✦ — WHAT HE CANNOT NAME ..!
summary: you were meant for valarr targaryen. his father had approved the match himself. neither of these facts stopped baelor breakspear from looking at you the way he did, and you were running out of reasons to look away. (10k)
pairing: baelor targaryen x fem!reader
content: brief side of valarr targaryen x reader, lannister!reader, age gap (reader is adult, baelor is older ig), arranged marriage, slow burn, angst, so much yearning, protective!baelor, reader has never been enough for anyone until now, father who means well and says the worst things, baelor is down bad, allusions to smut 18+ (MDNI): hand kink (you'll know when you get there), wedding night, baelor asks permission like a gentleman and then doesn't hold back, fade to black.
The gods had a particular sense of humour, Baelor though, in giving him everything he was supposed to want and then you walking through his gates.
He had approved the match himself, between you and Valarr, which was, he would come to understand, the single most foolish thing he had ever done. Of course it wasn’t official yet, but why else would Lancel Lannister bring his daughter to King’s Landing?
Lancel had said it plainly enough in the small council chamber three weeks prior, with the particular straightforwardness of a man who has run out of patience “my daughter is of age, Your Grace, and I would see her settled well, and there is no finer match in the Seven Kingdoms than your son,” and the council had agreed, Baelor had agreed, and the whole thing had been arranged with smooth efficiency.
King Daeron II's nameday celebration had been Baelor's own suggestion as convenient cover for the visit. A natural occasion for the Lannisters to travel to the capital, he'd said, and you had apparently been wanting silks that weren't available back home, it would also give Valarr and you time to find footing without the weight of a formal betrothal negotiation hanging over every interaction.
The Lannister procession came through the gates of the Red Keep at midday, when the autumn sun was still high enough to be warm without being punishing, and Baelor was already in the courtyard to receive them– standing at the foot of the keep's great steps with two of his household knights behind him and Lord Tarly at his elbow, saying something about trade routes that Baelor was not listening to.
He could not have said, afterward, why he had come down himself rather than sending a steward. It was not customary, strictly speaking, for the Prince of Dragonstone to stand in the courtyard like a man waiting for something. He had told himself it was a matter of courtesy.
The horses came through first, then the outriders, then the luggage carts, and then the carriage– crimson-lacquered, the Lannister lion picked out in gold on the door, and Baelor watched a groom move to open it and watched Lord Lancel step down first, broad and unhurried, already scanning the courtyard. Then a figure behind him, partly obscured, one hand catching the carriage door for balance as you stepped down, and then the hand let go and you straightened, and Baelor–
Baelor stopped thinking about trade routes.
He was not certain how long he stood there before he remembered he was supposed to be doing something. You were looking at the keep, at the towers of it, with the unhurried attention of someone who has decided to take a place in properly before saying anything about it, and there was something in it, in the simple fact of you standing in his courtyard looking at his home like it was worth looking at, that struck him somewhere in the chest with a precision he had not been braced for.
You were not looking at him. Most people, upon arriving in the courtyard of the Red Keep to be received by the Prince of Dragonstone, looked immediately at the Prince of Dragonstone. It was a reliable quality in people, the instinct to locate the most important person in a space and orient toward them.
Though you were looking at the towers.
And then, as if you had simply finished with them, your gaze came down and found him, and Baelor, who had stood in front of armies without flinching, who had presided over councils that decided the fates of thousands, who had buried his wife and raised two sons and not been rattled by anything in longer than he could remember– felt something move through him that he could not name and did not try to.
"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Tarly was saying.
"Mm," Baelor said, which covered most things, and walked forward to meet Lord Lancel.
The man clasped his hand with both of his, warm and firm, the grip of someone genuinely pleased to be here. "Your Grace," Lancel said, with the easy warmth of a man whose plans were going according to schedule. "You're too generous, as always." He glanced around the courtyard briefly. "King Daeron will be well celebrated. The city seems in fine spirits for it."
"It does," Baelor agreed, pleasantly. "His Grace will be glad you've come, my lord. He asks after you." He said it to Lancel's face the way a man was supposed to, and not to the figure just behind Lancel's shoulder, who had not moved and had not spoken.
He was extremely aware of not looking at you.
And then Lancel shifted, stepping slightly aside with the particular ease of a man about to make an introduction he has been looking forward to, and Baelor looked, because there was nothing else to do, because the alternative was to visibly avoid looking, which was worse, and you were there.
He extended his hand and said, "It is a pleasure to finally meet you, my lady…" and stopped, because he found, absurdly, that he wanted to hear your name from you rather than say the version he'd read in correspondence, which had always felt like a different thing from the real one.
You looked at him with the same look you'd given the towers and said your name, and offered your hand, Baelor took it and thought, with a clarity that was almost violent in its precision: I have made a terrible mistake.
Your name sat on his tongue like it had always been there. Like it belonged. He filed that away with considerable force, straightened and said pleasantly, "We hope King's Landing treats you well, my lady. I understand there are silks here you've been after?"
Something shifted in your expression, brief, contained, the ghost of something wry moving across your face before being put away. "There are, Your Grace," you said. "Though I suspect my father has also brought me here for reasons that have considerably less to do with silk."
Beside you, Lancel made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite anything, and Baelor looked at the man and found him studying the middle distance with the focused interest of someone who had absolutely heard what was just said, and Baelor looked back at you and felt the corner of his mouth move before he'd decided to let it. "Perceptive," he said.
"Occasionally," you said, and the word had a lightness to it, almost a warmth, and you held his gaze for just a beat longer than was strictly necessary before you looked away toward the keep, and Baelor looked away toward Lancel, and that was the first thirty seconds, and he was already in considerable trouble.
