I think one has to start somewhere… And overcome the hatred of my drawings, and the fear of sharing them. My beloved Kanej, my love, happiness, therapy, and doom. Love them more than life <3.
Daeron has become used to spending the evenings in your rooms, though he has not quite admitted how much the habit means to him. When you notice an irritated patch beneath his collar and reach for him, an ordinary act of care becomes something neither of youcan ignore, and Daeron must decide whether being seen wanting you means he has to retreat.
Word Count: 3.4k
Warnings: sexual thoughts and fantasies, references to brothels and past sexual encounters, developing relationship, arranged marriag, romantic touching, no explicit sexual content just Daeron being down bad and being a thousand percent a sub, Daeron continues to be very normal about his wife’s hands.
A/N: This takes place before their first kiss, and it's the first of a few stories I'll be posting going forward regarding the development of their intimacy. It was inspired by an anon message about the ways in which Daeron, consciously or not, might turn care or affection into something that arouses him. Hope you like it, please let me know what you think!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote "If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place. I would stay forever, I would become a citizen of you."
By now, Daeron has stopped pretending that he comes to your rooms for any reason worth naming.
The excuses had once required some effort: a misplaced hairpin, a book he thought might belong to you, news delivered so late that it could easily have waited until morning. Lately he simply arrives before supper and finds the chair near your dressing table unoccupied, as though no one else has understood that it is his. You no longer ask what he is doing there, and he no longer offers to leave before you have decided whether you want him to.
He has noticed this development, though he has declined to consider it closely.
This evening, you are choosing between two pairs of earrings while he turns one of your letters over in his hands. You have not given him permission to read it, warning him against opening it while you finish pinning your hair, and he has been resisting the seal for long enough to feel that some public acknowledgment of his virtue may soon be required. He says as much. You tell him that an unwillingness to commit petty treason while sitting three feet from the victim is not yet a virtue.
He watches your mouth in the mirror when you say it.
You are occupied with the earring and do not see. He has become increasingly accomplished at looking at you when your attention appears safely elsewhere: the movement of your fingers at the nape of your neck, the small concentration between your brows when a clasp will not catch, the part of your throat left uncovered while your hair is lifted. There is something indecent in how much neck a woman possesses once a man’s mouth has begun wanting to touch it. He has known women more naked than this and looked with less difficulty.
The comparison makes him lower his eyes to the letter. The wax has been stamped with a sun and spear. One of your sisters has written your name on the outside in a hand that leans sharply forward, impatient even before the letter begins, and he runs his thumb over the edge of the folded parchment instead of breaking the seal.
“Is that uncomfortable?”
He glances up. “The temptation? Excruciating.”
Your eyes have moved from his face to somewhere beneath it. “Your collar.”
He touches it reflexively. The skin along one side of his throat has been bothering him since he dressed, but discomforts that do not involve fire, blood, or his father’s disappointment rarely seem worth announcing.
“It is a collar,” He says. “Discomfort is half its purpose.”
“You have fastened it badly,” You set one earring down beside the other. Daeron expects you to return to the mirror. Instead, you turn toward him and hold out your hand for the letter. He gives it back and watches while you place it among the brushes and little covered pots on the table. “Come here.”
He is already near you. The observation reaches him only after he has shifted forward in the chair.
You make a quiet sound of impatience and step between the dressing table and his knees -not between them, precisely, though his body supplies the distinction before he has any use for it. Your skirts brush the front of his boot. He looks up.
“Hold still.”
He does.
There is no pause in which he considers refusing, no remark offered quickly enough to make the obedience seem accidental. The words leave your mouth, and his body answers with the same thoughtless compliance as a hand turning toward warmth. Only when your fingers reach his collar does he realize how readily he has given himself over to the instruction.
You loosen the top fastening. The edge of the fabric drags once against the irritated skin, and Daeron breathes through his teeth.
“That bad?”
“No. I enjoy making wounded noises when women undress me. It lends the occasion gravity.”
Your mouth twitches before you look down again, and then a small laugh escapes you, quieter than the ones he has coaxed from you in company. It is hardly more than breath, but it warms him with an immediacy he would prefer not to examine.
“You are being very brave then.” You tease.
“I have been told so often.”
The jest comes easily enough, but your hand has already returned to his collar, and whatever answer he might have built after them dissolves when you look at him properly.
His face has been studied often enough for signs of failure that the attention should feel familiar. Maekar searches for wine in his eyes and weakness in his posture. Servants look for the temper of the morning before deciding how near to place the cup. Other men have watched him to see whether he is drunk enough to become amusing, and women to see whether he is drunk enough to become easy.
Your gaze moves along the reddened skin beneath his jaw as though that is all you expect to find there.
Daeron becomes aware that he has not shaved as carefully as he might have. He has shaved himself for years, since one too many mornings when the razor flashed near his throat, the shadow of a servant’s arm opened briefly into wings, and he jerked back hard enough to send the basin ringing across the floor. After that, he decided it was kinder to spare the servants the fright and himself the embarrassment. There is probably a darker patch along the line of his chin, a small blemish near his mouth, some evidence of poor sleep gathered beneath his eyes. He knows what mirrors offer when he allows himself to look, and he does not usually imagine that close inspection improves the effect.
You do not appear disappointed.
Your fingers settle beneath his chin and turn his face toward the light.
Something small and shamefully pleased unfolds in his chest. He lets you position him, his head tipped back enough that his throat feels exposed, and watches your concentration narrow until there is nothing else in the room requiring you: no sister waiting inside a letter, no supper below, no pins slipping loose from your hair. You are looking at him because there is something about him you have decided deserves your attention.
He knows better than to make too much of it, and makes too much of it anyway.
“Stay there.” You order when he moves to speak.
His mouth closes.
You remove one hand and reach across the dressing table. The loss of your fingers beneath his jaw is immediate and disproportionate, and he resents the small pot you pick up for having required them elsewhere.
The lid gives with a faint scrape. Rosewater reaches him first, jasmine beneath it and the sharper scent of whatever has been mixed into the salve. He knows the blend. The first bath drawn for him in your rooms had carried it faintly in the steam because the servants had assumed the water was meant for you. He had sat in heat nearly painful enough to redden his skin and breathed in something that belonged to your body, your clothes, the rooms where you slept.
He had tried not to think of that afterward.
Your thumb touches the angle of his jaw.
The salve is cool. Your hand is not.
Daeron draws a slow breath and holds it for a moment, unwilling to let you feel how the movement travels through his throat beneath your fingers. You smooth the salve over the irritated line with practical care, your other hand steadying the side of his face.
You are close enough that he can see where the color of your mouth deepens toward the center. A loose section of hair has fallen near your cheek. Your sleeve brushes his shoulder when you lean nearer to inspect the skin, and his attention moves lower before he catches it, following the line of your body beneath the fabric.
That, at least, is easy enough to understand.
You are his wife. You are beautiful. Your hand is at his throat and your mouth is within reach. He has wanted women under circumstances considerably less encouraging, there is nothing mysterious in a body responding to proximity.
You tell him to lift his chin a little more, and he does that too.
The obedience sends a warmer pulse through him than the sight of your mouth had.
Daeron remains still, suddenly attentive to every place your body nearly meets his. Your skirts touch his knee when you shift. Your fingers spread along his neck to keep him steady, one resting close enough to his pulse that you must feel its change. He wonders what else you might tell him to do in that same quiet voice and dislikes how quickly his imagination provides answers.
From there, the want acquires edges, destinations, familiar exits. A woman’s hand can move lower. A mouth can close over another mouth. Clothes can be loosened for reasons less respectable than an irritated collar. There are rooms built for such transactions, bodies arranged around them, ways to leave afterward carrying little beyond fatigue.
He lets himself imagine your thumb passing over his lower lip, your hand sliding down from his throat, the space between your knees and his disappearing entirely.
He enjoys it.
That may be the worst of it. He does not fight the response when it first gathers low and hot inside him. He sits obediently beneath your hands and allows himself the pleasure of being touched, privately greedy for every unnecessary second you spend smoothing the same patch of skin. His breathing grows more deliberate. He keeps his hands on the arms of the chair because placing one at your waist would tell you too much, though the image remains available to him, vivid and uncomplicated.
Then you draw your thumb away to gather a little more salve, and what he wants most is not your mouth or the imagined weight of you against him.
It is the hand back where it was.
The realization enters without dignity. He wants you to continue touching the same place, your palm against his jaw, your fingers curved along his neck, your attention fixed on the minor discomfort you noticed without being asked. Wanting your mouth or your hand lower, elsewhere, would have been easier. He could bear simple lust. Lust has never required him to believe anything generous about another person.
This does.
The mornings return to him with abrupt, humiliating clarity: tea placed within reach, the coverlet lifted, your hair spread near his arm while the room lightened around you. The ordinary kindness of being expected somewhere. The fact that you have begun looking for him before asking why he has come.
A brothel has never required him to be known from one evening to the next. Anonymous hands do not remember where the skin is sore. Pleasure taken to exhaust the body asks nothing of the morning.
Your thumb returns beneath his jaw, and his body responds more sharply because it is yours and, shamefully, because you are being careful with him.
There is the filth in it, he thinks. There is what he does to every decent thing.
You touch him kindly and some starved, ill-trained part of him drags the kindness downward, gives it heat and appetite, folds it among all the other wants he has carried into worse rooms. He has taken something you offered without suspicion and made it into this.
He should move. He should make a remark and rise from the chair before you feel the proof of him gathering beneath your hand. Instead, he remains where you put him, unwilling to surrender the touch before surrender becomes necessary.
The pleasure lasts another second, perhaps two, before he thinks of you noticing, and enjoyment closes around the possibility.
If you understand, you may step away politely. You may fasten his collar and become more careful tomorrow, and the next evening, and every night after that. You may reconsider the looseness with which you let him into your rooms, the bed shared without fear, the casual liberties of your hand at his face. You may realize that none of it is harmless to him.
Or you may offer more.
The second possibility is no gentler. You are his wife. Arousal may look to you like a duty announced by the body, something that requires managing because you have been unfortunate enough to cause it. You might kiss him from obligation and permit whatever follows while he wonders whether you want him or merely understand marriage too well.
His face grows hot beneath your fingers. He feels the flush moving upward when the motion of your thumb falters against his throat. His breath catches. He swallows, and your fingertips move with it.
Daeron looks at your mouth first because that is where his attention has already betrayed him. Then, against every useful instinct, he raises his eyes to yours.
The expression on your face has changed.
For one suspended moment, he feels every place where you are still touching him: the heel of your palm against the side of his jaw, your fingers curved along his neck, the faint coolness of salve beneath your thumb. Nothing has been taken away yet, which somehow makes the pause worse. He has time to understand what you have understood.
His mouth opens before he knows what he means to say.
A joke might still save something. He could blame the warmth of the room, the collar, the lateness of the hour, the wine he has not yet drunk. He could make the response vulgar enough that neither of you would have to look directly at what caused it. There are a dozen ways to make himself less naked than this, and for once not one of them reaches his tongue quickly enough.
You are looking at him.
Your expression has not closed. There is no alarm in it, no careful blankness laid over discomfort. Your mouth has softened slightly, as though something almost like a smile had reached it and stopped there. Then your gaze lowers.
Only for a moment.
His lips.
You looked at his lips.
The realization sends the heat in him somewhere new. It does not soothe him; soothing would require certainty, and he knows better than to trust any meaning that is kind to him. Perhaps you are only confirming what his face has already betrayed. Perhaps you are wondering whether he intends to kiss you. Perhaps the softness in your expression is fondness, or pity, or simple amusement at how thoroughly he has failed to hide himself.
It might be pleasure.
The possibility tightens something low in him and makes the embarrassment worse.
He tries again to speak, but the sound gathers in his throat and stays there. Your fingers are close enough to feel the failed attempt. He sees the instant you notice, not because your expression changes much, but because your attention sharpens.
Daeron looks away.
The dressing table offers him an assortment of harmless things: the uncovered pot, the letter from your sister, the two earrings waiting beside the mirror. He fixes his eyes on one of them and could not afterward say which. He is aware only of sitting there with your hand against his face while both of you know what it has done to him.
You might draw away now. You might finish fastening his collar, step back, and become a little more careful tomorrow, and the next evening, and every night after that. The bed could become narrower without either of you moving in it. Your hands might begin to hesitate before doing what they had done without fear, every ordinary kindness acquiring a pause in which you considered what he might make of it.
The prospect hurts with an immediacy he does not want to examine.
There is another possibility, and it is scarcely kinder. You are his wife. His body may look to you like a duty announced, a need that requires managing because you have been unfortunate enough to cause it. You might lean closer, might kiss him because the marriage allows it, and he would have no way of knowing whether you had wanted the kiss before he forced the question into the room simply by sitting still beneath your hands.
You do neither. You wait, your palm warm against his jaw.
It should make the moment easier. Instead, he becomes more conscious of how badly he wants the touch restored, of the exact pressure of your hand and the small absence left by the stillness of your thumb. He had thought humiliation might extinguish appetite, but it has only stripped the appetite of every excuse.
You know now. Whatever dignity there was in pretending has already gone.
His eyes return first to your hand because looking at your face still feels beyond him. The rosewater and jasmine have warmed against his skin, the scent altered slightly by the heat of your fingers. He searches for some sign in the curve of your palm, in the pressure of it, as though your hand might tell him something your face has not.
Then he looks up.
Nothing in your expression has closed against him. You do not smile or move.
What passes through him is hardly brave. It is closer to resentment, or hunger, or the petulance of a man who has already been deprived of enough things by his own fear.
If you are going to know, he may as well have the hand back.
Daeron turns his face.
It is scarcely a movement, only the side of his jaw settling more fully into your palm, his chin lifting by a fraction toward the place your thumb had been smoothing. He cannot make himself hold your gaze while he does it. His eyes lower again, but the rest of him has already confessed enough.
For one breath, nothing happens.
Then your fingers move.
The touch returns without ceremony. Your thumb passes once beneath his jaw, following the irritated line with a care that could still be practical if either of you were determined to call it so. The salve no longer needs smoothing, not really, yet you linger long enough for him to settle against you and understand that you have not mistaken his request for permission to do anything else.
Relief moves through him before he can stop it. His shoulders loosen, and the breath leaves him slowly.
He wants to close his eyes. He wants to turn his mouth against the base of your thumb, to put one hand at your waist and keep you where you are. He does none of it, though there is no particular virtue in the restraint. He simply cannot tell which movement would end this and which would ask for something you have not offered.
So he stays where you have put him.
Your fingers rest at the side of his neck for another moment, light enough that he could pretend afterward they had never lingered. Then you draw away and refasten the collar, careful this time that the fabric does not scrape the tender skin.
The loss of contact leaves him abruptly cold.
You step back toward the dressing table. Your skirts pass over the front of his boot again, and he notices that too, because apparently his body has become incapable of allowing anything you do to remain insignificant.
You pick up the earring you had abandoned.
Daeron remains in the chair.
Neither of you speaks. The room does not insist upon it.
You turn toward the mirror and lift the earring to your ear, your fingers steady despite everything that has just happened. The letter remains sealed. Somewhere beyond the chamber, a door closes and footsteps move along the corridor toward supper.
He watches your reflection for a moment before lowering his eyes.
The place beneath his jaw still carries the shape of your hand. He touches it with two fingers, cautiously, as though the skin might tell him whether the moment happened as he remembers it. A faint trace of salve comes away against his fingertips.
Rosewater and jasmine.
He looks at the shine left there, then brings his hand nearer beneath the pretense of examining it more closely. The scent reaches him again, warmer now, caught somewhere between your touch and his skin.
The room has become familiar enough that Daeron no longer needs an excuse to be there, which is its own kind of danger.
After a long public evening, he watches you take yourself apart from the day piece by piece: the pins, the ornaments, the little golden sun worn in your hair. When he asks to help, the task gives him something safe to do with wanting.
Part of a Soft Midnight Breathing, a bunch of short stories (within the existing series) centered around nights in Daeron's marriage.
Word Count: 3.6k
Warnings: arranged marriage, established marriage, soft intimacy, acts of service, Daeron being desperately careful with his wife, mutual pining, this man is a sub and I cannot help myself writing him that way (subtly for now), the bloodied Martell sun may not be haunting Daeron yet but I hope it haunts you.
A/N: I've been thinking about Daeron wanting to be made useful for his wife for a while now. Even in the first morning they spend together he is already thinking that he wants to be of service and that man is a sub you cannot convince me otherwise. Hope you like it!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by daedalians, "Pure, and I mean that: her hair touching my arm as she sleeps. Imagine feeling that safe. I can. I do. The terror of all times stops, the night freezes. She shifts quietly but doesn't wake. Soft midnight breathing like a blue hammock, paradisiacal. Everything evil becomes bearable. And I think, 'I've loved you the whole of my life', which isn't possible, 'my life only started when I loved you', which is."
By the time the door closes behind you, Daeron has learned the shape of the evening too well to trust it.
There had been supper. Voices, some familiar and some not. His father’s table set with its usual careful severity, candles guttering in their cups, wine moving from hand to hand with the ease of water. There had been talk of hunting, of tourneys, of namedays and dead men and dying men.
Then, there had been talk of whispers from King’s Landing, talk that made everyone aware of the whispers that breathed fire to a rebellion once and yet no one spoke aloud of what it meant that they were rising again.
Valarr, only lowered his eyes upon the weight of the conversation, two fingers resting against the stem, face composed in the careful way of a man forged by King’s Landing. Baelor’s son, Myriah’s grandson, a prince near enough to the Iron Throne that every whisper seemed to find him, and Dornish enough that the finding had teeth.
No one said as much, of course. No one did, in rooms like that. They spoke of loyalty, of peace, of old wounds healed. They did not speak of how quickly old wound reopened when the wrong blood was seen too close to the crown.
Valarr had sat through it, and Daeron had watched with the clarity of not enough wine and a dread he could not accredit to any dream.
And you had sat through it with your back straight and your hands composed, answering when addressed, listening when it was wiser to listen, wearing the small gold son at the side of your hair and at the hollow of your throat as if every eye in the room had not, at some point, remembered it was there.
A Martell sun. A Dornish thing. A wife’s ornament, fastened neatly and worn proudly.
Daeron himself had looked at it more than once.
He had looked away more often.
Now the room is quiet, though not yet silent. No room is ever silent once a man has begun to need it. There is the settling of the fire, the small shift of your sleeve as you unfasten the clasp at your wrist, the faint scrape of a chair leg where he has moved it too little and too late to be of any use. Beyond the windows, the night presses itself against the glass. Inside, lamplight softens everything the day had made sharp.
You sit before the mirror and begin to take yourself apart from the court.
That is how it feels to him, though he knows better than to say it. The public version of you leaves piece by piece: the outer veil folded aside, the earring set into its little dish, the clasp at your throat undone after a moment’s resistance. Your shoulders lower by some measure to small for any courtier to notice and too large, somehow, for Daeron to survive without noticing.
He has seen this before.
That is the problem.
He has seen you in the mornings, cross with the birds for singing wrong, whatever that means. He has seen you barefoot before the fire, unimpressed by cold stone and too proud to say so until your little jumps from one foot to the other give you away. He knows which blend of tea you choose when you are tired, which letter you reach for first when messages from Dorne arrive, where your mouth tightens when a pin pulls too hard on your hair at the end of a long day.
He has begun to hoard these things.
The word comes to him with a little shame clinging to it. Hoard. Like a miser, like a dog with a bone. There is no theft in it, perhaps, because you have given him these private scraps of yourself freely enough, but that makes the keeping of them worse. He cannot even accuse himself cleanly, he only knows that some part of him collects what no one else sees and curls around it in the dark.
You catch his eye in the glass.
Daeron realizes then that he was standing there idly, watching you go about your night as if it were something he had been permitted to steal.
He looks at the fire, as if the fire has done something to earn the sudden attention.
In the mirror, your eyes remain on him.
“Daeron,” You say, and he looks back before he can pretend not to have heard. You have one hand lifted toward your hair, the other resting tiredly beside the little dish of pins. Your mouth softens, but only a little. “Come nearer, if you mean to stay.”
That should be enough to move him. It is an invitation with the softness left in it. A month ago, he would have bruised himself on the gratitude for it.
Tonight, he remains where he is.
And not from reluctance, no.
Worse.
Because you lift your hand again and reach for the last few pins in your hair and the movement is small and irritated and human and yours. Your fingers find one, draw it free, set it down. Another follows. The loosened shape of the day begins to give way under your hands.
The gold sun remains.
It sits a little further back, half-hidden from the glass and awkward to reach. You try once, then angle your wrist and try again. The pin catches. Your mouth tightens.
Daeron feels his own hand move before he has made any sensible argument for it.
Then he stops.
Your eyes return to him in the mirror.
There is no surprise in them, not exactly. You have known he was watching. Of course you have, he is rarely as subtle as shame insists he ought to be.
He should say something clever, something harmless, enough to empty the moment of itself. He should make himself ridiculous before wanting can do it for him.
Instead, he hears himself ask, “May I?”
The room, impossibly, seems to notice.
Your hand falls from the pin. For a breath, you only look at him, then your expression alters in a way too slight for certainty and too clear for mercy. You are tired, you are still wearing the remains of the day, and he has asked for the smallest thing in the world but has made it enormous by the asking.
“Please.” You say.
It is worse than yes. Yes would have been permission, but please has want in it.
Daeron crosse the few steps that separate you before he can decide against deserving to. The distance is short. He feels each step as if there is a court assembled to witness it, though there is only you in the mirror and the little gold sun caught where your own hand could not comfortably reach.
He stands close enough to see the fine line where the pin disappears beneath the arrangement. Close enough to smell the day’s remnants on you: smoke from the hall, a trace of jasmine from your perfume.
“Tell me if I pull.” He asks, because he is well aware of his propensity for failure, and he needs to know he won’t harm you with it.
“I will.”
He almost asks if you promise. The impulse is absurd and childish and gone before it becomes sound.
His fingers find the edge of the ornament.
It is warm.
That should not undo him. Objects take warmth from the body, this is no mystery. A cup warms in the hand, rings warm on fingers, cloth warms at the throat. Still, the little sun in his hand has been worn near you all evening, and some treacherous part of him receives that as if he has been entrusted with a living thing.
Careful, then.
Too careful, perhaps. He loosens one side, then another, working more by patience than skill. The pin shifts but does not come free.
You sit still beneath his hands, and that might be the worst of it. Not the trust itself, but the ease of your stillness, a s if you have decided his hands may belong there long enough to finish what they began.
His throat works once.
He tries again.
This time the pin catches on something. He draws back too quickly. Your breath catches; not a cry, barely even a sound, but enough.
Daeron removes his hands at once.
“I’m sorry.”
It comes out too sharply, too ready, as if the apology had been standing armed behind his teeth from the moment he touched you.
Your eyes lift to him in the mirror.
“It caught.” You say, as if it is simple, as if it is of no importance.
“I pulled.”
“Yes.”
The agreement is not cruel, and somehow that makes it harder.
“I should-…”
“Try again.”
The words are plain, quiet. No softnes layd over them to spare him the shape of what they are.
Try again.
Not stop. Not move away. Not give it here. Not you have done enough.
Again.
His hands hang useless for a moment at his sides. He cannot seem to lift them. The mistake has opened something under his ribs, quick and cold. It was only a tug, only a pin, only a tired breath drawn a little too fast.
Yet the old verdict had come easily: there, see, this is why.
This is why wanting must be kept out of the hands.
You turn a little, enough to bring the caught pin nearer, and lift your own hand. Not to take it from him, to show him.
“Here,” You explain. Your fingers touch the place just beneath the ornament. “Hold this still, then loosen that side first.”
Daeron obeys.
