Aug 16
Rhaenyra as Empress Matilda
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Rhaenyra as Empress Matilda
heey so, unusual request: (Rhaenyra x fem!reader + smut + sub!reader) be set in a "forbidden" romance where Rhaenyra is religious and the heiress of some church sect (almost a common nun, but different) Actually, that scene where Rhaenyra and Alicent were together (I don't remember the episode) where Rhaenyra was wearing an outfit similar to a nun's, that's where this idea came from... Well, the reader attends church with her parents and older siblings, even though she's not religious and goes out of obligation. That's how she meets Rhaenyra. There's a real tension between the two, and of course, Rhaenyra was constantly being provoked, and she tried not to fall into the "sins" of the flesh.
So basically "hellfire" vibes with rhae-rhae. Your wish is my command.
Sinful lust of a woman who was indeed closer to Gods. And her own faith being shaken by desire, dependency and need for dominance.
By the time you first saw Rhaenyra Targaryen, you had already learned how to be absent without leaving your seat.
The prayers helped. You knew them well enough that your lips could move while your thoughts went elsewhere; knew when to rise, when to kneel, when to lower your head with everyone around you. The painted saints had watched you grow from a child into a woman without ever becoming less remote. Incense still clung to your clothes after service. The bells still marked the hours. None of it had ever reached much deeper.
Your mother called that stubbornness.
You thought of it as familiarity.
That morning, familiarity failed.
The congregation quieted before you saw why. A soft movement passed through the pews, voices thinning one after another until there was only the sweep of heavy cloth over stone.
Grey appeared between the rows.
The woman walking toward the altar wore no ornament except the silver insignia resting at the center of her chest. Her gown fell from neck to floor in long, severe folds, loose enough to deny any clear impression of the body it covered. Her hands disappeared into wide sleeves whenever she brought them together. The construction around her head enclosed it completely, layers of grey fitted close around her face and falling over her shoulders without allowing so much as a strand of hair to show.
Everything had been hidden except her face.
And her eyes.
Violet.
Against all that colourless cloth they seemed almost excessive, the one thing about her the Church had failed to subdue.
Everyone knew Rhaenyra Targaryen.
The High Shepherd’s only child. His appointed successor. The woman some expected to renew the Church and others waited patiently to see fail.
She had given them little satisfaction.
Learned. Disciplined. Careful in public. More severe with herself than anyone else had managed to be.
There was older pride in it too, though few spoke plainly of that anymore. The Targaryens had spent generations softening the old claim without ever quite relinquishing it: their blood stood nearer the divine than other blood. Conversion had changed the language. It had not removed the conviction.
Rhaenyra had been born close to sacred things.
Then raised to stand closer still.
You had expected someone older.
Instead she took her place beside the altar, and for the remainder of the service your attention returned to her whenever it escaped the words.
There was little else to read.
A brief tightening around her lips when an elder minister lingered too long over obedience. The direction of those violet eyes when a child began crying in the western aisle. A glimpse of pale fingers before they vanished into grey again.
Once, near the end, she looked at you.
Nothing happened.
That was why you remembered it.
Her attention passed on.
Later, it returned.
This time you lowered yours first.
After the final blessing, your family remained behind as they always did, caught in greetings and small obligations while you drifted toward the edge of the nave.
When you looked back, your parents were speaking to Rhaenyra.
You could not hear them.
Your mother wore the earnest expression she reserved for matters concerning your moral improvement. Your father added something. Rhaenyra listened, hands hidden in grey.
Then her eyes found you across the sept.
You could not read what was in them.
Not displeasure.
Not willingness either.
Something quieter.
Your mother smiled.
That, unfortunately, you understood.
By the time they returned, Thursday afternoons had been arranged.
“For instruction,” she told you.
You looked past her.
Rhaenyra had already turned away.
___
The first lesson took place in the east library.
Rhaenyra had chosen two books and left a third closed beside her. You had expected doctrine administered like medicine until the hour ended.
Instead she asked what you believed.
You looked at her.
“About what?”
“Anything.”
“That seems ambitious for one afternoon.”
Something in her eyes shifted.
“Then begin with what you do not believe.”
“That may take longer.”
The faintest curve touched her lips.
It disappeared before you could be certain of it.
The hour went quickly after that.
You spoke about mercy because the book happened to open there. You called one passage an elaborate threat dressed as kindness. Rhaenyra told you that you had misunderstood it. You told her that calling disagreement misunderstanding was convenient.
She went quiet.
You expected offence.
Instead she turned the book toward you and tapped one line.
“Read that again.”
You did.
The argument changed slightly the second time.
You disliked that.
Rhaenyra saw.
“You may still hate it.”
“I do.”
“But now you hate what it actually says.”
That was the first moment you liked her.
Not admired.
Liked.
It troubled you enough that you spent the walk home constructing objections for the following Thursday.
By the third lesson, Rhaenyra noticed.
“You prepared.”
“I remembered something irritating.”
