summary: wooing back your wife, a tale in three parts.
pairing: baelor targaryen x wife reader
word count: 10k
based off of this! | masterlist
part i.
the king is nothing like what you had thought he would be.
you had only ever heard loose tales as they traveled down the kingsroad and eventually landed at the mottled stone of your family’s home.
tales of his arrogant father, the unworthy, they had begun whispering now that he was well in his grave. tales of his sweet, sad mother and his beautiful dornish wife.
you had never paid much attention when the topic of the royal family was brought up at tea. the steward’s wife would sit across from you, your aunt and cousin in the opposite chairs. you were invited even though they did not want you there because it was expected.
the steward’s wife was kind, though. she smiled at you and asked about you even when there was little space left for you to speak. she would inquire about the garden you had been working on when she remembered it.
you try hard to recall something she had told your aunt about during one of those teas. you were not paying much attention, lost in thought about something that escapes you now.
they had been speaking of the king and the rebels and regarding his retinue when something had loosely grasped your attention. something about—
“my good daughter,” king daeron bellows, and you are snapped away from your thoughts.
“your grace,” you say, dropping into a curtsy before you straighten yourself. you move your palms to the round curve of your belly, holding yourself there as you smile back at him.
you would think that it might be forced, but his grace has never been anything but kind. seeing him is not a burden, as it is with many others of the court.
in fact, his company has always been most welcome to you. his grace did not mind silence much, but he never left you to suffer when everyone else was speaking of a matter that you did not know much about.
such as when they reminisce on maekar’s trips to starfall when he was courting lady dyanna. they laugh and smile about the memory, their eyes fond and wistful.
you had never met lady dyanna, so you had smiled politely and focused on your meal. you do not recall where baelor was, but you still did not know maekar well enough to comment on his dear wife.
you had, at first, developed a tendency to go quite silent when you were near the royal family. it was almost habit, you remember thinking, wondering when you had decided that no one would notice if you did not speak a word for the duration of the meal.
you even recall a single, specific thought—it would all be better if baelor was there with you, seated across from you.
but in his absence, his father had stepped into the role.
you must have looked like a fool with how surprised you were when his grace first addressed you. he asked questions of how you were finding the keep, which of the ladies you had spoken with about joining as your company, and even if you felt the gardens here compared to your own.
it was perhaps then that you realized all that baelor had truly offered you when he proposed his suit.
more than just a new life, more than just a new title. rather, a new family entirely.
one that remembers your likes and mislikes, one that does not desire for you to stay silent and invisible.
such a small gesture from his grace, and yet, you remember it like it was only yesterday. even now, when you look at the king, you can see all those qualities baelor has inherited from him.
in fact, that is what it was—what your aunt and the steward sometimes mulled over. how the crown prince looked nothing like the king, how he had clearly taken after his mother.
and truthfully, just as you had told baelor during your very first meeting, it is a lovely thing to look like one’s mother, even if the rest of the world did not agree on the matter when it came to targaryens.
you can still hear the bitter words from your aunt in your head now.
but they would never know the truth, you now realize.
the truth of their character, the truth of their quality. of baelor’s kindness when you were worried over what people of the court might think of you, what his family might think of you. of how the queen greeted you so graciously, of how she had taken you in as another one of her children. and the king, a figure from your histories and stories, is now your father-by-law who is eager to meet his next grandchild.
if you think about it for too long, you overwhelm your senses. their acceptance and love that you had tasted, even if only for a few months.
how will summerhall compare to this?
“princess?” his grace says, and you blink slowly, before meeting his gaze once again.
you wonder if he knows yet of your departure, but it is no matter. by the end of the tourney, you will be leaving with the other guests. his grace and the queen do not much leave king’s landing, you know.
you wonder when he will get to meet the child named after his mother.
“yes, your grace?”
“i was only asking what you thought of our festivities? they have decorated the gardens quite beautifully, i hear,” king daeron says, and your expression falls into that familiar smile that is often present around him.
“i have no doubt of it,” you reply, though you are distracted.
your body goes warm and flushed at the thought of the gardens—where you had last seen baelor.
you had thought you were being clever in your avoidance of him. the hours of his many meetings and appointments did not stray from day to day, and you kept your outings, few as they were, to those times he would be occupied.
it feels almost unnaturally cruel, a jape of sorts from the gods. avoiding your husband when there was a time not so long ago that you desired nothing more than his constant presence.
but, you tell yourself, this is not entirely your husband.
he is not your baelor, not completely. and every moment you spend in his presence, your mind slips further and further into the sincerity behind his eyes, the familiarity of his touch, of his skin on yours.
in the gardens, he looked as though he did not want to leave.
but surely, that could not have been the truth. baelor has never shown you anything but kindness and sincerity. he does not want to hurt you, nor anyone. and after all, he did not fight you on the matter of your departure. if he was truly remembering, you think perhaps he might have.
you are not sure of anything anymore. the maester had said the early months of your pregnancy might lead to confusions of the mind, while your body focuses itself on growing the babe.
if only you could—
“and i would have you review the list of guests, if you will. perhaps you might spot any omissions, as it were. you are much keener than my son in those matters,” his grace says.
you are being intolerably rude again, so lost in your thoughts that you have missed most of his words.
“yes, your grace. i am set to meet lady kiera this afternoon. i shall look over the list with her,” you reply, playing with your fingers again.
“and of course, we had one written for your aunt and uncle. the last time they visited king’s landing was for the wedding, no?”
in an instant, your heart sinks into the depths of your stomach.
“oh,” you whisper, the sound breathy and quiet. “indeed, your grace.”
“yes, well, i am sure they will be glad to take the journey. another opportunity to see you, after all. i am certain-”
your mind takes you away for another moment, unwillingly. you watch as king daeron says something, but you cannot hear him.
all you can think of is your aunt and uncle, here, in king’s landing.
you had last seen them the day after your wedding to baelor. their carriage had been waiting by the doors to the keep.
you are like a child chasing a lost dream. you thought and hoped, for a moment, that perhaps they might realize that they will indeed miss your company. that perhaps they were sad to part with you after all these years.
perhaps you should have remained hopeless.
you can still recall crying alone in your chambers after. baelor was away with the small council and you had been all alone, realizing that in the midst of the grandness of your new life, lived a small reality that had been difficult to fully accept.
proof that they truly did not care about you, the only family you had in this world.
but when baelor returned to find you crying, when he comforted you… you knew you had gained a husband that cared for you tremendously. if anything, your only failure was not being able to accept his love as easily as he doled it unto you.
and then when the king and queen welcomed you with open arms. when maekar began warming up to you, you finally knew that you had gained back a true family to replace the false.
but all of this, now, you think gravely. you had not so much as written to your aunt and uncle about your unborn babe or baelor’s accident. to have them here—
another thought strikes you suddenly.
if you leave for summerhall a moment before they depart, or if they perhaps have even an inkling of a suspicion that you are leaving and that your husband is staying behind, you know what will happen.
they will never stop speaking of it.
you can imagine it now, just as it was before you had left for king’s landing for the first time. the way they gossip over tea and meals. they will whisper that you could not please the prince. that you were not enough for him, that all along they knew he was making a grave mistake in selecting you.
that he would come to regret it.
had their words become the truth?
“father,” baelor says, and you almost jump at the sound of his calm, familiar voice somewhere behind you. for a moment you are so distraught that you do not even turn to look at him, trapped in your thoughts. “i shall oversee the invitation for my good-family.”
you blink, your eyes moving between the king and the prince for a moment. if possible, your heart sinks down further. they converse for a moment, words that sound like nothing to your ringing ears, until finally king daeron smiles at you before departing himself.
you turn to face baelor.
“your grace, i-” you hesitate for a moment.
he does not know the truth about them. he does not know—
“their invitation,” baelor begins, and your heart begins to beat faster, “will conveniently be left behind. misplaced by a servant, you see.”
oh.
relief courses through your veins, a sensation akin to a cool breeze compared to the heat continuing to burning under your skin. your shoulders sink down, your heart ceases its endless pounding, and you stare at your husband.
“but i-” you start to say something, but he interrupts you gently, his hand coming to your shoulder to steady you.
“the maids will recover it a few days after the tourney has ended. then i will write them a missive myself explaining the mishap.”
“baelor,” you breathe, your eyes prickling with hot, unshed tears.
“you see, my wife, they will have no one to blame but me.”
baelor picks up the list of guests from the surface of the desk that his grace had left behind, the one you were meant to review with kiera.
“you do not have to,” you whisper, reaching for the paper yourself. “they will be so upset if they feel slighted.”
your words are dejected, but they are the truth.
you would hate for baelor to have to absorb to brunt of their ire, since you have no way of telling how they will behave now that they can consider the crown prince a part of their family.
odd, given that they never considered you—
“do not think of it for a moment longer. i shall see to it,” baelor says, folding up the parchment and tucking it into the pocket of his doublet.
you stare again, wide-eyed and breathless, wondering how he could have recalled this so quickly. was it also learned from maekar?
but how could maekar know, unless baelor had told him some time ago? it did not entirely make sense, and yet—
baelor takes your hands into his, the skin of his fingers hardened by years of wielding the sword, but still so surprisingly gentle with you. his tenderness never fails to make your knees weaken.
you must be trembling, you think, under the depth of his eyes on you, of the unsaid words that linger between the two of you.
he brings your hands up, close enough until he can press the softness of his lips onto the back of your hands.
your heart skips a beat, as though it is the first time he has touched you all over again.
part ii.
you and kiera have always shared a common mislike of the ladies of the court.
well, it is not truly a misliking. you would have to know them somewhat in order to make that decision.
indeed, you have not hosted enough gatherings and teas to attempt to win them over.
it is truthfully more your fault than theirs—it is expected of a prince’s wife to select ladies in waiting. it is expected to host them and exchange idle gossip and make them feel as though they have your favor and to reassure yourself that you, in turn, have theirs.
their husbands expect it. they expect it.
there is an underlying web of politics to the entire construct that you have never much been able to make sense of.
it just seemed so… wrong.
wrong to waste your newly found freedom with highborn ladies from great houses who you had such little in common with.
indeed, that time felt so much better spent in baelor’s company, or getting to know your new family. you could spend an entire evening in the presence of maekar’s children and not grow bored or tired for a single moment.
not when aegon had a hundred new stories to chatter on about, or the girls had a new toy or dress to show off. they would run around and entertain themselves and you in the process, whilst you gave their septa a much needed break.
you dreamed of the day when the youngest of his brood would begin to think of you as more of an aunt and less of their uncle’s new wife. and it seemed that day was not so far away before all of this.
but in all that time, you had not yet developed the relationships you were supposed to with the members of the royal court.
it is not only your fault. baelor seemed to care little of it, as well. you recall bringing the matter to his attention one day, asking him when it was proper to host a luncheon or a tea to get to know them.
your face flushes and grows hot at the memory. you remember it as clear as day—the two of you had been naked. you were wrapped in his arms and covered only by the silks of his bedding while you listened to the steady heartbeat of your husband beneath you.
you interrupted the sweet silence of the two of you catching your breath to ask about it.
and you know now that you were much more naive then, even if it had only been a few months ago. your face must have contorted with worry, and you must have chewed on your cheek or bit your lip or some other sign that made it so obvious to baelor that the matter was concerning you, making you anxious.
so baelor had done what he always did—dismissed it from your mind entirely. he convinced you not to think of it and had you focus instead on the kisses he littered on the back of your neck and the feel of his hands gripping your waist.
even now, the memory is enough to make your heart begin to race.
more than that—you had listened to him instantly. you forgot of your commitment to the court and focused instead on your reinvigorated mission to see what else you could convince your husband to do.
the matter had been dropped from your mind then, and you had preferred to keep it that way.
you wrinkle your nose at the thought—it is mostly his fault, after all. if he remembered it, you would go and chastise him for it now.
at every turn, baelor would bring his hands to your face and cup you between them, kissing your head and telling you that the ladies of the court will wait until he is ready to give up his time with you.
the very thought brings a smile to your face, until you feel sadness spreading slowly. you blink, trying to set the memory aside.
the baelor with you now does not remember those instances, nor would he want to be left with an abundance of questions from the court once your departure is noticed.
thus, you had made a new plan with kiera.
indeed, a part of your reluctance to greet them had been due to their treatment of your step-son’s wife. she had been at court longer than you, a great deal longer, ever since her family had arrived to celebrate some new trade deal that had been arranged between the east and the west.
it was then that her match with valarr had been arranged—meaning that the ladies of the court had plenty of time to meet with her, to get to know her. after all, she would be their queen one day.
but you know from your time with kiera that such an invitation had never come for her. it seemed that the court had made up their mind about lady kiera, and in truth, you knew it meant they had made up their mind about you as well.
but you were not stupid enough to believe it was for no reason at all.
of everything your aunt had told after your betrothal to the prince had been decided, one part in particular had stuck with you firmly.
that the ladies of the court would not accept you willingly or openly, not when you had stolen the chance of a match with the prince out from under their noses.
indeed you knew you had not stolen anything. you and baelor were blessed—or rather had been blessed—with a true love match. but the first time you were introduced to the court, you could discern their displeasure before they had even opened their mouths, from their glares alone.
there had been a small event following your first introduction to court, hosted by the queen. and though you had tried, you knew your efforts would bear no fruits.
there was little space left for you to speak when the queen was otherwise engaged, little that they wanted to know about you once they learned what house you hailed from.
they were clever too, particularly their cunning leaders. whenever a royal family member appeared, the ladies doled their attention on you, and it would dissipate as soon as their gazes moved elsewhere.
you had imagined that the court was a nest of vipers. in truth, it was much more. thorny roses and sharp-toothed lions walking ahead of the snakes.
it had been so easy to decide to greet kiera alone most days, almost too easy to prefer the company of the queen and her carefully selected brigade and your new nephews and nieces rather than making another attempt to acquaint yourself with people who already decided they did not like you.
you felt you had already suffered through enough of that.
your plan had worked well thus far, at least.
you had feigned illness once, accompanied baelor on a trip to dragonstone another time, and then conspired with kiera to claim that she was ill and that you did not wish to host a gathering without her.
and it had all worked well enough. until now, that is.
you are faced with an issue. you cannot leave for summerhall without even greeting the ladies of the court once since your last encounter. the rumors will gather all on their own, you know well enough, if you leave it up to chance.
at least this way you might plant the seed, whisper of your desire to visit summerhall to the person seated near you, discuss that maekar’s young children grow restless in their desire to visit their other home.
kiera had even told you to suggest that she and valarr will visit in the coming weeks, when the summer heat grew too tiresome to bear from the red keep.
it would not seem so suspicious, you decided.
(another part of you swells with fear, with worry. that you are making the wrong decision. that they will see through you in an instant, that they will know the truth—that your husband does not know you or love you, despite what he says.
that he will be alone here, perhaps even looking for someone else to fill his days, someone of his choosing. the ladies of the court that he has know for years, the families of which serve on his small council. ladies of great houses who were bred for the position that you now cower away from, a position that was never meant to be yours.
you—the wife of a crown prince. the thought has been ridiculous since the day you arrived here. it seems that every one else, save for you, already knew that. and now it has all led to this outcome, running away from the life you had just begun to embrace. despite what he says, you know the truth. you remind yourself of that simple truth over and over again, and then you set it aside.)
lady lannister is a great deal more frightening than you recall.
she is the sister of lord lannister, the one who serves on the king’s small council. you recall multiple instances where baelor had returned from a meeting complaining of something he had said, some foolish comment or some offer he was adamant on getting approved.
indeed, it seems both brother and sister are quite determined to get the outcome they desire.
lenore flashes her sharp green eyes at you when you arrive to the afternoon tea you had—quite begrudgingly—finally organized.
the maids are still arranging the flower decorations—white lilies and yellow roses, a collection of your favorite colors, since there were not enough of your favorite flower to decorate with—that resemble the gown you are wearing today.
you seem to be matching both lenore and her niece. jeyne is a young, pretty girl, younger than kiera, you know. the one time you had conversed with her, she had been perfectly polite, and not nearly as daunting as her aunt.
jeyne had been amiable, but once her family surrounded her, you noticed the air shift with indifference. her eyes narrowed, her tongue sharpened, and whatever mildly pleasant conversation you had been engaging in with her about the recent weather had come to a quick halt.
today, they are both dressed in a rich yellow, lannister gold, you think off-puttingly. their matching golden hair is piled up on their heads with jewels, as if they had readied themselves for a feast instead of your afternoon tea.
“your grace,” lenore says, and you feel your spine stiffen. the words sound unnatural coming from her mouth—she was one of the many who had called you my lady and somehow managed to make it sound like an insult.
at least, until baelor had begun enforcing the new title for you. back when he knew you enough to do so—
“-we were not expecting you so early. i am glad to see that you are well,” she says, her emerald eyes flickering to your belly for a moment.
even her words are double-edged. she means she did not expect you at all, and likely astonished you did not feign another illness to avoid the encounter altogether.
one small tea, you tell yourself, how long could it last? after this i will not see any of these ladies again for many moons. naerys will be here by then, and i shall require no other company save for her.
“thank you, my lady,” you reply, settling yourself at the seat at the head of the table.
you can feel the intensity of their gaze on you, waiting for you to say something, anything, to acknowledge them, to give lenore another reason to begin talking.
she is somewhat of the ruler of these circles, you had previously gathered. whatever she agreed upon seemed to slowly become the opinion of all other ladies.
and now, she waited to form her next opinion of you.
it made sense, after all—she is from a great house with an enormous amount of influence. she had been widowed young, and without any children. you believe her older brother now sits as lord of casterly rock, and the younger serves the king here.
more than that, she is shrewd. she disarms the other ladies and leaves it so that everyone is scrambling to remain in her good graces. one of queen myriah’s ladies had tried to help you understand the hierarchy within the ladies of the court one day, aiming to try and help you recover the place a prince’s wife should occupy.
all you had taken away from the conversation was a headache.
you close your eyes for a moment and take a deep breath.
you cannot let these ladies frighten you so—not when you have faced far more formidable opponents than them in your life. a tea with your aunt would no doubt set lenore straight, you know, the thought enough to almost make you laugh.
but your laughter dies in your throat as another thought trickles in.
had they treated jena this way?
had they watched her with narrow eyes, wondered why the crown had chosen her instead of one among their ranks? had they laughed behind her back or poked fun at the standing of her house?
jena was a daughter of the marches. she was descended from a proud, noble lineage that spans back generations, born of a blood that does not fear what women like lady lannister have to say about her.
you wonder for a moment how jena would have approached the court if she had been in your position. in your mind, she was far too perfect to ever make the mistakes that you had already made. she would not have feared meeting them, would not have made excuses to avoid gatherings and stayed in the comfort her husband provided.
no, you think. she would have been keenly smart about it, arranging meetings on her schedule and separating the women into more manageable sizes. she would have made sense of the political schemes that brewed in the women’s quarters, would have made sure that both she and baelor profited from this spider’s web that she had access to.
and what have you done all this time? ran away and hidden yourself, like a scared child.
“my—pardon me. your grace?” lady lannister repeats, and you blink, turning to stare at her and her niece. you do not know what she said before.
“my apologies, lady lenore,” you say, hoping to remind her for a final time that her name is preceded with lady and your name is preceded with princess. “i was merely lost in thought. we have so much to prepare for this upcoming tourney, as i am sure you have heard.”
lenore smiles at you, though you are certain she has taken away her own interpretation of your words.
“of course, it is most demanding, as i well remember. the other ladies and i certainly appreciate you finally finding time to host us all. don’t we, jeyne?”
her niece nods, and you smile at them both, blinking fast at the slight. finally.
you almost groan out loud. she is much more well-versed in this than you are. you cannot even find it in you to be impolite to the maids you overheard gossiping about you, comparing you to jena.
the thoughts clutter your mind again. perhaps it will all be a great deal quieter at summerhall, nothing but the cool breeze and the distant chatter of maekar’s children playing in the other chambers. no court, no ladies, no one to think of besides your daughter.
your heart feels as though it is being torn in half, all by your own doing. no baelor.
the room fills slowly, ladies appearing and taking their seats. they curtsy upon seeing you, and then they mingle and chat easily, since they are always in each other’s company.
in this room, you are the odd one out.
kiera was not yet feeling well enough to accept the invitation, and you feel dread seeping into your bones with the knowledge that the one companion you found comfort in would not be joining you today.
it is no matter. you smile at the lady next to you, lady mallister, you recognize. she wears a deep purple gown with a silver chain, the colors of her house.
“and how is lord mallister? has he yet returned from his journey to seagard?” you ask, and lady mallister smiles brightly at you.
“yes, your grace, he is well. his letters state he should arrive in the next few days.”
“that is good to hear, my lady. i do hope he will be able to join us for the tourney.”
“indeed, your grace.”
you feel a familiar rush of nerves possess you, that awful feeling when you want to say something else, but your mind does not want to allow it.
if you remember correctly, her husband was particularly fond of jousting, a champion of several tourneys held in the riverlands before he arrived to king’s landing as the king’s lord of ships.
you should bring it up. and then that feeling trickles in—what if you are wrong? what if you are thinking of another lord? lady mallister will forever think of you as the girl trying to play the role of a princess, confusing the men who serve your husband.
you take another deep breath. something baelor once told you comes to your mind—every time he noticed you worrying like this over some small thing.
“i imagine it serves as a reminder of his own victories at the lists. joyful memories, no doubt,” you say, blinking patiently as you await her response.
lady mallister smiles at you brightly.
“yes, your grace. and we were first introduced at the tourney in riverrun, for lord tully’s grandson. how kind of you to remember,” she says, and you beam back at her, returning her smile.
“of course, my lady. i-”
“apples,” lady lenore says, as the maids bring out the plates of fruits and cheese. “a favorite of yours, your grace?”
“uh, i… i suppose,” you say, taken aback for a moment. you had not thought of it much. you had only been planning for this tea for a short while, and even then, you had not thought it needed anything extravagant.
you had asked for your favorite fruits alongside the apples, but the maids had told you they could not accommodate your requests on such short notice. it had not seemed a matter of any importance at the time, and you had told them to serve whatever seemed best for these events.
“oh, well that is nice,” she says. your expression remains confused until she continues. “it is always important to reconnect with our lower classes. and eat as the common folk would.”
you feel your face burn at her words. lady lannister smiles like a vindictive woman, a woman scorned who has still come out on top.
you already know why she despises you so.
lord lannister had offered her widowed hand to both baelor and maekar twice over. they had not accepted, and instead baelor had one day appeared with you, and now you are paying the price of her humiliation.
it all rings true in your head, you think, everything you had been told before coming to king’s landing. that you do not do well with such great amounts of people. that you do not know how to handle the ladies of the court.
you cannot even organize a simple tea properly, the way it is meant to be done. teas at your home consisted of four or five women, and you would scramble away as soon as you were excused.
dazed, you wonder what the steward’s wife must think when she gazes on your empty seat in the solar.
that you might have been better off denying his grace’s request for your hand when he had asked, that you would never have fit into this life.
perhaps even that—
“you will have to excuse me, my ladies,” you hear baelor’s voice cut through the noise of the laughter and chatter that fills the room. your eyes lift from staring at your tea cup to the doors, which are open now, your husband standing between them.
“your grace,” they echo, each rising to curtsy as he makes his way to the head of the table, where you are seated.
you are surprised that he is here, the expression painted all over your features, no doubt obvious to them all. you do not rise, keeping your hand on the curve of your stomach where you feel naerys move around inside of you.
perhaps it is her father’s voice calling to her.
“your grace,” you say quietly, as he stands by your chair. baelor places one of his hands on the back of your chair, and the other one moves away from behind him, revealing to you a bouquet of flowers.
yellow and white flowers, lovely and freshly bloomed, wrapped with a ribbon.
your eyes move from him, to his hand, and back to him all in an instant.
“i hope you can forgive my intrusion. i had to make a very important delivery.”
you hear quiet murmurs fill the space—the ladies whispering to each other of the dashing prince. baelor is dressed as handsomely as usual today, though it feels even more… overwhelming than usual.
he dons a dark doublet with red sewn into the cloth. his beard seems freshly groomed, and he smells as he often does—that comforting scent you are so drawn to, leather and parchment and amber. he must have been working in his study this morning.
meaning that he interrupted his work for this—
“you did not need to do that,” you say, though it is mostly to yourself, accepting the flowers. you stare at them, pausing for a moment.
these are no ordinary flowers. they are your favorite ones, the ones you had grown yourself in the garden of your childhood home. they are not quite the evening stars from the garden, but rather a hybrid of two different plants you had created yourself.
you turn your eyes instantly, meeting baelor’s mismatched gaze. he looks down at you from his position, his hand moving from the back of the chair to your shoulder.
gods above—all you do recently is cry. you have heard it is one of those unfortunate effects of child-bearing, but this suddenly feels as though it is unrelated.
you do not think maekar could have recalled the flowers you grew in your garden before your marriage. not when he had never stepped foot in that garden himself.
no, this must be something recovered from baelor’s lost memories. his memories of you, and that—
you turn again as the door opens once more, a few other servants pouring into the room. they carry trays of fruits and sweets. you do not know what exactly they carry until they rest a plate in front of you.
pomegranates and apple cakes.
you had asked for them. they had told you of the delivery from the reach had been delayed due to a bout of bad weather in the west. you recall the conversation even now—because the maid looked as though she was frightened you might yell at her.
you think she must have only recently began working in the kitchens. you do not have it in you to yell at anyone, least of all a maid who does not possess the control of the conditions of the kingsroad and the rain.
if you did, then perhaps you might have set the ladies of the court in order when they excluded your step-son’s wife. perhaps you would have confronted themself to stop whispering about the children she has lost and stop spreading rumors in your court.
it had been a small thing, not having the fruits and desserts you desired for the tea. such a small thing that you had set it aside in your mind.
but this feels different altogether. the flowers that remind you of home, the fruit you used to eat every day, the applecakes you indulged in with baelor after a long dinner with his family.
the thought feels silly. when you used to kiss him after, his mouth tasted like apples and honey—
“baelor,” you begin, but he interrupts you.
“i had it arranged,” he says, quietly. and then louder— “it is unfortunate that we have not been able to host the court properly yet. i thought they should have your favorites for the first event.”
part iii.
baelor believes his plan is going sufficiently well thus far.
despite whatever is still missing from his mind, he would not need all of the knowledge back to know that the subject of your family is a sensitive one.
certainly, it is a great dealer easier now that he knows why. their behavior towards you is indifferent at best and cruel at its worst.
there are a few things now that he knows for certain.
baelor’s hand inadvertently clenches into a fist when he thinks of the regained memory for too long.
the almost casual way your aunt dismisses your despoilment, as if it means nothing to them. as though your safety and virtue is of no use to them, only a bargaining tool to get them what they truly desire—a match with his family.
it is almost humorous to imagine how they must have felt when you accepted his offer for your hand. they must have been enraged it was you over their own daughter, but then he has to stop for a moment.
had they mistreated you in the time between the betrothal and your arrival to king’s landing? how would baelor have known of that matter if you had not confided in him?
had you confided in him? was it forever lost to him now, everything that you might have told him about your family and your childhood, each part of your soul that you bared to him in the few months of marriage the two of you enjoyed together?
he does not know yet.
in truth, it would not have taken his recovered memory to determine that the presence of your family for the duration of the tourney would have only served to worsen your condition.
even a fool such as he might have made sense of it with the way your entire body tenses up at the very mention of their names.
his father had requested his presence to ensure that the remaining tasks for the tourney and the feast were properly arranged. small things, here and there, trying to acquaint him once more with the responsibilities from before the accident.
it is no use trying to explain to anyone that most of his memories have returned—just not the ones that he desires to gain back the most. instead he keeps quiet, nodding and completing tasks as they were assigned.
a bitter voice rattles through his mind. it is not as though you have anything better to spend your time on, it reminds him.
with his wife preparing for her departure with his brother.
it is selfish and unfair, he knows, to think of the situation so plainly. he does not know what you have been through, not fully, and likely, he never will.
maekar has stood by you this entire time—since the moment baelor fell into sleep. no doubt, you have begun to prefer his company in ways. his brother has been able to comfort you where baelor failed, has brought you peace where he has only brought strife and grief.
and though the idea of you leaving on that carriage for summerhall with maekar riding outside, his brother’s children inside and his child growing in your belly, he knows there is no one to fault besides himself.
but he will be damned if he does not at least try.
his father’s note had asked him to review the guests for the tourney. baelor’s eyes raked through the names quickly, wanting to part ways with the task, when he noticed your family’s name in the list.
then he took his quill and scratched it out.
and now, watching from the doorway as his father spoke with you gently about your family, he felt that familiar sense of accomplishment rush through him.
the pride of a husband, that knows his wife better than others around him. the way his father cannot discern that you are terribly anxious at the mere mention of your aunt and uncle. that the very idea of them visiting is enough to make you sink to the ground.
he knows. your husband knows.
and yet, when his father departs and you turn to look towards him with those bright, shining eyes, full of gratitude and relief, all he can think of is the gods.
they are as cruel as they are fair. to have such a lovely creature looking at him like this, even despite all that he has put you through.
the touch of your skin is a prayer in and of itself.
baelor kisses your hand and watches as the kingsguard escorts you back to your chambers so that you may rest easily without the fear of your family arriving in the next few days.
he should have taken you himself, but you requested distance, and he will not force you into his company until you are ready.
(his heart sings with joy when you turn back around to glance at him before you turn the corner, only to find him already staring in your direction.)
such a small task—a bit of spilled ink and an invitation hidden beneath the parchment of his study—and it has alleviated so much from your mind.
what else could he do besides search for other ways to calm you?
baelor had waited by your closed chamber door for a few minutes after you had gone inside, wondering if he should enter yet.
and it was there that he ran into your maid. the very one who informed him of the tea you have been planning with women of the court.
from there, it had been an easy task to think to the next step in his plan. in these last few weeks at court, he had not heard of you planning to meet with anyone except for kiera and his family. it could only mean that you were now arranging this tea in anticipation of your departure from the red keep.
and that also meant there must have been some reason you had not organized teas with them already.
and baelor already knows that reason.
he does not need any memories to place it, either. it was well-known to him that lord lannister had wanted his widowed sister’s hand for baelor and his niece’s hand for one of the young princes for some time now.
except there was a difference between the brother and sister.
lord lannister thought he had a heavy hand in the interworking of the small council and their decisions, though only because the king allowed him to live in that false belief.
his sister, on the other hand, had a very real influence over the ladies of the court, and it would remain that way until she one day married again.
hopefully, baelor thinks, somewhere far, far, away, where he will never have to deal with her presence again.
but the problem at hand is that you will be dealing with her presence shortly. the very one that overshadows all others in the room, that speaks over the royal family and adamantly pushes her own agenda.
he decided the only way to silence lady lannister is to give the rest of the ladies in the room something else to talk about.
namely, him and you.
the process was not born entirely naturally. he found that maid of yours, asking innocent questions about your preferences until he came to the understanding that you would not even have the comfort of your favorites at this tea that you are dreading.
it had not taken much to arrange for it, not when he insisted on it. and he knew that the sweet, surprised expression on your face would be well worth the effort, even if it had not been easy.
something in him knew. knew that you would smile at him, your eyes wide with disbelief that he would have gone to this length, or rather any length, for you.
when he departs, the ladies are whispering of the fine pair the two of you make. lady lannister is as red as her emblem.
in the evening, baelor finds himself pacing in his bedchamber before he finally gives in and makes his way to your chambers. it is not a decision made of a sound mind, but recently he has been afforded little time to speak with you.
the hour is not so late that it is improper to seek your company for a moment. when he knocks on the door to your chamber, it is a moment before you answer.
just as he is about to knock again, it swings open.
he is greeted by the sight of your maid. the girl looks puzzled, almost, that baelor is there, and both tries and fails to conceal her expression.
“your grace,” she says, dropping her head for a moment. “her grace is still-”
she does not need to finish her sentence. he looks beyond your maid into your chambers, where he can see candles lit, illuminating the space well. there is a robe and a towel set out, and a partition that must be hiding the copper tub from his vision.
“would you like me to inform her that you are here?” she asks, and baelor sighs, wondering when he had begun to feel like such a green boy again.
it all seems to melt away when he is too close to you. even from this distance, still standing outside the chambers, that lovely scent wafts towards him. it must be your soap then, he finally decides, distracted for another moment.
if could only close his eyes and breathe it in—
“your grace?” the girl repeats, and he opens his eyes in an instant. just as he is about to respond, he hears it.
he hears you.
“you may send him in, lyra,” you say, your voice muffled from behind the partition.
lyra steps aside and steps out. she shuts the door from the outside once baelor steps in.
the embers of the fire burn slowly, the entire room thick with the fragrance of that sweet scent in the air. baelor steps closer to you and it only grows stronger.
perhaps this is what his efforts have been leading to. a moment in your presence that does not bear the mark of these past few moons. as close to absolution as he can get for now.
it does not seem as though he has to think about it.
baelor sinks to his knees, at the same level as the tub, meeting your enchanting eyes. they almost glow at him while you wear that expression that you often do, a gentle daze, as though nothing he does is what you expect.
but this feels like what he would have done before. so much so that he might even term it a memory of his muscles, something he does not have to ponder over.
it is only natural.
you look much at peace in the tub. soft foamy bubbles cover you to your collarbone, but still he sees his ring hanging around your neck, resting just above the valley of your breasts.
“i am sorry,” you say, and he wishes that you would not apologize so often. “it is intolerably hot and she is restless.”
“as little dragons often are.”
you smile tenderly. baelor swallows as his heart thuds in his chest.
you must be tired, likely worn out from the events of the day. even after he left, he knows your tea with the ladies might have continued for several hours, if it had gone how you hoped.
and something in him stirs restlessly—you look so… at peace, for once.
your head resting against a cushion along the edge of the tub, your hair tied up so it would not get wet. loose strands frame your face, damp where they touch your flesh.
and under the soap, he thinks, is that soft skin he has so missed. the curve of your stomach where his daughter grows inside of you. what he would give to hold you there again, to cradle the two of you, to keep you both safe.
as is his job as your husband. as naerys’ father.
“and do not apologize to me. how are you faring?” he continues after a moment. you blink up at him before returning your gaze to your hand, which plays with the bubbles. his betrothal ring adorns your finger, the red stone glimmering in the candlelight.
“better now. thank you for today,” you say quietly, meeting his eyes once again. “you did not have to-”
“but i wanted to.”
you smile again, your soapy hand hanging off the side of the tub for a moment. he does not hesitate this time, taking your hand into his, holding it until he feels you relax yourself completely in his touch.
“it was not so bad as i thought,” you continue with a quiet laugh. “lady mallister was very kind to me. perhaps i should not have delayed it for so long.”
“i am glad to hear it. did anyone give you any difficulty?"
“i had thought lady lenore would, but she was very quiet after you left. you should have seen the look on her face. she was as surprised as i was, i think,” you giggle, tilting your head back until he can see the column of your neck clearly.
he resists the urge to press his lips there, instead holding onto your fingers a little more tightly.
is this what he has deprived himself of these last moons? the presence of your company, easy and gentle as you converse about your day and while you soak to give yourself some relief from the heat?
baelor shuts his eyes, wondering what could have possessed him to ever risk returning to this life for even a moment.
he looks away for a moment, to the vanity behind you where your towel rests. the flowers he brought you today rest there in a vase now.
“baelor?” you say softly, his attention moving from his thoughts to you quickly.
you look at him without any anger, without any disappointment. without any expectation, either. as though you are only happy for his company and that he is besides you.
that look in your eyes and the scent of your soap, flowers and something else in the air…
his mind takes him away for a moment.
another time, a bath just like this one. except it had been warm water, without quite so many suds. it had smelled lovely then too, though he wasn’t sure if it was the soaps and the oils or rather the scent of your clean, wet skin.
as though it was only moments ago, he can imagine it so vividly. your back against his chest, the two of you squeezing into the small space together.
but somehow, it had never felt crowded. it had been just the perfect amount of room, your bodies molded together. his hands rested on your waist now but they had just been on your arms and legs, helping your wash your skin.
you laid against him, your eyes shut while you sighed in content, and however wrong it is, the urge consumes him quickly and hotly.
so much so that he cannot let you rest any longer, even though you deserve it. a day full of introductions and greetings with countless lords and ladies.
the two of you needed this. only a few days into marriage and yet there is no world he can imagine without you by his side to face all that which is required of him.
even today—the conversation was entirely more bearable. the food tasted better, the company of those who frequently annoyed him much more tolerable.
and you had been very brave, he thinks, because he knows you do not much like many new people and faces all at once. it would be overwhelming for anyone, but you had handled it with such grace.
yes, he thinks, moving some of your damp hair away from your neck so he can place his lips there, you will make a fine queen one day.
you make a small, sweet noise, mostly shock, he imagines at the sensation. but he does not stop, tracing hot, wet kisses down your neck and onto your shoulder. his hands squeeze around your waist, your flesh soft under his grip, and it is not long before the sound of your sighs turn into moans that fill the chamber.
before he can make sense of it you are turned around, facing him while you press your palms against his chest. he is guiding you, two hands on your hips creating your movements while he focuses on your pretty face contorting with pleasure.
the water is warm and wet and yet you are somehow both warmer and wetter. the feeling of your cunt squeezing him submerges him completely, as though his head is being held underwater, and then—
“sweet girl,” he rasps, the sound drowned out as the water sloshes around your melded bodies.
you move of your own accord, taking your hands and clasping them over his. you intertwine your fingers with his, but you take control of the motions, rocking back and forth while he watches, some sort of goddess of love before his very own eyes.
it was only meant to be a bath.
“baelor?” you repeat, and he blinks, meeting your eyes again.
his skin is flushed and warm, the tips of his ears gone red, he knows, as your eyes focus on them for a moment before meeting his gaze again. suddenly the heat is suffocating and his breeches are—
“your memories chose odd times to return,” you comment, leaning your head back slightly.
he thinks you must be tired, that barrier you have been trying so hard to uphold slipping away for a moment. the way you speak calmly makes him think this is how it used to be.
you do not let go of his hand. it feels like another lifetime to him.
baelor clears his throat.
“i cannot help it. it is always something about you that triggers them. today it is…” he trails off, not wanting to admit the details of that specific memory. “something in the air, perhaps.”
“i remember,” you supply, smiling slightly, your eyes perhaps wistful at the thought as well. “i suppose i believe that you would not have told maekar about that.”
“i… i know i should not have lied,” baelor says, “i wrongly believed it was in earnest. i…”
“it is alright,” you say, the water moving quietly as you move your other hand to rest on your stomach. “you should not trouble yourself about it.”
that shell he is so familiar with begins to return. your voice grows softer, your words saying that which you believe he should like to hear rather than what you truly feel.
can you not see, princess, that i know the truth now?
baelor thinks for a moment that he should try harder. perhaps even attempt to push you further, to get you to see that there will be no more lies. that these past days have only been filled with an attempt to show you how much he cares for you, even if you do not yet completely believe it.
but he stops himself.
he knows what happens when he pushes you too quickly. he cannot recall it now, but there is a memory that warns him of it. his soul knows even that which his mind has forgotten.
“thank you for…” you start quietly, your fingers soft against his now. he knows you will pull away soon. “i meant to seek you out earlier but i became distracted. i thought the water would calm her first.”
“you do not have to thank me,” baelor replies. you smile at him for a moment. it feels as though he is living in one of his recollections for a moment.
“but you did not have to. and i still do not know how you found the fruits on such short notice.”
