I have so many questions about the Baelor/Sister-Wife/Maekar triangle like when did they first realize they loved her?? how was their first kiss?? the WEDDING NIGHT???? Aaaaaajhddsjskkkakdjdh
oh, i've had so many thoughts on this even before you lovely anon asked for it. in short: the beginning was also the middle and is also now. some love stories don't have a start because there never was, just as there never will be an ending. lemme explain:
you may assume there was a moment. a specific afternoon, a look across a room, a declaration — some identifiable before and after that you could point to and say there, that is where it changed. courts run on moments. courts need moments, need the clean narrative of revelation and decision, because courts are full of people who trade in information and information requires edges, requires the ability to say this is when it started and this is what it means.
there was no moment.
there was never a moment because there was never a before. the three of them did not change. the three of them simply were, and went on being, and the only thing that changed over the years was the clarity with which everyone around them could see what had always been true.
king Daeron II was a perceptive man. history remembers him as a diplomat, a peacemaker, the king who brought Dorne into the realm through marriage rather than conquest — and all of this is true, but what the histories do not record is the specific quality of his attention when it fell on his children. he watched them the way a man watches something he does not fully understand and is not certain he needs to.
he watched his sons with his daughter and he saw something he recognised.
he called it, once, to queen Myriah in the privacy of their solar, the Aemon quality. the Dragonknight had loved his sister Naerys with a specificity that had no clean category — not merely fraternal, not merely chivalric, something that existed in the space between those words and had no name that the realm would have accepted. Daeron had watched that love as a child. he knew the texture of it.
he saw it again in the way his eldest son's attention moved to his daughter before it moved anywhere else in a room. he saw it in the way his fourth son positioned himself — always, automatically, without appearing to think about it — between her and anything he had assessed as a potential threat, which was most things.
he mentioned it to Myriah.
Myriah, who had been watching since before Daeron noticed, simply said I know.
what do we do, Daeron said.
nothing, Myriah said. not yet. perhaps not ever. some things resolve themselves.
she was Dornish. she understood, in the specific way of someone raised in a culture that did not share the continent's more rigid pieties, that the heart's geography was not always mapped along expected lines. she was not entirely comfortable with what she saw — she was a mother, and complicated, and honest with herself about both — but she was also a woman who had come to a foreign court very young and survived it by understanding what was true rather than what was supposed to be true.
what was true was visible to anyone who looked carefully enough.
most people, occupied with their own concerns, did not look carefully enough.
the ones who did kept it to themselves.
this is where the outside view becomes most useful, because from the inside the three of them were presumably experiencing something they did not yet have clean language for. from the outside, however, the picture was remarkably clear.
a lord from the Reach made the first proposal. he was perfectly acceptable. he was, by every political and personal metric, an entirely reasonable match for a Targaryen princess. the maester who carried the proposal to the king did so with the quiet confidence of a man delivering good news.
the princess declined.
this was, in itself, unremarkable. princesses declined proposals. it was their prerogative and this princess was young yet.
what was slightly more remarkable was the quality of Baelor's stillness when the proposal was read aloud in his presence. not opposition — nothing so legible as opposition. simply a stillness that had a specific texture to it, the stillness of a man exercising a restraint that the situation did not, on the surface, appear to require.
Prince Maekar said nothing. Prince Maekar's jaw, however, communicated several things.
the second proposal arrived from the Stormlands. declined. the third from the Vale. declined. the fourth — and this one was genuinely a good match, politically significant, personally unobjectionable — was declined before the princess had agreed to receive the lord in question.
king Daeron rubbed his face. he mentioned Rhaenyra. it was not entirely a joke.
what the king was observing, from his particular vantage point, was the following: his daughter refused every proposal with the calm certainty of someone who already knew the answer to a question that had not yet been formally asked. Baelor became, in the context of each proposal, very still in a way that suggested significant internal activity. Maekar became, in the same context, a weather system.
