Flying Solo

Tiff 29 She/Her MINORS DNI. age in bio or i will block you .Super awesome icon picture drawn by the amazing talented @saucybrtt. just doing my best to make stories that i like Masterlist

[theskyisbrighthere]

Masterlist.

Meet Me in the Middle

Noctis Lucis Caelem/Original Female Character

Complete

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Haunted by Yesterday

Noctis Lucis Caelem/Original female Character a follow on from Meet Me in the Middle.

Chapter 1

Always a Riddle in the World

Far Cry 5 John Seed/Female Deputy

Watch it Grow

I'll Keep You Safe

Keeping Up The Pressure

Bittersweet Days

ABO Headcanons

Headcanons for my growing ABO Universe

[hanginginthevoid]

sneak peak! - jace fix-it fic

divider by @cafekitsune

“Their scales are rough – almost like tree bark. If you manage to retrieve one it's sharp as well, enough to where it could be repurposed into a blade.”

Jace speaks of Dragons as if he knows them. As if he has physically run his fingertips along their scales, as if he has slid down them on his way back to the ground. As if he has felt the flames produced from them on his very skin, and smelt like cinders after a long flight.

There's only one remaining family with Dragons though. And they do not reside anywhere in Essos. In fact – they've personally terrorized your people in the blank lands. Daemon Targaryen did, upon his mount Caraxes. 

Was this.. Prince Jacaerys? You suppose you could shorten it to Jace, but the commonfolk would never risk disrespecting a child of the crown in such a way. And his hair was different from a Targaryen’s. 

Then again you'd heard the stories of how Rhaenyra Targaryen birthed bastards. Of how her three oldest children all had brown hair despite both her and her husband's silvery gold strands.

Nonetheless Prince Jacaerys died in the battle of the Gullet. His dragon shot down into the sea and the Prince assaulted with Triarchy arrows. 

That was how you found him, was it not? Two arrows lodged deep into his shoulder and a bolt of your own people's creation secured in the muscles of his neck.

The realization does not hit you like a wall. Not like a slap, or a tidal wave. It reaches you with a primal sense of dread; one that sends ice through your veins and makes it difficult to breathe. As if he was a predator, simply biding his time with the prey.

Your hand tightens around Jace's – Prince Jacaerys’ – arm before realizing your mistake. This is not a friend, a companion, someone you could be besotted with. 

This was the enemy.

One that you wrapped in your silks. 

One that slept in your walls. Who has slept in your very own bed.

One that you revived because you could not quench your own curiosity. 

Your hand slips from its perch at the acceptance of these facts. Your face falls into a carefully crafted picture of indifference as your steps falter.

Jace – Prince Jacaerys, not Jace, Jace would not have deceived you in such a way – notices the second that your hand begins to move. His eyes dart to yours and he's able to watch with startling attention as you school your expression.

“What is it?” Jace's voice is tight and low, reserved only for you. His eyes are frantic, searching the area for what could have possibly caused you such distress.

You don't respond automatically and your eyes aren't fixed on someone or something in the distance. So Jace raises a palm to your cheek, tilting your head so you're forced to gaze upon him.

“What is wrong?”

“You – you are a Targaryen.” The words tear through your vocal chords. They bring you a physical pain from the center of your lungs all the way to the tip of your tongue. Despite that, they're quiet – well aware of what would befall Jace if anyone were to find out.

Time seems to freeze for a bit. 

A few moments that may seem sweet to outsiders. A young couple so lost in each other that they cannot be bothered to move from the center of the market. Trying to avoid public indecency, but too entranced with another to step away.

You know you should kill him, or more likely, have him killed. Should return him to his previous state. Bolt through his neck and all. His family has caused your people much distress. Your own father fights against his parents and grandsire.

[jacefiles]

Hi!

This is my first time requesting but I really enjoyed how you wrote modern!jacaerys.

I just got my wisdom teeth out and I keep imaging how fussy he'd be. Maybe he would make fun of you for looking like a chipmunk and then pout if anyone else did??? lol.

I need fluff to recover from mourning him :(

(Hi nonnie and welcome! I’m also new around here hehe and I feel you! Need all the fluff I can get to forget the dreadful fact he isn’t with us anymore 🥹)

I think Jace would be fussy and caring for you but he would also take advantages of your loopy state and tease you.

