#targaryens

[kathrenax]

"Brother's mace, most like... He's strong".

[ladythedrunken]

Targaryen’s obviously have a rule that you must match with Papa at tourneys

[bullseyegoon]

no dna tests needed

[catbayunthestoryteller]

Good Intentions

Pairing: Maekar Targaryen x f!reader

Summary: Maekar is trying to provide a good life for his new wife by removing himself from her company and offering alternatives. He fails. Warnings: a bit of angst because of pining, a bit of smut.

The morning light cut through the high, narrow windows of Summerhall with a pale, wintry insistence, and Maekar Targaryen, prince of the Seven Kingdoms, found himself staring at the ceiling of a room that was not his own. It was decorated with painted vines, a delicate feminine touch he had never bothered to notice before. The bed linens smelled of lavender and something else, sweet and warm. The weight on his arm was the source of the latter.

You were curled against him like a dormouse seeking warmth, both your hands wrapped around the corded muscle of his forearm as if he were a lifeline in a storm. Your cheek was pressed to his shoulder, lips slightly parted in the ease of deep, trusting sleep. A strand of your hair had escaped your night braid and lay across his tunic.

Maekar did not move.

He was a prince, a warrior, a man who had crushed rebellions beneath his mace and watched men die without flinching. But this, the soft, contented curve of your mouth, the way your breath puffed in tiny, even waves against his sleeve, paralyzed him. He cast his mind back, desperately trying to remember when exactly his careful, honorable plan had crumbled to dust. It was the previous night. It had been a fool's errand, a mission of pure and unparalleled idiocy disguised as magnanimity.

For months, he had constructed a cage for you, gilded and sprawling, and called it a marriage. After the death of his first wife, the mother of his children, the very concept of a new bride had felt like a betrayal, a picking at a wound that had barely scarred over after years. His brother, King Aerys, had insisted. The match was politically sound. You were from a fine lineage, a daughter of a loyal house, and your dowry was a collection of trade agreements and land rights that made the court accountants rub their hands with joy.

And you. You were a pretty thing: young, sweet, blinking up at him at the Sept with your big eyes, he had noted absently, and a slight pout on your mouth. He recognized that pout now, not as petulance, but as a sign of deep concentration, an unconscious expression you wore when you were trying very, very hard to be brave.

At the wedding feast, you had tried to engage him in conversation, your voice a soft, hopeful melody against the droning noise of the hall. He had grunted in response, complaining about the seasoning on the boar. You had blinked, then smiled, a small, tentative thing, and said, "Perhaps the kitchens will do better with the lemon cakes, my prince. Would you like me to ask them to bring some?" Deflecting his rudeness with a kindness so artless and sweet it had made his teeth ache.

He had taken you to Summerhall, the seat of his power and the monument to his own complicated legacy. He gave you servants who curtsied low, spacious rooms filled with sunlight and tapestries you seemed to admire, and a generous allowance that could have purchased a small fleet of ships. He had daughters, Daella and Rhae, who were delighted with you, finding in you a new playmate, a doll who could speak and laugh and teach them new embroidery stitches. His sons were a different matter. Aerion was a burning star of chaos somewhere in Essos, Aemon was at the Citadel, chaining himself to books, and Daeron…Daeron was usually never counted. The thought of his eldest, a dissipated dreamer, brought a familiar, leaden weariness to his gut. But the girls were happy, and you were occupied.

He thought he had it all handled.

Everything was provided, he had reasoned, watching you from across the courtyard one afternoon as you and Rhae chased a butterfly. You were a young maiden. His idea of a comfortable existence was good service, a sturdy roof, a well-stocked armory, and a couple of friends with whom to share a flask of strongwine. He had assumed, in his colossal, self-absorbed ignorance, that your needs were the same.

Until he started to see it. The quiet sigh you suppressed when he answered your sweet inquiry about his wellbeing with a noncommittal grunt at the dinner table. The way your eyes, those big, expressive eyes, would track a young knight in the yard as he laughed with his comrades, not with lust, but with a kind of wistful, academic curiosity. You were studying a creature you had never encountered. Daella, his sweet daughter, was already starting to enter that phase of mooning over singers and sighing at sunsets, a phase he dreaded with every fiber of his being. And you, his wife, a lively girl not much older than his own children, were saddled with a grumpy man whose range of communication with her was limited to tactical assessments of mutton and grunts about the weather. You were drowning in comfort and starved of life.

He could commission solutions. Jewelry? A cascade of sapphires appeared on your vanity. New dresses? Bolts of lace and silks in hues of deep green and amethyst filled your wardrobes. Rare books? He had a first-edition history of the Rhoynar, bound in pale leather, delivered to your solar. You had been effusive in your thanks, your pout melting into a radiant smile, but the smile never quite reached your eyes. The problem, he realized with a cold, hard jolt, was not resources.

The problem was romance. He couldn't morph himself into a handsome young knight with a carefree disposition and light humor, the kind of man who would compose a song for you, who would bring you a wildflower he’d picked on a reckless morning ride, who would whisper sweet, foolish nothings in your ear. He was Maekar Targaryen, a blunt instrument, a man of duty and gristle and a simmering, constant irritation at the world.

His poor wife. You were left to smile and giggle quietly at his dry, caustic remarks about a visiting lord’s speech. And you seemed genuinely amused by them, your laughter a soft, surprised ripple of sound that made him pause, mid-chew, in confusion. You were so deprived of pleasant company that you took what you could get from him, poor sweet thing. The realization had made him want to kick himself.

So, he had formed a plan, a scheme that, at the time, had seemed the pinnacle of rational, self-sacrificing genius. He went through his guards the next day under the guise of a brutal, unforgiving drill. He had them running siege patterns, sparring until their padded armor was dark with sweat, watching them like a hawk. He found the one he was looking for: Ser Elyas, a bastard from the Reach. He was honorable, sharp as a blade, and handsome in that sun-kissed, broad-shouldered way that maidens were supposed to swoon over. His laugh was easy, his temperament unruffled.

"Ser Elyas," Maekar had rumbled, his voice a low thunder. "You are being reassigned. You are now the personal guard to my wife, the princess. You will see to her safety at all times. You will accompany her on walks, attend her in the gardens, and ensure no harm befalls her."

He had made it clear to you on your wedding night that he had no intention of bedding you. It was a statement of fact, delivered not out of cruelty but out of a misguided sense of honesty. He had seen the flash of hurt in your eyes, quickly masked by a composed, brittle acceptance. So, naturally, he reasoned, after some time spent in the company of the charming Ser Elyas, you would come to love him. It was a natural, tragic story. A handsome knight and a neglected princess. He had practically gift-wrapped a discreet, passionate affair for you. It was the least he could give it to you, a substitute for the husband you had probably imagined, a way to satisfy that aching, youthful urge for romance that he, a man carved from stone, could never fulfill.

Yet, from what he observed over the following weeks, the plan had failed with spectacular precision. He would watch from a high balcony as Ser Elyas, in his gleaming plate, offered you his hand to help you over a damp patch of grass. You took it with polite, distant courtesy. You would exchange a few words, an occasional jest that made the knight chuckle, but your expression remained serene, unmoved. Maekar, a veteran of countless campaigns, knew the look of a soldier performing a duty. And your nights, as the quiet reports from your maids confirmed, were spent solely in your rooms. No secret knocks, no furtive shadows slipping from your door at dawn.

He was at his wits’ end. What did you want then? He had given you everything your station and age could desire. What would wipe off that pretty, unconscious pout off your face? Perhaps, he had finally conceded, if he talked to you. A novel concept for a marriage, he knew. He would go to you, and perhaps, in a moment of unguarded frustration, you would let your grievances slip.

The previous night, he had gone to your chamber. Your maid, a timid wisp of a girl, nearly dropped her mending box when she saw him at the threshold. "Leave us," he had commanded, and she fled. You had been seated by the fire, a book open on your lap, and you looked like a startled doe at his unexpected presence, your body going rigid, your eyes wide.

"My prince," you had said, your voice a breathless question.

He had felt like an intruder in his own wife's space. "I…I came to see how you were faring," he had managed, the words feeling foreign and clumsy on his tongue.

You recovered quickly, your innate grace taking over. You poured his wine yourself, and offered him a plate of fruit and honey cake. "I am well, my prince. Truly. The book you sent is fascinating. The accounts of the Rhoynish are almost unbelievable." You were making conversation. You were making it easy for him. And so you spoke for a while. It was surprisingly pleasant.

He found himself relaxing into a chair, debating the tactical blunders of the Valyrian conquest of the Rhoyne, and you had listened with rapt attention, asking pointed, intelligent questions that surprised him. You had a mind, he realized with a start. A sharp, curious mind hidden beneath the pout and the big eyes.

But he didn’t catch any clues. No lamenting a lack of knights, no forlorn sighs about the gardens, no veiled complaints about his absence. Just you, being…pleasant. So, eventually, he rose to leave. "It is late. You should rest."

The change was instantaneous. The spark of animation in your eyes died, replaced by a stricken, hollow look, as if you were wondering what you had done wrong. Your fingers tightened imperceptibly on the spine of your book. "Of course, my prince. Thank you for your company."

He hesitated. He was a man of military precision, and the sudden, palpable drop in your mood was a tactical variable he hadn't accounted for. He was already in your bed chambers. What kind of husband left his wife's bed chamber right before going to bed himself? A churlish one. A neglectful one. The servants would talk, of that he was certain. The walls of Summerhall had ears and mouths. But he did not care what servants would see or say. Their gossip was the chaff of court life. The thought that stopped him cold, that made his feet feel nailed to the floor, was simpler. He owed you basic courtesy, did he not? He had denied you everything else. He could not deny you the simple, public dignity of a husband who shared your bed for a night.

Before he could overthink himself out of it, he gestured to the bed. "Move over, then."

Your eyes, if possible, grew even wider. "My prince?"

"I will not sleep in my boots," he said gruffly, sitting on the edge of a chaise and beginning to unlace them. "I will stay. Just to sleep." He made a promise to himself then, a sacred oath. He would lie down with you, and he would speak to you until you fell asleep, so you would not be insulted by a silent, rigid vigil. Then, he would leave. He had been insulting you for months by refusing to do his duties as a husband, and this small act of presence would at least be a temporary salve on a wound he had no intention of healing.

