the longing never watered @rayveneyed - Tumblr Blog

Missing Cat

Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x f!reader (Modern AU)

Summary: You find a missing cat that belongs to a certain Targaryen. During the time which takes you to find the owner, Vhagar becomes attached to you, so now Aemond must deal with sharing her with you.

a/n: I had this in my drafts waiting for Aemond to come back in the show and him down and his dragon flying away was perfect for this!

The first time you saw Vhagar, she was a lump of storm clouds curled against the concrete base of your building, so still you almost mistook her for a discarded sweater. It was late autumn, that particular gray hour when the sun gives up and the streetlights haven’t quite decided to take over, and you were fumbling for your keys with cold-stiff fingers when the lump moved.

Not a sweater. A cat. A massive, ancient-looking cat the color of woodsmoke and iron, with a face like a disappointed dowager countess who had seen empires rise and fall. Her fur was thick and slightly ruffled, the way old velvet gets when it’s been stored wrong, and she was watching you with enormous yellow-green eyes that seemed to hold entire centuries in their depths.

“Hello,” you said, because you were the kind of person who talked to animals automatically, even when they looked at you like that.

The cat opened her mouth and yowled.

It wasn’t a meow. It wasn’t even a proper cat sound. It was a declaration, a demand, a rusty hinge of a noise that seemed to ask where you had been and why you hadn’t brought tribute. She stood up, stretched with the deliberate slowness of a creature that had never needed to hurry for anyone, and padded directly toward you.

“Do you belong to someone here?” you asked, looking at the entrance to your apartment building. The cat wound herself around your ankles with surprising force for something so elderly, nearly knocking you off balance. Her fur was cold from the outside air, and when you bent down to touch her, you felt the frail architecture of age beneath the thick coat, shoulder blades too prominent, a spine like a string of beads.

She had a collar. Good leather, emerald green, with what looked like real gold hardware. But there was no tag. No phone number. No name.

“Someone’s looking for you,” you murmured, scratching behind one ragged ear. The cat closed her eyes and leaned into your hand with the air of someone accepting their due. “Come on, then. Let’s get you inside.”

You opened the door and she walked in ahead of you like she owned the place, which was probably how she walked into every room she’d ever entered. The lobby was empty. You expected her to head for one of the apartment doors on the ground floor, to indicate somehow where she lived, but instead she sat down in the exact center of the lobby and began grooming her flank with the meticulous disdain of someone who had been terribly inconvenienced.

“Right,” you said. “Not helpful.”

You waited. The cat groomed. The elevator went up and came back down empty. Someone’s mail was sticking out of box 3B. The radiators clanked.

“Okay,” you said finally. “I have to go up. If you’re still here tomorrow, we’ll figure something out.”

She paused mid-lick to give you a look that said she had never been dismissed in her life and wasn’t about to start now.

She was still there when you got back from work the next day. Not in the lobby, outside again, on the same patch of concrete, curled into the exact same shape as if she’d never moved. The November dark had settled in thick and cold, her fur was beaded with the beginnings of frost, it made your chest clench.

“Absolutely not,” you told her, scooping her up before you could think better of it. She was heavier than she looked, a dense warm weight in your arms, and she made a sound like a creaking door as you carried her inside. “You’re coming upstairs. You’re eating something. We’re figuring out who you belong to.”

She didn’t struggle. She settled against your shoulder like she’d been doing this for a thousand years, her purr starting up low and rough like a motor that hadn’t been run in a while. Her claws kneaded gently into your coat, catching on the wool.

Your apartment was small. One bedroom, a galley kitchen, a living room that doubled as a dining room that doubled as an office. The cat surveyed it from the threshold with an expression you could only describe as politely appalled.

“It’s not much,” you said defensively, setting her down. “But it’s warm.”

She sniffed the baseboard. She investigated the corner where the radiator met the wall. She walked into the kitchen and sat down in front of the refrigerator with the clear expectation that it would open for her.

“What do you even eat?” you muttered, opening the fridge and scanning your meager contents. You didn’t have cat food. You didn’t have anything that seemed cat-appropriate. But you did have milk, and you did have a package of those cheap hot dogs from a supermarket.

“This is probably terrible for you,” you said, boiling one anyway and cutting it into small pieces, pouring a bowl of milk. “But you look like you’ve survived worse.”

She ate like she’d never seen food before. She drank the milk in laps. She looked up at you with a milk-white mustache on her gray muzzle and made a sound that resembled approval.

“You’re welcome,” you said, and sat down on the floor beside her.

