The Stranger

Nic | 23 | they/she | cod/ghostbc/asoiaf

[lovebugism]

ANGEL OF MY DREAMS ─── ormund hightower

summary: you are sent to ward in oldtown when the war begins; ormund finds that his attempts to erase your targaryen heritage cannot reach the strange prophetic dreams you cannot seem to control. (5k)

characters: ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen, mentions of rhaenyra targaryen and otto hightower

contents: targ!reader (unspecified relationship, no physical descriptions), enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, possessive!ormund, dragon dreamer!reader cw for manipulation, mentions of reader relying on alcohol, brief mentions of attempted assault, allusions to smut 18+ (MDNI)

You part from the Red Keep in a gown of Targaryen black and crimson; the silver dragons embroidered along the bodice worked by your cousin Helaena’s own hand. The small beaded stitches are, perhaps, the only piece of home you were allowed to carry with you across the narrow waters. Your heart has still not yet caught up to the news that sent you here — a family cracked down its center, each of them vying for a throne made of swords, all of them destined to cut their hands in the reaching.

And you, the only child of a middling southern lord and a Targaryen mother who stood dozens of names removed from any crown, had little blade to lend to either side of the war. So you were sent away from it, to ward with your cousin down south in Oldtown — whom you only met once when he was a small babe, though your parents insisted no one with your blood could ever be a stranger to you. Not in the midst of war anyway.

A hooded cloak of Hightower green and gold is draped over your head and shoulders upon your arrival — a kindness, you thought at the time, though you’ve come to understand it as more of a shroud these days. You’re led through winding streets and ivied alleyways to a pale-stone tower that descends high into the clouds — where Lord Ormund Hightower receives you, in a hall full of idle banners and stained-glass windows that turn the sunrays to shades of emerald green. 

“My lord,” you said as you dropped into a practiced curtsy before the long table he sat behind, feeling the ache in your legs on the descent after three long days at sea. You fought to remember the words your father told you to repeat, because he’d fought alongside Lord Ormund once, and knew much of his peculiar propensities. “My family thanks you for… providing me shelter here, among family, in such… troubled times.”

“Family,” Ormund scoffed in amusement. His mouth curled into an amused grin as he rose from his chair, wooden legs screeching along the cobbles. He rounded the table in slow strides and shook his dark-auburn head. “No, child— Daeron is family.”

He motioned to the chairs behind him with a lazy, ringed hand as he approached you. It was not hard to find which men sitting there belonged to your cousin; he was the youngest of them, to be sure, and wore a slightly more masculine version of Alicent’s face upon his rounder one.

“You, my girl, are a guest,” Ormund corrected with an artificial kindness that made your stomach feel sick. 

Sicker still was the smell of candlewax and salt and sea brine stained on the walls. The scent of bathing oils and incense filled your lungs the moment Ormund planted himself before you, with two wide palms splayed on either side of your arms. His chiseled features, carved from stone, looked almost apologetic when he ducked his head into your eyeline. 

“I do this as a favor to your father, and to my nephew,” the older man confessed. “Daeron has seen little family over these years, save myself— and I will not deny him the comfort of the blood he still has left to him.”

His voice was warm with a knight’s tenderness, though there was little of it in his words. 

His fingers were tender, too, as he drew them around the hood upon your head to pull it back from your hair — but the way he examined the Valyrian-silver strands between them was far less than kind. His strong jaw clenched; his pale eyes hardened; his chest rose and fell beneath his coat with a huff.

“Mm,” he muttered in disgust.“We’ll have to do something about this.”

Your hair is dyed a shade to complement your skin tone two days later. Your wardrobe is stripped of its Targaryen silks and replaced with Hightower green and gold within a week. You study the Hightower histories, you pray to the Hightower gods, you speak the way Hightowers speak. Within a month at Oldtown, you are stripped of any remnants of your Targaryen identity — a fact which seems to please Ormund, whose praise comes more and more frequently these days.

In his own accounting of the matter, he sees it as good work. Godly work. To have tamed a wild Valyrian beast, who rides no dragon but carries the blood of one all the same. They say Targaryens are destined to destroy, never create. And yet, Ormund has made a civilized thing out of you — fit for suppers at his tables, fit for silence everywhere else.

But he does not yet know about the dreams. 

You have always had them, or at least, since you were capable of comprehending their existence. They come less like sleep and more like drowning — fires not yet lit, soldiers not yet dead, rulers not yet born. You haven’t yet found a safe way to say I dreamed it and be believed, or be forgiven in the saying. So you do not say it.

Instead, you drink.

It started as a cup of Arbor Gold to sand down the edges of a dream when it still clung to you at breakfast, the only remedy the maesters could summon to ease your temperament. That turned into silver flasks tucked into the boning of your bodice — to be snuck during lessons and meetings and dinners with middling ale, to quiet your mind whenever the dreams began to claw at it. 

That, inevitably, turned into passing out at bars and brothels only to be woken over the shoulder of a soldier carrying you back home again.

It’s how you learned of Ormund’s keen nose, when he insisted he could smell the scent of ale on your breath from a hall’s length away, and could perfectly name which wine you’d snuck from the cellar accordingly. His worry for your obvious excess comes masked as irritation — because he is the one who had built you so carefully, and still he is the one watching you come apart at every seam he had sewn so carefully for you.

When you go missing one day until sundown, and Bold John interrupts the lord’s supper with news of your whereabouts and your refusal to return, Ormund goes to get you himself. He finds you a half-league outside the city, in a half-rundown pleasure house that wreaks of smoke, sour ale, and very heavily of sex — stale air humid from golden candles and naked bodies pressed too close together.

Ormund presses an embroidered handkerchief to his nose as he weaves through the crowd, spine straight and chin level. He finds you in the very back of the den of sin, slouched alone at a table with empty mugs of ale scattered all around you. Your dyed hair is half-loose from its pins as your heavy head lolls on your fist. With your tired eyes fluttering open and closed, you don’t realize the man’s towering over your table until he slams his fists upon it, jostling the cups standing there.

“Why, in the name of the Mother, are you in a brothel?” Ormund spits in place of a greeting.

Your eyes lift slowly to meet his sharper ones. The man’s angry features are softened slightly by the haze of alcohol clouding your vision. “This is the only ale in the city that isn’t watered down…” you shrug and can’t quite tell if you’re slurring or not.

“Well,” he scoffs a not-quite laugh. “I would hate to ask how many establishments you must’ve visited to figure that one out—” 

His head whips over his shoulder when a woman wearing nothing above the waist drifts past him, trailing her manicured fingers across the curls twisting at the nape of his neck — surely mistaking him for a rich lord in want of company. He flinches from her touch as if it had burned him. His chest flares with embarrassment and rage alike when you bury your laugh behind your cup.

“This is not godly, what you’re doing to yourself. Do you know that?” he scolds lowly, features twisted in disgust. “I have given you a home, a place at mine own table, and yet you repay that gift by—” 

He cuts himself off and exhales hard through his nose before the anger can get the best of him. He tilts his chin to peer down at you from the bridge of his nose as his long fingers twitch at his sides. 

“Perhaps Oldtown was the wrong place for you after all,” he concludes in a more even tone. “Perhaps you are better suited elsewhere, somewhere more able to accommodate your… temperament—”

“It’s the dreams,” you blurt, as if the words had been pushed out of you at his disappointment — at the thought of being abandoned, again. Your features crumble as you peer up at him with glassy, wet eyes. “Drinking is the only thing that helps… I cannot stop them, but I cannot bear them sober—”

“Dreams?” Ormund repeats, chuckling with a newfound amusement. “You’ve ruined yourself over a few childish fantasies?” 

Your chest burns red hot at his laughter. The embers prickle at your skin and the backs of your eyes. “I dreamt of Rhaenyra,” you spit through gritted teeth. “Sitting the Iron Throne.” 

“There!” Ormund chuckles, shrugging with his palms splayed ahead of him. “A dream, indeed— A woman upon the Iron Throne.”

“The news of King’s Landing’s fall will come with the news of your uncle’s death,” you continue lowly, hardly audible over the bustling brothel, without once taking your eyes off of his. “Slain by Rhaenyra’s own hand… And it will not be a swift death, either, my lord…”

Ormund’s features flicker under the weight of your words — a look of distant horror gone again in a blink. He shakes his head with a smug sort of smile. “My uncle is at Highgarden. Securing the Tyrell’s loyalty. He will return, in time, with gold and bannermen, though I’m sure you will have drunk yourself to death by the time they arrive.”

Rhaenyra takes King’s Landing a month later. 

A raven is sent with haste, disclosing that her very first act as Queen was to slay the catalyst of this very war. Otto Hightower’s head sits now on a pike outside the Red Keep, the scrawled parchment says, which Ormund reads with a frightening sort of composure about him.

“Sire?” Daeron presses the other side of the desk, anxious hands trembling behind his back. “Is everything alright?”

Ormund’s eyes lift slowly to look at him. “Your grandsire is dead,” he answers plainly and without reservation. “Slain by Rhaenyra the Usurper, who now sits the Iron Throne— where is your cousin, pray tell?” 

Daeron’s wide eyes flit away and back again, pink mouth parting as he tries to make sense of the sudden news and his uncle’s strange question. “My— I’m not sure— In her bedchamber, perhaps— But why—” 

Ormund rises from his chair and storms out of the room before the boy can finish his stammering. He makes a beeline directly for your chambers; a small space near enough to the servants’ quarters where the handmaidens can keep an eye on your comings and goings. He slams the heavy door open with so much as a knock to announce himself — it strikes hard against the wall with a resounding bang that shudders the glowing candle flames beside it.

You sit up straight in the center of your bed, blanketed by quilts and already donned in your pale white nightgown. The heavy novel on your lap slides from your thighs as you lurch suddenly in fright. 

You have little time to make sense of the sudden intrusion before Ormund closes the distance between you, wrapping a firm hand around your throat to pin you back against the pillows again — he holds you not with cruelty, but with fear. And you can feel it in the way his long, cold fingers tremble around your throat.

“You knew,” he snarls. 

Your wide eyes flit back and forth between his narrow ones as your weak hands attempt to pry his calloused fingers from your neck. “Knew what—?”

“My uncle’s slaughter,” Ormund shouts over your fearful wavering. “I cannot believe I allowed a traitorous Targaryen dragon to sit at my table— to sleep under my roof—” 

“I only dreamt it, my lord,” you choke out. 

“Liar.” 

You whimper when his fist closes tighter, but you do not fight him. Instead, your pleading gaze searches within his raging one for something that feels halfway human. 

“You wept the night your mother died,” is the first thing you think to say — the first dream you had the first night you slept within these walls. Ormund falters instantly at the sudden confession. “Not at her bedside, because you didn’t want to look weak in front of your father, but after. In the Godswood. Where no one would think to go looking for a Hightower.”

Ormund’s hand slackens slightly around your throat. A look of surprise softens his features.

“That’s why you keep the Seven so close now,” you continue tearily. “Because you still feel guilty that you turned to the Old Gods, and you worry that doing so disappointed your father, even though you’re not sure he ever caught you—”

“How—” Ormund chokes on the simple word. It gets lost somewhere in his throat and turns to ash on his tongue as his wet eyes dart between both of yours. “How do you—”

“I dreamt it…” you repeat again, voice thick with tears.

His calloused hands gentle around your throat. The pads of fingers ghost along your pulse as they drift to the edge of your jaw, and up to your temple where your silver roots begin to show through the dye. He looks half-horrified and half-bewildered.

“I have… dreamt of you,” Ormund confesses distantly, breathing fanning warm along your cheek. “I thought it madness at the time, a man dreaming of his own ward, but… It was you in my head, was it not? Or— was it only mine own guilt wearing your face to taunt me?”

“I cannot help it,” you answer vaguely, voice trembling. “I’ve never been able to stop it.”

“I do not want you to stop it,” Ormund shakes his head, firm with reverence as he clasps both warm hands around your jaw. His touch is solid enough to make you tense but still achingly tender in his way. “This is the work of the gods… I thought I was doing some small kindness for Daeron’s sake, taking you in, but…”

The rough pad of his thumb smooths gently over your burning cheek as he trails off.

Your eyes widen at his words, at the madness swimming in his glittering gaze. The same man who stormed in here minutes ago with the intent to hurt you, now one confession shy of dropping to his knees and worshiping you like the gods themselves. He touches you softly now, for perhaps the first time since you set foot in Oldtown. And you, having gone so long without any gentle touch at all, almost let yourself take sanctuary in it. Almost.

“Do you have any idea what we could do with this mind of yours?” He smiles wide until his eyes squint at the edges. “We could rule the world entire if we wished.”

We, he says, and you don’t know whether to be comforted or frightened by the implication.

“I don’t want to rule the world,” you tell him in a small, shaking voice. “I just… I want to rest.”

“Then rest,” Ormund nods with a smile that creases the corners of his pale eyes as his hands slide down to rest around your neck like a collar. “But dream. For me.”

The war leads the Hightower host to Tumbleton, where the town’s ancient castle is seized for Ormund’s use alone. The army idles there in wait for Aemond’s arrival and for Vhagar’s great shadow to fly in overhead. And in that waiting, you’ve seemingly become one of Ormund’s most trusted confidants. 

He visits your chambers more nights than not now. Enough that you’ve grown used to waking with him already beside you — with his warm weight settled into the mattress and his arm heavy across your waist, prepared to hold you through the nightmares that find you more regularly these days. You spend the bulk of your days with him, too, standing at his elbow before his campaign maps and his questions of whether the visions have given you a day, a name, or a river crossing to avoid.

You have told him of your limits far more than once, though he seems to forget in his unrelenting hunger for victory. “I cannot see everything, my lord,” you told him in the bath, as his gentle fingers smoothed fresh dye into your silver roots. “It only comes to me in sleep, and I cannot— summon an answer from them at command the way a maester can summon an answer from his books.”

“And yet…” Ormund crooned, dipping his stained hands into the warm water beside your bare chest, and washing the swirling dye from his fingertips. “You have given me more than any maester I have ever paid for in gold.”

You peered up at him with teary eyes. “I fear you place too much faith in me, my lord.”

“And I fear you place too little,” he grinned.

You spend a slow morning hunched over a chessboard with Daeron — the only true companion you’ve managed to find in all your time away from home, other than Ormund perhaps. The morning sun spills in silver-gold rays from the narrow windows, falling over the carved pieces ahead of you and turning the boy’s long hair a more flaming shade of Hightower red. 

“You’ve cornered my king again…” you croon within a feigned sigh of defeat, head lolling on one hand while your other drifts lazily over the wooden board. “You’re getting rather good at this, cousin.”

Daeron glares playfully at you beneath his lashes, green eyes glinting with amusement as his lip twitches with the hint of a smile. “You moved your bishop away from my king last turn. And now you’ve sacrificed your queen to a pawn.”

“Have I?” you hum in faux-puzzlement, brows lowered and lips jutted.

“If you’re going to let me win, you could at least be convincing about it—”

The door swings wide with a rusted screeching sound. Ormund’s shadow falls over the board like a cloud crossing the sun. “Leave us,” he tells his nephew in lieu of any actual greeting and leaves little room for argument as his broad form lingers at the entrance.

Daeron tenses instantly at the man’s sudden presence and rises from his seat without a word. He flashes you a quick glance that looks almost like trepidation at leaving you alone with him, but obeys his uncle nonetheless. The door shuts behind the boy with a quiet click. The remaining oxygen in the room goes with him.

Ormund flashes you a polite smile from across the room, though you aren’t looking at him to see it. “You weren’t in bed last night,” is all he says.

“I fell asleep in the library,” you tell him and hope he doesn’t notice how the words catch briefly in your throat. You reset the board ahead of you with anxious hands and hear the soft scrape of his boots along the cobbles as he approaches you.

“And what of your dreams?”

You shake your head, gaze averted. “Nothing of importance, my lord.”

“But you have seen something?” he presses.

You inhale sharply through your nose. “I saw a… a village in the Riverlands— burned down to its bones— women wailing over children with no faces left to grieve over,” you confess, more of a half-truth than a whole lie. “It concerns no war of yours, my lord.”

Ormund says nothing as he descends into the seat Daeron had left warm and watches you arrange the bone-carved pieces into their proper squares. His eyes crease at the edges with a quiet sort of tenderness. “Tell me, then,” he hums with an airiness you see rarely from him. “Will I win this round?”

Your eyes lift finally to his narrowed ones. “You will,” you answer, but do not tell him how.

He makes the first move, plucking his pawn between two fingers and moving it to the center. You answer with your pawn of dark onyx. “Have you ever heard of Meria Martell? The Yellow Toad of Dorne?” he asks as he pushes his knight forward.

“No,” you hum and advance your bishop, a fine move but admittedly not the best one. “I don’t believe I have.”

“Shame…” Ormund sighs and ponders his next move, pale fingers drumming lightly over the table. “She was the only woman ever to have been gifted with a truly military mind… Though the gods divested her of beauty in turn— hideous, hairless, thick of waist, blind.” He advances his knight again, claiming the territory undefended by your bishop. “She does not sound so formidable, but when Aegon the Conqueror claimed her lands, she swore that Dorne would ever be unbowed, unbent…”

Your fingers push your rook a square shy of where it ought to go. You swallow hard and look at Ormund through your lashes, wondering if he’d noticed. But he’s too deep in his ramblings to realize.

“Then a great host descended from the Red Mountains— us Hightowers regrettably among them,” he explains and claims your rook from the board, setting it to the side with a satisfied click. His quiet pride at himself eases the unrelenting panic in your chest. “Meria poisoned her own wells, hid her soldiers in the sand. Her castle, when they found it, was empty. The thought she was vanquished, but… She rose from the darkness and slaughtered them all in their beds.”

You meet Ormund’s amused smile with a wearier one. “Was she a hero, then? Or a villain?”

You move a pawn forward instead of the knight that would’ve threatened his king.  A flicker of hesitation crosses his strong features at the tactless move, but he dismisses the oversight a second later and plucks his ivory queen forward two squares.

“The Targaryens knew nothing of our civilization— the Faith, the Citadel,” Ormund answers, and seemingly forgets that you, yourself, are Targaryen by blood in his ramblings. A smile sits loosely on his mouth as he watches you consider your next move. “What they had, what they still have is strength. Their armies, the… obscenity of their dragons… But Meria outwitted her enemy. Because a cunning mind can resist the most savage of…”

You advance your remaining undefended piece, opening a path across the board for Ormund’s taking. His features screw in confusion a second later.

“What are you doing?” he scolds, brows lowered over his narrowed eyes.

You blink owlishly at him. “What do you mean, my lord?”

“That piece,” he spits and points a ringed finger at the board. “Why would you move it there when you very well could’ve taken my queen?”

Your breath catches somewhere in your throat, which feels like it’s tightening more and more by the second. Daeron was right, you think to yourself. You could stand to be a bit more convincing. 

“I-I’m sorry, my lord,” you stammer. “I didn’t notice—”

“Oh, don’t patronize yourself by playing the fool,” Ormund scoffs. “You are letting me win— Like I’m some child who cannot stomach the thought of losing.”

“We can start again, my lord,” you assure him, fingers trembling as you reach across the board. 

Your body jolts when he catches your wrist in a blink, quick like a snake going in for the strike. The sudden sweeping motion sends pieces from the board scattering to the cobbles below. Fear flashes hard across your face. Ormund softens at the sight of it, with a practiced breath in and out through his nose. His long fingers loosen slightly around your wrist, but they do not yet draw back.

“You should always want to win,” the man lectures you firmly, but without the bite in his voice from before. “Never hand a victory to anyone. Not even to me. The gods did not grant you that gift of yours so that you might spend it sparing another man’s pride.”

You shake your head, features crumbling at words. “It is not a gift,” you tell him in a tiny voice.

Ormund softens for you instantly. He rises slowly from his seat and pulls the adjacent one nearer to you. His knees brush your dress skirts when his hands again find yours. All the anger from before is gone from his touch now, as he warms your cold fingers between his warmer ones. 

“You’ve seen something,” he says — not quite a question, but not an assured statement either.

You shake your head and turn back towards the table. “It was nothing—”

Ormund watches you for a long moment. A fond smile twitches at the corners of his mouth as he ducks his head to catch your averted gaze. “You always look away when you lie. Did you know that?”

Your eyes snap to his on instinct. Your chest flares with a mixture of embarrassment and something that feels like intimacy, at the thought of being so noticed in such a small, simple way.

“Tell me,” he coaxes gently. “Tell it plain, however brutal it may be.”

You inhale deeply through your nose and try to will the words past the invisible hand around your throat. “I saw your death,” you waver and watch as his broad shoulders inflate with a breath he forgets to let go. “Here. At Tumbleton. Against a northern army— a bleeding man missing one arm.”

For a long moment, Ormund just looks at you. The edges of his eyes soften slightly just before his pink mouth curls into a slow smile. A laugh sputters from his lips all at once, more disbelieving than unkind.

“A one-armed man?” he repeats, aglow now with amusement. “I have fought hundreds of whole men and lived to tell it over supper afterward— I’m sure I can manage a rogue short one limb.”

When your weary look doesn’t soften to match his own ease, Ormund gentles again with a more sincere answer. “But… now that I know it, I can simply… step around it now. Can’t I?” he mutters. “Is that not the true use of your gift?”

You’re not all the way certain that’s how the “gift” works — if a dream can ever be undreamt — but you don’t tell him as much now. You’d much rather go on believing his truths over anyone else’s

“Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?” Ormund wonders quietly, brows lowering over his glimmering eyes. “Because of what you’ve seen?”

You nod once.

“And now… looking at me… do you see it still?”

You nod again, slower this time. 

For one blink, Ormund’s features go grey and slack before your eyes — his curls are matted to his forehead with blood, and his throat is cut open and weeping from a blade. Then you blink once more, and he’s Ormund again; whole and breathing and alive. The constant change is disorienting. You can never quite be sure, from one blink to the next, which face is truly his.

His broad hands rise to your face, cupping your jaw between his calloused palms with a gentleness that threatens to undo you completely. “I am here,” he tells you sternly, though his thumb smooths along your cheekbone much sweeter in comparison. “I am still whole, and I plan to stay that way for a great while yet— especially now that I know precisely what’s coming.”

You feel your hands reach up towards his own. You fold your fingers around his wrists and clutch him hard by the sleeves of his coat. You try hard to feel the steady thrum of his pulse under your touch, to remind yourself that his heart’s still beating.

“See?" he mutters. “I’m still here."

He draws you in and presses his forehead against yours. A whimper swells in the back of your throat at the foreign act of tenderness, though it turns into a stuttered breath on the way out.

Your eyes flutter shut as you breathe him in — the sun-fresh linen of his clothes, the sweet soap from his bath, the mint leaves on his breath. 

Ormund shifts slightly and turns his head until his nose brushes your hair, smelling of earthy dye and bathing oils. His eyes drift towards the narrow window and the sliver of blue sky beyond it; where Vhagar has not yet come, and where Rhaenyra’s dragons could appear at any moment.

“We could sit that throne,” he breathes suddenly into the quiet. “Daeron, as the rightful heir... Myself as his Hand… And you, at my side…”

You go very still against him.

“Think of it," Ormund presses. “A king who need not gamble at war the way every other fool king before him has— Rhaenyra sits a throne she cannot see one single day into. But we— We could sit together and never once be surprised by anything the world sends our way ever again."

Ormund draws back just far enough to look at you properly. His calloused hands are still tender on your cheeks, but something much more mad in comparison swims in his eyes now.

“We would bring the realm a peace it has not known since its creation. We could stop a war before it’s ever started— famine before the granaries empty— rebellions before the first man raises his sword.” The words tumble quickly from his mouth, as if he were seeing the future unfold behind his own eyes. “Daeron is kind; he’s righteous. He’d be the first king to sit that throne in a hundred years and truly deserve it… And we could help him restore peace to the Seven Kingdoms… Is that not what you want?"

“I don’t know what I want,” you waver, features crumpling under the weight of your burning tears as his face turns corpse again. “I just want it to stop—”

His expression gentles past his wonder, twisting sympathetically as he draws you back into him again. 

“Then let me make it stop,” Ormund mutters, tracing the bridge of your nose with the tip of his. “And if I cannot make it stop, at least let me carry it… So that you will never have to bear the weight of it alone again—”

He turns his head to swallow your mouth into a searing kiss. You sigh through your nose at the firm weight of it, and at the sweet-mint taste on his tongue when it finds yours in a long, languid lick. 

You hold him hard by the wrists and kiss him back even harder, burying all your withheld fears and desires into his mouth. His hands drop to your waist, and yours settle behind his neck on instinct, fingers toying at the auburn curls coiled at the nape of his neck.

Ormund guides you up from your seat and against the table’s edge without taking his lips off yours. The last of the scattered pieces fall to the ground as he urges you upon it, bending down over you until your back is flush against the cool oak below. Then he kisses down, down, down your body — smearing his lips along your jaw and neck and chest and the lace of your corset. 

You hear his knees hit the cobbles with a quiet thud, and feel his cold hands pushing your skirts up your warm inner thighs, right before his wet mouth kisses the most sensitive part of you. 

Your back arches off the table as your hands dart immediately to his curls, keeping him pressed against you there. A broken moan tumbles gracelessly from your mouth. It’s the first time in your life that you’ve ever felt almost human — held — whole.

[rawme-price]

No thoughts just alpha!ghost who has a fucked up taste in scents.

He doesn't care for the flowers, the sweets, the honey-warm notes in most potential partners. Whenever price huffs about some handsome little omega with a sweet scent, ghost nods along in feigned interest. He pretends to enjoy the typical scents because he knows the ridicule he'd face if he shared what really got him going.

Sour, sharp, so bitter they burn the back of his throat. Scents that reek of fear.

There's no excuse for it, really. He can't blame it on instincts, alphas want to protect their mates after all. Whatever is inside ghost that craves the hurt, the danger, the purely fucked-up is all him.

Maybe that's why he latches so tight when he meets you.

A soldier from a different unit, scent turned permanently bitter after too long in enemy possession. Prolonged trauma is known to warp pheromones, after all.

Most people have to grit their teeth and force themselves to talk to you. Your scent to off putting it sends their instincts scrambling. Trying to decipher what you mean when you are undeniably different from the standard.

You smell of terror. Of every bad thing that's happened to you, and for once someone isn't clawing at their skin to ignore it. For once someone, ghost, wants all of you.

It's like you were made for eachother, and neither of you are letting go.

Inspired by [this] post by @silverlullabies

[rhymewithrachel]

Totally non-regulation

[wyvern-whiskey]

😏

A fic inspired this

Full on Patreon🌚

[desk-drawerr]

He eat a nemon

[milkvetch114]

I Shut Her Wild, Wild Eyes With Kisses Four

Gwayne Hightower x Targaryen Princess Reader

𓏲ּ𝄢 𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: for four years you've stolen affection from ser gwayne hightower. kisses pressed to his cheek. fingers buried in his auburn hair. now you're finally betrothed, yet he remains as painfully chivalrous as ever, denying being pulled into an unwatched hallway or even a kiss despite his mischievous princess' every attempt to entice him.

𓏲ּ𝄢 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐬: smut, p with p, mild angst, fluff, heavy romance, swearing, poor gwayne, reader is a menace, yearning, making out, cunnilingus, thigh riding, 18+ MDNI

𓏲ּ𝄢 𝐚𝐧: reader is targaryen (rhaenyra’s younger sister)—no physical features are explicitly described other than targaryen features (purple eyes and silver hair since i couldn’t resist) title from freddie fox's droolworthy reading of Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci~ link

𓏲ּ𝄢 𝐰𝐜: 8.9k (oneshot)

Gwayne Hightower would not touch you.

It was beginning to feel like a punishment.

He was ever the attentive fiancée. He offered his arm when you walked. He held your waist to help you dismount Dreamfyre, but let go as soon as your riding boots brushed the floor. During feasts, he led you by the small of your back when the crowd pressed too closely, but he never allowed it to settle there. These many years you had been beside him, and he had never even stolen a kiss.

He spent four years before your match as your personal knight. And you had hardly been restrained with your affection for him then.

You pressed kisses to his cheek whenever he did something that pleased you. You threaded your fingers through his auburn hair when he knelt before you to fasten the ties of your riding boots. You touched him at any opportunity.  And now that he was your betrothed, your behavior grew tenfold.

You wore your lowest cut gowns, enough to earn disapproving stares from the maids, and leaned over tables when he stood across from you, asking what he thought of your rubies, baring your throat with the peak of your breasts.

A few goblets into any feast, you became a terror. You would catch Gwayne’s hand beneath the table and attempt to pull him toward abandoned halls, empty balconies, shadowed alcoves— anywhere private enough so that he might finally claim what was his.

He always followed where you led him. His fingers would close around yours. He would let you pull him from the hall, his long strides carrying him behind you without protest until the music dulled and the torchlight thinned. He followed until he realized what you planned. Then it was like trying to pull a stubborn mule by the rein.

"Princess…”

"Ser Gwayne." You would wrap your arms around his neck.

He would carefully peel them away. You would press yourself against him and feel, unmistakably, the hard outline of his cock against your stomach. Proof enough that he was not unaffected by you.

Sometimes his eyes closed as though he were praying through some private agony. His breath would leave him slowly through his nose. His large hands would settle upon your hips, warm and tight enough to make you ache beneath the silk.

But Gwayne always stepped away. He always peeled your hands from his clothes and returned you to the safety of the feast like some wayward child who had wandered too close to the fire.

Gwayne was too good a man. Too honorable. A knight who still believed in chivalry when half the realm treated it as a pretty lie told to maidens before men stuck themselves inside. He guarded your virtue more fiercely than you, refusing to take advantage of your wine-softened judgment no matter how you tempted and tormented him. Gwayne never allowed himself to ruin you.

It was the hottest day of the summer when you realized why.

You went to the training yard whenever the weather was warm. When the knights in their exertion would shed their shirts to continue their training. It was improper. This was explained to you endlessly by your ladies, your father, even your sister, but no one succeeded in stopping you.  You sat there for hours, watching as sweat ran down his throat and gathered along the hard planes of his chest. His auburn hair darkened at the temples. Broad through the shoulders, lean at the waist, his pale skin flushed from the sun.

You sat beneath a covered gallery with a cup of watered wine and made no effort to conceal your staring at only him.

Gwayne made every effort not to acknowledge it.

