched.
“When else should he expect to be soothed?” you asked. “When I was his age, whenever I had a nightmare—”
“We’re not coddling him,” he cut you off. “We don’t do that in the north. I understand that things are different in the south, but winter is coming. He must learn.”
Of course.
You should’ve known. Lord Stark had taken Bran to watch a traitor be executed just last month, and Robb was raised believing that was normal and expected.
It was very clear House Stark raised children much differently than House Greensted.
You gritted your teeth, then looked in the direction of the room over your shoulder before you turned to him, crossing your arms.
“Are you going to be like this when we have our own?”
“Are you?” he asked back with a tense chuckle. “Because we’re not going to be raising little southern lordlings who cling to their mother’s skirts whenever they’re scared.”
Anger shot through you faster than lightning.
“We’re not going to be raising little northern lordlings who’re not even allowed to cry after a nightmare either—you know what?” You held up a hand. “I’m not going to stay here and argue with you when your little brother is terrified.”
“He’s going back to his room—”
“He’s not,” you retorted. “He either sleeps between us tonight, or he can sleep in my bedchambers with me and Frost while you sleep alone in your own.”
He scoffed in disbelief. “My wife sleeps in my bed—”
“Your wife sleeps wherever she wants!” you snapped, glaring up at him. “It’s up to you where you sleep, but I am not sending a terrified child to his own room.”
Your name left his lips in exasperation while you walked away from him and entered the bedchambers to find Rickon already sitting on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs while still clutching to his direwolf toy. You went over to sit next to him as Robb entered the bedchambers and closed the door behind him.
“Would you like a bedtime story, my sweet?” you asked Rickon who sniffled and wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, then nodded vigorously and pulled himself up to get comfortable under the covers. Robb threw his head back, then held up his hands to gesture surrender after you shot a curt glare in his direction.
“I said nothing,” he grumbled as you raised your brows at him, then smiled at Rickon.
“Alright then,” you said, your voice soft. “Would you like to hear about the first king of the Reach?”
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Fears burden the mind.
Word Count: 4,3k
Warnings: Explicit language, mentions of pregnancy, adult themes, suggestive themes. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
Back at the Reach, one of the things both you and Margaery would get reprimanded for was gossip.
It wasn’t rare for either of you to stay up until the hour of the wolf and going over what happened during the day over and over again, focusing on a different person each time. Sometimes it’d be about fashion, or paramours, or the latest scandal, but there was always something.
And now, especially with the king’s visit, you had so much to go over, yet Margaery wasn’t here, and you still didn’t trust anyone in Winterfell.
So you had found a different solution.
“Robb, wake up!”
Robb let out a small groan when you shook him by the chest.
“Wake up,” you insisted. “I have things to tell you.”
“Can it wait?” he mumbled into his pillow, and you shook your head even though he couldn’t see you.
“Do you not find it strange that the king ignores the queen all the time?”
Robb’s eyes fluttered open and he squinted at you, the sight of his messy auburn curls making your chest all warm.
“What time is it?” he rasped out and you shrugged.
“Early. It’s rather rude of him, is it not? He ignored her in front of everyone when they first got here. And then at the feast too.”
“Why are you—”
“And not only did he ignore her, he also humiliated her at the feast, in front of people!” you insisted. “Does he not like her at all, do you think?”
“You woke up at this hour to gossip?”
“We barely talked last night,” you whined, your shoulders dropping in defeat while he smirked.
“We were too busy to talk.”
“But I wanted to talk!” you insisted. “And now that you’re awake—”
“I’m not awake.” He threw his arm around your torso to pull you to his chest, coaxing a giggle out of you as you propped yourself up on your elbows.
“Is it not strange?” you asked. “I mean when they wed, everyone agreed that she was the most—” You shook him, making him groan again. “Robb, I don’t think you’re listening!”
“Gods be good…”
“Has your father said anything about them?”
“No.”
“How come you—” A squeal escaped you when he squeezed your butt still half asleep, but you reached back to grab his wrist. “Not now, focus! Why didn’t you ask?”
“Why would I ask?”
You rolled your eyes.
“I swear I will never understand men,” you grumbled. “How are you not curious? He doesn’t like her, it’s very surprising.”
“Is it?” he asked with a yawn and opened his eyes, then ran a hand over his face as if trying to get rid of the haze of sleep. “Of course he doesn’t like her, she’s not pleasant at all.”
“Maybe not to other people, but she probably was pleasant to him at least at first,” you said. “She must have tried. There is no way she did not.”
“I suppose sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
“Her family is powerful,” you insisted, counting with your fingers, “she’s beautiful, educated, fashionable—”
A chuckle escaped him. “I don’t think the king cares much about fashion.”
“It helps still,” you commented. “I don’t know, the realm thinks she’s everything a queen is expected to be. And they have three children together, one would assume…”
“Hm?”
“How did he not eventually fall in love with her?”
He folded an arm under his head. “Maybe his love for Aunt Lyanna does not let him love anyone else.”
“It is rather odd, how every man has a different reaction to being left behind,” you muttered, heaving a sigh as you rested your chin on his chest, absentmindedly tracing his muscles. “The king wed and fathered children, but he still loves your aunt. And my father never recovered after my mother. No mistresses or wife, even though everyone kept pressuring him. It makes me wonder what she would think. Or what your aunt would think had she lived.”
If you hadn’t been so lost in your own thoughts, you would’ve noticed the silence falling upon the room, or his body tensing up.
“I guess there’s a reason why so many love ballads are sad,” you mused. “Heartbreak one way or another. That might be the one thing years cannot take away.”
He was so quiet that for half a minute you were convinced he had fallen asleep again. Yet, his deep voice that rumbled in his chest and vibrated underneath your palm didn’t sound sleepy at all when he finally spoke, the stern command almost taking you by surprise.
“You’re not allowed to do that.”
You lifted your head to blink up at him.
“Do what?”
“You’re not allowed to die before me.”
You couldn’t stop your chortle. “Robb…”
“I’m serious. You cannot.”
“When it comes to longevity, the gods seem to favor men more,” you couldn’t help but point out. “Men die in battle in wartime. Women die in childbirth regardless of war or peace.”
His eyes found yours.
“Is that what you fear?” he asked quietly and you pinched your lips, trying to pick the right words.
“I don’t think fear is the right word for it,” you ended up saying. “I’m no fool, I know what happened to my mother was largely related to the very short time between the twins’ birth and mine.”
Silas and Arys had told you that. Upon hearing your septa talking about how motherhood came with a price and the childbirth was the ultimate sacrifice, Silas had said fuck off to her face, making you burst into laughter even with the fear churning your stomach.
“My sister will not be sacrificed just so that some prick somewhere can have an heir,” Silas had spat. “And she will be educated to minimize the danger. Stop filling her head with nonsense, unless you want my father to release you of your duties.”
Arys had been the one to tell you all about it; how it was of importance that one’s body was given enough time to rest.
“When you wed,” he had told you, “you’ll have many herbs at your disposal. We’re not letting you wed anyone who you might not like, but regardless of how much you might like your future husband, you are putting your own health first. Always. No babe is more important than you, and you’re not making the same mistake mother and father did. You will only have kids when you’re ready, and they will have at least 3 years between them, not like us.”
“We won’t…” Robb started, then paused and shook his head. “I would never put you through that.”
Nor were you going to put yourself through that. You were going to be very careful and take nothing for granted, because you knew how it went for your mother; she’d had such easy childbirths until you, and each time she had bounced back so fast that both she and your father were convinced nothing bad would happen.
So the gods had decided to prove to them otherwise.
“No,” you said in an attempt to sound more confident than you felt, willing yourself not to think about Arrana’s bad wish. “It won’t be like that for me.”
But there was still that danger.
Even if you did everything right, there was still that danger, for you and for every woman in the realm.
However, Robb was never going to hear that from you, not even with a blade to your throat. He wasn’t going to hear that, your own family wasn’t going to hear that, none of the Starks were going to hear that, none of your ladies-in-waiting or your maids were going to hear that.
The only person whom you had shared those concerns with was Margaery, and it was going to stay that way.