The relief of being given an order to follow is almost indecent.
He hopes you do not read anything into the speed with which he follows the instruction, into the way his breath steadies when the task is given back to him, into the fact that being told where to put his hands feels more like reprieve than correction.
He hopes it while reading too much into it all himself.
His fingers return. Slower now. He holds where you showed him. His thumb brushes the skin just behind your ear.
It is hardly a touch.
It is also, instantly, the only thing in the room.
You do not move away.
Daeron keeps his eyes on the pin with the grimness of a man disarming a siege engine. If he looks at your face in the glass, he will lose whatever sense remains to him. The gold sun shifts beneath his fingers, one caught strand loosens. The pin slides free at last, and he lifts it away.
For a moment, he only holds it.
Small, gold, yours.
The Martell sun rests between his fingers. Its little rays are slightly blunted by use, a fine scratch runs along one of the edges. He had not seen that from across a hall, of course. No one would. The flaw belongs to the private inventory of you, and some despicable, tender part of him takes it in at once.
You look at it in his hand. You say nothing.
It should be finished.
He should set the ornament down. Move away. Return to admiring the hearth’s discipline, perhaps. Allow the usefulness to end before it can reveal what has been sheltering beneath it.
But another pin remains lower, plain and dark, nearly lost against the loosened shape of your hair. You do not reach for it.
Daeron sees it.
You see him seeing it.
He closes his fingers around the sun for a breath before setting it carefully in the dish with the others.
“May I?” He asks again, quieter.
Your gaze stays on him in the mirror.
This time, your answer is softer. Not smaller.
“Yes.”
He understands, then, or thinks he does. The first permission could have been for the inconvenience. The caught pin. The tired angle of your wrist. This one has less excuse around it.
Still, he reaches.
The second pin is easier. His hands remember enough from the first failure to be less foolish now. He holds the arranged section steady, works the pin loose, waits when he feels resistance. Your head tilts a fraction, helping him.
The little movement settles something in his chest.
When the pin comes free, you make a low sound of satisfaction.
“Better.” You say, a hint of a teasing smile curving at your lips.
Daeron feels the word like warmth poured where it should not go.
“I am relieved to have shown some improvement between disasters.”
“You have sisters,” You say around a breathed chuckle that lodges somewhere under his ribs. “How are you so solemn about this?”
“Rhae would sooner bite me than let me near her hair,” He points out, his own mouth curving into a smile at the acquiescing shrug of your mouth you answer with. “And Daella would have finished before I understood there was anything to help with.”
Your smile widens. Not by much. Enough that he sees it and has to look down at the pins in his hand.
The room breathes again.
With the last pin gone, the shape of the day loosens completely. You reach for the narrow ribbon beside the comb, softer than the others, worn enough at the edges.
Daeron has seen you use it before, though never from this close. It is not for court, it is not for anyone’s eyes, it is only to gather your hair for sleep, loose enough not to pull, firm enough to keep it from troubling you throughout the night.
“I can do that.” He says before wisdom returns.
Your hand pauses.
Daeron hears himself too late. Too eager. Too close to the truth.
But you only let the ribbon rest where it has fallen.
“Then do.”
The words are mild. The command in them is mostly practical. Mostly.
He takes the ribbon.
This should be nothing. He has tied knots before. Bandages. Laces. The occasional unfortunate purse string when he had still believed he could be trusted with coin and dignity in the same evening. A ribbon should not make a prince feel sixteen and doomed.
Your hair, loosened now from the day’s shape, lies heavy over his knuckles while he gathers the ribbon where you have indicated. He does not arrange the hair itself beyond what you show him. He only holds what he is given, ties where you tell him, works with care.
The knot comes out secure, but certainly not elegant.
He sees that at once. You see it too.
There is a small unevenness to the way the ribbon sits. The left side lies flatter than the right. He has tied it too carefully and somehow still incorrectly, which feels, privately, like a fair account of his whole character.
“It is uneven.” He says, albeit uselessly but he has always found ti easier to point out flaws before anyone else can.
“I know.”
“I can fix it.”
You turn from the mirror then, not fully, only enough to look at him without the glass between you.
“No.”
His hand stills near the ribbon.
The old chill stirs. He has done something wrong after all. The task is complete, and now it will be taken from him. You will correct it yourself. You will smile, perhaps, kindly enough to make him feel worse, and the small evidence of his attempt will be made clean again.
But you do not lift your hand to the ribbon.
You look at it once, then back at him.
“I like it.”
Pleasure lands first.
It is quick and bright and terrible, striking before he can defend himself. You like it. Not despite the unevenness being hidden, not because you have failed to see it. You have seen it and left it where his hands made it.
Then guilt follows, faithful as a hound.
He wanted you to like it. That is the shameful part. He had wanted the task to matter after the usefulness ended. He had wanted some proof that his hands could leave something behind and not have it immediately undone.
You give him the proof, and he has no idea where to put it.
“You have generous tastes.” He states, an attempt at a jest.
It is weak as a shield, barely a shield at all.
“Tonight, perhaps.”
You rise then, gathering the loosened weight of the evening with you. The ribbon remains as he tied it. The little gold sun rests in the dish, catching the lamplight from its shallow place among the other pins.
“I will not be long.” You say, and go into the bath chamber. The door closes softly behind you.
Daeron remains standing for a moment with his hands empty at his sides.
Then, because standing there feels too much like waiting to be judged, he sits.
The room changes without you in it. Not much. Only enough for him to notice how completely the signs of you remain: the pins in their dish, the cup gone cool, the book turned face-down beside the lamp, the faint impression left in the cushion before the glass. He looks at the ribbon in his mind and thinks, absurdly, that you will fix it now. Of course you will. You will have the privacy to do it. You will return with the little error corrected, and he will be relieved, perhaps, or disappointed in some private corner of himself he has no intention of examining.
The bath-chamber door opens again.
You return in your nightdress, with a loose robe drawn over it against the cold.
The ribbon is still uneven.
Daeron looks at it before he can stop himself. You see him look, but you say nothing.
For a moment, he thinks you will go to the bed and the night will take its next ordinary shape. You will lie down. He will follow after some delay he will pretend is not fear. The lamp will be lowered. The room will darken around them.
Instead, you sit beside him.
Close.
Not accidentally, not as one sits beside a stranger because the chair happens to be there. Your shoulder nearly touches his sleeve, and the uneven ribbon lies visible over one side, kept with deliberate care.
The ribbon remains as it was, the proof of his hands, kept when he was not there to see it kept. Daeron looks at it, then at his own hands.
They rest open on his knees, empty now, but they do not feel useless, and that is new enough to hurt.
You reach past him for the cup you had left on the table earlier, then seem to decide against it. Your hand lowers instead to the space between you. Not taking his. Only near enough that he knows you could.
He does not move.
For once, neither does he retreat.
The fire settles. The chamber smells of cooling tea, lamp oil, and the faint warmth of whatever fragrance the day has left in your hair. On the table, the gold sun lies clean and whole. In the mirror, if he cared to look, he would see the two of you seated close enough to belong to the same private hour.
He keeps his eyes on the ribbon.
Then you say, “For a gathering in honor of your cousin, I don’t think I heard him speak more than once.”
Daeron keeps his eyes on the hearth.
“No,” He agrees, “He did not. They were watching him, Valarr knows better than to give away anything.”
You are quiet for a breath. In the fire, a thin piece of wood shifts and breaks softly inward. Daeron watches the little fall of sparks as if there is something in it worth studying.
When you speak again your voice is soft, quiet,
“They were watching everyone.”
He turns his head then, but you are not looking at him. Your eyes remain on the hearth, your face made still by the same knowledge that sat beside you at supper: the golden sun in your hair, his mother’s blood in him, the old rebellions no one had named and everyone had remembered.
Daeron says nothing, for there is no useful answer to give you, no clean one.
Daeron says nothing, for there is no useful answer to give you, no clean one.
The fire shifts. Somewhere in the wood, a small pocket of sap gives way with a soft crack.
After a while, you add, “Lord Reyne spoke enough for the rest of them, anyway.”
Daeron exhales through his nose. “He quite enjoys the sound of his own voice.”
“I counted all the forts between Sunspear and Starfall in my head and he still wasn’t finished,” You complain, sinking further back in your seat as if the mere memory of the man has tired you more. “He told that story about his hound twice.”
Daeron’s brow furrows in confusion, and he turns to you, “I thought there were two hounds.”
Your next words stop shy of leaving your mouth, and your eyes flicker away as you consider what he said.
“There might have been,” You concede. “I do not remember the names enough to know for certain.”
“Arryk and Erryk.”
“Gods.” You scoff.
“He has the same gift for naming hounds that he has for telling stories, it seems.”
This time, the sound you make is almost a laugh. Daeron feels it before he hears it, in the slight movement of your shoulder against his, the way your body loosens beside his.
He almost follows.
It comes out only as breath, but you hear it. Your side presses more firmly against his, and your head almost rests on his shoulder.
The ribbon remains uneven.
Daeron lets it.
Thank you so much for reading!! I read and love each one of your comments, they literally sustain me. Thank you so much!
Unfriendly reminder that the first Blackfyre rebellion was made possible by discontent around how close the crown was to Dorne. Even less friendly reminder, Daeron is a son of a fourth son, but he is the grandson of a Martell, son of a Dayne (Dornish House), and now married to a Martell. Make that of what you will :)
Daeron has never known how to want without making a weapon of it first. Your attention is an ordinary thing to give away in public rooms, over tea, on horseback, in the middle of a dance; he knows this, and dislikes it anyway. But the more room you makes for him in your life, the harder it becomes to vanish behind wit, wine, or injury.
Or, three times Daeron is jealous and doesn't know what to do with himself, and one time he does.
Word Count: 13.6k
Warnings: jealousy, possessive feelings, marital tension, alcohol as a coping mechanism, nightmares/prophetic dreams, brief blood imagery, emotional avoidance, Daeron continuing to be very very normal about his wife
A/N: I wanted to explore how Daeron's jealousy and him being totally normal about his wife could evolve during the course of their marriage and as they get closer to one another. I had a lot of fun with this, hope you like it!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by , "Still, there is this terrible desire to be loved. Still, there is this horror at being left behind."
The gallery remains full even after supper. Not crowded enough for discomfort, though Daeron has never really trusted that measure. A room does not need to be crowded to have teeth, after all. A handful of guests can do as much damage as a court if place properly among wine, candlelight, old banners, and the painted eyes of dead men.
Summerhall has put its history on display tonight. Tapestries along the stone walls, hunting scenes and dragons worked in thread gone dull with age; portraits of Targaryen princes and princesses hung between them, pale faces looking down as if judgement were a family inheritance passed through the blood as reliably as silver hair -and while Daeron might have been spared of one, he certainly feels the weight of the other one-. A long table is set near the windows with cups, decanters, bowls of fruit and platters of cakes no one is eating. Servants move quietly between the little clusters of guests, refilling was is emptied, removing what was set aside.
The Dornish party is small. Passing through on their way to King’s Landing, officially. Invited to stop, of course, because Maekar might not admit it but there are few things he would not do to please his mother, and bringing his daughter-by-law trinkets from her home is what he has found works as of late to keep the Queen content with her son’s treatment of the Martell princess.
And the latest trinkets are, it seems the men and women of this small party. A handful of men from your father’s household, ladies who might have attended your mother once, a cousin of some degree Daeron has not troubled himself to calculate. The room has warmed around them as the evening wears on, though Summerhall hasn’t quite learned how to be Dornish. Its fires burn too cleanly. Its walls keep too much inside.
The birds sing wrong, you told him once. He hasn’t questioned it.
Daeron stands near a painted hunting scene and listens with little interest to a man whose name he has already lost.
Something about roads. Or weather. Or the merits of horses bred in the Reach, which has been the only subject even coming close to deserving an opinion. Daeron gives one when a pause seems to require it. The man seems satisfied, which only proves how little has been asked of him.
Maekar stands vigil in this little cluster, cup untouched in his hand, speaking when necessary and watching when not. He has the incredible talent of making silence look like martial discipline and not a man counting the heartbeats until this dull affair is over. Daeron has inherited no such useful gift. His silences are often mistaken for impertinence, drunkenness, stupidity, or some combination of the three.
To be fair, they are occasionally correct.
Across the room, you are laughing.
That is the first little detail of this night that lingers with him far longer than he should let it. Not the man standing beside you, not the shape of the circle you made among your own people, not even the sudden difference in your expression. Only the sound.
Daeron looks over before he means it.
A Martell knight stands before you, broad-shouldered and sun-kissed, with the easy posture of a man who has never had to learn how to make himself disappear in a room. He stands with one hand loosely around his cup, the other moving as he speaks, and seems at home in his own body.
Daeron dislikes him at once.
That, at least, is efficient.
The knight is saying something about your sisters.
“…-she has decided she is the eldest now, you understand. In rank only, of course.”
You laugh again.
Not politely, not the careful little sound you use at supper when Aerion circles once more to how interesting it is that the blood of the dragon is already in your veins from your grandmother Daenerys, not the polite chuckle at Rhae’s seventh time showing you the newest song she’s learned. This laugh comes before you remember the room, it seems. Your head tilts, your hand comes up as if to hide it but does not quite manage.
For a moment, you look younger than you do beside Daeron. Or perhaps not younger, simply closer to where you had begun.
“She has not.” You rebuke, incredulous.
The knight grins, pleased with himself. Daeron feels something in his stomach churn at the sight.
“She has. Quite gravely. Your mother asked who had given her the office, and she said the post had been abandoned and someone had to restore order.”
One of the ladies beside you says something too low for Daeron to hear.
The knight smiles, softer now, “There is not much the Prince can do about it. He says the Water Gardens have grown ambitious without you to keep them properly afraid, Princess.”
“Afraid?” you ask, voice tilted with humor, with teasing.
“I am merely repeating the words of my betters, of course.”
That earns another short laugh, softer this time, full of recognition.
One of the ladies touches your sleeve and adds something Daeron cannot hear. The knight answers, and the little cluster shifts nearer around its own warmth.
The man across from Daeron pauses,
“My Prince?”
Daeron turns back.
The Reachman, if that is what he is, looks at him expectantly. His father is looking at him too. There are questions in both faces, though only one man has learned the habit of making them feel like sentence.
“I beg your pardon,” Daeron says, “My attention wandered. It has always had poor discipline.”
A small laugh passes through the cluster.
The Reachman smiles. Relieved, it seems, to have been given permission, “We had only observed that you have been quiet tonight.”
“Quiet is one of the few virtues I have left.”
“One of the few?” Another man repeated, polite smile placed upon thin lips. “That is a harsh inventory, my Prince.”
“Not mine,” Daeron replies. He glances down at his cup. “I believe it is my father who keeps the official record.”
The laughter comes before anyone could decide whether it ought to.
Maekar, of course, does not laugh.
Daeron feels his father’s attention before he looks up to meet it. There it was, the small hardening around the eyes, the mouth held flat, the old warning without words. Daeron knew the shape of it so well it might as well have been another family sigil: Stop, enough. Do not make sport of what you are.
As a child, he learned to answer that look before it could become a hand around his arm, a strike that arrives too quickly to be braced against, or a reprimand spoken low enough that only the nearest people could hear. He learned to make a face for Egg, for Rhae, for Daella, so that if the eldest showed how little it weighed, the youngest would still believe a father’s anger can be survived.
He is older now, his sisters are not in the room, and Egg is probably evading nobles by hiding in some nook or another.
Still, Daeron smiles into the rim of his cup.
“To his credit,” He adds, “He has never lacked evidence.”
The room obliges him again.
Maekar turns his gaze away first, which is in some way worse than in he had spoken. Daeron drinks, because the cup is there and his hand already knows what to do with humiliation.
Across the room, the knight from your father’s household is speaking again,
“It has not been the same since you left. Your sisters blame everyone in turn, but I think they know perfectly well whose absence has ruined the household.”
You laugh again, though this one carries something more tender through it.
Since you left.
There is nothing in the phrase that should cut. Women leave home all the time. Girls are raised in one house and sent to another with jewels, contracts, horses, blessings, tears. Daeron knows the shape of the world, he was born inside it.
Still, his mind changes the words as they come.
Since you left very easily becomes since you were taken.
The cup in his hand has emptied itself somehow. Or he has emptied it. The distinction really does not matter for long.
Daeron sets it down on the nearest table and takes another from a passing servant with enough -with enough practice- to make it look accidental. The servant does not ask, servants rarely do by now. A useful thing, a reputation. It instructs people before one has to trouble oneself with speech.
He excuses himself from the cluster with a bow too graceful to be apologetic and crosses the gallery towards you.
No one stops him. Why should they? He is your husband. The law made him welcome in all the places where affection has not yet thought to invite him.
The Martell knight sees him first. There is deference in the man’s face at once, which Daeron dislikes immediately. Not because it is insufficient, or out of place, but because of how…exact it is. The knight straightens by the proper degree, inclines his head at the proper moment, and gives no sign of fumbling for the correct manner of greeting a prince. He does not grow eager, he does not grow nervous, he does not look over Daeron’s shoulder in search of Maekar’s approval, or glance down at the cup in Daeron’s hand, or attempt that careful brightness men sometimes use when they have heard too much and wish to pretend they have heard nothing at all.
He simply makes room, adapts. What an irritatingly competent thing to do.
You turn a moment later.
The laughter has not left your face entirely. It softens when you see him, perhaps, or guards itself. Daeron cannot tell quickly enough, and the uncertainty has teeth.
There had been a time, not long ago, when he might have known what to do with either expression. Welcome could be turned aside with charm, caution could be rewarded with proof that caution had been wise. He is good at that, at making people’s worst assumptions feel almost courteous.
But you have become more difficult than that.
You have seen him half-asleep, dead on his feet, asleep on your floor and, somehow, in your bed. You have seen him with his hands uncertain around a cup of tea, have let him into your room when he comes with excuses too poor to defend themselves. And now here he is with wine in his hand, his father’s silence at his back, and the room watching closely enough that every kindness could be mistaken for permission.
If there is welcome in your face, he does not know whether he deserves it.
If there is caution, he cannot pretend he has not taught it to you.
The uncertainty annoys him because it is his own fault. Most things are, by the time he notices them.
“Forgive me,” Daeron says as greeting, coming to stand at the edge of the little circle that has gathered around you. “I appear to have wandered into the happy corner of the room. I hope there is no custom against it.”
One of the Dornish ladies smiles. The knight offers a short bow.
“None that we’d dare enforce in the north, my Prince.”
“Oh, how generous of you.”
“Dorne has always prided itself on generosity.”
Daeron feels your gaze on him, he feels it before he lets himself look. A foolish thing, perhaps, to feel a gaze among so many others in a crowded room, but yours has begun to acquire that inconvenience: the ability to make him aware of his own hands, his own mouth, the cup he had not thought to set down.
When he looks, your expression gives him very little.
That is somehow worse than disapproval. Disapproval has uses, he can meet it, mock it, prove it right. This is only attention steady and difficult to name.
Perhaps you are waiting to see what he will do.
Perhaps you already know.
Neither possibility improves him.
He finds that he dislikes being watched by you in public. Privately it is different, privately there are fewer places to hide and at least the humiliation has the decency to feel intimate. Here, with his father somewhere behind him and your countrymen around you, your attention feels like a candle held too near a page already beginning to blacken.
Daeron looks away first.
The knight continues, perhaps because he has not yet understood the air has changed, or because Dornishmen are trained by heat and pride to step forward where other men step back.
“We were only telling your Lady wife that she is dearly missed back home.”
“I heard,” Daeron lifts his cup, almost in salute, “Then Summerhall must count itself lucky that Dorne is so generous with what it loves.”
That is still perfectly reasonable, perfectly polite. Almost. The sentence wears courtesy well enough. The older Dornish lady nods as if pleased by it, and even the knight smiles, though his dark eyes moved briefly to you. Daeron hates that.
“Generous, yes,” The man agrees. “Though not without complaint.”
“No, I imagine not,” He should stop there. He knows it. He knows he should stop, which has never once been the same as stopping. So he continues, “Generous our careless, I suppose that depends on who is left missing her.”
The knight’s smile does not disappear, though it suddenly seems something held in place rather than chosen. It is enough.
There is a small pause, quickly covered by one of the ladies making some comment about sisters and their talent for complaint. The room does not fall silent, nothing so dramatic happens. A few people nearby have begun to listen, because people always listened when the shape of a conversation suggested danger without yet promising consequence.
You have stopped smiling.
Daeron sees it. Sees, too, the moment you decide not to give the room any more than he has already taken. Your face arranges itself into composure with an ease that should relieve him.
It doesn’t.
A lady from the edge of the circle, eager to rescue the subject or perhaps himself, says, “Summerhall is hardly a poor exchange, my Prince.”
Daeron looks at him. Blinks once. Considers, for one brief instant, stopping.
“No,” He answers earnestly. “Summerhall has done what it can. But exile is difficult to furnish properly.”
This time, the laughter comes unevenly.
It is a good line. That is the trouble, for the room knows what to do with a good line, even when it is shaped like a bruise. Someone laughs because it is clever. Someone else laughs because Daeron has made himself the object before anyone could accuse him of making anyone else one. The knight does not laugh at all.
Neither do you.
Daeron drinks.
There is nothing in his throat that requires wine, no dream pressing behind his eyes, no old terror rising up with familiar claws. Only the sudden knowledge that he has taken the first true sound of your laughter this evening and made a room uncertain of it.
The wine goes down anyway.
You remain in the gallery for a while after that. Longer than he expected. Perhaps because leaving at once would have given the moment shape, perhaps because Martell women did not flee rooms simply because their husbands had decided to bleed over the carpets.
Daeron stays to.
He becomes, if anything, better company.
He answers one man’s question about tourneys with enough wit to make two ladies laugh into their cups. He listens to a story badly told and improves it at the teller’s expense so neatly that even the teller is grateful. He lets a servant refill his cup again and makes some remark about Summerhall’s hospitality being determined to finish what his vices have begun.
The room warms around him, because the room prefers him this way.
That is an old lesson, long ago learned. Men forgive a great deal of damage if it entertains them in passing. A prince might be drunk, disappointing, unreliable, damned by his father laughed over by his own household, but if he makes the disgrace easy to swallow, he can be welcomed for another cup.
Across the gallery, you are speaking with one of your ladies.
You do not look at him often.
That is fair. He has given you very little reason to.
When you finally withdraw, it is quietly. A word to the elder Dornish lady, a touch to the knight’s arm, brief and familiar, which he receives with a bow and a softer expression than Daeron cares for. Then you move toward the door.
Daeron is already following before deciding to.
He still has the cup in his hand, which was slightly improper, perhaps. Not improper enough to stop him. A wife could be escorted by worse things thana. Husband carrying wine, his own marriage is proof enough of that.
You slow when he comes to stand beside you.
For several steps, neither of you speak. The noise of the gallery thins behind you, laughter and voices blurring under stone. Torchlight moves along the corridor walls. A servant passes, bows, vanishes.
Daeron’s right hand holds the cup. His left remains at his side, useless.
Usually, he offers it.
Usually, the courtesy costs him less than the wanting did. He offers his arm as if it is only manners, and you take it as you have not both begun to understand repeated manners could become something more dangerous than habit.
Tonight, he does not know whether offering would be presumption or apology, so he does neither.
You walk three paces before stopping. Daeron stops as well.
You turn your head and look at his empty arm.
Ah.
He offers it then, a second too late, which seems to be the natural hour for most of his better impulses.
You take it, your hand settles lightly at his sleeve. No warmth in the gesture, but no refusal either.
“You were…uncharacteristically entertaining tonight.” You say, looking ahead.
“Uncharacteristically?” He repeats, attempts a joke, a smile. “I had hoped I was improving.”