You put up posters in the neighborhood: FOUND CAT, with a photo that didn’t do her justice and your phone number at the bottom. You posted in the local lost pet groups. You took her to a vet to check for a microchip, but there was nothing, which the vet found strange given the obvious quality of her collar.

“This is full-grain Italian leather,” the vet said, turning the collar over in her hands. “And the hardware is eighteen-karat gold plated. Someone spent a lot of money on this cat.”

“But no tag,” you said.

“But no tag,” the vet agreed. “Some people just assume their animals will never get out. Especially indoor cats. How’s she been eating?”

“Everything,” you said. “Anything. I gave her the crusts from my grilled cheese yesterday and she acted like it was a five-star meal.”

The vet laughed. “At her age, that’s a good sign. She’s healthy, just old. Very old. Probably fifteen, maybe older. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

So you did. You bought proper cat food eventually, the decent mid-range kind from the grocery store, and she ate it with the same enthusiasm she’d shown for the hot dogs and the milk and the leftover tuna salad. She slept on your bed every night. She sat in the window and watched the street below. You started calling her Lady, for lack of anything better, she ignored it with the same regal indifference she showed to everything else.

“You’re someone’s, aren’t you?” you said one evening, scratching under her chin while she purred like a broken generator. “Someone filthy rich.”

She closed her eyes and leaned into your hand, offering no answers.

You found the flyer on a Tuesday morning in early December, taped to a lamppost two blocks from your work office. The paper was thick and slightly glossy, the kind of paper that cost money, and the photo printed on it was clearly professional, the same gray cat, the same yellow-green eyes, but photographed against a dark background with studio lighting that made her look like a painting.

MISSING: VHAGAR, the flyer read. $7,000 REWARD FOR SAFE RETURN.

There was a phone number. That was all. No name. Just the cat’s name, the reward, and a number.

Vhagar. You tested the name in your mouth as you walked home, the flyer clutched in your cold hand. It sounded ancient. Mythological. Exactly the kind of name someone would give a cat who wore eighteen-karat gold on her collar and had professional photographs taken of her.

“Your name is Vhagar,” you told the cat when you got home. She was sprawled across your pillow in a pose of magnificent indolence, one paw draped over her eyes. At the sound of the name, her tail twitched. “That’s you, isn’t it? Vhagar.”

She lifted her head and looked at you, and for the first time since you’d found her, she let out a proper meow, short and declarative, as if to say finally, you’ve figured it out.

You sat down on the edge of your bed. Seven thousand dollars. That was two months of rent. That was the dental work you’d been putting off. That was breathing room, actual breathing room, the kind you hadn’t had since you’d moved to this city with its brutal rents and its casual cruelties and its complete indifference to whether you sank or swam.

But it wasn’t the money that made you pull out your phone. It was the way she’d been shivering on the concrete. The way someone had loved her enough to buy her that collar and take those photos and offer seven thousand dollars no questions asked, but not enough to put a tag on her. Not enough to think she might ever leave.

You typed the number into your phone before you could talk yourself out of it.

He answered on the second ring.

“Yes.”

Not hello. Not who is this. Just yes, flat and dry as old paper, a voice that expected the world to get to the point and not waste his time.

“Hi,” you said, suddenly aware that you hadn’t planned what to say. “I’m calling about the cat. The flyer. Vhagar. I think I have her.”

A pause. Just long enough to make you check if the call had dropped.

“Proof,” the voice said. “Send me proof.”

“What kind of...“

“A video that shows she’s alive and unharmed and actually in your possession.”

The demand was clipped, almost cold, and you felt a spike of irritation. You were doing him a favor. You could have kept the cat. You could have ignored the flyer entirely. But you swallowed your pride because seven thousand dollars was seven thousand dollars, and you’d already decided.

“Do you have Whatsapp or something with this number?” you asked, “I’ll send a video.”

He said yes and hung up without saying goodbye.

“Charming,” you muttered to the cat. Vhagar yawned, showing a pink mouth.

You recorded a thirty-second video of Vhagar on your bed, demonstrating that she was indeed alive and unharmed and being gently scratched behind the ears by someone who was not a cat thief. You sent it to the number. Thirty seconds later, your phone buzzed.

That’s her. Where can we meet?

You looked up the name attached to the number, of course. You weren’t stupid. You were about to meet a stranger from the internet to return a cat worth seven thousand dollars, and you wanted to know what you were walking into.

