[stellav1va]

Find Your Way Around <3

Tzuyuluvs -> stellav1va

Disclaimer - These works are only fiction. They are not real and do not represent the idol/character(s) I wrote about. This is purely what I think about them/their personalities and what fits my story the best.

❥ masterlists | wips | about me | dni | rules | tags | anons |

❥ I am 19, there will be no smut on this blog but I do have a separate one just for that.

I support Palestine. This is a fuck Israel blog.

<3

[stellav1va]

birthday girl 🥳🥳

[wild-imagines-and-stories]

The Crown, the King, and the Game

Pairing: Joffrey Baratheon/Lannister x wife!reader (or the beginnings of one maybe)

Genre: Slight Angst???

Warnings: None

WC: 4,449

Main Fanfiction Masterlist

A/N: If anyone is interested, I am willing to do a Part 2 of this story as it does have an ending that suggests that it could have a Part 2! Just let me know if you are interested and I will definitely work on a Part 2 when I can/am able too! Other than that, enjoy the story!!!

The heavy gold crown sitting on your head presses relentlessly against your brow.

It’s been there for hours now, yet somehow you’ve not grown accustomed to its weight.

If anything, it seems to become heavier with every passing moment.

The circlet itself is exquisite.

Of course it is.

Nothing surrounding the royal family of Westeros is permitted to be anything less.

Gold has been painstakingly shaped into delicate curling points around your head, each one decorated with tiny gemstones that catch the candlelight whenever you move. Rubies burn like droplets of blood between polished diamonds and small black stones making the combination a careful joining of Baratheon gold and Lannister crimson into something designed to announce wealth, power, and permanence.

To everyone looking upon you, it must be magnificent.

To you, it feels almost like a shackle.

One particularly sharp edge presses against the tender skin near your temple while another digs faintly into your hair.

Your scalp aches beneath the elaborate hairstyle your ladies spent nearly two hours constructing this morning, pinning, twisting and braiding your hair until every strand lay exactly where it was supposed to.

You don’t touch it. You don’t shift. You don’t complain.

A queen doesn’t fidget. A queen doesn’t grimace. A queen doesn’t reach up in the middle of her own wedding feast and tear the beautiful golden crown from her head simply because it feels as though it weighs as much as the Iron Throne itself.

So you sit perfectly still in your elaborate chair with our back straight, your shoulders relaxed, your chin remains lifted at precisely the angle your Septa spent years drilling into you and your hands rest delicately together in your lap beneath the enormous royal table, where no one can see how tightly your fingers are intertwined.

Every movement you make is measured. Every breath you take is controlled. Every expression you make is carefully chosen.

Because everyone’s watching you.

They’ve been watching you since dawn.

They watched your ladies dress you. They watched you walk through the Sept. They watched you stand beside the king. They watched you speak your vows. They watched the cloak of your father's house be removed from your shoulders. They watched another being placed around them. They watched you become someone else's.

Someone's wife. Someone's queen.

Joffrey's queen.

And now they watch you feast.

The thought causes your fingers to tighten together, but you force them loose again a moment later.

The vows you spoke this morning drift through your memory like something from a dream.

Words repeated before gods and men.

Promises of loyalty. Duty. Marriage. A lifetime.

Promises that sounded ceremonial when the Septon spoke them. Promises that became terrifyingly real when you repeated them.

Promises you cannot take back.

Not now. Not ever.

You sit at the center of the high table in the Great Hall of the Red Keep, positioned exactly where everyone can see you.

Exactly where everyone’s meant to see you.

The king and his new queen.

A picture of royal unity. A promise of stability. A display of power.

Around you, the wedding feast has erupted into such an extravagant celebration that it borders on madness.

The Great Hall is enormous even when empty.

Tonight, packed with hundreds upon hundreds of nobles, knights, servants, musicians, guards, courtiers, ambassadors, and wealthy guests from nearly every corner of the Seven Kingdoms, it feels almost impossibly vast.

Noise crashes against you from every direction.

Music pours down from the gallery overhead. Harps pluck out delicate melodies beneath the shrill, merry cry of pipes while drums pound out lively rhythms that seem to vibrate through the long wooden tables beneath everyone's elbows.

Somewhere farther down the hall, a lute joins the song. Then another.

Someone begins clapping in time. Others quickly follow.

The sound multiplies.

Laughter rises. Goblets strike against tables. Benches scrape across stone. A drunken knight shouts something unintelligible, earning another wave of laughter from his companions.

Above it all, hundreds of candles burn. Iron chandeliers hang from the vaulted ceiling, each crowded with flames. More candles stand in tall silver holders along the tables, their wax dripping slowly toward polished bases.

The flickering light paints everything gold. Gold upon goblets. Gold upon jewelry. Gold upon polished armor. Gold upon embroidered gowns. Gold upon the crown pressing painfully into your head.

Great banners descend from the walls with the crowned stag of House Baratheon and the crimson lion of House Lannister.

Both are symbols of power that tower over everyone gathered beneath them.

The heat is almost unbearable.

Too many bodies. Too many candles. Too many fires. Too much wine.

The enormous hearths blaze along the walls despite the warmth generated by the feast itself, and every time the doors open to admit another servant, a brief current of cooler evening air sweeps through the hall.

You find yourself waiting for those moments.

They’re the only times you feel as though you can breathe.

Servants weave through the chaos with astonishing skill as they carry enormous silver platters balanced upon their shoulders or between both hands.

Roasted boars glazed in honey and surrounded by baked apples. Stuffed capons browned until their skins gleam beneath melted butter. Trout brought fresh from the Blackwater and dressed with herbs. Thick slices of venison. Bowls overflowing with buttered carrots and turnips. Fresh loaves of bread, still steaming when servants tear them apart. Wheels of cheese. Sugared almonds. Blackberry tarts. Lemon cakes. Honey cakes. Cream pastries. Candied plums. Bowls of cherries so red they nearly match the Lannister banners overhead. Pitchers of Arbor Gold disappear almost as quickly as servants can refill them.

Red wine flows even faster.

The smell is overwhelming.

Roasted meat. Fresh bread. Butter. Spices. Smoke. Wine. Perfume. Sweat. Wax. Flowers. Your own scented oils. Joffrey's wine.

Everything mingles into one thick cloud that seems to settle at the back of your throat.

You’ve barely eaten since the feast began.

There’s enough food on the table before you to feed an entire village.

Your plate has been filled three separate times by attentive servants.

You’ve managed perhaps four bites.

Every mouthful turns to ash the moment you try to swallow it.

No one seems to notice. Or perhaps everyone notices.

That possibility is worse.

The Great Hall is filled shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly every important lord and lady in Westeros. And every single one of them smiles at you.

They smile when you look toward them. They smile when you pass them. They smiled during the ceremony. They smiled when you entered the feast beside Joffrey. They smiled when the herald announced you as queen.

Some raise their goblets whenever your gaze passes over them. Others bow their heads respectfully. A few mouth congratulations across the distance.

Beautiful queen. Radiant bride.

A blessed union. A prosperous reign.

Long live the king. Long live the queen.

So many smiles. So many congratulations. So many lies.

Because beneath those smiles, you see something else.

Pity.

You noticed the first pitiful glance during the ceremony.

You told yourself you imagined it before turning your attention back to what was happening.

Then another came.

And another.

Now you see it everywhere.

Some hide it well. Those who have survived King's Landing for many years are particularly skilled at keeping their thoughts buried behind pleasant expressions.

Others are not nearly as practiced. You catch an older lord watching you for several seconds before abruptly lowering his gaze into his wine. A lady seated beside him whispers something behind her hand.

Her husband immediately silences her.

Farther down the table, Lord Tyrell looks toward you.

Your eyes meet.

For the briefest instant, his smile falters. Then his gaze drops.

Lady Olenna Tyrell who sits beside him with Lady Margary on her other side is more difficult to read. The old woman's expression remains sharp and composed as she surveys the feast with the detached interest of someone watching a play whose ending she suspects she already knows.

Eventually her eyes reach you. They linger on you for a moment.

There’s calculation there. Intelligence. Assessment. And, perhaps, for the briefest heartbeat—Sympathy. 

Before it disappears and she turns away.

Lord Varys stands not far from the high table, his hands folded neatly inside the sleeves of his robes.

When you glance toward him, his expression is gentle. Almost kind.

Somehow, that’s worse.

Your stomach tightens.

They know.

All of them.

They all know what your marriage truly means.

Not romance. Not devotion. Not some beautiful song worthy of a bard.

Power. Alliance. Influence.

A queen beside the king. A woman placed carefully onto the great game board of Westeros. Beautiful enough to inspire admiration. Noble enough to strengthen the Crown. Educated enough to stand beside a king. Obedient enough, everyone undoubtedly hopes—to survive him.

Your fingers tighten together beneath the table until your knuckles ache.

You don’t dare unclasp them.

Not yet.

The trembling in your hands hasn’t entirely stopped since the ceremony.

You can hide it beneath the table, but you can’t hide it if you lift your goblet.

So you leave the wine untouched.

Beside you sits your husband.

King Joffrey Baratheon.

Even thinking those words feels strange.

Your husband.

This morning he was your king.

Tonight he’s both.

Joffrey lounges in his smaller ceremonial throne reserved for feasts that’s a bit bigger and taller than yours, looking completely at ease amid the chaos surrounding him.

His crown gleams beneath the candlelight. One leg stretches lazily forward. His fingers curl around a golden goblet filled with dark red wine.

He’s been drinking steadily for most of the evening.

Not enough to dull his senses of course, but it’s enough to sharpen certain parts of him.

You’ve already noticed it.

His laughter comes more easily. His irritation comes faster. His voice grows louder. His patience grows shorter.

You’ve begun watching the goblet almost as carefully as you watch him.

He swirls the wine absently. His lips curve into a smile.

Not warm. Not affectionate.

Satisfied.

Below the dais, two dwarfs dressed in absurdly oversized suits of armor ride tiny ponies around the cleared section of floor. They carry wooden lances. Painted shields hang from their arms.

One bears a crude wolf while the other bears a stag.

Their performance is deliberately ridiculous.

They charge.

Miss. Turn.

Charge again.

One lance strikes a shield with a loud crack.

The audience roars with laughter.

Joffrey leans forward in his chair with laughter that’s even louder than everyone else’s. "Oh, that one nearly had him!"

His voice carries through the room effortlessly.

Several nobles laugh even harder. Whether because they genuinely find the performance amusing or because their king does, you can’t tell.

Perhaps both.

The smaller performer attempts another charge.

His pony veers unexpectedly and he tumbles dramatically from the saddle, crashing into the rushes covering the stone floor.

The hall erupts again.

Joffrey throws his head back.

You feel sick.

Your gaze remains forward.

Don't react.

Your Septa's voice rises from memory. ‘A lady's face belongs to the court before it belongs to herself.’

You always hated that lesson.

Tonight, you understand it.

Don't show disgust. Don't show discomfort. Don't look away too quickly. Don't stare too long. Don't give anyone anything they can use.

You inhale slowly through your nose.

Hold it.

Exhale.

Again.

Your fingers gradually loosen.

You focus on the enormous arrangement of flowers near the center of the table.

White roses. Red roses. Gold ribbon.

Anything except the performers.

Anything except—"You are not eating, my lady wife."

Your entire body stills.

Joffrey's voice isn’t loud.

It doesn’t need to be.

It slices through everything else.

Your heartbeat stutters and for one terrible instant, you wonder how long he’s been watching you.

Slowly, carefully, you turn your head.

Joffrey’s already looking at you.

Not the performers. Not the guests. Not the musicians.

You.

His bright blue eyes are unnervingly focused.

You’ve learned something about his eyes over the past several weeks while preparing for the wedding.

They’re most frightening when he’s quiet.

Anger is obvious. Anger gives warning.

Silence means he’s thinking.

And you never know what conclusion he’ll reach until it’s too late.

His gaze moves briefly toward your untouched plate and goblet of wine before going back to your face. "You've barely touched anything."

His voice sounds almost conversational.

Almost.

You offer him the smallest smile. "I am merely overwhelmed by the grandeur of the occasion, Your Grace."

Your voice is steady.

You’re proud of that.

At least until his expression changes. 

"Overwhelmed?" he asks, with a tilt of his head as he looks directly in your eyes.

He repeats the word slowly.

As though examining it.

"Yes, Your Grace." you nod.

"By my feast?" he questions.

There’s something dangerous in the question.

Your mind moves quickly. Too quickly.

Is he offended? Does he think you dislike it? Does he believe you are criticizing him?

"No." You correct yourself immediately. "Not negatively."

His eyebrow rises.

You continue before he can interrupt. "I have never seen anything quite like it. The musicians, the food, the number of guests..." Your eyes sweep deliberately across the magnificent hall. "It is extraordinary."

That seems to please him.

Slightly.

His mouth curves upward. "As it should be."

"Of course."

"This is a royal wedding."

"Yes."

"My wedding."

The emphasis is subtle but you catch it anyway.

You incline your head. "Our wedding."

For one heartbeat, you fear you may have overstepped.

Then something brightens behind his eyes. "Yes." He smiles. "Our wedding."

Relief barely begins to loosen the knot inside your chest.

Then he reaches for you.

Without warning.

His hand crosses the small space between your chairs.

Long fingers wrap around your wrist.

Your breath catches and you nearly flinch.

Nearly.

Years of training save you.

His grip isn’t painful.

Not yet.

That distinction occurs to you immediately, and you hate that it does.

His fingers circle your wrist firmly.

Possessively.

His thumb settles directly over your pulse point.

Your heart’s racing.

He can feel it.

There’s no possibility that he can’t.

His gaze drops to where he holds you before slowly rising to meet your eyes. "You are frightened."

It’s not a question.

Your mouth goes dry.

You could deny it.

He’d know that it’s a lie.

You could admit it. But that choice could be worse.

So you choose something between the two. 

"I have entered a new life today."

His thumb presses slightly harder against your pulse.

"A new life."

"Yes." you nod.

"As my queen."

"Yes." you nod again.

His eyes narrow thoughtfully. "A queen should not fear."

You remain silent.

"A queen understands responsibility."

"I understand that there is much expected of me."

"There is." His grip on your wrist remains firm. "More than smiling and wearing pretty gowns."

"I know." you agree with a nod.

"Do you?"

You force yourself to meet his eyes. "Yes."

For several long seconds, neither of you speak.

Around you, the wedding feast continues.

Someone calls for another toast.

Goblets rise. A bard begins a song near the lower tables. A serving girl laughs when a drunken lord nearly falls backward from his bench. The dwarfs resume their performance.

Yet all of it feels impossibly distant.

The entire Great Hall seems to narrow until there’s only Joffrey.

Only his eyes. Only his hand around your wrist. Only the frantic beat of your pulse beneath his thumb.

He leans closer.

Not enough to draw obvious attention.

Enough that you smell the wine upon his breath. Enough that his shoulder nearly brushes yours. Enough that only you can hear him.

"This..." His free hand makes a small gesture toward the hall. "This is not merely a celebration."

Your gaze follows his gesture.

Hundreds of nobles. Hundreds of banners. Hundreds of candles.

"It is a display."

You look back at him.

His smile slowly widens. "They need to see strength." His eyes travel over the room. "They need to see wealth." Another gesture. "Power." His gaze returns to you. "Control."

The word settles uneasily inside you.

"They must believe everything is exactly as I desire."

His fingers tighten fractionally around your wrist.

"And now..." He lifts your joined hands slightly. "...you are part of that display."

Your stomach twists.

You swallow carefully. "I understand."

"I wonder if you do."

He speaks almost gently now.

That’s somehow more unsettling.

"You are no longer simply a lady of your father's house."

"No."

"You do not belong to your father's court."

His thumb strokes once across your wrist. "You belong here."

You cannot stop the chill that moves through you.

"You are my queen."

The emphasis is unmistakable.

My.

Not merely queen.

His queen.

"My victories are yours." His gaze never leaves your face. "My enemies are yours." Another slow stroke of his thumb. "My authority..." A pause. "...is yours to uphold."

You nod. "It is a significant responsibility, Your Grace."

Instantly—His expression changes.

The faint amusement disappears.

His jaw tightens. "Joffrey."

You blink.

For a heartbeat, you genuinely don’t understand.

Then his grip tightens. "My name."

His voice remains quiet.

Too quiet.

"When we are alone, you will call me Joffrey."

His gaze flickers toward the nearby members of the Small Council.

Several are very deliberately not looking at you.

"Here as well."

Your heart begins beating faster.

"The court must believe we stand together." He leans closer. "We are husband and wife."

The words should sound intimate.

Instead they sound like a decree.

"You are not some frightened girl addressing her king from across a throne room." His eyes search yours. "You are my wife."

Your lips part.

No sound emerges.

His eyes narrow.

You immediately recover. "Of course..."

The word barely escapes.

Then you force yourself to continue.

"...Joffrey."

As soon as his name leaves your lips, something changes.

His shoulders loosen and the tension in his jaw disappears.

"There." he says, his smile returning. "That wasn't difficult."

You give him a small smile. "No."

"Say it again."

Your stomach drops, but you keep your expression serene. "Joffrey."

His smile widens.

You cannot decide whether he likes hearing his name from you because it suggests intimacy—or because he ordered you to say it.

Perhaps both.

At last he releases your wrist.

Warmth rushes back into your fingers.

You lower your hand beneath the table immediately, your fingertips brushing across the skin. Faint pale marks remain where his fingers pressed into your wrist just moments ago.

They’ll disappear soon.

You hope.

Joffrey’s already turned away.

Just like that.

His mood shifts with startling ease.

One moment he’s interrogating you and the next he appears almost cheerful.

You watch as he reaches toward a silver platter piled high with fruit. His fingers hover over apples, plums, grapes, pears. He selects a ripe red pear before extending it toward you.

"Eat."

You hesitate for no more than a heartbea before you take it from him. "Thank you."

“As I said,” he begins his eyes meeting yours once more. "You cannot appear weak." He gestures toward the hall. "They expect beauty." His gaze moves over your gown. "Confidence." Then your crown. "Power."

His smile becomes strangely youthful.

Almost boyish.

"And my queen will give them exactly that."

You look down at the pear.

Your stomach rebels at the thought of food. But you lift it and take a small bite nonetheless.

Sweet juice touches your tongue.

Joffrey watches until you swallow. Then nods approvingly. "Better."

You take another bite.

You’ve never worked so hard to eat a piece of fruit.

Then—A young page hurries too close to the royal table.

He can’t be older than twelve.

Perhaps thirteen.

His arms tremble beneath the weight of a large silver pitcher.

Someone calls out to him, clearly wanting more wine.

He turns toward them too quickly and the pitcher tilts.

Wine sloshes dangerously close to the rim.

The boy catches it.

Barely.

But the movement draws Joffrey's attention.

"You."

The single word freezes the page.

The boy turns, his face draining of color. "Your Grace?"

"I said the red wine goes to Lord Merryweather."

The boy's eyes dart toward the tables. "I—yes, Your Grace. I was only—"

Joffrey's expression darkens. "I did not ask what you were doing."

The page immediately drops to one knee. "My apologies, Your Grace."

"I did not ask for apologies either."

The laughter surrounding the high table fades.

Not completely.

But enough.

People have noticed.

Joffrey notices that they’ve noticed.

His posture changes. His shoulders straighten.

The boy trembles.

"I asked for competence."

"Yes, Your Grace." the boy nods, still trembling.

"And yet apparently even carrying wine is beyond you."

The page lowers his head.

Your fingers tighten around the pear. Juice runs faintly over your thumb.

You want to speak.

The instinct rises before you can stop it.

He's a child.

You swallow the words though as you don’t know whether defending the boy will help him. You don’t know whether it will make Joffrey angrier.

So, that uncertainty of that keeps you silent.

For several terrible seconds, Joffrey stares at the kneeling page. Then he flicks his fingers dismissively. "Go."

The boy scrambles upright. "Yes, Your Grace."

He bows to the two of you before hurrying away.

You release a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

Joffrey turns toward you.

You immediately school your expression.

"What?"

"Nothing."

His eyes narrow.

For one horrible second, you think he knows. Then someone farther down the table shouts something amusing.

Joffrey's attention snaps away and he laughs.

Just like that.

The storm disappears.

He reaches for an apple. Bites into it.

Laughs again.

The musicians grow louder. Conversation resumes. Within seconds, the feast behaves as though nothing happened.

You remain perfectly still.

The pear rests between your hands.

Your thumb rubs absently over the place where its juice has made your skin sticky.

Slowly, cautiously, you look across the Great Hall again.

Hundreds of faces. Hundreds of smiles. Hundreds of people pretending tonight marks the beginning of a beautiful reign.

But now everything looks different.

The banners are no longer merely beautiful. 

They’re declarations of allegiance. The tables are not merely crowded. They’re arranged by rank. The laughter isn’t always genuine. The compliments are rarely meaningless.

Every conversation contains something beneath it. Every smile hides ambition. Every compliment carries calculation. Every servant hears more than anyone realizes. Every lord watches every other lord. Every lady remembers every insult. Every knight chooses where he stands. Every councilor weighs possibilities. Every whispered word might reach the wrong ears before morning.

King's Landing isn’t merely a city.

The Red Keep isn’t merely a palace.

This feast isn’t merely a celebration.

It’s a battlefield.

One without swords. One where smiles are armor and words are weapons.

And at the center of it all sits the young king beside you.

Your husband.

Joffrey.

He’s laughing again. His face is bright.

Beautiful, even.

If you had never seen the other side of him, you might think him charming.

That may be the most frightening thing of all.

His temper shifts like wildfire through summer grass.

Calm one moment. Devastating the next.

There’s no warning. No predictable pattern you understand.

Not yet anyway.

You look down at your hands. At the faint impressions fading from your wrist.

Then toward the crown reflected in the polished surface of your untouched goblet.

It’s never felt heavier.

And suddenly, with terrifying clarity, you understand something you did not understand when you walked into the Sept this morning.

Being queen won’t protect you. The title won’t protect you. The crown won’t protect you. Jewels won’t protect you. Guards won’t protect you. Your father's name may not protect you.

Even armies might not protect you from the dangers contained within these walls.

Because the greatest danger sits close enough that his sleeve brushes yours every time he moves.

You can’t defeat Joffrey. You can’t command him. You can’t predict him.

Not yet.

So you’ll have to learn.

Learn what makes his eyes brighten. Learn what makes his jaw tighten. Learn which words soothe him. Learn which words provoke him. Learn when silence is safer. Learn when silence looks suspicious. Learn when to flatter.

When to agree. When to redirect. When to disappear.

You’ll have to recognize the storm before the first cloud appears. You’ll have to learn how to read Joffrey Baratheon before even Joffrey understands what he is about to become.

Beside you, he suddenly turns.

Your heart jumps.

"Why are you staring at everyone?"

You meet his eyes.

Already, your mind is working. 

Testing possibilities. Searching for the answer least likely to displease him.

Then your gaze drifts across the crowded hall once more.

You allow a small smile to touch your lips. "I was admiring them."

Joffrey's eyebrow rises. "Admiring them?"

"Watching them." you correct.

"Why?"

You glance toward a table where several lords are drinking heavily. Then toward another where two ladies whisper behind jeweled hands. Then back toward your husband. "Because you were right."

His interest sharpens immediately. "About what?"

You lower your voice. "This is a display."

His expression brightens.

You continue carefully. "They are watching us."

"They always watch me." he replies.

"Yes." You glance toward the hall. "But perhaps we should watch them too."

For several seconds, Joffrey says nothing.

Fear crawls slowly through your stomach.

Have you said too much?

Then—He smiles.

Not cruelly. Not angrily.

Genuinely pleased.

"Perhaps you are cleverer than you look."

The insult hidden inside the compliment barely registers.

Because you’ve learned something.

Something small. Something important.

You smile back. "Perhaps."

His eyes narrow.

Your heart stops.

Then he laughs.

A short, delighted sound.

He raises his goblet toward you. "To my clever queen."

You hesitate. Then finally reach for your own untouched goblet.

Your hand doesn’t tremble this time.

You lift it. "To the king."

His eyes remain on yours.

You correct yourself. "To Joffrey."

His smile widens.

The rims of your goblets touch.

A tiny metallic chime.

Almost lost beneath the music. Almost meaningless.

But as you bring the wine toward your lips, you understand that something has changed.

Not between you and Joffrey.

Not truly.

Something’s changed inside you.

This morning, you entered the Red Keep as a bride.

Tonight, you begin learning how to survive as a queen.

And when Joffrey turns back toward the celebration, laughing as another performer stumbles across the floor, you watch him from the corner of your eye.

Not with the helpless terror you felt only moments ago.

With attention. With calculation. With purpose.

Because everyone in King's Landing is playing a game.

And whether you wanted to or not—you’ve just become one of its most important players.

[wild-imagines-and-stories]

The Crown, the King, and the Game

Pairing: Joffrey Baratheon/Lannister x wife!reader (or the beginnings of one maybe)

Genre: Slight Angst???

Warnings: None

WC: 4,449

Main Fanfiction Masterlist

A/N: If anyone is interested, I am willing to do a Part 2 of this story as it does have an ending that suggests that it could have a Part 2! Just let me know if you are interested and I will definitely work on a Part 2 when I can/am able too! Other than that, enjoy the story!!!

The heavy gold crown sitting on your head presses relentlessly against your brow.

It’s been there for hours now, yet somehow you’ve not grown accustomed to its weight.

If anything, it seems to become heavier with every passing moment.

The circlet itself is exquisite.

Of course it is.

Nothing surrounding the royal family of Westeros is permitted to be anything less.

Gold has been painstakingly shaped into delicate curling points around your head, each one decorated with tiny gemstones that catch the candlelight whenever you move. Rubies burn like droplets of blood between polished diamonds and small black stones making the combination a careful joining of Baratheon gold and Lannister crimson into something designed to announce wealth, power, and permanence.

To everyone looking upon you, it must be magnificent.

To you, it feels almost like a shackle.

One particularly sharp edge presses against the tender skin near your temple while another digs faintly into your hair.

Your scalp aches beneath the elaborate hairstyle your ladies spent nearly two hours constructing this morning, pinning, twisting and braiding your hair until every strand lay exactly where it was supposed to.

You don’t touch it. You don’t shift. You don’t complain.

A queen doesn’t fidget. A queen doesn’t grimace. A queen doesn’t reach up in the middle of her own wedding feast and tear the beautiful golden crown from her head simply because it feels as though it weighs as much as the Iron Throne itself.

So you sit perfectly still in your elaborate chair with our back straight, your shoulders relaxed, your chin remains lifted at precisely the angle your Septa spent years drilling into you and your hands rest delicately together in your lap beneath the enormous royal table, where no one can see how tightly your fingers are intertwined.

Every movement you make is measured. Every breath you take is controlled. Every expression you make is carefully chosen.

Because everyone’s watching you.

They’ve been watching you since dawn.

They watched your ladies dress you. They watched you walk through the Sept. They watched you stand beside the king. They watched you speak your vows. They watched the cloak of your father's house be removed from your shoulders. They watched another being placed around them. They watched you become someone else's.

Someone's wife. Someone's queen.

Joffrey's queen.

And now they watch you feast.

The thought causes your fingers to tighten together, but you force them loose again a moment later.

The vows you spoke this morning drift through your memory like something from a dream.

Words repeated before gods and men.

Promises of loyalty. Duty. Marriage. A lifetime.

Promises that sounded ceremonial when the Septon spoke them. Promises that became terrifyingly real when you repeated them.

Promises you cannot take back.

Not now. Not ever.

You sit at the center of the high table in the Great Hall of the Red Keep, positioned exactly where everyone can see you.

Exactly where everyone’s meant to see you.

The king and his new queen.

A picture of royal unity. A promise of stability. A display of power.

Around you, the wedding feast has erupted into such an extravagant celebration that it borders on madness.

The Great Hall is enormous even when empty.

Tonight, packed with hundreds upon hundreds of nobles, knights, servants, musicians, guards, courtiers, ambassadors, and wealthy guests from nearly every corner of the Seven Kingdoms, it feels almost impossibly vast.

Noise crashes against you from every direction.

Music pours down from the gallery overhead. Harps pluck out delicate melodies beneath the shrill, merry cry of pipes while drums pound out lively rhythms that seem to vibrate through the long wooden tables beneath everyone's elbows.

Somewhere farther down the hall, a lute joins the song. Then another.

Someone begins clapping in time. Others quickly follow.

The sound multiplies.

Laughter rises. Goblets strike against tables. Benches scrape across stone. A drunken knight shouts something unintelligible, earning another wave of laughter from his companions.

Above it all, hundreds of candles burn. Iron chandeliers hang from the vaulted ceiling, each crowded with flames. More candles stand in tall silver holders along the tables, their wax dripping slowly toward polished bases.

The flickering light paints everything gold. Gold upon goblets. Gold upon jewelry. Gold upon polished armor. Gold upon embroidered gowns. Gold upon the crown pressing painfully into your head.

Great banners descend from the walls with the crowned stag of House Baratheon and the crimson lion of House Lannister.

Both are symbols of power that tower over everyone gathered beneath them.

The heat is almost unbearable.

Too many bodies. Too many candles. Too many fires. Too much wine.

The enormous hearths blaze along the walls despite the warmth generated by the feast itself, and every time the doors open to admit another servant, a brief current of cooler evening air sweeps through the hall.

You find yourself waiting for those moments.

They’re the only times you feel as though you can breathe.

Servants weave through the chaos with astonishing skill as they carry enormous silver platters balanced upon their shoulders or between both hands.

Roasted boars glazed in honey and surrounded by baked apples. Stuffed capons browned until their skins gleam beneath melted butter. Trout brought fresh from the Blackwater and dressed with herbs. Thick slices of venison. Bowls overflowing with buttered carrots and turnips. Fresh loaves of bread, still steaming when servants tear them apart. Wheels of cheese. Sugared almonds. Blackberry tarts. Lemon cakes. Honey cakes. Cream pastries. Candied plums. Bowls of cherries so red they nearly match the Lannister banners overhead. Pitchers of Arbor Gold disappear almost as quickly as servants can refill them.

Red wine flows even faster.

The smell is overwhelming.

Roasted meat. Fresh bread. Butter. Spices. Smoke. Wine. Perfume. Sweat. Wax. Flowers. Your own scented oils. Joffrey's wine.

Everything mingles into one thick cloud that seems to settle at the back of your throat.

You’ve barely eaten since the feast began.

There’s enough food on the table before you to feed an entire village.

Your plate has been filled three separate times by attentive servants.

You’ve managed perhaps four bites.

Every mouthful turns to ash the moment you try to swallow it.

No one seems to notice. Or perhaps everyone notices.

That possibility is worse.

The Great Hall is filled shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly every important lord and lady in Westeros. And every single one of them smiles at you.

They smile when you look toward them. They smile when you pass them. They smiled during the ceremony. They smiled when you entered the feast beside Joffrey. They smiled when the herald announced you as queen.

Some raise their goblets whenever your gaze passes over them. Others bow their heads respectfully. A few mouth congratulations across the distance.

Beautiful queen. Radiant bride.

A blessed union. A prosperous reign.

Long live the king. Long live the queen.

So many smiles. So many congratulations. So many lies.

Because beneath those smiles, you see something else.

Pity.

You noticed the first pitiful glance during the ceremony.

You told yourself you imagined it before turning your attention back to what was happening.

Then another came.

And another.

Now you see it everywhere.

Some hide it well. Those who have survived King's Landing for many years are particularly skilled at keeping their thoughts buried behind pleasant expressions.

Others are not nearly as practiced. You catch an older lord watching you for several seconds before abruptly lowering his gaze into his wine. A lady seated beside him whispers something behind her hand.

Her husband immediately silences her.

Farther down the table, Lord Tyrell looks toward you.

Your eyes meet.

For the briefest instant, his smile falters. Then his gaze drops.

Lady Olenna Tyrell who sits beside him with Lady Margary on her other side is more difficult to read. The old woman's expression remains sharp and composed as she surveys the feast with the detached interest of someone watching a play whose ending she suspects she already knows.

Eventually her eyes reach you. They linger on you for a moment.

There’s calculation there. Intelligence. Assessment. And, perhaps, for the briefest heartbeat—Sympathy. 

Before it disappears and she turns away.

Lord Varys stands not far from the high table, his hands folded neatly inside the sleeves of his robes.

When you glance toward him, his expression is gentle. Almost kind.

Somehow, that’s worse.

Your stomach tightens.

They know.

All of them.

They all know what your marriage truly means.

Not romance. Not devotion. Not some beautiful song worthy of a bard.

Power. Alliance. Influence.

A queen beside the king. A woman placed carefully onto the great game board of Westeros. Beautiful enough to inspire admiration. Noble enough to strengthen the Crown. Educated enough to stand beside a king. Obedient enough, everyone undoubtedly hopes—to survive him.

Your fingers tighten together beneath the table until your knuckles ache.

You don’t dare unclasp them.

Not yet.

The trembling in your hands hasn’t entirely stopped since the ceremony.

You can hide it beneath the table, but you can’t hide it if you lift your goblet.

So you leave the wine untouched.

Beside you sits your husband.

King Joffrey Baratheon.

Even thinking those words feels strange.

Your husband.

This morning he was your king.

Tonight he’s both.

Joffrey lounges in his smaller ceremonial throne reserved for feasts that’s a bit bigger and taller than yours, looking completely at ease amid the chaos surrounding him.

His crown gleams beneath the candlelight. One leg stretches lazily forward. His fingers curl around a golden goblet filled with dark red wine.

He’s been drinking steadily for most of the evening.

Not enough to dull his senses of course, but it’s enough to sharpen certain parts of him.

You’ve already noticed it.

His laughter comes more easily. His irritation comes faster. His voice grows louder. His patience grows shorter.

You’ve begun watching the goblet almost as carefully as you watch him.

He swirls the wine absently. His lips curve into a smile.

Not warm. Not affectionate.

Satisfied.

Below the dais, two dwarfs dressed in absurdly oversized suits of armor ride tiny ponies around the cleared section of floor. They carry wooden lances. Painted shields hang from their arms.

One bears a crude wolf while the other bears a stag.

Their performance is deliberately ridiculous.

They charge.

Miss. Turn.

Charge again.

One lance strikes a shield with a loud crack.

The audience roars with laughter.

Joffrey leans forward in his chair with laughter that’s even louder than everyone else’s. "Oh, that one nearly had him!"

His voice carries through the room effortlessly.

Several nobles laugh even harder. Whether because they genuinely find the performance amusing or because their king does, you can’t tell.

Perhaps both.

The smaller performer attempts another charge.

His pony veers unexpectedly and he tumbles dramatically from the saddle, crashing into the rushes covering the stone floor.

The hall erupts again.

Joffrey throws his head back.

You feel sick.

Your gaze remains forward.

Don't react.

Your Septa's voice rises from memory. ‘A lady's face belongs to the court before it belongs to herself.’

You always hated that lesson.

Tonight, you understand it.

Don't show disgust. Don't show discomfort. Don't look away too quickly. Don't stare too long. Don't give anyone anything they can use.

You inhale slowly through your nose.

Hold it.

Exhale.

Again.

Your fingers gradually loosen.

You focus on the enormous arrangement of flowers near the center of the table.

White roses. Red roses. Gold ribbon.

Anything except the performers.

Anything except—"You are not eating, my lady wife."

Your entire body stills.

Joffrey's voice isn’t loud.

It doesn’t need to be.

It slices through everything else.

Your heartbeat stutters and for one terrible instant, you wonder how long he’s been watching you.

Slowly, carefully, you turn your head.

Joffrey’s already looking at you.

Not the performers. Not the guests. Not the musicians.

You.

His bright blue eyes are unnervingly focused.

You’ve learned something about his eyes over the past several weeks while preparing for the wedding.

They’re most frightening when he’s quiet.

Anger is obvious. Anger gives warning.

Silence means he’s thinking.

And you never know what conclusion he’ll reach until it’s too late.

His gaze moves briefly toward your untouched plate and goblet of wine before going back to your face. "You've barely touched anything."

His voice sounds almost conversational.

Almost.

You offer him the smallest smile. "I am merely overwhelmed by the grandeur of the occasion, Your Grace."

Your voice is steady.

You’re proud of that.

At least until his expression changes. 

"Overwhelmed?" he asks, with a tilt of his head as he looks directly in your eyes.

He repeats the word slowly.

As though examining it.

"Yes, Your Grace." you nod.

"By my feast?" he questions.

There’s something dangerous in the question.

Your mind moves quickly. Too quickly.

Is he offended? Does he think you dislike it? Does he believe you are criticizing him?

"No." You correct yourself immediately. "Not negatively."

His eyebrow rises.

You continue before he can interrupt. "I have never seen anything quite like it. The musicians, the food, the number of guests..." Your eyes sweep deliberately across the magnificent hall. "It is extraordinary."

That seems to please him.

Slightly.

His mouth curves upward. "As it should be."

"Of course."

"This is a royal wedding."

"Yes."

"My wedding."

The emphasis is subtle but you catch it anyway.

You incline your head. "Our wedding."

For one heartbeat, you fear you may have overstepped.

Then something brightens behind his eyes. "Yes." He smiles. "Our wedding."

Relief barely begins to loosen the knot inside your chest.

Then he reaches for you.

Without warning.

His hand crosses the small space between your chairs.

Long fingers wrap around your wrist.

Your breath catches and you nearly flinch.

Nearly.

Years of training save you.

His grip isn’t painful.

Not yet.

That distinction occurs to you immediately, and you hate that it does.

His fingers circle your wrist firmly.

Possessively.

His thumb settles directly over your pulse point.

Your heart’s racing.

He can feel it.

There’s no possibility that he can’t.

His gaze drops to where he holds you before slowly rising to meet your eyes. "You are frightened."

It’s not a question.

Your mouth goes dry.

You could deny it.

He’d know that it’s a lie.

You could admit it. But that choice could be worse.

So you choose something between the two. 

"I have entered a new life today."

His thumb presses slightly harder against your pulse.

"A new life."

"Yes." you nod.

"As my queen."

"Yes." you nod again.

His eyes narrow thoughtfully. "A queen should not fear."

You remain silent.

"A queen understands responsibility."

"I understand that there is much expected of me."

"There is." His grip on your wrist remains firm. "More than smiling and wearing pretty gowns."

"I know." you agree with a nod.

"Do you?"

You force yourself to meet his eyes. "Yes."

For several long seconds, neither of you speak.

Around you, the wedding feast continues.

Someone calls for another toast.

Goblets rise. A bard begins a song near the lower tables. A serving girl laughs when a drunken lord nearly falls backward from his bench. The dwarfs resume their performance.

Yet all of it feels impossibly distant.

The entire Great Hall seems to narrow until there’s only Joffrey.

Only his eyes. Only his hand around your wrist. Only the frantic beat of your pulse beneath his thumb.

He leans closer.

Not enough to draw obvious attention.

Enough that you smell the wine upon his breath. Enough that his shoulder nearly brushes yours. Enough that only you can hear him.

"This..." His free hand makes a small gesture toward the hall. "This is not merely a celebration."

Your gaze follows his gesture.

Hundreds of nobles. Hundreds of banners. Hundreds of candles.

"It is a display."

You look back at him.

His smile slowly widens. "They need to see strength." His eyes travel over the room. "They need to see wealth." Another gesture. "Power." His gaze returns to you. "Control."

The word settles uneasily inside you.

"They must believe everything is exactly as I desire."

His fingers tighten fractionally around your wrist.

"And now..." He lifts your joined hands slightly. "...you are part of that display."

Your stomach twists.

You swallow carefully. "I understand."

"I wonder if you do."

He speaks almost gently now.

That’s somehow more unsettling.

"You are no longer simply a lady of your father's house."

"No."

"You do not belong to your father's court."

His thumb strokes once across your wrist. "You belong here."

You cannot stop the chill that moves through you.

"You are my queen."

The emphasis is unmistakable.

My.

Not merely queen.

His queen.

"My victories are yours." His gaze never leaves your face. "My enemies are yours." Another slow stroke of his thumb. "My authority..." A pause. "...is yours to uphold."

You nod. "It is a significant responsibility, Your Grace."

Instantly—His expression changes.

The faint amusement disappears.

His jaw tightens. "Joffrey."

You blink.

For a heartbeat, you genuinely don’t understand.

Then his grip tightens. "My name."

His voice remains quiet.

Too quiet.

"When we are alone, you will call me Joffrey."

His gaze flickers toward the nearby members of the Small Council.

Several are very deliberately not looking at you.

"Here as well."

Your heart begins beating faster.

"The court must believe we stand together." He leans closer. "We are husband and wife."

The words should sound intimate.

Instead they sound like a decree.

"You are not some frightened girl addressing her king from across a throne room." His eyes search yours. "You are my wife."

Your lips part.

No sound emerges.

His eyes narrow.

You immediately recover. "Of course..."

The word barely escapes.

Then you force yourself to continue.

"...Joffrey."

As soon as his name leaves your lips, something changes.

His shoulders loosen and the tension in his jaw disappears.

"There." he says, his smile returning. "That wasn't difficult."

You give him a small smile. "No."

"Say it again."

Your stomach drops, but you keep your expression serene. "Joffrey."

His smile widens.

You cannot decide whether he likes hearing his name from you because it suggests intimacy—or because he ordered you to say it.

Perhaps both.

At last he releases your wrist.

Warmth rushes back into your fingers.

You lower your hand beneath the table immediately, your fingertips brushing across the skin. Faint pale marks remain where his fingers pressed into your wrist just moments ago.

They’ll disappear soon.

You hope.

Joffrey’s already turned away.

Just like that.

His mood shifts with startling ease.

One moment he’s interrogating you and the next he appears almost cheerful.

You watch as he reaches toward a silver platter piled high with fruit. His fingers hover over apples, plums, grapes, pears. He selects a ripe red pear before extending it toward you.

"Eat."

You hesitate for no more than a heartbea before you take it from him. "Thank you."

“As I said,” he begins his eyes meeting yours once more. "You cannot appear weak." He gestures toward the hall. "They expect beauty." His gaze moves over your gown. "Confidence." Then your crown. "Power."

His smile becomes strangely youthful.

Almost boyish.

"And my queen will give them exactly that."

You look down at the pear.

Your stomach rebels at the thought of food. But you lift it and take a small bite nonetheless.

Sweet juice touches your tongue.

Joffrey watches until you swallow. Then nods approvingly. "Better."

You take another bite.

You’ve never worked so hard to eat a piece of fruit.

Then—A young page hurries too close to the royal table.

He can’t be older than twelve.

Perhaps thirteen.

His arms tremble beneath the weight of a large silver pitcher.

Someone calls out to him, clearly wanting more wine.

He turns toward them too quickly and the pitcher tilts.

Wine sloshes dangerously close to the rim.

The boy catches it.

Barely.

But the movement draws Joffrey's attention.

"You."

The single word freezes the page.

The boy turns, his face draining of color. "Your Grace?"

"I said the red wine goes to Lord Merryweather."

