Feb 22
Modern au Baelor and maekar 🧎♀️🧎♀️
By: crazy_toma777
seen from China
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seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany
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seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from Russia
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
Modern au Baelor and maekar 🧎♀️🧎♀️
By: crazy_toma777
𝐒𝐇𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄 | baelor targaryen
| gif credits: @allyriadayne |
A/N: I am absolutely in love with @idksmtms's fics of Maekar having a young wife whom Dunk confuses with his daughter, and I just kept thinking about how Baelor would react if it happened to him 😭 so I wrote this. Special thanks to @vhagars-dementia for constantly blessing this fandom with her ideas!!! I dedicate this to you <3 And to all my Baelor enthusiasts.
— summary: ser duncan the tall thinks you're just a beautiful girl close to his own age, but his innocence is his undoing when he mistakes you for just another targaryen cousin. the only problem? you are actually the lady of dragonstone and baelor’s wife. — pairing: baelor targaryen x wife!reader — word count: 2k — content: controversial young wife!reader, age gap, humor, mentions of reader's hair length, jealous!baelor, implicit sexual references, pda.
⋆ . ۰˚ ౨ৎ ── series masterlist with different characters’ versions: here!
The hedge knight spends more time than ever with the family, forever trailing after Aegon like a loyal hound, laughing, jesting, and, above all, eating.
It was only to be expected that the prince would invite his dear friend to the feast held at Dragonstone for the celebration of your name day. Your husband, Baelor, had prepared a banquet worthy of you, with an enormous cake and hundreds of servants rushing frantically through the castle, adorning the halls with flowers and colors chosen to your liking. He knew you exceptionally well, so it had been easy for him to decorate precisely how you'd like.
You had told him, of course, that such splendor was unnecessary, that a small supper with the family would have more than sufficed. Yet Baelor delighted in spoiling you, for you were the finest blessing he had been granted in a lot of time.
Whenever Ser Duncan the Tall found himself in your presence, he devoted most of his time to watch you from afar—seeing you laugh beside Baelor, play with Egg, or even speak comfortably with Prince Aerion. Your presence was nothing short of glorious, a magnet for eyes and devotion wherever you went. Your nature was exquisite—kind, gentle, and so unbearably sweet that at times Dunk thought you could scarce be of the same blood as the rest of them.
And your beauty… that was another matter entirely. You were the loveliest sight the humble eyes of a hedge knight had ever beheld. Your form was wondrous, your face celestial, your long hair falling over your shoulders like a silken cascade, and your smile... it stole the very breath from his chest every time. Each time you entered his sight, a sigh would just escape out of him, soft and helpless, like a boy hopelessly in love.
“Do not even think it, Dunk,” Egg warns him, as he had more than once before, quick to notice the besotted look upon his big friend’s face as they sat together at the table. “That's out of your power to reach, Ser.”
But Dunk does not answer. He is far too intent upon you as you appear in the great hall’s doorway.
Today you wear a gown of red, dazzling, adorned with pearls and white embroidery that spreads across your bodice, climbs your shoulders, and trails down the length of your spine, where darker crimson stitching forms the likeness of dragon scales. Your hair lies loose down your back, softly waved, gleaming in the candlelight.
All rise at your entrance.
Dunk is the last. He nearly stumbles over his chair in his haste, its legs scraping loudly against the stone floor as he shoves it back. That alone—and you—turn him red as a summer apple.
Valarr, seated at his other side, watches his brutish motion with poorly hidden amusement.
“My love,” Baelor calls first, his face gentle as drifting clouds, fondness curving his lips as he comes to greet you properly. “Happy name day.”
You accept his embrace, smiling as he presses a tender kiss to your hair.
After him, the others come in turn, forming a line to offer their wishes, their thanks, their gifts—small tokens and letters placed into your hands.
Egg flings himself into your arms, making you laugh and sway back a step beneath the force of him. Baelor, standing close at your side, smiles at the sight. Ever tender are you with the younglings, and for that, he loves you all the more. You shower his children with a devotion so maternal and steadfast that one would never guess they did not spring from your own womb.
“Thank you, my sweet Aegon,” you tell him, stroking the fine, pale silver-gold hair already sprouting upon his head. The boy had even brought you a flower—one of those you cherished most, a silent token of his affection.
Duncan feels painfully out of place when his turn comes. Standing empty-handed while his stomach twists into a tight, miserable knot.
He is already flushed when you lift your gaze to him, your eyes sparkling with amusement at the familiar effect you have upon him—his trembling hands, his stammer, his shy smiles. He's so cute!
“Ser Duncan. I hope you would be here,” you greet him warmly, you know well the bond he shares with Aegon; to have him present is a comfort to your heart. “Aegon speaks wonders of you. It does not surprise me to see you have become each other's shadow.”
“My lady,” Dunk answers you, his voice no louder than a mouse’s squeak. His gaze, much against his better judgment, betrays him, making a swift, helpless journey over the length of your body.
And Baelor notices, of course; his smile fades, slow and certain, as he watches the knight’s every movement like a hawk perched upon your shoulder. A single brow lifts slightly, and a deep, thoughtful furrow begins to cloud his brow.
Duncan clears his throat and casts your husband an apologetic glance before daring to look at you again. “I— I beg your pardon. I would not wish to be an intrusion upon your name day. Your father was kind enough to grant me to attend.”
The hall falls into sepulchral silence. The small conversations that bloom among the Targaryens die at once when Dunk’s words echo through the great chamber, their meaning plain, their offense unmistakable and unashamed. Even the youngest cease their play, and the servants stand frozen right where they are.
All turn to stare at Duncan now, and they look upon him with mortified eyes, as though none dare breathe.
Somewhere, someone fails to smother a laugh—most likely Aerion.
Egg’s mouth falls open in mortification. He looks up at his friend, his expression stricken, willing him to understand—to see—that what he has just said is wrong. Very wrong.
Duncan looks down at him when his small squire gives his shin a furtive kick, meant to draw his notice without the others seeing. He frowns, bewildered, not understanding what offense he has given now to deserve such a blow.
And when he looks back to the grown folk, he finds you watching him with an expression poised in perfect balance between horror and amusement. There is even the faintest hint of a smile at the corner of your lips, one you must press away when you turn your head toward your prince.
Baelor does not look pleased as you do.
His face is uncommonly stern, his brow drawn tight, his lips pressed into a hard, unforgiving line, he is trying to gather every shred of his restraint to keep from striking the foolish knight upon your name day.
“She is my wife, Ser Duncan,” he clarifies, his patience stretched thin, drawn so taut it borders upon offense. His hand comes to curl around your waist as you lean into him, lifting one hand to his chest in quiet reassurance.
You are still trying to hide that treacherous, amused smile.
“Oh—Seven—” Dunk breathes, realization striking him at last. He drops at once to his knees, bowing his head in reverence and shame. “I beg your forgiveness, Your Grace. I—I did not know. My manners are poor—you must understand, I never m–meant offense.”
“Of course not, Ser,” you reply kindly, looking down at him, still leaning against your husband’s chest. He lets out a soft sigh beneath your touch, your hand rising and falling with the steady motion of his breath.
Baelor makes a sharp, dismissive gesture for him to rise. “See that it does not happen again.”
“Of course!” Dunk scrambles to his feet at once, his face burning red with shame. “I only meant that she is so young and beautiful, and you—”
His frantic blue eyes fall upon Valarr, standing just behind his father. The prince shakes his head swiftly, his mismatched eyes widening in urgent warning, bidding him to hold his tongue.
Dunk obeys at once and his jaw snaps shut so hard it almost snaps apart.
“You witless boy,” Maekar rebukes him, his face twisted with disgust and disdain when the hedge knight dares glance his way, standing at your side like some old, ill-tempered hound. “That should cost you your fucking tongue.”
Your soft laughter breaks through the tension of the moment, and all turn to look at you, the heavy air easing when they all realize this offends you not half so deeply as it does them.
“I am certain Ser Duncan meant no malice, Maekar,” you say, seeking to soothe them—most of all your husband. “And I should not like to see any tongues torn out upon my name day, please.”
Baelor’s gaze remains fixed upon the mortified knight, his hand coming to rest upon the pommel of his sword—a blade he carries in quiet defiance of your pleas to remain unarmed this day. He thinks, perhaps, that he shall have a use for it against Ser Duncan.
“... shall we eat at last, then?” Comes Daeron’s unmistakable voice from somewhere within the hall. “I am hungry. And thirsty.”
“Of that, none have any doubt,” Maekar mutters, rolling his eyes as he returns to the table.
The others follow in his wake, granting you and your husband a moment alone.
Ser Duncan gives you another quick, apologetic bow before hastening out from beneath your husband’s gaze.
You cannot hold it any longer.
A breath of laughter escapes you, soft and bright, and you turn in Baelor’s arms to face him fully.
He is still watching the place where Duncan stood, his jaw tight, his shoulders rigid beneath your touch, as if the insult lingers in the air like a foul smell.
Your fingers curl more firmly into the front of his doublet to call for his attention.
“My prince,” you whisper with a smile when his two-toned eyes finally meet yours. “My heart...”
You rise onto your toes and press a gentle kiss to his cheek, his beard tickling against your skin. His body noticeably softens beneath your warm affection.
Another kiss follows, softer still, at the corner of his mouth.
And one more, sweet and lingering, upon his lips.
