There Is No Explanation for a Love Such as This
Maeker Targaryen x Stark!male!reader—in which, he thinks he hates him when he's loved him all along.
TW: Maeker's complaints (that mask his love), kind of internal homophobia but not really, not canon compliant, internal doubts. Maeker being self-deprecating.
request from @normanssurvivalsite (I hope it's what you wanted. Sorry it took so long!)
Maeker did not understand why you were here. Why a Stark heir was brought to King’s Landing, especially one such as you who were loud and brash and full of laughter. It made no sense why you were here, before him, around him, your energy everywhere. The previously silent halls now rung with laughter and teasing, your voice echoing around the Keep even when you weren’t in the room.
It drove him to insanity.
It drove him to insanity the way you commanded attention and loyalty, the way you could have people laughing with you just by laughing yourself. It drove him to insanity, that you, a boy of no more than twenty could command more loyalty than he, a man of thirty-five. He wanted to know what was so special about you, what made you this force. This miracle in human flesh because knowing it might give him peace.
Peace where you had only given him chaos and insanity.
Peace, something he had not known since you arrived.
Peace…
***
“Come on, up you get,” Maeker hears you say, your voice bouncing off the stone walls of the Keep, echoing around to him, the pitch and tone grating on his nerves.
“No,” he hears Daeron mumble, words slurring and voice thick. “Don’ wanna.”
“I don’t really care, brother,” you say and he can hear you pulling him up to his feet, hauling him up, your footsteps strong and sure, accompanied by the stumbling and muttering and cursing of his son, the drunkard yet dear boy. The oldest haunted by dreams of what are not and yet will be.
“Wanna…sleep,” he hears his son mumble, accompanied by a curse falling from your lips. He cannot see you, but he can imagine it. He delights in it truly, this first crack in the armour of the perfect, bubbly heir to Winterfell. The boy made of ice, strong and cold and utterly unstoppable, a force of nature. One that’s never seen in the Keep.
“You have to help me out, Daeron. I can’t get you to your rooms without your help, come on. Don’t do this.” You sound pained and Maeker can feel a strange twinge deep inside of himself, one of kinship, shared burdens—because it sounds like you understand caring for someone who doesn’t want the help you need to provide.
It’s why he rounds the corner—or it’s what he tells himself at least—stopping before the two of you, sighing and shaking his head at the sight. His oldest son slumped against the wall, your arm hooked round his waist, the other holding his arm over your shoulder, anchoring him to you, attempting to leverage him up and out, but he’s not going.
“Idiot boy,” he hisses, stepping past you not even sparing a glance for you, his attention focused on his son, not you, never you. Because you did not belong. “Get up!” He loops his arm around his son’s other side, his arm brushing yours, electricity tingling around the space of contact, his teeth gritting at the feeling so familiar yet foreign at the same time. He takes his son’s other arm, looping it around his shoulders and pulling him up and away from the wall, from the empty bottle of wine tipped on its side. From his never-ending nightmares.
“Thanks,” you tell him and all he does is grunt in response, hauling his son and you along with him. You struggle to keep up with his aggressive strides and Maeker notices. He doesn’t want to notice. He doesn’t want to notice anything about you because you are nothing but a nuisance, yet he does all the same. He notices the way you always pass by the windows, watching the gardens as if seeing green and growth and spring is truly that foreign to you.
He notices the way you duck around the corners, always watching over your shoulder before disappearing into the library. He notices the way you always wear grey, never white as if being a boy means you cannot wear white, the colour of a maiden. As if being a boy doesn’t make you one of a sort.
He notices you.
And he would do anything not to. Because you are a nuisance, someone who doesn’t belong in the Keep.
Or at least, that’s what he tells himself.
“Wine,” mumbles Daeron, his voice drawing Maeker back to here and now, away from the image of you, haloed by the sun coming in through the window, half in shadow, half in light, a living nightmare with the promise of a dream.
“I think you’ve had enough, my friend,” you tell him, voice carrying through the halls boisterously, loudly. Like everything with you—too much.
“He is your prince,” Maeker counters, voice stern and rigid, unyielding. Yet he can hear something underneath his own voice, something strange, a tremor. Something that makes no sense with who he is, the power that he has.
“And a prince is a title; a friend is a person and a term of endearment. One does not contradict the other—do you imply that a prince cannot also occupy the role of a friend, Your Grace?” you counter and Maeker stops. Just stops in the hallway, his head cocking to the side just slightly.