“that is the benefit of being a prince, i suppose.”
you laugh and the lovely sound of it rings through his mind over and over again. if only he could bottle a sound, he thinks, and be drunk off it.
“it meant a great deal to me,” you finally finish, just above a whisper. he meets your eyes, which are watery again. “thank you for trying to help me even though i am leaving.”
the words are a dagger.
“of course. you are still my wife, whether you are here or at summerhall.”
your smile dims slightly, but you blink, trying to force your expression not to reveal what you are thinking.
and baelor knows that there is so much that remains unspoken. even when finally let go of his hand, even when he smiles at you for one final time before departing.
one step closer, though it seems there are still a thousand leagues ahead of him, and only a few days until you depart.
i will not give up now. you will have your husband back, no matter what it takes.
── After the death of your husband, his brother tries to make amends
— Angst | hurt-comfort | Baelor’s widow reader | Baelor’s death and funeral depicted | grieving | trauma bonding | contemplation of death | crying | soft Maekar | depressed Maekar | grovelling | we don't mourn Bealor Break-my-back enough
Word count: 1, 5
─────────
The world ought not to be the same after that pearly morning. The air grew quieter, golden streams of sunshine almost a mockery to tragedy upon the ground.
The realm’s prince was dead — a father, a son, a brother, a husband that once was.
The sight of his body, no longer breathing, no longer speaking, burning with flesh not yet rotten, not yet ready for an eternal sleep — what an ache it was to your heart.
It crackled, his flesh. Bones melted, hair went aflame, blood seared. Baelor faded. The man you once thought sturdy and everlasting. How foolish.
The warmth of flames stroked your face from where you stood. You smelled him, foul and bitter in death, but you refused to flinch. The whispers of fire were the only goodbye from him bestowed upon you, and you wished you could have talked to him just one last time.
No one spoke. Whatever could be said wouldn't compare with the great loss before you. With a gaze intent on the last glimpses you’d hold of Baelor, last memory, you felt Maekar near — the man who burdened you with this pain as much as himself.
His presence, for a rare moment, felt empty. No snarls, no tears, no anger. It seemed as if a part of him had perished along with Baelor and didn't have the right to return.
He hadn't spoken to you. You hadn't uttered a word to your husband’s assassin either. If the silence was born out of hate or grief, you couldn't be certain yourself.
It has ended, you thought in the cold comfort of your chamber once shared with him. Soon, you’d depart this wretched place behind, and Baelor with it, sealed in its past just as much. The silence choked your guts, and you lingered still like a fool, lost without him. What would become of you now?
A thought of Valarr passed your shambled mind. Gods, he was young, still needed a father. Yet his own blood took him away. And Matarys — you couldn't bring yourself to ponder about the weight of his grief, hurting him from afar. They were only boys.
Your lip tightened as you attempted to catch its tremble still between your teeth.
You missed him. The very fibre of your soul missed him. You wanted him back. It was unfair.
A weak whimper fell from your mouth before you could swallow it down, a shallow breath shrank within your chest.
Horribly, there wasn't any future lying before you — just this moment of dread, and perhaps a life of lasting grief after a ghost. The comprehension drew a breathless cry from your depths, raw with its despair. Tears bit at your eyes, bound around your throat.
A skreak nearby. The old floor gave a quiet call, and your gaze leapt to the disturbance.
Maekar. His frame soared at the doorway, as silent as he. The graveness upon his face was piercing, tangled with something sorrowful at the rims. Your opposing stares united, only your breaths echoing in the room for an agonising stillness.
Coming to your senses, you hastily dried your eyes.
“My prince…” You muttered hoarsely, tears and woe caged in your throat. He didn't judge. He didn't speak of it as if he understood without declaring so.
Only with the slow, dragging step he took did you truly see how broken he was. He had bled as well, yet the Gods spared him — the lesser man of the two.
An ugly smear of a bruise gushed over his cheekbone, cruel even to him. You could merely wonder how the rest of him ached beneath dark robes. A worn veil of gloom streamed over his form, the shade of mourning hiding his face.
“To try apologising,” his voice flowed slowly from pale lips, and his gaze lowered in humility not often found in his eye, “would be an insult to you.”
The distance between you hovered firmly even as he stood closer, not daring to close it when both of you held such misery.
“Nothing I could say would mend the pain I brought upon you,” he looked towards you, his face tight with remorse.
You answered with vacancy. Looked back in the eye of your husband’s killer and your kin by law.
It was tempting to blame him, to have an easy cause for a good man’s death. But deep within your wounded heart, you knew that wasn't right — not to Baelor, and not to Maekar.
“The Gods have spoken,” you said on a breath, felt the way your ribs hurt at those words, “whether their judgement is just… I wouldn't dare to question.”
Maekar’s fair head shook, furrows narrowing on his face.
“This wasn't a matter of Gods. It was a foolery, easy to prevent,” he spat through his teeth, bitterness pooling in his mouth. His anger had stung him, it appeared, when his jaw tautened, his lids closing to recall composure under the strength of his injuries. A fragile sigh plunged his shoulders. His glare found you again — crushed and glistening.
“If I could replace him, face the Gods myself… believe me, I would.”
“Don’t speak such nonsense,” you frowned, only because even entertaining the thought insulted you, “Whether you’d come into his place, I don't doubt. But he's the one gone.”
Maekar’s white crown tipped upwards as he soaked in your words. He regarded you with something quiet, contemplative, with the realisation that you didn't wish for his blood.
He nodded.
“That he is,” he whispered, the truth soft on his tongue, “And I’m the more sorry for it.”
“I know you are.”
Violent, sad eyes softened, swirling with disbelief as much as hope.
“You do not think me a monster?”
You’d lie if you said that sentiment didn't fill your being for past nights, reel at your sanity. But before you was no murder, no kinslayer — you witnessed a man grappling with his guilt, with his own loss. By his own hand, he had lost a brother.
“No.”
Maekar’s frail take of air carried in the dulled room, as though he could breathe again.
“You’re finer than most,” he choked. His lustrous gaze fled aside, “A lesser woman would want me gone. Want me dead.”
“Baelor wouldn't wish for that.”
A pierce to a heart, sharp in its truth. It sank between the two of you, a shared pain of different people.
“No, he wouldn't.” Maekar’s voice withered in his throat, laced with caught weeps. “He loved you.”
Your bones began to flutter, shudder silently.
“Honestly and entirely,” he looked upon your face. The shade of suffering carved into your features. He wished he could kiss it away, “and I see why.”
He closed in nearer to his best abilities at the strangled wail fouled in your chest. It was unbearable to see you toil to retain your emotion, how it shook you to the core. You were so tender — a grieving lamb.
Feeble apologies stuttered from your lips in shame, but he did not care for them. Your hands quivered, Maekar saw. He reached, his fingertips carefully grazing your tense wrist. A quiet question arose in your frantic expression, even if you didn't draw back.
With his eyes on the skin he touched, his lips parted in a struggle for words.
“If you let me… I’ll take care of you.”
You wavered at that. Blinking your unshed tears at Maekar, your heart twisted. He was just as tormented about it as you, yet held a sense of care in his tone — a true desire to help. To redeem himself to you.
“You don't deserve to be alone right now,” he whispered again, meeting your eyes. They were drowning. You were drowning.
In a surge impossible to cease, you shattered — face wrenching with guttural sob as your tremoring hand clasped over your mouth. A glimmer of shock passed Maekar briskly. Protectiveness followed it.
A bloody cry rooted into the cloth of his garments when his arms took you, holding you as closely as his bruises would allow without pain. You didn't think about collapsing into the grasp of your husband’s demise, the man whom you should resent. The necessity of comfort was stronger, to have something to uphold you.
Maekar felt you tremble beneath his hands. The weight of your heartbreak washed over him, piling on his own great heartache. He wished he could stop it — Gods, how he wished.
You gagged on outcries, mewled like a ruined animal, and Maekar held you through every gasp, every spilling sniffle.
“They took him… they took him away from me…”
Maekar’s breath hitched at your anguished moan — they. Not he. He didn't know if that brought him relief or more agony, your lack of wrath for him.
With a shudder of his own, his hand clasped the back of your head. Held you tighter against his massacred chest. His lips pressed tightly against your temple, almost a whisper of a kiss.
He let you cry into him. He cried with you, silent and secret. But he didn't let you go. He wouldn't let you go when you needed him, and he needed you.
for a flea bottom girl, there's nothing more dangerous than having a dragon prince catch you playing at knighthood
౨ৎ valarr targaryen x lowborn!reader ౨ৎ 3.7k ౨ৎ slow burn tension, banter, power imbalance, flustered!valarr, mentions of grief, asoiaf typical classism, asoiaf typical misogynism, reader call dunk her brother but they're not related, valarr is perfect, you can't read, grumpkins are coming from your liver ౨ৎ
MUD SPLASHED UP AT YOUR PANT LEGS. Torrents of rain crashed down from a sky so thick with storm clouds that they obstructed what little light the sickle moon tried to offer. A straw man waited across the across the training yard, ever-brave in the face of your brutal charge.
Running faster, closing the distance, you wondered: Are the gods on my side tonight?
Ser Arlan of Pennytree responded. Sword up! Shield!
You had no shield. So you lifted your sword with both hands and pushed harder, ran faster, splashing footfalls bringing the straw man closer, closer.
A bellow clawed from your throat, a vicious monster starved for glory and rife with grief.
Ser Arlan shouted: STRIKE!!!
You launched into the air, still bellowing, to slash down upon the delicate junction between the straw man's shoulder and neck. A killing blow, if he were human.
And if you hadn't fudged it like some amateur clod.
The heedless blow snapped your sword in half. Coming down from the jump, your bare feet failed to find purchase on the slick ground. Mud exploded as you crashed down onto your ass. It joined the rain on its way back down, spattering you head-to-toe in filth. You tried to wipe a thick glob of it from your eye, but little good that did — your hands were as muddy as the rest of you, so you only succeeded in smearing it down your cheek.
Ser Arlan added to your misery. Dead, he declared.
You huffed. "Oh, bollocks to that!"
What gave Ser Arlan the right to declare your fate? Irony? The old hedge knight was the only dead one here, his body decomposing in an unmarked grave several miles from here. You'd been there when Dunk — your brother by circumstance if not blood — laid Ser Arlan in the hole he'd dug him. You'd kissed your fingertips before smacking the old man on his colorless cheek. Dunk had shook his head, asked, Do you have to be so rough? as he shoveled loose dirt over Ser Arlan's body. You'd only been able to shrug. Watch the dirt pile up. Then collapse into your brother's arms.
Ser Arlan's voice was not real.
He had never taught you to wield sword and shield or how to execute a proper strike. He had never instructed you to rise from a fallen state, to dust yourself off and try again and again. He had never declared you dead, either, though you were certain there had been a number of times where he wished he could've, if only so he'd have a second to breathe without questioning what sort of trouble you were getting into. Might be I can't make you into a lady, he'd grumble through a chewed-up wad of sweetgrass, but I can make damn sure you don't become a man.
Only for Dunk had Ser Arlan played teacher. And even then, he hadn't been so good at it.
You tipped your head back to stare up at the storm clouds. The rain felt warm on your cheeks, and if you closed your eyes tight enough, it was almost as if Ser Arlan were sitting next to you, nudging your ribs with an elbow. Skies really pissing, eh?
You smiled.
"You did a shit job," you told Ser Arlan. Maybe an unfair statement given he had never truly consented to raising two Flea Bottom brats and — in his own words — owed you nothing in regard to the amount of effort he put into raising you. But it felt good to say it. And you knew that if the old man could hear you from whichever of the seven hells he'd ended up in, he was probably choking on his own laughter.
Ser Arlan had always liked hearing women curse.
You squeezed your eyes shut tighter. How was it possible to love Ser Arlan like a father while also hating him with your whole heart? Was that normal? You had no clue. Aside from Ser Arlan and Dunk, you had no experience with what having a family was meant to be like. Maybe all daughters hated their fathers. Maybe there was something wrong with you.
It didn't matter.
Never one to stew in self pity, you opened your eyes and pressed both palms into the mud on either side of you. You needed to get up, find a new sword, get back to playing hedge knight.
Soon as you went to stand, a prim male voice made you freeze.
"Perhaps it is not my place to intervene," the voice said, speaking loud enough to be heard over the downpour, "though I feel inclined to say that 'shit job' is a harsh judgment yourself, especially when the problem lies not with you, but your sword." A breath of a laugh, so faint you should not have heard it over the rain. "Could you imagine how many lives we would lose if men marched into battle with twigs in place of steel?"
Could be none, you wanted to say, so long as the enemy's as poorly armed.
"It was a stick," you said instead, glaring at your makeshift sword where it lay snapped in half before the straw man.
Curious, the voice asked, "Is there a difference between sticks and twigs?"
"Course." Twigs were too short and flimsy to make good swords. Sticks were superior, if still disappointing compared to steel. "Any boy who's played Knights and Maidens should know so."
"Ah," the voice said, "well therein lies our problem."
Mud squelched. Out of the corner of your eye, a pair of fine leather boots stepped into view. They circled round to your front, cutting between you and the straw man. Still sitting in the mud, you didn't dare look up. Ser Arlan might've done a shit job raising you — never teaching you to be a lady or a knight — but he'd taught you well enough when to keep your head low. And in a tourney camp crawling with highborn whelps — the kind who wore fancy boots in stormy weather — it was always safer to study the ground.
Lowly, you asked, "And what problem's that, m'lord?"
He answered simply. "I've never played Knights and Maidens."
"What?" That was insanity! "What boy's never played Knights and Maidens before?"
"A boy kept too busy."
"No boy's too busy for play," you argued, thinking how you and Dunk used to turn even the most mundane chores into games. Grooming horses meant you'd become stablehands in some high lord's household. Preparing supper turned you into hopeful chefs seeking prestige in the Free Cities. Even bathing could become a game whenever Dunk's spirits were high enough to indulge your desire to be an ironborn sailor seeking proof of merpeople.
"Some are," said Fancy Boots.
You scoffed without thinking. "What a load of bollocks."
Quiet, barked Ser Arlan. The words he spoke next were harsh yet mournful, etched into your mind over a thousand times. Do you know all it takes to be rid of a flea like you? A lordly hand slammed down on it. Insignificant as they find you, they probably won't notice the schmear of blood you leave behind.
Fortunately for you, the prim voice seemed to find your rashness amusing.
"Play was a rare commodity when I was a boy. There were not many children in the keep where I was raised. My cousins lived well away — a blessing and a curse. My choice in playmates had been limited to those charged to shape me into a master swordsman by the age of two-and-ten."
How tragic, you almost said.
But the voice went on. "I suppose there was always my father, though I cannot say a man who has earned the name Breakspear would've had much interest in teaching his heir to wield sticks."
Thunder boomed, rattling the world.
"Breakspear," you repeated dumbly. "As in…"
"Baelor Breakspear."
Prince of Dragonstone. Hand of the King. Protector of the Realm and heir to the Iron Throne.
Oh, Seven fucking—
Was it too late to urge the gods to your side? You were willing to forgive them for casting misfortune upon you in your fight with the straw man so long as they would now command the ground to open up and swallow you whole. You said a prayer in your head. Prayed hard, hoping to gain their attention.
But the gods were not kind. Or perhaps it was simply that you had never been anointed in holy oils and named in their light, so they didn't know who the fuck you were or why you were speaking to them.
Whatever the reason, the ground beneath you stayed disappointingly solid.
"My prince!" You slipped and slid in an attempt to get on your feet. When it became evident that the mud and your limbs had no plan to cooperate, you kept your head low out of embarrassment now and bleated, "Forgive me, I—…I'm such a dunce sometimes! My guardian always said so, my brother still says so, and clearly they're both onto something because now I've went and made a complete idiot of myself in front of—"
Prince Valarr Targaryen, heir to the heir of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, chuckled softly at you.
"At ease."
You would've scoffed if you weren't so terrified.
At ease. Didn't he know? Ease was an impossibility now. The rest of your life was like to be spent with this damned anxiety roaring in your veins. At ease. Was he godsdamned idiot? Ease was something no lowborn girl could afford in the presence of a highborn lord — let alone a dragon prince!
A bit of motion stole your attention.
Looking up — just barely, not enough to see any higher than his hips — you caught the prince removing one of his gloves. He tucked it into his belt. Extended his bare hand down to you, offering, you realized with a strange tightening in your belly, to help you up out of the mud.
You studied his hand with the cautious consideration of a feral dog.
His nails were short, strikingly clean. His fingers were long and slender, captivating in such a way that made you linger on them, teeth worrying your bottom lip. His moon-white palm managed to appear velvet-smooth and rough callused at once, accustomed to luxury yet familiar with the leather bite of a sword's hilt.
Your eyes went higher.
Blue-toned veins — filled with dragon's blood, you thought wondrously — traveled upwards beneath the skin of his wrist to disappear beneath the neatly cuffed fabric of a black tunic. The rain had soaked the fabric. It clung to his forearm, accentuated the lean muscle of his bicep. Stop looking, you told yourself. But you couldn't.
At his shoulder began a sleeveless leather coat that had been etched to give the appearance of dragon scales. A simple silver clasp fastened the coat low on his throat. His throat was as moon-white as his palms, appearing soft and elegant, yet spattered with…mud? No, not mud. The gods touch, you thought, undiscovered constellations blown delicately over flesh.
Freckles.
You begged your eyes to look down, then. To stop traveling any higher.
They did not listen.
Wet hair the color of dark caramel lay plastered to the prince's forehead. Raindrops glided over neat brows, down an artfully carved nose, cheeks that possessed enough of youth's roundness to give him a slight boyish appeal. His lips were the dusty pink of spring roses. His jaw was strong, confident.
You disliked him for every detail you couldn't help but notice.
Making peace with the fact that it might be taken for an insult, you ignored the prince's offer to help and once again pushed your palms into the mud. Mercifully, the mud and your limbs seemed to have reached a temporary truce. You stood with minimal struggle.
You could've sworn Prince Valarr frowned as his hand fell back to his side. But the expression was gone before you could be certain, replaced by regal composure that — frustratingly — was not at all unkind.
You forced a proper tone and chose words that wouldn't make you sound like the Flea Bottom scum he surely recognized you as. "Truly, my prince, I must ask for your forgiveness—"
"Freely given."
"—I hadn't expected anyone else to have use of the yard this late—"
His brow furrowed. "I fear you're mistaken," he tried saying.
But you kept on speaking over him. "—I'll take my leave now, " you said before remembering the scraps of etiquette the old man had tried drilling into you, adding, "If it please you, that is."
Prince Valarr blinked at you, his lips parting. With the first wordless sound that came out — shocking, in retrospect, since you hadn't known that a prince could be made speechless, nor what it said about you that you had been the one to make him so — you expected to be aptly dismissed. After all, the prince surely had better things to do than stand in a downpour listening to some girl in roughspun spew poorly memorized courtesies at him.
But then his gaze flitted downwards, neat brows furrowing.
"Where are your shoes?" he asked.
Your cheeks caught fire. "I must go," you squeaked.
He commanded you to stay — though perhaps begged was a more fitting descriptor.
No matter, the irrefutable law that was a prince's word kept your bare feet firmly planted, the mud between your toes suddenly wetter, squishier, more shameful.
"I assure you," Prince Valarr said, still gathering his bearings in this unusual interaction, "I have no use of the yard. I was on a walk, clearing my head, seeking a break from— Never mind that. What is important is that I was headed back to Lord Ashford's castle when I heard your…" amusement twitched at the corners of his mouth "…battle cry, I suppose you'd call it. I wrongly assumed it belonged to some squire putting in extra practice to impress his ser. I had thought to offer a hand, if they wished it." His eyes — so strange, the prince's eyes, one brown and one blue — flicked briefly toward the bare hand you had refused, hanging wet and useless at his side.
His voice remained kind, if slightly smaller than before. "My gut tells me that you are no squire, however."
"What gave it away?" you asked too quickly. "That I was fighting with a stick or that I've got tits?"
Muscle memory made you wince, expecting a clout on the ear from Ser Arlan. Was it a crime to say tits in front of a prince? Surely not!
Although…
You dismissed your fearful thoughts before they could fully form. Even if it were a crime — which it wasn't — the royal family wouldn't have brought a headsman with them to a simple tourney, would they?
You could almost see Ser Arlan thoughtfully stroking his beard. People can be hanged anywhere, he would've told you.
Oh, Mother, Maid, and Crone! you silently cursed yourself. You really needed to mind your tongue. Dunk would never let you live it down if you went and got yourself hanged over something so stupid as saying tits. Just couldn't put a lock on that big mouth of yours, could you? he'd grumble while pulling Ser Arlan's sword — his sword, now — from its scabbard to resentfully challenge the sentencing passed by the most powerful House in Westeros.
If Prince Valarr had interest in seeing you with rope around your neck, however, he did a good job at hiding it.
"The stick," he blurted out, then lowered his head, shaking it. "I beg you take no offense." What? You were the one with the fool's tongue — shouldn't he be offended? "Were it not so dark and the rain not so heavy," he continued rambling, "then surely I would've noticed that—"
"I have great tits?" Fuck.
A flush spread over Prince Valarr's moon-white cheeks. He fought hard to suppress a boyish grin. "That you're a lady," he corrected.
Oh.
Well.
That was decidedly more courteous than what you had said, wasn't it?
"No offense—uhm—taken, my prince. But I should correct you: I'm no lady."
You had played at being a lady before, on the rare but joyous occasions when you, Dunk, and Ser Arlan would spend a night or two in some lesser lordling's modest keep. You would meander through the halls, yammering about silks and jewels, making up complicated names for what you had convinced Dunk were real embroidery terms. Should I not perfect my curtswythian knotable before the next women's court, you'd tell him in a posh accent, Septa Schmooly will have my hide.
Sometimes, if the keep was fancy enough and no one was around to laugh at you, you would even play at being queen.
You cast your eyes downward. Absently began to scrape muddy filth out from under your fingernails.
Those were only ever games, as stupid and pointless as Knights and Maidens, pretending a stick could be a sword. The lords and ladies that ruled this world had the blood of mighty stags and howling wolves. What was in your blood? you wondered.
In the back of your mind, Ser Arlan sorrowfully answered: Fleas.
Prince Valarr paid no mind to your correction.
"Why use a stick?" he asked suddenly. "Are the practice swords not to your liking?"
"No, my prince, that's not— I'm sure the practice swords are fine, but…" You debated telling him the truth. Sighed. "My brother asked the 'prentice of Lord Ashford's master-at-arms if I could use them, but Lord Ashford… His master-at-arms said his lordship would prefer I not touch the weapons, even the practice ones."
"Did he say why?"
Your answer was stiff. "A woman's softness. Apparently Lord Ashford thinks it taints the grip, casting bad luck upon learning knights."
You expected the prince to agree. Why wouldn't he? Prince or lord, one highborn was as bad as the next.
But Prince Valarr snorted.
"Now there's a true dunce," he said. "Taints the grip! Have you ever heard something so ignorant? I suppose Lord Ashford also believes that grumpkins will eat his liver if he drinks cow's milk past midnight, hm? What a fool," he laughed. "My cousin Aerion has quite the talent for saying preposterous things, but I fear Lord Ashford may now have him beat."
Amusement bubbled out of you. You clamped a muddy hand over your mouth before it could become a fit, but your grin remained.
Prince Valarr seemed pleased to have earned this reaction.
He gestured to the covered weapon's area on the other side of the training yard. All the good steel had been loaded up in a wagon several hours before the storm had rolled in, taken to the armory so they wouldn't rust. But several wooden short swords remained, hanging on a weapon's rack alongside a busted bow and a morning star that had had several of its steel spikes broken off.
"Take your pick, my lady."
It was your turn to be speechless.
"But…Lord Ashford said…"
"If Ashford takes issue with my decision, I'll pay him in silver for each sword you taint. I'll even throw in a golden dragon for any knight who can prove he's been cursed by your softness." He gestured again. "Take what you wish. You have my word that no harm will come to you for it."
You chewed your bottom lip, questioning how much a prince's word was really worth.
Prince Valarr turned to leave.
"Wait!"
His back was to you, though mismatched eyes watched you from over his shoulder. At this angle, you noticed that a pure white streak slashed through his dark caramel hair.
"I…" don't understand, you wanted to say. Princes were supposed to be cruel and selfish, disgusted by barefoot girls with poor manners, who played at being a knight and failed at being a lady. Why are you not cruel? you wanted to ask him. Why are you making it so hard for me to dislike you?
You settled on saying, "Thank you, my prince."
Prince Valarr smiled. Thunder rumbled at the same instant, the world flashing pale blue as lightning forked through the clouds. It painted the prince in a most lovely light. You had a feeling the prince looked lovely in most lights.
"Call me Valarr."
YOU AWOKE LATE the next morning, a pleasant ache in your muscles that could come only from a night spent swinging wooden swords at a straw man and pretending to shoot a broken bow.
Even with your eyes closed, you knew that Dunk and his little squire had already left the elm tree camp that was to be your home for the duration of the tourney at Ashford. Not because you possessed some innate sibling bond through which his absence could be felt — because you didn't, which was well enough since you weren't so sure you'd even want to be so thoroughly bonded to the clumsy oaf — but because Dunk had actually tried waking you hours earlier to join them in going to watch the day's first tilt, a kindhearted invitation that you had met with a loud groan of displeasure and a blind hand swatting at his face.
Dunk wouldn't hold the near assault against you. He knew you weren't a morning person.
If anything, Dunk was a kind enough that, if you were really lucky, you would sit up, open your eyes, and find a delicious breakfast sandwich waiting for you. Your mouth watered just thinking of it: thick pumpernickel bread stacked with a fried goose egg, extra goat cheese, onion sliced incredibly thin, and some of that garlic flavored sauce that the colorful Baratheon lord had let Dunk take from his party.
Gods…if Dunk had made you one of those, you might just run off to the tourney grounds to give him a big fat smooch.
Except not really. Because then you'd both start retching and your glorious breakfast sandwich would become predigested mush to be scarfed down by some unworthy opossum.
There could be no crueler fate.
Stretching arms-over-head, you sat up and forced your eyes to open.
Your heart stopped.
Waiting near your bare feet, which were still coated in dried mud from the night before, was not the breakfast sandwich you'd been hoping for.
Boots.
Black leather with scale-like details, silver accents that shined in the sunlight. Boots, that looked just about your size. Boots, finer than anything you had ever owned in your entire life.
A scrap of parchment lay beneath the toe of one of them. You scrambled for it, squinting at the pretty handwriting, doing your best to sound out the words.
Knights and ladies all have one thing in common: a need for proper footwear.
—V
a/n | i actually really liked writing this reader, she was a hoot. and valarr <3 thanks for reading and i hope you liked it! as always, comments and reblogs are massively appreciated, and sending me asks with earn you one of those breakfast sandwiches dunk makes <3
no use of yn. no descriptors for skin tone/height/weight etc. mentions of connington-typical red hair but nothing else. an angst-heavy love story that follows two young people fighting off the pressures of maintaining a dynasty. heavily informed by book lore because I’m a huge nerd.
part one - [3.6k]
the dragons seek betrothals for the men of age. each poor woman in the kingdoms is dragged to the capital, ready to be bargained for // no warnings
part two - [4.5k]
life in the red keep sees lady connington suffering the disappearances of loved ones and strange ultimatums // no warnings
part three - [10.5k]
a wedding and a bedding at last // smut & foul language
part four - [11.4k]
a honeymoon followed by love and loss in westeros. // smut, mentions of stillbirth & animal harm
part five - [14.2k]
the prince finds comfort in his station, recovering from loss and hardships. you finally begin to feel like one of the family // smut
part six - [11.8k]
good heavens, it's ashford! secrecy and the dangers of living as royalty // traumatic injury & gore. animal harm. smut
part seven - [12.4k]
life in the wake of the tourney presents both opportunity and strife // childbirth. depictions of traumatic head injury. happy (unofficial) ending!
𓂃 in which valarr gives you a clumsy first kiss and gets flustered after, but you, his wife, decide that you can practice together.
𓂃 The kiss had been nothing like the songs.
Valarr had leaned in with all the grace of a duck attempting to curtsey. His nose had bumped yours first with a small, undignified thunk that made your eyes fly open in surprise. Then he'd panicked, jerked forward, and somehow managed to catch your upper lip with his teeth.
Not dreamily.
Like a man trying to eat a very small, very slippery grape.
It was not his fault, not really. You two got married too young, too soon, it was what his father expected and so did yours. So you two obeyed and married. Barely had the time to exchange a word before you were standing in the Sept of Baelor under the prying eyes of the court.
You made a sound he prayed to the Gods that it wasn’t a laugh. He pulled back so fast you swore to hear his neck crack. His pale face, already flushed from too much wedding wine, had turned the color of a ripe tomato.
He had been kissed before, but briefly. Nothing more than a little peck in the lips from a pretty wench Aerion had brought for him. He rejected any other suggestions from her because his father taught him to maintain decorum and to be a good prince.
"I'm sorry” he said. Then, louder: "I'm so sorry."
The Sept was empty now. The guests had dispersed about an hour ago, retreating to the Red Keep for the feast in the carriages. You were supposed to follow behind, but Prince Baelor insisted that you two needed some ‘alone time before the eyes of the Gods’ and nothing could’ve made you more nervous. The candles had burned low, guttering in their holders, casting long shadows across the marble floor. Somewhere outside, a servant was humming as they walked by.
And here you were. Husband and wife. Alone for the first time.
"That was—" you started.
"Awful” he finished miserably. "It was awful. You don't have to be kind. I've read the histories, I know what's expected of a husband on his wedding night, and I just—"
He made a vague, helpless gesture at his own face. "My nose. I think it’s too big. I've always suspected it. Now I have proof."
You stared at him.
The Prince of Dragonstone was muttering about the size of his nose and you started to laugh.
Not a delicate, lady-like giggle. A real laugh.
Valarr lowered his hands. His hair was falling into his eyes, and his expression shifted from mortification to confusion to something that looked almost like hurt.
"You're laughing at me” he said.
"Yes” you agreed, still laughing. "I'm so sorry. I am. I truly am." You wiped your eyes with the back of your hand. "But you bit my lip, my prince."
"I know." His voice was small.
"And you said your nose was too big."
"It is too big."
"It's a perfectly normal nose."
"It’s a genes thing" he said miserably. "All my ancestors had them. My grandsire has one. My father has one. I've just never—I've never done this before. Kissed someone. Properly. And now I've ruined it."
He sat down heavily on the edge of the statue of The Mother, looking for all the world like a man awaiting execution. "You probably want to go back to your own chamber. I wouldn't blame you. I'll tell everyone it was my fault. I'll tell them I snore. I do snore, actually. So that wouldn't even be a lie."
You looked at him, this strange, solemn, earnest boy-man who was your husband now. The songs had promised you fire and passion, a kiss that would make your knees weak. They had promised you a dragonlord, fierce and bold. Instead, you had gotten a flustered prince.
And somehow, you found that much better. You wouldn’t change him for some bad-tempered Targaryen with the seed of madness. This was much warmer, much tender. He was.
You crossed the room and sat down beside him.
"My prince” you said quietly.
“Please—just Valarr. I’m your husband now.”
“Valarr” you moved closer "Look at me."
He turned his head. His mismatched eyes were wary, braced for rejection. You reached out and took his hand. His fingers were cold. You laced yours through them anyway.
"You’re right, you're my husband. But didn’t know what I was agreeing to when I said my vows. And neither did you"
“What i did know is that husband and wife learn together.”
A pause. "Although, to be fair, I didn't know your kissing skills were quite so memorable.”
He almost smiled. "That's cruel” he said, but there was no heat in it. "You're being cruel to me on our wedding night, my lady.”
"I'm being honest on our wedding night. There's a difference." You squeezed his hand.
"The songs are wrong, you know. About all of it. About love at first sight, about perfect kisses, about everything being easy and beautiful and right the moment you look into someone's eyes."
His brow furrowed. "They are?"
"They are” you said firmly. "My mother told me. This morning she said that the first kiss would probably be terrible. That it almost always is. That it takes practice, like everything else.“
Valarr was quiet for a long moment. Then, very softly: "Your mother sounds wise."
"She is." You leaned your shoulder against his. "And I think, maybe, we should practice. If you want."
He turned to look at you. His face was still flushed, but something in his expression had shifted, less like a miserable man and more like a man who had just been offered a plate of lemon cakes.
"Practice” he repeated.
"Practice."
"You're not going to laugh at me again?"
"I make no promises” you said solemnly. "But I'll try very hard not to."
He considered this. Then, slowly, he raised his free hand and touched your cheek. His palm was warm now, or perhaps your skin was just cold. You couldn't tell. You couldn't think, suddenly, with him looking at you like that.
"I should warn you” he said quietly, "I'm still not very good at this."
"Good thing we have the rest of our lives, then."
He smiled.
It was the first real smile you had seen from him, not the tight, polite smile when you first met, it was small and a little bit shy, and it made his whole face change. Made him look even younger.
"All right” he said. "Practice."
This time, when he leaned in, he was careful. Slow. You closed your eyes and felt the soft brush of his nose against yours and the whisper of his breath on your lips. He hesitated for just a moment, as if asking silent permission.
You gave it.
The kiss was nothing like the songs.
It was clumsy in a different way, too much pressure, then not enough, a brief moment where you both seemed to forget which way to tilt heads. You felt him smile against your mouth, felt your own lips twitch in response, and broke apart laughing, foreheads pressed together, breath mingling in the space between you.
"That was still not very good” he admitted.
"No” you agreed. "But it was better."
He pulled back just enough to look at you. His eyes were bright, almost teasing now, the solemn mask well and truly discarded.
"Again?" he asked. “Please?”
You reached up and cupped the back of his neck, drawing him down.
"Again”
And the third time with his hand finding the small of your back and your fingers tangling in his hair, the third time was not perfect either. But his lips brushed so softly against yours that you melted. And so did he.
a/n: please tell me the dialogue wasn’t corny or anything otherwise i’ll just kms i stared at the screen for a while trying to find the right words, jesus.
summer is a room (i) | professor!baelor targaryen x reader
ೃ⁀➷ this is part four of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.
Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), professor/student relationship so therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), explicit sexual content, PiV sex, choking, brief drug use, angst, reader POV, no Y/N.
Word Count: 10k
Author Notes: This is one half of reader & Baelor's summer between her 2nd and 3rd (final!) years of grad school. My semester's finishing up so hopefully the wait for part 5 won't be as long. Thanks for bearing with me, I love chatting with y'all and I hope I've cooked up something tasty with this massive chapter <3
do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!
Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)
Summer is a room of unopened windows. Open me of this oppression. This deviant solstice in which I watch you from across the garden. It’s enough, isn’t it? I can live off of this.
—Lisa Marie Basile, “saint of fixation”
It’s a win-win arrangement. He gets housesitting services: someone to bring in his mail, water his plants, keep the kitchen from accumulating dust while he spends the summer with his family in the Stormlands. You get a place to stay in the gap before your new lease starts, a full house where the sink actually functions and you’re not awoken at two in the morning by the refrigerator making a startling new noise. There’s the massive bed all to yourself, too. The fancy coffee machine. The little fenced-in garden where you can fall asleep to the sound of his neighbor playing the saxophone in the early evening hours. You’re the one who’s benefitting, mainly.
Don’t hurry back, you’d joked when he handed over his spare key. The kiss he’d given you before he loaded his suitcase into his car and driven off into the humid morning still haunts your lips. No promises, sweet girl, he said.
You love his townhouse, you always have. You love the softness of his kitchen. You love the morning light that douses the living room and the evening light that turns the bedroom burnt orange. You love picking a book off of his well-stocked shelves and spending the whole weekend lingering in its pages. You’ve never, not once in your life, lived in a place so stable and comfortable and indulgent. Playing homeowner while you cook breakfast in nothing but your underwear and one of his shirts has to be some sort of fantasy.
But summer, that lazy beast that settles its hot chest against every crevice of King’s Landing, is long. Painfully so. Three weeks into his absence, you’re ready to eat your words. You’d give anything for him to hurry back to you.
The hours go slow while you babysit the library circulation desk. It’s a decent gig. You can at least play with the beginnings of essays and poems while you sit there. Mostly, though, you stare into midair and wonder about Baelor. About Summerhall, the family estate that he talks about as if it’s a magical realm. You picture him in those white linen shirts you’d seen him packing. In your imagination, he’s some sort of prince in his gorgeous palace, standing on a balcony while the wind makes a crown out of his gray-streaked curls.
“Tell me about the library. Did anyone check out anything interesting today?” He asks when he calls to check in. You’re lucky he can’t see you rolling your eyes.
“It was fine. I spent three hours looking for a law textbook that someone had put in the engineering section, that was fun.” You sigh and sip at the cocktail you’d made yourself with his nice whiskey. “I want to hear about you.”
“What about me?” He chuckles, always sounding a little surprised that you’re as interested in the mundanities of his day as he is in yours.
“I don’t know. Did you win at polo or shooting or whatever it is you rich people do?” It’s only half of a joke. You think he has mentioned shooting with his brother at some point.
“You’ll be disappointed.” There’s a shuffling noise in the background; you imagine him laying back on silken sheets beneath a canopied bed. “I spent most of today in the study.”
Of course. All the luxury in the world and he’s probably hunched over some absurdly expensive antique desk, scribbling away at peer reviews until his eyes water. His attachment to his work is fascinating. Devastating, too. You’d seen the leather satchel he packed, stuffed fuller than his suitcase had been. Papers packed tight. All begging for attention. Sometimes you wonder what he thinks will happen if he puts it down. It’s not the worst addiction he could have, but it’s an addiction nonetheless.
“You should be having fun,” you chide him, sounding more like a mother than a… well, whatever you are to him. A something-more-than-casual-hookup, something-less-than-girlfriend, it seems. You try not to let the ambiguity eat at you, but gods, it’s got sharp teeth.
“I could say the same for you.” Well, he’s got you there. “You have the money I left you.”
“That’s for emergencies.” You scoff. You’d taken one look at the envelope he’d left on the kitchen table and had felt dizzy. Whatever he thinks the going rate is for housesitting, he must’ve multiplied it by five.
“That’s for you, sweet girl.” The lowness in his voice, amplified by the rasp of the phone, makes your thighs clench. “Use it. You deserve it.”
“Fine.” As if it’s some horrible task, spending his money on fun. And yet you’re certain that you’ll feel guilty about it. Money might be a toy in his family. For you, it’s a tension headache.
The clock’s pushing one in the morning and you’ve moved from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom by the time you hear him make his time to go sigh. “I ought to go to bed. You’ll tell me if you need anything? You can text me anytime, you know that.”
“I know.” You have your phone perched on his pillow. Eyes closed, sheets cocooned around you, you can almost pretend that he’s right there.
“Good night, sweet girl.”
“Good night,” you murmur, and then, “I miss you.”
“I know.”
There’s a part of you that’s made bolder by the fact that he’s not really there. It scratches at the inside of your ribcage and makes you want to say things that you shouldn’t say. With your head tucked into the blankets that are steeped in his scent, your I miss yous sound more and more like I love yous every time he calls. You could almost let your guard down. You could almost let yourself say what you really mean.
But then your eyes are opening to emptiness and the blue light of the phone, and his metallic voice saying just before he hangs up: “I miss you, too.”
Summer is doing something strange to you.
It’s not the heat. Well, it’s not just the heat, because you’re no exception to its heavy, vicious presence. The aircon tries its best, but when the sun reaches its apex and the streets radiate so hot you can taste the asphalt in the air, no one can escape it. You’re pouring sweat the whole walk home from campus. The second you step into the townhouse, your drenched clothes get stripped off and kicked into a sad little pile while you stand in front of the open fridge in your underwear and chug water like your life depends on it.