His name was Aemond Targaryen. The social media profile that came up was locked down tight: private, no profile picture, just the name and a cover photo of what looked like a dragon from some fantasy series. You scrolled anyway, finding nothing, until you thought to try LinkedIn.

His LinkedIn profile was not private.

The photo hit you first: a man in his twenties, maybe, with sharp cheekbones and jawlines like cut glass and hair so pale it was almost silver, pulled back from his face. He was wearing a dark suit and looking slightly to the left of the camera with an expression of controlled impatience, like he’d been forced to sit for the photograph and was counting the seconds until he could leave.

Below the photo was a wall of text. Degrees. Certifications. Projects. Internships at companies you’d seen on the news. A master’s degree. A bachelor’s from some private university in Oldtown. Fluent in four languages. Currently serving as Vice President of Strategic Operations at Targaryen Industries, which a quick search revealed to be a multinational conglomerate dealing in everything from real estate to renewable energy to defense contracting.

Old money. Very, very old money. The kind of money that had its own Wikipedia page and several unflattering investigative journalism pieces.

“You belong to him?” you asked Vhagar, who had climbed onto your laptop keyboard and was slowly erasing several paragraphs of an email you’d been drafting. “You belong to a billionaire’s son with a dragon fixation and cheekbones that could cut glass?”

Vhagar purred smugly and stepped on the delete key.

The meeting place was outside a high-rise in city center that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated poor people. All black glass and angular steel, a lobby visible through the ground-floor windows that contained more marble than the average museum. A doorman in a uniform stood at attention by the revolving doors.

Aemond Targaryen was waiting on the sidewalk.

He looked exactly like his LinkedIn photo and nothing like it at all. The photo had captured his bone structure but missed everything else: the way he held himself like a blade, the way his one visible eye tracked movement with unsettling precision, the way the left side of his face bore a long, pale scar that cut through his eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline. He was wearing a long black coat that probably cost as much as the cat’s reward, and he was looking at the cat carrier in your hands with an expression you couldn’t quite read.

“Vhagar,” he said, and his voice was different now, still dry, still clipped, but with something underneath it that you recognized. You’d made that sound yourself, sometimes, when you came home to find Lady waiting for you on the pillow. Relief, maybe. Or something close to it.

“She’s fine,” you said, setting the carrier down. “She’s been eating well. Sleeping a lot. She’s very…opinionated.”

He crouched down, actually crouched, in his thousand-dollar coat on the sidewalk, and opened the carrier door. Vhagar emerged with the slow dignity of a dowager queen descending from her carriage, and when she saw him, she made a sound that was almost a chirp. She headbutted his hand. She allowed him to pick her up, tucking her massive gray body against his chest like she’d been doing it all her life. Which, you supposed, she had.

“Where did you find her?” he asked, not looking at you. His attention was entirely on the cat, his long fingers stroking through her fur with a gentleness that seemed at odds with everything else about him.

“Outside my building. She was sleeping on the concrete.”

His jaw tightened. “How long?”

“About three weeks ago.”

He didn’t say anything. His hand stilled on Vhagar’s back. Then he pulled out his phone, tapped the screen a few times, and your own phone buzzed in your pocket.

“The reward,” he said. “Thank you for returning her.”

You checked your banking app. Seven thousand dollars, transferred and pending.

“Right,” you said. “Well. Take care of her. And maybe…put a tag on her collar next time.”

He looked at you then. Actually looked at you, his single visible eye, the other was covered by a swoop of hair but seemed to be a glass prosthetic, you weren’t sure, fixing on your face with an intensity that made you want to step backward. His eye was violet. A pale, impossible shade of purple that you had assumed was contacts until you were standing three feet away from him and could see the way the light hit it.

“She has never run away before,” he said, and it sounded almost like an accusation. As if you had somehow lured his ancient cat away from her penthouse and convinced her to live on hot dogs and milk.

“Well,” you said again, because his stare was unnerving, “she’s home now.”

He didn’t thank you again. He turned and walked into the building, Vhagar draped over his shoulder like a fur stole, the doorman holding the door for him with a murmured “Mr. Targaryen” that you caught on the wind.

You stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer, the December cold seeping through your coat, and then you went home.

You assumed that was the end of it. You had your money, he had his cat, and your worlds had brushed against each other for exactly long enough to complete a transaction. You unfollowed the lost pet groups. You washed Vhagar’s fur off your pillowcases. You tried to ignore the way your apartment felt quieter now, emptier, the absence of her rumbling purr leaving a gap in the dark that you hadn’t expected to miss.

Four days later, your phone buzzed with a message from an unsaved number.