“That was not improvement,” You correct. “You made them laugh at you.”
“I find it saves time.”
Your hand does not tighten on his arm, but he feels the silence that follows his word as heavily as if you had. A strange thing to feel, as if silence suddenly has weight when carried by someone close enough.
“Then you made my home part of it,” You say, resolute as you add, “I want no part in it.”
An accusation of jealousy he might turn aside with a little grace and a great deal of dishonesty, but you dig instead at the thing beneath it. The thing he touched and dressed as wit and handed to the room.
Daeron’s smile stays in place. It has survived worse than truth.
“I thought that was decided when they put your hand in mine.”
The words come lightly, too lightly. They are out before he could decide whether he meant them as defense, apology, or merely as proof that he could always find a lower place to stand if given enough tope.
You stop again.
This time, your hand leaves his arm.
Daeron feels the absence before he lets himself look at you.
“Not by me.”
It should be mercy.
Some part of him knows that. Some small, inconvenient part, not yet fully drowned, knows you are not saying that you did not choose him, that you are not saying the marriage is exile. Knows you are only refusing the sentence he placed on the both of you, knows you are refusing to let him take your hand in his as another item in the long account of his disgrace.
He knows that, perhaps. He understands enough for it to hurt properly.
Still, what reaches him first is something else. Something easier, something his mind already knows how to hold.
Not by me.
No, of course not. Not by you. What choice had there been for you in any of it? A father’s promise, a prince’s arrangement, a road north, a sept, a hand placed in his. No wonder Dorne missed you, no wonder the knight looked at you as if he had brought a piece of home and found it kept in someone else’s cold hall.
Daeron inclines his head.
“Then I stand corrected.”
You look at him for a moment longer. Whatever answer you expected, it seems, was not that. Or perhaps was exactly that, and disappointment is only recognition arriving tired.
Your chambers are just ahead. The guard at the door lowers his eyes as you approach.
You do not ask Daeron to come in. He did not expect you to.
That, too, was a lie.
“Good night, Daeron.”
“Good night, Princess.”
The formality between you lands with a small, ugly sound.
You go inside, and the door closes behind you.
Daeron remains in the corridor with the cup still in his hand.
For a moment, he listens to the quiet beyond the door. No laughter, no voices from Dorne, no sisters complaining of an absence. Only the faint settling of the house around him and, farther away, the muffled life of the gallery continuing without need of him.
He looks down at the wine.
He had forgotten it there, which is ridiculous. Daeron has forgotten prayers, promises, appointments, names, hours, whole mornings if the previous night had been committed enough to the task.
Rarely wine.
There is no dragon waiting behind his eyes tonight, no fire, no dead thing dragging itself toward meaning. Nothing sent by Gods or blood or madness.
Only the memory of your joy leaving your face.
Daeron drinks anyway.
By now, Daeron knows the shape of your mornings.
It is a dangerous thing to know about a person. Worse when one has no defensible reason for knowing it. He has learned, through no virtue of his own, that you wake earlier than he does when sleep has been kind to him and later when it has not. That you prefer the shutters opened before the brazier is stirred, even in the cold. That you keep one shawl over the back of the same chair and use it more often than any lady should use a thing so plainly chosen for comfort.
He knows which cup is yours.
He knows you drink the first steeping too hot and complain when anyone else does the same. He knows the tea with orange blossom is for mornings, the darker one with clove and pomegranate rind is for rain and the rose-heavy blend is not meant for breakfast no matter how often he reaches for it because it smells most like your room at night.
He knows which one you set before him after a bad night.
That had not been a formal confession, not an outright admission, nothing as simple as that. Daeron could have defended himself against such things in principle. It had only been a morning, and the inside of his skill still full of fire and a sun blacked out by thick blood, and your hand setting a cup near him before asking whether he had slept at all. The dream had loosened something in him before wine or pride could fasten it back down and he had said, into the steam, that this one was less bitter.
Since then, that was the one you reached for when he started your mornings with shadows under his eyes.
He has learned these things quietly, with the grave attention a better man might give to military maps or ledgers of debt. Daeron has never been good with maps or ledgers. He prefers smaller proofs. A cup placed near his usual chair before he asks, a blend chosen because he had once admitted to preferring it, the maids no longer waiting for your order before setting a second tray in the room.
Little things, harmless things.
He has made a habit of surviving on harmless things.
This morning, the solar is bright enough to be indecent. Sunlight lies across the floorboards, thin and pale, catching in the steam from the teapot on your writing table. You sit with your sleeves drawn back from your wrists, letters spread before you in orderly piles. One is already sealed, another waits beneath your hand, a small packet of folded paper rests beside the inkpot, tied loosely with thread.
Daeron enters the sun lounge without announcement. He still pauses at the threshold, because habit has not made him entirely shameless. It has only made him hopeful in ways he prefers not to examine.
You look up, see him, and smile instead of asking why he is there.
That, too, is something he has learned to count.
“Good morrow,” You say, “You missed breakfast.”
He smiles before he can stop himself and comes farther into the room.
There is a cup set near the chair he uses. Not his chair, that would be a foolish thing to think. It is only the chair he has taken often enough that servants have begun to betray him by remembering. The cup is empty for now, but it waits in its little saucer with all the quiet presumption of a trap.
Daeron sits.
You return to your letter, writing a few more words as you comment, “Valarr writes that King’s Landing remains damp and cold.”
Daeron’s hand stills on the arm of the chair.
“Does he?”
“Mhm. Says those are its new principal virtues, alongside being constantly impressed with itself,” Your eyes dance over the open letter, “Says the Keep has not improved but at least one of his rooms smells less like wet stone now.”
Daeron looks at the open letter.
There is nothing secretive in the way it lies there. That makes it worse, somehow. Secrets have shape, secrets understand themselves. This is only paper, ordinary and half-folded, its contents harmless enough to be left beneath the morning light.
Your fingers return to the small packet beside the inkpot. You fold one edge more neatly, pressing it flat with your thumb.
“He sends his thanks for the blend,” You continue, “Though I suspect he let the water boil too long.”
Daeron looks at the packet.
Tea.
Of course it is tea.
It is very nearly funny.
He waits for himself to become reasonable about this. It does not happen.
“You sent Valarr tea?” He tries to make it sound like anything but an accusation, but he isn’t sure he succeeds.
“I did.”
“Tea.”
A furrow sets between your brows, confused, “Yes.”
“To King’s Landing.”
“I am told they have cups there.”
He looks at you. You do not look as though anything has happened.
Because nothing has happened, he reminds himself.
A woman has written to her husband’s cousin, she has sent him leaves and dried flowers from Dorne, she has made a packet for him with careful hands and perhaps a note on how not to ruin it.
Daeron knows all this, he knows it with terrible clarity.
The knowledge does nothing to improve him.
“What sort of tea?”
“Orange blossom and mint.”
Daeron’s mouth does something in response. He hopes it is not visible.
That one.
It’s a stupid thought. He knows this immediately and with some force. That one, as if the tea has sworn itself into service, as if dried leaves can be faithful, as if a blend made in Dorne long before his marriage, long before he first entered your room half-dead with sleeplessness and pride, long before he learned to sit in the morning and accept a cup from your hand, has somehow committed an offense by travelling to his cousin.
Still.
That one.
“You like that one.” You say upon his silence.
“Do I?”
You glance up, eyes slightly narrowed.
He has chosen badly. He knows that too.
“Yes,” You retort, slowly, “You do.”
“Then I am grateful to be informed.”
Your writing stops.
Daeron sits very still in the chair that is not his and looks anywhere but at the cup that is waiting for him. The packet next to your letter to his cousin gives off a faint scent even through paper. Orange blossom, mint, something green beneath it, a little bitter if seeped too long. You had thought him that three mornings ago, or ten, or some number he refuses to have kept. The water should not be scalding, the cup should be covered, and honey ruined the edge of it unless the leaves were old. He had listened as if the instructions mattered.
They had mattered.
That is the problem.
You told him because he was there. Because he had looked into the cup with an expression that must have betrayed ignorance, or curiosity, or some other undignified appetite. Because you were generous with what you knew. Because there was tea and he had hands with which to hold it.
And he had made too much of the lessons.
Naturally.
Daeron has always been talented at turning crumbs into evidence and then resenting the table for feeding other men.
You set the packet aside.
“I am sending more,” You continue, “His first attempt was apparently drinkable, but not correct. I know it.”
“An exacting standard.”
“You should appreciate it, you benefit from the same one.”
“Yes,” He answers, and he should bite his tongue but he doesn’t and instead quips, “How fortunate for me that your instruction is so widely available.”
That earns your full attention.
You look at him, and Daeron takes care to keep his face impassive.
It is a ridiculous amount of effort for so small a sentence. He knows that too, and resents the knowledge. There had been nothing in it, really. Only instruction, only tea, only Valarr in King’s Landing with his correct handwriting and his princely gratitude and a packet of leaves folded by your hands.
Nothing worth reacting to, really.
Which is why, of course, he is reacting so poorly.
Your gaze moves from his face to the untouched cup near him, then back again. Not long enough to accuse him, just long enough to make him aware that the cup is still empty, and that his hands have arranged themselves too neatly over the arms of the chair.
“Will you have tea?” You ask, tone carefully innocent.
“No, thank you.”
Your brows lift slightly.
There it is, the thing he had hoped to avoid and then walked toward with both eyes open. Not your anger, not even your confusion. Only the careful beginning of your understanding that something in him has caught, like a stray edge of an old cloak, on a point too small to be seen clearly, snagged and started fraying.
“You have not asked which one it is.” You protest, and Daeron offers a smile he does not mean.
“I am certain any selection would be excellent.”
“That is…a very careful answer.”
“I am making an effort.”
“Yes,” You answer, “I can see that.”
He smiles again.
He is doing it wrong. He is doing all of it wrong, and worse, he knows precisely how. A jealous man should have the decency to choose a worthy object. A glance, perhaps. A dance. A letter folded too carefully and hidden too quickly. A knight lingering near a lady’s hand. A lover, even. A lover would at least offer a man the dignity of proportion.
Tea does not. Tea sits on the table in a paper packet and makes him ridiculous.
“You are angry over tea.” You accuse, and for the sake of whatever pride he has left, he does not focus on the hint of laughter clinging to your voice.
“I am not angry.”
“No, you are being polite. It is worse, somehow.”
“I was unaware courtesy had fallen so low in your estimation,” He retorts, because deflection is easy, because biting is easier. “My father will say I have corrupted you.”
“It is not a matter of estimation,” You say without missing a beat, “But with you, courtesy rarely arrives without injury.”
“You keep a harsh account, Princess.”
“An informed one.”
He chuckles under his breath, because the alternative is worse.
You rise, take the teapot, and pour into the empty cup near his chair. The scent reaches him at once. Not orange blossom. Rose, this time, with a little lavender. The morning light moves through the steam with ease.
Daeron watches the cup with the irrational feeling that it has personally betrayed him by existing.
He should stop.
There are several good reasons to stop. The first is that he is a grown man and was supposed to leave irrational envy for his cousin behind him years ago. The second is that you have begun using his name in that level voice which usually means he is close to losing a kindness he had no right to expect. The third is that even he can hear himself.
He does not stop.
“How does my dear cousin take instruction from you?” He asks, head tilted to the side, “Gratefully, I assume.”
The question sounds almost idle. Almost.
Daeron hears the small excess in it only after it has left him. The polished edge, the word instruction held a little too long. He reaches for his cup before remembering he has refused one, and the empty movement of his hand annoys him enough that he sets it back on the arm of the chair with care.
You do not answer at once, which is worse than if you had. A quick answer might have let him pretend the remark had been quick as well, only another piece of morning nonsense passed between the teapot and the letters. Instead, you look at him for a moment, then down at the packet beside your hand.
Before answering, you sit back down with the poise some reserve for thrones, crossing one leg over the other as you turn your body to face him.
“Valarr asked about the blend.”
“Yes. I gathered that.”
“He complained about the cold, a-…”
“A terrible thing. It has taken many good men.”
A sigh is your next response.
“What is happening here?”
Daeron holds his smile. He is aware, now, of the shape of his own mouth. The sun is too bright in the room. The cup near him is too empty. The little paper packet on your side of the table has become absurdly present.
He hates that cursed little packet.
“I am merely making conversation.”
“No, you are making something else.”
He laughs once, very softly, “Am I? How industrious of me.”
That nearly works. Not with you, perhaps, but with himself. For a half a heartbeat, he feels the familiar little relief of having made shape out of discomfort and breathing gets a bit easier.
Then your eyes move from his face to the packet beside your hand, and the relief thins.
You seem to be following the line of him from one small proof to the next: the refused cup, the careful hands, the attention fixed too often on folded paper and thread.
The packet, damned thing that it is, is very small. It should not be able to accuse him of anything.
“You are acting,” You begin slowly, choosing your words, “as though I have given something away.”
“No.”
The answer comes too quickly.
You do not answer at once. You set your cup back down and the small sound of porcelain against porcelain seems louder than it should.
For a moment there is only the room: the pale sunlight, the letters, the faint steam from the pot and the cup he has refused. Somewhere beyond the window a guard calls to another in the yard, a horse stamps. Ordinary morning sounds. None of them appear to understand that Daeron has chosen at some point between sitting down and hearing you talk about letter, to be ruined by dried leaves.
“It is tea.” You sat at last.
“Yes,” He retorts through a humorless smile that is little more than lips pressed together, “I gathered.”
“No,” You argue, voice quiet, “I don’t think you did.”
He looks at you then, because the words are not sharp and still manage to prod at something sore.
There are several answers available to him. He can ask whether Dorne has a philosophy for every beverage. He can say he understands tea well enough to drink it, poorly enough to drink it, and not nearly enough to be scolded by it. He can mention Valarr again, because Valarr is convenient and absent and, therefore, safer than the truth.
He says none of that.
His hand tightens against the arm of the chair.
I thought that was ours.
The thought arrives whole and useless. He despises it at once. Ours. What an immoderate little word. He has no claim over orange blossoms or mint, no claim over the Water Gardens only available through your eyes and voice, no claim over the little instructions you give him with a practical hand and a half-distracted voice. He has no claim over the mornings simply because you have allowed him to sit in them.
I thought you only taught me these things.
Worse.
That one has the raw, stupid sound of a child objecting to a favorite story being told in another room.
Daeron says, “I was unaware there was so much to understand.”
“There is more of it.”
“Tea?”
“Tea.”
“And this is meant to settle the matter?”
“I am not certain there is a matter to settle, Daeron.”
That nearly makes him laugh. It also nearly ruins him.
Because you know. Not all of it, perhaps. Not what he has made of this in his own head, or the foolish shape his thoughts have made of a cup in the morning. But enough, enough to understand that he is behaving as if something has been taken from him, and enough to answer the injury without granting its terms.
There is more of it.
As if the loss is practical, as if it can be met with supply.
As if what he fears is scarcity.
Perhaps it is, he doesn’t truly know.
Daeron looks away first.
“A relief,” He says. “I would hate for the realm to suffer a shortage on my account.”
The answer has the shape of wit, at least. A little dented at the corners, perhaps, but serviceable. In another room, with another person, it might have passed for recovery.
Here, it sounds like retreat.
Your hand moves to his cup. For a moment he thinks you mean to take it back, and something in him tightens absurdly at the thought. But you only turn it slightly, setting the handle toward his hand.
A small correction.
He has seen you do it before. With your own cup, with his, with a bowl of sugar he had once reached for without looking and nearly knocked over the lip of the tray. You remember where hands go, where things spill, which habits are accidents waiting for a sleeve.
Then you lean back on your chair.
Valarr’s letter waits open on the table. The packet beside it remains untied, one folded corner lifting a little where the paper refuses neatness. You press it down with your thumb again and reach for the thread.
Daeron les the cup wait.
Steam rises and thins between you. The room goes on being morning around him: the pale square of sunlight on the floor, the scratch of pen in paper, the faint smell of clove, the distant sound of a horse stamping beyond the window. You write another line, pause, and read it back with a slight crease between your brows.
Every so often, your attention returns to him in small pieces. A glance at his hand, at the cup, at his face. Nothing that corners him, nothing that forgives him too quickly either.
He stays.
The tea cools.
He had wanted the lessons to mean something. That is the truth of it. Not in words, because words are rude enough to make even small hungers look excessive when he speaks them. But somewhere beneath them, in the place where he keeps things too soft to defend. He had wanted the cup near his chair to mean he was expected, he had wanted your correction of his methods to mean he was worth teaching, he had wanted the taste of orange blossom to belong to the morning because he had been allowed into it.
None of that has been taken. He know that, but what use has knowing things ever been to him? Knowing does not stop him from feeling robbed.
A stupid wound, then. His specialty.
By the time Daeron reaches for the cup, the steam has gone thin enough to vanis before it reaches his face.
Your pen pauses. Only for a moment.
You see the cup in his hand, then you see him. Your expression barely changes, but the corner of your mouth softens as if you have decided, privately, to spare him of something.
“It will be too cool now.”
Daeron looks down at the cup.
It is. Cooler than you tolerate it. Cooler than he has learned to expect from your hand. The clove has sharpened, the pomegranate rind sits bitter.
He drinks anyway.
“It is tolerable.”
Your nose furrows. Adorable.
“By Targaryen standards, perhaps.”
The silence after that is smaller than the one before it. You return to your letter, Daeron keeps the cup in his hand until the warmth has nearly left the porcelain. When you reach for the packet again and tie the thread around Valarr’s tea, he watches it without quite hating it.
The warmer days come slowly to Summerhall.
At first, they are only suggestions. A softer wind through the yard, frost thinning from the stable roofs before breakfast, the ground beginning grudgingly to remember that it can be green.
You have -had- begun riding together in the mornings.
Not every morning. Only when the weather permitted it and the roads had not turned to mud overnight. Only when he was sober enough to be called awake without it proving torturous and when the dreams had been kind enough to let him sleep enough to stand upright. A narrow set of conditions, perhaps, but they had occurred often enough to become something like a habit.
He had complained the first time.
Of course he had. It had been early, and cold, and the horse assigned to him had looked at him with the sour disappointment of an old septon. You had only adjusted your gloves and told him he could go back inside if he preferred to be defeated by what even a Dornishwoman considered a warm morning.
Daeron had ridden with you for nearly two hours out of spite.
After that, the spite became less useful as an explanation.
The rides were ordinary. No grand declarations, no soft confession made beneath flowing trees, no sudden absolution granted by sunlight and fresh air. Only the two of you leaving the yard while Summerhall stirred behind you, hooves on damp earth, your cloak moving with the horse’s pace, the ocassional turn of your head when you pointed out some path or bird or ridge he ought to have noticed in his own land and usually did not.
He learned the south path held water longest after rain. He learned you disliked riding too close to hunting dogs because they make the horses stupid. He learned that you always checked the girth yourself, no matter how many grooms had already done it, and that you grew quieter on the way back than on the way out, as if returning required something leaving did not.
He learned the small courtesies of it. Taking the reins of your horse when they were handed to him, waiting while you adjusted your gloves. Offering his hand as you readied to dismount, and receiving yours without making a triumph of it. Riding close enough to hear you when you spoke, not so close that either horse objected. Ordinary things. Husband’s things, though he would not have called them that aloud.
Daeron noticed them.
He noticed everything that could be mistaken for being trusted. Or worse, wanted.
He has -had- been getting better at touching you.
A ridiculous way to think of it, perhaps, as if a husband’s hand were a skill to be learned like swordwork or suns. But there had been a time when even taking your hand had seemed to him like a thing requiring courage he did not possess in reliable quantities. Now, he knew the shape of your fingers in the dark. He knew the warmth of your shoulder beneath his cheek and the weight of your head on his chest. He knew how your mouth softened under his and then turned up into an amused smile if he kissed you too cautiously.
He knew the sound of your breathing when sleep had almost taken you. He knew the place beneath your jaw where the scent of rosewater lingered longest after a bath. He knew that if he woke badly and did not speak, your hand would often find his wrist beneath the sheet, reminding him where he was.
He had kissed you in corridors where shadows no longer looked like soot. He had held your hand under tables. He had learned to sit close enough that your sleeve touches his and not immediately make some joke to excuse the wanting of it.
Small victories.
Small enough that no one else would have called them victories at all.
Then the dreams began again.
No, that is not right. The dreams had never stopped. They only sharpened their teeth.
For nearly a week now, the same image keeps returning to him in pieces. A sun first, bright enough to hurt. Gold, then darker. Blood moving over it slowly, thickly, as if the light itself has been cut open and left to drown. Sometimes, a hand beneath it. Your hand, or a hand he knows as yours because the dream insists upon it. Red between the fingers. Red at the wrist. Red where there should be warmth. Red, red, red.
Sometimes he sees your face. Sometimes he does not. The dream is not generous enough to be consistent. It leaves him with certainty instead of detail, which is worse. Certainty has no seams to pull apart, certainty wakes him and sits in his mouth until wine is the only thing with any weight against it.
It would be easier if you were still unfamiliar to him.
That is an ugly thought, and yet not less true for being ugly. Fear has less to work with when it is given a stranger. A wife kept at a distance can remain a figure: silk, title, duty, Martell gold. But you have not remained a figure, not for some time.
The dream takes what he knows and covers it in blood.
Your hand beneath his in the stable yard. Your hair against his arm. Your mouth under his. Your wrist beneath the sheet.
Not a stranger dead. Not a symbol. Not the sun of Dorne drowned red.
You.
The first morning after it comes, he does not tell you.
He almost does. You are there with tea and your sleeves drawn back from your wrists, reading a letter from one of your sisters. The sun from the window touches your hair. You have pinned part of it back with a small gold sun, one of the ornaments brought from Dorne, bright and harmless above your ear.
His mind covers it in blood.
Daeron looks down at his cup until the steam makes his eyes sting.
The second morning, he arrives late and leaves early.
The third, he does not join you in the solarium at all.
By the fourth day, he has made an art of absence.
He still shares your bed. Absence has different forms, he finds, when two people lie close enough to hear each other breathe. He turns away before you can settle against him. He pretends sleep has taken him when your hand moves beneath the sheet. Once, you kiss him before morning and he kisses you back too quickly, too hard, then draws away as if he has remembered a wound neither of you can see.
You ask him what is wrong.
He says, “Nothing.”
It is an old answer. Useless, but familiar. He has worn familiar uselessness for years.
When he does appear in your rooms before midnight, he is over-bright or formal or drunk enough that the distance can be blamed on wine. When he stays sober, he finds excuses to leave your side early. When your hand touches his, he goes still before he cans top himself.
You notice. Of course you notice.
That is the kindness and the danger of you. You have a talent for noticing what he would rather leave unobserved, and for saying less than he deserves.
Once, after supper, you ask him whether he has grown tired of the mornings.
Daeron looks at your mouth, because it is safer than the sun above your ear, safer than your hand resting bare beside your plate.
“Mornings have grown tired of me.” He says instead of anything truer.
Your expression does not change enough to give him anything easy.
“I asked you.”
“Yes,” He says, “I heard.”
“And?”
“And I would hate to speak for the dawn. It has always struck me as proud enough to object.”
You let that sit between you.
The next morning, you ask if he will ride with you when the weather clears.
He says yes.
He means it when he says it. That is the inconvenient part. Daeron has lied often enough to know the difference. He means to wake, to dress, to be in the yard when the grooms bring the horses out. He means to take the left side of the path because the low branches on the right catch at your cloak. He means to stop making a coward’s shrine of every room you enter.
Then night comes.
Then the sun goes black with blood again.