“Nothing bad is going to happen to me,” you added, desperate to disperse the gloomy air that felt almost suffocating around you. “Besides, no use worrying about any of that, only the gods know these things. Look at your own mother, she’s very healthy and she’s had five children so far—”
He pulled his brows together, confusion snapping him out of his own thoughts. “So far?”
Of course it worked.
“Well yes.” You shrugged your shoulders. “So far. You never know, they’re both still young—”
From the grimace twisting his handsome face, one would’ve thought you had spoken of something utterly unacceptable.
“Seven hells, don’t say that!”
A burst of laughter escaped you. “Robb, my love, I don’t know how to tell you this, but the fact that you have four other siblings—”
“That happened in the past!”
“Rickon is still little,” you argued. “And your mother and father are in love, anyone could see that. It’s normal!”
“It’s not normal,” he said, still grimacing while he motioned at the door. “He loves her from…from afar.”
“Mm, from up close. Very close, I’d say, because five kids is no duty—”
“From a respectable distance.”
“No to that also.”
He made a noise of disgust. “Can we stop talking about this? They’re too old to have a babe.”
“They’re not too old.”
“Fine, I’m too old to have a sibling,” he said, your laughter bouncing off the walls. “And I refuse to believe they would betray me like that.”
“Oh, such betrayal,” you said in an exaggerated manner, a hand on your chest. “Disaster, if you will.”
“Aye, it would be.”
You rolled your eyes at him while his gaze darted over your face, a frown pinching his forehead again.
“But you’ll be—” He swallowed thickly. “You’ll be fine, when…”
He didn’t need to finish his sentence, you knew exactly what he was referring to. You turned your bracelet around your wrist, heaving a dramatic sigh.
“How about this?” you said. “You give me your word that you won’t die in war, and I’ll give you my word that nothing will happen to me in childbirth. That’s called diplomacy, if you’re too northern to recognize such concept.”
That managed to make him huff out a chuckle, though the haunted look in his eyes didn’t disappear, not completely. He nodded after a beat, reaching out to cradle your cheek in his palm.
“Very well,” he said. “I give you my word. Do you?”
You lifted yourself a little to brush your lips against his, his hand slipping from your cheek to the side of your neck. His other arm snaked around your waist to press you to his body, butterflies erupting in your stomach.
“I do,” you said, a smile warming your face. “See? Who said the north and the south can’t negotiate?”
All your ladies-in-waiting agreed that the queen had to have grown bitter in time, perhaps because of her husband, perhaps because of her responsibilities, and perhaps because she had fewer admirers now than when she first wed the king. You didn’t know the reason, nor did you say too much out loud, but you were more than aware that she did not look happy at any time, with the exception of when she was talking to her brother.
Well, one of them, at least. Her other brother, Tyrion had arrived in Winterfell nearing the end of last night’s feast, having spent the whole day in a brothel in Wintertown, so if you had to guess, he was going to get along well with Theon.
Robb was busy throughout the afternoon, and so were you. While he went on a hunt with his father and the king, you and some of your ladies-in-waiting were tasked with taking baskets of food and herbs to Wintertown per Lady Stark’s orders. As much as you liked going to Wintertown, you still wondered whether there were no servants left in the castle to do this exact task, but you managed to keep your mouth shut.
She was probably making sure everyone in Wintertown had seen you and talked to you, and this was a good way to make sure of that.
Or perhaps she was trying to keep you out of the queen’s sight after that little exchange of yours the other night, that could’ve been the reason as well.
Alys, Lyra and Wylla had gone into the other street, leaving you with Barbrey and Jorelle. It had taken you a much shorter time to give the baskets to all the houses you were supposed to visit, so now you were waiting for the others while you explored the market, making small talk with vendors as Barbrey and Jorelle trailed after you. This was yet another instance that you couldn’t help but note was different in here, because back in the south, the vendors sold many different types of jewelry seeing that it was popular among noble ladies. In the north, rather than jewelry, women embroidered their gowns with beads and intricate pieces of bronze, copper and ivory.
Perhaps you could use some of those on your cloaks at least.
“…And my cousin will visit Winterfell with her lord husband, and she’ll die when she sees me,” Barbrey chattered. “I doubt she believed me when I wrote to her to tell her I’m a lady-in-waiting. I’m planning to get a new gown and embroider it by the time she visits, she’ll be so jealous!”
You accidentally exchanged glances with Jorelle who looked like she was trying her hardest to keep herself from rolling her eyes at Barbrey.
“Her wedding was two years ago, and she had the audacity to criticize what I wore to it. And let me tell you, her wedding gown wasn’t so impressive either! Her lord husband is of House Flint, and her gown had eyes all over it, it looked so weird.”
You raised your brows. “Her gown had eyes?”
“House Flint’s words are Ever Vigilant,” Jorelle explained, “and their banner has a pair of eyes on it.”
“And it looked like she was wearing the banner itself,” Barbrey added. “Let’s see whose gown is better now. And also, if I may, I’m sure I’ll make a better marriage now that I’m—”
“Barbrey, did you see that vendor over there?” Jorelle cut her off. “I think they have more colorful beads over there, they’d look good on your purple gown.”
“You’re right!” Barbrey gasped. “My lady, may I—?”
“Please go ahead,” you said a bit quicker than intended, but Barbrey was too excited to notice that. She rushed to the stall Jorelle was pointing at, and Jorelle let out a breath.
“There. Some peace and quiet.”
You bit back a smile. “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
You sometimes wondered whether you would’ve been able to get along well with Jorelle if it weren’t for her family and her whole almost betrothal with Robb. She probably held some resentment for you, and you still felt rather threatened by her. Despite that, sometimes she reminded you of Margaery with the calm air around her that made it nearly impossible to see through her, but you cast the thought away from your mind, forcing yourself to look at the beads on the tray.
“These look nice,” you commented as you approached the counter. “Are you good at embroidery, Jorelle?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Not my absolute favorite, but yes.”
“What is your absolute favorite?”
“I like riding.”
Right.
Of course she liked riding.
“So do I,” you said, taking a couple of bronze pieces into your palm to inspect them. “Silk is faster than my horses back in the Reach, but I’m getting used to such speed.”
“Your brother gifted her to you, did he not?”
“Yes. Cliff.”
She stole a look at you.
“And you’re close with all your brothers?”
“Mm hm. Well, Silas is the one I’m closest with, and then the twins. Arys and Cliff left home quite early, so I see them very rarely. Mostly on my namedays and such.” You lifted your gaze from the pieces in your hand. “I think you’ve talked to Perceon?”
Jorelle blinked a couple of times, her cheeks betraying her nonchalant demeanor when they turned pink.
“Yes,” she said, making herself busy with the beads. “He was—he is very southern.”
“Dornish, more like.”
A silence fell upon you and Jorelle nibbled on her lip, her eyes falling on Barbrey before turning to you.
“Can I ask you something?”
You put the bronze pieces back and grabbed a particularly shiny bead. “Of course.”
“Why did you…” she trailed off. “Why did you choose her to be among your ladies-in-waiting? After what Arrana has said?”
That question wasn’t about Barbrey, and you both knew it.
You had to give it to Jorelle, unlike other northerners, she did know how to be subtle. A bitter smile twitched your lips as you put the bead down, then reached for a thin silver chain, pretending to direct your attention on it.
“I’m very southern,” you said, your voice silky. “That’s one of the many cultural differences, I’ve found. Northerners are quite direct about alliances or enmity, but back in the south, it’s more complex than that. We’re taught to keep some people close, precisely because of lack of trust.”
She raised her brows, staring at you as if the remark had taken her by surprise.
“Ah,” she said after a beat, pressing her lips into a thin line. “I see.”
“My lady!” Wylla called out, making you look over your shoulder to see her approach you with Lyra and Alys following her. “We’re finished. Shall we go back?”
You thought for a moment, then shrugged your shoulders.
“Let’s stay a while longer,” you said, linking your arm through hers to lead her to the nearest stall. “I have plans for some of my cloaks, and I am in a desperate need of some beads.”