What did you do to my cat?

You stared at the screen. You had not saved his number but you had not deleted the chat.

Sorry?, you typed back.

The response came immediately. Vhagar. She won’t eat. She refuses her food. What were you feeding her?

You tried to remember. Milk? Boiled sausages? Some tuna. The vet said she was healthy.

The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Then your phone started ringing.

“Milk,” Aemond Targaryen said when you answered, his voice flat with barely contained outrage. “You fed a fifteen-year-old purebred Persian cat milk and boiled sausages?”

“She liked them,” you said defensively. “She ate them right up. What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” he said, “is that Vhagar’s normal diet consists of sustainably sourced Beluga caviar, free-range quail eggs, and a fish broth reduction that my family’s private chef prepares fresh every three days. She has never eaten processed meat in her life. She has certainly never consumed grocery store milk. And now she is sitting in front of her bowl looking at me as if I have personally betrayed her by serving her the same food she has happily eaten for fifteen years.”

You sat down on your bed. “She ate Beluga caviar? Like, the stuff that costs hundreds of dollars an ounce?”

“That’s not the point.”

“It kind of feels like the point.”

He made a sound of pure frustration, not quite a growl, not quite a sigh. “The point is that she’s refusing to eat. She’s refusing to eat and she’s refusing to come when I call her and she spent the entire morning glaring at me from the top of her custom-built cat tower, which, I might add, has three separate levels and a water feature.”

You tried to picture Vhagar, your Lady, who had slept on a spare pillow and eaten crusts off your plate, in a climate-controlled cat tower with a water feature. The image wouldn’t resolve.

“Have you tried…playing with her?” you asked.

“She doesn’t play,” Aemond said, as if you’d suggested she do her own taxes. “I throw her the toy mouse from Hermès and she demolishes it. That’s not playing. That’s destruction.”

“What about cardboard boxes?”

Silence. Long, profound silence, broken only by the faint sound of Vhagar yowling in the background.

“Cardboard boxes,” he repeated, his voice dangerously quiet.

“Yeah. You know. The things stuff gets shipped in? Cats love them. She went absolutely feral for the box my Amazon order came in. I put an old towel in it and she slept there for three days.”

“You want me,” Aemond Targaryen said, each word precise and clipped, “to give a member of my family, a cat who has been passed down through three generations, who has her own room in our estate, who has been photographed for Architectural Digest, a cardboard box?”

“I mean, it can’t hurt?”

Another long pause. The background yowling grew louder.

“This is absurd,” he said, and hung up.

The cardboard box apparently worked, because two days later he messaged you again. Not a call this time, a text, long and oddly formal, like a business proposal that had been written through gritted teeth.

Vhagar has been eating again. The box was…effective. However, she seems to have developed an attachment to your presence during her time away. She has been restless. The veterinarian suggested she may benefit from continued exposure to you as a source of environmental enrichment, which is a phrase I cannot believe I am typing. I am prepared to offer you a weekly retainer to visit and spend time with her. The compensation would be commensurate with your trouble.

Attached was a number that made your eyes water.

You read the message three times. You thought about the seven thousand dollars already sitting in your savings account. You thought about the way Vhagar had looked at you when you handed her over, that yellow-green stare that had seemed to say this isn’t over. You thought about Aemond Targaryen’s voice on the phone, dry and furious and somehow, despite everything, deeply concerned about a fifteen-year-old cat who missed you.

“This is insane,” you said to your empty apartment.

But you typed back: When do I start?

The first visit was awkward. Aemond’s apartment, if you could call a space that occupied nearly an entire floor of a high-rise an apartment, was a cathedral of minimalist wealth, all pale wood and pale stone and pale furniture that looked like it had never been sat on. Vhagar greeted you at the door with a yowl that seemed to say finally, you’ve arrived, and immediately led you to her custom cat tower, which was indeed three stories tall and featured a tiny chandelier.

“She’s been waiting by the door since this morning,” Aemond said. He was standing in the doorway of what appeared to be a library, dressed in a dark sweater that did nothing to soften the angles of his face. “I don’t understand why.”

“She’s a cat,” you said, sitting cross-legged on the heated marble floor while Vhagar climbed into your lap. “They’re mysterious.”

“She’s never sat in anyone’s lap but mine. And my mother’s. And occasionally my sister’s, though that ended badly.”

“What happened?”

“My sister is allergic. She found out when Vhagar sat on her face.”

You laughed. You couldn’t help it. Aemond was watching you with an expression that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t not one either, a slight softening around his mouth, a tilt to his head that made him look more like a person.