“Peace,” you plead humorously against his mouth, your fingers toying idly with the Hand of the King’s badge on his chest. “You look as though you mean to challenge the poor knight to single combat over a slip of the tongue, my love.”
“I am not amused,” he manifests, his tone remarkably sullen, yet you press another loving kiss to his lips to chase away his pettish little pout.
“No?” You lean closer, your voice drops into something more playful and teasing, “is it because he thinks you're old, husband?”
His lips tremble at your words, holding back an ironic smile, and his hands tighten at your waist, pulling you closer against him.
Baelor clicks his tongue, and your gaze falls to his lips as he does. “I am not old.”
“Well, considering my own age... truthfully, you are a bit older,” you continue to tease him, biting back a small laugh at his startled reaction. “Should I begin calling you father now, hm?”
His beautiful eyes narrow.
You grin—and steal another quick kiss before he can protest.
“Do not push your luck, wife,” he warns all the same, a playful little smile curving his lips. His hand slides down to the small of your back before he delivers a sharp, scolding swat to your backside, making you jolt lightly against him.
His brow arches slightly. “You are the only one left breathless and trembling like some frail, ancient little thing. Or must I remind you how you clung to me the other night and begged me to—?”
Your hand flies to his mouth, covering it before he can utter another word.
“My prince,” you hiss under your breath, though laughter trembles in your voice, your eyes wide with scandalized amusement. “You grow bold. We are in a hall full of eyes, and your sons sit but a stone's throw away.”
His lips move against your palm, pressing a lingering, heated kiss there that sends a shiver down your spine. Baelor gently pulls your hand away, though he does not let go of your fingers, his thumb stroking your knuckles with a slow, possessive rhythm, grazing your betrothal ring.
“Let them look,” he dismisses, leaning into you to kiss your lips properly, claiming them. And claiming you.
The heated kiss, at last, forces Duncan’s eyes away from you, and Baelor smiles against your mouth as he watches him behind you, finally closing his own eyes to savor the honeyed sweetness of your kiss.
✦ — BEHIND CLOSED DOORS ..!
summary: you did not want to marry prince baelor targaryen. you had heard the stories your entire life and none of them had made you want to be anywhere near the man they described. but the crown owed your father a debt, and debts in king's landing were paid in daughters.
pairing: baelor targaryen x fem!tyrell!reader
content: canon divergent, arranged marriage, non-implied age gap, angst, slow burn, jealousy, yearning, court politics, mentions of past character death (Baelor's first wife, vague insecurity, implied smut (18+ MDNI)
You did not want to marry Prince Baelor Targaryen. You had known it the moment your father summoned you to his solar with a particular stillness on his farce, one that meant a decision had already been made and your presence was a courtesy rather than a consultation. You had sat across from him and smiled and said nothing, because it was your duty to not say anything, and just obey. You loathed the thought of such.
The maester read the terms of the arrangement over supper, as though he were reading a list of household accounts. Even now at the Red Keep, after quite the travel from your home, your father sat across from you with his hands folded on the table and his eyes fixed on the tablecloth, and you sat very still and still thought of nothing at all, because that was the only way to keep yourself from doing something foolish.
You had the urge, briefly and vividly, to stand up from the table and walk out the room and keep walking, out of the Red Keep entirely, out through the gates and down to the harbour and onto the first ship that was going somewhere your father hadn’t already arranged. But you knew better than that. They would drag you back before tide turned. They always found a way too.
“The betrothal will be formalized within this moon period,” the maester said, glancing up from his scroll to look at you with the mild apologetic expression of a man delivering weather. “The wedding is to follow swiftly after. Prince Baelor has agreed to it, so I do not see why it shouldn’t go forward without trouble.”
Without trouble. As though trouble were something that lived in logistics. As though the trouble had nothing to do with you sitting in this room and being talked about like a parcel to be sent on.
Prince Baelor. You had heard the name your entire life. Everyone had. You grew up on the stories the way other children grew up on songs. Baelor Targaryen, who had held the line at Ashford when lesser men had broken and run. Baelor Targaryen, who had ridden through a burning village to pull three smallfolk children from a collapsed roof, and emerged the other side with his cloak in flames and not a word of complaint about it. Baelor Targaryen, who had put down the Blackfyre Rebellion with cool efficiency that men still talked about at feasts, their cups raised and their voices hushed with something that sat right at the border of reverence and fear.
They called him Breakspear. They called him that because no one had ever broken him.
You thought about that even after the maester excused himself and your father finally looked up from the tablecloth with the expression of a man who believed he was being generous.
"You'll be a princess," he said. "You understand what that means."
"Yes," you said, and your voice had no happiness in it, no solace, nothing that could be mistaken for either of those things. "I understand."
He took that as agreement, because he always took silence and stillness as agreement, and perhaps that was your fault too.
You lay awake in the guest chambers they had assigned you, the ones you would occupy until the wedding made you someone’s wife, and you turned your father’s ambition over in your mind like stones you already knew the shape of. He wanted children from this union. Heirs who carried Tyrell blood and Targaryen blood. Not giving any mind that Baelor already had two sons by his first wife, the one who had died in her labours years ago, giving birth to Prince Baelor's youngest son. Your father made it clear to you that he wanted his blood in the line of succession. He wanted to be able to look at the Iron Throne one day, and say, somewhere in that, there is something of mine.
You did not want that. You did not want any of it. You did not want to be near the prince, did not want to give him heirs on top of the ones he already had, did not want to spend your life in service of an ambition that had never once asked what you wanted from your own.
Two sons was enough for any man.
That night, sleep did not find you.
You saw him for the first time in the courtyard of the Red Keep, three days after your party had arrived. He was speaking to two knights in riding gear, his back half-turned to you, and your first thought was that he was taller than you had expected. Your second thought was that he looked like a man who had never in his life needed to raise his voice to make a room go quiet.
He turned when your footsteps scraped the stone, and you caught the full measure of him at once. The grey decorating his beard in patches. The broad set of his shoulders, built for armour even in plain clothes. The mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue, that settled on you with an attention so direct it was almost physical.
"My lady of Highgarden," he said, and there was a small smile on his lips, something measured and polite, as he tilted his head slightly down to look at you.
"Your Grace," you answered, almost too quickly, and kept your eyes down for a beat longer than you needed to, studying the worn stone at your feet like it might offer you something useful.
He waited for you to look up. You got the sense he was patient at waiting. You got the sense he had waited out many things larger than this.
"You've come a long way," he said.
"Indeed," you said, because you had to say something. "The road was kind. We had good weather, by the gods' grace."
"Did you."
"Yes."
A silence settled between you that felt less like discomfort and more like he was simply observing you, cataloguing something at a pace you couldn't rush. You smoothed your skirts with both hands, a nervous habit, and hated yourself for it almost immediately.
"I hope you are pleasant with having to wed me," he said, pausing briefly, watching you twist your fingers together in front of you. "Are you?"
No. The word arrived in your mind before anything else did, clean and immediate. No, I am not pleased, I am frightened and resentful and I have not slept properly in two weeks and every story I have ever heard about you ends with someone not getting back up.
But you could not say any of that. Your father would have your tongue before the sentence was finished.
"Do not do that to your fingers, my lady," Baelor said, interrupting the spiral before it could swallow you whole. "You'll do harm to them."
You stopped instantly. The command was not unkind, but it was a command, and your body obeyed it before your mind had finished deciding whether to. The smile that had been on his face when he first turned was gone now, though the faint softness underneath it remained, held carefully in place.
"I'm starting to wonder if you aren't pleased with the match," he said, his voice entirely calm, the way deep water is calm. "You still haven't answered."
"I apologize, Your Grace." The words came out smooth and easy, rehearsed without meaning to be. "I am pleased. It is my duty to be, and if our union strengthens the bonds between our houses, then I am glad of it."
A lie. A very good one. You had been practicing variations of it for weeks.
He looked at you for a moment longer than felt comfortable, long enough that you wondered if he knew, long enough that you felt the specific heat of being studied by someone who was accustomed to reading situations accurately and quickly. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose and looked out across the courtyard, giving you the small mercy of his profile instead of his full attention.
"A diplomatic answer," he said.
"I've been told I give those."
"I don't doubt it." He glanced back at you, brief and measuring. "I've been told you paint."
The change of subject was abrupt enough to unsettle you, which you suspected might have been the point. "I do," you said carefully. "Sometimes."
"What do you paint?"
The question was so plain and without ceremony that it caught you off guard. You had been braced for something political, something that required a careful answer, and instead you got this. "Flowers, mostly. And the water. We have a lake at home, on the south side of the grounds. I've painted it perhaps a hundred times."
"And it still interests you?" Not sarcastically. Genuinely curious in the way of someone who finds focus in other people interesting rather than puzzling.
"Every season it looks different," you said. "Every hour of the day. I don't think I could exhaust it."
Something shifted in his expression then, small and real, the faint softening of a face that held itself deliberately composed as a matter of long habit.
"I have kept you long enough," he said, and inclined his head to you. "I'll see you at supper, my lady."
He walked past you back into the keep, and you stood in the empty courtyard with your hands still at your sides and tried to decide what you made of that, and found that you couldn't. The wind came through and lifted the loose edge of your sleeve, and somewhere above you a bird crossed the grey sky, and you stood there until the sound of his footsteps had faded entirely.
Then you went inside, and sat with your ladies, and smiled, and said nothing at all. Because that’s the order of the way things were here.