Much to your displeasure, you couldn’t see Robb for the rest of the day. He had been with his father and the king in the Wolfswood the entire day, and they hadn’t returned to the castle during dinner either, because of the king’s request to have their dinner in the woods like he and Lord Stark used to whenever they went hunting in their youth.
At least that was the explanation Robb mumbled into your ear when he joined you in bed at dawn, waking you up with kisses instead of going to sleep himself. At first you had assumed he would be too tired, especially after having spent the whole night in the woods, but you were soon proven wrong.
There were many things, you had found, that you loved when it came to marital bed. The act itself was pleasurable beyond words, Robb always made sure you enjoyed it every single time, unlike what that lady of the night had told you back in the Reach. You hadn’t even thought it possible before, but it made you fall in love with him even more, your heart so full of him that it sometimes made you worry whether there would be room for anything else. You enjoyed his kisses, his touch, his weight upon you, and how he made you feel before and during, and after.
That was one of your favorite parts as well.
After.
How he held you until your trembling passed, with chaste kisses and the sweetest praises that made your stomach flutter happily. Even now, while you tried to catch your breath with his arm around you that pressed you tight against his chest, you felt half delirious, all thoughts but him shattered to different corners in your mind, impossible to put back together. He pressed a kiss on your damp forehead, his other hand brushing back your hair before he dipped his head and his lips found yours. You couldn’t decide if the fire that colored his cheeks was because of the heat of the room or the chase of pleasure more; a sheen of sweat making him glow under the sunlight spilling through the thin curtains around the bed. His curly auburn hair was a mess in the most handsome way, and the light in his eyes was so soft that you could swear your heart melted when he looked down at you with a fond smile, awakening your own.
You felt tired, and sore, and sticky all over, but most of all; completely and utterly happy.
“What are you thinking about?” you whispered while your fingertips traced his chest up and down, light as a feather.
“How pretty you are,” he said, the northern accent in his deep voice drawing a giddy giggle out of you before you brushed your lips against his.
“Right answer,” you said. “Especially after spending a whole day away from me.”
“It wasn’t by choice,” he grumbled. “I considered sneaking back into the castle like a common thief, more than once.”
The image his words conjured up in your mind was too funny for you to hold back your laughter. “Really?”
“My beautiful wife was in our bed waiting for me, and I was in the woods with a bunch of men.”
“But you were hunting,” you told him. “You love hunting.”
“Lamb, I promise you, there’s nothing I love more than this.” He motioned at your naked body, making you scrunch up your nose in embarrassment. “I was all but taken hostage. Just because the king doesn’t want to go back to his wife doesn’t mean he should assume the rest of us share that sentiment.”
…Was that—?
Was that Robb gossiping?
“Did he say that?”
“No, but he said something else while drunk,” he answered with a grimace, making your jaw drop. “I will not repeat those words to you, but he dislikes her even more than you assume.”
Very well, there was room for improvement there.
Not everyone could be a natural like you and Margaery, you’d teach him how to gossip in time.
“The queen drinks too,” you said. “I noticed it at the feast, and tonight’s dinner as well. Too much wine.”
“Might be the only thing they have in common.”
“Not the only thing, because she doesn’t like him either,” you said. “Have I told you the other night at the feast, she tried to give me advise, and then she said…”
“Hm?”
“She said she hopes we’ll be as happy as her and the king.”
Robb flicked his gaze up for a second with a scoff, the gesture so similar to the way you rolled your eyes whenever you were annoyed.
“She can keep hoping,” he said. “Seven hells, I can’t wait until they all leave.”
“But you don’t think—” You paused. “Do you think it was like that always?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s rather bitter, and all my ladies-in-waiting have many ideas about the reason. The queen had a lot of admirers when she was young, and Lyra has this theory that when one who’s used to compliments grows old…” you trailed off. “I don’t believe time takes away beauty, but I don’t want to be bitter like that when I grow old.”
His fingertips traced shapes on your bare skin. “You won’t.”
“It worried me all day today.”
“It shouldn’t have.”
“But perhaps she wasn’t like that either at first, because—”
“You couldn’t be bitter if you tried, it’s not in you.” The corners of his mouth curled, the glint in his eye making you blink up at him in confusion. “And I would know, I was just in you.”
A gasp left you and you pushed at his shoulder, heat sweeping over your face like a firestorm.
“I’m talking about something of importance!” you whined when he caught your wrist, his laugh echoing in the room. “And you’re making jests—”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” he cooed, though that mischievous smile of his betrayed the gentle tone of his voice. “I’m sorry. Come here.”
He pulled you to himself while you pouted at him, your brows knitted together in defiance. He bit back his grin, the pad of his thumb smoothing over the pinch of your frown before he cradled your cheek, his lips finding yours. That familiar warmth dripped down and down, a half sigh hitching in your throat as the kiss deepened, melting away your frustration along with every other thought that was plaguing your mind. Your eyes fluttered open when he nudged your nose with his, then pressed a kiss on the corner of your mouth, coaxing a giggle out of you.
“Jesting aside,” he said, the pleasant rumble of his voice vibrating under your palm resting on his chest. “It shouldn’t have worried you.”
“But what if you—”
“It shouldn’t have worried you, because there will never come a time when I look at you and not forget to breathe.”
Whatever you were going to say disappeared somewhere between your mind and your mouth while you gazed up at him, painfully aware of the lovesick smile on your face.
“And also,” he added, idly playing with your hair. “I meant it when I said you couldn’t if you tried. Your heart is too soft to be anything like her.”
That made your smile falter. You bit inside your cheek in deep thought, and when you spoke, your voice was almost too low to hear in the already quiet room:
“Everyone says life has a way of hardening hearts.”
He ran his knuckles down your spine as if trying to assure you.
“You entrusted me with yours to safekeep,” he murmured. “I will protect it from harm, for as long as I draw breath. Such fears will never come true, I promise.”
Tears rushed to your eyes out of nowhere but you blinked them away fast, desperate to swallow the lump in your throat. You captured his lips with yours, his hand slipping to your jaw to tilt your head, but you were both pulled out of the haze when someone pounded on the door, making you recoil in his arms.
“What?” Robb snapped at whoever it was behind the door. “What is it?”
It took you only a second to understand something was wrong.
“Robb, it’s—” Jon’s voice cracked mid-sentence before he took a shaky breath. “It’s Bran. He fell from the Broken Tower.”
A.N: Hi my loves! 🩷 Thank you so so much for your wonderful support, you've made me so happy! 🩷I hope you'll like this one as well, and please let me know what you think🩷 ILYSM, kisses! 🩷
Pairing: Robb Stark x F!Reader
Summary: Royal visitors can cause problems.
Word Count: 5k
Warnings: Explicit language, (canon) comments about weight, adult themes, suggestive themes. MDNI- Do not read if you're under 18.
Series Masterlist
It wasn’t that you weren’t good at holding grudges.
You were excellent at it, actually. Your very own sister-in-law was the proof of it, you hadn’t been able to get along well with her ever since you were a child.
So it wasn’t that you lacked the ability to hold grudges, it was just that Robb made it very difficult.
Day by day, your resilience was chipped away. You were still angry at him for calling that lady “pleasant” but he kept claiming it was for Jon, and though you hated to admit it, he also had a way of…
Well.
Convincing you and quenching your anger at the same time.
You were trying to choose between two pairs of earrings when Robb walked into your bedchambers, and you had to do a double-take to realize it was not a stranger who barged in, but your husband. You gasped, your hands shooting up to cover your mouth.
“What happened to your beard?!”
“My mother made me shave it,” he grumbled while you gawked at him. “For the king’s arrival.”
You had never seen Robb without a beard; he always had either a stubble or a very short beard, so this was the first time you were seeing him clean-shaven. Though he was handsome as always with his sharp jawline which was even more prominent without a beard, the sight felt rather strange to you, and it took you a couple of seconds to understand the reason. A huff of laughter escaped you, muffled by your hands before you lowered them.
“You look like a Reach knight!”
The way his expression turned from annoyed to complete and utter betrayal could’ve made a simple observer think you had just insulted him. He let out a displeased exhale through his nose, then strode past you to approach your mirror like it could magically grow his beard back if he glared at his reflection hard enough.