But the other knights did not conceal their interest in you. A young knight from the Reach bowed every time he passed the gallery. Another removed his shirt despite having done nothing strenuous enough to justify it. When one of them asked whether you might favor him with your ribbon for his next bout, Gwayne lowered his practice sword and looked at him.

“Ser Roland.”

“My lord?”

“If you possess enough breath to beg favours from the princess, you possess enough to continue.” Gwayne struck him hard enough to send the knight sprawling into the dust. When his opponent rose, Gwayne disarmed him so violently that both wooden swords cracked.

He never looked toward you, but the muscle jumping in his jaw was satisfaction enough. His jealousy was one of the few scraps you had. They were pitiful little things, but they proved Gwayne’s restraint was not disinterest.

When the training ended, you descended into the yard while the men washed and dressed. Gwayne’s shirt lay where he had left it. You only meant to collect it for him. That was all. A sweet, wifely gesture before you were properly his wife.

A ring slipped from the breast pocket when you lifted the linen.

It fell into the dust without a sound. It was gold, old enough that its surface had softened with years of wear. Small, delicate, made for a woman’s hand. A pale green stone rested in its setting, not bright like an emerald but gentle, almost clouded, with tiny filigree vines around the band. It looked like a humble version of your own betrothal ring on your finger set with purple sapphire.

Oh.

For months, perhaps longer, you had noticed him touching something inside that pocket. His fingers would disappear briefly beneath the edge of his doublet, finding something hidden there. You had caught him alone once, holding a small golden object in his palm and staring down at it with such a contemplative expression that you had quietly retreated before he noticed you.

You had wondered what it was. And now you knew. A woman’s wedding ring.

You looked toward Gwayne. He stood beside the well, speaking to another knight as water ran over his bare chest. He did not notice you.

Perhaps she was blonde. Oldtown seemed filled with golden women in your imagination, graceful and pious, with eyes as crystal blue as their waters. Likely she was the daughter of some landed knight, far too low for the son of Otto Hightower. She had to be beautiful.

Like your sister, Rhaenyra, you had been permitted your pick of the eligible men presented to you.

Ancient lords offered themselves beside sons younger than some of their horses. Heirs came from every corner of the realm, gathering at Driftmark until the corridors filled with unfamiliar banners and the stables groaned beneath the weight of their entourages. They waited in a line that curved through the great hall, each man eager for his chance to stand before you and explain why his blood was worth joining to yours.

You had sat on the throne of pale driftwood, made comfortable with plush white furs. Your skin polished with oils and perfume and your hair woven with pearls.

Your father’s advisor sat lower at your side, jabbering endlessly on about advantages in your ear.

The men themselves offered ships, armies, ancient blood, loyalty, gold, grain, any and every resource the crown had want for, they offered at your feet. Young and old praised your beauty, your intelligence, your lineage. You were the fairest daughter of the king. Truly befitting the title Jewel of the Realm. A true dragon amongst women. You rested your cheek on your fist.

One lord promised to give you six healthy sons despite appearing near death himself. Another recited the victories of every knight in his family since the Conquest. A young heir stumbled through a poem about your amethyst eyes, despite never having actually looked at your face since his attention was too caught at your breasts.

Then Gwayne stepped forward and bowed.

Your Gwayne. He was painfully handsome in the green finery of his House and silver jewelry; his auburn hair brushed back from his face.

“My princess, House Hightower has—"

“I accept.”

It was the first time you had spoken since the procession began. Silence spread across the hall.

Gwayne remained bent for a moment. When he lifted his head, his expression was almost comical. His eyes were wider than you had ever seen them, lips slightly parted.

“Princess,” the advisor beside you began cautiously, “perhaps you should consider—”

“Pray, consider what?” you turned on the man sharply. “House Hightower is among the oldest and wealthiest houses in the realm and Ser Gwayne’s father has served faithfully as Hand of the King for years.”

Otto Hightower was the worst of any power-hungry, conniving snake you’d ever witnessed, and his elder brother had only one son, Ormund. A cruel, volatile young man according to what Alicent heard from Gwayne. It was a matter of time before he befell accident and Gwayne would inherit Oldtown in his stead.

You had not spent years dreaming of Gwayne without considering what marriage to him would mean. You were besotted, not a fool.

“Every merchant vessel entering the Honeywine pays for the privilege. Every hold filled with silk, spice, wine, steel, or grain enriches House Hightower before its cargo ever reaches the market. Their wealth may not lie buried beneath a mountain like House Lannister’s, but trade does not run dry.”

You looked back to Gwayne, softening your voice. “I have always longed to see Oldtown. The most beautiful city in Westeros perfumed by endless flowers, I am told, and near enough I would be only two days by dragonback from my most precious sister. I think it a fine match.”

Gwayne looked at you.

You had begged him often enough for stories of Oldtown. Of the Hightower burning against the evening sky. The bells of the Starry Sept. Of the great markets along the Honeywine, crowded with merchants and sailors from half the known world. Of the city in spring and summer, when flowers climbed every wall and spilled from every garden until the streets seemed to burst with them. He always answered you patiently.

Otto coughed into his hand to poorly conceal his delight. He had already been presented and rejected before his son. He stood among the assembled lords looking every bit like a fat cat drowning in cream.

At the time you had thought Gwayne’s reaction adorable.

Now you felt like you were going to vomit—

He would not kiss you because he did not want to.

Gwayne had ceased being your personal protector once the betrothal was announced. A future husband could not stand alone outside your chambers at all hours without inviting questions about your virtue. And you— vain, witless creature that you were— found it romantic. You imagined him restless in his new rooms, him lying awake with the same ache that kept you from sleep.

All the while, he had been touching another woman’s ring through the fabric over his heart.

Suddenly every kindness he’d shown you spoiled beneath the memory of it.

He had been romantic, in his careful way. He remembered which flowers you liked and had them brought to your chambers when the gardens were bare. He stood beneath your balcony in the rain because you had fallen asleep under the covered daybed before dismissing him. He warmed your gloves before winter rides and carried sugared plums in his pocket because he knew you became more foul-tempered when hungry. After you rolled your ankle, he had carried you through half the Red Keep.

That was Gwayne’s particular cruelty. He was too good a man to be careless with you. Too honorable to let his reluctance become unkindness.

He had proposed because his father commanded it.

He was your knight only because he was commanded.

You had seen him joust the day your mother died. Alicent had spoken of her brother, how he was good. He was kind.

You had been lonely, half-wild with grief— you had seen your beautiful mother bleeding out in her bed. His blood in the mud. The unfairness. The helplessness of everything. You fixated upon him like a dragon with prey. You wanted him. You wanted him more than you'd ever wanted anything.

Viserys had always had a fatal weakness for his daughters. Jewels, hawks, gowns, ponies, sweetmeats, if either of you desired something, he rarely found the strength to refuse.

He was only seven-and-ten, already a knight. The scar beneath his left eye a neat line of black thread against pink swollen skin. He spoke his oaths to you. That day onward, his life belonged to you.

Perhaps someone had given the ring to him before he left. Perhaps he had intended to give it back with another promise.

Your stomach lurches painfully and you need to physically hold back the vomit, closing your mouth and constricting your throat.

His back was to you. You dropped his shirt back beneath the tree as though the linen had burned your hands. With no greeting nor blown kisses you turned on your heel.

You returned to your chambers, hand clenched around the ring until your nails drew blood. When you finally opened it, the delicate gold was stained red along one edge.

By twilight, you found Gwayne beneath the Heart Tree.

The sky above the walls had deepened to violet, the last of the sun caught in the highest windows of the Red Keep. Gwayne sat with his back against the pale trunk, his linen shirt only half-buttoned and his auburn hair disordered from the repeated drag of his hands through it. His doublet lay overturned across one knee. The contents of his pockets had been emptied onto the grass beside him

The sight of him scraped away much of the satisfaction you had carried with you.

The goldsmith had worked quickly when summoned by a princess. You had rejected three designs for chains before choosing one fine enough to disappear beneath Gwayne’s clothes, but strong enough that the ring would not be lost again. It was plain gold, without gems or needless ornament. Anything grander had seemed an insult to the modest woman you imagined once worn it.

Now, seeing the strain around his mouth and the bleakness in his eyes, you wished you had not taken it at all. “Gwayne.”

His head lifted sharply.

Relief came too quickly before he mastered it. He rose at once, brushing grass from his clothes, though his attention never left your face.

“My princess.”

You smiled despite the ache beneath your ribs. You had done something kind for him. That was what mattered. You brought the velvet pouch from behind your back and offered it to him. “I have something for you.”

He accepted it carefully, brows furrowed together.

The fine chain spilled over his palm, followed by the ring he had clearly spent the last several hours searching for like a madman. Relief broke naked across his face.  His shoulders lowered. His mouth parted on a breath.

“Forgive me.” Your voice came quieter now. “I should not have taken it.”

His eyes rose to yours.

“It fell from your shirt in the yard, and I feared you would lose it. You carry it loose in your pocket as though it were a copper.” You touched one finger to the chain in his hand. “Something so precious deserved better.”

“You had this made?”

You nodded. You would not be cruel enough to let him lose his last piece of her merely because you were a stupid, spoiled little bitch who imagined herself loved.

He looked at the chain again, thumb passing over the links with painful care.

Gwayne had always been good to you. Your blood was not made for gentleness, but he made you wish to be good back.

He was romantic in a hundred small ways. He gave you everything a good man might reasonably give a lady but withheld any single thing that would have allowed you to believe he wanted you as a man.

He slipped the chain over his head and tucked the ring beneath his shirt. It disappeared against his chest, settling exactly where you had intended— directly over his heart.

You looked at his face and wondered what kind of woman could place such grief there.

“She must have been very dear to you.”

Something changed in his expression. Love, certainly. Loss. A tenderness so old and deep that it appeared to have settled permanently into him.

“She was.” he said quietly. “More than I could ever explain.” His hand closed around the ring, “I miss her constantly.”

Something inside you broke like a final cut of a frayed thread. You clasped your hands together so he would not seem them shaking. You smiled once more, though it felt like stretching skin over a corpse. “It is late, I should return inside.”

He stepped toward you. “Allow me to escort you.”

“There is no need.”

“It is dark,” he reached for your hand.

You stepped away before he could touch it. The movement was small, no more than half a pace.

Still, his fingers stopped in the empty air between you. You pretended not to notice, giving a shallow curtsy, “good evening, Ser Gwayne.”

You had never addressed him so coldly in private before and his brown knit.

“My princess—”

You only turned on your heel.

You spent the two weeks before your wedding being haunted by a woman who did not possess a face.

You saw her in every maid with golden hair. Every noblewoman who giggled at something dry Gwayne had said. Every daughter of the Reach who lowered her lashes and found some reason to linger near him.

Sometimes she was blonde and gentle, pale as milk, with a soft voice made for prayer.

Sometimes she was dark-haired and bold. The sort of woman who might have met Gwayne in stables or beneath the shadow of the Hightower, pressing herself against him while he promised her a life he would never be permitted to give. You imagined he liked boldness if it was her.

Sometimes she had a full, romantic body that would have filled his hands beautifully. Sometimes she was slim-boned and graceful, made to stand beside him without making him look like a man burdened.

You imagined him kissing her without having to be begged. Following her into dark halls without stopping halfway to remember his honor. You imagined his hands closing around her waist because she was gentle and he wanted them there, rather than because she had been dismounting a dragon and needed help down.

You imagined him fucking her. The thought arrived most at night, vicious and detailed. Gwayne beneath another woman. Gwayne above her. His auburn hair disheveled through her fingers, his mouth open against her breast, his cock disappearing inside her body.

You became despondent.

The curtains remained drawn in your chambers. You did not rise until later and later in the day. Your meals sat untouched and stone cold or sent back to the kitchens.

Weeks’ worth of unopened gifts all from House Hightower sat piled high and collecting dust. The sent bouquets made your chambers smell of sweet moonblooms and died where they were placed because you would not allow your ladies to put them in water.

Far, far more had already been sent ahead to your soon-husband’s home in preparation for your arrival. You dreaded the thought of seeing any of it. You dreaded ever seeing Oldtown.

Your favorite gowns disappeared into the furthest reaches of your wardrobe. The low necklines Gwayne had once looked away from were replaced by collars worked high beneath your chin. You wore heavy embroidered silk despite the heat and sleeves buttoned at the wrist.

The first afternoon you appeared dressed like a particularly wealthy septa, Rhaenyra had choked on her watered-wine and kept staring like you'd grown a second head.

When you saw Gwayne later in the day, he eyed your gown as well. You gave him the same distant courtesy you might have offered any knight at court. “Good day, Ser Gwayne.”

You did not kiss his cheek. You did not touch his hair. When he offered his arm, you accepted because refusing would cause gossip. Your hand rested lightly upon his sleeve. Nothing more.

You addressed him only when courtesy required it.

Thank you, Ser Gwayne.

That will be all, Ser Gwayne.

You need not trouble yourself, Ser Gwayne.

Within two weeks, Rhaenyra had exhausted both her patience and her sympathy.

“You are ill,” she said, bursting into your chambers, despite it being the midday before your wedding, to find you still in bed. Your wedding gown hung ready for you against your painted screen. You spent the night and morning staring glumly at it.

Your sister planted both hands upon her hips.

“You do not attend the training yard. You have not spoken of your wedding, not with me or the planners. You have not tormented poor Ser Gwayne.” Her eyes narrowed. “And worst of all, you have not even been to see Dreamfyre in three days.”

You groaned, just wishing for her to go away. “I am not ill.”

"I swear to the gods, if you're pregnant out of wedlock—"

You dragged a pillow over your head. “I'm not pregnant, you bloody fool.”

There was a pause and you could feel her gaze burning a hole into your back. “Are you certain.”

“I would first need to actually bed him for that to be possible.”

Rhaenyra crossed the room in several quick strides and ripped the pillow from your face, staring down at you as if it was life and death. “You have not bedded him?”

You glare up at her, face scrunched.

“Your wedding is tomorrow. You have been betrothed for months. By the gods, what have you been doing all this time?”

You rolled away from her.

“Send for him. Have him take you. When the child arrives before the proper number of moons, we can claim it came early.”

You threw a pillow at her. “Are you deranged! I am still a maiden!”

She wore satisfaction like silk having managed to finally rile you for the first time in weeks. She sat heavily at the edge of your bed and laid atop you, her low back across yours. “Tell me.”

You did not want to. But there were no secrets allowed between you. And your sister was a relentless animal. She would remain atop you all day if necessary. She’d lie here till the end of time if it meant you would feel better.

“There is another woman.”

As you told your story, your sister’s expression did not change.  You didn’t expect her to understand. She has little interest in your brother-in-law, Laenor, which was hardly surprising considering he possessed even less interest in her entire sex.

“Ah. Well.” She nodded, resolved. “He has always made you too soft anyways. And now the solution is obvious,” her mouth curved faintly. “He will be your husband before the court. In private, you must do as I do. Occupy yourself elsewhere just as he will.”

Your stomach soured horribly again at the thought of another woman in his bed while you were married. But your thoughts moved toward her newest personal knight.

Ser Harwin “Breakbones” had become a frequent presence near your sister. Broad as a fortress wall, smiling too easily whenever she spoke. Due to your sister's scandalous stories, you were far more familiar with the way the man used his cock more than his actual personality.

“Such as your new occupation with Ser Harwin.”

Her smile widened. “Ser Harwin is certainly devoted to his duties.”

“I am certain he performs them tirelessly.”

“He has remarkable stamina.”

You laughed and you saw her face light in the way it always did when she managed to make you laugh. Then you saw the idea form in her head. A devious little spark.

Before you could object, she caught your face between both hands and smashed a kiss against your cheek. It was wet, loud and irritating.

You shoved at her shoulder, wiping her spit off. “Ugh! Get off me.”

“No more of this.” She declared.

“You are not queen yet. You cannot simply command my misery finished.”

She seized you again and smooshed another disgusting kiss upon your other cheek. “Tonight, we are going out.”

Your sister returned after dark.  She slipped through the hidden door behind the tapestry without knocking, wearing a rough brown tunic, loose breeches and boots that had been stolen from a stable boy. Her silver hair had been braided tightly and shoved beneath a dark wool cap, though several pale strands had already escaped around her temples.

She carried another bundle beneath one arm.

“Get dressed.”

It was far from the first time the two of you had escaped into the city. Within the hour, your hair had been crushed beneath a cap, your body hidden beneath coarse wool and Rhaenyra was pulling you through the city by the hand. It smelled like piss and roast meat and floral perfume poured over unwashed skin.

You drank first in a tavern where every table was sticky and the ale tasted as though it had been strained through an old boot. Then a brothel where sailors sang were loud and one of them narrowly missed vomiting into your lap.

You would learn later what happened inside the Red Keep.

A maid entered your chambers shortly before midnight and found the bed empty.

She panicked, searching everywhere you may have hidden in your chambers or the kitchens. All your ladies spent years watching you and Gwayne. if you were upset, they fetched him. When you caused mischief, he untangled it. When you disappeared, he always knew where to look. So, frantic, she burst directly into his chamber finding him halfway through removing his doublet.

"My lord," she gasped. "The princess... I—I cannot find her."

For one moment, he simply looked at her.

His mind rejected the words. You had retired hours ago. He had watched you leave the hall, dressed in dark blue, your throat covered to the chin. You had scarcely looked at him all evening.

“What do you mean, you cannot find her?”

The girl began to stammer. “Her bed is empty, my lord. Her ladies thought she was asleep. No one saw her leave, and the window is still locked, and I checked the solar, but she is not—”

“Who entered her rooms tonight?”

“No one, my lord. I swear it.”

“Who was stationed outside?”

“Ser Martyn and Ser Olyvar.”

“And they saw nothing?”

“No.”

“Then either they are liars or imbeciles.”

The maid’s eyes filled with tears at his harsh tone. Gwayne scarcely noticed. Fear had already taken hold of him, cold fingers sinking through flesh and curling around bone. You had been different for weeks. Quiet. So unlike yourself that he had begun to worry you had fallen ill, though every maester he sent to you insisted otherwise. You acted now with perfect courtesy to him. You looked at him as though he were a fucking stranger and it was driving him to madness.

Now your bed was empty.

“Say nothing of this,” he ordered.

The maid blinked. “My lord?”

"You will not wake the castle. You will not summon the guard. You will not speak a word of this unless I command it."

"But the princess—"

"Would be ruined before dawn if the Red Keep learned she vanished from her chambers the night before her wedding."

The words tasted foul. Vanished. The night before her wedding.

He had seen reluctant brides before. Girls wrapped in silk and pearls with red-rimmed eyes. He had pitied them. He never imagined you among them. Not after you had chosen him.

But you had retreated from him. And Gwayne couldn’t understand for the life of him why. He tried everything. He sent flowers, your favorite white moonblooms, roses, violets, and sweet peas till your chambers began to resemble a garden. Every morning your maids carried armfuls of dead flowers out. So jewels followed. Silver necklaces set with sapphire, emerald earrings, rubies meant to lie against the hollow of your throat. You wore none of them. He suffered through two hours with a court poet selecting syrupy verses he knew would make you tease him.

You only thanked him for the politeness shown by House Hightower.

You scarcely left your chambers anymore, and whenever he sought a private word, your ladies intercepted him with smiling excuses. The only place he ever truly saw you was at dinner and he couldn’t bloody well ask why you were no longer trying to entice his clothes off in front of the king.  

His last resort, he wore your silk favor around his wrist every morning in the yard. It was almost embarrassing.

A favour was meant for battle or a joust, not an ordinary afternoon in training. The other knights had noticed. One had smiled knowingly before Gwayne put him flat on his back in the dust. Dutifully, he tied your purple and green woven silk to his wrist every morning.

You always possessed some uncanny gift for appearing whenever he removed his shirt. Without fail he would look up from the yard to find you leering over the gallery, licking your lips like a cat— he, your cornered songbird.

But you never came. His heart fell everytime he glanced to the empty gallery and he was mottled with bruises because he kept glancing, failing to notice the blows coming to him.

He knew first where to search.

Dreamfyre’s enormous body rose and fell beneath the darkness of the Dragonpit, blue scales catching what little firelight reached her. When Gwayne approached, one golden eye opened and fixed upon him with displeasure.

He stopped well beyond reach of her jaws. He had known your dragon for four years. That did not make him foolish enough to mistake familiarity for safety.

Dreamfyre released a low rumble that vibrated through his ribs.

“I know,” he said, jumping back, “I very much dislike my being here as well.”

You had not fled the city. You would never have left without your dragon. You loved the beast with a devotion that was purely absurd considering she possessed teeth longer than his forearm and could swallow the both of you without chewing.

Relief came first. Then frustration. He had not spent four years enduring your mischief without learning that when you caused trouble, Rhaenyra was rarely far.

Gwayne closed his eyes “Seven fucking hells.”

The poppy den was warm enough to make your skin damp. Carpets covered every inch of the floor, stained with wine and ash. Smoke curled beneath the ceiling, sweet and burnt, thick enough to soften every face in the room. Men and women reclined against embroidered cushions with glassy eyes while servants moved between them carrying wine and pipes.

Neither of you smoked. You only liked the smell. You had drunk just enough to feel pleasantly warm without guaranteeing tomorrow's misery.

Rhaenyra sprawled beside you with one arm thrown over her eyes and one boot missing. You had no notion where it had gone.

A servant bent to refill your cup. His tunic hung open almost to his navel, displaying a great deal of smooth golden skin. Rhaenyra lifted her arm just enough to watch him leave. “Laenor would like him.”

“Laenor likes anything with a cock and a smile.”

“He is not so particular about the smile.”

Your laughter choked on your wine and burned as it came out of your nose.

Rhaenyra laughed so hard that she rolled onto her side, clutching her stomach.

You did not hear the door open. Gwayne stood at the entrance to the den, chest rising hard beneath his cloak. For the better part of an hour, he had searched every establishment Rhaenyra’s personal guard, Ser Cole, told him of. Dread sitting like lead in his stomach. He had imagined finding you in some alley with your throat cut open. Some filthy bastard laying hands where no man had leave to touch. He had imagined blood staining your silver hair.

He had not imagined you were lying facedown upon a stained carpet, cheeks flushed, drunk off your pretty little arse and laughing with your equally asinine sister

Then you turned your head and your laughter died.

Rhaenyra followed your stare. For several moments, no one moved.

He expected you to rise and come to him with an apology. You’d wear that sweet, sheepish little smile you used whenever your behaviour crossed the thin line between troublesome and outright criminal. You would hug his upper arm, press it to your breast and look up at him with fluttering lashes, telling him it had only been a bit of fun, Gwayne. And, as usual, he'd melt for you.

Instead, you and Rhaenyra looked at one another.

Something silent passed between you. You bolted in opposite directions.

Rhaenyra threw herself through the back entrance, her single boot abandoned somewhere behind her. Her laughter vanishing behind a hanging curtain.

You made it a few steps before Gwayne caught you around the middle.

A startled cry escaped you his arm locked across your stomach, crushing your back against his chest while you kicked uselessly.

“What,” he said against your ear, each word clipped with terrifying precision, “in the seven hells possessed you?”

“Unhand me this instant!” You struggled harder, trying to pry his arm from your waist.

Gwayne only tightened his grip. He had been imagining your throat opened because some Flea Bottom cunt had recognized the silver of your hair.

You drove your heel backward, narrowly missing his knee.

His patience ended.

He bent, caught you behind the knees and you shrieked as he threw you over his shoulder.

Blood rushed to your head. His shoulder dug beneath your ribs with every step as he walked out. You slapped both hands against his back and tried to force yourself upright, but the position gave you no leverage and you hung limp. Your cap slipped free and fell somewhere in the street white hair spilling nearly brushing his boots.

“Gwayne—!”

His hand struck the fat of your arse. It was not hard enough to truly hurt, but it stung even through your breeches, sharp enough to leave you frozen for one astonished breath.

Then outrage flooded you. “You fucking beast!”

Gwayne’s hand remained splayed across the backs of your thighs, keeping your flailing hips pinned against his shoulder.

“Compose yourself,” he said, voice dangerously calm, “If you kick me again, I shall take it as confirmation that the first correction was insufficient.”

“You would not dare.”

“Tonight has already proven that you greatly overestimate my patience.”

You kicked him again.

Gwayne halted. For one silent moment, his hand remained motionless against your thighs. Then he sighed through his nose. “As you wish.”

His palm cracked against your backside a second time. It landed harder than the first, not cruelly, but firmly enough that the sting bloomed hot beneath your breeches.

You gasped. “You—”

“Choose your next words carefully.”

“You sanctimonious cunt!”

You fought him the entire way back to the keep. You pounded your fists on his back and cursed his name, his House, and every Hightower ancestor unfortunate enough to have produced him. You threatened to have him dismissed, exiled, fed like a goat to dragons. When that failed, you informed him with crocodile tears that your ribs were breaking and he needed to put you down. He only huffed and shifted your hips higher upon his shoulder to take the pressure off, and you released a scream of pure frustration.

By the time he reached the hidden passage, his breathing had grown harsh, and sweat dampened the hair at his temples. Still, his hold never loosened. He endured your tantrum until you reached the concealed door behind the tapestry in your chambers. Gwayne shoved the panel open, strode inside, and threw you onto the bed.

You bounced on the mattress with a startled cry. He slammed the hidden door closed and turned upon you. You had never seen him so angry, never at you.

"What," he hissed, "possessed you?"

"It was only one evening."

"One evening in a brothel."

"A poppy den.” You crossed your arms, climbing to your knees on the bed. "Rhaenyra was only trying to give me a night of freedom."

"I do not care if she took you to the Starry Sept.” He looked at you with incredulous anger.

"The night before your wedding you went wandering Flea Bottom," he repeated, running his hand through his hair but saying the words slowly as if to make them sensible. "You could have been recognized. You could have been taken.” He scoffed. “Do you understand what men do to women they find unguarded in places like that? Do you understand what they would have done to you?”

“I do not belong to you yet, lord husband,” You snarled, “You forget to whom you speak, Ser.”

His face hardened. "I have forgotten nothing."

"Then remember our vows are not spoken till tomorrow. Until then, where I go and what I do are of no concern of yours."

“No concern—” His laugh was short and disbelieving. “I have spent the last hour searching Flea Bottom because you vanished from your bed, and you dare tell me you are no concern of mine?”

“You need not trouble yourself. By this time tomorrow, you will have all that was promised to you.”

Something in his expression shifted, though his anger remained. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“My hand. My name. Dragon’s blood for House Hightower.” Your face was inches from his, voice growing colder. “I shall stand beside you before the court. I shall leave for Oldtown when you commanded. I shall spread my legs and give whatever heirs your father expects of me."

Gwayne went utterly still.

You should have stopped. Instead, wounded pride drove the blade deeper. “Is that not enough?”

“Enough?” he repeated.

“You have never wanted anything more from me.”

He looked as if you had slapped him. “You believe that?” he asked.

“I assure you, I will perform my duty as well as you preform yours.”

Neither of you spoke. You only stared at one another, breathing hard. Then something in him seemed to crack, not into anger, but into exhaustion.

“You have not looked at me in two weeks.” His voice had gone quiet in a way that was worse than shouting. “If you cannot bear this match—if you cannot bear me—” He looked at you. “Tell me. Tell me plainly and I will find a way to undo it. I will fall on my sword before I see you miserable.”

Your throat tightened. Whatever anger had been there had quickly vanished. It hurt to look at the despair on his face.

"What would you have of me to ease this wretchedness I have must have done to you?”

You wanted. God you wanted. Just once before everything changed between you. Just once before he ceased to be your Gwayne when he returned to her.

You leaned up and pressed your lips against his. He was as still as a statue. You moved your mouth against his clumsily, pursing your lips together and then rubbing your lips against his. Gwayne still didn’t move. Your heart pounded painfully in your chest and your face flushed with embarrassment. Tears came to your eyes at his lack of reaction. When you pulled away you tried to hide your face from him. “I am so sorry.”

You still held him, your fingers buried in his hair, tears spilling freely down your cheeks. “I tried,” you say. “I swear I tried to be better.”

"I do not understand." You sobbed and tried to release him, but his hand caught your wrists keeping your palms pressed against his face though it was scrunched in confusion. "Sweetling, by the gods, what do you mean?”

“I tried to stop humiliating you. To stop touching you when you did not want me to. I know I have been selfish. I know what your father made you give up for this marriage.”

 His brow drew sharply together. “What did my father make me give up?”

“The woman in Oldtown.”

Silence.

“The what?”

“The ring,” you forced out. “The woman whose ring you carry. You said she was dearer to you than you could explain. You said you missed her constantly.”

For one long moment, Gwayne only stared. The misery of the past weeks lay suddenly naked before him. You thought—

Seven fucking hells.

You thought he belonged to another woman.

Gwayne’s fingers tightened around your wrist.

“I cannot—" your words dissolved around your broken breath. “I am not selfless. I cannot while you bed her. Gods watch her have your children. Please, Gwayne— please— I know you do not love me but please I cannot bear that—”

His mouth cut off your choked rambling.

The force of it bent you backward. His hands cupped your face, almost reverent in their gentleness, a startling contrast to the cruel hunger of his mouth. You made a suprised sound and he swallowed it.

For years he had imagined this.

Every night he stood outside your chambers, he imagined opening the door. He imagined finding you beneath the thin summer sheets, your nightgown rucked around your thighs, and finally taking what you had spent years offering him. Honour be damned, to hold you, press his lips to yours and finally bury himself in your slick, soft heat. Every indecent gown you wore he imagined throwing up your skirts and bending you over the nearest table until you forgot to laugh at him.

But you were his sweet princess. His beautiful love, innocent despite being a demon sent specifically to torment him. Despite what you believed, you did not truly understand the ugliness of men. He had spent years protecting you from his own indecency. He could not endure the thought of you looking upon him with fear or disgust if he acted.

But you were sobbing into his mouth because he had been so restrained that you actually believed he loved another, and Gwayne simply couldn't fucking bear it.

He had loved you since he was a squire visiting, unnoticed at the edge of your father’s yard. You had run right past him, silver hair amess, using your ruffled dress as a pouch for your stolen lemon cakes, your sister hot on your heel, not even noticing he existed. He still remembered the sound of your laughter.

Now you dared apologise for keeping him?

You cried harder.

Gwayne shushed you against your mouth, the sound low and ragged as he tried to soothe you but he did not stop. Each sob was cut short by another kiss. His tongue pushed between your lips with none of his usual courtesy, invading you so thoroughly that your fingers tightened painfully in his hair.