But then there are the dreams. Hazy, fractured, they stick to the inside of your skull like bits of wet confetti. You’ve started scratching lists into your journal first thing in the morning. An attempt to remember, to find meaning in the recurring symbols. Feathers, ink stains, someone’s hands all bloodied-up. Each night feels like a trip to some mysterious place that leaves you bone-weary and befuddled when you wake.
And amidst it all: Baelor. The lack of him winds itself into a needy cord around your neck. Strangles you while you retreat into your own mind during the long hours at the circulation desk. You’re more lust-struck than you’ve ever been in your life. Hands constantly scrambling to sate the need, each time you come around your own fingers you’re only deepening the void in your gut.
The evenings that Baelor doesn’t call spread like jam, thick and viscous. You languish in the muggy air, half-asleep, feeling an emotion you can’t put a name to. On the horizon: clouds looming heavy over Blackwater Bay. There’s a thunderstorm building, threatening to break.
You’re in the middle of a dream where your teeth are falling out when your phone rattles you awake. A groggy Hello? while your tongue prods the corners of your mouth, making sure that everything’s where it ought to be. The sheets have embedded little wrinkles onto your arms and cheeks. A sheen of sweat swaddles you while you peel yourself upright. There’s air humming through the vents and the overhead fan is doing its best, but you can tell the aircon is straining to keep up.
“Did I wake you, love?”
“No,” you mutter, blinking the sleep out of your eyes, “no, sorry, I’m awake.”
A little chuckle on the other end, probably him hearing right through your lie. “You work too much, you need your rest. I can call back—”
“No, please?” You can’t hide how needy you are. “Tell me about your day?”
You put him on speaker while you stumble downstairs, pouring yourself the tallest, iciest glass of water possible. He clearly didn’t take your commandment to have fun very seriously. Peer reviewing articles, editing syllabi for the fall term, helping his brother with business… his day sounds about as tedious as yours. You hmm and uh huh? while he talks, investigating the thermostat (which claims it’s about ten degrees cooler than it actually feels).
Funny, though. He sounds lighter. You’d go so far as to say excited, though nothing he reports seems particularly exciting.
“Can’t believe you,” you tease when he’s finished. “You know you’re allowed to take a break? No one’s going to kill you for it.”
“Work comes before play, you know that.”
“I’m not talking about play. I mean an actual break. Do nothing for a day, I dare you. Go stare at the clouds.” You’ve never seen him truly idle in all the time you’ve known him. Always fretting over a task, no matter how small: making tea, reorganizing a stack of papers, taking a call from one of his sons or brothers. The notion of him sitting somewhere, hands empty, eyes unfocused, is as strange and unsettling as your tooth dream.
“What about you, sweet girl?” He asks, oh-so-conveniently changing the focus back to you. “Did you use the money I left you?”
“Mhm.” You cast a sideways look at the untouched envelope on the kitchen table while you formulate some sort of story. “Um, I got my nails done.”
“Good girl. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Stop that.” It’s sinful, how cocky he sounds, praising you for spending his money. “D’you want me to bankrupt you or something?”
“You’d have to try awfully hard to do that, love,” he says. You can hear the smirk in his voice. Fucking rich boy. No matter how well he hides it, he’ll always be part of a class so far above you that he might as well live among the clouds. You, with your student loans quietly gaining interest and the odd collection of part-time jobs you’ve been working since you were fourteen… you’re solidly in the dirt of the world.
“You’d better start working on an airtight prenup, then.”
Fuck. Stupid joke. Your smile fades into thin air, skin prickling as if the room’s suddenly gone cold. You should know better than to use marriage as a punchline. It’s one of those lines you leave uncrossed with him, even if it hovers between the both of you like a loaded gun. Of course you’d be reckless enough to pull the trigger at some point.
“About that,” he says, in a tone that you can’t read over the phone. Heart pulsing out of control, your mouth goes dry and your brain comes up with a hundred possibilities for what he’s about to say next, each one more disastrous than the last.
“Uh huh?”
“I told my boys that I’m seeing someone,” he says.
“Oh.”
Genuinely dumbstruck, a long moment goes by before your brain fully processes what he’s said.
“Um, did you tell them that… like, how we met, or—”
“I said we met on campus. I think it’s best to leave it at that.” There’s a rumble of an inhale or an exhale. “But I told them that you’re a writer. That you work at the library. They’d like to meet you.”
“I’d love that,” you say so quickly, giddy with nerves, “I’d love to meet them, honestly. Anytime. If that’s alright with you.”
“I’ll figure out a time. Thank you, sweet girl.”
You’re not sure what to say. You’re not sure what to do with your hands. You’re standing in the middle of his kitchen, still bleary from your evening nap, feeling like a bomb just went off. Seismic tremors ripple through your bones. The sun glints off of your phone screen and casts a shiny, trembling reflection onto the wall.
The lie by omission doesn’t even bother you. You’d gladly play along with whatever story he wants to tell so he doesn’t have to admit that you were his student. You’re real. Not some nameless secret. Something more means that you’re someone who gets to meet his sons. His brothers someday, maybe. You’re someone who can fit into his life. Someone who might end up in one of those picture frames over the mantle someday.
It’s all you wanted, really. A dream come suddenly, shockingly true.
There’s some sort of muffled conversation on the other end of the call. “I’m sorry, sweet girl. More business. I’ll call you tomorrow?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course.” You stutter through the big, stupid grin on your face. “Talk to you then.”
“Good. Good night, love.”
“Good night.” You say, and then: “I love you.”
There’s the briefest silence.
Your breath hitches in your throat.
And then the call ends.
Fuck.
You’ve said it before, haven’t you? Surely you’ve let it slip by now. Gods, you’ve probably thought it a thousand times. While you’re falling asleep next to him. While he’s inside you. While he’s making you tea and hmm-ing while he reads your writing. He’s called you “love,” but that’s different. You’d use that with children, with shy undergrads who are nice to you in the library, with a seagull, for fuck’s sake. But as you stand there in the stark stillness of the kitchen, wracking your brain, you come up blank.
Maybe he hadn’t heard you? You try to replay the conversation in your memory. How long had that pause been, between you blurting out I love you and him hanging up? It feels like a whole handful of seconds had gone by, but maybe you’re remembering it wrong. Maybe he’d hung up in the middle of you saying it. There was someone in the background, maybe he was distracted by them. Maybe you broke up a little.
Or maybe he heard you loud and fucking clear. And didn’t say it back.
“Fuck.” You hiss. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck!”
Your phone clatters to the floor. Typical you. Shattering all the happiness you’d worked so hard to build. Fucking idiot, you curse yourself, whole body slipping into panic. Hands shaking while you fetch your phone off the hardwood, you’re trying to avoid going into full cardiac arrest when you look down and see that it’s pulled up your emergency contact screen.
Fucking hells. If this doesn’t constitute an emergency, you’re not sure what does.
It takes all of two rings for that familiar accent to greet you, bright and buoyant as ever. “Hey! I was just thinkin’ of you, isn’t that funny?”
“Dunk,” you warble, “I fucked up.”
“Winger!”
The pub’s packed tight. Saturday night, and there’s a football game on. King’s Landing Dragons versus Winterfell Direwolves. You bump your way past a stag party hogging the bar. The group of guys bang their fists and chant while the groom-to-be chugs his beer. The first daters, the uni friends, the girl groups mingling with the guy groups, all the usual suspects are there.
“Oi, Winger!”
You follow the sound to the corner, because even in the middle of all the chaos, you’ve at least got the certainty that Winger means you. And sure enough, you find him there: Duncan, tall and solid as ever, wrapping you in the sturdiest hug you’ve ever felt as soon as you lay eyes on him.
“You grew!” You giggle while you’re smushed against his chest. Your go-to line for as long as you can remember. Maybe he has grown, you wonder when he finally sets you down. He looks different. Good. He’s grown his hair out, shoulder-length and shiny as fresh copper even in the low lights. But those blue eyes, that scrappy old flannel with the hole in the cuff… he’s the same Duncan who you met when you were eight, that lost puppy of a boy who latched onto you as much as you did him.
“Nah, only sideways,” he grins, patting his gut (where you’re absolutely certain there’s nothing but abs). “Hey, you alright?”
He probably knows the answer is no. You look as tired as you feel. You’d been on the phone with him until the small hours of the morning, ranting and crying and pouring yourself shot after shot of Baelor’s top-shelf whiskey. Even now, the smell of alcohol in the air makes your stomach turn. The fact that you’ve wrestled yourself out of bed and taken the ferry all the way to Dragonstone is a fucking miracle.
“I’m fine.” You shrug, which means not at all.
“It’s fine if you’re not, y’know.” Mercifully, though, he changes the subject before all the weariness and heartache can claw its way to the surface again. “Hey, come meet my friends.”
He introduces you to Raymun—Fossoway, as in Fossoway Cider? you ask, and he just nods his mop of dark curls and blushes—and Raymun’s fiancée Rowan. Duncan fetches you a club soda while you get the full story about the whirlwind romance, the engagement, the wedding plans. They’re a funny couple. Finishing each other’s stories. Her correcting the details about how exactly he’d proposed. Him babbling about how he’d chosen the ring. You get a full slideshow of picture after picture of their baby, too: Rosie, three months old, apparently being fawned over by Rowan’s girlfriends for the evening.
“She’s Daddy’s girl through and through,” Rowan sighs, and Raymun just beams with pride.
“Aye, but she’s got her Mum’s good looks.” There’s a cheeky little look between them. Like they’re sharing a joke you’re not in on.
It’s sweet, though. How comfortable they are with each other. How they ebb and flow, how they tease and flirt. You’d be more charmed by it if you weren’t struck by the crushing question of whether you and Baelor could ever have it so easy.
Maybe you could’ve, if you hadn’t gone and royally fucked it up.
“So Duncan says you’re a writer?”
“Yeah,” you cringe internally, always so graceless making small talk about yourself. “Um, I’m in grad school at KLU. It’ll be my last year this fall.”
“Ugh.” Raymun catches himself. “Sorry. Nothing to do with you, I promise.”
“He’s got a thing about King’s Landing,” Rowan adds for him. “Hates the fancy folks. The Velaryons, the Celtigars, all them.”
“It’s the Targaryens mostly, but I—”
“Oi!” She elbows him in the ribs. “She’s fucking dating one of them, idiot. Remember what Duncan said? Have some class.”
“Oh! Right, sorry. No, I didn’t mean… it’s nothing personal, just, like, the principle,” Raymun scrambles sheepishly. You’re sure, from the looks on their faces, that you’ve gone a bit stiff. Residual pride puffs up your chest, even if today you’d gladly rant about the “fancy folks” and how much they tend to set your nerves aflame.
“That’s alright.” You manage a lopsided smile. “I get it. They’re not for everyone.”
Duncan, always your savior, swoops back in with another round of drinks. “Hey, pool table’s open. You want to play?”
“No mate, I’m shit,” Raymun insists, but he looks all too happy to be strong-armed into a game.
“You boys do that.” Rowan nudges you. “Fancy some air?”
Outside, you can hear the cheers and groans as the football game enters the second half. Rowan takes a hit of her cherry-flavored vape while the pair of you lean against the brick exterior and bask in the lukewarm breeze. Across the street, a pack of drunk uni boys whistles at the pair of you. Fuck off! you both yell back at the same time.
“Gods, sorry,” you wince. Rowan gives you a quizzical look, cocking a perfectly-plucked eyebrow.
“Sorry for what? They were talking to you.”
“What?”
Judging from the way she gives an incredulous little chuckle, you must look properly astounded. “Yeah, babe. I’m not their type now, am I?”
“Are you serious?”
You wonder if there’s something wrong with your eyes. She’s gorgeous. If someone told an artist to draw a beautiful woman, they’d draw her. Even under the dull streetlights, her curls are a bright, soft crown. Perfectly messy, perfectly twirled into an effortless bun that you could never, ever hope to achieve. The v-neck of her emerald green top frames her tits just right. Her jeans might as well be custom fit from the way they hug her ass. She’s a goddess, a vision, the kind of woman who you feel a little embarrassed standing next to, and you’re just… well. You’re you.
“You should be everyone’s type,” you offer, directing your gaze back to the concrete before you seem as perverted as those boys across the street.
“Aw, thanks,” she grins. “Sorry about Raymun, by the way. He’s from the Reach, you know how they get all territorial.”
“It’s fine. Really. He seems lovely.”
“Yeah, he’s a nice one.” You can feel her eyes on you, parsing you apart. “How’s yours?”
“Mine?”
Gods, it feels strange to talk about Baelor like this: so casual, so open. Like your relationship is as typical as anyone else’s. You’ve spent a year having heart palpitations about the notion of anyone at the university finding out about the two of you, and now you’re calling him mine on the sidewalk for any of the tipsy passersby to hear.
“He’s good,” you reply after chewing on the inside of your cheek for a minute. “He’s away for the summer, actually. Visiting family and all that.”
“That’s too bad.” She offers you a sympathetic hit of her vape. “Nothing like reunion sex though, yeah? They’re fun when they’re all pent up.”
Coughing up a cherry-flavored cloud, laughter bubbles from deep down in your chest. It’s a strange sound. Something you haven’t heard in what feels like ages. Light as a baby bird, making your whole body sparkle with a nicotine-laced effervescence. Maybe this was what you’ve needed all along as the antidote to your hollowness: summer air, girlish giggling, conspiratorial smiles shared with a potential partner in crime.
And maybe it’s that lack of pretense, that clever warmth that Rowan has, that makes you blurt out: “I told him I loved him last night.”
“Oh?”
“He didn’t say it back.” You’re wincing at yourself, but the floodgates are open and the rant tumbles out all at once. “I mean, it was right before I hung up, so maybe he didn’t hear me? But I think he probably did. And just before that, he said he told his sons about me and that they wanted to meet me, so I thought… I dunno, it just slipped out, but I thought it made sense, you know?”
“Maybe you just shocked him,” she reasons. “It’s one thing to think it, it’s another to hear it, yeah?”
Well. It all sounds so simple when she puts it like that.
You gnaw on your lip for a long minute. “What should I do?”
“If I were you? Nothing. You’ve said your bit, it’s his turn to say his.” Rowan tilts her head. “Aw, hey. Does he make you sad like this all the time?”
“No!” You’re quick to protest. “No, he’s perfect. I really do love him. It’s just… it’s hard sometimes.”
“Yeah, well. That’s just how it is, ain’t it?”
A car rumbles by, boosted bass making the ground quiver beneath you. Craning your neck to look past the old rooftops, past the glow of King’s Landing shining from across the bay, you stare into the night sky and just breathe. Messy you. Foolish, fucked-up, poetic you, always entangling yourself in complications because it’s more comfortable for you that way. You’ve been drifting in the atmosphere of your confusion. Untethered. And beside you, Rowan tucks her vape back in her pocket, a friendship one hour old and already pulling you back down to the ground.
“Hey, c’mon. Enough of that.” She gives you a playful nudge in the ribs. “Raymun really is shit at pool. Want to do a round of boys versus girls? You look like you could use a win.”
Breathy laughter drifting off on the wind, you rally your energy and find it shockingly renewed. “I could.”
Neither of you are a particularly skilled shot. But true to her word (and Raymun’s own), he really is utter shit. Drunken blush every time the cue strikes a ball at an awkward spot, he endures Rowan’s teasing all while staring at her with the widest, most starstruck eyes you’ve ever seen on a man. Team rivalry gets forgotten somewhere in the banter. You all lose track of the score and whose turn it is. They’re magnetized to each other’s sides, lips on necks and hands on hips, a sort of public foreplay that would make your stomach turn if it were anyone else. You’ll give them a pass. They’re too cute to hate.
“Hey, there she is!” Duncan claps as you sink the four ball, even though he’d spent ten minutes helping you set up the shot. His palm’s sweaty when he high-fives you. Big, toothy grin on his face. In the din of pop music from thirty years ago and angry football fans howling at the TV, you wrap your arms around his tree trunk frame and close your eyes. So solid, so constant. Your Dunk.
“Thanks for this,” you murmur into his shirt. “I missed you.”
He nests an innocent kiss onto the top of your head. “Missed you more, Winger.”
It’s two in the morning by the time you finally rattle the key into the lock of Baelor’s townhouse. Drunk on nothing but happiness. Humming some synth pop song the pub had on repeat. You’ve got girls’ night plans with Rowan in the works. A promise to Duncan to come to a match for the boys’ rugby team he’s started coaching. Every little nook of your heart feels so full. You pull out your phone and find two missed calls and two unread texts.
Please let me know when you get this.
I just want to know that you’re safe.
You tap out a reply and then toss your phone somewhere into the sea of bedsheets while you head for the shower.
i’m fine!
For once, maybe you mean it.
It’s not easy to do nothing. But you do it. Or, at least, you skirt as close to “nothing” as you can. A week later, phone on speaker propped against the mirror, makeup scattered across the vanity like a glittery bomb’s gone off, you don’t bring up that rogue “I love you”. You tell him about your plans for the night: mini-golf with Duncan, Rowan, and Raymun. You assure him that yes, you’ll pay for it with the money he left. You listen to his updates: his older son off to Tyrosh for an internship, his younger son invited on a beach holiday with school friends, his brother called into the city on business, all convenient excuses for him to shut himself in the library of his summer mansion and work until his eyes water. You let the conversation simmer in mundanity, pretending like nothing’s changed, like there’s not a needy creature pecking at your ribs from the inside, begging him to say it back.
“It’s good that you’re spending time with your friends,” he says. “I’m happy for you.”
There’s something taut about his voice. It makes your stomach flutter with nervousness. Are you? you’d push if you were bolder. I’m happy for you. I’m proud of you. I miss you. All these things he says, as if he’s steering toward a confession and slamming on the brakes at the last second. You bite your tongue while you swipe on another layer of your already-melting mascara. Silence has become your new accomplice. It stretches and stretches until it snaps.
“I should go.”
“Alright.” Disappointment dulls the excitement. “The aircon’s broken, by the way.”
“I’ll have it looked at.”
“Okay.” You wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. “Good night.”
There’s another pause. Breath held tight, you stare at the screen and wait. 45:05, the call time says. It ticks up and up. 45:06, 07, 08. You could say it again. Make sure he hears it. Double down, put all your cards on the table and dare him to make a move.
No. You’re doing nothing, you remind yourself. So you don’t.
“Good night, sweet—” is all you hear before you hang up.
There’s a man in the living room.
Still half-asleep, mouth dry, the margarita you’d split with Rowan last night making your stomach unsteady, you feel like you’ve stumbled into a bizarre little dream. Your detective instincts are slow to kick in. There’s no sign of a forced entry. He’s not shoving Baelor’s antique clock and silver candlesticks into a bag. If he’s a robber, he’s a fucking terrible one.
The stranger prods at the thermostat. Sleeves of his nicely-pressed white shirt rolled up, you have to stare for a moment at the sheer size of his forearms. Faint sweat stains make the contours of his biceps visible through the fabric. The aircon? you wonder, although he’s absurdly well-dressed. Maybe that’s just the kind of world that Baelor lives in, though. Even the electricians are clad in expensive watches and designer shoes.
“Hello?” You try your voice, finding it roughened by a morning rasp.
He turns, fixes you with a furrowed-brow look, eyes giving you a thorough once-over. A few strands of crisply-coiffed white hair cling to his forehead. He seems vaguely familiar, yet you can’t begin to think of who he reminds you of. You’re suddenly all too aware of the fact that you’re wearing nothing but a scrappy pair of panties and a three-sizes-too-big King’s Landing Dragons tee you’d dug out of Baelor’s closet.
“Ah,” he says. “The lady of the house.”
“Um…” your brain buffers. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone this soon.”
“Clearly.”
That wakes you up. Fancy electrician with an asshole scowl and the snark to match. Subtly trying to smooth your shirt further down your thighs, you consider whether it’s best to scramble back upstairs and leave him to his work or continue your strange journey to the kitchen for the cup of coffee that’s singing your name.
“Can I get you something to drink?” You offer, stomach growling, coffee winning out. “Tea or coffee?”
“Whiskey on the rocks,” he says, and your nervous laugh dies in your throat as you realize he’s not joking. “What, is the ice maker broken too?”
He digs into his back pocket as he swaggers through to the kitchen. You follow like a wide-eyed lost dog, stuttering faint protest when he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and nestles one between his lips. Massive hands pluck a matchbook from Baelor’s collection on the kitchen table—silver, emblazoned with a hotel logo—and strike a flame while you stand dumbfounded in the doorway.
“Seven hells,” the stranger grunts, flipping through the cabinets, “where does my fucking brother keep his glasses?”
Oh.
It all comes together. The white hair, the looming frame, the annoyance oozing from every pore. A recurring figure in half of the photographs in the house. The man you know Baelor’s talking about each time he says my brother with a sigh, half-frustration and half-fondness. Maekar.
“Other side of the sink.”
Ah, he huffs, fetching himself a glass. You let him pillage the liquor cabinet while you brew a pot of coffee. There’s no way you’re about to have this interaction without any caffeine in your body.
“Baelor didn’t say you were coming.” You try to sound nonchalant while the machine burbles and drips. Maekar makes himself completely at home at the kitchen table with his glass of whiskey in one hand and cigarette in the other.
“Used to be that I could drop in anytime I liked.” He drains half the shot in one sip. “But that was before you.”
Tucked against the corner cabinets, the air in the room feels impossibly humid and dense. It’s hard to read the expression playing out behind his well-groomed white beard. Accusation? Amusement? You feel like you’re going through the motions of your morning under a magnifying glass, cold eyes drilling into your every move. You know he’s judging your choice of attire. He’s probably judging which mug you choose from the cabinet: a hand-painted one that reminds you of the teacups Baelor had broken months ago. The almond milk you’re pouring into your coffee. The way you refuse to dirty a spoon just to properly mix the milk in, opting instead to just sip the too-bitter coffee while the white clouds settle to the bottom.
The more you stand there amidst the silence and the stares, the more you start to feel a sense of pride prickling at your chest. The townhouse has, for better or for worse, become the place you think of when you think about home. Your milk in the fridge. Your books strewn across the couch. Your hair getting caught in the drain of the tub. Maybe you won’t call him out on what this seems like to you—a nosy little brother taking advantage of a convenient opportunity to snoop—but you won’t shy away, either.
You clatter your mug onto the table, taking a seat and pointing at his nearly-empty pack of menthols. “D’you mind?”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he shrugs, sliding it across the table. You’re not a very well-practiced smoker, only ever indulging to look cool in front of handsome boys or to round out a night of drinks. Luck is on your side, though. You strike a match and take a drag without coughing.
“So was there a reason for you dropping in when you know your brother’s not here?” You dare to ask, meeting his steely gaze.
“Maybe I missed having a decent glass of whiskey.”
“Uh huh.” Doubtful, you tilt your head. “Like you can’t afford good whiskey?”
“I can afford it just fine,” he grumbles, “I gave this to him for his nameday. My fucking mistake, though. The distillery’s out of business now. Should’ve kept it for myself.”
Somehow, you doubt that. There’s a tenderness in the way he holds the bottle. A little smirk ghosts across his face. He seems like the kind of man who will whine and complain about wasting expensive liquor on his brother when really, deep down, he’s all chuffed with himself and his gift-giving abilities.
“Anyways. I thought I might do some investigating while I’m in the city,” he continues, blowing smoke sideways. “I’ve got this mystery, see.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“My brother.”
Can’t help with that one, you want to tell him. You’re still working at unraveling that particular mystery yourself.
Worry outweighs any clever remarks, though. “Is he alright?”
“He ought to be. It’s King’s Landing that usually makes him such a miserable old bastard, not Summerhall.” He quips. “Suppose that’s your doing, too.”
“You think he’s miserable?” Tired, you’d understand. Flustered, maybe, especially if he had heard your confession. But miserable… that makes you chew the inside of your cheek while your cigarette smoulders between your fingers. As much as you’re happy keeping Baelor at arm’s length while you wait for him to make a move, any move, you hate thinking of him wallowing his summer away.
“I think he’ll work himself to death if he gets the chance. And we don’t want that,” he raises an eyebrow, “do we?”
There’s a little guilt trip woven into that question. A hidden implication: that he’s only working as much as he is to distract himself from missing you. You’ve tried, you want to protest. It’s all you’ve been doing since he left. Gods, it’s a fucking bit between you two now. You’ve held up your end of the bargain, filling your evenings with Duncan and Rowan and Raymun instead of rotting away in the achingly empty bed.
Maybe you could’ve tried harder, though. Made less of a joke of it. Pushed him to put down the papers and the emails. Guilt twists your stomach in knots. Here you are, all proud of yourself for having a life beyond him, all while he’s shutting himself in a dark, lonely library like it’s a form of penance.
“Got any plans next week?”
“Hm? No.” Jarred back to reality, you rush to take one last drag of your cigarette before it burns out. Coffee washes the taste out of your mouth. Bitter replacing bitter. You can’t say that you have anything worth mentioning planned for the upcoming Midsummer holiday. With the University closed for the week, you were probably going to get drunk with Duncan and watch an obscene amount of reality TV.
“Come to Summerhall, then.” Maekar’s glass clinks as he sets it down, empty, the imprint of his lips fading on the rim. “At least the aircon functions there.”
“You’re sure that’d be alright?” You can’t deny the way you light up at the offer. Your mind conjures up images of rolling green hills, elaborate mansion halls cool and crisp even during the peak heat of the day, Baelor’s weight next to you as you fall asleep. It’s a tempting portrait.
“It’s my house, if I say it’s alright then it’s alright.” He coughs, forehead reddening. You watch him contemplating another glass of whiskey, ultimately deciding against it and pouring himself the dredges of the coffee you’d made.
“And I won’t be a bother? To your family?”
“Won’t be many of us this year.” No milk for him, but you could’ve guessed that. “His boys won’t be there, if that’s what you’re wondering. Me and him. My four youngest. Everyone else’s made a run for it.”
It’s exactly what you’d been wondering. Odd how those blue eyes seem to drill straight into your brain. You wish there were a book you could consult here. Is it alright to meet your maybe-boyfriend’s nieces and nephews before his sons? Is it acceptable to show up to his family’s summer mansion to stage a work-life balance intervention? When in this situation do you demand to know whether he loves you back?
“If you think he’ll be fine with it, then alright.”
“Good.” The way he says it makes you think that you didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. “You do own trousers, I hope.”
“No, I walk around Uni like this,” you deadpan, fighting sarcasm with sarcasm. Under different circumstances, you’d worry about making a good impression. Defer to shyness. The way this morning is going, though, you’ll be lucky if he gets a lukewarm impression from you.
Maekar just scoffs. “Careful, girl.”
Room heady with smoke and coffee, you breathe deep and wonder what you’re getting yourself into. There’s a thick, threatening undercurrent in the air. Tense as a warm front before it snaps. Nothing about it feels careful.
It’s raining when Baelor picks you up from the train station in Ashford. He lets you tuck yourself into your arms, lets you linger there in the parking lot, lets the steady drizzle dampen his hair while he holds you. I missed you so much, you murmur into his shirt, relishing in the way he kisses you. So what if there’s only two other cars around? It’s delightfully public, deliciously normal.
“I missed you, lovely girl,” he says, his wide hands wiping rain off of your forehead. Even with dark circles framing his eyes, he looks at you with a kind of gossamer-soft glow that makes your heart ache from sweetness.
Once you’re settled in the passenger seat, he drapes a hand over the steering wheel while the other perches possessively on your thigh. “I’m sorry my brother maneuvered you into coming here. He shouldn’t have intruded like that.”
“I don’t mind. I didn’t really need much maneuvering.” You trace the tendons of his fingers while he drives. Ink stains decorate the outside of his pinky. His wedding ring occupies its spot on his ring finger. You try not to think about that. You try not to think about whether its constant presence might have anything to do with the fact that he hadn’t said I love you back, either. Keep yourself the fuck together, you’d chanted over and over in your head on the train. You repeat it now, to the rhythm of the windshield wipers as the rain comes down. Keep. Yourself. The fuck. Together.
Somewhere in the repetition and the downpour, you drift off. It’s only when you feel the car jolt from asphalt to gravel that you wake. Sun peeks through still-bulging clouds, making the whole world glisten. Everything you see is impossibly green. Impossibly lush. The trees that line the road are likely older than Westeros itself, aching under the weight of their own gnarled limbs.
There’s a gate looming ahead, dragon motifs woven into the metalwork. Your one semester of Valyrian in undergrad doesn’t do you much good, but you try nonetheless to read what’s spelled out at the peak.
“Pez… perz…”
“Perzys ānogār,” he finishes for you, perfect rs rolling off of his tongue. “Fire and blood.”
You’d scoff at that, joke about how dramatic his family is, how he ought to get that tattooed, but then you see it. Summerhall. Framed by the rolling hills of the Stormlands, it’s a sliver of sun pulled from the sky. Afternoon light refracts off of the windows. Looming like a golden palace amidst all the greenery, you’re blinded by the finery, by the arches, by the sprawling, manicured grounds that seem like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a child’s storybook. It is a palace. A princess might as well be trapped in one of the tall towers that stands at each corner of the mansion. For all you know, there’s a dragon lurking somewhere nearby.
Baelor pulls up to the courtyard, where a man in a crisp suit is opening your door before you can process what’s happening. “Welcome, miss.”
“Will you have her bags taken to my room, please, Yorkel?” Baelor hands him the keys while you find your footing.
“Right away, sir.”
“Thanks,” you manage to say, jaw still slack as you stare at the exterior.
A firm hand finds its spot on the small of your back. “Shall we, sweet girl?”
If you were starstruck by the outside, the inside is enough to blind you. Double staircases and a massive chandelier greet you in the entryway. North wing to the right, Baelor explains. Dining room, library, lounge, drawing room, sitting room (you don’t fully understand what the difference between the last three is). South wing to the left, mostly bedrooms. He guides you up the stairs, where a massive portrait hangs front and center: a man in a suit with a dragon brooch on the lapel, his hand on the shoulder of a seated woman in a rust-orange Dornish-style gown. You’ve seen iterations of their faces in Baelor’s living room and in the Sunspear villa. Daeron and Myriah. Young and regal. Like a king and a queen.
“Are these all your family?” You ask, gesturing towards the corridor walls that are bedecked in old, gilded frames. Distracted, you nearly run into a maid carrying a silver tray before Baelor manages to steer you out of the way.
“My apologies, miss,” she says, calm and classy, carrying on with her work before you can insist that you’re the one who ought to be sorry, not her. You feel like you should be apologizing for just stepping on the pristine floors and breathing the cool, lilac-scented air. All the faces in all the portraits leer at you. Intruder, they accuse silently.
“I’ll give you the full tour tomorrow,” he promises. “You’ll want to rest before dinner.”
He guides you down the halls, past the ghostly gaze of dead family members. Our room, he says at last, opening a door while you bite back a grin. The room in question is probably the size of your entire previous flat. Massive curtains have been draped back, allowing sunlight to filter through the bay windows and splash the sage green walls. Through a doorway in the corner, you can see a claw foot tub. There’s a four-poster bed, a crystal light fixture sparkling from the ceiling, a rug that probably costs more than the average house.
“You live here?” Is all you can bring yourself to say. There’s more you want to ask. You’re dying to unravel the stories behind the portraits, eager to peer around all the corners and wander through all the grand rooms. It’s a strange, surreal, sparkling world you’ve wandered into.
“Only during the summer,” he says, “and as long as my brother tolerates me.”
Right. As if that makes it humbler, somehow.
“I’ll be in the library. Dinner is at eight.”
Pressing a kiss to your forehead, he lingers for a moment, as if he’s about to say something else. You meet his blue-brown gaze, breath frozen. But then he’s gone, leaving you to the intricate stillness, to the room that feels like a gaping mouth trying to swallow you whole.
You try to rest. Mostly, you flit in and out of consciousness. Fever dream snippets cascade every time your eyes close. You wander the halls in your dreams and wake, wondering how you’ve gotten yourself back to bed. You think you hear footsteps outside the room. Sometimes heavy, sometimes a faint pitter-patter. But when you stumble to the door and poke your head out, there’s never anything there.
Keep yourself the fuck together. Cool water and a quick rinse in the tub help. Not enough, though. Your head is still swimming as you touch up your makeup and tug on a slightly-wrinkled sundress.
It’s only a little frightening that you’d woken up to find your belongings all neatly unpacked, toiletries organized on the vanity and clothes hung up in the dresser next to Baelor’s. You don’t recall any of the staff coming in while you’d been in bed. Maybe they’re quiet, good at fluttering around unseen. Maybe the house is actually haunted.
Right down the hallway. Left to get to the entryway. After that, you’re less sure of where you’re going. You end up in the lounge (or is it the sitting room?), then the drawing room (or is it the lounge?), then a room that must be the library.
There’s a blur of white in your peripheral vision. You whip around, finding a little girl peeking at you from behind an armchair. Her pink dress is all aflutter, white hair coming loose from her barrettes. The two of you stare at each other for a moment. Ghost? You wonder.
“Hello.”
“Hi,” she says, and then scurries away before either of you can say anything else.
You try to follow, if only on the off chance that the dining room is her destination, but she’s long gone by the time you make it into the hallway again.
“Lost?”
“Fucking hells.” How is it that the most menacing man you’ve ever met can sneak up on you like a cat? “Yes, actually.”
Maekar snorts. “Are you certain you weren’t just spying?”
“That depends. Have you got something worth spying on? Secret dungeon, maybe?”
He gives you a long look from head to toe, probably trying to decide whether inviting you here was a mistake or not. You do your best not to shrink from it. He’s an animal of a man, quiet in the way he observes you but not less threatening for it. The kind of creature you might’ve been afraid of when you were little. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him, a grown-up might’ve said, even if you wouldn’t have believed it.
There’s a softness there too, though. Minuscule, buried in the lines around his eyes. It’s enough for you to see past the gruff facade. Enough to know that, just like his brother, he’s human.
“Come on, then,” he says at last. “Can’t have you wandering off.”
Of all the rooms in the mansion, the dining room might be the fanciest yet. It looks more suited to a banquet than a casual family dinner. Candlelight casts shadows over the vaulted ceilings. Maekar takes the seat at the head of the table, where a gigantic portrait of Aegon Targaryen hovers on the wall behind him. You’re fairly certain you’ve seen that portrait in history textbooks. Odd, how you’ve found yourself tangled up with a family whose fingerprints are all over the course of Westeros’s history.
Baelor pulls out a seat for you, ever the gentleman. While the staff pours water and wine, four pairs of eyes stare at you from across the table. Two boys, two girls. The smallest: the same girl you’d encountered in the library. She’s giving you a sly grin, which you flash right back at her.
“Aemon, Daella, Aegon, Rhae.” Maekar goes down the line one by one before he offers them your name.
“You’re Uncle Baelor’s girlfriend?” Daella seems incredulous. Twelve years old, if you’re remembering correctly, and probably the mirror image of her mother. Next to her, Aemon goes beet red and stares down at his napkin.
You shrug. “I’d say it’s more like he’s my boyfriend.”
Maekar snorts. For half a second, there’s an exchange of looks between him and Baelor, a language you could never hope to understand. Anxiety flares inside you—you’ve never called him a boyfriend before, especially not in front of other people—but he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t correct you. Just squeezes your hand under the table, warm and strong.
In between bites of Northern-style roast chicken, you answer the barrage of questions from Maekar’s children. What do you do? What do you write? Are you famous? Have you ever read The Tales of Florian and Jonquil? What did you think of it?
“Well, what did you think of it?” You reverse the question at Aegon, who perks up immediately.
“I liked the dragon fighting part! The rest of it was a bit boring.”
“Finish chewing before you speak, boy,” Maekar chides, though there’s no malice in it. Just a tired, fatherly frustration. Sorry, Aegon mutters with a mouth full of green beans.
You’re keenly aware of Baelor’s eyes on you during your dinnertime deposition. And though he steps into the conversation from time to time—Not tonight, sweetheart, he asserts gently when Rhae demands you meet her beloved pony Morning—he lets you handle their inquiries by yourself. It’s impossible to shake the sense that you’re being tested. And even if you manage to play along, even if you earn a giggle or two, your heart’s beating faster than it did in any exam you ever took in school.
After the chocolate mousse (which ends up smudged on Rhae’s nose somehow), the staff clear the table like clockwork while Aegon and Rhae whine about being sent to bed. It’s Aemon who corrals them. He lets Rhae clamber onto his back, gives a dutiful good night, Dad, to Maekar, offers you a shy smile. It was nice meeting you.
Daella lingers, sly as a fox. “Can I stay up—”
“One hour,” Maekar grunts, “and don’t let me hear that TV.”
“Thank you!” And even though he puts on a firm face, there’s nothing but fondness there when she pecks his cheek before running off to join her siblings.
It’s strange, really. You feel like you’re in the dark of the cinema. That soft sternness, that familiarity, it’s utterly foreign to you. Fatherhood might as well be a fantasy film. Blinking away your wistful stare, you turn and meet Baelor’s gentle gaze. Opening you, reading you. His hand returns to your thigh, a comforting weight, a silent I know. You latch onto his fingers with your own. It’s been too long since you had the anchor of his body latching you into reality. How fiercely you’d missed him. There’s a needy tension in your hands. Don’t let me go, it says.
Maekar lets out a long groan as he stands, rubbing his bearded chin. “Drinks and billiards?”
“Not tonight, I think,” Baelor says without breaking eye contact, the tiniest sparkle of suggestion surfacing. “Long day.”
“Yeah,” you lie. “Exhausted.”
You’re barely inside the threshold of the room when Baelor’s mouth is on yours. Lips on lips, teeth crashing against tongue, you stumble backwards while he swallows the laughter right out of your throat. This is what you were truly starved of. The heat of his body, the possessive clutch, the way he touches you like he could break you, like he’s just barely holding himself back.
“Perfect girl,” he rumbles in between hungry kisses, “beautiful girl, do you know how good you are?”
“No—” You gasp, shivering as he makes quick work of your dress. Your mind’s a summer storm, processing touch rather than words. His hands leave you bare in the moonlight before you even fully realize what he’d said.
“No?” He has to guide your hands to his shirt, your trembling fingers fumbling over the buttons. “Do you need me to show you?”
“Please.”
Together, you undress him. He lets his linen shirt fall to the floor while you trace the contours of his chest. You savor the salt-and-pepper scrape of the hair that blooms over his pectorals, interrupted by those two jagged silver scars, thinning and trailing down, down, down, to where it frames his hardening cock. All the muscles in his hips and thighs roll like marble, chiseled and smooth. Your eyes drink in the veins that run down the length of his cock, the moisture that gathers at the tip, the way it pulses to full erection under his white-knuckled fist. He’s a vision. A statue of a god you want to pray to.
He presses you toward the bed, and you let your legs part as your back hits the velvet comforter. The room of your body is a place you’ll always let him in. Baelor hovers over you, wolflike and wanton, eyes fixed on your exposed cunt.
Beautiful, he repeats, a little whisper. Heart hammering against your ribs, your breath comes in shy stutters as he traces the glistening folds. His fingers prod and caress every little nook. There’s no demand in his touch. Just quiet exploration. As if the warm, wet flesh of you is some precious thing.
“Look here.” He notches the tip of his cock at your weeping entrance, waits until your eyes fixate on the joining of your bodies. “I want you to watch.”