The boy's eyes dart toward the tables. "I—yes, Your Grace. I was only—"

Joffrey's expression darkens. "I did not ask what you were doing."

The page immediately drops to one knee. "My apologies, Your Grace."

"I did not ask for apologies either."

The laughter surrounding the high table fades.

Not completely.

But enough.

People have noticed.

Joffrey notices that they’ve noticed.

His posture changes. His shoulders straighten.

The boy trembles.

"I asked for competence."

"Yes, Your Grace." the boy nods, still trembling.

"And yet apparently even carrying wine is beyond you."

The page lowers his head.

Your fingers tighten around the pear. Juice runs faintly over your thumb.

You want to speak.

The instinct rises before you can stop it.

He's a child.

You swallow the words though as you don’t know whether defending the boy will help him. You don’t know whether it will make Joffrey angrier.

So, that uncertainty of that keeps you silent.

For several terrible seconds, Joffrey stares at the kneeling page. Then he flicks his fingers dismissively. "Go."

The boy scrambles upright. "Yes, Your Grace."

He bows to the two of you before hurrying away.

You release a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

Joffrey turns toward you.

You immediately school your expression.

"What?"

"Nothing."

His eyes narrow.

For one horrible second, you think he knows. Then someone farther down the table shouts something amusing.

Joffrey's attention snaps away and he laughs.

Just like that.

The storm disappears.

He reaches for an apple. Bites into it.

Laughs again.

The musicians grow louder. Conversation resumes. Within seconds, the feast behaves as though nothing happened.

You remain perfectly still.

The pear rests between your hands.

Your thumb rubs absently over the place where its juice has made your skin sticky.

Slowly, cautiously, you look across the Great Hall again.

Hundreds of faces. Hundreds of smiles. Hundreds of people pretending tonight marks the beginning of a beautiful reign.

But now everything looks different.

The banners are no longer merely beautiful. 

They’re declarations of allegiance. The tables are not merely crowded. They’re arranged by rank. The laughter isn’t always genuine. The compliments are rarely meaningless.

Every conversation contains something beneath it. Every smile hides ambition. Every compliment carries calculation. Every servant hears more than anyone realizes. Every lord watches every other lord. Every lady remembers every insult. Every knight chooses where he stands. Every councilor weighs possibilities. Every whispered word might reach the wrong ears before morning.

King's Landing isn’t merely a city.

The Red Keep isn’t merely a palace.

This feast isn’t merely a celebration.

It’s a battlefield.

One without swords. One where smiles are armor and words are weapons.

And at the center of it all sits the young king beside you.

Your husband.

Joffrey.

He’s laughing again. His face is bright.

Beautiful, even.

If you had never seen the other side of him, you might think him charming.

That may be the most frightening thing of all.

His temper shifts like wildfire through summer grass.

Calm one moment. Devastating the next.

There’s no warning. No predictable pattern you understand.

Not yet anyway.

You look down at your hands. At the faint impressions fading from your wrist.

Then toward the crown reflected in the polished surface of your untouched goblet.

It’s never felt heavier.

And suddenly, with terrifying clarity, you understand something you did not understand when you walked into the Sept this morning.

Being queen won’t protect you. The title won’t protect you. The crown won’t protect you. Jewels won’t protect you. Guards won’t protect you. Your father's name may not protect you.

Even armies might not protect you from the dangers contained within these walls.

Because the greatest danger sits close enough that his sleeve brushes yours every time he moves.

You can’t defeat Joffrey. You can’t command him. You can’t predict him.

Not yet.

So you’ll have to learn.

Learn what makes his eyes brighten. Learn what makes his jaw tighten. Learn which words soothe him. Learn which words provoke him. Learn when silence is safer. Learn when silence looks suspicious. Learn when to flatter.

When to agree. When to redirect. When to disappear.

You’ll have to recognize the storm before the first cloud appears. You’ll have to learn how to read Joffrey Baratheon before even Joffrey understands what he is about to become.

Beside you, he suddenly turns.

Your heart jumps.

"Why are you staring at everyone?"

You meet his eyes.

Already, your mind is working. 

Testing possibilities. Searching for the answer least likely to displease him.

Then your gaze drifts across the crowded hall once more.

You allow a small smile to touch your lips. "I was admiring them."

Joffrey's eyebrow rises. "Admiring them?"

"Watching them." you correct.

"Why?"

You glance toward a table where several lords are drinking heavily. Then toward another where two ladies whisper behind jeweled hands. Then back toward your husband. "Because you were right."

His interest sharpens immediately. "About what?"

You lower your voice. "This is a display."

His expression brightens.

You continue carefully. "They are watching us."

"They always watch me." he replies.

"Yes." You glance toward the hall. "But perhaps we should watch them too."

For several seconds, Joffrey says nothing.

Fear crawls slowly through your stomach.

Have you said too much?

Then—He smiles.

Not cruelly. Not angrily.

Genuinely pleased.

"Perhaps you are cleverer than you look."

The insult hidden inside the compliment barely registers.

Because you’ve learned something.

Something small. Something important.

You smile back. "Perhaps."

His eyes narrow.

Your heart stops.

Then he laughs.

A short, delighted sound.

He raises his goblet toward you. "To my clever queen."

You hesitate. Then finally reach for your own untouched goblet.

Your hand doesn’t tremble this time.

You lift it. "To the king."

His eyes remain on yours.

You correct yourself. "To Joffrey."

His smile widens.

The rims of your goblets touch.

A tiny metallic chime.

Almost lost beneath the music. Almost meaningless.

But as you bring the wine toward your lips, you understand that something has changed.

Not between you and Joffrey.

Not truly.

Something’s changed inside you.

This morning, you entered the Red Keep as a bride.

Tonight, you begin learning how to survive as a queen.

And when Joffrey turns back toward the celebration, laughing as another performer stumbles across the floor, you watch him from the corner of your eye.

Not with the helpless terror you felt only moments ago.

With attention. With calculation. With purpose.

Because everyone in King's Landing is playing a game.

And whether you wanted to or not—you’ve just become one of its most important players.

[lalalovelyly]

The Shores Of Broken Things

Jacaerys Velaryon x Reader

Summary: After the Battle of the Gullet, Prince Jacaerys Velaryon should be dead, instead, he washes ashore on a mysterious island, where a lonely woman nurses him back to health. As the days pass, Jace finds himself falling in love with his beautiful savior.

CW: The relationship contains themes of coercion, emotional dependency, and captivity. SMUT

Genre: Dark Fantasy

AN: First Jace fic! Different from what i usually write, comments are appreciated!

WC: 26K

He should be dead.

The last thing he remembered with any coherence was the sky, a sky choked with smoke and screaming. Beneath that memory lay only fractured images that swam behind his closed eyelids, fragments of chaos that refused to assemble into anything whole.

Vermax.

The name pierced through the darkness like a blade. His dragon. His beautiful, loyal Vermax, who had hatched from an egg placed in his cradle when he was nothing more than a squalling babe with a tuft of dark hair that already marked him as different from his silver-haired mother. Vermax had shrieked as the grappling hooks tore into his wings, as the Triarchy ships surrounded them, as the sea rose up to swallow them both.

Jace’s chest seized, he remembered the impact. He remembered the bone-shattering crash as Vermax slammed into the churning waters of the Gullet, and he remembered the dragon’s terrified, agonized roar. That sound had carried more than pain. It had carried something that felt like betrayal, as if Vermax could not understand why the sky had abandoned them. The cold of the sea had been absolute, salt water flooding his mouth, his throat, his lungs.

He had surfaced somehow. He had gasped and choked and reached for something, a piece of wreckage or a shattered mast, though the memory refused to sharpen. The waves had tossed him like a child’s toy. Through the spray and the smoke, the first bolt had taken him in the shoulder. The second had buried itself in his side, just beneath the ribs. The third was a blank space in his memory, a sensation his mind had simply refused to record.

What remained was the feeling that followed. A slow, spreading numbness. The way his limbs had stopped obeying him. The way the sky had tilted and spun, grey and gold and red bleeding together like watercolors on parchment. His last conscious thought had not been of his mother, nor of his brothers, nor of duty or the Iron Throne or the war that was tearing the realm apart. It had been of Vermax.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

—

He woke to the glow of candlelight, the light came from dozens of candles, the air smelled of salt and something else, something green and living. Herbs, perhaps, or flowers. It was an earthy smell, a growing smell, utterly unlike the smoke and blood and terror that had filled his nostrils before the darkness took him.

Jace tried to move, and his body screamed in protest. Every muscle, every joint, every inch of skin felt like an open wound packed with burning coals. Pain lanced through his shoulder, his side, his ribs. He sucked in a sharp breath through clenched teeth, and even that small motion sent fire racing down his spine.

“You shouldn’t move.”

The voice was soft and female, carrying an accent he had never heard before. The vowels were rounder than he was used to, the cadence lilting and unfamiliar, Jace turned his head slowly, every vertebra in his neck protesting, and saw you.

You were kneeling beside the bed, on a cushion of deep blue silk, and you were looking at him with an expression of such open relief that Jace forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

You were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the powdered faces and elaborate hairstyles of court ladies. You wore no jewelry, no rings, no gems at your throat. Your dress, if it could even be called that, was unlike anything he had ever seen, layers of fabric in pale ivory and soft gold that had been draped rather than tailored. The cut left your arms bare, and the neckline was wide and flowing. It was clothing from a warmer world entirely, bearing no resemblance to the heavy velvets and structured bodices of Westeros.

“You’re awake,” you said, and your smile was like dawn breaking over still water. “I was beginning to fear you wouldn’t open your eyes again.”

Jace opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was a dry, rasping croak. His throat felt as though it had been scoured raw.

You reached for a clay cup beside you, glazed deep blue, and lifted it to his lips with a careful hand. “Drink. Slowly. You’ve been without water for a long time.”

The water was cool and impossibly clean. It slid down his throat like mercy. He drank until you pulled the cup gently away, your expression soft but firm.

“I said slowly. Your body has been through a great ordeal.” Jace sagged back against the furs, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Even drinking had exhausted him. He could feel the heat radiating from his own skin, a fever burning beneath the surface. “Where…” His voice was barely a whisper, cracked and ruined. “Where am I?”

You set the cup aside. “My home. I found you on the shore.”

He tried to form another question, but his thoughts were slipping away from him like water through fingers. The shore. The battle. The arrows.

“Your body was full of arrows,” you said quietly, as if you had followed the path of his scattered thoughts. “You looked dead. I do not know how you survived.” A pause. “But I am glad you did.”

Jace stared at you, his vision blurring and sharpening in turns. The candles made halos around your silhouette. The cave walls curved around you both like cupped hands. He lay in a bed of soft furs with clean linen bandages wrapped around his chest and shoulder. The space around him was strange, a blend of cave stone and polished wood and silk cushions.

He tried to focus on you again, on your strange dress and your unfamiliar accent and the way you looked at him without the calculating gaze of a courtier. Your expression held only simple, unguarded relief.

“You…” he started, but the words crumbled before he could shape them. He was so tired. The heat in his blood was growing worse, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool air of the cave.

“Shh.” You leaned closer and pressed a cool cloth to his brow. Your touch was impossibly gentle. “You have a fever. The arrows were laced with something, I think. A poison, or something like it. It will take time to burn it out.”

Jace’s eyes fluttered. The cool cloth was a mercy, and your hand was steady against his skin.

“Where is this island?” he managed, the question barely a whisper. “How far from the battle…”

You shook your head, a small and quiet movement. “This is my island. That is all that matters now. You are here, and you are safe.” Your hand brushed the dark, sweat-soaked curls back from his forehead. “You are my guest. I will take care of you.”

He should have questioned you. He should have demanded to know where he was, who you were, how any of this was possible. He was a prince, raised on suspicion, trained to trust no one. But the fever was burning through him, and you were so calm, so steady, and your hands were so gentle, and he was so gods-damned tired.

“Rest,” you murmured. “You are not strong enough to stay awake. But you will be. In time.”

Jace’s eyes closed against his will. The darkness pulled at him, soft and warm. The last thing he felt was the cool cloth on his forehead and the gentle weight of your hand smoothing his hair back from his face.

“Sleep, Jace,” you whispered.

—

The days blurred together like watercolors left in the rain, Jace measured time by the changing quality of light that filtered through the cave's entrance, a distant glow that brightened and dimmed in a rhythm he slowly came to recognize. Morning, afternoon, evening, night. The cycle repeated itself over and over. He could not see the sky from his bed, only the rough stone ceiling and the flickering candles and, whenever he turned his head, the soft silhouette of you moving through the chamber.

You were always there, that was the first thing he truly understood once the fever broke and his mind began to piece itself back together. You were always there. When he woke gasping from nightmares of Vermax screaming, the arrows striking, the water closing over his head, you were beside him with your cool hand on his forehead and your voice murmuring words he could not quite catch but that soothed him anyway. When the pain in his wounds flared hot and unbearable, you were there with the medicine, spooning bitter liquid past his cracked lips and following it with cool water to wash away the taste. When the fever spiked and he thrashed in the furs, soaked in sweat and half-delirious, you were there with cloths dipped in cold water, pressing them to his chest, his neck, his brow.

He did not know how you slept. He did not know when you ate. He only knew that every time he opened his eyes, you were somewhere nearby, kneeling beside his bed or mixing herbs at the stone table or simply sitting on your silk cushion with your hands folded in your lap, watching the candles burn.

“You don’t have to stay,” he rasped one night, though it might have been day for all he could tell the difference. His voice was still weak and still cracked, but it no longer hurt to speak. “You must have other things to do.”

You looked up from the bowl you were mixing, and your lips curved into that soft, patient smile he was beginning to recognize. “I have nothing more important than keeping you alive, Jace. That is a full-time occupation, it seems.”

He wanted to argue, but exhaustion pulled him back under before he could form the words, the fever broke on what might have been the fifth day, or the sixth, or the seventh. He had lost count.

He woke drenched in sweat, his hair plastered to his forehead and the furs kicked to the foot of the bed, but his head was clear. For the first time since he had opened his eyes in this cave, his thoughts were not swimming in a haze of heat and pain. He could feel the wounds in his shoulder and side, still tender and still healing, but they no longer burned with the sharp, insistent fire of infection.

He was alive. He was going to stay alive, and that meant he had to get back.

His mother. His brothers. The war. Every day he spent lying in this bed was another day the Blacks fought without him, another day his family believed him dead, another day the Greens advanced their stolen throne. He had to get stronger. He had to return to Westeros.

“Your thoughts are very loud.” Jace turned his head. You were sitting on your cushion beside the bed, a piece of fabric in your hands and a needle moving in small, precise stitches. He had no idea how long you had been there. He had not even noticed you.

“My thoughts?” he repeated, his voice hoarse but steadier than before.

“You are frowning at the ceiling as though it has offended you.” You did not look up from your sewing, but there was a hint of amusement in your voice. “I assume you are planning your escape.”

Jace blinked. “I was not planning an escape. I was only thinking about how to leave.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is absolutely not the same thing.” Now you did look up, one eyebrow raised, and Jace felt his face warm. He had walked directly into that.

“You want to go back,” you said, and your voice was quieter now, the teasing edge softened into something more serious. “It is natural. You have people waiting for you. A family. A war, perhaps, judging by the state of you when I found you.” You returned your attention to your stitching. “I understand.”

He was quiet for a moment, watching your hands move. The fabric you were working on was pale blue, the stitches neat and even. You were making him more bandages, he realized.

“Yes,” he admitted finally. “I have to go back. My family needs me. They probably think I am dead.”

“Then we will work to make you strong enough to leave.” You bit off the thread with your teeth, smooth and practiced. “But you cannot rush it. The wounds are healing well, but if you push too hard, too fast, you will undo all my hard work. And I have worked very hard, Jace.”

There was something almost stern in your tone, and despite himself, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch upward. “I would not dream of undoing your hard work.”

“Good.” You set the sewing aside and rose to your feet, your gossamer skirts rustling softly against the stone floor. “You have been lying in that bed for days. I think it is time you tried to sit up properly. Do you think you can manage it?”

Jace took a breath. His shoulder throbbed. His side ached. But the fever was gone, and his head was clear, and he was so gods-damned tired of lying flat on his back.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I can.” It was harder than he had expected.

His muscles had atrophied during the days of fever and stillness. His arms shook when he pushed himself up, and the wound in his side pulled sharply, and by the time he was sitting upright against the carved headboard, he was breathing hard and sweating again. But he was sitting. He was upright. He was looking at the cave from a new angle, and it was strange and wonderful and disorienting all at once.

“There,” you said, and you were smiling now, truly smiling, something brighter than the gentle curve of lips he had grown used to. “That was not so terrible, was it?”

“Terrible,” Jace managed, still catching his breath. “Absolutely terrible.”

“But you did it.”

He looked at you, at the way the candlelight caught the strange color of your eyes, and he found himself almost smiling back. “I did it.”

—

The days that followed fell into a pattern, you would help him sit up in the mornings, propping him against the headboard with pillows and furs. You would change his bandages, your fingers quick and efficient, your touch never lingering longer than necessary but never cold or impersonal either. You would bring him food, strange fruits he had never tasted before, sweet and tangy, and a porridge made from some grain he did not recognize, and fresh water that tasted cleaner than anything he had ever drunk in his life.

And you would talk about small things, the weather on the island, the herbs you used in your medicines, the fish you caught in the tidal pools below the cliffs. You had a dry, quiet sense of humor that surprised him, and a way of tilting your head when you were thinking that he found himself watching for.

In return, he told you things about himself. He was still a prince, still trained in caution, and so he held back the details that mattered most. But he told you about Dragonstone, about the volcanic rock and the sea winds and the dragons that wheeled in the sky. He told you about his brothers, careful to speak of them in the present tense even though Luke was-even though Luke had become something he could not yet say aloud.

He told you other things instead. That he missed the sea. That he had never been good at dancing. That his mother had taught him to read when he was four years old, and he had been so proud that he had carried the book around for a week straight, showing it to anyone who would look.

You laughed at that, a real laugh, bright and surprised, as if you had not expected him to say something so ordinary. “A week?”

“I was very proud of myself.”

“I can imagine. A little prince with his book, demanding that everyone admire his genius.”

“I did not demand. I simply made strong suggestions.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is absolutely not the same thing, and I will not have my diplomatic skills insulted.”

You laughed again, and Jace realized with a jolt of surprise that he liked making you laugh. It was a good sound, your laugh, unstudied and unguarded, the sound of someone who spent too much time alone and had forgotten to be self-conscious about joy.

You were his only companion. His caretaker. His only visitor.

He had not seen another person even once in all the days he had been lying in this bed. No one came to the cave. No one called your name from outside. No one brought supplies or messages or news. It was only you, always you, appearing and disappearing through the winding passages of the cave system with the quiet confidence of someone who knew every stone by heart.

He had not asked about other people. It felt rude, somehow, when you were taking care of him and feeding him and changing his bandages and sitting beside him through the long, fevered nights. To ask about the absence of others would have sounded like an accusation, as though your company were insufficient, as though he had grown bored of you.

So he did not ask, but the question sat in the back of his mind, growing heavier with each passing day.

—

The day he walked for the first time was the day everything began to shift.

It was morning, the pale silver light filtering through the distant cave entrance, and you had just finished changing his bandages. The wounds were healing well, the flesh knitting together into angry red scars that would fade to white in time. You told him he would have a collection of them, a constellation across his shoulder and ribs. He said he would wear them with pride. You called him ridiculous.

“Today,” you announced, rising to your feet and brushing off your skirts, “you are going to walk.”

Jace looked up at you. “Walk.”

“Yes. Walk. Put one foot in front of the other. I assume you knew how to do it before you arrived here.”

“I knew how to walk.”

“Then today you will remember.”

It was harder than sitting up. It was harder than anything he had done since waking in this cave. His legs felt as though they belonged to someone else, weak and unsteady, the muscles wasted from days of lying still. You had to help him, your arm around his back and his arm across your shoulders, bearing some of his weight even though he tried very hard not to let you. You were smaller than him and slighter, and he was terrified of crushing you.

“You will not crush me,” you said, as if reading his thoughts. “I am stronger than I look. Stop trying to hold yourself up with pride alone and lean on me.”

He leaned on you, by the time he had taken five steps across the chamber, his legs were shaking and sweat was dripping down his face. But he had walked. Five steps. Then ten. Then, a few days later, he crossed the entire chamber without help, his hand braced against the wall and his breath coming hard and fast.

And the day after that, you smiled at him and said, “I think it is time you saw the sun.”

The cave system was a maze, Jace knew, that your home was larger than the single chamber where he had been lying. He had seen you disappear down passages and emerge from different directions, had caught glimpses of other rooms, a kitchen carved into the rock, a storage chamber lined with jars and barrels, a space where water trickled down the wall into a natural basin. But he had not grasped the full scale of it until you led him through it yourself.

The passages twisted and turned, branching off into side tunnels and dead ends. Some were narrow, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through. Others opened into wide chambers with high ceilings, lit by candles placed in alcoves and by thin shafts of daylight that pierced down through cracks in the rock. The walls were rough in some places and smooth in others, worn down by time and water and the patient labor of whoever had carved this place.

“Did you build all this?” Jace asked, his voice echoing strangely in the stone corridors. He was walking slowly, one hand on the wall for balance, but he was walking.

You glanced back at him. “The caves were here long before me. I only furnished them.”

“You furnished them very well,” he muttered, stepping around a carved wooden chest that would not have looked out of place in a merchant’s manse.

“I had time.”

That was all you said, as if it explained everything. As if it explained anything at all.

The light grew brighter as you walked, the grey-silver of filtered daylight giving way to a warm golden glow. Jace could smell the outside now, salt air and flowers and something green and growing. His heart beat faster. He had been underground for so long that he had almost forgotten what the sky looked like.

Then you stepped through the cave entrance, and he followed you, and the world opened up around him.

It was beautiful, there was no other word for it, no word that could possibly capture what Jace saw as he stood at the mouth of the cave, blinking in the sudden brightness, his eyes struggling to adjust after so many days of candlelight and shadow.

The island spread out before him like something from a dream, the cliffs where the cave was carved dropped down to a shoreline of white sand that gleamed in the morning sun. Beyond the beach, the water was the most extraordinary shade of blue he had ever seen, turquoise at the shore, deepening to sapphire further out, clear and calm and glittering with reflected light. The sky was vast and cloudless, a pale, soft blue that seemed to go on forever.

But it was the island itself that stole his breath, flowers grew everywhere, wild, sprawling, abundant blooms that cascaded down the cliffs and carpeted the meadows in explosions of color. He saw flowers in shades he had never encountered before, deep violet, vivid orange, a blue so pale it was almost silver. Trees heavy with fruit he did not recognize bent over natural pathways, their branches laden with something golden and round, something dark and pear-shaped, something that resembled a pomegranate but was the color of honey.

The air was warm and sweet, thick with the scent of blossoms and salt and damp earth. Birds sang somewhere in the distance, strange, melodic calls that were not quite like any birdsong he knew. A waterfall tumbled down the cliff face to his left, a thin silver ribbon that caught the light and threw rainbows into the air.

Jace stood there, swaying slightly on his still-weak legs, and he could not speak.

“I know,” you said quietly, standing beside him. “It is a great deal, after so long underground.”

“I have never seen anything like this.”

“It is home.” Your voice was matter of fact, but there was something softer underneath it, something almost sad. “Come. There is a place to sit not far from here. You should not stand for too long yet.”

He let you lead him to a flat outcropping of rock cushioned with moss and ferns, and he sat down heavily, still staring out at the impossible landscape. The flowers swayed in the breeze. The waterfall sang its endless song. The sea glittered and danced.

And there was no one here, the realization crept up on him slowly, settling over his shoulders like a cold cloak. He looked out at the island, the meadows, the fruit trees, the white sand beach, the cliffs, and he saw no houses and no fishing boats pulled up on the shore. He saw no paths worn by the tread of many feet and no smoke rising from chimneys. He heard no voices calling in the distance. He saw no sign of human life at all.

Only the flowers. The birds. The waterfall. The sea.

And you.

—

He did not say anything at first, you helped him walk a little further each day, down to the edge of the meadow where the strange golden fruit grew on low, sprawling trees, up to a ridge that overlooked the eastern shore where the water was even bluer and the sky even wider. You showed him the tidal pools, teeming with tiny creatures he had never seen, brightly colored shells that moved on dozens of legs, star-shaped animals that clung to the rocks, fish that darted and flashed like living jewels.

And everywhere you went, you were the only person, he saw no footprints but yours, he saw no structures but the cave. The only signs of cultivation were a small vegetable garden tucked into a sheltered hollow behind the cliffs, neat rows of plants he recognized, mostly herbs and some kind of root vegetable, and further back, half-hidden by a grove of flowering trees, a low stone wall enclosing a patch of churned earth.

He heard the pigs before he saw them, a grunting, snuffling chorus rose and fell, punctuated by the occasional indignant squeal. Jace followed the sound, moving carefully along a narrow path between two rock formations, and emerged into a clearing where at least two dozen pigs were milling about in a large stone enclosure. They were fat and healthy, their coats glossy, their ears flopping. Piglets tumbled over each other in the dirt while larger sows dozed in the shade of the trees.

And you were in the middle of them, you were scattering something from a woven basket, scraps of fruit rinds and vegetable peels and some kind of grain, and the pigs crowded around you like old friends. You were speaking to them in a low, affectionate murmur, and your hands moved among them with the ease of long familiarity.

You looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the enclosure. Your expression shifted, just slightly. Something guarded, something wary, flickered behind your eyes before you smoothed it away.

“You found my pigs,” you said, Jace leaned against the stone wall, catching his breath. The walk had been longer than he had realized, and his side was aching. “You have a lot of pigs.”

“They keep me company.” You tossed another handful of scraps into the enclosure, and a particularly large sow shouldered her way forward to claim it. “And they are useful. The meat, the fat, the leather. Nothing goes to waste.”

He watched you for a moment. The pigs jostled around your legs, grunting and snuffling, and you moved among them without the slightest hesitation, like a shepherdess, like someone who had been doing this for years.

“Where are the other people?” he asked.

Your hands stilled on the basket. You did not look up.

“What other people?”

“The villagers. The farmers. Whoever else lives here.” Jace gestured vaguely at the enclosure, at the pigs, at the island beyond. “You said this was your island. But someone has to help you with all of this.”

He trailed off. You were looking at him now, and your expression was strange, as though you had been expecting this question and dreading it in equal measure.

“There are no other people, Jace,” you said quietly.

He stared at you. “What do you mean, there are no other people?”

“I mean it is only me.” You set the basket down on the stone wall. Your hands, now empty, folded together in front of you. “There is no village. There are no farmers. There are no fishermen or shepherds or traders. There is only me, and the pigs, and the birds, and the fish in the sea. That is all.”

The words refused to make sense. Jace shook his head, a short, sharp movement. “That cannot be right. You cannot live here alone. How do you survive? How do you get supplies? There has to be someone else, a trader who comes by ship, a neighboring island, something.”

“There is no one else.” Your voice was calm and steady, but there was something raw underneath it now. “No ships come here. No traders. No neighbors. The island is hidden. It does not appear on any map. No one knows it exists.”

“That is impossible.”

“It is simply true.”

Jace pushed himself off the stone wall, ignoring the protest of his healing wounds. His heart was beating too fast. His thoughts were spinning. “How did you get here, then? How do you live? You cannot simply be alone on an island forever.”

“I did not say I chose it.”

The words stopped him cold, you were still standing in the middle of the pig enclosure, surrounded by grunting, oblivious animals. Your strange dress fluttered in the breeze, the pale fabric catching the sunlight. Your face was composed, but your eyes were dark with something old and heavy and carefully buried.

“My brother sent me here,” you said. “As punishment.”

Jace opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Punishment for what?”

“For disobeying him.” Your voice was flat now, reciting facts rather than feelings. “I did something he could not forgive. And instead of killing me, he sent me here. He had the means to do it, the ships, the men, the knowledge of this place. He left me with supplies and seeds and animals and told me I would never leave.”

“You have been here ever since,” Jace said slowly.

“I have been here ever since.”

“How long?”

You looked away, out over the blue water, and for a moment you were utterly still. “A long time.”

Jace’s mind was racing, scrambling to fit the pieces together. A brother with enough power to exile someone to a hidden island. Ships and men and the means to keep the place secret. A lord powerful enough to make his sister disappear without anyone asking questions.

“Who is your brother?” he asked.

Your jaw tightened. “A lord. That is all you need to know.”

“A lord of what? Where? What house?”

“It does not matter.” Your voice sharpened, just slightly, the first hint of steel he had ever heard from you. “What matters is that he is powerful enough to do this. Powerful enough that if I try to leave, if I find a way off this island and set foot on the mainland, I will be found and I will be brought back, and the consequences will be worse than exile.”

Jace stared at you, you were alone. Completely, utterly alone. You had been alone for what might have been months or years or decades. You had built a life in a cave, furnished it with silk and polished wood, grown a garden and raised pigs and taught yourself to heal. And no one had come for you. No one had visited. No one had even known you were here.

Until a dying dragon prince washed up on your shore.

“I am sorry,” he said, and the words felt pathetically inadequate. “I did not know.”

“How could you have known?” You picked up the basket again, your movements brisk and practical, as if you were eager to change the subject. “You were unconscious when you arrived. It is not as if I introduced myself and gave you a tour. Welcome to my prison, please enjoy the flowers.”

“It is not a prison.” You looked at him, and your smile was tired and sad and strangely kind. “It is a very beautiful prison. But it is a prison nonetheless.” You turned and walked away, the basket tucked under your arm, the pigs trailing after you like a strange, grunting entourage. Jace watched you go, your bare shoulders and your flowing dress and the way you moved through the meadow as if you had memorized every inch of it.

And he understood, suddenly, why you had never hesitated to save him. Why you had sat beside his bed for days on end. Why you had laughed at his stupid jokes and argued with him about the proper way to brew medicinal tea.

You were lonely.

Jace stood at the edge of the pig enclosure, the sun warm on his face and the sea glittering in the distance, and he thought about his mother and his brothers and the war and the throne.

He had to go back. He had to, but as he watched you disappear into the grove of flowering trees, your figure growing smaller and smaller against the impossible beauty of the island, he realized that leaving might be harder than he had thought.

—

In the days following your revelation—it is just me, there is no one else—Jace threw himself into the work of recovery with a ferocity that surprised even him. He woke early, before the light through the cave entrance had shifted from silver to gold, and he pushed his body harder than was probably wise. He walked the island's paths until his legs stopped shaking. He climbed the low cliffs until his arms stopped burning. He ate everything you put in front of him, slept when you told him to sleep, and bit back every complaint when you made him drink your bitter medicines.

"Someone is motivated," you remarked one morning, watching him pace the length of the chamber. He had been doing laps—back and forth, back and forth—testing the strength of his newly healed legs. The scars on his shoulder and side had faded to pink, then to white, and the pain was a distant memory now, only flaring when he moved too quickly or twisted the wrong way.

"I have to get home," he said, not breaking stride. "My mother needs me. My brothers need me. Every day I spend here is another day they think I'm dead."

You nodded, your expression unreadable. "Then we had better build you a boat."

The boat took shape slowly, you showed him a grove of trees on the eastern side of the island, tall and straight, their wood pale and close-grained, ideal for shipbuilding. You had an axe, kept sharp and well-oiled in one of the storage chambers, and you handed it to him without ceremony.

"I will help where I can," you said, "but I am not a shipwright. You will have to figure out most of it yourself."

Jace had never built a boat before. He had sailed on dozens of them but knowing how to sail and knowing how to build were two very different things. He felled the first tree through trial and error, the axe handle blistering his palms, the sweat dripping into his eyes. By the time the trunk crashed to the ground, he was exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure.

"Not bad," you said from where you sat on a nearby rock, a pile of mending in your lap. You had been watching him work for the better part of an hour, offering no advice but plenty of company. "For a prince who has never done a day's labor in his life."

"I've done labor."

"Name one example."

He opened his mouth and swung the axe into the fallen trunk with more force than necessary. "I trained with swords. That's labor."

"Swords are not labor. Swords are play for princes."

"Then what do you call this?" He gestured at the tree, the axe, his blistered hands.

You smiled, that slow, warm smile that was becoming as familiar to him as the sunrise. "I call it a good start."

The days passed, Jace shaped the wood as best he could, stripping branches and hewing planks with tools you provided from the depths of the cave. Some of them were strange—shaped for hands slightly different from his own, their handles worn smooth by use that was not his. He didn't ask where they came from. He was learning that there were questions you would answer and questions you would not, and the line between them was invisible until he crossed it.

But you were always there, always nearby.

He had grown accustomed to the rhythm of your presence, the rustle of your strange, flowing dresses, the soft pad of your bare feet on stone, the quiet humming you did when you worked. You brought him water when the sun grew hot. You checked his scars every evening, your fingers against his skin, pronouncing him healed and healing well. You sat with him while he ate, and you talked about nothing and everything, and your laugh was the brightest sound on an island full of bright sounds.

"I should be further along by now," he said one evening, staring at the skeleton of the boat with frustration. The hull was taking shape, but slowly—too slowly. At this rate, it would be months before it was seaworthy.

"You are one person building a boat by hand," you pointed out. You were sitting cross-legged on a flat rock, sorting through a basket of herbs. The setting sun caught the planes of your face, the curve of your bare shoulders, the way your dress draped across your lap in soft folds. "I think you are allowed to take your time."

"I don't have time." He ran a hand through his hair—longer now, curling past his ears, in desperate need of a trim. "My mother—she needs me. The war—"

He stopped.

The war.

What war?

The thought slipped through his mind like water through fingers, there and gone before he could catch it. There was a war. Of course there was a war. He was fighting in it. Or he had been fighting in it. That was why he had been in the Gullet, why Vermax had—

Vermax.

His chest tightened. He remembered the dragon's scream. He remembered the water closing over his head. He remembered the arrows.

But what was the war about?

"The war," he repeated, more quietly now. "I have to get back to the war."

You looked up from your herbs, and your expression was gentle. Unreadable. "You will. When the boat is ready, you will."

"Right." He nodded, the motion jerky. "Right. The boat."

He picked up the axe and got back to work.

—

One afternoon you were down by the shore, sitting in the shade of a flowering tree while Jace worked on the boat's hull. "Brothers," he said, sanding down a rough edge of wood. "Three of them. Well—two full brothers. Two half-brothers. That's four. No, wait." He frowned. "Joffrey and... and the little ones. Aegon and..."

He stopped, the name wouldn't come.

"Viserys," you said quietly.

"Viserys. Right. Viserys." He shook his head, laughing at himself. "I don't know why I couldn't remember that. He's the youngest. Named after my grandfather."

You said nothing. You only watched him with those shifting sea-glass eyes, and your fingers were very still on the mending in your lap.

"And Luke," Jace continued, the name coming easier now. "Lucerys. He's the second one. He's..."

Dead.

The word surfaced from somewhere deep, cold and sharp as a blade. But it didn't hurt the way it should have. It was distant. Muffled. Like a scream heard through a closed door.

"He's what?" you asked.

Jace blinked. "He's... he's at Dragonstone. With our mother. Waiting for me to come home."

You nodded slowly. "I am sure he misses you."

"He probably thinks I'm dead." Jace turned back to the boat, running his hand along the smooth wood. "I have to get back soon. Before he does something stupid. He's always doing stupid things, Luke. He's impulsive. Reckless. He doesn't think before he acts."

Luke is dead. Luke was torn apart by Vhagar above Storm's End. You weren't there. You didn't protect him.

But the voice was fading. Growing quieter. Harder to hear over the sound of the waves and the breeze and your soft, steady breathing.

—

The boat took longer than it should have, some days Jace worked on it from sunrise to sunset, his hands raw and calloused, his back aching, his mind fixed on the singular goal of getting home. But other days—more and more days, as the weeks wore on—he found himself... distracted.

The waterfall, for one thing.

It tumbled down the cliff face on the western side of the island, a silver ribbon that caught the sunlight and scattered it into rainbows. The pool at its base was deep and clear and shockingly cold, fed by some underground spring that kept it cool even in the heat of the afternoon. Jace had discovered it on one of his exploratory walks, and he had been drawn back to it again and again.

You came with him sometimes. You would sit on the rocks at the edge of the pool, your feet dangling in the water, your dress hiked up to your knees. You would tilt your face toward the sun and close your eyes, and Jace would find himself watching you instead of the waterfall.

"Are you going to swim or are you going to stare?" you asked one day, not opening your eyes.

"I wasn't staring."

"You were staring."

"I was... appreciating the scenery."

You opened one eye. "The scenery."

"The waterfall," he said, gesturing vaguely. "It's very nice."

You laughed—that bright, unguarded laugh that he had come to love—and he felt something warm bloom in his chest. Something that had nothing to do with the sun.

"Come on, then," you said, and before he could react, you slid off the rock and into the water with a splash that sent droplets arcing through the air like diamonds.

Jace stared at you. You surfaced a moment later, your hair plastered to your head, your dress clinging to your skin, the wet fabric rendered nearly transparent. The water lapped at your collarbones, and you were laughing again, and you looked—

You looked beautiful.

He had known you were beautiful from the moment he opened his eyes in the candlelit cave. But there was something different about you now. Something that had shifted, the curves of your face seemed softer. The color of your eyes seemed deeper. The way you moved—the way you laughed—the way you looked at him—it all seemed more vivid. More precious.

"Are you coming in or not?" you called, treading water in the center of the pool.

Jace pulled his shirt over his head and dove in after you, the water was cold and clean and wonderful. They splashed each other like children, chasing each other around the pool, ducking under the waterfall and emerging gasping and laughing. Jace couldn't remember the last time he had laughed like this—freely, openly, without the weight of duty pressing down on his shoulders.

Your dress clung to you like a second skin, the wet fabric outlining every curve of your body. Jace tried very hard not to notice. He failed. "You're staring again," you said, but your voice was different now. Quieter. Almost shy.

"Sorry." He wasn't sorry.

—

"I was betrothed," he said one evening.

You were sitting on the rocks overlooking the western sea, watching the sun sink toward the horizon in a blaze of orange and pink. Jace sat beside you, close enough that he could feel the warmth of your arm near his. The boat sat half-finished on the beach below, forgotten for the day.

"Was?" you asked.

"Am. I am betrothed." He frowned. "I think. We were supposed to marry before... before I left."

"Before the battle."

"Before the battle, yes." He stared out at the sunset, trying to conjure her face. His betrothed. She was a Targaryen, he was sure of that. Silver hair. Purple eyes. A dragon. But her name—her name wouldn't come. "She's my cousin, I think. Or my step-sister. Both, actually. It's complicated."

"What is her name?"

Jace opened his mouth. The name wasn't there.

"I can't remember," he said, and the admission felt strange. Not frightening—it should have been frightening—but strange. Like discovering a pocket in a familiar coat that he had never noticed before. "I know her face. She's... she's fierce. Brave. She has a dragon. A small one, I think. Or maybe it's large. I can't..."

He trailed off.

You were quiet for a moment. Then, very softly: "Do you love her?"

"Love?" He considered the question. "I don't know. She's family. She's duty. She's... she's what I'm supposed to do, but i care for her, a lot."

"That is not the same as love."

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

He didn't say anything else. Neither did you. But your arm was warm against his, and the sunset was beautiful, and when he finally walked you back to the cave, his hand found the small of your back without thinking, and you leaned into the touch instead of pulling away.

—

He forgot about the betrothed entirely by morning.

—

The days grew warmer. Or perhaps they didn't—perhaps it was only that Jace had stopped paying attention to the passage of time. The boat sat on the beach, half-finished, and he told himself he would work on it tomorrow. Tomorrow came and went, and he spent it with you instead—walking the island paths, gathering fruit from the strange golden trees, sitting by the waterfall and talking about nothing.

What are you doing? a voice whispered in the back of his mind. You have to go home. Your mother needs you.

But what did his mother need him for? There was something—something important—something about a throne, a war, a betrayal. But the details were foggy now, blurred like ink left out in the rain.

He remembered her face. Her silver hair. Her voice saying his name, but the rest was slipping away, piece by piece, day by day, and the more he forgot, the more he noticed you.

The way you moved through the meadow, your skirts brushing the wildflowers. The way you hummed when you cooked, some melody he had never heard before but that felt familiar anyway. The way you looked at him sometimes, quick glances from beneath your lashes, as if you were checking to make sure he was still there. Still real. Still alive.

The way your hand felt in his when he helped you over a rocky patch of ground.

The way your laugh echoed off the cliffs and came back to them multiplied, a chorus of joy.

The way your eyes caught the light of the setting sun and held it, like they were made of something more than flesh.

He loved you.

He loved the sound of your voice and the curve of your smile and the gentle patience with which you had nursed him back from the edge of death. He loved your dry humor and your quiet strength and the way you never pressed him for answers he didn't have. He loved the life you had built here, alone on an island that should not exist, and he loved that you had let him into it.

He loved you.

And the more he loved you, the less he remembered.

—

The morning was hot and still, Jace had woken early, as he always did now, but instead of reaching for the axe or walking down to the beach where the half-finished boat sat waiting, he had gone straight to the waterfall.

The pool was cool and clear, fed by the endless rush of water that tumbled down the cliff face in a silver curtain. He shed his clothes on the rocks, just the loose linen breeches you had sewn for him from fabric found somewhere in the depths of the cave, and dove in without hesitation. The cold shock of the water stole his breath and cleared his head, chasing away the last cobwebs of sleep.

He floated on his back, staring up at the pale blue sky, watching the birds wheel overhead. His dark hair fanned out in the water around him. The scars on his shoulder and side had faded to thin white lines, barely visible now. He was stronger than he had ever been, his muscles hardened by weeks of manual labor, his skin tanned golden by the sun.

He should have been thinking about the boat, about going home, about his mother and his brothers and the war.

He was thinking about you. Your laugh, your smile, the way your eyes caught the light. The way your hand felt in his. The way you looked at him sometimes, soft and searching, with something unspoken hovering just behind your lips. He had kissed you before, small kisses, brief and chaste, a press of his lips to your forehead when you fell asleep beside him, a brush of his mouth against your knuckles when you handed him a cup of water. But he had not kissed you properly. He had not kissed you the way he wanted to, the way he had been imagining for weeks, the way that left no doubt about what he felt.

He was thinking about that when he heard your footsteps on the rocks above. "You started without me."

Jace turned in the water, treading easily, and looked up at you. You were standing at the edge of the pool, barefoot on the smooth stone, wearing your dress of pale purple gossamer that drifted around your ankles in the faint breeze. The sun caught the planes of your face and the curve of your neck and the dip of your collarbones, and the sight of you struck him silent for a moment.

"Someone has to," he called back, forcing his voice into something approaching normal. "You sleep too late."

"I was gathering herbs. Some of us have work to do."

"Swimming is work. It builds character."

You laughed, that bright, warm sound that he had come to treasure more than anything else on this island. "Is that what you are doing? Building character?"

"Come in and find out."

You hesitated for just a moment. Your eyes met his across the water, and something flickered in your expression, something tentative and questioning, as if you were making a decision and waiting to see if he would notice.