It had not been long before Valarr eventually came down. Baelor still in conversation with Lancel, still being perfectly composed about all of it, when the doors of the keep opened behind him and Valarr came down the steps into the courtyard with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had been told guests had arrived and saw absolutely no reason not to come and find them immediately.
He was, Baelor thought, with the particular mixture of pride and something considerably less straightforward, very like his mother in that way. Jena had never waited for things to come to her either.
"My lord," Valarr said, extending his hand to Lancel with the bright warmth he gave most people on first meeting, the smile of a young man who genuinely liked people and wanted them to know it. "I've been looking forward to your visit." And then his gaze moved easily, the way it always did, searching out the most interesting thing in the space, and found you, and something in his expression shifted into the particular surprised pleasure of a man who had been given something better than he expected. "And you must be–"
"His daughter," you said, with a faint lift at the corner of your mouth. "Yes."
Valarr blinked. Then laughed, a real one, caught off guard by it, and said, "I was going to say my lady, but yes, that too." He took your hand and bowed over it with a gallantry that was entirely genuine and only slightly showing off, and when he straightened he was already tilting his head with that look he got when something had caught his interest and he intended to find out more about it.
Baelor watched his son look at you with the slow dawning delight of someone who had been expecting a pleasant obligation and found something else entirely, and felt something move through his chest that he could not call by its right name in a courtyard in broad daylight. It was not pride, though there was pride in it somewhere. It was something uglier than pride– the sudden, unreasonable, completely inexcusable awareness that he did not want this.
That he had arranged it himself, had sat in a council chamber and approved it with both hands, and was standing here now watching it begin to work exactly as intended, and wanted, with a clarity that shamed him, to undo all of it. To send Lancel Lannister back to Lannisport. To find some quiet room and keep you in it and not share you with anyone, least of all his own son, who deserved none of what his father was currently thinking and had done nothing wrong except arrive in a courtyard and smile at a girl.
Baelor looked away. He was not a selfish man, had never been, had spent the better part of his life making sure of it. He was not going to become one now, and certainly not at the expense of Valarr, who was good and kind and deserved a match that his father had not already decided to covet before the first afternoon was out.
He was not going to do that.
He looked away, and kept looking away, and was thoroughly disgusted with himself.
"—wouldn't you say, Your Grace?" Lancel was saying beside him.
"Entirely," Baelor said, and looked back at Lancel with the practiced ease of a man who had been half-present in conversations for most of his life and had learned to manage it gracefully.
Behind him, Valarr said something that made you tilt your head and give him that look — the assessing one, the one that made people feel they were being read — and then say something back that made Valarr laugh again, and Baelor kept his eyes on Lancel and his expression pleasantly attentive and turned away.
He was very good at turning away.
He was considerably less good at it than he used to be.
King's Landing was louder than you had expected, and warmer, and smelled quite differently from Lannisport, which smelled of salt and sea wind and the particular clean cold of the Westerlands coast. Here it smelled of people and dust and something underneath it that wasn't quite pleasant but wasn't quite unpleasant either, the smell of a city that had been alive for a very long time and had no interest in apologising for it.
You had wanted the silks, and you had gotten them, three bolts of Myrish lace and two of a pale sea-coloured silk that you had been thinking about for the better part of six months, and your chambers in the Red Keep were comfortable and the servants were efficient and the view from your window was the sort that made you stand there longer than you meant to every morning, the whole of the city spread out below you in the early light.
It was fine. It was more than fine. You were being very ungrateful, you told yourself, for the small persistent feeling at the back of your mind that said your father had not brought you all this way simply because he was feeling generous about silk.
Your father had done it again. Brought you somewhere and arranged for there to be a man, the way he always did, the way he had been doing since you were old enough for it to be a thing worth arranging.
Lord Whatshisname from the Reach, the second son of somebody important from the Stormlands, the cousin of someone your father owed a favour to. They arrived, they were pleasant or they weren't, they made their interest known or they didn't, and nothing ever came of any of it. Your father would look at you afterward with that expression of fond, exhausted patience and say that your heart was merely just too big for most men to know what to do with it, which you had decided a long time ago was a very kind way of saying that you were too much.
You were used to it by now. You were good at making peace with things you were used to.
What you were considerably less good at, you were discovering, was making peace with Baelor Targaryen.
You had noticed him noticing you, which was the problem, and you had noticed him in return, which was a bigger one.
It would have been easier if he were not handsome. You had not been prepared for that, which in retrospect was foolish of you, he was a Targaryen, and Targaryens were not, as a rule, difficult to look at, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and being confronted with it in a courtyard on a random warm afternoon when you had nowhere to put your face.
He was broad-shouldered and distinctive-bearded with greys decorating spots of it and had the kind of face that had been lived in long enough to have something behind it, though his eyes were mismatched, one brown and one blue, and they were the most specific thing about him, the thing that made looking at him feel like being caught even when he wasn't looking back. You had decided on the first evening to stop noticing any of this and had been failing at it consistently ever since.
And then there was the other thing, which was worse than the handsome, which was the way he paid attention. Not in the way men at court paid attention to women, which was a performance you had seen enough times to recognise immediately and set aside without much effort. This was different. The difference was in the quality of it, the way his attention when it landed on you felt less like being looked at and more like being seen, and those were not the same thing at all and you wished they were, because you knew how to handle being looked at.