“Oh, fuck,” you gasp, burning at the sight, watching him split you open with a slick, sinful sound, “oh, fuck—”
A wide hand claps over your mouth right before your voice elevates to a shout. Shh, shh, shh, he hisses, halfway buried inside you. Addled by lust, you forget you’re not in the safety of his house where you can cry and moan as loud as you like. You’re like a pair of teenagers. Horny as beasts, biting back the obscene sounds that bubble up. He keeps you muzzled like that for a long, painful moment, until the vibrations in your vocal cords die down.
Fuck. Oxygen deprivation sends an electric shock straight to your clit. Slowly, trembling, you wrap your fingers around his wrist. He lets you slide his hand down, over your chin, until it’s perching around your throat. The tendons in his jaw tighten once he realizes what you want.
“I can take it,” you rasp, “I want it.”
“Gods, you’re…” he’s muttering, “fuck, sweet girl, I can’t—”
“I want it.” You whine, squeezing his wrist insistently. “Hard. Please.”
“Fucking hells.” Composure entirely lost, he tightens his grip and presses his cock fully inside you all in the span of a single second.
There’s no pause. No chance to adjust to the stretch or the squeeze. He fucks you fast and fierce, setting a brutal pace that sparks your entire body alight. The slap, slap, slap of skin echoes off the walls, dulled by the blood pounding in your ears. Either he doesn’t know his own strength or he’s being rougher than he’s ever been. You don’t care. You cant your hips up to meet each thrust, mouth agape, gasping for air while he ruts into you.
“There… there you are, sweet thing, good girl,” he praises you, though there’s a sharp edge to his voice, one last vestige of restraint. Tension builds and builds low in your stomach. Your mind is screaming even if you can’t use your voice. I love you, you tell him with your body, with the drag of your tongue over his, with the scrape of your nails down his back, with each needy clench of your cunt.
You get ridiculously, indecently wet before you come. You can feel it staining his pelvis, ruining the sheets. The sound fills your foggy head: a sickening, gorgeous song. Oh my gods, you’re mouthing, jaw dropping open, all the tension coiling tighter and tighter.
Baelor kisses the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your brow. “I—fuck, I feel it. There it is. Let it happen.”
And how can you deny him? How can you not fall to pieces as he keeps his persistent, ruthless rhythm, fucking you just the way you like, keeping you powerless and pinned beneath him? His cock and the way it fills and bruises your pussy is only half of what sets off your orgasm. It’s the look in his eyes. The possessiveness in his palms. You’re his, every particle of you.
Scream cut off by his pressure, you writhe and sob while you come, feeling the wave of it all the way down to your toes. His beard tickles your chin while he mutters filth and sweetness. He brings you through it, only increasing his pace when you’re soaked and slack beneath him.
With your head lulling back on the bed, you’re faintly aware of the light from the hall slipping through the gaps in the doorframe. The door itself is just barely ajar. You can’t tell if it’s just the blurriness of your vision, but you think there’s a shadow there. Tall, broad, faint. You blink. Tears invade your eyes. Maybe there ought to be panic rising inside you, but all you can process is how badly you need Baelor to come.
“Come inside me?” You whisper, raking your hands through his hair. It’s a cheap trick at this point, a surefire way to get him to finish. But you want it as much as you’re sure he does. Weeks apart mean you don’t want to waste his come on your belly or in your mouth. You want it deep. Careless. Spilling out of you like a secret.
“You shouldn’t—” he chokes out a strained laugh, “shouldn’t let me keep… doing that… gods…”
You just smile, all weak and watery. “I’d let you do anything to me.”
And then Baelor’s grip is going iron-strong as he comes, staining your vision with black spots. A ragged, animalistic sound bursts from his chest. Thick, hot warmth floods your core. Gods, it feels good to be claimed like this. To be so full of him.
When your eyes refocus, the doorway’s empty. Maybe it was a trick of the light. A figment of your fucked-out imagination. A voyeuristic ghost. Whatever it was, it’s lost to the darkness, to the song of your breath and Baelor’s mingling together against the din of crickets stridulating outside. A night breeze picks up against the windowpanes. In the distance, thunder begins to roll.
what the wind was making | professor!baelor targaryen x reader
ೃ⁀➷ this is part three of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.
Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), Dark Academia AU, professor/student relationship so therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), m!masturbation, angst, hurt/comfort, dead spouse, so much yearning, Baelor's POV, no Y/N.
Word Count: 6.9k
Author Notes: This is a PREQUEL chapter. Part 1 covers fall/winter of reader's second year of grad school. Part 2 covers spring of her second year. In this chapter, we're going back to spring of her first year. I struggled a lot writing this chapter and I still don't feel like I did Baelor's POV justice, but hopefully this answers some questions about the beginning of Baelor & reader's relationship. I'm constantly astounded by the response this fic has received and I'm so grateful for y'all who read my silly headcanons and visit my silly askbox.
Summer vacation is coming up next time... come back for part 4 <3 Gorgeous dividers are by @huraxy-dividers
do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!
Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)
But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel.
You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.
—Pablo Neruda (trans. W.S. Merwin)
Dear Professor Targaryen, your email begins, I’m aware this will likely be an unusual request.
It’s the most interesting line to grace Baelor’s inbox in a long time. He scans your introduction, realizes that you’re right. It’s unusual for literature students to attempt his graduate seminars. Even more unusual for first-year students, usually still bewitched by the allure of academia. He knows his reputation. Demanding, he’s been called on more than one evaluation. He cares for his students, truly. Follows with pride as their rhetoric gets sharper and their research forges new paths. It’s because he demands, though. Pushes. He has a tendency to give even the ones with the brightest eyes a few dark circles.
You’ve heard as much, it seems. I’ve talked with several of the doctoral students in the history department who all spoke to the rigorous standards you hold in your classroom. It’s my hope that an outside perspective would bolster discussion rather than hinder it.
He can’t say he’s ever had a student from the writing program in one of his seminars. He imagines you as a fawn of a girl, head whipping back and forth during class, lost in the whirlwind of dates and names and debates about historical interpretation. A wavery I don’t know? as if there’s a knife at your throat whenever he might invite you to answer a question. He ought to do the honorable thing. Turn you down, direct you to his gentler colleagues, stop himself from scaring you away from graduate studies altogether.
And yet there’s something defiant about your request. It’s less of a request, really. More of a dare.
I’m of the opinion that creativity needn’t be the rival—much less the enemy—of criticism. I hope you are as well.
You’ve attached the form he needs to sign. Bold of you.
Fingers rapping on the worn oak desk, he mulls over the email while blue light washes over him. There’s a feeling in his stomach that he can’t ignore. A scholarly sense of inquisitiveness he hasn’t felt for a long time. He prints the form and inks his signature, blotting a dot of black against the side of his pinky, just above the ring that bears his family crest. Funny. A poet might call that an omen, but you’re the writer. He’ll leave the poetics to you.
The doctoral candidates deep in their dissertations. The disillusioned second-year graduate students who reek of coffee and cigarettes. The strangers from other departments, art history or public policy, sinking low in their seats as if their cover might be blown at any second. Baelor knows the archetypes who sit around his seminar table so well. He sorts them into columns, knows which ones will drop after the first week, knows which ones are already preening for a letter of recommendation. The class changes every semester—new articles to examine, different nuances to be teased out of a particular reading—but the cast of characters never does.
You’re harder to categorize. He feels it from the first week when you take the seat nearest to him on his brown-eyed side. The one that the rest of your peers, either out of shyness or respect, had left vacant. He bristles. Wonders if your nonchalance might be synonymous with a lack of seriousness.
That concern dissipates as soon as he hears you speak. You’re exactly how you sounded in your email, and more. Curious. Clever, but subtly so: no pretense, no frills, no ticking off as many five-syllable vocabulary words as you can in one sentence.
“It’s a bit of an ungenerous reading, though, isn’t it?” You chime in twenty minutes into a conversation about an article analyzing the diaries of Nymeria of Dorne. He watches your eyes dart around the room before landing on his.
There’s a fierceness to you as well, he observes. A severity that makes all the others look dull in comparison.
The table is slow to react, so he prods. “Ungenerous how?”
“I mean, it’s more interested in what her mentions of the grain trade mean for the structure of the early Dornish economy than what it might mean about her.” You flip through your flimsy dogeared copy of The Diaries of Nymeria of Dorne: 2nd Edition Translation, and Baelor can’t help but try to make out what some of your scribbled annotations are. “Here: ‘Spring rains flood the Greenblood. Barges bring wheat and salt for lemon cakes.’ She’s in the middle of a war and she’s looking forward to eating lemon cakes. Doesn’t that speak more to who she was as a person than what the economy was like?”
“For an article concerned with economics, I might argue it’s a particularly congruous quotation,” he pushes back, though with none of the ice in his voice that he might usually use to shut down a fruitless line of inquiry. He leaves the door open, inviting you through, wondering where your mind is headed.
And you, without hesitating, take his invitation. “I think it’s a wasted opportunity, that’s all. It’d be lovely if any of these historians treated Nymeria like a real human with actual desires rather than a convenient primary source.”
“That’s usually how historicization works,” one of the other students, Willem, pipes up. It’s not entirely unfriendly, but there’s an air of patronization in his tone, an unspoken assumption that of course you wouldn’t know something like that. Heat flares in his chest, a chivalric impulse that makes him flex his fingers and want to speak up on your behalf. But you only stare back at him and shrug.
“Well. Their loss, then.”
He finally gets a good look at your annotation at the end of class, while you’re chatting to the art history student next to you who had been too shy to speak the entire time. There’s a harsh circle around one of the paragraphs in the article you’d disapproved of and Fuck off! nestled in the margins.
Not a fawn, he realizes. More like a hawk, biding your time before you swoop in with something new and fresh and entirely unexpected.
Last one to leave, you pause by the door while he’s still packing up his papers into the worn leather satchel Jena had gifted him one nameday, years ago. “I hope I’m not giving my program a bad name.”
“The opposite, actually,” he says, and the grin that spreads across your face seems like some sort of prize. It’s a twisted thing to think about a bit of well-received encouragement. He swallows hard, focuses on his coat. You don’t seem to notice his silent self-flagellation. You just lean against the door handle, giving him one last little wave.
“Good. Well. See you next week, then.”
When he steps outside, the winter air hits him harder than the bullets he’d taken in the army. He rubs a hand across his chin and sighs. Nothing is different. Every term begins with the same simmering anticipation. But something has changed. He can feel it in his bone marrow, in the fingers that already threaten to go numb in the frigid night. He can feel it in the way that he’s already anxious for next week, for whatever surprises you have waiting behind those sharp, subdued eyes of yours. Stop this, he tells himself, but it’s beyond his control. Something dormant inside of him is stirring, opening its eyes, coming back to life.
He doesn’t mean to spy. It’s a coincidence, truly, that his office has a view over the steps of Penrose Hall. He’s watched thousands of students come and go from their literature classes for years. The doors creak open and light soaks the courtyard below. Half nine. The last graduate class letting out for the night.
There you are, hugging a pile of papers to your front. A tired slant to your shoulders. While your classmates pair off and head home in groups, you keep your own company. He wonders whose choice that is; theirs or yours.
It’s concern that makes him watch you until you disappear beyond the courtyard, he tells himself. You’re a young woman walking alone after dark. It’s your safety he has in mind. But when he looks down at the paper he’d been grading, there are dents embedded from his grip. Baelor drops it, lets it flutter to the ground. Even in the low light, the gold band of his wedding ring glares like an open flame.
“Is this a good time?”
It is. And isn’t. Of course, he says, waving for you to take a seat, because he knows the policy on his syllabus. Open office hours, noon to one, no appointment needed. You make him nervous, though. Make him feel like the nearly-shut door is a sin.
“I wanted to ask about the term paper,” you jump right in. “I know you don’t accept creative projects, but I wondered if you might be open to a more sentimental approach.”
“Hm. What does sentimental mean to you?” He leans back in his chair, rotating each ring one by one while your eyes begin to sparkle. It’s utterly captivating, utterly new. Such a question would usually make his students jump to defensiveness. Scramble to explain themselves or shut down and back away from the line of questioning. But you approach it with fascination, like he’s handed you some shiny gift to unwrap.
“I just don’t want to fall into the trap of treating history like it’s dead. I read your article about the influence of pre-Andal art on the development of Dornish culture,” you say, and he can’t deny how his ego swells at that, “and I thought about how sad it is, that people like Willem think that historical means unemotional. That article almost made me cry.”
Baelor’s cheeks turn hot. A bit of praise isn’t unusual from students who hope to stay in his good graces. He wouldn’t normally blush at a comment about his reading of a source or his criticism of previous scholarship, but you see past all the technicalities and stare right into his soul. He shouldn’t indulge himself. Shouldn’t feed on that genuine admiration and curiosity that’s plain to see. He’s only a man, though. He can’t help the wretched, white-hot need that burns inside of him.
“Go on,” he concedes. “Tell me more.”
And you do. You talk and talk and he asks and you answer. You rant about an article which has found itself in your good graces and two others which you can’t conceal your disdain for. You flesh out a point you’d made about the translation of Nymeria’s diaries, the tragedy of all the gaps through which language can slip. You go on until he’s running late for his lecture at two, and you’re laughing a bashful laugh and saying gods, sorry, I lost track of time. I’ll see you next week?
True to your word, you’re there next week. And the week after that. His office hours morph into a standing appointment, reiterating points you’d made in seminar and elaborating on the ones you’d cut short. You fill his empty world with your armful of books, your patchwork philosophy, your sarcastic asides.
The silence after you leave is always the worst. It reverberates, pierces him, makes the whole room seem colder.
In the wake of you, the guilt seeps in. Pervasive as winter’s iron-strong grip. Its poison makes his blood curdle in his veins, makes the walls close in around him. Sick, he calls himself, sick, depraved, perverted, disgusting. You’re closer in age to Valarr than you are to him. Every thought he has disgraces him. That part of himself that you’ve woken is bright-eyed and alert now, roaring and clawing at the inside of his chest. Die, he begs it, die, or at least sleep, but it’s a feral thing. It demands attention. Demands tribute.
“I know it’s not due until tomorrow.” You dance into his office one day, a grin blossoming as you hand him your term paper draft. His fingers brush against yours for half a second. That’s all it takes for his skin to turn sparkling warm. Your eyes search his. He’s started to pick up on your little tells. It’s praise you’re seeking, so it’s praise he gives.
“Ah. Trying to impress me?” He asks as a wry smile surfaces.
“Maybe.”
He shouldn’t feel so hopeful. He isn’t even certain what he’s hoping for. At best, he’s a mentor with all the wrong motivations. At worst, he’s some sort of monster. But he feels real. Painfully, explosively real for the first time in years. You’ve brought him back from a grave he was digging himself. Woken him like a bird perched outside his window, singing your smart, sweet song.
So he lets himself hope.
It’s long after you’ve left one afternoon, when he’s gathering his things to walk home for the day, when he notices one of your books forgotten on the chair. An Anthology of Westerosi Women Poets. Golden-brown pages and glue-stained binding on the spine make it look especially frail, though the date on the inside cover isn’t even years past. Well-loved, then. Tended to.
He opens to the middle of the book, but as soon as he glimpses your annotations, he shuts it. It’s an intrusion. A voyeur’s view of your relationship to the poems within. The skin on his neck prickles as if someone’s watching, though the only audience are his own books leering from their shelves.
Tucking it into his satchel, he tells himself it’ll be safer at home. Less of a chance it’ll be lost in the piles of papers on his desk or picked up by another student by mistake. He’s only being careful.
It’s frightening, really. The lies he tells himself. The excuses he makes.
There’s nothing careful about how he takes it to bed. Glass of whiskey on the nightstand, rain thrumming against the window, he opens it like a secret and runs his fingers over the pages. Feels the dips of the underlines you’ve made. The curves of your comments. Stray couplets populate the margins, imitations of your favorite lines. It’s more intimate than undressing. Like he’s seeing into the bones of you.
Somewhere in the whiskey-tinted evening, he drifts off. Snippets of poetry and the smell of ink constellate his dreams. When he wakes, his cheek is pressed to your book. Traces of your perfume cling to its pages, a ghost of you now embedded in little lines on his face. His cock is shamefully, achingly hard.
It’s Jena’s face he pictures while he stands under scalding water and curses himself for being so horrible, so weak. But it’s your face he pictures when he puts his hand on his throbbing cock. Your face he imagines under him, sharp tongue gone dumb while he fucks you. Your face that makes his heart go heavy and hollow while the water goes cold, while the shower washes come down the drain.
Microwaved stew and cigarette smoke make for a less than ideal welcome home. In the kitchen, Maekar is glaring at something on his phone, a bowl of leftovers already polished off. Somehow, Baelor is more relieved than he is annoyed. As much as he wishes he’d pillage someone else’s fridge for once, it’s good to know that his brother is at least taking the time to feed himself.
“I thought you were trying to quit,” he sighs, opening a window with a pointed look.
“I was.” Maekar groans, smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth. “Guess which one it is this time.”
“Daeron?” It’s a genuine guess. Also a translated prayer: please, not Aerion. He doesn’t wish any more suffering on Daeron than his nephew already inflicts upon himself, but he’s certain Maekar would prefer the familiarity of rehab over whatever scandal of Aerion’s might already be plastering itself over the covers of gossip magazines.
“Father. Crafty bastard tried to set me up. Sent me off to meet with the president of philanthropy at Citadel College on his behalf and forgot to mention the meeting was at a winery and the president’s a fucking widow.” He scoffs as he flicks the cigarette over the ashtray that Baelor keeps around just for him, just in case. “He ever do that to you?”
He winces. It’s not a pleasant memory: some Hightower woman, a daughter of a friend of his father’s, pushed toward him at a charity gala at Dragonstone barely two years after Jena’s death. Baelor, show her around, Daeron said, conveniently disappearing a moment later. She had been friendly. Decent enough to look uncomfortable once she saw the ring on his finger. It was the closest he’d ever come to raising his voice at his father.
“Once.”
“Well, turns out Arbor red still gives me a bloody headache. Had to ask her for a paracetamol. Dy would’ve loved that.” Maekar chuckles at himself, and even Baelor has to laugh. He remembers a holiday years ago at Summerhall, his brother flushed and whinging after supper while the children ran wild through the sitting room and Dyanna fished around in her purse. Oh, give him a break, Baelor, she’d said when he teased, poor thing’s on his cycle.
Maekar nudges the chair next to him with his foot. Baelor lets out a long breath as he sits down, all the day’s pressures rolling off of his shoulders and into the gentle, menthol-streaked haze of the kitchen. A copy of your seminar paper draft is still on the table from where he’d mulled over it the night before. His praise adorns the pages. Perhaps it’s soft of him, but in place of critique there’s only intrigue. Say more on this written where he might tell another student Explain. There’s a stain on a corner now. The pages are ruffled from where his brother had—utterly unashamed of himself, of course—been reading it.
“You look good,” Maekar says. Baelor finds himself subject to the scrutiny of a furrowed brow and two narrowed blue eyes.
“I do?”
There’s a gruff hmm as he takes another drag. Not a visit, then. More like an interrogation. Sometimes Baelor wonders if he’s his brother’s seventh child. One who needs less checking in on, perhaps, but still. He wonders how Daeron and Aerion have become impervious to that steely gaze. Whatever mask he wears, whatever act he puts on, it carves through him all the same.
“It’s been a better term than most,” he says, and it’s true. The lectures come easier. Campus seems brighter. The classroom is all he can think about, singing a siren song while he ought to be thinking about something, anything else.
Maekar turns his attention to your draft. “This one’s clever.”
“She’s in my graduate seminar,” Baelor says all too quickly. His attempt at an unexciting diversion only makes his brother’s stare intensify.
“Yes, I can read.” He grunts, but there’s a little smirk dancing over his mouth as he looks over something you’d written. “Funny. You must like her.”
Wringing his hands, the rings make his fingers feel like lead. “I do.”
“Well.” That makes Maekar pause, uncharacteristically still for a moment. “Good for her.”
Is it? Baelor wonders. The way he feels when he reads your work, when he sees your mouth open in its witty way right before you speak… nothing about it feels good. Dangerous, perhaps. Like he could break you from the sheer weight of his want. His hands could sooner ruin you than offer you tenderness. It disgusts him. It compels him.
“You don’t need to worry about me.” It’s only half of a lie.
“No. Gods know I don’t need to be fucking worrying about you and yet you’re good at giving me reasons to worry,” Maekar grumbles, snuffing out the remnants of his cigarette and running a hand through his already askew white hair. “At least wait until she’s not your student before you do something stupid. Father says his blood pressure is fine but we all know that’s not true.”
“It’s not like that.” But Maekar raises an eyebrow, sees right through him, and Baelor finds himself admitting: “I wouldn’t know how. Not anymore. I’m not… meant for it.”
“Huh.”
There’s a gleam in his brother’s eyes, a joke wanting to be made. He waits for the punchline. Some juvenile comment, surely, but the blow never comes.
Perhaps it’s the common ground they both stand on but rarely speak about. How to move on. If moving on is possible. Whether they ought to accept that love was for a softer time, a younger time, or whether they should shake their warrior instincts awake and fight to prove themselves wrong. Jena and Dyanna would’ve retched to see them both where they are now. Such hardened, hopeless old men.
“Well, whatever this is,” Maekar says, and Baelor knows what he means, knows that it’s the solitude and the silence and the self-sabotage and everything else he forces himself to endure, “you’re not meant for that either.”
Half nine, and the doors of Penrose Hall are whining and groaning while the writing students file into the crystalline spring air. Two of them are bursting with laughter, smacking each other’s shoulders and giggling as they fade off into the lamplit haze. A group of three pauses for a smoke break and then go their separate ways. There’s a warmth starting to wake up King’s Landing from its winter slumber. Sound and movement ripple where campus used to be frozen.
Baelor watches for ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty, and you still haven’t come out. The bells of the campus chapel strike ten. An uneasy feeling gnaws at his gut. His mind conjures up images of you in a claustrophobic corner with some man’s hands clawing at your clothes, or you on the slick, dewy cobblestones with an ankle twisted at some unnatural angle, and he’s pulling on his coat and charging down the stairs before he realizes what he’s doing.
It doesn’t take long to find you. You’re on the other side of Penrose Hall, curled up on the steps, staring at the barely-budding willow tree that brushes up against the side of the building. Knees drawn into your chest. Shoulders like shuddering wings hunched inwards. You shrink against the night’s soft sibilance, the rattle of the wind, the thickness of the dark.
“Oh, sorry. Hi.” You’re quick to wipe your eyes when you see him approaching. Even in the shadows, he can see rivulets on your cheeks. An angry tint around your irises.
“Did something happen?” It’s harsher than he intends. There’s a threat woven into the question. Blood singing, bones humming, his army-trained body is suddenly ready to carry out any command you might give him.
“No.” You say too quickly, and even a halfhearted attempt at a smile barely lasts a second. “Nothing. Fucking… it’s nothing.”
But it’s not nothing. Not to him, not if it means you’re holding yourself as if the world has sunk an angry fist into the center of your stomach. Baelor takes another step forward, gently pushing into the stormy atmosphere of you. He can feel the clouds circling, the tension becoming electric. His skin is primed for a lightning strike.
You make a defeated little shrug, your voice straining to hold back. “It’s so lonely. In there. Or it’s like they’re all there and I’m somewhere else, or… I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know…”
And then the storm breaks. Your face falls. The gravity around you gets heavier, heavier, and all his body can do is kneel against the cold stone steps and let your arms form a death grip around him while you cry.
It’s strange. It’s wrong. Muscle memory makes him hold you like he would have held Jena. He rubs uneven circles over your back, stiff and slow to surrender. It takes a minute for his hands to adjust. To sculpt themselves to the contours of you. Trembling just as much as you are, the thought of someone coming across you both in this twisted embrace is somehow less terrifying than your warbled I don’t know. You, always on the path of some unexpected thesis. You, stringing words together in ways that make language feel lustrous. You, reduced to I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry sobbed into the fabric of his shirt.
He’s the one who ought to feel sorry. Ashamed. He ought to pity you, and instead he’s full of a disgusting pride, so smug about the fact that he’s the one holding you together. Such uncanny power he wields over you. So sick and so selfish. In his core, a nagging truth: it feels good to be needed like this. To let his own desire bloom in return. He needs you. Your brokenness, your brilliance, he needs it all, he needs to walk into it like a room, he needs to lose himself and discover you.
“I know,” he murmurs, while the wind kisses the willow branches and his breath does the same to your hair, “it’s alright. I know.”
“I know.”
You’re sad, Jena said, that it was what tumbled out in reply. Sleep-deprived under the soulless hospital lights, he should have waited for his mind to sync with his mouth before he spoke. I’m not, he should have said. Too late for that. Too late for so many things.
Time collapsed in that sterile room. The date on the whiteboard that the nurses updated every day could have been in a different language for all it mattered. Change came in the form of a new drawing from Matarys taped to the wall or the slow decay of a bouquet on the side table. He stayed awake through the night and slept without dreams in fleeting fits during the day. All the world was taupe and white. Antiseptic. What a mundane hell.
Jena rattled out a breath. “We used to be such happy people.”
And they had. They’d done everything beautifully, achingly right. They’d studied shoulder-to-shoulder in the library and kissed on the stoop of her flat after he walked her home. He’d given her his mother’s engagement ring. Their wedding had been featured in the King’s Landing Times style section. They’d had the boys. Summered in Dorne and Pentos. Bought a house at the edge of the city limits with a pool and a view of Blackwater Bay. They’d gone to the boys’ football games on weekends and gone out for fish and chips after, win or lose. They’d hosted dinner parties. Made love on weeknights. They’d been so blindingly happy. Until they weren’t.
“I’ll take it with me.”
“You’ll take what, sweetheart?” All those chasms in their conversations. The bridges he had to build. How ironic. He’d fallen in love with her mind, her law school logic. Every day, a little less of it remained.
“All that sadness.” Half of her face tried to smile. “So you can go on living. Will you let me do that for you?”
Her hand reached for his. Rings loose around her bone-thin fingers. Nails painted pink from the last time Dyanna visited. The tremor they hadn’t noticed until it was too late made the glitter catch the light with each little twitch. It was so easy to acquiesce. Dose promises like morphine. What a good liar he was. What a coward.
A month later, and there were still flecks of blush-colored polish on her nails when she was buried. He kept the engagement ring for Valarr. Her wedding ring for Matarys. All of his sadness, he kept for himself.
The last week of term arrives with a warm front that thunders its arrival over King’s Landing and then rests its humid remnants across the city. Baelor spends the afternoon tidying his desk, putting the office to rest before the holiday. Down in the courtyard, a group of students have set up camp around a bench. Their laughter echoes against the old stone buildings. No revising will be done, surely, yet it fills him with fondness. He thinks about the boys. Wonders what they’re doing on the first summery day of the year.
You catch him in the doorway just as he’s leaving, out of breath from the stairs. There’s a tin in your hands. A loop of twine around it, tied in a bow, slightly askew. So relieved to see you, he can’t stop the sigh that wrests itself from his lungs. Your name comes out of his mouth the same way he might say thank the gods.
“Um, I wanted to thank you.” You sound flustered. “For the other week. You were so lovely and patient, I’m sorry I was such a mess.”
“Please, you don’t need to apologize. I hope everything’s alright,” he says, although he knows it’s not. That expression on your face had been something wretched. A kind of hauntedness that can’t be fixed in one night. It’s there even now. Softened by the mellow sunlight, maybe, but still fluttering across your eyes. If only he could be the kind of man who would erase that darkness. Someone younger. Someone easier. He’d just make your darkness deeper, he tells himself. He’d be another ghost perching on your sad shoulders.
And yet he’s letting you slip like water through his cupped palms. Classes over for term, summer rushing in to sweep you away, you’ll be lost to the past soon. A five-month fever dream he’ll try to relive every night. He’ll miss your melancholy, yet he’ll miss that rare, swooping joy of yours even more fiercely.
“I’m looking forward to reading your seminar paper.” It’s a last-ditch attempt to prove to himself that he can make you smile, and gods, it works. You light up like the morning sky. He wishes he could stay in your light forever. Bask in it. Burn in it. Die in it.
“Bribe for good marks, then?” You offer him the tin with a sheepish grin. “I’m not a great baker but I figured you can’t go wrong with shortbread, and I added some cardamom so it’s a little different…”
He can tell you’re circling a thought as you trail off, afraid to tuck your wings and land. Your gaze keeps flickering down at the tin. Just as quickly as your clouds had parted, they’re gathering again. When you finally do look up at him, there’s a glint of something he can’t analyze. Hope, maybe. Or danger. Perhaps the two are the same.
“I really loved your class. I’ll miss it,” you say, and then there’s a small catch in your voice, a confession wriggling its way out, and you whisper, “I’ll miss you, too.”
There it is: the wondering and the wishing suddenly stripped back, all just a maze of prose leading to your hushed thesis. It’s daybreak after a long night. Sunrise over Blackwater Bay, streaked with crimson. You give him exactly what his sinful soul has yearned for and doom him in the same breath. Damnation feels dangerously akin to relief.
The doorway frames your body impossibly close to his. Your eyes are fixed on his, wanting, asking. He exhales and makes your lashes waver like minuscule feathers. One hand lifts to brush against the front of your shirt. It would be easy to push you away. It would be even easier to pull you closer. Baelor’s lips part ever so slightly. He watches you mirror him, watches how you wait right at the brink of some invisible boundary. You make it his line to cross.
He inhales. Closes his eyes. And chooses.
“And?”
“And what?”
There’s a drawn-out groan from the other end of the call. “Oh, gods. What’d you do?”
“Nothing.” He answers. “We said goodbye and she left.”
The pathetic finality of it echoes around his kitchen. He brushes shortbread crumbs from the side of his mouth. Thanks again, you’d blurted out. The tin, shoved into his hands like it burned you. The second he hesitated too long, you knew. Smart thing. Sweet, smart, beautiful girl, you’d seen right through him, right to all the fear and guilt holding him back. Your crestfallen expression and the sound of your footsteps fleeing down the hall loop endlessly in his mind. Baelor-breaks-things, destroying all the softness of that moment in the name of safety.
“And what are you going to do?”
“Nothing.” Because there is nothing left to do. You were a sparrow flickering by his window, a final warm day in the autumn of his life. Term is over. That final look of hurt will grow smaller and smaller in his mind each year, until he can’t remember whether you were real or a dream he had just before waking.
Maekar is quiet. Maekar is never quiet.
“I thought nothing was exactly what you would’ve had me do,” he pushes, interpreting silence as disapproval.
“Well, if there was ever a time to do something, I’d say you fucking missed it.”
Frustration stabbing at the front of his skull, he rubs his forehead as he leans over the table. “You said I’d be mad to get involved with a student.”
“She’s not your student anymore, is she?” There’s a sharp exhale and probably a cloud of cigarette smoke haloing him. “First woman you’ve fancied in eight years. Seven hells, and you call me stubborn.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He snaps. For once, he craves direction. Someone to tell him what to do. What not to do. It’s exhausting, these mazes he builds for himself, the dead ends and the sharp corners he gets trapped in. He wants an answer, except he’s terrified that when it comes to him, it’ll be in the shape of you.
“I mean,” Maekar says, “I don’t like the idea of you doing nothing forever.”
When he sees you again, he thinks he’s dreaming.
He’s not meant to be on campus. He’s not even meant to be in King’s Landing, but with his family packed uncomfortably tight in Summerhall and both of the boys off on their own holiday adventures, it had seemed best to retreat back to his townhouse for a week or two. Try to finish the research he’d meant to finish months ago. Try to write, prepare for the autumn term, distract himself with routine.
It’s sweltering in the capitol. Even the pages of the book he’d come all the way to his office to retrieve are swollen with humidity. The heat crawls up his back, stains his collar with sweat, makes the city vibrate from the constant hum of aircon units. Evening brings relief, but not much. When he rounds a corner and sees you descending the steps outside the library, he half-wonders if he’s gone delirious.
Oh, hello, you exhale, and he shouldn’t be so satisfied by the way your mouth twists into a little smile, but he is. He shouldn’t insist to walk you home, but he does. He shouldn’t let his heart leap into his throat when your bare arm bumps against his rolled-up sleeve, but how can he not? His whole body burns with a heat that goes beyond the simmering summer air.
“I mostly just sit there. It’s not so bad,” you tell him about your job at the circulation desk. “When I’m bored, I’ll search up people I know and see what titles they’ve checked out.”
“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my library records wouldn’t be terribly fascinating.”
You give him a sideways look full of mischief. “No. They’re not. Sorry.”
Over the city skyline, the sunset drenches the brick houses in shades of tangerine. Windows reflect rich, warm light. It halos you, makes you seem like an angel framed in stained glass above the shrine in a sept. Baelor can’t remember the last time he prayed. Before Jena’s death, most likely. The sight of you, smiling and chatting in the golden hour glow, could put him on his knees. Could make a devotee of him.
You’re on a tangent about your landlord—the scum of the fucking earth, you hiss—when he slows to a stop outside his townhouse. There’s a bus stop at the end of the row. He ought to leave you there and say goodnight, to stop himself before he can destroy you with the ferocity of his longing, but gravity is pulling him inside and threatens to sweep you along with him.
“This is yours?” Your wide eyes absorb the facade of the building, the old door, the original windows he paid far too much to have restored. It’s a fault he’s keenly aware of, one he chalks up to a historian’s instinct. Refusing to let go of the past. Forcing it to suffer in his hands instead of letting it go.
“Can I make you tea?” He offers, struck by the notion of you in his home. “I never thanked you properly. For the shortbread.”
“The shortbread was a thank you, you don’t need to thank me for it.” Smart girl, you see through his poor excuse to prolong this sweet, sudden interlude. “Tea would be lovely, though.”
It’s odd seeing you drift through his living room. Your eyes wander over the art that Jena had collected. The old pictures on his mantel. Your hands cradle a teacup he’d inherited from his grandmother, who had probably inherited it from her own grandmother. You’re an interloper in his quiet world. And yet you fit in so seamlessly. Lean on the kitchen table and talk to him like it’s just another evening, like you were meant to be here. He listens to you ranting about your classmates with wonder clouding his vision and guilt nipping at his heels. So wrong. So oddly right.
“...and he’s smart, but gods, he was such a cunt.” Bashful, you hide your lips behind the teacup. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright. We’re not in class anymore.”
It sounds too much like permission to be innocent. For a searing moment, you hold his gaze. He’s seen you make the same calculations before in class. It’s the sort of scrutiny that could make lesser men shrink into themselves. That asks: what do you really mean?
He knows what he means, even if he’s too ashamed to admit it to himself.
It’s dark by the time he walks you to the door. Excuses draft themselves in his head: he ought to walk you to the bus stop, or he ought to drive you home, or you ought to stay until it cools off a bit more. They’re brimming in his throat as you linger in the foyer, as he finally picks up your poetry anthology from its spot on his side table where he’d thought about taking it back to his office for half the semester. It’s intoxicating, thinking of his fingerprints overlapping invisibly with yours on its pages.
“Gods, I thought I’d lost this! Thank you.” Brimming with a strange kind of light, there’s a shift in the weather of you. “Honestly, thank you, Professor Targaryen, so much. For everything.”
“Baelor,” he insists. He doesn’t typically let students drop the honorifics with him, but you’re not his student anymore, are you?
“Right.” You lock eyes with him as your hand covers his own. “Thank you, Baelor. I really will miss your class.”
“I’ll miss you.” he admits all of a sudden, as if it’s ripped out of him just by the soft pressure of your palm over his knuckles. “You were brilliant. Are. You are a brilliant writer.”
What happens next, he isn’t entirely certain. He knows he leans in. He knows that his eyelids drift shut, his head bows in prayer. Whether it’s you or him who finally closes the distance, though, he can’t tell. He can only hope that it’s him. To hope that there’s still a part of himself brave enough to do something rather than nothing.
It’s more of a fight than a kiss. Both of you pushing and pulling, breaking the last boundaries of decency. He’s messy, out of practice, stiff lips taking their time to thaw and melt against yours. Your book clatters against the floor. Salt streaks across his tongue. His hands perch against the contours of your neck, drawing you closer, wanting things that only a starved man could want. Your sweetness, your submission, it makes a monster of him. Ignites that reawoken beast in his chest. When you finally gasp for air, he finds himself chasing your mouth, greed outweighing tenderness.
“I’m sorry.” He could be apologizing for any number of things. Maybe it’s not you he’s truly apologizing to. All the neurons in his brain are hopelessly still. His animal instincts latch onto the taste of you and howl a song throughout his body.
“It’s alright. I wanted this,” you laugh breathlessly, gripping him like you’ll die if you let go. “I wanted this so much.”
“I know.” His mouth finds yours again. He’s better this time. Learning. Discovering. I know, he murmurs when you pull back to breathe, as your fingers start to work at the buttons of his shirt. Book forgotten, doorway forgotten, the world folds in on itself. It shifts and recenters, all the stars coming into new alignments, until all he feels is alive. Until all he knows is you.
waterfalls of the sun | professor!baelor targaryen x reader
ೃ⁀➷ this is part two of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.
Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), professor/student relationship & therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), explicit sexual content, fingering, pinv sex, reader POV, no Y/N.
Word Count: 5.6k
Author Notes: The response to part one was so incredible that I couldn't not make a part two :) Full disclosure, I don't know exactly where this series is headed. I have a part three and four sketched out, concepts for more beyond that, and a general idea of how I want reader & Baelor's arcs to pan out. I hope I can keep this going for as long as y'all are interested in this particular AU! Since it's spring break season, enjoy a timely little vacation with the old man <3 Gorgeous dividers are by @huraxy-dividers.
do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!
Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
—Mary Oliver, “Dogfish”
You’re a tragic hero. The misfortunes pile up: a group of law students stole your favorite table in the library. Your classmates who claimed they were sooo busy, sorry babes and turned down drinks are posting pictures at some fancy club uptown. There’s an insufferable man in your writing workshop who keeps using the word epistemological (incorrectly). Spring holiday is approaching and you’ve got absolutely nothing planned. And you’re in a standoff with your landlord over your backed-up sink, which he keeps insisting he’s fixed despite the evidence to the contrary. You give Baelor the sad report while you attempt to snake the drain for the fifth time.
“—which made me think he means ontological, but that’s so much more pretentious, isn’t it—ow!” An overconfident tug ends with your hand smacking against the faucet. If there’s something clogging the sink, it’s about as stubborn as you are.
“Your landlord really ought to be the one doing that, love.”
There’s a turn signal ticking on his end of the call. You catch a glimpse of the timer: 1:47:22 and counting. He never seems to tire of your aimless rambles. You’re baffled by his patience; you’d be bored of yourself by now. And yet he’s calling nearly every night you’re not together. Lets you go on and on while he drives home from a visit with one of his brothers. Go on, sweet girl, he’ll prod you when you trail off, I’m listening.
“That bastard can’t tell a sink from a shower,” you grumble. “You’d be a better plumber than he is.”
A muffled laugh. “You’d like that.”
It’s compelling, the thought of him kneeling in your kitchen. Sleeves rolled up, forearms straining as he wrestles with the J bend, maybe a gleam of sweat on his neck… you tuck that image into a shameful, needy nook of your brain.
“Hm. Maybe I would.”
He’s never set foot in your shabby little flat, only given it skeptical glances while picking you up or dropping you off in his sleek SUV that looks far too out of place next to the humble sedans parked along your street. It’s one line you both leave uncrossed. You don’t invite him. He doesn’t push in. Some form of plausible deniability, maybe, though there’s no lie you could tell that would explain away your relationship with him at this point. The calls, the texts, the four out of seven nights a week you usually spend at his house… you strayed from the path of professionalism a long time ago. You wonder if something would change if he stepped foot in your drafty bedroom. If he saw the pictures tacked to your walls or the stacks of books blooming on every surface. Maybe it’s easier for him to keep himself out of your world. Easier to not get attached.