Anyways, enjoy~~~

The fluorescent lights were the first thing to greet you, a flat white glare that seemed to press itself directly against your skull. Too bright, was the only coherent thought you could summon, and you frowned up at the ceiling tiles as if they'd personally wronged you. Somewhere to your left a nurse was asking questions, her voice arriving in soft, delayed waves, but the anaesthesia had turned your mind to syrup, thick and slow, and nothing she said quite landed.

Then the door opened, and a different kind of warmth entered the room.

Your mother couldn't be there, so the responsibility of getting you home safely had fallen, quite naturally, onto your boyfriend. Jacaerys had shown up the moment you were free from the surgery, dark curls slightly damp from the rain outside, jacket still smelling faintly of the cold. But when he stepped through the doorway and your eyes landed on him, there was no flicker of recognition, only a slow, owlish blink.

You stared at him with your mouth hanging open around the gauze, a thin line of drool catching at the corner of your lip, utterly unbothered by your own state.

A laugh broke out of him before he could stop it. "Hey pretty," he murmured, leaning down to poke gently at your stuffed cheek. "You look like a chipmunk hiding treats." You didn't respond, too busy watching the lights flicker, while he turned his attention to the doctor rattling off post-op instructions: soft foods only, pain medication every six hours, no straws, call if there's excessive swelling. Jace nodded along, committing it all to memory the way he committed everything that mattered to you to memory, quietly and completely.

It wasn't until you were buckled into the passenger seat, the car humming low beneath you, that a single brain cell finally sparked to life.

Jace drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting against your knee, a habit he'd never quite admit to. You clutched a worn travel pillow to your chest like it was the only solid thing left in the world, blinking at him with wide, glassy eyes, trying very hard to figure out who, exactly, this devastatingly handsome stranger was.

"Hey-" you finally said, words slurring soft around the gauze. "Hey, pretty boy."

His mouth twitched. He glanced over, just for a second. "Yeah? You talking to me?"

"You're really pretty," you informed him, with the serious conviction of someone delivering important news. Your gaze tracked the line of his jaw like it was the most fascinating thing you'd ever seen. "But you gotta pull over. If my boyfriend Jace finds out a supermodel is driving me home, he's gonna get so sad. He has the prettiest eyes. I can't make him sad."

Something warm cracked open in his chest, equal parts tenderness and barely contained amusement. He decided, then and there, to see exactly how far this would go.

"Oh yeah?" he said, clearing his throat, eyes fixed dutifully on the road, the picture of an innocent stranger. "This Jace guy sounds like a lucky dude. He treat you well?"

You looked at him like he'd just insulted a national monument. "The best. He let me borrow his favorite hoodie. He’s super smart and caring. He makes me feel safe and seen and heard." Your voice dropped, almost reverent. "And he has these tiny curls right at the back of his neck. I like to twirl them when we watch movies."

His ears went hot. He had not, in fact, expected you to get that specific. "Is he now," he managed, voice a little strangled.

"Yes. So don't try anything, mister." You pointed a wobbling, accusatory finger at him, the threat losing most of its power when your attention scattered seconds later, caught entirely by a particularly interesting tree sliding past the window.

There was a beat of silence, and then, out of nothing, you said, "You know, I used to think he was gay."

That got his attention fast. "What- Why?"

"Yeah, he has this really cool friend, Cregan. I love Cregan too, but I thought I had no chance. Cregan is also pretty." You said this all with the breezy honesty of someone who had never once filtered a thought in her life. Jace opened his mouth, fully prepared to defend his honor against this slander, but you'd already moved on, eyes welling with sudden, mysterious tears because the tree that had just passed reminded you of something you couldn't quite name. He sat there, half laughing, half stunned into silence, completely unequipped to keep up with the loopy logic unspooling beside him.

By the time they reached his apartment, you'd transferred your loyalty fully to the concept of fidelity, informing him at every step up the stairs that you were taken, thank you very much, even as YOU were the one clung to his arm like it was the only thing keeping you upright and it was.