You had been handling it your whole life. You did not know what to do with someone who listened to the things you said and also, somehow, to the things you didn't say, who noticed the small ways you held yourself in a room and said nothing about it, who had looked at you on the first afternoon across a courtyard with those mismatched eyes and made you feel, for one disorienting moment, like you had already been known by him for a very long time.
You were fighting it. You wanted to be clear about that, at least to yourself, because there was no one else you could be clear about it. You were fighting it with the practical, clear-eyed determination of someone who understood the situation completely and had absolutely no intention of making it worse.
The situation was: you were here for Valarr. Your father wanted this match and your father's wants were not nothing, they were the product of careful thought and genuine care for you, and Valarr was warm and kind and had laughed at something you said on the first afternoon with a genuineness that had caught you off guard.
Valarr was fine. Valarr was more than fine. Valarr was who you were supposed to be thinking about, and you were thinking about him, you were making a concerted and ongoing effort to think about him, and it was working, mostly, except for the times you were sitting in a room and his father said something quietly funny and you had to remind yourself, with more effort than should have been necessary, that you were not there for his father.
You were very good at not finishing thoughts that started that way. You had gotten a great deal of practice at it over the past week and expected to need considerably more before this visit was over.
The tourney held in honour of King Daeron II's nameday was on a bright, punishing afternoon, the sun sitting high and merciless over the yard and the heat of it pressing down on everything like a hand laid flat on the back of your neck.
You sat in the royal box with your father on your left and the awareness you had been managing for two weeks now on your right, in the form of Baelor Targaryen, who had been there when you arrived and had set aside whatever he had been discussing with Lord Tarly when you sat down with the easy unhurried attention of a man who was very good at making you feel like the most important thing in the room without doing anything that could be specifically identified as doing that.
"How are you finding the celebrations so far, my lady?" he asked, as the lists filled below and the crowd noise swelled around you.
You fanned yourself with the folded programme your maid had pressed into your hands on the way in and looked out at the yard. "Considerably hotter than I was prepared for, Your Grace," you said.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "King's Landing in early autumn. It gets worse before it gets better."
"That is the least reassuring thing anyone has said to me since I arrived," you told him.
"You've been speaking to the wrong people, then," he said. "Most of them are much less honest."
You glanced at him sidelong and found him looking at the lists with that composed half-smile of his and looked away again before he could catch you looking. "And is that what you are, Your Grace?" you asked, directing your words at the yard below. "Honest?"
"Occasionally," he said, and something in the way he said it made it feel like more than a word, like it was the beginning of a sentence he had decided not to finish, and you fanned yourself again and watched the first knight take the field and told yourself the warmth in your face was the sun.
It was midway through the afternoon, when the crowd had warmed to the sustained pleasant noise of people who were genuinely enjoying themselves, that you heard your name called from below.
You looked down. Valarr was on his horse at the edge of the lists, having just unhorsed a knight from the Vale with the easy competence he brought to most things physical, and he was looking up at the royal box with that bright open smile of his and a question in his expression that he made verbal a moment later, raising his voice just enough to carry. "My lady, would you do me the honour of your favour?"
The crowd nearest the box rippled with the pleasant noise of people who found this charming, and you felt your father shift beside you with the satisfied stillness of a man watching something go according to plan, and you stood carefully because standing quickly in this heat was inadvisable and reached up to unhook the laurel wreath from your hair.
"Good luck, my prince," you called down, and leaned over the railing to pass it to the page who had appeared below, and as you straightened you became aware of two things at once. Your father's expression, which was pleased in a way he was not quite bothering to conceal. And the quality of the silence on your right.
You sat back down. You looked forward at the lists. You told yourself you wouldn’t even gaze upon Baelor but you did the eaxt opposite.
He was watching the yard, his profile composed and still, he did not look at you, and somehow that was worse than if he had, because you had spent enough time in his company over the past week to know the difference between him not looking at you because there was nothing to look at and him not looking at you because he had decided not to.
Valarr won. Of course he won. He was young and quick and had been trained by the best in the kingdom, and he dispatched the Dornish knight he was paired with in two passes with a thoroughness that brought the crowd to its feet. You clapped with everyone else, genuinely pleased, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was simple uncomplicated gladness.
And then Valarr rode up to the box again and the crowd went quiet in the anticipatory way of people who knew what was coming, and he looked up at you with that bright easy smile and declared you queen of love and beauty, and the yard erupted, and you rose and accepted the crown of pale roses with the composed grace your mother had spent years teaching you, and you smiled, and it was fine, it was genuinely fine, you were glad.
You just also couldn't stop thinking, somewhere very quietly underneath all of it, about what it would have felt like if it had been his father asking for your favour instead. What Baelor's voice would have sounded like carrying across that yard. Whether he would have smiled after, the way Valarr was smiling now, or whether he would have simply looked at you with those mismatched eyes of his and let that be enough.
You sat down and did not think about that anymore, and were almost entirely successful.
The feast was held in the great hall on the fourteenth evening of your stay, by which point you had been in King's Landing long enough to stop finding the noise of it startling and long enough to have developed, you were privately admitting to yourself, feelings that were becoming increasingly inconvenient.
Not for Baelor. You were managing that. You were managing it very well, you thought– you had developed a system, which was to look at him only when it was necessary and to keep your expression pleasantly neutral when you did, and to occupy your mind with other things when you found it drifting in directions it had no business drifting, and it was working, mostly, except for the times it wasn't, which were more frequent than you would have liked but still, you felt, within the bounds of manageable.
The inconvenient feelings were for Valarr.