Myriah observed all of this and said nothing and waited.
the lords who proposed and were refused began, eventually, to hear the rumours. most of them withdrew their proposals with a diplomatic grace that suggested they had decided the political complications were not worth the effort. a few persisted. they were also declined.
three years passed. the unnamed thing accumulated.
there are varying accounts of the conversation that changed everything.
what is known is that Baelor requested a private audience with his father and mother together — unusual, the together part — and that the audience lasted the better part of an afternoon. what is known is that queen Myriah sent her ladies away before the prince arrived, which suggests she had some foreknowledge of the subject. what is known is that when the audience ended the king was seen to stand at his solar window for a long time looking at something that was not the courtyard below.
what Baelor said, in substance, was this: that the proposals would continue to fail. that they would continue to fail for reasons that had nothing to do with the lords proposing and everything to do with the three of them, and that everyone in proximity had known this for some time, and that the question was not whether to accept what was true but how to arrange it with the least damage to the realm and the most dignity for everyone involved. he cited Aegon the Conqueror. he cited the precedent of plural marriage in the dynasty's history. he was, by all accounts, extremely well prepared.
he did not, according to those who knew him well, mention Maekar's role in the genesis of the plan. he did not need to. the king and queen knew their sons.
Myriah asked one question, which was whether this was what her daughter wanted.
Baelor said yes.
Myriah was quiet for a moment. then she said that she would like to speak to her daughter before any decision was made. Baelor said of course. Daeron said he would think about it.
he thought about it for a whole turn of the moon.
those who observed the king during that time noted that he visited the godswood more than was typical, which was not something Daeron did casually. those who observed Maekar during that month noted that he was even less talkative than usual, which was considerable, and that his sparring sessions had an intensity that left his partners needing recovery time. those who observed the princess noted that she was the calmest of the three of them, which was either evidence of extraordinary composure or evidence that she had made her peace with the outcome some time ago and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
those who knew her well suspected the latter.
what can be reconstructed, from the behaviour of the three of them in the weeks preceding Baelor's request for an audience, is something like the following: a shift. not dramatic — nothing between these three was ever dramatic in the way of court spectacle — but legible, to those who had been watching long enough to read the register. the specific quality of them in proximity changed. not in substance. in certainty.
Baelor had always attended to her completely. after: the attending had a different quality, the quality of something confirmed rather than something carefully managed. the composure was the same. what was underneath it was not held at the same distance.
Maekar had always positioned himself between her and whatever he had assessed as a threat. after: he stopped pretending, even to himself, that the positioning was purely fraternal. those who observed him closely noted that the controlled severity of him — never absent, never entirely — sat differently on him. like a man who has set something down and found that his hands, now empty, know what they want to reach for.
the princess — who had always been the calmest of the three, who had been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up since before anyone else had identified what it was catching up to — was simply, quietly, the same. which was itself information. she had not changed because she had not needed to change. she had been ready before they were.
this is the thing about her that both of them understood, in their different ways, in the aftermath of whatever happened in those unwitnessed weeks: she had always known. she had been the fixed point. she had refused every proposal not because she did not have words for what she wanted but because she was waiting for the words to be available to all three of them simultaneously.
when they became available, she was already there.
what happened between the three of them in some unrecorded space of the Red Keep — who moved first, what was said, whether anything was said at all — belongs to them. courts do not own everything. some moments resist the witness.
what the court saw was the aftermath: three people who had always been certain of each other arriving, finally, at the specific certainty that required action.