“About the text?”
“About what you said.”
There it was again. that brief brightness in her eyes when you gave her resistance instead of obedience.
For the first time in years, you had found someone in the Church who did not mistake being challenged for being insulted.
You began to look forward to Thursdays.
At first, that was all.
The lessons moved as the months did.
The east library when others were near.
The cloister walks when the weather allowed it.
A smaller room overlooking the inner garden when one of the senior clergy occupied the library.
Later, more often, the library adjoining Rhaenyra’s own chambers.
That room altered something without permission.
It held her choices.
Books she had selected herself. Pages in her handwriting. A shawl left over one chair. Once, a cup gone cold beside the window.
The first time you entered, your attention moved through the room before you could stop it.
Rhaenyra closed the door behind you.
“You expected it to look different?”
You turned.
“I had not thought about it.”
“That is unconvincing.”
You let your eyes return to the shelves.
“I thought perhaps there would be more saints.”
“There are already enough of them elsewhere.”
You looked at her.
She had said it dryly.
You smiled despite yourself.
Rhaenyra noticed, and for a moment the office she wore as carefully as the grey seemed to loosen around her.
That became another reason to return.
Not the lessons themselves.
What happened around them.
You would leave thinking about some remark Rhaenyra had made after the book had already closed. Or the way she had become unexpectedly fierce defending a point about conscience. Or the silence that followed when you asked whether she had ever wished she had been born into a different family.
She had not answered.
The next week, while walking the cloister, she did.
“My life would have been easier.”
You looked toward her.
She kept walking.
“I do not think easier would have made it better.”
You carried that home too.
So the arguments changed.
You began listening during service because you wanted to challenge something later.
Then you began listening because Rhaenyra was speaking.
She caught you once.
Afterward, while you walked through the covered arcade, she said, “You paid attention today.”
You turned toward her.
“I usually pay attention.”
“You usually look as though you are enduring a dental procedure.”
“You look at the congregation too much.”
“I am standing in front of it.”
“That sounds like an excuse.”
A low sound escaped her, almost a laugh, restrained as soon as it appeared.
You liked that more than you should have.
By then, you had begun to read Rhaenyra’s face precisely because she worked so hard to make it unreadable.
The Church had trained stillness into her.
Tiny things therefore acquired weight.
The way her eyes narrowed when you pushed too far.
The almost imperceptible delay before she answered something personal.
The shift in her attention when you were no longer discussing the text at all.
At first, finding those limits delighted you.
You had finally found someone worth pressing against.
Someone who would not collapse into offence or dismiss you as irreverent simply because you refused to pretend conviction.
You wanted to know where Rhaenyra’s certainty ended.
Then, gradually, you began wanting to know where Rhaenyra did.
That was more dangerous.
Once, sitting opposite her in the private library, you said, “You defend a remarkable number of rules you do not seem to like.”
Rhaenyra turned one page.
“Disliking a rule does not make it useless.”
“And obeying one does not make it good.”
“No.”
You waited for more.
None came.
“You agree with me.”
“I said no such thing.”
“You did not have to.”
Her eyes lifted to yours.
For a moment neither of you spoke.
There were other sentences available.
You did not use them.
Rhaenyra returned to the page.
The silence felt more intimate than the argument.
After that you became aware of how often you looked at her rather than the text.
There was little of her permitted to be seen.
Grey concealed the body.
So you learned her through what remained.
Violet eyes.
Lips that pressed together when she was thinking.
The occasional appearance of a wrist where the sleeve had fallen back.
Once, Rhaenyra reached across you for a book.
Her sleeve brushed your arm.
Nothing happened.
You thought about it that night.
At the following lesson, you chose the chair beside hers.
Rhaenyra did not comment.
Neither did you.
The first time your knee touched hers, Rhaenyra lost her place.
A manuscript lay open between you, fragile enough that you had both bent near to read it.
Rain moved softly against the window.
Your knee came against hers.
Rhaenyra stopped speaking.
You remained where you were.
So did she.
After a moment she continued.
Two lines later she repeated one.
You looked toward her.
The violet of her eyes had sharpened.
The text concerned discipline.
Prayer.
Fasting.
Chastity.
You could have said something.
Months earlier, you would have.
Instead you let the silence remain.
A few minutes later, you moved away.
The lesson ended early.
You walked home with the strange sensation that something had happened despite neither of you having done anything.
Rhaenyra remained in the sept long after evening prayer.
She knelt because she had always trusted the posture when her mind resisted order.
Her body knew reverence even when thought failed.
The first prayer disappeared halfway through.
She began again.
Your knee against hers.
Again.
Your fingers resting close to hers beside the manuscript.
Again.
The way you had looked at her after she lost the line.
By the fourth attempt she could no longer pretend she was praying.
She remained on her knees anyway.
Rhaenyra had listened to desire confessed for years.
She knew its humiliations well.
Men who betrayed vows for bodies they later claimed meant nothing. Women who returned to lovers after swearing they would not. Clergy who punished flesh for what the mind continued to want.