The feast was loud and long and you drank your wine too fast and smiled until your face ached. Baelor sat at the head of the table to your left in the same dark cloth he had been married in, the three-headed dragon embroidered at his chest, and you had been a wife now for approximately six hours and you could feel the full weight of it settling over you like armour you hadn't been measured for.
You had married a man who had killed people.
Not cruelly. Not without cause. But he had, and the stories were very clear on that, and they did not try to soften it, not even for the women who were being handed to him. He had done what needed doing and done it well and the realm had benefited and all of that was true and none of it made a difference to the part of you that was sitting at this feast watching the candlelight move across his hands and thinking about all the things those hands had done before they had touched your jaw this morning.
You did not know how much wine you had drunk. Enough. Not enough. Somewhere in between. You had lost count around the third cup and stopped caring around the fourth, and the noise of the feast pressed in from all sides, laughter and music and the scrape of chairs on stone, and somewhere in the middle of all of it you sat very still and rethought your entire life from the beginning.
Merry found you eventually, your cousin with her pretty laugh and her gift for making any room feel smaller and warmer. She dropped into the seat beside you and took your hand under the table and squeezed once, and you squeezed back, and neither of you said anything about it.
"He keeps looking over," she said quietly into your ear, after a while.
"Does he?"
"He's been watching you all evening."
"He's probably worried I'll knock something over," you said. Merry laughed. Across the table Baelor said something low to the man beside him and did not look up from his cup, and you watched him for one unguarded moment before you looked away.
You watched him sometimes, after that, in the spaces between conversations. When he wasn't looking. You tried to read him the way you read the lake, the way you looked at a thing from different angles until it gave you something. He did not gesture when he spoke. He did not laugh loudly. He listened more than he talked, which among men of his station was genuinely unusual, and when he did speak the people around him leaned in without seeming to realize they were doing it. Like plants toward light. Like something involuntary.
What surprised you, later, was the bedding ceremony. Or rather, the absence of one.
Baelor had refused it. Quietly, without spectacle, in the way he seemed to do most things, and the court had no choice but to fold around his decision and pretend they had never expected otherwise. You heard it from Merry, who had heard it from one of the Kingsguard, and you stood there absorbing the information with a feeling you didn't immediately have a name for. Relief, you decided. It was relief. Strange and unexpected and slightly humiliating to feel so strongly, but there it was.
Even so, when the door to your new chambers clicked shut behind you both and you heard the latch catch, your chest tightened all the same.
The room was full of candles, dozens of them, casting everything in soft shifting gold. Someone had arranged fresh flowers near the window, roses among them, and turned down the bed with the kind of careful attention that made the whole thing feel more deliberate, more inevitable. You crossed to the window and stood with your arms folded loosely at your waist and looked out at the dark city below and tried to remember what breathing was supposed to feel like.
Then he said your name.
Not my lady. Your name, and it sat differently in his mouth that it did in anyone else’s. Lower, somehow. More considered.
You turned from the window. He was watching you with that same quality he always had, the direct unhurried attention, but there was something else underneath it now. Something careful. Like a man approaching a problem he didn't want to make worse.
"You don't have to worry so much," he said, and moved to the table across the room, pouring wine with his back half-turned to you. His hands were steady. Of course they were. "We won't consummate it tonight."
The words landed and your stomach dropped, but not from relief. From something closer to dread, the specific crawling dread of a daughter who could already hear her father's voice somewhere in the back of her skull telling her she had failed before she had even begun. It had only been a couple hours of being a wife and you already failed short. You dropped your gaze to the floor. Your fingers found each other, and you started pulling at the skin around your knuckles without meaning to.
"Did I do something, my prince?" The words came out smaller than you intended. Quieter.
He set the goblet down. You heard him turn.
"You don't have to keep calling me that," he said. "We're married now."
"What would you prefer?"
"My name," he said. "Just my name."
You pulled in a slow breath. "Have I done something wrong, Baelor?"
His name in your mouth felt foreign and right at the same time, like a word in a language you had been studying a long time and had only just spoken aloud.
He crossed the room toward you, not quickly, not with any urgency, just steadily, and he stopped when he reached you and put two fingers under your chin and tilted your face up. His touch was warm. Dry. Unhurried.
You were not expecting the kiss he pressed to your forehead. Soft, brief, almost nothing, and yet it stayed on your skin after he pulled back, like the impression of something.
When you looked up at him your lips were parted and you had nothing to say.
"No," he said, simply. "You haven't done anything wrong." He searched your face for a moment, his mismatched eyes moving between yours. "I don't want my wife drunk and anxious the first time. I'd rather you come to it because you trust me enough. Not because the court expects it of you before morning."
A silence opened up between you. Outside, the city murmured on, indifferent.
"That could take a long time," you said, and you meant it lightly but it didn't come out quite that way.
"I know," he said. And then, without any particular weight to it, like a man stating a fact he had already made peace with: "I can wait."
You looked at him standing there in the candlelight, large and steady and entirely serious, and you thought about all the stories, all the things they said about him, the battles and the efficiency and the men who had not gotten back up, and you thought: none of them mentioned this part. None of them thought to.
In the weeks that followed, you learned that baelor woke before dawn, every morning, and could be found in the training yard before the light had fully come. You learned that he ate simply and without fuss and that feasts bored him, that he tolerated them because they were required and endured them the way another man might endure a long sea voyage.
You were still frightened of him. Not in the way you had been that first night, with your arms crossed and your heart hammering. You didn’t know how he made you feel.
Baelor noticed your distance, of course. How could he not. You were always in bed before he came to the chambers, feigning sleep or close enough to it that he never tested the difference. You declined his invitations to share supper with excuse after careful excuse, a headache, correspondence from home, fatigue from the afternoon. He accepted each one without comment, and somehow that was worse than if he had pressed you. You were grateful, most of all, that he had not yet commanded the marriage to be consummated. That was the thing you held onto.
You felt guilty about it sometimes. In small quiet moments, when you were honest with yourself. But guilt was a feeling you could set down and pick back up. Fear sat differently in the body.
Every other day there was a new rumour. Your ladies brought them to you the way birds bring things back to a nest, little bright pieces of nothing that accumulated into something. You had no choice but to sit and listen, just as you were doing now, in the small solar off the main hall where the afternoon light came in sideways and made everything look warmer than it was.
"He is a great man," said Elayne Hightower, in the tone of someone conveying information she believed you were too simple to already possess. She was one of the ladies assigned to you upon your arrival, and in the weeks since you had arrived at a quiet and absolute conclusion: you did not like her. Not even a little. She was the kind of woman who delivered cruelty with a smile and then looked confused when anyone minded. "A great man in every sense of the word, if you take my meaning."
She let the last words hang there and looked at you sideways, watching for a reaction.
You took a slow sip from your goblet and gave her nothing.
"Surely you've consummated the marriage by now," she said, leaning forward slightly, dropping her voice in the conspiratorial register of someone who wanted an audience but pretended otherwise. She set her goblet down on the table and smiled at you with all her teeth. "Do tell. How was it?"
The bluntness of it made your eyes go wide before you could stop them. "I do not wish to speak of such matters with you, Lady Hightower."
She rolled her eyes, the gesture practiced and a little bored. "No need to be so shy about it, princess. Virgins always get so delicate when someone brings it up. It's rather sweet, really." The word sweet landed the way a small blade lands, point first. The other ladies around you had gone very still, a few of them hiding their mouths behind their goblets. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, not knowing what you're about."
"Mind your tongue," you said, and you meant it to come out firm and it came out soft, which was worse.
She made a small sound with her teeth, a dismissive little tsk, and waved her hand as though you'd said something tedious. Then she tilted her head at you, her smile going thin and sharp at the edges.
"Well. If you won't share, I suppose I'll simply tell you how he spent the remainder of the evening. Once he was done with you, that is." She paused for effect. Let the silence do its work. "He came to me."
The room went very quiet.
You sat completely still. You were aware of every person in that room, every averted eye, every carefully controlled expression. You could hear the city outside the window. You could hear your own pulse.
You thought about the night of your wedding. Baelor helping you out of your dress without making anything of it. Baelor sitting with you until you had went into a dreamless sleep, after the many wines you had that evening. You had thought, lying there in the dark, that whatever he was, he was at least that. Decent. Trying.
But then. A man of his station and appetites, refused by his new wife night after night. It was not hard to imagine. It was, in fact, very easy to imagine, and you hated how easily the picture assembled itself.
You felt the anger arrive before you'd decided to feel it. It was different from the distant background dread you'd been carrying for weeks. This was sharp. Immediate. Something with edges.
Your brows pulled together without meaning them to.
"I can tell you the particulars if you like," Elayne said, pleasantly. "He talks you through it, I'll say that much. Very thorough. He did write me this morning, actually, to say he'd be visiting again soon." She glanced at the other ladies with a little lift of her chin, a performer acknowledging her audience. "I suppose things between you two haven't quite found their footing yet."
You stood up.
It happened before you had finished deciding to do it. One moment you were sitting and the next you were on your feet, and the room seemed to go even quieter somehow, the way rooms do when something shifts.
"That is my husband you are speaking of," you said. Your voice was very even. You were rather proud of how even it was, given that your hands were trembling slightly at your sides and you could feel the humiliation pressing up behind your eyes like water behind a dam. "Whatever the circumstance, whatever your history with him, you will not speak his name to me in this manner again. If you do, I will take the matter directly to His Grace the King. Do you understand me?"