He settled you onto the couch, propped against a small mountain of pillows, and disappeared into the kitchen for two minutes, just long enough to grab the ice packs and your liquid pain medication. He needs to make sure you’re taken care of. When he walked back into the living room, you looked up, and your whole face transformed.

Something in your brain finally clicked back into place. The pretty stranger from the car evaporated, and in his place stood the only person who'd ever mattered.

"Jace!" The gasp came out thick with loopy, dramatic tears, your eyes shining. "You're here. You saved me."

He set the ice packs down gently and lowered himself onto the edge of the couch, utterly endeared. "I'm here, sweetheart. I've been here the whole time."

You threw your arms around his neck, burying your face into his shoulder like you hadn't seen him in years instead of minutes. "The guy who drove me home was so sketchy, Jace. He kept trying to flirt with me. I told him I only love you. I told him about your hoodie."

He wrapped his arms around you fully, rubbing slow circles into your back, laughter shaking quietly through his chest as he pressed his face into your hair to hide it. "I heard all of it. You did a great job defending my honor. I'm very proud of you."

A pause. Then, suddenly urgent: "Is Rhaenyra here?"

He blinked. "What? No, we're at your apartment, not my mom's place."

Your face crumpled instantly, lower lip wobbling. "But I wanted the cookies. Your mom makes the best cookies. She's so lovely." A fresh wave of tears threatened, and Jace, slightly panicked and entirely charmed, reached for his phone before you could spiral further.

Rhaenyra picked up despite clearly being in the middle of something, her voice warm even through the distraction in the background. You snatched the phone from Jace's hand with surprising speed for someone who could barely sit upright, and launched into a slurred, heartfelt conversation that made his mother laugh more than once. She teased you gently, said something that made you giggle into the phone, and Jace, watching this whole exchange unfold, felt a small, ridiculous flicker of jealousy.

"Okay, that's enough, she's mine to tease," he said, leaning in to pry the phone back, pressing a quick goodbye to his mother before she could embarrass him further.

As the heavier wave of the pain medication finally pulled at your eyelids, Jace pressed the ice packs carefully against your swollen cheeks. You whined softly at the cold, pouting up at him with such genuine betrayal that he had to bite back another laugh. His eyes, though, stayed soft the entire time, unguarded in a way they rarely were with anyone else.

He leaned down and pressed a slow, careful kiss to your forehead.

"Sleep," he murmured against your skin. "I'll be right here when you wake up."

And he was. He made sure you were cared for. He also definitely recorded your tantrums and showed you later as you whined, asking his to delete them.

We all deserve a cutie patootie like Jace in our lives <3

© jacefiles - all rights reserved, please refrain from copying, reposting, modifying or translating my work on any platform.

[jacefiles]

YOUR PROMISE | J.V

Synopsis: The third arrow strikes, sealing the fate of Jacaerys Velaryon… except he wakes up in a world without dragons, convinced it was only a dream. Or was it? Because there is one promise his soul never forgot, and somehow… yours remembers it too.

Pairing: Jacaerys Velaryon x fem!Reader

Genre: reincarnation au, modern!jacaerys, established relationship

Warning: None tbh its just fluff (coping mechanism🥹), there is no specific description of reader so enjoy, no aegon or viserys, Rhaenyra is married to Laenor but its platonic, inaccurate description of battle of the gullet? (I tried-).

A/N: I recently got into HOTD and then I lost my favourite character aka Jace. I made this blog so I can be delulu about him 😭. Also half of this is me word vomiting🥴.

Word Count: 10.1k

- English is not my first language so / apologise in advance for any mistakes or typos!

The sea did not merely roll that day, it burned.

Fire danced with a horrific, erratic grace across the blackened waters of the Gullet, transforming the vital shipping lane into a sprawling, floating graveyard. Flames leapt from ship to ship in hungry arcs, feeding on timber and pitch and the desperate prayers of drowning men. Beneath the merciless onslaught of Team Black’s dragons, mighty Triarchy war-galleys splintered like kindling, their hulls cracking open to swallow their crews whole. Great masts toppled into the waves with the slow, theatrical finality of falling monuments. And yet, this was no easy victory. No clean triumph etched into the history books with golden ink. Below, Lord Corlys Velaryon’s fleet fought with everything it had, attempting to trap the armada in the narrow, choking passage, buying time in blood and smoke and screaming iron.