She had pitied them.
Sometimes, though she would not have admitted it, she had thought herself stronger.
Not a god.
Never that.
But Targaryen blood had carried its old conceit into her childhood in subtler forms. Nearer the sacred. Made for more. And then the Church itself had chosen her, trained her, held her apart until purity became not merely conduct but evidence of fitness.
Rhaenyra had believed herself closer to whatever in a person ought to govern appetite.
Now she knelt on the same stone as everyone else and wanted with the same humiliating simplicity.
Your lips.
Your hands.
Your attention.
No divine mystery in it.
Only wanting.
And not even a man she might one day marry and render acceptable through ceremony.
A woman.
The thought struck somewhere deeper than doctrine.
There was no future arrangement waiting to sanctify this.
No obedience she could perform later that would make the desire useful.
She remained there until the candles burned low.
The next Thursday she was tired.
You noticed.
Of course you did.
Once her fingers trembled while turning a page.
The pleasure you had taken in affecting her changed shape.
A few evenings later you saw her kneeling alone in a side chapel after everyone else had gone.
She did not know you were there.
You watched only long enough to understand that the stillness of her body looked less like prayer than punishment.
Then you left.
The following week you sat opposite her again.
Rhaenyra looked once at the empty chair beside her.
The lesson continued.
Distance should have helped.
That was the worst discovery.
You stopped lingering.
Stopped letting your attention rest on Rhaenyra during services.
Stopped finding reasons for your hand to remain near hers.
She had wanted relief.
Instead she began waiting for what you no longer gave her.
The absence of your attention became as palpable as its presence had been.
Every Thursday you chose the farther chair.
Every Sunday you looked toward the altar rather than toward her.
Rhaenyra found herself searching for your eyes and despised herself afterward.
She began extending the lessons.
Not consciously at first.
There was simply another passage worth reading.
Another question.
One evening, when you closed the final book, she said, “There is something else.”
You waited.
Rhaenyra opened another volume.
The thing she showed you could easily have waited until next week.
Both of you knew it.
Neither said so.
By the time you left, darkness had filled the windows.
That night she dreamed of you in places you had never been.
Asleep in the chair beside her fire. Your shoes left near the bed. Your head resting against her shoulder while a carriage moved through darkness.
She woke with a sense of absence she could not explain away.
After that, the dreams became less merciful.
She began covering her head before leaving her bedchamber, long before anyone required it.
Grey became protection.
Then punishment.
___
Winter pushed the lessons almost entirely into Rhaenyra’s private rooms.
By then attendants knew you.
No one questioned when you crossed the outer chamber carrying books or left near supper.
That familiarity became the thing that finally ruined both of you.
One afternoon you arrived earlier than expected.
A guard recognized you and let you through. An attendant passing with folded linen told you Lady Rhaenyra was in the library and would join you presently.
You entered.
Rhaenyra was already dressed for the sept.
Grey fell from her shoulders to the floor in the severe lines you knew from every Thursday and every service, the silver insignia already fastened at her chest. Only the final part of her preparation remained unfinished.
Her hair was loose.
Silver fell almost to her waist.
A heavy sweep of it lay over her shoulders and down her back, bright against the grey, so completely at odds with the severity in which you had always known her that the sight emptied your mind.
Rhaenyra turned.
She stopped.
Neither of you spoke.
For months she had existed to you as grey and violet. The same garments stood before you now, the same figure the congregation knew, and yet the silver altered everything. It poured over the plainness of the gown with an extravagance the Church usually kept completely out of sight.
You had known what Targaryen hair looked like. Everyone had.
Knowing did not prepare you for hers.
Rhaenyra watched you take it in.
A section had fallen forward over her shoulder.
Your hand lifted, then hesitated.
Her eyes followed the movement.
You should have lowered it.
Instead your fingers touched the silver.
Soft.
Warm where it had rested against her.
Rhaenyra inhaled.
You looked at her.
There was no irreverence left in your face now, none of the challenge she had learned to expect from you. You had never looked at an altar with that kind of wonder, nor at a saint, nor at anything she had spent months trying to teach you to value.
Only her.
Rhaenyra crossed the distance and kissed you.
There was no caution in it.
Her hand caught the side of your face, and the force of the kiss drove you back until your hip struck the table.
You answered immediately, your hands finding the silver she had spent months hiding from you.
Rhaenyra made a low sound against your lips.
You kissed her harder.
She let you.
Then your hand tightened in her hair.
Rhaenyra stopped.
The change was absolute.
She drew away.
The room returned.
Firelight.
Books.
Formal grey still fastened around her body.
Your breathing.
Hers.
Rhaenyra looked at you as though she had discovered herself committing an act in someone else’s body.
And under the horror came something even crueler: recognition.
All those years of discipline.
All that blood supposedly nearer the divine.
All that quiet pride in being stronger than people who came to confession ruined because one woman had touched her hair with wonder.