He lay down atop the covers, fully clothed in his tunic and breeches, a stiff, awkward pillar of a man. You slipped under the furs with a rustle of linen, lying rigidly on your back. The silence was deafening. Maekar cast about for something, anything, to say. "Tell me more about the Rhoynar," he commanded, his voice a little too loud in the quiet room.

And so you did, your voice soft and hesitant at first, then gaining strength. You spoke of the legends, the songs of the Mother Rhoyne, the giant turtles that were said to be gods. He listened, inserting a dry comment now and again that made you giggle, that beautiful, rippling sound he was growing dangerously accustomed to. He stayed, and continued speaking to you about the defensive layout of river cities, the logistical challenges of moving a legion through marshland, until your words began to slur, your breathing deepened, and your face went slack with peace. He had done it. He thought he would leave when he was sure you were deep in sleep. He would just wait one more minute. Just to be certain. The fire had burned down to embers. The room was warm. The scent of lavender was soporific. And that was the last thing he remembered.

Now, it was morning. The maid’s insistent knocking on the door was a relentless, chipper assault on his senses. He was still fully clothed, his tunic creased. And you were curled up next to him, clutching his arm as if it were the most natural, obvious thing in the world. The knocking roused you. You stirred, a small hum of contentment escaping your lips before your eyes fluttered open. Your gaze, hazy with sleep, traveled up his arm, over his chest, and settled on his face. The reaction was not one of surprise, or at least not the kind he expected. It was pleasure. A deep, luminous, bone-deep pleasure that transformed your features. You were smiling. A shy, pleased smile, as if you had just woken from a beautiful dream and found it still real.

"Good morning, my prince," you murmured, your voice thick and honeyed with sleep. There was a newfound confidence in it, a possessiveness that hadn't been there before. "Are you to have a busy day? I thought I might join you, if it were permitted. Perhaps I could assist you with your letters?"

Maekar found himself staring. The words were simple, but the meaning behind them was not. His plan, the handsome guard, the neglected lady, the grand affair, it all crashed down around his ears in a shower of broken, idiotic pottery. He realized his mistake with the force of a warhammer to the chest. You thought your husband was finally coming around. The gift, the miraculous, improbable gift you had wanted all along, was not a surrogate. It was him.

You wanted this. Him. His presence. His attention. His dry, sarcastic remarks. His tactical critiques of ancient river warfare. His grumpy, unyielding, solid self.

All this time, you had wanted him.

He felt a strange, tight sensation in his chest, a feeling he hadn't allowed himself to entertain for many, many years. It was a seed of warmth, cracking through the cold, hard stone he had meticulously built around his heart. He cleared his throat, his voice emerging as a low, rusty rumble.

"You can join me," he said, the words a surrender. "If you wish."

The pout was completely gone now. The smile that remained in its place was brilliant, a sun emerging from behind a lifetime of clouds. It was a smile just for him. And for the first time since he had been forced to take a new wife, Maekar Targaryen didn't feel saddled. He felt, with a terrifying, exhilarating certainty, that he was about to be completely, irrevocably unhorsed.

The days that followed that first, accidental night established a new rhythm in Summerhall, one Maekar found himself falling into with a disquieting ease he refused to examine too closely.

You had asked to assist him, and Maekar, a man who had never refused a direct request from a lady in his life out of sheer, blunt propriety, could find no reasonable grounds to deny you. You appeared in his solar the next morning, freshly dressed in a gown of pale yellow that made you look like a spring daffodil, and settled yourself in the chair across from his great oaken desk. He expected you to be a distraction. Instead, you proved infuriatingly useful. Your handwriting was elegant where his was a cramped, soldierly scrawl.

You sorted his correspondence into neat piles: urgent, routine, and the one you tactfully labeled "probably insincere flattery from lords who want something." He had let out a surprised bark of laughter at that, and you had beamed at him as if he'd just crowned you Queen of Love and Beauty.

This became your habit. Mornings in his solar, you with your neat piles and your quiet, intelligent questions about the running of the lands. Afternoons, you would walk with him along the battlements, your hand resting lightly on his arm as he pointed out the defensive improvements he was making to the eastern wall. You listened with genuine interest, asking about murder holes and arrow slits with a curiosity that was wholly unfeigned. Evenings, you dined together, and your sweet inquiries about his wellbeing were no longer met with grunts. He found himself actually answering you, describing the frustrations of a dispute between two minor landed knights or the irritating news from court. You would nod, your brow furrowed in thought, and offer observations that were often startlingly perceptive.

And every night, the same delicate, unspoken negotiation occurred.

The first time it happened outside of your own chambers, you had been in his rooms. It was late, the fire burning low, and you had been reading aloud to him from a treatise on dragonlore while he sharpened his dagger. Your voice had grown hoarse, and he noticed the way you rubbed at your eyes with the back of your hand. He could not, in good conscience, send you shuffling down cold corridors to your own chambers. The very idea was absurd. What kind of husband kicked his own wife out into the night like a stray cat?

"The hour is late," he had said, sheathing his dagger with a decisive click. "You will stay here."

You had looked at him with that expression again, the one that was half hope and half caution, as if you were afraid of misinterpreting his words. "Here, my prince?"

"In my bed," he clarified, the words coming out more gruffly than he intended. "I will take the chaise."

But you had looked so stricken at that suggestion, your face falling in that way he was growing to dread, that he had found himself amending the plan. "Or I will join you. The bed is large enough. It is not seemly for a prince to sleep on a chaise in his own chambers."

It was a flimsy justification, and he knew it. But the way your expression brightened, the shy, pleased smile that curved your lips, was worth the internal grumbling. He lay beside you that night, a careful distance between your bodies, and spoke to you about the properties of Valyrian steel until your breathing evened out into the soft rhythm of sleep. He awoke to find you pressed against his side, your head on his shoulder, one of your hands resting over his heart as if counting the beats.

This, too, became your habit. You clinging to him in sleep like a limpet to a rock, and Maekar waking each morning to the scent of your hair and the warm, trusting weight of your body against his. He told himself it was for your dignity. He told himself it was a small kindness, a basic courtesy. He told himself many things, and believed none of them.

Then there was the incident with the lamprey pie.

A lord from the coastal holdings had sent a gift of lampreys, and the kitchens had prepared them in a rich, heavily spiced pie. You had eaten only a small portion, politely complimenting the flavor, but within hours you were taken ill. Maekar was in the yard overseeing a drill when your maid came running, her face pale as milk.

"My prince, it is the princess. She is unwell. The maester says it is the lamprey, that it has irritated her stomach something fierce."

He did not remember crossing the castle. He only remembered the cold spike of fear that had lanced through him, the way his heart had hammered against his ribs with a violence that had nothing to do with exertion. He found you in your chambers, curled on your side in the great bed, your face waxen and beaded with sweat. The maester was there, a fussy old man who was doing far too much hand-wringing for Maekar's liking.

"She will recover, my prince. It is a mere gastric disturbance. But she must eat to keep her strength up, and she refuses. The princess will not touch the porridge."

Maekar looked at the tray on the bedside table. A bowl of plain, unappetizing porridge sat there, cooling and congealing. You were facing away from it, your eyes closed, your pout firmly in place.

"Leave us," Maekar commanded. The maester and the maids scurried out like mice before a dragon.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. Your eyes fluttered open, and you looked at him with such a mix of misery and embarrassment that it made something twist painfully in his chest.

"I am sorry," you whispered, your voice thin and reedy. "I am being foolish. It will pass."

"You will eat," he said, reaching for the bowl.

"My prince, I cannot. The very thought..."

"You will eat," he repeated, and this time his voice was gentler, an unfamiliar softness creeping in despite his best efforts. He scooped a small portion of the porridge onto the spoon. "Open your mouth."

You stared at him, those big eyes glassy with discomfort, and for a moment he thought you would refuse him. But then you parted your lips, a tiny, obedient gesture, and he carefully slid the spoon into your mouth. You swallowed with visible effort, your face scrunching up, and he immediately had another spoonful ready.

"Good," he said, the praise awkward on his tongue. "Again."

He fed you the entire bowl that way, spoonful by painstaking spoonful, his large, calloused hands surprisingly steady. He did not rush you. He waited between each bite, murmuring gruff words of encouragement that felt foreign and strange, like a language he had never been taught. When the bowl was empty, he set it aside and reached for a cloth, dabbing gently at the corner of your mouth.

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that made him feel like a hero from a song, when all he had done was feed you porridge.

"Thank you, Maekar," you breathed, using his name without his title for the first time. It hit him somewhere deep, a blow he had no armor for.

"Rest now," he ordered, his voice rougher than he intended. "I will stay."

He stayed. He lay beside you, fully clothed, and let you curl into his side. He stayed until your breathing steadied and the color slowly returned to your cheeks. He stayed even after that, watching the firelight play across the ceiling, feeling the steady rise and fall of your chest against his, and wondered what in the seven hells he was doing.

But still, still, he put off the matter of bedding you.

It was not that he did not want to. The realization had crept up on him with the slow, inevitable force of a rising tide. He wanted to. Gods help him, he wanted to. The sight of you in your thin nightdress, the way your hair spilled across the pillows, the warmth of your body pressed against his each morning, it was testing the limits of his resolve, which had never been particularly strong where matters of the heart were concerned. He had simply never had his heart involved before.

But to bed you would be to open a door he was not certain he could close again. He had built his life around duty, around the cold, hard certainties of obligation and honor. He had loved once, and loss had carved a hollow in him that he had believed was permanent. You were filling that hollow, day by day, smile by smile, and the sensation was as terrifying as it was intoxicating.

He was a coward. Maekar Targaryen, who had faced down rebel lords and laughed at the prospect of single combat, was a coward when it came to his own wife.

Then came the night of the kiss.

It was an evening like any other. You had spent the day in his solar, helping him draft responses to a particularly tedious batch of petitions. Dinner had been a quiet affair, just the two of you, and you had made him laugh, actually laugh, a deep, surprised rumble of sound, with a wicked impression of a pompous lord who had visited the previous week. You had retired to his chambers, as had become your custom, and he had told you about the Dragonknight's campaigns in Dorne until your eyes grew heavy.

"Goodnight, Maekar," you said, your voice soft and drowsy.

And then you kissed him.

It was not a forceful kiss, not a demand or an invitation. It was a brief, gentle press of your lips against his, as natural and unthinking as a breath. A goodbye. An act of simple, uncomplicated affection. You pulled back, your eyes already closing, and nestled into your pillow with a contented sigh, as if you had done nothing of any particular note.

Maekar lay frozen, staring at the canopy above him, his heart thundering in his ears.