You whimpered.

The sound nearly ruined him. He dragged you closer until your thighs struck his, one hand sliding behind your neck to keep you where he wanted you. His tongue moved against yours with vulgar hunger, licking into your mouth. You only opened for him, trembling while he took and took.

When you finally choked on a breath, Gwayne tore his mouth away. Only an inch. Barely enough to let you gasp.

“The woman,” he whispered, kissing the corner of your lips. “Your supposed rival—” Another kiss. “My mother.”

You froze but Gwayne kissed again before you could reply.

“The ring belonged to my mother.”

His mouth moved over yours between each broken word, as though he could not force himself to leave you long enough to explain.

“She died when I was eight,” a kiss to your upper lip. “I loved her.”

You could not stop sobbing, whether from the wine or the relief or violent exhilaration of having his hands finally upon you.

Gwayne muttered an apology against your mouth, though nothing in the way he kissed you was sorry.

You coughed when his tongue pushed too deep. He drew back just enough for you to breathe, lips still brushing yours in small, feverish kisses, unwilling to surrender even that scrap of contact.

“I am sorry,” he whispered.

Kiss.

“Sweetling, breathe.”

Kiss.

You sniffled and turned your face away, overwhelmed by the rough scrape of his mouth tasing of salt from the humiliating tears covering you both.

Gwayne caught your chin. His fingers forced your face back toward him. Then he kissed your tightly pursed mouth again.

“I love you,” he said between kisses, “I love you. I love you.”

You laughed now against his mouth, still trying to kiss him back each time, still with wet cheeks.

"I should go," He said in between kisses, but he made no move to stand. 

You didn’t answer, just tugged him by his collar. You couldn’t let him go. Not now, not after this. The only thing you wanted was to spend this night together, in love. You press yourself against his body with frantic, clawing need to be closer, so that you could cut him open and bury yourself inside his skin. Maybe that would finally relieve that ache you felt within you every day. You rolled your hips, desperate and Gwayne immediately offered his leg without thinking.

Acting on instinct, you hitch your legs around him, and gasp at the sensation. His leg against your thighs and your clit rubbing him through the rough material of your trousers. The friction was exquisite and brutal all at once. You rocked against him, unsteady and wild, while his mouth gentled on yours— his hunger seemingly somewhat satiated by the sensation of you against his leg.

But soon the fabric began to burn, chafing your sensitive skin raw. “Gwayne,” you begged, voice fraying. “Please—it’s too rough.” You tightened your legs around him, holding on like you might drown. “I need—”

He understood, ever your valiant knight. He pulled back just enough to lay you down on the mattress, your body pliant beneath his hands. He tugged at your trousers, the burlap scraping one last time as he dragged them down your thighs.

He looked at you and the intensity of it nearly burned. His eyes raked over your slick, flushed cunt, the faint trembling of your naked thighs, the way your knees tried to edge together in reflexive shyness. His mouth fell open as if he’d never seen a woman before. He groaned as if wounded, “Gods be good.”

You giggled, face hot with the embarrassment of being seen for the first time. It was unbearable. You tried to cross your legs, but his palms eased them apart again with effortless strength.

“Don’t stare,” you whispered, throwing your arm over your eyes.

“You’re so beautiful.” Gwayne's gaze was on your face, dark at the cheeks and vulnerable for him.

He settled down between your legs. He kissed your thigh, then turned his head and kissed the other. He ventured higher and gave a soft bite to the sensitive skin and nosed at the spot before running his tongue over it. 

He didn't let you set the pace. When you tried to grind closer, he held you still, forcing you to let him savor. He sucked, he licked, he bit gently at your inner thighs, making sure every inch of soft flesh was marked before he even considered giving you what you desired.

“Husband, please”

As if to reward you for his new title, Gwayne brought his mouth to your center, until his nose was hovering above your clit. You felt him inhaling deeply and you yelped. His eyes were shut tight in bliss, as though committing the very scent of you to memory before he pressed a kiss to your mound. “Gods you’re soaked.”

The first swipe of his tongue was unlike anything you could have imagined. You gasped and slammed your hands down on the mattress. "Gwayne."

Gwayne moaned and pressed closer.

He took it slow at first, so slow you could have died from it. He licked at your entrance without ever quite dipping inside, just tasting the slick on his tongue. He kissed at your clit ever so gently, just to feel you shiver and moan under his lips. But when Gwayne finally, finally licked his way from your entrance up to your clit, the bastard avoided touching it directly with his tongue, instead swirling little circles around the pearl just for the sake of making you twitch and grab at his hair needily, practically humping his face the same way you had his thigh.

He didn’t allow you. One broad hand pinned your hips to your bed, still slowly licking up down and everywhere but where you needed him most. You were throbbing now, achingly empty, and Gwayne was only humming softly above your clit and slowly dancing his tongue in the spaces around it. Not content to let you get away from him without some form of punishment it seemed.

“Gwayne,” your fingers pulled at his auburn hair.

His green eyes opened looking up at you—a direct, flat stroke over your clit that made you gasp, your back bowing off the bed, your knees clamping around his ears as a shock of pure sensation ignited along your nerves.

The game was over. Now his tongue worked you in earnest, lavishing attention directly on your clit before straying from his patterns to trace the hooded flesh around it, only to return again with relentless, focused laps.

Obscene wet noises filled the room, making you shut eyes and turn your head away, body singing in pleasure, a delicious knot building fast in your belly.

But he pulled back and you practically sobbed, your fingers tightening in his hair as he said muffled and breathless against you, “Eyes, wife. Eyes back on me.”

He resumed again only after your eyes were locked on him, though your vision was watery.

His lips sealed around your clit, and he suckled on the bead with a careful mouth, not hard enough to bruise, but certainly hard enough to let the tight knot in your stomach peak and crash through you.

You screamed as you came, having to bite the flesh of your lip to keep from waking the entire keep. Your back arching tight and knees slamming shut around Gwayne’s ears. You couldn’t speak but you whined and Gwayne knowingly went back to licking broad stripes with his tongue, soft enough not to overwhelm you.

He kept licking until you pushed his head away, panting as you came down from your release. Watching the debauched act of him licking his lips, wiping off the excess slick with the back of his hand before his cheek rested, haggard on your thigh.

For a moment all you could do was lay there.

 "Was that it?" You ask dumbly. "Was that all?" 

Gwayne turned his head and gave a bite against your thigh.

"No," you laugh, pushing his head back as he continued placing punishing bites on your delicate skin. "I meant— will you not let me tend you?"

Rhaenyra had explained to you, in graphic detail, every act she knew to preform and you had always been eager to have him in your mouth, but right now, you could hardly remember how to articulate your own name.

Gwayne laughed and lifted his head. "I do know what you mean." He climbed up over your body and collapsed beside you.

Your fingers toyed with the lace of his breeches, but his hand lifted your knuckles to his lips. "Not tonight, sweetling." He took you into his arms and pulled you close.

You huffed at him and he laughed. “Patience.”

“I have waited far too long already,” you whined but were content enough to turn in his arms and tuck your head into his neck. "Can we not just find someone to marry us now?" 

He laughed. Gwayne wondered how you would react if he told you that he would take himself in hand and murmur your name, spilling over himself nearly every night for four year.

"I will marry you tomorrow, in the light of the Seven so all may know I didn’t steal you away in the night.”

He pet your hair and you preened. “Fine... but if you refuse to finally bed me afterwards, I shall lock you in with Dreamfyre and let her have her way with you instead."

Gwayne bit back a laugh. "I am at your service, my princess." 

You laughed again and as your eyes slowly closed to sleep, you felt him shift out from beneath you, and your hands fisted to his shirt.

"I must go," he said, gently unfurling your hands. "Before anyone wakes." 

"No, stay with me," you whined. 

He laughed softly. "Soon, my love, I promise." 

He kissed you once, twice, four times, before he pulled away from your grip and slid out of bed. 

And when tomorrow came, you two stood together before the altar of the Seven, dressed in white and green, the scent of beeswax and fresh flowers filling the sept. Sunlight poured through colored glass, bathing the marble in pools of ruby and sapphire. You cut one another's lips and were one with him, exactly as you had always been meant to be.

HOTD masterlist

𓏲ּ𝄢 𝐚𝐧: if you stayed this long, thank you thank you thank you!! this is my first fic i’m posting after a very, very long slump. I have more queued up and more in the works MWAH!

if you want to be in my tagged for any character i write for let me know :)

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[rottenbites]

CHAINS OF LOVE

CHAPTER ONE: SER MARK MULLENDORE

PAIRING: sworn protector!gwayne hightower x fem!targtower reader

SUMMARY: ser mark mullendore has been put to rest, leaving you defenseless and without a knight. your mother, queen alicent, remedies that quickly, finding you a new sworn protector who hits a little too close to home

WORD COUNT: 4.6k

AUTHORS NOTE: welcome to chains of love!!! i am so excited to start writing for gwayne and targtower!reader!!! it’s going to be a total roller coaster of emotions and feelings, and i can’t wait to get into it!!! this is also my first time writing asoiaf incest, so bare with me. this chapter also contains mentions of death and creepy, unwanted behaviour from men, so read at your own risk.

HIGH VALYRIAN IS IN ITALICS

ser mark mullendore took his last breath on the day of your twentieth name day. a testament to the years he spent protecting your life, harbouring a care for you as if you were his own kin.

the funeral pyre laid smokey in front of you; moonfyre, your midnight blue scaled dragon, swirling the sky over your head. it was only you in this barren field, your family and members of court and council not thinking it important that a man had died. mark came from a noble house in the reach, yet he had no family, and the families occupying the red keep, people he called his closest friends, didn’t seem to care about him.

it was only you honouring his death. the girl he called his daughter. the girl who he had been sworn to protect since she had turned six name days old. you stood in front of his wrapped body with a spine straight back, fire dancing across the gold of your silken dress as the mount holding mark’s body engulfed in flames. you had demanded a firm dracarys from moonfyre, yet your words had cracked, emotion blanketing the edges of your voice with a firm grasp.

this was a man who lifted you up easily and threw you over his shoulder when you were eight, catching you sneaking into the kitchens to thieve a batch of lemon cakes. that same man, who didn’t scold you harshly, yet shared a pastry with you and told you to not do it again, had died of sickness, and you would be damned to let people forget him.

“my princess!” a voice drifted through the air of the cliff, high pitched and squeaky in its announce. you lifted your tear stained face up from the pyre, taking in the sight of a young squire running up the grassy hill. you glared at the boy, not waiting for him to come closer before you unleashed your torrent of fury onto him.

“can’t you see i’m busy?!” you snapped, moonfyre growling and snapping her jaws behind you. the two of you were always in tuned. anytime you were grumpy, happy, or sad, moonfyre was similar, the dragon keepers being able to guess her mood for the day for all they would need is a moment with you and she was understood.

the squire halted a couple paces away from the burning body, a cherry hued blush on his cheeks as he wrung out his fingers in nervousness. people knew you were quick to temper, and it was never fun being on the receiving end. “i’m sorry, princess. it’s just that her grace — the queen, has called you back to the tourney grounds. it is your name day after all.”

a sneer rocked its way into your lips, eyes turning into slits as you stared at the squire with a molten glare. he shrunk under your gaze, not being able to hold a second of eye contact before he was shrinking into himself like a petulant child being caught on grounds they weren’t supposed to wander.

“ser mark has died,” you breathed, red hot anger radiating off of you in waves. if you were a dragon, fire would’ve been breathing from your lips, the fury coating your blood heating up your body and making you feel like you were going to explode. “i think it’s easy to understand that i don’t give a fuck about my name day, or the tourney for that matter. are you that daft that you cannot comprehend that?”

a deafening silence blankets the cliff as the squire shrinks even further into himself, mouth agape as he tries to come up with words to combat your snark. you stare at him with a raised brow, and before he can even utter a word, you snap at him again, words sharper and more cutthroat than before.

“that’s what i thought.” you say, crossing your arms over your chest before staring back down at the still burning body of mark mullendore. “you can leave now.”

“as you wish.” the squire scurries off before you can snap again, leaving you in a peaceful silence that is only interrupted by the beat of moonfyre’s wings. it dawns on you that this is what ser mark would’ve wanted. a serene moment for just himself and his daughter. the gods knew king viserys didn’t treat you as such, so what was a problem in stepping up?

a sigh tore from your lips, hands itching to touch ser marks sword withered skin. it didn’t matter how much he trained or how people called him a brute, ser mark was always kind and gentle with you, and you’d remember that until your dying breath.

no one had ever been as sweet to you as ser mark had. your parents were ghosts, your father melting away as your mother tried and pretended she cared, but you knew you weren’t her favourite deep down. your elder brother aegon was a drunk, too busy drowning in his cups and fucking whores to notice you. and when he did? he was cruel, making jabs at you that always left you wondering your worth.

helaena, your elder sister, was a sweet and gentle soul, but she liked to be by herself. sometimes you’d visit her and her children in her chambers, but she was always quiet, the visits usually spent with you playing with jaehaera and jaehaerys instead of talking with your sister.

your younger brothers, aemond and daeron, were vastly different, the latter having gone off to oldtown when he was very young, leaving you to only know snippets of his personality in letters you sent once every moon. from what you could gather, he was kind, and to you, a targaryen man known for his kindness was a good thing.

aemond was an enigma in his own, the one-eyed man more reserved and quiet than talkative. you guys bonded on the grounds of being the black sheep of the family, but aemond felt like he held a brighter candle to the name, sulking around corners and training to the sword with ser criston cole, a man who you loathed for no apparent reason other than he made your bones rattle with irritation.

it dawned on you at a young age that you held a syndrome only middle children could understand, the one where you felt left out even in a crowded room. it made you feel isolated as a kid, yet ser mark always made you feel seen, cheering you up when the trials of being a targaryen got too much.

now he was gone, and at the realization that you were invisible once again, a tear slipped down your cheek, a watery gasp leaving your lips as you clutched at your chest in agony.

“gods, ser.” you sobbed, holding onto your heart as it broke in your chest, the muscle feeling like it was spasming and burning all at once. “why did you leave me alone in this wretched world! it was supposed to be you and i forever, and i don’t know if i can live without you.”

behind you, moonfyre flew down in a fellow swoop, landing beside your shaking frame and nuzzling her snout into your chest. a shaken laugh left your lips, your head leaning down to lay on top of her nose, nuzzling into her deeply.

“i love you, my girl.” you breathed out the words in a soft breath, holding onto her a little tighter. the smoke was starting to make your head spin, and you knew it was time to go back to the tourney grounds before your mother sent a whole batch of kings guard to look for you.

with a sigh, you patted moonfyre’s neck, caressing her midnight blue scales before commanding to her deeply in high valyrian. “go back to the dragon pit,” you said firmly, backing away so the midnight monster could descend into the air and fly away towards her resting place.

a deep dread wallowed in your gut was you watched moonfyre fly away, your fingernails digging into the beds around your cuticles in worry. you didn’t want to leave ser mark, but you also knew he wouldn’t want you to hold back your life just for him. this thought made you sigh yet another breath, moving forward towards the noise of the tourney that was being celebrated in your name.

many minutes of aching feet and sniffling sobs finally led you to the tourney grounds, your eyes taking in the extravagance of all the tents and vendors that lined the field. you walked through with your head held high, the feeling of ser mark not behind you uncommon and saddening, yet you tried to get used to the feeling.

the royal pavilions came into view as you walked a little further, the sight before you complete and utter chaos. alicent stood frantic, her fingers twisting the green sleeves of her dress as she spoke harshly and sharply to her sworn protector and leader of the kings guard, ser criston cole, the rest of the white cloaks being spread around evenly. helaena sat on a bench beside the yawning mouth of the main pavilion, butterfly in hand as jaehaera and jaehaerys ran around wildly close by.

aegon was slumped over beside helaena, drunk off his arse even though it was only half past midday. aemond was nowhere to be seen, and you were certain he was probably off training somewhere.

your lips twisted in displeasure, the thought that you were abandoning ser mark for this terror one of pure unbridled anger. no words left your lips as the chaos ensued around you, and it wasn’t until your mother caught onto the sight of your silver curls and golden dress that she finally let go of all the tension that was building up in her shoulders.

alicent turned to ser criston and said a few more words before stalking over to you, her face a mask of anger as her dress billowed behind her in a storming fury. “where in the sevens name have you been?” she seethed, grabbing onto your upper arm with malice. her nails dug into your skin, and you felt a hiss leave your lips as she started tugging you towards the pavilion. “i’ve been worried off my wits for hours!”

a roll of your eyes had alicent digging her nails harder into your upper arm, leaving a gasp of pain to breach through your mouth. “don’t give me attitude, or i swear to the seven, i will send you to oldtown to become a septa!”

“i was on the cliffside by blackwater bay,” you mumbled, tripping over your slippers as your feet slid on the grass. “i laid ser mark to rest. a feat none of the imbeciles in this gods forsaken realm had the honour to do.”

a drunken laugh was heard from your left, your head whipping to the side to encounter a drunk yet somewhat coherent aegon. a lazy smirk was thrown on his face, disgust rolling in your gut as he eyed you up and down with the lustful eyes of a snake. “what’s with your incessant need to drone on about that mullendore nobody?” aegon slurred, gaze landing on your breasts with a smirk. “a good fuck would do you good. get your mind off that animal. you know which chambers to come to if you need aiding between your thighs, sister.”

“focus on your wife, you drunken craven!” a gasped yell left your lips, ripping your arm out of your mothers hold to charge at aegon. “and don’t speak of ser mark again! or i will cut off your cock and feed it to-“

“woah there, m’lady.” arms wrapped around your waist in a firm grip, your body spinning as the perpetrator pulled you away from aegon’s grinning frame. your arms clawed at your brother, glaring daggers and yelling curse words at aegon as the mystery man held you in a firm grip. “you mustn’t make a scene.”

a half scoff, half snort left your lips, spinning your head to glare at the stupid hedge knight who dare speak to you in such way. why wasn’t anyone stepping in? why wasn’t your mother calling the kings guard to unhand this treasonous man from you? it was all blinding, and you couldn’t help the sneer that blanketed your words.

“pardon me, ser. but if you don’t mind letting me the fuck go.” the words died in your throat as your lilac gaze caught onto that of warm brown, alabaster skin marred with freckles and soft auburn hair the only thing in your sight as you took in your captor. you knew now why your mother or the kings guard hadn’t acted, for the man holding you was non other than your uncle gwayne, proud knight of oldtown and a man you hadn’t seen since your tenth name day.

he’s grown in the decade since you last saw him. sharper, acute, and definitely more handsome than before. his eyes were wide, taking you in with a startled smile that rendered you speechless. he held you firm around the waist, fingers digging into the divots in your back as he pulled you away from aegon’s giggling frame. you could hear your mother sigh behind you, her fingers most definitely pinching her nose in exasperation.

“can you ever be proper, my dear?” she asked in a withered breath, auburn hair billowing behind her in the wind as she glared at aegon with sharp eyes. “gwayne. you can let my daughter go. and aegon. one more word from you and i’m enlisting constant surveillance around your chambers.”

aegon’s drunken protests were sparked on deaf ears as gwayne squeezed the flesh of your hips, smiling at you dashingly before letting you go all together. you fixed your wind swept silver curls, cursing yourself for deciding to go with your hair down today for it now resembled a birds nest. your lips blew at strands as you smoothed them down your head, doing the same motion to your rumpled dress before placing your hands on your hips and staring at gwayne with eyes thinned into slits.

“what are you doing here, dear uncle?” you asked suspiciously, watching as gwayne fixed his chest plate with a boyish grin. “you should be holding down the fort in oldtown. not halting me from attacking my disgrace of a brother.”

gwayne only laughed at your accusation, shaking his auburn hair out of his eyes before looking you up and down swiftly. it wasn’t leering or lustful in the way that aegon did it. gwayne seemed to be sweeping you for injuries, making sure his firm hold on you from earlier hadn’t harmed you.

“your mother hasn’t told you, i presume?” he questioned, looking past your shoulder to alicent with a raised brow. you whipped around at his remark, taking in your mothers too stoic face and knowing she was about to be the harbinger of bad news.

with another sigh, alicent reached forward and placed a hand on your shoulder, squeezing lightly before explaining what your uncle had meant. “i know you’ve been heartbroken by the sudden passing of ser mark,” she responded, his name on her tongue shooting a pang of sadness to your heart. “but you need a protector, my dear. you can’t go around unsupervised.”

gears starting winding and turning in your brain; gwayne’s sudden appearance. why he had rushed to save you when you charged aegon. it was all starting to make sense, and the realization had you letting out a dry, humorous laugh.

“no.” you stated firmly, moving your head back and forth between alicent and gwayne, taking in your mothers firm yet motherly stare and your uncles apathetic eyes. “mother! you’ve got to be joking.”

alicent squeezed your shoulder tighter, nails digging into the blade as a warning to stop acting like a brat. after five kids you would’ve thought she was trained well in deflating their temper tantrums, but you and your siblings all had targaryen blood running through your veins, and nothing could stop the swell of wrath that sparked when any of you got mad.

“it needs to be done,” alicent responded, looking around to see if anyone had caught onto the crowned princess throwing a fit. “ser mark had passed, and i trust little in the kings guard by my own sworn protector. gwayne is a fine enough choice, and he took this role was grace and apathy.”

you only scoffed, ripping your shoulder out of your mothers hold to spin around on your uncle. he stared at you wide eyed, taking in the fiery lilac embers of your eyes and the wild untamed energy that radiated off of you in waves. “ser mark just perished not even a fortnight ago,” you quipped, rounding on gwayne with the predatory act of a dragon. “you dare steal a dead man’s position?”

“there’s little to steal, princess.” ser criston thought it perfect to put in his two cents, a sneer sucker punching itself across your face as you whirled on him in fury. “he’s passed. the position isn’t his anymore.”

“i’m sorry, who the fuck asked for your opinion?” alicent gasped at your language, her cheeks flaming in anger. gwayne tried to hide his snicker, agreeing with you on your hatred for the knight. he’s heard about ser criston’s lack of honourable behaviour, detesting him for breaking his vows and becoming the thing the warrior would loath.

a crack sounded through the air as alicent slapped you across the cheek, your head snapping sideways as a red hot print latched itself onto your skin. a gasp was heard from her brother behind you, yet no reaction came your way, your head turning back to your mother as she glared at you deeply.

“you watch your tone, young lady. and stop acting like a petulant child.” her words were sharp, cutting into your skin like glass. you just glared at your mother, seeing the deepness of her aversion towards who you really were. alicent never really saw you, and because of this, she never saw your relationship with ser mark, not understanding why appointing you a new protector so soon made you upset.

a silence blankets over your small gathering, the only noise being the merchants and nobles wandering around camp. you just stare defiantly at your mother, waiting for her to make the next move.

alicent only sighs for the umpteenth time, looking past you to her brother who is wide eyed at the display you and your mother just made. “gwayne. please escort my daughter back to her chambers. she’s had a rough morning, and i think some rest would do her good.”

your defiant stare turns into an open gaping mouth, wide eyed and angry as your mother turns her back on you to talk again with ser criston. it was heartbreaking, being on the receiving end of your mother’s indifference. she only seemed to care for helaena these days, her favouritism clear as she shooed you away to your chambers on your own name day.

a soft hand blanketed your shoulder, the feeling almost comforting as you whirled around to see gwayne looking at you sadly, a soft smile on his lips that showed how much care he held for you.

“come, sweet niece,” he whispered, trying his best to keep his words low and out of earshot of alicent and ser criston. “let’s get you back to your chambers. i know you detest this tourney anyways.”

the kindness of his words seeped into your bones, making a warmth bloom underneath your skin. gwayne was always kind. he never picked favourites like your mother did, doling out his affections for each of his nieces and nephews evenly. if ser mark’s death wasn’t weighing heavy on your chest, you would’ve been glad that gwayne was your new protector, for his knightly virtues and honourable behaviour made him a good man.

with a defiant huff, you pushed aside that warmth in your chest, remembering ser mark and how it was supposed to be him with you right now. you fluttered past gwayne with the grace of a disgruntled fairy, dress swishing behind you as the wind lifted your silver hair.

gwayne hurried after you in measured steps, his armour clanking as he tried to keep your pace. nobles and common folk looked on earnestly and confused as the young princess tore through the camp grounds, her exasperated uncle following behind her. it was a sight for sore eyes, the whispers starting to already form.

“it’s been a while since i’ve made your acquaintance, princess.” gwayne’s voice was smooth, his attempt at trying to form small talk making you irritable. “you’ve grown into a fine young lady since our last meeting.”

“i was ten when i last encountered you,” the words that came out of your mouth were clipped, your head turning to the side to eye gwayne as you continued to walk towards the red keep. “it would be concerning if i didn’t grow.”

a huff of laughter left gwayne’s lips, his arms placed demurely behind his back. “you’re quick to wit, dear princess. i must say though, it evades my memory if you were always this smart tongued as a child.”

it was easily detectable to see the prying of gwayne’s questions, how he inquired cryptically on your upbringing, wondering on the difference between you then and you ten years later. a raise of your brow showed your knowledge of gwayne’s ulterior motives, your face passive as the red keep’s scarlet bricks came into view.

“growing up in my family leaves you moving down one of two paths,” you responded, the bustling sounds of stable boys and maids hitting your ears the closer you got to the castles yawning mouthed entrance. “either you become quiet and meek, or you become steeled and hardened. i learned early on the quietness gets you nowhere in life, so being a cruel bitch must do.”

a soft silence came over both you and your uncle, the only sound being the howling wind ghosting through your ears and over your skin. you looked over to gwayne to see a mask of thoughtfulness over his usual muted expression, his eyebrows drawn tight as he bit his lip and stared down at the rubbled sand beneath his feet.

“i don’t think your cruel.” gwayne’s words were finite, his bitten lip twisting as he stared head of you towards the halls of the red keep. “mouthy? yes. headstrong? definitely. but not cruel.”

laughter left you in a quick, loud shout, your head thrown back in merriment as gwayne stared at you with a smile, a soft yet quizzical look on his face. “what’s so funny, princess?”

“i’m sorry, uncle. it’s just that no one has ever spoken of me in such manner.” you grinned at him as you continued walking, silently taking in his ethereal beauty. gwayne was seriously gorgeous, and you realized that you don’t recall what he looked like from when you were ten. the only image you have of him is gwayne now; a godly beauty that is steadfast and strong in his words and actions.

it was refreshing, how gwayne didn’t diminish you like aegon did with his lewd words, or how he didn’t ignore your requests like your mother did. you weren’t fond of him taking ser mark’s place, but you could see yourself warming up to him in the future. for now, you’d stew in your anger, for it’s the only way you could hold onto your best friends memory.

gwayne shook his head, a grin on his face that rivalled the brightness of the sun. you could tell you were getting closer to your chambers, and some deep part of you didn’t want this conversation to end. “that’s too bad,” gwayne responded, spine straight and poise in a knightly manor. “i’m honoured to be the first one to acknowledge your kindness.”

“kindness?” you snorted, ignoring the spark of warmth that ignited in your stomach at gwayne’s words. “dear uncle, you just held me back from attacking my brother. how is that me demonstrating acts of kindness?”

a mask of displeasure twisted over gwayne’s face as you mentioned aegon, a soft sneer igniting on his lips that made you hold back a smirk. “don’t mouth this off to anyone but me, but aegon is far from honourable, and if your mother or that craven ser criston weren’t there, i would’ve let you get a few scratches in.”

more laughter danced from your lips, the knowledge that gwayne hated ser criston just as much as you did brightening. you spotted your chamber doors in the distance, sighing as you could now finally get some peace and quiet. talking to your uncle was all nice, yet the toll of putting ser mark to rest started weighing heavy on you, leaving your bones weary and your body in need of rest.

“well, i’m glad to hear that you’re on my side, dear uncle. but i fear it’s time for me to retire.” you stopped in front of your door with a wave of exhaustion, your eyes tired and your quick whit dwindling. gwayne only bowed his head in response, grabbing your free hand that wasn’t reaching for the door handle to bring it up to his mouth.

the kiss he placed on the back of your hand was delicate, one that sent shivers wracking through your bones. in this moment, it was hard to see this man as your uncle. in this moment, all you could see was a dashing man who treated you with respect. one who cherished you.

his lips lingered on your skin, their warmth leaving you in a trance even as he pulled away, staring at you with kind eyes.

“get some rest, darling niece.” he whispered, a unfamiliar cherry blush dancing across your cheeks. “and sorry for the loss of your old protector. i remember you mentioning his name was mark mullendore, and i can’t help but think back to meeting him at a tourney.” a smile dusted his lips, one of remembrance and good memories. “he was a fine knight, and i hope to protect and keep you unharmed to the degree that he upheld.”

with a reverent nod of his head, gwayne spun on his heel and moved back down the hall, your eyes following his purposeful gait before he turned a corner and you lost him.

something deep furled in your gut, and you didn’t know if it was his acknowledgement of ser mark, something not one singular person had done since his death, or that gwayne seemed steadfast in his protection of you. he was always a noble man, a follower of the seven and honourable enough to cover a whole army, but something in his words left tingles in your veins, a feeling you hadn’t felt since you developed a silly crush on a kitchen boy when you were twelve.

your hand clutched tightly onto the door handle of your chamber, mind reeling with emotions that hadn’t been unearthed since you were a girl. what you were feeling was dulcet, but it was forbidden, and that made your stomach clench so tight, you felt like you were going to be sick.

“seven hells.” you breathed, throwing your chamber door open and slamming it in a fellow swoosh, your body flinging itself onto your bed in agony.

this was going to be hell.

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MASTERLIST

[rhymewithrachel]

They tried to stop me from drawing ghost knight but they CANT

[synnicall]

Ormund Hightower has bewitched me body and soul so much so I feel possessed. I am enraptured by that emotionally unstable man I need him so desperately.

[lovebugism]

BLOOD OF MY BLOOD, KIN OF MY KIN ─── ormund hightower

summary: a glimpse into the years you and ormund raised daeron before the war took its toll, and all the years after. (10k)

characters: ormund hightower / wife!reader, daeron targaryen, alicent hightower, viserys i targaryen, mentions of rhaenyra and daemon

contents: established relationship, found family, domestic bliss, angst, hurt/comfort, protective!ormund, canon divergent, not proofread, cw for mentions of pregnancy complications and miscarriages, brief mentions of blood and gore, canon typical manipulation and psychosis from ormund towards the end lol

( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

115 A.C. / Oldtown

The bed is still warm from your blood on the morning the babe arrives.