She had kissed you like anyone else starved long enough.
No sacredness in it.
No transcendence.
Only hunger.
You lowered your hands.
Rhaenyra turned away.
The silver shifted across the grey at her back.
“Go.”
Her voice sounded unfamiliar.
You waited.
She did not turn.
You left.
___
The note reached your mother two days later.
Rhaenyra’s obligations no longer allowed private instruction.
Nothing more.
Your mother read it at breakfast.
Then she looked at you.
“What happened?”
You could not answer.
That was enough to convict you in her mind.
She spent the better part of the morning explaining exactly how thoroughly you had squandered Rhaenyra’s generosity. You let her.
The alternative was betraying something Rhaenyra had made clear she wanted hidden.
Thursday came.
For the first time in months, there was nowhere you were expected to be.
You hated it.
You missed the arguments first.
Then the walks.
Then the silence after the arguments had ended.
You missed the way Rhaenyra listened before answering something difficult.
You missed the occasional dryness in her voice that nobody else seemed to hear.
And under all of it remained the kiss.
Not fantasy now.
Memory.
Rhaenyra’s lips.
Her hand against your face.
Your fingers in silver hair.
You saw her at service three days later.
Grey again.
Nothing of the woman near the fire remained except the violet eyes.
She did not look toward you.
That was worse than the note.
Rhaenyra’s nights became unbearable.
The kiss had removed the last refuge of uncertainty.
Before, she could tell herself she did not know what yielding would feel like.
Now she knew.
Worse, she knew she had liked it.
Liked your hands in her hair.
Liked the shock on your face when you saw her bareheaded.
Liked being seen as a woman instead of an office.
She prayed.
Your lips returned.
She fasted.
Hunger sharpened everything.
She avoided the private library for six days, then despised herself for allowing a room to frighten her.
She slept badly.
Once she woke from a dream in which you had been kissing her neck, and before shame arrived, pleasure did.
That order mattered.
Pleasure first.
Then shame.
Rhaenyra lay awake until dawn understanding that sin did not feel like punishment while it was happening.
That realization began changing her.
Slowly.
Not toward forgiveness.
Toward appetite.
She had spent years imagining sin as something ugly enough that virtue merely required seeing it clearly.
But there were nights now when she remembered your hands and did not immediately pray.
There were nights when she allowed herself the memory for a little while before asking forgiveness.
Then longer.
Sometimes no prayer came at all.
That frightened her.
It also relieved her.
The next morning, she would stand while attendants secured grey around her head and feel the old shame return with daylight.
Then night would come.
The body became less obedient.
Perhaps the mind did too.
___
Nearly three weeks after the note, you went back.
Not to the library.
To her rooms.
The guards knew you.
That was almost absurd.
One of them opened the outer door without question, assuming the old arrangement still held.
An attendant was nowhere in sight.
You found Rhaenyra in the sitting room beyond.
She was not dressed for anyone.
A dark robe had been belted carelessly around her waist, and her silver hair was loose, less orderly than the first time you had seen it, one side fallen over her shoulder as though she had been running her hand through it while she read. A book rested open against her knee.
She looked up.
The colour left her face.
“What are you doing here?”
It was the first thing she had said to you in weeks.
You closed the door behind you.
“I missed my lessons.”
Something almost painful moved through her eyes.
“You should not have come.”
“My mother agrees.”
Rhaenyra lowered the book.
You could hear your own anger now that she was in front of you.
“She thinks I offended you.”
Rhaenyra looked away.
“You let her.”
A pause.
“That was not my intention.”
“No. Your intention was apparently to send a note and disappear.”
The words came sharper than you had planned.
Rhaenyra stood.
“You should leave.”
You almost laughed, though the pain in your chest was boiling.
“That worked very well last time.”
Her face changed.
You continued before courage failed.
“You taught me for months that faith without examination is worthless. That people should understand what they claim to believe.”
Rhaenyra’s fingers tightened around the closed book.
“And when something happened that you did not want to understand, you stopped speaking to me.”
“I understand it perfectly.”
The force of her answer silenced you.
Rhaenyra looked suddenly furious.
Not with you.
With herself.
“That is the problem.”
The room went quiet.
Your anger softened by a fraction.
Rhaenyra turned away.
Silver shifted across the back of her robe.
You watched her.
“If this is what you believe,” you said more quietly, “then perhaps I learned the wrong lesson.”
She looked back.
You had meant it to hurt.
It did not land the way you expected.
Something in Rhaenyra’s composure simply gave out.
She crossed the room.
Her hand came to your face.
The kiss was immediate.
Harder than the first.
You had three weeks of anger in you.
You gave all of it back.
No one apologized.
No one explained.
Your hands found the robe at her waist. Rhaenyra’s moved to the fastening of your dress.
The second crossing was nothing like the first because neither of you could claim surprise.
There was no ceremonial grey now.
Only Rhaenyra, dishevelled and furious and breathing against your lips while silver hair caught between your hands.