He wakes before dawn with his hand clenched in the sheet and your name bitten raw behind his teeth. For one foolish moment he thinks the dream has ended because he has opened his eyes. Then the room takes shape, and the dark in the corners looks too wet, and there is a smear of red behind his eyelids each time he blinks, and when he turns to look at you the comfort of you sleeping beside him is replaced by the dread as he finds only an image of torn open skin and spilled blood.
Daeron stumbles out of the bed, out of the bedroom. Daeron drinks.
At first, because he is afraid.
Then because the first cup does not help.
Then because the second almost does.
Morning arrives without his permission, finds him asleep -though that seems too generous a word for the rest he got- for the first time in a long time away from you.
The servant comes twice. The first time, Daeron does not answer. The second time, he says something with his head still against the table that makes the man retreat with an apology and the careful steps of someone who has learned how to survive princes before breakfast.
By the time Daeron dresses, the ride is already gone.
He knows it before anyone tells him. The stable yard has a particular sound when horses are being led out. A briskness. Buckles, hooves, men calling to one another. He missed it. He lies to himself for another quarter hour, because he is still capable of pettiness even alone, then fastens his collar too carefully and goes downstairs.
He looks presentable.
Mostly.
His mouth tastes sour. The morning light irritates him. His hair is combed, his coat correct, his hands steady so long as he gives them something to do. There is nothing spectacular in the ruin of him today. No stumbling, no slurred words, no vase broken in a corridor or servant sent running. Only the quieter evidence: the line of his mouth, the shadow beneath his eyes, the way his left hand closes once before he reaches the yard.
You are returning as he steps under the arch.
Of course.
Summerhall has always had a taste for timing.
The horses come up from the lower path, their legs splashed with pale mud. A groom hurries forward. Ser Martyn rides a little behind you, close enough to have attended you properly, not close enough to be accused of anything but competence. He is one of Maekar’s household knights, a man of ordinary birth and excellent posture, with a quiet face Daeron has never had reason to resent before.
He resents it now.
Ser Martyn dismounts first. He hands his reins to the groom and turns to your horse. The movement is practiced. Unremarkable. He reaches up. You place your gloved hand in his.
Daeron sees it.
A hand in a hand.
Leather over leather. Nothing more.
The dream supplies the rest. The knight shifts in place
Your glove is dark from the reins, not blood. The sun that fastens your cloak is only gold. The red that flashes across his sight is not there, not in the yard, not on your sleeve, not between your fingers when Ser Martyn steadies you from the saddle.
Daeron knows this.
His body does not.
The air goes too thin at the back of his throat. For one instant, he is back in the dream with the sun drowning and your hand lost beneath it. Then your boots touch the ground, and Ser Martyn steps back, and you are whole before him in the yard, cheeks colored by the ride, hair loosened at one temple, alive enough to look immediately and very clearly displeased.
That does not help as much as it should.
“Princess,” Ser Martyn says, lowering his hand. “The south path is still wet beyond the ash grove. I would avoid it tomorrow unless the wind holds.”
“Thank you, ser. I will remember.”
He knows the path you rode.
That is the thought that arrives, small and mean, before Daeron can stop it. He knows which road. He knows where the mud was. He knows the state of the wind, the ash grove, the morning he occupied because Daeron did not.
Ser Martyn turns then and sees him.
“My Prince.” He bows at once. Respectful. Correct. Untroubled.
Daeron smiles. It is empty.
“I see my absence was well supplied.”
The yard does not fall silent, though it seems to adjust itself around the words. A groom busies himself too intently with a strap. One of the horses blows hard through its nose and shakes mud from its fetlock.
Ser Martyn’s expression changes by a fraction.
You remove your gloves slowly.
“Someone had to ride with me.” You say, tone clipped.
A simple answer. Daeron would have preferred a complicated one. Complications give a man room to be clever.
“And Ser Martyn was available.”
“Ser Martyn was asked.”
That lands cleanly.
Daeron looks at the knight. “By my father?”
Ser Martyn inclines his head. “Prince Maekar thought it proper that the princess not ride unattended.”
“Proper.” Daeron repeats, disgust curling around the word. The knight shifts in place.
You glance at Ser Martyn. “Thank you for the ride, ser. And for the warning about the path.”
The dismissal is gentle, but it is dismissal all the same. The knight bows again, to you first, then to Daeron. That irritates him too, the order of it, though it is exactly as it should be. Ser Martyn leaves with the groom toward the stables.
Daeron watches him go longer than dignity requires.
“He did nothing wrong.” You state.
“I did not say he had.”
“No. You rarely begin there.”
That should amuse him. In another morning, perhaps, it would. Today it finds no purchase.
“He is very attentive.”
“He was attending me.”
“An impressive distinction.”
“It is not difficult.”
“No?”
“No,” You finish tugging the first glove free with more force than it requires and hold it in your bare hand. “He rode with me because you did not come.”
The dream returns in a flash so quick it almost disguises itself as memory. Your hand bare now, fingers flexing around dark leather. Blood in the palm. Blood slicking the wrist. The sun swallowed by red until no gold remains.
Daeron looks away from your hand.
“I was indisposed.”
“Yes.”
The word is quiet. Agreement, not absolution.
His jaw tightens.
“You might try sounding less convinced.”
“How could I? You have been indisposed for days after all.”
The yard feels too open. Too bright. Somewhere behind him, a stable door creaks. The sound grates along his nerves.
He looks at you.
Your face is composed, but not cold. That is almost worse. Coldness would let him turn cruel without feeling vulgar about it. This is hurt held in both hands and kept steady.
“You have been gone for days,” You claim, stepping closer. “Even when you are in the room. You sleep beside me and turn away before I can touch you. You kiss me as if you are trying to end the thing before it begins. When I ask what has changed, you give me wine or wit or courtesy, and then you disappear.”
Daeron thinks of the dream blade he has not seen.
Only blood. Only the result. The world already after.
“I asked if you would come,” You continue, and something in his chest cracks when he hears the tremble, the sadness, in your voice, “You said yes.”
“I intended to.”
“I know.”
That, somehow, is the worse part.
He exhales a laugh without humor. “Then why hold trial?”
“This is not a trial.”
“It has witnesses.”
“The witnesses are leaving because I dismissed them.”
“Very efficient.”
“Daeron.”
Again. His name as a hand on a door before it closes.
He should stop.
There are places in a conversation where a man can turn back if he has the sense to recognize them. Daeron has rarely been accused of sense, but he sees this one clearly enough. He sees your riding cloak, the gold sun at your throat, the mud at the hem. He sees the place where Ser Martyn’s hand had steadied yours. He sees the blood that is not there.
He could say: I was afraid.
He could say: I saw you.
He could say: I keep seeing you.
His tongue stays behind his teeth.
“You seem to have managed very well without me.” He says instead.
Your expression shifts.
There. There it is. The moment he has made himself worse than the thing that hurt him.
“You do not get to resent the help I accepted after you failed to come.”
The words are not loud. They do not need to be. They strike more cleanly for being measured.
Daeron’s face does something pleasant and useless, “I am not resenting anything.”
“You are.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” You step closer, enough that he can see the small crease left by your glove at your wrist. “And you are choosing the wrong target.”
He focuses on the small detail of your wrist, though he knows better.
Your hand is bare. Your skin is only skin. A faint mark from leather. A little cold at the knuckles. Nothing more.
His mind gives him blood anyway.
Daeron closes his left hand.
You notice that too. Of course you do. Your eyes flick down, then back to his face.
For a moment, the anger in you makes room for something else.
He hates that most of all.
“What is it?” You ask.
“Nothing.”
The answer arrives too quickly and too low.
You do not believe him. He had not expected you to. The morning seems to hold itself still around the lie.
“Do not make your father’s knight answer for what you did.” You say, a sigh leaving you.
“I did not ask him to answer.”
“You tried.”
Daeron looks toward the stables, where Ser Martyn has disappeared. “A man may envy competence.”
“You were not envying him.”
“No?”
“No.”
A small wind moves through the yard. Your cloak shifts, and the Martell sun at your throat catches the light again. Gold. Only gold. Bright enough to hurt.
Daeron looks at it for one breath too long.
Your voice changes. “Daeron.”
He wants to tell you.
The desire rises so abruptly that for a moment he almost mistakes it for courage. It is not courage. It is exhaustion, fear looking for somewhere else to live. He has brought other fears to you before in pieces, badly wrapped, hidden inside jokes or silence or the ruin of his sleep. You have never known how to cure them, but that was never the point. You only made space beside them until they became less monstrous for having company.
This one is different.
This one wears your face.
To speak it would bring the dream into the yard. It would put blood between you in daylight. It would ask you to stand still while he described the sight of you dead or dying or something close enough that his body cannot tell the difference.
He cannot do that.
He cannot keep doing this either.
“I saw-…”
The words leave him before he can stop them.
You go still.
“What?”
Daeron looks at your hand.
The bare hand. The living hand. The hand that held the reins this morning, that accepted another man’s help because Daeron had made himself absent, that has touched cups and letters and the back of his wrist in rooms where he was too tired to pretend not to need it.
“What did you see?” You press.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes.
There is the sun. There is blood. There is your hand beneath it. There is the certainty of loss, thick and choking and stupidly bright. There is wine in his throat from last night and shame in his mouth from this morning. There is Ser Martyn’s hand under yours. There is his own hand, late and empty.
“Nothing.” Daeron says.
Your face tightens.
“Daeron.”
“Nothing I should have brought to you.”
The answer is almost true, which is the most cowardly kind of lie.
You are quiet for a moment.
He feels, absurdly, as if he has put something at your feet after all. Not the dream. Not enough of it to be understood. Only the shape of the refusal. Only the locked box and no key.
When you speak, your voice is lower, “Then do not bring me this instead.”
He looks at you.
“This?”
“Whatever it is you are doing now,” Your fingers close around your gloves. “This…this. This pretending the problem is a ride, or my hand, or who helped me down from a horse.”
Daeron says nothing.
“You may be frightened,” You say. “You may be angry. You may be whatever it is you will not tell me you are. But do not hand it to me by cutting someone else.”
The words settle in the yard.
Somewhere nearby, one of the horses stamps again. A groom murmurs to it, soft and practical. The world has a talent for continuing through humiliations. Daeron has always disliked that.
He could apologize.
The apology is there, or something like it. He can feel the shape of it behind his teeth, awkward and insufficient but present. He thinks of saying your name. He thinks of reaching for your hand and then cannot, because the dream is still too near and his own hand feels unfit for the task.
So he does what he knows how to do.
He bows his head.
“As the princess commands.”
Your expression closes.
Not entirely. Not forever. But enough for him to see the door he has shut with his own hands.
The courtesy sounds ugly between you. He had chosen it because it was clean. It arrives instead like a blade wiped on a sleeve.
You look at him for another moment, then begin pulling your glove back over your bare hand.
That, too, he notices.
The hiding of it.
The horse stands waiting beside you, reins held loose by the groom. Ser Martyn is gone. The yard is bright. The gold sun at your throat gleams as you turn, catching the light in a way that should mean nothing.
Daeron watches you walk toward the house.
The mud has dried a little at the hem of your riding skirt. Your cloak moves with each step. Your hand, gloved again, stays at your side.
There is no blood.
He tells himself that once. Then again. By the third time, the words have become useless.
The sun on your cloak is only gold.
Daeron cannot look at it for long.
By the time Summerhall grows warm enough for music after supper, Daeron has learned several things he has no wish to name.
He has learned that you notice when he leaves a cup unfinished. That you remember which chair he chooses when he wishes to look less tired than he is. That if he comes to your rooms too late and says something foolish at the door, you may still move your papers aside before telling him so.
He has learned, too, that not every silence requires rescue. Some silences are only a room making space for two people who have grown used to one another. Some are the pause before you ask whether he has eaten. Some are the quiet after he answers honestly enough to make both of you look elsewhere for a moment.
Tonight, Summerhall has opened itself to guests.
Not court, thank the Gods. Court makes even pleasure behave as if it has been summoned for questioning. This is only supper, music, a warm gallery, men and women lingering because the wine is good and the air from the open arches smells faintly of grass. Candles burn along the walls. The old tapestries look less severe in the shifting light, their dragons softened by weather and music and the late hour.
You leave him near one of the long tables after supper, your hand brushing his sleeve as you go.
It is a small touch. Hardly a touch at all. A warning that you are moving, perhaps, or a habit neither of you has agreed to notice. You step away to answer Lady Reyne about something sent from Dorne, and Daeron remains where he is, one hand near a cup, watching the room behave around him.
He knows how to do this part.
Stand. Drink. Smile when required. Let men think him harmless until he is bored enough to prove otherwise. He has survived whole evenings on less.
For a while, the room asks nothing difficult of him.
Music begins after the servants clear most of the supper things. Not a formal set, only a few players near the far end of the gallery, enough to make the guests shift and laugh and remember their bodies after too much sitting. Someone asks a young lady to dance. Someone else follows. The gallery opens itself in degrees.
Daeron sees the moment a man asks you.
He is some Reach lordling with a pleasant face and the sort of manners that have never had to defend themselves against anything more dangerous than boredom. His name came to Daeron earlier and left almost at once. Beesbury, perhaps. Or Rowan. Something with fields in it. He is no one important, which should help.
It does not.
You accept because there is no reason not to. Because he asks correctly. Because this is the kind of evening where women are asked to dance and men are meant to endure it with dignity, or at least with the appearance of it.
Daeron reaches for the cup beside him and finds it already in his hand.
He looks down.
The wine is dark, the surface catching the candlelight in a narrow red line. He does not remember taking it. A servant must have offered it, or he must have accepted it because his hand is faithful to older loyalties than the rest of him.
Across the gallery, the lord places his hand at your back.
Correctly, briefly. but still there.
Daeron sets the cup down.
Not with force. Not with virtue. He sets it down because it has started to annoy him, and because holding it makes his hand feel occupied in the wrong direction.
Your gown is deep orange tonight, with gold worked lightly at the cuffs. Not Martell colors in full proclamation, but close enough that the candlelight finds you easily. Your hair has been pinned back with the small gold sun above your ear, bright when you turn, small enough to disappear when the music carries you past a shadow.
Tonight, he can look at it.
Mostly.
The lord says something as the dance turns you nearer. Daeron cannot hear the whole of it, only the end.
“...-makes even Summerhall seem generous, Princess.”
You laugh.
Softly. Politely, perhaps. Nothing unguarded. Nothing given away. Only enough warmth to reward a harmless compliment and let the dance continue.
Daeron knows the difference.
That should help too.
It does not.
The lord smiles as if he has achieved something.
Perhaps he has. Perhaps that is what irritates Daeron most: not that the man has done anything wrong, but that he has received exactly what the room permits him to receive. A dance. A smile. Your attention for the length of the music. No more than that.
Daeron dislikes the exactness of it.
The lord speaks again. You answer with your head tipped slightly toward him, your attention polite and clean and infuriatingly blameless. Daeron sees the man receive it with the pleased concentration of someone being given more than he deserves.
An old instinct lets a line form in Daeron’s mouth.
Careful, my lord. My wife has a charitable habit of making dull men feel briefly interesting.
It is a good line.
He can imagine the shape of the room after it lands: the little burst of laughter, the lord uncertain whether he has been insulted, your face tightening before you decide what can be shown. Daeron would smile. Someone would call him witty. The thing inside him would have somewhere to go.
He keeps his mouth closed.
Not because he feels noble. There is nothing noble in him just then. There is only the line, sharp and ready, and you across the room, turning beneath the candles with another man’s hand at your back.
Then the music begins to slow.
The dance is nearly over.
Daeron straightens before he has decided to move.
A foolish thing, perhaps, to cross a room for a woman already his wife. A revealing thing. But the thought of remaining where he is while someone else returns you to the edge of the gallery feels suddenly intolerable. It is not the insult he wants most. It is not the laughter.
It is your hand.
The music ends.
There is light applause, the loose sort given after supper when no one is required to mean it too deeply. The lord bows over your hand. He does not kiss it. Daeron is aware of his own gratitude for that, which annoys him enough to make him cross the room faster.
You turn, and for a moment your gaze finds him coming toward you.
Your expression changes, though not by much. A small awareness. A little warmth at the edge of amusement. You know him too well not to see something on his face, and not cruelly enough to name it at once.
The Reach lord straightens when Daeron reaches you.
“Dear wife.”
The greeting comes out more formal than he intends. Your eyes move over his face first, then past his shoulder, toward the table where he left the cup.
When you look back at him, there is nothing triumphant in it. No approval. No lesson. Only notice.
“Yes?”
“The next one.”
It is too blunt. He hears it after he says it, the demand of it, the stripped-down wanting.
Your hand pauses at your side.
Daeron looks at it. The glove is still smooth over your fingers, still warm, he thinks, from the other man’s hand.
He breathes through his nose.
“If you will.” He adds.
Your mouth softens, almost despite you.
Not forgiveness. Not instruction. Only the look you give him when he has arrived at a door badly and not yet fled from it.
“Of course.”
The lord bows again, cheerful and untroubled. “Prince Daeron.”
“My Lord.”
Only that.
He manages only that.
The next piece begins.
It is slower than the last, less crowded, the kind of dance that requires proximity more than display. Your hand settles in his. His other hand finds the proper place at your back, above the waist, where any court would permit it and where his fingers nevertheless know the shape of you well enough to make permission feel irrelevant.
For several steps, neither of you speaks.
The music gives the silence somewhere to go. Daeron watches the turn of other couples, the pale swing of sleeves, the candlelight moving in bright strips across the floor. He can feel your attention on him, though your face is angled toward his shoulder.
He had thought coming to you would settle something.
It does, a little.
Not enough.
The lord is no longer touching you. That should satisfy whatever low, graceless thing has taken up residence beneath Daeron’s ribs.
It does not.
Instead, having your hand only makes him aware of wanting more of what he already has. Your attention. Your eyes on him. Some reassurance he will not ask for because he knows better than to need it, and because knowing better has never once cured him of needing.
“You came quickly.”
The words are quiet, pitched for him alone. Not teasing enough to let him dismiss them. Not solemn enough to make him feel accused.
Daeron glances down at you. Candlelight catches along your cheek before the turn carries it away.
“The music ended.”
“It did.”
Nothing in your voice contradicts him. That makes it harder to answer lightly.
He looks past your shoulder. The lord has already stepped aside, already smiling at someone else, as if the dance has cost him nothing at all.
“He was pleased with himself.”
Your hand remains in his, warm through the glove. A pause follows, long enough for him to hear the pettiness in what he has said.
“He was only dancing.”
That draws his eyes back to you.
“I know,” The words come out too flat. He hears the accusation in them after, late enough to dislike himself for it. “I saw.”
Your hand does not pull away. It changes instead, becoming more present in his, and that is almost worse. He would know what to do with offense. This is harder.
“There was nothing improper in it.” He offers it as if it might excuse him from feeling anything.
It does not.
“No.” You agree. You do not sound amused. That is almost worse.
“I know that too,” The dance turns. For a moment he has to look away from your face to keep the step, and the gold sun in your hair flashes bright, then disappears into shadow. A breath, and then, “I disliked it anyway.”
There. Worse. Truer.
Your eyes stay on him long enough that he considers retreat. The first escape is already there, waiting: a joke, not even a bad one. Then another. Then the shape of an apology made sharp enough to save his pride.
At last, your mouth softens. Not quite a smile.
“Yes. I thought you might.”
He looks away first.
The words should be humiliating. They are. They also settle something, though he resents that too.
“I wanted to say something else to him," He states. Your gaze stays on him. He should not continue, the admisison is already too large, lying there between you without decency to disguise itself. Still, he goes on, "Something clever.”
The word feels worse once spoken. Smaller. Meaner.
You do not rescue him from it.
“I even came up with a very good line” He adds, because apparently he cannot be honest without also trying to make himself less pitiable.
Now your mouth almost moves.
“I am sure.”
“I nearly regret wasting it.”
“Do you?”
He thinks of the line. The little burst of laughter. The lord’s uncertain face. Your own face changing before you could prevent it.
“No.” The answer comes out without ornament. It leaves him with nothing to hide behind.
His hand has gone careful at your back. He notices and loosens it.
“It would have made him look foolish.”
“Yes.”
“And me clever.”
“Yes.”
“And you-...”
The sentence stops there.
The music does not. The dance carries you another few steps while the unfinished thing hangs between you.
Your expression changes slowly. The amusement thins, not into anger, but into attention.
“And me?”
He could still refuse. There is room. A smaller man would call it mercy and take it.
Daeron looks at your shoulder, at the gold thread near your cuff, at anything but your face.
“Kind,” he says. “Warm. The qualities he might have mistaken for something made for him.”
The words are awkward and too earnest. Heat rises in his neck as soon as they are out.
You do not soften them for him.
For a few steps, there is only the music, your hand in his, the brush of your gown when the dance brings you close again.
“I was only being polite.”
Your voice is still quiet. It does not flatten the feeling, does not ask him to disown it. Only gives the plainest shape of what happened.
“I know.”
“I am often polite.”
“I have suffered from it.”
That gets the smallest movement from your mouth.
The sight loosens something in him before he can stop it.
“You are suffering now?”
There is more warmth in the question than the words require.
“Yes.”
“From my politeness?”
“From its reach.”
Your fingers settle more securely against his.
“I am still dancing with you.”
You say it almost practically, as if pointing out where his hand already is, where yours has remained.
Daeron looks at you then.
There it is. The thing he had wanted and would not have asked for. No grand tenderness. No assurance made large enough to embarrass you both. Only the practical fact of your hand still in his, your body still following the same music as his.
He grips your hand a fraction too tightly before making himself ease.
“Yes.”
Your eyes flick to his hand, then back to his face.
You say nothing.
That mercy again.
He is beginning to resent how much of marriage appears to be surviving mercy.
The Reach lord laughs at something near the windows. Daeron hears it, or thinks he does. His shoulders know before his mind does, a small tightening that begins at the back of his neck and moves down into his hand at your back.
Your fingers press once into his.
Not warning. Not instruction.
Only there.
Daeron breathes in.
The old feeling is not gone. It stands where it stood before, ugly and alive, offering him the same exits: a line, a drink, a turn of the shoulder, a coldness he could later pretend was manners.
He looks at you instead.
You are close enough that the room blurs at the edges of your face. Close enough that the gold at your cuffs catches against his sleeve when the dance carries you through the next turn. Close enough that he can see the place where you are trying not to smile at him.
“You look as if you want to say something.”
Your voice has gone softer, threaded with amusement now. Not indulgent. Only yours.
“I often do.”
“I know.”
“It passes.”
“Does it?”
Daeron glances once toward the windows.
The lord is still there. Still whole, still smiling, still possibly named Rowan. The line remains where Daeron left it, sharp and unused.
He looks back at you.
“It is passing.”
The corner of your mouth moves.
“Is it?”
“No.”
This time, your laugh is very quiet.
It is not the laugh from Dorne, not the laugh of a home before him, not the sound he once tried to turn into proof of his own exclusion. This one happens inside the dance, close enough that only he can hear it, startled out of you by his failure to lie convincingly.
Daeron smiles before he thinks better of it.
Not the bright, useful smile. Not the one made for rooms, for fathers, for witnesses, for escape. Only a brief, helpless thing that comes because you are laughing and he is close enough to feel it happen.
The next step brings you nearer. Or he does. Or both of you do, badly enough that the dance would suffer if anyone were watching closely.
For a moment, your brow nearly touches his. Not quite. Close enough that he feels the warmth of your breath and sees the amusement still caught at the corner of your mouth.
He could say something.
He does not, and you do not move away.
The music nears its final turn.
He feels it before he hears it: the subtle preparation of the other couples, the shift of hands, the return of public posture. He does not want to let go. That is not new. What is new is that the wanting does not immediately sharpen into resentment.