This was not something you had planned for. You had arrived in King's Landing with your silk. your suspicions, your practiced composure and your very sensible intention to be pleasant and unattached to let your father do whatever your father was going to do without getting your own heart involved in it, and then Valarr had been– Valarr. Warm and easy and funny in a way that didn't require anything from you, and genuinely interested in the things you said in the way that some men performed interest and some men actually felt it, and you had caught yourself, over the past two weeks, looking forward to seeing him in a way you hadn't planned on and were now trying to figure out what to do with.
It was fine. It was more than fine. You were making peace with it, the way you always made peace with things. Your father wanted a match, Valarr was a good man, and you were starting to feel something real, perhaps that was simply how it worked sometimes.
You had almost entirely convinced yourself of this by the time Valarr appeared at your shoulder during a lull in the dancing and said, "My lady, would you dance with me?" and held out his hand, and you looked at it for a moment. "I would," you said, and took his hand, and let him lead you out among the other dancers, and told yourself the warmth in your chest was uncomplicated.
He was a good dancer, better than you'd expected, though you weren't sure why you'd expected otherwise. He held you with the comfortable confidence of someone who had learned young and never had reason to be nervous about it. The music was good, the hall was warm and bright, you talked while you danced the way you had started talking over the past two weeks, easily, without the careful weight of people trying to make impressions on each other.
"You look like you're enjoying yourself," Valarr said, with a slight lift of amusement in it, like he was pleasantly surprised.
"I am," you said, which was true. "Should I not be?"
"Most people look slightly terrified at formal feasts," he said. "Like they're being evaluated."
"I am being evaluated," you said. "I'm just choosing not to find it terrifying."
He looked at you with that tilted-head thing he did when something caught him off guard, and laughed. "That's– yes. That's exactly the right way to think about it, actually." He turned you neatly through a gap in the other dancers. "My father says something similar. He says the court can only make you small if you let it."
"Your father," you said, very carefully, "seems like a wise man."
"He is," Valarr said, simply and without hesitation, the way people spoke about things they had never had cause to doubt. "He's a good man. Better than he gets credit for, I think. People see the prince and they forget the man."
You looked at him while he said this, at the open uncomplicated affection on his face, and felt something complicated move through your own chest in response to it that you did not examine. "That must be–" you started, and then Valarr's feet stopped.
Not gradually. Not the slowing of someone who has decided to stop. It was a full, immediate, involuntary halt, like a man who has walked into a wall he didn't see, and you stumbled slightly into him, and said, instinctively, "Oh– I'm sorry, did I–" and started to look down at his feet, thinking you'd trodden on him.
"No," Valarr said, distantly, already not quite looking at you. "No, you didn'™ forgive me, my lady, I–" He was looking past you, toward the doors of the great hall, and his expression had done something you hadn't seen it do before, something unguarded, startled and– lit, somehow, like a man recognising something he hadn't expected to see here. "Forgive me," he said again, already moving, already stepping back from you with a brief apologetic incline of his head. "There's someone I– I'll find you later, my lady.”
And then he was gone, moving through the crowd with a purpose that had nothing to do with you, and you stood in the middle of the dance floor as the music continued around you and the other couples moved past you like water around a stone, and you turned, slowly, because some part of you already knew you didn't want to see it and were going to look anyway, and found Valarr across the hall at the doors, smiling at a girl you had never seen before.
She was beautiful, which you noticed the way you noticed most things that were true and inconvenient, with a flat, clear-eyed acknowledgment that didn't help at all.She had pink hair, dressed in the particular style of the Free Cities that sat slightly apart from the Westerosi fashion around her in a way that drew the eye, and Valarr was taking her hand and pressing his lips to it and saying something that made her laugh, and his smile– his smile was different from the one he'd been giving you all evening. Wider. Less considered. The smile of someone who had forgotten, just for a moment, that they were in a room full of people.
You were still standing in the middle of the dance floor.
You became aware of this, and of the number of people around you who were either too polite or too interested in their own conversations to remark on it, and you moved smoothly, with the composed unhurried walk of someone who had somewhere to be and had chosen this direction deliberately, back to the table, back to your seat, back to the cup of wine your father's steward had left for you, and you sat down and folded your hands in your lap and looked at the table.
Your father noticed. Of course he noticed, he noticed everything, always, it was his most reliable quality, though he said nothing, because he also knew when silence was more useful than speech.
You did not look at Valarr and the pink-haired girl.
You looked at them for approximately forty-five seconds, which told you everything you needed to know, and then you looked at the table and felt the heat of embarrassment move through you slowly from your chest outward, warm and thorough and deeply unpleasant. It wasn't grief, exactly. It wasn't heartbreak you hadn't been there yet, you hadn't had time to get there, it was something smaller and sharper, the embarrassment of having started to let yourself believe something that turned out to be beside the point.
"My lady."
You looked up. Baelor was watching you from further down the table, his expression giving nothing away, his eyes doing that thing where they were more specific than his face, seeing more than the face admitted to, or so it always felt when they were directed at you. "Are you alright?" he said, quietly enough that it was for you and not the table.
You smiled. You were very good at smiling when you needed to, you had been practicing since you were old enough to understand that a lady's face was a thing she owed to the room she was in. "Of course, Your Grace," you said, pleasantly. "It is a wonderful evening."
His eyes did not move from yours for a moment, and in that moment you had the uncomfortable feeling of being seen very clearly by someone who was not going to say so. "It is," he agreed, and looked away, you looked at your hands in your lap, while the hall moved cheerfully around you, and the wine in your cup was very good and you barely tasted it.
"I think I need some air," you said, to no one in particular, or to your father, and rose before anyone could respond, and walked to the doors of the great hall with the measured, unhurried steps of someone who was fine, who was perfectly fine, who was simply in need of a moment outside and would be back shortly.