“What did you say, boy?” he asks you and he turns to look at you, taking in the stern set of your jaw, the bob of your Adam’s apple as you face him, straightening.
“I corrected your notion of the words. A title given by birthright does not negate the occupation of a role such as friend, Your Grace,” you answer, lifting your chin in a stupid defiant move and he sneers, his upper lip curling, preparing to bite back a retort but you continue, “and it’s my lord, not boy. I have a title myself as the son of Lord Stark, as his heir. That entitles me to some respect, Your Grace.”
And he had no response, simply a grunt as he turned away, the sight of your eyes, burning with fire lingering in his mind. Lingering in a way that was strange and infuriating at the same time.
And it left him with a question, a query: What was it you were doing here?
***
You have grown bolder and more annoying, spending more time with Daeron, keeping the wine from his grip, laughing with Aegon and Daeron, joking and laughing and teasing. Not even Aerion no longer griped about your presence, no longer viewed you as an outsider, annoyed by your antics.
Now, everyone but he was alright with you.
“What is the Stark boy even doing here, brother?!” he cries now, his hands flying at his sides, dramatic motions necessitated by the antics of the court. The antics you helped to create. “He speaks with knowledge in some moments, yet acts like a fool all the others! He has no place here! He’s a nuisance!”
“Why is it that his presence bothers you so, brother?” Baelor asks, his tone calm and even, his eyes still focused on upon the trade agreements before him, quill held aloft in his hand as he prepares to sign, dipping it into the deep red ink pot. “Because from where I stand, you rarely interact with the lordling. He should not cause you this much distress.”
“He is a fool and he is teaching my Aegon to be the same!” Maeker cries, frustration overwhelming, remembering the sight of you with his youngest, tender and caring and teasing. Teaching him something, the words of wolves and falcons and hunts arcing up to his ears from your whispered conversation, your eyes alight in a way that made that strange yet foreign feeling erupt within him again.
Because you interacted with his sons like you cared.
“He is no fool, Maeker,” Baelor says now, his voice a sigh as he looks up, face tired as he looks at his youngest brother, the one hot-headed and bullish and prone to hating before loving. “He is a genius. Lord Stark wanted him to have access to our archives, our records and knowledge. He has some…I believe he called it a hypothesis surrounding dragons and the eggs and their fossilization. He views it as a problem and he loves to solve them.”
“Then why does he act like an idiot?” Maeker folds his arms across his chest, leaning back against the stone wall, kicking one foot out before him, awaiting his brother’s reply, eyebrows arched.
“Because he doesn’t want people to know. You and I both know that the Northern folk are not always the most…accepting. And he is just, truly a delightful character who loves to laugh. Can you fault him? Look at his family,” Baelor says, standing from his desk, mismatched eyes narrowing on his brother, one eyebrow rising, a mimic of Maeker’s own expression.
“He’s far too close to my children,” he complains and Baelor comes to stand before him, his hands coming to rest on his brother’s shoulders.
“Why do you care?” The words are pointed and aimed at something that Maeker doesn’t want to admit, the thing that he’s wondered ever since he noticed you watching the spring, haloed by the light of the sun.
“He is a fool,” he remarks, but the protest falls short even to his own ears and Baelor shakes his head, stepping back from his brother and turning on his heel, back to his desk.
“No,” Baelor says, his back still to Maeker, gaze finding the window, the sight of you playing with Rhae and Egg beyond it, a sight that reminds him of Dyanna. “Do you remember the first time you met Dyanna?”
“Not clearly,” Maeker says, brow knitting together in confusion as he walks towards his brother, clasping his hands behind his back. “I remember she wore a Dayne purple dress and…was gorgeous as always.” His voice is soft and reverent as he thinks back on his late wife, the woman who had been his everything, who gave him everything. Including her life.
“You don’t remember then,” Baelor says, his tone light and expression nostalgic as he remembers, mind clearer than his younger brother’s. “You were both children and you glared at her and called her stupid and walked off. For the entirety of her time with us, you insulted her constantly and complained about her to me nonstop. You found fault where we all found perfection and when it was time for her to leave, you got angry. You didn’t want her to go because you realized that you hated her because you loved her and you didn’t want to love anyone. And all she did when you confessed…all she did was look at you and said I always knew.”