Baelor requested the audience with his parents. he was, by every account, extremely well prepared.
he would have been. he had, after all, just spent some weeks confirming everything he needed to know.
after the king agreed, the public ceremony came first.
the High Septon officiated with the expression of a man who had been reminded of something he would have preferred not to be reminded of and had decided that accommodation was the wiser path. the sept was full. the realm had opinions, and the realm had come to witness them being rendered irrelevant by the simple fact of the Crown proceeding regardless.
what the witnesses saw: a princess in deep crimson and black, every bit the blood of the dragon, standing between her two brothers, who were also her husbands, and the specific quality of the three of them together in that space — the way they occupied it, the way their attention moved, the specific gravity of three people who had been the centre of each other's worlds for long enough that it had become simply the natural order of things — that made the occasion feel less like a beginning and more like a ratification.
king Daeron wept, quietly, in the way of a man who considers weeping a private act and had underestimated the occasion.
queen Myriah did not weep. she watched her children with the specific quality of attention she had always brought to them, the hawk's patience of it, and at some point during the ceremony something in her expression resolved into something that was not quite peace but was adjacent to it. she had not expected this. she had not wanted it, precisely. but she was a woman who understood what was true, and what was true was standing before her in Targaryen colours between two men who looked at her like she was the fixed point around which everything else organised itself.
she had loved Daeron since before she had words for it. she supposed she understood the feelings of her own daughter.
however important the ceremony at the Sept may had looked, the truly important celebration was held at the privacy of Dragonstone, where the court did not follow.
this was understood without being stated — that the journey to the ancient Targaryen seat was a private one, that what happened there was not for the realm's consumption, that the public ceremony had been the realm's and this was theirs. the three of them departed with a small retinue that had the discretion of people who understood what they were part of and the wisdom to understand that some things were not for recording.
what can be said about Dragonstone is this: it is old. it is volcanic and specific and the stone of it holds things the way old places hold things, in the weight of the walls and the quality of the silence and the accumulated presence of everyone who came before.
the Valyrian rite is older than the Faith. older than the realm. it predates the Conquest and the dragons and most of what the continent thinks of as history. the words of it are not widely known outside the family — they are passed down, kept, spoken in the language that the Targaryens brought from across the sea and have not entirely relinquished.
what those words mean, in substance, is simply: mine. ours. always.
what the walls of Dragonstone made of the night that followed is not recorded. those walls have witnessed a great deal, across a great many centuries. by all available evidence, they were not entirely unprepared.
now, years after their union, here is what some people at court still get wrong.
they look at the three of them and they look for the seams. they look for evidence of negotiation, of compromise, of the specific friction of three people who have arranged themselves into an unusual configuration and are managing the arrangement. they look for who is primary and who is secondary, who loves more and who loves less, who made the sacrifice and who received it.
there are no seams. there never were.
what there is, instead, is this: a woman who moves through every room like she knows exactly where she is going, flanked by two men who would rearrange the room if the room required it. a Crown Prince whose attention moves to her before it moves anywhere else and does not apologise for this. a prickly prince whose jaw communicates more than most men's speeches and whose body positions itself between her and everything he has assessed as a threat, which remains most things.
the specific warmth of the three of them in proximity. the private language of it — the gestures, the silences, the particular quality of a look between any two of them that has years of history compressed into it.
king Daeron called it the Aemon quality. Myriah called it, eventually, simply her children.
the realm calls it, depending on who you ask, a scandal or a tradition or simply the Targaryens doing what the Targaryens have always done, which is refusing to be governed by the categories everyone else accepts.
what it actually is, stripped of every label and every opinion and every lord who made a proposal and was declined and every High Septon who required reminding:
three people who were always going to be this. who simply, in the fullness of time, arrived at it.
So, about the brotherly competition piece within the Three Heads of the Dragon AU...
and on the jealousy of dragons (or: how baelor and maekar targaryen love the same woman and hate each other for it, a little)
here is the thing about writing jealousy into this throuple dynamic: it should not exist, and it exists anyway, and the way it exists tells you everything about who these men are.
baelor and maekar are not jealous in the way of insecure men. they are not threatened. they do not doubt. they have shared a life and a bed and a woman they both love completely for long enough that the architecture of it is load-bearing — remove any one of the three and the whole thing comes down. they know this. the jealousy is not about fear of losing you.
it is about fear of being less.
and that is an entirely different animal.