You had kissed him.

This was his fault. The thought careened through his skull like a loose cannon on a ship's deck. This was entirely, unequivocally his fault. He had done this. He had planted this notion in your head, watered it with his attentions, and now it had bloomed into something he could no longer ignore.

A fortnight ago, you had been helping him remove his heavy outer tunic after a long day of inspections, your small fingers working deftly at the clasps. It had been such a wifely gesture, so intimate and so natural, that before he had known what he was doing, he had leaned down and pressed his lips to your brow. A brief, chaste kiss. A thank you. He had not even realized he had done it until he saw the way you had frozen, your eyes wide. He had cleared his throat and muttered something about the fire needing more wood, and the moment had passed.

But you had taken that kiss, that single, thoughtless gesture, and drawn a conclusion from it. You had decided, in your sweet, hopeful way, that your husband wanted you to initiate affection as well. That he was too reserved, too gruff, too locked within his own silences to ask for what he wanted. And so, with that gentle, trusting kiss, you had reached across the chasm he had placed between you and offered him a bridge.

Did he want you to? The question burned in his mind, insistent and demanding. Did he want you to kiss him goodnight, as if it were the most normal thing in the world? As if you were truly husband and wife in every sense?

He certainly was not complaining. The ghost of your lips still tingled on his, and his body was reacting in ways that were entirely inappropriate for a man who was supposed to be letting his wife sleep. He was not complaining at all. That was the problem.

He should be complaining. He should be panicking. Because this, this sweetness, this trust, this quiet, domestic intimacy, led inexorably to one conclusion. You would expect children now. The thought hit him like a splash of ice water. Of course you would expect children. A princess, a wife, a woman who had been raised to understand that the bearing of heirs was a fundamental part of her duty. And you would want them, he realized with a jolt. You would want his children. Not out of duty, but out of genuine desire. You would want a babe with his silver-gold hair and your eyes, a child you could hold and nurture and love.

Gods be good.

He turned his head on the pillow to look at you. You were already asleep, your face peaceful, your lips still curved in that small, contented smile. You had no idea of the earthquake you had just set off in his chest. You had kissed him and promptly fallen asleep, trusting him completely, utterly unaware of the crisis you had left in your wake.

Maekar stared at you for a long time, watching the steady rise and fall of your breath, the way your lashes cast delicate shadows on your cheeks. His mind was a whirlwind of duty and desire, fear and longing, the cold echoes of past grief and the warm, insistent pulse of something new.

He could not keep putting this off. He could not keep lying beside you, night after night, pretending that this was a mere courtesy. He could not keep telling himself that he was doing this for your dignity, when in truth, your dignity was the last thing on his mind when he felt the press of your body against his in the dark.

But not tonight. Tonight, you were asleep, and he was a coward still. Tonight, he would lie here and listen to you breathe and feel the warmth of your kiss still burning on his lips.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he would be braver.

Or perhaps, he thought grimly, you would kiss him again, and the choice would be taken out of his hands entirely. The thought was not as unwelcome as it should have been.

The kisses continued.

Every night, without fail, you would bid him goodnight with that same gentle, fleeting press of your lips against his. It was never demanding, never lingering. It was a question posed in the softest possible terms, a door left slightly ajar, an invitation he could accept or decline as he saw fit. And every night, for the first several nights, Maekar accepted it the same way: by remaining perfectly, rigidly still, a statue of a man enduring a pleasant but bewildering assault.

He felt you withdraw each time, felt the tiny, almost imperceptible slump of your shoulders as you settled back onto your pillow. You never said anything. You never complained. But he knew. He was a dull rock, an unresponsive lump of granite, and he was hurting you with his passivity. The knowledge gnawed at him, a persistent, guilty ache that followed him through his days and haunted his waking hours.

The fifth night, something in him snapped. Simply, as you leaned in to press your customary kiss to his lips, he found himself moving. His hand came up, rough and calloused, to cup the back of your head. And he kissed you back.

It was not a passionate kiss. It was not the kiss of a man swept away by desire. It was a careful response, a returning of pressure, a silent acknowledgment. He felt your startled inhale against his mouth, the way your body went taut with surprise. When he pulled back, your eyes were wide, your lips parted, and there was a look on your face that made his chest constrict.

Expectation. Hope. A question that had been waiting, patient and trembling, for an answer.

Maekar looked at you, at your big eyes shining in the firelight, at your kiss-swollen mouth, at the delicate line of your collarbone visible above the lace of your nightdress. He thought of all the nights he had lain beside you, rigid with restraint. He thought of the way you smiled at him, the way you laughed at his dry remarks, the way you clung to his arm in sleep as if he were the only safe harbor in a storm.

He resigned himself. The decision came not with a sense of defeat, but with a strange, liberating clarity. He did not want to become the object of your resentment. He could not bear the thought of those eyes looking at him with bitterness, with the slow, corrosive realization that your husband was a man who denied you not only his affection but the most basic experiences of womanhood. You were young and full of life, and he had been keeping you in a gilded cage, feeding you porridge and kissing your forehead as if you were a child rather than a wife.

"You deserve pleasure," he said, his voice low and rough, the words feeling as if they were being dragged from some deep, hidden place within him. "I have been remiss in my duties."

Your breath caught. "Maekar..."

He moved before he could lose his nerve. His hands found your waist, and he lifted you as if you weighed nothing, settling you onto his lap with a decisive, careful motion. You were warm through the thin fabric of your nightdress, your body soft and pliant against the hard planes of his chest. He could feel the rapid flutter of your heart.

"I will not take what I have no right to claim," he said, the words a rough murmur against your temple. "But I can give you this. Let me give you this."

His fingers found the hem of your nightdress, and he pushed it up slowly, giving you time to object. You did not object. You only watched him with those enormous eyes, your hands resting on his shoulders as if you did not quite know what to do with them. He touched you gently, so gently, his battle-roughened hands moving with a delicacy that surprised even himself. He explored the soft skin of your thighs, the curve of your hip, the dip of your waist. He learned the shape of you by touch alone, his gaze fixed on your face, cataloguing every flicker of expression.

When his fingers found the center of your heat, you gasped, your head falling back, your fingers digging into his shoulders. He moved with slow, patient circles, learning what made you sigh, what made you shudder, what made your hips buck involuntarily against his hand. He was methodical in his attentions, as he was in all things, and he brought you to the peak with the same focused determination he might apply to a siege.

You shattered against him with a cry that was half surprise and half relief, your body arching, your hands fisting in the fabric of his tunic. He held you through it, his free arm wrapped securely around your waist, anchoring you against the storm of sensation. When the tremors subsided, you slumped against his chest, breathing hard, your face buried in the crook of his neck.

He gave you a moment. Then, with the same gentle efficiency, he rearranged your nightdress, lifted you from his lap, and placed you back onto the bed. He drew the furs up to your chin and pressed a kiss to your forehead.

"Sleep now," he commanded, his voice a low rumble.

You blinked up at him, your expression dazed and soft and so full of something that looked terrifyingly like adoration. "But you..."

"This was for you," he said, cutting you off with a firmness that brooked no argument. "Rest."

You slept. He did not. He lay beside you in the darkness, his body aching with unfulfilled need, and told himself that this was enough. He had done his duty. He had given you pleasure without complicating matters with his own involvement. It was a tidy solution, a clean, surgical strike. You were satisfied. There was no need to get himself fully involved.

This, too, became a habit.

Every few nights, when the expectant look in your eyes grew too pronounced to ignore, he would pull you onto his lap and touch you until you came apart in his arms. He learned the rhythms of your body. He knew the spot just below your ear that made you whimper when he pressed his lips to it. He knew the pace that made you clutch at him desperately, the slower, teasing touches that made you gasp his name like a prayer. He gave you pleasure as a general might distribute supplies to a besieged city: regularly, efficiently, and with a steadfast refusal to partake himself.

He thought you accepted this. He thought you understood the unspoken terms of this arrangement. He was a fool.

It was a quiet evening, the fire burning low in the hearth, the castle settling into the deep hush of night. He had just returned from a grueling inspection of the eastern watchtowers, his muscles aching, his mood as dark as the storm clouds gathering over the mountains. You were waiting for him in his chambers, a book open on your lap, a cup of warmed wine already poured and waiting on his desk.

You were always waiting for him now. The thought should not have warmed him as it did.

The night's ritual had been completed. You were nestled against him, your body still humming with the aftermath of pleasure, your breathing slowly returning to normal. He was preparing to settle you back onto your pillow, to pull up the furs and press his customary kiss to your forehead, when you spoke.

"Maekar." Your voice was soft, hesitant, but there was a thread of steel beneath it that he had learned to recognize. "May I ask you something?"

"You may," he said, his guard instinctively rising.

You were silent for a moment, your fingers tracing idle patterns on the fabric of his tunic. Then, you lifted your head to look at him, and the expression in your eyes made his heart stutter.

"Why do you not want anything for yourself?"

The question hung in the air between them, simple and devastating. He opened his mouth to deflect, to offer some gruff platitude about duty and obligation, but you did not give him the chance.

"Every night," you continued, your voice still soft but gaining strength, "you give me such pleasure. You are so gentle, so careful, so attentive. But you never…" You hesitated, a flush creeping up your cheeks, but you pressed on with the same determined courage you had shown since the day you arrived at Summerhall. "You never let me touch you. You never seek your own release. It is as if you believe you do not deserve it, or as if you think I am not capable of giving it."

"You are capable," he said, the words escaping before he could cage them.

"Then why?" Your pout was there, that unconscious, pretty pout that he had come to know so well. But it was accompanied by a look so loving, so open and earnest and full of desperate hope, that it struck him like a blow. "I could learn. I could learn how to please you, if you are willing to teach me. I am not afraid. I want to be a true wife to you, in every sense."

He felt something cracking inside him, the carefully constructed walls he had built around his heart beginning to crumble. "It is not a matter of teaching," he said, his voice strained. "There are…consequences. You are young. You should not be burdened with..."

"Children," you finished for him, and he was stunned into silence. "You are worried about children."

It was not the only thing, but it was the easiest to admit. He nodded stiffly.

You took a deep breath, and he watched as you gathered your courage, your hands clasping together in your lap. "If you do not wish for children," you said, your voice steady despite the tremor he could see in your fingers, "I can drink moon tea. We can postpone the idea. I have spoken to the maester, and he has assured me it is safe when used sparingly."