The Red Keep was large enough that you could walk for some time without doubling back, and you had been walking for ten minutes before you found yourself in a part of it that was quieter than the rest, an older wing, by the look of the stonework, the torches fewer and the ceiling lower and the whole corridor having the particular quality of a place that was maintained but not often used.
There was a window alcove at the end of it, deep-set, with a stone seat worn smooth by what must have been centuries of people sitting in it, looking out at whatever this particular angle of the keep faced. You sat in the alcove and pulled your knees up slightly and looked at the courtyard and let yourself, finally, in the absence of anyone watching, feel all of it.
It wasn't much, in the end. A few tears, which you caught with the back of your hand before they could make it past your cheekbones, the kind of tears that came less from sadness than from the pressure of holding a face together for too long. It was the frustration of it.
The frustration of being here, again, in this same position you had been in a dozen times before, having tried and adjusted and made peace and tried again, and somehow always arriving at the same place: standing in the middle of a room watching someone look at someone else the way you had started, foolishly, quietly, to hope they might look at you.
Your heart is too big. You had always thought that was a generous interpretation of the evidence. It suggested rather more plainly that there was simply something about you that people grew tired of, some quality you had too much of or not enough of, something that made men perfectly happy to spend a fortnight in your company and then look across a room and find someone else entirely, the fact that you could never identify what it was did not make it better, it made it worse, because you couldn't fix a thing you couldn't name.
You wiped your eyes with the back of your hand and took a slow breath and looked at the dark courtyard and told yourself firmly that you were done, that this was enough, that you were going back to the feast in five minutes and you were going to be perfectly pleasant for the rest of the evening and you were going to stop being so–
The voice came from behind you, low and unhurried, and you knew it before you had finished turning. You stood up too quickly, nearly getting your foot caught in the hem of your dress, as you brought your hands to wipe your face, the hem of the dress righted itself.
Baelor was standing at the entrance to the alcove, a few feet away, looking at you with an expression you had not seen on him before and could not immediately read.
“Your Grace,” you said, your voice came out steadier than you deserved credit for.
"Just Baelor," he said, quietly. "If you'll allow it."
You lowered your hands. You could feel that your eyes were red, that there was very little you could do about it. "Baelor, then," and the name sat differently in your mouth than the title had, warmer, more familiar, like something you had been saying for longer than two weeks.
He did not look away from you, and did not look around the alcove or at the courtyard below or at anything else, just at you, and you had the sense that the looking was very deliberate, that he was choosing to look at you the way people chose to say difficult things, because they had decided it was the right thing and were going to see it through. "What's upset you?" he asked.
"Nothing," you said immediately, with a smile plastered on your face.
Baelor looked at you, and the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, not quite anything else, just a small acknowledgment of what you had just done. "My lady," he said.
"Nothing worth mentioning," you amended.
"That isn't the same as nothing," he said.
You looked at him. He looked back at you. The torch at the end of the courtyard below moved in a breath of wind, sending the shadow of it shifting across the stones.
"I'm merely–" you started, then stopped, then started again. "It has been a long evening, Your Grace– Baelor." The name again, and the same warmth in it, and you saw something shift very slightly in his expression when you said it. "I needed a moment away from the noise."
"You've been crying," he said, simply and without cruelty, just the fact of it.
You opened your mouth then closed it, looking at the courtyard then back at him, because looking away from him felt somehow more revealing than looking at him. "A little," you admitted. "It's nothing."
"It doesn't look like nothing," he said. He had not moved from the entrance of the alcove, had kept that careful distance, and you were aware of it. Aware of the distance and his awareness of it, of the sense that it was a choice he was making and maintaining. "If something has happened to distress you, I would know of it."
There was something in the way he said it, not a demand, not the authority of a prince requiring information, but something quieter than that, something that had more weight in it than a command would have had, precisely because it wasn't one. You felt it somewhere in your chest and looked at your hands.
"I was enjoying myself this evening. Before." You smoothed your skirt, a small unnecessary gesture. "And then I found myself somewhat abruptly not, and I think I simply needed to…" gesturing vaguely at the alcove, "...be somewhere quiet for a moment. That is all."
"Valarr," he said.
You looked up. He was watching you with that steady, specific attention, and you felt the back of your neck go warm despite the cool of the corridor. "I don't—" you started.
"You don't have to," he said.
The quiet between you held for a moment, full and textured, the kind of quiet that was made of things not said.
"I feel foolish," you said, finally, quietly. "I know it is foolish to feel foolish about feeling foolish, so please don't tell me that." You said it with a small attempt at lightness, and he received it without patronizing it, and so you continued. "I had started to think perhaps there was something there. Between Valarr and I. Something real." You looked at the courtyard. "And then he looked across the room at her, and I could see that whatever he'd had with me was. It was practice, maybe. Or kindness. And she was the actual thing."
Baelor said nothing for a moment. You could feel him looking at you, and you kept your eyes on the courtyard because meeting it felt like more than you had the composure for just now.
"You think you scared him off," he said, carefully.
You made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. "I think I always do, somehow," you said. "My father says my heart is too big for most men. Which is very kind. I have somewhat less kind interpretations of the evidence."
"What evidence," Baelor said, and something in his voice had changed, something that made you look at him despite yourself, and find him watching you with an expression that was more intent than before, something in it that you couldn't name.
"The pattern of it, I suppose. The same thing, more or less, every time. I am, I think I am quite a lot. I talk too much, or feel too much, or– I don't know exactly what it is, only that it seems to be reliably too much for people to–" you stopped, because you had said rather more of that than you intended to, and your voice had done something at the end of it that you were not pleased with.