maekar's jealousy is quiet and it is devastating precisely because he would never call it that.
maekar has organised his entire interior life around not needing things. he is practical. he is useful. he is the one who notices when your shoulder is bothering you before you says so, who positions himself between you and an unfamiliar room, who stays when he wakes early because he knows you sleep better with his weight there. he has constructed a very thorough case for his own indispensability and the case is built entirely on function because function is the vocabulary he has and tenderness is the vocabulary he has been pretending not to speak for forty-odd years.
and then there is baelor. baelor who makes you laugh the unguarded way. baelor whose hand rests near yours on a cushion in a quiet solar and whose presence in a room with you has the quality of two people who have never once needed to perform ease because ease is simply what they are together. baelor who gets the softness. the looseness. the specific quality of a woman completely and uncomplicated held.
maekar watches this and files it under irrelevant and the filing does not take.
what makes his jealousy so interesting to write is that it is not about the sex. maekar is not lying awake wondering if baelor is better in bed — he knows the answer to that question with the serene confidence of a man who has conducted extensive empirical research. what he is lying awake about is the after. the quiet. the staying. the version of you that exists in those low-lit domestic moments that he does not know how to inhabit without feeling like he is doing it wrong.
he wants to be soft with you. he has no idea how to want that without it feeling like defeat.
so his jealousy comes out sideways — in the set of his jaw across a room, in the way he comes to you afterward with his hands already certain and his intentions already physical, trying to be useful in the register where he knows he is useful, trying to give you something so undeniably good that the question of the other thing doesn't need to be asked.
it sometimes comes out in tell me he does this better — a line that sounds like competitive arrogance and is, underneath, a man asking am I enough in the only language he currently has access to.
and when you finally crack him open — slowly, with your hands on his face and your patience and the specific tenderness of a woman who has known him long enough to see through every defence he has ever constructed — what comes out is not the soldier or the prince or the man who wins almost every sparring match.
what comes out is someone who just wanted to be held.
and did not know he was allowed to ask.
baelor's jealousy is louder, which surprises people, because baelor is not a loud man.
here is the thing about baelor: he has always been the brain. the diplomat. the one who thinks before he acts, who attends carefully, who is reasonable in rooms that are becoming unreasonable. he has an entire identity built around the composure, and the composure is genuine — it is not performance, it is not repression, it is simply who he is.
but underneath the composure there is a man who has heard, through walls, the sounds his wife makes with his brother (also her husband). and has noted, with the careful attention he gives everything, that he does not get those sounds. not those specific ones. not with that frequency or that particular quality of abandon.
and he has filed this under not requiring attention with the thoroughness of a man who knows that what he is feeling is not rational and has therefore decided not to feel it, and the filing, like maekar's, does not entirely take.
baelor's jealousy is the jealousy of a man who has always thought of himself as the mind to maekar's body — the one who makes you feel known, attended to, completely seen, while maekar makes you feel something more physical and immediate. he has accepted this division without ever consciously accepting it. it has simply been the way things are. and then maekar leaves a mark on your neck and you walk into his study wearing it and something underneath all the reason and composure says: why not me.
not instead of him. that is important. baelor does not want to replace anything. he wants to add something. he wants to discover whether the careful patient architecture of how he loves you has been, in some specific register, a limitation he imposed on himself rather than an accurate reflection of what he is capable of.
he wants to be rough. he wants to leave marks. he wants to hear the sound.
and what is so compelling about baelor's jealousy is that it makes him ask for it. maekar would never ask — maekar works around the asking, approaches the wanting from the side, gets there through competition and provocation and the specific dynamics that let him have things without technically requesting them. baelor looks you in the eye and says I've heard you through walls and I want to know what he does that I don't and the vulnerability of that — the specific exposure of the most composed man in the room admitting that he has been keeping score and the score has been bothering him — is extraordinary.