Maekar stared at you. You had spoken to the maester. You, his sweet wife, had gone to the old man and asked about moon tea. The image was so absurd, so unexpectedly bold, that he almost laughed.

But you were not finished. "I would like to have a child someday," you continued, and now your voice grew softer, more wistful. "One child of my own. No matter a boy or a girl. And I would raise it with the best of my ability, with all the love I have to give. But…" You reached out, your small hand coming to rest on his cheek, your thumb brushing the line of his jaw. "I would like to have a life first. A marriage. A husband who does not treat me like a delicate piece of glass that might shatter at his touch."

Your eyes were wet, but you were smiling. That smile. The one that had undone him from the very beginning.

"I want you, Maekar," you whispered. "I want my husband."

The walls crumbled. The last defenses fell. Maekar Targaryen, prince of Summerhall, breaker of rebellions and terror of his enemies, looked at his young wife and realized he was only a man. A man who had been fighting a losing battle against his own heart for longer than he cared to admit. A man who loved his wife.

He loved you. The truth of it was a physical thing, a weight in his chest, a fire in his blood. He loved your laugh, your pout, your clever mind and your gentle hands and your infuriating, wonderful habit of clinging to him in sleep. He loved your courage, standing before him now and baring your soul with nothing but hope to shield you. He loved you.

"Gods be good," he breathed, and then he was moving.

His hands found your waist, and this time there was nothing careful or clinical about the touch. He pulled you against him, crushing you to his chest, and his mouth descended on yours in a kiss that was nothing like the chaste, hesitant presses of lips you had shared before. This was a surrender. A desperate, hungry admission of everything he had been too stubborn to say.

You gasped against his mouth, and then your arms were around his neck, your fingers tangling in his hair, and you were kissing him back with an enthusiasm that made his head spin. When he finally pulled back, you were both breathing hard, your faces inches apart.

"You foolish, stubborn man," you whispered, but your voice was thick with tears and joy. "I have been waiting for you to understand."

"I understand now," he said, his voice a low, wrecked rasp. "Forgive me. For all of it. For the neglect, for the distance, for the guard I foisted upon you like a fool..."

"You gave me Ser Elyas?" Your eyes widened, and then a surprised laugh bubbled up from your throat. "Oh, Maekar. I thought he was just a very attentive guard. I wondered why he kept trying to recite poetry at me."

Maekar groaned, dropping his forehead to yours. "I am an idiot."

"You are my idiot," you corrected, and the possessive warmth in your voice was his final undoing. "My husband. And I believe you owe me a proper wedding night."

He looked at you, at the mischievous glint in your eyes, at the loving curve of your smile, and he felt something he had not felt in many, many years. Hope. Joy. A future unfolding before him that was not merely duty and endurance, but something bright and warm and achingly beautiful.

"I owe you much more than that," he murmured, and he lowered his mouth to yours once more.

a/n: Liked the fic? You can donate on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3

[sweetwhisperingangel]

Every Mark*ੈ✩‧₊˚

General Synopsis: You have given the realm six sons and every mark on your body to prove it. But insecurity is a quiet thing and during the Grand Feast of King Daeron II, it finds you all at once....

pairing: Husband!Baelor Targaryenx Wife!reader x Husband!Maekar Targaryen

word count: 12k.

Content: 18+ minors dont interact,body image issues, hurt/comfort, jealousy, scars, suggestive content, p in v, polyamory, fluff, targcest, soft ending

You stood before the mirror with your chin lifted and your shoulders back.

The dressing room had been overtaken entirely. Your ladies-in-waiting moved around you, fanning bolts of fabric out on either side. Silks and velvets and things more delicate, colors ranging from a winter sea to a red so dark it bordered on black in certain lights. They rippled and shimmered as the women moved, catching the last warm gold of the evening sun that poured through the high chamber windows and turned everything briefly ethereal.

You yourself wore only a fitting garment, loose, unfinished, existing solely to give the seamstress her markers and to give you some vague impression of how the silhouette might look.

You had not expected the fabrics that were shown to you.

From silk to georgette, from heavy damask to something so fine and light it seemed to move of its own accord in the faintest touch. Every available cloth had been sourced, folded, hung, and presented for your consideration. The arrangement alone must have cost more than most lords spent on their entire household in a year.

You grimaced.

Both your husbands had an unseemly talent for excess when it came to you, a talent you had attempted to discourage. You had told them once, that it was entirely unnecessary, that you wanted for nothing, that they would do far better directing their generosity toward the smallfolk or the sept or truly anything that was not you.

You remembered very clearly how that conversation had gone.

Baelor had looked at you with that expression of his, that gave nothing away, a small smile settled at the corner of his mouth, his chin lifted. He had let you finish.

Then he had said: "For you, there is nothing too grand. You are Princess to this realm and Queen to be. You will be adorned as such."

You had looked to Maekar, hoping for an ally.

Maekar had looked back at you, then slowly crossed his arms across his chest, and considered the matter entirely settled, gave a single nod in agreement with everything Baelor had just said.

Not one word of his own.

The fabrics had arrived the following morning. More than before, if anything, as though the conversation had somehow encouraged them.

"Turn it," you said, and the ladies rotated a deep crimson satin. It caught the light differently on the second look, richer, almost mineral, like garnet pulled fresh from the earth. You tilted your head.

That one. Bold enough to honor them both. Red enough to make a statement without having to open your mouth.

You gave a single nod and a seamstress moved around you with tape and pins in hand. Hem, shoulders, the length of your arm.

Then she reached your middle.

She paused.

Her brow furrowed and she measured again. Carefully.

"Is something the matter?"

She startled, nearly dropping a few pins from her hand. "N-No, Your Grace. I apologize." Her eyes dropped immediately to her work but not before they had flickered, just once, to the soft curve of your belly.

You watched her in the mirror.

"I am asking you to be honest with me."

The seamstress swallowed.

"Yes, Your Grace. I will need to make some readjustments around your middle. I deeply apologize."

The room did not freeze so much as empty. The murmuring of your ladies trailing off into nothing, the rustle of fabric going still. Something small and quiet inside your chest simply stopped.

Your hands moved before you thought to stop them, settling over the curve of your belly. The way you might cover something you did not want seen.

It was such a small thing. Such an ordinary, professional observation from a woman simply doing her work. She had not been cruel. She had not even been unkind. And yet the words had found something in you that more than twenty years of marriage had left entirely unguarded because your husbands had never given you reason to guard it.

Not once.

Not in the dark, when there was nothing between you and their hands, when Baelor's mouth traced your skin and Maekar's grip left marks he never apologized for.

Not in passing, in the ordinary daylight hours of a shared life. Not in any of the thousand small moments that might have invited cruelty, had they been different men.

In more than twenty years, through six children and all the ways your body had changed and shifted and marked itself with the evidence of that, not once had either of them made you feel that any part of you required an apology, so you had simply never thought about it.

And yet, as if the gods had decided that women had not suffered quite enough, that small passing professional assessment had woken something in you that had apparently been sleeping very lightly. It was a foolish thought. You had never had reason to doubt yourself. Until someone else voiced it.

"Very well," you said.

Afterwards, when the seamstress had retreated to a smaller room next door to make her adjustments, you let your ladies press jewels into your palm for approximately thirty seconds before you raised your hand.

"Leave me."

They inclined their heads and left without a word. The door clicked shut behind them.

You stood before the mirror alone.

Slowly, you reached for the knot of the garment and let it fall.

It had been some time since you had truly looked at yourself.

Your breasts were softer than they had once been, heavier, sitting lower than you remembered. Your nipples darker than they had been in your girlhood. Your belly was soft too and mapped, hip to navel, with the pale silver traces of scars that had long since faded. But those were not the only marks.

There, low on your abdomen still faint after all these years, the long curved scar from Valarr. Your first birth, the hardest of them all. Three days of labor and a maester who had fought to keep you both in the world and won, barely.

Higher, at your left hip, the tear from Aerion. Too fast, too early, the kind of birth that happened before anyone was ready.

And then there, low, just above your pubic mound, Aegon's mark. The stubbornest of all of them, and the most intimate in its placement, a thin line that had refused to silver eight years. Still faintly pink.

Eight years since Aegon. Eight years since the last of them had come into the world red-faced and angry and perfect.

Six children. Six times your body had opened itself and endured and kept going and you had never, not once, allowed yourself to think of it as anything other than duty. What mothers did. What wives did. What was simply expected and therefore required no acknowledgment.

Standing here now, alone in the quiet of your chamber, you were not sure whether to feel proud of it or grieve it.

Perhaps both. Perhaps that was the only honest answer.

You thought of yourself twenty years ago. The smoothness of that skin. The absence of scars. The body that had not yet learned what it would be asked to do, or what it would cost.

You wondered, sometimes, if that girl would even recognize you.

Your eyes moved over your reflection again, searching for something.

And then, the questions came.

Did your husbands truly see this and feel what they claimed to feel?

Was it genuine?

Or was this simply duty to them?

The thought arrived like poison. Maybe they could do it because of someone else. A younger woman living in their minds. Softer skin behind closed eyes when their hands were on yours. Maybe that was how they managed it. Maybe that was the only way they could.

Your mind fed you the thought and then fed you more and you stood there and let it.

Your proudness. Your stubbornness. Twenty years of certainty, all of it quietly dismantled by nothing more than your own reflection.

You pressed your lips together.

You could not make it make sense. The body in the mirror and the hunger in their eyes could not possibly be looking at the same thing.

The shame followed.

It washed over you in a wave you were not prepared for. The doubt, the grief for that girl in the mirror who no longer existed, the deep humiliation of standing in your own skin and finding it wanting.

You had faced childbed fever. You had faced loss. You had sat at the bedsides of sick children and held yourself together by sheer will alone.

You had not expected this to be the thing that broke through.

You bent and retrieved the garment from the floor. Pulled it around your shoulders. Hugged it close with both arms wrapped tight across your middle and held yourself.

And then, quietly, you wept.

The doors to the great hall were open, with warm light and noise spilling into the corridor. You paused there for a moment, just long enough to straighten your shoulders, lift your chin, and make yourself look composed.

Your corset was tightly laced beneath your gown, shaping your figure into something polished and proper. It didn’t quite match what you had seen in the mirror an hour ago. Still, you were grateful for it, even if that feeling didn’t sit entirely right with everything else on your mind tonight.

Then the herald's voice rang out, cutting through the noise of the hall.

"Her Royal Highness, Princess of the Seven Kingdoms. Wife to Prince Baelor and Prince Maekar of House Targaryen. Mother to six princes of the realm."