“I do not understand why she insists so much,” he mumbled while you tilted your head, watching him in the mirror with your arms crossed. “A northman cannot be without his beard, it’s just not right.”
You covered your laughter by clearing your throat and plopped down on the bed, a grin curling your lips.
“Recite me a poem,” you demanded, and he turned around to scowl at you.
“I don’t know any.”
“You look like you do,” you said airily. “Can you sing, at least? Play any instruments? Almost every knight in the Reach can.”
“I’m no Reach knight,” he grumbled. “And it’ll grow back.”
“Are you saying that to me or yourself?”
He took another look at his reflection, running a hand over his face.
“I look like a boy.”
“A handsome Reach boy,” you chirped, earning an annoyed glare in return.
“Don’t.”
You held up your hands in a mock of surrender before you pushed yourself off the bed.
“Well, I must go,” you said. “Lady Stark needed me today, so I’ll leave you and my mirror alone.”
“Wait—” He caught up with you to grab your wrist so that he could pull you closer, drawing a giggle out of you. You playfully slipped your wrist out of his grasp with a gasp, feigning shock.
“I’m very offended by you daring to believe I’d kiss you,” you said with a hand on your chest. “As handsome as you are, I’ll have you know I’m very loyal to my husband.”
“I am your husband!”
You made a noise of disagreement.
“My husband has a beard,” you pointed out, taking a step back. “You appear to be one of the knights who used to follow me around in the ballroom begging for a dance.”
Well, that wasn’t entirely true; none of those knights were as handsome as Robb was, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Learn a poem in the meantime,” you told him, walking backwards to the door. “Or grow your beard back. Whichever is faster.”
With that, you walked out of the room and left him there, your laughter echoing in the hallway.
Though you both had very different trainings, it was times like these you could see that Lady Stark was in fact raised in the south.
Being the lady of the castle—especially when the said castle was Winterfell—came with so many responsibilities. Hosting guests was not only duty but also an art, which she pulled off flawlessly, even before the guests were there. The bedchambers, the feast, the entertainment, it was all ready the moment you got the news that the king would be arriving today. There were direwolf banners hanging in and outside the castle, and by the time you and the Starks gathered in the yard, you could already hear the sound of the horses approaching.
You had picked a pearly gray silk gown for the day, to blend in with the rest of the family, with your pelt thrown over your shoulders. Jon wasn’t allowed to stand with the family per Lady Stark’s orders, and it had put Robb in a rather sullen mood that he only snapped out of at the sight of Arya rushing to cross the yard with a helmet on her head. Lord Stark quickly pulled it off of her head and sent her to go stand between Sansa and Bran. You were right beside Robb, your hand in his while he caressed the back of your hand with his thumb almost absentmindedly, making you bite back a smile before you looked over your shoulder to steal a glance at your ladies-in-waiting in the crowd.
You hadn’t met the king or the queen before, and it had been on purpose, thanks to Silas and your father. The king’s many affairs with other women was not unheard of throughout the realm, and two years ago, around the time that title of yours started being thrown around, he and the queen had visited the Reach. A week before that, per Silas’ counsel and your father’s orders, you weren’t allowed to go outside so that when you missed the feast in King’s honor, the whole Reach thought you had been too sick to join any feast the whole week. The reason was simple; neither your father nor Silas wanted to risk the possibility of you catching the king’s interest, seeing that if you did, there would be so little that they could do except send you to Dorne to keep you safe and away from the most powerful man of the realm.
Though many families in the Reach would be delighted at the idea of their daughter catching the king’s eye and elevating their status, your family loved you way too much to put you in a situation where you would be forced to be a mistress.
But thankfully, you were safe now.
Not that the married women were safe in the southern court, especially from the king. However, you were Robb’s wife now, the future Lady of Winterfell, and nobody, not even the king, could risk the wrath of House Stark and the North by crossing a line.
You were probably the safest lady in the whole realm.
You snapped out of your thoughts when the horsemen passed the gates and entered the yard, a young boy that could only be a couple years older than Sansa—the prince, if you had to guess— at the front. Sansa sighed beside you, making Robb turn to her and then frown at the boy who gave Sansa a smirk, and you had to bite back your smile.
Of course Sansa would admire the prince.
The queen’s carriage entered the yard as well, followed by the Kingsguard and the king, whom you only recognized because of the crown. He was a heavy man with a serious look on his face, his eyes darting around the yard as his horse stopped and his squire rushed to help him dismount. Lord Stark bent a knee, the rest of the family and the whole yard following him suit, and it was only when the king motioned at him to rise that he stood up, all of you doing the same.
The king held Lord Stark’s gaze. “You got fat.”
You blinked a couple of times, holding your breath to see what Lord Stark would say, but he only lowered his eyes to the king’s stomach before raising his brows at him, as if returning the statement without so much as a word. The king burst into laughter, making Lord Stark smile as well before he pulled him into a hug.
…Gods, you were never going to understand men’s humor or their idea of friendship.
“Cat!” he greeted Lady Stark with a happy smile, hugging her as well. Sansa was still staring at the prince, and you leaned closer to her so that Robb couldn’t hear your whisper.
“You might want to pretend to be a little more nonchalant, my sweet.”
Sansa gave you an abashed smile while the king and Lord Stark exchanged words.
“Do you think he finds me beautiful?”
“Of course he does,” you whispered back, watching the queen step out of the carriage. She was beautiful, the displeasure on her face wasn’t enough to take away from it, and she looked around the yard before her eyes stopped on you.
“You must be Robb.” The king shook Robb’s hand before his eyes found you. “And the newest member of the family, I assume. The tales of your beauty weren’t lying, my lady.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” you accepted the compliment with a well-practiced graceful smile. The queen approached Lord Stark who kissed her hand, but everyone’s attention turned to the king in a second when he spoke:
“Take me to your crypt, I want to pay my respects.”
“We’ve been riding for a month, my love,” the queen said kindly, and you had to wonder for a second whether everyone else could hear just how forced it sounded or just you. “Surely the dead can wait.”
The king didn’t even spare her a glance.
“Ned,” he said curtly before he walked away, and Lord Stark followed him into the Keep.
…Ah.
The crypt.
Where Lord Stark’s sister who was also the king’s alleged true love laid in her eternal sleep.
The Queen looked like she wanted to argue, but her brother touched her arm as if signaling her to stop talking, and you averted your eyes, making yourself busy with your bracelet.
It was one of the many things you and Margaery were taught when you were little.
If someone above your rank was insulted or ignored in front of you, you never saw it.
Lord Stark and the king spent almost an hour in the crypts while the queen retired to her bedchambers to rest. It seemed that Lord Stark had much to speak with the king, because Robb had come to find you in the yard around an hour before the feast, clearly released from his father’s solar. You quickly dismissed your ladies-in-waiting so that you could speak freely at the far corner of the yard, and to be completely honest, the way you two sat was not appropriate at all; rather than sitting across from one another, you had your back against his chest, his arms wrapped around you while he nuzzled to your hair.
It had been rather peaceful, at least until a moment ago.
“A betrothal?” you repeated, craning your neck to look up at him. “Between Sansa and…”
“Prince Joffrey,” Robb finished your sentence for you, letting out a displeased noise as you pulled out of his arms to turn to see him better. “Don’t—”
“And Lord Stark said yes?”
“Sansa would cry for the rest of her life if he did not,” Robb said with a grimace. “She is in love already, and they haven’t even talked to each other yet. My mother talked my father into it, he will take the girls with him when he goes to King’s Landing to be the Hand.”
A frown pinched your forehead while Robb’s fingers drew shapes in your palm absentmindedly.
“Robb, I don’t think…”
Gods, how were you going to approach this?
You had to walk a very thin line here. You couldn’t risk anyone think you were trying to sabotage Sansa’s future, especially when the root of your worries was her future. Sansa was the sweetest girl ever, and you were certain she would grow up to be the loveliest lady and queen, but it was because of that you weren’t as excited as Lady Stark about this union.
Sansa was too sweet and naive for King’s Landing.