“Are you still there, sweet girl?”
“Mhm.” You tamp down your insecurity and abandon the sink for the night. “Sorry. Where was I?”
Somewhere in your monologue, you end up in bed, trying to warm up under four layers of blankets. Winter is a pigheaded creature that refuses to drift away, even if the warmer months are close enough for you to almost smell the pollen and feel an oceanic breeze through an open window. The cold against your nose and the heat under the comforter make for a slow sedative. First your eyes are closed, then the pauses between each sentence get longer, and then you’re snapping awake to a nearly-drained battery and a call time of 4:55:01 that’s still climbing higher.
On the other end, the shushing sound of his breath. You’re half-dreaming. Fading again. You let your head fall back onto the pillow, let the call go on. It’s not enough to satisfy the wanton monster inside of you, that ugly, familiar beast. But you’re too possessive of these little moments to ask for anything more.
“What the fuck?”
He nearly drops his spoon in the pasta sauce he’s been tending to. Your third glass of wine is empty (you’re on break, it’s fine) and you’re scowling at your phone. It seems as if you’re the only member of your program who isn’t tanning on an expensive boat or dining at a seaside bistro.
“They’re in Volantis,” you huff, showing him the pictures of your classmates lounging in the sunshine. “The same assholes who complain about how our stipend is so low and they can never do anything fun. And they’re in fucking Volantis. It’s… what?”
He’s grinning over the stove. “It’s good to know that some things don’t change. Every graduate program has to have a few shockingly wealthy students.”
“Yeah, but you were the one going to Volantis on holiday when you were in grad school,” you point out.
He cocks an eyebrow. “Maybe. But I never complained about the stipend.”
You didn’t need to, you want to tease him. It’s probably for the best that you were still a child when he was getting his doctorate (even if that thought makes your head spin). You can just imagine how much disdain you would’ve had for him if you were the same age, how you would’ve rolled your eyes at his neat, name-brand clothes and his crisp, unblemished textbooks. Daddy’s money, you would’ve muttered behind his back. He would’ve been off on summer holidays across the Narrow Sea, flirting with foreign girls and collecting pretentious stories about the culture and the history to share during the autumn term while you’d be waiting tables and seething with jealousy.
Well. You imagine that’s how it’d be, at least. He doesn’t talk about what he was doing when he was your age. You don’t ask.
“I’m not mad that they’ve got the money for it. Good for them, you know? I just wish they’d be honest about it,” you sigh, reaching for the bottle of red.
He hmms and returns to his cooking. Candlelight and the incandescent bulbs turn the kitchen soft and sepia. In a few weeks, the sun will be out. You’ll be able to put away your winter coats. The trees on campus will bud and bloom. You’re mad with desire for it. Of all the seasons, it’s always spring that takes the longest to set in. For now, you rub your strained eyes in his dim kitchen. The radio is playing an old song that Baelor taps his fingers to the tune of. It’s life in slow-motion, but it’s life.
“Do you still want to see Dorne? We could go. Just for a bit.”
You perk up immediately, the burst of excitement barely contained. “Yes. Gods, yes, but… aren’t your sons visiting?”
“For a few days, then they’re off to see their cousins at Summerhall and I’ve got an article to finish before the end of term.” He fixes you a plate (plenty of cheese on your pasta, he knows you so well) and sets it down for you. “I could use the change of pace.”
Can I meet them? You wish you were brave enough to ask. You overhear him on the phone with his boys sometimes. Good night. I love you. I’m proud of you, he’ll say just before he hangs up. The younger one sends letters. You’ve seen them on the kitchen table with the rest of Baelor’s mail, Matarys Targaryen, Dragonstone College printed out in messy, boyish handwriting at the top left of the envelope. You want so badly to hear all about their accomplishments, the trouble they get into, the fun they have. But he’s got a clever little smirk playing at the corners of his mouth—he knows he’s got you, he’s heard your wistful rants about how badly you wish you could just melt away in the Dornish sun—and you don’t want to ruin this. Not now.
“We don’t… I mean, it’s a bit late to get a hotel and all that.” It’s a poor attempt at being reasonable. You’re ready to spring out of your chair and pack a bag.
“We wouldn’t need to do that.” He sits down across from you and pours himself a glass of wine. “I’ve got a villa in Sunspear.”
“You’ve got a villa. In Sunspear.”
Your shock makes him chuckle. “It was my mother’s.”
Right. Like that makes it any less ridiculous. You know his family’s wealthy. For fuck’s sake, half of the campus is named Targaryen-something-or-other. There are prime ministers and ambassadors and CEOs and socialites sprouting left and right from his family tree. But he’s not gaudy about it. You could almost forget that he’s got more money than you could ever conceive of. That the wine you’re drinking casually together on a Thursday costs more than all the groceries you’ve bought for the past month. That he could probably fetch a few million for his townhouse if he decided to sell.
You’re fighting with your landlord over a sink. He has a villa in Sunspear. It baffles you how disparate your lives are, and yet how easily they seem to fit together at times.
“Okay.” You hide your grin with a mouthful of pasta. “Let’s go.”
Whatever you’d imagined about his family’s wealth, you clearly weren’t imaginative enough.
The villa sits on a hill overlooking the city, making it seem as if you could jump from the edge of the property and land right in the heart of Sunspear. It’s late when you arrive—somewhere in the ten hour drive, you’d fallen asleep to the sound of the radio and the metronome stroke of his hand against your thigh—so the lights are on and sparkling like a glass of champagne. The gate and the gardens keep any neighbors at a safe distance, but you’d seen glimpses of the other houses on the hill on the drive in. Houses would be a degrading word to call them, actually. Castles seems like a better fit.
Inside is even more striking. Golden suns spiral in tile patterns on the floor. It makes you cringe to even walk on them. Like stepping on a museum display. In the living room, a massive fresco adorns an entire wall while an ornately framed painting hangs opposite. Your heart beats faster as you get close enough to realize that it’s not a print.
Rich. It’s the only word you can think of. Not just expensive. The chocolatey mahogany dining table, the velvet cushions on the sofa, the creamy marble in the kitchen… the whole house is a dessert that’d leave your throat stinging from the sugar. A decadence you want to die in.
“Make yourself comfortable.” Baelor, the gentleman that he is, takes both of your bags off to the bedroom, leaving you to stand awestruck in the living room.
Over by the piano—because of course there’s a grand piano, shiny and proud and probably worth more money than you’ll ever make in your entire life—is a little table spotted with framed photos. You gravitate toward it, always hungry for the crumbs of his life, for snapshots of the stories he never shares with you. Most of them are old, a bit sun-stained. A couple in different flowery settings: the man, tall and white-haired, dressed in crisp suits and tailored streetwear, and the woman, dark curls billowing over her shoulders, eyes always glinting toward the camera with a dreamy shine.
Baelor finds you lost in the past, holding a picture of the dark-haired woman smiling under an orange tree with a blond toddler sleeping in her lap. “This is your mum?”
“How can you tell?”
“You’ve got her eyes.” You giggle. “Well, eye.”
You set the frame back down. Next to it, half-hidden, you notice a newer frame. A wedding: petals in the air, stained glass of the most intricate sept you’ve ever seen in the background, a man smiling at his bride, kissing their intertwined hands. Your breath catches in your throat. It’s Baelor. You know immediately. Younger, no streaks of gray in his wavy brown hair, but the same dented nose and faint lines framing his smile. Heart-stoppingly handsome.
And in her gorgeous white gown, auburn hair caressed by her veil, looking at him in the same way you do, like he hung every star in the sky—
“Is this—”
“Yes.” His voice is uncharacteristically tentative. “Jena. We honeymooned here.”
Oh.
It’s a punch to the gut. Or a kiss on the cheek. Your brain is reeling from the whiplash. Yes, you’re standing in a haunted house, but… it’s a haunted house that he honeymooned in. That he brought you to. It’s as sweet as it is morbid. A strange show of vulnerability. You’re a whirlwind of wistful anxiety, heart galloping like a wild horse at the smallest dash of hope, all while he looks like he’s waiting for a sharp slap across his stubbly cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes avoiding yours. You’ve never seen him so uncertain.
“It’s alright. You should talk about her.” That doesn’t sound right, and now you’re scrambling to save face. “I mean, if you want to. I’d listen.”
And you would. You’d put a muzzle on your jealousy if it meant he’d open up. You get little scraps about his brother—six unruly children, the eldest back in rehab and the youngest a five-year-old girl going on fifteen—but never about Jena or his boys. You wish he’d tell you all about his wedding. Who got drunkest at the reception. If his brother was his best man, what the speech was like. What song they picked for their first dance. What flavor the cake was.
You’d pick vanilla with strawberry. Not that you’ve pictured it. But if time passed, if he asked, if it came to that… that’s what you’d pick.
He fiddles with his rings, a sad attempt at a smile crossing his face. “Some other time, maybe.”
It’s tranquil in the villa while the two of you drift towards bed. This sort of silence is different, a sort that makes you soften rather than tense up and lock your jaw. You’re sneaking glances at him in the mirror while you brush your teeth. You wonder if he brushed his teeth on the night of his wedding. If he tumbled into bed with his gorgeous bride and forgot, woke up the next day with that grainy un-brushed feeling in his mouth. You’re so full of mundane questions. So desperate to close the gentle distance he keeps you at. You fall asleep tucked neatly into his chest, hoping that some other time isn’t too far away.
You do try to behave.
The first two days are the most productive you’ve had in ages. A writer’s retreat that would make your classmates ache with jealousy. You flit from corner to corner of the villa, churning out pages and shifting to a new nook the second you need a change of scenery. With Baelor working away at an article in the study, you have free reign to pace around the kitchen, to occupy the entire sofa with your loose leaf scribbles, to spend an afternoon editing by the pool with only the lemon trees and the doves as your audience. All the mist and misery of a King’s Landing winter dissipates from your head in the clear, constant Dornish sun.
It’s your holiday, though. It’s warm and drowsy and so deliciously languid. In the molten haze, you forget about your drafts. You let your laptop battery die. You find yourself stretched out on a chaise in the study, a priceless first edition you’d plucked off the bookshelves utterly forgotten in your lap, watching Baelor’s thumb stroke a page of The Dornish Historical Review.
Gods, you’re greedy. You shock yourself by the depths of your own want. How fresh it feels, even after all these months.
He finds you in the garden, mid-afternoon, when you’re half-asleep and half-naked. Underneath the linen shirt you stole from him, your skin shimmers with sweat. You’re torn from the beginning of a dream by the weight of him at your side and the slip of his hand over your thigh.
“I was sleeping,” you mumble, feigning annoyance. Your legs part, a wordless invitation, and he slides his palm along the plane of your inner thigh, letting his fingertips just barely brush against the edge of your underwear.
“Were you?” He presses a kiss to your shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“‘S okay. I forgive you.”
You’ll always forgive him when he touches you so sweetly. When he nuzzles against your neck, the stubble of his beard adding little needlepoint sparks to each kiss. His hand tucks inside your underwear, pressing against your cunt, so firm, so sure.
“Couldn’t stop thinking about this.” One finger slips between your wet folds, then another. His knuckles sink and sink, sliding across all the tender spots inside you, until the stretch makes your breath stutter. A pause. His breath against your shoulder. And then he repeats it. Muffled by the fabric of your underwear and the flesh of his hand, you can just barely hear the sloppy squelch of him drawing all the slickness from you, pulling and pushing in all the ways that make you keen and cry.
“Yeah?” You feel your body going liquid-smooth, slowly giving into the pulse that spreads from your pelvis out to your entire nervous system. “Did… was I distracting you—oh…”
“Always.” He whispers. “Everywhere. You haunt me.”
His fingers withdraw all of a sudden. You’re blinking your eyes open, about to whine and beg, when everything comes into soft clarity and you see him sucking your juices off of his fingers, his gaze fixed so intensely on your face that it’s as if he’s undoing the buttons of your soul. Your mouth goes dry.
“Fuck, let me? Please?” You’re pawing at his wrist, boneless but insistent, and his eyes go dark as he relents and slides his fingers into your mouth. You close your eyes and suck. So earthy, so tangy, laced with the bookish smell of paper on his skin. A string of saliva glistens as he pulls his hand back, tracing over your lips before he sinks the spit-coated fingers back into your cunt.
“There’s my girl,” he murmurs while you moan and arch your hips into his touch. “So good for me. Let me take care of you.”
He’s steady as he works you back toward the edge that had disappeared right in front of you. So responsive to your little twitches and gasps. You can feel his wrist all drenched and sticky, the tendons flexing, each muscle moving just enough to coax your orgasm closer. A throaty hum spills out of your mouth. It’s so hot, so vibrant, so close—
“I know. I know.” His thumb just barely grazes your clit, and that does it. “Show me.”
“Fuck!” You whimper, and you’re coming all over his hand while he kisses your dumbstruck mouth. The whole world seems blindingly brilliant. Golden as the lemons that drape like fat jewels from the branches overhead. You love his cock in ways that make you shiver from the sinfulness of it, and yet there’s something singular and magical about how the same hands that caress frail pages of old manuscripts can also make you come so hard you soak the blanket underneath you.
You take his cock later, when the sun has gone down and the white bedsheets turn pale blue in the moonlight. You let him fuck you slow and safe. You marvel at the pearlescent spill of his come when he pulls out, as he marks your body like a blank paper.
Like a bride.
Late morning, and you’re sprawled out on the terrace while he marks up his own article draft. Fierce red marks bloom across the page. Entire paragraphs get the axe. He’s more critical with his own work than with students’ work. You wonder if he knows how talented he is at breathing life into history. How his articles (and oh, you’ve read them all, you’ve endured chapters and chapters on topics you know nothing about just to absorb more of him) reveal a reverence for his profession.
Have you told him how much you like reading his work? Maybe. You try to think back on all the evenings spent curled like a cat around him while he ruminates on his latest research and come up shamefully blank.
You should say something now. Tell him to think twice before making another cruel strikethrough, tell him how you wish he’d give you a fraction of the soul that seems to spill so easily onto the page. But it’s so lovely and peaceful between the two of you. So bright. There’s hope and birdsong and citrus in the air. Why ruin it all? You tuck that thought away and return to the Top 20 Attractions in Sunspear article you’d been scrolling through.
“Did you know that Westeros’s largest lemon cake is in Sunspear?”
“Hmm?” He seems to consider that seriously. “That makes sense, I suppose. What with the Rhoynish revival and the lemon being symbolic of—”
“Was that in the assigned reading?” You quip at him, so satisfied by how that makes his chest vibrate as he chuckles. “D’you want to go?”
He flips a page, and you can see an angry red X over half of what he’d written. “I can’t say it’s on the list of things I’d like to see before I die.”
“No? Well, I’m adding it to mine.” You scroll past a list of even more absurd tourist traps until you find something more suited to his tastes. “The Museum of Dornish History is open. They’ve got an exhibit on mosaics.”
He’s quiet. Too quiet for your liking. You’ve gotten good at translating those pensive pauses.
“You don’t want to go.”
“Sweet girl,” he starts, putting his papers aside as if he’s preparing for a lecture, “it’s not that I don’t want to go—”
“We don’t have to. It’s fine.” It’s not. You just don’t want to sour this little interlude with a petty argument. You can swallow your disappointment. You’re a fucking professional at this point.
You move to get up, but he’s putting a firm hand on your thigh to keep you anchored on the sofa. “I have colleagues at the museum here. If we were in… I don’t know, Lys or Meereen, I’d take you in a heartbeat. Do you hear me?”
“I know, but…” Gods, he’s so frustratingly rational. “I wish we could go somewhere.”
It makes you sound so small, so needy. You need to hold his hand all the way down the street, not just the blocks where no one is around. You need to go out for lunch and steal chips off of his plate. You need to kiss him in public and make him blush that pretty blush of his. You need anyone who’s looking to know that he’s yours, that you’re his.
“I don’t want to make things difficult for you. I need to protect this,” he says, so gentle and a little awkward, as if he’s forcing the earnestness from somewhere raw and deep inside of him. “Will you let me? Please?”
As if you could stop him. He’s too busy protecting you to see how badly you want to be hurt. You want the difficulty. The judgment. You’re desperate for the danger and the pitfalls if it means you can be with him. Properly. Not just as a girlfriend, but… as someone. Something more than just a girl he’s fucking.
Baelor-breaks-things. You’d told him he wouldn’t break you. Now, he’s being so careful with you that you could confuse the softness for suffocation. You need to breathe.
“Okay,” you acquiesce, then tilt your head and fix him with a look. “Can I have the keys?”
So you go. Fuck it, why not? You’re on holiday, you ought to do holiday things. You visit the museum. You buy an overpriced shirt from the gift shop. You wind through sun-drenched streets while the terracotta roof tiles bake in the afternoon heat. You try your luck at a club and abandon it after a single vodka soda, too contemplative to loosen up and dance with the horribly sunburnt eighteen-year-old girls visiting from Oldtown, even though they seem well-intentioned and tell you you’re, like, sooooo pretty in the restroom.
You end up perched on a bench in a historical plaza overlooking the ocean, fingers stained by the salt and spice of street food. An old fountain at the center of the plaza bubbles and blips every time someone flicks a coin in. Seagulls pace and peck at scraps. One saunters up. Fixes its greedy eyes on you.
“Sorry, love,” you tell it, showing it the empty container. Silly thing. All want, no courage. You’d shoo it away, but it reminds you of… well, you.
Gods, it’s bright, even after nightfall. The horizon stays just slightly luminous, like the sun might change its mind and come back out at any second. Little bursts of light illuminate the plaza: camera flashes, flickering lampposts, TVs from the flats above the shops. A lone busker is still plucking at a guitar. The whole world seems so viscerally alive, as if you could dig your fingers into the ground and feel its pulse thrumming away.
It’s rare, these moments where you feel like life isn’t some secret place that you’re waiting to be taken to. It’s here. You’re in it, fully submersed, letting it illuminate all the dormant corners of your heart.
And yet, you still wish he was here. Not to clutch and kiss and flirt. You just want to have him near. To know that he hears the music, that he smells the coriander and the peppers. To know that he’s with you amidst the brightness. That he feels it too.
On the last day of your holiday, you miss the sunset. Pink melts into orange. Orange gives way to murky blue. It’s only a blur in your peripheral vision while you ride him, palms braced against his chest, forcing him to lie back and let you take what you want. You want to remember this for the rest of your life: how he praises you for chasing your own pleasure, how his hands tremble on your hips, how his eyes drift shut and he whispers your name just before he comes.
“I don’t want to go back,” you admit while you lie naked in his arms afterward. Already, you’re dreading the mud and rain of King’s Landing, the spring days that are just barely too cool to open the windows. It’s a cruel form of time travel, departing the ease of this eternal summer for a city still wrapped in winter’s grubby fingers. Back to the damp classrooms, the puddles gathering on the cobblestones, the cold seeping into your chest and leaving you bitter.
“I know, love.” Baelor cups your chin and kisses you long and slow. “We can come back. There’s a festival at midsummer. You’d like that.”
It should make you feel hopeful. Instead, all you feel is a sea of confusion churning inside you. He won’t be seen in public with you, won’t come inside your flat, won’t let you see all the scenes and the people he keeps guarded in his past, and yet he’s holding you like you’re carved from glass and talking like it’s a sure thing, the notion that the two of you will still be together in three months. You’re two strange planets caught in each other’s orbits. Sometimes near enough to collide. Sometimes so distant you could mistake him for a shooting star flickering by. You sit up, that sea inside you cresting into a surge of clarity.
“Can I ask you something? I don’t want you to answer it right now. I want you to think about it, and then you answer it when you know for sure. I need you to be sure. Do you promise?”
There’s a look on his moonlit face that you could almost call pride. “I promise.”
“Alright.” You look in his eyes, searching the depths of the brown and the glimmers of the blue. “Is this just sex? Or is this something more?”
“Sweet girl, I—” he starts, but you shake your head and nestle yourself back into the sheets.
“Think about it.”
With his arm pillowed under your head, you lay on your side and watch the citrus trees sway in the night breeze. You’ll need to wake up early tomorrow. Get in the car, drive back to King’s Landing, say goodbye to the Dornish sun. But you stay awake just to listen to the wind blowing in from the ocean. To Baelor’s breath against your neck. To a bird fretting outside the window, making its last tiny chirps before bedtime. Your little honeymoon, singing you good night.
Can I see you?
The text pops up while you’re folding laundry in front of a halfway interesting home renovation show. You have to check twice to make sure that it’s actually him. He’d dropped you off at your flat less than twenty-four hours ago, in the middle of a spring rain shower that somehow felt more frigid than a blizzard. It sends a warm prickle of electricity down your spine, the idea that he can’t make it a whole day without wanting to be near.
It’s a relief too. Already, you can feel the loneliness seeping back in. A cold draft through the unsealed cracks of a drafty window. How distant it had been in Dorne. How dormant. And now it’s carving itself back into your bones, making your whole body feel heavier.
i’ll be over in 20
Stay there. I’ll come to you.
Shit. You don’t even have time to register the thrill. By the time you’ve changed out of your pajamas, made your bed, collected the laundry, scrubbed the bathroom, and lit a candle for good measure, he’s knocking on your door.
“Sorry it’s a mess,” you wince as you let him in, nudging a random pile of books under your sofa while he’s taking off his shoes. “Tea?”
“Please.”
It’s strange seeing him sit at the kitchen table that you saved from a dumpster. Its one broken leg propped up by an anthropology textbook you haven’t touched since your first year of undergrad. The stains from hot sauce and red wine. You make him orange spice tea in a Pennytree Rugby Club mug, so faded from the dishwasher that half of the letters are just vague smudges. He doesn’t say anything about the fact that the light over your sink blinks every few minutes. Or about the odd grumble that the heater spits out. He’s just watching you.
“Thought you’d be sick of me after a week,” you try to joke while you fuss over the tea bags, although it comes out sadder than you’d intended.
“A week wasn’t enough.” And gods, he’s so genuine, those blue-brown eyes full of barren honesty. “It was too still. Back home. Without you, I don’t…”
Wherever that thought was going, it’s lost to the haze of the fluorescent lights. You turn back to the sink, washing your hands just to have a second to think. You’re never quite sure where you stand with him. Some days it’s like you can see the doors around his heart opening, the radiance spilling from inside; others, he might as well be a constellation whose light is as mysterious as it is distant.
“I have an answer for you. The beginning of one, at least,” he says slowly, analytically, once you’re sitting across from him, and it sends your heart racing. “You’ll forgive me if I make you wait for the rest? I want to get it right.”
“That’s fine.” You can see his red pen moving in your mind, annotating every word he says before he speaks. “I’ll hold you to it, though.”
“I hope you will.” There’s a ghost of a grin over his face, and then he says: “It’s something more.”
It’s as if the whole world illuminates into colors you’d never known existed. A sunrise over the grayscale inside you. All your animal instincts, always howling and whining for more, more, more go silent. Appeased. It’s the smallest concession. Not a door opening, more like a curtain drawn back. But it’s enough to make your world shift on its axis. The constellation of him suddenly readable.
His broad shoulders relax half a centimeter, tension evaporating into the night. You think there’s a watery sheen over his eyes, but it’s gone just as soon as you notice. His palm is warm from his tea when you reach out to grasp it.
“Thank you,” you whisper.
There’s an ease in the aftermath of his small, seismic confession. A layer of pressure stripped away. It’s not a fix-all. You’ll tear yourself to pieces until he finishes his soul-searching and tells you exactly what this is between the two of you, if it’s not just sex. For now, though, you’ll take anything he gives you in your fragile, fawning hands. You’ll treasure it. You’ll pray that it lasts, or that it at least has time to wind itself into the fabric of your being before one of you inevitably breaks it.
He takes your mugs when you’re finished. “Sink still giving you trouble?”
“When isn’t it?”
“I’ll take a look if you like.”
He’s no handyman. You’re fairly certain his only qualifications to fix your sink are those biceps of his that he keeps hidden under dress shirts and knit jumpers. But he’s sweet. Chivalrous. If he wants to be your knight saving you from the horrors of your ancient, constantly-breaking flat, who are you to stop him?
You quirk an eyebrow. “Yeah, go on then.”
He rolls up the maroon sleeves of his jumper. His forearms are still sunkissed from the Dornish skies. The look he gives you is so knowing. You’d like that, he’d said, and yes, you absolutely do. You like all of him, so fucking much. Your golden man. Your whiplash love. Your something more.
the limits of your longing | professor!baelor targaryen x reader
ೃ⁀➷ this is part one of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.
Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), Dark Academia AU (tbh more like dimly-lit academia), professor/student relationship so therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), explicit sexual content, angst, hurt/comfort, dead spouse, brief drug use, alcohol, oral sex, pinv sex, choking (BARELY), reader is kind of existentially depressed but so is Baelor, reader POV, no Y/N.
Word Count: 5.7k
Author Notes: I am an American (#sorry) but I feel like modern ASOIAF universe fics feel strange if they're not Brit-ified. I've done my best to ignore my yeehaw-y'all-wudder-upbringing and make this modernized Westeros world feel cohesive (queue... jumper... flat...) but there will likely be gaps in my knowledge #mybad.
In terms of the reader-insert of it all, reader doesn't have a physical description or much of a backstory. She does have a pretty complex personality though. I come from OC territory so this is my first attempt at writing genuine second person reader insert... let's call this a craft exercise.
Gorgeous dividers are by @huraxy-dividers
do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!
Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy
We can’t keep doing this, he likes to say, but he never ends it. He never meant for it to happen, you’re sure. You didn’t mean for it either. You’re falling asleep to the sound of him scribbling Needs further explanation on an essay he’s grading, your thighs still tickle from his beard, and you really don’t know how this keeps happening, it just does.
He must be lonely, you figure. Or sad. Or going through some sort of mid-life crisis. You’ve seen the pictures of his sons in his office: the younger one, the lanky redhead, grinning in a boarding school uniform, and the older one, a carbon copy of his father, off on summer holiday adventures in his university jumper. Barely younger than you.
And there’s the wedding ring he doesn’t take off. You tried reading the obituary in the library when you were supposed to be doing research and only got as far as “...passed thirteen months after a diagnosis of glioblastoma…” before you felt sick.
You’ve felt that ring inside you while you’ve fallen apart on his fingers. You’ve licked the warm metal clean after.
He’s probably making the same calculations about you. He probably wonders what fucked you up so bad that you’d rather spend a Friday night watching a man old enough to be your father make you chamomile in his delicate old teacups. What made you the kind of girl who gets wet seeing Brilliant point in his handwriting on your papers.
Whatever. If that’s what he’s thinking when he’s staring at you, at least he’s staring at you.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while you straighten his shirt in the dim office lamplight, but it just means not here.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while his cock presses deep enough to bruise, but it just means he’s close.
Sometimes you wonder if you just remind him of himself. Excellent historicization, he’s written on your latest essay. Your literature professors are probably sick of telling you to revise, cut to the criticism already, leave the historical details to the historians. There’s a fresh draft, cleaner, already edited in your laptop. You knew as soon as you wrote that paragraph that it was just for him.
“Are you trying to woo me or something?” You grin at him, tapping the note.
He sets a flowery cup of peppermint tea down for you. “Maybe I’m trying to convince you to change your field.”
“I’m not cut out for history.” You’d taken his class as an elective, after all. A change of pace from your normal literary seminars and creative workshops. You hadn’t expected to like it, let alone like him.
“What makes you say that?” Head tilted, he studies you with his two-toned eyes. “You wrote the best seminar paper I’ve read in ten years.”
Ten years. Ten years ago he was married, a father of two, already tenured, and you were… well. Doing whatever stupid teenage shit you were doing ten years ago. Your face feels hot while you think of something to say, avoiding his gaze, staring at the collection of matchbooks he keeps in a bowl on the center of the table.
“Because I’m a writer,” you point out. “You’re used to reading what historians write.”
Baelor seems to mull that over like you’ve said something profound. It’s odd, the way being in his kitchen seems to pry apart all your usual defenses. You’re so cold in the classroom, so analytical, so exact in everything you say. A dog with its teeth bared. Growling and barking so no one can see how frightened you are of being wrong. But here, with the light over the stove casting a tender glow over his face, you open your mouth and some half-baked thought comes spilling out.
He’s softer too, a half-smile on his face like you’re some sort of precious thing. “I’d like to read your work.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” is your knee-jerk reaction. The lines of his forehead crinkle as the smile fades.
“Why not?”
You shrug and sip your tea. “It’s just different.”
It’s not that you only write bleeding heart poems about him. Sure, you do, sometimes, but you wouldn’t care if he read them. It’s all the rest that you don’t want him to see. The threads that show up like fragile pieces of flesh under a layer of armor. The loneliness. The insecurity. The existential dread. You know there are parts of him that he’ll never let you see. You’re allowed to keep some of yourself hidden too.
It’s always fucking raining in King’s Landing. Always flooding the cobblestone streets. Instead of soaking your shoes and trudging home after your seminar, you find a seat in his lecture hall. He doesn’t see you amidst the sea of strung out undergraduates taking frantic notes while he moves through his slides. You don’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to listen to him.
“You’ll have noticed that our readings for this week come from anthropologists, not historians. It is true that the pre-Andal period is usually considered prehistoric, but I think we would do well to remember that the early Andal people we’ll be reading about next week did not arrive into an empty void; rather, they stepped into a pre-existing culture.” He gestures to the image on the projector, ancient art spiraling over cave walls. “We know from their art and preserved burials that the First Men likely had complex relationships, storytelling practices, and religious icons. I want us to look at these engravings from about ten thousand years ago in the Mountains of the Moon. What might we say about the people who had created them?”
The sounds of rainfall and laptop keys pitter-patter throughout the hall while he leans against the podium. A gentle smile plays across his face. Not smug. Just curious.
“This isn’t a trick question, I promise.”
He fiddles with his hands while he talks. Flexing, tapping, twisting his rings. It’s charming. Unconscious. You think about it while you touch yourself later, making yourself come like it’s a punishment.
After you wash your hands and stare at yourself in the mirror for far too long, calling yourself a fucking pervert and every other name you can think of, there are two unread texts waiting for you.
Did you not have an answer to my questions in lecture? Or were you hoping I wouldn’t notice you?
I know you would have had something poetic to say.
Fuck. Okay. Maybe a little smug.
Two in the morning and your flat is haunted by the smell of a candle that burned out an hour ago. He calls, knowing you’re awake. You’re a pair of insomniacs who only seem to go to bed at a decent hour when you’re sleeping together.
“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” he says. “That there’s a difference between what you write as a historian and what you write as a writer. ”
“I guess… it’s the difference between academic and creative. Impersonal versus personal.” You’re not as eloquent as you wish you were. But you hear his curious hum, the sound he always makes when you’re treading toward a point and he wants to hear more.
“You don’t think history can be personal?”
“Maybe. But there’s more to hide behind.”
Silence on the other end. And then, “Keep talking.”
“I don’t really have a thesis here,” you admit. Even if you did, you’re too tired to spell it out in any sort of cohesive way.
“Then you’ll find one. Keep talking, sweet girl. I want to listen.”
So you do. You talk and talk and talk, spinning in circles and never quite landing on a point. You lose your train of thought. Somewhere along the way, you diverge into ranting about an article you’d read for class, about which table in the library is your favorite, about the trip you wish you could take to Dorne if your stipend weren’t so fucking abysmal. You’re sure you’ve bored him, you’re sure you’ve put him to sleep, but each time you stop yourself he’s humming on the other end of the phone. Keep talking.
Knees against the aged hardwood floor of his office. His fingers tense in your hair. It’s late enough that you can tell what phase the moon is in, hanging low over the crested rooftops of the University halls. But he still grits his teeth together while you run your tongue over the veins of his cock. Only the softest grunts echo low in his chest. You look up at him through watery eyes, choking yourself on him, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
You’ve never met a man like him. A man who listens to you talk for hours on end. Who wants to listen. A man whose cock you want to suck, because gods, he’s handsome, he’s tense, and the way he blushes while you go down on him makes your chest burn with a sort of pride you’ve never had before.
“Fuck, love,” he chokes out, his hand on your head going taut. “Sweet… sweet girl, I—”
And then his head drops back, all the muscles in his neck glinting in the moonlight. You savor every last drop of him, every sensitive twitch, until he’s pulling you off and up onto his lap. There’s saliva and come dripping down your chin. It glistens in his salt-and-pepper stubble after he kisses you.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he says, but there’s a breathy little laugh in his throat and the lines around his eyes are gleaming at you, so you just laugh along with him and whisper yes, yes we can.
“Are you there, sweet girl?”
There’s a crunched-up beer can in the gutter. Headlights and neon signs reflect off the aluminum. It’s a little mesmerizing. A small distraction from the gnawing ache in your chest.
“Are you alright?”
You’re not. You’re high and alone and not dressed for the crisp autumn night. You don’t know where your friends went. Fuck, you don’t even know where exactly you are. You’d stepped out of the club to breathe and now you’re curled up on the curb like a stray dog, tears and glitter running down your cheeks. Baelor’s disembodied voice drifts past you like a ghost before you remember that you’d called him.
“Are you there?”
“Can you come get me?” Your voice is so small. “I don’t… I want to go home.”
“Where are you?” Something clatters on his end. His keys, maybe. Your hazy eyes catch the time on your phone. One thirty in the morning, and he’d picked up right away.
“Flea Bottom.” Your head whirls as you search for a street sign. “Um, Gin Alley.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He’s pulling up in just under ten. You practically fling yourself into your arms, babbling apologies through your tears.
“You’re alright? Look at me. Did someone do this to you?” He holds your face in his hands, eyes flickering over you, checking for damage. There's an edge to him that you've never seen before. As if the hands that hold you so delicately could just as soon snap someone's nose in your defense.
You shake your head, making the whole world spin again. You wish you could say yes. Wish you could blame it on someone slipping something in your drink or feeling you up, but the only problem is you.
“I’m just fucked up.”
You expect to be reprimanded. You want him to be angry. If he is, he doesn’t give you the self-deprecating satisfaction. He just shrugs off his coat and drapes it over your shoulders.
“Let’s get you home.”
Home. Not back to my house. Just home. You’ll forget that bit when you wake up tomorrow. For now, you roll that around in your head over and over while the radio airs a news story about birds’ changing migratory routes in the Stormlands he drives you home.
There’s a half-drunk cup of tea keeping a pile of papers company on the kitchen table. He pours you a glass of water, makes you drink it while he takes you upstairs and sits you down on the bed. Your sweat-stained clothes end up in his laundry hamper, replaced by an old King’s Landing University shirt. You’re staring listlessly at the floor while he fetches a damp washcloth from the bathroom and dabs away your ruined makeup. Warm damp. The kind of comfortable temperature that means he’d stood by the tap adjusting the water until it wouldn’t shock you. It’s so much more than you deserve.
“I’m sorry,” you say for the hundredth time, and once your mouth opens you can’t stop yourself. “I didn’t mean to be a mess, I just get so… it’s so quiet sometimes and I hate it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you.” He unfurls a pair of socks and slides them onto your feet. His lips press to your kneecaps. You could shatter from the softness of it.
“Something is, though,” you insist. “I feel like a monster.”
He’s silent for a long time. “You’re cruel to yourself.”
So are you, you want to tell him. He buries himself in articles and research on a weekend like it’s a form of self-flagellation. Like enough sleepless nights will help him atone for whatever he feels guilty about. He buries himself in you. Fucks you as if it’ll purify him, but how could it when you’re just as bad? Irredeemably self-destructive, the pair of you.
Your shaky hand reaches for the collar of his shirt. A silent ask. Make me forget this. But he intercepts it and kisses the inside of your sweaty palm, melting your lust away like rain over snow.
“Come here. You’re alright.” Lights go out and he eases you into bed, keeping his hands anchored around you as if you’ll disappear if he doesn’t. “My sweet girl. Smart girl. You’ll be alright.”
And maybe you will. There are times when you nearly believe that. Mid-afternoons in his office, curled in a faded armchair, you doze off while he parses through an article at his desk. The light trickles through the old window panes just soft and just warm enough to blanket you. There are mornings when you wake up first and get to fix him coffee (really, you just like using his fancy machine). He keeps a container of your particular creamer in his fridge. You bring him matchbooks to add to his collection.
It’s sweet. Soporific. The kind of domesticity that almost fills the emptiness inside you. When you sit down to write, the page fills with lines about folding socks. Matchbooks. Heterochromia. Hands stained with ink.
You put on real estate show reruns while you try to thread enough of those images together to make a halfway decent poem. Strange how you can actually sleep next to him, instead of staring at the ceiling and spiraling like you do back in your flat. You’re half-dreaming, just holding on long enough to see which quaint Riverlands cottage the couple chooses, when—
“Thought they’d choose the second house.”
“Fucking hell!” Scared out of your skin, you thought he’d fallen asleep an hour ago. His laughter fills the room like a shock of warmth in the early winter air. He’s so beautiful with all the lines of his face framing his smile, silver-streaked dark hair grown out and mussed from the pillows. Fuck off, you mutter. You’re grinning too.
when are you coming back?
You’re an embarrassment to the women’s restroom queue. A line of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen, chatting or giggling or drunkenly figuring out how to operate a digital camera, all shimmering in each other’s presence, and you’re texting a graying man who’s at an academic conference. Your lack of camaraderie is probably setting feminism back twenty years. You’d said yes to a night out because you’re young, you’re fun, you should be doing something young and fun on a Friday night, but now you’re one too many drinks in and sulking against the wall. You stare at the phone until he responds. The girl behind you is actively breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone and you can’t even bring yourself to eavesdrop.
Return flight gets in at 9:45 tomorrow night.
can i see you then?
You’re so fucking desperate. A week without him and you’re in heat, howling for attention. A group of girlfriends stumbles out of the restroom and finally, you’re nearing the front of the queue.
I’ll pick you up on my way home.
ok!
i miss you
It’s like typing it out makes it sound even more miserable. You’re about to triple text, lighten the blow with some quick diversion. He responds faster.
I miss you too. I’ve been thinking about you.
What are you doing tonight? Tell me about your day.
Your knees almost give out. Trying to blink your eyes into instant clarity, you manage to pull yourself together.
at th pub
with friends :)
Are you safe?
yeah i’m fine just bored
ive had more fun just sitting in your kitchen
i love your kitchen
At this point, your thumbs are moving of their own accord. You’re typing out something about how you love his matchbook collection, you love his stupid grandmotherly teacups, you love falling asleep to the sound of him marking up papers, you love him—
I know. That’s where I picture you when I think of you.
My beautiful girl.
Throat suddenly dry, you feel fire in your core and a heat to your thighs that makes you hazy. The fact that he probably doesn’t even mean to be turning you on only makes it hotter. But fuck, you can’t help it, the sheer nice-ness of it makes you want to ride him within an inch of his life, right there in that kitchen.
And then, of course, he has to drive it home.
I hope I dream about you tonight.
Slamming the stall shut harder than you mean to, you take three tries to latch the door and then fumble to pull your top down. The lighting’s low and the picture turns out a little blurred, but you send the image of your pretty tits and your drunken smile without an ounce of the shame you ought to have.
wish you were here <3
You’re both insatiable after he returns. A dusting of snow makes the cobblestone streets slick and lures you the warmth of his house on weeknights when you really ought to be answering emails and polishing drafts for publication. You’ve barely crossed the threshold, snowflakes still melting on your coat, when he’s kissing you senseless. A muffled greeting gets lost somewhere in your smile.