The hall shifted. People turned to look. Voices grew quieter, one table at a time, starting near the doors and spreading across the hall.

You walked in.

The great hall had been transformed. Every long table draped in cloth of gold and deep Targaryen crimson, candles burning in their hundreds along the walls and suspended in iron chandeliers above, casting everything in warm amber light that caught the jewels of the assembled lords and ladies. Fresh flowers had been brought in from the glass gardens, white and red arranged in various displays between the candelabras, and the smell of them mingled with roasting meat and spiced wine made it clear this was a celebration.

The red gown was beautiful. You knew it was beautiful and yet all you felt was the weight of being looked at. Lords inclining their heads as your eyes passed over them. Ladies assessing you, smiles that may or may not have reached their eyes. You smiled back at all of them and felt beneath the corset uncomfortable in your own skin.

You breathed in.

And then, a loud shout.

"Mother!"

Aegon had spotted you from across the room, the conversation with Aemon abandoned mid-sentence.

He was already moving, pushing through the crowd with little care for manners. Two lords had to step quickly aside, and a lady grabbed her wine cup before he knocked into her.

He hit you around the middle.

Both arms thrown around you, his face pressing directly into the soft of your belly, his small hands gripping your sides with a force that was frankly surprising for someone his size. He held on with the complete certainty of a boy who had never once questioned whether he was wanted.

You stiffened and felt the grimace cross your face before you had any hope of stopping it. You were grateful that he was buried too far into you to see it.

"My sweetling." You kept your voice warm and drew him back gently, turning him by the shoulders to face you. "Look at you."

He wore an apricot silk doublet that shimmered through various shades of gold as he moved, with deep red and black visible beneath. Dornish in its cut, but threaded with elements of House Targaryen and there, if you looked closely, traces of your own house woven in.

Over his right breast hung a three-headed dragon in silver. Queen Myriah's doing, without question.

His hair had been dressed back from his face.

It would last another hour at most and you both knew it.

"How are you enjoying the festivities?" you asked, smoothing his collar with both hands.

Aegon's expression changed drastically. "Not much. The lords keep trying to talk to me about things I do not care about and Lord Bracken's son stepped on my foot and did not even apologize."

"Did he."

"Deliberately, I think."

"I am certain it was an accident."

"Aemon says I should not hit him back because we are at grandsire's feast and it would be embarrassing." He paused. "Aemon is probably right."

"Aemon is absolutely right."

"I know." He sighed, loudly. "I would still rather be outside."

"If it would make you feel better," you said, leaning slightly toward him and keeping your voice low, "I would rather be outside too."

His face split into a grin and you smiled back at him before you could help yourself. Your sweet boy.

A beat of comfortable silence settled between you, warm and easy and then...

He went still.

The grin faded, replaced by something that had no business being on the face of a boy his age. He looked up at you and the sheer focus of it caught you off guard, those violet eyes of his moving over your face with careful attention that made the back of your neck prickle.

You had the sudden and very uncomfortable feeling of being read.

"Are you alright?"

You held his gaze for a moment.

He looked back at you and waited, with a patience that was entirely Baelor's and a stubbornness that was entirely Maekar's, and the combination of the two on that small face was almost enough to undo you completely.

Gods. You had really gone and birthed sons with the observational instincts of their fathers.

"I am perfectly well, thank you my sweet." The words came out smooth and easy, "Now go back to your brother."

Aegon's face arranged itself into a scowl. He held it for a moment, clearly weighing his options, and then turned and scurried back toward Aemon.

He looked back at you once.

Over his shoulder, those too-sharp eyes finding your face across the hall with an ease that should not have been possible at his age.

You turned your attention to the room instead and searched the rest of the hall for your sons.

Aerion was not difficult to find. He stood at the center of a small cluster of young noble ladies, all of them flushed and giggling, their eyes moving over him freely and without shame.

He was enjoying every moment of it, you could tell by the set of his shoulders, the easy smile, the way he leaned slightly toward whoever was speaking. He wore House Targaryen colors, bold black with red accents, but underneath, if you looked closely, faint lines of apricot silk caught the light.

Matarys stood not far from his brother, which was where Matarys tended to be, close enough to keep an eye on things, far enough to want no part in them. He was talking to a group of men, several of them knights by the look of them, all wearing very serious expressions. Matarys fit right in amongst them. The difference between him and Aerion not twenty feet away was so completely typical of them both that you felt a laugh leave you.

Your eyes moved on.

To the right, beside the Iron Throne, King Daeron stood with Queen Myriah, talking to a group from Tyrosh. Beside them stood Kiera and Valarr nearby, doing a poor job of pretending he had not noticed her. You watched him steal a glance at her. Watched her notice. Watched them both look away in opposite directions like two people with absolutely nothing to hide.

You pressed your lips together.

It was indeed a very good match.

Further along the hall your second eldest Daeron stood with a young lord from House Lannister.

It was a fine atmosphere. Warm and loud and glittering with everything a celebration ought to be.

And yet your eyes, traitorously, had begun to move.

The hall was full of lords, naturally. Men of every age and station filling the long tables, deep in the serious business of being seen and seeing others. But between them, beside them, were their daughters. Their sisters. Young noble ladies in gowns of every color, their skin smooth, their laughter easy, their figures untouched by the demands of duty and childbirth and years.

They moved through the hall like light through glass, effortless, bright, drawing the eye without trying.

You watched them and felt something ugly stir in the pit of your stomach.

It was shameless, the thought that followed. You knew it was shameless even as it took shape. But there it was regardless, rising up from that same dark place where the doubt had been living all evening.

Your husbands were men. Vital, powerful, striking men who commanded every room they entered. And these girls were everywhere tonight, glowing with youth that required no effort other than a beautiful gown.

What man, given the choice, would stop himself. After all even your husbands...

You stopped the thought before it finished itself.

And yet the shame sat in you like a stone at the bottom of a river and your feet did not want to carry you further into the room.

You were still standing there, caught between duty and the desire to simply not, when a hand settled at your side.

Warm. Familiar. Fingers curling against your hip like they had every right to be there . A private hello in the middle of a very public room. It pressed, just slightly, into the softness there.

You pulled away before you had consciously decided to and turned.

Baelor.

He stood close and his head dipped slightly toward your ear, his voice dropping to something low and meant only for you.

"My love. You look radiant tonight."

That voice. Even now, after everything, after all the years, the low warm of it settled deep in your belly, coiling somewhere intimate and inconvenient, and you had no control over it whatsoever.

It died as quickly as it came.

You stepped back, just slightly.

"Husband." You kept your voice light and easy. "How are you enjoying the festivities?"

There it was, that flutter in his eyes. Brief, barely there. His gaze moved over you, top to bottom and back again, slow and thorough.

You watched him pull himself together and so you looked at him properly for the first time this evening.

He was, by any honest accounting, unfairly handsome for a man his age.

His brown hair had grown into something richer with the years, peppered through with grey that caught the candlelight like silver thread, slightly longer on top and curling at the ends.

His mismatched eyes were warm tonight, full of that quiet command that he carried as naturally as other men carried swords. His beard was trimmed close and neat, framing the line of his jaw.

He was broad through the shoulder, straight-backed, carrying himself with the kind of authority that could not be taught and could not be faked.

He wore a long doublet of black so deep it drank the light, and yet the fabric itself gave off something, a deep red hue that surfaced depending on how he moved, like embers beneath coal. It fit him extraordinarily well.

He caught you staring and smiled.

It was, unfortunately, an extremely handsome smile.

And then your eyes moved past him, just for a moment and your stomach dropped.

They were looking at him.

Several of the young noble ladies you had noted earlier had their eyes fixed on your husband with an attention that could not be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was, hungry and shameless.

The look of women who saw something they wanted and had not yet decided against reaching for it. One, in a pale gold gown, had her lips slightly parted, her gaze dragging over Baelor with a boldness that made your jaw tighten. Another leaned toward her companion and murmured something in her ear, her eyes never leaving his profile. A third young, dark haired beautiful woman was not even attempting subtlety. She was simply staring, her wine cup forgotten in her hand. She was fucking him with her eyes and she did not care who knew it.

And when they finally noticed you looking, they did not even have the decency to look ashamed. Just a small glance aside. A little smile shared between them. And then, one of them reached up and pulled her neckline just low enough to make herself perfectly clear.

The jealousy that hit you was hot and ugly and you did not care even slightly that it was, because you were fairly certain that if you opened your mouth right now not a single dignified thing would come out of it.

You turned back to your husband.

He was still looking only at you.

Which somehow made it worse.

"I am enjoying myself greatly." His voice dropped just low enough that it was only for you. "Though at present it is you I am most enjoying looking at."

You scoffed. It came out before you could dress it in something more appropriate, sharp and dismissive and you watched his smile falter at the edges.

And then something rose up in you that you had no name for and no warning of, a hot, wordless anger that had nothing reasonable at its root. You were angry at the way he looked at you. Angry at the sincerity of it. Angry, most of all, because you wanted to believe it and could not, and that felt like his fault even though it wasn't, and you knew it wasn't, and that made you angrier still.

"Must you always stand so close to me."

It came out sharper than you intended and you did not apologize for it.

Baelor stilled.

"My love—"

"I simply need room to breathe." You kept your chin up. Kept your voice even. "That is all."

He looked at you for a moment with those mismatched eyes of his, steady and careful, just observing.

It was, you thought, extremely irritating.

"Of course." He said it quietly, graciously and inclined his head at you. Not a single trace of reproach in it.

That somehow made it worse.

You turned and walked away from him, your chin high and your chest tight, and did not look back.

You moved through the hall with your head high, nodding once to Lord Tully as you passed, exchanging a small smile with one of the Tyrell women.

You lifted a goblet of wine from a passing servant's tray without breaking stride and by the time you reached the grand table and settled into your seat, you felt utterly terrible for the way you snapped at Baelor. Yet the small irrational part of you that had wanted a reaction, that had wanted to crack that composure of his just slightly, sat in your chest alongside the guilt and did not apologize for itself.

A servant appeared at your elbow almost immediately, setting down a small board arranged with care. Aged cheese, dark bread, sliced cold meat fanned out.

And in the center, nestled amongst it all—

A sugar-filled date.

You stared at it.

It was your favorite. Had been your favorite for as long as you could remember, and someone in this kitchen had thought of that tonight and the small thoughtfulness of it should have moved you and instead it did the opposite entirely. Your eyes dropped to your belly, hidden and shaped and smoothed beneath the crimson gown, and something unreasonable moved through you.