“Tea?” he asked, and it sounded almost reluctant, like the offer had escaped without his permission.

“Sure,” you said. “Tea would be great.”

Every Saturday, you took the train and spent the afternoon in Aemond Targaryen’s penthouse, ostensibly to entertain a cat who spent most of her time ignoring you in favor of her cardboard box. But Aemond was always there, hovering, appearing with cups of tea that grew progressively more elaborate, then plates of food that started as simple snacks and evolved into full meals.

“You said you’ve been eating bread and cheese for dinner,” he said one evening, setting a plate of something that looked like it belonged in a Michelin-starred restaurant on the coffee table in front of you. “That’s not nutritious.”

“I’m aware,” you said, but you ate it anyway, and it was the best thing you’d ever tasted.

He started finding reasons to extend your visits. A new toy for Vhagar to try. A documentary about Chartreux cats he thought you should watch. An outing to a cat café that he claimed was for research purposes but that mostly involved him standing in the corner looking deeply uncomfortable while cats climbed all over you.

“You’re not a cat person,” you observed, as a calico tried to scale his leg.

“I’m a Vhagar person,” he corrected, gently removing the calico and placing it on the floor. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“I’m beginning to think there might be,” he said, and then he turned away before you could ask what he meant.

Winter turned into spring. Your Saturday visits turned into Saturday visits plus occasional Wednesday dinners plus a standing invitation to a Sunday morning walk in a park, which Aemond claimed was for Vhagar’s benefit even though Vhagar never actually walked. He texted you articles about cat behavior and screenshots of Vhagar doing mundane things with captions like She sat in the box again. I don’t understand and The chef wants to know if she can have the sausage recipe.

“There’s no recipe,” you told him. “You boil them.”

“I told him that. He didn’t believe me.”

He started asking about your life. Your job. Your family. The things you cared about and the things you were afraid of and the things you wanted but had never let yourself reach for. He listened carefully, his pale eye fixed on your face, his sharp features softening in increments so small you almost didn’t notice them until one day you looked at him and realized you couldn’t remember why you’d ever found him cold.

Vhagar, for her part, seemed entirely unimpressed with the whole arrangement. She spent most of your visits asleep in her cardboard box, a new one now, because Aemond had his assistant procure them weekly, and only occasionally deigned to acknowledge your presence with a slow blink or a rumbling purr.

“She likes you,” Aemond said one evening, watching the cat knead her claws into an old towel.

“She tolerates me.”

“No.” He shook his head, his gaze still fixed on Vhagar. “She likes you. She’s particular. She doesn’t tolerate anyone she doesn’t like. She bit my brother once. Drew blood.”

“What did your brother do?”

“Breathed too loudly, I think.”

You laughed, Aemond glanced at you, and the expression on his face was something you’d never seen before, open, almost unguarded, his mouth curved into the ghost of a smile that transformed his severe features into startlingly beautiful.

“I’m glad you found her,” he said quietly. “The cat. I’m glad you found her.”

“Me too,” you said, and you weren’t entirely sure you were talking about the cat anymore.

Vhagar yawned, stretched, and went back to sleep, indifferent to everything but the warmth of the room and the comfort of her box.

You learned the layout of his penthouse the way you'd once learned the streets of your neighborhood, by heart, by instinct, by the slow accretion of familiarity that turns the unfamiliar into home.

You learned other things, too. That Aemond took his coffee black but would drink tea if you made it. That he read three books a month and annotated them in a spidery, elegant script. That he had a brother he never mentioned and a sister he mentioned only in passing and a mother who called him every Sunday at precisely eleven in the morning, which he answered without fail even if he was in the middle of a sentence. That his left eye, the one always covered, the one the scar bisected, was a wound he carried with him everywhere, a quiet grief he never spoke about directly but that shaped the way he moved through rooms, always keeping his right side to the door.

You learned about Alys by accident.

It was a Saturday in late March, the kind of day that pretends to be spring but still bites with winter's teeth, and you had arrived at the penthouse to find Aemond already pulling on his coat.

"Something's come up," he said, and his voice had that clipped quality it got when he was trying not to show frustration. "I have to go out of town. I'll be back Monday."

"Okay," you said, hanging your own coat on the hook he'd cleared for you weeks ago. "Do you want me to come back then, or..."

"No." He paused, his hands stilling on his scarf. "I was hoping you could stay with Vhagar. She gets…unsettled when I'm gone too long."