"Look at me," Baelor said. You looked at him.
"You are not too much," he said, and he said it the way he said things he meant.
His eyes had not moved from yours, and they did not move now, and you felt the looking of them like something warm and specific, like a hand placed with care. "You are not too much and you have not scared anyone off and whatever the pattern is that you think you've found, you have read it wrong."
You looked at him, this man standing in a quiet corridor with torchlight from the courtyard moving on the stones behind him, looking at you with something in his face that had no safe name and that you had been avoiding naming for two weeks, and felt something in your chest pull in a direction that was deeply inconvenient and completely beyond your ability to manage.
"Baelor," you said. Very quietly. Not as a sentence, not going anywhere, just the name, because it was the only thing you had.
"Yes," he said. Just as quietly.
His jaw tightened fractionally, and he looked at you, and you looked at him, and the torch moved in the courtyard below, and neither of you said anything else for a long moment that held everything and nothing at once.
Then he straightened, and something careful came back into his expression, the composed half-smile of a man rearranging himself. "Come back to the feast," he said. "You have nothing to be ashamed of, and I won't have you sitting in a corridor thinking otherwise."
You looked at him for another moment. Then you stood, and smoothed your dress, and said, "Yes, alright," and followed him back through the quiet corridor toward the noise and the light, and did not think about the way he had looked at you.
You thought about it for the rest of the evening.
"This is absurd."
Your father's voice had the particular controlled fury of a man who had been raised never to shout and was currently finding that a significant inconvenience. He had been saying it for the better part of ten minutes now, in various configurations, and each time it landed a little heavier than the last.
"I did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated," he said, to the room, to the lords seated around the long table, and most specifically to Baelor Targaryen, who sat at the head of it in the place of King Daeron, who was ill. Nobody had commented on that. Baelor was the Prince of Dragonstone and the Hand of the King. "My daughter did not travel to the Red Keep to be humiliated. We had an agreement– Valarr was to court my daughter, and in return House Lannister offers the crown its full support and cooperation. And now, a week after the feast, Lady Kiera of Tyrosh appears and the boy announces he will be marrying her and no one else."
He looked at Baelor directly. "It’s fucking nonsense."
You were looking at the table.
You had been looking at the table since you sat down and had no immediate plans to stop. You were not upset about Valarr. That was what made all of this so much harder to sit through. You were not upset about Valarr, not genuinely, not in the way your father seemed to believe you should be. You had seen the way Valarr looked at Kiera of Tyrosh across the great hall and understood, with a clarity that was almost kind in its simplicity, that whatever had been between you and Valarr had been warmth and nothing more.
It was genuinely fine.
What was not fine was that your father had reminded you last night, when the news spread through the Red Keep and reached your chambers before supper, that you were once again unwed, once again the almost, once again the woman that men were perfectly pleasant to and then left for another woman. He had not been cruel about it. He was never cruel. But he had been sharp, in the way only people who loved you could be, and the sharpness of it had stayed with you through the night and was sitting with you still.
You kept your eyes on the table. Hands folded in your lap. Face arranged into something you hoped read as dignified rather than what it actually was.
"My lady."
You looked up before you had decided to.
Baelor's voice had a quality that did that to you, had done it since the first afternoon in the courtyard, and you still had not worked out how to stop your body from responding before you had chosen to respond. He was looking at you from the head of the table with an expression that was calm and unhurried and gave nothing away, the way his expressions always did, except for his eyes, which were doing the thing they always did, which was see you considerably more clearly than you wanted to be seen. He did not look stressed. He did not look rattled by your father's outburst or by the situation or by any of it. He looked, infuriatingly, rather pleasant.
"What are your thoughts on the matter?" he said, and leaned back in his chair as he said it, settling more fully into the seat, and his hands came to rest on the armrests with the unhurried ease of a man entirely comfortable in the space he occupied.
You noticed his hands, which you had no business noticing– the width of them, the rings he wore, the particular way they moved when he was thinking, deliberate and unhurried, like everything else about him. He was turning one ring slowly with his thumb, the one on his right hand with the Targaryen sigil carved into dark stone, turning it in a slow circle without seeming to know he was doing it, and you watched it for a moment longer than you should have and thought, with shame of a person whose mind had gone somewhere they had absolutely not given permission to go, about what those hands would feel like.
Around your wrist. Against your jaw. Curved at the base of your throat, pressing, the weight of them, the warmth.
You looked back at the table.
Your face felt very warm. You were grateful, for the first time, for the poor lighting in the small council chamber.
When you looked back up at him he was still looking at you, and his expression had shifted by something so small it was barely a shift at all, just a quality in the eyes, something that said he had noticed exactly where your attention had gone and was choosing, with great deliberateness, not to say so.
The heat moved from your face down the back of your neck.
"I am quite happy for Prince Valarr and Lady Kiera," you said, with every ounce of composure you had been rehearsing since the night before. "They seemed very well suited to one another and I wish them–"
"No the fuck she isn't," your father said.
The room went very quiet in the specific way of rooms where people are pretending very hard not to have heard something. You closed your eyes for one brief moment. Opened them. Looked at the table.
Baelor's gaze moved from you to your father with the slow deliberateness , something in his expression cooled, not unkindly, but with the quality of a man who had a great deal of patience and was keeping careful track of how much of it was being spent.