It had not been quite two days since the maester had drawn the small, still shape of your daughter from you and told you, gently enough as not to break you further, that she had never drawn breath at all. You had told none of the household that you had been carrying her at all, save for the maesters and your closest of handmaidens — for you had learned, after the second loss, how courtiers feed on grief like vultures to carrion. So while you wept for days longer than your babe would ever live, the rest of Oldtown simply assumed that their lady had taken ill with a woman’s ailment, and kept to her rooms accordingly.

But today the King is coming, and your mother would surely turn in her early grave if she knew the lady she raised up planned to receive a king from a sickbed — pallid, unlaced, and undone.

“There is no harm in resting, my love,” Ormund coos from across the room, watching with attentive eyes as your handmaiden laces you into a gown of Hightower green. You keep yourself braced on the wooden back of a chair and grit your teeth with every tug, pulling carefully to conceal the subtle bump of your stomach.

The man tilts his head and crosses his arms over the chest of his emerald doublet, in a feeble attempt to extinguish the worry searing between his lungs. “Viserys is a king man. He will understand. Alicent, more than anyone, would understand—”

“And what has Alicent lost?” you argue, sharper than you intended. Your head whips hard to the side in time to find Ormund flinching beneath the bite of your words — a small flicker at the edges of his eyes; a brief lowering of his brows. 

You soften with a sigh a moment later and remind yourself that Ormund lost something too, even if the loss was not pulled from his body to claim it. 

“Forgive me, I… I only meant that… The Queen has four living children. And she carried each one with grace— There is no part of her that could possibly understand how I feel… And I wouldn’t wish it upon her besides.”

Ormund exhales through his nose and takes a step closer, boots scuffing the cobbles. “Then at least let me tell them that you are unwell—”

“No,” you dismiss with a shake of your stubborn head, eyes shutting briefly when the corset tightens again. “I refuse to be spoken of like some frail, ailing thing while the King sups at our table.”

Your gaze is wet with unshed tears when they open again, snapping to Ormund’s pale ones with a glimmering determination. “I am the Lady Hightower,” you tell him, brows raised and eyes firm. “So I will greet them standing. On my own feet. In my own home.”

Ormund’s chest, still heavy with grief, blooms with a distant sort of pride at your words. Perhaps because a part of him had long understood that you did not always dream of being the Lady Hightower. Your marriage was made of meetings and ledgers and alliances rather than any actual tenderness, as was true in most great marriages in Westeros. He knows, had you had it your way, you would’ve wed that gardener’s boy you grew up with — who you attempted to bring with you to Oldtown upon your betrothal, along with many of your household’s servants.

Ormund had the brawny, olive-skinned boy sent away within a fortnight — the moment he understood what kind of feelings the peasant boy had for you, and you for him. It was perhaps the first mad thing he ever did for you and, by Ormund’s later admission, the first time he realized that he might love you truly. (Though he had not thought it mad at the time, or love until many moons later, when he was struck with the sudden realization that the thought of Oldtown with you in it would be entirely unbearable.)

“Then we shall go,” Ormund nods in acquiescence as he plants himself just ahead of you. His gaze fixes into a sterner look a second later, as he tilts his chin to his chest and ducks into your eyeline. “But know I am not happy about this.”

“And yet Oldtown will remain standing anyway,” you joke in a softer coo. “I have faith that we’ll survive one of your unhappy mornings, my lord.”

The walk from your chambers to the gates of Oldtown is not long, but you feel every stone beneath your slippers as if the journey were some great pilgrimage across the whole of Westeros. 

You brace Ormund’s strong arm with both your hands, fingers curling into the fine wool of his coat hard enough to blanche your knuckles. He slows his long stride to match your smaller, more careful one without a word shared between you — a wall of green and muscles at your side, shielding you from the curious eyes of courtiers wondering why their lord and lady moved so slowly. So close.

It’s the first time you’ve tasted fresh air in three days. The breeze smells of the sea from the harbor and fish from the markets — mixing with the sweet citrus of the orange and lemon trees blooming in the gardens. Their white petals scatter like snow along the pale stone with every gust off the bay. You breathe in deeply through your nose, trying hopelessly to clear away the metallic tang of your own blood stubbornly clinging to the inside of your nostrils.

“His Grace, Viserys of House Targaryen,” the herald calls as the royal party files in on fine horses and gilded carriages, black banners snapping in the wind. “First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men.”

Viserys is the first to exit when the caravan finally stills. He descends the steps a knight places down for him, portlier than you remember from your last journey to King’s Landing, some years before your marriage. His kind face has started to wither from fatigue and age alike. The crown seems heavier upon his head, though perhaps it’s only from where his silver hair has started to thin at the scalp.

Alicent follows out just behind him. She wears a black dress with drooping sleeves and a veil to cover her long auburn curls, fit for a funeral procession. A knight of white armor and long black hair helps her descend the steps as she cradles a small, dark bundle squirming in protest in her arms.

You sink into a curtsy. A white-hot pain swells from the pit of your stomach to the top of your spine — a lightning strike that burns for minutes after. You grip Ormund’s arm until your fingers tremble, though the polite smile on your face remains when you rise again.

“Ormund,” Viserys greets with an easy smile. He clasps your husband’s free arm with a genuine affection while his tired eyes drift along the white stone towers of the city. “My… Oldtown is just as fair as I remember it.”

“I agree, Your Grace, though I confess I am far more partial,” Ormund responds with a dry humor and a knightly smile. “I hear the view improves the longer one is forced to stare at it.”

Viserys laughs while, beside him, Alicent tries and fails to summon her own. Her elegant features are worn from the weeks of travel, many of which you imagine were spent balancing the fussing weight concealed against her chest just now.

“And my lady…” Viserys inclines his silver head towards you, studying your face with a pair of kind eyes. “You look well.”

You feel, in a word, like death dressed in Hightower green. You feel hollowed out and stitched together again, the farthest thing from well. But you nod once and thank the King all the same, profoundly grateful when your voice doesn’t shake.

“Truly. Marriage suits you both well,” Viserys nods. “Though, I admit, I’d hope Daeron might have had a cousin or two near enough in age to grow up beside him here. Once he’s old enough for such things, of course.”

Ormund tenses beside you. 

His arm feels very suddenly like holding onto stone. His pale eyes turn glacial in a flicker; a withheld grief that he forces himself to swallow down the second it rises like bile in his throat. You say nothing at all. You just keep smiling and pray to whatever god will hear you that you do not weep in front of the King and all his men.

“But there’s still time— You’ll have one of your own before long, I’m sure of it,” the older man continues, possessing no notion of what had happened behind these walls hardly two days past. If he notices anything amiss, he does not dwell on it, and turns instead to Alicent. “Go on. Let them see the boy.”

Alicent’s arms tighten instinctively around the bundle in her grasp and inhales sharply through her nose. It had been her own decision that Daeron be sent to her family’s ancestral home. Her last child was not quite six months when she counseled her King to send him to ward, far from the chaos of King’s Landing. But she finds herself suddenly plagued by the harsh realization that this will be the last time she will hold this baby as he is now. The next time she’s like to lay eyes on him again, he’ll be an unrecognizable young boy, and not nearly the small thing fussing against her collarbone now.

“He hasn't slept," Alicent warns as she steps closer. Her green eyes are warm and weary when they flit to you. “He didn’t take well to the carriage. Or the ship. He’s cried the whole way from Blackwater, I think. Poor thing…”

“I’m sure we can manage a crying babe, my Queen,” Ormund says gently, though there’s a distant aching in his voice disguised as good humor that only you could recognize. “I grew up with Gwayne, if you remember. I’m more than acquainted with wailing boys by now.”

Alicent musters a small smile and closes the distance between you to settle her son in your arms. 

He’s warm — that’s the first thing you notice — he’s a small furnace swaddled in Targaryen black. He stirs briefly at the transfer from one chest to another, round face screwing tight in the prelude to a wail. Your heart clenches to brace yourself for that sound. It never comes.

The babe turns his face into the curve of your throat and settles into stillness with one small fist curled into the fabric of your gown. The tiny sound he makes isn’t a cry, but it isn’t quite a coo either. He sleeps, finally, in your arms — not even two days after you held your daughter between them, who had never awoken at all.

Ormund’s wide hand settles at the small of your back. Even in its steadiness, you feel the subtle tremor of his fingers against your spine. His throat tightens with the sudden urge to cry at the sight — of you, still frail and yet so bravely composed, cradling another woman’s child after laying your own to rest in the sept. He swallows through the hands of grief strangling his throat and feels a warmer feeling settling in its wake.

“Well…” Viserys hums, watching the baby sleep against you with a proud look in his weathered eyes. “It seems the boy’s found his corner of Oldtown already— Isn’t that lovely, Alicent?”

The woman nods, though shock still etches slightly in her pale features and behind the dark green of her eyes. “Of course, Your Grace,” she says and clears her throat, blinking back her tears with a queen’s practiced grace. “Thank you both for taking him.”

“He'll want for nothing here," Ormund swears with a firm nod. “You have my word. We'll raise him as if he were our own trueborn son.”

You pull the blanket gently back to peer at the sleeping baby swaddled within it. He’s practically all cheeks, with his mother’s mouth and nose. 

You had been certain, two days past, that your life had surely ended with your daughter’s. That there would be nothing more to life than a hollow, vacant silence. But now, there is warmth — and a babe’s slow breath fanning along your collarbone. 

You do not yet have a name for the foreign feeling swelling inside of you. It’s not joy, not yet, but it isn’t grief either. Or, at least, not only grief. And for now, that would have to be enough.

127 A.C. / Training Yard

The sound of clashing steel finds you before the sight of it does. The ring and scrape of blade on blade carries across the bustling courtyard, where you’ve gone to look for a young prince who was, as Maester Yorrick informed you with a palpable impatience, nearly an hour late for his lessons. You find the boy exactly where you imagined he would be — sword-training with his uncle, who has since stripped down to a pale tunic now darkened with sweat from the exercise.

Daeron, now thirteen years of age, is all knees and elbows from a sudden growth spurt that had taken him seemingly overnight. He presses a defensive attack upon his uncle with all the fierceness of a knight, but with the gracelessness of a teenage boy. Even you could tell from where you stood that his swing had no hope of landing. Ormund turns the blow aside with a lazy flick of his wrist, no more troublesome than swatting a fly from the air.

“Awful,” you hear the man scold from afar. When Daeron grits his teeth and presses forward once more, Ormund steps back and lets the boy’s momentum carry him a half stride too far. His blade misses his mark by inches. “Gods, that’s even worse—”

Daeron lunges a third time, fuelled now by a boyish rage that twists his freckled features. Ormund steps inside the overextended reach, hooks a boot around the boy’s ankle, and trips him onto the dirt with his blunted blade pressed to his ribs. Daeron hits the ground with a thud, red-faced and breathing heavy. His long auburn tendrils cling to his sweaty temple when he whips his head to glare up at his uncle.

“Dead,” Ormund proclaims from where he stands over the boy, flat but not totally unkind. He raises his brows and tilts his chin to his chest. “If this were a real sword, I’d have had your head before the thought to swing finished forming in that head of yours.”

Daeron twists himself upward and shoves the faux blade away with a boyish scowl. “You always say that,” he grumbles, refusing the hand Ormund extends to help him up. He rises to full height on his own and swipes dirt from his pale palms.

“Yes. I always say it because it's always true. You're thinking with your temper again— I can see it in your shoulders before you’ve even moved,” the older man lectures as he turns on the heel of his boot and walks off a few paces. “Again. And this time, think before you swing. Not after—” 

“I think that’s enough for this morning,” you call to them as you step further into the yard, dress skirts rushing around your ankles in the summer breeze. “Maester Yorrick has been waiting all morning. And his patience, unlike yours, my lord, has its limits.”

Daeron nods once, shoulders sagging with an absent relief. “Yes, ma’am—”

“Give us a few more minutes,” Ormund dismisses simultaneously. “He’s close to getting his footwork right. I can feel it.”

You flash the man a look — one slight lift of your brow, one flicker of dullness behind the eyes. Years of marriage have honed that wordless look to a firm edge, one which finds Ormund like a blade. He nods in concession with a heavy exhale through his nose.

“You heard her, boy. Go on,” Ormund says, jerking his chin toward the tower and extending his hand out for the practice sword.

Daeron obeys without question. He passes the dull blade over and crosses the yard to you. You see the sweat and dirt streaked across his freckled face the closer he gets. “Come here to me,” you sigh and catch his round chin between your thumb and forefinger when he plants himself ahead of you. You swipe the filth from his cheeks with the hem of your sleeve like you’ve done since he was small enough to fit in one arm.

“I’m not a child anymore, you know," Daeron reminds you with a childish grimace as he suffers your motherly affections. “I’m a squire now.”

“Oh, a squire, are you?” you croon in response with an obvious air of sarcasm. You smooth wild auburn hair from his temples before pressing a chaste kiss to his hairline. “Go on now— before Maester Yorrick decides to make you study your histories until sundown.” 

Daeron nods and ducks past you towards the tower stair, though you catch the corner of his pink mouth twitching upward into a grin before he’s turned away. You watch him leave with an attentive stare as Ormund discards the training swords at their posts. He approaches you in long, slow strides, allowing you to see the mark that training has left upon him — the way the sweat dampens his dark curls and the collar of his tunic, making the fabric stick to his broad shoulders and toned chest. 

He smells of sweet wine, musky bathing oils, and salty sweat when he towers just before you. He tips his chin to his chest and raises his brows to his hairline, pale eyes glimmering with an expectant look.

“…Well?” 

You blink up at him with a feigned innocence. “Well, what?”

“My kiss,” he answers with a shrug like it’s obvious, like he were a man coming to collect his debts. “You gave the boy his, and I’ve spent half the morning training him— I should think that I’ve earned at least that much.” 

“Oh, really?” you squint. “After you told the boy he’s like to lose his head?”

“I told him the truth,” Ormund argues with an unrepentant laugh and takes a slow step closer to you. “Is the truth unkind merely because it stings a little going down?” 

His hands splay along your waist, wide and warm along the edges of your corset. It takes everything in you not to cave for him right there, in the full view of the crowded courtyard. You cross your arms over your chest instead. “If you keep being so hard on him, he’ll grow to hate sword training altogether—”

“May be. But he will go on alive a good deal longer for having learned it the hard way now— instead of on a real field, with real steel, without me there to guide him.” Ormund ducks his head to catch your eye, pale gaze glimmering in time the pink smile tugging at his lips. “Surely you are not truly cross with me, my love…” he croons quietly.

You shrug with a raised chin, unwilling to concede so easily. “Perhaps I am.”

“Well, then, it’s hardly my doing,” he chuckles, a sound far warmer than the silver-gold sunshine sprawling over the courtyard. The pads of his thumbs smooth over your ribs in an absentminded affection. “You've gone so soft on the boy that you can scarcely bear to watch him lose a practice bout, without petting his hair over it after."

“Well, someone in this household has to be soft with him," you argue lightly, more teasing now than truly cross. Your slipper scrapes the dirt as you take a short step closer to him. What little distance remained between you closes now in an instant; each rise and fall of his chest brushes your folded arms. “You spend your mornings convincing the poor boy the world means to kill him, and I spend my nights convincing him that he could rule the world entire if he wished... Perhaps he’ll come out well-balanced for it, in the end.”

“Assuming one of us doesn’t kill the other over the method first,” Ormund quips.

“Precisely,” you nod.

“Well, I think it’s a fine system,” the man agrees gravely, drawing you an impossible inch closer by the hands still on your waist. His breath fans warm across your jaw as he leans in closer, still smelling of the mint leaves he’d chewed after breakfast. “And one I certainly intend to go on employing indefinitely… If my wife forgives me long enough to let me kiss her.”

His low voice glitters somewhere in the center of your chest. Your eyes narrow despite the small smile curling hopelessly at your mouth. “I don’t think I’ve yet decided,” you lilt.

“Well, I have,” he croons quietly, and does not wait for your retort before leaning down to press his lips against yours.

His broad nose flattens into the side of yours under the weight of his kiss, a slow and languid thing — as natural as the white waves ebbing and flowing against the pale stone tower of Oldtown. Your hands twist in his pale tunic billowing in the sea breeze, dissolving into the man like salt in water. 

There is nothing you would not forgive this man for, you think distantly to yourself. There is no madness he could not lead you toward, not if he kisses you like this the entire way there.

130 A.C. /  Ormund’s Solar

The raven arrives like all the rest — unceremoniously, on a sunless grey morning, from the trembling hands of the weathered maester. You tend to your needlework by the crackling hearth, burning low to fight off the morning chill blowing in from the sea, while Daeron reads in the opposite chair with one leg slung over the arm of it — both of you still waking with the early morning.

Across the room, Ormund sits at his desk and breaks the seal with a dull crack. Your gaze drifts to the man as he unrolls the letter, parchment whispering beneath his ringed fingers. You watch his pale eyes flit across the words once, and his brows lower in confusion a moment later. He shifts in his seat and reads it again, slower this time. His spine straightens with a soldier’s subconscious instinct as he draws a deep breath in and forgets to let it go. 

The quiet feels loud as it swells within the solar. The popping fire startles you briefly, as you get lost in Ormund’s wordless dread. You feel his silent panic as if it were your own. You rise from your seat and lay your needlework on the cushion behind you, careful not to trouble Daeron’s reading as you stroll to the man’s side.

“Ormund?” you call quietly to him. “Ormund— What does it say?”

He says nothing in response; he just lifts his ringed hand and passes you the parchment curled between his middle and forefinger. His eyes remained fixed on a negligible chip in the cobblestone wall across the room as you pluck the paper from his hand. His silence is not convincing; his silence, as you’ve learned in years of marriage, is far more frightening than any voice he could raise.  

Your eyes dart over the scrawled ink thrice over, just as he had, because your mind refuses to process the words on the first two passes.

“By the time this reaches you, the city has already fallen. Rhaenyra Targaryen holds King’s Landing and names herself Queen upon the Iron Throne. She has taken the Queen Dowager prisoner, as well as the King’s wife and last living heir. Send word of your household’s safety. Guard the boy.” 

The letters blur and steady and blur again, swimming before your eyes. Your blood runs cold while the glowing hearth simultaneously fills the room with a near-unbearable heat. As your breaths come faster and shallower to you, you hear a small voice call from behind you.

“Is something wrong?” Daeron wonders aloud as he glances up from the heavy novel in his lap. His auburn brows knit low over his green eyes, casting a faint shadow over his freckled cheeks, which are slowly starting to lose the softness of boyhood.

“Go on to your chambers, Daeron,” you tell him in a voice strangely steady compared to how shaken you feel. “It’s time to break your fast. I’ll have the servants fetch it for you.” 

“I’m not hungry,” the boy insists as he rises slowly from his chair, setting his book aside and walking slowly from the hearth. His eyes dart back and forth between your profile and Ormund’s when both of you refuse to look at him. His shoulders straighten with a strangling tension. “What’s happened? What does it say—?”

“Daeron,” Ormund snaps, voice cutting through the quiet room like a blade. His eyes are similarly sharp when they snap finally to the boy’s pleading once. “Listen to your mother, boy. Go.”

Mother, he says. The word lingers and hangs in the air for a long moment. Even in his newfound worry, Ormund’s eyes still flicker with a startled awareness at how easily the slip-up had escaped him, though there is little time to dwell on it now. 

Daeron's pink mouth parts with some half-formed protest at the ready. Whatever words he could conjure up on such short notice turn to dust on his tongue at the look his uncle gives him, chiseled features hardening into an unfeeling sort of look. Daeron exhales a held breath, gathers his book from his seat, and heads for the door without further argument.

Ormund’s knowing voice follows him out: “And don’t stand outside the door eavesdropping, either. Straight to your chambers. I'll know if you've stopped on the stair."

Only when the door shuts behind the boy with a soft click do your teary eyes lift from the parchment in your trembling hands. You say nothing for a long moment. The muffled sounds of the bustling castle fill the silence — the sounds of an oblivious world still living, though it feels a little like yours has stopped.

“I know," Ormund says before you’ve spoken, before you’ve needed to speak. “I know.”

“Okay,” you nod once. “So what are you going to do?”

He huffs a not-quite laugh. “I’ve only just found out about this. As have you,” he answers, a little sharper than he means to. “I’ll need a moment to think about the problem before you ask me to solve it, my love.” 

“A moment is no longer a luxury we have,” you argue, voice rising despite yourself and wavering on every syllable with a palpable fear. “Rhaenyra has dragons, Ormund— she has Daemon and three new bastard riders sworn to her besides. She does not need a moment to bring any of them to our door.”

Your dress skirt spins around your ankles when you turn suddenly in place. Ormund’s pale eyes follow your form as you storm back towards the hearth, ranting the whole way there.

“She will come for him, Ormund— not if, when. She will stop at nothing to silence any claim that challenges her own,” you continue, voice cracking under the weight of your unshed tears. “Daeron is a threat to her! Simply by breathing, he is a threat to her, and she will not leave him idling here out of some… familial courtesy for some half-brother she’s never met.”

The flame crackles quietly when you toss the letter into it. The wax seal blackens and weeps; the ink turns slowly to ash. You’d hoped that destroying those words might, in turn, settle the uneasy feeling they’ve brought you; but to no avail.

“I know that,” Ormund nods with a jaw clenched tight, ringed fingers curling into fists over his thighs beneath the desk. 

“Then think!” Your shout bounces off the cobbled walls as you turn to face him once more. His face blurs behind the burning tears clouding your vision. The swelling emotion thickens your voice as you yell to him, half-wild with a preemptive grief. “I have already buried children who never got to draw breath— I will not bury another who has drawn fifteen years of them under this roof! Do not let them take him, Ormund— I don't care what it costs. Do not let them our boy!”

Ormund’s chair scrapes the cobbles as he rises slowly to full height. He crosses the solar in slow, silent strides. Your glassy eyes stay locked with his as he nears. You peer stubbornly up at him from beneath your lashes, clumped with unshed tears; but you do not protest when his palms smooth over the outsides of your elbows to pull you into his arms. 

You melt hopelessly against his chest, fisting the back of his doublet in both hands, and trembling slowly as you choke down a sob. Ormund’s wide hands smooth along your back and feels his chest tighten with a striking, familiar ache. He thought once there was no worse sound in the world than hearing your weeping over a lost child; but he knows, now, that there is something equally as troubling: your weeping over a child you fear you’re about to lose and feeling like there is no time yet to stop it.

“I will not let anyone take him,” Ormunds promises evenly, with a distance that suggests he’s already assembling a plan in the depths of his mind. His arms curl tighter, pressing you harder against him. “I swear it to you. By the gods, they will not have our son.”

You pull back from him, just far enough to search his steady gaze with your wearier one. “But how?” you press weakly, more of a demand than a real question.

Ormund ponders for a long moment. The shadow of his adam’s apple rises and falls in his throat as he swallows. And when he speaks again, the words fall from his tongue flat and even, as if he were testing each one the moment they left his mouth.

“No one at court has laid eyes on the boy since he was a babe in arms…” he answers lowly, brows lifting to his hairline. “Alicent hasn’t seen him in years… There is no one outside these walls who would know what he looks like… So if they come— when they come… I suppose Rhaenryra would presume any silver-haired boy as Viserys’ heir.”

Your brows furrow as confusion twists slowly across your face.

“We’d only need enough lye and patience,” Ormund continues with a shrug. “And a boy willing enough to answer to a name that isn’t his, and to go with Rhaenyra, should her dragons come calling.”

You tense within his hold as the words run through you like ice-cold water. “You mean to… to send a different child in his place?”

“Yes,” Ormund answers instantly and without apology. “It isn’t a kind plan, I know. And I won’t pretend that someone else’s son won’t have to suffer for it, if it comes to pass, but… You did not ask me for a kind plan.”

You grieve the heat of his hands when he lifts them from your back, just to smooth his gently calloused palms over your jaw a moment later. He rubs the rough pads of his thumbs along your burning cheeks. You melt into his touch of warm velvet and peer up at him with teary eyes. Ormund’s gaze softens around the edges as his mouth lifts into a sad sort of smile.

“You asked me not to let them take our boy,” he continues lowly. “And however cruel it may be… this is but the only coin I have to buy that promise with.”

You know that a part of you should be horrified. You know what he is describing is a monstrous thing — an innocent boy’s whole life offered as a shield for another’s. You search deep within yourself to find that terror, but cannot seem to locate it. Instead, you find relief, like a crack of sunlight peeking through storm clouds — the very hint of a promise that your family was not long in the dying just yet.

“Do it,” you hear yourself say, shaking your head between his hands. “Whatever it costs… Whoever it costs… Do it.”

Ormund nods with a deep inhale through his nose, leaning forward to press his mouth to your hairline — to seal his promise with a kiss.

130 A.C. / Tumbleton Sept

Rhaenyra's dragonriders come for Daeron not nearly a fortnight into the army's march. Ormund sends the son of a merchant in his place — a boy of the right age and the right pale coloring, plucked quietly from Oldtown and dressed in borrowed finery before anyone thought to look twice. “Be brave, young prince," Ormund had said to the blanch-haired boy, only for show, though what he really meant was: “I will have your family hanged if you do not play your part.”

Ormund knelt before Daemon Targaryen and swore his fealty to the Queen, but marched on for Tumbleton the second the dragons took flight, all the shame. 

The chaos follows them there, too.

Daeron attempts to seek a momentary refuge in the foreign castle’s candlelit sept. A cramped chamber made of brown stone and hazy smoke from the flickering candles, where Tessarion grumbles in protest of captivity. The lack of sunlight has dulled her fluorescent blue scales, and has made her ill-tempered due to the lack of exercise. Daeron alone she allows close, pressing her great head into the boy’s small neck, and momentarily forgetting about the heavy chains around her throat when he pets her stony scales. 

Ormund finds him there. Ormund has a way of finding him anywhere. It is a gift and a curse, perhaps — comforting when Daeron was small and frightened of the dark; but less so now, when Daeron’s every attempt at solitude is interrupted by his uncle, constantly watching him as if he were a traitor to be surveilled and not his kin.

“I have warned you against indulging in affections for the best,” Ormund says as he approaches. The man cradles the boy's freckled cheeks in his wide, calloused palms despite Tessarion's low growl of warning.“You are a good boy,” he says, and in the very same breath, without losing the tender smile on his face: “You have a taint in your blood,” and “You must be king.”

Ormund makes less and less sense to him these days — the throes of war, Daeron supposes, though a part of him is frightened that it began long before that. 

Sometimes he thinks Ormund only makes sense when you’re near enough to translate his tangled, wild emotions back into something grounded and real. You’ve always had a way of gentling the man; usually with nothing more than a steady hand along his wrist to calm whatever storm had been moving within him. 

Daeron has seen you do it a hundred times over without ever quite understanding how. But he prays now for your swift return from the city, so that you might do it again — so that you might soften whatever unfamiliar thing has taken root in his uncle when he commands his soldiers to drag in the peasant man from earlier that afternoon. The one who broke Ser Garrick’s nose defending against his own wife’s assault; an act any decent lord would have called simple justice. 

Ormund draws his sword from its sheath at his hip. The hiss of the steel leaving the leather fills the small stone sept, loud enough to echo off the old walls that have likely seen a great many prayers and, Daeron suspects, not so very many murders. The older man turns the blade and offers the embellished hilt to the boy, pale eyes hardening when he hesitates.

“We have risked much and more to raise you up,” Ormund says, strong features twisting into something resembling offense. “Surely, you do not wish to disappoint us now.”

Us. Daeron is pulled into his uncle’s orbit at that single syllable alone; the unbearable thought of failing the only two people in this world who have ever troubled themselves to love him — one standing before him with a blade held out like a peace offering, and the other somewhere in the depths of the dark city but still steady on his mind all the same.

Daeron lays his palms out flat before his brain has fully comprehended the motion. He prays Ormund doesn’t notice how they tremble when he rests the sword upon them — the weight of the blade cold and heavy upon his fingers.

Daeron’s hands tremble around the ornate leather hilt of Ormund’s sword. His misty eyes find the prisoner kneeling just before him on the cold stone — bloodied and chained for a crime any noble man in Westeros would surely commit with honor — before glancing slowly to where his uncle looms behind him. Candlelight flickers in shades of orange-gold upon the man’s chiseled features, pooling a deep black in the hollows of his eyes.

“What would Mother think of this?” Daeron hears himself ask, voice cracking under the weight of the tears burning hot in the backs of his eyes. 

It is his last and most desperate attempt to reach for his uncle, just as he has seen you do, and to pull him back from the dangerous ledge he stands upon. But he knows the man has already made up his mind; and he knows that there is no version of him that walks out of this sept without spilling blood.

Ormund’s face softens slightly, though there is little tenderness in what he asks of the boy now. “Alicent would understand,” he coos in a gentle voice. “War asks difficult things of every great house—”

“I didn’t—” Daeron swallows hard, smaller now than moments before. “I did not mean the Lady Alicent…” 

Realization flashes across Ormund’s face — a visible recognition of exactly which woman the boy had meant, and has always meant every time the word slipped accidentally from his mouth and was never corrected for it after. Daeron was not yours by blood, but he was yours in every other way that matters. The small, warm weight of him stopped crying the moment he was placed into your arms fifteen years ago, and never truly stopped being yours since.

Still, Ormund does not soften for it. If anything, something in him hardens further as he takes a slow step closer to the boy.

“Your mother would be proud,” he answers, brows lowered as if the answer was the plainest thing in the world. “Don’t you see? Any strike against this army is a strike against her, against everything she’s built to keep you safe… Any man who raises his fist against our men raises it, in the end, against her… And do you not want to protect her, just as she has spent every day protecting you?”

Daeron swallows hard. The weight of Ormund’s words feels heavy in his throat, heavier than the blade in his hands as his trembling fingers tighten around its hilt. His teary green eyes linger on the steel, flickering shades of gold in the candlelight. 

“No, please, I beg you,” the battered prisoner rasps, dried blood matting at his curls from whatever rough handling had brought him here. “I have a family, my lord. Please—”

Daeron’s eyes lift to find the man’s pleading gaze and linger upon him for a long while. He sees your face in the very back of his mind, the only real mother he’s ever truly known, and hears Ormund’s disappointed voice layered over it as he draws the heavy blade back. 