The final steps carry you near the edge of the gallery, where the candlelight thins and the air from the arches is cooler. Your hand remains in his. His remains at your back. Nothing increases. Nothing withdraws.
For once, the admission has not broken the flow of anything.
The dance ends.
You begin to lower your hand.
He lets you.
For a moment, the absence of your fingers sits in his palm. It is only absence, he reminds himself. Not theft, not proof, not a wound to be answered.
Only the end of a dance.
You curtsey. He bows. When he straightens, you remain near him.
The Reach lord -Rowan, perhaps; Daeron still has not recovered the name- glances across the room again. His gaze passes over you, lingering just enough to prove he is not as subtle as courtesy has allowed him to believe.
Daeron sees it.
You see Daeron seeing it.
For a breath, the old line returns, hopeful as a loyal dog.
Daeron keeps his mouth shut.
Your hand touches his sleeve, not taking his arm yet, only finding the fabric.
“He is going to think you dislike him.”
The comment is low, almost idle, but your eyes are on his face.
Daeron looks down at you.
There is something like amusement there now. Not indulgent. Not instructive. Only yours.
“I do dislike him.”
“I know.”
A pause.
Then, quieter, because he cannot help himself and because it is easier now that the worst of it has already been said badly, “I dislike him less than I did.”
Your mouth softens.
“A triumph.”
“No.”
The word leaves him too quickly. He looks toward the room, then back to you.
“Do not call it that.”
You study him for a moment.
Then you nod once, as if accepting the correction, or the refusal, or whatever dignity he is trying to rescue from this.
“Walk with me?”
It is an ordinary question. A practical one. There are guests to greet, another dance beginning, the long gallery open before you, music gathering itself again at the far end of the room.
Daeron offers his arm.
You take it.
The unused line remains for a few steps, sharp behind his teeth. Then someone laughs near the windows, a servant passes with a tray, your sleeve brushes his wrist, and he has to adjust his pace to yours when you turn toward the arches.
By the time the music begins again, it has become only heat in his face, only the pressure of your fingers through his coat, only the next step and then the next.
Thank you for reading! The dream about the sun blocked out by blood is definitely coming to play later and I'm definitely planning to write something about it later on btw.
Daeron takes a bath in a room that smells like his wife, returns expecting absence, and finds instead that you have made space for him to stay.
Continuation of I'm not sure what peace is and What it's supposed to feel like
Word Count: 10.6k
Warnings: slow burn even though they are married, angst, thoughts of drinking, drinking as a coping mechanism, references to alcohol dependance, sleep deprivation, fear of sleep, nightmares / prophetic dreams, panic/anxiety, emotional hurt/comfort, non-sexual intimacy, this man is Touch Starved
A/N: Daeron taking a bath. Daeron taking a bath. DaerontakingabathDaerontakingabathDaerontakingabath. Writing that scene shouldn't have been as fun as it was. someone give that wet dog of a man a bath in a room that smells like his wife damn it. Anyhow, finally the third and final part to what was supposed to be a one-shot. Hope you like it!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by anatomy-of-rains, "You touch me and suddenly I feel a little less war torn. I'm not sure what peace is supposed to feel like but I think it may feel a lot like you."
The adjoining chamber is already full of steam.
It softens the stone walls, clouds the edges of the mirror above the basin, and turns the air warm enough that Daeron feels the difference at once when he crosses the threshold. The maid steps in after him only far enough to set a folded cloth within reach of the bath and adjust one of the lamps near the wall.
She does not look at him directly. That is either mercy or training, and he has never found much use in distinguishing between the two.
“That will be all.” He tells her, and his voice comes out steadier than the rest of him feels.
The maid curtsies, withdraws, and closes the door.
He is alone here.
For a moment, that is enough to make the chamber feel enormous, which is ridiculous, because it is not. It is smaller than the room beyond, smaller than the dining chamber from last night, smaller than half the rooms in Summerhall built for no reason he has ever understood. Still, the quiet after the door closes has a strange weight to it. The main chamber is cut away from him. Your voice, the maids’ soft movement, the small established order of your morning, all of it becomes something on the other side of wood and steam, safe from his intrusion once more.
He stands where he has been left and looks at everything except himself.
That proves more difficult than it should, and the mirror catches him anyway.
Only for a breath, a moment. But enough to see a pale face made worse by morning, eyes still red at the edges, blond hair tangled from the floor and your hand or not your hand and his poor decisions. Enough to see his shirt creased, his collar gone wrong. The shape of the man you have been forced, by the arrangements of your fathers and now by his own weakness and selfishness, to endure.
He looks away before his own eyes can linger on him.
He removes his cloak at first. It is twisted from sleep and smells faintly of smoke, wine, and the cold corridors he has dragged himself through the night. His boots follow, then the rest, each piece of clothing set aside with less care than neatness would require and more care than he wants to admit to. He does not fold them, that would be absurd. But he makes them small on the seat near the wall, keeping them contained, out of the way, as if even discarded clothes might trespass if left too openly in a chamber that has not learned to expect them.
His ring catches a fastening on his belt.
Daeron stills.
Gold against linen. A small, practical obstruction, nothing more. He frees it after a moment, and the ring turns slightly on his finger, warm from his own skin. Wife, he thinks, because apparently his mind has decided to be unhelpful and linger on what is not his to linger on. But the mere thought of the word, the existence of it in itself, brings an uglier truth to light, a thing that because you and wife exist, must exist in return. Daeron and husband.
The words are not new, they have followed him for weeks now, fastened to him by vow and law and witnesses, but they had been easier to bear when they belonged to other people’s mouths. In those mouths, the words had been almost impersonal, almost surreal. Wife as duty. Husband as title. Marriage as a room he was expected to enter and instead spent weeks circling like a coward with subpar manners.
In your mouth, they had not sounded like that.
The words had been placed among ordinary things, and no solemnity would have troubled him half as much as the way you made the words practical, routinary, domestic even. My husband, because you had ordered a bath for him. Wife, because you had decided to joke that his endurance of it might reflect upon you. Practical, almost absurd, and therefore much harder to defend against than anything solemn could have been.
Arrangement he knows how to mistrust. Ceremony he knows how to dull himself to survive.
This was something smaller. And it has stayed with him, struck him somewhere and dug under his skin like an arrowhead.
The bath waits.
It is large enough to be indulgent, deep enough that steam rises from it in steady white threads. They have prepared it as they would prepare it for you. He knows this before he knows how he knows it. There are oils on the surface of the water, faintly golden where the light catches them, and petals darkened by heat, and the scent that fills the chamber is not the sharp cleanliness of soap alone but something warmer: jasmine, perhaps, rosewater, and something green beneath it that makes him think of gardens he has never seen and sun on stone after saltwater has been poured over it.
Yours, then. Entirely yours.
The realization should make him step back.
Instead, he reaches for the edge of the bath and lowers himself into water hot enough to make him gasp.
For one appalled second, he wonders whether this is how Dornish women conduct warfare on ‘northerners’.
The thought is so immediate and so stupid that it nearly helps. Nearly. His skin stings first, then protests, then begins, traitorously, to accept the heat. He does not add cold water. There is a jug of it within reach, set there by someone more sensible than either of you, but he does not touch it. He tells himself this is because adjusting another person’s bath would be an unnecessary intimacy, which is nonsense. He is already sitting naked in it, there is scarcely more intimacy than that. He tells himself, then, that the water is tolerable anyhow. That is closer to the truth, eventually.
Mostly, he does not add cold water because this becomes another thing to know. To hoard.
You dislike cold floors. You drink lavender tea too dull for the morning unless your sister rescues it with orange blossoms. You order baths for men who give you poor excuses. You bathe in water that might strip flesh from bone and consider it, apparently, ordinary.
A man ought not hoard such things.
Daeron does anyway.
The heat works its way into the stiffness of him with humiliating efficiency. His calves loosen first, then his back by slow degrees, then the shoulder that had spent the night against the bedframe and has been making its grievance known ever since. His body, faithless little kingdom, begins to soften as if it has been waiting permission from someone that is certainly not himself. His mind remains awake, irritably so, observing the betrayal from behind his eyes.
He leans his head back against the rim of the bath, only for a moment.
The steam gathers over his face. The scent of jasmine and rosewater clings to the back of his throat, a word unsaid. Somewhere beyond the door, he thinks he hears movement, or imagines it because the alternative is an emptiness too daunting to trust.
Perhaps you are dressing yourself, adjusting the necklace the maid had picked out for you -he does hope she chose something other than the rubies, it looks entirely too much like blood to be against the skin of your neck-. Perhaps the girl is fastening something at your back, nimble fingers making quick work of a knot and smoothing over the curve of your waist as she checks her work -and he has no right to envy an intimacy he has not earned, but for a foolish, passing moment, he thinks he could serve just as they do, if you’d let him-. Perhaps your morning has already recovered itself and is preparing to go on without him, which is only reasonable -he tells himself there is no grief in that truth, no dread pooling in his chest at the thought-.
His eyes close.
He opens them again at once.
It would be almost funny, he thinks, if the first night he spent with his wife ended with him drowning in her bath. No one else would find that funny, though, and that is usually a reliable sign that he should keep the thought to himself.
He reaches for the soap.
It, too, smells faintly of the chamber and not of him. Clean, floral, warm from steam. He washes because that is what one does in a bath, because he has been given a task and can still manage the simpler forms of obedience. Smoke leaves his skin. Wine leaves, or something near enough to leaving. The night comes away in stages: under his nails, at his throat, from the inside of his wrists where his pulse has begun to slow against his will.
When he raises his hands to his hair, he does it too quickly.
His fingers catch in the tangles at first, and the small pain is useful. Ordinary, easy enough to understand. He works soap through the strands, more roughly than necessary, and then his hand reaches the place near his temple where your fingers had been.
Or had not been.
He stops.
Water laps softly against the side of the bath, phantom caresses at his ribs with each movement of the scalding water. Steam curls at the edge of the mirror. His hand is in his hair and for one shameful, stupid moment he tries to remember the shape of your touch precisely enough to repeat it.
It is impossible. Of course it is.
His own hand knows him too much. It arrives with intention, with memory, with the whole weight of all of it. It cannot move slowly, steadily enough to be yours. It cannot be gentle enough. It cannot grant him the mercy of pretending the touch is coming from outside himself.
Still, his fingers pass once, lightly, near his temple.
A poor imitation. Worse for being close to nothing at all.
Daeron lets his hand fall back into the water.
He scrubs perhaps a tad too hard after that, then stops because there had never been dirt there. Not where it mattered, not in the place his skin keeps insisting had been touched.
That is quite enough of that.
He rinses his hair with water that is still too hot and tells himself the heat in his face is only from the bath. It is a reasonable lie, and he appreciates those when they present themselves.
By the time he rises, the chamber has become thick with steam and the water has gifted him enough heat to make leaving it feel like an error. He does anyway. His body protests this, too, having apparently decided to develop opinions now that no one has asked for them.
The stone floor is cold beneath his feet, which gives him, briefly and uncharitably, a fuller understanding of your earlier flight toward the carpet.
He dries himself with the linen left for him.
The clean clothes wait, innocently, on a low bench near the wall.
He notices them properly only then. A shirt, breeches. Fresh linen and silk. Nothing remarkable, but unmistakably his.
Daeron stands very still with the cloth in his hands.
They might have been fetched while he sat by the hearth. That is possible. Servants are efficient creatures, and princes’ clothing tends to appear where it is required with a speed that would be impressive if it did not so often make one feel like a child. Perhaps someone went to whatever room his things occupy now. Perhaps someone opened a cabinet, chose what was needed, laid it out, and withdrew.
Or perhaps the clothes had already been here.
The thought is quiet. And so, so much worse.
These are, after all, his chambers as much as yours. That is what everyone says. That is what the law says, and household arrangements, and the servants who have no doubt been instructed to treat the matter as fact no matter how thoroughly he has failed to inhabit it. There could be clothes here. A place for boots. A drawer, perhaps. A hook. Some small portion of the room set aside for a husband who has spent weeks in absence.
He does not know whether the clothes were fetched or waiting.
He does not know which answer he wants.
In the end, wanting does not matter. The clothes are here, and he cannot return in nothing but a towel.
So he dresses.
The clean shirt feels too clean against his skin. The scent from the bath clings beneath it anyway, at his wrists, in his hair, along his throat. Jasmine, rosewater, heat. The scent sits under the clean linen at his throat and wrists, private enough that no one else might notice and strong enough that he could not stop noticing.
Still, as he fastens the shirt, he wonders how long it will last once he leaves this place. How long before smoke, wine, his own skin, the rest of the world take it from him. How long before there is no trace left of this morning but the knowledge that there had been one.
You did not need to touch him again -if you ever did in the first place- to leave something on him.
The ring remains of course. Gold is easy enough to keep. Gold is meant to be seen, accounted for. A lawful mark, a public one. No one would think him strange for wearing proof that a vow had been spoken over him.
This is different.
There is no proof in the scent at his wrist, no witness at the warmth of the water, no name for the small shameful want that rises in him at the thought of carrying some trace of your room beyond its door. He becomes dreadfully, painfully aware of how much he wants to preserve it, as if evidence of you might be hoarded the way other men hoard letters favors, locks of hair, things actually given.
Nothing has been given.
Not like that.
And still, he catches himself pressing his thumb once against the inside of his wrist, where the scent of you lingers strongest, before he has the sense to stop himself.
He dislikes that thought and therefore does not look at it directly.
Instead, he looks toward the door.
The main room is quiet.
Too quiet, perhaps, though he has no right to judge the proper amount of sound your chambers make without him in them. The maid might still be there. You might be dressed by now. Gone, perhaps, to wherever your morning had meant to take you before he appeared on your floor and made himself into an obstacle to be stepped around with more grace than he deserved.
He tells himself that would be better.
It would be easier, certainly. To return to an empty room. To find the bed made or not yet made, sheets still faintly shaped by your sleep, perhaps the scent of you lingering at the pillow, perhaps some warmth left in the mattress if he were foolish enough to check, which he would not be.
Probably.
He could send for wine then.
The thought arrives with such practice ease that it embarrasses him more than longing would have. Not much, he tells himself first, because every bad idea deserves the courtesy of beginning politely. Only enough to take the edge from the thought of sleep.
A thought follows, shamefully almost as practiced as the first, and he thinks of allowing himself another bad idea. He will drink enough to make the bed survivable, enough to lie down where you had been and keep the dark from arriving too quickly with its mouth full of teeth.
Another indulgence, that. Another trespass dressed as necessity. If the Gods keep a ledger of him, they must have long ago assigned several clerks to the work; so one more line would hardly ruin the order of the page.
Drink. Lie down. Borrow the last warmth of your body from the sheets. Sleep, perhaps, if wine did what wine was meant to do and the dreams were too slow to follow.
He knows what to call that.
The word comes anyway.
Worth it.
It is a miserable little thought, greedy and quiet and entirely his. He lets it sit there for a moment because there is no one in the bath chamber to see what shape wanting takes when left unattended.
He thinks of what awaits him past the door. A cup on the table not yet cleared away. A shawl moved from one chair to another. Small proofs that you had been there and were no longer there.
Remnants.
He has always known what to do with remnants. They are easier than presence. Easier than wanting while the thing wanted is still in reach. A scent in linen, warmth fading from a mattress, the last image of a dream gone thin by morning; all ask less of him than a person who stays.
And perhaps it is better, he thinks, to keep only what remains.
What remains cannot look back at him.
The thought should comfort him. It does not.
Daeron stalls, delays his exit, fully aware of what he’s doing and unable to stop himself. Familiar dance, that.
He checks the fastening of his sleeve once, then again. Runs a hand through his damp hair and stops when his fingers reach his temple. Looks toward the mirror and away from it without letting his reflection gather. Listens to the quiet beyond the door until the quiet begins to sound like an answer.
Gone, then.
Probably.
Reasonably.
He ought to be relieved.
He opens the door.
The main chamber is brighter now. The curtains have been drawn closed again, but the hearth has taken properly and lights the irregular shapes and the traces of you. For one short, dreadful instant, he thinks the room is empty.
Then he sees you.
You are on the bed.
You are sitting against the pillows with your legs folded beneath the covers, a book open in your lap and one hand resting lightly against the page as though you have been holding your place rather than reading. The maids are gone, the tea has been cleared, and the room has settled into stillness that is not abandonment somehow.
Daeron stops with one hand still on the latch of the door.
You look up from the book slowly, one hand resting over the page, and for a moment Daeron can only stand there with the door half-open behind him. You do not startle, you do not ask why he has returned. The room is quiet enough that even the latch settling into place would feel like an answer, and still you only look at him, as if there had always been a place in the morning for this.
He had prepared himself for remnants: a little warmth left in silk, the ghost of lavender, some proof that you had been there and no longer were. Things he could keep because they would not know they were being kept. Things that could not look back.
The scent of you clings to his skin. You are looking at him.
Daeron closes the door behind him.
The latch settles with a soft, final sound that seems louder than it ought to. He keeps his hand there a moment after it has done its work, fingers resting uselessly against the metal, as if there is sense in holding the room shut once he has chosen not to leave it.
The scent of your bath is still on him. In his damp hair, at his wrists, beneath the clean linen of the shirt. He is aware of it with a clarity bordering on indecent, and because of that, because the awareness has nowhere reasonable to go, he looks away and towards the hearth. Fire and dancing flames are not easier to gaze into, exactly, but they are at least more familiar.
He feels as clearly as if it were a touch the weight of your gaze on him. Your eyes move over him, not rudely, not slowly enough to make a thing of it. He wonders, not for the first time, what you see when you look at him. Damp hair. Clean shirt. Bare throat. Whatever the bath has removed and whatever it left behind.
“Was the water warm enough?” You ask.
Daeron’s fingers loosen from the latch, and his eyes disobey him and greedily return to you.
“I mistook it for a test of character.”
Your mouth shifts, not quite a smile. “And did you pass?”
“I survived,” He steps away from the door because continuing to hold it would make him look either nervous or trapped, and he would prefer to appear neither while being both. “I hesitate to claim more.”
“Then it was warm enough.”
The answer comes with such calm satisfaction that he has to look away. The bath had been hot enough to make his skin briefly reconsider its allegiance to him, and you sit there as if he has merely confirmed the household staff had not failed one of their simpler duties. Of course. Of course you would think so. You had fled the cold stone as if it had personally insulted you, you had ordered fire into water and called it adequate.
Another thing to know, he thinks.
He should stop collecting them. He does not, he will not.
“Your morning has been…forgiving.” He says. It is the safest version of what he means. Not you waited. Not I thought you would be gone. Not I had already prepared myself for a room without you in it and was halfway to making a comfort of the idea. Only the morning, which can be blamed for any number of things and blushes at none of them.
You glance at the book in your lap. “I was reading.”
“Were you?”
“A little.”
His eyes drop before he can stop them. The book is open beneath your hand, the corner softened where your thumb has held it. He cannot know how long you have been sitting there with your attention fixed elsewhere. He only knows that when he left the room, you had been near the hearth, wrapped in the beginnings of a morning that looked as if it would soon gather itself and go on without him.
Now you are back in the bed.
That should be a small difference. A change of seat, nothing more. People move through rooms, women sit where they please in their own chambers. But the bed is not the chair, and the room no longer feels like a morning resuming its proper course after his interruption. It feels, instead, as if the interruption -as if he- has been given a place to stay.
He should not want that as much as he does.
“You did not need to wait.” He says.
“I know.”
The answer is immediate, if slightly offended. No excuse offered, no kindness dressed up as inconvenience. You do not even look embarrassed by it, which is inconsiderate enough that it nearly steadies him.
“You could have gone, continued on with your day.”
“I could have.”
He waits for more because men like him are always foolishly expecting more, expecting perhaps for absolution to announce itself. You give him none. You only shift the book slightly higher in your lap, one finger sliding along the page as though you might return to it, though your eyes remain on him.
Daeron inclines his head, accepting whatever kind of answer that is meant to be, and looks toward the hearth again. The chair is still there, and so is the small table, though the cups have been taken away and with them the last clean script he had been given. Tea had made sense. A chair had made sense. A bath made sense because it had answered the lie offered about the sheets, and a man who has been given a practical solution to a practical problem can sometimes pretend that nothing else has been touched.
He takes half a step in that direction anyway.
Not even a full one. His body knows the way to the chair before his mind can object. The hearth is a place to stand near without meaning anything, a chair is a way to remain in a room without asking the room to bear too much of him. He is almost grateful for the instinct that tries to take him there again, almost ready to let it carry him back into distance.
Then the book closes.
It is not a loud sound, but it changes the room regardless, it rings in his ears like the strike of a mace.
You set the book aside on the bed near your hip, careful with it, unhurried. Then you reach for the covers on the empty side and draw them back.
Daeron stops.
Or tries to. His feet stop before the rest of him does, and the rest of him arrives badly: breath first, then pulse, then the sudden useless awareness of his hands at his sides. For one absurd moment he feels almost threatened by the sight of sheets folded back from a mattress. He has stood in taverns with drunk men reaching too quickly for knives and felt less plainly outmatched than he does now.
That is not a flattering comparison, even he knows that. He has never mistaken himself for a courageous man. Courage, in his experience, belongs more visibly to people with fewer alternatives. Still, there is something humiliating in discovering that a brawl can be easier to face than a space made gently for him.
The panic is there first, because panic is quick and well-trained. It knows the path through his body. It tightens the throat, lifts the breath, makes the opened bed into a question with teeth.
The wanting is slower.
It comes after, heavy and almost trusting, before he can stop it: the treacherous drop of the body toward rest, the ache in his knees remembering the floor, the pull of warmth and silk and the empty place you have made as if his absence had been expected to end. Need is a clumsy thing when it has been starved too long. It does not know how to enter a room politely.
The movement is small, domestic. So plain that his mind still tries, hopelessly, to deny it the force of an invitation. A seat offered, a cup poured, a bed made available. All of it quiet enough to refuse, perhaps, if refusal had not begun to feel like one more form of lying.
You look at the opened space and then back at him.
“I take it the bath has resolved the matter of the sheets?”
The accuracy of it lands before he can dress it as accusation.
He had said he was not fit company for clean sheets. He has now been bathed, dressed, and returned to the room scented faintly of your oil and your water and whatever else he should not be carrying on his skin. He had been answered too thoroughly. There are cruelties in the world, he finds, less effective than a practical woman with patience.
He owes you, if nothing else, to drop the pretenses, and so he takes a breath and attempts,
“You should not make a practice of solving my excuses.”
“Then stop giving me solvable ones.”
For a moment, he has no answer. The plural catches him. Ones. You have not only answered the matter of the sheets, you have noticed a pattern while he had been busy mistaking evasion and cowardice for delicacy and subterfuge. He had thought himself careful. He had thought himself negligible. He had thought himself and his absences inconsequential.
Apparently, he has been legible.
His mouth moves, as it often does, before anything wise can reach it,
“They are made for a reason.”
“So is a bed.”
The absurdity of it almost saves him. He lets out a breath that might have become a laugh under different conditions, if his chest were a little lighter, if he had perhaps a different body or a different mind, if he were a different man instead of the one standing there with sleep caught under his ribs like a sickness.
You are bringing him down to the object, you seem to understand the object is easier to survive than what it means. He tries to reduce it to wood, linen, mattress, warmth. His body refuses the simplification in the usual places: throat, hands, breath.
He knows a bed is just a bed, but his body, traitorous and hungry thing, does not appear convinced.
“I would not impose on your reading.”
“You overestimate my interest in the book.”
There is something in your voice then, too slight to name generously and too present to ignore.
Not flirtation, exactly. He knows better than to call it that, as if attention becomes invitation merely because a starving man has decided it tastes like it. It is only that: attention. Your book set aside, your eyes on him, your interest turned from the page to the man standing uselessly near the bed.