"I appreciate Lord Lancel's candour," he said, evenly, and then looked back at you, which was somehow worse. "If there is a grievance—"
"The grievance," your father said, the restraint in his voice something impressive in its way, "is that my daughter has been made to look a fool, and House Lannister has been made to look a fool, and this needs to be resolved before I say something in this chamber that I cannot unsay, or I swear to the gods that—"
"Wed her to me."
The words fell into the room like a stone dropped into still water, and everything stopped.
Your mouth opened. You were not aware of deciding to open it. You became aware of it after, along with the fact that you had looked at Baelor before you looked at anyone else, which said something you were not going to examine right now, and he was looking back at you, just at you, not at your father or the lords or the room, just at you, with an expression that was entirely unreadable and eyes that were not.
"What," your father said. Flat and slow, the voice of a man refusing to accept that he had heard correctly.
"Wed her to me," Baelor said again, with the same even unhurried certainty of a man repeating something perfectly reasonable that someone had simply failed to hear the first time.
He had not looked away from you. You were having some difficulty breathing at a normal rate.
Your father looked at you with an expression you could not parse, something between disbelief and calculation, and you looked back at him and then back at Baelor because you could not seem to stop doing that, and Baelor was still watching you , and you felt warmth moving through you that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber.
"This does not solve the insult to my house," your father said. The snarl had gone out of his voice, replaced by something more careful, a man recalibrating. "My daughter was brought here under the understanding that she would be a prince's wife. You're asking me to consider her a consolation prize, Your Grace, which I find—"
"I am asking you to consider her a princess and future queen," Baelor said, still without looking at anyone but you, his voice patient and his hands still on the armrests of that chair. "She would be Princess of Dragonstone. When the time comes, queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Any children we had would be princes and princesses of the realm." A pause. "House Lannister would lose nothing it was promised and gain considerably more. The alliance holds, my lord, and your daughter's position would be rather more significant than the one you came here seeking."
"More significant," your father repeated, with the flat tone of a man being maneuvered and knowing it and not yet having decided how he felt about it.
"Considerably," Baelor said.
Your father looked at you again. You looked back at him and tried to make your face say something useful, and were not entirely sure what it said instead. Whatever it was, he looked at it for a long moment and then looked away, pressing his mouth into a thin line and saying nothing, which was Lancel Lannister's version of thinking very hard about something.
"She's been on the market longer than I care to admit, as the whole of Westeros is aware. You'd be getting goods that no one wanted, Your Grace, with respect to my daughter." he said finally, the snarky edge back in his voice, the particular one he used when he was testing something.
You stared at the table.
You had spent your entire life being loved by this man and in this moment you wished, very sincerely, that he would stop.
"Lord Lancel," Baelor said, and something in the way he said it made you look up despite yourself, and you found him looking at your father with an expression that was perfectly pleasant and had a quality underneath it like stone. "Your daughter is not goods, nor is she something to be appraised. I'd ask you to remember that in my council chamber."
Your father had the grace to look briefly taken aback. He cleared his throat. "I only meant—"
"I know what you meant," Baelor said, mildly, and looked back at you, and the shift from that cool quality to the way he looked at you was so immediate and so different that you felt it somewhere behind your sternum like a hand pressed flat. "I also know it isn't what I think."
The room was very quiet.
"I think it's rather a good idea."
Your voice cut through the quiet of the room cleanly, and you felt everyone in it look at you, and you looked at your father.
He was staring at you with an expression you had not seen on his face in a very long time, something between surprise and the particular stillness of a man recalibrating quickly. You held his gaze and kept your face very still and said, quietly, "After all, since no one wants my goods," and you let the words sit there between you, his words, and watched something move across his face that he could not quite contain, something that was not quite guilt but was adjacent to it, "he wants me for how I am."
The indifference in your voice was real and it was not real, both things at once, because underneath it was something older and more tired than anger, the particular hurt of being spoken of that way by someone who loved you, you were absolutely not going to cry in this council chamber in front of four lords and Baelor Targaryen, but you let your father see it in your face for one moment, the hurt, before you looked back down at your hands.
The silence in the room had a different quality to it now.
Your father said nothing. You could feel him beside you, the particular stillness of a man who had said the wrong thing and knew it and did not yet know what to do with that knowledge, and you did not look at him.
“Alright,” your father said finally, his voice stripped of its earlier edge, much softer this time.
You looked at Baelor without meaning to.
“In a moons time then.” He says, concluding the council.
You were a wife.
You still could not quite believe it, even standing in the middle of your shared chambers with the candles burning low around you and the sound of the city muffled behind the thick stone walls and the weight of the day sitting on your shoulders like something physical. Wedded to Baelor Breakspear Targaryen. His princess. The words sat strangely in your mind, too large for the space you had made for them, and you stood with your back half to him and your hands clasped in front of you and tried to find somewhere to put yourself in this room that was now yours as much as his.
You had heard things, today. People talked at weddings the way they always talked, freely and without much care for who was listening, and you had caught enough of it in passing– in the sept, in the corridors, at the feast– to know what the court thought of this union. That he had married for duty. That he was trying to put a ghost to rest. That you were an alliance and a convenience and that Jena Dondarrion would always be the woman who had actually held his heart, and everything after her was simply duty.
You had smiled through all of it. You were very good at smiling through things.
The door closed behind him.
"Are you alright?"
His voice, even now, even after weeks of hearing it, did something to the back of your neck. You kept your eyes on the far wall and said, "Yes," and heard, in the small silence that followed, that he did not believe you.
"We are wedded now," he said, and his voice was soft, unhurried, the way it always was. "I would rather you not speak lies to me."