Then you reached up and untied the clasps at your shoulders.

The dress fell and Jace stopped breathing.

You stood above him in nothing but the sunlight, bare to the sky and the water and his gaze. The curves of your body were soft and smooth, your skin glowing in the morning light. Your breasts were full and round and tight in the open air. Your waist dipped inward in a graceful curve before flaring out to the swell of your hips.

You were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Are you coming in or not?" he asked, his voice rougher than he intended.

You smiled, then you dove into the water in one clean, graceful arc, slicing through the surface with barely a splash.

You surfaced inches from him, the water lapped at your collarbones, but beneath the surface he could see the pale shape of your body, distorted by the ripples, impossibly close. Droplets clung to your lashes. Your hair floated around you like ink spilled in water. Your lips were parted and slightly wet, and you were looking at him with those shifting sea-glass eyes, and Jace forgot how to think.

"The water is nice," you said, and your voice was teasing and light, but there was a tremor underneath it.

"Nice," he repeated. He could not stop staring at your mouth.

"Very refreshing."

"I had not noticed."

"No?"

"No."

His hand found your waist beneath the water. Your skin was cool and slick and impossibly soft. You did not pull away. You drifted closer, your bare legs brushing against his, and the contact sent a jolt through him like lightning striking water. He could feel the heat of your core through the cool water, a promise of the warmth waiting for him, and his cock stirred against the confines of his breeches.

"Jace," you whispered.

That was all. Just his name, but the way you said it, breathless and aching and full of want, broke something open inside him.

He kissed you, his mouth strong against yours. His hand tightened on your waist, pulling you flush against him. His other hand came up to cup the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair. You made a small, desperate sound against his lips and kissed him back just as fiercely, your arms winding around his neck, your bare breasts pressing against the hard plane of his chest.

You were bare beneath his hands, there was nothing between his palms and your skin but water. He could feel every curve of you against the hard muscle of his own. His thumbs traced the ridges of your middle, and you shivered, and he swallowed the sound you made. His hands slid lower, cupping the full curve of your arse, kneading the firm flesh, pulling your hips against his so you could feel the rigid length of him pressing against your belly through the wet linen of his breeches.

"Jace," you gasped against his mouth. "Jace, I—"

"Tell me to stop." His voice was wrecked, barely recognizable. "Tell me to stop and I will stop."

"Do not stop." Your fingers dug into his shoulders, nails biting into his sun-warmed skin. "Please do not stop."

He kissed you again, deeper this time, slower. His tongue traced the seam of your lips, and you opened for him with a shuddering breath. The taste of you, sweet and clean and faintly herbal from the medicines you were always brewing, flooded his senses. He explored your mouth thoroughly, learning the texture of your tongue, the ridge of your teeth, the softness of your inner cheeks. You moaned into his mouth and sucked on his tongue, and the sensation went straight to his groin. He could feel your heart pounding against his chest, or perhaps that was his own heart, hammering so hard he thought it might crack his ribs.

Your legs wrapped around his waist beneath the water. The movement was instinctive and natural, and it brought your hips flush against his, the heat of your sex pressing against the hard ridge of his cock through his breeches. He groaned against your mouth, low and rough, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your thighs. You were so warm. Even in the cool water, the core of you radiated a heat that he could feel through the fabric separating them.

He walked you backward through the pool, still kissing you, still holding you, until your back met the smooth stone of the cliff wall. The waterfall rushed beside them, a curtain of silver sound. He kissed the hollow of your throat, feeling your pulse flutter against his lips. He traced the delicate line of your collarbone with his tongue, tasting the clean, mineral tang of the spring water on your skin. He let his mouth drift lower, over the swell of your breast, and when his lips closed around one tight, pebbled nipple, you gasped and arched against him, your fingers fisting in his hair.

He lavished attention on your breasts, suckling first one and then the other, his tongue circling the tight buds, his teeth grazing them with just enough pressure to make you moan. Your breasts were perfect in his hands, full and soft, fitting his palms as though they had been made for him. He kneaded them gently, thumbs brushing over the wet peaks, watching your face contort with pleasure. Your head had fallen back against the stone, your lips parted, your eyes squeezed shut. The sight of you like this, bare and wanting and completely surrendered to his mouth, made his cock throb painfully against his breeches.

"I have wanted this," he breathed against your skin, his voice ragged. "Gods, I have wanted this for so long."

"Then do not wait any longer."

He lifted his head and looked at you. Your eyes were dark with want, your lips swollen from his kisses, your chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow breaths. The water lapped at your breasts, revealing and hiding, and he could feel every inch of you pressed against him, every curve, every soft place, every point of contact where your body met his.

"Are you sure?" he asked. He needed to hear it. He needed to know.

In answer, you cupped his face in your hands and pulled him down to you. "I have never been more sure of anything in my life."

He kissed you again, soft and sweet this time, a promise and a question all at once. Then his hand slid down your body beneath the water, tracing the curve of your waist, the swell of your hip, the sensitive skin of your inner thigh. Your legs tightened around his waist, and he felt you tremble against him. His fingers found the heat of you, warm and slick even in the cool water, and he traced the folds of your sex with a feather-light touch. You gasped and bucked against his hand. He explored you slowly, learning the shape of you, the soft outer lips, the slick inner petals, the hard pearl of your pleasure at the apex. When he circled that sensitive nub with his thumb, you cried out, a sound half-lost in the rush of the waterfall. He swallowed it with his mouth, kissing you through it, his touch gentle and searching and patient. He slid one finger inside you, feeling the tight, wet heat of your body grip him, and you moaned against his lips. He added a second finger, stretching you gently, his thumb still circling your sensitive peak, and you writhed against his hand, your inner walls clenching around his fingers.

"Please," you whispered, the word broken and beautiful. "Please, Jace. I need you inside me."

He withdrew his fingers, and you made a small sound of protest that he silenced with a kiss. He reached down and freed himself from his breeches, his cock springing out, hard and thick and aching. The head was dark with need, a bead of moisture already forming at the tip. You glanced down through the clear water and your eyes widened at the sight of him, long and rigid, curving slightly upward toward his belly.

"You are so beautiful," he murmured, positioning himself at your entrance. He rubbed the head of his cock against your slick folds, coating himself in your wetness, teasing you both with the promise of what was to come. "I want to watch your face when I enter you. I want to see what I do to you."

Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels pressing into the small of his back. "Then do it. I want to feel you."

He pushed into you slowly, so slowly, inch by agonizing inch. The water made everything liquid and easy, but he wanted to savor this, the way your eyes fluttered closed, the way your mouth fell open, the way your body welcomed him. You were so tight and so warm and so perfect around him. He could feel every ridge and fold of your inner walls as they gripped him and fluttered and stretched to accommodate his size. Your heat enveloped him, searing even through the cool water, and he had to stop and breathe when he was fully sheathed, his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding back.

"Look at me," he murmured. "Please. Look at me."

Your eyes opened. They were dark and shining, full of something that looked very much like love. "You feel incredible," you breathed. "I am so full."

He began to move, he withdrew almost completely, feeling the drag of your body against every inch of his length, and then pushed back in with a slow, deep thrust that made you both gasp. The sensation was overwhelming, the tight clutch of your body, the heat, the way your inner muscles rippled around him. He set a steady rhythm, each stroke deliberate and full, sliding into you to the hilt and then pulling back until only the head remained inside you. The water splashed gently around them, ripples spreading outward in concentric circles with every movement. Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper with every thrust. Your hands slid down his spine, tracing the ridges of muscle that flexed with every movement. You were making soft, breathless sounds, gasps and moans and fragments of his name, and he caught each one with his mouth, kissing you, drinking you down like wine.

"You feel incredible," he groaned against your lips. "So tight. So perfect. I could stay inside you forever."

"So do you," you gasped, your words barely coherent, slurred with pleasure. "Harder, Jace. Please."

He did not need to be asked twice. His pace quickened, his hips slamming against yours with increasing force. The sound of their coupling echoed off the cliff walls, wet and rhythmic, the slap of skin against skin beneath the water. Your breasts bounced with every thrust, and he watched them, mesmerized by the way they moved, the way the water lapped at the peaks. He bent his head and captured one nipple in his mouth again, sucking hard, grazing it with his teeth, and you cried out sharply, your inner walls clenching around him.

He shifted his angle slightly, tilting his hips, and on the next thrust you cried out sharply, your head falling back against the stone, your whole body arching against his. He had found the right spot, that sensitive place deep inside you, and he drove into it again and again, watching your face contort with pleasure. Your brow furrowed and your lips parted and your eyes lost focus, and you were babbling now, a stream of broken words, his name and pleas for more and incoherent praise.

"There," you gasped. "Right there. Do not stop. Please do not stop."

He did not stop. He could not have stopped if the world was ending. There was nothing but you, your body, your voice, your hands on his skin. He felt your inner walls begin to flutter around him, the first warning signs of your approaching climax, and he moved his hand between your bodies, finding the slick, sensitive pearl of you beneath the water. He pressed his thumb against it in tight, circling strokes, matching the rhythm of his thrusts.

"That is it," he murmured against your ear, his voice low and rough. "Let go. I want to feel you come apart around me."

Your climax took you by surprise. He felt it building, the way your breath quickened, the way your nails bit into his shoulders, the way your body tightened around him until he could barely move. And then you shattered, crying out his name, your head thrown back, your whole body arching and shuddering against his. He felt the rhythmic pulsing of your release gripping his cock, your inner walls milking him in waves, and he watched your face contort with pleasure, your mouth open, your eyes squeezed shut, your cheeks flushed dark. The sight of you, bare and beautiful and completely undone, was enough to push him over the edge. He drove into you one final time, burying himself to the hilt, and let go. His release surged through him in hot, pulsing waves, spilling deep inside you, and he groaned your name against the curve of your neck, his body shaking with the force of his climax.

For a long moment, neither of you moved, your breathing slowed, your chest rising and falling against his. Your fingers traced lazy patterns on the back of his neck. He remained inside you, still half-hard, reluctant to separate from the warmth of your body. He could feel his seed and your slickness mingled together, warm and wet around him, and the sensation was so intimate, so perfect, that he never wanted to move again.

"Jace," you whispered, and your voice was hoarse and sweet and utterly content.

He lifted his head and looked at you. Your cheeks were flushed. Your lips were red and swollen. Your hair was a wild tangle around your shoulders. Your eyes were soft and hazy with satisfaction. You had never looked more beautiful.

"I love you," he said.

The words came out before he could stop them, before he even realized he was thinking them. But once they were spoken, he knew they were true. He loved you. He loved you so completely and so absolutely that he could barely remember what his life had been before you. You were everything. You were the sun and the sea and the stars. You were the only thing that mattered.

Your eyes widened. "I love you too," you said. "I have loved you since the moment you opened your eyes."

He kissed you again, softly this time, tenderly, a kiss that tasted of water and salt and promises. And then he held you, your body still wrapped around his, the waterfall cool against his back, the sun warm on his face.

They did not leave the pool for a long time. When they finally climbed out, their skin pruned and their limbs heavy with satisfaction, they did not bother to dress. Jace carried you to a patch of soft grass beneath the flowering trees, and he laid you down among the fallen petals, pink and white and gold. He knelt between your spread thighs and looked down at you, at your bare body glistening with water droplets, at the place where his seed was already beginning to leak from your swollen folds, and he felt himself harden again at the sight.

He made love to you again, slower this time, sweeter. He kissed his way down your body, his mouth tracing the hollow of your throat, the swell of your breasts, the plane of your stomach. He paused to dip his tongue into your navel, making you squirm, and then continued lower, pressing kisses to your hip bones, the sensitive crease where your thighs met your body. When he reached the junction of your thighs, he settled between them and looked up at you. Your scent was intoxicating, musky and sweet and mixed with the salt of his own release. He could see the evidence of their earlier coupling, the glistening slickness that coated your folds, and the sight made him groan with want.

He tasted you properly for the first time. His tongue parted your folds, tracing a slow path from your entrance to the peak of your pleasure. The taste of you combined with the taste of him was earthy and raw and utterly intoxicating. You cried out and fisted your hands in the grass, your hips rising to meet his mouth. He took his time, learning what you liked, alternating between broad, flat strokes of his tongue and focused, circling attention to your sensitive peak. He slid two fingers inside you as he sucked on that tight bundle of nerves, curling them forward to press against that sensitive spot on your inner wall, and you came apart against his mouth, your thighs trembling around his head, your voice breaking on his name, your body gushing wetness that he lapped up eagerly.

After that, they walked back to the cave hand in hand, bare and unashamed, their clothes forgotten on the rocks by the waterfall. The sun had climbed higher in the sky, and the island was alive with birdsong and the scent of flowers. Jace kept his hand on the small of your back as you walked, unable to stop touching you, his thumb tracing small circles against your skin.

When you reached the bedchamber, the bed where he had first woken, the furs soft and the candles flickering on the walls, he took you again. This time you pushed him down onto his back and climbed on top of him, straddling his hips. You looked down at him and you reached between your bodies to guide him to your entrance. He watched his cock disappear inside you, inch by inch, watched the way your folds stretched to accommodate him, and the sight was almost enough to make him spend right there. You sank down until he was fully seated inside you, and you both moaned at the sensation.

You began to move, rolling your hips in a slow, sinuous rhythm. He watched you move above him, your breasts swaying with each roll of your hips, your stomach flexing, your head thrown back in pleasure. He reached up and cupped your breasts, rolling the tight peaks between his fingers, and you gasped and increased your pace. Your thighs flexed as you rose and fell, taking him deeper with every stroke. He guided you with his hands on your waist, helping you find a rhythm that made you both moan, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh of your hips.

"Look at you," he breathed, his voice full of wonder. "You are so beautiful riding my cock."

You leaned forward, bracing your hands on his chest, and the new angle made you gasp. He thrust up into you from below, meeting your movements, and the wet sound of your bodies joining filled the chamber. Your inner walls were fluttering around him again, your breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He moved one hand to where your bodies were joined and pressed his thumb against your sensitive peak, circling it in time with your movements. You cried out and shattered above him, your body clenching around him, your back arching. The sight of you, lost in pleasure, pushed him over the edge. He thrust up into you one final time and spilled his seed deep inside you, groaning your name, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to leave marks.

You collapsed against his chest, spent and trembling, and he wrapped his arms around you and held you close, still buried inside you. Your breath was warm against his neck. Your heart hammered against his chest. He could feel the thrum of your pulse where your bodies were still joined, and he never wanted to let you go.

You fell asleep like that, joined together, your body draped over his, and when you woke an hour later, the candles had burned lower and the light through the cave entrance had shifted to the gold of late afternoon. You stirred against him, and he felt himself harden again inside you, still buried in your warmth. You smiled sleepily and began to move your hips in a slow, lazy rhythm, and he rolled you onto your back and made love to you again, gentle and tender, whispering your name like a prayer.

After that day, they could not keep their hands off each other, it was as if a dam had broken. Every moment they were together, they were touching. His hand on the small of your back, your fingers tangled in his hair, his lips on your shoulder, your thigh pressed against his beneath the dinner table. The boat sat forgotten on the beach, the wood beginning to weather and grey in the salt air. The days blurred into a haze of sun and water and skin.

He took you in the meadow, surrounded by wildflowers, the grass tickling your bare skin as he moved inside you, your legs wrapped around his waist and your fingers digging into his back. The sun was warm on his shoulders and the scent of blossoms was thick in the air. He rolled onto his back, pulling you on top of him without breaking their connection, and you rode him among the flowers, your head thrown back, your breasts bouncing with every movement, the bright petals clinging to your damp skin.

You pulled him into the storage chamber one afternoon and pressed him against the cool stone wall. You sank to your knees before him on the worn stone floor, looking up at him and you freed him from his breeches with practiced hands. He was already hard, his cock springing out, the tip glistening. You wrapped your hand around the base of him, feeling the weight and heat of him in your palm, and then you leaned forward and took him into your mouth.

He groaned and buried his fingers in your hair as your lips closed around him. You took him slowly, deliberately, your tongue tracing the ridge on the underside of his shaft, your cheeks hollowing as you sucked. You worked him with your mouth and your hand in tandem, your head bobbing in a steady rhythm, your tongue swirling around the sensitive head on every upstroke. He watched you move, mesmerized, watching his cock disappear between your lips again and again, feeling the wet heat of your mouth, the gentle scrape of your teeth. When you took him deeper, relaxing your throat to accommodate his length, he groaned your name and tightened his grip on your hair.

You pulled back, your lips slick and swollen, a strand of saliva connecting you to his tip. You looked up at him and smiled, a slow, wicked smile, and then you took him deep again, hollowing your cheeks, increasing your pace. Your hand cupped him gently, rolling him in your palm, and the dual sensation pushed him closer and closer to the edge. When he could not hold back any longer, he warned you, his voice ragged, but you only took him deeper, and he spilled into your mouth with a ragged cry of your name. You swallowed everything he gave you, your throat working around him, and you did not pull away until he was spent and trembling.

You looked up at him, your lips slick and swollen, a tiny bead of his release at the corner of your mouth that you caught with your tongue. The sight of you, kneeling before him, having taken everything he had to give, made his spent cock twitch with interest. He pulled you to your feet and kissed you deeply, tasting himself on your tongue, and then he spun you around and bent you over the stone table where you mixed your medicines.

He bunched your skirts around your waist, baring you to his gaze. Your folds were already slick and glistening, your arousal dripping down your inner thighs. He ran his hand over the curve of your backside, kneading the firm flesh, and then he positioned himself at your entrance. He entered you from behind in one smooth thrust, burying himself to the hilt, and you gasped and clutched at the worn stone surface. He set a hard, fast rhythm, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to leave fingerprints and the other braced on the table beside yours. The sound of his hips slamming against your backside filled the small chamber, wet and rhythmic, punctuated by your breathless gasps and his low groans.

"Is this what you wanted when you got on your knees for me?" he asked, his voice rough. "Did you want me to bend you over and fuck you until you screamed?"

"Yes," you gasped, pushing back against him. "Yes, I wanted this. I wanted you."

He reached around and found your sensitive peak with his fingers, rubbing tight circles in time with his thrusts. The angle was perfect, driving him deep, hitting that spot inside you with every stroke. Your gasps turned to cries, your cries turned to screams, and when you came, your body clenching around him so tightly that he could barely move, he followed a heartbeat later, groaning your name into the curve of your shoulder, spilling himself deep inside you.

He stayed inside you until he softened, his forehead resting against your shoulder blade, both of you breathing hard. Then he pulled out gently and turned you around, and he kissed you softly, tenderly, his hands cupping your face.

Every night, they fell asleep tangled together in his bed, their bed now, and every morning they woke the same way. Sometimes he would wake first and simply watch you sleep, the soft rise and fall of your chest, the way your lips curved into a faint smile as if you were dreaming of him. Sometimes you would wake first and trace the lines of his scars with your fingertips, until he stirred and rolled on top of you and the day began the way all their days began now, with your legs around his waist and your soft cries filling the candlelit chamber.

He could not get enough of you. He could not get enough of your taste or your scent or the sounds you made when you came apart in his arms. He could not get enough of the way your eyes fluttered closed when he kissed your neck, or the way your back arched when he ran his hands down your sides, or the way you whispered his name in the darkness, over and over, like an incantation. He learned every inch of your body, every sensitive spot, every place that made you gasp and every place that made you moan. He learned the rhythm you liked, slow and deep when you were tender, fast and hard when you were hungry. He learned how to read your body well enough to know which one you needed before you had to ask. He learned that you liked it when he talked to you while he moved inside you, telling you how beautiful you were, how much he loved you, how he wanted to stay buried in your warmth forever.

And every time he was inside you, every time you came apart in his arms, every time he lost himself in the heat and the pleasure and the overwhelming, consuming love he felt for you, something else slipped away.

In many ways, you were. You were his world now. You were everything.

And he was forgetting that there had ever been anything else.

—

The ship appeared on the horizon like a ghost from a life Jace had almost forgotten, he was down by the shore, skipping stones across the glass-flat water while you gathered shells further down the beach.

Then he saw it, a dark shape cut against the glare of the sun. At first he thought it was a cloud, or a trick of the light, or one of the strange birds that sometimes wheeled overhead. But the shape grew larger and sharper and resolved itself into masts and sails and a hull cutting through the water.

Jace's hand froze mid-throw. The stone dropped from his fingers and plunked into the shallows.

"Jace?" Your voice came from further down the beach, laced with concern. "What is it?"

"A ship."

The word felt strange in his mouth, foreign. He had not seen a ship in how long? Months? Years? He could not remember. Time had stopped meaning anything on this island.

He squinted against the sun, his heart beating faster. The ship was large, a warship by the look of it, three masts and a reinforced hull. As it drew closer, he could make out the banner snapping from the mainmast.

A seahorse. Silver on sea-green.

Velaryon.

The name hit him like a wave. His grandfather's house. His mother's allies. His family. The memories surged up from wherever they had been hiding, Dragonstone, Driftmark, the fleet, Lord Corlys, the war.

The war. He was fighting a war. His mother needed him. He had to go home.

"They are here for me," he breathed, and then he was running down the beach, waving his arms over his head, shouting at the top of his lungs. "Here! I am here!"

The soldiers came ashore in a longboat, six of them, their armor gleaming in the sun, the Velaryon seahorse embossed on their breastplates. They were grizzled men, seasoned fighters, and when they saw Jace standing on the beach, their faces broke into expressions of shock and relief and barely contained joy.

"Prince Jacaerys," the lead soldier breathed, dropping to one knee in the sand. "We thought you were dead. The Queen, your mother, she sent ships to every corner of the Narrow Sea. She never gave up hope."

Jace pulled the man to his feet, his hands shaking. "My mother. Is she well? Is the war still—"

"The war continues, my prince. The queen has taken Kings Landing. She will be overjoyed to see you. Everyone believed you had perished at the Gullet."

The Gullet. The arrows. Vermax screaming. The water closing over his head.

Jace shoved the memories aside. "I am alive," he said, and he was laughing now, giddy with relief and adrenaline. "I am alive, and I am coming home."

He turned to find you, you were standing a few paces back, your hands clasped in front of you, watching the soldiers with an expression he could not read. Your strange dress fluttered in the sea breeze, and your eyes were dark and unreadable.

"This is Y/N," Jace said, pulling you forward. You came reluctantly, your bare feet dragging in the sand. "She saved my life. She pulled me from the water and nursed me back to health. I would not be alive without her."

The lead soldier bowed to you, respectful. "The Queen will want to thank you personally, my lady. You have done the realm a great service."

You said nothing. You only nodded, a small, stiff movement.

Jace pulled you aside while the soldiers began unloading supplies from the longboat. His hands were still shaking. His heart was pounding. He felt more alive than he had in weeks, or months, or however long it had been.

"You are coming with me," he said, the words tumbling out in a rush. "I know what you told me about your brother and the exile. But I am a prince, and my mother is the Queen. Whatever power your brother holds, it is nothing compared to the Iron Throne. We can protect you."

Your eyes widened. "Jace..."

"I mean it." He took your hands in his, squeezing tight. "You saved my life. You have been alone here for so long, and I am not going to leave you behind. Come with me to Westeros. I will keep you safe. I swear it."

For a long moment, you only looked at him. Your sea-glass eyes searched his face, looking for something he did not recognize. It might have been doubt or hesitation or some reason to refuse, then you smiled.

"Yes," you said. "I will come with you."

Jace pulled you into his arms and held you tight, his face buried in your hair, breathing in the scent of you, salt and flowers and home. "We leave at dawn," he murmured. "Tomorrow, we leave at dawn."

That night, you cooked a feast, the soldiers were camped on the beach, their tents pitched in a neat row above the tide line. They had offered to share their rations, but you had insisted, telling them in that quiet, gracious way of yours that they were guests on your island and that you would feed them.

Jace helped you carry platters of food down to the beach. There was roasted pork, crackling and golden, seasoned with herbs from your garden. There were strange fruits sliced and arranged in intricate patterns. There was fresh bread baked in the stone oven at the back of the cave, still warm and fragrant. And there was wine, more wine than Jace had ever seen in the cave, deep red wine in clay amphorae, rich and dark and potent.

"Where did you get all this?" he asked, watching you fill cup after cup for the soldiers.

You smiled, your hands steady on the amphora. "I have been saving it. For a special occasion."

The feast was a joyous affair. The soldiers laughed and sang and told Jace stories of the war, battles won and lost, allies gained and betrayed, the endless, grinding struggle for the Iron Throne. He listened with half an ear, nodding in the right places, but his attention kept drifting to you.

You moved among the soldiers like a ghost, refilling cups, offering plates of food, your smile never wavering. The men thanked you with drunken enthusiasm, their faces flushed with wine and gratitude. Jace felt a swell of pride watching you, his savior, his love, soon to be his companion in Westeros, where he would shower you with every luxury you had been denied on this lonely island.

"To the Prince!" one of the soldiers bellowed, raising his cup. "To Prince Jacaerys, returned from the dead!"

"To the Prince!" the others roared.

Jace raised his own cup and drank deep. The wine was stronger than he expected, and it went to his head almost immediately. The stars above seemed to blur and swirl. The fire on the beach danced and flickered. Your hand found his under the table, and he squeezed it tight.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow, we go home

—

He woke to sunlight and the sound of birdsong, his head pounded. His mouth was dry and sour with the aftertaste of wine. He groaned and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, trying to drive back the ache that throbbed behind them. How much had he drunk? He remembered the feast. He remembered the soldiers laughing, the wine flowing, your hand in his beneath the table. He remembered the fire on the beach and the stars wheeling overhead and the giddy, overwhelming relief of knowing that he was finally, finally going home.

The soldiers, Jace sat up so fast that the furs tangled around his legs and nearly sent him sprawling. The soldiers. The ship. They were leaving at dawn. He had to get up. He had to get dressed. He had to—

He stumbled out of the bed and through the winding passages of the cave, his bare feet slapping against the cold stone. The light grew brighter as he ran, golden and warm, and then he burst through the cave entrance and stopped dead at the edge of the cliff.

The beach was empty, his eyes swept the shoreline, back and forth, back and forth, searching for the tents and the longboat and the supply crates. He looked for the ship, the great Velaryon warship with its three masts and its silver seahorse banner, riding at anchor in the bay.

There was nothing there, the white sand stretched out below him, pristine and unmarked. The sea glittered in the morning sun, calm and blue and utterly empty all the way to the horizon. No ship. No sails. No sign that anyone had ever been here at all.

"What..." Jace's voice came out hoarse, cracked. He turned and ran down the path to the beach, his legs still unsteady, his heart pounding against his ribs. He reached the sand and walked through the place where the camp had been, his eyes scanning the ground for any trace of the soldiers. A footprint. A scrap of cloth. A ring of stones where the fire had burned. A spilled cup. Anything.

The sand was smooth and unblemished. The tide had come in during the night and erased whatever marks might have been left behind.

"Jace?" Your voice drifted down from the cliff above, calm and curious. "What are you doing?"

He looked up. You were standing at the mouth of the cave, barefoot, wrapped in one of your flowing dresses, your hair loose around your shoulders. The morning light caught the soft curves of your face and made your eyes gleam.

"The soldiers," Jace called up to you. "The ship. Where are they?"

You tilted your head, your brow furrowing slightly. "What soldiers?"

The question hit him like a physical blow. He stood there on the empty beach, staring up at you, waiting for you to laugh or smile or tell him it was a joke. You only looked back at him with mild, patient confusion.

"The soldiers," he repeated, his voice rising. "The Velaryon soldiers. Six of them. They came yesterday in a warship. They landed on the beach. We had a feast. You served them roast pork and wine. They were going to take us home this morning."

Your expression did not change. That small, puzzled frown remained, as though he were speaking a language you did not quite recognize.

"Jace," you said gently, "I think you must have dreamed it."

"I did not dream it." He was breathing hard now, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "They were here. They said my mother sent them. You spoke to them. You—"

He stopped, you were walking down the path to the beach now, your bare feet moving sure and steady over the rocks. When you reached the sand, you came to stand beside him, and your hand rose to rest against his cheek.

"You had a great deal of wine last night," you said, your voice soft and soothing. "More than I have ever seen you drink. Sometimes wine can make dreams feel very real."

Jace shook his head, pulling away from your touch. "It was not a dream. They were here. They were real."

"Then where are they now?" You gestured at the empty beach, the empty sea, the empty horizon. "Where is the ship? Where are the footprints? Where is the fire? If six men camped on this beach last night, where is the evidence of it?"

The sand was smooth. The sea was empty. There was no smoke rising from the ashes of a campfire. There were no tent pegs driven into the earth. There was no ship, no longboat, no sign that anyone but the two of you had ever set foot on this island.

"I do not know," he said, and his voice sounded thin and uncertain even to his own ears. "I do not understand."

You stepped closer, and your hand found his cheek again, and this time he did not pull away. Your palm was cool against his flushed skin.

"You have been through so much," you murmured. "Your body is still healing. Your mind is still healing. Dreams and memories and wishes can all blur together. But you are here with me, and you are safe. That is what matters."

Jace stared down at the sand. His head was pounding. His thoughts were tangled, slipping over each other like stones in a landslide. He remembered the feast so clearly, the taste of the roast pork, the sound of the soldiers' laughter, the weight of your hand in his. He remembered the banner snapping in the wind, silver seahorse on sea-green. He remembered the lead soldier kneeling in the sand, the shock and relief on his weathered face.

But the beach was empty.

"Perhaps you are right," he said slowly, and the words felt like surrender. "Perhaps I dreamed it."

You smiled, and your smile was warm and gentle and full of something that might have been relief. "Come back inside. I will make you something to eat. You will feel better once you have eaten."

He let you lead him back up the path and into the cave. He let you sit him down at the stone table. He let you place a plate of fruit and fresh bread in front of him, and he ate without tasting it, his mind still chasing the fragments of the dream that had felt so real.

That was what you had called it. A dream. And perhaps you were right. Perhaps the longing for home had grown so strong that his mind had conjured a rescue where none existed. Perhaps the wine had done the rest, weaving the longing into something that felt like memory.

Perhaps.

He did not think about it for the rest of the day, it was not until late afternoon that he noticed the pigs, he was walking past the enclosure without any particular destination in mind, his feet carrying him along the familiar path, when he stopped and frowned.

The pigs had always been numerous, he had never bothered to count them exactly, but now, looking at the enclosure, he could see that there were more than there had been the day before. Many more.

The sows jostled and grunted. The piglets tumbled over each other in the dirt. They were fat, healthy animals with glossy coats and floppy ears, rooting in the churned earth of the enclosure, there were at least twice as many pigs as there had been the day before.

Jace stood at the stone wall and stared at them. The pigs stared back, their small dark eyes unblinking, he stood there for a long time.

—

Days later, Jace found the hole by accident, though later he would wonder whether anything on this island ever happened by accident at all. He had been exploring, something he did more and more often now, wandering the island's paths and cliffs and hidden coves as if searching for something he could not name. He had walked further than usual that afternoon, following a thin stream that wound through a cleft in the cliffs, its water cold and clear and tasting faintly of minerals when he cupped his hands to drink. The stream led him deeper into the interior than he had ever gone before, past stands of flowering trees whose blossoms released a sweet, drowsy perfume, past moss-covered boulders that loomed overhead like the shoulders of buried giants and that was when he saw it.

A dark opening in the rock face, half-hidden by a curtain of flowering vines that spilled down from the cliff above in cascades of white and purple. The vines were thick and tangled, but they did not quite conceal the gap behind them. An opening wide enough for a man to walk through without ducking his head.

He should not have gone in. He knew that, even as his feet carried him forward, even as his hands reached out to push the vines aside. A voice in the back of his mind, the voice that had once belonged to a prince trained in caution and suspicion, whispered that he should turn around and walk back to the sunlit meadow and forget he had ever seen this place. But that voice had grown very quiet in the months he had spent on this island, and something else had grown louder.

The darkness swallowed him whole. He stood motionless for a long moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust, one hand pressed flat against the cool stone of the wall. The passage sloped downward, the floor worn smooth by the passage of time or water or the tread of feet. He could not see more than a few feet ahead, but he could feel the space around him opening up, widening into something larger than a simple tunnel. The air was dry and still, the silence so complete that he could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears.

He walked deeper, the passage twisted once, then twice, then opened abruptly into a chamber so vast that Jace's footsteps echoed back to him from walls he could not see. Thin shafts of daylight pierced down through cracks in the ceiling high above, illuminating the space in pale, dusty columns that fell across the floor like the bars of a cage made of light and in those columns of light, Jace saw them.

Armor.

Dozens of sets, perhaps hundreds, arranged against the walls and stacked in corners and laid out on stone slabs that rose from the floor like altars. Breastplates and greaves and gauntlets and helms, their surfaces catching the thin light and throwing it back in dull gleams. Some were polished and gleaming, as if they had been cleaned and oiled with meticulous care. Others were rusted and crumbling, their edges flaking away into red-brown dust, their shapes barely recognizable beneath the corrosion of years or decades or centuries. Swords and axes and spears and maces, their blades dull with age and disuse, their hilts wrapped in leather that had rotted away to nothing.

And clothes, stacks and stacks of clothes, tunics and breeches and cloaks and boots and belts and gloves. They were piled against the walls in drifts that rose nearly to the ceiling, some of them neatly folded as if awaiting a return that would never come, others tossed carelessly into corners in tangled heaps of faded fabric. Some were new, the dyes still bright, the wool still soft, the linen still crisp and clean. Others were ancient and moth-eaten, their threads crumbling at the slightest touch, their colors bleached to ghostly echoes of what they had once been.

Jace stood in the center of the chamber and turned in a slow circle, his breath caught in his throat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a fist beating against a locked door. The scale of it was incomprehensible. There were so many. Too many. More than one person could ever need. More than a dozen people could ever need. More than a hundred people could ever need. This was not a collection. This was a graveyard for the belongings of the dead.

His eyes caught on a breastplate near his feet, and the world tilted sideways, it was newer than the others. Its metal still held a faint gleam beneath a thin layer of dust, and its leather straps were still supple, and on its chest, embossed in silver that caught the light like a blade, was the seahorse of House Velaryon.

He remembered the lead soldier kneeling in the sand, his weathered face breaking into shock and relief. He remembered the feast on the beach, the crackling fire, the roast pork and the wine and your hand in his beneath the table. He remembered waking to find the beach empty and the sea bare and you standing at the mouth of the cave with your head tilted and your brow furrowed, asking him what soldiers he meant, telling him it was only a dream, only a dream, nothing more than a dream.

The soldiers who had never been here. The soldiers he had only imagined. Their armor was lying at his feet.

He stumbled backward. His heel caught on a gauntlet and sent it skittering across the stone floor with a sound like a startled crab. The noise echoed through the chamber and died away into silence, and Jace stood there with his hands shaking and his mind blank with a terror so absolute that it felt almost like calm. He could not think. He could not breathe. He could not make sense of what he was seeing, and some part of him understood with terrible clarity that making sense of it would destroy everything he had built on this island. Every moment of peace. Every hour of love. Every whispered word in the darkness. All of it balanced on the edge of this pit, and if he looked down, if he truly looked, he would fall.

"What are you doing here?"

He spun around so fast that his boots skidded on the stone floor, his heart slammed against his ribs, once, twice, a frantic drumbeat of pure animal terror.. "Nothing. I was only looking, I wanted to understand—"

"You were only looking." You stepped out of the shadows and into the thin light that filtered down from the cracks in the ceiling, and the expression on your face made his stomach drop. The gentle warmth he had come to love was gone. The softness was gone. Your jaw was tight, the muscles corded beneath your skin, and your hands were clenched into fists at your sides, and your eyes were fixed on him with a glittering intensity that pinned him in place like a butterfly on a board. "At what, precisely? At the belongings of dead men? At the evidence of my sins? At the proof that I am not the gentle, lonely woman you thought you loved?"

Your hands unclenched and clenched again, the fingers curling and uncurling in a rhythm that seemed almost involuntary, as though you were strangling something invisible.

"I asked you a question, Jace." Your voice dropped, soft and dangerous. "What are you doing here?"

He should have been afraid. He was afraid. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up, and his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his throat, and every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to run. But something else rose up inside him too, some scrap of the prince he used to be, some stubborn remnant of the boy who had faced down enemies on the battlefield and never flinched. He straightened his spine and met your eyes and refused to look away.

"Why are they here?" he asked, gesturing at the armor that surrounded them. "All of these. Dozens of sets. Hundreds, maybe. The soldiers who came for me, their armor is here. The same breastplate, the same sigil. It wasn't a dream was it? What happened to them?"

You stared at him. A muscle in your jaw twitched.

"It does not matter."

"It matters to me."

"It does not matter, Jace." Your voice was rising now, cracking at the edges, splintering into something raw and desperate. "It should not matter, Jace. Those men are gone. Let them stay gone. Let the past stay buried. We were happy. We were so happy. Why could you not leave well enough alone?"

"Because I need to know the truth."

"The truth will not make you happy. The truth will not keep you warm at night. The truth will not hold you when you wake from nightmares and tell you that everything is going to be all right."

"The truth is the truth. I deserve to know it."

You laughed, it was sharp and bitter and jagged, the laugh of someone who had been hurt too many times to believe in fairness anymore. "You sound just like them. Every single one of them. They all wanted the truth. They all thought they deserved to know. And do you know what happened when they found it?"

Jace did not answer. He did not need to answer. The armors answered for him.

"What happened to the soldiers?" he asked instead. His voice was very quiet. "The ones who came for me. The ones whose armor is lying at my feet. What did you do to them?"

Your face crumpled, the coldness shattered and the fury crumbled and underneath it was something far older and far more terrifying, a grief so immense it had calcified into rage over centuries of solitude. The tears that spilled down your cheeks were real, hot and sudden and utterly convincing.

"Why do you want to leave me?" you screamed, the sound echoed off the stone walls and came back multiplied, a chorus of accusations that battered him from every direction. Your voice was raw and ragged, shredded at the edges, and the pain in it was so enormous that Jace felt his own heart clench in response. The anger that had been building in him, the righteous fury at being lied to, began to waver. How could he be angry at someone who was in so much pain? How could he accuse someone who was so clearly suffering?

"Why do you want to leave me?" you cried again, and your voice broke on the last word. "Why do they always leave? Every single one of them, they wash up on my shore and I save them and I nurse them back to health and I give them everything I have, everything I am, and they tell me they love me, they look me in the eyes and they swear they love me, and I believe them every time, every single time I believe them because I am so desperate to be loved by someone, anyone, and then they remember. They always remember. And they always leave. They always want to go home. Why am I never enough? Why am I never enough for anyone?"

The question hung in the air, raw and bleeding. Your chest was heaving. Your hands were shaking. You looked at him with those burning eyes, and Jace felt his resolve crumbling, you were not a monster, you were wounded, a woman who had been abandoned and betrayed so many times that she had forgotten how to trust. How could he blame you for what you had done?

"I love you," he said, and his voice was shaking but he meant it with every fiber of his being. "I love you. I do. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone."

"Then why do you want to leave me?" Your voice was small now, wounded, the fury draining away to reveal the vulnerability beneath. "If you love me, why isn't that enough? Why do you need to go back? Why can't you just stay here with me? Why do you need a mother and brothers and a war and a throne? Why can you not just stay here and be mine?"

"Because I have a family." He was pleading now, hating himself for the pain he was causing you. "Because I have a mother who needs me and brothers who are waiting for me. Because there is a war, a war I was fighting, a war I was supposed to win. Because I have a duty."

"A duty." You laughed, but it was a broken sound, a laugh that was really a sob. "Duty. Honor. Family. I have heard all of this before. Every single one of them said the same thing. They had to go back. They had responsibilities. They had people who needed them. And what about me? What about what I need? I needed them. I loved them. And they left me anyway. They all left me. Just like you will leave me."

"I don't want to leave you," Jace said, and the words felt inadequate, pathetic. "I want to go home, yes. I want to see my mother. I want to protect her from the enemies who would see her dead and her throne stolen. But I want to take you with me. I want you to meet her. I want to marry you properly, before the whole court, with a septon and a cloak and vows spoken in the light of the Seven. I want to make you my queen. When I sit the Iron Throne, you will sit beside me."

He reached for you, desperate to comfort you, to wipe the tears from your cheeks. You did not pull away, but you did not lean into his touch either.

"I do not care what you did to these men," he said, his voice low and fierce. "I do not care what you have done. I love you. I love you more than I have ever loved anything in my life. I just want you to come with me. Please. Come with me."

For a long moment, you were silent, then you shook your head. Slowly. Miserably. With the exhausted certainty of someone who had heard these same promises too many times to count.

"It is not true," you whispered. "They always say this. When my brother sends them here, they always tell me they love me. They always promise they will stay. They look at me with those earnest eyes and they swear they are different from the others, and I believe them. I always believe them. Because I want to believe. Because I want so desperately for it to be true. And then they remember who they were before, and everything changes."

You pulled your hands out of his grip and wrapped your arms around yourself, your shoulders hunching inward as though you were trying to make yourself smaller, harder to hurt. Jace felt a surge of protectiveness so strong it almost knocked the breath out of him. He wanted to hold you. He wanted to shield you from everything that had ever hurt you.

"They remember their old lives," you continued, your voice barely above a whisper, "and they tell me they will save me. They tell me they will break the curse and take me away from here and marry me in a real sept with real vows. They promise me everything I have ever wanted. And for a little while I let myself hope. I let myself believe that this time will be different. This time the love will be real."

Your voice caught on the last word, splintering into something that was almost a sob. Jace felt tears prick at the corners of his own eyes. Gods, how could anyone have done this to you? How could anyone have been so cruel?

"But they never mean it," you said. "They are only saying what they think I want to hear. They are only trying to placate me, to buy themselves time, to find a way to escape. And when they try to break the curse and they fail, when they realize their love is not strong enough, when they understand that they do not really love me at all, they run. They try to leave. And I—"

You stopped. Your hands were trembling violently now, the fingers twisting together in front of you.

"What do you do?" Jace asked, though he already knew the answer. He knew it, and it horrified him, and yet somehow he could not bring himself to judge you for it. You had been hurt. You had been betrayed. You had been left alone for so long that you had forgotten what it felt like to be held. How could anyone expect you to react with grace when another man tried to abandon you?

"I do not let them leave." Your voice was barely a whisper, so quiet he had to lean closer to hear it. "They do not get to leave. They do not get to go back to their families and forget about me while I rot here alone. They stay. They stay here with me. Forever."

"The pigs," Jace said.

"They are happier as pigs," Your voice took on a defensive edge, almost childlike in its insistence. "They do not remember their old lives. They do not feel the disappointment. They do not want to leave. They are content. They have food and shelter and each other. I take care of them. I take better care of them than anyone ever took care of me." Your eyes searched his face, looking for understanding, looking for absolution. "They are better off this way. I gave them peace. I gave them a life without pain. Do you know what my brother gave me? Do you know what it feels like to be left here, alone, for centuries, with nothing but the sound of the waves and the crying of the gulls and the knowledge that no one is ever coming for you?"