But apparently he is starving enough to take it.
The knowledge lands in him with a small, private shame. He takes it anyway. Not as proof, because he is not quite foolish enough for that, but as something near enough to warmth that his body does not care what name should be given to it. He lets it catch, lets it matter, lets it be one more thing he will later pretend he did not keep.
The opened side of the bed waits beside you.
That is the ridiculous part. It is not even truly an offer, if one wants to be precise about it. The room is his as much as yours. The bed is his as much as yours. The space beneath the folded covers is, by every law that has ever spoken over them, the side of the bed that is technically his.
Technically is such a terrible word. It has excused more cowardice than he cares to admit.
Technically, he has had space here for weeks now. Technically, he has had a wife. Technically, there has been room enough for him in the bed every night he chose a chair, a corner, a borrowed patch of floor instead. The word gives a man all the shape of belonging without requiring him to suffer the fact of it. It lets him stand outside a door and call it restraint. It lets him make absence into mercy. It lets him pretend not taking something is the same as not wanting it.
Your hand rests near the turned-back covers, still and patient.
You are not insisting, not saying a thing, not issuing any commands he might follow or refuse.
He does not move.
“Daeron,” You say. His name, for the first time on your lips without title, without courtesy wrapped around it, without the replacement of husband like a hand placed over a wound to see whether it still bleeds. Just the name. Quietly spoken, all the more dangerous for that, because no one has made it a command and yet it reaches him as one. “It is just a bed. You may lie down.”
Just a bed.
He could almost laugh. He could almost tell you that very few things are just themselves once they have been wanted desperately enough. A cup is not a cup if it is handed to a starving man. A door is not a door if it is left unlocked for someone who has spent too long outside. A bed is not just a bed when sleep has teeth and dreams have learned his name and there is another person close enough to witness what happens if he forgets to be careful.
But the words are about this morning. He knows that. He knows that. This room, this hour, this body dragged past the point of any convincing denial. A present mercy, a practical one.
Some undisciplined part of him strains to hear more anyway.
This room again, perhaps. This bed again. Sleep within reach of you, without wine enough to blunt the edges first. The possibility of waking badly with you there to, if nothing else, witness it, witness him. The possibility of being allowed to return even after he has proved exactly why he should not.
He should say no.
He takes a step toward the bed.
It is infuriating, how quickly the body abandons principle when offered a place to fall. One step, then another, before he has gathered the proper objection. He feels heavier with each pace, not weaker exactly, but aware of every hinge and muscle and old ache as if the promise of rest has made exhaustion bold enough to declare itself. His knees remember the floor. His shoulder remembers the bedframe. His hands remember the cup burning his fingers. His mind remembers every hour it has been denied the dark behind his lids and every reason that dark cannot be trusted.
By the time he reaches the bed, he has thought of four refusals and yet spoken none of them.
You do not move away. It feels like a strike.
He stops beside the opened covers, close enough now to see the faint crease where the book had rested against your lap, the loose fall of your sleeve near your wrist, the place where the bedding has held the shape of your warmth. The scent of you clings to him still. Not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but enough that he knows it is there.
“Only for a moment.” He says, and it comes out low. Too low, perhaps, to be properly offered to you. It might have been meant for himself, except he is no longer alone in a room where such lies can pass unchallenged.
Only for a moment. A reassurance, if you are generous. A limit, if he is strong enough to hold one. An apology, nearly. Or worse than any of those, the smallest shape a plea can take.
You look at him for a beat.
Then you say, “Start there, then.”
He has no defense for that.
The words do not take the lie from him, but they do not let him keep it either. They leave him instead with the first part only: the beginning, the act, the one survivable inch between refusal and surrender. Start there, then. As if one can begin with a moment and not be ruined by what follows.
Daeron sits first because lying down all at once sounds too close to collapse.
The mattress gives way beneath him. Warm, still, from the proximity to where you have been sitting, and the sensation travels through the sheets at his hip with such sudden intimacy that he has to set one hand against the bed to steady himself. There is no reason for warmth to feel like being caught, there is no reason for it to feel like evidence. It is only a body’s remnant left in cloth, only the ordinary physics of someone having remained.
He had been prepared to steal that warmth after you were gone. It is much harder to touch it while you are still here.
He keeps his eyes lowered as he draws his legs onto the bed. Too carefully, because care is the last curtesy left to him. He leaves space between you. More than enough. His damp hair brushes the pillow when he lowers himself, and some part of him notes with horror and relief that the pillow does not reject him.
Absurd.
He lies on his back, any other position would ask too much of the room. His body wants desperately to curl toward warmth, toward the dip of the mattress, toward the living fact of another person beside him. He refuses it that much. His hands settle over his stomach, then move, then settle again at his sides because over his stomach looks too corpse-like but at his sides feels too vulnerable. Breathing evenly suddenly becomes an occupation. Not closing his eyes becomes another.
Beside him, you are quiet.
Not gone. Not touching him. Not asking him to make the moment into anything more than he can bear.
Daeron stares up at the canopy and tells himself, with the last foolish scrap of authority he possesses, that he will stay only long enough for the bed to stop feeling like mercy.
But the bed never stops feeling like mercy. That is the first problem.
The second is that mercy, once accepted, proves to have weight.
Daeron lies beneath the canopy and feels every inch of the mattress as if his body has been asked to give testimony against him. The silk is clean and soft. The pillow is too soft. The covers lie folded low over his hips because he has drawn them there with extensive care, as if there is a correct way to be covered in a bed that belongs to one’s wife and he might yet discovered by doing nothing too quickly. His damp hair cools against the pillow. His shirt pulls faintly at one shoulder when he breathes. His hands rest at his side, then over his stomach, then at his sides again.
There are, apparently, no good places for hands when a man is trying to seem less breakable than he feels.
Beside him, you sit against the pillows with the book returned to your lap. You have opened it again, though he does not know whether this is for your sake or his, whether you intend to read or only to give him something other than your quiet to survive. The pages make a small sound when you turn them. Dry paper, a careful touch, the whisper one sheet passing over another.
He keeps his eyes on the canopy. It is easier than looking at you.
It is also markedly not easy.
The distance between your bodies should reassure him. He has left enough of it. A uselessly polite stretch of linen, a diplomatic border in the middle of a marriage bed. No part of him dares touch any part of you. Even the warmth of your body reaches him only indirectly, through the mattress and the air and the scent of your bath still caught in his hair.
Because the quiet is starting to sound too much like something he might rest in, he blurts out,
“You may regret this.”
The page stills beneath your hand.
For half a heartbeat, he wishes he had kept the warning inside his mouth. He has given too many warnings already, and none he actually wanted you to heed.
“The bed?” You ask.
A laugh would help. He can feel the shape of one somewhere in his throat, but what leaves his chest is trembling and too honest.
“Me in it.”
You do not answer at once.
The quiet is not empty, and somehow that makes it worse. He can hear the fire shifting in the hearth, the soft movement of your body against the pillows, the slow drag of his own breath trying to behave against the dreadful feeling that no air is reaching him.
So he fills the silence again,
“I do not always sleep well.”
The understatement is so vast that for a moment he feels almost fond of it. A small, badly built bridge over a chasm no one has asked to cross. He does not sleep well. He does not sleep harmlessly. He does not sleep as one ought to sleep beside another person, with nothing but rest passing through the body and no horrors dragging themselves behind the eyes. He does not know how to make sleep survivable, he does not know how to make it safe, he does not know how to keep it from finding him.
You sit with that for a moment, a breath you let out and one he holds.
Then you turn the page.
“Then sleep badly here.”
Daeron has slept badly in chairs, on floors, against walls, in borrowed rooms where dawn found him before oblivion did. Badly is familiar, it is almost easy. It is the here that catches him, the placement of it with such ease, as if ruin has simply been given somewhere to happen.
He should not be grateful for it. Gratitude is a dangerous habit when one has so little judgement about where to place it.
“Generous.” He says, because some defense must be made.
“You underestimate my selfishness.”
There is something said there, a truth he might hoard with the others if he just reaches. But like an open flame, the thought tangles with dread and Daeron lets go of it as if it had burned him.
For a while, he tries to let the sound arrange the room. Page, fire, breath. The faint shift of silk when you settle more comfortably against the pillows, the hush of paper beneath your fingers.
His body begins, treacherously, to believe in the bed.
It starts at the edges. A loosening in his fingers. The slow unclenching of his jaw. The drop of one shoulder toward the mattress before he has agreed to yield it. His back, faithless and exhausted, softening by a fraction. The warmth under the covers gathering around his legs. The pillow accepting the weight of his head with an indecent willingness.
Then sleep moves, shifts.
It does not come as sleep should come, gently and by degrees, with the simple darkening of a tired mind. It waits just beneath that, a pressure, a tide at the edge of him, a beast on the prowl. it is something old enough, familiar enough, that it knows the way.
His eyes open.
He had not known he had closed them.
His breath catches so sharply that he has to swallow the sound before it becomes something more obvious. Every muscle returns to duty at once: hands still, face still, body still. Do not move. Do not dream. Do not frighten her. Do not make her regret staying.
The instructions arrive with the useless authority of prayers said after the Gods have already made their decision.
Beside him, the page does not turn. Daeron keeps his gaze fixed on the canopy.
There are kinds of cowardice so small they almost pass for manners. He tells himself he is sparing you the awkwardness of being looked at after you have noticed too match, he tells himself there is no need to check whether your attention has shifted from the book to him, he tells himself several things in rapid succession, all of them respectable and none of them true enough to matter.
He does not look because he does not want to see regret.
Not pity, either. Pity would be bad enough, but regret would be worse. Regret would mean the morning had reached the point all kindness eventually reaches with him: the moment of reconsideration, the quiet correction of generosity, the recognition that whatever had seemed harmless from a distance had become something else when allowed too close.
The page turns. Only then does he breathe again.
Slowly. Too slowly, probably.
He starts with the prayer the septa taught him when he was young enough to believe the order of words mattered more than the state of the soul offering them. Father above, judge me justly. Mother above, keep me kindly. Warrior, lend me strength. Smith, mend what has broken. Maiden, preserve the untouched. Crone, light the way. Stranger-
He stops there.
Not the Stranger. Not tonight, not this morning, not in this bed with you turning pages beside him as if a man might be trusted to lie still and not invite every dark thing he has ever feared into the room.
He begins again.
Father above, judge me justly.
That goes poorly as well.
After prayer fails, he counts kings. That lasts until too many of them begin to die in ways he does not care to remember. He turns instead to wines, which is either discipline or cruelty, and lists Arbor golds first because they are easiest, then reds, then the pale vintages some lord in the Reach once insisted had notes of pear and sunlight, whatever the fuck that means. The first swallow. The warmth moving down his throat. The dulling at the edges of his mind, not enough to save him, never enough to save him, but enough to make sleep less like being taken by the throat.
There is no wine in him. Not enough to count.
The thought lands late and hard. No proper barrier. No thick sweetness at the back of his mouth. No obedient, reliable blur between himself and the place sleep throws him into. He has come to the bed without the one ritual he has taught his body to expect before surrender, and the body, recognizing omission too late, answers with a small ugly panic under the ribs.
He turns it into stillness because that is what he has.
The book shifts in your lap. Your thumb worries at the edge of a page. He listens to that instead of the absence in his blood.
Then the bed gathers him again.
It is unbearable, how patient exhaustion can be. It waits through useless prayer, through counting, through the catalogue of wines he cannot drink, and then it returns to the body as if nothing has been decided. His eyes grow heavy. The fire softens. The sound of pages draws further away, then closer, then farther again. His thoughts begin to loosen their order.
Not gone, not dreaming, he reminds himself. Only thinning. Only a moment.
Dark collects at the back of his eyes.
Something moves inside it. A wing, a flame, a sky cracked open.
Daeron wakes before he has slept.
This time, his hand jerks against the covers. Only once, a small, stupid movement. Nothing that should matter. But his heart is suddenly loud, and his skin is cold beneath the warmth of the bed, and for one wild second he cannot remember whether the thing reaching for him had been in the dream or in the room.
The page does not turn.
He presses his hand flat against the mattress and forces his fingers open. One by one. He does not curl them into the sheet despite the instinct begging him to. He does not grip despite immobilizing need to cling to something to tether him here. He does not turn his head despite the way something in him already starves for a glimpse of you even if he has you closer than he deserves.
He does not turn his head. He can feel the place where your attention might be, and because he cannot bear it, he refuses to make it real.
Nothing happens. You do not ask. The fire shifts. The room remains a room, the bed remains a bed, his wife remains beside him with a book in your lap and enough mercy, apparently, to leave some things unnamed.
That nearly undoes him more than being questioned would have.
In another world, he might ask what you are reading.
The thought comes from nowhere and is almost more frightening than the ark because it is so small. So possible. It belongs to a man who can turn his head on a pillow and ask his wife about a book without making the question into a confession. It belongs to rooms where the beds are slept in and mornings are ordinary and no one counts the distance between bodies.
In another, kinder world, he might ask you to read aloud.
Not because the words would matter. They could be histories, accounts, some dreadful romance full of people making choices no living person would survive. It would not matter. He thinks, with a want so simple it shames him more than many worse things have managed to, that your voice might give the dark something to hold besides him, that it might carry him toward sleep by a road the dreams have not yet learned to watch.
He does not ask. Of course he does not ask.
Instead, he counts the ridiculous blades Aerion once purchased from a merchant who had sworn on three gods and one dead mother that each was made in the likeness of one of Valyrian steel. The first had been too heavy, the second too bright, the third had a dragon worked into the pommel so badly that Aerion called it an insult. There had been eight of them, or nine, Daeron cannot remember. He starts over at the first because the number matters less than the work of keeping the mind moving so sleep cannot catch it standing still.
One.
Too heavy.
Two.
Too bright.
Three.
The insult.
A page turns.
He follows the sound as far as he can.
His body lowers by degrees despite him: shoulder, jaw, spine, breath. Each surrender is small enough to deny until it gathers with the others and becomes something dangerous. The room blurs at its edges, the canopy loses its pattern, the fire becomes warmth without shape. Your presence remains the one fixed thing near him, not touching, not speaking, only there in the little sounds of paper and cloth and breath.
Sleep reaches again.
He feels it before it has images, that is the worst part. Before ash, before heat, before any face or field or flame can name itself, there is the pull. The old certainty of being dragged toward a place where his body will not obey him and waking will not come when called.
No.
His eyes open.
The word does not leave him, it lodges somewhere behind his teeth.
The book has gone still again. Daeron stares upward and does not move.
This time, he cannot make himself begin with counting prayers. The words feel worn from use, thin as cloth held to light. He tries wines again and loses the order after Arbor red. He tries kings and finds death. He tries the blades and cannot remember whether there were eight or nine or whether Aerion had bought them all or only a few. His mind, traitorous now in its own exhaustion, refuses the clean lines he gives it.
So he counts his breaths.
One, and the bed under him.
Two, and the fire.
Three, and the space between your body and his.
Four, and the page beneath your hand.
Five, and the dark waiting.
At five, he begins again.
One. The bed under him.
Two. The fire.
Three. You, beside him, not gone.
He stops there because counting you feels like another kind of theft.
The page turns at last, soft and careful in the quiet.
Daeron closes his eyes for the span of one breath and opens them again before sleep can decide it has been invited.
Then he begins again at one.
After a while, he hears the book close beside him. Daeron does not look.
The sound is small, barely more than paper against paper, leather settling shut, your hand leaving the page. Still, after the long effort of counting every sound in the room into its proper place, the change reaches him with absurd force. The page will not turn again. The little rhythm he had used to keep himself awake has stopped, and for a moment he feels almost betrayed by the silence.
Then the mattress shifts.
Not much, only enough to tell him you’ve moved.
He keeps his eyes shut at first, which is worse than keeping them open because darkness is never empty for him, not for long. He opens them again and fixes them on the canopy before anything can gather behind his lids. The pattern above him is blurred by exhaustion, the carved lines of wood and shadow going soft at the edges, but it is still there. A thing, a shape, a proof that he is awake.
The bed dips more fully at his side. You are lying down.
He knows it before he lets himself understand it. The change in the sheets, the warmth shifting nearer, the quiet adjustment of your body as you settle into the space beside him, close enough for the mattress to change under both of you and far enough away that he has no honest complaint or warning to give.
The arrangement of the room has changed again, and Daeron, who has learned to lie very still through dreams with teeth in them, through his father’s anger, through tavern rooms where drunk men mistake misery for an invitation to draw blood, finds himself nearly undone by the sound of a woman lying down in her own bed.
His hands remain where they are. That takes effort.
Everything takes effort, really. Breathing without making a study of it, remaining still without looking dead, keeping his eyes open without seeming terrified of closing them. Not turning his head. Especially not turning his head. He cannot look at you. If he looks, he will have to see how close you are, and if he sees how close you are, he will have to survive whatever it is his heart does with that knowledge.
There are limits, though he will be the first to admit he has met very few of them with dignity.
The mattress shifts once more, then settles. You have turned onto your side. He knows that too, because the warmth changes shape, because your breathing is angled toward him now, because some part of his body that has no loyalty to his pride is aware of you with humiliating precision. The same way you had slept the night before, perhaps. Curled on your side, one hand loose near your face, unaware of him until morning made the whole disaster visible.
Except this time, you are facing him.
Except this time, he is in the bed with you.
Except this time, after a long moment of lying very still and pretending stillness can pass for restraint, Daeron turns too.
It is not a graceful movement. He takes it slowly, as if any suddenness might give away too much, might come across too eager, drawing one shoulder from the mattress, shifting beneath the covers, finding the edge of the pillow with his cheek. His body understands the shape before his mind permits it: turned toward warmth, toward breath, toward the living fact of you in the bed beside him. He stops before he has turned fully enough to be accused of seeking you.
He leaves space, more than enough.
A careful, cowardly distance between his knees and yours, between his chest and the hand he does not yet know how to refuse.
His gaze drops to the sheets between you. It is marginally safer than your face. Marginally.
His throat works, but no sound comes out. Good, he is certain no sound he’s capable of now would help him.
The room waits.
Fire low in the heart, sheets warming in uneven places beneath him. The faint smell of rosewater and jasmine clinging to his own skin. Your breathing, steady enough to be kind or deliberate enough to be kinder. The bed does not ask him to move, you do not ask him to speak. Nothing in the room asks him for anything, which is perhaps why wanting begins to move so freely through him, finding no obstacle except his own will, which was never anything impressive in the first place.
Then your hand comes to rest between you.
Daeron goes still in a way that has nothing to do with rest.
It is not touching him, it is not even particularly close, if one wished to be reasonable about this. Reason, however, has been making a poor showing all morning. Your hand rests on the sheets between your bodies, palm turned upward, fingers loose, neither reaching nor withdrawn. A hand in the bed. A simple thing, a deniable thing. If he had more courage, perhaps he might even call it inconsequential.
He does not have enough courage for that.
He knows the shape of it.
That is the part that catches beneath his ribs. Palm open. Fingers easy. The softness of an offered thing made to look like sleep, or carelessness, or nothing at all. It is the shape his mind had worried over in the bath when his own hand failed at gentleness near his temple, the shape he had remembered from the night before when you had been unknowingly within reach and all his wanting had been safely impossible because you were asleep.
Now you are awake. Now the hand is there. Now any movement toward it would belong to him.
If you had touched him, he could have endured it as something done to him. If you had told him to take your hand, he could have made obedience out of it and hidden himself inside the instruction. This is worse, this is nothing dressed as nothing, and therefore everything depends upon whether he is desperate enough to make it into an offer.
He is.
The knowledge is immediate and degrading.
He does not move. Sleep shifts under the edge of him again.
Not only sleep, the place before it, the slope. The body beginning to lose its argument with itself. The edges of the room blur, then steady when he forces his eyes wider. His breath shortens. The dark behind his eyes is not visible because his eyes are open, but he knows it is there, waiting without face, waiting with patience. A warmth without comfort, a pressure without hand, the old pull toward a place where waking does not answer when called.
No, he thinks. The word is useless. It has always been useless.
His fingers move anyway.
Only slightly, a failure more than a decision. His hand shifts against the sheets, and then again, and for a breath he thinks he may be able to pretend the movement has been nothing more than another restless adjustment from a man very bad at lying still. Then the backs of his fingers brush the backs of yours.
He stops. Every part of him stops.
Your skin is warm.
That is all, that is the whole catastrophe of it. Warm skin, the faint rise of knuckles, the impossibly small contact of his skin against yours. It should mean nothing. It is barely touch. It is less than what courtiers trade in greetings, less than what servants tolerate in passing cups, less than what he has given strangers without remembering their faces.
His heart behaves as if he has been caught in a crime.
You do not move away.
For a moment, the two of you remain like that, scarcely touching at all, and Daeron cannot decide whether your stillness is mercy or a test. Perhaps it is neither, perhaps you are simply letting him have the exact measure of what he has chosen and no more or less. That would be like you, he thinks, though he does not know you well enough to be so certain and is becoming dangerously willing to pretend otherwise.
He has done worse things than touch a woman’s hand, the Gods know that. The Gods, if they keep their ledger, have darker ink set aside for him than this. Still, very few things have felt so much like reaching for something so out of his reach.
His hand turns before he has decided to let it.
Not boldly, he only lets his fingers shift from the back of your hand to the hollow of your palm, awkward and careful and half-ashamed, as though even now he might apologize to the space between your fingers for entering it. His hand is trembling; he hates that you must feel it. He hates even more than that even then he does not pull away.
Your fingers close once around his.
Only once. A small answer, a confirmation barely stronger than breath. Your hand receives his and then rests, warm and steady, as if nothing astonishing has happened at all.
Something in him gives way.
Not enough to break, only barely enough to stop holding himself quite so hard.
He keeps his gaze lowered between you, fixed on the place where your hand has answered his. It is easier than looking at your face, though not by much. Your fingers do not tighten again, but neither do they leave. The fire is still in the hearth, the bed is still beneath him. The room remains itself. The dark waits where it has always waited. The dreams have not vanished, and sleep has not become kinder. Still, his hand remains where it is.
And when the room begins to blur again, there is something for him to find.
Your palm against his. Your fingers loosely held. The slight pressure of your hand answering the tremor in his, not stopping it, not shaming, merely existing around it. Waking has a shape now, a place to return that is not the canopy, not the counting. He follows it without moving, lets his attention drop from the dark to the point where your hands meet. Warmth, touch, skin. The faint, living pulse of another body close enough to be known.
One, he thinks, and does not know whether he means breath, or heartbeat, or your hand.
The counting falls apart almost at once. And for once, he lets it.
Sleep comes again.
He feels it gather and his body begins its old revolt, every tired muscle tightening for the fight it has no strength left to win. But the fight does not find the same shape. His fingers, instead of clawing at the sheet, hold yours. His breath, instead of catching alone behind his teeth, finds the rhythm of yours and loses itself there. The dark presses forward, and the room recedes, and still some part of him knows the difference between dream and hand.
The bed warms around him, the fire becomes a distant, steady thing. Your presence remains, reduced and magnified at once into the place where his hand is not empty.
He does not trust sleep, he does not forgive it. Some lucid, frightened part of him refuses even now, insisting that he should keep watch, keep count, keep himself from falling where the dreams can take him and do what they please with him.
He cannot.
His eyes close, and this time, he does not open them at once.
the room slips again. He loses the fire, then the curtains, then the weight of the covers over his legs. He keeps your hand longer than the rest, or perhaps it simply becomes the only thing he knows how to notice. Warmth, skin, you. The faint pressure of your fingers answering his when his own forget how to be still, when some frightened and foolish part of him squeezes once as if to request reassurance you remain there.
The dark comes anyway.