Not to mention, you knew nearly nothing about Prince Joffrey. There was a reason why it had taken Silas so much time to make a decision about your husband, marriage couldn’t be decided in a haste. Granted the king and Lord Stark were friends, but it didn’t mean their children would form a good union, and the moment they wed, Sansa would be bound to Prince Joffrey forever, regardless of how strong her house was.
And this was yet another time you were thankful to the gods for Silas and the rest of your family.
Those rules didn’t apply to you.
“What is it?” Robb asked, pulling you out of your thoughts. You opened your mouth and closed it again, then took a deep breath.
“Sansa is very young still.”
“Oh they won’t wed right away,” Robb said. “They’ll wait until my father deems it the right time. Sansa will just be in King’s Landing in the meantime, with Arya.”
You stole a look at the rest of the yard, deep in thought.
“Well, perhaps…” You paused. “Perhaps if they won’t wed right away, Sansa could stay here a bit longer so that I can teach her things.”
“Like what?”
“Like how to survive in the southern court.”
He huffed a laugh. “Oh come on.”
“Robb, I’m serious.”
“My father will be with her, she’ll be fine.”
“Your father cannot save her from everything,” you said. “Nor can he help her in everything, especially when it comes to the south. It’s a different world than here, and please don’t get me wrong, but Sansa still believes in fairytales. She must learn know how to—”
You stopped yourself and Robb pulled his brows together.
“How to what?”
Manipulate people.
It was beyond you how no one had given her the necessary training, especially if the southern court had been a possibility all along. You were rather sheltered and very much aware of it, but when it came to southern court games and wielding power, you and Margaery were given a very strict education.
Although you falling in love was unexpected, your husband falling in love with you had always been the plan.
“The southern court is an incredibly dangerous place,” you told him. “I fear she might not be ready for it just yet. If she stays here a little longer—”
“Nothing bad will happen to her in the southern court,” he assured you. “My father and the king are close as brothers.”
“Which is wonderful, but think about it,” you insisted. “Silas didn’t make our union happen because of my father and yours. He made it, because he approved you above all that. Does your father know Prince Joffrey? Do you? Beyond the fact that he will sit the Iron Throne once his father passes?”
“He can’t do anything to Sansa,” Robb brushed you off. “Sansa is a Stark.”
You caught the sight of the queen’s brother Jaime Lannister and Prince Joffrey stepping out of the keep into the yard, then huffed out.
“Can you please ask your father either way?” you asked. “If she can stay here for a moon or two?”
His eyes softened as he cupped your cheek gently, then dipped his head to give you the sweetest kiss, making your heart skip a beat. A giggle escaped you, your cheeks growing hot.
“We’re in public!”
“And we’re on our honeymoon,” he defended himself while you dragged your fingertip over the snarling wolf clasps on his doublet before you buried your face to his chest where his laugh rumbled deep. He pressed a kiss on top of your head, his hand still cradling your cheek.
“But you’ll ask?” you insisted and he heaved a sigh.
“I’ll ask,” he said. “Happy?”
“Very,” you chirped as you lifted your head to beam at him. “Thank you!”
He held your gaze in his, stroking your cheekbone with his thumb.
“I’ll never be able to tell you no, will I?” he asked and you scrunched up your nose, then grinned.
“Probably not,” you said airily. “But then again, why would you want to?”
That drew a chuckle out of him, and he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe himself.
“Aye,” he murmured, leaning in to kiss you again. “Why would I want to indeed?”
Thanks to Lady Stark, the feast was going perfectly.
And everyone was having fun. Sansa was over the moon with the news, and she had made you promise that you would lend her one of your gowns for her to wear in the King’s Landing, so that she could impress the ladies there. Though you wanted to say it would take more than a gown, you decided not to say anything until Robb asked Lord Stark, so instead you assured her that you would help her with choosing the perfect gown and jewelry so that she would make an impeccable first impression on the southern court. Just until a moment ago that you and Robb were sitting at one of the tables among your peers, drinking and laughing, but when Arya threw food at Sansa’s dress, Lady Stark had shot him a look that clearly said to step in, so that the royal family wouldn’t notice the chaos that was about to erupt. Robb heaved a sigh and kissed your temple before he made his way to Arya and lifted her out of her seat, telling her it was time for bed. Arya pouted, but one gentle push from Robb made her start walking, and they both left the Great Hall so that he could tuck her in.
Watching Robb take care of his siblings never failed to make your chest all warm. He knew how to handle all of them, adapting a softer approach with Sansa and Bran while roughhousing Arya and Rickon who loved it. For a moment, you couldn’t stop your mind from wandering off, so you found yourself imagining what a great father he would make one day, to your own kids.
You knew it was too early, you still couldn’t tell whether you were ready, especially with your mother’s fate, yet the simple image of him with a baby made you smile.
You wondered whether they would take after him or you. Or perhaps they would be the perfect combination of you both—
“My lady.” Alys’ voice snapped you out of your thoughts. “Lady Stark and the queen ask for you, I think.”
You turned your head to take a look at the High Table where only Lady Stark and the queen sat—everyone else had scattered around the Great Hall. Lady Stark nodded at you and you pushed your chair back.
“Thank you Alys,” you whispered and stood up, then made your way to the High Table. You swept a well-trained curtsy, then straightened up and smiled at them, clasping your hands in front of you.
“Your Grace,” you said. “Lady Stark.”
“Hello my dear.”
“I wanted to see the infamous Blossom of the Reach,” the queen said, making your smile wider. “Everyone sings your praises, even miles away.”
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
“Including your best friend,” she said, making your head whip up. “Margaery Tyrell. She is dazzling the capital as we speak.”
And judging by the tone of her voice, she was not happy about that.
You would’ve been lying if you said it was unexpected. Margaery never feared anyone, no matter their social standing.
“As she dazzled the Reach,” you said. “I’m sure she flourishes in King’s Landing.”
“Do remind me, who had more admirers in the Reach? You or her?”
The attempt was nearly pitiful, and you had to hold back your laughter. This wasn’t new, the way people would try to sow discord between you and Margaery so that you would turn against each other and become rivals for—
For what?
Attention?
The queen wasn’t the first, nor would she be the last to find out your and Margaery’s bond ran too deep to get harmed by such comments. Margaery could be crowned the most beautiful girl in the realm tomorrow—in your opinion, she deserved it—, and you would be cheering her at the top of your lungs. She could be the queen, and you would be the first to bow down; there was no possibility of you turning bitter for her accomplishments and happiness, you loved her way too much for that.
And it was mutual too. Margaery never held contempt for you even when that title started being thrown around in the Reach, instead she fueled it, so that even more people would talk about it.
There was nothing anyone could do to make you and Margaery turn into enemies, no matter how much they tried.
“Oh, one stops counting after a while,” you said with a laugh. “It was rather hard for us to keep track of it, but the last I remember she had poems and I had songs. You would have to ask her though.”
“The Reach does love its songs, does it not?” the queen asked. “Just as singers love their embellishments, I’d say.”
…Ah.
Well, alright then.
There were only three people in this hall who could tell what that veiled comment really meant; the queen herself, Lady Stark, and you, seeing that you were all quite fluent in the language of the southern court and how it held insults behind compliments, or simple statements.
Like that one.
“Such admirers can affect a lady in a certain way,” the queen added. “Like excess pride. You and your friend should be careful.”
So now not only were your looks exaggerated, but you and Margaery were both arrogant.
Very well.
If she came all this way to your home to insult you and your best friend, you could play the game.
“Both my best friend and I look up to you as the pinnacle of humility, we grew up with the tales of your beauty, Your Grace,” you said airily. “Back when we were little girls, that was all we would hear from King’s Landing. To this day, I still remember how many admirers you used to have back in the day. I’m sure you’re delighted that his majesty relieved you of them, even after so many years!”
The tiny twitch of her lips reminded you of a snarl, but it was gone as fast as it came.
“Well,” she said after a beat. “I hope that you and your husband will be as happy as me and the king have been.”
The same king who had spent the majority of the feast drunk with another woman in his lap.
Sure.