She pulled you farther into the room.
The lamp trembled when the table shifted.
A book fell.
Neither of you stopped.
Rhaenyra’s lips moved to your neck.
You felt her hesitate there.
One breath.
Two.
Then the hesitation ended.
That was the difference.
The first kiss had frightened her back into herself.
This time she allowed herself to continue.
Your fingers found the loose knot of her robe, then paused when the fabric gave under your hands.
Rhaenyra felt it.
Her lips left yours.
For a moment you remained close enough to share breath, silver fallen forward between you.
She did not close the robe.
You opened it slowly.
Months of grey had taught you to imagine her body only by omission. A wrist where a sleeve slipped. The line of a shoulder inferred from cloth. The warmth of her knee once against yours.
Now there was nothing ceremonial left between seeing and knowing.
Your attention moved over her.
Rhaenyra watched you see her.
The look in her eyes changed before anything else did.
You touched her waist.
Her breath caught.
Then her hands were on you again.
She opened your dress with a concentration that made every fastening feel more intimate than the kiss had. Her knuckles brushed your skin. Your own hands travelled over her shoulders and into the silver hair you had thought about far too often since the afternoon by the fire.
Rhaenyra closed her eyes when you kissed her neck.
You did it again.
Her fingers tightened at your waist.
A bell sounded somewhere farther inside the sept.
Both of you heard it.
Neither moved until the final note had faded.
When you looked at her again, some part of her was still holding back.
You could feel it in the way she touched you. wanting, then checking herself; drawing you closer, then leaving enough space to pretend she might still step away.
She had done that for months.
You no longer wanted to help her.
So you moved out of her hands.
Rhaenyra looked at you.
Then you lowered yourself.
Your knees met the floor.
Her whole body stilled.
You had knelt in the sept more times than you could count because everyone around you did. You knew how to lower your head at the right moment, how to rise when prayer ended, how to perform obedience without ever feeling much of it.
This was different.
You looked up at her and waited.
Not uncertainly.
Expectantly.
Rhaenyra understood.
Her hand slid into your hair.
At first the touch was almost careful.
Then you leaned into her palm, letting your eyes close for a moment.
Something in her face gave way.
Her grip tightened.
“Closer.”
You moved at once. Your hands, your lips serving your goddess.
While on your knees you couldnt see her face, but her voice, her body, her fingers in your hair were helping you.
The obedience struck through her.
She tested it.
Her fingers guided you where she wanted you, and rather than resist the pressure, you followed willingly, letting her decide the distance between you and when you were allowed to close it.
Rhaenyra watched the choice happen.
For months you had questioned everything she gave you. Picked apart her arguments, refused every easy answer, treated authority as something that had to earn its place before you would concede even an inch.
Here she did not have to persuade you at all.
“Look at me.”
Your eyes lifted immediately.
Heat moved through you at the expression that crossed her face.
You liked that look.
More dangerously, you liked knowing you had caused it by obeying.
Rhaenyra seemed to realize the same thing.
“Stay there.”
You remained exactly where she had put you.
A faint change touched her lips before hunger overtook it.
This was not the obedience the Church received from you. That had always been borrowed, performed because your family expected it and resistance would have required more effort than compliance.
Rhaenyra had yours because you wanted her to have it.
When her hold grew firmer, your body answered before you could hide the response.
She noticed.
“You like that.”
It was not quite a question.
Heat rose into your face.
You did not look away.
“Yes.”
The word seemed to settle somewhere deep in her.
Rhaenyra drew you closer again, slower this time, watching the willingness with which you followed.
The first time she guided you, there was still caution in it.
The second time there was not.
Her breathing grew uneven.
You felt the moment she stopped trying to remain perfectly still.
That small surrender of movement affected you almost as much as it did her.
Rhaenyra had been receiving.
Now she was taking.
Outside, prayer began somewhere beyond the walls.
The words did not reach you clearly. Only the rise and fall of voices, softened by stone.
Rhaenyra heard them.
Her attention flickered toward the door.
For one suspended second, you thought the sound might return her to herself.
Instead her eyes came back to you.
Her hand tightened.
She continued.
Her composure fractured by degrees.
A sharper breath.
Her head falling back before she caught herself.
The tension in her thighs.
The small involuntary movement she had been resisting until resistance became more difficult than giving in.
You felt her begin to use your willingness rather than merely accept it.
Rhaenyra felt it too.
The pleasure on her face was almost frightening.
Not because it was wild.
Because it was lucid.
She knew exactly what she was doing now.
Closer to the gods, the old Targaryens had said.
Rhaenyra had carried some quieter version of that pride all her life.
And here you were on your knees before her, offering freely what you had never offered the gods with any conviction.
She should have despised the thought.
Instead it made something dark and delighted move through her.
Your name escaped her.
Barely louder than breath.
Then again.
Her fingers tightened once more, and this time she did not soften the gesture afterward.
When pleasure finally broke through her, it did not look holy.