This time, Daeron does not wake himself to avoid meeting it.
His hand is still in yours when sleep takes him.
Thank you for reading! I have entirely too many ideas for this universe/collection, so I'll hopefully be posting more soon.
Morning finds Daeron exactly where he never meant to be: on the floor beside your bed, seen in the full light of what he failed to hide.
He expects the room to become impossible now that he has been found there. Instead, the morning continues. A bath is drawn, tea is poured, and your questions are careful enough.
Daeron has spent weeks making his absence look like mercy, but now, with every poor answer he gives, he begins to understand that you noticed. And that you intend to understand why.
Continuation of I'm not sure what peace is
Word Count: 6.3k
Warnings: mentions of drinking, drinking as a coping mechanism, prophetic dreams, and arranged marriages. I think that's it.
A/N: This was supposed to be a second and final part to this little story but it got away from me and I had to cut it up. I'll be posting part 3 soon, would love to hear your thoughts in the meantime!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by anatomy-of-rains, "You touch me and suddenly I feel a little less war torn. I'm not sure what peace is supposed to feel like but I think it may feel a lot like you."
The first thing Daeron feels is a hand in his hair.
For a few breaths, he does not know enough to make a person out of it. There is only the careful pass of fingers through hair gone tangled from the floor and the night and however many hours of poor decisions preceded it; there is only the faint graze along his hairline, almost to his temple, a thing to gentle to have context and too unlikely to require one. His half-sleeping mind, useless with the softness of it, does not think of you at first. It does not think of anyone, it only knows warmth where there should be none, the slight pull of a strand caught and released, the shape of a hand moving slowly enough that his body has time to trust it before thought can interfere.
His body, treacherous and starving thing this body is, accepts it before he understands that it has.
Something in him sinks. Not much, not enough for anyone watching to name it. A fraction only, the barest softening of his neck, his cheek turning by a breath toward the touch. Sleep still has him by the throat. Or perhaps not sleep, perhaps something worse, something like that small falling feeling before the body remembers to be afraid of falling.
He does not jolt awake, not this time. He is still somewhere inside that slow, impossible descent when your hand is gone, and it is the cold left behind -instead of pain, of fear, of any of the usual mercies- that opens his eyes.
Morning finds him, unsurprisingly, badly.
There is pale light at the curtains, thin and grey-gold, enough for it to return shape to the room and cruelty to the objects in it. The bed is beside him, the floor is beneath him. His shoulder is pressed to the bedframe, his mouth tastes of old wine, one leg has gone so thoroughly numb that it might as well belong to some other fool entirely. And, most importantly, your face is clear above him, turned toward him and far too awake.
You are looking at him.
For a moment, Daeron does nothing. He does not move his hands, he does not breathe properly, he does not even manage the good sense to look away. In darkness, the room had been kind enough to blur itself around him, to make intention and accident resemble one another if one did not look too closely. Morning, as always, is less generous. It has arranged the facts with humiliating simplicity: floor, bed, wife.
The promise to leave before you woke broken before he could even remember making it.
He had meant to spare you this. Before light, before servants, before your eyes opened and found him folded beside your bed like some stray creature. He had meant to rise, to go, to leave no sign of himself but perhaps a little warmth where his shoulder had touched the frame, and even that would have been gone soon enough. A harmless failure, if there is such a thing. Small, quiet, entirely his.
Instead, you are awake, and he is still here.
Your hand is no longer in his hair by the time he is awake enough to know if it had even been there. That should make it easier to dismiss. A dream, perhaps, however rare the good ones are. A stray mercy invented by the last scraps of sleep.
But his skin remembers the path of your fingers near his temple, and his cheek feels colder, and his body has the nerve to miss something his mind has not yet agreed happened.
That, more than the floor, is the problem.
Daeron looks down and finds his fingers still curled into the fabric of his trousers, stiff from clutching cloth through the night. His cloak has twisted around one shoulder, and his damn boots are still on, because of course they are. When he tries to shift in place, sensation returns to his leg in a hot, ugly prickle from knee to ankle, and his mouth tightens before he can stop it.
Well, that is certainly dignified.
He moves away from the bed. Not far, because his body refuses the ambition of distance, but enough that his shoulder leaves the frame and his head no longer rests against the mattress. Enough, perhaps, to pretend there had been intention in any of this.
He can feel the shape his hair must be in, which should not matter, except your hand had been in it, perhaps, and he cannot decide whether it is worse if you know you touched him or if you do not.
You watch him do it.
Not cruelly, not even with the sort of pity he might survive by hating it. Your eyes are too clear for that, too awake. There is worry in your face, he thinks. Curiosity too, perhaps, in the careful way you do not ask the obvious question. You look at him as if he’s a puzzle that has appeared on your floor.
“That cannot have been comfortable.” You say.
Daeron does not look at you when he answers,
“I have slept in worse places, I promise you.”
It is true, but it still makes such a poor defense, even to his own ears.
A small silence follows. He feels it along the side of his face, the back of his neck, the places where your fingers had been or had not been. Then he looks at you properly, because not looking has begun to feel more revealing than the alternative, and reaches for the nearest thing that might keep the morning from becoming too grave to survive.
The smile comes by habit, poorly assembled and dragged from somewhere near the ribs.it trembles before he can make it useful, but it is there.
With nothing else, he offers, “Good morrow.”
You blink once, and then your mouth softens. Not quite into a smile, but near enough that his chest goes briefly, stupidly tight.
“This is certainly one way to begin one.”
It should not help. And yet, it does. Only a little, only enough that the room does not split open beneath him.
You have taken the shape of what he offered you, ridiculous as it is, and answered in kind. Morning, manners, a prince on the floor wishing you a good morning as if he has not just woken beside your bed with one leg useless, his hair ruined, and his last scrap of good sense and self-preservation somewhere beneath the mattress.
Or perhaps beneath your hand.
No, not that. He refuses to let the thought linger. He is not certain there had been a hand. He would prefer, almost not to be certain.
You shift against the pillows, rising a little onto one elbow. The covers move with you. Daeron’s gaze drops at once to your hand instead of your face, which was a mistake, because your hand is no longer near his hair or his face but it still exists, and that seems almost as dangerous.
Your fingers rest loose against the sheets. Empty.
He looks away.
“That was a very poor use of a perfectly serviceable bed, however.” You say, tone light.
His fingers tighten once against his knee.
There it is: the bed. It has been in the room the whole time, of course. Large and soft and impossible behind him, above him, beside him, however one measures impossibility from the floor. Still, it feels newly named when you say it, as if the object has turned to look at him.
Daeron studies the floorboards between his boots for a shameful moment. They are ordinary floorboards. Indifferent. He finds himself grateful for that.
“I am hardly fit company for clean sheets.”
The answer comes easily because it is not entirely a lie. He had been all wine and smoke and cold corridors when he arrived, wakefulness worn thin enough to tear. Whatever filth clung to him had at least been real enough to name, and that has always been the mercy of practical things. dirt can be washed, sheets can be changed, boots can be removed. No one has to speak of what else a man brings into a room when he comes there after days of refusing sleep.
He glances up only briefly.
Your expression has changed. Not enough for accusation, not enough for certainty. Only a small adjustment around the eyes, a quiet narrowing of thought. You do not believe him, perhaps. Or perhaps you believe the words and not the shape he has forced them into. Perhaps you have mercifully decided there are some answers to brittle to touch directly in the early morning.
His stomach twists. He waits for you to say something.
You do not.
A knock comes at the door, light and routine, and Daeron goes still so quickly that his returning leg punishes him for it. Before either of you say anything, the door opens, because morning has rules and servants obey them, and princesses do not usually begin the day with their husbands half-curled on the floor beside their beds like a scolded dog.
Three maids enter with the efficient quiet of women expecting the morning to behave like morning.
“Good morrow, Princess,” The first says, “You ought to write to y-…”
She sees him then.
To her credit, she does not drop anything, only chokes on her words and halts her stride. The second maid stops half a step behind her. The third looks down at the folded dress in her arms as if it has, quite suddenly, become the most interesting thing in the world. There is a pause, small but complete, in which everyone in the room -or halfway into it- appears to remember at once that no one has been given the proper script for this.
Daeron considers closing his eyes. That has rarely solved anything, but he has always appreciated the simplicity of the method.
Instead he lifts a hand and offers a half-hearted wave of his hand, and the first maid’s eyes widen, turning in search for guidance to you.
You sit up a bit more fully, unhurried. Not startled, not apologetic, not embarrassed.
“Good morrow.”
The maids take their cue from you, and the first is quick to recover, curtsying her greeting.
“Princess,” A bow of her head, eyes that of a cornered rabbit when she stammers and adds, “Uh, m-my Prince.”
Daeron remains on the floor. This is not the worst state in which the servants of Summerhall have found him. There are servants in this castle who could probably rank his humiliations by season.
Still, for some reason this feels worse in a way he does not intend to examine while still sitting beside your bed with his leg half-numb and his hair in disarray.
You keep your attention on the maids.
“Have a bath drawn, would you, Laerra?”
The first maid’s -Laerra’s, he learns- eyes flicker once, very quickly, toward Daeron. Then back to you. Only once.
“Of course, princess.”
No one says for whom, no one needs to,
Daeron lowers his gaze to his hands. His fingers are still stiff, and there is a crease in the fabric where he held himself all night. Perhaps you believed him, when he told you the smell of smoke and grime of the day were what kept him from your bed. Perhaps you did nt. Perhaps you only decided to answer the lie he gave you instead of the truth he could not.
He says nothing.
The room moves around his silence. Not with the brittle and tentative care of people pretending not to have seen what they have seen, no, although in some ways that might have been easier. Instead, the maids recover because you have recovered them, and morning resumes with the terrible efficiency of a thing that has never once considered stopping for Daeron’s benefit.
One of the girls leaves to see to your request of a bath. Another goes to the hearth and kneels before the embers, coaxing what remains of the night’s warmth back into flame. The third crosses to the wardrobe with the folded gown still in her arms and lays it out with practiced care, perfectly aware of where it ought to go, of which hook takes which sleeve, of which warm boots belong with which shade, of which dress can bear a necklace of rubies and which requires something less severe.
They know the room.
That is the thing that Daeron notices, the thought that lingers, though he would prefer not to. He lingers not on the quick glance the first maid gives him before she disappears, not on the way the second keeps her eyes politely on the hearth, not in the third’s sudden and heroic interest in fabric. Those are familiar enough forms of discretion, and he has lived his whole life among servants and their careful blindness. Their presence should not matter.
It does not matter, not in the way it should.
What unsettles him is the ease of them, the way the room opens itself to their hands, the way they know which curtains to draw first, where the kettle waits, which small casket holds your hairpins, which shawl was left over the chair the night before. The way one of them, after only a few moments, says, with the familiar worry of a woman continuing a conversation that must have begun days ago,
“You ought to write to your sister, princess. There is barely enough orange blossom left for the week.”
You make a small sound that might be agreement and might be offense at being reminded of it.
“She is well aware,” You state, “She has just chosen to abandon me to northern weeds.”
The maid at the hearth smiles down into her work.
“I am certain she would be heartbroken to hear your plight.”
“She should be.”
It is nothing, a small exchange, easy enough to pass unnoticed if one belongs in the room. Daeron does not. He remains on the floor beside the bed, half-numb and entirely too awake, and listens as if the matter of dried orange blossoms sent from your family’s home is a court secret he has stumbled upon by mistake. Orange blossoms, lavender, a sister who sends things. A morning habit old enough to be teased over. A life made of little continuities that have nothing to do with him.
He had thought, somewhat stupidly and perhaps arrogantly, that his presence would make the room impossible.
The room appears not to have noticed he has irrupted. Or worse, it has noticed and decided to continue anyway.
You shift on the bed, and Daeron moves because you do.
There is no thought in it at first. You draw the covers aside, and his palms press against the floor. You sit up, and he gathers one knee beneath himself. You reach for the robe folded near the pillow, and he rises, stiffly, because suddenly remaining on the floor becomes an absurdity too large even for him to defend.
His body objects to the change with great conviction. His leg, newly returned to him and apparently resentful of its treatment, sends another ugly prickle up his calf. His back is stiff from the strange angle of sleep. The hand he uses to brace himself on the floor is slow to open properly, fingers still half-curled from the night. He manages to stand without making a so und, which he counts as a victory, although perhaps only because he has lowered his standards beyond recognition.
You do not comment. That helps more than it should.
You stand and slip into the robe with your attention half on the maid at the hearth, half on the morning itself, as though your husband rising from the floor beside your bed is only one more thing to be folded into the day’s order of events.
Your bare feet touch the floor, and your face changes by the smallest degree.
Then, with more haste than dignity, you make for the carpet before the hearth.
It is such an ordinary little betrayal of discomfort that Daeron looks at it a moment too long. And suddenly you are less the clear face above him in the morning light and more a woman who dislikes a cold floor, and there is something in the small, ridiculous flight from the boards that makes the room feel less like a place where he has committed some grave offense.
He looks away a moment too late. No one seems to notice.
You reach the carpet and tuck one foot behind the other as though to scold the floor without giving it the satisfaction of words. The maid at the hearth set the kettle near the revived flame, another brings the cups and utensils to the small table by the chairs, and the scent of lavender begins to lift into the air, faint at first and then steadier, soft enough that it reminds him of last night.
You move toward it, and Daeron follows.
He does not decide to. Deciding would have at least given him the dignity of refusing himself. Instead, you move, and the rest of the room becomes briefly unreadable, and by the time he understands what his body has done, he is standing near the hearth a few steps behind you like a hound awaiting instruction.
He stops. You glance over your shoulder.
“You may sit, you know.”
The words are mild. Almost formal, almost amused.
Permission, at last. That is worse than a command in some ways, and better in others.
Daeron sits.
Immediately, which he realizes a heartbeat too late. The chair is not far from the hearth, close enough for warmth to reach his knees and for the revived light to catch on the rim of the tea tray.
He should have hesitated, he thinks. He should have made some polite refusal, some gesture toward leaving, some claim about duties or intrusion or whatever shape of lie would have done the least damage. Instead, you gave him a place to put himself, and he put himself there.
Very well. Apparently this is also the sort of morning he is having.
You pour the tea yourself.
A maid might have done it. Perhaps one usually does, he does not know enough of your mornings to know what is habit and what has been changed around him, which is its own discomfort. You rake the kettle in hand, steady and unhurried, and fill one cup before setting the pot down. The tea is a pale, almost grey amber in the morning light. The lavender scent rises with the steam.
Not one thing about it is remarkable enough to justify the care with which he watches it.
Then you turn and offer the cup to him.
For a breath, Daeron only looks at it.
A task, he thinks. Something ordinary enough that he can understand the expected use of his hands.
He takes it because he has been given it, because he remembers his manners even when they have to crawl to him from very far away, because refusing would be stranger than accepting, because you are looking at him and the cup is somehow easier to meet than your face.
The first tremor is small. Small enough that, had he been alone, he might have ignored it. The second sends the tea lapping against the rim, and he tightens his grip st once, too quickly, too visibly, his fingers closing around the porcelain with enough force that the heat bites into his skin. A drop spills over anyway, sliding down the side of the cup and across the knuckle of his thumb.
It burns. He does not let go.
For a moment, the whole of him narrows to the ridiculous work of keeping tea inside a cup. Not the bed, not the floor, not your hand in his hair or not in his hair, not the maids moving around the edges of the room, not the fact that he has no idea what to do with the mercy of being allowed to remain. Only the cup, the heat, the small crescent of liquid threatening the rim, and his useless hands making a spectacle of what ought to be simple.
You look at the tea. Then at his fingers. Then, mercifully, not at his face.
“I was overgenerous.” You say, choosing to critique the pour of the drink instead of him. Instead of the evidence that his body has followed the ruination of his mind, and some combination of too little sleep and too little drink has taken his hands from his control.
A breath catches somewhere behind his teeth. It might have become a laugh in a different man, or in a different morning, or in a different world.
Overgenerous.
Yes. But not with the tea.
The thought is there and gone before he can punish himself properly for it. You have been overgenerous with the chair, with the cup, with the calm way you let the morning move around him as if he has not dragged some private wreckage into your day. Overgenerous with the fiction that the problem is the pour and not the hand holding it. Overgenerous, perhaps, with letting him have the smaller lie when the larger truth sits beside him like another guest at the hearth.
He lowers the cup enough to keep from spilling more.
“My thanks.” He says, because that is safer than anything else.
“For the tea or the absolution?”
The question is light enough that one of the maids might mistake it for teasing if she were listening. Daeron does not make that mistake.
He looks at the cup for a moment, before retorting, “I had not realized they were being served together.”
This time, your smile does arrive, small and brief, and he has the terrible satisfaction of having caused it while wishing, at once, that he had not seen it clearly enough to want another.
You turn back to the tray to pour for yourself.
“It is better with orange blossom,” You say, after a moment, returning your attention and your words to the tea, “The lavender alone is too dull in the morning.”
Deron brings the cup to his mouth because holding it and not drinking it has begun to feel absurd. The tea tastes of lavender and something faintly bitter beneath the floral softness. His mouth still tastes of old wine, the tea does not cure that, but it argues with it, which is more than he expected.
“You dislike dull things in the morning?”
“I dislike unnecessary dullness at all hours.”
You are adding nothing to your own cup. No honey, no milk. Only the tea as it is, apparently inadequate but still worth drinking. The maid at the hearth makes a small, amused sound and hides it badly by taking the kettle and moving it away. You ignore her, which tells him this, too, belongs to the room: the tea, the orange blossom, your sister’s delay, the maid’s poorly hidden amusement, the shape of a morning that has made space for all of it before he even set foot here.
“It lacks the freshness of orange,” You point out, glancing down into your cup. “And pomegranate rind. But my dear sister has abandoned me to lavender and boiled water.”
He ought not to find the petulant affront at imperfect tea endearing, he ought not to smile. He does anyway.
You sit then, close enough that the light from the hearth catches the side of your face and the steam from your cup rises between you in thin, vanishing threads.
“When she remembers her duties,” You continue, “You should try it properly.”
It is a small thing, so small a better man might have known how to leave it small. A cup of tea, no more. A comment made because you were speaking of orange blossoms and lavender and sisters who send gifts from home. Not an invitation, not a promise, not anything he should take into his hands and hold so tightly it cuts him.
Daeron knows this. He knows this with the same part of himself that knows the cup is not too full.
He should say something. A jest, perhaps. Something light enough to return the offering to its proper size. Instead, the warmth of the cup presses into his palms, and the room continues around him, and for once Daeron cannot find the cruelty in allowing himself to imagine a later in which he is still permitted to be here.
“You might regret teaching me to expect better tea.” Daeron says. It is not the answer he meant to give.
He meant to make some harmless remark about your sister, perhaps, or about orange blossom being wasted on a man whose palate has survived far worse offenses than inferior lavender. He meant to keep the offer where you had left it: small, domestic, no more dangerous than steam rising from a cup. Instead, the warning comes before he has decided whether he is making a joke of it.
A poor habit, that. Speaking.
You look at him over the rim of your cup.
“I shall take my chances.”
Of course you say that lightly, of course you make it sound as if the danger is only tea, only expectation only a prince developing standards inconvenient to your stores. That is the mercy of it, and the trouble. You leave the words exactly where he has placed them and somehow hear what sits beneath them anyway. Or so he hopes, against hope.
Daeron lowers his gaze to his own cup. The spilled drop has cooled against his thumb, leaving a faint tackiness where tea and heat and his own unreliable hand have conspired against him.
“A brave woman.”
“A curious one, mostly.” You correct.
That makes him look up again.
You say it without solemnity, which is the only reason he does not retreat behind whatever flattery or foolishness he can find. There is no grand claim in your expression, no pretty gentleness arranged for his benefit. Simply the same watchful softness from before, made more dangerous by the fact that it is not trying very hard to disguise itself. Curious, then. Not frightened or disgusted. Yet, anyhow.
He takes another careful sip of tea because the cup gives him something to do with his mouth other than make matters worse.
The room continues around you both. The two maids that were lingering in your room finishing their duties bow their goodbyes and take their leave, while he hears somewhere beyond one of the internal doors water being poured. The bath exists now as a consequence of his own excuse, which means it is both mercy and a trap, and he is too tired to decide which name is less humiliating.
You set your cup down first.
“Had you slept before you came here?”
The question is not abrupt, not exactly. It is simply placed there, careful and plain, as if you have followed the thread he offered and found, beneath better tea, the shape of something less easily sweetened.
Daeron’s fingers settle more firmly around the cup.
“That depends on what one counts as sleep.”
The answer arrives with enough ease to be a tad painful. He even manages to make it sound mildly thoughtful, as if the matter is philosophical rather than pathetic. As if sleep is a category to be debated over breakfast, as if he has not spent a lifetime learning all the ways a body may close its eyes and still refuse to rest.
You tilt your head a little.
“I mean the kind after which one wakes rested.”
Ah. A most difficult standard.
He considers lying. He considers several lies, in fact, arranging themselves obediently as soldiers at a muster. Some are polished enough to be believed by someone less awake than you. Some are true in ways that would not help him. Some involve dignity, which is ambitions of them.
In the end, he obeys an unspoken command, fulfills an unvoiced request, and offers truth.
“Then no.”
Your expression does not change enough for him to resent it. That is inconvenient.
The truth sits between you, small and ugly and not nearly complete enough to explain itself. He dislikes it for that. A fuller truth, perhaps, could have defended itself. This one only sits there, insufficient and exposed, while you look at him as though you are not yet finished seeing it.
Because his mouth proves often faster than his thoughts, he uselessly adds,
“There was not enough wine to make a convincing attempt at it.”
The words are lighter than the admission beneath them, or try to be. He hears that himself. Hears, too late, the shape of what he has given away.
His reputation precedes him, he knows this. Tales of his vices carry just as far as the reputation of his House. But this is different, this speaks of something more. Not wine as pleasure, not wine as vice alone -though the Realm, he is sure, has enjoyed that simpler story well enough-. Wine as tool, wine as door, wine as a blunt instrument taken to the back of wakefulness until something in him quietens or pretends to.
He brings the cup to his mouth again and finds it too empty to help him now.
Your gaze drops once, briefly, to the cup. Then back to him.
“And before last night?”
There it is, then. The next door opening before he has found a way to close the first.
Daeron leans back on the seat, or attempts something like it. The movement pulls at his stiff shoulders, reminds him of the floor, of the bedframe, of the absurd fact that he has already provided you with more evidence than any sensible defendant would allow.
“Summerhall has more chairs and corners than any reasonable castle requires.”
For a moment, there is no sound but the hearth.
You do not smile. Not quite.
“That was not an answer.”
“No,” He says, with practiced insolence, “But it was a very accurate inventory.”
That earns him something. Not a laugh, not fully, but a narrowing of your eyes that suggests amusement has considered entering the room and decided, for the moment, to remain near the door. He will take it. The Gods know he has taken less.
You look toward the bed, then toward the chair beneath him, then back to his face. The movement is small, too small to accuse, too small to name. still, Daeron sees the path of it and feels something in him draw tight in answer.
Floor. Chair. Bed.
Not a difficult inventory.
He knows what you are trying to understand, or thinks he does. A husband who will not sleep in the bed. A prince who appears at dawn beside it. A reputation dragged in behind him like mud on a cloak. A set of inconveniences you did not choose and are no expected, by law and Gods and men, to manage.
You are measuring the burden of him, he thinks.
Unsure as to why the words seem to claw their way past his throat, why restlessness demands of him something and his body obeys before he choses to, he rushes to say,
“I did not mean for this to become part of your morning.”
The words are not apology enough and too much apology at once. He hears the stiffness in them and dislikes it. He dislikes, too, that they are the nearest thing to honesty he can reach without touching the larger shape of it.