You picked the date up and set it on the plate beside you without eating it.

You looked at the rest of the food, decided against all of it, and lifted your eyes to the hall instead.

Across the room, Matarys, Aerion and Daeron had found each other in the far corner, three goblets of wine between them, heads bent together over something that had all three of them laughing, their cheeks flushed rosy with warmth and wine and each other's company. You watched them for a moment longer than you meant to. Your boys. Grown and broad-shouldered and loud with laughter and so thoroughly themselves that something in your chest pulled tight and sweet at the sight of them.

Aemon and Aegon had migrated toward a group of children from the Dornish houses, deep in what appeared to be a very serious game of hands.

You smiled to yourself.

Further down the hall you caught sight of Valarr and Kiera, half hidden from the rest of the room near the far wall. Valarr was speaking low, his whole attention on her face, and Kiera's cheeks were pink and she was leaning closer without seeming to realize she was doing it.

You looked away. That was theirs. It did not need an audience.

You were still watching the hall with your wine when a figure approached and stopped at the edge of your table. Young. Well dressed. A face you placed after a moment of thought, Lord Arryn's son. Ronnel.

He inclined his head to you.

"May I, Your Grace?" He gestured to the empty seat beside you.

You nodded.

He sat, settled himself, and turned to you with the expression of someone who had been working up to this approach for some time.

"It is a fine night tonight, Your Grace."

"It is indeed. How are you enjoying yourself, Lord Arryn?"

He smiled and opened his mouth to answer.

And then his eyes dropped to the small plate beside you, to the date sitting there untouched, and without a word he reached over and picked it up. Turned it between his fingers.

You watched his hand.

Something about it struck you as both very young and very male, and you said nothing, only watched and waited to see what he would do with it.

He set the date down and turned to you properly.

"I am enjoying myself greatly, Your Grace. Though I confess the company at my table pales considerably compared to the company I find here."

"You are kind, Lord Arryn."

"I am honest." He said it with a grin, his eyes moved over you in a way that was not subtle.

"My father speaks very highly of your family. Of you especially."

"Does he."

"He says there is no woman in the Seven Kingdoms who has given more to the realm than you have." He leaned forward slightly, his elbow finding the table, closing the distance between you. "Six sons, Your Grace. Six princes. The realm owes you a great debt."

And there it was.

Said with complete sincerity. Said as a compliment, wrapped in genuine admiration, delivered with that uncomplicated smile.

Six sons. As though that was the whole of you. As though the most remarkable thing about you was the number of times your body had successfully produced an heir.

You kept your smile exactly where it was.

"The realm is very generous in its accounting," you said pleasantly.

He laughed and his eyes dropped briefly, just briefly, to the neckline of your gown before finding your face again.

"If I may say, Your Grace." His voice dropped just slightly. "The realm rather undersells you."

"Is that so."

"Considerably." He held your gaze and did not look away, his grin shifting into something a little slower, a little more sure of itself.

"I find myself wondering how it is that two princes have managed to keep you entirely to themselves all these years without the rest of us losing our minds over it."

You reached over, picked up the date from the plate where he had set it, and placed it back in the center of your board with a small smile.

"You are very bold for a man drinking my husband's wine, Lord Arryn."

His grin widened. "Is that a complaint, Your Grace?"

"That," you said pleasantly, lifting your own goblet, "is an observation."

He laughed at that and you found yourself, despite everything, almost enjoying it.

"Then I shall take it as an invitation," he said.

"You may take it however you like, Lord Arryn. It changes nothing."

He tilted his head, still smiling, studying you. "You are not what I expected, Your Grace."

"And what did you expect?"

"Something more distant. More formal." His eyes moved over your face. "You are funnier than I expected. And..." He stopped himself.

"Go on," you said.

He looked at you steadily. "More beautiful than I expected."

The words landed warm and you were just allowing yourself to feel something good for the first time this entire evening when a voice cut through from somewhere behind your left shoulder.

"Bold of him, is it not." Light. Amused. Meant for whoever stood beside her.

"She must be grateful for the attention." A second voice, lower, with a little laugh underneath it. "Women her age do not get it so freely anymore. Not when there are younger options in the room."

A pause.

"I suppose when you have done your duty and given your husbands their heirs there is nothing left but to take compliments where you can find them."

The warmth of the moment died so completely and so quickly it was as though it had never been there at all.

You set your goblet down.

Your smile did not move. Not even slightly. Twenty years had made you very good at that.

Ronnel had heard it too, you could tell by the slight shift in his expression, the flicker of discomfort that crossed his face before he smoothed it over. To his credit he opened his mouth as though he intended to say something.

"It has been a pleasure, Lord Arryn," you said pleasantly, before he could.

"The pleasure was mine, Your Grace." He said it quietly.

He left.

You sat very still.

Around you the feast continued, the laughter, the clinking of goblets, the hundred conversations of half the realm enjoying themselves. None of it had stopped. None of it had even paused. The world had kept moving through the thirty seconds it had taken for two women behind you to dismantle what little was left of the evening and it had not noticed and it did not care.

You reached for your wine.

A shadow fell across the table and the chair beside you scraped back loudly against the stone floor and Maekar dropped into the seat that Lord Arryn had left not two minutes ago. The chair groaned under him. He stretched one leg out, reached across youand grabbed a handful of nuts from the bowl near your elbow, and sat back.

Behind you, the two women stopped talking.

You took a sip of your wine.

"This night is far too long," Maekar said, to no one and put the nuts in his mouth.

You said nothing.

He chewed. Looked out across the hall with that assessing gaze of his, taking stock of the room. You kept your eyes forward and your wine in your hand and waited for whatever.

Then you felt it.

His gaze moving from the hall, to you.

"You are not eating."

"I am aware of what I am and am not doing, thank you."

He looked at the untouched plate. Then at you. "Eat something."

"I am not hungry."

"You have not eaten anything."

"Maekar, I am not hungry."

He reached over, picked up the date from the center of your board beside and held it out.

You stared at it.

"No."

He kept holding it out.

"I said no."

He put it down directly in front of you and reached for the nuts again.

You placed the date to the side.

"Who was he," he said.

"Lord Arryn's son. He was being polite."

"He was not being polite."

"We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation—"

"I know what I saw."

"Then you saw a young lord making conversation with a princess at a feast, which is entirely unremarkable and none of your concern."

Something shifted in his jaw. "It becomes my concern when a lord sits that close to my wife."

"Oh." The laugh that came out of you was not a kind one. "Oh, so that is your concern. A lord sitting too close." You kept your voice low but there was nothing soft in it. "How interesting that you find that so troubling."

He frowned. "What is that supposed to mean."

"It means," You turned to face him fully, your hands flat on the table. "That every woman in this hall has been looking at you since the moment you walked in like they want to pull you out of that doublet and not one of them has been subtle about it." You held his gaze. "And I did not see you rushing across the room about that."

He stared at you.

"That is completely different."

"Is it."

"Yes." Flat. Certain. "Because I am not interested in them."

"And yet there they are." You gestured vaguely behind him. "Looking. And here you are, saying nothing, doing nothing, and the moment one man speaks to me for five minutes—"

"He was not just speaking to you—"

"He was a boy with too much wine, Maekar, he was harmless—"

"I did not say he was not harmless, I said he was sitting too close to my wife and I did not like it." His voice had dropped to something very quiet now, which with Maekar was always more dangerous than volume.

"Those are not the same thing."

"Then what are you saying." You matched his tone.

"Because from where I am sitting it looks very much like you trust every woman in this room with your attention but you do not trust me with a conversation."

"That is not what this is." His jaw worked.

"Then tell me what it is."

He looked at you. "I told you. He was too close."

"He was making conversation."

"He was looking at you like—" He stopped again.

"Like what." You lifted your chin.

"Like he wanted you." He said it simply, no heat in it, just fact. "And I did not like it."

"You did not like it." You stared at him. "You did not like another man finding your wife attractive."

"I did not like another man thinking he had any right to—"

"But they do." You gestured behind him again, wider this time. "All of them. Every woman who has been staring at you and Baelor all evening, undressing you both with their eyes, whispering to each other—" Your voice caught slightly. You pushed through it.

"They think they have every right. And no one says a word about that. No one storms across the room about that. But one man sits beside me and suddenly—"

"You are my wife."

"So are you mine." You said it hard and fast and meant every syllable of it.

"That works both ways Maekar."

Silence.

He looked at you for a long moment and something moved behind his eyes.

"Something is wrong," he said quietly.

"Nothing is wrong."

"You have been acting strange since the moment you walked into this hall. This morning you were completely different." His eyes did not move from your face. "What happened."

You felt it then, that wall you had been holding up all evening, brick by brick begin to crack right down the middle.

You leaned in close. Close enough that no one around you could hear a single word of what was about to come out of your mouth.

"You want to know what happened." Your voice was low and shaking at the edges and you did not care.

"I stood in front of a mirror tonight and I looked at myself."

The ugliness rose up through your chest hot and unstoppable.

"I looked at my breasts, the way they hang now, the way they never sat the way they used to. I looked at my belly, soft and scarred from carrying six children. I looked at the marks on my hips, on my stomach—" Your jaw tightened. "All of it. Every part of me that used to be something else before I spent more than twenty years giving this family everything my body had to give."

His expression had gone completely still.

"And then I walked into this hall." Your voice dropped lower. "And I watched every young, smooth, untouched woman in this room look at my husbands like they were something worth having." Your throat burned.

"And I thought, why would they not look back. Why would you not. Why would either of you not look back and think, yes. That. Instead of — " You gestured at yourself. All of yourself. "This."

He said nothing.

You felt the tears brimming and you were on your feet before a single one of them could fall, because you would not. Not here.

You did not look at Maekar's face. You could not.

"I need air." Your voice came out wrecked and quiet and you did not wait for his answer. "Do not follow me."

You turned and walked and then you were moving faster than was dignified and you did not care even slightly. The hall blurred at the edges and from the corner of your eye you caught your sons.

Matarys, straightening. Aerion, frowning. Daeron going still mid conversation. Their faces all wearing different versions of the same expression and you looked away from all of them because if you looked at them properly right now you would fall apart completely.

A pair of Kingsguard fell into step behind you.

You turned and looked at them with an expression that stopped them where they stood. They did not follow.