Fireplace ablaze and turning the whole living room ochre, it doesn’t take long for you to thaw. Something crinkles as he presses your back into the couch cushions. You grab a stray pile of papers from under you, nearly tossing them aside before you open your eyes and blink.
“Is this mine?” Lust-drunk and thinking in slow-motion, you can still recognize your own handwriting. Had you given him an essay draft to look over? The uneven lines don’t seem like the usual literary criticism you ask him to review. You catch a handful of words—held in the matchbook of you… divining ink stains… all the dark matter of the universe—and then you realize.
“Fuck, did you read this?”
“You left it behind last night,” he murmurs, kissing down the lines of your throat.
“I didn’t mean to.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Surely, he can see right through you now. All the cracks you’ve tried to plaster over, all the longing you’ve tried to hide. Not just for him, but for… something gentle. Stable. Something hopeful and bright that you’re not sure either of you know how to find.
His mouth back on yours, he pulls the papers from your hands, leaving a papercut on your pinky that bubbles with red instantly. “Ow!”
Whatever anger might’ve kindled within you dies as he takes your finger and sucks the blood away. Fuck, you love him like this. Starved and needy. Blown pupils making both eyes look entirely black. He asks with his hands and his mouth and you give, clawing at your clothes until you’re bare for him. You’re a pair of moonlit animals. If he’s already seen all the shameful pieces of you that you bury in your work, then there’s no point in holding out.
Pressing you back into the couch, Baelor bows his head to suck at your tits. Teeth graze against your nipples. Hungry. Insistent. You know what he wants as soon as he trails downwards, but you’re too impatient and too empty to let him.
“No, fuck—” you whine while he worships your inner thighs, even though the prickle of his chin over the sensitive, soft skin makes your spine arch off the cushions. “Please fuck me, I want your cock, please—”
“This first.” It’s firm. You can writhe and complain as much as you want, but when he spreads your legs and inhales the scent of your cunt, you know you can’t stop him.
He’s so diligent when he eats you out. It’s another form of study for him. Whatever makes you moan and tense gets repeated, honed in on. Tongue lapping at the hot core of you, his nose brushes up against your clit and your whole body goes taut with the shock of it. But instead of pulling back and letting your edge fade, he only nuzzles deeper.
A hand slides up your thighs to your stomach. You grab it and squeeze hard enough to cut off circulation. His rings stamp into your skin.
“Please—please fuck me now,” you’re moaning, begging, desperate to be full of him when you finally come. “I’ll do whatever you want, I fucking… I fucking promise, I just need it—”
His other hand opens you up. No resistance, only the pressure and stretch of three long fingers, you break for him and choke at the sensation of it. Combined with the tug of his lips over your clit, it’s enough to make you cry and come like the mess that you are.
“Sweet thing,” he’s humming as he eases you through it. “Good girl. Thank you.”
Thank you? You’re struggling for breath, and he’s fucking thanking you. You’d laugh at how sweet it is, but you finally clear your eyes enough to get a good look at his face, and… gods. He’s feral. That wasn’t for you. It was for him.
You grab at his face, pulling him near until he finally lets you kiss your own juices off of him. Salt and sweat washes over your tongue. You’re so blissed-out that you don’t hear the music of his belt, don’t feel the pressure against your cunt until his thick cock is easing inside you, slowly, making you feel every inch until his hips sit flush against yours.
“Is this what you need?” His voice is a string pulled dangerously stiff. You manage a weak mhmm, bucking against him insistently, but he doesn’t move.
“No. Look at me.” He wipes your eyes with his thumb, bringing you back to your body, back to him. “There she is. Talk to me, sweet girl.”
“I just want you.” Unrefined nonsense swirls through your head, all centered around him. “You’re so… so good, how can you… how can you be good to me?”
A shallow, experimental thrust makes you clutch at his sculpted biceps. “My angel. You’re easy to—”
“I’m easy?” Neurons finally firing fast enough to tease him, you grin at the blush that spreads across his crooked nose, over the lines of his cheeks, down to the old scars that are peppered across his chest. The drag of his cock inside you is torturously slow.
“Easy to be good for,” he finally manages to choke out once he regains control of himself. “You make… you make this so easy.”
That means something you can’t quite decipher. Right now, you don’t care. You just clench your cunt around him and spur him on, teeth clashing against teeth as his thrusts get faster and faster.
He doesn’t fuck you like he’s trying to be good. He fucks you like he’s trying to figure out just how far he can push you. How much he can take. Like he wants you to tell him slow down, enough, please be gentle, but you don’t. You take it all and still want more.
My girl, my angel, so good for me. The praise melts into you. Gods, you need him to finish. He’s getting sloppy, barely pulling out before he presses back into your cunt. The sound of it is disgusting and delicious. You’re soaking the couch, soaking him, leaving drool on the corners of his mouth when you kiss him, and he just keeps going.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” you cry out while he chases release, “you’re—”
Wherever that thought was going, you don’t get to finish it. His hand, the one that still smells like you, barely presses against the base of your neck. Your head drops back. Everything goes white hot and loud. The pain of overstimulation makes the orgasm bittersweet in the most savory way, striking through your whole body and leaving you raw. All your brain can process is how full you are and how warm, how strong he is.
“Oh, fuck, sw—sweet girl,” he stutters, and you know he’s getting close. You grip his arms hard enough to bruise and beam up at him through fresh tears. He’s so perfect like this, sweating and straining and vulnerable. It makes you want things you shouldn’t want.
“Inside?” You whisper, sweet as a song, and that’s what breaks him. A guttural sound, half-laugh and half-sob rips from his throat. He buries his cock so deep inside you that you can’t feel where you end and he begins. The warm flood of his come spills and spills and fills you in a way that’s hot and primal and perfect.
It feels right.
“Was it good?” You manage to ask while his cock goes soft inside of you. Your hands play with the coarse tufts of his hair that are overdue for a cut.
“You always feel good.”
That makes you preen a bit. It’s not what you mean, though.
“I mean my writing. Did you like it?”
“It felt like you.” It’s not a yes, but it makes you glow more than a simple yes ever could. “Alive. Intense.”
You turn your head so you can see blue and brown; your heaven, your earth. “It didn’t scare you?”
“Beautiful girl,” he furrows his brow, quizzical and almost amused, “why would you scare me?”
The truth of it is, you scare yourself.
There’s the void that seems to follow you everywhere. You’re used to that, though. You know you’ll feel it in your chest when all the noise of the day dies down. It manifests in your writing unbidden. It’s so familiar you might as well name it, put a leash on it, drag it around with you and feed it leftovers from your plate. And maybe it bubbles up, like it had that night outside the club, but for the most part it’s an unfortunate background noise.
The want, though, that’s… new. Something you don’t know how to describe. Ravenous. Unhinged. It burns through you and leaves you weak and raw.
It’s not that you want him in disgusting and depraved ways, though that’s part of it. No. You want to hear the story of every matchbook in his bowl. You want to know where he got the scars on his chest. You want to know if they have something to do with the military medal that’s framed on his mantelpiece. You want to learn the names of the people in his pictures. You want him to tell you about his sons, what they were like as boys, what they want to do with their lives.
You want him to take off that wedding ring. You want him to take you on a proper date. Dinner. Drinks. A shitty film. You want him to kiss you where people can watch and then take you home, and you want that home to be a place where both of you live. A place where there might be a picture of you on his fridge.
You want everything with him. In the best ways, in the worst ways. Everything.
He’s been marking up papers for an hour and you’ve probably just been staring at him for the past thirty minutes. Letting your mind wander. The sunset is turning his office rosy and warm, even though the ancient radiator can barely keep your fingers from going numb when winter gets this frigid. His blue eye seems nearly violet in this light.
You cast your gaze outside. In the courtyard, figures wrapped in scarves and heavy coats cluster and scatter. One on a bench springs up to greet another. They intertwine and melt, heading off towards a lecture hall hand-in-mittened-hand.
Baelor hmms about whatever he’s reading and you can’t help it, you lean over his desk and kiss him before either of you realize what’s happening. His pen clatters to the floor. Strong hands cradle your face. It’s gentle, easy. No lust, just soft lips on yours and the leather-and-paper scent of him filling your lungs.
When you pull away, there’s a dazed look on his face. “What was that for?”
“Dunno,” is your sheepish answer.
His gaze flickers toward the door, ever so slightly ajar. He’s quiet, contemplative, and also a fucking loud thinker. The warmth seems to seep out of the room in the space of a few seconds. You read his mind and feel something fragile and needy inside you snap.
“We can’t keep—”
“Will you stop fucking saying that?”
Blue-brown eyes go oceanic with hurt, but you’re already shoving your books in your bag. Not this. Not again. You can’t keep listening to the same tired line. Maybe it used to excite you. Now it’s a crutch he leans on and you just want to pull it out from under him.
“Just tell me if you don’t want me,” you spit, as though you wouldn’t come crawling back to him like a kicked dog even if he did. “You don’t need to make up excuses.”
“Stop that.” He’s stern all of a sudden. “You’re acting like—”
Fuck. You know what he wants to say, even if he catches himself before he lets it slip. It makes your eyes sting with frustration.
“Like what?” You push. “Say it.”
He sighs your name like a curse. Fuck it, you think. If he can’t bring himself to hurt you, you don’t mind hurting yourself.
“Fine, I will. I’m acting like a child.” You’re crying in earnest now, hoping that your tears sparkle just enough to make him guilty. “You’re here too, you know? It’s not just me. Either you like fucking pathetic girls or you’re just as fucked as I am, take your pick.”
“That’s not fair,” he snaps, though you feel like you’re being perfectly fair to both of you. “You’re a smart girl, you understand that there are consequences to something like this.”
“What is this, then? Your midlife crisis? Am I the treatment for whatever’s fucking wrong with you?” It’s cruel, cold, ripped from the ugliest depths of your heart. “Whatever. Suffer, then.”
He doesn’t call after you. His colleagues give you odd looks as you hurry out of the building and gods, the cold hits you in just the right way. One solid punch to the gut, forcing all the breath out of you. You hold the tears back. You walk all the way home without falling to pieces on the street. The emptiness is there to keep you company, your loyal little ghost. You’re glad to feel it. That fierce ache in your bones. You’d started to miss it.
You apologize. Because of course you do. You spend all of two days angry at him, and then you’re scrambling to clean up your mess before the withdrawal hits you like a train.
i’m sorry. can we talk? i was so wrong.
No, you were right.
Can I see you?
He doesn’t say what you were right about. He only whispers I’m sorry while he sucks at your neck, I’m sorry while he mouths against your breasts, I’m sorry when he turns you over and strokes the back of your head while he fucks into you. Please… please stay, when you’re sobbing through the overstimulation. Stay with me, when he starts to falter, chest stuttering against your back, his nose wet when he kisses against your shoulder. Please… fuck. Sweet girl. Can I come inside you?
You cling to him when he makes tea after. The kitchen tiles bite with cold against your toes. He presses his lips to your hair while the water boils and sways from side to side. Always oscillating. Always in-between.
There’s a new mug set out for you, a plain white one with his son’s university crest on it. “What happened to your teacups?”
“I dropped them,” he admits, pausing for a moment before he continues. “I’ve always been too rough with my hands. My brother used to call me Baelor-breaks-things when we were little.”
He’s never talked about his brother before. It’s the tiniest opening, a door inside him barely left ajar.
“I don’t want to break this,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to break you.”
“You won’t.”
You don’t know that for sure. Or maybe you’re the one who will do all the breaking just to spare him the pain. For now, you let the rise and fall of his chest measure the passing seconds. Fractured messiness pressed together. Almost whole. With your eyes closed amidst the sound of rain on the eaves, you can almost imagine that everything you’ve ever longed for is right here.
End notes: Come talk abt the old man & poetry with me. Thanks for thirsting :)
the limits of your longing | professor!baelor targaryen x reader
ೃ⁀➷ this is part one of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.
Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), Dark Academia AU (tbh more like dimly-lit academia), professor/student relationship so therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), explicit sexual content, angst, hurt/comfort, dead spouse, brief drug use, alcohol, oral sex, pinv sex, choking (BARELY), reader is kind of existentially depressed but so is Baelor, reader POV, no Y/N.
Word Count: 5.7k
Author Notes: I am an American (#sorry) but I feel like modern ASOIAF universe fics feel strange if they're not Brit-ified. I've done my best to ignore my yeehaw-y'all-wudder-upbringing and make this modernized Westeros world feel cohesive (queue... jumper... flat...) but there will likely be gaps in my knowledge #mybad.
In terms of the reader-insert of it all, reader doesn't have a physical description or much of a backstory. She does have a pretty complex personality though. I come from OC territory so this is my first attempt at writing genuine second person reader insert... let's call this a craft exercise.
Gorgeous dividers are by @huraxy-dividers
do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!
Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Joanna Macy
We can’t keep doing this, he likes to say, but he never ends it. He never meant for it to happen, you’re sure. You didn’t mean for it either. You’re falling asleep to the sound of him scribbling Needs further explanation on an essay he’s grading, your thighs still tickle from his beard, and you really don’t know how this keeps happening, it just does.
He must be lonely, you figure. Or sad. Or going through some sort of mid-life crisis. You’ve seen the pictures of his sons in his office: the younger one, the lanky redhead, grinning in a boarding school uniform, and the older one, a carbon copy of his father, off on summer holiday adventures in his university jumper. Barely younger than you.
And there’s the wedding ring he doesn’t take off. You tried reading the obituary in the library when you were supposed to be doing research and only got as far as “...passed thirteen months after a diagnosis of glioblastoma…” before you felt sick.
You’ve felt that ring inside you while you’ve fallen apart on his fingers. You’ve licked the warm metal clean after.
He’s probably making the same calculations about you. He probably wonders what fucked you up so bad that you’d rather spend a Friday night watching a man old enough to be your father make you chamomile in his delicate old teacups. What made you the kind of girl who gets wet seeing Brilliant point in his handwriting on your papers.
Whatever. If that’s what he’s thinking when he’s staring at you, at least he’s staring at you.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while you straighten his shirt in the dim office lamplight, but it just means not here.
We can’t keep doing this, he says while his cock presses deep enough to bruise, but it just means he’s close.
Sometimes you wonder if you just remind him of himself. Excellent historicization, he’s written on your latest essay. Your literature professors are probably sick of telling you to revise, cut to the criticism already, leave the historical details to the historians. There’s a fresh draft, cleaner, already edited in your laptop. You knew as soon as you wrote that paragraph that it was just for him.
“Are you trying to woo me or something?” You grin at him, tapping the note.
He sets a flowery cup of peppermint tea down for you. “Maybe I’m trying to convince you to change your field.”
“I’m not cut out for history.” You’d taken his class as an elective, after all. A change of pace from your normal literary seminars and creative workshops. You hadn’t expected to like it, let alone like him.
“What makes you say that?” Head tilted, he studies you with his two-toned eyes. “You wrote the best seminar paper I’ve read in ten years.”
Ten years. Ten years ago he was married, a father of two, already tenured, and you were… well. Doing whatever stupid teenage shit you were doing ten years ago. Your face feels hot while you think of something to say, avoiding his gaze, staring at the collection of matchbooks he keeps in a bowl on the center of the table.
“Because I’m a writer,” you point out. “You’re used to reading what historians write.”
Baelor seems to mull that over like you’ve said something profound. It’s odd, the way being in his kitchen seems to pry apart all your usual defenses. You’re so cold in the classroom, so analytical, so exact in everything you say. A dog with its teeth bared. Growling and barking so no one can see how frightened you are of being wrong. But here, with the light over the stove casting a tender glow over his face, you open your mouth and some half-baked thought comes spilling out.
He’s softer too, a half-smile on his face like you’re some sort of precious thing. “I’d like to read your work.”
“You wouldn’t like it,” is your knee-jerk reaction. The lines of his forehead crinkle as the smile fades.
“Why not?”
You shrug and sip your tea. “It’s just different.”
It’s not that you only write bleeding heart poems about him. Sure, you do, sometimes, but you wouldn’t care if he read them. It’s all the rest that you don’t want him to see. The threads that show up like fragile pieces of flesh under a layer of armor. The loneliness. The insecurity. The existential dread. You know there are parts of him that he’ll never let you see. You’re allowed to keep some of yourself hidden too.
It’s always fucking raining in King’s Landing. Always flooding the cobblestone streets. Instead of soaking your shoes and trudging home after your seminar, you find a seat in his lecture hall. He doesn’t see you amidst the sea of strung out undergraduates taking frantic notes while he moves through his slides. You don’t mind. It’s nice, sometimes, just to listen to him.
“You’ll have noticed that our readings for this week come from anthropologists, not historians. It is true that the pre-Andal period is usually considered prehistoric, but I think we would do well to remember that the early Andal people we’ll be reading about next week did not arrive into an empty void; rather, they stepped into a pre-existing culture.” He gestures to the image on the projector, ancient art spiraling over cave walls. “We know from their art and preserved burials that the First Men likely had complex relationships, storytelling practices, and religious icons. I want us to look at these engravings from about ten thousand years ago in the Mountains of the Moon. What might we say about the people who had created them?”
The sounds of rainfall and laptop keys pitter-patter throughout the hall while he leans against the podium. A gentle smile plays across his face. Not smug. Just curious.
“This isn’t a trick question, I promise.”
He fiddles with his hands while he talks. Flexing, tapping, twisting his rings. It’s charming. Unconscious. You think about it while you touch yourself later, making yourself come like it’s a punishment.
After you wash your hands and stare at yourself in the mirror for far too long, calling yourself a fucking pervert and every other name you can think of, there are two unread texts waiting for you.
Did you not have an answer to my questions in lecture? Or were you hoping I wouldn’t notice you?
I know you would have had something poetic to say.
Fuck. Okay. Maybe a little smug.
Two in the morning and your flat is haunted by the smell of a candle that burned out an hour ago. He calls, knowing you’re awake. You’re a pair of insomniacs who only seem to go to bed at a decent hour when you’re sleeping together.
“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” he says. “That there’s a difference between what you write as a historian and what you write as a writer. ”
“I guess… it’s the difference between academic and creative. Impersonal versus personal.” You’re not as eloquent as you wish you were. But you hear his curious hum, the sound he always makes when you’re treading toward a point and he wants to hear more.
“You don’t think history can be personal?”
“Maybe. But there’s more to hide behind.”
Silence on the other end. And then, “Keep talking.”
“I don’t really have a thesis here,” you admit. Even if you did, you’re too tired to spell it out in any sort of cohesive way.
“Then you’ll find one. Keep talking, sweet girl. I want to listen.”
So you do. You talk and talk and talk, spinning in circles and never quite landing on a point. You lose your train of thought. Somewhere along the way, you diverge into ranting about an article you’d read for class, about which table in the library is your favorite, about the trip you wish you could take to Dorne if your stipend weren’t so fucking abysmal. You’re sure you’ve bored him, you’re sure you’ve put him to sleep, but each time you stop yourself he’s humming on the other end of the phone. Keep talking.
Knees against the aged hardwood floor of his office. His fingers tense in your hair. It’s late enough that you can tell what phase the moon is in, hanging low over the crested rooftops of the University halls. But he still grits his teeth together while you run your tongue over the veins of his cock. Only the softest grunts echo low in his chest. You look up at him through watery eyes, choking yourself on him, and he’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
You’ve never met a man like him. A man who listens to you talk for hours on end. Who wants to listen. A man whose cock you want to suck, because gods, he’s handsome, he’s tense, and the way he blushes while you go down on him makes your chest burn with a sort of pride you’ve never had before.
“Fuck, love,” he chokes out, his hand on your head going taut. “Sweet… sweet girl, I—”
And then his head drops back, all the muscles in his neck glinting in the moonlight. You savor every last drop of him, every sensitive twitch, until he’s pulling you off and up onto his lap. There’s saliva and come dripping down your chin. It glistens in his salt-and-pepper stubble after he kisses you.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he says, but there’s a breathy little laugh in his throat and the lines around his eyes are gleaming at you, so you just laugh along with him and whisper yes, yes we can.
“Are you there, sweet girl?”
There’s a crunched-up beer can in the gutter. Headlights and neon signs reflect off the aluminum. It’s a little mesmerizing. A small distraction from the gnawing ache in your chest.
“Are you alright?”
You’re not. You’re high and alone and not dressed for the crisp autumn night. You don’t know where your friends went. Fuck, you don’t even know where exactly you are. You’d stepped out of the club to breathe and now you’re curled up on the curb like a stray dog, tears and glitter running down your cheeks. Baelor’s disembodied voice drifts past you like a ghost before you remember that you’d called him.
“Are you there?”
“Can you come get me?” Your voice is so small. “I don’t… I want to go home.”
“Where are you?” Something clatters on his end. His keys, maybe. Your hazy eyes catch the time on your phone. One thirty in the morning, and he’d picked up right away.
“Flea Bottom.” Your head whirls as you search for a street sign. “Um, Gin Alley.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He’s pulling up in just under ten. You practically fling yourself into your arms, babbling apologies through your tears.
“You’re alright? Look at me. Did someone do this to you?” He holds your face in his hands, eyes flickering over you, checking for damage. There's an edge to him that you've never seen before. As if the hands that hold you so delicately could just as soon snap someone's nose in your defense.
You shake your head, making the whole world spin again. You wish you could say yes. Wish you could blame it on someone slipping something in your drink or feeling you up, but the only problem is you.
“I’m just fucked up.”
You expect to be reprimanded. You want him to be angry. If he is, he doesn’t give you the self-deprecating satisfaction. He just shrugs off his coat and drapes it over your shoulders.
“Let’s get you home.”
Home. Not back to my house. Just home. You’ll forget that bit when you wake up tomorrow. For now, you roll that around in your head over and over while the radio airs a news story about birds’ changing migratory routes in the Stormlands he drives you home.
There’s a half-drunk cup of tea keeping a pile of papers company on the kitchen table. He pours you a glass of water, makes you drink it while he takes you upstairs and sits you down on the bed. Your sweat-stained clothes end up in his laundry hamper, replaced by an old King’s Landing University shirt. You’re staring listlessly at the floor while he fetches a damp washcloth from the bathroom and dabs away your ruined makeup. Warm damp. The kind of comfortable temperature that means he’d stood by the tap adjusting the water until it wouldn’t shock you. It’s so much more than you deserve.
“I’m sorry,” you say for the hundredth time, and once your mouth opens you can’t stop yourself. “I didn’t mean to be a mess, I just get so… it’s so quiet sometimes and I hate it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you.” He unfurls a pair of socks and slides them onto your feet. His lips press to your kneecaps. You could shatter from the softness of it.
“Something is, though,” you insist. “I feel like a monster.”
He’s silent for a long time. “You’re cruel to yourself.”
So are you, you want to tell him. He buries himself in articles and research on a weekend like it’s a form of self-flagellation. Like enough sleepless nights will help him atone for whatever he feels guilty about. He buries himself in you. Fucks you as if it’ll purify him, but how could it when you’re just as bad? Irredeemably self-destructive, the pair of you.
Your shaky hand reaches for the collar of his shirt. A silent ask. Make me forget this. But he intercepts it and kisses the inside of your sweaty palm, melting your lust away like rain over snow.
“Come here. You’re alright.” Lights go out and he eases you into bed, keeping his hands anchored around you as if you’ll disappear if he doesn’t. “My sweet girl. Smart girl. You’ll be alright.”
And maybe you will. There are times when you nearly believe that. Mid-afternoons in his office, curled in a faded armchair, you doze off while he parses through an article at his desk. The light trickles through the old window panes just soft and just warm enough to blanket you. There are mornings when you wake up first and get to fix him coffee (really, you just like using his fancy machine). He keeps a container of your particular creamer in his fridge. You bring him matchbooks to add to his collection.
It’s sweet. Soporific. The kind of domesticity that almost fills the emptiness inside you. When you sit down to write, the page fills with lines about folding socks. Matchbooks. Heterochromia. Hands stained with ink.
You put on real estate show reruns while you try to thread enough of those images together to make a halfway decent poem. Strange how you can actually sleep next to him, instead of staring at the ceiling and spiraling like you do back in your flat. You’re half-dreaming, just holding on long enough to see which quaint Riverlands cottage the couple chooses, when—
“Thought they’d choose the second house.”
“Fucking hell!” Scared out of your skin, you thought he’d fallen asleep an hour ago. His laughter fills the room like a shock of warmth in the early winter air. He’s so beautiful with all the lines of his face framing his smile, silver-streaked dark hair grown out and mussed from the pillows. Fuck off, you mutter. You’re grinning too.
when are you coming back?
You’re an embarrassment to the women’s restroom queue. A line of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen, chatting or giggling or drunkenly figuring out how to operate a digital camera, all shimmering in each other’s presence, and you’re texting a graying man who’s at an academic conference. Your lack of camaraderie is probably setting feminism back twenty years. You’d said yes to a night out because you’re young, you’re fun, you should be doing something young and fun on a Friday night, but now you’re one too many drinks in and sulking against the wall. You stare at the phone until he responds. The girl behind you is actively breaking up with her boyfriend on the phone and you can’t even bring yourself to eavesdrop.
Return flight gets in at 9:45 tomorrow night.
can i see you then?
You’re so fucking desperate. A week without him and you’re in heat, howling for attention. A group of girlfriends stumbles out of the restroom and finally, you’re nearing the front of the queue.
I’ll pick you up on my way home.
ok!
i miss you
It’s like typing it out makes it sound even more miserable. You’re about to triple text, lighten the blow with some quick diversion. He responds faster.
I miss you too. I’ve been thinking about you.
What are you doing tonight? Tell me about your day.
Your knees almost give out. Trying to blink your eyes into instant clarity, you manage to pull yourself together.
at th pub
with friends :)
Are you safe?
yeah i’m fine just bored
ive had more fun just sitting in your kitchen
i love your kitchen
At this point, your thumbs are moving of their own accord. You’re typing out something about how you love his matchbook collection, you love his stupid grandmotherly teacups, you love falling asleep to the sound of him marking up papers, you love him—
I know. That’s where I picture you when I think of you.
My beautiful girl.
Throat suddenly dry, you feel fire in your core and a heat to your thighs that makes you hazy. The fact that he probably doesn’t even mean to be turning you on only makes it hotter. But fuck, you can’t help it, the sheer nice-ness of it makes you want to ride him within an inch of his life, right there in that kitchen.
And then, of course, he has to drive it home.
I hope I dream about you tonight.
Slamming the stall shut harder than you mean to, you take three tries to latch the door and then fumble to pull your top down. The lighting’s low and the picture turns out a little blurred, but you send the image of your pretty tits and your drunken smile without an ounce of the shame you ought to have.
wish you were here <3
You’re both insatiable after he returns. A dusting of snow makes the cobblestone streets slick and lures you the warmth of his house on weeknights when you really ought to be answering emails and polishing drafts for publication. You’ve barely crossed the threshold, snowflakes still melting on your coat, when he’s kissing you senseless. A muffled greeting gets lost somewhere in your smile.
Fireplace ablaze and turning the whole living room ochre, it doesn’t take long for you to thaw. Something crinkles as he presses your back into the couch cushions. You grab a stray pile of papers from under you, nearly tossing them aside before you open your eyes and blink.
“Is this mine?” Lust-drunk and thinking in slow-motion, you can still recognize your own handwriting. Had you given him an essay draft to look over? The uneven lines don’t seem like the usual literary criticism you ask him to review. You catch a handful of words—held in the matchbook of you… divining ink stains… all the dark matter of the universe—and then you realize.
“Fuck, did you read this?”
“You left it behind last night,” he murmurs, kissing down the lines of your throat.
“I didn’t mean to.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Surely, he can see right through you now. All the cracks you’ve tried to plaster over, all the longing you’ve tried to hide. Not just for him, but for… something gentle. Stable. Something hopeful and bright that you’re not sure either of you know how to find.
His mouth back on yours, he pulls the papers from your hands, leaving a papercut on your pinky that bubbles with red instantly. “Ow!”
Whatever anger might’ve kindled within you dies as he takes your finger and sucks the blood away. Fuck, you love him like this. Starved and needy. Blown pupils making both eyes look entirely black. He asks with his hands and his mouth and you give, clawing at your clothes until you’re bare for him. You’re a pair of moonlit animals. If he’s already seen all the shameful pieces of you that you bury in your work, then there’s no point in holding out.
Pressing you back into the couch, Baelor bows his head to suck at your tits. Teeth graze against your nipples. Hungry. Insistent. You know what he wants as soon as he trails downwards, but you’re too impatient and too empty to let him.
“No, fuck—” you whine while he worships your inner thighs, even though the prickle of his chin over the sensitive, soft skin makes your spine arch off the cushions. “Please fuck me, I want your cock, please—”
“This first.” It’s firm. You can writhe and complain as much as you want, but when he spreads your legs and inhales the scent of your cunt, you know you can’t stop him.
He’s so diligent when he eats you out. It’s another form of study for him. Whatever makes you moan and tense gets repeated, honed in on. Tongue lapping at the hot core of you, his nose brushes up against your clit and your whole body goes taut with the shock of it. But instead of pulling back and letting your edge fade, he only nuzzles deeper.
A hand slides up your thighs to your stomach. You grab it and squeeze hard enough to cut off circulation. His rings stamp into your skin.
“Please—please fuck me now,” you’re moaning, begging, desperate to be full of him when you finally come. “I’ll do whatever you want, I fucking… I fucking promise, I just need it—”
His other hand opens you up. No resistance, only the pressure and stretch of three long fingers, you break for him and choke at the sensation of it. Combined with the tug of his lips over your clit, it’s enough to make you cry and come like the mess that you are.
“Sweet thing,” he’s humming as he eases you through it. “Good girl. Thank you.”
Thank you? You’re struggling for breath, and he’s fucking thanking you. You’d laugh at how sweet it is, but you finally clear your eyes enough to get a good look at his face, and… gods. He’s feral. That wasn’t for you. It was for him.
You grab at his face, pulling him near until he finally lets you kiss your own juices off of him. Salt and sweat washes over your tongue. You’re so blissed-out that you don’t hear the music of his belt, don’t feel the pressure against your cunt until his thick cock is easing inside you, slowly, making you feel every inch until his hips sit flush against yours.
“Is this what you need?” His voice is a string pulled dangerously stiff. You manage a weak mhmm, bucking against him insistently, but he doesn’t move.
“No. Look at me.” He wipes your eyes with his thumb, bringing you back to your body, back to him. “There she is. Talk to me, sweet girl.”
“I just want you.” Unrefined nonsense swirls through your head, all centered around him. “You’re so… so good, how can you… how can you be good to me?”
A shallow, experimental thrust makes you clutch at his sculpted biceps. “My angel. You’re easy to—”
“I’m easy?” Neurons finally firing fast enough to tease him, you grin at the blush that spreads across his crooked nose, over the lines of his cheeks, down to the old scars that are peppered across his chest. The drag of his cock inside you is torturously slow.
“Easy to be good for,” he finally manages to choke out once he regains control of himself. “You make… you make this so easy.”
That means something you can’t quite decipher. Right now, you don’t care. You just clench your cunt around him and spur him on, teeth clashing against teeth as his thrusts get faster and faster.
He doesn’t fuck you like he’s trying to be good. He fucks you like he’s trying to figure out just how far he can push you. How much he can take. Like he wants you to tell him slow down, enough, please be gentle, but you don’t. You take it all and still want more.
My girl, my angel, so good for me. The praise melts into you. Gods, you need him to finish. He’s getting sloppy, barely pulling out before he presses back into your cunt. The sound of it is disgusting and delicious. You’re soaking the couch, soaking him, leaving drool on the corners of his mouth when you kiss him, and he just keeps going.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” you cry out while he chases release, “you’re—”
Wherever that thought was going, you don’t get to finish it. His hand, the one that still smells like you, barely presses against the base of your neck. Your head drops back. Everything goes white hot and loud. The pain of overstimulation makes the orgasm bittersweet in the most savory way, striking through your whole body and leaving you raw. All your brain can process is how full you are and how warm, how strong he is.
“Oh, fuck, sw—sweet girl,” he stutters, and you know he’s getting close. You grip his arms hard enough to bruise and beam up at him through fresh tears. He’s so perfect like this, sweating and straining and vulnerable. It makes you want things you shouldn’t want.
“Inside?” You whisper, sweet as a song, and that’s what breaks him. A guttural sound, half-laugh and half-sob rips from his throat. He buries his cock so deep inside you that you can’t feel where you end and he begins. The warm flood of his come spills and spills and fills you in a way that’s hot and primal and perfect.
It feels right.
“Was it good?” You manage to ask while his cock goes soft inside of you. Your hands play with the coarse tufts of his hair that are overdue for a cut.
“You always feel good.”
That makes you preen a bit. It’s not what you mean, though.
“I mean my writing. Did you like it?”
“It felt like you.” It’s not a yes, but it makes you glow more than a simple yes ever could. “Alive. Intense.”
You turn your head so you can see blue and brown; your heaven, your earth. “It didn’t scare you?”
“Beautiful girl,” he furrows his brow, quizzical and almost amused, “why would you scare me?”
The truth of it is, you scare yourself.
There’s the void that seems to follow you everywhere. You’re used to that, though. You know you’ll feel it in your chest when all the noise of the day dies down. It manifests in your writing unbidden. It’s so familiar you might as well name it, put a leash on it, drag it around with you and feed it leftovers from your plate. And maybe it bubbles up, like it had that night outside the club, but for the most part it’s an unfortunate background noise.
The want, though, that’s… new. Something you don’t know how to describe. Ravenous. Unhinged. It burns through you and leaves you weak and raw.
It’s not that you want him in disgusting and depraved ways, though that’s part of it. No. You want to hear the story of every matchbook in his bowl. You want to know where he got the scars on his chest. You want to know if they have something to do with the military medal that’s framed on his mantelpiece. You want to learn the names of the people in his pictures. You want him to tell you about his sons, what they were like as boys, what they want to do with their lives.
You want him to take off that wedding ring. You want him to take you on a proper date. Dinner. Drinks. A shitty film. You want him to kiss you where people can watch and then take you home, and you want that home to be a place where both of you live. A place where there might be a picture of you on his fridge.
You want everything with him. In the best ways, in the worst ways. Everything.
He’s been marking up papers for an hour and you’ve probably just been staring at him for the past thirty minutes. Letting your mind wander. The sunset is turning his office rosy and warm, even though the ancient radiator can barely keep your fingers from going numb when winter gets this frigid. His blue eye seems nearly violet in this light.
You cast your gaze outside. In the courtyard, figures wrapped in scarves and heavy coats cluster and scatter. One on a bench springs up to greet another. They intertwine and melt, heading off towards a lecture hall hand-in-mittened-hand.
Baelor hmms about whatever he’s reading and you can’t help it, you lean over his desk and kiss him before either of you realize what’s happening. His pen clatters to the floor. Strong hands cradle your face. It’s gentle, easy. No lust, just soft lips on yours and the leather-and-paper scent of him filling your lungs.
When you pull away, there’s a dazed look on his face. “What was that for?”
“Dunno,” is your sheepish answer.
His gaze flickers toward the door, ever so slightly ajar. He’s quiet, contemplative, and also a fucking loud thinker. The warmth seems to seep out of the room in the space of a few seconds. You read his mind and feel something fragile and needy inside you snap.
“We can’t keep—”
“Will you stop fucking saying that?”
Blue-brown eyes go oceanic with hurt, but you’re already shoving your books in your bag. Not this. Not again. You can’t keep listening to the same tired line. Maybe it used to excite you. Now it’s a crutch he leans on and you just want to pull it out from under him.
“Just tell me if you don’t want me,” you spit, as though you wouldn’t come crawling back to him like a kicked dog even if he did. “You don’t need to make up excuses.”
“Stop that.” He’s stern all of a sudden. “You’re acting like—”
Fuck. You know what he wants to say, even if he catches himself before he lets it slip. It makes your eyes sting with frustration.
“Like what?” You push. “Say it.”
He sighs your name like a curse. Fuck it, you think. If he can’t bring himself to hurt you, you don’t mind hurting yourself.
“Fine, I will. I’m acting like a child.” You’re crying in earnest now, hoping that your tears sparkle just enough to make him guilty. “You’re here too, you know? It’s not just me. Either you like fucking pathetic girls or you’re just as fucked as I am, take your pick.”
“That’s not fair,” he snaps, though you feel like you’re being perfectly fair to both of you. “You’re a smart girl, you understand that there are consequences to something like this.”
“What is this, then? Your midlife crisis? Am I the treatment for whatever’s fucking wrong with you?” It’s cruel, cold, ripped from the ugliest depths of your heart. “Whatever. Suffer, then.”
He doesn’t call after you. His colleagues give you odd looks as you hurry out of the building and gods, the cold hits you in just the right way. One solid punch to the gut, forcing all the breath out of you. You hold the tears back. You walk all the way home without falling to pieces on the street. The emptiness is there to keep you company, your loyal little ghost. You’re glad to feel it. That fierce ache in your bones. You’d started to miss it.
You apologize. Because of course you do. You spend all of two days angry at him, and then you’re scrambling to clean up your mess before the withdrawal hits you like a train.
i’m sorry. can we talk? i was so wrong.
No, you were right.
Can I see you?
He doesn’t say what you were right about. He only whispers I’m sorry while he sucks at your neck, I’m sorry while he mouths against your breasts, I’m sorry when he turns you over and strokes the back of your head while he fucks into you. Please… please stay, when you’re sobbing through the overstimulation. Stay with me, when he starts to falter, chest stuttering against your back, his nose wet when he kisses against your shoulder. Please… fuck. Sweet girl. Can I come inside you?
You cling to him when he makes tea after. The kitchen tiles bite with cold against your toes. He presses his lips to your hair while the water boils and sways from side to side. Always oscillating. Always in-between.
There’s a new mug set out for you, a plain white one with his son’s university crest on it. “What happened to your teacups?”
“I dropped them,” he admits, pausing for a moment before he continues. “I’ve always been too rough with my hands. My brother used to call me Baelor-breaks-things when we were little.”
He’s never talked about his brother before. It’s the tiniest opening, a door inside him barely left ajar.
“I don’t want to break this,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to break you.”
“You won’t.”
You don’t know that for sure. Or maybe you’re the one who will do all the breaking just to spare him the pain. For now, you let the rise and fall of his chest measure the passing seconds. Fractured messiness pressed together. Almost whole. With your eyes closed amidst the sound of rain on the eaves, you can almost imagine that everything you’ve ever longed for is right here.
End notes: Come talk abt the old man & poetry with me. Thanks for thirsting :)
I’ve got a fic concept, for a Maekar x Baelor’s widow!Reader and I NEED your Thoughts on it! 𝜗𝜚⋆₊˚
Disclaimer: English isn’t my first language and I never really wrote anything, so I’m not really sure if I should start.
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
╰┈➤ CONCEPT
It’s set a few months after the trial of the seven, Baelor’s widow stays in kingslanding after the incident and is ofc severely depressed, fully in mourning and all that stuff.
After not getting any better she gets send to Summerhall, for mental recovery (maybe by King Daeron or even Valarr, not sure yet).
Maekar, who’s also still depressed after the event, is at first extremely distant, because that poor man feels GUILTY, for what has happened to Baelor and reader. Of course, they get closer over time and their relationship slowly starts.