Your dingers rest against the handle of your cup.
“It became part of my morning when I woke and found you on the floor.”
He concedes with a gesture of his head, looking away, “That was…poor planning on my part.”
Your mouth softens a little.
“I was warned of your proclivity for that,” You recall, “By you, if memory serves. Which only proved to me you were telling the truth, by the way.”
It startles a laugh out of him. Barely one, gone almost before it arrives, more breath than sound. Still, it is there, and for a second the room loosens around the fact of it.
Daeron looks back at the tea.
“I should not keep you.”
He begins to set the cup down as he says it, the motion careful and deliberate, because if he can return the cup, rise from the chair, leave the hearth, reach the door, then perhaps morning can still be folded back into something nearer to what it should have been. You will have your cold floors, your orange-less tea, your maids and your gown and your sister to accuse of betrayal. He will remove the question of himself from the room before it grows teeth.
“You cannot leave now,” You say. His hands still on the cup. Your words do not sound like a plea, but they do not sound like an order either. Faltering for only a moment, you straighten in your seat and explain, “If you go, I will have ordered a bath for no one, and my maids will have one more reason to think me strange.”
Daeron blinks once, then, because he cannot help himself, “They have reasons?”
“They think me unreasonable about tea.”
“A grave reputation.”
“But a defensible one. If nothing else, written off as Dornish eccentricity. Requesting a bath for a ghost, however, would be…absurd of me.”
He looks at you, and you merely look back, composed and absurd and apparently very serious about the political cost of unused bathwater. It should not work, it is as transparent an attempt at manipulation as there ever was one.
You are not asking him to stay because you wish him to, nor are you asking him to stay because he looks like he may fall apart if given a corridor with no instruction. You are asking him to spare you a minor domestic embarrassment.
A task, then.
A reason to stay that does not have to be hunger, that does not have to bring shame.
Daeron’s fingers leave the cup.
“I would not wish to imperil so delicate a reputation.”
“No,” You say, smile curving at the corners of your lips. “I thought not.”
There is something too knowing in your response, but before he can decide whether to take offense or comfort from it, the door opens again.
The maid who had left returns with cheeks slightly warmed from haste, though she has enough discipline not to show more than that. She curtsies from the threshold to the bathing room.
“The bath is ready, Princess.”
The words arrive like mercy with a latch on it.
Daeron stands because this time there is a clear thing to do. His body protests less now, or he is better prepared to ignore it. The chair shifts beneath him, the light of the hearth slipping over the cup he has left behind, over the small place where his thumb has marked the porcelain with tea. He does not look toward the bed. He does not look toward your hand.
He does, however, look at you.
Only briefly. Only a moment.
You give him no softness large enough to drown in, no visible permission, no careful speech about rest or shame or whatever else might someone be entitled to after finding a man on their floor. You only lift your cup again, as though the morning has not been derailed in the slightest.
“Do try to enjoy it.” You say.
“For the sake of your reputation also?"
“Well, yes,” You agree, a glint in your eye when you turn your gaze to him, “It would speak poorly of me as a wife if my husband walks to the bath I had drawn for him like a man to the gallows.”
For a moment, he forgets the maid, the bath, the open door.
Wife is not a new word, the Gods know the word has lingered in his head since long before he had a face and a voice to tie to the title. Even if not spoken aloud, it has been spoken over him by septons and lords and witnesses, folded into contracts, fastened to him by law and ceremony. But in your mouth, in the morning, with tea still warm in his hands and steam waiting in the next room, the word seems to land in him differently.
Not softer, worse than that somehow. As if the word has been allowed to mean something.
He turns toward the adjoining chamber where the bath waits.
It is an escape, of a kind. Only another room, steam, water, the consequences of the lie he was permitted to give. Still, it is away from the hearth, away from your eyes, away from the chair where tea sounds dangerously close to a promise.
As you can robably tell by the 'northern weeds' comment, the Reader is a Martell, eldest daughter of a third son of the Prince. The marriage was not arranged for political reasons really (the daughter of a third son and the son of a fourth are not exactly big players), I will get into that in a later fic. Thank you for reading!
Summerhall is quiet at night, but Daeron knows better than to trust quiet.
After days of wine and the fear of the dreams waiting behind his eyes, he finds himself outside the chamber he has spent weeks avoiding for your sake. He does not mean to ask for comfort. He does not even mean to stay.
But the room is quiet, and you are there, and for once the dark is not empty.
Word Count: 4.4k
Warnings: drunkenness, alcohol as a coping mechanism, arranged marriage, sleep deprivation, prophetic dreams/visions, fear of sleep, self-deprecating thoughts, angst, Daeron as a grade-A yearner.
A/N: I felt like a monster writing my first Daeron fic, so here is something a little bit lighter. not entirely fluff, but certainly some comfort after the other one.
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by anatomy-of-rains, "You touch me and suddenly I feel a little less war torn. I'm not sure what peace is supposed to feel like but I think it may feel a lot like you."
The wine is not enough. That is the trouble with it tonight.
Not that it is poor wine -he is honest enough to admit he doubts he ever drank wine for its taste-, nor that there is too little of it. The scattered servants lingering still have been dutiful enough in that regard, appearing and disappearing at the edge of the smaller dining chamber with the quiet, practiced misery of men who have learned the shape of a prince’s worst habits.
A cup emptied, a cup filled. A flagon replaced before it is asked for. A candle trimmed. A glance lowered. All of it a dance so familiar that Daeron has long since stopped noticing the steps.
He had meant to sleep here, he thinks. Or perhaps he had only meant to drink until sleep became a less frightening notion. There is a difference, he knows it, though it has grown thin after so many hours awake. He has slept only in scraps these last few days, if scraps may be called sleep at all: his eyes closing for a breath or two between one cup and the next, his head dipping toward his shoulder before the body startles itself back into obedience, the darkness behind his eyelids already too crowded to trust.
No dream has taken him tonight, and that should be a mercy. It is not, because he knows that it only means they are waiting.
They do that, sometimes. Withdraw long enough to make him foolish, to find him with defenses lowered. Long enough to make him think perhaps the body can outlast them, perhaps wine and wakefulness and motion can hold the door shut if only he is clever enough, stubborn enough, ruined enough. Then, when he inevitably fails, they come back. With teeth.
So he drinks.
Or tries to.
The cup is halfway to his lips when the ring catches against the rim.
A small sound, nothing more. Silver against gold, clear and bright and indecently clean in the muffled room.
Daeron stills.
The servant nearest the wall stills with him, as if the sound were command enough. Daeron does not look at him, his gaze has dropped instead to his own hand, to the ring there, to the pale gleam of it around a finger that does not feel entirely his.
It is not the first time he has noticed it, of course it isn’t. Rings are made to be noticed; vows are made to be remembered. That is the cruelty of them, or perhaps the mercy, if there is a difference between them at all.
He is married.
The thought arrives first as a fact, and only after a breath as a wound.
Not because the word displeases him, though he sometimes wishes it would. That would certainly be simpler. Crueler, perhaps, but simpler.
No, the word has the opposite danger. It is too warm a word for what has been done to you, too intimate for a bond you did not choose, too claiming from a man who has spent the weeks since your wedding making of his absence a mercy.
His wife.
He does not often allow himself the shape of that thought without placing something else around it like a frame. Vow is safer. Ceremony, witness, some public facing architecture of a thing that might otherwise become want if he lets himself look at it for too long. Duty is easier, a public contract is easier, the Gods know both are things he knows how to fail and how to survive breaking.
The ring rests against the cup.
Wine below, vow above.
The jest would almost be good, if he were less tired.
There had been other answers once. Poor ones, ugly ones. Warm rooms where no one asked too carefully what a prince wished to forget. Laughter softened by coin, by wine, by habit. Hands that did not need to be known in the morning. Mouths that did not ask for truth before biting. A body could be made into a simpler thing in such places, and for a few hours the world might have been kind enough to believe the lie.
He does not go there now. Not since you were married.
It is not virtue, he knows himself better than to try and find that in himself. It is only a vow, and a vow, he has found, is sometimes easier to keep than a self.
He has so little of himself left to give you. This, at least, he can keep from anyone else.
The thought is small. Ridiculous, perhaps. A beggar’s candle laid at an altar. He does not know what you would do with it if he ever had the poor taste to offer it aloud. Pity him, perhaps. Worse, thank him. Worse still, accept it for what it is.
A poor gift, really, which is why it remains unsaid, unrevealed. But it is a promise he can keep, a vow he can keep from breaking, and he has little else to offer.
Fidelity, if nothing else, might be one of the last things left in him worthy of offering to you.
Daeron sets the cup down.
The servant shifts, “My prince?”
The wine trembles once in the cup, a tiny wave, then settles.
Daeron looks at it a moment longer, as if it might yet become useful, as if it might yet open some road beneath him where sleep is only sleep and the dark behind his eyes is only dark.
It does not.
He stands.
The room moves with him, not spinning, not quite, but drawing itself a little too slowly into place. He is not drunk enough, the realization is a weight on his chest. Not sober enough to be steady, not drunk enough to be safe, the worst state between.
“My prince,” The servant tries again, softer now, “Shall I-”
“No,” Daeron tells him, though he does not know what is being offered. More wine, a chair, a bed, a mercy. It hardly matters, “No, I have been admirably tended to, but I require nothing more.”
It is meant to sound light. It almost does.
He leaves before the man can decide whether to believe him.
___
Summerhall sleeps badly.
Perhaps that is only because Daeron does, perhaps houses are innocent of the futures men place inside them. Stone is only stone, timber only timber, shadow only shadow, and it is no fault of Summerhall’s that the dark gathers in the wrong corners.
Still, at night, the place feels less built than waiting.
The corridors are nearly empty at this hour. A few guards stand at their posts with faces made blank by discipline, the torches burn low in their brackets. Autumn has begun to thin the warmth from the walls, drawing summer out of the stones by slow degrees, and the air that moves through the halls carries the first sharpness of the season to come.
Summerhall was refuge once, home once.
It still is, in some ways. That is the cruel part. Grief clings to the old stone, yes. His mother is part of its walls as surely as mortar is, part of the rooms no one names too directly, part of the hush that gathers around his father’s worse days, around certain doors and certain hours. But it has no ash in its memory yet. No blackened stone, no terrible fire anyone speaks of but him, on nights where sleep does not let go of him and servants find him incoherent and half-mad, in the worst grief his dreams draw from him.
He grew up beneath these arches, learned the turns of these passages, the windows that catch dawn first, the stair that groans in the rain, the place where the mosaic above the east gallery has cracked and never been properly mended.
It should be safe. It remembers him young, after all. Almost happy, almost whole.
Instead, it feels haunted by what has not happened.
A shadow lies along the pale stone ahead of him, too dark to be only shadow. For a moment it looks like soot, as if some fire has already passed its hand along the wall and left the proof behind. Daeron blinks, and it is only the angle of torchlight, only night, only his mind making ruin out of darkness because it has grown too practiced at the work.
He keeps walking.
Movement is useful, it gives the body instruction. One foot, then the next. A turn. A stair. Another corridor. So long as he walks, he is not lying down, and so long as he is not lying down, sleep remains a thing at distance. A country glimpsed across water, a door closed but not yet opened.
He does not think about where he is going.
That is what he tells himself, at least.
The castle knows the path even if he does not. Or his body does. It carries him through Summerhall with a purpose his mind refuses to dignify, to linger on. Past the gallery, past the windows where the night presses black against the glass, past a shutter that rattles softly in the wind -sounding for one breath too much like a whisper, or a wing, or a hand against wood-.
He touches the ring as he walks.
Not fondly, not even consciously at first. His thumb finds the edge of it and turns there, worrying the metal as if it were a thought that might be worked smooth by repetition.
His wife is asleep somewhere in the castle.
No, not somewhere. The correction comes before he can prevent it. He knows exactly where.
He stops at the next turn, absurdly, as if stillness might undo that knowledge. It does not.
The corridor beyond is familiar. Too familiar. The guards at the far end are familiar, the door between them is familiar.
Your chamber, he thinks.
The law has made it his as well.
Theirs, it insists.
The word sits badly.
Him and you. You and him. Joined by words as if words have ever been a harmless thing. To think of the room as something of the two of you feels like reaching for more than a door, more than a bed. It feels like placing himself beside you in a sentence and expecting the sentence to hold all the weight.
Still, he has not asked for separate chambers.
You haven’t, and some foolish part of him clings to that fact and makes him not quite able to ask for them either, even if for your sake he ought to.
He cannot say he remembers the path that took him here, the thoughts, if there were any, that led to the decision to drag himself to your doorstep.
Calling it your doorstep is not really accurate, he gathers, but he cannot bring himself to even name himself the distance he knows he ought to put there -the distance he owes you, the distance you deserve-.
So he has done the kinder thing, or what he has told himself is kinder. He has slept elsewhere. In chairs, or couches. Once in a garden bed after too much wine and not enough sense. In guest rooms when some excuse could be found. In rooms that smelled of smoke and spilled drink. Nowhere that required you to learn the weight of him beside you.
He has spared you, with great dedication. Has made a habit of it.
And yet, here he is.
One of the guards straightens as he approaches. The other looks briefly toward the door, then away again with admirable discipline.
Daeron smiles before he can decide not to. It is a thin, trembling thing, but he remembers his manners.
“My prince,” The guard greets, keeping his voice low, “Shall I announce you?”
The absurdity of it nearly makes Daeron laugh.
Announce him. At the door of the chamber that is his by law and not his by any honest measure. Announce him. A visitor, a petitioner, a man who has arrived somewhere he has a right to enter and still stalls, awaiting permission that won’t come.
He lets his words carry the smallest theatrical offense when he answers,
“At this hour?” Daeron asks. A beat passes. His smile remains, his certainty does not. “It is late, is it not?”
The guard’s eyes lower at once. Kindness, perhaps. Or discomfort. Often they look the same.
“Very late, my prince.” He confirms.
“Good.” Daeron says, though he has no idea what good means here.
He looks at the door.
He should leave.
The thought is clear enough that ought to count for something. He should turn around, he should go back to the dining chamber, or to some chair, or to whatever patch of floor first offers itself. He should not bring wine and wakefulness and the stink of fear to your threshold. He should not stand outside your room like a stray hound that has mistaken pity for invitation.
His hand lifts anyway.
The latch is cool beneath his fingers. When his ring makes the slightest sound against the metal of it, it sounds less like a call to heel than a comfort.
For a moment, Daeron does nothing but stand there with his hand on the door and his ring cold against the metal. Behind him, the guard breathes carefully. Ahead of him, wood and silence, just quiet.
No. Not quiet.
Something softer than that, less daunting than that.
The faintest shift of sheets. The low, faint crackling fo a dying hearth. And beneath it, so slight he might have imagined it, the steady rhythm of someone sleeping.
The room beyond the door is quiet, but it is not empty.
Daeron opens the door.
The room receives him before he understands that it has.
That is what feels most dangerous, most daunting. Not the darkness, not the hush, not the low, dying glow of the hearth.
There is little enough light to see by, only a weak gold caught in the embers, a faint redness under ash. The sort of firelight that should trouble him with its closeness to other things. burnt things, blackened things, screaming things. It does not.
Daeron stands just inside the door with one hand still on the latch, and some part of him loosens before he has given it permission. His shoulders. His jaw. The small, ugly clench behind the ribs that has held him upright for hours, days, however long it has been. It eases by a fraction, and the easing is so unexpected that it almost feels like being caught.
He closes the door.
His body does that, too, before his mind has quite approved it.
The latch clicks into place. It is a small sound. Soft, really. Careful. Still, he flinches as if it has struck the room instead of merely closed it. The guards are on the other side now. The corridors, the cold, the low torches, the palace with all its waiting shadows. Behind him. Kept out.
Or he has shut himself in.
Or he has shut himself in with you.
The thought is absurdly difficult to place, shelter and trap wear one another’s faces in the dark. A cornered thing does not always know whether it has found a den or a cage. Worse still, Daeron cannot decide which of you is the beast cornered.
So he does not decide. He remains very still.
The room is nearly blind around him, though he can make out the dark shapes of furniture by degrees: the curve of a chair near the hearth, the small table beside it, the heavier shadow of the bed. The air is warmer than the corridor, though only just. Warm with what remains. Linen. Ash. The faint trace of the oil you use in your hair, something soft and foreign to Summerhall, carried here with you and made ordinary. Beneath it, almost imagined, the dry ghost of lavender tea.
You have made a place of this room.
A shawl left over the back of the chair by the hearth, one end slipping toward the floor. A book, open-faced on the seat as if you meant to return to it and sleep had interrupted you. A pair of gloves laid neatly together, fingers touching fingers like hands intertwined.
Small things. Things of yours.
Daeron looks at them because they are safer than the bed. Or, at the very least, he tells himself they are.
The chair by the hearth catches him first. He can imagine you there too easily, and because the imagining comes without permission, he hates himself for the sweetness of it. You sitting while the night gathered at the windows, you reading with the shawl drawn around your shoulders, you turning a page. You, pausing at some sound in the corridor that was not him, or perhaps was never going to be him.
Perhaps thinking of him.
The thought is obscene, and he pushes it away.
Not because there is anything indecent in it. That would almost make it easier. But there isn’t, the thought is soft, domestic, harmless. The idea that you may have sat in this room, in the quiet, and allowed him some place in your mind not shaped by duty or dread or regret. That you might have wondered where he was, whether he would come, whether he slept.
He should not want that. He should not want to have been thought of kindly in a room he has spent weeks avoiding.
The bed is there. He has known it all along, and he turns toward it finally, because all the smaller proofs of you lead there in the end.
You are asleep on your side, turned slightly toward the room, one hand drawn near your face on the pillow. The dying hearth almost gives nothing of you to sight. A line of cheek, the loose fall of hair, the line of the sheet near your shoulder. The faint suggestion of fingers resting open against the silk, soft in a way that makes his own hands feel suddenly large and ruined and too badly made to hope for the touch of yours.
He looks away. Then looks back.
Only once. A brief glance, a stolen thing. But enough.
The moment feels breakable, that is the word his mind does not quite form and his body knows regardless. Breakable. As if he has opened the door upon something made of glass, or frost, or morning before anyone has spoken into it. The dark around you is only dark, the night is only night. You sleep as though sleep is something one might enter without being dragged there, as though the body might surrender and not be punished for it.
He has brought the wrong world to your door.
Wine, wakefulness, cold corridors and old fears. Shadows that become soot if looked at too long, fire where there are only embers, screaming where there is only wind. He keeps it all inside his skin by will or habit or some uglier thing, but skin has never seemed a reliable border to him.
He does not wake you. He does not even truly consider it.
There is a world, perhaps, where he does. Some other world made kinder by accident. In it, your eyes open without fear, your face does not tighten at the sight of him, your mouth does not shape his name as accusation or pity. In it, you see him in the dark and do not wish him elsewhere.
Perhaps you shift aside, perhaps you lift the covers. Perhaps you say nothing at all. No questions, no startled breath, only room made for him.
In that world, he is the sort of man who climbs onto bed beside you.
In that world, he is the sort of man who can gather you against him as something real and loved and his -not owned, never owned, but held-. A tether, to this time, this house, this body, this world where the walls are not yet black and the dead are not yet calling.
Or in that world, perhaps you hold him. The thought comes worse, a blade, a wound.
In that world, your hand tangles in his hair, your palm settles softly at the back of his neck. In that world, there’s a touch moving over him as if there’s nothing in him that might cut you for coming too close, as if the skin that has always felt to him like something flayed and exposed might learn, beneath your hand, to be only skin.
In this world, Daeron closes his eyes.
When he opens them again, nothing has changed. You are still sleeping, the room is still dark, the bed is still impossible.
Not forbidden, that would imply a gate, a guard, a rule. This is simpler than that. A man may stand beneath the Dragonmont and understand that dragons will never fly above him again, a boy may look toward the stars and know he has no road there. One might desire a thing and never mistake desire for reach.
The bed is yours.
The law has made room for him beside you, but law is a clumsy, useless thing. It cannot build belonging out of witnesses and words alone, it cannot make him the man who would be allowed to lie down in the warmth you have left open by sleeping.
So Daeron approaches, but he dares not climb into the bed, dares not touch it.
Heavy steps take him to your side of the bed, though he does not name it that. There is no question of the other side. The other side is the place a husband might claim if he had courage enough or cruelty enough, but it means nothing. The bed is soft because you are in it, the room is shelter because you occupy it. If there is any warmth in the world in this night, it gathers where you breathe.
He is not brave or cruel enough to climb into bed, but the Gods know he is not strong enough to step away from it, from you.
He goes to the floor beside it instead.
He lowers himself carefully at first, then less carefully.
By the time he reaches the cold floor, the movement feels less like sitting and more like yielding. The boards are cold beneath him. He notices it distantly, and almost welcomes it. Cold is honest, hardness is honest. Neither asks anything of him, neither allow him to forget himself.
His shoulder comes to rest against the bedframe, the edge of the mattress.
For a moment he sits upright, knees drawn toward him, boots still on, cloak still around his shoulders. A trespasser, dressed for leaving, dressed to give away how much he does not belong here. His hands settle against his knees, fingers curling into the fabric there. He isn’t sure if he’s holding himself in place or holding himself back, and gathers the difference does not matter.
The ring presses cold against his finger.
He touches it, deliberately, once. Only once.
Above him, you shift in your sleep. Daeron goes still.
The sheets whisper. Your hand moves a little on the pillow, fingers loosening, palm open and empty beside your face. He looks at it, because a hand is safer to look at than a cheek, the delicate fan of lashes, a mouth he knows the softness of. Because a hand may be imagined without the gnashing violence of wanting the person it belongs to.
But even that is not safe.
Your fingers are soft with rest, and his own tighten in his clothes until the knuckles ache.
He thinks, absurdly, of touching nothing.
Not you, not the sheet, not the covers hanging near his shoulder. Not the edge of the mattress where his head has begun, without permission, to lean. He thinks of making himself into a shape that asks for nothing and leaves no mark. He thinks that if he can be still enough, quiet enough, perhaps this will not count as taking.
Only a moment, he tells himself.
That much is allowed.
Perhaps not allowed, but forgivable. So small an indulgence it may pass unnoticed by Gods and wives alike.
Only a moment, and then he will go. He will rise before morning, before the servants breach the quiet, before light can make something of him. You will wake to nothing worse than the room you had before him, the bed undisturbed, the air untroubled. You will never need to know that he brought himself here and then thought better than to burden you with the knowledge.
He will spare you this.
He lets his head rest, barely, against the edge of the mattress.
The covers are soft beneath his temple. Not warm, not enough. Enough.
Your breathing moves above him.
In.
Out.
The room follows it.
Or he does.
The hearth gives a low crackle no more than a settling ember. Once, that night have become something else. Tonight, it remains small, contained, simply a sound in a room where someone is sleeping.
Your breathing returns.
In.
Out.
The dark does not empty itself around him, it has a rhythm now, a body. A witness that asks nothing, knows nothing, but stays. Daeron listens to it with the attention of a man counting waves from a shore, though he does not know what shore he has reached, or whether he is meant to be there, or how long before the tide drags him back.
Only a moment, he thinks again, but the thought has lost its teeth.
His fingers loosen in the fabric against his knees.
His body, traitorous and wise, gives up another inch of itself. Then another. The line of his spine softens against the bedframe. His eyes close.
He means to open them.
He will.
Before morning, before you wake, before this becomes anything that must be answered for.
Above him, you breathe, and sleep takes him before he can forbid it.
Thank you for reading! In case this story isn't evidence enoiugh, Orbiter by Noah Kahan has me on a chokehold.
There's a second part to this btw, I'll try to post it soon.
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