and then, having asked, he executes. because baelor is always going to execute. the patience turned inside out is still baelor — still precise, still attending, still the man who wanted the exact words and nothing approximate even while his cock was buried in your cunt and his composure was in pieces on the floor. he is rough in a way that is entirely his own, not an imitation of maekar, not brawl mistaken for brain — just baelor, finally, with the careful removed.
the line of confirmation — tell me I am as good as him — is the funniest and most revealing thing he does in any of these situations. because maekar sometimes uses something similar from a position of near-certainty, daring you to contradict him, already knowing you can't. baelor uses it from genuine need. he needs to hear it. he has constructed a very reasonable case for why he should not need to hear it and the case has not held and he is asking anyway, directly, with the specificity that is always his.
and what you gives him in return is not just the words. it is a different sound. not the one he heard through walls. something new. something that belongs only to this room and this version of him and this specific evening of him finally, briefly, letting himself be something other than careful.
he presses his lips to both marks afterward. his and maekar's (because of course he also leaves a mark of his own). both acknowledged. both claimed.
that gesture is the whole of baelor in one movement: the man who thinks about everything, who attends to everything, who would not in a thousand years leave maekar's mark unacknowledged because leaving it unacknowledged would mean that his jealousy is something visceral and real and dangerous rather than some twisted, dragon-esque kind of brotherly competition, and he has been loving maekar and you his whole life for that to crack the relationship.
even in the wreckage of his composure, he is still the most deliberate man in the room.
the thing that makes this dynamic work is that their jealousies are mirrors.
maekar wants the softness baelor gives you. baelor wants the abandon maekar draws from you. each of them is looking across the architecture of this relationship at the thing the other one has and feeling the specific ache of its absence, and neither of them would ever say so directly, and you know, because you always know, and you give them both what they're reaching for in the moments when they finally, reluctantly, let you.
they are not jealous of each other in the way of men competing for a woman. they are jealous of each other in the way of men who love the same woman completely and have each, in their own register, been given access to something the other hasn't — and cannot quite stop noticing the door they're standing outside of.
the good news is that you have the key to both.
the better news is that you know exactly when to use it.
this has been an essay about two fictional dragons and their feelings. i am SO normal about this. thank you for coming to my ted talk.
So I've been thinking a lot about your wonderful Three Heads of the Dragon au and now I find myself curious. Do you have thoughts on the birth order of them? Because I've still been thinking of Baelor as the oldest and Maekar as the youngest so reader is somewhere in the middle. But is she dead middle between Aerys and Rhaegel? Or second oldest after Baelor? Or second youngest before Maekar? Or is she actually oldest or youngest herself? Because wherever she fits could certainly prompt some Feelings from Baelor and/or Maekar.
so, first of all, i need to thank you for your constant input and for your amazingly well crafted comments on the works of this particular AU. they are incredibly insightful and very accurate to what i picture!
now, so this is a great question and I've thought about it a lot, so let's get into it properly.
Birth order: Baelor is the eldest, the heir, born first and raised accordingly — which matters, because it means he spent his earliest years in a kind of separate orbit, groomed early for a role that put a certain distance between him and his younger siblings before he was old enough to understand why. Then Aerys. Then Rhaegel. Then her, the only princess. Then Maekar, just over a year behind her.
She and Maekar were close enough in age that they were essentially raised as a unit. And from the start they were the same kind of child, in a way that had nothing to do with being told to get along. They looked alike — the white hair, unmistakable; a servant spotting one head of it in a corridor knew to brace for the second somewhere nearby. And they matched temperamentally in the way that mattered most: Maekar was born cranky (this is canon, I did not invent this, the man came out of the womb unimpressed), and she was not quite that, but she had his same intensity, his same all-or-nothing quality, and the two of them found each other immediately and never really let go.
She refused to be taught apart from him. This is not an exaggeration; she actually refused, with the absolute conviction small children have about things that adults consider negotiable. Her septas reported it as a problem to be solved, and her father, eventually, stopped trying to solve it. She and Maekar learned their letters together and overall were inseparable in the specific way that meant the rest of the Keep simply built their presence into its expectations.
