Political families always have their secrets, and perhaps there are families whose secrets intertwine like rays of light. Not a tangle, but a seamless crossing of things, coming together (and sometimes apart) smoothly, without a certainty of where they began or where they will end.
They were not seamless like this, though, decidedly far from it. Maybe they are barbs on a wire, or knots in one string (they are certainly something, but fanciful sunlight is not it). They are the interruptions in their own continuum, consistently blocking each other and being blocked; looking away when they lock gazes across a hall, more handshakes from campaigns than kisses in summer and winter.
They are the blockades in the stream, impeding their own happiness, here. Some nights they will lay awake, separate rooms in different countries, and they will wonder why they so love this dance - the strange, foreign footsteps do not flatter either of them, but they refuse to stop as much as they refuse to go.
They are an enigma to no one - they do not even see the irony - but an enigma all the same.
One night it is storming outside, it does not rattle windows and it does not light up the sky, but the rumbling of thunder and the harsh whips of rain against glass is unmistakable. Robb mentions, as they sit together as they sometimes did, that he thinks thunder sounds lively. Rhaegar thinks it sad.
‘You think everything is sad,’ his accent is a delight for Rhaegar, but it does not shield any mocking back. Robb grins (it’s so trademark and Robb that it almost hurts) and he tries to wink at him. So unlike his serious father, Robb.
He tries to laugh, ‘Not everything, Stark.’ If he doesn’t use his name it isn’t as scandalous, the fool inside him says.
‘A lot of things, though.’ Robb leans back in the chair and the wood creaks against him. ‘Targaryen,’ he mocks and rolls his eyes.
They are both the heir to a fortune not their own making, to tongues sprung loose of lips like canon-fire in a war of words and lies and commands. Their first names are the only things that define them, and yet even lovers dare not speak them. Like passwords, like triggers.
They do not even belong to themselves, the plight of the first born. Rhaegar will find himself smiling, some nights when he is alone in the home he meant to share. A house of clandestine affairs, shared only with Robb, some fleeting moments. Sometimes to fuck and sometimes to sit - maybe they talk. Boarding in secrets, forcing anything else out.
‘Do you even want people to love you?’ Robb rasps, when Rhaegar says nothing. For a man of words, they are his bane before the Stark heir. He doesn't know the answer for Robb, he almost says yes and he almost says no.
‘You’re young,’ is his only response. He is, though - young - and Rhaegar thinks him naive in this. He hasn’t lost loves yet, he knows, but he will. He will, and this too, is sad.