Her breath broke. Her body tightened. The violet of her eyes vanished when they closed, and for several seconds there was only Rhaenyra holding you close and failing completely to remain the woman she had spent years presenting to the world.
The prayer continued outside.
Slowly, she looked down.
You were still there.
Still kneeling.
Her hand was still in your hair.
The sight struck her hard enough that you saw shame arrive almost immediately.
Her fingers loosened.
You could have risen.
Instead you touched her.
Rhaenyra looked at you.
There was no regret in your face.
No fear of her.
No embarrassment at having given her exactly what she had wanted.
The shame did not disappear.
It simply ceased to be the strongest thing in the room.
Rhaenyra pulled you up.
The kiss that followed had none of the restraint of the first.
You barely had time to catch your balance before the table pressed against you again. Silver hair fell around both of you as Rhaenyra kissed your neck, her lips moving over skin she had spent months pretending not to imagine.
This time she did not stop herself after the first touch.
Her hands moved with purpose.
You felt the difference immediately.
The months of questions had ended.
Rhaenyra was learning you now in another language.
Where your breath changed.
What made your body arch toward her.
How quickly your bravado disappeared when her voice dropped.
“Stay.”
You obeyed before she had finished saying it.
Rhaenyra noticed.
Her hand settled at your waist, holding you where she wanted you, and when your body tried instinctively to follow the pleasure she was giving you, she kept you still.
A frustrated sound caught in your breath.
The faintest change touched her expression.
She liked that too.
“I said stay.”
There was unmistakable authority in it now.
You went still.
Not because you had to.
Because hearing that voice turned on you-quiet, controlled, expecting obedience made something in you loosen completely.
Rhaenyra saw it happen.
After that she became bolder about asking.
You tried to keep quiet.
That became difficult almost at once.
Rhaenyra noticed every failed breath, every effort to swallow a sound before it escaped. She returned deliberately to whatever caused it, watching you with an attention so complete that you had nowhere to hide from her.
The heir who had spent months terrified of appetite was becoming greedy.
Not careless.
Never inattentive.
Greedy for your reactions.
For the way your fingers caught at her shoulder.
For the way your knees weakened when she touched you exactly where your body had already taught her to.
For your willingness to let her decide the pace.
A sound escaped you.
Rhaenyra kissed you before it could carry.
Footsteps passed in the corridor.
Both of you froze.
Her hand remained where it was.
Your breathing sounded enormous.
A voice murmured outside.
Another answered.
The steps slowed.
Rhaenyra’s eyes stayed on yours.
You saw fear there.
You also saw how little it had begun to matter.
The footsteps moved on.
For a second neither of you moved.
Then you leaned toward her.
Rhaenyra understood.
The next touch was firmer.
You caught at her shoulder again.
She kept you exactly where she wanted you.
Your body had already learned what her quietness meant.
Pleasure gathered quickly enough to frighten you.
Rhaenyra saw that too.
Her lips brushed your cheek, then your ear.
“Look at me.”
You did.
The order was soft.
Your response immediate.
That almost undid her again.
Violet held yours while your body gave way.
You tried to turn your face into her shoulder when pleasure became too much.
“Don’t hide.”
You stopped.
The words were nearly a whisper.
You made yourself meet her eyes again.
The obedience itself had become part of the pleasure now, passed between you until it was difficult to tell whether Rhaenyra was more intoxicated by commanding or by the fact that you kept choosing to listen.
She held you through the shaking that followed until your weight settled against her.
For a while there was nothing but breath.
Her hand at your waist.
Your forehead near her neck.
Silver hair against your skin.
The prayer outside had ended.
A bell answered it.
Rhaenyra did not step away.
That surprised you.
Perhaps it surprised her more.
You felt shame return to her in the stillness afterward, but this time it arrived too late to command anything.
She had enjoyed your kneeling.
Enjoyed your obedience.
Enjoyed taking pleasure from you and giving it back.
No interpretation could make that clean.
Rhaenyra knew it.
Her hand moved slowly up your back.
You lifted your face.
She looked exhausted.
And strangely peaceful.
Only for a moment.
You touched her cheek.
Rhaenyra closed her eyes and leaned into your palm.
Then, with the faintest movement, she turned her face and kissed it.
No prayer followed.
Not yet.
___
Morning was worse.
Rhaenyra woke before the bells.
For several moments she did not know why the room felt different.
Then she felt your weight against her.
You had fallen asleep close sometime after midnight, one hand near her waist, your breathing slow and warm against her shoulder.
Silver hair lay everywhere.
Across the pillow.
Across your arm.
Nothing had been restored.
No grey.
No insignia.
No visible office.
Rhaenyra looked at you and understood, with a clarity prayer had never given her, that she had wanted this too.
Not merely the pleasure.
This.
Someone sleeping in her bed.
Someone who had seen her without the construction that made her recognizable to the world.
Someone who had knelt to her and then, hours later, trusted her enough to sleep.