You pushed through the side door and into the night and then you were running, your gown gathered in both fists, down the stone path and past the roses and the fountain and through the dark until the lemon trees rose up around you and the noise of the feast was nothing but a distant murmur.

You found a bench and sat down hard.

And you cried the way you had been holding back all evening, with your whole chest, bent forward, both hands pressed over your belly and your face crumpling and the tears falling freely into the dark with no one to see them and nothing left to hold them back.

As you sobbed you caught movement from the corner of your eye and looked up.

The lemon trees had been decorated, you had not noticed in your rush to get here, but now, with your eyes adjusting and the tears clearing slightly, you saw them properly.

Small glass Dornish suns hung from the branches, each one cradling a tiny candle that threw warm gold light across the leaves in shifting patterns.

And amongst them, tied with thin ribbon, barely larger than a child's palm,

Paintings.

You stood slowly and reached for the nearest one, your fingers closing around it carefully.

It was rough in the way of a child's work, uneven lines, colors slightly outside their edges but purposeful.

A dragon, painted in careful strokes of black and red, and beneath it a small cluster of figures. A family.

You reached for the second one.

Another dragon. Another family. Slightly different hand, Aemon's, you thought, more careful than his brother's, the lines steadier.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the dark with a painting in each hand and felt something move through your chest.

"It was Egg's idea."

You startled slightly, turning. From the dark between the trees Baelor emerged, the soft light of the glass ornaments catching him in warm gold as he moved toward you.

"He came to me a few days ago and asked if there was something that could be done to make the gardens more beautiful for the feast." The corner of his mouth moved. "I assumed he meant flowers. More candles perhaps." He looked at the portraits in your hands. "And then he and Aemon appeared at my solar with those, and I understood."

You looked down at them again. The small uneven dragons. The little painted families beneath them.

Something in your chest pulled so tight it almost hurt.

"He wanted to show you himself, later in the evening." Baelor's voice was gentle. "It seems you found them first."

"Of course he did this." Your voice came out rough and you laughed despite yourself, small and watery.

Baelor moved closer. Not close enough to crowd you and reached into his pocket and pulled a cloth, holding it out to you without a word.

You took it. Pressed it under your eyes and took a deep breath.

"How long have you been out here," you asked quietly.

"Long enough."

"And him?" You nodded toward the far end of the garden where a second figure stood in the dark, keeping his distance. Still as a post. Watching.

Baelor glanced briefly over his shoulder.

"He followed you the moment you left the hall." He turned back to you. "I asked him to give you a moment."

You huffed at that and you felt yourself smiling.

You looked at Baelor eyes, and they were warm and full of concern.

You sat down at the bench and he waited and you nodded and he sat down next to you.

You still clutched the small portaits in your hand.

"Do you want to tell me," Baelor said, "what happened tonight."

You looked down at the paintings in your hands.

At the small painted dragons. The small painted families.

"It was a moment of weakness." You folded your fingers around the paintings carefully, not looking at him. "Do not concern yourself with me Baelor. You have far more important business to attend to tonight."

"Look at me."

You looked at him.

That careful composed layer of him entirely gone, stripped back to something underneath that he did not show many people and had always shown you freely.

He reached out and took your free hand. Slowly. Giving you every opportunity to pull away. And then he placed it flat against his chest, over his heart, and held it there with both of his.

"I am Prince of this realm," he said quietly. "Lord Hand to the King. Father to six sons." His eyes did not leave yours. "But I am your husband before any of it. We both are. And our duty to you extends far beyond anything our titles could put a name to." His hand pressed yours more firmly against his chest. "You are not a concern, you are not an obligation. You are our soul. Everything we are begins and ends with you."

Your lip trembled.

You pressed it together hard and it trembled anyway and you hated it and could not stop it.

Then you heard footsteps on the stone path.

Maekar stepped into the warm light of the glass ornaments and stopped just behind Baelor's shoulder, his eyes moving over your face. But his jaw was tight and something in his expression was raw in a way you had not seen from him in a very long time.

"My brother is right." His voice came out lower than usual. Rougher at the edges.

He stepped closer and looked at you the way he rarely let himself look at you in front of anyone.

"You are it." He said it low and certain. "You have always been it. For both of us. There is no version of any of this," he gestured between the three of them, "that exists without you at the very center of it." His throat moved. "There has only ever been you. There will only ever be you."

He held your gaze for a moment longer. Then he glanced briefly at Baelor and then he looked back at you.

And then Maekar, went to his knees in front of you.

The breath left your body.

Your face burned. Something low in your belly pulled tight and your thighs pressed together and you stared down at him with your heart hammering against your ribs.

He took both of your hands in his. His were large and rough and warm and they swallowed yours completely.

"What you said to me in that hall," He stopped. Started again. "The way you spoke about yourself. What you see when you look at yourself." His jaw tightened.

"It broke something in me, because it means we have failed you. Somewhere in all these years, we have failed you and I—" His voice dropped to almost nothing.

"I am not a man who fails at things he cares about. I do not know how to be that man. The thought that you have been carrying this—" He pressed your hands harder against his.

"Looking at yourself and seeing something lesser. Something diminished." His eyes burned up at you. "When I look at you I see the only thing in this world that has ever made me feel utterly incapable. Completely undone." A rough exhale. "You are the only thing that has ever had that power over me and you will never understand how completely I mean that."

You were breathing heavily. Both of them had their eyes only on you and the weight of it was doing things to you that had no place in a garden and every place in a bed. Your chest was tight and your face was hot and your hands were unsteady and you opened your mouth—

Voices.

All three of you straightened at once. Maekar was on his feet before you had drawn your next breath, and by the time the pair of guards rounded the corner you were all three standing at a respectable distance from one another like perfectly composed members of the royal family enjoying the evening air.

Or attempting to.

You were aware, that your eyes were red and your lips were parted and your chest was still rising and falling faster than it ought to be, and that both your husbands looked like men who had been in the middle of something they very much intended to finish.

Baelor's composure slightly frayed at the edges, Maekar's jaw set and his eyes still dark with everything he had not yet said. The picture the three of you made could be interpreted in a number of ways.

None of them entirely wrong.

The guards inclined their heads. The King was asking for both princes. Immediately, if it pleased them.

Neither of them looked pleased.

Baelor nodded once at the guards. Maekar said nothing, only held your gaze for one long charged moment that made the heat in your face travel considerably lower, and then turned and followed his brother.

You watched them go.

At the garden entrance Maekar stopped. Turned back. And with a short sharp gesture summoned the nearest Kingsguard and said something low that you could not hear. The guard nodded and posted himself at the entrance immediately, back straight, eyes forward.

For you. Without a word to you about it. Simply done.

You stood beneath the lemon trees in the warm gold light of the little glass suns, your children's painted dragons held carefully in both hands, and listened to your husbands' footsteps fade back toward the feast.

The garden settled into quiet.

You looked down at the paintings.

And Breathed.

The evening turned faster than you expected.

You did return to the hall later and somewhere between sitting down at the table and your second cup of wine the night shifted into something almost bearable.

Your sons noticed. Of course they noticed. They were their fathers' children and they had been watching you since you walked back through those doors and within minutes they had without discussion or instruction, rearranged themselves around you at the table.

Matarys on your left, talking across you to Daeron about something you did not follow but did not need to. Aerion on your right, loud, proud and gesturing too widely with his wine cup. Valarr had appeared from wherever Kiera had been keeping him, sliding into the seat across from you with a small smile that told you he knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to do it anyway.

Aemon and Aegon had simply wedged themselves in wherever there was space, elbows on the table, chins in their hands, completely unbothered by the decorum expected of princes at their grandsire's feast.

All six of them. Around you. Like they had agreed on it.

At some point during the evening you produced the two small paintnigs from the folds of your gown. You watched Aegon's face when he saw them and you pulled him toward you and kissed him on both cheeks and then his forehead and then his cheek again for good measure. He let you. Every single one.

Aemon submitted to one kiss and then pulled back with the expression of a boy who had a reputation to maintain, which made Aerion laugh so hard he spilled his wine.

You smiled more in that hour than you had in the entire evening before it.

When it ended, the room gradually emptied. You said your goodnights with warmth and kissed your sons, inclined your head to your goodfather the King and your goodmother who caught your eye and held it for just a moment with an expression that told you she saw more than she said, which was entirely characteristic of her.

You found a servant and gave quiet instructions.

The bathhouse sat apart from the main castle floors, connected by a short covered corridor that was mercifully empty at this hour. It was a small stone room, warm and low-lit, the water already heated by the smooth dark stones lining the basin, steam rising soft and slow in the candlelight.

You let the servant help you out of the gown and when you were down to nothing you told her to leave you.

She did.

You stood for a moment in the warm steam, in the candlelight, with no one's eyes on you.

Then you lowered yourself into the water slowly, let it rise around you, and closed your eyes.

You did not know how long you stayed like that. Long enough for the tension in your shoulders to begin to loosen.

Then footsteps. Two sets. Coming down the covered corridor.

You did not open your eyes. Did not say a word. Simply stayed where you were with your chin tipped back and your heart beating considerably faster than the warm water had any right to make it, and waited.

The door. The sound of fabric. A pause.

Then an almighty groan as Maekar lowered himself into the water on your left that was so deeply, startled a laugh out of you before you could stop it.

Baelor, settling in on your right, laughed too.

"Seven hells." Maekar's voice bounced off the stone walls. "Tell father next time he can kiss the arses of those lordlings himself."

"It is our duty," Baelor said mildly. "And his."

"Fuck duty sometimes."

A beat of silence.

"That," Baelor said, his voice dropping to something considerably lower, "I have to agree with. I would much rather be fucking something else entirely."

The heat that flooded your face had nothing to do with the water.

Maekar made a low sound of agreement that rumbled through the steam and settled somewhere in the base of your spine.

You opened your eyes.

Baelor was watching the candles, his expression unreadable but his eyes dark. And then Maekar's hand found the back of your neck, his thumb tracing slow along the line of your neck, following the bone of it.

Your breath caught.

Then Baelor moved.

He turned toward you in the water and stepped close, close enough that you felt him against your thighs, hard and hot and his hands found your hips beneath the surface and gripped them in a way that pulled a soft sound from somewhere in your throat that you had not given permission for.

His face was inches from yours, his mismatched eyes blown almost entirely black, the candlelight catching the water on his skin.