Then he strikes. 

The cut is not clean. The blade lodges at an off angle in the man’s corded neck and sticks somewhere deep between flesh and bone. The man’s pained shout comes out wet and gargled, bouncing off the cobbled walls and in the depths of Daeron’s mind. 

The boy’s body flinches from what his own hand has done as bright crimson blood spouts from the gaping wound and splatters along the old stone. 

His face crumples as he removes the blade. It takes a world of strength in his thin arms to wrench it out again. A quiet whimper sounds in his throat when the blade drags against bone and stumbles backward when the man’s limp body collapses at his feet with a dull smack. Dark blood spreads slowly across the stone in a widening, glistening pool that catches the candlelight like moonlight on the bay.

Daeron looks down at the crimson dripping off the steel blade. He does not notice his uncle’s approach until his broader hands are gently guiding the sword from his fingers — fingers that no longer feel like his own. 

Ormund wipes the steel clean against the dead man's tunic, one side and then the other, with the methodical care of a man cleaning a hunting knife after a kill. He sheaths the blade back into its hilt and closes the remaining distance between him and the boy.

When Daeron’s mind finally returns to his body — ears still ringing, vision still hazy — his wide eyes snap to his uncle’s face and sees a quiet pride swimming in his features once more. It’s as comforting as it is horrifying. And when Ormund's strong arms wrap around the boy’s shoulders and draw him close to his chest, that feels like a dizzying concoction of the two even more so.

“I am proud of you, boy…” Ormund tells him as he leans in close, pressing his mouth to the boy’s hair in a near-kiss, though he whispers to him instead:  “Do not tell your mother of this. Understood?"

Daeron does not answer, though Ormund does not ask him for one now.

130 A.C.  /  Tumbleton Castle

You return to the castle late in the evening, weary down to your bones from the long day. 

You had gone into town with what coin and grain the army could spare, and found Lady Kat there among the frightened smallfolk, tending to the smith's wife, whose arm still sat bound in a rough splint. The woman's round face was kind, but you knew that no amount of offered bread or soft words could cure what comfort had been taken from her.

“Do you know where my husband is?” she had asked you before you left, with something desperate in her voice that made you wish you had a better answer than the only truthful one you could give.

“I’m sorry. I do not know," you told her, smiling in what sympathy you could muster, honest in your ignorance if nothing else.

The question sits strangely in your chest on the ride back to the castle, though you struggle to place exactly why.

Dinner is already laid out by the time you arrive. The long table is embellished with more food than Tumbleton's starving smallfolk have likely seen since the war began. The notion sits heavy in your stomach before you’ve even entered the dining hall, where Ormund rises from his seat to greet you. 

His warmth is striking, a shade too bright for the late hour. He presses a jeweled chalice of ale into your hand with a tender grin and a pair of soft eyes, asking after the wife and the town's wounded with an attentiveness he doesn’t usually spare for such small domestic accounts.

“Sit,” he tells you with one wide hand along the small of your back to urge you the short distance to the table. “You've had a long day, my love. Eat something before it goes cold."

Confusion floods your face at the emptiness beside your usual seat. “Where's Daeron? He hasn’t missed out on lemon cakes since he was old enough to chew them.”

“He's not feeling well. Best to let him rest,” Ormund answers with a polite smile as he pours himself a goblet of wine. His soft eyes flit between you and the glugging flagon. “Sit with me, love. I’m sure you’re half-starved yourself."

He sits down in his cushioned seat at the head of the long table and gestures for you to take yours. You remain stubbornly in place, because you know him far too well for anything else. Years of marriage have taught you every register of his voice; every flicker behind his eyes; every twitch in his features. And this one, all warm and careful and slightly too eager, is one you’d learned to trust least of all.

“What have you done?” you deadpan.

Ormund scoffs a breathless laugh, bouncing his broad shoulders in a shrug. “Why do you insist I’ve done something?” 

“Because I can hear it in your voice.”

Ormund huffs again, though it’s more of a sound of surprise than true laughter this time. “Well, I assure you, dear wife, I have done nothing at all.”

“Is that what will Daeron tell me?” you press. “When I go to his chambers and ask him myself?"

“He will tell you that I'm an excellent uncle and an even better husband," Ormund quips with his elbows propped on the table and his pointer fingers steepled together. “And also that you ought to sit down and eat your supper with your poor husband, before you go making a production out of a boy's upset stomach.”

You leave despite his words, led purely by the intuition swirling in your stomach that drags you directly to Daeron’s chamber door. You knock once and receive no answer — when the silence holds on the third try, you let yourself in and find the boy alone in his room, curled small on the edge of his bed in a way that strikes you deep in the chest; a reminder of that swaddled babe curled against your chest fifteen years past.

He does not look up when you enter, nor when you lower yourself gingerly onto the edge of the mattress beside him without a word. His shoulders shake in small, tight increments as he struggles to choke down his own sobs. He drags each breath in through his nose and holds it for a beat too long until it shudders out of him again.

He freezes when you lay a gentle hand on his shoulder, going rigid against whatever emotion he’s trying not to shake loose.

“What's happened, my love?" you coo to him, gentling your voice the way you might for a much younger child. “Tell me."

He shakes his auburn head against the pillow and sniffles to himself. “He told me I couldn't…"

“Who? Ormund?”  you press and feel a preemptive anger kindling hot in your chest before you’ve even heard the whole of it. “Well… Your uncle tells me a great many things that I’ve long since learned to ignore. So I imagine he can spare us the indulgence of a secret or two.”

After another shaky breath, Daeron pushes himself up from the mattress. He snivels wetly and wipes his flushed cheeks with the back of one hand. You smooth down his wild flaming tendrils until he finds the words to speak.

“The blacksmith…” he wavers. “The one who struck Ser Garrick this morning…”

Your stomach swirls with a sick feeling when he trails off. Your blood runs cold with a fear of what he might say next. You think instantly of the woman with the kind face and the splinted arm, asking so gently if you knew where her husband had run off to. You have to remind yourself to breathe again as you ask, “What of him?”

“Ormund made me…” Daeron’s breath catches in his throat with a horror reignited in the pit of his chest. “He said any strike against the army was a strike against the crown. Against me. Against you.” He forces each word out through unshed tears and feels half-furious at himself when his voice shatters. “He told me it would be a king’s justice. That it— that it would make you proud.”

The boy’s eyes lift to yours then, glassy and green and rimmed red. They dart back and forth over your face, searching for an ounce of comfort within it.

“Are you?” he asks in a voice barely above a whisper. “Proud of me, I mean.”

You nod until the words have climbed through the fear swelling in your throat.

“Of course I am,” you answer breathlessly, but with no hesitation at all despite the dread searing in your chest. “I have been proud of you since the day I met you. Nothing you could do— Nothing of what your uncle made you do could change that. And you did it, I have no doubt, because some part of you believed it would keep our family safe. Protecting the people you love, even when doing so costs so much, is no easy feat, my love. I know this better than you might think…” 

Your mind drifts to the pale-haired boy — the merchant’s son who was brown of hair before you found him. The boy who was borrowed and dressed up in a prince’s wardrobe and sent off to whatever fate Rhaenyra’s justice had in store for him. The boy who is very likely chained or worse for a crime that was never truly his, simply because you and Ormund decided his captivity was a fair trade for Daeron’s freedom.

Daeron watches your eyes well with tears of your own, and his freckled face crumples further at the thought of hurting you further. “I did not mean to make you sad…" he mutters with a wet gaze that flits between yours.

“You haven't," you tell him firmly, though your voice remains steady. You gather the boy into your arms and press your cheek against his hair, feeling his tear-stained cheeks wet the skin of your chest. “I’m not sad, my love. I promise. I only love you. That's all….”

You sit with him for a long while after that — until his breathing steadies and his shoulders lose their edge. Only then do you rise, with one last kiss to his forehead, and leave him to whatever uneasy slumber he can manage after what the long day had done to him.

You run into Ormund on your way down the long corridor. His broad form towers in the narrow passageway as his wide hands splay before him in confusion. “What’s taken you so long? Your dinner’s already gone cold.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Your shoulder scrapes along his arm as you shove by him with little affection. Ormund huffs and falls easily into step with you on his much longer legs. The two of you move through the stony corridors in a silent tension that grows with every step you take, torchlight guttering along the damp walls as you pass them. The words of an argument well in your throat the whole way to your chambers and refuse to break free until the door has shut finally behind you.

“I cannot believe you!” you shout, features twisted in anger. “How dare you tell my son to lie to me! After everything—"

Ormund shakes his head. “I only told him to spare you a grief that serves no purpose—"

“You told him to kill a man, Ormund! A smith. A husband.” The words come out through a jaw clenched tight. Your eyes glitter in the flickering candlelight with every one that spills from your mouth, hands gesticulating wildly at your sides. “I stood in that town not an hour ago and told his wife I didn't know where he was. And I didn't know, because you hadn't thought to tell me you hadn’t let him go at all! And now I have to carry that too, on top of everything else because you've decided I didn’t need to be troubled with it—”

“It’s war!” Ormund shouts, voice ringing through the cobbled walls. His handsome features harden instantly as he stares you down with emotionless pale eyes. His long fingers curl into fists before relaxing once more in a repeated cycle intended to calm him. “I will not apologize for teaching that boy what war requires of men who mean to survive it. For now, it’s only Ser Garrick’s broken nose, but we will have far worse than that done to us before this war is through. If Daeron doesn’t learn that now, he’s as good as dead—”

“He’s sixteen—”

“He’s the King's last trueborn son, with any righteous claim to the throne!” Ormund thunders over your teary retort, approaching you with long strides. “He is the rider of a dragon that is the only thing standing between this army and total ruin— What don’t you understand about that?”

Ormund towers over you at once. His firm hands close hard around your arms, keeping you close and unmoving before him. He ducks his head to your height, eyes darting wildly between yours.

“Do you think I enjoyed putting that sword in his hand?” he continues, quieter now. “Do you think I've slept easy a single night since we left Oldtown, knowing what I'm shaping him into— why I have to?”

You swallow hard through a tight throat, peering up at him through the tears clouding your vision. “I think you’ve decided his suffering is a fair price for war,” you waver. “And I think you decided that without asking me.”

“Yes,” Ormund nods without reservation. “I have decided a great many things without asking you first— I did not ask you first when I decided to blanch that stranger’s hair and send him off in Daeron’s place, did I? And yet you still thanked me for it with your words and body when it kept our boy breathing.”

His words tear right through your chest. You shake your head in protest of them even though you know that he’s right — that you are no better than Ormund even in his madness; that you would do worse and more for Daeron if the war called for it, if you were brave enough to do it. 

“Did I complain, all those years, when grief after grief left this house without an heir of its own blood?” Ormund goes on, quieter now but no less harsh, as his features twist in a stifled sort of anguish. “Did I complain when courtiers wondered in whispers why a man would stay wed to a wife that could not give him an heir?” 

You flinch at his words like you can feel them physically, tearing you from the inside out, though his long fingers caging you force you to stomach them.

“I never complained. Because I love you and because I understood it was no fault of your own,” Ormund continues. “So I have earned, I think, the right to make one hard choice without you looking at me as though I’ve become some monster for it.”

Anger pricks your skin beneath your heavy gown like needles.

It is not the unfairness of the blow of his words that sends you reeling, but rather the sheer astonishment at how low he has stooped in his fury — in his grief. It is, perhaps, the cruelest thing he’s ever said to you; made crueler still for how plainly he does not seem to recognize his own cruelty at all.

“Say that again,” you tell him in an emotionless monotone. “Say it plainly, exactly how you mean it— that you think I am some monster—”

“I didn’t mean…” Ormund huffs and hangs his head, tense shoulders dropping as the lingering anger slips from his skin like rain. “I am not saying this to be cruel— Gods know, I’d sooner cut out my own tongue before I meant any cruelty to you.”

His pale eyes are wet and soft again when they lift to meet yours. His hands loosen their grip on your arms as they lift to cradle your cheeks, softly calloused and warm like velvet along your blazing skin.

“Daeron is the only child either of us has been permitted to keep,” the man continues, softer now. “He is not merely a boy I love, though gods know I do, but he is the only proof that we were ever meant to be parents at all… After everything this life took from us in the trying… Do you understand what I’m telling you?"

“So what?” you press, voice breaking. “The only way he gets to stay ours is if he survives long enough to sit a throne? Is that the only way to remove the taint from his blood— that’s what you called it, right?”

Ormund softens further in the face of your anger.

“Without Aemond, without Vhagar, this army has no dragon to answer to whatever Rhaenyra sends against us next… But Daeron has Tessarion, and Daeron has a claim that half this army would follow into the fire itself,” he coos gently to you, as if anything louder might break you entirely. His thumbs smooth gently along your cheekbones, wiping away a tear that clings stubbornly to the burning skin there. “The war is coming here, my love. It is not a thing we can shield him from any longer. He is our only hope of surviving what is coming, and every bit his birthright to lead it."

“Surely…” you trail off in disbelief, wild eyes searching his bluer ones. “Surely you do not mean to make our child fight in this war."

“It is the will of the gods,” Ormund croons as if it were that simple.

Something in you knows, as each word spills from his mouth, that this is not a man reasoning clearly. You can hear it in the smoothness of his voice and in each too-quick answer on his tongue. And yet, you want more than anything for him to be right. You want it so badly it frightens you — for the gods to will this war’s end, for Ormund’s victory, for your son’s survival. 

You don’t realize you’re crying until Ormund draws you fully into his chest with one wide hand along your back and another cradling the back of your head. Tears fall from your lashes and wet the front of his emerald doublet.

“Listen to me…” he mutters into your hair. “If he sits that throne, no one in this realm could ever call him anything but ours. He is Viserys’s heir, yes, but he became a Hightower the moment you held him— and if he rules, no man will ever again whisper that he is not truly yours. He will restore ancient order to the throne. That is how we keep him.”

You shake your head in protest as you lean back from him again, just far enough to peer up at him with tear-heavy eyes. “Just bring him back to me,” you plead fiercely to him. “When this battle is done, I don't care what it costs you to manage it. Bring him back—”

“I will," Ormund nods with the same iron certainty that has carried you through every hard year of your marriage. “I swear it to you. I’ll bring him home—”

“And you,” you remind with a stern finger jabbed into the center of his chest. “You come back to me, too— I have buried enough of what I love in this life, Ormund. I will not bury another. You come back to me. Both of you.”

He nods and leans down to press his forehead against yours. Each of his heaving exhales through his nose fans warm across your chin.

“I will,” he breathes against you, thumbs sweeping again along your cheekbone. He shifts against you to brush the smallest of kisses to the bridge of your nose — so gentle that it makes you feel like crying. Your hands curl hard around his wrist to keep him close. “The gods owe us a debt. And we will see it repaid in full before this war is through, I promise you.”

You cling to the certainty in his voice the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood; the way a starving woman clings to the memory of her last full meal — you cling to him the way a grieving woman clings to the gods themselves.

[roxxmo]

custody of blood | part II

summary: the seventh day approaches, and you test ormund's restraint. pairing: ormund hightower x targtower!reader content/warnings: 18+ (mdni), SMUT, dubcon, pussy inspection, fingering, edging, orgasm denial, spanking with belt, male masturbation, forced bathing, nudity, voyeurism, slut-shaming, jealousy, aftercare (...i think?), physical intimidation/rough handling, DADDY ISSUES!!, emotional manipulation, religious abuse and religious guilt, canon-typical incest (cousins), age gap (~20 years), icky guardian/ward relationship, canon-typical misogyny, canon-divergent, no use of y/n word count: 12k (i blacked out around 5k tbh) A/N: surprise!! got this chapter out a bit early! guys...what has this man done to my psyche. i'm writing shit i am not even into but since it's him i'm WET!!! this is a long one and i tried my best to proofread, but i'm sure i've missed some things so apologies if it's a lil wonky! sooo thankful for all the love on part I and i hope part II meets your expectations! mr. roxxmo and i are moving houses (yay!) this weekend so that's why the final part of the series will be a bit later. will try to do headcannons or short oneshots if i have the time, and as usual, if i can get part III out before schedule i absolutely will! <3

← previous chapter MASTERLIST finale → (COMING 7/31)

The feast unfolded as such evenings always did.

Like the rest of the ancient tower, the Great Hall of the Hightower was composed of whitewashed limestone, its vaulted ceiling rising so high that you sometimes wondered where it ended. As children, you and the Hightower boys would race beneath it, shouting up to hear your voices echo through the chamber. Great tapestries of Hightower green adorned the walls, each depicting the house’s victories in battle alongside scenes devoted to the Faith of the Seven. No matter where you went in the Hightower, the Seven followed. 

Tonight, the hall was filled with noble houses from across the Reach. Lords and ladies moved between the long oak tables, drinking, laughing, and otherwise partaking in every sort of merriment before the coming days of tiresome discussions of taxes, grains, and preparations for the season’s harvest. 

You sat where you always did: at the head table, on Ormund’s right. In the very place once occupied by the late Lady Hightower. You had done everything he asked after the solar. Your women had pressed damp cloths to your tear-swollen eyes and pinched color back into your cheeks. They had laced you into the embroidered sky-blue gown Ormund preferred, its neckline high enough to preserve modesty, yet low enough that anyone seated too near might glimpse the suggestion of your bosom. You had been washed, gathered, and arranged once more into the woman he had made of you, with every trace of your momentary lapse carefully hidden away. 

Ormund had been pleased. He spoke none of Lord Godric Ashford or the excitement in the solar. He simply conducted himself as he usually did at such feasts, discussing philosophy and politics with the visiting lords, occasionally asking for your thoughts and praising you to anyone who would listen– commending how wise his ward was, how faithfully you attended the sept. All the while, his hand remained on your thigh beneath the table, squeezing gently as his thumb moved back and forth over the silk. Just as he usually did. 

This should have pleased you. His touch always did. Tonight, though, your mind was muddled with flashes of memories. 

The conversation with Lord Ashford you were not meant to hear. Ormund’s rings cutting into your face as he gripped your chin. The cool sheets of his bed twisted in your fists. His hand at your waist, his voice low as he hushed you and told you to be still. 

The seventh day. 

Following Lady Hightower in the Citadel, your small hand tucked in hers. Playing in the gardens with the Hightower boys. The letter from your queen mother coldly explaining why you could not visit the Red Keep on your sixteenth nameday. The burning pressure. Entering. Stretching. Confessing. 

The seventh day.

Ser Joldwin Mormont and the ashes of his fur-trimmed cloak. Lying across Ormund’s bare chest afterward, listening to the rhythmic beat of his heart. His lips against yours, tasting faintly of wine. Watching one of your siblings’ dragons fly overhead, its giant shadow blackening the earth. 

The seventh day. 

Being held. The knowledge you were never truly wanted. 

The seventh day.

“You are fidgeting.”

Ormund’s voice broke whatever spell your thoughts had cast over you.

You lowered your head. “I am sorry, my lord.”

Ormund hummed. Beneath the table, his hand shifted higher on your thigh, pressing into the soft flesh through the silk of your gown. The feast carried on around you, laughter mingling with the chords of lyres and flutes as they echoed through the Great Hall. No one could see the way their host groped you in plain sight. “Are you thinking of tonight?” 

Yes, you were. And of so much more. “No, my lord.” 

“You appear sad.” He leaned closer, his mouth brushing the shell of your ear, and you shivered. “Have you a reason to be?”

You shook your head quickly. “None, my lord.”

“Good,” he murmured. “Then stop pouting so unbecomingly before our guests and smile.”

You obeyed, because you always did. You arranged your lips into something soft and pleasant, as he liked. Ormund grinned in return and squeezed your thigh once more, hard. “Much better, my dear.”

“Lord Hightower! I do hope we are not intruding, but I simply had to introduce myself properly to your esteemed ward.”

Ormund’s hand stilled upon you, though he had not yet removed it. 

A broad, heavyset man stood before the head table, clad in a fine orange doublet. The wine cup in his hand was filled to the brim, sloshing around as he gestured. Drink had reddened his round, bearded face, and a crooked grin seemed fixed upon it. Behind him stood a tall young man with dark curly hair, fine features, and bright brown eyes. Those eyes were fixed entirely upon you. Something in his look sent warmth rushing into your cheeks.

“Lord Ashford,” Ormund greeted tensely. As the man drew nearer, Ormund briefly brushed one finger beneath his nose, the faintest crease appearing between his brows. “I was under the impression that only your son would attend the harvest feast this season. It is a… surprise to see you here as well.” 

“And miss the finest wine in the Reach?” Lord Ashford chortled, lifting his cup so enthusiastically that a little spilled over the rim and onto the marble floor. Ormund’s eye twitched as he looked at the puddle. “Of course I had to come.”

Lord Robert Ashford. You knew of him, if not the man himself. He was said to be kind, if somewhat silly, with a particular weakness for feasts and fine drink, but there was not one wicked thing about him. Which meant the young man standing behind him must be…

“And this is my son, Godric,” Lord Ashford continued, stepping to the side with a proud flourish to the young man behind him. “Though I understand the two of you require little introduction. He spoke with you earlier about a certain…someone, did he not, Lord Hightower?”

Godric coughed. “Father–”

“Oh, the boy has heard such wonderful things about the princess,” Lord Ashford went on, tipsy enough he was either failing to notice his son’s embarrassment or actively choosing to ignore it. “Her grace, her devotion to the Seven, and of course I would be remiss not to mention her beauty. I fear he has scarcely spoken of anything else since the prospect of betrothal was–”

“Father, please,” Godric interrupted him, a flush creeping above the collar of his doublet. “I am certain the princess has no wish to hear you recite every private conversation we have shared.”

Lord Ashford chuckled and clapped a broad hand against his son’s shoulder. “There is no shame in admiring a fine young lady. Nor, surely, in allowing two young people the opportunity to become better acquainted.”

Ormund’s fingers pressed so deeply into your thigh that you were certain they would leave marks. You did not dare look at him, though you imagined his face had gone terrifyingly blank.

Oblivious to the storm gathering beside you, Godric bowed. “It is an honor to meet you properly, Princess.”

Remembering Ormund’s warning in the solar– and with his hand still gripping you beneath the table– you offered Godric only the smallest inclination of your head before lowering your eyes once more.

“The honor is mine, my lord,” you murmured.

Godric smiled. Ormund, however, did not. 

“Lord Ashford, I am not sure if your son made you aware of the extent of our earlier discussion,” Ormund moved the hand that was on your thigh to the back of your chair. “He made his intentions sufficiently clear. As did I with him.”

Lord Ashford’s crooked smile lowered. “Well, yes…Godric did tell me some of the conversation. But I had hoped that perhaps, upon further reflection–”

“There is nothing upon which to reflect.”

Silence quickly consumed the small gathering at the head table. Ormund smiled urbanely, one hand still gripping the back of your chair. You felt caged. 

“Your admiration for my ward is noted, Lord Ashford,” Ormund said coolly. “You are certainly not the first to admire her, and I doubt you will be the last. But this match will not be considered.”

Humiliation ravaged you like a wildfire. You fixed your gaze on the grain of the table, afraid that if you looked up, the Ashfords would see the tears stinging your eyes. You wished– prayed– that they would go away. 

Ormund sighed and leaned back in his chair. At last, he released your chair and reached for his cup, lifting it with an air of studied levity. “Now then, I would hate to keep you from the wine you traveled so far to enjoy, Lord Ashford.”

“I– well, of course, Lord Hightower,” Robert stammered, plainly attempting to smooth over the moment. He summoned an easy smile, though it came out strained, and bowed low. “Thank you again for your gracious hospitality.” 

Godric’s eyes shifted between you and Ormund before he followed suit. “Lord Hightower. Princess.”

And then, finally, they were gone.

You exhaled shakily, blinking back tears. Ormund had already retrieved the pomander from his breeches and lifted it beneath his nose, breathing deeply. 

“Lord Ashford reeks of cheap wine and horse shit,” he grimaced, keeping the pomander close. “You should thank the Seven that you will not be sent away to live among such people.”

You had smelled neither cheap wine nor horse shit when the Ashfords stood before you. You wanted to tell him so. You wanted to tell him it was cruel to speak of them with such contempt when they had done nothing more than ask for your hand. Instead, you lowered your head. “Yes, my lord.”

Ormund’s eyes narrowed as he studied you over the silver pomander. His gaze moved from the wet shine of your eyes to the stiffness of your pouted lips to your quivering chin. He knew you more than anyone had or would ever know. He could see right through you. You knew it. For a second, it looked as if he was about to say something. 

A steward suddenly appeared at his shoulder. 

“My lord, Lord Uffering requests a private word regarding the grain levies before tomorrow’s council.”

“Lord Uffering can wait,” Ormund replied swiftly, eyes never leaving you. 

The steward shifted uneasily, wringing his hands. “Yes, my lord, but, erm…Lord Orme has joined him in the western gallery…and now they are disputing with each other. Quite loudly, I may add.”

Ormund exhaled hard through his nose. “If you could use your eyes, you would see that I am currently occupied.”

“Yes, my lord. But the matter is drawing attention, and…”

Ormund’s fingers tightened around the pomander before he finally lowered it. “Fine.”

He turned back to you, regarding you with such intensity that the clamor of the feast seemed to ebb around you. “You will remain seated here until I return.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“I will not be long.” His hand settled briefly at the nape of your neck, thumb pressing into the divot beneath your ear. “When I come back, we will retire for the evening.”

Your stomach churned. The seventh day.

“Y-yes, my lord,” you whispered.

Ormund held your gaze for another moment, as though searching for the truth only he could uncover. Then he withdrew his hand and rose from the table. You watched him follow the steward toward the western gallery and disappear beneath the archway.

The moment he was out of sight, the stiffness in your bones left you. You slumped in your chair and looked across the crowded Great Hall. The feast continued all around you– lords and ladies mingling, eating, drinking, laughing without a care. Without any knowledge of what these walls truly held.

Why did Ormund restrain you so? Why did he keep you from everyone? Why did he refuse to do the one thing expected of him as your guardian? You were of age. You were a woman in every sense. Would it not serve his interests as your kin to arrange a marriage for you? His sons had gone, and he had been widowed for years. Would it not suit him to be rid of you at last, free to take another wife of his own?

The thought made bile turn in your throat the moment it formed.

Why?

Why did the idea of Ormund with a wife make something sick and vicious twist inside you? Why was any of this happening?

Why was he so cruel? Why did you want him to be?

You understood, at least, his refusal of Aemond. Ormund had told you often enough what such a match meant: brother wed to sister, blood folded endlessly back into itself. Targaryen wickedness in its truest form. He would not permit you to remember that such customs belonged to your heritage as well.

But what of the others? Ser Joldwin, all those years ago, broad and steady and strong. The Martell boy. Every lord and heir who had been dismissed for some fault Ormund alone had deemed unforgivable. Perhaps each of them had shortcomings, that might have been true. But Godric seemed precisely the sort of man Ormund should have wanted for you– young, courteous, well-born, heir to a respectable house.

So what did Ormund want? To keep you as his ward forever? To hold you in his bed one night, kiss your mouth, and tell you how good you were, only to admonish you hours later for whatever sin he had decided lived inside you?

The ceaseless shifting in reality left you dizzy.

“Princess?”

So lost were you in thought that you had not noticed Lord Godric Ashford return to the head table and lower himself into the empty seat beside you.

You startled, and he immediately raised both hands in apology. “Forgive me, Princess. I did not mean to frighten you. I only hoped for a moment to speak with you, if I may?”

Your eyes flitted from Godric to the archway through which Ormund had disappeared. At any moment, he might return and find you speaking to the very man he had forbidden you to entertain. He would punish you, surely. The thought made something low in your belly begin to warm like embers. “Lord Godric, I…I am not certain it is proper for us to be speaking without a chaperone.”

Godric hesitated, glanced out over the crowded Great Hall, then looked back at you with a small, playful smile. “Surely a chaperone of a hundred feast guests would suffice?” 

Ormund would not think so. You bit your lip. You knew precisely what he would have you do. Turn up your nose at Godric and tell him you obeyed your guardian in all things. Then scurry obediently to Ormund and confess what had happened, so he might find some reason to bring about the end of House Ashford. 

But you always did what Ormund wanted. When had you last considered what you wanted?

The answer should have been simple. Godric was young, kind, and handsome. He wished to marry you. Surely this was what any young woman would want: to be admired by a good man and offered a life beyond the walls that had confined her.

Did you want to speak with him? Perhaps.

Or perhaps you only believed you ought to want it.

“I promise you, my lady, I shall do nothing to scandalize your reputation– aside from perhaps subjecting you to a few poor jokes.” Godric placed a hand solemnly over his heart. “I swear it upon my life.”

You could not help but giggle. You could scarcely remember the last time someone had been so light with you. Years ago, perhaps. “I believe you, Lord Godric.”

“Now my father, on the other hand…” Godric glanced towards the table where Lord Robert was engaging in a loud and animated recounting of some story, wine cup spilling with every exaggerated hand movement. Godric sighed. “He seems to be on the precipice of a scandal every time he steps foot out of Ashford. I am certain you could guess that from his earlier…revelations…which I should apologize again for.”

“There is no need to apologize. Your father was very kind.”

“Ah, you are being lenient with him. He can be a fool, but he is also my father, so I suppose that makes me one as well,” Godric chuckled, and his grin widened when you laughed with him. 

For a few moments, the two of you sat together and watched as Lord Robert continued his tale. Then Godric’s expression softened. 

“Did…Lord Hightower tell you anything of our conversation earlier?”

Your smile faltered. You remembered every word, pressed against the boarded door in that forgotten corridor. But you could hardly admit you listened to a conversation never intended for your ears. Or that Ormund refused you any true explanation of what happened. 

You chose your words carefully. “He told me only that you had spoken with him.”

“I see.”

“I do hope he was not unkind to you.”

“No more than might be expected of a man guarding something very precious to him.”

The words flooded you with warmth. Your gaze dropped to your hands, pressed into the sky-blue silk of your gown. The one Ormund chose for you. 

Godric continued, voice genuine. “Lord Hightower seems very protective of you, Princess.”

“He has always been so. Ormund is like a…a father to me.” You felt bile briefly rise in your throat. You swallowed it. “He took me in when I was just a girl. Oldtown is all I have ever known.”