“What does that have to do with anything, brother?!” Maeker feels that familiar mix of anger and grief at the mention of his Dyanna, the love of his life. The one who was his only, the one made for him at the Seven’s decree.
“I think you know, Maeker,” Baelor says, turning to his brother and placing a hand upon his shoulder, patting him once and then walking off, out the door to the rest of the Keep, leaving Maeker alone in his office, alone yet not because he looks out the window and he sees you.
He sees you, a boy of two and twenty, picking up his son and placing him on your shoulders, running through the gardens, his daughters laughing at your antics. Their faces no doubt filled with joy.
With love.
Everyone here in the Red Keep loves you. Everyone except him.
But when he turns and leaves his brother’s office, turning down the stone hallway, hallways that always seem to ring with the absence of his Dyanna, without her soft and delicate nature, her calming ways and stubborn strength, he wonders. Now, he wonders if he truly does hate you.
He wonders if he’s noticed everything about you from the colours in which you dress, to the way you creep to the library hoping no one will notice, to the way you stare at spring and summer as if they are beasts of a wonderous nature, one which you have never seen before. A strange and wonderous thing.
And Maeker realizes as he walks the long walk back to his chambers, that you, a boy who acts like a fool with the mind of a saviour, are a strange and wonderous thing.
And that he’s never really hated you at all.
But he also realizes that he can never love you. He would like to curse the rules, tell them to fuck off but he cannot and just because he cares for you, doesn’t mean that you do him.
Why would you after all?
He’s a man. An older one at that. And you are a boy, one with the potential for true love. A real love, one that causes a wedding and children.
You are a boy, deserving of your own Dyanna.
And after all, what boy would love a man? That’s strange and wrong and impossible. He knows that he should not love you after all, not entertain these thoughts and yet he cannot seem to stop.
Because his brother is right.
As always.
***
“Your Grace?” you call out, voice questioning and quiet, yet it carries through the library, a lack of the loudness it usually has, the loudness that he complained about to Baelor, the one he’s griped about to himself yet also the one he misses now. He misses it because the loudness is you and he knows now that he does not hate you.
That he never did.
“My lord,” he answers, inclining his head as he approaches you where you sit at a long wooden table, scarred with marks from daggers and fire and men’s anger. “I’ve come to study with you, if you will have me.”
“Of course, Your Grace!” you cry, pulling out the chair beside you, moving two leatherbound tomes before him. “Actually, you have wonderful timing because I could use your help. You see, dragons began to dwindle in size, correct? And then we see fossilization of the eggs that your family has now, yes? Well, perhaps…” All Maeker does is listen, nodding as you speak because even though you ask questions, you do not expect an answer.
And Maeker is conflicted, a bundle of confusion inside of himself because of you. Because of himself.
Because of the impossibility of what he feels for you.
So, all he does is listen.
***
It becomes an everyday occurrence, you talking at him, flipping through pages rapidly, pointing things out to him and speaking in rapid-fire. It becomes a habit, something unconscious and needed and normal.
And Maeker begins to resign himself to the truth. That he spoke true when he said he would take no other wife, that he would love no other woman.
He just loves a man.
He just loves you.
***
“You’re late,” he calls out as you slip into the library, walking quickly to the table, sinking into your chair beside him. “I’ve been waiting, boy.” You do not balk at the name like you used to, finding that it’s a term of endearment now, the prince now having accepted you.
Even if it’s not in the way in which you wish.
Because you know what you like and it is not the fairer sex. No, it never has been. It’s an essential part of your being that you are a man who likes men. It is not something that can change, nor do you want it to, it is who you are but falling is always hard.
It’s hard because you don’t know if you will ever find peace, if you will ever be the one to find someone who likes you for real. For you and not the leverage they can gain over Lord Stark.
You want a man who wants you.
And right now, you have fallen hard for Prince Maeker Targaryen. Someone known for his love of Dyanna Dayne, the love that consumes all of someone. Everything they have. Everything they will ever have.
Even if he were like you, there would never be room for you.
Or so you think.
“I had to escort Prince Daeron home. They found him in another brothel and he would not leave unless I assisted him,” you answer, pulling one of the texts to you, but his hand on yours stops the track of pulling the book to you. His touch would always stop you.
“Thank you,” he says, tone quiet, but not weak. Strong, impossibly so. And you cannot help the way your expression changes at his touch, turning lovesick like a fool, skin tingling at the contact while your heart melts and surges at the same time in your chest. You curse the foolish thing, but it helps not.