Jace's throat was dry. "Why did you not do it to me?"

"Because I thought you were different." Your voice was small now, so small it was almost swallowed by the shadows of the cave. "Because when I looked at you, when I held you through the fevers and listened to you talk about your home and your family, I thought—I hoped—that you might really love me." A tear slid down your cheek, and you did not wipe it away. "I thought you would stay."

The guilt hit Jace like a physical blow. You had hoped. You had let yourself hope, despite everything, despite centuries of betrayal and abandonment, and he was about to become just another name on the long list of people who had disappointed you. He was about to leave you, just like all the others. He was about to prove that your hope had been misplaced, that love was a lie, that no one would ever truly choose you.

"I am sorry," he said, and he meant it with every part of himself. "I am so sorry. I do not want to leave you. I want to stay. I want both things. I want to go home, but I want you to come with me. Can I not have both things?"

"No one ever wants both things." You pulled your hands away, and your expression was hardening again, the vulnerability sealing itself back behind walls of old resentment. "They want to leave. They always want to leave. As soon as they remember their old lives, they want to leave. And when they realize they cannot break the curse, they run. They all run. And I have to stop them because if I do not stop them they will leave me alone again, and I cannot be alone again, Jace, I cannot, I would rather die than be alone again—"

"What curse?" Jace cut through your spiraling words, his voice urgent. "You said they could not break the curse. What curse?"

"It does not matter," you said. Your voice was empty now, drained of all the fury and grief that had filled it moments before. "You are going to leave me too. You are going to try to break the curse, and you are going to fail, because no one has ever succeeded, and then you are going to run. Just like all the others."

"Tell me what the curse is. Please. Let me help you."

You stared at him for a long, long moment. The candles flickered in their alcoves, their flames guttering in a draft he could not feel. The armor gleamed dully in the shadows, the relics of a hundred men who had stood where he was standing now and made the same promises he was making. Somewhere far away, muffled by stone and distance, the pigs grunted in their enclosure. The men who had failed. The men whose love had not been strong enough.

"My brother exiled me here," you said finally. Your voice was flat now, reciting facts rather than feelings, as though you had told this story so many times that the words had lost all meaning. "Centuries ago. So long ago that the world I came from does not exist anymore, and when I disobeyed him, when I refused to do what he asked of me, he put a curse on this island as punishment. I cannot leave. No ship will carry me. No boat will bear my weight. If I try to swim, the sea itself will rise up and drag me back to shore. I am bound here, bound to this rock, until the curse is broken or the world ends."

"How do I break it?"

You looked at him, and your eyes were ancient and exhausted and utterly without hope. Jace felt his heart twist. You had been disappointed so many times. You did not believe he could do it.

"There is a cave," you said. "Behind the waterfall on the western cliff. There is a statue inside, a statue of me carved from black stone, wrapped in chains. I cannot enter the cave. It is spelled against me." Your hand rose unconsciously to your neck, as if feeling for the links of a collar that was not there. "If the statue is broken, the curse will be lifted. The chains will fall. I will be free."

"Then I will break it."

"It is not that simple." Your voice was quiet now, almost gentle, and there was something in it that felt like a warning, a kindness, an attempt to protect him from the disappointment you were certain was coming. "Only a man who knows my true nature can destroy the statue. Only a man who has seen what I am, what I have done, every monstrous thing I have committed in my long and miserable existence, and still loves me truly. Not charmed. Not tricked. Not fogged by the magic of this island. Real love. Clear-eyed love. Love that looks at the worst of me and does not flinch." You paused. "If his love is false, if it is only gratitude or loneliness or the lingering effects of my enchantments, the statue will not break. It will not even crack. And I will know. I will know that his love was a lie."

"I am not them," he said.

"You are. You are exactly like them."

"No." He stepped forward and took your face in his hands, his thumbs brushing the tears from your cheeks. "I am not them. I am going to break the curse. I am going to set you free. I am going to take you away from this island and give you the life you deserve. I swear it."

"You cannot promise that."

"I can. I am." He pressed his forehead against yours. "I love you. I know what you are. I know what you have done. And I love you anyway. I love you not despite the worst of you but because of it. Because the worst of you was born from pain, and I want to heal that pain. I want to be the one who finally proves to you that love is real. That you are worthy of it. That you have always been worthy of it."

You let out a sound that was half laugh and half sob. "You are a fool, Jacaerys Velaryon."

"Take me to the cave behind the waterfall," he said. "Let me prove it."

"Alright," you whispered, as if you had expected him to ask. "I will take you. But do not say I did not warn you."

You turned and walked out of the cave, and Jace followed you, his heart pounding and his mind clear and his love for you burning in his chest like a flame that no wind could extinguish. He was going to save you. He was going to be the one. He was going to prove that love was stronger than any curse, stronger than any magic, stronger than centuries of solitude and betrayal.

He had to be the one. The alternative was unthinkable.

—

The walk was silent, you led him along the familiar path, the meadow with its strange flowers swaying in the breeze, the grove of fruit trees with their golden bounty hanging heavy from the branches, the rocky outcropping that overlooked the western shore where the sea stretched out blue and endless and utterly indifferent to what was about to happen. The waterfall was roaring louder than usual, or perhaps it only seemed that way. Perhaps it was the blood pounding in his ears. Perhaps it was the weight of what he was about to do pressing down on him like a physical thing, a stone laid across his chest that made every breath feel shallow and insufficient.

You stopped at the edge of the pool, where the water churned white with the endless cascade. Your face was pale. Your hands were shaking at your sides, the fingers twisting together in that nervous gesture he had come to recognize, the one that always made him want to pull you into his arms and promise you that everything would be alright.

"There," you said, pointing, Jace squinted through the spray. Behind the curtain of falling water, barely visible through the silver torrent, was a dark opening in the rock face. A cave mouth, smaller than the one you lived in, half-hidden by the cascade. It looked like something that did not want to be found.

"I cannot enter," you said, and your voice was quiet, almost reverent. "The spell prevents me. The moment I step through the water, I am pushed back. It burns." You wrapped your arms around yourself, your fingers digging into the flesh of your upper arms. The gesture was meant to look vulnerable, meant to make him feel protective. It worked. "You have to go alone."

Jace nodded. He had expected this. Of course he had expected this. The hero always had to face the trial alone. That was how these stories went.

"I will come back," he said.

You did not answer. Your eyes were fixed on the waterfall, dark and terrified, and your lower lip trembled just slightly, just enough for him to notice.

"Hey." He touched your chin, turning your face toward him. Your skin was cold beneath his fingers. "I will come back. I promise."

"Everyone promises." Your voice was barely a whisper, and there was something in it that snagged at his heart like a fishhook. "Everyone who has ever stood on this shore has promised to come back."

"I am not everyone."

He kissed your lips and for just a moment he felt something move beneath the surface. A flicker. A pulse. Something that was not quite human. Then the moment passed, and you were just you again, fragile and frightened and looking at him with those sea-glass eyes that held all the sadness in the world.

He turned away before he could lose his nerve. He dove into the pool, and the water closed over his head like a fist.

The cold was shocking. It was more than cold. It was the absence of warmth, the absence of life, a cold that sank into his bones and wrapped around his heart and squeezed. He surfaced gasping, his breath torn from his lungs in a ragged gasp, and swam toward the waterfall with strong, desperate strokes. The roar grew louder as he approached, a wall of sound that pressed against his eardrums until he could hear nothing else. The spray blinded him, stinging his eyes, filling his mouth with the taste of minerals and stone. The current tried to push him back, tried to shove him away from the cave entrance as if the water itself did not want him to pass.

But he kept swimming. He had promised. He had promised he would come back, he reached the rock face and pulled himself up onto a narrow ledge, slick with moss and running water, his fingers scrabbling for purchase on the wet stone. The cave entrance yawned before him, dark and silent and somehow hungry, as if the darkness itself was waiting for him to step inside. He looked back once. You were still standing at the edge of the pool, a pale figure in a pale dress, your hands pressed to your mouth. You looked like a ghost. You looked like a memory of someone who had died a long time ago.

Then he turned and walked into the darkness.

—

The cave was small, smaller than he had expected. The passage was short, barely twenty paces, the walls rough and wet beneath his trailing fingers, the floor sloping downward into the heart of the rock. The roar of the waterfall faded behind him, muffled by the stone, until the only sound was the drip of water and the soft scuff of his bare feet on the rock and the steady, insistent pounding of his own heart.

The passage opened into a round chamber no larger than your bedchamber back in the main cave. The walls were smooth and wet, glistening with moisture, catching the light and throwing it back in a thousand tiny reflections. The only illumination came from somewhere above, a thin shaft of daylight that pierced through a crack in the rock and fell in a single golden beam onto the center of the chamber. It was like something out of a sept, that beam of light. It was like the light that fell on an altar, or a tomb, or a place where something sacred had been buried and forgotten.

And in the center of the chamber was the statue.

It was you, smooth and luminous, carved with such skill that it seemed almost alive. The surface of the stone had been polished to a soft gleam, catching the golden light and holding it, and the details were so fine that Jace could see the individual strands of hair. The statue knelt on a stone pedestal, its head bowed in an attitude of submission or prayer, its face frozen in an expression of such profound sorrow that Jace felt his chest tighten just looking at it. The eyes were closed. The lips were slightly parted, as if caught in the middle of a sigh. The shoulders were hunched forward, the spine curved, every line of the body speaking of exhaustion and despair and the weight of an eternity spent alone.

And the hands, the statue's hands were raised in front of its chest, palms facing each other, fingers slightly curled as if holding something invisible. And around those marble wrists, coiled so tightly they seemed to be part of the stone itself, were two snakes.

No. Not snakes. Bracelets. Golden bracelets, each one shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. But the serpents were not connected to each other. They were separate, independent, each one locked around a single wrist, each one devouring itself in an endless cycle of consumption and renewal. Their golden eyes gleamed in the shaft of daylight, bright and watchful and aware. Their scales were so finely detailed that Jace could count every one, each scale overlapping the next in perfect, reptilian precision. Their jaws were clamped tight around their own tails, and their bodies were wound around the marble wrists in coils that looked tight enough to bruise.

They were not chains. Not exactly. They were something worse. They were a trap that could not be escaped because there was nothing to break. The snakes held her wrists, and her wrists held the snakes, and neither could let go, and the whole thing was a perfect, closed loop of imprisonment that had no beginning and no end.

Jace stood in the darkness at the edge of the chamber, staring at the statue. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat, in his temples, in the tips of his fingers. His hands were slick with water and sweat. The marble figure knelt in its beam of light, motionless and patient, and the golden snakes watched him with their glittering eyes, and the silence was so complete that he could hear the blood rushing through his own veins.

He bent down and picked up a rock from the floor of the cave. It was heavy, sharp-edged, big enough to do damage. He turned it over in his hands, testing its weight, feeling the rough edges bite into his palm. Break the statue. Break the curse. Simple. You had told him what to do. You had told him it was simple.

He took a step toward the pedestal.

"Are you quite certain about this?"

Jace froze, the voice was male. Low and smooth and echoing, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It bounced off the wet stone walls, slid through the darkness, coiled around him like smoke, like water, like something that had been waiting in the shadows for a very long time. It was not a human voice. It was too resonant for that, too layered, as if many voices were speaking at once in perfect, dissonant harmony.

"Who is there?" Jace demanded. His voice sounded too loud in the silence, too harsh, too frightened. He hated how frightened he sounded.

No answer. Just the dripping of water. The distant, muffled roar of the falls.

"You should think very carefully before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life. Which, I should warn you, may not be very long."

Jace spun around, the rock raised like a weapon. The chamber was empty. The passage behind him was empty. The shadows pressed against the walls, still and silent and utterly unoccupied.

"I said who is there?"

"A friend." The voice was almost gentle now, almost kind. It was the voice of a father speaking to a wayward son, a mentor guiding a confused student. "Someone who does not want to see you make a mistake you cannot undo. Someone who has watched this same scene play out more times than I can count, and who is very, very tired of seeing young men throw their lives away."

Jace's grip tightened on the rock. The edges cut into his palm, grounding him. "Show yourself."

"I cannot. I am not really here. I am just a voice in the dark. A warning. A kindness, if you will let me be." The voice paused, and when it spoke again, it was softer. Sadder. "I am the only person on this island who is actually trying to help you, Jacaerys."

"Don't listen to it," Jace muttered to himself. He turned back toward the statue. "It's just another part of the curse. It's trying to stop you. She said there would be things trying to stop you."

"Is that what she told you?" The voice sounded amused now, deeply and darkly amused. "That the curse is the villain? That she is the victim? How very convenient for her. How very convenient that she has a story that makes her the helpless damsel and everyone else the monster. She tells that story very well. She has had centuries of practice."

Jace ignored it. He stepped closer to the pedestal. The marble woman knelt in her beam of light, motionless and sorrowful. The golden snakes glinted.

"She is very beautiful, isn't she?" the voice continued, and now it was almost conversational, almost casual, as if they were two old friends discussing the weather. "Of course she is. She's had centuries to perfect the act. The dresses. The smiles. The way she looks at you like you are the only man in the world, like you are the answer to every prayer she has ever whispered into the darkness. It is all very convincing. It is meant to be. She has been refining it for longer than your entire bloodline has existed."

"You do not know anything about her."

"I know everything about her." The voice was sharper now, the amusement draining away to reveal something harder underneath. "I know what she is. I know what she has done. I know how many men have stood exactly where you are standing now, holding a rock just like that one, thinking they were going to be the one. The special one. The one whose love was strong enough." A pause, heavy with meaning. "Do you know how many of them succeeded?"

Jace did not answer.

"None. Not one. In all the centuries she has been trapped on this island, not a single man has broken that statue. Do you know why? Because it cannot be broken. It is a trap. It is the bait, and you are the fish, and you are swimming toward it with your mouth wide open."

"You are lying." Jace's voice was shaking now. He hated that it was shaking. "You are just another part of the curse. You are trying to stop me from freeing her."

"I am trying to stop you from destroying yourself." The voice was closer now, seeming to come from just behind his left shoulder. He spun around, but there was nothing there. Only shadows. Only the dripping of water. "Let me ask you something, Jacaerys. Can you remember your mother's name?"

He opened his mouth but nothing came out, the name was gone. It had been there a moment ago, he was sure of it. He could see her face, silver hair and sad eyes, could feel the shape of her in his memory. But the name, the name would not come.

"Your brothers," the voice continued, relentless and calm. "How many brothers do you have? What are their names?"

"I have brothers. I know I have brothers." His voice sounded desperate, even to his own ears. "Luke-Lucerys. And the others. The little ones."

"You are reciting words. You are not remembering. She has taken them from you, piece by piece, day by day. She has been stealing your memories since the moment you arrived. The food she feeds you. The wine she pours you. The herbs she puts in your medicine. They do not just heal your wounds. They erase you. They hollow you out. They make room for her."

Jace's mind was blank. Empty. There was nothing there but fog, thick and white and impenetrable, where his memories should have been.

"She has taken them from you," the voice said, and now it was almost gentle again, almost pitying. "Piece by piece. Day by day. Every moment you spend in her presence, she is stealing more of who you are. Your family. Your home. Your past. Your very self. And you call that love? You think that is what love looks like?"

"She saved my life."

"She kept you alive because she needed you. There is a difference. She needs a man to break the curse. She always needs a man to break the curse. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked. She lures them in with her beauty and her vulnerability and her sad, sad story, and she makes them love her, and then she sends them here to die. Because no one can break the curse. No one. The statue does not break. It has never broken. And when the man fails, when he realizes his love is not strong enough, she has her excuse. She was right all along. No one really loves her. So she turns them into pigs and waits for the next shipwreck, the next castaway, the next fool who will believe her lies."

He kept going "You think that is love?" The voice laughed, a soft and pitying laugh. "You think a woman who erases your past and steals your future and traps you on an island where you can never leave loves you? You think any of this is real?"

"I love her." Jace's voice cracked. "I know I love her. That is real. Whatever else she has done, my love for her is real."

"Oh, it feels real. I am sure it does. But do you know why it feels real?" The voice paused, letting the question hang in the darkness. "Because she makes it feel real. That is what she does. That is what the magic does. It wraps around your mind and makes you think you are feeling something true. But it is not true, Jacaerys. It is a trick. A trap. You have been ensnared since the moment you opened your eyes in that candlelit room and saw her kneeling beside your bed like a worried bride."

Jace's arm was lowering. The rock felt heavier now, so heavy he could barely hold it. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.

"She told me you would say things like this," he said, but his voice was weak. Uncertain. "She told me the curse would try to stop me. She warned me there would be voices."

"The curse is not stopping you. I am not the curse. I am the only thing standing between you and an eternity of rooting in the dirt with all the other men who believed her lies." The voice was right next to his ear now, so close he could feel the cold breath of it against his skin. "Do you want to know the real story, Jacaerys? Do you want to know who she really is?"

He did not answer. He did not want to know. He wanted to cover his ears and run back through the waterfall and hold you in his arms and forget this voice had ever spoken to him. But his feet would not move. His body would not obey him.

"She is not a victim," the voice whispered. "She is not a lonely woman trapped by a cruel brother. That is a story she invented centuries ago because it makes men feel protective. It makes them feel noble. It makes them want to save her. The truth is much simpler, and much uglier. She is a goddess, a thing that was worshipped before your ancestors crawled out of the mud. And she was imprisoned here not as punishment, but as containment. Because she is dangerous. Because she feeds on devotion the way a spider feeds on flies."

"You are lying."

"Am I? If you break that statue," the voice said, "she will be free. And the moment she is free, she will have no more use for you. Her love for you, such as it is, will vanish. It is not real love, Jacaerys. It is bait. It is a lure. It is the promise of everything you have ever wanted, dangled in front of you to make you do what she needs. And once you have done it, once you have served your purpose, she will discard you like all the others."

"Stop." Jace's voice cracked on the word.

"That is the part she did not tell you, is it not? She did not tell you that her love is conditional. She did not tell you that it lasts only as long as she is trapped. The moment she is free, the magic breaks both ways. The chains fall from her wrists, and her love for you falls with them."

"You are lying." Jace's voice was a raw whisper, barely audible over the distant roar of the waterfall. "You are the curse. You are trying to stop me from freeing her."

"She told every man before you the exact same story. Word for word. The cruel brother. The lonely exile. The curse that can only be broken by true love. She told it to the knight in rusted armor whose bones are rotting in that cave. She told it to the merchant captain whose shield is propped against the wall. And you are just the latest audience."

"Stop."

"She does not love you. She cannot love you. She is not capable of love. She is capable of hunger, and she calls it love because that is what makes men stay. But it is not love. It has never been love. It is just need. Just appetite. Just the endless, grinding loneliness of a creature that consumes everything it touches and is still never full."

Jace opened his eyes. The statue knelt in its beam of light. The golden snakes watched him with their glittering, knowing eyes. The marble face was frozen in its expression of eternal sorrow.

What if the voice was right?

What if none of it was real?

What if he broke the statue, and your love disappeared, and he spent the rest of his life chasing a ghost?

What if he was just the next fool in line?

"Go back," the voice whispered. "Go back to the beach. Build your boat. Leave this place while you still can. While you still remember enough of yourself to want to leave. She will try to stop you. She will cry and plead and tell you she loves you. But it will be a lie. It has always been a lie. Go back, Jacaerys. Go home. Save yourself."

—

You had been waiting for hours. You stood at the edge of the pool, your bare feet sinking into the damp sand, your eyes fixed on the curtain of falling water. The roar of the waterfall filled your ears until you could hear nothing else, but you were listening for something beneath the roar. A shout. A crash. The sound of stone breaking. The sound of a man drowning.

Anything. Please, anything.

Jace surfaced at the edge of the pool, gasping, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, his skin slick with water and gleaming in the sunlight. He pulled himself onto the sand, his chest heaving, his arms trembling with exhaustion, and for a moment he just knelt there on his hands and knees, catching his breath, water streaming from his body in rivulets. You just stared at him, searching his face for some sign of what had happened, some clue in the set of his jaw or the light in his eyes. Was the curse broken? Had he succeeded? Had he been the one, the only one, the man whose love was finally strong enough?

"I did it," he said, and his voice was warm and triumphant and full of a joy you had never heard from him before. "I broke the curse."

You stumbled forward, your legs barely supporting you, your hands reaching for him before your mind had fully registered what he had said. "You—you did? It is broken? I am free?"

"You are free." He rose to his feet, still smiling, and opened his arms to you. "You are free, Y/N. We can leave. Together. Just like I promised."

A sob tore from your throat, raw and jagged and utterly involuntary. You threw yourself into his arms, your body shaking, tears streaming down your face in hot, messy rivulets. He caught you and held you tight, his hands warm on your back, his lips pressing kisses to your hair, your temple, your cheek, his voice murmuring reassurances that you could barely hear over the pounding of your own heart.

"I love you," you gasped, the words tumbling out between sobs, unstoppable, irrepressible. "I love you, I love you, I love you—"

"I love you too." His voice was soft. Tender. Everything you had ever wanted to hear. "I told you I would save you. I told you I was different. I told you I was not like the others."

He kissed you, it was a deep kiss, a passionate kiss, the kind of kiss that spoke of relief and joy and a future finally within reach. You melted into him, your body pressing against his, your hands sliding up his chest, his shoulders, his neck, tangling in his wet hair. The waterfall roared behind you, but it sounded different now, less like a threat and more like applause. The sun was warm on your skin, warmer than it had ever been. You were free. You were finally, impossibly free. After centuries of solitude, centuries of hoping and losing and hoping again, someone had finally loved you enough.

You did not notice anything until you felt the cold metal snap shut against your skin, you tore away from him, stumbling backward, your hand flying to your wrist. Something was there. Something heavy and cold and horribly, sickeningly familiar. You looked down, and the world stopped.

A golden snake. Coiled around your forearm, its tail clamped in its own jaws, its scales gleaming in the sunlight with a wet, organic sheen. Its eyes were bright and watchful and alive. It was warm against your skin, warm like something that had a heartbeat, warm like something that was feeding.

Identical to the ones in the cave. Identical to the ones that had bound the statue for centuries, the statue that was supposed to be destroyed, the statue that he had told you he had broken.

But the statue was not destroyed. You knew that now with a cold, creeping certainty. He had not broken it. He had done something else. Something worse.

"What—" Your voice came out strangled, barely a whisper, the words catching in your throat like bones. "What is this?"

Jace was still standing by the water's edge. His smile was gone. His face had changed, shifted into something you did not recognize. The warmth in his eyes had drained away, replaced by something flat and cold and terribly, terribly calm. He looked at you the way a scholar might look at a pinned insect, curious and detached and utterly without feeling.

He raised his own arm.

The matching snake was coiled around his wrist. Twin to yours. Identical in every detail, from the curve of the scales to the glint of the golden eyes. Linked by nothing visible. Linked all the same. You could feel it, the connection between them, an invisible chain that stretched from your wrist to his and bound you together tighter than any iron ever could.

"I could not break the curse," he said. His voice was calm. Too calm. The voice of a man who had made a decision and was at peace with it. "The statue would not break. I struck it with the rock, and the rock shattered. I struck it with my fists, and my knuckles bled. I threw myself against it, and it did not even crack." He paused, his dark eyes fixed on yours, unblinking. "The voice, your brother, he told me the truth. He told me what you really are. He told me what you have done. He told me what you would do to me the moment you were free."

"No." You shook your head, backing away from him. Your wrist was burning where the snake touched your skin, a cold fire that spread up your arm and into your chest. "No, Jace, whatever he told you, it is a lie. It is always a lie. He is trying to trap you, he is trying to turn you against me—"

"Is it a lie?" He tilted his head, regarding you with that terrible calm. "He told me the curse made me love you. He told me you have been feeding on my devotion since the moment I opened my eyes. He told me you would leave me the instant you were free."

"That is not true!" You were screaming now, your voice raw and cracking. "I love you! I have never loved anyone the way I love you! You have to believe me!"

"Then why can I not remember my mother's name?" His voice cracked on the word mother, just slightly, and beneath the coldness you saw something flicker. Something wounded. Something that still hurt. "Why can I not remember my brothers' faces? Why did I wake up this morning and realize that I could not recall the sound of my father's voice, or the color of my brother's eyes, or the name of the dragon I rode into battle? You took everything from me. Everything I was. Everything I loved. You hollowed me out and filled me with yourself, and you expected me to believe it was love?"

"I did not mean to!" You were sobbing now, the tears hot and bitter on your cheeks. "I did not want to take your memories, i loved you so much i did not want you to leave me."

"You loved being loved." His voice was flat. Final. "There is a difference."

You stared at him. Your chest was heaving. Your wrist was throbbing, the golden snake pulsing against your skin like a second heartbeat. You could feel it now, the thing that bound you together. It was not just a chain. It was a tether. A leash.

"The statue forced you to have a physical body," Jace said, and his voice had shifted again, becoming almost conversational. Almost pleasant. "You are not mortal. You are not human something that was bound to this island and trapped in the stone. The chains kept you here. The statue kept you solid. Touchable. Real." He paused. "Without the statue, you would have no body. You would be nothing but mist and memory. Is that not what your brother wanted? To keep you contained? To keep you in a form that could touch and taste and take?"

You did not answer. You could not answer. Your throat had closed around the words.

"I could not break the curse," Jace said, and he took a step toward you, his bare feet silent on the sand. "I could not destroy the statue. But I could transfer it. I could take the chains off the stone and put them onto something else. Something living. Something that could carry them." He raised his arm again, showing you the snake coiled around his wrist, and his smile returned. It was not a kind smile. "You are not bound to the island anymore. You are bound to me."

The world tilted. The roar of the waterfall seemed to fade, replaced by a high, thin ringing in your ears. The sun was too bright. The sand was too soft. The golden snake was too warm against your skin.

"You—" Your voice would not work. "You did not—"

"I did." He was still calm. Still cold. Still looking at you with those eyes that used to be so full of love. "The voice told me it was the only way. The only way to make sure you could not leave me. The only way to make sure your love was real. The only way to be certain that when I woke up tomorrow, you would still be there, and the day after that, and the day after that."

"You trapped me."

He laughed. It was a soft laugh, a quiet laugh, but there was nothing warm in it. "I freed you. You can leave the island now. The chains that bound you to this rock are gone. You can walk onto a ship and sail away and see the world again. Is that not what you wanted? Is that not what you have been begging me for since the moment we met?"

"You bound me to you!"

"And you bound me to you first." His voice sharpened, the calm cracking for just a moment to reveal the fury underneath. "You made me love you. You made me forget my own mother's name. You drugged my food and whispered in my ear and wrapped yourself around my mind so tightly I could not tell where you ended and I began. You trapped me on this island long before I ever trapped you. The only difference is that my chains were made of kisses and lies, and yours are made of gold."

"I loved you!" The words tore from your throat, raw and ragged. "I loved you! Everything I did, I did because I loved you!"

"You made me forget my mother's name," he said again, and his voice was quieter now, almost sad. "Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what you took from me? She is out there somewhere, fighting a war, grieving a son she believes is dead, and I cannot remember her name. I cannot remember her face. I know I love her. I know I owe her everything. But when I try to picture her, there is nothing there. Just fog. Just you."

You opened your mouth, but no words came. What could you possibly say? What defense could you offer that would not sound hollow and selfish and monstrous?

"You stole my memories and drugged my food and lied to me for months," Jace continued, and now he was walking toward you, closing the distance between you with slow, deliberate steps. "You let me believe I was going home. You let me build a boat I was never going to finish. You let me dream of a future that did not exist. And when I found out the truth, when I confronted you in that cave full of dead men's armor, what did you do? Did you apologize? Did you offer to help me leave? No. You cried. You made yourself the victim. You told me how lonely you were, how sad you were, how much you had suffered. You made me comfort you. You made me feel guilty for discovering your lies."

He stopped in front of you, close enough that you could feel the heat of his body, close enough that you could see the pulse beating in his throat. "And I did feel guilty," he said. "I felt so guilty that I almost forgot what you had done. I almost let myself believe that you were the victim. That I was the one who had wronged you by wanting to go home. That is how good you are at this. That is how deep your hooks go."

"Please." Your voice was barely a whisper now. "Please, Jace, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I only wanted to be loved. I only wanted—"

"I know what you wanted." He reached up and touched your face, his fingers gentle against your tear-streaked cheek. The gesture was almost tender. Almost loving. It made your skin crawl. "You wanted someone to stay. You wanted someone to choose you. And now someone has. I have chosen you. I have chosen you over my family, over my throne, over my memories, over everything I ever was. I have given up my entire life to be with you. Are you not happy? Is this not what you wanted?"

"You have made me your prisoner."

"I have made you my equal." His thumb traced the curve of your cheekbone, wiping away a tear. "We are connected now. Bound together. What happens to one of us happens to the other. If you leave, I will feel it. If you try to run, I will know. And if you try to hurt me—" He shrugged. "The snakes will not let you. They protect what they hold. That is what the voice told me."

"The voice. He told you to do this?"

"He gave me a choice. Break the statue, free you, and watch you leave me the moment we set foot on the mainland. Or bind you to me, keep you close, and never wonder again whether your love was real." His smile returned, and it was the saddest smile you had ever seen. "It was not a difficult choice. I love you. I cannot lose you. So I made sure I would never have to."

You stared at him. The man you loved. The man who had just destroyed you. The man who had looked at your chains and decided to put them on himself rather than break them, because he could not bear the thought of you walking free.

"This is not love," you whispered. "This is possession."

"Is there a difference?" He tilted his head, his dark eyes glittering. "You tell me. You have been doing this for centuries. You tell me where love ends and possession begins. You tell me whether what you felt for me was really love, or just the desperate hunger of a lonely creature who needed someone, anyone, to fill the void. You tell me whether I am any different from you, or whether I am just the first man who was willing to sink to your level."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. The words would not come.

"Exactly," Jace said. "You cannot tell me. Because you do not know either. Because you have been confusing love and hunger for so long that you cannot tell them apart anymore. And now I am the same. You have made me the same." He leaned closer, his lips brushing your ear. "We are equals now. Partners. Two monsters bound together for eternity. Is that not romantic? Is that not what you always wanted? Someone who would never leave you, never abandon you, never choose anything over you?"

"You are insane," you breathed.

"I am what you made me." He pulled back and looked into your eyes, and his expression was unreadable. "You wanted me to stay. I am staying. You wanted me to love you. I love you. You wanted me to be different from the others. I am different. I am the one who did not run. I am the one who looked at the chains and chose to wear them. I am the one who gave up everything to be with you." He cupped your face in both hands, gentle and terrible and utterly inescapable. "Why are you not happy? If you really loved me, you would be happy. This is what you wanted. This is what you have been asking for since the moment we met. Someone who would stay. Someone who would choose you. Someone who would never leave."

He kissed your forehead, and his lips were warm, and the golden snake pulsed against your wrist like a second heart.

"I am going to build us a boat," he said. "A real one this time. One that can carry us both back to Westeros. And you are going to meet my mother, and I am going to take back my throne, and you are going to be my queen. Just like I promised. Just like we planned. The only difference is that now I know you will not leave me. Now I know your love is real. Because it has to be. Because you have no choice." He pulled back and smiled, and his smile was beautiful and broken and utterly terrifying. "You are free now, Y/N. Free from the island. Free from your brother's curse. Free from the statue and the chains and the centuries of solitude. You can go anywhere you want. You can do anything you want. The whole world is open to you." He took your hand, the one with the golden snake coiled around the wrist, and pressed it to his chest, over his heart. "As long as you never leave my side."

You looked down at the snake. At his hand holding yours. At the invisible chain that stretched between you, unbreakable and eternal.

"You are a monster," you whispered.

Jace smiled. "Now you know how it feels."

[perkqularkreashions]

MYSTICAL…MAGICAL?

Pairing: Eddard Stark x Mean!Cold!Lannister!Reader

Description: AU - You’re Tywin’s daughter, spending time in the North with your best friend, Lady Manderly, after Robert’s Rebellion, you slowly fall for him, Eddard Stark.

Warning; MDNI (18+), explicit smut (P-in-V), time skip, mentions pregnancy, mentions childbirth, lowkey cliffhanger?? Uncharacteristically soft Lannister!mother, cannon description of Lannister featured on reader.

𓃭 ───────── 𓃭

Robert’s Rebellion End

283 AC - Winterfell

The heavy oak rafters of the Great Hall vibrated with the rhythmic thud of standard-issue northern boots. All around, men and women spun with a frantic, unrefined energy, their tankards colliding over splintering trestle tables while ale slopped onto the rushes below. They drummed their palms against the wood, a deafening accompaniment to the raucous folklore howling from their throats.

You sat perfectly rigid, your spine a straight line of pure Casterly Rock defiance amid the chaos. Your face remained a mask of sheer, unyielding boredom as you stared blankly at the swirling crowd.

Every loud cheer felt like a personal affront. You hated this place. You hated the cold, you hated the damp, and most of all, you hated this crude display they called a victory celebration.

Beside you, Lady Manderly leaned in, her shoulders shaking with a light laugh as she nudged your elbow. "Stop that," she chided softly, her eyes bright with the evening's merriment. "Take the scowl off your beautiful face and just enjoy the air for once."

"It is sickening," you hissed back, your jaw tightening until it ached. You didn't bother turning your head to look at her. "The entire room smells of stale ale and desperation."

"It smells of life," she countered, waving a hand toward the center of the hall. "Look at them. They survived a war. Let them dance."

Your eyes drifted past the spinning smallfolk, tracking a specific movement near the high table. Catelyn Tully was gliding gracefully through the steps of a traditional dance, her laughter light and painted across her flushed cheeks. But her gaze wasn't on the musicians. It was fixed entirely on the quiet center of the room: Eddard Stark.

The Lord of Winterfell sat with a heavy goblet in his hand, his gray eyes steady, observing his people with a solemn pride. He looked every bit the dour northern beast—untamed, unpolished, and entirely out of place in the grand tapestry of the Seven Kingdoms. Yet, the Tully girl looked at him as if he had hung the stars.

"She looks ridiculous," you muttered under your breath, curling your fingers tightly around the stem of your untouched wine cup. "Chasing after a wolf who looks as though he'd rather be burying a corpse than celebrating a victory."

Lady Manderly sighed, her amusement fading into a look of mild pity. "He is the hero of the hour. And she is trying to find joy in a match that was forced by tragedy. You could learn a thing or two from her resilience."

"Resilience? It looks closer to delusion," you snapped, finally cutting your sharp gaze toward her. "A Lannister does not pretend to find warmth in a frozen wasteland, nor do we paint smiles on our faces to please men who smell of wet hound."

From across the hall, as if sensing the sheer malice radiating from your corner, Eddard Stark shifted. His dark head turned slowly, away from the dancing Tully girl, until his somber gray eyes locked directly onto yours. He didn't smile. He didn't nod. He merely watched you, his expression as unreadable and cold as the Wall itself.

You didn't break the stare. Instead, you tilted your chin up, letting the firelight catch the proud golden gleam of your hair, letting him see every ounce of the contempt you held for his precious North.

"Careful," Lady Manderly whispered, noticing the sudden tension between the two tables. "The Quiet Wolf has sharp teeth, and you are bleeding hostility."

"Let him bite," you replied, your voice dropping to a dangerous, icy purr as you held the Stark lord's gaze. "I assure you, he will find a Lannister is far too bitter a meal to stomach."

You narrowed your eyes, the warmth of the hearth doing nothing to melt the frost in your glare. Across the crowded hall, the Lord of Winterfell still hadn't broken his gaze.

"He won't stop looking," you snapped, your voice cutting through the din of the music as you leaned toward your companion.

Lady Manderly followed your line of sight, a knowing, mischievous grin spreading across her face. She giggled, nudging your shoulder with entirely too much familiarity. "Then go speak to him! He is unmarried, the papers haven’t been signed for Lady Tully.”

"I would rather die a thousand agonizing deaths," you hissed, the words dripping with all the venom a lioness could muster.

Yet, despite the revulsion twisting your stomach, your eyes drifted back across the room against your own volition. Eddard Stark hadn't shifted an inch. His somber gray gaze remained anchored to yours, heavy and unblinking. For a split second, a strange, traitorous flutter bloomed in your chest—a sudden, sharp spike of heat that had absolutely nothing to do with anger.

You ripped your eyes away instantly, your cheeks burning with a sudden flush that you desperately hoped she would mistake for the heat of the fire.

"You're blushing," Lady Manderly teased, her voice a delighted whisper. "The great Lannister facade is cracking over a bit of northern grit."

"The air in here is suffocating, nothing more," you retorted, your knuckles turning white as you gripped your chalice. "If he continues to stare at me like a starved hound, I will have my guards teach him some southron manners."

"He is the Warden of the North, my lady. I doubt your guards would make it past the threshold," she replied, her smile fading into a softer, more curious expression. "Why does he bother you so much? He hasn't even spoken a word to you."

"His very existence is an irritation," you muttered, refusing to look back toward the high table. "He sits there like a monument of misery, yet everyone bows to him as if he's a god. It's pathetic."

"Perhaps he is just curious," she offered gently. "It is not every day a golden lion wanders so far into the wilderness."

"Curiosity is for the weak," you said, tilting your chin up to regain your composure. "And I have no intention of satisfying his."

The roaring chaos of the feast had finally wilted into a quiet, hollow hum. Servants moved like ghosts through the shadows of the Great Hall, their brooms sweeping away the trodden rushes and discarded bones. The smell of roasted meat had turned cold, replaced by the bitter sting of dying tallow candles and the damp draft whispering through the high stone arches.

You walked with a stiff, measured stride, though your progress was severely hindered by the heavy weight of Lady Manderly clinging to your arm. She stumbled beside you, her cheeks flushed a bright, undignified crimson as she dragged you toward the center of the emptying room.

"See? Look!" she slurred, her voice echoing too loudly against the high stone walls. She stopped, swaying on her feet as she gestured wildly to the empty space near the hearth. "I will get Lord Cerwyn to marry me. I will look him right in his eye."

"You can barely keep your eyes open, let alone look a man in them," you remarked coldly, trying to pry her fingers from your silk sleeve.

She ignored your protest, grabbing you by both shoulders with a clumsy, sudden grip. "I will tell him: 'Take me, my lord!' Just like that." She giggled, a breathless, wild sound, before releasing you to spin in a slow, unsteady circle.

"If you say that to him, he will assume the winter chill has finally rotted your brain," you said, crossing your arms over your chest to shield yourself from the draft.

She stopped her spinning, her laughter subsiding into a teasing, knowing grin as she stumbled back toward you. "And what of you, then? You won't even look at a man unless he sits on a throne."

"I demand standards. A concept you seem to have forgotten after your third cup of arbor gold," you countered, tilting your chin up to maintain your dignity despite her pulling at you.

"Oh, please." She laughed, waving a dismissive hand close to your face. "You’ll marry some southern lord that your Lord Tywin forces you to marry. Some dull, wealthy lordling from the Reach who will lock you in a tower of gold."

Your breath hitched slightly, the cold truth of her words striking a chord you preferred to keep buried deep beneath your pride. "A tower of gold is still warmer than this frozen wasteland," you replied, your voice dropping to a sharp, defensive hiss.

"At least a northern husband would keep you warm," she teased, taking another clumsy step backward. "But your father will have you sold to the highest bidder before the year is out, and we both know it."

"Silence," you commanded, the Lannister pride flaring hot in your chest as you glared at her. "You speak of things you do not understand."

She looked down, her brow furrowing in sudden, tragic realization as she tilted her empty tankard upside down. "Ah. It's gone," she mumbled, her eyes widening. Before you could stop her, she turned on her heel and began to scurry away, heading back toward the shadowy alcoves where the remaining kegs were being guarded.

"Wait here, please!" she called over her shoulder, her voice echoing in the rafters.

"Don't you dare leave me—" You cut yourself off, exhaling a sharp, irritated sigh through your nose. Despite your better judgment, you stayed put.

You turned your back to the massive iron-ringed doors of the hall, wrapping your arms tightly over your chest to ward off the encroaching chill. The silence of the room deepened.

You didn't hear a single footstep, nor did you feel the shift in the air, but an instinct—a sudden, prickling heat at the back of your neck—made you look over your shoulder. You didn't turn around fully, keeping your posture guarded as you glanced backward.

It was Eddard Stark.

Your jaw clenched instantly, the muscles locking tight. He stood a few paces away, his heavy fur cloak shifting slightly as he stopped.

"You're staring," you said, your voice cutting through the quiet like a shard of ice.

"You're scowling," he countered smoothly. He didn't sound angry; his voice was just a deep, low rumble that seemed to vibrate against the stones as he took a deliberate step closer.

"If you stopped staring, perhaps you wouldn't notice what my face is doing," you snapped, finally turning your head a fraction more to glare at him out of the corner of your eye.

"Perhaps," he said, pausing just outside your personal space. His gray eyes searched your face, entirely unbothered by the venom dripping from your words. "Though a face like that is rather hard to miss in a room full of celebration."

"If you came over here to lecture me on northern hospitality, Lord Stark, save your breath," you retorted, fully turning to face him now, your chin held high. "I have no desire to partake in your crude victory dances."

"I did not ask you to dance," Ned replied quietly, his hands resting on the pommel of his sword. "I merely wondered why a lady of Casterly Rock looks as though she would rather swallow glass than breathe our air."

"Because your air is foul, and your company is worse," you said, stepping closer to close the gap between you, refusing to let him intimidate you with his height. "You look at me as if I am an intruder."

"You are an intruder," he said, a ghost of a sharp, knowing smile touching his lips. "But that does not mean you are unwelcome."

You gathered your fine silk skirts in one tight, angry fist, stepping forward to march right past him. "Thank you for the welcome, Lord Stark, but you can keep it, I would rather be anywhere else" you said, throwing the words over your shoulder like a curse.

"You walk away quickly for someone who claims to fear nothing here," his voice rolled after you, low and steady.

You paused, your boots halting against the stone. You didn't turn back, but your spine went rigid. "I do not fear you, nor your wilderness. I am simply bored of it."

"Then why stay in the hall?" Ned asked. You could hear the faint rustle of his leather brigandine as he turned to face your back. "The courtyard is empty. The gates are open. Yet you linger where the music was loudest."

"I was waiting for Lady Manderly," you snapped, finally pivoting around to glare at him, your silks rustling around your ankles. "An obligation of courtesy. A concept I doubt a wolf understands."

"We understand loyalty," Ned countered, taking a single, slow step toward you. "And we understand when someone is hiding behind a sharp tongue."

"I hide behind nothing!" you hissed, stepping closer to him, your chest heaving with a sudden flare of temper. "I am a Lannister. If I despise a place, I say it. If I despise a man, he knows it."

"And do you despise me, my lady?" he asked quietly, his gray eyes locking onto yours with that same infuriating, unblinking intensity.

The question hung heavily between you in the vast, drafty space of the emptying hall. Your breath hitched, that strange, traitorous flutter returning to your chest, hotter this time.

You swallowed the sudden warmth down, forcing your features back into a mask of pure disdain.