She could keep hoping, Robb would never do that to you.
“I’m sure it would please you, Your Grace,” you said with a bright smile and she held your gaze in hers, then gave you a curt nod, signaling you could leave. You dropped a curtsy straight down with your head held high, then walked away from the High Table to join your ladies-in-waiting.
“The queen does not look happy,” Lyra murmured and Jorelle raised her brows, stealing a look at the table.
“Would you be?” she asked. “If my husband humiliated me like that…”
“I will never wed.”
“You might have to,” Barbrey said and Lyra shrugged her shoulders.
“Not really. I’m not the heir, I have no such responsibilities. One of my sisters has two children, she was never wed.”
“Bear Island has different customs than the rest of the North,” Wylla said. “If my father tried to wed me to someone like the king, I’d run away.”
“She’s still the queen,” Barbrey said and Wylla shook her head.
“I’m too northern to accept such disrespect.”
“By the way, have any of you talked to her ladies-in-waiting?”
“I’ve been avoiding them like the plague.”
“Well, I’ve talked to them, and…”
The rest of Alys’ words disappeared into a buzz when the familiar feeling hit you, making you frown slightly. Your theory was that it was instinct for ladies of the court, you just learned to notice when men were looking at you even without a glance in their direction. Perhaps it was habit, perhaps it was a way to survive, but you knew when they were watching.
And sure enough, when you turned your head, you found Robb, Lord Stark, the king and Prince Joffrey all looking in your direction. Robb did not look happy for some reason, he had his jaw clenched while he listened to the king, and Prince Joffrey scowled before his eyes found mother and his frown deepened, as if she had done something of great offense. You let a lovesick smile light up your face as you waved at Robb without sparing the rest of them a glance, and that seemed to snap him out of his mood, that familiar soft light appearing in his gaze as he lifted his cup a little to greet you. The king said something and smacked him on the back, letting out a boisterous laugh and you lingered there for a moment, then rolled your shoulders back.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” you said and walked away from your ladies to approach the men on the other side of the hall.
“Your Graces, my lord,” you greeted the king, the prince and Lord Stark, then beamed at Robb and turned to them. “May I please borrow my lord husband for a minute if you don’t mind?”
The king laughed.
“Oh he stopped listening to us the moment you looked his way,” he said. “But that’s how a newlywed must be, huh Robb? Your father used to have the same look on his face whenever you looked at your mother.”
“Robert, come on now,” Lord Stark said and the king grinned.
“You did,” he insisted while you laced your fingers through Robb’s. “The same tortured look, even when I dragged you to hunts! That’s how you know it’s a good match.”
“Speaking of matches, I’ve heard the happy news,” you told Prince Joffrey with a smile. “I’m certain you and our beautiful Sansa will be as happy as we are, Your Grace.”
Prince Joffrey didn’t seem delighted at all, his eyes finding his mother again before forcing himself to smile.
“Thank you, my lady.”
“Anyway, as I was saying, the whole North is talking of that duel! The future Warden of the North is a great fighter just like his father!”
A shadow crossed Prince Joffrey’s face but you paid him no mind.
“I’m glad the whole North is entertained, but I was rather terrified,” you said, leaning sideways to Robb’s arm and he pressed a kiss on top of your head as if trying to soothe you at the mention of the duel.
“You had nothing to worry about, I told you that,” Robb muttered into your hair and you shot him a mischievous look.
“The love of my life putting himself in danger scares me, that’s no crime,” you said, earning a chuckle from the king. “Is it, Your Grace?”
“Not at all,” the king said. “Even the strongest men are defeated by love more than sword, my boy. Great warrior or not, you might want to keep that in mind.”
“I will, Your Grace.”
“If you’ll excuse us please.”
Robb followed you as you both crossed the Great Hall, still holding your hand tight until you stopped and turned to him. He seemed rather tense, frowning at Prince Joffrey who had just approached the queen to mutter something to her ear with a sour expression. You raised your brows, watching Robb grab a cup from one of the servants before he took a sip, still glaring at the High Table.
“Is everything alright?”
His attention snapped back to you. “Mm hm.”
“Are you certain?” you asked. “What were you all talking about before I approached?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
Though you wanted to insist, you decided otherwise. “Have you had the chance to talk to your father yet?”
“About?”
“About Sansa!” you whispered. “If she can stay a bit longer.”
“I mentioned it, he said no.” Robb shrugged his shoulders. “And I’ve told you, he’ll keep an eye on her. She’ll be safe.”
You pursed your lips before taking a deep breath.
“Alright, then I’ll send a letter to Margaery first thing in the morning,” you said. “She’s in King’s Landing, she should be able to help Sansa.”
He tilted his head.
“Margaery Tyrell?”
“Do you know another Margaery?”
“Your best friend whom you’re angry at?”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m angry at her or not,” you said. “At the end of the day, I trust her with my life. We both know what’s important and when to put aside disagreements, she’s never going to deny me if I ask her for a favor.”
“Even after what happened?”
“Don’t underestimate her loyalty to me, or mine to her,” you said. “Trust me. If I need help, she’ll help.”
“I’ll never understand you two,” he muttered. “And I still think you’re worrying for nothing and Sansa will be fine, but very well. Write to her if it’ll put your heart at ease.”
“Hey.” Jon’s voice reached you and you looked over your shoulder to find him smiling. The sight seemed to have taken Robb by surprise as much as you, because he scoffed a laugh.
“Did Theon get maimed?” he asked. “How come you’re smiling?”
“Uncle Benjen is here.”
Robb’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“Wait, Benjen Stark does exist?” you asked, looking between him and Jon, and Robb nodded fervently.
“Our uncle. He’s the First Ranger of the Night’s Watch.”
You were guessing that was an impressive title in the North, from the proud tone of Robb’s voice.
“Come,” Robb added. “I must introduce you to him, he’s amazing.”
“I mean to be honest, I doubt introductions are needed,” you pointed out, drawing chuckles out of both brothers. “I feel like I know him already.”
What if there is a Better Reader in the Backrooms and once Real Reader sees her, she gets jealous and protective over Better Bobby??
ok, ok, ok, but imagine.
you've been in the backrooms with Better Bobby for... who knows how long.
time is... a carpet, buzzing light and his almost-right smile. and you shouldn't be here. you know you shouldn't be here. but bobby (real bobby, your bobby, the bobby who asked you to be his girlfriend junior year and made you feel like the only person in the room before he started making you feel like the only person in a room he'd rather not be in) real bobby stopped trying.
real bobby got comfortable. real bobby started looking through you like you were furniture, answering "yeah that's cool" without looking up, forgetting plans you made, treating your presence like background noise he'd already tuned out. and you were so lonely. you were so lonely in a relationship that technically still existed, wearing your boyfriend's letterman jacket like a costume for a role he'd stopped rehearsing, and then you heard a voice in a wall.
or maybe it was always there. that door. maybe Better Bobby just finally opened it for you.
because that's how it happened, wasn't it? no one forced you. there was just a door that shouldn't have been there and a voice on the other side that sounded like bobby (like bobby on a GOOD day, like bobby when he still looked at you like you mattered) saying "hey, come here, i want to show you something" and you followed it because you were starving.
you were emotionally starving and something that sounded like the boy you loved was offering you a meal and you walked right in.
and Better Bobby has he's been everything. he's been real bobby with the volume turned up on all the parts that made you fall in love and all the parts that faded turned back on.
he remembers things you say. he asks follow-up questions. he angles himself between you and every dark hallway and when you talk he LOOKS at you with bobby's blue eyes and actually, fully, completely pays attention. he finds you blankets. he stays awake while you sleep. he hums bobby's little tuneless songs and when you wake up from nightmares about the smiling thing in the dark and flickering lights he says "i'm here, i'm right here" and means it in a way that real bobby hasn't meant anything in months.
and you've been indulging. you know you have. you've been leaning into it the way you lean into a hot bath: knowing it's temporary, knowing the water's going to cool, but right now it's warm and you're so cold and nobody has made you feel warm in so, so long.