Baelor watched this from a small distance.
He was not much older than she was, a mere question of five years. He had not had this with Aerys or Rhaegel — the heir's track kept him slightly apart even from his immediate brothers, the specific isolation of being raised toward a role rather than simply raised — and what he watched, when he watched her and Maekar, was not resentment. It was longing.
The plain, unguarded longing of a child who noticed that other people have a thing he doesn't have and has no idea how to ask for it.
He never asked. He didn't have to.
One afternoon, she and Maekar were playing — whatever passed for playing between a not-yet-cranky toddler and her favourite co-conspirator — and she looked across the room and saw Baelor sitting by himself, immersed in books and parchments, doing the specific quiet waiting of a child who has learned not to expect to be included, yet with the body language of someone deeply starved for something more.
Something he saw in his youngest siblings.
She didn't say anything.
She didn't explain anything. At four, she was not yet old enough to have the language for what she was doing, and even if she had been, I personally don't think she would have used it — explanation had never really been how the three of them communicated, even now, even as adults.
She simply got up, walked over to him, and took his hand.
Maekar scowled when she brought Baelor to his side. Of course he scowled — this was his afternoon, his sister, and a strange variable had just been introduced without his consent.
She took his hand too. Both hands. One in each of hers.
And she smiled — the specific small, unselfconscious smile of a child who has solved a problem and doesn't fully understand the problem was complicated — and she stood there, between them, holding both, until Maekar's scowl gave way to something less defended and Baelor's careful stillness gave way to something that had not been allowed out very often.
That was it. That was the whole of it.
No declaration, no understanding articulated, nothing that any chronicler would have thought worth recording.
Her mother saw it from across the room.
She told the story for years afterward — quietly, to people she trusted, with the specific quality of a woman who recognised something significant happening inside something that looked, on its surface, like nothing at all.
She just took both their hands, she would say. She didn't ask either of them. She just decided they were going to be a unit, and they were.
She was not wrong.
Everything that came after — the proposals refused, the plan Maekar suggested and Baelor argued, the wedding and Dragonstone and years of a private language built from gestures and silences — all of it traces back to a toddler in a nursery who looked at a lonely older brother and a possessive younger one and simply resolved it, with no more sophistication than two small hands reaching in two directions at once.
She had been doing the same thing, in more complicated forms, ever since.
It is, I think, the truest thing about her — she does not negotiate the people she loves into compatibility. She simply holds onto all of them at once, with both hands, and waits for the rest of the room to catch up.
It took years for the rest of the room to catch up. To try and understand the depth of their bond. She never once let go in the meantime.
a little snippet of a hymn for the sinners (this is Baelor's POV) 👀
-
He understood, kneeling there, that he was thoroughly and completely finished.
Because lust, at least, could be confessed. Named, absolved, resisted with enough discipline and enough distance. But what was a man supposed to do with affection that had stopped being distinguishable, at some point he couldn't pinpoint, from prayer itself?
Baelor's lips trembled around the next attempt.
"Lord—"
The word broke apart before it finished forming.
He had spent years — his whole vocation, really — teaching other people that grace was never withheld from anyone who sought it honestly, that God did not turn away an honest accounting of a struggling heart. And yet honesty, tonight, felt like the single most impossible thing currently available to him. Because if God were to search his heart in this exact moment, He would find no noble struggle waiting there to reward. Baelor already knew that much. He was already lost, and some new, terrible clarity in him suspected God knew it too, and had simply chosen, as He had for four long years now, to say nothing about it either way.
Me: isn't there anything sexual you've wanted to try for a long time? Nothing that particularly appeals to you right now?
Hubby: *with the cheekiest smile possible* tiramisu, but I've already tried it
My dear @katiecat446 sent me this M A S T E R P I E C E this morning and yeah, this is essentially Father Baelor for the upcoming a hymn for the sinners (the cassock stays on just as the armour)