You felt his hand before you fully registered that he had moved, his fingers closing gently around your arm and turning you, not forcing, just the suggestion of it, and you let yourself be turned because there was no version of this where you were going to stand with your back to him all night. He was close. Closer than he had been permitted to be before tonight, and the candles threw his shadow long across the floor behind him and caught the silver in his beard and the particular quality of his eyes, one brown and one blue, both of them on you.
You opened your mouth. Closed it.
"Can I ask you something?" you said, and your voice came out smaller than you intended.
"Of course," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.
You looked at the middle of his chest because looking at his face felt like too much right now. "I heard things today," you said. "People talking." You stopped, felt the embarrassment of it move through you, and made yourself continue anyway. "About your lady wife. Jena." You said her name carefully, like a thing that needed to be handled. "They said — they said you married again for duty, to put her memory to rest, and that I am an alliance and nothing more." You looked up at him then, because you needed to see his face when he answered. "Is that true?"
He looked at you for a long moment and there was no anger in it and no grief, just that steadiness, that particular focused attention he gave you that you had never quite gotten used to. "My lady wife who perished was the duty," he said, simply and without cruelty. "I was fond of her. I did love her, in the way that you love someone you have built a life alongside. But that was many years ago, and it was not–" he paused, and something shifted in his expression, something that looked like a man choosing his words not because he was being careful but because he wanted to be accurate. "It was not what I felt the day I saw you in that courtyard."
You went very still.
"I have never felt that in my entire life," he said, and his voice was quiet and even and utterly without performance, the voice of a man stating a fact he had already made his peace with. "That feeling. The strength of it." His eyes had not moved from yours. "I came close to calling off the betrothal entirely. I could not justify it to myself — I thought you had feelings for Valarr, I thought I was simply a man of a certain age wanting something that was not his, and I told myself that every morning for weeks and believed it less every time."
"You thought I had feelings for Valarr," you said.
"I did," he said.
"I didn't," you said.
Something moved across his face. "I know that now," he said.
The candles moved in a breath of air from somewhere and the light shifted across his face and you stood there in your wedding clothes in your shared chambers and felt the heat of the past weeks, all the looking and not looking and the rings and the council chamber and the alcove and every moment you had pressed down and put away, rising up through you all at once like something that had been held underwater finally breaking the surface.
"Baelor," you said.
"Yes," he said. Not a question. Just the word, steady and warm, and he was already close and he did not move closer and did not move away and simply waited, the way he always waited, with the patience of someone who had decided something and was content to let you arrive at it yourself.
You reached up and touched his jaw before you decided to, your fingertips against the grey of his beard, feeling the texture of it, and you heard the quiet sound he made at the back of his throat, barely anything, just the smallest exhale, and it moved through you like heat.
His hand came up to cover yours where it rested against his face, his fingers closing over yours, warm and certain, and you felt the size of that hand, the breadth of it, and thought about everything you had thought in that council chamber and felt your face go warm.
"I have been wanting to do that," you admitted, very quietly, "since the first week."
"Only the first week," he said, and the warmth in his voice had a low quality to it now, something underneath it that you had not heard before, and you felt it in your chest and lower.
"Perhaps since the courtyard," you said.
"That's more honest," he said.
You laughed, a small unsteady thing, and he smiled at the sound of it, and then the smile faded into something more intent as he looked at you, and his free hand came up slowly, giving you every opportunity to move away, and curved at the side of your neck, his thumb at your jaw, tilting your face up, and you felt the weight of it exactly the way you had imagined it and it was worse than imagining, it was so much worse, warm and specific and certain.
"I am going to kiss you," he said, low and unhurried, watching your face.
"I know," you said.
"Are you alright with that," he said.
You looked at him, this man who had been patient for weeks and built a fire in your chest without touching you and was asking you, on your wedding night, if he was allowed. "Baelor," you said, and your voice had gone soft with something you did not bother to hide anymore. "Yes."
He kissed you slowly, the way he did everything, without rush, and his mouth was warm and his beard was exactly as strange against your skin as you had imagined and also nothing like you had imagined, and his hand at your jaw tilted you into him and his other hand found your waist and you felt the warmth of both of them through the fabric of your dress and made a small sound against his mouth that you had not planned on making.
He pulled back just enough to look at you, his forehead nearly against yours, his thumb moving once along your jaw, and his eyes were very dark in the candlelight.
"I have been wanting to do that," he said quietly, "since considerably before the first week."
You laughed again, breathless, and felt him smile against your temple when he pressed his lips there, and then to your cheek, and then to the corner of your mouth, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world who has nonetheless decided to use it very specifically.
"Baelor," you said, against his mouth.
"Mm," he said, which was not quite an answer and did not need to be.
His hands moved to the laces at the back of your dress, slowly, finding them without rushing, and you felt the loosening of it, the give of the fabric, his fingers warm against the skin of your back as he worked, and you pressed your forehead to his jaw and breathed him in and felt the particular quality of the quiet in the room.
"Are you still nervous?" he asked, low against your hair.
"A little," you admitted.
His hands stilled at your back, just resting there, warm and certain. "We have time," he said. "All the time there is."
You pulled back enough to look at him, at his face in the candlelight, at those mismatched eyes that had been looking at you since a courtyard in early autumn, and felt something settle in your chest that had been unsettled for a very long time.
"I don't want time," you said. "I've been patient for months."
Something shifted in his expression, something that moved through his eyes and down to the curve of his mouth, warm and unhurried and very deliberate. His hands at your back drew you closer rather than stilling, and when he kissed you again it was different from the first time, deeper, less careful, and you felt the warmth of it move through you all the way down, and slid your hands up into his hair, and stopped being patient.