you let him walk close. you let him hum. let yourself pretend, in the amber wash of light, that the eyes are the right shade of blue and the hands are the right temperature and the thing sitting next to you in the hallway that smells like mildew is just a boy who loves you and not a question you can't answer.
but you maintain it in the beginning. the mild suspicion. the distance. the tension when his head tilts at that angle that necks don't do. the way you catch yourself leaning in and pull back and watch something flicker across his face (hurt? performance of hurt? does it matter when it looks the same?) you keep one hand on the wall at all times. metaphorically. ready to run. because you know what he is even if you don't know WHAT he is. because what if the warmth is borrowed and the attention is replicated?
and somewhere above this fluorescent nightmare your actual boyfriend is probably not even wondering where you went.
and then, one day, you turn a corner on level 0 and there she is.
and she looks like you.
but better. the way Better Bobby is bobby but more.
she's you with the contrast turned up. you, but rested. you, but without the dark circles and the bitten nails and the desperate grateful look you get when Better Bobby does something thoughtful. that pathetic oh-god-someone-noticed-me expression that you hate on your own face.
she's you the way you look in the mirror when the lighting is perfect and you're having the best day of your life, which, for the record, you're NOT having. because you're standing on wet carpet under buzzing lights looking at a thing that crawled out of the walls wearing your face like a sunday dress.
and she looks at Better Bobby.
and she SMILES.
not your smile. yours is still a little tight, still cautious and always halfway to flinching because the last person you loved taught you that attention is temporary and warmth gets revoked without warning.
hers is wide and warm and full and it reaches her eyes (your eyes, YOUR eyes but without the hurt behind them) and she tilts her head and says "hi, bobby" in your voice but lighter. your voice without the weight of being someone's afterthought for the better part of a year.
and here's where your brain should be going: that's an entity. that's a threat. we need to leave.
here's where your brain ACTUALLY goes: why is she looking at him like that?
because she IS. she's looking at Better Bobby with an openness you have never once allowed yourself. she's looking at him without the flinch. without the constant background calculation of is this real or is he going to get bored of me too. she's looking at him like she's never been neglected. like she's never sat on a bed waiting for someone to look up from a screen and notice she'd been waiting. like she doesn't carry the specific, learned knowledge that love has a half-life and attention decays and eventually everyone stops seeing you.
Better You doesn't doubt him.
Better You isn't waiting for him to lose interest.
Better You is what you would be if real bobby hadn't taught you that being loved is a temporary condition.
and the thing that absolutely dismantles you, the thing that sends you into a jealousy spiral so irrational it should be clinically studied, is watching Better Bobby's reaction.
because he looks at her. he looks at this perfected version of you, this you-without-the-damage, this you who would never flinch when he reaches for her, who would never pull back at the last second, would never look at his kindness with suspicion because the last boy with that face stopped being kind. she doesn't know that, she's never been un-loved, she's BETTER—
and his head tilts. the not-quite-human angle. the one that means he's processing something new.
and you can see him considering it.
and what hits you isn't just jealousy. it's recognition. it's the pattern completing. because you've been here before, haven't you?
not in the backrooms. in your own bedroom. watching real bobby's attention slide away from you toward his camera, his friends, anything, everything. the whole world more interesting than the girl sitting right there.
you've been the person someone grows bored of. been the version that isn't enough. and now here, in the one place where something was finally paying attention to you, finally choosing you, finally making you feel like you were worth staying awake for... here comes the upgrade. here comes the 2.0. a you without the flinch or the doubt or the desperate, needy wounded thing living behind your ribs and of COURSE he's going to choose her. of course. because that's how this works. that's how this ALWAYS works.
you're hard to love and here is the proof, smiling with your mouth.
and what comes out of your mouth is not "bobby, that's an entity, we need to go." what comes out of your mouth, before your brain can catch it, in a voice that is embarrassingly, revealingly sharp, is:
"bobby."
one word. aimed at him. not at her. because you're not afraid of what Better You will do. you're afraid that the one thing in the universe that chose to love you is about to unchoose. just like the original did. you're afraid you're about to watch it happen again, in real time, wearing the same face both times.
Better Bobby looks at you.
glances at her.
looks at you.
and something shifts.
it's small. you'd miss it if you weren't watching him with the intensity of someone whose entire emotional survival depends on what happens in the next ten seconds. his expression (bobby's expression, that open curious, considering look) doesn't change. but something behind it does. like a building settling. a decision being made in a room you can't quite see.
he takes your hand.
his fingers are the wrong temperature. they're always the wrong temperature. too cool in a place that's always too warm, like touching something that exists at a slight remove from the physics of the room. you know this hand. you've memorised this hand without meaning to. the shape of bobby's fingers rebuilt in whatever Better Bobby is made of, and when they close around yours you feel the strength in them held in check. gentle. chosen.
he turns around.
Better You is still standing there. still smiling. still wearing your face without any of the cracks in it. and Better Bobby looks at her (at it) and something happens to his eyes.
the blue goes out.
not like a light switching off. a light being swallowed. bobby's blue, that specific clear blue you fell in love with in a hallway between second and third period, drains out of his irises and what's behind it is black. not dark brown. not deep blue. pure black.
the kind of black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. the kind of black that was here before the backrooms were here, a black that's been watching from inside bobby's blue eyes this entire time, patient and ancient. so fundamentally other that your hand tightens in his involuntarily because your body understands something your brain is still processing: you are holding hands with something that existed before the concept of hands.
and he says, in bobby's voice but emptied of everything warm:
"don't follow. or i'll rip you apart."
flat. cold. the way you'd state a law of physics. a description. a factual account of what will happen, delivered with the same casual certainty as "water is wet" or "sky is blue." his voice doesn't do the bobby crack. there is nothing human in it at all. this is the thing under the bobby. the thing that BUILT the bobby, speaking from behind the mask without bothering to move the mouth right. it's older and colder and more vast than anything that's ever said your name softly in the dark while you were trying to sleep.
Better You stops smiling.
the black blinks out. the blue comes back. bobby's blue. warm, familiar, slightly wrong in the way you've gotten used to. the wrongness you've started to find almost-comforting because at least it's consistent. at least it's YOUR wrongness, the wrongness you know. chose.
he looks at you. bobby's face. bobby's almost-smile. the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes you forget, for a moment, about the black.
"coming, baby?" he says, like nothing happened. like he didn't just flash the void behind his face. like his hand in yours isn't a claim, a territory marker, a line drawn in wet carpet.
and you realise three things simultaneously:
one. he chose you. not better you. not the version without the damage. you. the flinching, doubting, suspicious, wounded, difficult, real you. whatever his reasons are (love, obsession, malfunction, possession, something without a human name) he chose the hard one.
two. he will kill for it. the thing in the hallway wearing your face is an entity that could probably survive most of what the backrooms throw at it. he looked at it with ancient black nothing-eyes and said i will unmake you and meant it.
three. you don't know if being chosen by something like that is salvation or the most beautiful trap ever built.
and you hold his hand (wrong temperature, wrong pressure, wrong wrong wrong) and you keep walking.
lowkey need to see how real!bobby handles his girl's disappearance 🚬..delicious
pairing: bobby franklin x f!reader x entity!bobby
contents/warnings: bobby's pov, emotional neglect in a relationship, heavy grief and loss, angsty in general, emotional volatility/verbal cruelty, alcohol abuse (clark), existential/cosmic horror (erasure from reality), self-loathing and guilt (told you he'll be going through it!)
notes: we're giving this twink a character as promised! got carried away but surprisingly?? really like how it came out?? hope y'all enjoy, and excited to see if the tide changes on the Real Bobby hate lol.
📹better bobby series masterlist.
Real Bobby notices on a Tuesday.
Not right away. That’s the single most damning thing. The part that’ll eat at him later, that’ll sit in his chest like a hot coal for months, perhaps the rest of his goddamn life if he’s being honest.
He doesn't notice right away.
The first night, he figures you're pulling a double at the store. It's happened before. He eats cereal standing over the sink, leaves his bowl on the counter, sleeps diagonally. Doesn't think about it.
The second night, he's annoyed. You could've called. He almost picks up the apartment phone but gets distracted by something on TV, and the receiver stays in the cradle, your number undialed, and he falls asleep with the light on.