"You are nothing to me but a minor inconvenience, Lord Stark," you whispered, the lie tasting like ash on your tongue.

Without giving him the satisfaction of another word, you turned on your heel and swept out of the Great Hall, leaving the Quiet Wolf alone in the shadows of his own castle

𓃭 ───────── 𓃭

The heavy oak door of your bedchamber shut with a resounding thud that rattled the iron hinges. You threw the bolt forward, the sharp clack of metal signaling a desperate attempt to lock out the rest of Westeros—and the man who ruled it.

You paced the length of the room, your fine leather slippers clicking against the cold stone floor. Why did you feel this way? It was entirely unacceptable. You gripped the edge of the dark wooden vanity, staring at your reflection in the polished silver mirror. Your cheeks were flushed, your breathing shallow. Why couldn’t you stop thinking about those stupid, solemn gray eyes? The unruly dark hair that defied the neatness of southron courts? Even the slight, powerful lean in his stance as he challenged you—it all clung to your mind like the stubborn northern frost.

You pushed the thoughts away, gripping your fists until your nails bit into your palms.

"I will not be plagued by these treacherous thoughts," you said aloud to the empty room, your voice trembling slightly before you forced it into a brittle sneer. "This is purely the wine."

You let out a sharp, mocking laugh at your own expense, shaking your head as you walked over to the washbasin. "Yes. The Arbor Gold was poured entirely too freely tonight. A Lannister does not lose her mind over a dour provincial lord who looks as though he combs his hair with a combat dagger."

You splashed cold water onto your face, hoping the freezing sting would shock the heat out of your skin. But as you wiped your face with a linen towel, your eyes drifted toward the narrow arched window. Out there, past the courtyard, the ancient stones of Winterfell slept under a blanket of stars. He was out there. Probably still standing in the shadows of the Great Hall, or walking the battlements with that same quiet, heavy stride.

"He is nothing," you whispered fiercely to the dark room, unlacing your bodice with aggressive, jerky movements. "A minor lord of a frozen wasteland. Father will arrange a match with someone of actual consequence."

Yet, as you finally crawled into the heavy furs of the bed, the mattress felt entirely too large, and the silence of the room felt entirely too loud.

𓃭 ───────── 𓃭

The harsh, grey morning light filtered through the narrow window of your chambers, doing little to ease the prickling irritation beneath your skin. You sat stiffly before the vanity, staring at your reflection with an intensity that made the young northern maid behind you visibly nervous.

"Please make it neat," you snapped, your voice sharp enough to cut the heavy morning air. "The braids must be done up today. I will not look unkempt."

"Yes, m’lady," the girl murmured, her fingers trembling slightly as she picked up the bone comb.

You watched her through the mirror, your eyes tracking the simple, practical twist of her own hair. A sudden, unbidden thought flashed through your mind—the image of Catelyn Tully gliding through the hall, effortless and perfectly suited to the environment. The Tully girl gathered attention by simply existing, drawing eyes without even trying. Your jaw tightened.

"Is that the style that northerners wear?" you asked, turning your head just enough to look at her directly.

"No, m’lady—"

"I would like to try the hairstyle," you spoke up quickly. Too quickly.

The words left your mouth before your pride could intercept them, and a sudden wave of mortification washed over you. What are you doing? If your father, Tywin Lannister, saw you acting this way—altering your very appearance to fit into a provincial fortress—he would have your head. A Lannister dictates the room; she does not adapt to it. Yet, the thought of those steady grey eyes seeing you looking like a displaced southron outsider again pricked at your vanity.

The maid paused, blinking in surprise, before nodding quickly. "As you wish, my lady."

Her hands proved far more deft than you anticipated. She worked meticulously, transforming your thick, golden locks into an intricate, cascading masterpiece. The top and sides of your hair were pulled back into an elaborate tapestry of woven plaits, crowns of delicate, intersecting braids that gathered at the back of your head. Long, slender accent braids trailed down from the crown, frames for your face, while the rest of your hair fell in deep, tumbling waves down your back. To complete the look, she threaded tiny, glinting gold beads throughout the woven crown and along the length of the smaller braids, catching the morning light like drops of dew frozen in a golden web.

It was undeniably northern in its structure—heavy, elaborate, and wild—yet the golden beads maintained a distinct air of Lannister opulence.

You stared at yourself in the mirror, your heart doing another one of those treacherous, unpredictable flutters. It looked beautiful. It looked intentional.

"Will there be anything else, m'lady?" the maid asked softly, stepping back.

"No," you replied coldly, masking your internal turmoil as you stood up and smoothed your gown. "That will be all."

You swept into the Great Hall, the heavy silk of your skirts rustling softly against the stone floor. Your eyes immediately found Lady Manderly, who was already bright-eyed and entirely recovered from the previous night's excesses.

She smiled brightly the moment she caught sight of you, a small giggle escaping her lips as she hurried over and grabbed your arm. "You’ve risen!" she cheered, squeezing your elbow affectionately, though sarcasm dripped in her tone. "It’s great to have you as a best friend!"

"What did I do to earn that title?" you asked, your voice maintaining its usual cool, guarded edge.

"I asked you to stay in the hall, and you were completely gone when I got back!" she snapped playfully, rolling her eyes.

"You took too long," you lied smoothly.

In truth, you had every intention of being there when she returned, but the memory of the Quiet Wolf's piercing stare had driven you from the room. As if summoned by your thoughts, your eyes drifted across the expanse of the hall, tracking until they landed directly on Eddard Stark. He was seated at the high table, listening intently to one of his bannermen. From this distance, you allowed yourself a private, unblinking moment to simply look at him—admiring the sharp line of his jaw and the quiet command he held over the room without ever raising his voice.

Lady Manderly began dragging you toward the benches, chatting aimlessly, but your focus remained anchored to the Lord of Winterfell.

Suddenly, your jaw clenched, a cold spike of irritation piercing through your chest as Lady Catelyn Tully made her presence known. She glided to Eddard's side, her posture radiant, offering him a gentle, painted smile as she leaned down to speak to him.

"She moves like a bird trying entirely too hard to impress a hunter," you muttered under your breath, your fingers tightening into fists at your side.

"Who?" Lady Manderly asked, pulling you down onto the bench beside her. She glanced up, her eyes darting between the high table and your face. "Ah. Lady Catelyn. They look well together, don't they? A perfect match for the North."

She watched your face, laughing slightly.

"If your definition of perfect is entirely dreadfully dull, then yes, I suppose they are," you snapped, tearing your gaze away to look at the breakfast spread before you, though you had suddenly lost your appetite.

"You are exceptionally bitter this morning," Lady Manderly observed, leaning in closer. Her eyes widened slightly as she truly took in your appearance. "And... wait. Your hair. Is that a northern crown braid?"

Your heart did a small, dangerous thump against your ribs. "It is a practical style for a drafty castle," you said quickly, your voice dripping with defensive ice. "Nothing more."

"With gold beads?" she teased, a knowing smirk playing on her lips. "It looks beautiful. Very... regal. I wonder if a certain wolf will notice the sudden change in weather."

“They are having another festive night! Who knows how long this celebration will last,” Lady Manderly said, seamlessly changing the subject as she clasped her hands together. “But tonight, I will find the courage to dance with Lord Cerwyn. I swear it.”

You stopped listening. Your world narrowed to the high table, where Catelyn Tully’s pale hand moved to rest gently on Eddard’s cloaked shoulder. You watched, rigid, as the Lord of Winterfell instinctively leaned his head a fraction closer to her touch, his stark demeanor softening just for a second.

Sickly romance in the air, you hissed to yourself, the bitter thought burning in your throat. Beside you, Lady Manderly remained entirely oblivious, her eyes locked onto Lord Cerwyn across the room as she continued rambling on about her grand plan to win his attention.

“It is a good one,” you agreed automatically, giving a empty nod without really hearing a single word she said.

As the hours bled away, the night churned into a frenzy. The music swelled louder and more lively than the previous night, the frantic thrum of the drums and pipes echoing off the stone walls. You sat entirely alone at the long table, a solitary golden figure watching the swirling chaos of the floor.

Catelyn and Eddard moved gracefully through the crowd, while a flushed Lady Manderly was finally spinning alongside Lord Cerwyn. In the midst of her dance, your friend caught your eye and flashed a brilliant, triumphant smile. You offered her a curt, subtle nod of approval, and her smile only grew brighter.

Left to the quiet of your own mind, a dark, unfamiliar venom began to fester. What does she have that I don’t? you thought, your eyes tracking the Tully girl. I can smile. I can be appealing.

Yet, as soon as the thought formed, the bitter reality of your past crept in. You thought about the southron lords who had tried to court you at Casterly Rock—the wealthy heirs, the decorated knights. None of them had ever worked out.

An unbidden memory surfaced, sharp and wounding. You could practically see your father, Tywin Lannister, standing in his solar, pinching the bridge of his nose in sheer frustration. "You cannot run off every lord in Westeros just because you are cold," his stern voice echoed clearly in your mind. "Pretend to be appealing, if only for the sake of your house."

Your jaw clenched at the memory. You weren't broken; you simply refused to bow to men who did not deserve you. But watching the Quiet Wolf look at another woman with such easy comfort made the ice in your veins feel dangerously brittle.

The chaotic swirl of the Great Hall seemed to blur into a dull hum as Eddard Stark suddenly turned his head, his movement cutting through the frantic energy of the dancers. He caught your gaze.

Your breath hitched, trapped in your throat as you stared back at him across the crowded room. That strange, volatile feeling rose in your chest again, hotter and more demanding this time, threatening to crack the icy armor you wore so carefully. You couldn't tear your eyes away. Your gaze traced the rugged contour of his face—the steady, solemn depth of his eyes, the surprising softness of his lips beneath his trimmed beard, and the dark, untamed strands of his hair falling loose over his shoulders. He looked entirely like the wild land he ruled, and for a terrifying second, you found it utterly magnetic.

Realizing you were staring with a vulnerability that terrified you, you violently wrenched your eyes away, forcing your gaze down to the ringed surface of your goblet. Your heart hammered against your ribs like a caged beast, your knuckles turning white as you gripped the silver stem.

"Everything alright?" Lady Manderly asked, breathless and flushed as she stumbled back to the table, her dance with Lord Cerwyn finally ending.

"Perfectly fine," you lied, your voice a sharp, tight whisper as you desperately willed the sudden heat in your cheeks to fade back into the shadows.

You downed the rest of your drink, the strong, fermented burning of the northern ale cutting a sharp path down your throat. It did nothing to soothe the sudden, chaotic warmth twisting inside you, but it gave you a momentary shield—a reason to keep your head tilted back, your eyes fixed on the raftered ceiling rather than him.

You set the empty chalice down against the heavy oak table with a deliberate, sharp clack.

"My word," Lady Manderly gasped softly, fanning her flushed face with a hand as she slid onto the bench beside you. "I did not think a lady of the West could drink like a mountain clansman."

"When the company is tedious and the air is drafty, one must find warmth where she can," you replied smoothly, your voice returning to its familiar, razor-sharp precision despite the rapid thumping of your heart. You kept your gaze trained rigidly on your companion, refusing to let your eyes drift even a fraction of an inch back toward the Lord of Winterfell.

"Well, it seems to have given you some color at least," she teased, leaning her chin on her palm to look at you. "For a moment there, you looked as though you had seen a ghost."

"Only the ghost of my own patience," you snapped, smoothing down the front of your fine silk gown with elegant, decisive strokes. "Now tell me of your Lord Cerwyn. Did he manage to speak a coherent sentence, or does he merely grunt in time with the music?"

Lady Manderly let out a bright, melodic laugh, completely delighted by your biting wit. "He speaks perfectly well, I’ll have you know! He told me my steps were as light as the first snowfall."

"How delightfully uninspired," you remarked, tilting your chin up as a servant approached to refill your chalice. "A standard northern compliment. I suppose next he will tell you your eyes are as bright as a polished broadsword."

"And what would you prefer he say?" The deep, low rumble of a voice cut through the air behind you, shattering your composure instantly.

You froze, your fingers tightening around the edge of the table before you slowly turned your head.

Eddard Stark stood just a step away from the bench. He had left the high table entirely unannounced, his imposing figure cloaked in heavy, dark furs that smelled faintly of winter air and woodsmoke. His gray eyes were fixed on you, unblinking and intensely focused.

Lady Manderly gasped softly, quickly sliding off the bench to curtsy. "Lord Stark."

"Lady Manderly," Ned acknowledged with a respectful nod, though his gaze never truly left your face. "I believe Lord Cerwyn is looking for you near the hearth. He matches your enthusiasm for the music."

Taking the very obvious hint, your companion shot you a wide-eyed, panicked look of excitement before bowing her head. "Of course, my lord. Excuse me." She scurried away, abandoning you once more to the wolf.

"Is it a habit of yours, Lord Stark, to frighten off my companions?" you asked, your voice a sharp, dangerous purr.

"I did not think a Lannister could be frightened so easily," Ned replied quietly, taking half a step closer. His eyes tracked the golden beads woven into your hair, a faint, unreadable twitch touching the corner of his lips. "And I merely offered her a path back to the dancing."

"And what are you offering me? More tedious riddles?" You crossed your arms, your jaw clenching as that traitorous flutter bloomed in your chest again. "If you came to mock my choice of attire, save your breath."

"I did not come to mock you," he said, his tone softening into something steady and grounding. "The braids suit you. They make you look less like a captive bird and more like... someone who belongs here."

"I belong in the West," you snapped too quickly, your pride flaring hot against the sudden compliment. "In the warmth. Not in a drafty hall surrounded by people who celebrate a bloody victory with the grace of wild boars."

"Yet, here you are," Ned countered, his quiet voice easily piercing through your defenses. "Watching the room as if you want to be a part of it, but too proud to take the first step."

"I have no desire to partake in this unrefined nonsense," you hissed, stepping closer until you could see the dark flecks in his gray eyes. "And I certainly do not need a solemn northern lord analyzing my desires."

"Perhaps not," Ned murmured, his gaze dropping briefly to your lips before locking back onto your eyes. "But you have been bleeding hostility across my hall for three nights, my lady. I merely wanted to know if the wolf had truly done something to offend the lion, or if you simply prefer the taste of your own venom."

You let out a sharp, breathless laugh, your chest heaving slightly as you held his stare. "Your very presence is an offense, Lord Stark. You sit there so quietly, pretending to be a monument of duty, while everyone else dances to your tune."

"I do not ask them to dance," he said, a ghost of a real smile appearing on his face. "I only watch. Much like you."

"We are nothing alike," you whispered fiercely, though the sheer proximity of his warmth was making it harder to breathe.

"No," Ned agreed softly, his hand resting casually on the pommel of his sword as he leaned down just a fraction closer. "We are not. But that does not mean we cannot find a common ground. Even in the frost."

You didn’t have a retort. For the first time in your life, the sharp, defensive armor of your words completely failed you. Your chest tightened so fiercely it felt as though the breath had been stolen straight from your lungs.

You stood up too quickly, the sudden movement causing your bench to scrape harshly against the stone floor. The sharp noise drew a few eyes, including Catelyn Tully’s; she watched you from the high table, her brow furrowing with quiet, elegant curiosity.

You narrowed your eyes, screaming at yourself inside your own mind. Say something! Anything! But you couldn't. His eyes were just too grey, too deep, anchoring you to the spot like a ship caught in a freezing sea.

Unable to bear the heat of his proximity for another second, you spun on your heel and marched past him. But you only made it two steps before you heard the heavy rustle of his furs as he shifted. Your boots halted against the stone, and against your better judgment, you stopped and looked over your shoulder.

He hadn't let you escape. Eddard had moved with a quiet, lethal swiftness, his shoulder now hovering incredibly close to yours, blocking out the rest of the crowded hall.

"You're insufferable, Eddard," you breathed, the words slipping out sharp and desperate.

That is all you have? Gods! you scolded yourself internally, your heart hammering a frantic rhythm against your ribs.

He didn't flinch at your tone. Instead, his grey eyes locked onto yours, dark and unreadable, as he stepped even closer. Slowly, deliberately, he began to circle you, his movements cautious but entirely unyielding. You didn't retreat; your body moved instinctively with his, turning just enough to keep him in your sight, the tension between you pulling as tight as a bowstring.

Before you could utter another threat, his large, calloused hand slid firmly against your waist.

The heat of his palm burned through the fine silk of your gown. Your breath hitched, and your fingers flew down to grab his wrist, your grip tightening over his leather bracer as if you could pull his hand away. But you didn't push him. You just held him there, staring up at him as the noise of the Great Hall completely faded into nothing.

Ned leaned down, his breath brushing the shell of your ear, his voice dropping to a low, rough whisper that made your knees turn to water.

"I like the way you say my name. Say it again,” he murmured, pulling back just enough so that you were forced to look directly into his eyes. Those damn grey eyes—so deep and unyielding, like the ancient winter stone beneath your feet.

Your heart battered violently against your ribs. Say something! your mind screamed, desperate to reclaim the sharp, untouchable dignity of a Lannister. But your throat felt entirely parched, your usual venom evaporating under the steady heat of his gaze.

"You are a fool, Lord Stark," you managed to breathe out, your voice trembling slightly despite your best efforts to make it a weapon.

"That isn't what you called me a moment ago," Ned replied, his grip on your waist tightening just a fraction, anchoring you against him. He didn't look angry; he looked entirely captivated, a quiet intensity burning in his gaze that made the rest of the crowded, roaring hall disappear.

"I called you insufferable," you countered, tilting your chin up, trying to find your footing as your fingers still clung tightly to his wrist. "And I meant it. you stand there expecting me to simply bend to your will."

"I expect nothing from you," Ned said softly, his thumb tracing a slow, warm line through the silk of your gown. "Except the truth."

"The truth is that I belong in the South," you whispered fiercely, your eyes darting down to his lips before snapping back to his grey gaze. "My father would see us both ruined for this."

"Let him try," Ned whispered back, his face leaning in closer until your breaths mingled in the cool air of the hall. "Say my name again."

You forced your fingers to unclench from his wrist, tearing yourself out of his grasp with a sharp, ragged breath. You took a definitive step backward, creating a desperate gulf of cold air between your bodies before your resolve could completely dissolve. Without giving him another syllable, you spun on your heel, your golden-beaded braids whipping over your shoulder as you swept away from him and toward the heavy arched exit.

Your boots practically flew over the stone floor. Your mind was a furious tempest, scolding your own weakness with every step you took into the chilly, dark corridors of the castle. You are a Lannister, you reminded yourself fiercely, your teeth grinding together.

You do not tremble for a northern barbarian. You do not let a wolf touch you. You cursed his arrogance, you cursed his quiet confidence, and you cursed the way he had effortlessly seen right through your mask.

But gods, beneath all the pride and the carefully cultivated frost, you loved it.

You loved the dangerous, electric thrill of his hand on your waist. You loved the rough, low gravel of his voice when he whispered in your ear, demanding a vulnerability no southron lord had ever been brave enough to seek. You pressed a hand against your ribs, trying to ground yourself, but the phantom warmth of his touch still burned through your silk gown, refusing to let you freeze again.

In the center of the Great Hall, Eddard Stark stood perfectly still for just a single, suspended moment. Across the room, Catelyn Tully stared at him, her gaze heavy with a sudden, quiet realization as she watched the tension radiating from his frame. But Ned didn’t look back at her. Breaking his solemn posture, he turned on his heel and walked after you.

You hadn’t made it far down the dim, drafty corridor. The sound of his purposeful, heavy footsteps echoed against the stone, giving you only a second's warning before his hand clamped firmly around your arm, halting your escape.

You spun around, your breath catching in your throat as he stepped directly into your personal space. He looked at you with an intensity that burned right through your defenses. Before you could snap a retort, his large, calloused hand moved up, his fingers cuffing your jawline and tilting your face up to force your gaze to meet his.

“Say my name again,” Ned commanded, his voice a low, rough rumble that vibrated right against your skin. His thumb brushed against your cheekbone, the contrast of his heat against your icy skin making your chest tighten dangerously. “I will not release you until you say it.”

Your pride flared, a desperate instinct to fight back, but looking into those deep, unyielding grey eyes, the words melted away. Your fingers curled into the heavy fabric of his furs, not pulling away, but anchoring yourself to him.

“Eddard,” you breathed out, the name slipping from your lips like a confession. His thumb brushed against your lower lip.

What are you doing! You thought, your lips gently pressed against the pad of his thumb. You pulled away quickly, you continued your trek to your chambers.

𓃭 ───────── 𓃭

The a few days later, the godswood was choked with a thick, suffocating silence. You found him beneath the heart tree.

Lord Eddard Stark knelt in quiet prayer, the pale bark of the weirwood towering above him like a bleeding sentinel. Snow drifted lazily through the ancient canopy, settling softly upon his broad shoulders, yet he made no move to brush it away. He looked entirely carved from the landscape itself.

“You,” you said, your voice sharp enough to slice through the morning damp.

He turned slowly at the sound of your voice, rising from the frozen earth with his usual measured grace. “My lady.”

“You did some witchcraft on me,” you demanded, marching into the clearing with your jaw clenched tightly.

His brow furrowed, his solemn grey eyes blinking in genuine confusion. “What?”

“Do not play coy with me, Eddard.”

“I did no such thing,” he replied, his deep voice entirely level.

“You did.”

“I assure you, I did not.”

You folded your arms tightly across your chest, your fine Southron silks completely unsuited for the frost, though your pride kept you from shivering. “Then explain it.”

“I would,” he said evenly, taking a single step toward you, “if I knew what it was.”

You began pacing in front of him, your boots snapping twigs beneath the snow, irritation evident in every line of your posture. “I have not slept properly in days.”

He listened without interruption, his gaze tracking your frantic movements.

“You keep appearing in my thoughts,” you snapped, throwing your hands up in a rare display of fractured composure. “I find myself wondering whether you’ve eaten. Yesterday, I saw a heavy wool cloak in the armory and thought it looked warm enough for you.” The words left a bitter, unpalatable taste in your mouth, forcing a sharp breath from your lungs. “I despise this.”

Eddard regarded you for a long, quiet moment, the wind rustling the red leaves above his head. “…That does not sound like witchcraft.”

“It is.”

“It sounds more like concern.”

“It is not.”

“It does.”

“I have never concerned myself with another person in such a manner,” you hissed, stopping your pacing to glare at him.

“Perhaps,” he offered, his voice softening just a fraction, “you simply care.”

You let out a harsh, disbelieving scoff. “I am a Lannister.”

“I noticed.”

“We do not… do this.”

“What is ‘this’?”

You gestured wildly between the two of you in sheer frustration. “This persistent, suffocating awareness of another person. It is distracting. It is entirely inconvenient.”

The faintest, maddening smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. You pointed an accusing finger straight at his chest. “There. You smiled.”

“I did.”

“You are pleased.”

“I find your accusation amusing.”

“It is not amusing!”

“No?”

“You have bewitched me,” you whispered fiercely, taking a step into his personal space, “and now you stand here mocking my suffering.”

“I fear you give me too much credit, my lady.”

You huffed, tearing your gaze away from his lips. “My brother once told me the North is full of old, dark magic.”

“My brother says many things,” Ned replied quietly.

“So does mine.” A heavy silence settled between you again, broken only by the low whisper of the wind through the bare, frozen branches.

Then, Eddard took a deep breath, brushing the accumulation of snow from his dark leather gloves. “If it eases your mind,” he said, his grey eyes locking onto yours with that same terrifying intensity from the night before, “I believe I have been similarly afflicted.”

You frowned, your chest tightening. “…Afflicted?”

“I’ve found myself wondering whether you’ve broken your fast,” he confessed, his stance shifting just slightly closer to yours. Your expression didn't change, but your heart began a frantic rhythm. “You dislike the morning cold,” he continued, his gaze drifting down to your lightly clad shoulders, “so I nearly had another set of northern furs sent to your chambers.”

You simply stared, entirely speechless.

“And yesterday,” he admitted, looking almost sheepish as he rubbed the back of his neck, “I heard someone laugh brightly in the courtyard. I found myself disappointed when I turned and saw it wasn’t you.”

You felt something deep in your chest tighten so fiercely it ached. Your knuckles whitened beneath your folded arms. “…Gods.”

“I suppose we’re both cursed,” he said.

“No,” you countered quickly, desperately trying to reassemble your crumbling armor. “You have clearly conspired against House Lannister. This is a political assault.”

For the first time since you’d arrived in this wretched, beautiful frozen fortress, Eddard Stark laughed. It was a quiet, warm sound that seemed to banish the winter chill entirely. You frowned at him, utterly vexed. “I fail to see what is humorous.”

“I know.”

“And stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Smiling.”

“I’ll try,” he murmured, though the spark in his eyes told a different story.

You sighed heavily through your nose, gathering your skirts to turn back toward the path. “…Very well.”

“What now?” he called after you.

“If this is not witchcraft,” you muttered over your shoulder, already marching swiftly toward the safety of the stone castle, “then I fear the alternative is far more dangerous.”

When you heard his soft, rumbling chuckle follow you through the trees, your fingers dug into your palms. It had to be magic. It was the only explanation that protected your pride.

"Stop laughing, Eddard!" you shouted back, refusing to look at him.

The crunch of his heavy boots against the frozen snow grew louder, closing the distance before you could even clear the edge of the clearing. A sudden, firm grip clutched your arm, spinning you around to face him.

“I hate when you walk away from me,” Eddard whispered, his breath pluming in the crisp morning air as he stared down at you. “Stop.”

Your chest heaved, your hands pressing against his leather-clad chest to keep some semblance of distance between you. “Stop what?”

“Walking away from me,” he said, his voice dropping into a fierce, low register that brooked no argument. His hands moved from your arm to rest firmly on your hips, holding you in place against the winter wind. “I cannot have my wife moving away from me at every turn.”

The air left your lungs all at once. The world seemed to tilt beneath your feet, the stark white of the godswood spinning around you.

“Your what?” you choked out, your regal Lannister composure entirely shattering as you stared at him in utter disbelief.

“Eddard—”

“Yes,” he whispered, his grip tightening on your hips just enough to pull you flush against him. The sheer, solid heat of his body radiated through the layers of your silk gown, completely defying the biting frost of the godswood.

“You speak of madness,” you managed to breathe out, though your voice lacked its usual icy venom. Your fingers instinctively curled into the thick fur of his collar, your heart hammering a frantic rhythm against your ribs. “My father would never allow it. He has plans for me—matches that involve thrones and golden fortresses, not a drafty castle in the middle of a frozen wasteland.”

“Let him have his plans,” Ned murmured, his grey eyes locking onto yours with an unyielding intensity that made everything else melt away. He leaned down, his face mere inches from yours, his breath warm against your lips. “I am the Warden of the North, my lady. I do not ask your father for his permission to keep what is already mine.”

Your jaw slackened slightly, a breathless shudder running through you. “You are incredibly arrogant for a quiet man.”

“And you are incredibly stubborn for a woman who is currently holding onto me for warmth,” he countered, a genuine, soft smile finally breaking across his rugged features.

He leaned in a fraction closer, his forehead resting gently against yours. “You belong to me.”

Before you could formulate another biting retort, his lips pressed against yours, effectively stealing the remaining breath from your lungs.

The kiss was heavy, deep, and entirely consuming—a sudden contrast to the quiet, disciplined man he pretended to be in the Great Hall. His hands slid up from your hips, his fingers tangling firmly into the intricate northern braids at the back of your head, tilting your face up to drink you in.

His finger tighten on your hair, yanking them more. Forcing your lips to part under his mouth.

The kiss turned feral in an instant, completely shattering the illusion of the quiet, honorable lord. His tongue slid into your mouth, deep and possessive, claiming you with a raw hunger that made your knees instantly buckle.

He caught you against him, his other hand sliding down from your ass to cup. He pulled you closer your pelvis hard against his stiffening length. A soft, helpless whimper was caught in your throat, entirely swallowed by him as he drank you in, his mouth moving over yours with a slick, heavy heat that left you completely breathless.

He dragged his lips away from yours just an inch, his teeth nipping sharply at your bottom lip before trailing down the sensitive skin of your jaw. His breath was ragged, hot, and heavy against your neck as his hands gripped you tighter, pinning you flush against his chest.

"I want to drag you into the snow and lift these fine silks around your waist," he growled against your skin, his voice a low, filthy purr that made a sudden, wicked heat coil deep in your core. "I want to feel you wrapping those legs around my hips, taking all of me beneath the winter sky until you are crying my name to the old gods."

He pressed his lips to the racing pulse point at your throat, his touch softening as he brought his hand up to cup your flushed cheek, his grey eyes burning into yours with absolute certainty.

"You are going to be my wife," he murmured softly, his lips brushing yours once more in a tender, lingering promise. "And I will spend the rest of my days keeping you warm."

“That will never happen,” you said weakly, the words lacking any of their usual Lannister venom as you clutched at the heavy fur of his cloak. Your breath came in shallow, ragged gasps, the fierce heat of his sudden declaration still echoing in the quiet spaces of the snowy woods.

Eddard smiled, a genuine, soft expression that entirely transformed his rugged features, before pressing his forehead gently against yours.

"It will," he murmured, his deep voice carrying the absolute weight of a northern vow against your lips. "Your father may wield gold, my lady, but he does not rule the winter. I am not letting you go back south.”

His fingers clamped tight around your throat, squeezing just enough to steal your breath as he yanked your hips flush against his. "You can try to leave, you can try to deny what I've said, you can delude your mind into thinking you will leave at the end of this celebration," he growled, his lips brushing yours with a punishing, breathless friction, "but I will hunt whatever progression, whatever guard that will take you away from me—and I will ruin you until you can't even remember how to stand without my hands holding you up."

The thick, hot weight of his cock pulsated rhythmically against your lower belly, grinding demandingly through the thin fabric of your clothes. He let out a low, ragged growl at the friction, his fingers tightening on your throat to tilt your face up as he pressed his erection even harder against you, leaving no room for you to breathe, let alone escape the hard promise of what he was going to do to you.

The crunch of approaching footsteps broke the quiet, and Lady Manderly rounded the snow-dusted hedges, her expression a mix of relief and utter confusion.

"There you are! I've been looking everywhere," she said, letting out a breathless laugh as she brushed a stray curl from her face. "Are you okay? What did you see out here that led—"

Her words died in her throat. The laughter vanished from her eyes as Eddard Stark stepped into view from behind you. Without a single word to your companion, his large, warm hand slid possessively over the curve of your waist, pulling you back against his chest for just a second. He leaned down, his lips pressing a slow, deliberate kiss to your forehead before his breath brushed the golden braids near your ear, nipping at your ear lobe before moving back to the top of your head.

"I will be waiting," he murmured into your hair, his voice low and full of a quiet, unyielding promise.

He released you, giving Lady Manderly a respectful but entirely unbothered nod as he swept past her, his heavy fur cloak billowing in the winter wind as he walked back toward the castle.

The silence stretched for three agonizing seconds before Lady Manderly practically exploded, her eyes wide as saucers. "What the hells happened in four fucking days?!"

"I don't know! I don't fucking know!" you cried out, your hands flying to your face as the sheer weight of what you had just done finally crashed over you.

The icy Lannister composure you had cultivated your entire life was completely gone, replaced by a raw, spiraling panic. "I—my father is going to kill me. Jaime... Cersei... gods, they will all think I've completely lost my mind! Tyrion!”

"Calm down!" she yelled, grabbing you by your shoulders and shaking you gently, though a wild, shocked smile was fighting its way onto her face. "Take a breath and talk to me! What happened out here?!"

"He kissed me," you choked out, your voice dropping to a panicked whisper as you gripped Lady Manderly’s forearms. Your mind was racing, a chaotic blur of golden lions and grey wolves clashing violently in your head. "He... he grabbed me. Right here. In the snow. And he said—gods, he said he’s going to make me his wife."

Lady Manderly’s jaw dropped so low you thought it might unhinge completely. "The Quiet Wolf said what?"

"He told me he wouldn't let me go back south," you said, pacing a tight, frantic circle in the snow, your fine silk skirts dragging through the slush. All the fierce pride that usually guarded your tongue had dissolved into sheer, unadulterated terror. "He said he doesn't care about my father's plans. He called me his sweet lioness, and then he... he looked at me as if I already belonged to him."

"And what did you say?" she gasped, stepping into your path to halt your pacing, her fingers clutching your shoulders. "Tell me you didn't spit in his face. Tell me you didn't threaten to have Lord Tywin bring an army to burn Winterfell to the ground."

"I told him it would never happen," you whispered, looking back toward the path where his heavy footsteps had left deep impressions in the snow. Your chest tightened, a betraying warmth blooming in your throat despite the freezing wind. "But I said it weakly. I couldn't even force the venom into my own voice. I just stood there and let him press his forehead to mine like a fool."

Lady Manderly let out a sharp, breathless squeal, a hand flying over her mouth to muffle the sound.

"You're in love with him."

"I am not in love with him!" you hissed, your eyes snapping to hers, flashing with a desperate spark of your usual fire. "I am a Lannister! We do not fall in love with dour, provincial lords who smell of winter and leather. I am supposed to marry a king, or a warden of the south, or someone who actually understands the value of a bath and a gold dragon!"

"Then why are your cheeks as red as a Tully banner?" she teased, "And why did you let him kiss your forehead just now in front of me without taking his hand off your waist?"

You groaned, burying your face in your hands. The cold air stung your skin, but it did nothing to cool the flush burning from your neck up to your brow. "Because he is insufferable. He does this... this thing with his eyes. Those damn grey eyes. They look right through me, as if all my anger is nothing but a transparent lie."

"It is a transparent lie," Lady Manderly laughed softly, her tone turning gentler as she pulled your hands away from your face. "For four days, you have scowled at the walls, at the food, and at the music. But every time he looked at you, you stopped breathing. I saw it. The whole hall saw it."

"Tyrion will mock me until the end of my days," you muttered, the thought of his arrogant smirk making your stomach twist. "And Cersei... Cersei will think I’ve surrendered myself to a barbarian just to spite her. But Father..." You swallowed hard, the phantom image of Tywin Lannister's cold, judgmental stare looming over you. "Father will see it as a betrayal of our house."

"Lord Tywin is hundreds of leagues away," she reminded you quietly, stepping closer to shield you from the wind. "But the Warden of the North is right here. And it sounds to me like the wolf has already marked his territory."

"He hasn't marked anything," you snapped, though the memory of his rough, wicked whispers against your skin made a sudden, heavy heat coil deep in your stomach. You pulled your cloak tighter around your shoulders, your golden-beaded braids shifting against the dark fabric. "If he thinks a few bold words and a kiss in the godswood are enough to tame a lioness, he has vastly underestimated my house."

"Oh, I don't think he wants to tame you at all," Lady Manderly smiled, linking her arm through yours to guide you back toward the castle. "I think he likes the bite."

“It’s witchcraft! It’s barbaric!” you snapped, your boots striking the flagstones with furious precision as you entered the covered walkway.

“It’s love—”

“Will you shut up!” you snapped, spinning around to glare at her so fiercely she actually took a half-step back. “Do not use that wretched word in my presence.”

“We can lie to your father,” she offered, completely unfazed by your outburst as she caught up to your frantic pace.

You stopped dead in your tracks, turning a look of pure, unadulterated disbelief upon her. “Are you just willfully dumb, or do you just like to irritate me? One does not simply lie to Tywin Lannister and live to tell the tale!”

“We can say you’ve decided you wanted to stay longer for some political reason—until we figure out whatever is going on between you two,” she said, a brilliant, entirely too-cheerful smile breaking across her face. She reached out, patting your arm with infuriating calm. “Calm down!”

“Calm down?” you hissed, your voice dropping to a dangerous, vibrating whisper as you looked around to ensure no passing guards or servants were within earshot. “You want me to calm down when a northern savage has effectively upended my entire life in less than a turn of the moon? If my father catches wind of this, he will have me dragged back to Casterly Rock in chains of gold.”

“Then don't let him catch wind of it yet,” Lady Manderly reasoned, her eyes dancing with the sheer thrill of the conspiracy. “Write to him. Tell him the winter roads are treacherous. Tell him you are securing an alliance. Tell him anything, but give yourself time.”

“Time for what?” you demanded, though your heart gave a traitorous, heavy thud against your ribs at the mere thought of staying. “Time to let him look at me with those ridiculous grey eyes until I completely forget who I am?”

“Time to see if the wolf can actually catch the lioness,” she whispered with a wink, pulling you along toward the warmth of the keep.

“You are—gods—I simply cannot deal with you right now,” you muttered, tearing your arm from hers.

You practically fled down the corridor, retreating to the sanctuary of your chambers. You slammed the heavy door, threw the bolt, and refused to leave for the rest of the evening, willfully ignoring the bells that chimed for supper. The thought of facing the Great Hall—of watching Eddard, or worse, watching Catelyn Tully watch him—made your stomach twist into knots.

Hours bled into the night until the castle grew quiet. A sudden, firm knock on your door shattered the silence. Before you could even demand who it was, the heavy iron latch clicked. The door swung open, and Eddard Stark stepped into the firelight. He had a quiet, heavy grace about him, his dark hair damp from the encroaching night mist.

“You missed supper,” he said, his deep voice filling the small room instantly.

“I am not all that hungry,” you lied, keeping your back to him as you stood by the hearth, your fingers gripping the stone mantle.

“I miss your cold presence in the hall,” Ned murmured. He closed the distance between you with a slow, deliberate stride, the rustle of his leather brigandine tracing his movements.

“Don’t flatter me, Lord Stark,” you snapped, though the heat of his proximity was already making your pulse race. “I am sure Lady Catelyn was more than happy to fill the silence in my absence.”

Ned stopped just inches behind you. He didn't touch you, but his warmth radiated through the space between you, a silent command that forced you to turn and face him.

“Let her fill whatever silence she pleases,” Ned whispered, his grey eyes darkening as they locked onto yours, stripping away every ounce of your Southron defiance. He reached out, his large, calloused hand gently but firmly cupping the side of your neck, his thumb resting right over your frantically beating pulse. “She is not the one who haunts my thoughts. She is not the one I want.”

Your breath hitched, your hands instinctively coming up to rest against his chest, feeling the heavy, steady thud of his heart beneath the leather. “Eddard... you cannot say these things to me. I am a Lannister. We are meant to be enemies. We are meant to be careful.”

“I am done being careful with you,” he growled softly, leaning down until his lips brushed against yours with a agonizing, slow friction. The romantic tension between you pulled so tight it felt as though the very air would snap. He pressed his forehead against yours, his breath hot and ragged against your skin. “Hear me, sweet lioness. Your father can claim the West, and the King can claim the South. But I am yours. Every piece of me. And I will defy the world before I let another man touch what belongs to the North.”

“Why are you so sure of this?” you whispered, the question breaking from your throat before your pride could weaponize it into a venomous remark.

He didn’t answer with words. Eddard silenced you instantly, his mouth crashing down onto yours with a heavy, feral intensity that obliterated any lingering thoughts of resistance.

The kiss was unvarnished and stripped away the image of the stoic, honorable Lord of Winterfell. His hand slid from your neck, his fingers clawing into your hair to tilt your head back as his tongue forced its way past your lips, deep and possessive.

He pinned you back against the edge of the heavy wooden vanity, his broad frame crowding yours until you could feel the hard, rigid length pressing boldly against your thighs through the thin fabric of your shift. Your fingers dug frantically into the thick leather, your head falling back as he dragged his mouth down to bite sharply your throat, his hands sliding down to grip your hips and lift you flush against him. A soft, breathless whimper escaped you, completely undone by the raw, unbridled hunger of the wolf.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, his chest heaving, his grey eyes dark and utterly consumed as his thumbs stroked your bruised, wet lips.

Finally he answering your question,"Because you belong in my bed," he growled softly, the gravelly edge of his voice vibrating against your skin. "And because you tremble for me just as fiercely as I do for you."

Your breath caught in your throat, a desperate, shuddering gasp leaving your mouth as Ned suddenly gripped your waist and lifted you completely onto the edge of the heavy wooden vanity.

He stepped deep between your thighs, his large, calloused hands sliding down to grip the bare flesh of your ass through the parted folds of your shifted silks. With a sudden, powerful surge of control, he lifted you higher, guiding your legs to wrap tightly around his hips as he carried you into the shadows of the bedchamber, pressing you down into the heavy, dark furs of the mattress.

Before you could even draw breath to protest, the dynamic shifted. You found yourself pulled up, your silk shift pooling around your waist as he guided you to sit astride his lap, pinning you on top of him.

He lay flat on his back beneath you, but there was no illusion of who held the reins. His hands immediately flew to the bare flesh of your ass, his thick fingers digging in deeply, anchoring you over him with an unyielding, bruising grip.

"Move for me, sweet lioness," he growled up from the darkness of the pillows, his grey eyes burning like hot ash in the firelight.

Your breath hitched as you felt the raw, thick heat of his desire pressing relentlessly against your opening. You tilted your hips, a breathless whimper escaping your lips as you began to slide down his length, the friction agonizingly slick and intense. The sensation was overwhelming, a sudden, heavy fullness that made your core ache with a desperate, coiled tension.

But as you tried to find a rhythm, Eddard's hands tightened on your hips, completely halting your movement. He took control from the bottom, his powerful fingers lifting you up and pulling you down against him with a heavy, merciless force. He dictated every slide, every agonizingly slow friction, driving his length deep inside you until your head fell back.

"Eddard—gods, please," you cried out, your fingers clawing frantically into the muscle of his chest, your skin flushing a deep, brilliant crimson as the pleasure threatened to pull you under.

"Look at me," he commanded softly. "Tell me again. Whose wife are you?"

"I... I am a Lannister, I am—" You tried to claw back your pride, but he shifted his hips beneath you, driving up so deeply that a high, fractured gasp was ripped from your throat.

"You are my wife," Ned growled, his grip turning possessive and fierce as he set a brutal, driving pace from below, forcing you to ride him through the sheer, blinding storm of his control. "Say it. Let the old gods hear you."

"I am yours," you sobbed out, completely undone as your climax began to fracture through your veins, your body tightening violently around his length. "I am your wife, Eddard... I will be your wife."

A dark, triumphant groan tore from his chest at your words, his hands gripping your ass to lock you flush against his hips as he finally let himself unravel beneath you, filling you with a thick, scalding heat that left you both trembling in the quiet of the winter night.

The heavy, musky heat of the bedchamber was thick with the scent of woodsmoke and slick, tangled skin. You slumped against his chest, your breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches, but Eddard wasn't finished with you. Before the aftershocks of your climax could even fade, his large, rough hands shifted from your hips, sliding lower to clamp fiercely onto your ass.

His fingers dug in deep, bruisingly possessive, reminding you instantly that he still held complete control from beneath you. With a sudden, powerful upward surge of his hips, he drove his thick length back into your dripping core, burying himself inside you until you let out a sharp, fractured gasp against his neck.

"Eddard—" you choked out, your hands clawing frantically at the furs beneath his head as he set a renewed, merciless pace. He didn't just slide you up and down; his hands manipulated the flesh of your cheeks, lifting you up and pulling you down hard against his thrusts, grinding your pelvis flat against his until the friction was blinding.