Rhaenyra should have felt ruined.
Instead the first thing she felt was possessive tenderness.
That was almost unbearable.
She lay still until you woke.
Your eyes opened slowly.
For a moment neither remembered shame.
Then you smiled.
Small.
Sleep-softened.
Rhaenyra’s chest tightened.
“You stayed.”
Your voice was rough.
“You did not ask me to go.”
Neither of you said anything after that.
The bell sounded.
Rhaenyra looked toward the window.
Daylight.
The Church returning.
She rose.
You watched her become the heir again.
The robe first.
Then more formal grey brought by an attendant who never entered far enough to see you behind the inner screen.
Rhaenyra gathered the silver.
You came closer and helped without being asked.
The hair disappeared slowly.
It had become intimate now, this erasure.
Your fingers tucked the final section away.
The grey closed around her face.
Only violet remained.
Rhaenyra looked at herself in the mirror.
For years that image had meant purity to her.
Now it meant concealment.
The distinction unsettled her.
She touched the silver insignia once.
Then looked at you through the mirror.
Nothing about last night had made her stop believing.
That would have been easier.
She still believed in Gods.
Still believed in duty.
Still believed restraint had value.
She simply no longer believed herself above the people who failed at it.
And somewhere, terribly, she had stopped wanting to be.
After that, the lessons disappeared without quite ending.
You were admitted differently.
The guards knew you.
The attendants knew you had once been Rhaenyra’s pupil and did not question why the arrangement had resumed in some altered form.
Sometimes books waited.
Sometimes they did not.
The relationship grew in the spaces where instruction had once lived.
You still argued.
Rhaenyra still disliked half your conclusions.
You still told her when the Church was being ridiculous.
Now she occasionally agreed.
At night, other things changed faster.
The first weeks, Rhaenyra still paused.
Still seemed startled by herself whenever desire became too easy.
Then she began freeing herself by degrees.
The head covering came off earlier.
The formal robe disappeared before you arrived.
Some nights she met you barefoot, silver hair already loose, wine on the table.
Those evenings frightened her afterward because she had prepared for you.
Preparation meant anticipation.
Anticipation meant choice.
Eventually even that ceased to surprise her.
She learned what she liked.
Learned what you liked.
Learned that she enjoyed your submission with a hunger she could not translate into any respectable virtue.
There were nights when she made you kneel again.
The second time, she hesitated less.
The third, almost not at all.
By then she no longer needed to test whether you would follow.
A hand at the back of your neck could be enough.
A quiet “come here.”
A glance toward the floor.
You understood.
And each time you chose to obey, Rhaenyra grew a little less ashamed of asking.
Once, with your face turned upward and her hand resting in your hair, Rhaenyra heard bells for evening prayer begin beyond the windows.
She did not stop.
That realization came later.
She had heard the bells.
And chosen not to stop.
The woman who had once spent hours punishing herself for a knee brushing hers now listened to prayer while indulging the same desire deliberately.
That was the downfall.
Not one violent collapse.
A series of permissions.
Tonight, no prayer.
Tonight, the robe left open.
Tonight, your lips at her neck.
Tonight, kneel.
Tonight, stay.
By morning shame often returned.
But shame no longer carried authority.
It had become one voice among others.
Want was louder now.
Sometimes tenderness louder still.
Rhaenyra hated herself less cleanly.
That, perhaps, was the greatest change.
The secrecy settled around the relationship gradually.
You learned which corridors emptied after evening prayer.
Which attendant could be trusted not to ask why you remained late.
Which nights Rhaenyra wanted speech and which left her too exhausted for anything but your presence.
Sometimes you arrived to find her still in full grey.
Sometimes the head covering was already gone.
Those evenings felt almost indecent in their ordinariness.
Silver over a robe.
Bare feet near the fire.
Rhaenyra reading while you occupied the opposite chair until the book was eventually forgotten.
The first time she allowed herself to fall asleep peacefully beside you, you remained awake longer than necessary simply because the sight seemed impossible.
The Church’s immaculate heir slept with silver hair spread across the pillow and one hand loosely curled near your waist.
Morning returned her to grey.
Always.
The sin remained too.
Rhaenyra never ceased believing.
That was what made the arrangement impossible to simplify.
She did not decide the Church was wrong merely because she loved what happened in private.
She did not wake one morning liberated from shame.
Sometimes after you left, she still prayed.
Sometimes you found her quieter after nights when desire had overtaken restraint too completely.
There were mornings when she would not meet her own eyes in the mirror while the grey was fastened around her head.
And somewhere under all of it remained the injury to her pride: the knowledge that blood had not made her different after all. She had not transcended appetite. She had merely gone longer without meeting the thing capable of awakening it.
That humiliation never quite left.
Neither did another, more secret pleasure.
If she was no closer to the gods than anyone else in her weakness, there were still moments when you looked at her as though she were.
Rhaenyra hated how much she loved that.
Then you would return.
And she would open the door.