“I would do anything for you, Your Grace,” you whisper and when you see his eyes widen, flare, you regret your words, biting your tongue now, hoping that he didn’t notice, that he didn’t see anything underneath it but a devoted subject, sworn to the throne. The throne of which his family controls.
“Anything?” he asks you and you nod, mouth growing dry as you watch his eyes shift, the ice inside of them shattering, revealing insecurity as strong as the ones inside of you.
“Anything.” He shifts in his seat to face you properly, both hands coming to rest on yours, anchoring yours to the table while your skin burns at the contact.
“I vowed after my wife died,” he begins, face growing solemn and light at the same time, eyes unfocused as if he can see her, Dyanna. His precious love of all. “I vowed to never take another wife, to never love another woman because I couldn’t. She was my everything. She was everything.” His tone is fierce and strong and you can feel your heart sinking but then it surges when his eyes clear and focus upon you, the expression upon his face, that of something changed. Like a man forever altered. “And I meant those words. I mean those words. But I have found it in my heart to love another.”
“Who, Your Grace?” you ask, hope choking you. Impossible hope.
“Someone who arrived in the Keep carrying ice on the air. Someone loud and boisterous in effort to hide their true nature, the nature of intelligence, wiser than any Maester. Someone who cares for people even when they do not care back. Someone born to a family of ice yet as warm as any fire.” You know then at his words that it is you, yet you want his confirmation.
You want to hear him say it.
“They sound like quite the miracle, Your Grace,” you say and he smiles then at you, a smile that tells you he knows what you are playing at.
“They are. You are. I need to know…would you…?” he trails off, unsure of how to ask you if you feel what he feels. If you are like him.
And you answer him in the only way you can. You lean forwards and press your lips to his, an open-mouthed kiss that catches him off-guard but not for long because soon he returns it, his tongue darting into your mouth, stroking yours in ways you didn’t know could feel so good, in ways that have the two of you gasping into each other’s mouths, his hands finding your waist, grounding himself in the firmness of your body, the solid structure of your body, the flatness and the planes of muscle, honed by the mandatory swordcraft of any son of Stark.
Your hands drift in different directions, one twining in the short silver strands of his hair, pulling gently as your mouth continues to move against his, your other hand drifting to his waist, fingers digging in just slightly to his back. As if reminding yourself that this is real.
That he is real.
“This may well ruin us both, my heart,” he whispers, pulling back from the kiss, his lips swollen from the force of the kiss, of your lips on his. And you know it, but you could not care because he has called you my heart.
“I don’t care,” you whisper, pulling him back to you, your face just inches from his, “do you?”
In answer, he kisses you again.
And again.
***
It was not easy your love. It was not easy when he had your chambers moved to ones near his and people asked questions. It was not easy when young Aegon saw you and his father kissing in a way that “women kiss men”. It was not easy when the family found out.
But in other ways, it was easy. It was easy because he never expected you to be anyone you weren’t. He didn’t expect you to act like a woman because you aren’t one. You never will be and never want to be. He didn’t want you to be anyone but the boy whom he had thought he hated when in fact he loved.
And it was easy in other ways because Baelor had always known. Had been accepting of. Had finally had it with the family, telling them to just shut up and letting your rooms join Maeker’s.
It wasn’t easy and yet it was.
It was easy because it was love. And love is never easy but it always is worth it. Which makes it easy in the long run because loving someone that you’re meant to love is truly the easiest thing in the world and you had been rewarded.
You found the one who loved you.
“When did you know you loved me?” Maeker asks you now, his arms tight around you, the two of you lying on your backs, eyes trained on the ceiling where you insisted on painting a giant star chart.
“I knew when you first rolled your eyes at me because you were the first to never try to impress me for my father’s loyalty,” you answer and in reply, you can feel the scruff of his beard on your left temple as he presses a kiss to the top of your head.
“Sometimes,” he muses, “I cannot believe that our love is real. That it’s something that exists. It’s so strange.”
“Yes, it is,” you answer, snuggling back in his arms, your head coming to rest on his bare chest. “But there is no explanation for a love such as this. It’s real and strong and that is all that matters.”
“Yes. You’re right, my love. As always.” And then the two of you slip back into sleep, the one fact reverberating between the two of you—there is no explanation for a love such as this.
And there doesn’t need to be.
It is love.
That is all that matters.