The last time he'd gone out of town, a business trip to Westerlands, three days, he'd called you twice a day with updates on Vhagar's mood and appetite. You hadn't minded. The money was good, and honestly, you'd grown fond of the old cat's cranky companionship.

"Sure," you said. "Where are you going?"

"Riverlands."

You waited for elaboration. None came.

"That's…specific."

He didn't meet your eyes. "Alys lives there. She doesn't like the city."

The name landed in your chest like a stone hurled. Alys. A woman's name, spoken with a familiarity that suggested it had been in his mouth many times before. You realized, with a strange hollow feeling, that he'd never mentioned her. Not once. In all those afternoons and evenings and Sunday walks, he'd never said a word about a girlfriend waiting for him in some small town hours away.

"I didn't know you were seeing someone," you said, and you were proud of how neutral your voice came out.

"It's complicated." He adjusted his scarf, still not looking at you. "We've been together for a while. She prefers her independence. I prefer…" He trailed off, a muscle jumping in his jaw. "It works."

"Right," you said. "Well. Go. Vhagar and I will be fine."

He finally looked at you then, something unreadable flickering across his features. "Thank you," he said, and left.

The penthouse felt different without him. Larger, certainly, all those minimalist rooms spreading out around you like a museum after hours. But also quieter in a way that felt less peaceful and more hollow. Vhagar seemed to sense it too; she followed you from room to room with more persistence than usual, her ragged meow punctuating the silence.

You did what you always did when you were catsitting: you sat on the heated floor with Vhagar in your lap, you watched your shows that Aemond pretended to disdain but always ended up commenting on, you ate from the refrigerator that his private chef kept stocked with things you couldn't pronounce. But your mind kept circling back to the name. Alys. The way he'd said it: flat, contained, like a fact he'd long since stopped examining.

On Sunday morning, the house phone rang at half past eleven. You let it ring. The answering machine beeped. A woman's voice which you assumed belonged to his mother, given the time, came through:

Aemond, I've spoken with the surgeon. He has an opening in April. Answer your phone.

Surgeon. April. Cold settled in your stomach.

When Aemond returned on Monday evening, he looked tired in a way that went beyond travel fatigue. His coat was rumpled, his hair escaping its usual careful restraint, his mouth set in a thin line that softened only slightly when Vhagar waddled over to greet him.

"Good trip?" you asked, gathering your things.

"Fine."

"How's Alys?"

The pause was a beat too long. "Fine."

"She must be something," you said carefully, "to keep you driving hours every time you have a free weekend."

He didn't take the bait. He just bent down to scratch Vhagar's chin, his expression shuttered. "She's very busy. Her practice takes up most of her time."

"Practice?"

"Traditional medicine. Herbalism. Holistic healing." He said it without irony, without skepticism, as if a woman who made her living selling tinctures and salves was the most natural thing in the world for a man with multiple advanced degrees and a vice presidency at a multinational corporation. "She's very skilled."

"I'm sure she is," you said, and left before you could say something you'd regret.

After that, you started noticing things.

The way Aemond's phone would buzz and he'd check it immediately, his expression flickering. The way he'd disappear into his study for hours, his voice a low murmur behind the closed door, emerging with that same tired look he'd worn coming back from Riverlands. The way he never texted Alys, or if he did, she never texted back, because every communication seemed to require a phone call, a ritual, a set-aside block of time he guarded fiercely.

"She doesn't like texting," he explained once, when you'd commented on the absurdity of him scheduling a two-hour call in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. "She finds it impersonal."

You thought about the string of unanswered texts on your own phone: friends from college, coworkers, the guy you'd gone on two dates with last month before he'd ghosted you, and wondered what it would be like to have someone so devoted to you that they'd carve out hours of their day just to hear your voice, while you couldn't be bothered to send a single line of text back.

"She must be very special," you said.

"She is." But he said it the way someone might recite a fact they'd memorized rather than a truth they felt in their bones.

The pieces assembled themselves slowly over weeks. Alys was older than him. Alys had a practice in a small town hours from the city. Alys refused to move, refused to visit, refused to integrate herself into his life in any way that required effort on her part. Alys gave him just enough to keep him coming back: a phone call, a weekend, a jar of something homemade that he'd place on his kitchen counter and stare at with an expression that made your chest ache.

He was too smart for this. That was the thing that got you, the thing that lodged under your ribs like a splinter. Aemond Targaryen, with his degrees and his four languages and his portfolio of accomplishments that would have been impressive for a man twice his age, was being strung along by someone who couldn't even be bothered to answer a text message. And he accepted it. He accepted it like it was all he deserved, like affection was a currency that could only be earned through suffering, like love was something you had to bleed for. You suspected he was taught to fish out flirts and gold diggers easily, but he hadn't been taught to examine his emotinal needs.