Elayne looked up at you from her seat with that same thin smile, and said, "I've hurt you. I'm sorry for it, truly," in a voice that contained not one single grain of apology.
The lady beside her pressed her lips together to hide something that was almost certainly a smile.
You did not say another word. You turned and walked out of the room, and you did not wait for your knight to fall into step behind you. You walked until the corridor bent and the solar was out of sight, and then you stopped and pressed your back against the stone wall and breathed and looked at the ceiling and thought about absolutely nothing at all, which was very hard to do, and which you forced yourself to manage anyway.
You stayed there until you trusted your face again. Then you went back to your chambers and sat at your window and watched the world outside until the light faded, and you did not want to think about Elayne Hightower, and you certainly did not want to think about Baelor.
You didn't hear the door open. Your eyes were distant, fixed on nothing in particular beyond the glass, and your meals had come and gone untouched all day, the chambermaids cycling in and out like tides, and you had let them. Appetite required a kind of presence you did not currently have.
Without meaning to you, as Baelor spoke your name, as you turned to face him you glared at him, a pouty look on your face.
"Is it true?" The words left your mouth before you had decided to say them. You didn't know where the nerve came from. Only that the jealousy had been sitting in you all day like something swallowed wrong, and underneath it the thing you had been less willing to look at: that somewhere in the weeks of distance and avoidance and careful politeness, you had grown fond of him. Quietly. Without meaning to. You had been seeking him out even as you pulled away. Maybe that was why he had gone elsewhere. Maybe the fault was yours and you hated that thought most of all.
You hated her. You were certain of it now.
Baelor looked confused. More than confused, actually. Surprised, in the specific way of a man who had learned not to expect much and was recalibrating in real time. You were always the one who waited to be spoken to first, who answered in half-sentences and agreeable nods. You speaking first, and like this, meant something was wrong. His brows drew together. "What's true, princess?" he said quietly, his eyes moving over your face.
"Do not make me say it." Your voice was unsteady and you resented it. "It hurts enough to think about. Let alone say it to your face."
He took a step toward you and you looked down and that was when he noticed your hands, your fingers picking at the skin around your nails the way they always did when you were trying not to cry.
"How many times," he said, and his voice was very calm, "have I told you to stop doing that."
"Do not act as though you care," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word and you hated yourself for it. You looked up at him. "Did you care when you went to Elayne Hightower on the night of our wedding? Did you think of me at all? People call you honourable. They say it like it is the truest thing about you."
Something moved across his face. Something small and quick. He pressed his lips together and the corner of his mouth shifted, barely, the suggestion of something that in any other moment might have been amusement.
"What is funny about this?" You stared at him. "Do you know what it felt like, sitting there while she told me in front of everyone. While they smiled behind their goblets and thought I couldn't see."
He closed the distance between you. "What did she say." Not a question. A quiet command.
"Vile things. Things I don't wish to repeat." Your voice broke properly then and you turned away and walked toward the window because you needed something to look at that wasn't his face. You could feel the tears and you refused them, crossing your arms over your chest.
You startled when his hands found your shoulders. His fingers gathered your hair and moved it aside, and then the scratch of his beard against the slope of your neck, the press of his lips there, warm and deliberate, and his hands settling at your waist, drawing you back against him. You let him, because you were tired and hurt and his hands were warm, and some part of you had been wanting something like this for weeks without knowing how to say so.
"Tell me what she said," he said against your hair.
You told him all of it. The smile on Elayne's face. The details she offered without being asked. The letter she claimed he had sent that very morning. Your voice stayed mostly level and only broke once, near the end. His hands did not move from your waist the entire time.
"She said you'd promised to see her this evening," you finished. "It was humiliating. I never want to see those women again. You have made me friendless in a court that was never mine to begin with."
You pulled away and turned to face him. He looked down at you with an expression so steady and intent it was almost hard to hold.
"Were they laughing," he said.
"Smiling. Murmuring. Close enough."
"Then why would you call them your friends."
You opened your mouth and closed it. He had a point and you hated that he had a point and you were not going to let it distract you. "That is beside the matter. You still haven't answered me." The next words came out low and laced with something that surprised even you. "Whether you truly found comfort between her legs on the night you wed me."
You lifted your chin at him. "If you promised to see her this evening, then go. I won't keep you."
He held your gaze for a long moment. And then, very quietly, "do you think I would do that to you."
You stared at him.
The question sat between you, very quiet, and he did not move while he waited for you to answer it. He just looked at you the way he always looked at things, with that patient undivided attention that had unnerved you from the beginning and unnerved you still, though differently now. Less like standing in the path of something and more like being seen.
"She said you did," you said finally. Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "She said it very plainly."
"And you believed her."
It was not an accusation. It was not even a question, quite.
"I didn't want to," you said. "I tried not to. But I sat in that room and I listened to her describe you and I thought about all the nights I've gone to bed before you came in, and all the suppers I've refused, and I thought—" You stopped. The words felt too honest. Too much of something you hadn't meant to say out loud.
"You thought what," he said.
"I thought that you would have every reason to." You lifted your eyes to his. "I have not been easy. I know that. I have not been what a wife is supposed to be to you and I have known it every day and done nothing about it because I was frightened, and I—" Your voice broke on the last word and you pressed your lips together hard and looked at the ceiling and refused to cry in front of him. Absolutely refused.
His hand came up and curved around your jaw, tilting your face back down toward his. His thumb moved once across your cheekbone, slow and deliberate, the way you might steady something fragile.
"Look at me," he said.
You did. You had no choice when he held your face like that.
"I have not touched Elayne Hightower," he said. "Not on our wedding night and not since. I’ve never done so, and I have no intention of doing so ever." He held your gaze, not blinking, not letting you look away. "I don't know what she told you or why she told it, but it was a lie. Every word of it."
You searched his face the way you searched paintings, looking for the thing that was not right, the detail that would give the lie away. There was nothing. There was only Baelor, steady as he always was, telling you something plainly and without performance, the way he told you everything.
"Why would she say it then," you said. "She had details. She said you wrote to her."
"She is a woman who enjoys the particular power that comes from making other women feel small," he said, without heat or drama, as though he were noting the weather. "And you are new here, and a princess, and a considerable threat to people who were comfortable before you arrived. She said it because she could and because she wanted to see what it would do to you."
Your mouth was dry. "And what did it do to me."
Something shifted in his expression. Softened, in that way that still caught you off guard when it happened.
"It made you speak to me," he said. "First. Without waiting to be spoken to."
You hadn't thought of it that way. You hadn't thought of much of anything clearly today. You became abruptly and uncomfortably aware of how close he was, his hand still at your face, the warmth of him in the cooling room.
"I made a fool of myself," you said quietly.
"You were jealous," he said. "That's not foolish."
You felt heat climb your neck. "I wasn't—"
"You were." And there was that near-smile again, the one that lived at the very corner of his mouth and barely made it further than that. "I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I'm telling you because I'd rather you know that I noticed and that it mattered to me. That you mattered enough to be jealous over."
You didn't have anything to say to that. You had prepared for denial and deflection and a polite dismissal, you had not prepared for this, for him standing in the candlelight holding your face and telling you plainly that you mattered, without ceremony, without asking for anything back.
"You should have told me," you said finally, because you had to say something and it was the truest thing left. "If she had said those things to you about me you would have told me. You wouldn't have let me believe it."
"No," he agreed. "I wouldn't have." He studied you for a moment. Then: "I'll speak to her."
"Don't." The word came out quickly. "It will only make it worse. It will only give her more to say."
He shakes his head in a silent no. “She won’t, I’ll make sure of it.”
"Baelor, please." You moved after him as he turned, reaching for his arm without thinking. "I'm asking you not to. She will humiliate me further for it. She will talk about me behind my back to anyone who will listen, she'll make my life a living—"
He kissed you.
Not gently. Not the way he had kissed your forehead on the wedding night, careful and brief and almost impersonal. This was something else entirely. His mouth pressed to yours with a kind of fierce certainty, one hand cradling the back of your neck, his thumb tilting your jaw up, and the sheer unexpectedness of it emptied your mind of every word you had been about to say.
For one stunned moment you simply stood there. Then, without deciding to, your eyes closed and you leaned into it. It was not a polite kiss. It was not the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he is merely fond of. It was hungry and deliberate, all heat and pressure and the slide of his tongue against yours, the faint graze of teeth at your bottom lip, his beard rough against your skin, and it tasted like wine and something underneath it that was just him, and it stole the breath from your lungs so thoroughly that when he finally pulled back you had to remind yourself how lungs worked.
You looked up at him. Your mouth was still parted. You had nothing at all to say. He did not step back. He did not look remotely apologetic. He simply watched you absorb what he had done.
A faint thread of warmth lingered between your lips when he pulled away, and his thumb came up to swipe it from your skin almost absently, eyes never leaving yours.
“That is what you were afraid of,” he said quietly.
You swallowed. “Of being kissed?”
“No.” His thumb pressed once against your lower lip. “Of wanting it.”
Heat climbed your neck.
Before you could answer, he leaned in again, but this time the kiss was slower. Not an interruption. Not a silencing. His mouth moved over yours with intent, coaxing instead of claiming, and when you softened beneath him, when your hand tightened at his chest and your body leaned into his without instruction, he made a low sound of approval in his throat.