Then he moved one hand, it traveled up slowly up your sweat-slicked stomach. His calloused palm cupped your breast, the rough skin sent a jolt of electricity straight to your lower abdomen. He squeezed the soft, heavy mound firmly, his thumb rolling over the hard, aching nipple with a deliberate, crude friction that had you throwing your head back.

"You feel so fucking tight around me, my sweet lioness," he growled "Look at how you take all of me."

He pumped up into you with a heavy, wet rhythm, his fingers working your breast mercilessly, pinching and rolling the nipple until you were sobbing into the quiet room. The contrast of his rough, unpolished northern strength against your fine Southron skin was entirely indecent, stripping away every ounce of the proud lady you pretended to be.

You were completely undone, riding him wildly as his hand on your ass dictated every deep, stretching plunge, driving you both toward a second, even more volatile ruin.

The slick, heavy friction between your bodies echoed in the quiet room, a scandalous soundtrack to the absolute ruin of your Lannister dignity. He didn't allow you a moment to recover. His hand remained clamped tightly on your ass, his thick fingers sinking and molding you to him as he tilted your pelvis to stretch you even wider around his length.

With every deep, upward surge of his hips, his calloused palm still worked at your breast with a crude, heavy possessiveness. He squeezed the soft weight of it, his fingers twisting and pinching the swollen nipple until a high, needy whimper was ripped from your throat.

"You're soaking wet for me," Ned growled, his voice a low, filthy rumble against your ear as he drove himself up into you, bottoming out so hard the breath left you entirely. "Look at what the wolf does to you. Every time I touch you, you open up just for me."

"Eddard—gods, stop talking," you gasped, your fingers digging frantically into his broad shoulders as your hips began to roll instinctively against his, desperate for the friction. Your pride was entirely gone, burned away by the raw, unbridled hunger of his touch.

"No," he growled, his teeth biting sharply into the junction where your neck met your shoulder, marking you as his over and over again. His hand on your ass lifted you high, dragging you slowly down the entire thick length of him before slamming his hips upward to meet you. "I want you to hear it. I want you to remember the weight of me inside you when you try to look at me across my hall tomorrow."

He accelerated the pace, his grip on your flesh turning entirely merciless. His thumb flicked over your aching nipple in a brutal, rapid rhythm that matched the wet, heavy pounding of his hips. The pleasure was too much, too sharp, fracturing your vision into a blur of firelight and dark furs. Your inner muscles clamped desperately around him, convulsing in tight, rhythmic waves as your second climax began to tear through you.

Ned let out a dark, feral groan, his fingers digging bruisingly deep into your ass as he felt you tighten around him. He stopped guiding your movements and simply pinned you down onto him, driving his hips up in short, heavy, punishing thrusts that filled your core completely, riding out the storm of your release until he finally unraveled inside you with a violent, shuddering shudder.

The heavy, wet sound of your joined bodies finally slowed to a halt, leaving only the sound of your fractured, ragged breathing echoing into the rafters of the chamber. You collapsed completely against his broad chest, your forehead resting against the damp skin of his shoulder, your entire body trembling with the aftershocks of the release. The musky, sweet scent of your shared heat hung thick in the air between the heavy furs.

Eddard didn't release his grip on you. His large, calloused hands remained heavy and possessive, resting flat against the curve of your ass, keeping you firmly pinned astride his lap so you couldn't pull away from his fading length.

His chest heaved beneath you, his heart a frantic, wild hammer against your ribs. He buried his face in the golden tangle of your hair, his lips brushing the sensitive skin behind your ear as his breathing slowly began to steady.

"Say it," he murmured, his voice a low, rough gravelly whisper that still carried the raw edge of total possession.

You let out a soft, exhausted groan, your fingers weakly curling into the dark furs beneath his head. "I already told you what you wanted, Eddard... I am your wife."

"Not that," Ned whispered, his hands squeezing the soft flesh of your ass just tight enough to make your breath hitch, reminding you that even in the quiet aftermath, he wasn't done with you

His thumb finding your highly sensitive clit and delivering a firm, deliberate stroke that made your entire body twitch.

"Look at me," he commanded, his voice thick and rough against your ear.

You gasped, your hips instinctively arching into his touch as his thumb rolled over the aching peak again, melting the last remnants of your famous Lannister steel. "Please... I'm looking."

"The cold, untouchable lioness," he murmured, his gaze locking onto yours as his thumb maintained a slow, torturous rhythm that kept you hovering right on the edge of a clean break. "Tell me who owns you."

"You," you whimpered, your fingers clawing at the sheets, all your usual calculated restraint burning away under his touch. "Only you."

He paused the movement, pressing down just hard enough to make you whine in desperate need. "Not enough. Call me your husband."

“I have called myself your wife already!” You whimpered

“Not enough!”

"Say it anyway," he growled, resuming the heavy, relentless friction of his thumb until your breath shattered and your composure completely disintegrated. "Say it."

"My husband," you choked out, arching helplessly into his hand as the sudden, overwhelming release took you all over again. "You're my husband."

Your heart gave a traitorous, violent thud.

A low, deeply satisfied hum vibrated in his chest at the words. Ned closed his eyes, his grip softening into something fiercely protective as he pulled you down flat against him, wrapping his broad arms around your back and sealing you into the safety of his warmth against the biting northern night.

𓃭 ───────── 𓃭

15 Years Later

298 AC (After Conquest)

 The heavy furs of the master bedchamber did little to stifle the mounting exhaustion of King Robert’s impending arrival. As you stood by the hearth, mentally cataloging the endless preparations, a pair of calloused hands slid around your waist. Eddard drew you back against his broad chest, his beard scratching softly against your shoulder as he pressed a warm, lingering kiss to the side of your neck before slowly licking your neck.

With a sharp huff, you shoved his chest, twisting out of his embrace. "Stay away from me, you barbarically horny wolf!" you snapped, smoothing down your gown with rigid dignity.

Ned blinked, a rare, amused twitch tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Me?"

"Yes, you! Seven children, Eddard. Seven!" You gestured toward the window, where the chaotic sounds of the courtyard echoed. "I have single-handedly populated this entire frozen fortress. Your dirty little wolves offer me absolutely no peace."

Ned stepped closer, his dark eyes gleaming with quiet warmth. "They are your children, too, my love. Most of them have that bright Lannister gold in their hair to prove it. Robb, Tybolt, Sansa, Rickon, Jamie. All blonde in some way.”

"Do not try to charm your way out of this," you countered, pointing an accusing finger at him. "Only my sweet Bran and little Jamie have any sense of decency. The rest of them—Robb, Tybolt, Sansa, Rickon, even my wild Arya—are entirely insolent. They take after their father."

"Arya has the Stark look, I'll grant you," Ned chuckled, reaching out to catch your hand, his thumb rubbing soothingly over your knuckles. "But that fierce pride? That is pure lioness. You can hardly blame me for the traits they stole from you and the things you allow her to do.”

“Excuse me?” You said slightly amused

“She only has that wild look because her mother allows her to run rampant through our halls,” Ned murmured, his lips brushing your neck once more before he finally relented and pulled back. He wore a quiet, knowing smile. “Cutting her hair... gifting her a sword for her name day. I thought Catelyn Tully was going to faint right into the rushes when she saw the girl swinging steel.”

At the mention of the Tully woman, your posture stiffened. "She is a wanderer who seems to ghost herself in my halls," you snapped, crossing your arms. "Every name day, and every anniversary of your brother Brandon’s death, there she is, lingering in Winterfell. One would think she was the one who married the Wolf."

"She is a friend to my family—"

"That is irrelevant!" you cut him off, raising your chin. "My daughter asked for a sword, and I simply provided. Nothing is too great or too small for my children. But that does not excuse Arya's arrogance and wildness—a trait she inherits entirely from you, Eddard Stark!" You pressed a sharp finger firmly against his chest.

Ned chuckled, his large hand coming up to gently clasp your wrist, though he didn't pull your hand away. "She gets her arrogance from her mother. The very same mother who forced Ser Jaime to ride all the way to Winterfell just to knight our girl."

The memory of it was so vivid, it seemed to paint itself across the quiet, firelit stone of your bedchamber.

Years ago, you had been sitting by the hearth, drawing a silver-backed brush through Arya’s thick, dark hair. It was the deep, shadow-brown of the North, looking so much like her father’s. Watching her squirm, she had reminded you so intensely of the stories of Brandon Stark—wild, untamed, and entirely chaotic.

"Mother," Arya had spoken slowly, her small voice breaking the quiet. Ned had looked up from his ledger at the desk, watching the two of you. "Why do you keep your hair so long? Why do you look so beautiful with yours, when I look like... well, like Father?"

Ned had shifted in his seat, opening his mouth to offer some gentle, fatherly reassurance, but you had simply raised a hand to silence him.

"Hair is not honor, sweet girl," you had whispered, your fingers gently tilting her chin up. "It grows back. Character does not. Speak your mind. What is truly troubling you?"

Arya had swallowed hard, looking down at her lap. "I don’t want my hair long anymore. I can’t be knighted with long hair. It gets in my eyes when I train."

Ned had immediately intervened, stepping toward the hearth. "Arya, it is customary for ladies to keep their hair long and tended. And ladies cannot be—"

Before he could finish his lecture on northern propriety and usher her off to bed, you had reached for the heavy shears on the vanity. With a swift, decisive grip, you gathered Arya’s dark locks and sheared them off in one clean, merciless chop, leaving her with a short, jagged, boyish cut.

Ned had stopped dead in his tracks, his jaw dropping as his eyes darted from the dark tresses sliding across your lap to the absolute look of fierce triumph on his daughter's face. He let out a low, defeated groan, pinching the bridge of his nose. "By the old gods..." he muttered, knowing right then that there was absolutely no controlling the two lionesses in his house.

Within the following moons, the Golden Lion himself had arrived. Jaime had stood in the Great Hall, his gilded armor looking entirely out of place against the grey stone of Winterfell, bickering fiercely with you while Ned watched in dry amusement.

"You're the only bloody knight I trust with my daughter!" you had snapped, stepping right into his space.

"You don't even have a proper master-at-arms to train her!" Jaime had shot back, gesturing wildly.

"Did you ride all the way to the bloody North just to ask if I had a damn master-at-arms?" you snapped, punching his armored shoulder hard enough to make the metal clang.

Jaime had winced, rubbing his arm. "I am not knighting a Stark."

"You're not knighting a Stark," you had hissed, leaning close enough that he could see the dangerous Lannister fire in your eyes. "You are knighting my daughter. And you will knight her."

When the day finally came, the Great Hall of Winterfell was thick with a tense, stunned silence. The northern lords lined the long tables, their faces twisted in deep scowls, muttering heavily into their horns of ale at the sheer absurdity of the spectacle. Standing near the hearth, Lady Catelyn Tully sat rigid, her hands tightly clasped in her lap, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line of absolute disapproval. She looked as though she might faint from the sheer, unladylike impropriety of it all.

But you stood tall beside Ned, your chin raised high as your brother, Ser Jaime Lannister, stepped forward in his brilliant, gleaming Kingsguard armor.

Arya knelt before him, her boyish haircut exposing her small shoulders, her dark eyes shining with an unyielding intensity. With perfect, solemn grace, Jaime drew his magnificent sword, the steel catching the firelight as he tapped her left shoulder, then her right.

"In the name of the Warrior, I charge you to be brave," Jaime's voice rang out, carrying an unusual weight of respect through the rafters.

The moment the sword was sheathed, the silence broke—not from the grumbling lords, but from the front row of the family gallery.

"That was so bloody cool!" little Jamie—Ser Jaime's young namesake—burst out, his bright dirty blonde hair bouncing as he jumped up and down, clapping his hands wildly. “Me next! Uncle Jamie! Me next! Me! Me!”

"She looks like a real warrior!" young Brandon cheered beside him, his grey eyes wide with awe, while little Rickon giggled and mirrored his brothers' excitement, tugging on his mother's skirts.

Over by the pillar, standing quietly in the shadows where he usually kept himself, Jon Snow watched the display. A rare, genuinely bright smile broke across his usually solemn face, a quiet warmth in his eyes as he looked at his favorite half-sister achieving the impossible.

The memory faded, leaving the quiet warmth of your bedchamber once more. Ned’s hand was still wrapped gently around your wrist, his thumb tracing the pulse point there, a soft chuckle escaping his chest as you pulled he back to the present.

"She looked like a proper squire by the time Jaime finished with her," Ned murmured, a nostalgic warmth softening his rugged features. "Even if my lords nearly choked on their ale seeing a Kingsguard bestow knighthood upon a girl."

"Let them choke," you said, though the sharpness in your voice had finally begun to yield to the heat of his touch. "A lioness does not concern herself with the opinions of sheep, Eddard. As my father would say…and nor does a wolf, I should hope."

"No," Ned agreed, pulling you that crucial inch closer until the warmth of his chest pressed against yours, his arms enveloping you in the safe, familiar scent of leather and winter frost. "But this wolf is still waiting for his wife to forgive him for the crime of giving her seven beautiful, insolent children. Though he wishes for more. Another wild girl. Maybe a boy…twins?”

You ignored his last statement

"She is my daughter, and she is everything that I am not," you said, your voice softening with a rare, quiet ferocity as you looked into the fire. "She will not be hindered by the expectations that nearly suffocated me. She doesn't want children, she doesn't want a lord husband—she wants to be a knight. I saw to it that she became one."

Ned's expression softened, a tender, knowing look replacing his usual stoic mask. "You won't admit it, but you love them. All of them. Fiercely. Which is why we should have another.”

“Eddard control yourself!”

But you looked away, refusing to let him see the truth in your eyes. You didn’t mind having more children, mothering a small babe that would look like him or yourself.

"They were all my children, born from my womb," you said coldly, waving your hand to dismiss his sentiment. "Feeding them, protecting them, seeing them thrive... it is the least I can do as a mother. Now, is that why you are here? To bother me with your soft-hearted observations?"

"No," Ned said, his voice dropping an octave, the warmth instantly evaporating from his features. "Lady Tully will be coming. She wishes to see us."

Your posture went rigid, the Lannister gold in your veins turning to ice. "Us? Or you? That woman thinks she can needle her way into my family, and you sit back and allow the damn fish to do so. Ever since we first wed, ever since I birthed all seven of our children, she has been lurking, gifting them with trinkets from House Tully as if she has some claim to this house." You stepped into his space, your chin tilted up, your eyes flashing. "I am the Lady of Winterfell, Eddard. Not her."

Ned didn’t flinch, but the gravity in his dark eyes made the room feel suddenly colder. He reached out, his heavy hands gripping your shoulders, not to hold you back, but to anchor you for the blow.

"I know. You are my one and only true wife. She is not here to play at being a mother to our children," Ned said quietly. "She wants to discuss Jon Arryn’s death. She believes... she has reason to believe that the Lannisters murdered the Hand."

The words hung in the freezing air, heavy and suffocating. Your breath caught in your throat, your mind instantly racing to your twin, to your father, to the terrifying, bloody lengths your family would go to protect their secrets. If Jaime... if Tywin...Fuck…If Cersei.

Before you could even form a defense, a heavy, impatient pounding rattled the oak doors of your bedchamber, shattering the tense silence.

"Enter!" you snapped, glad for the distraction, though your voice still carried the sharp edge of your rising panic.

The door burst open, and a small stampede of boys spilled at the doorway.

"Mother! Please tell Robb that you want our hair cut short!" Jon insisted, his usual quiet reservation entirely forgotten in his frustration.

Ned’s eyebrows shot up. He stood frozen, his gaze darting between you and his bastard son, who had just naturally, without a second thought, called his proud Lannister wife mother in a moment of pure household chaos.

Robb, Tybolt, and Theon crowded in right behind Jon, practically tripping over one another.

You crossed your arms, leveling the group with a stern, unimpressed look. "Isn't that exactly what I requested?" you snapped.

"Yes, mother! They don't listen to a word of it," Theon chimed in quickly, nodding in fervent agreement.

Ned’s head snapped toward him, his jaw nearly dropping. Theon too? The ironborn ward was looking to you for maternal authority just as naturally as the rest of them.

"Well, then go," you commanded, stepping forward to inspect the four of them. You reached out, flicking a stray piece of straw from Robb's shoulder and turning Tybolt's chin to look at his smudge-faced cheek. You cuff Theon’s face before scowling. "You look filthy, all of you. Like dirty, unkempt wolves that have been rolling in the dirt. Go bathe and cut those manes off immediately! Now!"

The boys scrambled, offering quick, mumbled apologies before rushing back out the door, their heavy boots clattering down the stone corridor.

A sudden, powerful rush of memory washed over him, pulling him backward through the fog of the last years. He had a vivid, striking flashback to the cold afternoon when a frightened, defiant ten-year-old ward had first stepped off the horses in the courtyard of Winterfell.

Theon had been trembling then—not from the cold, but from terror. His father's rebellion had been crushed, his brothers were dead, and he had been surrounded by silent, grim-faced northern soldiers who looked at him as if he were nothing but a bargaining chip.

Ned remembered how you had stepped forward, your heavy velvet skirts sweeping through the slush. You had looked every bit the proud, untouchable Lannister, your chin tilted high, your eyes sweeping over the boy with an icy precision.

“The boy is freezing, my husband,” you had said to Ned, your voice cutting through the tense silence of the courtyard like a blade. “And he looks as though he expects us to execute him on the spot. Is this how House Stark welcomes its guests, even those taken by force? The Starks are wild and unkempt things, dirty and wild… are you hungry?”

Ned had watched, silent and cautious, as you knelt in the freezing mud, utterly ignoring the ruin to your fine silks. You had reached out, your movements deliberate and unhurried. Theon had flinched away, his small hands curling into defensive fists, but you hadn't retreated.

Instead, you had taken his small, chapped hands in yours. Your fingers had been warm, the rings pressing gently against his skin as you rubbed his hands to bring the circulation back.

“You are heir to the Iron Isles,” you had told him, your voice softening just enough to cut through his terror, “and a handsome one at that.”

The boy had blinked, completely disarmed by the sudden, unexpected warmth from a woman who looked like royalty. The defensive tension in his small shoulders had melted instantly.

“Come, let’s eat,” you had said, rising gracefully and pulling him along with you. “You will sit with me, my sons, and my little girl.”

He had let you lead him inside without a single protest, his tiny fingers clinging to yours as if you were his only shield against the cold.

The heavy oak door clicked shut brought him back to the present. The sudden silence that rushed back into the room was deafening. The warm, chaotic domesticity of the sons you raised vanished, leaving only the freezing northern air and the terrible truth of Ned's accusation.

Ned slowly turned back to you, the brief amusement of the boys' interruption and the warmth of the flash back entirely gone from his face. He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a dangerous, heavy whisper. "Your brothers Jaime and Tyrion, along with your sister is coming with the King. If Catelyn's words are true... if your family has murdered my second father..." He paused, his grip tightening on your waist. "What will you do when the lion and the wolf finally tear each other apart?"

You thought for a moment before looking away. What would you do?

[missmanlykink]

yes WE will be fucking bobby from backrooms

[stellav1va]

I got pokopia and that’s all I want to play now

[stellav1va]

im so drunk

[the-darklings]

YOUR 'BETTER BOBBY' FIC WAS SO GOOD! if you ever felt inspired would LOVE to read more about them. maybe another entity attacks them and they get separated? and alone and lost, reader can't help but miss the real Bobby ahhh. anyway, love you, thank you for writing!

I'm so glad you're all loving this idea, because inspiration hit me so hard I wrote this in one sitting. Continuation to this. Def let me know if you wanna see more 👀 warnings: horror (finally got to write my true love), and some gore (nothing explicit/implied) series masterlist.

You've been here long enough that you've stopped counting the hallways.

That, in hindsight, should probably scare you the most. The fact that it doesn't scare you anymore.

The yellow used to make your skin crawl, that specific shade of institutional sick. Now it's just... the colour of home. Better Bobby's taught you that. Through sheer repetition of safety.

Every time he pulls you into a new room and checks the corners before letting you sit down. Every time he angles his body between you and a doorway without thinking about it. Or when he hands you something to eat. You've stopped asking where the food comes from. That's another question that goes in circles every time you try it. He watches you until you take a bite, satisfied, like feeding you is the only task on a list he takes very seriously.

You have a room now. Your room. He found it for you three (days? rotations? sleeps?) ago, deeper in Level 0 than you'd been before, tucked behind a series of turns that he walked so confidently you wondered if he'd planned the route in advance.

It's quieter than the others. The carpet is thicker, the hum lower, and there's a warm patch on the floor near the far wall where some buried pipe must be running. Better Bobby dragged every blanket he'd scavenged into a pile on that warm spot and when you'd looked at him he'd shrugged, one shoulder, earring catching the fluorescent light.

"What? You get cold."

Real Bobby used to steal the covers.

You try not to make the comparison. You try so hard. But Better Bobby makes it impossible because he's everything real Bobby was on your best days. Distilled and concentrated, with all the carelessness burned off.

He touches you constantly. Not sexually, just contact. His hand on the back of your neck when you walk. His chin on your shoulder when you're sitting together. His fingers finding yours in the dark when the lights flicker, which they do sometimes. And in those brief, stuttering seconds of blackness you can hear things moving in the walls and Better Bobby's grip tightens. He says I'm here like it's a fact of physics. Like his presence beside you is as fundamental and non-negotiable as gravity.

It's a Thursday, you think, or what you've decided is Thursday—you've started naming the days by feeling, which probably means you're losing it—when everything goes wrong.

You're walking. Better Bobby's slightly ahead of you, one hand trailing the wall, talking about something. He talks to you the way real Bobby used to, a constant low-level narration.

Except Better Bobby's commentary is about the architecture of this place, which hallways are safe, which ones echo differently than they should. The way the carpet changes texture near certain thresholds you should know about. You're half-listening, comfortable in the drone of his familiar voice, when he stops abruptly.

You almost walk into his back.

"Bobby?"

He doesn't answer. His head tilts slightly, the way a dog would listen toa distant sound. His whole body goes rigid in a way you've never seen before. Better Bobby doesn't tense up. Better Bobby is languid and easy and always, always calm.

"Bobby, what—"

"Don't move."

His voice is different. Stripped of the warmth, the lazy drawl, all the honeyed softness he pours over you. What's left is flat and hard. Something in your hindbrain fires that hasn't fired since you got here because Better Bobby has kept you so safe that you forgot what fear tasted like.

You taste it now. Bright and metallic at the back of your throat.

The lights flicker abovehead. Not the usual gentle stutter or dimming it does at random intervals. This is violent, a seizure of light, and in the strobe of it you spot something at the end of the hallway.

You can't process it. Your brain tries and slides off the shape the way water slides off wax. It's too tall, and wrong. So wrong. It takes up too much space for its size, like it's pressing against the dimensions of the hallway from the inside, and it's looking at you with something that isn't a face.

Better Bobby shoves you behind him. Both hands this time. Hard.

"Go."

"I'm not leaving you—"

"Go. Left, left, straight, third door. I'll find you." He looks over his shoulder at you and his eyes are dark and flat. Ancient in a way that makes your stomach drop because for just a second—just a flicker, shorter than the lights—the thing looking out from behind Bobby's face isn't Bobby, either. "Baby. Run."

You run.

Left, left, straight, except there's no third door. There's no door at all.

The hallway stretches and bends and the carpet under your feet changes from rough to damp to something that feels horribly organic so abruptly you almost skid. You're running and the fluorescent yellow is shifting with you, deepening in increments, and the walls are getting narrower.

The ceiling goes lower suddenly and you realise, with a lurch of animal terror, that you're not on Level 0 anymore.

You don't know when it changed. There was no door, no threshold, no moment. The hallways just... became somewhere else. Like you walked through an edit. A jump cut in reality.

You stagger to a stop. Your breathing is so loud it fills the quiet corridor.

It's dark here. Not quite pitch black, mercifully. There's light, but it's coming from somewhere wrong. Faintly blue, sourceless, the colour of television static.

The walls aren't yellow anymore. They're concrete instead. Industrial. Stained with something you refuse to look at closely. The ceiling is a mess of exposed pipes and dead wiring, and water (you hope desperately it's water) drips in a strange pattern that sets your teeth on edge

It's cold here. You're shaking, you realise a moment too late.

You press your back against the concrete wall and slide down to the floor, pulling your knees to your chest and try to make yourself small. Try to make yourself invisible. Because Better Bobby isn't here and without him you're nothing in this place.

Just soft, warm, alive thing in a place that is none of those things.

That's when you see it. From the corner of your eye.

It assembles itself in pieces in the dark, the way a photograph develops, the way something reveals itself to you only once it's already too close.

Teeth first.

A grin. Too wide and white, wrong, hanging in the blue-black dark about thirty feet down the corridor. Human teeth in a human smile except there are too many of them and the smile is too wide. It's not attached to anything you can see, either. Just the grin, suspended, luminous. The way a Cheshire cat would look if the Cheshire cat wanted to kill you.

It doesn't move. You don't breathe.

Then it's twenty feet away.

You didn't see it move. You didn't blink. Not once. It was thirty feet and now it's twenty and the grin hasn't changed, not even slightly. The same frozen rictus of delight, and you understand with a sick, cold certainty that it's not walking toward you. It's just... closer. Like the distance between you is a thing it can edit. A number it can change at will.

Fifteen feet. The grin widens. You didn't think it could widen.

You can see more of it now, or rather you can see the shape of more of it. The suggestion of a body behind the smile, darker than the dark around it, a silhouette that doesn't quite hold its edges. And the sound. There's a sound now, low and wet, like someone trying to laugh through a mouthful of something thick. A gurgling, hitching, delighted sound.

It's happy to see you. Whatever this thing is, it's so, so happy that you're here.

Ten feet. You can feel the cold coming off it. Not temperature, exactly, something else. An absence. A pulling. Like it's drawing the warmth out of the air between you one degree at a time and feeding the grin with it.

You open your mouth to scream and nothing comes out.

"Close your eyes."

The voice comes from directly behind you.

You didn't hear him arrive. You didn't hear footsteps or breathing or the rustle of fabric. He's just there, the way he's always just there. His hand closes over your eyes from behind, firm, warm, his palm flush against your face, fingers curving over your brow.

"Close them. Keep them closed. Don't open them until I tell you to."

Better Bobby's voice is calm. Completely, impossibly calm. The same tone he uses when he's telling you to go back to sleep after the lights flicker. But underneath it—deep underneath, in a register you feel more than hear—there's something else now. An edge that doesn't sound like Bobby at all.

His hand lifts off your eyes. You keep them shut. You squeeze them so tight you see colours behind your lids. Bright, bursting phosphenes, and you press your face into your knees and you hear him move away from you. Toward it.

Then the sounds start.

You can't categorise them. You won't.

There's a tearing sound. Not fabric, or paper; something denser, wetter, something with resistance. A sound like a dog shaking water from its fur except heavier and it ends in a crack that reverberates through the concrete floor and up through your spine.

The gurgling laughter changes pitch. Goes higher. Then higher still. Then it's not laughter anymore, it's something between a shriek and a frequency. A sound that vibrates in the roots of your teeth, and underneath all of it is a low rumbling that you realise is coming from Better Bobby. A sound no human throat should make, a sound like tectonic plates grinding in the dark.

There's a splash. Something hisses, like water on a hot pan. The shrieking cuts out—not fades, cuts, abruptly, like someone hit a switch—and then there's a long, wet, dragging sound that moves away from you down the corridor and fades into the pipes and the dark.

Silence.

There's a ringing in your ears. Your fingers feel numb, heavy. You're biting the inside of your cheek so hard you can taste blood in your mouth.

Footsteps. Normal ones. The soft pad of sneakers on concrete.

"Okay, baby. You can open your eyes now."

You do. Better Bobby is standing in front of you, looking down at you with that soft, tilted expression. Same white tee. Same denim shorts. Trusty camera over his shoulder. Not a drop of anything on him. Not a wrinkle. His hair isn't even mussed any more than usual. His earring catches the faint blue light and throws a tiny star onto the concrete wall and he's smiling at you, gently, like you just had a bad dream and he's here to tell you it's morning.

There's nothing in the hallway behind him. Nothing on the floor. No sign that anything was ever there at all, except a faint smell. Ozone, copper and deeper beneath that, an almost rotten stench. You try to examine it but it's already fading.

You don't ask. You can't ask.

Your body moves before your brain does. You launch yourself off the floor and into him so hard he actually rocks back a step. Better Bobby, who's never been moved by anything in your presence, who stands in front of horrors like a wall moves this time. Your arms lock around his neck and you bury your face in his chest.

You're shaking. So violently that it's almost convulsive, these full-body tremors that you can't control, and the sound coming out of you isn't crying exactly. It's more animal than that, a high keening thing that you'd be embarrassed about if you had any room left for embarrassment but you don't, you used it all up being terrified.

Better Bobby catches you. He doesn't stumble again. His arms come around you and they're solid and warm. He holds you so tight that the shaking has nowhere to go, like he's absorbing it into himself, and one hand cradles the back of your head, pressing your ear against his chest. His heartbeat is steady, steady, so steady, and how is he so steady, how is he always so steady—

"Shhh. I got you. I'm here. It's gone."

You can't stop. You're gripping his shirt in both fists, knuckles blanching, and you're gasping against his collarbone and he just...

He holds you. Doesn't rush it. Or tell you you're okay or that it wasn't that bad or any of the things real Bobby would say in later months to make you feel silly for being scared. He just holds on and rocks you, the smallest movement, his cheek resting on top of your head.

"You're safe, baby. Nothing touches you. I promise. Nothing ever touches you."

Your voice comes out cracked and ruined. "What—what was that, what did you— how did you—"

He hums gently. "Don't worry about it."

"Bobby, that thing, it was—its face, it was smiling, it was—"

"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you. Tips your chin up with his knuckle. That lazy smile, easy and warm and so perfectly Bobby it makes your chest splinter. "I know what it was. It's gone now. Don't worry about it."

"How did you get rid of it?" you rasp.

His thumb strokes your jawline. "Does it matter?"

"Yes."

He looks at you. For a moment something flickers behind his eyes. Something vast and patient and very, very old. Then it's gone, and he's just Bobby again, warm-eyed and soft-mouthed, tucking your hair behind your ear.

"I told you, baby. Nothing gets past me." He kisses your forehead. Slow. Gentle. His lips are warm and the concrete corridor is freezing around you. You lean into him like he's the last source of heat in the world. "Come on. Let's go home."

He takes your hand.

You let him lead you.

He leads you back through the concrete and the pipes and the blue-dark, his thumb rubbing circles on your knuckles, and you don't look behind you.

Not even once. Because whatever he did in that corridor is something you have decided you don't need to see the aftermath of, and also because some part of you—the part that still thinks clearly, the part that Better Bobby hasn't quite reached yet—understands that there is no aftermath.

That whatever Better Bobby does to the things in the dark, he does it completely. He doesn't leave evidence. He doesn't leave remains. He unmakes them, and he does it wearing Bobby's crooked smile, Bobby's silver earring and Bobby's cut-off shorts like a costume. Like a skin, like a love letter written in someone else's handwriting.

The concrete gives way to carpet. Just as abruptly. The blue darkens to yellow again. The cold lifts. The hum returns, and for the first time ever you're grateful for it. The way you'd be grateful for the sound of traffic outside your apartment window because it means you're back in the world, or at least, back in the only world you have left.

Your room. The warm patch. The blankets.

Better Bobby guides you down, wrapping the blankets snug around you. He tucks himself behind you and you press back into his chest, his arm winding around your waist. You're still shaking faintly, these little aftershock tremors, and he absorbs every single one.

"Sleep, baby. I'm right here."

And you close your eyes and you think about real Bobby.

You think about the apartment in Santa Clara. The kitchen counter where he used to roll joints with the window open because you didn't like the smell building up inside. The way his camera equipment colonised every flat surface, cables and lenses and that one light diffuser he was so particular about. You used to complain it and he used to say babe, genius needs room to breathe and you'd throw a dish towel at his head while smothering a grin.

You think about the night you fell in love with him. Not the day you realised it (you'd known for a while by then) but the night it actually happened.

You sitting on the hood of his car in a parking lot off El Camino Real, sharing a joint, and he'd turned to you with the camera for once not in his hands and said, so disarmingly, you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, and his face looked stripped of its usual cockiness. Bare. Scared. Young.

He was so young. You both were.

You wonder if he's sitting in that apartment right now with the TV on and the lights off, not really watching, just existing in the space you used to fill.

You wonder if he's looked at your toothbrush in the holder next to his. If he's opened the fridge and seen the leftovers you made two nights before you vanished (was it two nights? you're losing track of the real timeline, it's blurring at the edges, and that scares you more than the grin in the dark) and whether he ate them or whether they're still sitting there. Slowly going bad, a small decomposition that mirrors something larger in your life.

You wonder if he's picked up his pager. Scrolled to your name. Stared at it.

You wonder if his thumb hovered over the button the way it used to hover over the shutter release—that perfect hesitation, that half-second of do I or don't I—and whether he pressed it or whether he set the pager down and rolled over. Told himself he'd deal with it tomorrow the way he's been telling himself he'd deal with you tomorrow for months now.

You wonder if somewhere under the indifference and the exhaustion and the slow-growing cruelty there is still a version of Bobby who filmed you sleeping because the light was good. Who cut a Metallica shirt into a crop top with kitchen scissors and held it up like a trophy. Who said hold still, the light's doing something crazy on you and meant I love you, you're beautiful and couldn't say it any other way.

You wonder if that Bobby still misses you.

You wonder if he'd ever come looking.

Better Bobby pulls you closer. His mouth finds the spot behind your ear. The one real Bobby discovered during your second date together. The one that makes everything go quiet inside your skull.

"You're thinking again," he murmurs.

"I know."

"About him."

You don't answer. You don't have to.

Better Bobby is quiet for a long time. His breathing is slow and even against your back. The lights hum their tuneless hymn in your ears. Somewhere deep in the walls, something moves again, and you tense at the scraping sound.

Better Bobby's arm tightens around you. A reflex, instant, protective, the one thing about him that never feels performed.

"He's not coming, baby," he says softly. He doesn't say it meanly this time, either. Not triumphant. More so sad. Almost like he wishes it weren't true, for your sake. Because even this thing that wears Bobby's face and unmakes grinning horrors in the dark doesn't want to watch you grieve. "You know that."

You close your eyes.

You do know. Maybe you've known for a while now.

Maybe that's why you stay.

[stellav1va]

I JUST SAW TWICE LIVE

[mirai-lunar]

Objective: Survive.

★ A simple guide on how to survive the Invincible Variants. The stars range from one to five. One being the easiest to five being the most difficult. Fem! Reader.

Includes: Sinister Mark, Omni Mark, Mohawk Mark, No Goggles Mark, Goggles Mark, Veil Mark (Shiesty Mark), Masked Mark, Viltrum Mark

Warnings: Dark Content, Violence, Suggestive Themes, Yandere Behavior

Word Count: ~2.5k

Sinister Mark

★★★★★

-You’re fucked.

-If all the variants had a difficulty level, his would be extreme.

-One second he’s playing with your feelings. The next second he’s harshly biting into your neck.

-Your relationship in the beginning is going to be rough, if you can even call it a relationship.

-Reciprocating in any way is how you will survive.

-Bite him back. Claw at his face. Or just endure. None of these options do much, but it does amuse him. 

-One day, he returns to you, his mouth covered in blood. You mentally prepare for him to put you through hell again, but this time he just leans in close before resting his head in the crook of your neck.  

-Your body stiffens, but you don’t drop your guard just yet. 

- When he asks you what’s wrong, you frown before responding. 

- “It’s nothing. I just expected… the usual.” 

-He’d hum, his lips pressing against your skin. As he kissed your neck amorously, he’d speak swiftly.

- “You’d better get used to me. I’m not letting you leave.”

-Not a good thing to hear.

-But after that day, he’s… a bit softer with you. 

-Instead of speaking down to you, he now speaks to you. He asks some simple questions and my God, you had better respond.

-He’s possessive to the extreme. If someone just as much looks at you, then their head is coming clean off. You belong to him, and only him.

-Freedom? What freedom? You have no freedom. 

-Want to really knock him off guard? Be nice to him. Yes, this will be near impossible to do, but it will leave him trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with you.

-You can survive him, just barely if you can endure. If not then…

Omni Mark

★★✩✩✩

-You’ll be fine.

-When compared to other variants, he’s a safe option. 

-He’s calm. And that eases a lot of your worries.

-Just tell him that you trust him. Simple, right?

-Whenever he returns from his… outings, and you ask him how his day was, he’d smile and respond with a simple:

- “Uneventful.” 

-The blood on his outfit says otherwise.

-He could listen to you talk for hours. About the most mundane things too.

-Any issues you have, he will attempt to solve them. Sounds good, right?

-Well…

-If you mention a person you dislike, then he will kill them. So be careful who you mention.

-Freedom? Yes, you have freedom. He trusts you. 

-Don’t break that trust though. If you attempt to run away, he will find you. Expect a frown and some words from him once he does.

- “I expected more from you, Y/n.”

- Huge ‘I’m not mad at you, just disappointed’ energy.

-Most of the time he just hovers around in the sky as you run your errands. Unless you want him to accompany you. 

-Catches you off guard. A lot.

- “Hey.”

-You gasp when you hear his voice, your phone almost slipping from your hands. You turn around to face him.

-“Mark?” You said, your eyes wide with surprise. “You scared me. How long have you been floating there?”

- “A while,” he admitted. There was a bit of amusement in his voice. “...Reading fanfiction again?”

-The shock on your face says it all.

-Will consider your feelings if something he does bothers you, but will also remind you that he is far from good. 

-You survive because he pretty much takes care of you. Not too much to do on your part. 

Mohawk Mark

★★★★✩

-In for a dangerous ride with this one.

-He’s an emperor in his world, and he gets what he wants. If he likes you he’s just going to take you. Plain and simple. 

-This is another variant that thinks he owns you.

-Sure he’ll treat you well for the most part, but this heavily depends on how you act. 

-Most of the time he doesn’t mind your frowns when you’re upset, or your occasional sassy remarks. He thinks it's adorable. 

-But if your frowns turn into looks of pure hatred, and your sass is followed up with constant anger…if you become completely unbearable to him…he will kill you.

-(Main reason he’s at 4 stars)

-If none of this applies to you, then there’s no problem. He likes you a lot.

-He’s also horny a lot. Every night you don’t sleep with this gremlin he’s complaining about it. Good luck. 

-Freedom? Sure, you have freedom. You found a simple loophole. He leaves often, so just leave right after he leaves. 

-And be back before he gets back.

-If you’re not back when he calls for you then…

- “Where the fuck is she?!”

-Once he finds you… Privileges. Are. Gone. It only takes one screw up.

- “I wasn’t trying to run away,” you explained. “I was making my way back when you found me.” 

- “Sure you were. You can’t fucking fool me, Y/n.” 

-Whether what you were saying is true or not doesn’t matter to him.

- When he calls you by your actual name, and not some nickname, then you know he is not happy. 

-But if you apologize (and mean it) he’ll give you a few freedoms back. Definitely not all though. You’ll be at his side a lot more often now. 

-Just make sure he doesn’t find you if you plan on running away.

-Will you survive? Well, it depends on how you act. Just stroke that ego of his and you’ll be fine.

No Goggles Mark

★★★✩✩

-In for a wild ride with this one.

-This variant’s personality is chaotic, but lucky for you, he isn’t out to ruin your life. He just likes to have fun.

-If you can’t match his energy, let him know asap. This will save you a lot of emotional distress.

- “I’m not Invincible like you, Mark,” you calmly told him. “Could you be a bit… well a lot more careful with me?”

- “Okay! :)”

-He does care. So just talk to him whenever you’re scared. He will stop whatever he’s doing to respond. 

-Heck, he could be in the middle of destroying half a block of buildings, and come back to you for a split second to ask you how you’re doing. It’d be kinda sweet, if he wasn’t so destructive. 

-He’s a thrill seeker! So if your ideas are fun and/or challenging, then he’s on board. 

- “How fast can you fly to space and back?” You ask him. 

- “Just watch!” 

- Boom! Anddd he’s gone. 

-Freedom? Yes! You can do things! But you’re both doing those things together.

-You’ll almost always be around him, unless the situation is too dangerous for him to take you. 

-The best way to survive is to reciprocate his love for you. Tell him you love him too. Hug him. Rub his hair. 

-You could use his love for you to your advantage…

-For example, if you want to get away from him, just convince him to leave you somewhere you deem safe, and assure him you’ll be there when he gets back. 

-The second he leaves you race off.

-High risk though. If he finds you, you had better come up with a good excuse. If the excuse is good, then you’re fine. If not then…

-”You’re not trying to get away from me, are you Y/n?”

-That other side of him is terrifying. 

-If your personality is chaotic like his, you two will get along just fine. 

-”I always hated that place,” you grumbled, looking at the building you once worked at. He lit up.

“Want me to destroy it?” He asked you. You also lit up.

“Sure!”

-If you’re level-headed, you two would make for an interesting dynamic.

- “Let’s not jump off this building today Mark. I just finished eating,” you calmly told him.

- “Aww, well can we at least jump off a smaller building?” he asked. You sighed.

- “Well alright. As long as you hold on to me.”

-Your days will always be filled with chaos, but you’ll survive. 

Goggles Mark

★★★★✩

-Uh oh.

-This variant is manipulative and sadistic. You’re gonna have a bad time. 

- He won’t kill you, but he won’t hesitate to kill the people you love. 

-You could go on a long rant about how much of a monster he is and he’d just sigh. 

- “Well that was pointless Y/n,” he’d tell you. “You should consider thinking a bit more before responding so harshly to me.”

-He says this and he was the one that kidnapped you??

-The best thing to do in this situation is to try and get the fuck away.

-The next best thing is to remain calm, and try to reason with him.

-If you’re nice, then he’ll listen to what you have to say. That doesn’t mean he’s going to do what you say though, he’ll just listen. 

- You could trade affection for things you want. He actually likes this idea if you mention it. 

-Freedom? Haha… No. 

-You’re stuck with him. 

-If you somehow manage to get away from him, he’d actually be impressed. 

- “How long have you been planning that escape, Hm? A few days? Weeks?” He’d ask you.

-You’d remain quiet, refusing to reveal anything just in case you need to try it again. 

-After that though, the situation gets worse. You’ll have to literally beg him to let you do things. And if you get overwhelmed and burst into tears he’ll think you’re cute. 

-Will you survive? Yes. Will you have horrible trauma? Absolutely.

Veil Invincible (Shiesty Mark)

★★✩✩✩

-You’d be fine with him. 

-He’s arrogant, but not towards you. He’s the type that would get along with any personality. 

-If you're sassy? He thinks you’re funny.

-Shy? He’ll do the talking. 

-Confident? He’ll feed off your energy.

-Just don’t be a killjoy though! He’s not a fan of people who spoil the fun. 

-Freedom? Yes, you have freedom! Don’t go too far though. And yell if you need him!