You saw it in the way he was with Vhagar, too. The cat tolerated him at best: she allowed his attention, accepted his offerings of caviar and quail eggs, but rarely sought him out the way she sought you. And yet he adored her. He planned his schedule around her meals. He commissioned custom furniture for her comfort. He spoke about her like she was a revered ancestor, which, in his family, she practically was.

And you. You, who had been hired as a catsitter and somehow become something more: a fixture in his home, a recipient of his cooking, his concern and his increasingly frequent glances that lingered just a moment too long. You, who he'd started looking at like you were precious, unexpected, something he hadn't known he was allowed to want.

The pattern was right there, written in the architecture of his life: Aemond Targaryen attached himself to people who barely tolerated him, and he called it love because he didn't know what else to call it.

The call came on a Thursday in late April.

"I need you to take Vhagar," Aemond said, his voice strained in a way you'd never heard before. "For several days. A week, maybe. Can you do that?"

You were at work, hunched over your desk with a spreadsheet blurring in front of your eyes. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just...I have a procedure tomorrow, and I won't be able to care for her."

"Procedure?" Your stomach dropped. "What kind of procedure?"

A pause. You could hear him breathing, slow and controlled, the way he breathed when he was trying to keep himself together. "My eye. My mother found a surgeon. Another one. He thinks there's a chance."

The word another hit you like a punch. How many surgeries had there been? How many times had he gone under the knife, hoping for something that never came?

"I'll come to pick her up," you asnwered.

When you arrived at the penthouse, the doorman let you up without question, you were on the permanent access list now, a fact that still felt surreal every time you thought about it, and Aemond was waiting at the door.

He looked terrible.

His face was pale. His left eye, the one that was always covered, was visible now, hair finally brushed back. He was holding himself very still, very straight, the posture of someone who had learned long ago to carry pain without showing it.

"Before you say anything," he said, "I'm fine."

"You're having surgery."

"Another surgery. They're all the same." He stepped aside to let you in. "My mother is optimistic. She's always optimistic. The surgeon says there's a thirty percent chance of partial vision restoration, which means there's a seventy percent chance of nothing at all. I've made my peace with it. She hasn't."

You followed him into the living room, where Vhagar was sprawled in her cardboard box, a new one, large and rectangular, with a towel that had been arranged just so. She blinked at you slowly and didn't get up.

"When is it?" you asked.

"Tomorrow morning. Early. I have a car picking me up at five."

"You're going alone?"

The question seemed to confuse him. "Yes. Who else would go with me?"

You thought about Alys, somewhere in Riverlands, mixing her herbs and ignoring her phone. You thought about his mother, who had arranged the surgery but apparently not her schedule to be there for it. You thought about his siblings, who he never spoke about.

"I could go with you," you said, before you could stop yourself.

Surprise flickered across his face. "That's not necessary. You're here for Vhagar."

"Vhagar can come. She's a cat. She'll sleep through the whole thing."

"Vhagar in a hospital waiting room?"

"Fine, not in the waiting room. But I can still go. You shouldn't be alone."

He looked at you for a long moment, his good eye searching your face. "Why?" he asked finally. The question sounded genuine, as if he truly couldn't fathom why anyone would offer him comfort without being asked.

"Because that's what people do," you said. "They show up for each other."

"Ah." He turned away, busying himself with a stack of papers on the kitchen counter. "I appreciate the offer. Truly. But I've been doing this alone for a long time. I know how to handle my own treatment. Take Vhagar. I'll call you when I'm home."

You took Vhagar. You packed her into her carrier, which was, of course, custom-made leather with a monogrammed cushion, and you carried her down to the lobby and out to the street, and you stood there on the sidewalk for a full minute before you turned around and went back inside.

Aemond was still in the kitchen when you walked back in, Vhagar's carrier swinging from your hand. He looked up, his expression shifting from surprise to confusion to what that looked almost like relief before he shut it down.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm staying," you set the carrier down and opened it. Vhagar emerged with an indignant yowl and immediately headed for her cardboard box. "You shouldn't be alone, and I'm not letting you send me home just because you're too stubborn to admit you need help."

"The guest room is made up," he said, his voice was very quiet.

"Good. I'm ordering takeout. What do you want?"

"I have a list of approved restaurants in the drawer."

"Of course you do."