“Good girl,” he murmured against your mouth. “That is honest.”
His hands slid down from your shoulders to your waist, broad and steady, and then lower, settling at your hips. He pulled you flush against him, slow enough that you felt the full press of him between you, solid and unmistakable even through layers.
Your breath caught.
He noticed.
“You feel that,” he said, not asking.
“Yes.”
“And you thought I had no appetite.”
The corner of his mouth lifted faintly.
When he called for Elayne Hightower before the small council that evening, the scratches at his throat said everything he did not need to, and every lord present saw them just as clearly as she did.
✶ — START OVER AGAIN !
summary: baelor loses his memory after the trial of seven. you help him remember everything he forgot, and he falls in love with you again everyday. (2.2k)
pairing: baelor targaryen / fem!reader
contents: fix it fic because i'm a widow in mourning, established relationship, implied age gap, angst, hurt/comfort, a bunch of fluff, canon divergence cw for spoilers for s1ep5, mentions of blood and gore
“Have I told you that I love you today?”
You think you’ve heard that question uttered more in the span of a year than any other — save for, maybe, “How is Valarr?” and “Any word from my brother?” The Trial of Seven had not been kind to any of the knights on that field that day, but least of all to yours. Baelor had suffered a blow to the back of the helm from Maekar’s mace that had not killed him, but had perhaps made him wish that he were dead.
He spent nearly thirty days in a coma, surviving only on honey and water, which had turned him skin and bone. And then, when he finally woke, he spent several more days caught in a cycle of excruciating pain and deep sleep from the milk of the poppy he was prescribed. It took him a week thereafter to make sense of his surroundings in the Ashford Infirmary, and then another to put a name to your face — the woman who had not left his bedside since he woke, whose beauty he could only vaguely recognize.
His head injury had stripped him of his memories, the maesters said, and had prevented him from making any new ones. When the wound finally healed and the medicine no longer clouded his awareness, Baelor could remember only this: the birth of his son, the childhood he shared with his younger brother, and the love he had for you.
He could hardly use his limbs for a time, let alone rule the Seven Kingdoms, so Maekar relieved his brother of his duties. You did not return to your home in King’s Landing when you left Ashford. Instead, you made a new one in Sunspear, on a piece of far-off farmland, not far from where his mother grew up in Dorne. The warmth and the golden yellow sun brought the color back to his face, and made Baelor nostalgic for a time he can no longer remember now.
“Tell me again,” the man says with his head tipped back. He looks up at you as you stand beside his chair, raking the thin blade down the length of his neck. Heavy soap cakes onto the white cloth around his neck, along with the fine scruff you shave off his pale skin.
“I’ve already told you a thousand times,” you laugh. “I think I could recite the Dance of the Dragons better than most maesters at this point.”
The sound of your pretty giggling mixes with that of the rolling waves from the bright blue sea about a furlong away from the porch, and the distant bleating of goats being shooed away from the grape vineyard a mile or so up the hill. Everything smells like sea salt and citrus and soap and you.
Baelor knows he has a hard time remembering his home back in King’s Landing, but he can’t understand why he should care about anything other than the one he shares with you now.
“I should know it, I know…” Baelor hums in a soft voice that borders on melancholic.
He smiles softly to himself as his mismatched eyes dart over your face — memorizing the shape of your eyes, the curve of your nose, and the dip in your cupid’s bow — lest the merciless Gods take that memory away from him, too. He fights back a shiver while you sculpt his greying beard with a blade in your expert hand, taking care of him like you were made to do it, though he struggles to recall why.
“I just… I don’t understand why I don’t remember…” he confesses quietly.
You smile through the pang of grief in your chest and repeat the reminder you have to tell him most days. “Because you got hurt, my love. And the maester said it affected your memory.”
“I got hurt…” Baelor echoes, not quite a question, but not quite a firm statement either.
“Yes,” you nod, smoothing the edge of the blade down the milky white tendons of his neck. “You were defending Ser Duncan’s honor at the trial of seven—”
“Trial of seven?” the older man repeats with a furrow to his dark brows. “There hasn’t been one of those in over a century.”
The statement of fact makes you perk.
“Do you remember the last one?” you press gently, parting from his side to wash the blade off in the basin of warm water beside you.
Baelor thinks for a moment, blue-brown irises tracing the fluffy white clouds overhead as he fights to recall a deeply held memory. “It was… Maegor the Cruel,” he mumbles some moments later. “And Ser Damon from House Morrigen— They called him Damon the Devout…”
He turns his head to the side to flash you a soft smile, full of a quiet pride, as if he himself were shocked at having remembered. You meet his sheepish grin with a wider beam, “Aye, my love,” you nod as you return to his side, brushing the blade gently over his jaw. “That’s right.”
“Pity…” he hums in a monotone, folding his weathered hands across his stomach. “I can remember every battle recorded in the citadel, but not my own…”
“Ser Duncan was accused of hurting Aerion, your nephew, who opted for a trial of seven rather than trial by combat,” you explain, soft eyes flitting from Baelor’s attentive gaze to where you shape the edges of his grey beard. “And when Ser Duncan couldn’t find seven fighters, you stood up for him — like a true knight. And you fought gallantly—”
Baelor makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat.
“A gallant knight would remember fighting gallantly,” he protests. “And I can hardly remember what happened to me.”
“Perhaps it’s best you don’t,” you murmur warmly and turn away. “It was a brutal fight.”
Baelor’s soft voice follows you the short distance to the basin, where you drop the blade and rinse your hands. “Tell me,” he says with an audible, sad sort of smile in his voice. “Of how gallantly I fought, I mean.”
Even with your back facing him, he can see the way your shoulders tense, as if his simple plea were enough to take your breath away.
You swallow hard and fight back the distant nausea that always accompanies the bitter memories. You blink, and suddenly the basin of soapy water becomes bright crimson blood — and the white suds turn into the shards of Baelor’s bone and brain, from where you’d cradled his wound to keep his skull from falling apart. Even now, the scent of a salty sea and dewy grass washes away to the stench of copper you’d smelled in the barracks that day — when the blood was so thick in the air you could taste it.
You shake your head to physically remove the memory from your brain. Your answer is the repeated monotone you find yourself reciting most days. “You protected your men. All of them.” You clear your throat when your voice cracks. “It wasn’t until after it was over, when Aerion yielded from his injuries, that Maekar hit you with his mace whilst trying to get to his son. Hard enough to put you in a coma for a moon’s turn.”
“Of course he did,” Baelor hums with a strange fondness in his voice as he plucks the towel from around his neck, wiping the remnants of shaving cream from his skin. “My brother was always stronger than he realized… Even when we were boys…”
Baelor smiles at you and waits for you to look back at him. You never do.
You just keep dipping your hands into the water, like you’re trying to wipe something from your already clean skin. You’d gained a habit of that since the day you nearly lost Baelor — when you rubbed your hands raw in scalding water because you felt like his blood was still clinging to your skin there, long after it had washed away.
“Forgive me,” he says. “If my words pain you— I mean no offense.”
“Stop that,” you scold, features twisting in offense as your head snaps in the man’s direction. You close the brief distance between you to snatch the towel from his fingers, drying off your hands with a quiet smile. “I know you don’t, Baelor. You’re too kind for any of that.”
You sit gingerly across his thighs and dab diligently at the soapy spots he’d missed on his neck. Your soft lavender scent mixes with the spiced oils he’d bathed in that morning.
Baelor’s mismatched eyes soften with affection as he cradles your waist in a pair of wide, sturdy hands. “If only I could remember… Then you wouldn’t have to carry it all… And I wouldn’t be such a burden to you.”
You flinch, as if his words have found you like a physical blow to the stomach.
“You’re the furthest thing from a burden, my love,” you tell him, stern but no less soft with him. “I wouldn’t want you to remember any of it, anyway. I’ll happily hold the memories for the two of us…”
“You were there, yes?” he wonders then.
You nod wordlessly, not trusting yourself to speak.
“And you saw it?”
“I saw all of it,” you answer, slightly strangled by the burning tears you fight hard to blink away. Your glassy eyes remain on the towel in your grasp, lacking the strength to meet Baelor’s gaze. “I ran to you in the barracks when it was over… I didn’t let go of you for two days— they had to transport both of us to the infirmary together…”
You exhale a sharp exhale through your nose, as if you mean to laugh, though the smile doesn’t quite match the sadness in your eyes.
“Eventually, my body gave out from exhaustion, and Maekar carried me out,” you sigh. “I’m pretty sure I slapped him for it when I woke up, but… That might’ve just been a dream— I’m not sure.”
Baelor’s lip twitches in a faint smile, half-hidden beneath the cloth you press to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs beneath it.
“For what?”
“You shouldn’t have had to see that— You shouldn’t have had to see me like that.”
“Perhaps not,” you shrug. “But you’re here now. And you’re getting better every day. And that’s all I really care about now.”
You drop the towel into your lap and cup Baelor’s bearded jaw in your soft palms, brushing the trimmed edges with your thumb. There’s a distinct sort of tenderness in the way you hold him, like you’re savoring the way he feels against you — his coarse scruff in your delicate palms, the warmth beneath his pale skin, the way his chest rises and falls beneath you with even breaths. Alive.
“Any word from my brother?” he asks, the third time that morning.
“Not yet,” you smile. “He was here three days ago to check in on you, remember?”