Again.
Again.
That repetition became its own answer.
Rumors never became accusations.
They remained fragments.
A servant had seen you leaving the private corridor after dark.
Someone else said Rhaenyra still instructed you personally.
An attendant once entered in the morning and found two cups by the bedchamber fire.
Nothing held.
Stone swallowed voices.
Grey concealed silver.
Ritual repaired every visible disorder before the congregation arrived.
The sept kept what it heard.
On the seventh day, Rhaenyra stood beside the altar.
Her hair was hidden completely.
Her gown erased the body you knew.
Her hands disappeared into grey sleeves.
Only violet remained.
You sat with your family.
Your mother believed the instruction had ultimately done you good.
Perhaps it had.
You listened now.
Not because faith had suddenly found you.
Because Rhaenyra’s voice mattered.
When the congregation knelt, you knelt with them.
Stone met your knees.
Around you, hundreds bowed toward the altar.
Rhaenyra looked over them.
Then her eyes found you.
Only for a moment.
No one else would have understood what passed there.
You remembered silver spilling over your hands.
A dark robe left open near the fire.
The first startled breath when you lowered yourself before her.
Other nights after that, when surprise had become certainty.
Rhaenyra remembered them too.
The violet changed.
Barely.
Then her attention returned to the prayer.
The walls remained silent.
They had become very good at that.
When Heleana showen her teeth after she was done with everything — some people call it bravery. When Aegon shows his teeth after everything what happened to him — some people call this good character arc (and yes it is) but when Rhaenyra finally shows her teeth after everything she wents thought and just don't let people show disrespect without consequences — some people thinks she's mad and awful person. Not only fans. I mean...
Seriously? Baela yapped at her queen, who she is admitted hers queen (unlike Heleana) and this show give us Rhaenyra's fair reaction as something dark and mad? Old man not only one who forgets who this woman is, I guess. Beala was so wrong in this scene.
Rhaenyra didn't abandoned Corlys as she did Mysaria. He walked out of her Council on his own legs because he wanted to. As he did when Viserys refused send halp on Stepstouns and refused marry Leana. And I remained you what Beala admitted herself what Corlys's own character brings him troubles. And now Beala don't like what Rhaenyra sent Daemon with his dragon to place were Corlys is and focused on other problems. And won’t let Baela go alone to place were the Hightowers's army are, and instead of this leaving her in the capital with the other dragon? Who will be Baela backup if Sunfire will shows up? Bay the way, exactly what plan for Corlys save Beala have if she wants to fly? I don't know.
And that «Me and Addam» thing. Baela, you told your uncle what you are understand and not blame Rhaenyra for her coldness. Because it's expected after everything. You refused rest and flyed all this time because you wanted prove yourself to Rhaenyra. You flyed with Jace because you wanted, not because Rhaenyra «use you».
Contrariwise, Beala rejecters almost every order what Rhaenyra gives to her if not all of it. And everything because Baela wanted fight and prove herself. And this is exactly that Rhaena did — rejected Rhaenyra's will, only one order what Rhaenyra ever given: «Be with my boys far away from fight». Rhaena choose her own ambition and valid dragon. And now Baela blaming Rhaenyra for dislike this. Do not tall me, what Beala ever thought what Rhaenyra have no rights for being cold and «abandon» Rhaena.
And here we are: Corlys refused Rhaenyra because he wanted to and got trouble — this not her fault. The fact what Rhaenyra refused be nicer to Rhaena after everything what happened because she didn't want followed orders — not her fould, Baela. The fact what Baela now sitting in her room because she yapped at queen — not Rhaenyra's fould, Addam. Not darkness or cruelty. It's consequences. All tat Rhaenyra did thought this episode, it's just don't let people being rough to her.
Since I haven't seen anybody say it, I will.
Baela had no reason/right to have that outburst at Rhaenyra, saying that she uses people to her advantage and throws them away when they aren't useful and that she had done it with Baela considering how much she has been working and flying around and blah blah blah, but what people seem to forget is that episodes earlier Rhaenyra told her to get some rest Baela was the one who did not want to and insisted to keep going so Rhaenyra said yes, so to turn around and throw that on her face made no sense
If Rhaenyra and Aerion were twins. She'd be the oldest and she'd keep him on a leash.
Lowk curious WHY ppl ship rhaenyra and alicent?? Like Alicent is why rhaenyra had a stillbirth, Alicent sliced her hand and tried to take rhaenyras sons eye for self defense, married her dad, was putting her kids against rhaenyra, participates in the Green council’s decision to crown Aegon instead of Rhaenyra, said “no” when rhaenyra asked her to stop the war by saying “it’s too late rhaenyra” then begged for rhaenyra to stop the war later that season, took rhaenyras baby right after birth, and rhaenyra had to walk straight after birth to Alicent instead of resting, participated in taking her birthright right after telling rhaenyra she will be a good queen, a reason why lucerys died and she has the AUDACITY to light a candle.