The surgery happened. You didn't go with him, he insisted, and you could tell it was important to him, this one last bastion of self-sufficiency, but you were there when he came back, pale and shaking and trying very hard to pretend he wasn't. The bandage was fresh, the swelling worse, and he walked through the door like a soldier returning from a battle he'd already known he would lose.

"Thirty percent," he said, lowering himself onto the couch carefully. "We'll know in a few weeks."

"The guest room is very nice," you said. "Also I made breakfast."

"You made breakfast?"

"Don't sound so surprised. I can cook some things. Eggs. Toast. Coffee. The basics."

He ate the eggs and the toast. He drank the coffee. Then he fell asleep on the couch, his head tilted back against the cushions, his bandaged eye turned toward the ceiling, and you covered him with a blanket and sat in the armchair across from him and watched the afternoon light move across his face.

Vhagar jumped onto his lap and settled there, a warm gray weight, he didn't wake up.

You stayed longer. Aemond was supposed to be resting, but resting turned out to mean pacing the penthouse at odd hours, staring out the windows, picking at the meals you ordered from his list of approved restaurants because apparently your culinary skills didn't extend past breakfast.

"I can make pasta," you offered on the third day, when he was eyeing a container of takeout Thai with the expression of someone who had eaten too much takeout Thai. "It won't be good pasta, but it'll be pasta."

"I don't trust your definition of pasta."

"It comes from a box. You boil it. You put sauce on it."

"Sauce from a jar?"

"Sauce from a jar," you confirmed.

He looked genuinely pained. "Order from the place on 57th. The one with the green awning. They know my order."

"Of course they do."

That evening, as you were eating pasta that had definitely never seen the inside of a jar, you decided to ask the question that had been sitting in your throat for days.

"Does Alys know you had surgery?"

Aemond's fork paused halfway to his mouth. "I mentioned it."

"You mentioned it."

"We talked last night. She's sending a jar of her salve. For the inflammation." He said it matter-of-factly, as if this were a perfectly normal response to your partner undergoing eye surgery. "She says it's very effective. Arnica, mostly, with some other herbs. She grows them herself."

"She's not coming to visit?"

He set his fork down. "She doesn't like the city. I told you."

"She doesn't like the city enough to visit her boyfriend after surgery?"

"It's not that simple."

"It seems pretty simple from where I'm sitting."

His jaw tightened, the familiar muscle jumping beneath his skin. "Alys is…she's not like other people. She has her own life, her own practice, her own way of doing things. I knew that when we started this. I accepted it."

"What does she accept about you?"

The question landed harder than you'd intended. His good eye fixed on your face, sharp and suddenly very violet, and for a moment you thought he was going to snap at you, tell you to leave, remind you that you were just the catsitter and this was none of your business.

Instead, he muttered, "I don't know."

You ate in silence after that. Vhagar, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, climbed onto the table and tried to stick her face in Aemond's pasta, and he let her.

At three in the morning, you found him in the living room, sitting in the dark with Vhagar in his lap and the lights of the city spread out below him like a carpet of stars. His bandage glowed white in the dimness, he didn't turn when you came in, just kept staring out the window with an expression that made something twist painfully in your chest.

"Can't sleep?" you asked, settling into the armchair beside him.

"The pain medication wears off around two. I'm used to it."

"That's not what I asked."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "I keep thinking about what you said. At dinner."

"I said a lot of things at dinner."

"About what she accepts." He turned to look at you, even in the darkness, even with half his face covered in gauze, the intensity of his gaze made it hard to breathe. "I don't think she accepts anything about me. I think she tolerates me. And I've spent so long thinking that was the same thing."

"It's not," you said.

"No. It's not." He looked back out the window. "Vhagar tolerates me. But she chose you. When she ran away, she found you, and she stayed. She doesn't do that for anyone."

"She stayed for the hot dogs."

"She stayed for you." His voice was barely above a whisper. "I think I understand why now."

Vhagar purred in his lap. The distance between your chair and the couch felt impossibly vast and impossibly small all at once, a gap that could be crossed in two steps or two years depending on whether either of you had the courage to move.

"She's not coming," Aemond said. "Alys. She's not coming, and I don't think I mind as much as I should."

"How do you feel about it?"

He was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough, scraped raw, the voice of someone admitting the truth against his will.

"Relieved," he said. "I feel relieved."

You sat in silence, keeping him company in the small hours of the morning until the sky began to pale and Vhagar yawned and stretched and demanded her breakfast.

Part 2: coming soon...

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