Baelor’s brown-blue eyes dart back and forth between yours, going glassy as he struggles to recollect the not-so-distant memory. He swallows hard, half-embarrassed, and shakes his head. “I… I think I’m having some trouble remembering…”
“That’s okay,” you tell him, scratching gently at his scruff. “That’s why I’m here. To help you remember.”
“And we’re…” he trails off, brows lowered in curiosity. “We’re married, yes?”
Your smile widens. You nod once, proud and visibly giddy. “We are.”
“You poor thing,” he scoffs a quiet laugh that mixes with your lighter giggling. “What did you do to the Gods to end up cursed with an old man like me?”
“Must’ve been something nice, I’m sure,” you lilt and curl your arms around his shoulders. Your fingers rake through his short grey hair, tracing lightly over the healed wound at the top of his neck, where the base of his skull dips in. “Considering they saved you for me… I wouldn’t exactly call that cursed…”
Your words trail off as the tip of your nose traces the bridge of his. You close the minimal space between you to press a chaste kiss to his mouth. When you pull away, you catch a flicker of something flashing across his face — like he’s seeing you for the very first time.
That was, perhaps, the only good thing to come out of all this, watching Baelor fall in love with you again every day.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” you giggle.
“Have I told you that I love you today?” Baelor wonders, for the hundredth or so time that day.
“You tell me every day, Baelor,” you grin. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing it a few more times…”
You lean in to kiss him again — a longer and more languid thing this time. Baelor exhales a heavy sigh against you that fans across your cupid’s bow. He prays your kiss leaves a mark on him, like hot sealing wax on a love letter. He wants you to mark him with your touch — to burn him, to stamp him, to brand him — so that he’ll have something to remember this moment by, before it’s gone again forever.
How do they fuck?
⋆°｡⋆♡ TW/CW: SMUT, 18+ (MINORS/AGELESS/BLANK BLOGS DON’T INTERACT), Bad English, No use of Y/N, GN Reader (no body description or pronouns), Specifics TW/CW under for each character, Dom Characters (mostly), Semi-Public Sex, Reader is not specified to be a spouse, or lowborn etc, let me know if I need to add more TW/Tags ♡ My blog contains dark content, be careful when interacting/following! Please if you like my work don't forget to reblog/interact with me♡ °˖➴ Characters: Daeron, Lyonel, Valarr, Baelor, Maekar, Aerion
⤠ None ⤟ Masterlist ⤠ None ⤟
So... Can you tell I have favourites lmfao anyway I had these men inside my head (and only that sigh) for a while and i needed to get it out like immediately. Why is everyone either so pretty or so incredibly charismatic? Like give me a break! How do you expect me to keep up with the story when everyone looks so good??? My god
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Sub Character, Overstimulation, Public Sex, Half-Clothed Sex
Everything around Daeron is a mess. His family, his room, himself even. So it's not surprising when his sex is also messy, dirty, prince unlike. He doesn't care about where you two are doing it, in the comfortable bed in his or your chambers, in a brothel with little to no privacy, a more hidden spot in the garden of red keep maybe while his father (or anyone really) is looking for him.
Sweaty, cum leaking out all of you and sticking on your and his body, half clothed still. Possibly outside, definitely not covered enough, so everyone could see what you two are doing... But he did promise it won't happen. His thrust are deep but slow, with no really a rhythm behind it. You are the one doing most of the work usually, riding him while his hands and face are all your body, everywhere he can touch pleading you to faster, slower, that he's about to cum, you are so pretty, he's so lucky... Daeron babbles a lot of nothing when he feels you around him, it's like you overstimulate him in the best way just by being close to him. Daeron is nothing but a needy, desperate, yearning man who needs all the help you can give him to cool off.
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Brat Taming, Dom Character, Manhandling, Public Sex, Exhibitionist Kink
Lyonel is... well, a lot. Not in a bad way, of course, he is a man that likes what he likes and also a big, tall man who loooooooves fighting. So he does love when you put a bit of a fight with him, act bratty and even a little mean to him, it only makes his blood go south and needs to put you into your place.
He loves manhandling you and has no shame, most of the time people will know that you guys have sex or going to. Lyonel also will make you scream his name more than once or he will not stop, as if people needed a reminder to who you are married to/being fucked. He has something of an exhibitionist kink? Kind of. It's not like Lyonel cares if someone watches or tries to interrupt the two of you, so you two will have sex outside with little care from him. What are they gonna do if they found you? Complain? And Lyonel loves hearing you moan, scream, whimper, plead, whatever sound comes from your pretty mouth so he won't keep his thrust slow, but faster and deeper every time. It's not like it's hard for him, considering the beast he has between his legs...
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Rough & Soft Sex, Spanking, Dacryphilia?, Mention of Oral sex
Prince Valarr is just... Perfect! At first. Having the pressure of being the heir, the prince of the realm, his father would also mean having a lot of stuff pent-up, but also the impossibility to try whatever it might be improper for someone of his status.
That is not to say he won't make love to you. Cause he will! He is a very soft and caring boy, but Valarr is also curious and needy. There is a lot of stuff to find out about him and you, in how your bodies react to each other and what you don't or do like. So while there is a time when he will thrust in you deep but slow, making you feel every inch of his cock, and kissing you so softly, so gently while his hand goes to your clit to make you cum faster... He will also fuck you rough and mean; spanking your butt until a pretty red mark of his hand appears, hair completely messy, clothes discarded somewhere else in the room, eyes full of lust and tears... It's a beautiful sight that makes Valarr salivate. I personally see Valarr and Daeron having a little club about eating/blowing you like it's hobby or passion.
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Soft Sex, Teasing, Overstimulation, Not really dirty talk but he's talking...
Dear sweet Baelor... It's a man who I'm not sure of. He's perfect, too perfect... But I can't see him being like his son, he's a older man with two sons after all- so he knows what he likes and has no problem with teaching you or gently showing it to you. I feel like he is a major teaser and talker, mostly about complementing you.
Baelor is a traditional man: he likes being in a bed, maybe while having a bath, a bit of wine, and he lets the situation go along with little touches, small kisses, compliments, all stuff that makes you whimper and shiver. It's like he is courting you all over again and tempting you with sex, like he wants you to jump on him and not the other way around. And oh when you do Baelor is ready to give you anything: he's so sweet with his words, his touches, his thrusts... He also loves to overstimulate you until you are basically sobbing, but oh you can give him more right? One more orgasm, it's all he asks "my sweet" he would call you, and how can you say no when Baelor asks with his sweet, elegant voice? Ignore the fact that he said so for the last 5 orgasms...
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Needy Maekar (im NOT sorry), Dirty Talk, Rough Sex, Dirty Talk, Bruises
My living stress Maekar. Single dad who cannot catch a break Maekar, please be his stress relief sometimes. Help him, please. It's not like he's needy, unlike his eldest son, but he does seek your affection, your body, more than he wants. It's kind of like an addiction, but the way your body reacts to his, the way your body looks... Maekar shivers at the mere thought, feeling himself hardened. What did you do to him?
Maekar really tries to be a gentleman to you, and he is!, it's just that he slips sometimes. He grabs you rougher than intended, pushes his cock inside of you deeper than he wanted, takes you in his office and not his bedroom... Part of him feels bad, but hearing you moan his name like that, it only makes him rougher. Meaner even. Not by calling you names (he can't bring himself to), but telling you how dirty you are being now, taking his cock so well it makes his head spin, that he will make you need him like you do for him, touching all over your body with his calloused hands and firm grip that for sure it's going to leave a mark tomorrow. That would make him feel bad and try to lavish you with so much love and softness, although you can tell that he's a bit proud...
₍^. .^₎⟆ TW/CW: Aerion, Rough Sex, His whole dragon obsession (he calls you mate), Bruises&Hickeys, Public Sex, Creampie
Sigh... So, Aerion... Aerion aerion aerion... Out of everyone he's probably the roughest and meanest. Like by a lot, it's not even a competition. Kind of like his father he is obsessed with your body, more so with the way you make him feel so he won't care where you two are, if he wants to have sex he will. Even during dinner you will feel his fingers between your inner thighs...
He's so rough. You will be left not only sore but with bruises, hickeys, all over your body, either made by his hands or mouth. Aerion loves marking you in any possible way, no matter how you remind him that his cum is leaking out of you into your thighs. A dragon should make sure everyone knows who is their mate, always. And no matter how his father and uncle look at him, Aerion will only make it worse, more obvious. He will also make you scream louder that day, maybe even fuck you in the garden or in his father office, his thrusts are so fast and will force you into different position. Aerion will always finish inside, maybe sometimes on your face if you blow him, but he much prefers to finish inside of you again and again. What? You thought one time would be enough? Think again.
This work belongs to @/sapphireis, do not repost, translate, copy, rewrite, use for AI, or share on tiktok without my permission. Reblogs/interaction are appreciated and encouraged♡
put me in there and call it 'The Whore of The Seven Kingdoms' the way I'd be dick hopping
♱ 𝒉𝒐𝒍𝒚 𝒘𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒎𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒕.
pairing: baelor "breakspear" targaryen x f!stark!reader
and so the story goes: a dragon falls in love with a wolf, ice invites fire.
content warnings/contains: stark!reader (no physical description other than the fact you're barthogan stark's daughter); set pre-akotsk so no show spoilers, but post first blackfyre rebellion; strangers to lovers; implied age gap; protective!smitten!baelor; angst/fluff; mutual pining; falling in love; sexual tension; court drama.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ pinterest board | inspo tag & asks | ao3┊baelor/lady stark playlist | aerion/lady stark playlist
⊹ ࣪ ˖ word count: 90k┊next update: 29.03.26┊rated: t.