-If you actually do end up yelling for help, he’ll be by your side in less than a second. You’ll have to stand behind him as he beats whomever was threatening you into a bloody mess. 

-If you try running away, he’ll also be by you in a second, lifting you off the ground in a playful, yet warning manner.

- “Anddd where do you think you’re going?” He'll ask you. You sheepishly rub the back of your head. 

- “Nowhere.” 

-He thinks you're the cutest thing ever. 

-Want to throw him off guard? Lift that veil of his ever so slightly and kiss him on his jaw. He loves it.

-If you’re kind then that’s a plus. Heck, you can even be mean to him sometimes. It isn’t too much of a problem. Just don’t make it a habit. 

-“There’s only so much a person can take for fuck’s sake.” 

-He wouldn’t hurt you. But he would revoke flight privileges. So if you’re mean often, you’ll have to walk often. 

- “My feet are killing me,” you grumbled, trudging on the ground. He’d respond from the sky above, laughing a little. 

- “Just apologize and I’ll fly you the rest of the way!” 

-You’ll survive. He can’t stay mad at you. 

Masked Mark

★✩✩✩✩

-You’re safe with him. 

-He cares about you a lot.

-If he’s ever worried about something, just hold his hands and tell him that everything is going to be alright. That always puts him at ease.

- You are his everything. He loves you so much. You could be glaring daggers at him and he still thinks you're precious.

-Freedom? Well, yes and no. 

-As long as it’s safe, then yes, you can go do some things. But he’s going with you. If it’s not safe? Then no, he’ll go for you instead. 

-And please, stay put while he’s gone. 

-If you don’t, then he will panic.

- “Y/n, I’ll take you where you want to go. You don’t have to run off,” he murmured. You frowned before responding. 

- “What if I don’t want to go with you?” 

- “You have to. It’s too dangerous.”

-He’s fine with you being mad at him, he kind of expects it.

-But if you actually like him, then the two of you would be inseparable. He’ll rest his head on your lap as you speak to him. 

- “You worry too much Mark. We’re here together, that’s all that matters.” 

- “...Yeah. Thanks Y/n.”

-He always treats you well, and will help you with any problems you face. Just ask, and he’ll be there. 

-You often forget that he’s dangerous because he’s so kind to you. He's a completely different person when you're not around.

-You’ll survive, regardless of how you act. He won’t let you die while he’s breathing. 

Viltrum Mark

★★★★✩

-Oh, you’ll survive. 

-Ironically, he’s probably the safest option.

-Mainly because he wouldn’t let anyone near you, let alone touch you.

-But you trade your freedom for safety.

- “All you have to do is listen and obey. Do I make myself clear?” He told you. 

-That cold look of his left you uneasy. 

-While he’s very direct, he does care for you. You’re left unaware of this little fact though.

-Freedom? Heavily depends on how you act. If you do what he says then he’ll let you do a few things. If not, then no. 

-You can be a bother to him, but if anyone else calls you that…

-“If you speak of her in that way again, I’ll rip off your head.”

-He doesn’t care who it is. Hell, it could be another viltrumite. Disrespecting you means disrespecting him. And he never tolerates disrespect. Sometimes, he doesn’t even bother to speak, he just immediately goes in for the kill.  

-To survive in the beginning, it’s best to just do what he says. After sometime maybe you could be a bit more rebellious. 

-You can also melt that icy exterior of his if you’re sweet. When you two are sitting alone, just rest your head against his arm. Or cuddle up to him. His body will stiffen at the warm affection. 

- “Thanks for sticking up for me,” you murmured. He remained quiet for a bit before responding. 

- “I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t so bothersome.”

- “I know. Thanks a lot though.”

- “....”

-Overtime, he expresses his love for you. It may take a while though, depending on how you act. 

-You’ll survive, no problem. He’ll make sure of it. 

~

*Says I'm not writing about so many variants anymore.

*Proceeds to write about 8 of them. Smh.

[yasministration]

concussions and interruptions au m.list

ˋ°•*⁀➷ navigation, ꩜ smut, ❀ fluff, 𖤓 angsty/angry, 𖤐 funny, ♡ my fave!

synopsis: when you accidentally meet harry's parents for the first time, they quickly learn that you're a very sweet girl, but you have a very complicated family. slytherin!reader this list is arranged in chronological order, here are the fics in order of posting date

meet concussions and interruptions reader

✩ concussions and interruptions - You aren’t expecting to meet Harry’s parents for the first time while you share an intimate moment in the hospital wing after he sustains another quidditch injury (❀𖤐)

✩ who is she - your friends watch how affectionate you are with harry from across the courtyard, and briefly wonder if they've ever seen you so comfortable with a boyfriend before. (❀♡)

✩ after curfew - you and harry seem to forget his godfather is doing rounds when you sneak out after curfew (❀𖤐)

✩ my fault - harry feels as though you haven't been putting equal effort to get along with his friends, but the truth is that you're just sick and jealous of seeing him with hermione. (❀𖤓)

✩ nothing to say - even after all these years, there are still firsts for you to experience with your best friend. your best friend pansy, duh. (❀𖤐)

✩ tell me about him - daphne is the first of your friends to seriously ask you about your boyfriend, except you don't know where to start, and you also have a secret audience. (❀)

✩ stay the night - a small note with six words perhaps changes your entire relationship with harry overnight. (❀)

✩ it's a date - when harry and his parents see you in diagon alley, they are surprised to see the sudden change in behaviour you have at your parents' presence. but that won't stop harry from getting his kiss. (❀𖤓)

✩ heavy dresses, tight corsets - in the guise of having a sleepover with daphne, you go over to harry's house, where you can finally take this stupid dress off. (❀♡)

✩ the giant squid - harry and his friends find out you're afraid of the giant squid (❀𖤐)

✩ the glass room - you bring harry and his friends to meet your friend group in the glass room, hidden in the depths of the slytherin common room. (❀𖤐)

✩ people are watching - it seems that you begin to care less and less who gets to see the true side of your parents. and apparently, so do they. (❀𖤓)

✩ forgotten dance -  harry doesn’t care what you drag him to do at his first slytherin party as long as he’s with you. (❀♡)

✩ the talk - when james potter catches you and his son making out in his bedroom, he excitedly goes to tell his wife. but he isn't expecting her to call you both down for a talk no one can take seriously. (❀𖤐)

✩ in his arms - harry had been right when he told you not to go back home after graduation. but how could you not when your entire history laid there? (❀𖤓)

✩ my girl - after you failed to show up to dinner with the notts, your parents give a poor excuse as to why you aren’t there. but theo spreads the message to your friends, and they all become a little suspicious of what may have truly happened. (❀)

✩ hands full - sex with harry potter makes you lose your ability to think, even when his mother is speaking to him on the other side of the locked door. (❀꩜)

✩ pass the wrench - when james enters his living room and can't find harry to help him fix something, he decides you're fit to help with the job. after all, you're practically already his daughter in law. (❀𖤐♡)

✩ be my baby - another night at the potter household reveals that you love one of harry's least favourite songs, a.k.a his dad's all time favourite. (❀)

✩ baby fever - there are too many cute babies in diagon alley, and their innocent smiles and babbling voices make it difficult for you to focus on Lily Potter's story (❀)

✩ after noon - sirius and james are left at the potter household while lily, remus and harry are at hogsmeade. when you wake up from your peaceful slumber, they suggest a fun way to spend the day, but there’s one flaw to their plan: you can’t ride a bike. (❀)

✩ shopping spree - harry insists to see what you bought from your little shopping spree, even if it means getting a little worked up before dinner (❀)

✩ fitting room - fortunately for your shopping addiction (and unfortunately for your bank account), harry only seems to enable you whenever you go shopping. maybe a little too much. (❀)

other:

✩ introducing the friend groups

✩ how the friend groups react to the relationship

[stellav1va]

had my first manager shift today it went very well 👍

[pittsick]

𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐀𝐋𝐋: sam & dean winchester ft. eater!reader.

© 𝐩𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐤 : 2026.

summary: Little town in Ohio, multiple bodies have been found; skin eaten and ribs cracked. Sam and Dean expect another monster. A werewolf, a ghoul, a wendigo. But when they get there, nothing is what they have seen before... In the end, the monster is just another human.

cw: +18. 10.2k words. fem!reader. graphic gore (torn flesh, exposed organs, blood). cannibalism. murder and implied past murders. predatory behavior. body horror. blasphemous / distorted religious symbolism and imagery. guilt. self-harm ideation (starvation, biting self to resist urges). psychological distress. shame and self-loathing. fear and panic. implied sexual activity (non-explicit). threat of gun violence. dark themes of faith, God, damnation. reblog is a creator's best-friend, thank you!

The town didn’t have a name that mattered.

It was one of those places folded into the flat spine of rural Ohio, stitched together by cornfields and faith. A single main street with a feed store, a diner that closed at three, and a church that stood taller than anything else, white paint peeling like old sunburned skin. The kind of town where porch lights hum all night and everyone knows when a stranger’s car rolls in.

The sidewalks were cracked like old knuckles, weeds pushing through as if even the earth was trying to escape. Screen doors slapped shut in the evenings while radios murmured gospel through open windows, and the air always carried the faint smell of fertilizer and something metallic beneath it—something that clung to the back of the throat if you breathed too deeply. The cemetery rested on a slight hill behind the church, headstones leaning at tired angles, as though even the dead were weary of standing upright in a place that refused to change.

On Sundays, the congregation filled the pews with stiff collars and bowed heads, singing hymns that echoed too loudly in the hollow space.

The preacher spoke of sin like it was weather; inevitable, seasonal, rolling in whether you invited it or not. People here believed in hell with the same certainty they believed in harvests. They believed evil had claws and horns and glowing eyes. They never imagined it might look like a girl buying coffee at the diner, nodding politely, hands folded as if in prayer.

That’s why you don’t stay long in places like this, and that’s why it surprises you when you do.

They call it animal attacks at first.

Livestock torn apart in the early hours before dawn. Then a drifter found near the railroad tracks, ribcage opened like a hymnal, meat missing with surgical neatness but no knife wounds to explain it. No paw prints, no tire tracks, just blood soaked deep into the dirt and bones shining pale in the moonlight.

The papers say ritualistic, the sheriff says sick individual and the preacher says the devil walks among us.

Two days later, a waitress from the diner disappears on her way home.

After that, the word no one wants to say begins to creep through town like rot under floorboards: cannibal. It isn’t spoken aloud at first—it’s breathed behind cupped hands in grocery aisles, muttered over rotary phones late at night, written off as hysteria the moment it leaves someone’s mouth. But the evidence refuses to soften itself into something easier. The bodies, when they’re found at all, are wrong in a way that no animal could manage; flesh removed with deliberation, organs taken clean, bones left like pale offerings under open sky. Whatever is doing this isn’t wild. It isn’t mindless… It is choosing.

Men begin walking their wives to their cars after late shifts. Porch lights that once flickered lazily now burn until dawn, as if illumination alone could ward off something so intimate. Parents call their children inside before sunset, voices tight and brittle. The town shortens its hours; the diner closes earlier, the feed store installs a lock it hasn’t needed in twenty years. Every stranger becomes suspect. Every quiet neighbor suddenly looks different under scrutiny. The fear is not loud—it is constant, low, thrumming beneath conversations like a second heartbeat.

Sunday sermons swell in volume and urgency. The preacher speaks of Sodom, of wolves in sheep’s clothing, of flesh and consequence. He dabs sweat from his brow while the congregation nods, clutching Bibles like shields. They want it to be something supernatural, something with horns and fire and a name that can be cast out in prayer. What terrifies them more than the gore, more than the empty bedrooms and unanswered calls, is the possibility that the thing devouring their own might kneel beside them in the pews. That it might look like them, speak like them, bleed like them.

That’s when the black car pulls into town.

The engine of the Impala growls low and familiar as it rolls past the church and toward the sheriff’s office. Inside, Dean drums his fingers against the steering wheel, eyes scanning the sleepy storefronts with a predator’s ease.

They hadn’t meant to pick up the case at all. It started as a blip in a police scanner thread, then a local news clipping buried three pages deep online: Rural Authorities Baffled by Livestock Mutilations. Sam had noticed the phrasing first; not attacks, not maulings but mutilations. He’d dug deeper from a library computer in Indiana while Dean refueled the car, pulling archived coroner summaries and sheriff’s statements that didn’t make it into print. 

No claw marks, no sulfur, no EMF spikes reported by any curious amateur ghost hunters in the area. Just flesh missing in specific patterns and a rising body count that felt purposeful. By the time Sam called Dean over to the screen, his voice had that edge it only gets when something is wrong in a way he can’t categorize.

“Ohio,” he mutters while driving, eyes on the never ending road. “Why is it always Ohio?” Beside him, Sam flips another page in the thin stack of printed articles of John’s journal on his lap. His brow is furrowed in that deep, thoughtful way that means something isn’t fitting right. “It’s not an animal,” Sam says quietly.

“No kidding.”

“There are no defensive wounds. No tearing. It’s… deliberate.” He swallows slightly. “I’m talking organs removed, muscle tissue consumed but not randomly.”

Dean glances over for a second, almost scoffing. “You saying we’ve got a gourmet werewolf?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t match anything I’ve read.”

Dean smirks. “Great, love when you say that.”

They’d thrown theories at it on the drive east. Wendigo—but there were no signs of prolonged isolation or cannibalistic frenzy, no half-eaten remains dragged into the woods. Ghoul—but ghouls preferred the dead, grave dirt under their nails and carrion on their breath. Werewolf—too surgical, and wrong moon cycle. Demon—no sulfur, no possession symptoms in town reports. 

Dean even suggested some backwoods cult, but the lack of ritual markings and the precision of the missing tissue dismantled that fast. Every option ended the same way: a dead end. Which meant either something new had crawled out of the dark or something old had never been given a name.

They don’t know you yet but you’ve been here your whole life.

This town isn’t a stop along the way; it’s the place that raised you, baptized you, watched you grow tall and quiet beneath its steeple shadow. You know every cracked sidewalk and sagging porch, you know which houses keep their lights on past midnight and which fields flood first in spring, you learned to ride a bike on these roads. 

Learned your Bible verses in that white church with the leaning cross, learned how to bow your head and pretend you were normal while something inside you stirred.

Your childhood bedroom still faces the cornfields—the wallpaper peeled when you were seventeen, curling at the corners like dried skin, and your father never fixed it. He doesn’t fix much anymore. The house smells like old coffee, of your mom’s perfume, sawdust and the faint copper tang you swear no one else can detect. You still sleep there some nights, staring at the ceiling while the porch light hums outside and trucks groan down the highway in the distance. You tell yourself that staying means you aren’t running, that staying means you’re braver than whatever lives inside your ribs.

The hunger has been worse lately.

Not wild, not rabid, oh no. That would almost be easier. No, it’s steady—reverent. Like a hymn sung too low to interrupt but too constant to ignore. It hums under your skin during Sunday service while the preacher speaks of flesh and sin. It coils tighter when hands join in prayer, when warmth presses shoulder to shoulder in the pew. You feel it most when the congregation says body and blood in unison, when communion wafers dissolve on tongues and the word sacrifice hangs heavy in the air. The irony does not escape you.

Three nights ago, it all became unbearable.

You told yourself you would drive: just drive until the feeling thinned. But you didn’t make it past the railroad tracks and he was already there—a drifter with a backpack and hollow eyes, someone no one in town would claim. The hunger isn’t violent at first; it’s intimate, it moves through you like a prayer answered wrong. When it finally took control, it was not frenzy but inevitability. It was flesh parted beneath your hands, warmth spilled over your skin, the smell of iron filled your lungs like incense. You didn’t stop until the ache quieted and the world fell silent again.

You never enjoy it. There is no thrill, no ecstasy, only relief so profound it feels holy. Like kneeling at an altar and finally being absolved. The gore doesn’t shock you anymore—the slick weight of muscle, the fragile crack of bone, the way the human body opens with terrible simplicity. What devastates you is the aftermath: the knowledge that you have taken something God once breathed into.

Afterward, you went to the creek like you did when you were a teenager, when it first started and you didn’t understand why your hands wouldn’t stop shaking. You knelt in the mud and scrubbed at your skin until it burned, watching pink water swirl downstream, you whispered apologies into the dark—to Him, to your parents sleeping down the road, to the town that taught you about heaven and hell in equal measure. You asked for forgiveness the way other girls asked for love.

You don’t see yourself as a monster, because monsters are loud, obvious, they snarl and bare their teeth.

You are quiet, you bow your head in church, you say ma’am and sir, you hold doors open, you sit in the third pew from the front and sing hymns with a voice that never trembles.

You are not evil, just wrong.

The Winchester brothers roll into town just after noon, the Impala’s black frame cutting through the quiet like a bad omen. The church bell is ringing when they pass it—slow, heavy tolls that seem to press down on the air itself. Dean notices the way curtains shift in windows as they drive by, the way conversations on the sidewalk stall. Small towns always react like that: suspicion first and hospitality second.

By the time they park outside the sheriff’s office, Sam has already read every article twice.

Inside, the office smells like burnt coffee and old paper, a mounted deer head stares blankly from one wall. Sheriff Grady is thick-necked, red-faced, and exhausted in a way that suggests he hasn’t slept properly in days. Dean flashes a badge—federal, polished, convincing—and starts talking livestock patterns and possible animal migration. Sam fills in the blanks, calm and methodical, asking for autopsy photos, timelines, witness statements. The sheriff hesitates before handing over the file.

“You boys ever seen anything like this?” he asks, voice low.

Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “We’ve seen strange.”

The sheriff studies them like he’s weighing how much to believe, then finally mutters, “You’re just in time, we found another one this morning.”

The crime scene sits just beyond the cemetery fence, tall grass bending in the wind like it’s trying to look away. A coroner’s van idles nearby and flies swarm thick and greedy in the humid air. Sam and Dean step under the yellow tape, gloves snapping tight over their hands.

The smell hits immediately: copper-heavy blood baked under the sun, layered with the sweet-sick rot of exposed viscera. It clings to the back of the throat, almost making them gag. Dean exhales through his nose. “Okay, that’s new.”

The body lies on its back, head tilted unnaturally toward the church steeple as if in accusation. The ribcage has been opened with disturbing neatness; not hacked, not torn, but parted. The sternum split clean, flesh stripped from the ribs in long, deliberate sections, muscles missing in symmetrical patterns along the thighs and abdomen. The cavity gapes open, empty where organs should rest and the heart is gone… so are portions of the liver.

No ragged edges, no scattered chunks, but just absence: long and heavy.

Flies crawl along exposed bone, dipping into dark hollows where warmth once lived. Blood has pooled beneath the spine and dried in thick, almost black sheets beneath him. “No sulfur,” Dean notes quietly, scanning with an EMF meter more out of habit than hope. “No claw marks,” Sam replies, crouching lower. He studies the edges of the wounds, fingertips hovering but not touching. “No tearing at connective tissue. It’s clean.”

Dean circles the body, boots flattening grass sticky with blood. “You ever see a wolf do this?” he mutters. “Because I haven’t.”

Sam doesn’t answer immediately but his jaw tightens slightly as he observes the way muscle has been separated from bone—not in frenzy, but with intention. The way joints were dislocated efficiently or the way nothing was wasted in certain areas.

Dean crouches beside him, lowering his voice. “Wendigo?”

Sam shakes his head faintly. “Wendigos tear, they hoard and they drag remains back to a nest. There’s no feeding pattern like that here.” Dean studies the open chest cavity again, grimacing. “Werewolf without the whole moonlight aesthetic?”

“No bite marks, no saliva traces.” Sam swallows, eyes tracing the precision again. “It’s almost… surgical.”

Dean straightens slowly, gaze drifting toward the church looming nearby, white paint glowing harsh against blue sky.

“Almost like it knew exactly what it wanted,” he mutters back at his brother. Sam stands too, staring out at the cornfields stretching endless and silent beyond the cemetery. He doesn’t say what he’s thinking, he doesn’t say the cuts don’t look animal. He doesn’t say the removal patterns resemble something disturbingly deliberate, he doesn’t say that whatever did this wasn’t frenzied—it was controlled.

Instead, murmurs, “Whatever it is… it’s not sloppy.”

Dean glances at him. “You’re holding back.”

Sam’s expression shutters slightly. “I’m thinking.”

Dean studies the body one more time, jaw set hard. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Me too.”

The bell above the diner door jingles sometime after the lunch rush has thinned, and you barely look up at first. The place smells like burnt coffee, fryer grease, and lemon disinfectant; familiar, comforting in a way that almost makes you forget the tension coiled beneath your ribs. You’re tucked into your usual booth by the window, cardigan sleeves pushed over your hands, a plate of untouched pie softening in front of you. You come here more out of habit than hunger, real hunger is something else entirely.

When you finally glance toward the door, you notice them immediately: they don’t fit in.

One of them moves like he owns whatever space he steps into. Broad-shouldered, leather jacket despite the heat, boots that look worn in rather than decorative. The other is taller, quieter, his hair falling into his eyes as he scans the room with something sharper than curiosity. They aren’t dressed like locals, they aren’t passing through on farm business, there’s a weight to them, like they carry more than duffel bags in the trunk of their car.

You think city, you think temporary, you think they won’t stay long.

They slide into a booth near the counter. The older one—the louder one—flashes the waitress an easy grin and orders pie before he’s even fully seated. The taller one asks for coffee and thanks her in a voice low and careful.

You find yourself watching them without meaning to.

It’s not attraction exactly, not yet… It’s curiosity; the same kind you feel when a storm rolls in unexpectedly, something different in the air, something alive.

Your hunger stirs faintly at the edges, confused more than awakened. Not because of them specifically, but because newness has a scent all its own. You press your tongue to the back of your teeth and focus on your coffee instead, breathing slow.

At their booth, Dean leans back and stretches his arms along the vinyl seat, surveying the diner like it’s just another stop on a long, endless road. “Small town charm,” he mutters, glancing at a faded photo of the high school football team from 1998 framed crooked on the wall. “You can practically taste the cholesterol.”

Sam doesn’t smile because he’s already scanning faces subtly; farmers in seed caps, an elderly couple sharing fries, a teenage girl refilling napkin dispensers. He isn’t looking for anyone specific yet but just patterns and tells.

“Let’s eat first,” Dean says, lowering his voice once the waitress walks away. “Then we ask about the drifter. See who gets twitchy.” Sam nods, fingers tapping lightly against his mug. “Sheriff said he used to hang around here, someone might’ve noticed something.”

Dean shrugs. “Or someone’s lying.”

Their food arrives, and for a moment they look like exactly what they’re pretending to be: two road-weary men passing through, arguing lightly over who gets the last fry. Dean makes a show of enjoying the pie and Sam drinks his coffee black and watches the room over the rim of his cup.

His gaze passes over you once; not lingering, not even suspicious, simply cataloging everyone around.

You drop your eyes quickly anyway, heat creeping up your neck for reasons you don’t examine too closely. You’re used to being invisible here, so used to blending into wood-paneled walls and soft country radio playing overhead. But something about them makes the diner feel smaller.

Dean wipes his mouth with a napkin and nods subtly toward the counter. “After this, we’ll ask if anyone’s seen strangers around the railroad tracks.”

Sam hums in agreement. “Keep it casual.”

“Hey! I always do.”

Neither of them are looking at you now: you’re just another quiet girl in a cardigan, nursing cold coffee and staring out at cornfields through streaked glass.

You finish your drink and slide out of the booth, leaving a few crumpled bills beneath the plate. As you walk toward the door, you pass their table close enough to catch the scent of leather and gun oil beneath cheap motel soap. Dean glances up automatically, offering a brief, easy smile—reflexive charm. You give a small nod in return, smile on your face, the kind of acknowledgment small towns are built on.

The bell jingles again as you step back into the afternoon heat. Inside, Sam watches the door swing shut, then looks back down at his coffee. Outside, you stand for a moment on the sidewalk, sunlight pressing warm against your skin. The hunger is quiet for now, just a distant hum, vibrating under your skin and bones.

That night, you dream of teeth.

Not just your own—rows and rows of them, white and endless, lining the pews of the church like a congregation. They chatter softly in place of prayer, clicking together in rhythm with the tolling bell overhead. The sound is deafening. You’re standing barefoot in the aisle, dress hem soaked dark and heavy, and when you look down, blood is spreading from beneath your feet in slow, deliberate rivers. It creeps between the wooden boards, thick and warm, carrying the copper scent of communion turned rancid.

The altar is wrong: the cross above it drips steadily, red tracing the carved ribs of Christ’s body as if they’ve been split open fresh. His painted chest gapes, ribs pried apart like shutters, muscle exposed in glistening strands. You can see the cavity inside Him—empty, simply hollow. The organ meant to rest there gone. The congregation doesn’t scream but they kneel and they bow their heads as if this is expected, as if sacrifice has simply changed shape.

Then the floor shifts beneath you: bones push up through the wood like roots; femurs and vertebrae twisting together into something cathedral-like and obscene. Rot clings to them, sweet and suffocating, clotted pieces of muscle still attached in stringy ribbons. Hands reach up from the blood at your ankles, not to drag you down, but to hold you in place. Their fingers are slick, their palms warm against your skin. The faces attached to them are familiar: the drifter by the tracks, the stranger near the cornfield, shadows of others you never let yourself name. They don’t look angry, they look disappointed.

Church bells keep ringing, louder, louder and louder. Until the sound becomes a heartbeat—your heartbeat—pounding so hard you can taste it. The hunger pulses with it, a living thing inside your chest, pressing outward as if it wants to split you open the same way. You feel your own ribs part in the dream, feel fingers hook beneath bone and pull. Not to kill you but to look inside, to see what’s wrong.

You wake before dawn with the hunger clawing at your ribs.

Your sheets are damp with sweat; the room smells faintly metallic, though you know that’s in your head. Your jaw aches from clenching and for a split second, you swear you can still feel warmth coating your hands, something sticky beneath your nails.

It’s too soon.

You press your palm to your mouth and breathe through it, inhaling slowly, exhaling slower, like the preacher taught during long sermons when panic tried to creep in. The sky outside your window is still ink-dark, the world holding its breath before morning.

Not again, not yet.

Please.

You lie awake staring at the ceiling while the porch light hums outside your bedroom window and the house settles around you in tired creaks. Your parent’s door is closed down the hall. The clock on your nightstand blinks 3:17 a.m. in dull red numbers. The hunger has been building, low and patient, like something sharpening its teeth in the dark.

You try to pray.

You press your hands together, tug on the silver cross at your neck, bow your head, whisper words you’ve known since childhood—deliver us from evil, forgive us our trespasses—but the phrases feel thin tonight. Paper shields against something ancient and gnawing. The hunger doesn’t rage, it doesn’t scream, but God, it beckons.

By 3:43, you are sitting up.

By 3:51, you are pulling on some jeans and your boots.

You don’t turn on any lights as you move through the house, you don’t look at the family photos lining the hallway, you don’t let yourself hesitate at the door. The screen creaks softly when you push it open, and the night air wraps around you thick and damp, heavy with the smell of soil and corn and distant fertilizer.

The fields are endless in the dark, silvered by moonlight and whispering prayers. You walk toward them like you’ve done this a hundred times before. Because you have.

The gravel crunches beneath your boots, crickets pause and resume their chorus. Somewhere far off, a dog barks once and then falls silent. Your pulse is steady, but your mouth floods with that familiar metallic tang; your gums ache, your fingers flex at your sides as if remembering something they were made to do.

You don’t know how long you walk before you hear him.

A laugh—sloppy, off-balance. Followed by the crunch of someone stumbling through the outer edge of the cornfield. You pause, body going still as prey. He emerges from between the stalks, swaying. Mid-thirties maybe, a shirt half untucked and a bottle dangling loose from his fingers. He smells like cheap beer and sweat and something sour beneath it.

He doesn’t see you at first. When he does, he squints. “Jesus,” he slurs. “You scared the hell outta me.” You say nothing but recognize him as one of the regulars of the diner. The hunger tightens, sharp now and the warmth of him hits you like a wave. Alive… So alive. “You lost?” he asks, taking a step closer. “You shouldn’t be out here alone, it’s late.”

The irony almost makes you laugh.

He steps closer again, close enough that you can see the pulse in his throat, close enough that you can hear his heart under the slur of his breathing. You feel something inside you give way.

You move before you consciously decide to. One second there’s space between you; the next your hands are in his shirt, fingers fisted tight. He yelps in surprise, bottle dropping and shattering at your feet. For half a heartbeat, there’s confusion on his face. Then your teeth sink in. Hot.  That’s what you always forget.

How hot blood is when it spills fresh: it floods your mouth in a rush, copper-rich and thick, coating your tongue, sliding down your throat before you can even swallow properly. He screams—a wet, choking sound—and tries to push you away, but you’re stronger now. Stronger than you look, stronger than you ever want to be.

You pull him down into the grass.

The corn stalks sway above you like witnesses turning their backs.

Your hands work without hesitation, without doubt. You know where to press, where to tear: skin parts beneath your fingers with a resistance that gives way in sudden, awful bursts, muscle stretches and snaps in fibrous strands and warmth pours over your wrists, slick and alive. His movements grow weaker quickly—shock, blood loss, the body surrendering to something it cannot understand.

You don’t look at his face. You focus on the hunger because it guides you. It makes you forget about anything else.

Ribs crack beneath your grip with a muffled, splintering sound, the cavity opens under your hands, steam rising faintly in the cool night air, the smell is overwhelming; iron and salt and something almost sweet beneath it. You reach inside and feel the frantic flutter of a heart still trying. For a moment, just one, your hands hesitate.

When it’s over, the field is quiet again. Crickets resume their song and the moon watches without judgment.

You kneel back on your heels, chest heaving, blood soaking into your levi's jeans, sticky and cooling against your skin. Your mouth is stained red, your hands tremble as the hunger recedes, as the roaring in your ears fades to a low hum. But as always, there’s tears running down your cheeks, mixing with the wet blood.

Relief settles over you like a heavy blanket.

You sit there longer than you should, staring at what remains. Pale bone catching moonlight, torn muscle exposed to open air, skin shredded apart. The earth is drinking what it’s been given. Your stomach twists—not with nausea, but with something far worse. Guilt. It crashes in once the silence returns, once the hunger is sated and you are left alone with yourself again.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper into the dark. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, sorry.” You don’t know who you’re apologizing to. The man in pieces at your knees? The God hanging in the church down the road? Your parents asleep in his bed, unaware that their daughter has slipped out into the night again?

You wipe your hands on the grass, but the blood doesn’t really leave.

By the time you walk back toward the house, dawn is just beginning to bruise the horizon. The porch light is still humming and you step inside quietly, boots left by the door, and move down the hallway like a ghost returning to her grave. In your bedroom, you sit on the edge of the bed and stare at your hands until the shaking stops.

The hunger is quiet now, but just for a little while.

Morning in town arrives pale and merciless.

By seven, the rumor had already outrun the sun: a farmer found him, half-hidden in the corn like something the earth tried to swallow and couldn’t finish. The sheriff calls it in with a voice stretched thin, and word travels fast—faster than it should in a place this small. Another body, worse than the others.

Dean’s phone vibrates while he’s still nursing motel coffee that tastes like burnt pennies. He answers on the second ring, jaw tightening as he listens.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “We’re on our way.”

Sam is already grabbing his jacket.

The field looks different in daylight. Cruel, blood-soaked, poison from the divine.

Yellow tape cuts across the green like a wound that won’t close, police cruisers idle along the dirt road and a small cluster of townspeople gathers at a distance despite orders to stay back—drawn by horror the same way people are drawn to open flame.

The smell carries farther this time. It’s all thick, metallic and sweet in a way that makes the stomach revolt. Dean ducks under the tape first, flashing the same federal badge as before. Sam follows, eyes already scanning the ground, the stalks bent and broken where struggle turned into collapse.

The body lies on its side this time, twisted into the grass.

Or what remains of it does.

The throat is ruined—torn open, not ragged but decisively breached. Dried blood cakes the collar of his clothes in dark, stiff layers. His abdomen has been opened wider than the previous victim, ribs forced apart at unnatural angles, cartilage snapped clean. Portions of muscle are missing from the thighs and shoulders, removed in long, deliberate strips. The cavity of his chest gapes toward the sky, organs absent in select, intentional places.

Flies swarm thick over exposed bone again. Dean swears under his breath. “Jesus.”

Sam crouches slowly, taking it in piece by piece; the soil beneath the body is blackened with blood that soaked deep overnight, there are no animal tracks circling the perimeter, no dragging marks leading away. Just impressions from a struggle that ended quickly. “He was alive when it started,” Sam murmurs, mostly to himself.

Dean glances at him. “Yeah?”

“Defensive abrasions on his forearms, bruises, like he tried to push it off.” Sam swallows slightly, eyes tracing the precision again. Dean straightens, scanning the edge of the field. Behind them, the murmur of townspeople grows louder.

That’s when Sam sees you. You didn’t mean to come, you told yourself you wouldn’t but guilt has a gravity of its own.

You stand at the edge of the crowd, cardigan pulled tight around you despite the rising heat. Your face is horrified—and your eyes are fixed on the yellow tape as if you can see through it. Gone is the smile, the bright eyes and the politeness everyone knows of you.

You can’t stop picturing it: the way his breath hitched, the sound of ribs giving way, the warmth on your hands. Your stomach twists violently, not with hunger this time but with shame. The relief from last night is gone, replaced by a hollow ache that spreads through your chest like frost.

You don’t notice Sam watching you, not at first.

He remembers you from the diner: the quiet girl with the cardigan and the tired eyes, the one who left without finishing her coffee. You don’t look like someone who belongs at a crime scene. But you’re here. He nudges Dean lightly. “I’ll be back.”

Dean arches a brow but doesn’t argue.

Sam slips back under the tape and makes his way through the onlookers, flashing his badge when necessary. You feel him before you see him, there’s a shift in the air, a presence stepping into your orbit. “Ma’am,” he says gently. You turn to face him. Up close, he looks taller than you remembered, broader and his expression isn’t accusatory— it’s careful. Concerned, almost.

“Agent Elsher,” he starts, offering the fake last name smoothly. “I saw you yesterday at the diner, right? Can I ask what you’re doing out here?” Your throat feels dry, your muscles aching inside your body.

“I live here,” you manage to voice back at him. “Everyone does.”

He nods once. “You know the victim?” You shake your head quickly. Too quickly. “I’ve seen him around.” Your eyes flick past him, toward the field, you can smell it even from here; the blood drying in the heat, the faint sweetness of opened flesh, the rot just beginning to whisper at the edges.

Your pulse stutters and the hunger stirs once more. It shouldn’t—you fed.

But it does, not because of the body, but because of him.

Sam watches the way your pupils shift, the way your breathing changes almost imperceptibly. Something in his gut tightens, not in suspicion yet, but in awareness. “You okay?” he asks quietly and you nod at him. Lie. Being this close to him feels wrong… It feels different. Your hunger has always been drawn to vulnerability—drifters, loners, men already slipping. Sam is none of those things; he is steady and strong. 

Your body reacts anyway as heat creeps up your spine, your gums ache faintly. You clench your jaw, forcing your teeth together. You don’t want to look at his throat but God, you do. “Did you hear anything last night?” he continued, voice calm. “Any shouting? Cars?”

You swallow, the memory flashes vivid and brutal—the scream cut short, the crack of bone under your hands. “No, I didn’t hear anything,” you whisper. Sam studies you for a moment longer than is comfortable.

Behind him, Dean calls out something to the sheriff, frustration lacing his tone. Your gaze flickers to the field again. The man’s ribcage is visible even from this distance—pale arcs through broken grass. A smear of darkened blood marks the earth like a signature.

Your stomach churns. “I’m sorry,” you murmur suddenly.

Sam blinks at those words. “For what?” You realize what you’ve said and shake your head quickly. “For… what’s happening. It’s—” Your voice falters. “It’s awful.” He watches you carefully. Up close, he notices the faint tremor in your hands, the exhaustion carved into your features and the way you look not frightened anymore but burdened.

“You don’t have to stay,” he says softly. “You shouldn’t.”

Your eyes meet his and for one dangerous second, the world narrows. The hunger hums louder—not violent, not overwhelming, but curious, intrigued. It presses toward him like a compass needle seeking north. You take a step back instinctively, scared of yourself.

“I should go,” you whisper. Sam nods slowly. “If you remember anything, anything at all, come by the sheriff’s office.” You nod again.

You turn away before the pull becomes unbearable.

Sam watches you retreat through the thinning crowd, cardigan swaying around your waist, shoulders drawn tight as if you’re holding yourself together by force alone. Dean approaches him moments later. “Friend of yours?” Dean asks lightly, joking in his tone. Sam shakes his head, still watching the spot where you disappeared. “No.” But something about the way you stood there—too close, too still—lingers in his mind.

Back in the field, the body lies open to the sky, bones gleaming under harsh morning sun. And somewhere in your house, you press your back against your bedroom door and slide down to the floor, shaking.

The hunger isn’t gone at all.

Two days pass in a blur of church bells and sirens.

The town tries to fold the horror into itself the way it always does; with casseroles and whispered prayers and the steady hum of gossip behind drawn curtains. The body found by the cornfield is spoken about in lowered voices now. No one says what the coroner actually saw: the precision of torn muscle, the absence of certain organs, the way the ribs had been split like a butcher’s offering.

You know what he saw, you know because your teeth still damn ache.

You don’t sleep much or when you do, it’s shallow and fevered. You see bone under moonlight, you feel warm blood running over your wrists again. You wake with the phantom taste of iron coating your tongue and the echo of tearing flesh in your ears, nightmares and dreams mixing together.

And beneath the guilt, the crushing, nauseating guilt, there is still the hunger you know so well. It is quieter now, sated for the moment, but it hums like something coiled.

Waiting.

Sam can’t stop thinking about you.

He doesn’t say it like that, doesn’t even let it sound personal but Dean notices the way his brother circles back to the same detail in conversation. “The coroner said the tissue removal was… deliberate,” Sam mutters from the passenger seat of the Impala, case file open on his lap. “Not random scavenging.”

Dean drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “You think we’re dealing with a ghoul?”

“Maybe.” Sam hesitates. “Or something pretending to be one.”

“And the girl from the diner?” Dean asks lightly, but there’s a thread of curiosity under it. Sam stares out the window at the passing fields. “I don’t know, she was at the scene the next morning. She looked—” He searches for the word. “Not shocked. Just… wrecked.”

“People get wrecked seeing a body split open like that,” Dean says. “Doesn’t make them monsters.”

“I know.”

But Sam doesn’t sound convinced.

You don’t want to go back to the diner, it feels like stepping into a confession booth.

But routine is safety, routine is invisibility. So you pull on your soft cardigan, smooth your long dress, and walk through town like you always do. The bell above the diner door chimes as you step inside. The smell hits you first; it’s grease, coffee, sugar. And underneath it all—salt, sweat, warmth.

You see them immediately.

They’re seated in the same booth as before. The older one—Dean, you overheard the waitress call him—leans back with easy confidence, jacket slung over the vinyl seat. The taller one sits straighter, hands folded loosely around a mug like he’s trying to ground himself. Sam. The hunger reacts before you do, it lifts its head inside your chest like a scenting animal.

Not because they are weak but because they are strong. Because something in them feels different, denser, almost bright. It makes your mouth flood, it makes your pulse stutter. You nearly turn around and run out, trying to escape the feeling inside your chest.

But Dean sees you first, he flashes you that same easy smile. “Hey. Corner booth, right?”

You swallow, smile back at him and try to be as polite as you normally is. “Yeah, that’s me.” Your voice sounds normal, well, you think. Sam’s eyes are on you again, but not accusatory. Dean gestures to the empty seat at their table. “We were just talking about how small towns always have the best pie. You’re local, right? Any recommendations?”

It’s harmless, casual conversation between two people. You sit before you can stop yourself. The vinyl seat sticks faintly to your thighs. You fold your hands in your lap to hide how they tremble. “Cherry,” you say. “They make it from scratch. Might be the best pie I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

“See?” Dean grins at Sam. “Told you.” But Sam doesn’t smile, he studies your face, and it makes something inside you twist. “We didn’t catch your name,” he says gently.

You give it, syllables rolling onto your tongue. He repeats it like he’s testing the shape of it. “You’ve lived here long?” Dean then asks you, hands crossing on the old diner table.

“Yes, all my life.” Is all you can reply to the question, because there’s nothing else to say.  “You knew the man who died?” Sam questions you again. The words land like a stone dropped into a well. You picture him again—sprawled in the dirt, breath sour with alcohol, pulse fluttering weakly in his throat before your teeth found it. You remember the sound his ribs made when you pulled them apart. The way his blood soaked into the soil.

You keep your face soft. “I’ve seen him around,” you say. “He drank a lot.”

Dean nods. “Sheriff says animal attack. You buy that?” Your hunger shifts under your ribs at the sound of his voice, uneasy. You shrug. “There are coyotes sometimes.” Sam’s gaze sharpens just slightly. “Coyotes don’t usually remove organs that cleanly.”

Your heart slams once, hard enough you think they must hear it. “I wouldn’t know,” you reply. “I’ve never seen something like that before.”

It’s the truth, you’ve never seen yourself from the outside. Never met anyone like you before. Never saw the stain of blood, the color of mud on skin when fighting, the hunger in someone else's eyes. Dean leans back, studying you now too. He’s attentive, hazel eyes on your pretty face. “You were at the scene the other morning.”

You freeze. “I—” You lick your lips; they taste like salt and fear. “Everyone was.”

“Yeah,” Dean says easily. “You just looked like it hit you hard.”

Because it did. Because you tore into a human body under the moon like a starving animal and now the memory won’t leave your hands. “I don’t like blood,” you say quietly. The lie sits between you and Sam watches your throat when you swallow.

And then it happens; the hunger flares again. It’s so sudden, making you gasp under your breath. The feeling is violent like a thunderstorm, calling at your name and tearing at your stomach. It looks at Sam first—at the strong line of his neck, the steady pulse beneath the skin. It imagines breaking that skin, it imagines warmth flooding your mouth.

Then it turns to Dean—smaller, louder, confidence like spice on his skin. You imagine sinking your teeth into his shoulder, hearing him gasp in surprise before pain overtakes it. You flinch at the ideas and images.

“Hey,” Sam says softly. “You okay?” You realize your expression passed from neutral to horrified, probably. “I just—” You push back from the table too quickly. “I need air.”

Dean stands halfway, instinctively. “You want us to—”

“No.” You steady yourself. “I’m fine.” But you’re not. Because for the first time, the hunger doesn’t feel satisfied by memory. It feels curious, it feels interested to those two men. It feels like it wants to know what hunters taste like; though you don’t know that word, don’t know what they are, only that something about them is dangerous and bright and unbearably tempting.

Sam doesn’t reach for you, but he looks like he wants to. And that look, that concern in his eyes, it’s worse than suspicion. As you step out into the afternoon light, heart hammering, you don’t know what frightens you more:

That Sam suspects you or that your hunger is starting to crave them both.

But the guilt has teeth.