I’m thinking about a lot of angst, fluff, maybe eventual smut, talk of past relationships and deaths, age gap, aerion being a brat and Maekar being a STRESSED father. I also think about making her a Tyrell, but that’s just personal preferences.
summary: baelor finds out you intend to leave for summerhall.
pairing: baelor targaryen x wife reader
word count: 7.2k
based off of this! | masterlist
the entirety of two days passes before baelor decides he cannot continue on for a moment longer without seeing you again.
two immensely painful days since he last saw you. since you left those chambers the two of you shared, hurt and anguished, the very things he swore to protect you from.
you had been clever in your avoidance of him, though he was beginning to reach his own wit’s end.
the thought is quite maddening, he decides, wondering if he has ever recalled such a memory before. to have you so close yet entirely far away.
you take meals alone in your chambers, and leave only when necessary. your maids tell all visitors that the babe has left you feeling unwell, that you require privacy. you have, at the very least, remained unbothered by the bustle of the keep as it readies itself for the tourney his father is hosting.
in short notice, they have reached out to all the surrounding nobility. many of the great houses would not arrive in time for the first joust, but still, the field has been readied. the entire castle was deep in the process of being decorated and adorned for their guests. a feast is to follow the tourney, though it still feels, perhaps, a little inappropriate.
at least, maekar seems to think so. his brother has been grumbling about more fucking guests and another fucking tourney since that day he saw you last.
a vast, dark cloud settles firmly over baelor’s heart when he thinks about it, whenever he’s given a moment’s reprieve from the duties of the hand he has been neglecting. it rumbles discontently throughout the day.
today, he must settle on which lords would be granted a private audience with himself and his father during their stay in king’s landing. next, a meeting of the small council to determine the grand prizes for the tourney and a handful of other details that hold absolutely no importance at all.
he cannot help it—even if he knows that he should pay attention to these things. for a moment, baelor wonders how he had managed this during the months when the two of you had been newlyweds. had he truly gotten such little work completed, with how lost he is in his thoughts of you?
with the way thoughts of you consume him?
or had it truly been a better reality at that time? had he been keenly focused on his work, trying to accomplish everything he could during the days so that his evenings with you would not be interrupted?
had he remained in his study until the weariness of sleep washed over him? had you walked in trepidation towards his desk to persuade him to return to your shared chambers, to that bed you warm and your soft skin?
no, he thinks quickly.
the loss of these most vital memories aches his head once again. but still, he remains certain that there is no possible way he would have avoided your company in such a manner.
and yes, baelor finally admits to himself, as painful as it is, after days of ruminating on the matter. all of this was his fault.
he was completely and utterly wrong to ask maekar for the summary of the memories of you he had lost. he was wrong to ask maekar instead of you. he was wrong to speak of the recollections to you and make it seem as though they had returned to him naturally.
most of all, it was wrong to spend that evening in his chambers with you—though when he shuts his eyes and begins to think about it, the flush of heat washes over him slowly.
how soft the bareness of your skin felt under his fingertips. how you looked flustered and wanton under him, the sweet noises you had made. how easily the two of you fit together in sleep, how your bodies molded together as if they had been made for the other.
all of it was wrong.
he had let himself be clouded by a singular desire, despite the consequences he knew he might have to pay—wanting to do whatever he could to reassure you.
to stop your lovely eyes from crying. to stop these painful emotions from gripping your mind and heart so frequently. to rest, if only for a moment, with the belief that he had returned to you in the way that you remembered.
and now he has betrayed you.
it seems an entirely unfair exchange now, when he reflects back on it. one peaceful night by your side causing you days of pain and misery.
he should not have done it. he should not have lied. he should not have put you through this, and yet—
bloodraven clears his throat, and baelor blinks from his position in his seat. he moves his gaze, which had been focused on the black crystal ball befitting his station, towards the crimson eyes that belonged to the master of whispers.
baelor’s own eyes trace across his pale skin until they steady and fixate on the red mark that covered his face.
whatever the man wanted baelor to respond to goes unnoticed, as his father contributes to the conversation next. both daeron and brynden stare at baelor intently for a moment, before continuing on.
how cruel the gods are, baelor thinks for a brief moment, to leave memories of the lords in this room intact while stealing away those of you.
and not only of you. of the child the two of you brought into this world, the memories of the little girl he spoke to you of. he feels a sense of longing rain over him again—a daughter.
his daughter. who you had fondly been calling naerys all this time.
baelor has thought of her for so very long. even years ago, after matarys, he had always thought he and jena would be blessed again and that maybe, this time, it would be just as he envisioned in his mind. a little girl with eyes that match both of her elder brothers, one blue and one brown. jena’s soft red hair, perhaps.
but that dream had died, along with his wife, only to be reborn among those ashes now with you.
you, with the even lovelier eyes that he can easily imagine blinking up at him, in the form of a sweet young babe. then, a quiet little girl, just like you, if the gods deem it to be so. one that tugs on the sleeve of his doublet when she is tired, or stares at him from her place in her mother’s arms. perhaps with locks of hair resembling yours, or inheriting that countenance that he finds himself so lost in thought about.
the way you are sweet and courteous without trying. how you can set any member of his family at ease with your shy charm. how his sons take to you even though you are closer in age to them than to him—
and then there is the other matter.
if baelor dwells on it for too long, he feels that subtle shift of rage boiling up and beginning to engulf him.
that he knows these qualities of yours but he does not truly know them. that he can easily remember those traits but does not know how he knows they belong to you. the hidden memories that conceal a vast treasure underneath—months of encounters and conversations and perhaps even letters from when the two of you were first betrothed.
maekar had told him, in the fewest words that he could manage, about the day the two of them had left your family’s keep. his brother had commented about how they had made it almost half a day’s ride to the next destination on their tour, before baelor had suddenly been overcome with an urge to leave.
to return to your family’s home, as it was. but he does not know the full length of the story following that.
seven hells—he cannot even remember the night that his third child was brought into this world. the night that you and he made a princess of the kingdom together with your love. the thought feels unjustly cruel, as if a piece of his pride has been stripped away.
to have a creature as lovely as you so close yet so far. to have his seed growing in the womb of someone he cannot remember marrying.
the thought consumes him throughout the days, while he deigns to finally listen to what you said and leave you be until you are ready to see him again.
you want to hide, at least for these two days, and he has no choice but to grant you, at least, that.
baelor thinks on it grimly long after the sun has set, after the small council has met and departed, after he has eaten alone with his sons while matarys asks of you and your health until he realizes baelor has no answer to give.
he has stolen enough from you, the thought reminds him. the least he can do now is grant you privacy and peace when you desire it most.
and baelor truly thought that it was enough. that he could manage without your presence for these few days—that it would not be as insufferable and painful as he imagined.
indeed, it was quite worse.
the deprivation of your gentle warmth ran over him at each corner, when he turned to say something to you only to find himself alone. unspoken words linger on his tongue until they turn bitter, words meant for your ears. he misses that sweet laughter and the way your eyes welled with tears, even ones of happiness, when he said something that seemed to overwhelm your emotions.
at least from when he was summoning joyful memories. what else has he given you now, but torment and grief?
the thought is interrupted as the meeting of the small council finally concludes. baelor leaves without allowing an opportunity for his father to speak with him.
-
maekar returns to his study just after the children have taken luncheon together. valarr and kiera dine in their chambers alone, with his young daughter-by-law still recovering from her most recent loss.
valarr had informed him that you had gone to pay a visit to kiera in the morning, sometime yesterday. likely it was during the hour the small council meets, otherwise he is certain he would have noticed.
baelor has been completing his correspondence at the smaller desk within his—yours and his—chambers. he steps out only to take appointments in the study when necessary, as he works back into the usual routine of tasks that await for him.
all because these chambers are closer to the ones you are residing in than to his study. he orders that the doors remain open, watching and waiting for a glimpse. even ser corbray of the kingsguard is told to wait diligently for a sign of you and to inform baelor at once if he sees one.
but, you had timed it well.
perhaps you already knew of the way his mind works in that regard. it would not be surprising to him. the two of you might have even begun to enter that sweet, blissful part of marriage where you begin to understand the other person more than you even understand yourself at times. if only—
“i went to see her,” maekar says, and baelor is snapped from his thoughts instantly.
“did you?” his own voice sounds surprisingly steady. he has become mildly proficient at masking the reproach and resent he currently holds for himself.
“yes. she… she is understandably upset.”
maekar was pacing by the window, but now has made his way toward the other side of baelor’s desk. he does not sit, rather leans his weight against the wood while remaining upright.
“yes, i imagine she is.”
“when are you going?” maekar asks while leaning forward slightly. something small, perhaps… eagerness, lingers in his brother’s tone. “to speak with her, i mean?”
but that is quite an odd comment in and of itself. why would maekar be—
“she has asked me for some distance. i should like to at least attempt to grant her wishes this time.” baelor is silent for a moment. “why?”
“i believe you should not wait any longer.”
“why?” baelor repeats.
he runs a hand over his beard, an inkling of frustration growing stronger with each passing moment.
he would often run his fingers over his head, over the short, cropped hairs in moments such as these. he cannot do so any longer without wincing.
but perhaps he deserves the pain.
“she is quite… mistaken about your intentions. she might benefit from hearing directly from you before making any… i only mean that-”
maekar flushes, his face reddening, a sharp contrast against his silver hair.
another odd sight, baelor thinks. his brother does not usually care enough about matters to react in such a way.
“if she needs more time, i will grant her it to her,” he finally says, after a moment’s pause.
“do not delay this,” maekar presses on. the words almost sound… pained. indeed, they are dripping with an unequal amount of both pain and concern. “she is in distress. she will benefit from seeing you far more than me. i tried to comfort her but-”
“you… comforted her?”
“no, you idiot,” maekar replies, snapping his words, though not in his usual fashion. he takes a moment, almost… reassessing before he decides on what to say next. “well… yes, but only because she was-”
“was what?”
“crying. what else?” maekar says, straightening his spine. “and you are far more proficient at handling her tears than i.”
baelor stops for a moment, his eyes piercing through his brother.
his fingers tighten into a clenched fist before he can help it. not borne of anger towards maekar, but rather towards himself.
and a hatred of these circumstances—that his own brother has more memories with his wife than he does. envy that he can easily recall their first encounter. a certain lamentation that maekar can go visit his wife while he denies himself the same encounter.
it is not fair, he thinks, perhaps for the first time.
the thought is bitter and angry, an amalgamation of emotions that he has wanted to avoid and suppress as much as possible.
none of this is fair, least of all to you, and yet he cannot help but think of it as the mask he has been trying to hold carefully in place slips away for a moment.
not fair that you are more willing to speak with maekar, even if it is by his own doing. not fair that save for a pearly white dress in a strange garden, he cannot remember meeting his own wife. not fair that all he believes he knows of you has been earned and gathered in the last few days.
and worse, still, is the important, stabbing reminder that all of it is entirely his fault.
no one had forced him to defend ser duncan. no one made him abandon his wife in bed to don his son’s armor and fight against his own brother.
the loss of his memories is his own fault. the torment you are suffering through is, again, his fault and his fault only.
he cannot imagine any world where a simple conversation is enough to earn back your favor after what he has put you through.
“you need to speak with her,” maekar says, pressing his palms forward against the desk. “i… she has something to tell you.”
“what have i done to anger them so?” baelor says quietly. the words are mostly spoken to himself.
“what?” maekar asks sharply. “them?”
“the gods. they have found reason to punish me over and over. i find love again and i cannot even remember it. my child grows inside of her and i cannot even remember the length of our marriage, let alone-”
baelor stops himself, steadying his hand against the wood of the bureau. it had begun to tremble.
he does not often lose his composure. a lesson that had been engrained in him through years of education and conversations with his father, of the many things that a crown prince should and should not do. the behavior he can and cannot exhibit. traits that will be excused in his peers that would not be tolerated in baelor.
and key among them—he should not lose his poise and calmness because of something he has no control over.
and yet, that is precisely why all of this is so difficult. all of these matters were under his control at one time. his own decisions led him here.
he cannot blame for you, not even for a moment. he cannot wish that you would heed him without guilt possessing him. he should comply with your desires. he should leave you alone until you are ready. he should not cause you any further pain.
all of these things are true.
but staying away from you now is a feat that will remain impossible.
“go speak to her,” maekar says, as baelor meets his violet eyes once more. still, they are filled with an expression he cannot quite interpret. “i believe she has just finished tea in the garden with your son and his wife.”
he leaves without another word.
he dwells on it for a moment—the way his brother sounded, the words he said, the manner in which he might have comforted you—but dismisses the thoughts once he makes his way outside and reaches the warmth of the day.
the garden is teeming with fresh blossoms. the greenery and brightly colored petals are enough to overwhelm the senses if it was one’s first time here.
he wonders, briefly, what you had thought of these gardens when he had first brought you here. had you been overjoyed, given your proclivity? or had you missed the simpler one of your home, reminiscent of another time in your life entirely?
a time without these duties—without ladies of the court to attend to, without a heavy schedule of appointments each day. you do not much seem to enjoy the company of a great deal of strangers from what he gathers.
baelor lets his mind wander for a moment whilst he watches kiera and valarr take a turn about the gardens. approaching you, watching the expanse of green silk that covers your back carefully, he wonders if you did, indeed, prefer your life before all of this.
had it been better before he had uprooted you?
maekar had spoken of your unseemly, arrogant family, but he had elected to take his brother’s words with a shadow of a doubt. maekar found most people unseemly and arrogant, and well—
baelor cannot stop staring as the sunlight dances over your hair.
you are not focused on him, rather the wall of vines. comely pink flowers grow there, all of different sizes, from what he can discern presently. you fuss with the leaves and branches, the color them not too dissimilar to your own gown, perhaps lost in a different world altogether.
after all, how could anyone with those traits raise someone as gracious and lovely as you?
“i thought i might find you here.”
your body tenses, your shoulders moving suddenly until you are facing him in a quick motion. you meet his eyes for a moment that seems to last an eternity.
blinking at him, your expression shifts, the length of the branch you were adjusting slipping out from between your fingers until it falls towards the grass. you look down, torn away from him, and for a moment, he feels it.
upset. incredibly so, because he has lost the ability to see your enchanting eyes.
all of this feels, somehow, familiar. baelor knows almost certainly it is not, but it is, at the same time. a living contradiction.
“allow me,” he interrupts his own thought, crouching down to retrieve the stems. he picks it up and returns it to your hand, brushing fingertips just barely.
your skin is warm and soft. he feels a ripple of something unfamiliar and familiar spreading at the contact, as small as it was.
he holds back another smile—such is your effect on him.
“thank you, your grace,” you say quietly, politely as ever. you move your pretty eyes, focusing on his son and kiera instead. “i was only… i should return to-”
the first words he has heard you utter in days. baelor resists the urge to shut his eyes and soak in the feeling—your melodic voice, sweet and calm despite all the crying he has put you through, no doubt.
“grant me but a moment,” he pleads, the words hanging still against the light and breeze of the gardens. “how are you feeling?”
“i… i am fine. i am here to see valarr and kiera.” you try to sound stern, but the pain in your voice deceives you.
“i know,” he says. “i only require a moment. have i not granted your request thus far?”
you blink, looking up at him with a sharp emotion hidden behind your doe eyes. baelor holds back a grimace—the question was ill-spoken.
“of course, your grace,” you finally say. “as you wish.”
you chew on your cheek, focusing your attention to the ground beneath your slippers now. he stares for a moment too long at his ring hanging just above the neckline of your dress, almost losing his train of thought.
“i know that i should not have lied to you,” he begins, and he feels that familiar ache return as you begin to blink quickly. no doubt, to ward away the tears that seem so inevitable to you. “and i am… truly, truly sorry for it. i have caused you a great deal of pain, and though it was not my intention, it has still harmed you.”
you release your cheek from your teeth, your shining eyes coming to meet his for a moment.
baelor thinks for a moment that he would give up anything in this life to see your lovely features without the harrowing distress he has created for you.
“you should not apologize to me, your grace. i-i do not require it.” your words are soft-spoken and much too polite to truly reflect what you feel in your heart.
“and i wish to give it regardless.”
“there is nothing to apologize for,” you begin, the words sounding awfully trained. “you are well within your right to-”
“there is no excuse for lying to you. even if my intentions were not meant to harm. i… i only mean that… whatever you believe, i should like the chance to explain myself further. so that you do not mistake my intentions-”
“i assure you, i have not mistaken your intentions. and i am most grateful that you are trying so adamantly to protect our-your child.”
baelor pauses for a moment, trying to read your expression.
“what?”
“you do not need to pretend any longer, your grace,” you say, as though it is all very clear to you. “i now know the truth. and i promise that you have nothing to fear for the safety of the babe. i will not make any more mistakes in taking care of her-or him,” you finish, correcting yourself quickly.
“i do not understand,” baelor says, focusing his eyes on yours.
you lock gazes with him for another moment, staring deeply, before moving your hand to rest gently against the curve of your belly.
a desire flickers through him quickly—that he wishes to know your every thought.
what do you think of when you gaze into his eyes? what memory comes to your mind first? what proof of his love do you carry in your heart, what do you look for when you stare at him in that way?
“the babe will be safe. i assure you. there should be no issues on the journey. i have spoken to the grandmaester myself, and-”
“the journey? journey where?”
“i… did prince maekar not tell you?” you blink at him expectantly.
“tell me what?” baelor breathes.
he imagines, with the world slowing down behind him suddenly, that this might perhaps be a moment of anger, the sort he was not usually allowed to exhibit. at least, towards maekar, for not being entirely truthful.
and, well, towards you—
it could not be anger. never anger.
instead baelor feels an overwhelming sense of dread seeping into his veins. dread and hurt and pain, all together.
“that i… i am leaving,” you say, confusion and hurt shining in your bright, sad eyes. he watches them, unable to look away for even a heartbeat. “for summerhall. your brother has agreed to host me.”
“summerhall?” baelor echoes. the word is scarcely a whisper. “but you have never been there. why would you go alone-”
he does not know where those words come from.
“i will not be entirely alone. maekar has agreed to accompany me, as well. you…” your words halt for a moment. you release a deep breath before continuing, as though you are deciding in which way to present the words. “you should have no fear for the safety of your child.”
baelor stares you blankly, the confusion on his expression morphing into something else entirely.
you think it is a mixture of relief and some other thing, perhaps. that you will be away from him, that he will not have to spend his days worrying about you or thinking of you or anything else.
“your grace?” you say quietly, but baelor does not respond.
he only looks at you.
-
“your grace?” the words come out suddenly, as though you are a great deal surprised by his presence, as he expected. “i… i had heard of the flag bearer returning but i had not thought it was you with them.”
“indeed,” baelor says, staring at you for longer than he should. “i am here.”
it is only that it is quite difficult to stop looking at you. your apprehension dissipates in mere moments, and you smile sweetly at him.
that bright, gentle smile that has grown so familiar to him.
your mouth curves up as your cheeks and your eyes reflect the joy in the simple motion. the very same one from the evening in the garden—reserved yet lovely.
you look at him as though there is no one else you would rather be speaking to, and he tries to soak in the feeling as a cloth might soak up water.
or perhaps, more aptly, a scrap of cotton floating in the vastness of the sea.
“have you… forgotten something here?” you question, blinking quickly at him.
“yes, i have,” baelor answers.
you fiddle with your hands, nervous, no doubt.
perhaps that someone might catch the two of you speaking alone without a guard or a maid in sight. in the light of day, your nerves seem far more apparent. the dress you are wearing now, plain emerald-colored cotton, seems to fit you much better than the other one had, the white one from the prior evening.
no, he thinks, though the thought feels lecherous. this one must have been made for you, or at least altered.
or perhaps even a touch too small.
the cloth sits and stretches snugly against the swell of your breasts, following the shape of your waist and hips. there is a matching satin bow sitting by your neck, one that he gazes on for far too long before meeting your pretty eyes again.
you smile at him kindly.
“and were you able to find it?”
“yes,” he breathes. “i did. just now, in fact.”
“oh,” you reply quietly. “well, i am glad that you did not have to travel so far. nor search for very long.”
“thank you, my lady.”
you meet his eyes, and then look away, almost as if you became nervous by his gaze in an instant. you stare at the ground for a moment too long.
“of course, your grace.”
“would you be so kind as to show me the direction of your lord uncle’s study?”
“oh. yes. of course,” you say, as if you are trying to chastise yourself.
as if you are silly to presume he would want to spend another moment with you, as though you should have understood his true notion of finding your aunt and uncle immediately.
baelor relishes a new thought for the length of a few heartbeats before setting it aside.
you—completely and utterly relinquished of these worries. with someone tending to your needs, rather than the other way around. with someone to reassure you, so that you do not feel as though you must make yourself smaller and quieter at every turn.
perhaps, he could—
you begin speaking again, describing the instructions for the corridor behind you towards the left side. he bites his tongue, refraining from accidentally mentioning that he already knew the way to your uncle’s quarters.
baelor only wanted to hear your voice for a few more moments.
“well,” you begin quietly, as though no one else should be allowed to hear the thought. “i hope you have safe travels. it was… it was very nice to talk with you. and i am glad to have a chance to say goodbye, your grace.”
“indeed it was. thank you, my lady.”
he does not say goodbye, because this will not be the final time the two of you meet.
you smile one last time before turning to walk away. he watches you leave, and then continues to gaze as you turn your head back for a brief moment, to see if he was still there.
and of course, he was. your head spins back around as you make your way down the corridor. and as difficult as it seems to allow you to walk away from him, he manages. for now.
for the task he truly returned here for.
baelor sighs whilst bracing his hand on the handle. he can hear quiet bickering from the other side of the door as he knocks, before opening it to announce himself.
“my lord,” baelor greets, watching as your uncle rushes towards the doorway where he stands. your aunt is in the room too, watching with large, unsettling eyes, a painted smile taking over whatever expression was previously on her face.
not nearly as lovely nor as sincere as yours had been only moments—
“my prince,” the man booms, confused yet eager. his eyes are wide like coins, bouncing between his wife and baelor for a few moments. “we are honored to receive you again.”
“as am i.”
“we apologize, your grace,” your aunt interrupts. “i would have arranged to greet you at the castle doors if i had known of your return. when the flag-bearer was spotted, i presumed it was one of your guards. i hope you did not have to venture too far-”
“not at all, my lady,” baelor interrupts, before she can get too far ahead of him. “in fact, i ran into your niece in the corridor. she was kind enough to direct me here.”
“oh,” your aunt’s smile dims at the mention of your name. “yes, of course. our niece. how kind.”
she mutters something under her breath that baelor cannot quite make out while your uncle begins speaking again.
“if you had only forgotten something, your grace, i assure you we could have sent a rider on the morrow. you did not need to trouble yourself-”
“it is no trouble-”
“-of course, unless you had a reason for returning?”
he stares at the baelor much too eagerly, like a hound waiting for a piece of meat to fall to him.
“in fact, i did, my lord,” baelor says, wishing he had more of a knack for slicing through pleasantries, as maekar did.
your aunt’s face turns up, and she faces your uncle to exchange a glance for a moment—a giddy, arrogant smile, no doubt—before turning back towards baelor.
“yes, your grace?” she chatters excitedly.
“this may sound odd,” baelor begins, the words sounding surprisingly steady. “but i should like to ask for the hand-”
“yes,” your aunt squeals, jumping up from her seat. “of course-”
“-of your niece,” he finishes.
“what?” her mouth falls open a bit, the word coming out dully. your uncle gazes nervously towards her before looking back at baelor.
the answer, baelor already knows, is yes. only a fool would deny their house any form of a royal marriage, much less the hand of the crown prince.
but it is not just the fact that they are obliged to say yes.
rather, it is all of it. the way no one here seems to care for your safety or well-being in the slightest. the way that your clothes are either too large or too small.
how you understand a side of him he has not shown to anyone in a great deal of years. how with a single sentence, you quell his mind. how the curve of your nose and the way you smile, genuinely and sweetly, with your entire face is enough to plague his thoughts for the duration of their stay in the keep.
he had returned to the gardens that morning, before their departure, to see if he could perhaps engage in one final conversation with you. you had not been there—not that he had entirely expected it. you still had your own responsibilities, no doubt, but he was eager to see you regardless.
if not only to bid you goodbye properly.
perhaps he might have even asked you himself, first, rather than speaking with what remains of your family.
but he decides then and there that you shall not have to worry about this any longer.
whatever family you are missing here, he will make up for it tenfold in king’s landing.
baelor blinks, realizing he is not alone in the gardens with you, but rather in the study with two strangers staring at him. they both possess an expression that he can only describe as stunned silence.
“what? our… what?”
“i should like to ask for the hand of your niece in marriage.”
“to… your son?”
“no. as i said, he is already wed. i meant to-”
“your nephew? the young prince?”
“no.”
“then to whom, your grace? not-”
“for myself. i should like to marry her, if you will accept my suit.”
“how can this… how, uh-” your uncle bumbles over his words until your aunt prods him sharply with her elbow. “uh, when did the two of you encounter each other? we tried to-”
your lord uncle stops speaking suddenly, but it is too late. he has said enough.
because they tried to hide you. baelor feels a rush of fury possess him, unlike anything else he has felt before. it is not enough that you are the only person here, and in the last several tours, he has felt comfortable speaking with.
that you shine so much brighter than the rest of the members of your family. that your conversation is refreshing, that your presence is…
relieving.
that is the word, baelor thinks, sighing deeply. you relieve him of duties that he did not realize were weighing him down. for the duration of this visit, he has been chasing that similar feeling, to no avail.
the lighthearted jests you make without even trying to make him laugh. how you ramble with levity until you feel that you have spoken for too long. how you fluster when you realize you have said something you should not have.
and yet, for a girl that might be of a suitable age to marry one of his nephews, you carry an air of earnestness that he finds himself thinking about.
he had meant it when he told maekar of your nature. quiet and gentle and most heartfelt. you allow him to forget for a moment, of his title, when all he is ever faced with is those who remind him of it further.
and then you say something thoughtful about being similar to one’s mother and he cannot help but wonder what you might have endured these years to make you so…
sincere.
a sincerity that is profoundly lacking in his life. seeing you in the garden had been one thing, but the times he has seen you since have only shown him that there is no one here that quite understands you, or perhaps no one that is even trying to understand you.
and well, he might be able to try, at the very least.
the two of you might be the only ones who understand each other. baelor tries to reflect on what you had said the last time he had seen you, discussing the guests of the tourney and the sort of life that awaited you after your cousins were both wed, when it would be your turn.
and perhaps it is strange. odd, to say the least. you will be surprised, no doubt. perhaps baelor has acted too rashly, but what else remains besides impulsivity?
everything he has done has been for duty, just like you. an entire life spent following the instructions of others, trying to do what is expected of him.
this is most unexpected. and yet, he had not even made it hours into the journey to the next castle on their organized tour before he felt the urge to return.
because of you. because of—
“your grace?” your uncle demands, and he blinks, returning from his thoughts to the present.
“we happened, by chance, to encounter each other. and i can assure you that i have given the matter the appropriate amount of consideration.”
“in a matter of days?” your aunt remarks.
baelor narrows his eyes at her.
“are you doubting your prince?”
the woman does not even have the decency to look ashamed, though your uncle flusters, trying to defend her before being interrupted.
“if this is a matter of… despoilment,” she rasps, her voice coated in a bitter anger, “it would be your princely duty to inform us first. i assure you, we may work out the issue in other ways, rather than-”
“other ways?” baelor demands.
“if you have spoiled her, it is no matter. but we will need an arrangement for our family. to preserve our honor,” your aunt states, seeming as though she has formed a plan in her head, devoid of any reason or logic.
baelor holds back a laugh.
“will you have your guards find her ladyship, my lord?” baelor asks quietly, before turning towards your aunt. “i will ask for her hand myself, as you seem to be mistaken in regard to my intentions. to suggest that i have acted untowardly to the lady is a matter of most seriousness. i ask again, is that what you intend to do? insult your prince and your niece in the same breath?”
baelor thinks he rather enjoys the way your aunt’s face goes pale. she stumbles over words, blinking rapidly before she stops speaking all together.
he cannot recall what she said next. nothing comes to him, nothing save for the way you smile when he had asked you for your hand.
and it had been nothing short of magnificent. if only—
“your grace?” you repeat, and baelor blinks.
in an instant, he has left the walls of your uncle’s study within the castle you used to call your home. he is transported to the gardens of your new home, the keep that shall be yours for the rest of your days.
a home for the both of you, together.
and no matter what it takes, he cannot let you leave with maekar and begin to make summerhall that place in your heart.
that place which baelor is meant to reside within.
“my apologies. i-i was lost in a thought.”
“are you well?” you ask, with so much sincerity that it seems to fill the empty space between the two of you. it only grows smaller as he steps closer to you, taking your soft hands into his.
baelor intertwines your fingers with his, holding tightly enough that you cannot pull away.
if you are upset, you do not show it. instead, he feels you melt into his touch, leaning closer, your eyes fluttering for a moment.
you sigh, and his heart aches.
“i am fine. this garden seems to be a trigger, of sorts, for old memories. and your gown. it looks similar to the one you wore when i asked for your hand.”
your eyes shoot to find his, locking for a moment. hope glimmers there for a few heartbeats, rich and hearty and pure, before it slowly leaves. your expression remains unchanged, but your eyes reveal the truth.
you do not believe him.
“i am glad to hear it, your grace. perhaps… one day when you have regained all of your memories, i could return. but… for now, i… i think it is best if i leave.”
your eyes wander for a moment, tracing along his hands, where he holds you, to his arms and his shoulders, before you fixate on him again.
you truly do have lovely eyes.
“if you wish to leave, i will permit it. but i have a request for you, if you are agreeable to it.”
“yes, your grace?” you answer quietly.
“stay until the tourney. it is only a matter of days.”
“oh,” you remark. “of course. i-i agree, it would look very strange if i were not present for it. that is most thoughtful of you.”
baelor does not say anything, holding onto your fingers a little tighter. the air between the two of you is fragrant, but not from the flowers.
from you—from your dizzying scent. the scent that wafts around his chambers and the corridors and drifts from you, a lovely aroma that has not left his mind since he first opened his eyes.
“may i… have my hand back?” you request, and baelor resists the urge to pull you into a deep kiss.
he swallows painfully instead, releasing your hand slowly, guiding it back to your side himself. his knuckles brush against the silk of your dress, his eyes not leaving yours.
“i… bid you goodbye, your grace.” you say, moving carefully until you are freed from between baelor and the wall of vines and flowers.
“goodbye, my lady.”
he watches you leave. you search briefly for his son and kiera, before realizing they might have already left. you approach your maid and ser donnel, before you depart yourself.
and then, just for the length of a single heartbeat, you turn back around, only to find baelor already staring in your direction, before you turn once more and leave.
he does not have much time, he gathers, but at least more than if you had chosen to leave before the tourney.
he plucks one of the pink flowers from the vine, spinning it around his fingers for a moment. he has but a handful of days to ensure that you do not leave for summerhall at all, by whatever means necessary.
baelor tucks the flower into the pocket of his doublet.
i have courted you once, wife. and now i will court you again.
—summary: in the aftermath of baelor’s death, grief fractures the royal family and leaves you unmoored in a world that no longer feels like home. torn between duty and love, you must decide whether to remain a perfect princess or choose the man who only sees you.
—pairing: ser duncan the tall x female!targaryen!reader─aerion targaryen x female!cousin!reader
—word count: ~7.7k
—content: hurt/comfort, heavy emotional themes, grief and mourning, yearning, angst with happy ending, hair dye symbolism because we are dramatic, not proofread!
⋆ . ۰˚ ☽ ˚ ｡ 7 / 7 ── series masterlist here!
A/N: Thank you so much for all the love and support on this series, really<3 Its been a crazy ride, I hope you enjoy the ending as much as I loved writing it! And let’s just pretend it’s not painfully obvious who my favorite was all along hahahah
The sunlight in King's Landing would seep through the library's immense arched windows, bringing in a warm golden glow that seemed to exist solely when he was in the room.
“Don't rush, sweet child,” Baelor had told you that day, his voice a soothing balm as his gentle, patient hand guided yours to correct the angle of your pen. “Stories are not to be written in haste, but with care. If you are to learn anything from me, let it be the art of listening before you pass judgment.”
Your melodramatic little sigh made him crack a smile. As the middle child, you always had to work extra hard for his attention, trapped between the high expectations held for the eldest and the freedom enjoyed by the youngest. Only ten years of age at the time, you already couldn't find your own place in the world, often wondering if you were even in the right skin—unsure of who you truly even were.
With him, however, you never felt left out, never a stranger. You belonged. Right there, by his side.
Baelor had leaned in, letting the comforting warmth he always radiated envelop you in a quiet, reassuring embrace. He peeked over your shoulder, studying the ink-smudged piece of parchment.
“I don't think I can, Father,” you whispered in resignation and dropped the pen in a fit of frustration. Nevertheless, you held back all your emotion and the urge to cry, you never did that around him, to appear brave, like your brothers. “Valarr is so perfect, Matarys is so charming. I'm just the space in between.”
Your small body shrank even further into the big chair, your toes barely scraping the floor as you swung them with disdain. “I don't think I can ever be what the Realm expects of me...”
His soft laughter rang out in the stillness of the library, carrying a sense of pride that you didn't need to strive for, as it was already yours. You were so young, yet more self-conscious than other children of your age, more perceptive and definitely more sensitive. Patience, it seemed, was not one of your strongest traits.
That's why his chuckle came across as offensive to you, because for a moment you thought he was mocking you and your clumsiness. In reality, it was just because you happened to be the sweetest and most adorable creature he had ever seen.
Realizing that you were genuinely sulking and pouting, Baelor gently spun you around toward him so that you could look straight into his eyes, those eyes that somehow always managed to peer beyond your physical self, reflecting his own soul.
“You can do anything, little one,” your father asserted with a certainty that made you stop sniffling back the tears that had betrayed your distress. “Not because the Realm expects it of you, but because you are my daughter. And you are not the ‘space in between,’ you are the balance that keeps us all together.”
He brushed a strand of silver hair from your teary face with such sweet tenderness, sealing his promise with a smile that calmed you deeply. It was a strange thing, that you had been born with hair the color of silver, most of it, for in the midst of that silver expanse grew strands of dark brown hair—a trait inherited from his side of the family, from his own mother.
“And what will happen once you’re gone?” you blurted out, with that innocent naivety that was too sophisticated for your age, too aware. “What will become of me, Father? The world is too big, and I... I only know how to be your daughter. I don’t know who I really am.”
Your father cupped your face in his hands, forcing you to hold his gaze with gentle severity.
“Listen to me carefully,” he began, his voice taking on a more solemn edge. “I will never leave you. Even if you do not see me, I will always be with you. In every decision you make, in every gesture of mercy and compassion, I will be there. You are my daughter, my sweet girl. You will never cease to be so.”
He sighed softly, kissing your forehead in a slow manner that felt like a farewell, which you did not comprehend at the time.
“You will never be alone, child. I will be there in the deepest love others give you, as well”
You frowned faintly, not understanding.
“When the right person comes, the one meant for you... your person,” he hummed. “They will love you as much as I love your mother, as much as I love you. They will see you as we do. The most beautiful girl, but also the most terribly capricious—”
Then, as if he feared he had grown too serious for a child’s heart, his fingers tickled down to your stomach, bringing forth an outburst of giggles, and he joined in the laughter, scooping you into his arms.
“And if they ever fail at that,” he declared playfully, pressing noisy kisses to your temple, “I shall haunt them most terribly.”
The pen fell forgotten on the desk, and your laughs faded into the quiet air once you left the library.
The golden glow dimmed away with his departure.
The world had turned dark and cold, making you feel like a foreigner walking through it. With the relentless thought that your father was no longer around, no longer waiting for you in the library, no longer supporting your whims, no longer there to witness your growth, your marriage, or the birth of your children… nor will you ever see him seated on the Iron Throne.
He was gone.
And guilt was gnawing at you from the inside.
If you believed you were doing the righteous thing, why did the gods seem so keen to punish you? Was this the price you were to pay for following your own heart? Is this what the Gods demanded of you?
Ashes.
All that was left of your father were ashes, drifting in the wind and swirling with the clouds above Ashford.
You looked up at the trail of his smoke as it disappeared high in the sky. It comforted you to think that he was flying away, bound by no name, no sense of duty or obligation weighing him down to earth. At last, Baelor was free.
And without Baelor, what would be left of you? What would become of you in the world, in the Realm? Where would you go? So many questions tormented your thoughts, and somehow, each new one that surfaced extinguished a little more of the small flame of hope in your heart that you would be able to return to Dragonstone with Duncan.
The idea of a future without your father's guidance loomed over you like a bottomless abyss. Who would you be now?
You were no longer the Heir's protégé, but a loose piece on a chessboard that was becoming dangerously unpredictable.
You were still there, standing in front of his pyre, even after everyone else had already left, all except Valarr, needless to say. He had stuck by your side all through the day, enduring your silent tearful outbursts, your existential queries and your rambling prayers, holding you together, just like any older brother would.
He kept his distance from you to allow you some privacy in your grief, and for that of himself as well. Sitting on a boulder, he observed from afar all that your father had left behind for you. Ashes.
Your fingers fidgeted in front of you, rolling the ring you wore on one of them, a ring that had once been his. It was only a matter of fate that it fit you perfectly.
But your anxious fidgeting stopped abruptly with the touch of a big but gentle hand laid on your shoulder, which made you flinch a little, startled, forcing you to snap out of the visions of the past you were reliving in the flames that were consuming your father's body.
Ser Duncan was at your side, leaning heavily on a cane, his face was a mess of bruises, he could barely open one eye, the other was so swollen and contorted that it was painful just to look at it. The pain you were suffering was one thing, but you couldn't imagine the pain he must be going through, in both body and soul.
You hadn't seen him since dawn. You had suggested that he should come with you to the castle, that you would provide him with your own chambers so that he could be tended to by the Maester, but to your surprise, he had refused. And you had let him go, consumed by the agony of loss.
But there he was, right back to you.
Where you both knew he ought not to be, among the very people who had put him on that path to begin with, who had made him go through so much.
Where you both knew he ought not to be, among the very people who had put him on that path to begin with, who had made him go through so much. But he felt he had the right to bid Baelor one last farewell, and, most important of all, to see you.
The story that had begun had to be finished. The old man had told him.
”Ser Duncan—”
His name was taken away by the cold breeze as the towering man forced himself to kneel before you, bowing his head in a gesture of respect that displayed more of his physical frailty than any diplomatic intent.
You glanced fleetingly at your brother, who was observing the scene from afar with keen, cautious eyes. He shrugged at your gaze.
“Forgive me, Princess,” Duncan grunted, words catching in his throat from the stinging pain in his midsection. “Please do forgive me—please take all that is left of me. I am but a man at your service. I am your man, my life is yours.”
A tearful little smile curled the corners of your lips, and your hand reached out down to him, affectionately running over his features to lift his chin, compelling him to look up at you. His eye was crystallized by big tears, set in place with the weight of so many emotions—adoration and longing above all else—once his gaze collided with yours.
“Rise,” you commanded softly, leaning toward him to help him do so, slipping an arm through his. Your voice was light and slightly humorous, complicit, “Please, Dunk. I thought we’d already gotten past formalities.”
Duncan got up carefully, supporting himself with his cane, but his other hand couldn't let go of yours, clinging to it in a desperate need to feel your warmth and solace. Home. That's what you were.
He contented himself with just looking at you carefully at in your near approach, his hand tentatively sliding up your arm, your shoulder, your neck, all the way to your face, brushing away the couple of tears from your skin.
As you melted into his gentle touch, you closed your eyes for a moment to be lost in the darkness and love of his caress.