"More than twenty years ago," he said quietly, "you bewitched us." His thumbs traced slow circles against your hips. "The way you laugh. The way you move through a room. The way your eyes look when the sunlight catches them." His grip tightened, pulling you fractionally closer, the water shifting between you. "The way you tip your head back when the wind comes through your hair and you close your eyes and simply feel it." A pause. "There is no one. There has never been anyone. There will never be anyone."

Behind you Maekar's thumb moved from your neck to the shell of your ear, slow and deliberate, and you felt your eyes flutter.

"I remember," Baelor continued, his voice lower still, "very clearly after Aegon's birth. After you had recovered. The first night you undressed in front of us again." Something moved through his expression that was raw and entirely unmanaged. "The want I felt in that moment was beyond anything I had words for. Beyond anything I thought I was still capable of feeling after twenty years." His fingers traced upward from your hips, following the curve of you through the water. "If I could be selfish and I am telling you now that I want to be, deeply and thoroughly selfish, I would have you every moment of every day and still feel it was not enough."

His hand rose further, fingertips tracing the line of your throat, your jaw, his eyes following the path of them across your face like he was memorizing something he intended to keep.

"You have given this realm six sons," he said softly. "And the realm will remember only that. The realm will count you in heirs and duty and years of service and it will never once understand what it is actually looking at." His eyes met yours. "But we know. We have always known." His thumb traced your lower lip. "You are so much more than what you have given. So much more than what they see."

The water shifted as Maekar's hands found the underside of your thighs and gripped, pulling you back and settling you into his lap. The breath left your body. You felt him hard against you, felt the low rumble in his chest as he exhaled against your neck, and then his mouth found the skin beneath your ear and he sucked slowly, his tongue tracing the spot.

"Forgive us," Baelor said softly. "For ever making you feel otherwise."

You had no words. You had lost them somewhere between Maekar's hands on your thighs and his mouth on your neck and Baelor standing in the water before you close enough to feel the heat coming off him.

Baelor's eyes dropped.

The water sat just below your chest and your nipples peaked above the surface in the cool air of the bathhouse.

His eyes moved to Maekar.

Maekar, who was sucking a bruise into your neck with absolutely no apology for it, whose hands had spread wide and warm across your thighs beneath the water, holding you exactly where he wanted you. A soft sound left your mouth that you had no control over and then another as his teeth grazed the skin he had just marked.

Your head fell back against his shoulder.

"Please—" The word came out broken and breathless and wanting. "Please, I need—"

"We know," Maekar said against your neck. Low and rough and entirely sure of himself. "We know what you need."

Something passed between them over your shoulder, a look, brief and wordless and then Maekar's hands were on your hips and he lifted you out of the water without ceremony and set you down on the stone edge. No gentleness in it.

The stone was cool against the backs of your thighs.

He spread your legs and you felt the flush crawl from your face all the way down your chest and you opened your mouth to say something, anything and then—

Both mouths on you at once.

Baelor's tongue slow and precise, working you with that devastating patience of his, and Maekar's rougher, hungrier, no finesse in it whatsoever, just raw focused want.

Their mouths clashed against each other in the space between your thighs, neither yielding, both utterly consumed, and the sensation of it was so overwhelming that the sound that left you was nothing close to dignified.

Maekar pulled back just long enough to suck your inner thigh hard enough to mark it and then returned with even less restraint than before. Baelor's tongue moved in slow circles and then pressed flat and you nearly came off the stone edge entirely.

Your fingers tightened in Baelor's hair. Your other hand found Maekar's shoulder and gripped hard enough that he would feel it tomorrow and he made a low sound against you that vibrated through your entire body.

"Look at us." Maekar pulled back just enough to speak, his voice wrecked and rough. "Look down and look at us."

You looked down at them and the sight alone nearly undid you entirely.

Baelor's mouth on you was precise and devastating, his tongue pressing and curling and drawing out sounds from you that echoed off the stone walls, sucking everything you gave him like you were something to be savored. Your thighs shook around his shoulders.

You watched as he tenderly pressed his lips to the scar low on your mound and kissed it slowly, his eyes lifting to yours as he did it, holding your gaze, making sure you were watching, making sure you understood exactly what he was doing and why. Then his tongue, flat and warm, traced the length of it without hurry.

You made a sound that was half sob and half something else entirely.

And then he returned to your folds and you stopped being able to think about anything at all.

Maekar shouldered him aside.

Simply replaced him with that characteristic lack of patience and buried his face in you with a roughness that dragged a broken cry from your throat. Hungry, his hands locked around your hips pulling you against his mouth rather than going to meet you.

And then without warning, Maekar pulled back and grabbed Baelor by the jaw and kissed him hard, open and rough, a low groan coming from both of them as he licked the taste of you from his brother's mouth.

Baelor's hand fisted in Maekar's hair. The sound of it, the sight of it, pulled another wave of heat through you so sharply you whimpered.

They broke apart breathing hard, eyes dark, and turned to look at you at exactly the same moment.

Baelor reached for your ankles and pulled you back into the water between them and you went boneless, barely capable of standing. They pressed in from both sides, warm skin and hard bodies and hands everywhere at once and Baelor lowered his head and took your nipple into his mouth, kneading the weight of your breast in both hands while Maekar's mouth found your throat from behind, sucking and biting a path from your shoulder to your ear.

Your head fell back against Maekar's chest.

Your hands found his hair behind you and pulled and he groaned against your neck.

"Still think we do not want you," Maekar said roughly against your skin. Not a question. A statement, low and wrecked and burning. "Still think that."

You could not have formed a coherent answer if your life had depended on it.

Baelor in front, pulling you against him, his mouth finding yours in a deep kiss while his hands mapped every inch of your skin beneath the water without shame or hesitation.

And then Maekar pressed in from behind.

His hands gripped your hips and he slid inside you from behind slowly and the sound that left you was swallowed by Baelor's mouth. You grabbed at anything you could reach, one hand fisting in Baelor's hair, the other reaching back to grip Maekar's thigh behind you.

Maekar's pace built without mercy, his hands locked on your hips, the water churning around all three of you.

Baelor's hands cupped your breasts, his thumbs moving across your nipples slowly while Maekar drove into you from behind without restraint, and being pressed between them, held completely between their bodies, no space between you and either of them, was almost more than you could process.

Then Baelor lowered his lips to your ear, his voice dropping.

"Perhaps this time a daughter," he murmured. "I would not mind at all having you full with child again."

The sound that left you was shameless.

You felt Maekar shudder behind you, his grip tightening to the point of pain as he spent himself, his forehead dropping heavy against the back of your neck with a rough groan that rumbled through your entire body.

And then Baelor lifted you and pressed you back against the stone edge and slid inside you, deeper than Maekar's angle had allowed, and his pace was just as hard but slower, his mismatched eyes holding yours with an intensity that made it impossible to look away.

His hands gripped the curve of your ass, pulling you into every stroke.

Behind him Maekar watched, his dark eyes burning, and the sight of him watching you with Baelor sent you spiraling toward the edge faster than anything else could have.

Your thighs shook.

Your nails found Baelor's shoulders.

"I know," he breathed against your mouth. "Come for me."

It hit you like a wave breaking, white behind your eyes, your whole body shuddering between them, Baelor's and Maekar's name leaving your mouth as if you were praying a blessing. His grip on you was bruising and you did not care even slightly. Behind him Maekar's hand found your thigh and held it through the shaking like an anchor.

The white faded slowly.

The candlelight came back. The water. The warm stone at your back.

Baelor's forehead dropped against yours, both of you breathing hard and ragged, his chest heaving against you. His hands were still gripping your skin with an intensity that told you exactly what you would find on yourself tomorrow morning.

You did not mind it at all.

The heavy breathing eased slowly. Baelor pressed his lips to your forehead. Your cheek. The corner of your mouth. Small, soft things, entirely different from everything that had preceded them, and you felt tears prick unexpectedly at the gentleness of it.

Maekar's hand moved in slow steady strokes up your spine.

Nobody spoke.

The candles burned low around you and the water had gone still and the three of you simply breathed together in the quiet.

You looked at Baelor.

You took his face between both your hands and kissed him slowly and deeply and with everything you had not known how to say all evening. He kissed you back the same way, one hand covering yours against his cheek.

When you pulled back you were both quiet for a moment.

Then you turned and wobbled through the water toward Maekar, who had settled against the edge watching you both, and your feet slipped on the stone beneath and he caught you before you had even fully registered the fall, hands at your waist, steady and immediate, as though he had been expecting it.

"Graceful," he said.

"Hush."

The corner of his mouth moved.

You curled into him anyway, pressing your lips to his jaw, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He exhaled slowly beneath your attention and his arms came around you and held you against his chest.

Baelor settled in beside you both, his shoulder warm against yours, and took your hand beneath the water and simply held it.

The three of you sat in the low candlelight and the still water and said nothing for a long moment.

"I love you," you said quietly.

Maekar's nose pressed into your hair.

Baelor's hand tightened around yours.

"And we love you," Baelor said softly. "Every part of you. Everything that you are and will be and you once was."

Maekar said nothing.

He just held you closer.

Later, back in your chambers, the candles burned down to nothing and your husbands were restless and entirely unwilling to let the night end, and you gave yourself over to them completely and without reservation and they took everything you gave and returned it threefold.

It was very late when it finally went quiet.

Dawn came in slowly through the high windows, pale and soft.

You were the first to surface from sleep, barely, just enough to be aware of the warmth on either side of you. Baelor's hand rested open against your stomach. Maekar had his face pressed into the curve of your neck, one arm thrown across you both, heavy and certain even in sleep, as though some part of him had decided even unconscious that he was not finished holding on.

You lay very still and looked at the pale dawn creeping across the ceiling and took a slow breath.

The uncertainties were still there. The ugly, shapeless insecurities that had swallowed you whole. You were not foolish enough to think one night had erased them entirely. It did not work that way.

But here, in the early quiet, tangled in warm sheets between two men who had given you their souls without condition or hesitation, the uncertainties were very small, nearly insignificant.

Smaller than Baelor's hand resting against your stomach.

Smaller than the sound of Maekar breathing slow and deep against your neck, holding you flush against him.

Smaller, than two little painted dragons hanging in a lemon tree. Drawn by small hands that loved you without condition or any awareness of the cost of what you had given to deserve them.

You exhaled slowly.

And closed your eyes.

For now you let yourself simply be held.

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˗ˏˋ ♡ ˎˊ˗

[hobi-j]

Still collecting crumbs of this man!!!

[whodied66]

Saera targaryen

my favorite beautiful princess with disorder