It does not sit quietly in you like remorse should; no, it gnaws, it scrapes its way up your spine and settles behind your eyes so that even when you blink, you see red. You try to drown it in routine—washing dishes twice, folding laundry with trembling precision, standing in the shower until the water runs cold and your skin turns hot and raw but the smell never fully leaves you. It’s like iron, soil and something sweetly rotten beneath it.

You kneel at the foot of your bed and press your forehead to your clasped hands that night. “Please,” you whisper to a God you have never felt but have always feared. “Please don’t let me do it again.”

The room is dark except for the sliver of moonlight spilling across the floorboards like pale milk. The house creaks around you, settling. Outside, the town hums in its sleep with porch lights buzzing faintly, a dog barking once and then going quiet, wind moving through the cornfields in a slow, sighing hush. You try to pray properly and you try to imagine forgiveness descending like white light through stained glass. An angel caressing your forehead, promising a room for you to Heaven.

Instead, you imagine Sam.

You see him as clearly as if he’s standing at the edge of your bed, all tall with shoulders slightly hunched as though bracing against a cold no one else feels. You remember the way he said your name at the diner, gentle, careful, like he was afraid of breaking something fragile. You imagine that same mouth parting in shock, you imagine blood there. The thought makes your stomach twist so violently you gag.

“No,” you murmur to yourself, shaking your head. “No, no—”

Then Dean intrudes into your mind, that leather jacket creaking as he leans back in the booth, grin crooked and easy. There is something solid about him, something loud and alive. You imagine your hands fisting in that jacket, dragging him closer, you imagine the resistance in his muscles when you press him down.

The hunger responds to the thoughts like a struck match, it flares bright and hot, licking at the inside of your ribs. You double over on the floor, palms digging into the wood. Your pulse hammers in your ears like church bells ringing the hour. You tell yourself to stay, you try to crawl back into bed. But the hunger has already made its decision.

It rises through you like a tide, pulling your limbs with it. Your body moves before your mind consents. You don’t remember unlocking the door. You only remember the night air hitting your face—cool, damp, carrying the scent of soil and growing things and distant human breath.

You walk barefoot into the dark.

The Impala has been idling half a mile down the road for over an hour. Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel, jaw tight. “You saw her face, Sammy. That wasn’t normal. She knows something about this.” Sam’s gaze is fixed on your house in the distance, lights out, curtains still. He doesn’t reply for a moment, letting the silence eat everything around. “I know.”

“You think she’s our monster?” Dean asks, turning his head toward his brother, trying to see his expression. There’s something serious about the taller one, right now. Something that looks like concern. “I don’t know what she is,” Sam admits quietly. “But something’s wrong.”

Dean exhales sharply. “So we watch.” Sam simply nods at that.

So they watch, for minutes, for hours, until they see the front door open and they see you step out. Sam straightens immediately. “That’s her.” You move like someone sleepwalking—slow, deliberate, head slightly bowed. You don’t look left or right, you don’t see the car parked down the road with its lights off.

“Where’s she going?” Dean mutters, eyes squinting as he tries to follow the movements of your body. Sam’s voice is low. “Into the fields.”

Dean doesn’t hesitate, pushing the door of the driver seat of Baby. “Let’s go.”

The corn swallows you whole, stalks brush your shoulders and whisper secrets against your ears. The moon hangs low and swollen above you, pale and watchful. Your breath comes in shallow pulls, every sense sharpens until the world feels unbearably loud; the rustle of fabric, the crunch of dirt underfoot, the distant murmur of voices. Voices. You stop in your steps.

There, ahead and deeper in the field, a soft laugh. A girl’s voice, breathless and bright and then, a boy answering her in a low murmur. You close your eyes, you could turn back, you should go home. But the hunger presses forward, relentless, begging to be fed like an animal. So you step toward the sound.

Through a break in the stalks and near the clearing, you see them: a couple tangled together on a blanket, limbs almost all bare in the moonlight. The boy is leaning over her, kissing her neck, she giggles and pushes at his shoulders playfully. They are so alive it hurts through the bones of your ribs. Your mouth floods, your nails dig crescents into your palms. “Don’t,” you whisper to yourself, but you are already moving.

The first scream is cut short; you hit him with enough force to knock the air from his lungs, the girl tumbles sideways, shrieking, scrambling backward through the dirt. “What the hell—?!” the boy gasps, trying to shove you off. Your hands are in his hair and your teeth find his throat too fast for him to do anything about it. It’s over before he can even think about it. 

Skin splits with a sickening ease, hot blood surges into your mouth, thick and metallic, and the sound he makes—that choked, bubbling cry—vibrates against your jaw. You press him down harder, knees digging into his ribs as he thrashes. The girl is screaming now, scrambling to her feet. “Get off him! Get off—!” You tear, you rip apart, you shred.

Your fingers hook beneath his shirt, dragging fabric and skin aside. You feel the delicate give of muscle under your nails, the slick slide of it when you pull. There is a crack; sharp and obscene as one of his ribs gives way beneath the pressure of your grip. He is still alive when you bite deeper because you feel the flutter of his pulse weaken against your tongue.

The girl runs away, her scream rips through the cornfield, high and hysterical.

“Dean—” Sam’s voice is tight through the darkness of the night. “Did you hear that?” They are already moving, pushing through the stalks toward the sound. Another scream, it’s closer now, more panicked. Dean draws his gun as they break into a clearing.

The flickering headlights from the road spill faintly through the gaps in the corn, illuminating you in flashes of white. Sam stops dead when he sees you, his brain not understanding the vision he has, for a second. It can’t be true, it can’t be that. “Jesus Christ.” He mutters quietly; you are kneeling over what used to be a boy, his chest is open.

Bones gleams wetly in the moonlight, jagged and wrong. Blood soaks into the earth beneath him, dark and spreading. Your hands are buried inside him, slick to the wrists, with your mouth red, chin dripping, eyes wide and glass-bright in the light. Your white nightdress is soaked with crimson blood, the smell of iron and copper sticking to the fabric. For a moment, you don’t even see them, you are too busy breathing hard, shoulders rising and falling, as if you’ve just surfaced from deep water.

Dean’s voice cuts through the night, sharp and electrifying. “Hey!” You flinch immediately, your head snaps toward the sound like a deer caught in headlights, pupils blown out. Sam steps forward despite himself. “It’s her,” he breathes, horror and something heartbreakingly like recognition mixing in his tone. You stare at them, blood drips from your fingers back into the ruin of the boy’s chest. Your expression shifts—confusion, then shame, then something feral and starving that makes Dean’s grip tighten on his gun.

“Drop him,” Dean orders, voice rough. You look down at what you’re holding; at the torn flesh in your hands, at the open cavity where a heart used to beat. Your lips part, trembling, voice quiet. “I tried,” you whisper, though you don’t know if you’re speaking to them or to God. “I tried not to.”

Sam’s gaze locks with yours and for one terrible, suspended second, the hunger inside you turns toward him again. It recognizes him, it wants, it longs for the heart beating inside his chest. Dean sees the change in your eyes, the slightest of shifts. “Sam,” he warns softly.

You rise slowly from the body, blood sliding down your arms like dark sleeves and crimson ribbons. The girl’s screams are fading in the distance, forgotten for a moment. The cornfield is suddenly too small to contain what you are and Sam, standing there in the moonlight, realizes with a sickening certainty—they didn’t find the monster but the monster found them. 

For a long moment after the screaming stops, the world feels carved out of silence.

You are standing in the middle of it; in the trampled clearing, in the metallic fog of fresh blood, in the wreckage of a boy whose name you never learned. Your breath comes in ragged pulls. The night air is thick and damp, clinging to your skin where it isn’t already lacquered in red, it dries in stiffening streaks along your forearms, dark and almost black under the moon.

Dean’s gun is still pointed at you but it looks small compared to what you’ve done.

Sam steps closer despite it, boots sinking slightly into the churned dirt. His gaze moves over the scene with dawning horror—the torn sternum, the exposed cavity, the slick gleam of organs interrupted and handled and bitten. He swallows hard, Adam’s apple bobbing, but he doesn’t look away from you for long. “What are you?” he asks again, but this time it’s clear bewilderment.

You don’t know how to answer without sounding insane.

Your teeth chatter once: not from cold, but from the comedown. The hunger that had roared through you minutes ago is quieter now, coiled and sated, licking its chops in the dark recesses of your ribs. It is pleased. It hums low and satisfied, like a choir after the final hymn. “I don’t have an official name for it,” you say, voice hoarse. “I’ve tried to find one, though.”

Dean’s eyes flick to the body and back to you. “You eat people,” he says flatly.

“Yes. I am an eater.” There is no point in softening it, no point of denying it anymore. The word lands heavy between you; it feels like kneeling in a confessional and admitting the worst thing you’ve ever done—except there is no absolution waiting behind a screen, only the cold mouth of a gun.

“I don’t hunt during the day,” you continue, because if you stop speaking you might collapse. “I don’t stalk children, I don’t break into houses, I wait until the hunger is so loud I can’t hear my own thoughts. And then I go somewhere empty, somewhere I think no one will notice.”

Dean’s jaw tightens, his eyes darkening. “Someone always notices.”

You nod, tears cutting tracks through the blood on your cheeks. “I know.”

The wind moves faintly through the corn again, making the stalks whisper around you. It sounds almost like prayer, like a congregation murmuring in the dark. “I tried to starve it out once,” you say quietly. “Locked myself in my room for five days, I thought if I prayed hard enough, if I didn’t move, if I made myself small enough, God would see me and fix it.”

Sam’s expression changes at that, something in it cracks, like he can understand a point of your story. “What happened?” he asks. You give a broken laugh. “I nearly tore my own arm open.” The confession hangs in the air.

“It’s not a taste,” you try to explain, pressing a shaking hand to your chest. “It’s pressure. It builds here, like something pushing out from the inside and it makes my bones feel hollow, my teeth ache, my skin feels too tight. And when I see someone—when I smell them—it’s like the bell rings.”

“Bell,” Dean repeats.

“Like church bells calling the faithful,” you whisper. “Only I’m not walking toward salvation, I’m walking directly toward slaughter.” Dean lowers the gun an inch without realizing he’s done it.

Sam looks at the dead boy again, at the violence of it; the split ribs like broken cathedral arches, the blood soaking into the roots of the corn. He has seen monsters before, all sorts. Ghouls, vampires, wendigos, spirits or things that delight in carnage. You do not look delighted, no, you look ruined. “You were at the diner,” Sam says slowly. “You felt it then.”

Your breath stutters. “Yes.”

“With us.” You can’t meet his eyes.

“It was louder,” you admit. “Stronger… I don’t know why, but it scared me.”

Dean lets out a humorless huff. “That’s comforting.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” you say quickly, desperate. “That’s why I left. That’s why I went into the fields instead of staying in town.” Instead. The word is a knife. Dean drags a hand down his face. “So what, we’re supposed to give you points for picking random over personal?”

“No,” you whisper. “I’m not asking for points. I’m asking you to understand that I hate this.”

The night presses closer around you, heavy and intimate, blood continues to drip from your fingertips in slow, rhythmic taps. Sam studies you the way he studies lore: searching for pattern, for origin, for some line in some book that might explain you. “You were born like this?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“No bite, no ritual, no deal?”

“No.” You voice back at him, at them. Dean finally lowers the gun fully, though he keeps it in his hand. “Great,” he mutters. “A homegrown nightmare.” You flinch at the word nightmare, because that’s what it feels like; like you’ve been trapped in one since childhood, since the first time you stared too long at the pulse in someone’s throat and felt your mouth fill with saliva.

“Then maybe you should kill me,” you say, and your voice is steadier now than you expect. “Before it happens again.” The hunger reacts instantly, thrashing against the cage of your ribs, furious at the suggestion. Your knees weaken under the force of it and you sway. Sam moves forward without thinking but Dean’s hand shoots out to block him. “Careful.”

“I’m not going to attack him,” you say faintly. “If I was going to, I would have.” Dean doesn’t answer, he looks at the body, at you and finally, at Sam. They’ve made these decisions before in graveyards and barns and abandoned warehouses. Usually it’s clear. Usually the monster lunges, or laughs, or bares its teeth.

You just stand there, shaking, covered in evidence.

“She’s not possessed,” Sam says quietly. “She’s not turned, she’s not feeding for fun.”

“She’s still feeding,” Dean replies.

“And if we shoot her,” Sam continues, “we still don’t know what she is… or if there are more like her.” Dean’s mouth presses into a thin line.

You suddenly feel very small.

The town lies just beyond the fields: houses dark, porch lights humming, unaware that something ancient and wrong has been kneeling in its crops for years. The thought of staying makes your stomach churn.

“I can’t stay here,” you whisper. “The girl ran away… They’ll find this, they’ll start asking questions, and put me in jail. I’m not able to hide anymore.” Dean glances toward the road, toward the faint glint of the Impala through the stalks.

“You’re right about one thing,” he says. “You can’t stay.” You look up at him, startled. Sam’s eyes flick to his brother’s. “Dean.”

“We don’t know what she is, no idea if she’s truly human,” Dean repeats. “Which means we don’t know how to kill her or if we can—and I’m not big on shooting first and Googling later.” Despite everything, a hysterical sound escapes you. Dean meets your gaze fully for the first time since the gun went up; there’s no softness there, but there isn’t cruelty either.

“You’re coming with us,” he says. The words don’t make sense at first. “What?”

“You want to not kill people?” he continues. “Then you don’t get to sit in this town and wait for the next bell to ring. We figure out what you are, we figure out if there’s a cure or a leash.” Sam exhales slowly, tension easing just a fraction. “We can research, cross-reference. There has to be something.”

“And if there isn’t?” you ask, still not realizing that Dean isn’t going to kill you on the spot. Dean’s jaw tightens. “Then we’ll deal with that when we get there.”

It’s a stay of execution.

Your legs finally give out, you sink to your knees in the blood-soaked dirt, not in surrender but in exhaustion. The hunger is quiet now, full and drowsy but the guilt is louder, howling in the hollow space it left behind. It always is after you finish eating. It’s like a loud ringing in your ears.

Sam steps closer again, slower this time, giving you room to flinch away. “You need to clean up,” he says gently. You look down at yourself—at the red coating your skin, at the evidence of what you are.

You nod without replying.

They don’t let you wash in the boy’s bloodied clearing, they guide you back toward the road, keeping distance but not abandoning you. Dean walks slightly behind, watchful and Sam stays to your side, close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him. It makes the hunger stir faintly but you shove it down.

At the edge of the field, Dean shrugs off his leather jacket and tosses it toward you. “Put that on.” It’s absurdly tender, the gesture. You slip your arms into it despite the blood, leather sticking to your skin.

The Impala waits like something patient and black beneath the moon. You hesitate before climbing in and behind you, the town sleeps on—unaware that one of its quiet daughters is leaving in the dead of night, stained red, riding shotgun with two hunters who haven’t decided whether she’s a case study or a future grave. Your parents are sleeping in the house, with the porch light flickering, moths attracted to it like flies to rot.

Sam gets into the back seat with you instead of the front as Dean starts the engine. The headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating the road out of town.

As the fields fall away behind you and the small Ohio houses shrink into nothing, you press your forehead to the cool glass and close your eyes. You don’t know if this is salvation, you don’t know if it’s a longer road to the gallows. But for the first time in your life, you are not alone with the bell ringing inside your ribs.

And somewhere between the fading cornfields and the open highway, the hunger goes quiet.

For now.

taglist: @userhotd @angeldoll1e @stargral @nekkiotine @fawnettewinchester @grimsonandclover @ravensficrecs @elenacarey @alexxavicry @prismozo @kathh01 @dumbbandpoetic @hisfavoriteweepingangel @bluestrd @coochiemama3000 @eepwtf @domingodeaan @jiminie-08 @stqrfirez @pervyangelz @cxlt-lamb1 @dolcefloral @heldbycas @amourflores @avasarchve @harleymuses @chronic-fangirl-222 @nerdypinupcrystal @snoopysnote @blessorte @blushhbambi @flwer555 @qardasngan @aerangi @if4tmn @i-gotta-go-so-much-bigger @agustd202204 ( to be added )

notes: once again... i went a bit insane with this fic #lmfao. but i just wanted to make dean, sam and eater!reader meet. also, this is not canon to eater!reader story with dean and sam, but just something i had in mind! meaning: this probably won't have happened with you request this reader for sam or dean (unless you want to)... if that makes sense? + i feel like this end is too rushed but uh 10.2k words… so yeah, sorry!

[i-smoke-chapstick]

saw that you're in your got era so perhaps jealousy headcanons for the got or hotd characters? 👀 literally anyone from these characters - robb, jaime, margaery, oberyn, theon, cersei or ramsay, I'd love to see your interpretation on any of them ! ( or aemond, alicent, aegon, gwayne, OTTO !!, larys, daemon or mysaria for hotd, again whichever era you feel like it !!) and just for future reference, do you write for asoiaf characters or mainly the shows?

'LOVE CAN KILL, [jealousy! hcs]

-GOT / HOTD CHARACTERS X READER-

⋆ Characters ↬ Robb, Jaime, Margaery, Oberyn, Cersei, Joffrey, Ramsay, Tyrion, The Hound, Aemond, Aegon, Alicent, Gwayne, Daemon

⋆ 𝐒𝐘𝐍𝐎𝐏𝐒𝐈𝐒 ; jealousy, and how some characters deal with it ;)

⋆ tags/warnings. GOT and HOTD!characters x female reader. SFW! But naturally, some of these characters get a bit suggestive! Possessive behavior, canon typical violence, etc. Please send in more GOT/HOTD requests! Apologies this took so long, this is more characters in a post than I've ever done lol. Unfortunately I'm not super familiar with Otto, Larys, Theon, or Mysaria, so I decided to pick some characters I'm more familiar with! (Joffrey is my #1 favorite of all time, my sincerest apologies.) Whew, 14 characters ! For right now I'm only writing for the TV shows! (i've only read book 1, lol)

𝑅𝛰𝐵𝐵 𝑆𝑇𝐴𝑅𝐾

♫ “I wasn't thinking when I told you to stay.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

With Robb, it's all about the body language. And boy, he's horrible at hiding it.

He can have a hard time placing the feeling as jealousy. He was raised to be honorable. But feelings of...neglect run deep with him. Oldest child syndrome, if you will.

Which is why his jealousy most likely manifests in subdued, quiet behavior. Part of him will recognize he's being ridiculous, while another part of him is silently fuming. Fists clenched, he'll send you an intense stare as he watches you converse with another lord.

His emotions leak through his expressions. When he catches you staring back, his gaze will flit down, and he'll wait patiently for you're time. Or...in most cases...he'll march right up, placing himself between you and the man. Maybe a small, "I'll take it from here." If the lord is offering to help you with something.

A subtle touch on the small of your back. It's a small claim, a subtle "back-off."

A lot of his jealousy also transforms into protectiveness more than anything. He'll offer to accompany reader to places he wouldn't normally be concerned about. He's close by, and he's reminding her wordlessly, he's watching over her and any threat.

Finally, when you two are alone, will he drop down that guard of his. Covering up that burning pit inside him with casual humor, you can sense the underlaying seriousness of his voice in his light teases.

"You’re quite popular these days. Should I be worried that I’m not your only admirer?"

He certainly beds you, having something to prove. And only afterwards when you are in his arms, sweaty and warm from the candlelight, wrapped in furs...will he calm down.

"It’s not that I don’t trust you… It’s them I don’t trust. Some men don’t know how to keep their place." He'll whisper, holding onto you firmly.

𝐽𝐴𝐼𝑀𝐸 𝐿𝐴𝑁𝑁𝐼𝑆𝑇𝐸𝑅

♫ “You don't know that you're in over your head.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Jaime's jealousy is burning. It's simply the way he was raised. And gods, you are his.

Numerous sarcastic remarks flow between the two of you and the man who he believes has essentially stolen your affections. His taunts are offhand, dry remarks, often directed towards his "opponent" or even you, if he's feeling bitter enough.

"I didn’t realize he was such a comedian. Maybe I should ask him for pointers." He'll say, with that sarcastic drawl. "If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to make me jealous. Not that it would work, of course." He chuckles, but his gaze is sharp.

Depending on the offense, Jaime's reactions differ. If you simply have an admirer, a few...well chosen words are directed towards them. His confidence allows him to not be too bothered. Maybe standing closer, clearly showing off to whatever poor soul thought they had a shot with you.

It's a different story if you are friends with the person involved, or entertain their advances even mildly or jokingly.

That's when the uncharacteristic tension comes out, full of small twitches in his jaw and curt, smug responses. His visible annoyance is uncontrolled.

We saw how he was with Loras when it came to Cersei. If he feels truly threatened, whether it's by another pretty boy, or just someone he feels could...hypothetically...have the upper hand...He'll corner them when you're off somewhere else. And give a small warning, from the Kingslayer himself.

"You seem to have forgotten who you're dealing with, so let me remind you." He leans in just close enough for his words to sink in. "Whatever you think you might be to her… you’re not. Let’s keep it that way, hm? I'd hate to see you make any...lasting mistakes."

𝑀𝐴𝑅𝐺𝐴𝐸𝑅𝑌 𝑇𝑌𝑅𝐸𝐿𝐿

♫ “It was just too hard to push you away.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Margaery is smart with her feelings. She knows how to play the game, and play it well. Instead of showing her jealousy openly, she's a touch more composed than most characters on this list.

She recognizes just how precious you are, and admires that. She doesn't necessarily blame others when they become...attached to you.

When jealousy arises, she views it more as a small problem in need of being handled. And she knows how to handle things.

She embraces the graceful competition, subtly outshining anyone who seems to get in the way of her goals. Her goal being you're affection, of course. You're already hers, and she sees no problem in working to keep it that way.

This appears in gestures of strategic sweetness to keep you close, perhaps wearing your favorite gowns on her, and offering that charming smirk. She doesn't shy away from manipulating you, just a teeny bit.

"They’re certainly captivated by you. I suppose I’ll have to work harder to keep your attention." She teases, "Besides, who could ever compare to us?"

Her words carry a playful undertone, but she makes her point clear. Laughing charmingly, threading her arm through yours.

Very rarely does she think she's in any serious danger. She prides herself on being yours and knowing how to keep you on a tight leash. Though...if she feels genuinely worried, she expresses her feelings quite clearly but still gently. She reminds her lover of their shared goals, and all that they've built together.

"My, you do attract admirers easily, don’t you? I’ll have to start guarding you more closely." She gives you a playful look, though her touch on your arm will linger just a bit longer than usual.

𝛰𝐵𝐸𝑅𝑌𝑁 𝑀𝐴𝑅𝑇𝐸𝐿𝐿

♫ “Let me go, but you won't let me go.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Oberyn doesn't feel insecure. How could he? He knows, deep down, that you're his. Jealousy isn't something he confines himself too, he views it as an ugly emotion, capable of getting rid of the true wonders love has to offer.

That being said...he is only a man. And he is fiercely protective. If anyone were to flirt with you and you were clearly uninterested, it would be a swift death, or at the very least, he'd make his point clear with a blow or two and a cutting edge remark. Especially if they are a Lannister. He enjoys you being admired, but only to a certain extent.

"Your efforts are wasted, they’re far too captivating for someone like you. I’d suggest you find someone more... suited to your charms." He begins, hand itching for his spear, "Consider this your first and last warning."

Yeah, he means business.

Most of the time, he spins the situation to show-off. Showcase his own passion and devotion to you. If it's simply a friend of yours, he may even offer them to join in. If not, he'll spend the entire night practically worshipping you, promising that he's the only one who could ever make you feel like this.

Similarly to Margaery, he teases you lightly.

"You have a lovely laugh. But I must admit, it’s much better when it’s for me alone."

Oberyn doesn't shy away from PDA either. It's that assertive reclaiming he seems to favor, pulling you close, whispering something that affirms your affections for each other. He'll revel when he watches the other mans face fall in dismay.

He might get cocky, and push it a bit far. By the time he's done, the 'competition' will be utterly humiliated and embarrassed. He'll be smirking at his own quips.

"I assure you, my friend, my lover favors...more substantial things." He motions to the poor mans crotch.

You're gonna have to give him a slap on the arm.

𝐶𝐸𝑅𝑆𝐸𝐼 𝐿𝐴𝑁𝑁𝐼𝑆𝑇𝐸𝑅

♫ “Consequence of loving me can be cruel.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Cersei's jealousy is intense and multifaceted, to say the least. It manifests in a mix of cold fury and harsh threats, channeling that anger into much more controlling behavior.

Deep down, she is terribly insecure. Once another man or woman as your attention, and she catches on, she's coolly lashing out. And she catches on quickly.

At first she may appear indifferent, but if you look close enough, you can see the subtly giveaways. The way her lip curls, her nostrils flare, and her knuckles go white gripping her wine chalice.

If you're the first one to confront her, and attempt to reassure her, you'll save yourself some trouble down the line. Guaranteed, she'll deny it, but still make a passive-aggressive remark here and there. But eventually she'll calm down, edges softening.

That rare moment of vulnerability that you're not sure is manipulation or not. She'll look towards the ground, running her thumb over you're hand on her cheek. She'll sit on the edge of her bed, jaw clenched.

Now, it's a whole different story if you don't catch on to the early signs. If you don't manage to reassure or call her out in time, that jealousy implodes.

She may confront you first, anger bleeding through her. She runs on it. She may even threaten you, oblivious to the potential consequences her words might have.

“You think you can charm your way into my affections by paying attention to that little fool?" She's standing up, loathing distorting her features. Her voice raises. "Perhaps I should throw a feast in her honor. Let’s see how charming she is when surrounded by my people."

It's threats and threats and more and more threats...which can be especially worrying if the person she's jealous of is a friend of yours.

Almost every scenario ends with you having to comfort her, treading carefully with the words you say.

Now, when it comes to confronting the competition, she makes it very clear. Though, these threats are often much more impulsive. A swig of wine, and she gracefully moves towards them when you're out of sight.

A faux compliment or two, before she whispers, close.

“You’ll find that my guards are quite loyal to me. A simple command, and they’ll ensure you never breathe the same air as her again.”

It only makes her feel a bit better. But, regardless, she's smiling smugly, feeling proud of herself when the offenders face turns white.

𝐽𝛰𝐹𝐹𝑅𝐸𝑌 𝐵𝐴𝑅𝐴𝑇𝐻𝐸𝛰𝑁

♫ “Too much love can kill.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Oh, Joffrey. I'm obsessed with him.

Yeah. He has the worst jealousy issues out of everyone on this list. It's baaaaad. It's a cocktail of insecurity, possessiveness, and entitlement. As someone who has been raised to believe he is above others, and has been coddled his entire life...it infuriates him.

It's the same feeling you get as a child, when someone steals one of your toys. You belong to him. He never grew out of that mentality, or that feeling.

Be prepared for plentiful outbursts of anger. He's a tantrum personified, especially if he feels disrespected. Insecurity grips him tight and refuses to let up until he's either been heavily reassured...or the other person is... taken care of.

And even then, after reassuring him for hours, it may not be enough. You know how he hired a knight to take out Tyrion in the Battle of Blackwater? Yeah. That person will be paid a little 'visit.'

When reassuring him, similar to Cersei, you really have to be careful what you say, or it might make the situation even worse. At that point, he's seeing red.

"I’m the king! You should be grateful for my attention, not chasing after scraps!" He's huffing, pointing to himself as his breathing increases. He'll look at you with an ice cold glare, nose wrinkled in distaste.

He might even force his hand around your face, harshly grabbing you. He looks dead into your eyes, voice clear and low. "You're mine. You belong to me." He's seething.

If he notices you simply looking at anyone else too long, he'll feel beyond threatened in both his masculinity and position as king. Especially if you laugh at another mans jokes, or simply attempt to be friendly with a commoner or lord.

"What’s so amusing? You’d think you’d find better entertainment than that fool." He mutters under his breath harshly, bad habit of picking at his fingers. He'll shuffle uncomfortably. He'll look to you expecting agreeance. It's 100% that mentality of 'Friends? You don't need friends. You have me.'

Yeah, he keeps the very blunt insults coming. Petulant name calling is not above him. Includes, but is not limited too, "Degenerates, Idiots, Commoners, Peasants, or Cretins" which he may describe as being "Stupid, Disgusting, Repellent, Sickening, or Revolting." He's got a LOT of those angry remarks in the bank.

While he may not directly confront the offender, (he doesn't have time for idle threats.) He has his own ways of dealing with them. And that is a public humiliation ritual, making a mockery of any rival. And if they disobey ANY whim of his, they're gone. That one scene with Tyrion at his wedding? That "Kneel!"? He's commanding the same of any man unlucky enough to have threatened his claim on you. Oh, and they're going to be his cupbearer.

Even if they do as he asks, by now his anger will have transformed into that renewed sense of cruelty. "You're fingers or your tongue?...Or I could just cut your throat."

𝑅𝐴𝑀𝑆𝐴𝑌 𝐵𝛰𝐿𝑇𝛰𝑁

♫ “You're gonna suffer now, whatever you do.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

His jealousy may not be as overtly intense as Joffrey's, but it certainly is the scariest.

In his own words, he prefers being an only child. That same kind of mentality certainly carries over to his relationship with you. He prefers to be the only one you see that way.

He loves a good game, and that's what this is. If anything, it's quite exhilarating for him. Though, he is a huge hypocrite. For a man who thinks jealousy is boring coming from you, he feels it quite freely.

Sees it as a means of asserting dominance, whether that be through intimidation or overt manipulation. He doesn't deny it like most characters on this list. When he's feeling jealous, he says it. It's a small warning for you not to go any farther, lest worse things occur for you or the perceived threat.

He'll go up to whoever you are talking too, saccharine and honorable smile on his face. He'll casually interrupt, introducing himself as Lord Bolton's successor. Despite his calm demeanor, there is a tightness in his face, and a wicked look in his eyes, that only you can recognize. It will make you shiver.

If the rival persists, he'll find it all too amusing.

"You're bold, I'll give you that." He says with a boisterous laugh, and you already know the mans fate is sealed.

Looks like his hounds will be having another meal tonight. He'll have his men go out looking for the man, and he'll question him more...privately, when you aren't there to witness his tortuous taunts.

But for now, his focus is on you, and your loyalty to him. When he excuses the both of you, his hand is gripping yours painfully tight.

By the time you're in his chamber, he's on you, ripping your clothes off with a harsh intensity and pushing you to the wall. His nose is twitching in barely kept anger, forcing you to look at him.

We all saw that scene between him and Myranda when she threatens to marry someone else, and it was not pretty. His eyes are borderline bloodshot, and he can't keep his hands off you or your throat.

"You're mine." He leans forward, through gritted teeth. It's better you don't put up a fight, because he'll be having you and your attention one way or another.

Que the numerous kisses and bite marks soon to follow. And he is not gentle when he's inside you.

You'll never hear from the flirtatious lord again...and if you do, it's only in the prayers of his grieving family.

𝑇𝑌𝑅𝐼𝛰𝑁 𝐿𝐴𝑁𝑁𝐼𝑆𝑇𝐸𝑅

♫ “My love, you are not safe with me.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Now, Tyrion's jealousy is more subdued and introspective versus some characters on this list. He has a good sense of self-awareness, and he's intelligent to figure out what he's feeling quite quickly.

At first he'll dismiss it as nothing more than an annoying feeling of insecurity he attempts to cover up. But...it doesn't last long. Especially when someone else makes you laugh. Or when Bronn makes a taunt with a half smirk, that some other fancy lord has taken a keen interest in his lady. (Bronn, you instigator!)

As such, Tyrion resorts to his usual humor to deflect any unpleasant feelings he may have when he's jealous. Similar to his brother, these witty remarks are are subtle intimidation technique, meant to dryly convey his displeasure.

"Ah, the sound of laughter. How quaint. I suppose I’ll have to work harder to earn your amusement." He forces a smile, masking his discomfort. "I didn’t realize I was competing for the title of Court Jester."

These feelings of inadequacy manifest in more self-deprecating ways for Tyrion, given his anger is more controlled. He might opt to drown his sorrows, so don't be surprised if you catch him drunkenly waving his chalice around, doing poor impressions of the so-called-lord that had your attention.

This doesn't mean he won't confront the rival, though. Quite the opposite. While he won't seek the man out, (For his sake, he isn't privy to seeing the tall handsome lord in person. He's not a masochist.) If he happens to come across him flirting with you first hand, or sees him during a feast, he'll make sure to throw one or two gibes out there.

"Desperation looks unflattering on you, my friend. Perhaps you should tone it down a notch." He speaks carefully, nodding to Bronn as a subtle warning. "Or at least the best you can manage..?"

If the rival flirts with you blatantly and in front of him, I can 100% imagine him putting them down. After a flirtatious remark directed towards you, he'll make a dry comment, "Flattery is wasted on me, but do go on; I’m always entertained by those who think they can win my affection." As if it was directed towards him. Probably shuts the man up for a moment.

When the two of you are alone, he'd be very grateful if you could just hold him. Give him that reassurance he craves when his carefree facade breaks. That moment of vulnerability means the world to him.

𝑆𝐴𝑁𝐷𝛰𝑅 "𝑇𝐻𝐸 𝐻𝛰𝑈𝑁𝐷" 𝐶𝐿𝐸𝐺𝐴𝑁𝐸

♫ “I need you to go, don't fight me.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Listen up, Sandor doesn't take shit.

Jealousy isn't an emotion Sandor is particularly used too. In fact, he didn't think he'd find anyone to love in his lifetime, so the feeling is foreign and unpleasant. And, like a mean dog, Sandor's first reaction is to growl.

He doesn't like it. Says it's constricting, and it pisses him off. Not just the pretty boy lord flirting with you, but the whole situation in general. Makes him feel vulnerable, and weak.

Naturally, his first reaction is to distance himself. He may avoid you, grumbling, spitting out vile and vulgar comments to get you to run with your tail between your legs. It's better for the both of you that way.

"You think they’re worth your time? Just a pretty smile to distract you?" He scoffs, shaking his head. "You could do better. But then again, you always choose to suffer." He motions at himself, and it's a glimpse of that self-depreciation he buries.

But you love him for a reason, and you know that won't end well. Best way to handle him when he's jealous is to be gentle, and to listen.

He doesn't want empty reassurances. He's complicated that way, even if they are genuine. He isn't one for flowery words or overt displays of emotion, so the best way to comfort him would be to give him some space, but continue to take care of him.

It will still frustrate him, but eventually he'll cave. He'll rejoin you, silently, eventually. Won't offer any apologies, but maybe a gruff nod, and you two will commence whatever it is you two have.

In future instances, he becomes much more brutally honest with how he feels. Doesn't sugarcoat it. If he doesn't like someone, even if they are a friend, he expects them gone- or he'll take care of them regardless. That kind of possessive behavior is just something you'll have to work through.

I can imagine him silently brooding if he witnesses someone flirting with you first hand. Typically his size and reputation is enough to scare whoever away. He's looming over them, eyes dark, and ready to defend what's his.

When you take your leave, he'll confront the person with a very explicit threat or two.

"If you don’t back off, I’ll find a nice dark corner to stuff you in- preferably with a pile of shit." Or, "Get any closer, and I’ll rip your tongue out and shove it down your throat."

𝐴𝐸𝑀𝛰𝑁𝐷 𝑇𝐴𝑅𝐺𝐴𝑅𝑌𝐸𝑁

♫ “Get swallowed by the weight.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Aemond has the most...complex jealousy out of everyone on this list. It's layered, and the outcome may be unpredictable. It's an emotional and volatile nature that's been building up for years since he was a child.

He often had feelings of jealousy for his brother, his nephews, etc. That trauma is deeply rooted in him, and it's hard to let go of old habits, given it's been present all his life.

You'll watch his head bow in distaste when you make small conversation with other lords. How his eye will gaze at you, almost warningly. His jaw will be clenched tight, and he'll avoid eye contact, looking off to the side in anger. He doesn't want to watch.

If it's a friend of yours, he can be a bit mean, questioning your loyalty a bit harshly.

"Friendship? Is that what you call it?" He speaks, angrily. A thinly veiled threat is directed to you, "It seems more like a prelude to betrayal."

He'll brood in the corner, silently waiting. That is, unless, he deems the man goes too far.

In the scene where he gets his eye put out by Lucerys, the conversation that starts before it happens pretty much sums his jealousy up. He's firm with his claim to Vaghar, and the same goes for you.

When Rhaena states that Vaghar was hers to claim, Aemond responds in kind, "Then you should've claimed her." And puts up a hell of a fight to prove his point. That same possessiveness carries over to his relationship with you. He doesn't back down. You're his.

He has no problems getting in between you and the man he feels threatened of. He offers a blunt threat.

"I could have you torn apart, limb by limb, and I’d sleep soundly at night. Be certain of that."

Guaranteed, mixed feelings of insecurity will rise to the surface. When you two are alone, he'll continue to brood silently, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, and body language tight.

Please do reassure him. He needs it. His eye will soften, and he'll place his hand over yours, leaning into your touch. With a soft huff of an air, a final warning slips past his lips.

"Don’t make me remind you why I’m the only one worthy of you."

𝐴𝐸𝐺𝛰𝑁 𝑇𝐴𝑅𝐺𝐴𝑅𝑌𝐸𝑁

♫ “I wanna hold on tightly.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Aegon handles jealousy poorly, much like he seems to handle everything else.

It's like throwing gasoline on a fire. Once that feeling in his chest flares up, it's shown through erratic behavior, sarcasm, and attempts to assert his claim in juvenile, insecure ways. Unlike his brother, he lacks the restraint to simply brood.

No, be prepared for plenty of mocking comments directed towards the man he's threatened of, and showy displays to prove he's the better choice.

Everyone knows he is unpredictable and reckless, and possessiveness drives him to act out. He certainly overindulges to cope with his insecurity, (getting shitfaced) and will gladly push your boundaries to get your attention back on him.

Not to mention the belittling comments he'll make.

"Oh, is that who you’ve chosen to entertain now? I didn’t realize your taste had grown so dull."

Prone to acting overtly clingy, almost like a restless cat. He will attempt to slide over into the conversation, resting an arm around you, or even pulling you away. He doesn't care if it's 'improper.' He probably brings up his status, his bloodline, acting over-the-top.

He's also no stranger to outbursts. His temper may make him lash out impulsively, whether that be towards you or the man whose got your attention. If he's in a particular mood, be ready to deal with a screaming Aegon, threatening to slaughter and burn said rival. His fist will come down hard on the council table.

He also doesn't care if he's making a show of it in front of the council members. Que Alicent or Otto attempting to placate him. He needs to have a cooler head if he's going to be ruling the Seven Kingdoms, and this type of behavior isn't very becoming.

He definitely thinks he's owed some make-up sex, if only to quell the insecure storm raging inside him.

"You think they could satisfy you? Truly?" He says, firmly, as he steps closer. Anger is burning in his words, volume raising. "They wouldn’t even know where to begin."

And he plans to show you that he's right.

𝐴𝐿𝐼𝐶𝐸𝑁𝑇 𝐻𝐼𝐺𝐻𝑇𝛰𝑊𝐸𝑅

♫ “I'm afraid I'll pull you over the edge.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Alicent experiences jealousy complexly, just like Aemond. It gnaws on her until she's at her breaking point. Rather than overt displays or confrontations, she attempts to employ more strategic distance...but it always ends up resorting in icy politeness.

She's making her displeasure known through restrained, pointed remarks. Out of duty and pride, she'll attempt to avoid direct confrontation, but she wears her jealousy on her sleeve.

I imagine her withdrawing from the situation at first, if not for anything but her own sake. Her gut reaction, out of insecurity, is to escape the situation. It honestly makes her feel sick.

Unless she's forced to stay...then she'll begrudgingly offer a tight smile. Her responses are carefully measured, and she slips into that role of "queen" rather than a lover.

A part of it stems from passive aggressiveness, and another part of it is purely subconscious.

Speaking of passive aggressiveness, she'll make some pretty cutting remarks, either questioning your loyalty or purposely feigning ignorance to the situation.

"Perhaps I’m mistaken. But I know loyalty when I see it. Or when I don’t."

It's an all bark, no bite threat towards you. But it serves as an aggressive reminder of your connection with her, and that you are now apart of her duties.

If she does interfere beforehand, she'll make indirect remarks about the person causing her jealousy, but will most likely frame it as merely her own curiosity.

Maybe just a touch of self-depreciation, unintentional manipulation. Years of Otto's techniques have rubbed off on her.

"It’s of little consequence, truly. I simply thought I was the one you preferred to spend your time with. I may have misjudged."

𝐺𝑊𝐴𝑌𝑁𝐸 𝐻𝐼𝐺𝐻𝑇𝛰𝑊𝐸𝑅

♫ “Hurts to say it over, over again.” Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

In contrast to Alicent, Gwayne has no problem when he feels threatened to step in. He's a member of a powerful house, and a knight no less. Those two things have taught him to be prideful and honorable.

He will defend your honor whenever he deems in necessary, and there are no exceptions. He certainly has a flash of a temper, but he believes he's much more restrained than others, given his training.

If he thinks someone is crossing a line, he'll interfere. He'll position himself quite closely to you, making his presence known.

He offers the man a silent warning, offering a cool, assessing look. It would be enough to communicate his disapproval.

And if the man persists...well...they'll end up with the end of a sword pointed at them.

Similar to Robb, Gwayne's jealousy appears more in his heightened protectiveness. He insists on staying close for your safety.

"Do they need to be reminded that you’re already spoken for?"

Obviously, his noble pride carries on. If he gets pushed, his jealousy will show more openly, taking the man aside, and telling them that he is more worthy of her time and attention. Might throw in a comment about his noble standing.

He'll take you aside when everything is said and done, reminding her his intentions are honorable. Everyone else is just...unworthy.

"You may not see it, but I know men like him. If he truly respected you, he wouldn’t need to linger around someone else’s beloved."

𝐷𝐴𝐸𝑀𝛰𝑁 𝑇𝐴𝑅𝐺𝐴𝑅𝑌𝐸𝑁

♫ "No matter how you feel." Love Can Kill by Lennon Stella

Oh boy, you'll have to keep this man on a tight leash when his jealousy flares up. It's as intense as he is, and he shows it openly.

He'll deny it, or embrace it, depending on the severity of the perceived offense. It's closely tied to that desire for power within him he can't seem to shake. Any affront to your loyalty is an affront to his own standing.

He switches from possessive protectiveness to outright hostility. There's really no in between. It's a raw and unfiltered fury that makes his hand shake and his eye twitch.

He doesn't tolerate rivals, and he's very upfront that he's the only one fit to be by your side. This comes through when he has you all to himself on his bed...

He'll confront the person whether you want him to or not.

"If they value their limbs, they’d remember you’re mine." He mutters casually, pacing around the room.

He carries that hard glint in his eyes. He may even mildly appreciate the sheer balls of the man stupid enough to attempt to flirt with you, but he'll shut it down quicker than anyone on this list.

"You’ve got a bold tongue. I wonder if I should cut it out..?" He'll look to you for permission. It's up to you if you wanna let the dragon loose!

[stellav1va]

feeling devious