Then you drew closer to him so you could embrace him, taking great care not to cause him pain, tucking your face into his chest, breathing in his scent and succumbing to the soothing beat of his heart.
“What is left of me is yours, Your Grace. Take it,” he pleaded in a whispered voice, caressing your hair with one of his hand. Then his strong, big arms wrapped around you, holding you close. The cane fell to the grass beside you, now forgotten, since Dunk had found a much better source of support. “Take me.”
Leaning the side of your face onto his chest, you gazed at the altar where your father's body had been laid to rest, reduced to nothing but ashes, dust, and air. Nothingness.
You backed away from his body so you could look up at Dunk's face and as you did, out of the corner of your eye, you spotted Valarr standing up and start walking back down the hill to the castle, offering you both that much needed privacy.
Duncan cupped both hands on your face, his gaze so full of devotion that it was almost breathtaking to see. It was too much.
“For that, I'll have to go with you, then,” at last, you you offered him an answer to his proposal—his plea, rather—keeping your voice low and secretive.
“With—with me?” Dunk furrowed his brow in confusion, having expected you to be taking him to Dragonstone or King's Landing and have him pledge his allegiance as your sworn guard.
But to leave with him? To run away and give up your entire life? For him? It was not even considered among the many possibilities and options he had been contemplating so earnestly all morning.
You took his hands carefully in yours, squeezing them with a desperate firmness. The ring on your finger—the one that had belonged to Baelor—pressed into his skin.
He was willing to do anything for you, to vow allegiance to whomever, as long as it kept him by your side and allowed him to see you every day. He'd be your secret lover, for sure. He'd be whatever you wanted him to be. But yours.
“Listen to me, Dunk,” you whispered carefully, wetting your chapped lips with your tongue. “My father is gone. Valarr will do his best to protect me, but even he can not stop the wheel from turning. They will marry me off to some Lord in the Reach or the North to secure the peace.”
Dunk’s expression faltered for a moment, then paused to gather his thoughts to express himself with the utmost precision. He wanted to be appropriate. To do what he considered the right thing to do. “B–but, a Lord... a Lord would provide for you.”
You shook your head gently, “I don’t want to be a princess anymore if it means losing the only person who sees me. The only person I know loves me as much as my father did.”
He promised you love in his voice and his eyes, in his touch, in his closeness. His body felt like it belonged next to yours—a sense of something so familiar, so right.
His throat worked.
“You think love is enough?”
Your gaze drifted back to the pyre, where the Silent Sisters were still working, blissfully ignorant of your conversation, their concern for the dead far greater than that for the living.
“I think love is the only thing that ever was.” Your fingers slid up to the ring again, turning it slowly. “My father taught me that duty is love made visible.”
“But what if love is also duty?” you whispered, thoughtfully.
By the time you finally looked back at Dunk, he was already staring back at you, appreciating every inch of your face in silent awe.
Love.
You smiled bashfully at that, at the sight of love in the azure of his eye. “We leave. We disappear. I would rather be a wanderer with you than some broodmare with a life of silent resentment.”
Duncan just let his eye slowly close in resignation, fully aware that you were right.
“You’d give it all up?” he asked hesitantly, his voice barely audible over the wind.
“If you are to take me, Dunk, you take all of me. Not just fragments or broken pieces—not as a illegitimate affair. You deserve all of me,” you answered firmly. A trembling sigh escaped from your lungs, certain on one thing. “And I don't belong here anymore. Never truly did.”
Duncan glanced over at Baelor for a while, chewing his lower lip in contemplation, the Silent Sisters continued their gentle, quiet work.
And finally, he turned back to you, his fingers soothingly caressing yours.
“Then we leave, my lady.” he nodded, his voice was deep and reassuring.
Not Princess.
Not Your Grace.
Just his lady. His.
To be his gave you a deep sensation of safety and tranquility. To be free.
The wind swept across the hill, carrying the last thin ribbon of smoke into the pale sky. It felt like an omen or perhaps a blessing.
His thumb brushed over the ring again, tracing the sigil engraved upon it. He knew what it all this meant. He knew what you were leaving behind. For him.
Carefully, he lifted your hand and pressed his lips into your knuckles, and you observed him do it with soft eyes.
“Soon my family will be heading back to King's Landing.” you informed quietly. “Valarr will… delay questions or suspicions.”
At the mention of your brother, something flickered in your chest.
“Will he forgive you?” Dunk asked gently.
“No,” you said honestly. “But he will understand. He has to.”
That, perhaps, was worse.
“We'll meet by the old elm tree at noon, then.”
Aerion breathed weakly, and even though he was lost in a profound slumber, his brow was heavily furrowed, still grumpy even in his state of unconsciousness.
If not for the tightness in his jaw, the faint crease between his brows, one might have mistaken him for peaceful.
But you knew better.
You had been sitting there for a while, watching his fragile state, more as a punishment than a consolation. Wondering if he would be different once he opened his eyes, if he would leave all his malice and darkness in the past.
Probably not.
“I'll send him to the Free Cities,” your uncle announced after a prolonged silence, after he too had stepped in to gaze at Aerion sleeping. “Lys. Perhaps a few years there will calm him down a bit.”
You both knew that couldn't be possible. Aerion was beyond redemption, and his father, more than anyone, must have known that even sending him to the Great Citadel to serve as a Maester would not be sufficient to soothe the rage of his broken soul.
Prince Maekar seemed distraught, paler than usual, his eyes blank and teary every time you turned to look at him, sunk in a cold shadow of grief and remorse. He had perhaps more reasons to feel guilty.
He could barely even look at you, so ashamed was he.
“He will be far from here,” Maekar continued, his voice low and husky. “And far from you. He will not trouble you again… or those you have.”
He understood that you would take Ser Duncan with you wherever you went. As a knight or as a secret lover, he could tell that Ser Duncan had devoted himself to you entirely in return for everything you had done for him, and whether you accepted him or not, Maekar would not intrude. He would leave that choice for you to take.
“I fear his absence will trouble me more,” you admitted quietly, the corners of your lips quivering.
A life without Aerion for many would be a welcome relief. But for you, it didn't feel right, it felt unnaturally wrong. Not having him right by your side during your visits to Summerhall, or whenever he traveled to Dragonstone, or the times you all gathered together in King's Landing. Those would be glimpses of a different life of yours, a past left behind.
“Yes,” Maekar hummed with wry amusement, his gaze turning back to his sleeping son, his own smile tearful as well. “I know.”
The silence was deafening, and with each labored breath Aerion drew, your heart seemed to shrink further.
Maekar was aware of the way you were looking at his son; he always had been.
“He loves you,” his statement drew your alarmed gaze back to him. “He sought my approval to ask for your hand over five separate occasions before coming here.” He cleared his throat to choke back the cry that threatened to erupt. “At the last of these, I accepted. I asked Baelor for his approval and…”
A weak, mournful laugh rumbled from his throat. You watched him attentively, always eager to hear of your father.
“And he told me he would rather be put to death than hand you over to my son,” he finally concluded, his face darkening as the recollection of reality sank in upon him again.
It took all your strength to even get the words out, the lump in your throat pressing down like a stranglehold. “I don't blame you, Uncle. I understand you'll have to live with it, but not from me. He would have done the same to protect me.”
Maekar mustered the courage to look back at you, and you caught a glimpse of his chin trembling slightly as he fought back the tears.
You reached out your hand to his trembling one in his lap, and he squeezed it back, cradling it in his palm, in need of emotional reassurance. He was always the one who contained others, so strong and tough. Now he looked like crystal about to shatter.
It was strange to see him like this. So emotionally vulnerable, so human...
Maekar gazed at your intertwined hands with a look of disbelief, as if he couldn't believe that forgiveness still existed in a world he himself had helped to destroy.
“You always were too much like him,” he muttered.
You offered a faint smile. “I hope so.”
You squeezed his hand tighter, even though your own fingers were trembling now.
Prince Maekar was just a broken brother who saw in you a reflection of the best he had just lost.
“He lives in you,” he rejoiced, smiling proud and sorrowful, his voice choked with affection.
Then he leaned toward you to press a rough, unskilled kiss on your forehead, a gesture of affection so uncharacteristic of him that it took your breath away. His lips trembled against your skin before he pulled away, and for a second, you saw a single tear roll down his cheek before he turned his face toward Aerion's sleeping form.
“That knight of yours is as stubborn as a mule. He’ll live to give me more headaches, I’m sure.” He took a deep breath, “I will have him summoned so that I may speak with him. I'll offer him a position in my service.”
You grimaced, looking up at him, “I don't think he'll accept, Uncle. He has had enough of us.”
“And refuse the chance to get to see you every day? I don’t think so.” Prince Maekar snorted, unconvinced. “Aegon has also assured me he will not be squire to anyone but Ser Duncan.”
A flicker of fondness crossed your features at that.
“Aegon is loyal,” you smiled softly. “Stubbornly so.”
“As is his knight,” Maekar replied dryly.
You studied your uncle’s face — the exhaustion carved into it, the grief he did not allow himself to voice. He had lost a brother. Nearly lost a son. And perhaps, in some quiet corner of his heart, he knew he was losing you too.
“Uncle,” you began carefully, “if Ser Duncan refuses your offer...”
Maekar’s eyes flicked toward you, perceptive as ever.
“…will you let him go?”
Your uncle was not a cruel man. Hard, yes. Unyielding, proud. But not cruel.
He just sighed, a weary, bone-deep sound. “If he refuses, I will not chain him.” A faint, dry edge touched his voice. “I am not my son.”
Relief bloomed in your chest, fragile and fleeting.
“Thank you,” you whispered.
“I will not stand in your way,” he said at last. “And neither will Aerion.”
Those words felt unreal.
You rose slowly from your seat beside Aerion’s bed. For a brief, foolish moment, you considered brushing a strand of hair from his face—a final gesture of familiarity—but you stopped yourself.
Some endings required distance.
You turned back to Maekar instead.
“Thank you,” you croaked.
He shook his head faintly. “Do not thank me, niece. If Baelor is watching, he is likely cursing us both.”
A small smile ghosted across your lips. “He always did prefer righteousness over happiness.”
“You deserve it,” he said, low and firm. “Happiness. Do not let any of us make you believe otherwise.”
As you moved toward the door, you paused one last time, glancing back at Aerion’s sleeping form and Maekar's trembling back.
“Goodbye, Uncle Maekar,” you whispered, unsure whether you meant it as farewell or an apology, maybe both.
The scent of herbs and strong dyes lingered in the air of your chambers, as a couple of your maids finished packing the most essential items into a small bag.
“Darker, please,” you requested, examining your reflection in the polished bronze mirror.
Your ladies-in-waiting, with anguished faces and in absolute silence, worked quickly. The strand of hair that had once been the distinctive silver-white of your lineage was now dyed a deep black.
You wanted to just disappear. You wanted the Princess Targaryen to die with your father, leaving only a name, a shadow.
When they finished, you felt definitely different.
You watched the door swing open through the mirror's reflection, revealing Valarr, already striding in. He looked utterly devastated, his eyes tear-swollen and his posture hunched under the weight of grief. He stopped in his tracks, studying you, and for a moment he didn't seem to recognize you with your now dark hair.
“So now you're planning to flee?” your brother reproached you, gazing at you with hurt as you rose to face him. His eyes scanned your quarters, your maids hanging down their heads in shame, caught red-handed. “You're leaving?”
“Without our father, I am no one here, Valarr,” you explained, stepping closer to him and reaching out to find his hands, but he pulled them out of reach. That stung you to the core, causing you to drop your own in a gesture of defeat. “You have your wife, you have a family of your own. You have your place in this world. You will be the Heir, if the King reaffirms it. I—I have nothing,” your voice trembled in distress, “and I'm not going to stay here to be sent off to marry some lord I'll never love. I'm not like t–that.”
Silence fell again.
Your brother just looked at your dark hair, then at the travel-worn boots peeking from beneath your skirts, and let out a laugh that sounded more like a choke. His eyes, usually so full of warmth, were now burning with resentment and sorrow.
One of your maids sniffled quietly and Valarr flicked his gaze toward them, then back to you. With a sharp motion of his hand, he dismissed them.
“Leave us.”
They obeyed at once, slipping out like shadows retreating from torchlight. The door shut with a soft, final sound.
“Nothing?” he repeated once you were both alone. “You have me. You have Matarys. You have the legacy he spent his entire life building, and you’re casting it into the dirt as if it were meaningless.”
You closed your eyes, dropping your head in despair, not daring to even look at him, making him scoff sourly.
“So this is it,” Valarr whispered, the so much bitterness in his. “That hedge knight has taken you away from me as well. He has taken you both.”
Your frown deepened, your view of him blurring through tears, “Valarr, that’s not fair—”
“Fair?” he spat. He took a trembling breath, raking his fingers back through his hair, visibly at odds with himself. “Do you think any of this is fair? Or does any of this even make sense at a–all?”
His voice broke on the last word.
You wanted to tell him that you weren't choosing Dunk over him—you were choosing to survive, to do the right thing, just as your father had taught you.
But you didn't have to say anything at all, because Valarr understood perfectly. He knew you were right—most of the time you were. If he truly wanted to see you happy, genuinely happy, he knew he had to let you go.
Slowly, you reached out, resting a hand on his trembling shoulder and he didn't pull away this time.
“I have to find out who I am, brother,” you croaked out, your voice thick with the tears you had been trying to suppress. “Away from the throne, away from the pressure of our name. If I stay, I’ll only be a ghost haunting these halls, a piece of property to be traded. I can't—I can't do that.”
He finally turned to face you, and the sight was heart–breaking. His eyes were swimming, the two–toned depths clouded with a pain so profound it made him look so fragile and childish–like.
His hand rose, hesitant, as though unsure whether he still had the right and he touched a darkened strand of your hair.
“You look so different,” he said thickly. “It does not suit you,”
A broken laugh escaped you. “That is rather the point, brother.”
“He will not keep you safe,” he swallowed with difficulty. “The world is crueler beyond these walls.”
“And it is not cruel within them?” you asked gently.
His mouth parted and then closed.
He knew. The marriages whispered about in corridors, the alliances already weighed against your womb, the letters waiting to be sent once mourning ended.
“Without you... I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep us all together.” he confessed, a single tear finally breaking free and tracing a path through his flushed cheek.
His composure finally shattered. Valarr reached out and pulled you into a fierce, desperate embrace and he held you as if he could physically keep you from fading away, his sobs muffled against your cloak.
He hugged you tight, as he used to when you were children and you hid from storms.
“You will always be my brother,” you promised, hugging him back tearfully.
After a long time, he pulled back just enough to frame your face with his hands. His thumbs brushed over your cheekbones, lingering with a tenderness that felt like a final benediction.
“If you ever find that the world is too big, or too cold, or if that big knight of yours is too much of a brute, you come home.” He looked at you with a mournful, watery smile—the kind of look someone gives a beautiful dream right before waking up. “Do you hear me? You will always have a place by my side.”
He leaned down and pressed a lingering, trembling kiss to your forehead, sealing his acceptance.
“Valarr...”
He did not look at you as he spoke this time.
“Do not thank me,” he warned. “If I look upon you once more before you leave, I may bar the doors myself.”
You nodded, unable to find the words to thank him for the mercy of his surrender. Picking up your small bag, rushing across the quarters as Valarr sat down at one of the seats at your table, pouring himself a glass of wine. At the threshold, you paused.
“Valarr,” you called out to him softly.
He did not turn. He couldn't.
“Yes?”
“You will not shame him.”
His shoulders trembled beneath your tearful gaze.
“I know,” he replied. “You won't either.”
Your feet came to a halt by some kind of gravity when you reached past the partially open door of Aerion's bedchamber. And your hand moved of its own accord, pushing the dark wood open just enough to slip inside.
The chamber was dim, heavy with the scent of herbs and pain, and death. A single candle burned low beside the bed.
And there he was.
Aerion lay exactly as you had left him earlier—on his back, silver hair spilled across the pillow, brow still furrowed, arguing with the world of unconsciousness.
For a moment, you only stood there, you had already said goodbye.
You had said it to your uncle. To your brother.
But not to him.
His breathing was steadier now, though still weak. The sharp angles of his face were softened by shadows.
Without the sneer. Without the cutting words.
Just a boy. A broken boy.
“This is foolish,” you whispered to yourself.
And yet you moved closer still.
You stood beside his bed, looking down at him.
You tried to summon anger. To remember every cruel remark, every selfish act, every moment he had forced you to be something you never were. To be his.
But all you felt was grief.
Your hand trembled as you reached out.
You hesitated only once before brushing your fingers lightly over his temple, careful not to wake him. His skin was warm beneath your touch.
His brow twitched under your gentle caress.
A sad, fragile smile touched your lips at that.
“You would hate this,” you cooed,your fingers tracing a delicate caress down the curve of his cheekbone. “You would say black makes me look like a crow.”
The words felt strange spoken aloud.
For years, distance had seemed impossible between you two. You had orbited the same rooms, the same feasts, the same summers at Summerhall. His presence had been as constant as the sun rising in the east. Something both inevitable and beyond control.
And now, silence.
You leaned down slowly and your lips brushed his forehead, just at the crease that never seemed to leave him.
The kiss was gentle, lingering and heavy. A farewell pressed into skin that might never feel your touch again.
His breathing hitched faintly beneath you.
“I forgive you,” you whispered against him, so quietly it barely existed. “You tried, in your own way. As I did.”
A tear finally escaped you, falling into his hairline before you could stop it.
You brushed your thumb once more over his brow, smoothing out the wrinkled skin between his eyebrows. “I hope Lys is kinder to you than we were, cousin.”
His breathing slowed down and softened.
At first, you thought it was only the shifting of sleep.
Then—
Your name.
You straightened before your resolve could fracture completely and forced your feet to move.
At the door, you hesitated only once, but still, you stepped into the corridor.
The door began to close.
And just before it sealed shut, violet eyes opened slowly.
He had heard it, all of it. He had felt your gentle touch, your lips softly whispering his name as if it was yours to claim. So it was, it was yours to pronounce, to love, and to hold.
Even if you were halfway across the world, even if you were in another man's arms. He knew that his name was as much yours as his whole heart had been.
It was always yours, after all. And as long as you were both looking up at the same moon, he would forever be yours.
To long for you, it had always cost him heartache. He understood that all of his bones would be broken from bearing the weight of your love.
The door clicked softly into place.
Silence swallowed the room once more.
Aerion continued to stare at the wood long after it closed, as though willing it to open again.
But it did not.
And for the first time in his life, the fire in Aerion's chest did not burn with anger.
It burned with loss.
You had spent the afternoon gathering what you would need, the most important item being Sweetfoot, the beautiful mare that Raymun had mentioned to you that Dunk had sold to get some money so he could get into the lists. It was the mare that had once belonged to Ser Arlan.
You had stopped by to pay Ser Reymun a quick visit at his tent, offering him a small bag of coins as a token of gratitude for taking Duncan's side in the Trial of Seven, he had been very brave. But he simply hugged you and handed you a couple of green apples instead, his new personal badge for his emblem.
“By the Seven… Princess? I almost didn't recognize you there.” He had told you as soon as he saw you appear with your new dark hair, hidden under your hood. “You look like a lady from the Free Cities, perhaps, or a raven-haired beauty from the North. He is a lucky man, my friend.”
You had also found out that he had married and fathered a child with a woman in a single night, allegedly. You just winced when you noticed the redhead's prominent belly as she held onto his arm, forcing yourself to offer them a smile.
Sweetfoot was a docile horse, and immediately accepted you, nuzzling your hand when you held out a piece of one of the apples that Raymun had gifted you.
Near the old elm tree, as he promised, Ser Duncan was waiting for you.
He was checking Thunder’s saddle with careful hands, movements slower than usual, his bruised ribs no doubt protesting every bend, and as you approached holding Sweetfoot's reins, you overheard him talking to the horses.
His horse huffed impatiently, pawing once at the grass. And Chestnut bobbed her head when she recognized you from behind her owner's back.
“Aye, Chestnut, I know,” Duncan sighed, straightening a strap. “You like her as well, don’t you? Yeah, she’s good, she’s so good.”
He sighed then, resting his forehead briefly against Thunder’s neck.
“Oh yeah, s–she’ll come,” he murmured under his breath, more to himself than the horses. “She said she would.”
You barely had time to tighten your fingers around the reins before Sweetfoot decided for herself.
The mare’s ears shot forward, her whole body stilled, then trembled.
And before you could murmur a warning, she tugged once, very sharply and slipped free of your hold, trotting towards Duncan.
“…Sweetfoot?” Dunk asked once he sensed the mare trotting toward him, turning around so he could happily caress her. “What’re you doin’ here, eh?”
Duncan stilled once he saw out of the corner of his eye that your figure had appeared in his line of sight, walking in his direction.
His head snapped up.
For a second—just a second—confusion clouded his battered face again at the sight of the dark-haired woman approaching him.
Then recognition struck.
“My lady,” he breathed out, his jaw hanging open. “What...?”
You pushed the hood back slowly.
The dying sunlight caught in your hair, not bright and otherworldly as before, but deep as ink, soft as shadow.
“It’s me,” you said gently.
“You…” His voice trailed off.
You tried to smile, suddenly self-conscious under his gaze.
“I asked for it darker,” you admitted sheepishly. “I thought it would be easier. If I bore less resemblance to—”
“To some Targaryen?” he finished for you, his naturally deep voice toning down to a humorous approach.
But you frowned at that, feigning offense. “That sounded like an insult.”
Duncan’s eyes widened immediately.
“It weren’t,” he said at once, almost tripping over the words as he hobbled closer to you. “Gods, no. I didn’t mean—”
Sweetfoot huffed at his side, as if impatient with his fumbling.
Dunk dragged a hand down his face, clearly flustered.
“I only meant...” he searched for the right shape of it as heached out hesitantly for you, rough fingers lifting a single strand of your hair between them.
Then he caressed your cheek reassuringly.
“It suits you,” he said at last.
Relief fluttered weakly in your chest.
You raised your eyebrows, hopeful. “It does?”
“A–aye.” His thumb brushed near your temple, careful and loving. “You look...”
He struggled for the word, brow furrowing.
“Different?” you offered, softly.
But he shook his head.
“You look like yourself,” he corrected. “Perfect.”
He swallowed, suddenly earnest and uncertain.
“I mean—not that you weren’t before. You were—you are. I just—” Dunk shifted his weight, wincing faintly at his ribs. “I don’t much care what color your hair is. You could shave it all off and I’d still—” He stopped, is ears burning red as you stared at him, a hint of a smile appearing on your lips, letting him ramble on. “Fucking hell—I ain’t clever with these things, but I know you. And you’re—you’re—”
“Duncan”
He exhaled sharply at that, hands opening helplessly at his sides.
“My—my lady,” he stammered back, all red in the face and struggling to hold your gaze. “I’m sorry, I’m not very g–good at this, I’ve never—”
You rose onto your toes and kissed him, his words died against your mouth.
Then his hands came up instinctively to your body, one settling at your waist, the other cupping the back of your head, pulling you closer to him. And when you pulled away, he leaned in again, tilting his head to give you a much slower kiss.
When Duncan finally pulled away, he pressed his forehead gently to yours.
“Are you certain?”
You gazed up at him through your fluttering eyelashes, half-opening your lips, your tone of voice unquestionable. “Yes.”
His fingers ran through your hair a few more times before turning toward Sweetfoot, adjusting the reins with gentle familiarity.
“I don’t think I should ride her,” you said, shaking your head softly. “She was Ser Arlan’s. She’s yours, Dunk.”
Duncan looked back at you, offering you a little reassuring smile.
“She was Ser Arlan’s,” he agreed. “And he gave her to me.”
He stepped closer, placing the reins back into your hands.
“And I give her to you.”
Your fingers tightened around the leather, looking up at him with quiet emotion.
“Duncan—”
“Up you go, my love,” he interrupted you, moving to help you mount the mare. His hands were steady on your waist despite his pain, lifting you with surprising care onto the waiting horse.
He set you gently into the saddle atop Sweetfoot.
You looked down at him, wide-eyed.
“I can't possibly deserve this,” you insisted. “Dunk, I only bought her back so you would not have to regret selling her.”
He smiled up at you, warm.
“Aye,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You bought her back. That means she’s yours now.”
He helped you place your feet in the stirrups, using the excuse to affectionately run his hands up and down your calves.
Then he leaned close to Sweetfoot’s ear, lowering his voice in that conspiratorial tone he always used with the horses.
“Now listen here, girl,” he muttered, stroking her neck. “That’s my lady you’re carryin’. You mind your steps. Nice and steady. You treat her well, d’you hear me?”
Your hand drifted down to Sweetfoot’s pale forelock, fingers threading gently through the silvery strands that shimmered faintly in the last glow of evening. The hair was soft beneath your touch, almost luminous against your dark sleeves.
“Yeah, she's a lot trickier to please than the old man, I tell you that,” Duncan added teasingly.
“I heard that.”
Sweetfoot huffed softly as Duncan chuckled.
His smile deepened at your smiling face, and he turned toward Thunder, gathering the reins to mount as well.
He had one boot braced against the stirrup—
“Ser Duncan!”
Duncan froze and very slowly, he lowered his foot back to the ground. You twisted around on the saddle, occupied as you were with securing your bag along the side.
From the over the stone fence, stepped Aegon trying very hard to look composed despite the fact that he had clearly been running. He gasped out your name too, in desperation.
“My lord father says I am to serve you,” he declared with solemnity, raising his chin in confidence, his eyes flicking up to your face and then to Duncan’s and then back again.
“Egg...” you named him affectionately, your face softening.
“Serve you, Ser,” Dunk corrected him, giving a single nod with his head, permitting him to join you.
“Ser,” Egg repeated, a joyful smile curving his lips.
Duncan rode slightly ahead, broad back straight despite the ache in his ribs. One hand rested loosely on Thunder’s reins; the other hovered near his side out of habit more than need.
Every so often, he would glance over his shoulder, not to check the road.
To check you.
You caught him at it once.
“I won’t fall,” you assured him, snorting with amusement at his excessive concern for your well-being.
His mouth twitched. “Didn’t think you would.”
Egg guided Chestnut up alongside Sweetfoot after a short stretch of silence.
“You look different.” your little cousin pointed out bluntly.
“So I’ve been told,” you murmured, with a playful arch of your eyebrows.
After observing you for a couple of long seconds, Aegon nodded once, brisk and decisive.
“It suits you,” he declared. “You look less… conspicuous.”
Duncan made a noise under his breath. “You’ve been eavesdroppin’.”
“I have not,” Egg snapped back at him. “I still think the hair was a good decision,” he said thoughtfully after. “Less likely to be recognized. Better than shaving it all off, I suppose.”
“Thank you, Egg,” you replied warmly.
Duncan cleared his throat loudly from ahead. “We are not discussin’ her hair like it’s a cloak she’s put on.”
Egg rolled his eyes. “You were staring at it.”
“I was not.”
“You were!” Egg leaned closer to you, lowering his voice as though confiding state secrets, “he has looked back at least seven times—”
“I have not,” Duncan called over his shoulder.
“Eight,” Egg corrected.
You could not help it then—you laughed, the sound carrying lightly across the open field. Sweetfoot’s ears flicked back at the noise, and you reached forward to stroke her pale mane again, smoothing the white strands between your fingers.
Duncan slowed Thunder slightly so that he rode closer to your side as well.
His voice was quieter when he spoke this time, but his expression was just as concerned and loving. “You cold?”
“I am quite fine, Ser Duncan,” you teased. “You may look at the road now.”
A faint flush crept up his neck.
“I am lookin’ at the road,” he muttered, turning forward again far too quickly.
Egg snorted. “He’s hopeless.”
“Hush,” you chided fondly, though your gaze lingered on Duncan’s broad back. The set of his shoulders. The steadiness of him.
You let the silence settle comfortably before speaking.
“Where are we going?”
Duncan considered that.
“Well,” he admitted, “I hadn’t rightly planned that part.”
Egg piped up from behind, “We could head toward the river road. Fewer patrols.”
Duncan glanced back at him. “You’ve been thinkin’ on this.”
“I always think, Ser,” Egg replied primly.
The trees began to thin as the path sloped gently downward and the world felt wider already.
Your gaze drifted upward.
High above the open stretch of sky, a lone bird circled on wide, unhurried wings—dark against the fading gold, riding the last warm currents of air. It did not struggle. It did not falter. It simply rose.
You could almost hear him still, your father, his gentle voice, speaking of hawks and omens and how the Seven must surely favor creatures brave enough to trust the wind.
The bird soared once more, then turned toward the horizon, becoming smaller and smaller until it was no more than a shadow against the darkening blue.
You watched until it vanished.
“The river road,” you said at last, hopeful. “It sounds nice.”
As the three of you turned your horses toward the faint silver glow ahead, the sky deepened into indigo.
And though something precious had taken flight beyond your reach.
A/N: I am absolutely in love with @idksmtms's fics of Maekar having a young wife whom Dunk confuses with his daughter, and I just kept thinking about how Baelor would react if it happened to him 😭 so I wrote this. Special thanks to @vhagars-dementia for constantly blessing this fandom with her ideas!!! I dedicate this to you <3 And to all my Baelor enthusiasts.
— summary: ser duncan the tall thinks you're just a beautiful girl close to his own age, but his innocence is his undoing when he mistakes you for just another targaryen cousin. the only problem? you are actually the lady of dragonstone and baelor’s wife.
— pairing: baelor targaryen x wife!reader
— word count: 2k
— content: controversial young wife!reader, age gap, humor, mentions of reader's hair length, jealous!baelor, implicit sexual references, pda.
⋆ . ۰˚ ౨ৎ ── series masterlist with different characters’ versions: here!
The hedge knight spends more time than ever with the family, forever trailing after Aegon like a loyal hound, laughing, jesting, and, above all, eating.
It was only to be expected that the prince would invite his dear friend to the feast held at Dragonstone for the celebration of your name day. Your husband, Baelor, had prepared a banquet worthy of you, with an enormous cake and hundreds of servants rushing frantically through the castle, adorning the halls with flowers and colors chosen to your liking. He knew you exceptionally well, so it had been easy for him to decorate precisely how you'd like.
You had told him, of course, that such splendor was unnecessary, that a small supper with the family would have more than sufficed. Yet Baelor delighted in spoiling you, for you were the finest blessing he had been granted in a lot of time.
Whenever Ser Duncan the Tall found himself in your presence, he devoted most of his time to watch you from afar—seeing you laugh beside Baelor, play with Egg, or even speak comfortably with Prince Aerion. Your presence was nothing short of glorious, a magnet for eyes and devotion wherever you went. Your nature was exquisite—kind, gentle, and so unbearably sweet that at times Dunk thought you could scarce be of the same blood as the rest of them.
And your beauty… that was another matter entirely. You were the loveliest sight the humble eyes of a hedge knight had ever beheld. Your form was wondrous, your face celestial, your long hair falling over your shoulders like a silken cascade, and your smile... it stole the very breath from his chest every time. Each time you entered his sight, a sigh would just escape out of him, soft and helpless, like a boy hopelessly in love.
“Do not even think it, Dunk,” Egg warns him, as he had more than once before, quick to notice the besotted look upon his big friend’s face as they sat together at the table. “That's out of your power to reach, Ser.”
But Dunk does not answer. He is far too intent upon you as you appear in the great hall’s doorway.
Today you wear a gown of red, dazzling, adorned with pearls and white embroidery that spreads across your bodice, climbs your shoulders, and trails down the length of your spine, where darker crimson stitching forms the likeness of dragon scales. Your hair lies loose down your back, softly waved, gleaming in the candlelight.
All rise at your entrance.
Dunk is the last. He nearly stumbles over his chair in his haste, its legs scraping loudly against the stone floor as he shoves it back. That alone—and you—turn him red as a summer apple.
Valarr, seated at his other side, watches his brutish motion with poorly hidden amusement.
“My love,” Baelor calls first, his face gentle as drifting clouds, fondness curving his lips as he comes to greet you properly. “Happy name day.”
You accept his embrace, smiling as he presses a tender kiss to your hair.
After him, the others come in turn, forming a line to offer their wishes, their thanks, their gifts—small tokens and letters placed into your hands.
Egg flings himself into your arms, making you laugh and sway back a step beneath the force of him. Baelor, standing close at your side, smiles at the sight. Ever tender are you with the younglings, and for that, he loves you all the more. You shower his children with a devotion so maternal and steadfast that one would never guess they did not spring from your own womb.
“Thank you, my sweet Aegon,” you tell him, stroking the fine, pale silver-gold hair already sprouting upon his head. The boy had even brought you a flower—one of those you cherished most, a silent token of his affection.
Duncan feels painfully out of place when his turn comes. Standing empty-handed while his stomach twists into a tight, miserable knot.
He is already flushed when you lift your gaze to him, your eyes sparkling with amusement at the familiar effect you have upon him—his trembling hands, his stammer, his shy smiles. He's so cute!
“Ser Duncan. I hope you would be here,” you greet him warmly, you know well the bond he shares with Aegon; to have him present is a comfort to your heart. “Aegon speaks wonders of you. It does not surprise me to see you have become each other's shadow.”
“My lady,” Dunk answers you, his voice no louder than a mouse’s squeak. His gaze, much against his better judgment, betrays him, making a swift, helpless journey over the length of your body.
And Baelor notices, of course; his smile fades, slow and certain, as he watches the knight’s every movement like a hawk perched upon your shoulder. A single brow lifts slightly, and a deep, thoughtful furrow begins to cloud his brow.
Duncan clears his throat and casts your husband an apologetic glance before daring to look at you again. “I— I beg your pardon. I would not wish to be an intrusion upon your name day. Your father was kind enough to grant me to attend.”
The hall falls into sepulchral silence. The small conversations that bloom among the Targaryens die at once when Dunk’s words echo through the great chamber, their meaning plain, their offense unmistakable and unashamed. Even the youngest cease their play, and the servants stand frozen right where they are.
All turn to stare at Duncan now, and they look upon him with mortified eyes, as though none dare breathe.
Somewhere, someone fails to smother a laugh—most likely Aerion.
Egg’s mouth falls open in mortification. He looks up at his friend, his expression stricken, willing him to understand—to see—that what he has just said is wrong. Very wrong.
Duncan looks down at him when his small squire gives his shin a furtive kick, meant to draw his notice without the others seeing. He frowns, bewildered, not understanding what offense he has given now to deserve such a blow.
And when he looks back to the grown folk, he finds you watching him with an expression poised in perfect balance between horror and amusement. There is even the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of your lips, one you must press away when you turn your head toward your prince.
Baelor does not look pleased as you do.
His face is uncommonly stern, his brow drawn tight, his lips pressed into a hard, unforgiving line, he is trying to gather every shred of his restraint to keep from striking the foolish knight upon your name day.
“She is my wife, Ser Duncan,” he clarifies, his patience stretched thin, drawn so taut it borders upon offense. His hand comes to curl around your waist as you lean into him, lifting one hand to his chest in quiet reassurance.
You are still trying to hide that treacherous, amused smile.
“Oh—Seven—” Dunk breathes, realization striking him at last. He drops at once to his knees, bowing his head in reverence and shame. “I beg your forgiveness, Your Grace. I—I did not know. My manners are poor—you must understand, I never m–meant offense.”
“Of course not, Ser,” you reply kindly, looking down at him, still leaning against your husband’s chest. He lets out a soft sigh beneath your touch, your hand rising and falling with the steady motion of his breath.
Baelor makes a sharp, dismissive gesture for him to rise. “See that it does not happen again.”
“Of course!” Dunk scrambles to his feet at once, his face burning red with shame. “I only meant that she is so young and beautiful, and you—”
His frantic blue eyes fall upon Valarr, standing just behind his father. The prince shakes his head swiftly, his mismatched eyes widening in urgent warning, bidding him to hold his tongue.
Dunk obeys at once and his jaw snaps shut so hard it almost snaps apart.
“You witless boy,” Maekar rebukes him, his face twisted with disgust and disdain when the hedge knight dares glance his way, standing at your side like some old, ill-tempered hound. “That should cost you your fucking tongue.”
Your soft laughter breaks through the tension of the moment, and all turn to look at you, the heavy air easing when they all realize this offends you not half so deeply as it does them.
“I am certain Ser Duncan meant no malice, Maekar,” you say, seeking to soothe them—most of all your husband. “And I should not like to see any tongues torn out upon my name day, please.”
Baelor’s gaze remains fixed upon the mortified knight, his hand coming to rest upon the pommel of his sword—a blade he carries in quiet defiance of your pleas to remain unarmed this day. He thinks, perhaps, that he shall have a use for it against Ser Duncan.
“... shall we eat at last, then?” Comes Daeron’s unmistakable voice from somewhere within the hall. “I am hungry. And thirsty.”
“Of that, none have any doubt,” Maekar mutters, rolling his eyes as he returns to the table.
The others follow in his wake, granting you and your husband a moment alone.
Ser Duncan gives you another quick, apologetic bow before hastening out from beneath your husband’s gaze.
You cannot hold it any longer.
A breath of laughter escapes you, soft and bright, and you turn in Baelor’s arms to face him fully.
He is still watching the place where Duncan stood, his jaw tight, his shoulders rigid beneath your touch, as if the insult lingers in the air like a foul smell.
Your fingers curl more firmly into the front of his doublet to call for his attention.
“My prince,” you whisper with a smile when his two-toned eyes finally meet yours. “My heart...”
You rise onto your toes and press a gentle kiss to his cheek, his beard tickling against your skin. His body noticeably softens beneath your warm affection.
Another kiss follows, softer still, at the corner of his mouth.
And one more, sweet and lingering, upon his lips.
“Peace,” you plead humorously against his mouth, your fingers toying idly with the Hand of the King’s badge on his chest. “You look as though you mean to challenge the poor knight to single combat over a slip of the tongue, my love.”
“I am not amused,” he manifests, his tone remarkably sullen, yet you press another loving kiss to his lips to chase away his pettish little pout.
“No?” You lean closer, your voice drops into something more playful and teasing, “is it because he thinks you're old, husband?”
His lips tremble at your words, holding back an ironic smile, and his hands tighten at your waist, pulling you closer against him.
Baelor clicks his tongue, and your gaze falls to his lips as he does. “I am not old.”
“Well, considering my own age... truthfully, you are a bit older,” you continue to tease him, biting back a small laugh at his startled reaction. “Should I begin calling you father now, hm?”
His beautiful eyes narrow.
You grin—and steal another quick kiss before he can protest.
“Do not push your luck, wife,” he warns all the same, a playful little smile curving his lips. His hand slides down to the small of your back before he delivers a sharp, scolding swat to your backside, making you jolt lightly against him.
His brow arches slightly. “You are the only one left breathless and trembling like some frail, ancient little thing. Or must I remind you how you clung to me the other night and begged me to—?”
Your hand flies to his mouth, covering it before he can utter another word.
“My prince,” you hiss under your breath, though laughter trembles in your voice, your eyes wide with scandalized amusement. “You grow bold. We are in a hall full of eyes, and your sons sit but a stone's throw away.”
His lips move against your palm, pressing a lingering, heated kiss there that sends a shiver down your spine. Baelor gently pulls your hand away, though he does not let go of your fingers, his thumb stroking your knuckles with a slow, possessive rhythm, grazing your betrothal ring.
“Let them look,” he dismisses, leaning into you to kiss your lips properly, claiming them. And claiming you.
The heated kiss, at last, forces Duncan’s eyes away from you, and Baelor smiles against your mouth as he watches him behind you, finally closing his own eyes to savor the honeyed sweetness of your kiss.
dededos
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
areudirty
andulkaphoto