⤷ CHAPTER INDEX:
⊹ ࣪ ˖ one.┊two.┊three.┊four.┊five.┊six.┊seven.┊eight.┊nine.┊ten.┊eleven.
⤷ BONUS CONTENT:
DRABBLES/BLURBS/ONE-SHOTS:
(*) indicates smut
jealousy. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft. lyonel
first meeting. ⊹ baelor/lady stark (baelor's pov)
a cooling hand. ⊹ baelor/lady stark
"you choose them. you always do." ⊹ aerion/lady stark
protection. ⊹ baelor/lady stark/maekar
just friends. ⊹ lyonel/lady stark
blackwind. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft. blackwind
family. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft. maekarlings + papa maekar
the bronze fury. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft. verminthor (dragons survived the dance!au)
a hug. ⊹ baelor/lady stark
in another life. ⊹ lyonel/lady stark/baelor
always for you. ⊹ aerion/lady stark
a hedge knight. ⊹ dunk/lady stark (platonic)
meaning in death. ⊹ aerion/lady stark
the baby test. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft. verminthor (dragons survived the dance!au)
a sick day. ⊹ baelor/lady stark/maekar
"your man." ⊹ lady stark ft dunk, baelor, lyonel, aerion, maekar.
hair. ⊹ maekar/lady stark
'come to bed.' ⊹ baelor/lady stark/lyonel
'come to bed.' ⊹ aerion/lady stark
house colours. ⊹ baelor/lady stark
'may i have this dance?' ⊹ aerion/lady stark
kiss goodnight ⊹ lyonel/lady stark
today with you. ⊹ aerion/lady stark
forever undone. ⊹ baelor/lady stark
stop before i kiss you. ⊹ lyonel/lady stark
where is my wife? ⊹ maekar/lady stark
modern!aerion ⊹ aerion/lady stark
the kidnapping. ⊹ daemon blackfyre/lady stark
wolf's wrath. ⊹ aerion/lady stark ft egg
beach day. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft valarr && matarys
'i do not want it.' ⊹ maekar/lady stark (*)
can you put that out on me? / explicit version (*) ⊹ aerion/lady stark (modern au)
cracks and pieces. ⊹ baelor/lady stark ft aerion && maekar
devour me. ⊹ aerion/lady stark/daeron (LS born later au)
go back to pretending. ⊹ maekar/lady stark
what attracts them. ⊹ lady stark ft dunk, baelor, lyonel, aerion, maekar.
laughter. ⊹ aerion/lady stark ft egg
'you're playing with my patience.' ⊹ baelor/lady stark
currently accepting headcanon/drabble requests and discussions for this series, feel free to send something in!
P.S. I do not do tag lists, if you want to keep up with this fic, please bookmark this post or follow me directly, thank you.
Request for Baelor marrying a controversially young wife who is absolutely obsessed with him and just want to fuck him every minute of every day, whenever wherever 🥵 he is determined to keep up with her and they end up getting caught in embarrassing situations by the staff and courtiers. imagine: a lady in waiting walking in on them going at it in the gardens, a poor stableboy getting an eyeful of a princess on her knees in front of the heir, Maekar having to get his eyes bleached after catching them in the small council room. poor Baelor becomes the talk of the castle and his reputation of a stern, serious princes changes forever.
ᴛʜᴇ ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴋᴇᴇᴘ | ʙᴀᴇʟᴏʀ ᴛᴀʀɢᴀʀʏᴇɴ
─ summary: You and Baelor get caught everywhere in his attempt to prove that he can keep up with a woman of your age.
─ pairing: Baelor Targaryen x second wife!reader
─ word count: 3k (I am just as confused as you)
─ content: 18+ MDNI | harrasment| "violence"| (a girlie has to defend herself)| filthy shameless smut | exhibitionism | voyeurism | age gap | getting caught
─ a/n: There's nothing I love more than stressing out these old men. As always thank you for reading, likes, comments, requests, and reblogs🖤
The heat of the tourney grounds pressed against your skin and made the heavy silks of your gown cling to your body in ways that felt entirely too suffocating. You had slipped away from your septa and your handmaidens near the lists, needing just a moment of air, a breath of freedom that didn't smell of sweat, horses, and steel. The Red Keep loomed in the distance, but you had wandered toward the fringe of the encampment, where the canvas tents flapped in the wind and the noise was a dull roar rather than a deafening clash.
You thought you were hidden enough. You were wrong.
The knight found you near a stack of empty wine casks. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and reeking of cheap ale and stale sweat, his doublet unlaced to reveal a stained tunic underneath. He blocked your path, his shadow falling over you, and when you tried to step around him, he moved with you.
"Now, now, little dove," he slurred, his eyes raking over you with a gaze that felt sticky and unwanted. "A pretty thing like you shouldn't be wandering all alone. A man could get the wrong idea."
"I am returning to the Keep," you said, keeping your voice steady, though your heart hammered against your ribs. You lifted your chin, trying to project the authority your father had drilled into you. "Let me pass."
"Come now, don't be haughty," he laughed, a wet, ugly sound. He reached out, his thick fingers brushing against the fabric of your sleeve. "I could show you a good time before you scurry back to your tower. I bet you've never even had a real man between those legs, have you?"
Revulsion curdled in your stomach. You tried to jerk your arm away, but his grip tightened, bruisingly hard. "Unhand me," you hissed, your shyness burning away in a flash of hot anger.
"Feisty," he grinned, showing yellowed teeth. "I like that. Makes it better when you break."
He didn't see the slap coming. You swung your hand with every ounce of strength your fear and fury could muster, connecting hard with his cheek. The sound was a sharp crack that echoed off the nearby tents. His head snapped to the side, and he stumbled back a step, more from surprise than pain.
Before he could recover, you kicked him. You aimed for his knee but caught his shin, driving the hard toe of your slipper into the bone. The knight howled, a sound of pure, undignified agony, and crumbled to the dirt, clutching his leg.
"You little bitch!" he spat, tears of pain actually gathering in his eyes as he glared up at you from the ground. "Do you know who I am? I'll have you whipped for this insolence!"
"You'll do nothing," a new voice cut through the air.
The knight froze. You looked up, your breath catching in your throat. A man stood over the drunken knight, his presence instantly commanding the space.
Baelor. The Prince.
He didn't look at you. His eyes were fixed on the heap of a man on the ground. "I suggest you leave, before I decide that a knight who cannot hold his wine has no business holding a sword either."
The knight scrambled backward, his bravado evaporating instantly in the face of royal authority. He muttered a curse, scrambled to his feet, and limped away as fast as his injured leg would carry him, not daring to look back.
Only then did Baelor turn his gaze to you. The intensity of his focus made your knees feel weak, but not from fear. He studied your face, taking in the tears in your eyes, the rapid rise and fall of your chest.
"Are you harmed?" he asked, stepping closer. Up close, he was even more striking. He was tall, with the build of a warrior who had spent a lifetime with sword and shield, tanned skin, arresting eyes, lines of experience around his eyes that only added to his handsomeness.
"I am perfectly fine," you said, perhaps a bit too quickly, smoothing your skirts with trembling hands. "He was... he was just drunk."
"He was a fool," Baelor corrected gently. He looked around the empty patch of ground. "Where are your ladies? Your guard? Tourneys are no place for young maidens to be alone."
You bit your lip, feeling embarrassment creep up your neck. "I... I slipped them. I just wanted a moment of quiet."
A corner of his mouth twitched upward. It wasn't a mocking smile — it was warm, amused. "I see. You handled yourself remarkably well. That was a formidable kick."
"I can take care of myself," you insisted, lifting your chin again, though your voice lacked its earlier bite.
"Yes," he said softly, his eyes roaming over your face with a new kind of interest. "That is apparent."
"Come. I will walk you back. I cannot in good conscience leave you here, waiting for the next drunkard to find you."
"I can find my own way."
"I have no doubt," he said, offering his arm. "But humor an old man. I would feel better knowing you reached safety."
You hesitated. You were annoyed at being treated like a child, at needing a rescue when you had clearly been winning the fight. But you looked at his arm — strong, steady, clothed in fine velvet — and then up at his face. He was incredibly handsome.
You placed your hand on his arm. "Very well, my prince."
The walk back was a slow one. At first, you were silent, stewing in your annoyance, but Baelor did not press you. He spoke of the heat, of the tourney, of the specific breed of hawks his sons were training. You found yourself looking at him more often than not, watching the way the sunlight caught the grey in his beard, the way his amber eye seemed to hold a secret fire.
By the time you reached the shadow of the castle walls, your annoyance had evaporated, replaced by a strange, fluttering sensation in your stomach. He bowed over your hand before leaving, his lips brushing your knuckles in a gesture that was formal yet lingered a fraction of a second too long.
"Take care of yourself, my lady," he murmured.
You watched him walk away, and for the first time in your life, you felt a pang of regret that a conversation was ending.
The months that followed were a blur of stolen glances, secret meetings, and a court that whispered furiously about the Prince's new infatuation. Baelor agonised over the age difference, he was old enough to be your father, but the heart, as the poets often said, rarely listened to reason.