“There is much virtue in that, my lady. A guardian should be concerned for his ward’s safety and reputation. Truly, I would think poorly of him if he were not. But…” He hesitated, glancing toward the western gallery before leaning nearer, his face suddenly gone serious. “You are no longer a child, Princess. And marriage, as you know, is not some minor matter to be settled without your input. A guardian may offer counsel, certainly, but I do not believe any woman should be forced into a marriage she does not desire…or denied one she might.”

You blinked at him, stunned. Ormund spoke of unsuitable bloodlines, weak heirs, vulgar fathers, and men whose intentions he did not trust. He spoke endlessly of what he would permit and what he would prevent. Never once had he asked what you desired. The concept was as foreign to you as Dothraki. 

Godric cleared his throat after a few seconds of silence. “Forgive me. I do not mean to speak against Lord Hightower.”

“N-no, no,” you stammered quickly. “You have said nothing wrong.”

He nodded, though concern lingered in his eyes. “Then may I ask you something else?”

You should have refused. You should have told him it was time to retire. You should have found Ormund. Instead, you found yourself nodding.

“Are you…happy here?”

The question struck you like a slap to the face. 

Happy? 

You had never considered it. Happiness was not a concept widely spoken of in the Hightower. Maybe there were moments. As a child, playing with the Hightower boys in the gardens. When Lady Hightower would sing you lullabies to sleep. Ormund’s bed, warm beneath you in the darkness. His lips against your brow when you memorized all your scripture. 

Moments that were fleeting. But moments that stuck. 

Then you thought of locked doors. Of punishments. Of Ormund’s voice, loud and raging, his mood shifting at the drop of a pin. Of the seventh day. Of sin. 

“I…” Your fingers tightened together in your lap. Would you confess? “I am…content.”

Godric did not appear shocked. Nor did he demand an explanation. He merely regarded you with a quiet sadness that made you feel more exposed than Ormund’s scrutiny ever had.

“I hope you will not think me forward, Princess, but I meant what I told Lord Hightower,” he said. There was a sincerity to him more pure than anything you knew possible. “I have heard nothing but good things of you, and what little time I have spent in your company has only made me wish to know you better.”

Warmth rose into your cheeks. 

“I cannot pretend to know whether you might ever desire such a match,” he continued. “But if you were willing, I would still like the opportunity to…entertain the prospect. If that is what you wished, of course.” 

Surely you should wish that. Surely you ought not to be thinking of Ormund’s hand gripping your thigh beneath the table. Surely you ought not to wonder what it would feel like if Ormund were the one offering you such a choice.

If he were asking you to be his.

Before you could respond, the musicians reached the end of their song. A livelier tune began almost at once, the beat of the drums rising above the conversations as couples moved toward the center of the hall. Godric glanced toward them, then stood. 

“Now, this may embarrass me so thoroughly that you decide to be rid of me altogether, but I must ask regardless.” He turned back to you and held out his hand. “Would you dance with me, Princess?”

You looked once more towards the archway. Ormund would return any second now. He would see you, dancing with Godric in front of the entire feast. He would see you being held by another man. If he did not kill you, he would surely kill Godric. 

“Yes,” you whispered, heart beating violently against your ribcage. You placed your hand in Godric’s. “I would.” 

Godric led you into the center of the hall crowded with dancing bodies, one hand holding yours while the other hovered near your waist, as though he feared even the smallest impropriety might send you fleeing back to the head table. 

“You should know,” he spoke loudly over the music as he guided you into the first turn, “that I was once declared the finest dancer in Ashford.”

“Oh, really?”

“Well…I was seven,” he admitted. “And the only competition was my sister, who could not yet walk. And the judge was my mother.”

Your laughter rang through the hall as he spun you beneath his arm and guided you back into step.

You should have been happy. You were dancing with a handsome young man who had made his interest in you plain. Godric was courteous. He kept his hands precisely where they belonged and made no attempt to grope or possess you. He complimented your dancing, whispered jokes near your ear, knew every step, and led you well.

Yet all you did was look over his shoulder, searching for Ormund.

Your gaze swept over every face, every couple, every archway. He was nowhere to be seen. Something inside you deflated and the realization came with a flush of shame: perhaps you were doing all of this for him. You wanted him to see you. You wanted him to want you. 

When the final notes rang through the hall, Godric drew you gently to a stop. Around you, the other dancers bowed and separated, their laughter mingling with the applause.

“I must say, my lady,” Godric was still slightly breathless from the dance, his hand holding yours lightly, “I think we make quite a fine pair of dancers.”

You blushed and lifted your free hand to smooth a few stray hairs from your face. You were about to say something, what exactly you could not remember, when a familiar, low voice spoke directly behind you.

“Lord Godric.”

You turned. 

Ormund stood only a few paces away, the crowd having parted around him. Conversations nearby were already quieting. His eyes, blue and still as a frozen pond, were fixed upon your intertwined hands. His face was empty. Terrifyingly, completely empty.

With sudden, perfect clarity, you knew you had gotten what you wished for. And you knew you had made the worst mistake of your life.

“Lord Hightower,” Godric said, his voice turning cautious. He followed Ormund’s gaze and untangled his fingers from yours. “I was only telling the princess that she is an excellent dancer. Whatever lessons you must have arranged for her–”

“Do you make a habit,” Ormund uttered, his voice carrying loudly enough to silence those nearest you, “of disrespecting your hosts?”

Godric blinked and glanced at the confused faces gathering around you. “...My lord?”

“Do you take me for a fool?”

“I– of course not, Lord Hightower.” Godric gave a nervous, uncertain laugh. “We were only dancing.”

“Dancing? Only dancing?” With slow, imposing steps, Ormund advanced into the center of the hall, closer to you. “No, Lord Godric, I think not. I think what you have done is force yourself upon my ward after being expressly forbidden to do so.”

Panic overtook Godric’s expression. “Lord Hightower, I-I did no such thing–”

“But you did, did you not?” Ormund continued, his composure making every word more horrible to endure. “I made my refusal perfectly clear. You pretended to accept my authority, and then, the moment my back was turned, you disregarded my wishes. You disrespected my house. You disrespected her.”

You wanted to interject and defend Godric. You wanted to cower behind Ormund. You did neither.

“You took advantage of her,” Ormund declared, gesturing toward you as though you were evidence to be presented before the hall. “You knew the princess to be quiet and kind. You knew she was too gently raised to humiliate you with a refusal before half the Reach. And so you waited until I was absent and imposed upon her courtesy.”

Godric’s face reddened with the pressure of the entire Great Hall watching this encounter unfold. “The princess agreed to dance with me. She wanted to.”

Ormund’s eyes shifted to you and the hall seemed to contract. Something sharp flickered in his gaze as he tilted his head. 

“Did she now?” he asked, so softly it was barely a whisper. 

Godric turned to you, an obvious plea in his expression for you to absolve him of whatever crime Ormund had laid at his feet before the assembled houses of the Reach. You felt as though you had committed treason against the Crown itself. No– worse than that. As though you had sinned beneath the very eyes of the Seven.

Contrition flooded you so completely that you could scarcely bear Ormund’s gaze. Instead, you fixed your eyes down at the marble floor of the Great Hall– the same floor you had once raced across as a child. 

“Is it true?” He stepped closer until the polished leather of his shoes entered your lowered vision. “Did you wish to dance with him?”

Your voice trembled when you finally answered. “...yes.”

Tears blurred the marble beneath you. Still, you forced yourself to lift your head. Ormund’s face had gone flat once more.

He regarded you for what seemed like minutes, then gave a single, measured nod, as though you had confirmed something he had already known. “I see.”

Ormund’s gaze lingered upon you for another awful moment before he turned toward the watching hall, putting his hand on your arm. His grip was tight. “The princess is plainly unwell,” he announced, his voice once again smooth and measured. “I fear the excitement of the evening has overtaken her.”

A few sympathetic murmurs moved through the crowd. You were unwell, but not for whatever reason Ormund was claiming. You simply kept your eyes fixed above the crowd and willed yourself not to start crying. 

“Please,” Ormund continued, offering the gathered guests his courteous, practiced smile that did not reach his eyes, “return to your dancing. There is no reason our feast should be interrupted.”

Then he looked to Godric. “You may rejoin your father.”

Godric’s mouth parted as though he might object, but whatever he saw in Ormund’s face silenced him. He bowed stiffly instead. “Of course, Lord Hightower.”

Ormund moved his hand from your arm to the small of your back. “Come, my dear. I believe it is time to retire for the night.”

You allowed him to steer you through the parting crowd and out of the Great Hall. By the time the noise of the feast had faded behind you, you were sniveling like a pathetic child. Nothing remained but the sharp echo of Ormund’s footsteps and the hurried patter of your own as you struggled to match his long strides through the stone corridor.

Perhaps you should apologize. Perhaps you should explain yourself. If you could only make him understand, then perhaps he would–

Your head snapped backward.

A cry tore from your throat as Ormund seized a fistful of your hair and wrenched you toward him. You stumbled helplessly beneath his grip, dragged backward until your spine struck the stone wall.

“You fucking insolent slut,” he hissed. His fist tightened against your scalp, wrenching your head back until tears sprang anew to your eyes. “I cannot leave you out of my sight for a single minute before you whore yourself before a hall full of lords?”

He yanked again and the back of your head struck the stone with a dull crack. You clawed at his wrist, desperate to relieve the searing pull at your roots, but he twisted easily beyond your grasp.

“O-Ormund, I am– I did not–” you sobbed, reaching for him again.

His grip only tightened. You felt strands of hair pull and snap beneath his fingers.

“Please,” you cried. “It hurts–!”

“I have given everything to raise you. Everything.” Ormund spat the words, flecks of spittle striking your cheeks. “My house. My food. My protection. My own bed. All I have ever asked of you is obedience and respect.” He wrenched your head farther back. “And this is how I am repaid? You make a cuckold of me before half the Reach, shamelessly flaunting yourself for some boy?”

“It was only– we only danced–”

“You might as well have sucked his cock in the Great Hall.” His body crushed yours against the wall until you were flattened beneath his weight, the scabbard of his sword digging painfully into your hip. “Is that what you wanted to do? Hmm? You accomplished so much in the little while I was gone. Perhaps you did that as well.”

Your face flushed in shame as you gasped at his words. “No, Ormund! No–”

He leaned closer until his face hovered mere inches from yours, pure vitriol burning in his eyes. Ormund’s fist remained tangled in your hair, holding you helplessly in place. Then, suddenly, he froze. The fury in him shifted as he lowered his head, the bridge of his nose grazing your jaw. 

He breathed in. Ormund’s face twisted at once with disgust, as though he were suppressing the urge to gag. “You smell of him.”

A broken sob escaped you, your scalp still burning beneath his grip. There was no reasoning with him. Still, your heart twisted, and you tried. “I b-barely touched him, my lord. Please. You must believe me!”

The muscle in Ormund’s jaw flexed. Without warning, he wrenched you away from the wall and dragged you after him. His pace quickened as he marched you through the corridor, forcing you to stumble in order to keep from being pulled from your feet. Servants flattened themselves against the walls at the sight of him– the master of the Hightower hauling a princess of the realm by her hair while she sniveled and sobbed behind him. None dared intervene. They only lowered their eyes and stepped aside.

“You are an ungrateful, treacherous brat,” Ormund growled. “You may lie to me. You may lie before every lord in that hall. You may even kneel in the sept and lie beneath the faces of the Seven.” He shoved open the door to his bedchamber and pulled you inside. “But the Father sees what is hidden.”

The door slammed shut behind you. Ormund released your hair only to seize the back of your neck. Though the force of his grip kept your head fixed, your eyes shifted toward the bed, already knowing what would come next.

Instead, he steered you toward the adjoining bathing chamber and threw open the door. Heat and steam billowed from within. Servants still moved around the claw-footed tub, pouring steaming, scented water from brass ewers. At the sight of Ormund storming inside with you trapped beneath his hand, they startled and pressed themselves against the tiled walls. 

“The Father judges every falsehood,” Ormund continued, his mouth close to your ear. “Every wicked thought. Every secret desire.”

“I did not–”

“Do not lie to me again.” His fingers dug harder into your neck. “You may deny it until your tongue rots in your mouth, but your body has already betrayed you.”

Ormund lowered his face once more, breathing against your hair, your cheek, the bare skin above your collar. A shudder of revulsion passed through him. “His stink is everywhere.”

He dragged you toward the filled tub. “You will wash it off.”

One of the servants, an older woman with a weathered face, hesitantly stepped forward. “My lord, we were not expecting the princess until later. The water is still too hot–”

Ormund’s head snapped toward her, his gaze blazing. “Leave. At once.”

The servants did not argue. They bowed hurriedly, abandoned the remaining ewers, and fled from the chamber. You did not blame them. For who would want to defend you, who had so obviously sinned before your lord?

Ormund pushed you towards the tub. “Undress.”

You did not move. You could not. Perhaps Ormund had seen glimpses of you before, the shape of your body beneath the sheer nightgowns he often gifted you, the outline of your breasts when candlelight illuminated the fabric. But those moments belonged to the night, in the darkness, when you could tell yourself his eyes were closed or turned elsewhere. 

You had never stood naked before your guardian. 

Your hair hung tangled around your face, scalp still throbbing where he had pulled. Tears and snot wetted the cupid’s bow of your lip, and you were shaking so violently that your teeth had begun to chatter. You had been diminished to nothing. 

“M-my lord,” you whispered, turning towards Ormund. “I can call the women back, they will help me–”

“No.” Ormund stared at you with open contempt. “You will not. You were comfortable enough flaunting yourself for that boy. Now, you discover modesty?”

Your cheeks burned and you hung your head. “Please, my lord…”

Ormund stepped nearer, hands twitching at his side. “You behaved like a harlot in my hall. You may undress like one here.”

Humiliation rippled through you like a wave. You began to believe he was right. You had disobeyed Ormund. You had accepted Godric’s hand. Why? Because you wanted a reaction from Ormund. And now, you had one. 

Your fingers fumbled for the ribbons at the back of your gown. They would not obey you. Each time you caught one, it slipped from your trembling grasp. 

“You are moving too slowly.”

“I-I am trying…” you sputtered. “But my hands…they will not cease trembling…”

The faint rasp of metal leaving leather made you freeze. Ormund drew the small dagger he carried at his belt.

“My lord, please don’t–”

Ormund caught the back of your gown in one fist, and with one swift movement, he cut through the ribbons. The bodice split open with a series of sharp snaps, the ruined ties falling loose around you. Ormund dragged the blade downward, severing embroidery and silk without care until the gown sagged from your shoulders and exposed your breasts. You gasped and tried to catch the fabric, but Ormund had already sheathed the dagger. He seized the torn gown and wrenched it down over your hips, leaving you naked in a pool of shredded blue silk.

Feebly, you crossed your arms over yourself. Ormund was quicker. He grabbed you by the upper arm and hauled you toward the steaming tub, his chest rising and falling with each furious breath.

“In.”

You lifted one trembling foot over the rim. The instant your toes touched the water, scalding heat shot through you. You recoiled with a yelp. “Ormund, it is too hot–”

“Good.” His hands closed around your shoulders. “Perhaps it will burn his stink from you.”

He forced you down. You cried as the searing water engulfed your body. You tried to rise, but Ormund held you beneath the surface of the bath, his fingers biting into your shoulders. Before you could catch your breath, he had dropped to his knees beside the tub and seized a sponge from the tray. 

He caught your wrist and began scrubbing your arm. The rough sponge dragged over your skin again and again, leaving it flushed pink and burning. Ormund’s eyes were wild, his movements frantic. Beneath the fury, there was a panic, a desperation you had witnessed only a handful of times before. It terrified you. 

“Men bow to their lords,” he muttered, dragging the sponge from your wrist to your shoulder as though he meant to strip away the skin itself and uncover something clean beneath it.

You recognized the words at once. Scripture, recited in the sept while you knelt beside Lady Hightower. Now Ormund spoke them in the bathing chamber she had once shared with her husband– only she was dead and rotting somewhere in a crypt, and you were grown and naked beneath his hands. 

“Repeat it,” he hissed. “As I taught you.”

“M-men bow to their lords.”

“Lords bow to their kings.” The sponge moved across your collarbone, then up the side of your neck.

“Lords bow to their k-kings…”

“And kings and queens bow before the Seven Who Are One.” He scrubbed the tender skin beneath your jaw. The same place where, in the darkness of night, he so often buried his face. 

Your voice shook. “Kings and queens bow before the S-seven Who Are One...”

The sponge dragged down your other arm. “All sins may be forgiven.”

“All sins may be forgiven...”

Ormund seized your knee and yanked your leg toward him, scrubbing harshly over your calf. “But crimes must still be punished.”

You swallowed a sob. “But crimes must still be…punished.”

At last, the sponge slipped from his hand and struck the tiled floor with a wet slap. Your entire body was rubbed pink and raw from his touch. Ormund remained kneeling by the tub, chest heaving as though he had just come from hours in the training yard. The water had finally cooled in the tub around you, though your tears had never once ceased. 

Men bow to their lords. Kings and queens bow before the Seven Who Are One. Crimes must still be punished.

The words could not cease circling your mind. 

Crimes must still be punished. Crimes must still be punished. Crimes must still be punished.

Steam from the bath had loosened Ormund’s brown curls, leaving them wild around his face. The sleeves and front of his doublet were soaked through. His collar sat crooked. Strands of hair had fallen across his brow.

You had never seen him so disordered. Ormund was particular about every detail of his appearance. Now he looked just about as ruined as you felt.

He rose and reached into the tub. You flinched, but his hands closed around your waist and lifted you to your feet. Water streamed from your body, droplets tracing the curves of your breasts and the softness of your stomach before falling back into the bath. The cooler air tightened your skin, your nipples pebbling as you shivered beneath his hands.

Ormund held you there, naked and trembling before him. Then he bent toward you. His nose brushed the wet skin beneath your ear. He inhaled once before moving lower to breathe against your neck and shoulder. You scarcely dared move.

At last, the terrible tension in his body eased.

“Clean,” he murmured. His hands tightened possessively around your waist. “You are clean again.”

Seemingly satisfied with his work, Ormund stepped back and surveyed you. His gaze traveled from your wet hair to your breasts, then lower still, lingering over the glistening curls at the apex of your thighs. 

He drew a slow breath, steadying himself, before turning away to restore some measure of order to his appearance. He straightened his collar and smoothed a hand over his damp curls, though the soaked fabric of his doublet clung stubbornly to him. Then he reached into the tub and took your hand. “Out.”

Water streamed from your body and pooled across the tiles as you stepped over the rim. Ormund kept one hand around yours and the other at your waist. Then he retrieved the linen nightgown the servants had left folded over a nearby chair and tossed it toward you without looking. “Dress yourself.”

You clutched it against your chest, relieved merely to have something with which to cover yourself. “Y-yes, my lord.”

With shaking hands, you pulled it over your head. The fabric caught against your wet skin, clinging to your breasts and thighs despite your efforts to tug it loose.

When you had finished, Ormund turned back. For a moment, the two of you merely stared at one another. Then he lifted a hand and brushed a wet tendril of hair from your face, his touch impossibly gentle after the same hand had scrubbed your skin raw only moments before. “Do you understand why I do this for you?”

You nodded slowly.

“Then tell me.”

You swallowed. “To…purge me?”

“Yes.” He stepped nearer, cupping your cheek. “I have told you before, and I will continue to tell you. At your core, you are a wicked creature. However earnestly you may struggle against it, the sins of your forefathers live within you. That is why you disobey. Why you cannot always recognize the corruption in your own desires.”

Your breathing grew shallow at his words.

“It is my duty to purge it from you, to discipline what is wicked and preserve what may yet be made good.” Ormund’s hand settled more firmly against your cheek, holding your face toward his. He studied you expectantly. “Do you understand me?”

“I understand you, Ormund.”

“Good girl.” His hand fell away. He turned and left the bathing chamber without another word. You remained where you were for a moment, waiting until you trusted your legs not to collapse beneath you, then wobbled after him.

The bedchamber had grown dim behind the closed shutters, illuminated only by the wavering glow of candlelight and slivers of moonlight. Ormund stood beside the wardrobe, peeling the soaked doublet from his body and revealing the muscled planes of his back. Though he so often slept without a shirt, you turned away bashfully. 

When Ormund faced you again, you kept your gaze fixed upon the ornate rug beneath your bare feet.

“Right,” he said. He dragged a hand over his jaw and glanced from you to the bed. Then he inclined his head toward it. “On the bed, then. Ready yourself.”

Your heart seemed to stop. Your gaze snapped up to him, your brows drawing together. “M-my lord?”

He scoffed as though you were a fool for questioning him. “It is the seventh day. Surely you did not imagine yourself excused…particularly after tonight. I have all the more reason now to question your purity.”

Your mouth opened, then closed again. “B-but, my lord…the bath–”

“The bath did nothing but remove the taint of horse shit from you,” Ormund spat. He advanced upon you. “As I told you before, you managed a great deal in the few minutes I was gone. How am I to know you did not give yourself to Lord Ashford?”

The accusation was absurd. Ormund had been absent for perhaps ten minutes. The hall had been filled with half the Reach. Surely he could not truly believe that you had…

“I said, on the bed,” Ormund repeated, each word sharpened by warning. “Do not make me say it again.”

You hurried toward the bed and crawled onto it. You had done this so many times that the motions should have come as second nature. Yet each time, every part of you trembled with the same terrible mixture of dread and anticipation…and something hotter beneath them both that you could never bring yourself to name.

You shuffled backward until your head met the pillows, then lowered yourself flat against the mattress. Ormund remained at the foot of the bed, the pale skin of his bare chest almost luminous in the candlelight. He looked at your position with a scowl, then closed his hands around your ankles. With one sharp pull, he dragged you toward him until your ass rested at the very edge of the mattress.

He tapped the outsides of your quivering thighs. You parted them, allowing him to step between your legs.

Ormund looked down at you. Your breasts rose and fell beneath the damp nightgown, each breath shallow and unsteady. “You are nervous tonight.”

You began to shake your head, but he clicked his tongue. “Remember what I told you. Do not lie to me.”

Your throat tightened. “I-I am nervous, my lord.”

“Why?” The question was edged with mockery. Ormund reached down and caught the hem of your nightgown between his fingers. “This should hardly surprise you by now. Or…is there something you are trying to hide from me tonight?”

“No, my lord. I swear, I have nothing to hide–”

“We shall see.” He began to draw the nightgown upward. Higher and higher, until the cool air brushed over your calves and thighs, raising gooseflesh in its wake. Higher still, until the fabric gathered around your waist and your sex lay completely exposed beneath his gaze.

Ormund inhaled, and you could have sworn his breath trembled. His thumbs pressed against your puffy pussy lips, parting you beneath the candlelight. You were unbearably sensitive after the scalding bath, and the sudden touch of cool air on your exposed flesh drew a helpless whimper from your throat.

Ormund stilled. His hands remained firmly in place, holding you open as his narrowed eyes lifted to your face. “What was that?”

You swallowed. “N-nothing, my lord.”

“Nothing?” he repeated softly. “Have you learned nothing tonight?”

“I did not mean–”

“Your mouth lies,” Ormund murmured. “But your body confesses so readily.”

Humiliation burned through you. You turned your face toward the pillows, but his voice sharpened.

“Look at me.”

You obeyed. Ormund studied you with a feverish focus. Without speaking, he prodded your entrance with the tip of his middle finger. The sensation made you jolt. He steadied you with a hand pressed firmly upon your hip. “Stay still.”

You tried, desperately. You fixed your eyes upon his face and willed every muscle to quiet, though your breath came shallow and uneven. 

Ormund paused, the tip of his finger still pressing against your hole. “What shall I find tonight, hmm? That you have been faithful to the Seven above? Faithful to me? Or shall I find you have let Lord Ashford fuck this pretty little cunt?”

You squirmed beneath his gaze, feeling as though you had been scalded again by his brazen words. “N-no, my lord.”

Ormund hummed in response. Then, once again, he used his other thumb to spread your pussy lips open, his gaze transfixed on where his finger rested.

“Look at you…” His voice was hushed, contemplative. “I have barely touched you, and your pussy is already fluttering.”

You whined, horrifically embarrassed, but he shushed you before you could protest.

“You are thinking of that Ashford boy, aren’t you?”

You shook your head immediately, adamant. You could hardly remember Godric’s face now. 

Ormund tutted. “Words.”

“No! No, I am not.”

“Then why,” he asked, his gaze never leaving you, “is your cunt weeping?”

You had no answer, other than your body had answered before your mind.

“It is no matter,” Ormund sighed, thumb still holding you open. “You are a deceitful bitch who will learn her lesson regardless.”

Slowly, Ormund began to push his fingertip into you. A broken moan tore through you at the burning intrusion, though you had felt this so many times before. The walls of your pussy clenched around him, and you tried to will yourself to relax your muscles. Breathe, you commanded yourself. Obey. 

His hand stilled, the tip of his finger seated inside you. He did not look away. 

“If you are not wet for Lord Godric,” Ormund whispered, finally lifting his gaze to yours, “then who is it for?” 

For a moment, you were no longer in Ormund’s chambers. You remembered attending the sept with Lady Hightower, kneeling beside her before the bejeweled statue of the Father. You remembered her lessons, her gentle voice, the certainty with which she had spoken.

“You must always tell the truth,” she had taught you. “For the Father sees all.”

The words echoed now, impossible to ignore. You were compelled. You had to confess.

“You.”

Ormund groaned at the confession, his hand tightening at your waist. 

“Do you hear yourself, you harlot?” His voice rattled maniacally, the rings on his fingers pressing into the soft flesh of you. “Do you not hear the lewdness of your own words? Lusting after me, your own guardian?”

Shame flooded through you. You should have lowered your eyes. You should have taken back the confession. But there was something in his voice that told you he was not reprimanding you. Ormund wanted you to say it. He wanted you to confess.

Before you could even think of a response, Ormund’s mouth twisted. Then he spat.

A hot, wet glob landed directly on the swollen pearl at the top of your cunt, obscene and shocking enough that your whole body shuddered. The sensation was like nothing you had ever felt before. Vulgar in a way that made humiliation burn through you even as a moan slipped from your throat.

Ormund saw it, because just as the Father did, he saw everything. A wicked, knowing grin spread across his face.

“Theeere it is,” he murmured, voice low and rough with satisfaction. “Moaning like a bitch in heat. Acting like the whore you are.”

Your face burned and you turned back into the pillows, trying to stifle the whimpering sounds that were attempting to escape you. 

Ormund leaned closer, caging your body in with his, the tip of his finger still inserted into you. “You think I do not know you? I raised you. I made you.”

Your thighs twitched instinctively, as if you could push him away. For a moment, he withdrew slightly, as if it were finished. As if Ormund would simply wipe his hand on the handkerchief he always kept on him and declare the matter settled. It had always been that way before.

The ritual– the inspection that occurred every seventh day– always ended the same. Ormund would stop at the first knuckle, claiming only to feel enough to confirm that your maidenhead was still intact. Then he would withdraw, disappear into the bathing chamber for a few moments while you caught your breath alone on the bed, and return composed once more.

Afterward was the part you cherished most. Perhaps it was the only reason you endured the ritual at all. Ormund would take you into his arms. He would press his lips to your brow, your cheek, sometimes even your mouth, and tell you how good you had been. How faithful. How untouched. He would allow you to rest against him, your head upon his chest, while he kissed the top of your head and held you as though you were something precious.

And for a little while, you no longer felt like a ward. No longer like an unwanted addition to his household. For a little while, you felt like a wife would.

You felt wanted.

But this time, Ormund did none of that. Instead, he pushed forward. 

You gasped at the invasion, hands tightening around the sheets as his finger slid deeper than it ever had before. It was only one finger, and still you felt stretched open by it, your body struggling to make sense of the unfamiliar pressure. Pain mixed with pleasure, a strange concoction that was better than anything you had ever known. 

Ormund watched the reaction move across your face.

“She is so tight,” he whispered, almost in a trance as he looked down at where his finger disappeared inside you. “So untouched. So desperate for more.”

Your stomach twisted at his words. Of course you were untouched. You could not imagine ever being touched by anyone other than Ormund. 

“So obedient for your lord,” Ormund added, voice husky. “And still you asked me not to stop.” 

His thumb moved slowly, the pad of it pressing against your aching clit right above where his finger held you open. The sensation struck through you so sharply your thighs closed his hand, though he pried them back open with ease. 

Ormund’s thumb began to circle your clit, slow and deliberate, while his finger remained seated inside you. The two sensations seemed to pull against one another: the deep stretch of him, the slick pressure of his thumb, the unbearable intimacy of being watched while your body answered him so honestly.

“Do not be so quiet now, my sweet girl,” Ormund commanded you. “Not when your body is finally telling the truth.”

His finger began to move. Slowly at first, dragging almost to the tip before pressing back in. The stretch came easier now, slicker with your growing arousal. His thumb kept circling with maddening precision, steady enough that something began to gather low in your belly.

A coil. A warning. A want. It was overwhelming. It was maddening. It was completely and utterly terrifying. 

“Ormund…”

His finger curled slightly inside you, pressing against a soft place that made you see stars, and you cried out, back arching. 

“There we are,” Ormund breathed. “That is what you have been trying to tell me.”

“N-no,” you said, though the denial sounded weak even to your own ears.

Ormund leaned closer, mouth skimming your jaw. “You want this. You have wanted this every time I stopped.”

Your lips parted, but no answer came.

The coil inside you wound tighter and tighter, every pass of his thumb dragging you closer to some precipice you did not understand. Your thighs began to tremble. Your breath broke into small, helpless whimpers. Panic and pleasure tangled together until you could no longer tell which one made you shake.

“Ormund, please,” you gasped. “S-something…something is happening!”

“Is it?” His voice was calm, almost cruelly so, his eyes fixed on your face. Then, just as the feeling rose so sharply it frightened you, Ormund withdrew completely. His finger slipped out of you, and his thumb left your clit all at once.

The loss was immediate. You whined, hips lifting after him before you could stop yourself, your cunt clenching around nothing. 

Ormund stepped back from the bed, composed and distant, as though whatever had existed between you moments before had vanished entirely. He reached for the handkerchief he kept in his back pocket, and cleaned your glistening arousal off of his finger with a maddening calmness. 

You propped yourself up on your elbows, chest heaving. Sweat had beaded on your forehead from the intense pleasure that was there just moments before. When you spoke, your voice was small and confused. “...My lord?”

Ormund did not look at you. “I have confirmed what I needed to know. You are untouched. That has not changed. But you still disobeyed me.”