The third morning, he reaches for you.
It's not conscious, really. It's that old reflex in him. The one from the early days. Something he thought he trained out of himself because tenderness was starting to feel like a liability, so he resorted to laziness instead. His hand slid across the mattress toward the warm dip where you normally sleep. But his fingers find only cold sheets. Flat, undisturbed. No impression of a body. And something in Bobby’s chest pinches, just slightly, like a hand closing around a tender nerve.
He sits up. Looks at your side of the bed. The pillow still has the shape of your head from three nights ago. Nothing's been moved.
He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to him—actually said, out loud, in person—was I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.
You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.
He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours.
Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.
He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.
Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoes—the white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred times—are sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.
Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon.
The cops tell him to come in the following morning.
The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. There’s no hostility. It’s the other thing, the worse one. Interest.
“So,” Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. “Three days.”
“Yeah.”
“And you noticed this morning?”
Bobby's jaw tightens. “I thought she was working doubles.”
Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. “For three days.”
“It's happened before,” Bobby says a little defensively.
“Has it?” Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. “Walk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?”
Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.
Moreno nods. Writes. “And after that? What'd you do that night?”
“Watched TV. Went to bed.”
“Alone?”
Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. “Yeah. Alone.”
“Okay.” Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. “We talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.” He looks up from the notebook. “You want to tell me about that?”
Bobby's chest goes tight. “Couples argue.”
“Sure they do. What were you arguing about?”
“I don't—stuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.”
“They said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,” Moreno remarks. “Mrs Nguyen used the word volatile.”
Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. “I never touched her. If that's what you're—”
“Nobody said that,” Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. “But I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.”
Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.
“We'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,” Moreno says. “Your footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.”
Bobby nods. Numbly.
They take the camera. They take the tapes, too.
Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.
They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.
“We reviewed the tapes, Bobby,” Moreno says.
Bobby waits.
“There's a lot of footage of her,” Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. “A lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.”
“The light was good,” Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.
Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, “Bobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.” He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. “You see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesn’t look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help you—”
“That's not—I never hurt her. I was—”
“What were you?”
And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:
“I love her.”
Not loved. There’s no past tense here. This isn’t careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobby’s eyes burn.
Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.
“I love her,” he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. “I love her, and I was—I wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn't—I would never—”
Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.
They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.
There’s no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.
He goes to the store that night.
Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else.
They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find.
Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were.
That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins.
Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just left—the displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.
He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow.
He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it just… comes out.
“Hey, baby. It's Bobby.”
His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.
“I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—this is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you can’t hear me because you’re not here. But I just—” He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. “The cops think I did something to you. They looked at me like—” He swallows. “I don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.”
The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse.
He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.
It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness.
But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.
Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.
I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.
I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.
Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasn’t found a source of.
I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and I—I felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how to—I couldn't—
Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.
He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.
No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would never—
Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.
So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone.
You're just somewhere he hasn’t found you yet.
Month two.
The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.
A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.
People stop coming.
Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought.
The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.
The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture.
He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.
So Clark hires Kat.
Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.
Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement.
She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top.
She says, “We're closed.”
“I know. I'm not shopping.”
She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.
The second time, she asks.
“You're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl who—” She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. “Sorry. Clark mentioned it.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm Kat,” she says. “I'm covering her shifts.”
“I know.”
Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.
Hey baby. It's me again.
That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.
He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.
He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.
The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.
And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying something—he can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toast—and the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered.
You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen.
Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.
He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it.
You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thing—the mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meant—and your eyes are warm.
Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.
He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.
He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.
Month three.
Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him.
It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished.
She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.
She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell.
She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct.
You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.
He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.
It's the tapes that start to bother him first.
Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footage—the toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edges—and something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.
You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.
Except your face.
Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face is… fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there's… something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.
He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively.
His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.
He believes it. For a while. He presses play.
One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.
“You loved her a lot, huh,” she says. Soft. Not a question.
Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.
He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows it’s not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.
“I still love her,” he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.
He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?
But he can't—
He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it.
Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.
He can't live in that version. He won't.
Month four.
Bobby starts going through the inventory records.
Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.
The tapes are getting worse.
He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see.
Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.
Something has shifted.
Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite.
He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity.
The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.
He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think he’s high again.
They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.
He starts making a list of his failures instead.
An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And that’s worse.
The night you came home excited about something—a movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywall—and you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.
He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.
He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.
He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.
You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face is… smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.
The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face.
Bobby is looking at you, and he can’t tell what you look like. He’s lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet he’s looking at a tape from four months ago, and he can’t reconstruct you.
The audio is worse. Your voice—the one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tender—is distorted.
Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.
Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.
He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:
Something's happening to you, baby. I can't—I don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.
I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.
The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.
So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.
He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.
I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.
I should've told you every morning.
Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need to—I need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.
Month five.
Kat touches his arm.
It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.
Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.
“You know,” she says cautiously, “you don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.” She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.
Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.
His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.
He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.
That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.
The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.
Except there's no one holding the spatula.
Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.
The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.
Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.
The audio says — — toast — and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.
Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.
He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.
Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.
He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.
The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believes—
He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.
Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, you’re fading. The early tapes—the oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first months—are the worst.
On those, you’re gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.
Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.
On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.
Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that you’re being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.
The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you.
He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.
And now even that’s being taken.
He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe he’s going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.
Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this is—please. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But I’m asking. I'm begging. Please.
I can barely remember your face, baby.
I looked at the tapes, and you're not—you're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.
Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.
The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.
Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.
He stays until morning anyway.
Month six.
The apartment is starting to forget you.
Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.
Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mug—your mug, the one on the drying rack—he put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there.
The tapes are blank.
Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened.
Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label.
The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.
All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.
A library of blanks. An archive of absence.
He has no pictures of you.
He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you.
Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too.
Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.
He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right.
The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. You’re being unmade—from the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memory—and Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.
He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail.
Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.
Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.
It's getting harder to believe.
He can feel it.
Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case.
Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time to— and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, but— and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.
He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.
But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still there—that impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palm—and it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.
This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and he’ll not leave it.
He will not let the last proof of you go.
Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing.
A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.
He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.
The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.
Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardice—Robert Franklin refuses to quit this.
This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.
So he goes. Every night. He goes.
Month seven.
Clark is drunk.
Bobby can tell before he's through the door.
The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face.
The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.
“Bobby.” Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. “Right on time.”
“Clark.” Bobby eyes the bottle. “Where's Kat?”
“Sent her home early.” Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. “Sit down.”
“I'm going downstairs.”
“No.” Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. “You're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.”
Bobby stops.
“Linda kicked me out,” Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. “So I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.” The joke almost lands. Almost. “Which means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.”
“You're—what?”
“I'm saying you can't come here anymore.”
The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.
“Clark—”
“Seven months.”
And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.
Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.
“Seven months of you in my basement. Seven months of—do you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.” Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. “I built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wall—”
“That's not my fault —”
“She's not down there.” Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. “She's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.”
Bobby sucks in a breath. “You don't know that. Nobody does.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.
A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.
“She's either dead,” Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling over— “or she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have this—this haunting—attached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night is—”
He stops himself. A crack appears in Clark’s anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.
Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.
“Bobby.” His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. “I didn't—that came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.”
Bobby doesn't hear him.
Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.
The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs.
Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.
Dead or she left you.
Dead.
Or she left you.
He can't fucking breathe. He can't—the air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open.
And behind it is a version of reality where you’re in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.
And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.
“Bobby. Bobby, wait—”
Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.
“Bobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did he—”
Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knows—somewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fire—that she doesn't deserve what’s coming. She's been nothing but kind.
Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. She’s a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man who’s bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.
But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And he…
He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, he’ll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.
“Don't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don't—” His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. “I'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can't—I can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.”
He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the irony—Bobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being there—is so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.
He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.
“I can't,” he rasps. Quiet, broken. “I'm sorry.”
Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.
The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon there’ll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.
Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.
She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, “I don't need you to love me, Bobby.”
Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.
Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence.
He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.
But he doesn't walk away, either.
an: ohoho, i'm so excited to hear what ya'll think after that lmao. we're picking up with BB and you next time. stay tunedddd~
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