You fell in love with his quiet strength. He fell in love with your fire, your spirit, the way you looked at him not as a prince but as a man.
The wedding was a grand affair, but the wedding night was yours alone.
You had feared a duty, a fumbling, awkward encounter performed in the dark under the sheets. Instead, Baelor had treated your body like a holy site, worshipping every inch of you with a patience and skill that made you weep. When he joined you in the bed, the insecurities about his age, about his ability to please a woman in the flower of her youth, vanished in the heat of your touch. You were insatiable, and he rose to meet you, again and again, proving that experience and endurance were worth far more than youth.
But the whispers did not stop. If anything, they grew louder. Baelor heard them all. They said ladies your age were insatiable, that you needed a stallion, not an ageing warhorse. They said it had been too many years since Baelor had proven himself in the field, and surely he was failing you in the bedchamber. He saw the way men looked at you when you walked through the gardens, old lords and young squires alike, their eyes lingering on your figure, imagining they could give you what he supposedly could not. It ate at him, a quiet, corrosive jealousy. He loved you with a ferocity that terrified him, the thought of losing you, of you looking elsewhere because he failed you, caused physical pain in his chest.
He didn't need to prove anything to you. You were insatiable, it was true, but he was the only one who could quench that thirst. You didn't look at the young squires or the handsome knights. Your eyes were only for your husband. You wanted him constantly, the feel of his rough hands, the scent of his skin, the deep gravelly sound of his voice when he lost control.
You didn't care for propriety. You didn't care if the guards heard your cries through the doors of your chambers. In fact, the thought that they knew exactly what their prince was doing to his young wife only made you wetter, made you claw at his back harder.
It started in the garden. It was a secluded corner, or so you had thought, surrounded by high hedges. The sun was high, casting dappled shadows on the grass. Baelor had been reading a report on a bench, but you had other plans. You missed him. He had been in council for three days straight, and you felt like a starving woman denied her favourite meal.
You dropped to your knees in the dirt before him, not caring about the stains on your velvet skirts. You pushed his tunic up, your mouth finding the hard line of his stomach, trailing kisses downward until you reached the laces of his breeches.
He gasped, his hand tangling in your hair, his resistance crumbling instantly as your fingers worked the leather strings. "Someone will see."
"Let them," you whispered, freeing his cock. It was thick and heavy, already hard for you. You took him into your mouth, swirling your tongue around the head, tasting the salt of him.
He groaned, a sound that was half-protest, half-surrender. "You are a wicked girl," he breathed, his hips bucking up slightly.
You pulled back and turned around, dropping to your hands and knees. You looked back at him over your shoulder, your hair cascading down your back. "Fuck me, Baelor. Please."
He fell to his knees behind you, gripping your hips with bruising force. He lined himself up and slammed into you, filling you so completely that you cried out, your fingers digging into the earth.
He took you hard and fast, his hips slapping against your backside, driving you into the dirt. There was no gentleness here. You pushed back against him, meeting his thrusts, begging for more.
"Gods, you are tight," he gritted out, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "I love this cunt."
"It is yours," you moaned, your voice rising. "Only yours. Fuck me harder!"
The snap of a twig broke through the haze of your arousal. You didn't care, but Baelor froze. His head snapped up, his body tensing.
Standing ten feet away, clutching a basket of fallen flowers, was one of your maids. Her eyes were wide as saucers, her mouth open in a silent cry. She stared at the sight of her princess on her hands and knees in the dirt, being taken by the heir to the throne.
Baelor started to pull back, panic flaring in his mismatched eyes. "I told you this was a bad idea," he hissed.
"Don't stop," you commanded, your voice breathless and desperate. You pushed back onto him, taking him deep again, clenching around him to hold him there. "Don't you dare stop. She has already seen."
The maid dropped her basket. Flowers scattered everywhere. She turned and fled, her footsteps pounding away on the gravel path.
Baelor groaned, the exhibitionism clearly infecting him too. He gripped your hips harder and resumed his rhythm, even harder than before.
The stables were next. You had intended to go for a ride in the Kingswood, a leisurely afternoon escape. But as soon as you entered the dim, hay-scented building, the privacy of the high loft overwhelmed you.
Baelor was checking on his black horse. You walked up behind him, wrapping your arms around his waist, pressing your chest against his back. He smelled of leather and bergamot, a scent that made your head spin.
"I think I would rather ride my dragon than a horse," you whispered against his spine, your hand sliding down to the front of his breeches.
He turned in your arms, capturing your mouth in a searing kiss, lifting you effortlessly and setting you on a bale of hay. He shoved his breeches down just enough, and you hiked your skirts up, opening your legs for him. He stepped between your thighs, lifting your legs to wrap around his waist before impaling you on his cock in one smooth stroke. You gasped, your head falling back against the rough wood of the stall wall.
"Ride me, then," he commanded, his hands gripping your backside.
The friction was exquisite, the stretch intense. You were lost in the rhythm, so focused on the feeling of him filling you, stretching you, that you didn't hear the approach of the stable hand until you heard a sharp intake of breath.
You looked over Baelor's shoulder. The young man stood frozen in the aisle, a curry comb in his hand, his eyes locked on the sight of his prince buried inside his princess. He stood there, his cheeks flushing red, watching.
Baelor realised what was happening, felt the way you clenched around him in response to the voyeur. He chuckled darkly against your neck. "You like being watched, don't you?"
"Yes," you hissed. "I want everyone to see how well you fuck me."
He redoubled his efforts, pounding into you harder. You cried out, your orgasm building fast and hot. When it hit, you shattered, your body convulsing, your cries echoing off the stone walls. Baelor followed you moments later, burying his face in your neck as he emptied himself inside you.
The stable boy was gone when you finally came down, but the knowledge that he had stayed, that he had watched every second, lingered between you like a third presence.
The small council chamber was the ultimate transgression. Baelor sat at the head of the table, surrounded by empty chairs, preparing for the afternoon session. He looked tired, lines of fatigue etched around his eyes.
You slipped into the room, closing the heavy oak door behind you.
"You look exhausted," you said softly, walking up to his high-backed chair.
He looked up, a tired smile transforming his face. "The realm does not rest, my love."
"Rest for a moment," you murmured, climbing onto his lap. You straddled his legs, your skirts pooling around you.
He sighed, wrapping his arms around your waist, burying his face in your cleavage. "You are a distraction," he mumbled, but his hands were already wandering, sliding up your back to pull you closer.
"I want to be your distraction," you whispered, kissing his forehead, his nose, finding his lips.
The kiss was slow and sweet, but it ignited a fire that had been smouldering for days. His tongue swept into your mouth, tasting you, claiming you. His hands gripped your waist, lifting you slightly.
"You are bare," he observed with a groan, his fingers encountering nothing but soft skin and wet heat under your layers of silk. "Do you wish to kill me?"
You hummed in response.
"Turn around," he breathed.
He lifted you and turned you so your back was pressed against his chest, your legs draped over the arms of the chair. He quickly unlaced his breeches, freeing his straining erection.
You reached down, guiding him to your entrance. You were dripping wet, ready for him. He gripped your hips and pulled you down onto him, filling you in one long, smooth glide.
"Gods," you gasped, your head falling back against his shoulder. He felt so big like this, stretching you wide.
He held you still, his hips bucking up slightly, grinding deep inside you. "I could stay like this forever," he whispered in your ear, nipping at the sensitive skin of your neck.
The door handle rattled. You both froze. The heavy oak door pushed open and Maekar strode in, followed by the other council members. They stopped short when they saw the tableau. Baelor sat in his chair, looking completely at ease. You sat on his lap looking demure, your skirts hiding the fact that your husband was buried inside you.
"My lady," Maekar said, confused. "I... did not realise you were attending."
"Just observing."
Baelor's hand rested on your hip, possessive and heavy. "Shall we begin?"
The meeting was agony. Every shift Baelor made sent jolts of pleasure through you. Every time he coughed or cleared his throat, you felt the vibration in his chest. You sat through discussions of taxes and grain with a dripping cunt and a husband who was slowly, subtly rocking his hips, keeping himself hard inside you.
When the other lords finally filed out an hour later, you were trembling with the effort of staying quiet. Only Maekar remained. He waited for the door to close.
He looked at Baelor sharply. "Is something the matter? You seem... distracted."
Baelor shifted, and you had to bite your lip to keep from moaning. "I am perfectly fine, brother."
Maekar's eyes narrowed. He looked at you, then at Baelor, then down at the way your skirts were arranged, the way Baelor's arm was locked around your waist. The realisation dawned on his face slowly.
He stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the stone floor. He looked at you both with incredulous eyes, then at his brother. "Have you no shame?"
Baelor threw his head back and laughed, a full, rich sound that made his cock twitch inside you. "I assure you, this was not my idea."
Maekar stormed out, shaking his head, muttering about madness and Targaryen blood.
Baelor kissed your neck, his laughter fading into a satisfied hum. "You, my pretty little wife," he whispered, his hand sliding up to cup your breast, "keep getting me into trouble."
"I think you like it," you breathed, finally letting yourself move, grinding down onto him.
"I do," he admitted. "I love you."
He began to move again, intent on finishing what he had started.
The whispers in the court changed. They did not call him an old man anymore. They said the prince and his young wife were mad, insatiable for each other, unable to keep their hands off one another.
They were right.