You stared at him, searching his face for some sign that he did not mean it. Some indication that this was a test, that Ormund would relent as he always did. That he would gather you in his arms, kiss your face, and fall asleep.

He did not. 

“You are not forgiven,” Ormund said matter-of-factly. Then came the words you never expected to hear. “You will return to your own chambers tonight.”

Your own chambers. You had not slept there in years. Not since before Lady Hightower had died. 

The feast, the bath, the feeling of something coiling in you as Ormund used his fingers upon you like an instrument– it all came crashing down at once. You were unsteady, disoriented. Lost. 

He was sending you away from the only place where you knew how to exist. The only place where you had ever felt wanted.

You scrambled from the bed, your feet landing unevenly against the rug. Before you could think better of it, you reached for his arm.

“My lord, please.” Your voice shook. “I-I cannot sleep there.”

Ormund did not move.

“Please,” you whispered. “I can only sleep here. I have only ever slept here.”

He refused to answer. He remained focused on the handkerchief, wiping the finger that had been inside you moments ago. 

“Please, Ormund. I-I love you.”

He always liked hearing that. You lifted yourself onto your toes and pressed a desperate, open-mouthed kiss to his cheek, waiting for the familiar response. Waiting for his hand to come to your face, for his voice to soften, for him to tell you that everything was all right.

Ormund did not.

Your heart seemed to collapse inside your chest. You could not understand how he could stand there so calmly when you felt as though you were breaking apart.

“I was so ungrateful,” you sobbed. “I was t-treasonous, my lord. I was wicked.” Your hands tightened around him. “I should have rebuked Lord Godric. I should have listened. I was an insolent fool.”

Not knowing what else to do, you sank to your knees before him, head bowed as though you were kneeling before the altar in the sept. The posture came instinctively from years beneath Ormund’s instruction, a familiar act of surrender and supplication.

“Please forgive me,” you whispered. “I will do anything you ask of me. Please.”

You remained there before him, the room silent save for your trembling breaths and quiet sobs. Your forehead stayed bowed, your hands clutching the fabric of his breeches as though letting go would mean losing him entirely. 

Finally, Ormund looked down upon you. “You hear yourself, do you not?” 

You lifted your swollen eyes toward him.

“You beg for forgiveness, but you do not yet understand what it is you are asking forgiveness for.” Ormund crouched until he was level with you, hands on your shoulders. “This is not about Godric or a dance or a foolish mistake. It is about what lies beneath it, the thing I have warned you of for years.”

You shivered beneath his touch, the words chilling you. 

“The dragon within you.”

It felt as though the entire world had narrowed to this room, to this moment, to you kneeling before him. As though every lesson in the sept, every warning, every correction had led you here. 

“I have spent years trying to protect you from the worst parts of yourself,” he continued. “And still, when temptation came, you reached for it. That is why an apology is not enough.”

Your breath caught in your throat.

“You must learn that your impulses do not rule you. Your desires, your pride, they do not rule you. Not even the dragon that plagues your soul.”

“What rules you is none of those.” Ormund leaned closer, his nose brushing yours. “It is me.”

With that, Ormund rose to his feet, though you remained kneeling. His hand went to the leather belt at his waist, the same belt from which his sword scabbard hung. Slowly, he unfastened it and set the scabbard aside on the chest near the bed. He turned to you and gestured for you to stand. 

You obeyed instantly, rising on shaky legs. 

“If you want forgiveness, you will listen to me,” Ormund said, undoing the belt until it came loose in his hand. “You will disrobe. You will set yourself upon the bed. And you will take the strokes of my belt in penance for your sins. Will you do that for your lord?”

You nodded. You would do anything he asked of you. Hands trembling, you reached for the hem of your nightgown and pulled it over your head. You were bare, naked as the day you were born. It felt different from the bath. This time, there was no steam to soften the room. This time, you could clearly see Ormund take all of you in: the line of your calves, the curve of your hips, the plane of your stomach, the weight of your breasts. His eyes moved over your body shamelessly, intense and hungry.

“Onto the bed,” he ordered. “Face away from me.”

You complied, turning from him and crawling onto the mattress. Before you could move too far, Ormund caught your calf in one hand, signaling for you to stop once you were on all fours near the edge of the bed. His touch lingered there for a moment, and then his hand slid upward, palm dragging from your calf to your thigh, then higher still, until it settled over the soft curve of your ass. His fingers squeezed once, firm and possessive, before dropping lower.

You heard the soft whisper of leather as Ormund folded the belt in his hand. You could not see his face from where you knelt, turned away from him, but you could feel his gaze moving over you. The back of your neck, your trembling spine. Your exposed cunt, surely glistening now with arousal though you could not understand why. And then your ass, presented bare and vulnerable to him, where he intended to mark you. 

“You will pray the Seven’s lesson as you were taught,” he said, though his voice had gone strained. 

A familiar molten heat, like what you felt just a few minutes earlier, had begun to unwind in your belly. You nodded, eyes on the bed below you. “Yes, my lord.”

Leather cracked across your skin. The sound came before you could even register the pain, sharp and booming like thunder. You cried out as a bright line of heat bloomed over your ass, fingers clutching uselessly at the sheets. 

“The Father,” Ormund breathed, voice low. “Tell me His vow.”

You remembered learning your lessons. It was Ormund who taught you when you were just a girl. Before you knew what you would become. What he would become. 

“I-I submit to all judgement,” you recited shakily. 

The belt came down again, landing just below the first one.

You jolted forward, a broken sound spilling from your mouth as the second stroke landed just below the first. Heat spread through you in terrible waves and your knees trembled, but Ormund’s free hand caught your hip to hold you up. 

“The Mother.”

“I seek mercy.”

The third stroke fell harder.

You sobbed again, and shame burned through you at the sound, but Ormund only stepped closer. You could feel him now, the heat of his body just behind yours, the roughness creeping into his breathing. 

“The Warrior.”

You pressed your forehead into the sheets, squeezing your eyes shut, willing yourself to submit. “I will have c-courage.”

The fourth stroke cracked across you, closer to your wet sex. The sound that came from you this time was not a sob, but a moan. You heard Ormund utter a low curse under his breath from behind you. 

“The Maiden, now, girl. You should know this one by heart.”

“I will guard my innocence.”

Next, the fifth stroke. You cried out, smothering your sounds in the sheet, but this time Ormund made no attempt to hide the rough, ruined exhale he made in response. 

You realized there, completely naked on his bed, the bed you had shared with him for years, that Ormund was enjoying this. 

“The Smith,” he ordered you. 

“I will be remade.”

The sixth stroke landed and pain sparked through you, body sagging slightly before Ormund caught you with his hand. His wide palm moved from your waist to the punished, red flesh of your ass. 

“Ormund,” you whispered, though you didn’t know what you wanted of him.

His breath shuddered. “The Crone.”

“I will s-seek wisdom.”

You could hear how close he was. Hear it in the uneven pull of air through his teeth, in the way his hands trembled against your skin.

“Now, the last,” he said.

Like a final judgement, the seventh stroke came down. Hard.

Your cry broke open, high and helpless, your body finally collapsing forward into the sheets as the hurt bloomed through you in a final, burning wave. Ormund followed you down at once, his body bowing over yours from behind.

“The Stranger,” he panted into your ear, bare chest pressed against your back. “Tell me His vow.”

“I will leave behind what I was.”

The belt slipped from his hand and hit the floor. You heard the unmistakable frantic tug of laces being loosened, the rustle of breeches as Ormund shoved them down with no patience at all. 

You did not understand what was happening at first. You only knew he was behind you, breathing hard, one hand gripping your hip so hard it bruised while the other was moving between your bodies with a frenzied desperation. 

Then you felt him. The hard length of his cock, pressed against the swollen skin of your ass. You gasped at the silky, heavy, throbbing sensation. Perhaps you had felt it before, but between sheets, between linen, pressed against your back in the dead of night. You did not know, or did not want to know, or even fully understand what it was. But you knew now. 

You heard movement, skin rubbing skin. Ormund’s fist worked himself in quick, uneven strokes, the leaking head of him pressed against the raw flesh. 

Ormund groaned low in his throat, the sound muffled against your shoulder as he bent over you.

“Do you feel that, Princess?” he rasped. His hips jerked forward, the stiff length of him dragging on your ass. The contact made him shudder violently against you. “Do you feel me on you? This is what you do to me. You have bewitched me, heart and flesh alike.”

Your face burned so hot you thought you might cry from the humiliation of it. Bent beneath him in the bed he once shared with his wife. Marked by him. Listening to the rough, wet sound of his hand moving over himself while his body trembled against yours. 

You turned your head instinctively, trying to look back. To see the reality of what was happening to your innocence. Ormund’s palm came down between your shoulders, forcing your face down into the sheets. 

“No,” he ordered, voice ragged. “Do not l-look at me. Stay down.”

You obeyed. A broken sound left him at that, like a laugh. 

“My good girl,” Ormund breathed. “My sweet, good girl.”

His hand moved faster. From behind, you could feel every frantic pull of his fist in the rhythm of his body: the way his hips twitched, the way his thighs pressed against the backs of yours, the way his hot breath puffed against your neck. Ormund dragged the head of himself lower, close enough that you could feel the swollen head of his cock brush your cunt. 

“Do you want it?” he asked. “Do you want your guardian to finally take you? Do you want me to give you my cock and fill you with my seed so everyone will know who you belong to?”

You did. You wanted it so badly. You wanted Ormund to fuck you, to finally take the virginity he treasured so much. 

“Do you want it, my darling girl?” Ormund repeated shakily, dragging his cock up and down your slick folds, the leaking head of it bumping against your swollen clit. “If I pushed in right now, would you open for me? Would you let me take what is rightfully mine?”

Your fingers twisted into the sheets. You did not even know what you were asking for. You only felt the compulsion of the Father move through you. “Yes, my lord! M-make me yours…”

Ormund groaned. But, to your dismay, he did not push himself into you. Instead, he drew himself back, dragging his cock against your skin as his fist resumed its desperate rhythm. 

His mouth found your shoulder, open and trembling. His teeth grazed you once, biting down lightly. 

“You are mine,” he said against your skin. “Whether I fuck you tonight or keep you untouched for the rest of your life, you are mine.” 

Ormund’s hips stuttered hard against you. “Tell me whose you are, Princess.”

“Y-yours…”

“Say it properly for your lord.”

“I am yours, Ormund!”

With a final, low groan, Ormund collapsed over you, body shaking. You felt something hot and wet spurt across the marks of your ass. His hand kept moving through the violent pulses, dragging every last wave out of himself while he panted your name into the back of your shoulder. 

Finally, the spasming of his cock subsided, and his weight softened over you. Ormund remained bowed over your body, trembling as he pressed his forehead between your shoulder blades. His lips moved slowly along your spine. His palm, sticky with release, spread tenderly over your waist, drawing you more firmly beneath him. 

“My precious girl,” he whispered, pressing another damp kiss to your back. “My beautiful, perfect princess. You did so well for me.” 

You could do nothing but lie there beneath him, overwhelmed and exhausted, your body aching everywhere he had touched you. 

Ormund wrapped both arms around you, rolling onto his side and bringing you with him. He gathered your naked body so tightly against his own it felt like he had never intended to let you go. His release remained warm upon your skin, trapped between you as he fitted himself along your back. One arm circled your waist and the other slipped beneath your head, drawing you into the shelter of his bare chest. Ormund kissed the hairs at the nape of your neck, then your shoulder, his mouth lingering over every place it touched.

“Come here,” he murmured. “My pretty little thing.”

Ormund turned you carefully within his arms until you faced him. His hand moved slowly through your hair, smoothing it back from your flushing, tear-streaked face as he pressed kisses across your cheeks. He did not seem to care that you were both disordered and sweaty, that his breeches remained tangled around his thighs, or that his seed still clung to your body.

Your eyes burned. “I-I thought you hated me… That you would send me away forever.”

“No.” Ormund cupped the back of your head, keeping you against him. “No, my love. Never that.”

A sob escaped, and you buried your face against him, clutching at him as though the Hightower itself were crumbling around you.

Ormund drew you fully atop him, arranging your body over his with practiced intimacy. Your cheek rested above his thumping heart. One of your legs slipped between his, your naked bodies fitting together beneath the rumpled sheets as naturally as though you had been made by the Seven for this. 

“You frightened yourself tonight,” he murmured, rocking you gently against him. “You forgot what I taught you. But you remember now, do you not?”

You nodded silently. Ormund tipped your face upward. His gaze moved over your swollen eyes and trembling mouth with such devotion it hurt. 

“I forgive you.”

Finally.

Finally, the words you had spent the entire night longing to hear. The words you had wanted since the moment you realized your Valyrian blood was something impure. 

The weight of it all overwhelmed you, his forgiveness, his naked body beneath yours, the certainty that he was not sending you from his bed. It all crashed over you at once, and your body shook with the force of your tears. Ormund gathered you closer, shushing softly as he kissed your forehead, your temple, your quivering lips.

“I love you,” he murmured. “I love you. Must I say it a thousand times? I love you.”

You pushed yourself further into him and sobbed harder. You believed Ormund. You always did. For he always told the truth.

“I-I am sorry for the wickedness in me, Ormund,” you stuttered, tears wetting his chest. “I should have been better for you.”

“Oh, my sweet girl.” His fingers combed gently through your hair, the same hair he so often praised for lacking the silver-gold of your blood. “You are not the first woman to struggle against the wretchedness within her.”

Ormund shifted beneath the covers, drawing you higher upon his chest until your face rested within the curve of his neck. His lips brushed your brow again and again as though he could not bear to stop kissing you.

“The Seven have blessed you, though,” he continued. “They did not leave you among your diseased kin who would encourage that fire. They did not leave you in the Red Keep. They did not leave you to dragons.”

You lifted your face from his chest. The candles had long since sputtered out, leaving only moonlight to illuminate the handsome angles of his face. The face you loved, the face you worshipped so dearly. Ormund cupped your cheek and brought your mouth to his.

The kiss was slow and delicate, nothing like the frenzy whose presence still marked your bodies: the angry welts left by his belt, his seed drying against your thighs. Ormund kissed you with the solemnity of a husband sealing a vow before the gods. When he pulled away, he did not allow even an inch of space to form between you.

“You were given to me,” he whispered against your mouth. “To raise. To correct when you wandered. And to cherish when you returned.”

A smile spread across Ormund’s face, full of such love and adoration that your soul ached with it. “And you will always return to me.”

Ormund took your hand in his and pressed it flat over the steady beating of his heart. Then he brought your fingers to his lips and kissed each tip one by one. “The Seven knew you needed something greater than blood or the Iron Throne. Greater even than dragons.”

Your eyes grew heavy as the last of your terror loosened beneath his attention. Ormund drew the covers more closely around your entwined bodies and tucked your head beneath his chin. “They knew you needed a home. A father.”

You nestled deeper into his chest, lulled by the heart beating beneath your ear. Sleep had nearly claimed you when his arms tightened around you.

When Ormund spoke again, his voice was so hushed that you thought perhaps you had dreamed it.

“They knew you needed me.”

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[idrawsnoopyeveryday]

could you please do snoopy playing the french horn? It’s one of my favorite instruments and i have been playing for 9 years :) thank you very much

222.

[targlocket]

OUR BOY

ormund hightower x wife!reader, mom figure!reader & daeron targaryen

cw: spoilers for ep 4!!, found family trope, reader thinks of daeron as her own, tension, religious themes, slight manipulation, fluff fluff, motherly reader!!, hurt/comfort, reader is very protective of daeron, emotional distress, quarelling, ormund does love his wife, petnames (my love, sweetheart, sweetling), (2.7kw).

synopsis: A child doesn't need to come from the womb to weave his way into your heart. Your husband knows as much.

a/n: this was a wip since the second episode sitting in my drafts, and now with episode four out, it sparked me to continue it! i love daeron so much, and so does reader. they're a dysfunctional family, but they make it work! guys this piece is very dear to me okay it's my baby i love it so much.

"From King Aemond."

"King?" You frown, looking at the young squire for confirmation, which he gives with a slow nod of his head.

"Yes, my lady," Daeron says, brows pinching, mimicking your bewilderment. "The messenger said so himself when he delivered the letter to Lord Ormund."

You huff, the news rattling you a bit, sighing as if the weight of what must've transpired back in King's Landing is already heavy to carry. "Gods helps us all."

Daeron's expression turns sympathetic as he sees your mood sour, prompting you to step closer, one hand moving to brush his cheek as you speak, your tone hushed but warm. "Don't give me that look," you scold, but it contradicts the softness of your touch and tone. "There's nothing to worry about." Your thumb smooths over his cheekbone, motherly and reassuring, as you always do when he's putting others' emotions onto his own young shoulders. "Ormund will know what to make of it."

"As always."

Both of you perk up at the familiar voice, watching as your husband enters the tent through the flaps, one eyebrow raised as he assesses the scene, eyes narrowing at the sight of your hand cradling Daeron's cheek, jaw clenching minutely. "Such matters are not for wives," he shoots you a look, "or squires," his voice dips to a firmer tone as he glances at Daeron, "to worry about." Ormund closes the flap behind him before continuing, seeking privacy. "Or talk behind their hands like gossiping mongrels where I cannot hear."

You feel Daeron tense beneath your hand, and your thumb brushes his cheek to soothe, huffing as you hold your husband's gaze. "The boy was just relaying information to me, which I am grateful for." Daeron relaxes under your touch, which makes you hum, sneaking him a small smile before turning your gaze back to Ormund. "As any squire would."

"He is my squire."

"I borrowed him," you counter, lifting your chin, not backing down.

"You cannot borrow someone's squire. It is unheard of."

"And yet you are hearing about it now. Novelties are common during wartime, are they not?"

The corner of Ormund's lips twitches for one moment at your audacity before he scoffs, eyes narrowed as he holds your gaze enough to let you know this will not be the end of this conversation. It sends a shiver down your spine.

"So they say," he responds, stepping closer, motioning with one hand towards the flap of the tent. "Go see what that beast of yours is doing, won't you? There are matters I must discuss with Lady Hightower." Ormund's tone is firm, brooking no argument as he waits for Daeron to obey, the young boy nodding curtly, before turning to do the same to you, albeit a touch more reverent.

"My lord, my lady."

You smile, thumb tracing his cheek once more before he moves, letting your hand fall to your side, watching as he makes haste towards the tent's exit.

The silence he leaves behind is thick for a heartbeat, two, before it is broken by your husband's voice. "You coddle him incessantly," he reprimands, face scrunching in distaste, as if such a thing offended him personally. "Petting him like a cat and cooing at him as if he were but a babe."

Being a touch theatrical has always been one of your husband's most endearing traits, and one of his most daunting, as you sometimes remind him, to his annoyance. You will never admit that poking at that certain flaw of his tickles you greatly, just as it does now.

"He is young," you combat, "and this is his first ever war. A gentle touch would do him well."

"Too gentle of a touch will soften him overmuch and he will not be fit to fight alongside me, as is his duty," your husband counters, tone resolute as he takes slow, measured steps towards you, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. "You know this."

And you did. The importance of coming out victorious was paramount to your husband, his house, and his cause. Seating the rightful heir on the Iron Throne was the one thing that mattered most, and Ormund was hellbent on seeing it through to the end, by any means necessary.

"I am aware," your tone softens, sighing as you reach for him, hand touching his cheek as you did Daeron, but the difference was stark in the way you offered your affection, thumbing at the cut of his cheekbone with intent, leaning in until your breaths mingled. Ormund frowned, knowing you were trying to appease him, but didn't pull away, instead leaning into your touch, tilting his head into the cradle of your palm, eyes boring into yours. “But someone has to soften the rigour you instill in him, husband, for he shall not be cruel, but just, even in times of war.”

“Being just is not enough,” he protests again, and you can feel his jaw tighten beneath your hand, which you try to soothe with soft swipes of your thumb along the bone, a touch that he welcomes, despite the turmoil in his gaze. “If one needs to be heartless, then the Gods have willed it so.”

Your brows pinch together, the urge to try and make your husband see reason slowly curdling into something acrid. “Since when have the Gods willed a young boy to cruelty, Ormund?” Your tone is no longer soft nor warm, sharpening at the mere thought of Daeron being made into something he was not meant to be. “Is this what the Seven Pointed Star had taught us all these years?”

Ormund’s eyes widen for a fraction, the use of his name in such a cadence from you and the sting of your words halting his breath. He knew how fiercely protective you were of the boy, like a lioness with its cub, even if not yours by womb. Now it was his turn to try and bring back the sweetness in your tone, for he shall never admit it, but having his wife cross with him was a fate he did not particularly enjoy.

“My love,” he murmured, and tried not to react when he saw your expression pinch even more at the fond moniker. “Sometimes, in the midst of war, we cannot abide by all that The Faith has taught us, no matter how much we wish to grace the Gods with our deeds.” Ormund took a breath, trying not to get irritated when your pretty face didn’t soften an inch. “And that boy is fated to sit The Iron Throne, for his blood is pure, and not savage, and his teachings are proper, and not the stuff of legends long past.”

Sit the Iron Throne.

You took a step back, recoiling from your husband as if burned, the warmth of your touch no longer on his cheek as you whispered, mortified. “Sit the Iron Throne?”

Such plans were news to you, for Aemond was to be the rightful heir now that Aegon was gone. But it seems your husband’s ideals reached further than you could’ve ever conjured up yourself. Was it because Aemond was to be sent to Harrenhal? Did your husband believe Rhaenyra’s forces would slay Vhagar and thus leave the throne with no one to occupy it?

“No,” you said, resolute, fingers starting to tremble as you curled them into fists at your side. “I will not have my boy thrown into that den of vipers that we’ve tried so hard to keep him safe from.”

Ormund’s chest rattled with the deep breath he took, as if preparing himself for the onslaught of your dissatisfaction to come. “He is not—”

“Don’t you dare!” Your tone was sharp as steel, voice rising, all pretence gone now that your husband had braved to utter those words to you, knowing how much they would chip at your tender heart. “You know just as well as I that Daeron is more mine than anyone else’s. I have raised him since he was a babe—”

“And you have done so valiantly, my dear, but—” Ormund tries to soothe, but the bitter taste in your mouth from his words is more pungent than anything he could say to save himself from your wrath.

“Do not patronise me so!”

Your chest is heaving, and you feel those damnable pinpricks behind your eyes, moisture dampening your lash line, tears slowly forming, as if already feeling the grief of losing one of the things you cherish most. “King’s Landing is a wretched place, devoid of honour and swarming with enemies, and you want to send our—”

Our son.

But you stop, chin wobbling, not daring to say such a thing now, knowing it will do no good, and only make your husband protest further.

The sweetest boy, who hid his chubby little face into your skirts and clung to them when nightmares came at night, is now sentenced to a life you know he does not wish for. You can already feel your stomach churning with trepidation just at the thought, your gaze unwavering despite the tears brimming in your eyes to shoot daggers at your husband, who stays unmoving before you, looking equal parts irritated and unsure of how to proceed in the face of such strong emotions.

“I cannot, Ormund,” you whisper, voice breaking around the edges. “I shall not let you make a scheme of my boy just to fuel your own ambitions.”

You expect your husband to protest, to scream and rage and rip the very tent you’re in apart in his hands, but he does none of those things. Instead, he watches you, as calculated as he’s ever been, as if devising a plan to turn your sorrow into something for his own gain, or so you think.

What you do not anticipate is for Ormund to sigh, long and suffering, before walking towards you, lessening the distance between your bodies until his sword hilt bumps against your hip. “Do you believe that I am doing this solely for my own gain, my love?”

And you want to argue that, yes, you are certain of such things, for your husband was never one to not think of himself or his family first and foremost. But you don’t get to verbalise that, Ormund’s voice, softer than before, carrying that tone which could melt the marrow of your bones in mere seconds, but now, your impending grief is too great, your sorrow hardening you too much for such mellowness so quick.

“I do it for us,” he says, tilting his head to the side, bringing your faces closer, noses almost brushing. “For our legacy. For the future of House Hightower, which is now in ruins given the death of Otto and the usurpation of the King.”

You wish to protest, but your husband does not let you, sensing the argument on the tip of your tongue before it forms, a habit he picked up after more than a decade by your side, knowing you inside and out.

“Ascending Daeron to the throne will grant us power beyond our imagination, and allow the boy to live in a world of his own making.” The words are just and sound, but they do not go through you; the image of your sweet Daeron sitting upon that blasted throne full of swords and lies is too heavy on your heart.

“He will be in grave danger,” you croak, tears brimming along your lash line, slowly slipping down warm cheeks. “People will seek to harm him, to demand favours he’s not ready to offer, to—”

“And I will be in his shadow, making sure none of that comes to fruition,” Ormund says, tone brooking no argument, his gaze holding yours, willing you to see the seriousness of the matter. “If anyone dares to conspire against our boy, I will have their heads before they can draw their next breath. You have my word, sweet wife.”

Our boy.

You draw in a trembling, wet breath, your husband’s words breaking your heart and putting it back together in one fell swoop, a quiet, choked sob parting your lips as you try to utter a word back, anything to dismantle Ormund’s words, but you cannot.

“Oh, my love,” he coos, and it does not sound as condescending as it should’ve, as Ormund would pity those around him who show weakness. No, not with you. He wouldn’t dare make a spectacle of your tender, caring heart, which has grounded him many a time in his darkest, most turbulent moments. “Come here, sweetheart. Do not weep so.”

And you, powerless to resist, take the small step which is needed to bridge the distance between you, allowing your husband to cradle you in his arms, holding you as gently as one would a flower, but firm enough to make it known he wishes not to let go anytime soon.

One of his broad palms settles along your back, slowly smoothing down from the small of your back to the nape of your neck, the other anchored to the back of your head, coaxing you to rest your face along his throat. “Shh, shh, sweetling,” he whispers, turning his head to brush the words against your temple before pressing a soft, lingering kiss against your brow. “I will never let anything befall you or the boy. You know that with certainty.”

You do.

Gods, you do, but the fear that gripped your heart like a vice at the thought of such a grand plan was more powerful than reason and proof. Ormund had always gone above and beyond to ensure you and Daeron were safe at all times, even when he was away, instructing guards to follow you around like shadows and sit unmoving at your doors while you slumbered.

“I-i know, but the peril that awaits him if—”

Another kiss brushing your skin halted your incoming spiral, the feeling of your husband’s warm, rough lips against your temple melting you further into the safe strength of his arms, a haven in itself as you feared for what was to come. “The peril shall not exist. Our boy will have me, you, and more men-at-arms that I can count to keep him away from harm. In that, you must trust. In me, also.”

Your arms, which have hesitated until now, moved to grip at the back of your husband’s tunic as you embraced him tightly, needing a rock to cling to, nuzzling your face into his throat, dampening his skin with your tears as you sobbed quietly. “I trust in you more than life itself,” you croaked, and felt the pleased hum your words elicited from Ormund, as if the thought of you confiding in him so wholeheartedly brought him immense satisfaction. “But not that place, those people, that damned chair.”

“And you are right to do so, my love,” he approved, slowly putting weight from one foot to another, guiding your bodies into a gentle sway from side to side, meant to soothe you further. “Gods know everything the Targaryens touch is defiled beyond words. But we shall change that. Make it our own. A place where we and the boy can build a world fit for us alone.”

It sounded too good to be true, like a fairytale the septas would whisper to babes as they grew older, but the determined tone of your husband’s voice made you want to cling to this fantasy as well.

“Just us and our boy?” You murmured, fingers curling tighter into Ormund’s tunic, as if you could etch the very hope of such notions into his very bones.

“Yes, my sweet,” he whispered, brushing another lingering kiss to your temple, eyes fluttering shut as he held you close, still swaying. “Just us and our boy.”

gif cr: @/emmaziadarcy

[roxxmo]

custody of blood | part I

summary: sent to oldtown as a ward beneath your cousin lord ormund hightower's protection, you learn there are some vows that are easier to preach than to keep. pairing: ormund hightower x targtower!reader content/warnings: 18+ (mdni), icky guardian/ward relationship, canon-typical incest (cousins), age gap (~20 years), grooming, religious abuse and religious guilt, emotional manipulation, coercive control, possessiveness, severe power imbalance, forced declarations of affection, physical intimidation/rough handling, parental abandonment, references to childhood neglect, implied sexualized ritual, canon-typical misogyny, canon divergent, no use of y/n word count: 6.8k A/N: i need psychological help for how badly i need this man fr. originally had this planned as a oneshot, but i kept writing more...and more...and more...and felt like i was going to rush through the material if i tried to fit it all in one, so now we have a three-part series that i am very excited for you all to read :) hope you guys enjoy this freak of a man AND to see how freaked out i make these two hehehe! and excited for you all to see what ormund means when he reminds reader it is the seventh day...hmm...wonder what he has in store... also, fun drinking game: take a shot every time reader says "yes, my lord"

MASTERLIST next chapter → (COMING 7/24)

The other side of the bed was empty when you awoke, though the sheets remained warm and rumpled. Eyes still heavy from the lingering seeds of sleep, your hand reached across the mattress, patting until it found the warm hollow of where his body had lain. Ormund was almost always up before dawn. 

“Idleness is as plain a sin as vanity or greed,” he liked to say. “It begets indulgence, indulgence begets excess, and excess begets unfaithfulness.”

Unfaithfulness, of course, was inexcusable.

The bedchamber was still dim, with only the first suggestion of morning creeping beneath the shutters. Beyond the walls of the Hightower, you could hear the bells of the Citadel begin their first tolls. 

Ormund, as expected, was already kneeling before the small altar in the corner of the room. He wore only his linen sleeping shirt and breeches, and though his back was turned to you, you could see one hand slowly turning the pages of his weathered copy of The Seven-Pointed Star and hear the low murmur of passages he had committed to memory. 

In all the years you had lived in Oldtown, never once had Ormund deviated from this morning ritual. You remember the first time you had seen it. You had been a small child then, prone to wandering from your own chambers in the middle of the night into this one, back when it had belonged to the late Lady Hightower as much as it did her husband. She had always been kind to you. Like a true mother, when your own was so far away. 

Whenever sleep would not come, or the young Hightower boys had filled your head with tales of monsters lurking beneath the floor, you would creep from your bed and patter barefoot down the stone passage. You would ease open the heavy, creaking door and stand silently at the foot of the canopied bed until Lady Hightower stirred. She would always lift the blankets for you. From his side of the bed, Ormund would grumble some half-hearted objection about indulgence and the necessity of teaching you independence, but Lady Hightower paid him little mind. She would draw you into the warmth between them and promise that no monster in Oldtown would dare pass through their chamber door.

Even after she died, you did not cease coming.

It hurt, at first. To lie in the bed where she had once held you, the space now empty without her. Ormund never objected to your staying. Though he remained stoic and stony throughout his own grief, perhaps there was comfort for him, too, in not being left to sleep alone. When you wept silently into her old pillow, he would smooth your hair back from your face and say nothing. 

The habit endured long after your tears had dried and the black mourning clothes had been packed away. Some nights, you would attempt an honest effort at remaining in your own chambers, only to find yourself once again padding down the candlelit passage towards his. 

Ormund never turned you away. Now it was his hand that lifted the blankets for you to crawl beneath. Now it was his arm that pulled you in, wrapped around your waist in the night, his face that pressed into your hair, his body whose warmth you sought beneath the covers. 

The servants of the Hightower knew that your own chambers were little more than a formality, so seldom occupied that dust gathered upon the bed. You slept in your cousin Ormund’s chambers, you bathed there, you dressed there. Nearly every trace of your daily life had migrated into his rooms, until there was little left in your own to suggest they had ever belonged to you. 

It was only natural. After Lady Hightower’s death, the keeping of the household had fallen into your hands. It was you who approved the servants’ schedules, arranged the seating at feasts, and received the wives and daughters of visiting noble houses. Some might have found it strange that Ormund’s ward should occupy so much of his late wife’s place while remaining neither wed nor formally mistress of his household. Stranger still, perhaps, that if anyone entered Lord Ormund’s chambers before the sunrise, they would find him curled around his ward– Queen Alicent’s youngest daughter– his body arranged in the shape a husband’s would make.

If they did find it strange, no one within Oldtown had the courage to remark upon it. 

“You’re awake.”

You propped yourself up on your elbows to watch as Ormund closed the prayer book and rose from the altar. 

“Yes,” you answered as he crossed the chamber to the washstand. He dipped his hands into the porcelain basin and brought the water to his face. “I heard you praying.”

Ormund hummed as he dried himself with the folded linen cloth laid fresh each morning beside the ewer. “It would serve you well to join me in morning prayer.”

You ducked your head. “Yes, my lord.”

“I think only of your soul. One burdened by the sins of your…Targaryen…forefathers should labor all the more harder to absolve herself of them.”

“Yes, my lord.”

You waited for him to chide you further, or launch into one of his soliloquies on how faithfulness did not sleep merely because the sun had yet to rise. Ormund did none of that. 

Instead, he made his way to the bed and lowered himself onto the edge beside you, his weight dipping the mattress. Ormund lifted one hand to cup your cheek and ran his thumb gently beneath your eye. You nuzzled into his touch without a thought. 

“We will have visitors from the Reach in the Hightower later today. In particular, Lord Godric Ashford will call upon me this morning in my solar,” he said, as casually as if he were discussing the day’s weather. 

Your brows rose. You knew that several noble houses from across the Reach were expected at the Hightower in the coming days for discussions of taxes, grain, and the season’s feasts. Hosting them was hardly unusual. Nor was it unusual for one of their unmarried sons to request a private audience with your guardian. “Lord Robert’s son?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Ormund mused, seemingly more occupied with gently stroking his thumb back and forth over your cheekbone. “I assume he intends to ask for your hand in marriage.”

Your stomach twisted in a mixture of dread and excitement. Lowering your eyes, you worried at a stray thread in the coverlet. “Do you…do you think he might be suitable?”

The thumb on your cheek stopped. Ormund’s face tightened slightly, as though some rancid smell had entered the room. “That, my dear, remains to be seen.”

He stood from the bed, and you instantly missed the warmth of his touch. You watched him cross to the wardrobe and pull open the carved doors, retrieving his clothes for the day. 

“But you will still hear him, yes?” 

“That is what I have agreed to,” Ormund answered with obvious reluctance, stepping into his breeches. “And I suppose I must keep my word. I will hear his presentation, just as I have heard the others before him.”

He slipped his arms into the doublet, turning to you as he began buttoning it. “You will not concern yourself with the meeting. You were entrusted to me for good reason. Namely, my rectitude and discernment in such matters. You would not want to be betrothed to some ignorant oaf, would you?”

“No, my lord.”

“And you know that I have only your best interests at heart, including the question of what sort of man you should be given to. Correct?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Ormund smiled affectionately. “Good girl.”

Your heart squeezed at the praise. It had always been that way with Ormund, desperately seeking any type of reassurance that you were saved. That you were obedient. That you were wanted. That you were good. 

The sound of light footsteps and swishing skirts echoed under the chamber’s door. Your servants, no doubt, waiting to be beckoned in by the Lord Hightower to serve upon his ward. 

Ormund made his way back over to you, but this time stayed standing, looking down upon you. “You will attend the sept this morning. When Lord Ashford has finished his proposition, you will come to me in the solar. This evening, we will receive our guests for supper in the Great Hall.”

You bowed your head obediently, just as he taught you. “Yes, my lord.”

Ormund turned to the door as if he meant to call the servants in, and then paused. He slowly turned back to you, his blue eyes swimming with a feeling you had become quite familiar with. Determination, and something weightier under it. Something you had never been able to name, but knew intimately. 

“It is the seventh day,” he stated, his voice low. You knew that. You knew by now not to recognize the day by name, but by its count. “You will come straight to this chamber after supper. Bathe first.” 

Silently, you nodded. His face twisted in disapproval. “Your words, please.”

“Y-yes, my lord.”

He exhaled, a small measure of satisfaction returning to his face. “Good. Very good.” 

Ormund laid one hand over yours where it rested atop the coverlet, looking suddenly very serious. “And do tell your women never use to that horrid citrus oil on you again like they did last week. It taints you.”

“I will.” 

He squeezed your hand in appreciation, then straightened himself and turned towards the door. “You may enter.”

The door opened at once, like your women had been waiting. They filed into the chamber with lowered eyes, none appearing surprised to find you sitting in Lord Ormund’s bed. He did not bother to look at them, his gaze fixed on you as he spoke. 

“See that she is properly dressed to receive visitors.”

The girls spoke in unison, eyes still fixed on the ground. “Yes, Lord Hightower.”

Ormund nodded at you once. An unspoken acknowledgement passed between the two of you. The seventh day. What the night would hold. Then he departed, leaving the chamber door open behind him. 

Your women moved quickly and efficiently, drawing back the blankets and settling a robe over your shoulders as they began the familiar work of preparing you for the day. There was no time to dally. Before long, your hair had been pinned, your gown laced tightly in Hightower green, and your throat and wrists adorned with jewels Ormund had gifted you on namedays and holy days.

One of the girls uncorked the vial of citrus oil and reached for your neck. You grabbed her hand, stopping her. 

“Lord Ormund,” was all you had to say. 

She bowed her head in immediate understanding and exchanged it for another perfumed oil he had shipped from Lys for you. 

Soon, you looked as a proper Hightower woman ought to look. And by the next tolling of the bells, you had entered the sept of the Citadel.

The seven-walled chamber appeared much as it had when you first arrived in Oldtown– or, at least, as it had in your earliest memories once you had gone from a crawling babe to a waddling child. Damp clung to the stone floors. At the center stood an altar crowded with pools of hardened wax and burning candles, while bejeweled likenesses of the Seven watched from alcoves set into each wall. Your attendants lingered behind you like silent shadows as you moved through the sept, a veil drawn over your hair.

You walked as Ormund had always instructed you to walk: head bowed, hands clasped, each step quiet. The very picture of piety in a woman.

Stopping at the Maiden, you thought once more of the late Lady Hightower. You often served as her little companion to the sept on mornings like this, following closely behind as she knelt and prayed before each altar. You could feel the memory clearly: the whisper of her skirts against the stone, the warmth of her hand around your smaller one, the patient way she corrected your prayers when your childish tongue stumbled over the words. 

The truth was that you had no memories before ones such as these, ones of Oldtown. 

You were just a babe when your father, King Viserys, sent you south to be fostered among your Hightower kin. Ormund had always said that, for all the sins of your parents, they had at least possessed the wisdom to recognize Oldtown was where you belonged. 

The explanation for your immediate exile from King’s Landing had always been a convoluted one.

On some days, you had been sent away because court was dangerous. On others, because King’s Landing was steeped in pride and your father wished for you to be raised in the piety of your mother’s kin. Lady Hightower had longed for a daughter. Your health was fragile as a babe, Oldtown’s air was better for a delicate infant. Alicent had a difficult birth and needed time to rest. The reasons always shifted depending upon who offered them.

The clearest explanation, though it was the one that had always gone unspoken, was that you had simply not been wanted.

At first glance, there was nothing about you that suggested descent from Old Valyria. You possessed neither silver hair nor amethyst eyes. Beautiful, certainly, but not plainly Targaryen. You bore none of the unmistakable marks of your father’s house.

More importantly, you had no dragon.

Ormund refused to speak of that last matter. You did not know whether an egg had been placed in your cradle according to custom, whether it had failed to hatch, whether the hatchling had died, or whether no egg had ever been given to you at all. Whatever the circumstances, it seemed the Seven had determined that you were not to be a Targaryen, but a Hightower.

“A blessing,” Ormund often called it, standing behind you, watching intently as you brushed your hair in the evenings. “That your appearance was not marred by the stain of inbreeding. You should be grateful the gods favored you enough to preserve your beauty from such impurity.”

What he really meant was, “You should be grateful the gods gave you to me”. 

And you were. Your childhood in Oldtown had been a happy one. Ormund and Lady Hightower’s sons took to you as a true sister, including you in their games no matter how often you ran weeping to their mother after they shoved you into the mud. You received the finest education the Citadel’s maesters could provide and were thoroughly instructed in histories, languages, scripture, and the workings of court. Ormund instilled in you the virtues expected of a holy and pious woman. Lady Hightower taught you kindness. You wanted for nothing. You were cared for completely.

Being cared for, however, was not the same as being wanted.

One by one, the boys grew into men. They departed to serve in other courts, took wives, and established households of their own. You remained behind. After Lady Hightower’s death, the question of where you belonged began to trouble you even more. 

You searched everywhere for some reflection of yourself. In histories and poems. In portraits, tapestries, and family trees. You studied every face and name, hoping one might reveal why you had been born in the first place. 

Though Ormund preferred that you remain ignorant to the fact, you knew you were a Targaryen.

He contradicted himself often in that regard. He insisted that you were a Hightower whenever you longed for King’s Landing, yet invoked the sins of your Valyrian predecessors whenever you displeased him. As a child, the inconsistency had deeply confused you. Now, though, you knew better to question it. 

The histories did not speak of Targaryens as aliens deserving only shame. On the contrary, they praised them. Aegon the Conqueror had crossed the Narrow Sea and conquered Westeros, his lineage sitting upon the Iron Throne from then until the end of time. They had bound themselves to mighty beasts that would bow to no other riders. Why should you not wish to be one of them? Why should you be ashamed?

Perhaps that was why, during one of your rare visits to King’s Landing, you became determined to find some way of securing your place within your own bloodline. Ormund had permitted you, after much begging on your part and great reluctance on his, to attend the wedding of your brother Aegon to your sister Helaena. You had still been young enough to think yourself a girl, though womanhood waited only just around the corner, and through that haze of youth the wedding had seemed beautiful.

Now, of course, memory revealed what you had been too young to recognize then: the discomfort across Helaena’s face, the uninterested ambivalence with which Aegon accepted the ceremony, the celebration disguising a union neither seemed to really desire. But that morning, surrounded by jewels and music and flowers, by feasts and speeches proclaiming the strength of their union, you had understood only one thing.

If your appearance could not prove you a Targaryen, perhaps marriage could.

When you returned to Oldtown, full of courtly notions and girlish fancy, you announced to Ormund that you would marry your brother Aemond– who had scarcely looked your way throughout the entire visit. Ormund had been seated behind the desk in his solar, writing upon a sheet of parchment. At your declaration, the quill froze between his fingers.

With deliberate care, he set the quill aside and lifted his eyes to you with a dreadful stillness. “You will do no such thing.”

Your smile slowly faded. “But…Aegon married Helaena. That is what Targaryens do.”

Ormund rose suddenly from behind the desk, his chair scraping harshly across the stone floor. You remembered how the sound had frightened you.

“The Targaryens– your father’s family– are incestuous barbarians,” he had declared. “Their minds are so corrupted by generations of inbreeding that they no longer possess the sense to recognize depravity. Your mother whored herself to a Targaryen. I will not give you to your own brother. I will not allow you to repeat her sins and bring further shame upon the Hightower name.”

By then, he had crossed the solar and taken your chin firmly in his hand, his fingers dimpling the skin of your cheeks. You had begun to cry, though you could not tell whether it was from fear, shame, or the sudden loneliness of knowing you might never truly belong anywhere.

“But then I could live with Father and Mother,” you whispered, tears slipping down your cheeks. “I could go home.”

Ormund bent until his face was close to yours, his breath hot against your skin. His grip tightened beneath your chin. “This is your home.”

The memory faded as you reached for a candle from the basket beneath the Maiden’s altar. You held its wick to one of the burning flames and watched a bead of wax gather at the tip before slipping towards your fingers.

Aemond had been the first man Ormund refused you. He had not been the last.

Among Ormund’s duties as your guardian was the arrangement of your eventual betrothal. Ormund approached that responsibility as he approached all others: with severe discretion, particular judgment, and standards so high that no man alive seemed capable of meeting them.

There had never been a shortage of suitors. You were young, unmarried, and beautiful– and whatever Ormund might say of your father’s house, the hand of a Targaryen princess remained a prize few sensible men would dismiss. 

As you grew older, the procession became a lengthy one.

The first man to formally inquire after you had been Ser Joldwin Mormont. You remembered him quite clearly. He had been nearer Ormund’s age than your own, tall and broad as most Northmen seemed to be, with a rough face that was not altogether unpleasant. He was steady in temperament and remained remarkably calm beneath Ormund’s inquisitions. He had even brought you a gift: a beautiful velvet cloak trimmed in bear fur. You had thought he resembled the carved likenesses of the Warrior found in the sept. He would make a good husband, you had decided.

Ormund had not agreed.

He had no shortage of qualms. Men of the North were ignorant, uncivilized, and hardly better than an illiterate barbarian dragging around a club in Ormund’s opinion. Bear Island was remote, bitterly cold, and impoverished. Worst of all, the Mormonts possessed a peculiar habit of treating their women as though they were equals. 

It was not a place, he decided, where you belonged.

Ormund had declared Joldwin entirely unsuitable, and forced you to toss the beautiful cloak into the fireplace of the Great Hall. He said it smelt of bear shit.  

After that, the list of suitors started to blend together. 

There was a Martell, handsome enough to make you blush with warm brown eyes, who winked at you across the hall. Ormund reacted as though the man had attempted to bed you in the middle of the Hightower. The Dornish were lecherous and tried to “fuck anything that walked”, he told you. 

There was a young Rowan who stuttered frequently and spoke so softly that you had to lean closer to hear him. Ormund dismissed him as weak and unfit for a wife. 

A ruddy-cheeked and quite cheerful Redwyne heir sent you summerwine and a song composed in praise of your beauty. Ormund called him frivolous.

One man lived too far from Oldtown. Another lived so near that Ormund questioned whether he sought your hand only to gain influence within the city. One possessed too many ambitions. Another had none. One was too young to govern you properly, while another was so old that Ormund expressed outrage at the very notion of subjecting you to him.

There was always some defect. Too proud. Too timid. Too wealthy. Too poor. Too worldly. Too sheltered. Too handsome. Too plain. 

Ormund’s standards contradicted one another so thoroughly that, had all his preferences been gathered together, the perfect husband would have needed to be commanding without controlling you, gentle without indulging you, wealthy without greed, devout without presumption, and situated near enough that you might never truly leave the Hightower.

Such a man had yet to present himself.

Perhaps, you thought as you placed your candle down before the Maiden’s altar and bowed your head, Lord Godric Ashford would be different. Perhaps today would finally be the day Ormund found a suitable match for you. Perhaps today was the day you would understand what fate had intended for your life. Perhaps you would finally be chosen.

You set your candle upon the Maiden’s altar and prayed for love, for a fruitful marriage, and for a husband who chose you with a pure heart. You tried to imagine such a life with Godric, though you did not yet know his face. 

You hoped he was strong, like Ormund. Tall, like Ormund. Handsome, like Ormund. 

You hoped that he might be enough like Ormund to earn his approval. You hoped, without really understanding why, that he was like Ormund. 

By the time you returned to the Hightower, Lord Ashford had already been shown into Ormund’s solar and begun his proposition. 

Ormund had never permitted you to be present for such conversations, of course. Serious matters, he insisted, were to be muddled by girlish sentiment. Over the years, you had therefore found other ways to learn what decisions were being made about your future without you. Some time ago, you had discovered a narrow passage running behind the rear wall of Ormund’s solar– an old servants’ entrance, long forgotten, its doorway boarded over and concealed behind a heavy tapestry.

And so, upon returning to the Hightower, you dismissed your ladies with the excuse that you wished to pray alone in your chambers (surely the gods would forgive the lie, given the good reason for it). Once they had gone, you slipped behind the tapestry and crept down the cobwebbed corridor until you reached the boarded door. Pressing your ear to the weathered planks, you heard the low murmur of men’s voices.

“...and I would never seek to separate her from Oldtown, Lord Hightower,” an unfamiliar voice spoke. You leaned closer. It was firm but polite, young but not imprudent. Lord Godric Ashford. He sounded kind. “I understand the princess is quite close with you, and I would ensure she could visit the Hightower as often as she wished. Family is of the utmost importance to me.”

You heard Ormund’s chair squeak. You could imagine he had leaned back in it, hands clasped in front of him, assessing Lord Ashford as he did all things brought before his judgement. “That seems to me an indulgence. She would be your wife, would she not? You would not want her with you in Ashford?”

“Of course, my lord. But I would not be so cruel as to forbid her from visiting the man that raised her. My own mother was a Caswell, and she visited my grandsire at Bitterbridge at every turning of the season.”

“And if she wished to visit more often than you considered appropriate?”

There was a brief pause. “I would speak with her, as husband and wife should.”

“Hmm. And if speaking did not bring her around to your judgement?”

There was another lull, longer this time, before Lord Godric gave an uneasy chuckle. “Well, I would hope my wife did not need to be disciplined as a child would.”

“Hopes are not the same as reality,” Ormund replied easily. “Particularly where Targaryen blood is concerned. They are a willful and proud people. Very resistant to correction.” 

“I-I have heard no such things of the princess, my lord.”

“No? Then what have you heard of her?”

“Every account has described her as the very image of what a noblewoman ought to be: beautiful, gracious, and demure. I’ve been told she is quite pious, as well.”

A thoughtful silence settled over the solar. You wished desperately you could see Ormund’s face. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. 

“She is.”

Your heart swelled and instinctively, you pressed yourself closer to the boards. You were a good girl. 

“But do not mistake her nurture for nature, Lord Godric. She did not arrive in Oldtown so.”

“My lord, I did not mean to suggest–”

“Every virtue you have heard praised in her was cultivated beneath my hand. Her modesty, her devotion. The weeds of Targaryen pride had to be pulled, one by one. A garden does not become handsome just because a flower has good intentions. It becomes handsome because a gardener has the discipline to attend to it every single day and cut away what ought not grow.”

Lord Godric hesitated in his answer. “And…you believe a husband must continue that work? Pull the weeds from her?”

“I believe,” Ormund answered slowly, “that any man who means to take her from me must be capable of preserving what I have made.”

What he had made. 

You drew a shaky breath, your fingernails pressing into the weathered boards.

Perhaps it was true. Ormund had spent years teaching you the faults of your father’s house. They were blasphemous, unnatural. Incestuous and violent. An abomination before the Seven. His lessons were so ingrained within you that even the faintest reminder of your Valyrian blood could fill you with shame.

You had not chosen that blood. You had not asked to be born into it. You had only ever wanted to be good. And if Targaryens were innately wicked, perhaps you truly did owe everything virtuous within you to Ormund.

As a child, you had often wondered what sort of creature you might have become without his guidance. If he were true, which he often was, you would be a terrible creature malformed by sin. The thought frightened you still. But another more terrible one followed suit: without his guidance, you would not have had him.

No arms around your waist in the night. No hand smoothing your hair. No voice telling you what was right, what was wrong, what was safe. A life without Ormund. You tried to imagine it and found only emptiness. Would such a life truly be worth living?

And yet…you wanted to be chosen.

Your own mother and father had decided they had no need of you in King’s Landing, though they kept their other children close. You had been sent to Oldtown, where you doubted Ormund and Lady Hightower had been given much choice in whether they would receive you. No one had ever truly chosen you.

That was what made the suitors difficult to dismiss. They came before Ormund willingly, they asked for your hand because they wanted you. You liked that more than you wished to admit. 

And though the thought of leaving Ormund filled your stomach with dread, it had become increasingly difficult not to resent him for refusing every man who tried to choose you.

“I believe I have heard all I need,” Ormund said suddenly, his voice decisive. Your heart faltered. You knew what that meant. 

“...My lord?” You could hear Godric shift closer to the desk. “I hope I have not caused offense of any sort. I only meant that, should the princess become my wife, I would do all within my power to–”

“I said I have heard enough.” Something heavy was placed on the desk with a thud. A wine cup, presumably.

You wanted desperately for Godric to protest. You wanted him to declare his love to you, though he had never once seen your face. You wanted him to insist that perhaps the choice of whom you married ought to belong, at least in part, to you. You wanted him to accuse Ormund of cruelty for denying you the right to a husband.

The last thought filled you with immediate shame. You whispered a hurried prayer under your breath to the Father, begging forgiveness for having judged the man who had only ever sought to protect you.

Godric did none of that. Instead, he simply uttered with cool restraint, “As you will, Lord Hightower.”

A chair scraped across the floor and heavy footsteps crossed the solar, followed by the opening and closing of its main door. You withdrew from the boarded door slowly, blinking as tears began to brim at your eyes.

Usually, disappointment was all you felt when another suitor was refused. A dull ache in your heart followed by the acceptance that Ormund must have seen some defect you had overlooked. He knew the nature of men and the dangers of the world in ways you did not.

This time felt…different.

Godric had spoken respectfully. He had promised not to sever you from Oldtown. He had regarded your devotion and gentleness, and when Ormund questioned whether he could govern you, Godric had not boasted of cruelty or correction. His only failure had been suggesting that you ought to be treated as a wife rather than a child.

By the time you emerged from behind the tapestry, Lord Ashford was gone. The corridor stood empty, save for the guard outside the solar, offering no glimpse of the man who had come to ask for your hand and been dismissed before you could even see his face.

Ormund had instructed you to come to him once the proposition concluded. Usually, you obeyed quickly. Now, though, you lingered outside the solar door with your hand raised to knock, struggling to understand the feelings swimming in your mind. Confusion, disappointment. And something dangerously close to anger.

You knocked anyways.

“You may enter,” Ormund called. 

You opened the door and stepped inside, carefully pulling it shut behind you. Ormund had moved from the desk to the window and stood peering down at the city below. The shutters had been opened. He turned at the sound of the door closing, looked you over once, and– apparently finding no objections with your appearance– gestured towards the carved chairs near his desk. 

“Sit.”

You did. 

Ormund remained beside the window and drew a long breath through his nose. His face tightened with mild disgust. “Lord Ashford seems, from his smell, to possess a great fondness for horses.”

You sniffed discreetly. There was nothing in the air besides parchment and the dried florals Ormund preferred to keep throughout his rooms. “Perhaps he rode in this morning.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps the men of Ashford prefer to sleep in stables.” Ormund reached into the pocket of his breeches and withdrew the ornate pomander he carried. He held it beneath his nose and inhaled deeply. Only once he appeared satisfied that every trace of Lord Ashford had been driven from his nostrils did he return it to his pocket. Then he turned to you, settling against the window ledge with his hands clasped before him. “You attended the sept this morning?”

You stared down at your hands, folded in your lap. “Yes, my lord.”

“And for whom did you light a candle for today?”

You chewed on your lower lip. “The Maiden.”

Ormund nodded in consideration, crossing his arms over his chest. “And why did you choose the Maiden today?”

“I…I wanted to pray for your meeting with Lord Ashford to go well.”

“You prayed for Lord Ashford?”

Your palms had begun to feel sweaty. “Y-yes, my lord.”

“You prayed to marry him?"

“...yes, my lord.”

The muscle under Ormund’s eye twitched. He pushed himself away from the window and approached you slowly. Rounding the corner of the desk, he stopped beside your chair. Then, tugging at the fabric of his breeches over his thighs, he lowered himself until he was kneeling at eye level with you. You kept your gaze fixed on your lap. 

“You wish to leave Oldtown so badly,” he said softly, so quietly it was barely a whisper, “that you would pray to marry a man who you have never met?”

“M-my lord, I did not–”

“Look at me.”

Trembling, you raised your gaze to meet his. Ormund’s face had gone still, though the blue of his eyes had turned icy. Your stomach lurched. 

“I have risked much to raise you,” Ormund began, leaning in closer to you. “I have shielded you from those at court who question why King Viserys cast his youngest daughter out of King’s Landing. I have protected you from men who would use your blood and name for their own advancement. I have purged you of the evils of Valyria and shaped you into a proper woman. And now, now you hate me enough that would you leave my bed for a stranger?”

Heat burned at your cheeks, hearing Ormund speak like that. Like your shared bed was something…you could not finish the thought. “No, Ormund, please, I don’t–”

“You hate me enough that you would question my judgement?” he pressed, voice lowering to a gravelly hum. “You believe you know better than I? That I am ignorant?”

Hot tears had begun to spill over, wetting your lashes and blurring your vision. “I don’t, my lord, I don’t know b-better than you, I only wanted–”

“Tell me, then.” Ormund seized your face in one hand, his rings digging into your cheeks as he forced your chin upward. “Tell me that you do not wish to leave me.”

“I-I do not wish to leave you, my lord,” you choked, sobbing fully now. 

“Tell me that no man could care for you as I have.”

“No man could c-care for me as you have!”

His hand tightened enough around your chin that your cheeks squished together. His face, though, had shifted, a diseased softness bleeding into it. “Now, you must tell me what you have forgotten to say.”

Shame and something hotter burned low in your gut. He always made you say the words like this. When you had no option but to force the truth out of you. 

“I…” your breath shuddered. “I love you.”

Ormund’s grip refused to loosen. “Again, please.”

The words caught in your throat, scraping like sand. “I love you, Ormund.”

Finally, his face eased, and so did his hold. 

“There,” he murmured, sickeningly tender as he wiped his thumb across your cheek, catching one of your stray tears. “Was that so difficult to say?”

You shook your head quickly. You did not trust your voice. 

Seemingly satisfied, Ormund rose from where he was crouched, dusting off his breeches. The matter was finished. He returned to his desk, lowering himself in his chair, no trace of the man who had just seconds ago demanded the sick truth of your devotion. You remained frozen, unable to move, cheeks wet and burning. You suddenly were conscious of how horrible you must look, swollen eyes and shaking hands. 

Ormund glanced up from his papers. “You will go and ready yourself for the evening’s feast now.”

Numb, you stared at him. He raised one brow in question. Ormund did not like to repeat himself. 

“Y-yes, my lord,” you stuttered. 

“Wear the blue silk. The one with the square neckline,” he dipped his quill into the ink, already moved on from the excitement and back to his usual self. He glanced up once more, eyes moving across your face. “And…have the women repair your face. It would be quite unbecoming to our guests to see you have upset yourself.”

You were thoroughly humiliated. “Yes, my lord.”

Legs shaking slightly, you rose and smoothed your skirts. 

“And, one more thing,” Ormund spoke, though he continued reading the parchment he held. “You will not speak with Lord Ashford this evening.”

You paused. Was this a trap? “Would it…would it not appear discourteous if I refused to–”

“The matter has already been decided, my girl. You have no need to encourage him further.”

“I…I understand.” You bowed, trying not to trip over your still unsteady feet, and then turned towards the door. You had just put your hand on the latch when Ormund spoke again.

“Have you forgotten something?”

You paused, and then looked back in the solar. Ormund had finally lifted his eyes from the parchment and was leaning back in his seat. He tapped one finger against his cheek. 

Your cheeks grew hotter, though you had done this hundreds of times before. Thousands, perhaps. You crossed the solar to where Ormund sat, his expression completely neutral. Heart beating in your throat, you bent carefully and pressed your lips briefly to his cheek. He caught your wrist before you could retreat.

“Once more, properly this time,” he commanded.

You swallowed and kissed him again, lingering this time until you felt the faint scrape of where he had shaved that morning and breathed in the familiar fragrance of his pomander.

Ormund released his grip on you, mouth curled in a smile. “Good girl. You may go now.”

You bowed, lower this time, and left the solar with the warm and humiliating feeling you had become accustomed to now living in the very place Ormund had hollowed out inside you over years and years. 

As you walked down the halls of Hightower, face lowered so any passerbys would not catch a glimpse of your reddened cheeks and puffy eyes, you wondered why you felt the way you did. 

Lord Ashford would be at the feast that evening, and though Ormund had forbidden you from speaking to him, you knew that you would search for him among the gathered faces. For what, you could not say. To prove something, perhaps. But what, exactly?

That Ormund was right? Or that he was wrong? 

And afterward…no matter the excitement from the day, you had not forgotten Ormund’s reminder that morning. 

“It is the seventh day.”

You dreaded the fact, but not for the ritual that awaited you, but rather the shameful fact it made you excited. 

It seemed this was to be a day of contradictions.

You wanted Lord Ashford to see you, and you hoped he never appeared so that you might obey Ormund without temptation. You wanted Ormund to loosen his hold upon you, and you wanted him to swear that he would never allow you to belong to anyone else.

How could both desires live in the same body? The same heart? You did not know.

You knew only that, by the end of the night, Ormund would decide which desire you were permitted to keep.

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[ndnbutch]

I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where y’all lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was “hetslop”—this person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually don’t think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post that’s been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that they’d need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldn’t have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of y’all are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. it’s not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.

[ndnbutch]

on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of y’all NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think that’s actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think you’re no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldn’t kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human

[synnicall]

Excessive Centrifugal Force is SUCH a good piece because it literally feels like the music itself it desperately reaching out further and further, just barely, to try and save itself.