The atmosphere was a living thing, a suffocating shroud woven from the sharp salt tang of brine, the acrid bite of billowing smoke, the unmistakable iron-sweetness of fresh blood, and the sickening, almost honeyed stench of burning pitch. It coated the throat and burned the eyes.

High above the carnage, roaring through the roiling tempest of fire and ash, rode Prince Jacaerys Velaryon.

He sat astride Vermax like a man born to the sky because he was. The great emerald dragon cut through the smoke-choked air like a gleaming blade, his scales catching the hellish firelight below, wings spread wide. Jace’s riding leathers were already dark with spray and soot. His dark curls whipped against his face. He did not notice. His eyes were fixed on the battle, calculating and measuring, feeling the terrible weight of command settle across his shoulders with the intimacy of something he had worn all his life.

He had locked his mother in her chambers at Dragonstone before leaving. Had stood outside the door and listened to her pound against it, her voice cracking on his name. The sound had nearly unmade him entirely. But she was the queen. She was the cause. She could not be lost, and Jacaerys Velaryon had long since made peace with the arithmetic of that.

She lives. Therefore, I go.

Beside him, Baela streaked across the smoke on Moondancer fierce and brilliant, her silver hair streaming behind her like a war banner. And then, piercing through the mist like something half-imagined, a new silhouette emerged. Jace’s eyes snapped to it. His stomach lurched with shock before his heart swelled with a pride so fierce it nearly hurt.

Rhaena. Flying the wild dragon Sheepstealer.

Of course she was.

Together they were three dragons raining hell from the heavens, and for one blazing, exhilarating moment, Jace believed they might actually win this despite Sheepstealer almost knocking him out. He watched their collective fire devastate Admiral Lohar’s vanguard below, great tongues of flame consuming the armada’s leading ships, sending men screaming into the sea. He felt the savage triumph of it. The rightness.

Then the heavy, rhythmic thrum of scorpions began.

Massive iron bolts tore through the clouds around them. The Triarchy fleet was enormous, he had known this, had known it academically the way one knows a thing from maps and reports but knowing it and watching it materialize below him in all its terrible scale were entirely different experiences.

He pressed Vermax into a steep, dangerously low dive.

Below, through the roiling chaos, Jace had spotted Lord Corlys’s flagship being violently rammed by Lohar’s vessel. The silver-haired sea snake, his grandfather by every measure that mattered, surrounded and struggling. Jace made his decision in the space of half a breath. He would break the enemy lines. He would fly low. He would end this.

He flew too close to the water.

His focus had narrowed to a single burning point, the ships, the threat, the duty and so he did not hear the volley until it was already too late.

A heavy iron shaft sliced violently through the membrane of Vermax’s right wing with a sound like tearing cloth and screaming metal fused together. Another slammed directly into the dragon’s chest with a concussive, world-shaking force that Jace felt through every bone in his body.

Vermax screamed.

The sound ripped through Jace like a physical blade. Not a roar, not the magnificent, terrible declaration of a dragon in battle. A scream. Raw and agonizing and so deeply personal that Jace felt his own lungs seize in sympathy, as though the bolt had pierced him too. The great emerald body shuddered beneath him. The massive wings faltered, losing the steady rhythm that held them aloft. The world tilted.

They were falling.

“No-”

Jace yanked desperately on the reins, his boots straining hard against the stirrups, body thrown forward as the sea rushed upward to meet them with terrifying speed. Wind screamed past his ears. The fire and the smoke and the battle became a chaotic blur of sensation.

“Vermax, fly!”

The dragon fought. Even now, even broken and burning, Vermax fought. A beast born of fire, refusing absolutely to yield to the water. One wing beat heavily, then another. The torn membrane fluttered uselessly, a tattered rag of what it had been, but still Vermax tried, and something in Jace’s chest shattered at the sight of it.

“Soves!” His voice broke on the word, all royal dignity stripped away, reduced to something raw and helpless and very young. “Soves, Vermax! Please-”

One final, agonizing beat of the wings.

It was not enough.

Freezing, brine-heavy water swallowed Jacaerys Velaryon whole. It was not like diving, it was like being struck by the earth itself, like the sea had become solid in the last instant before collision, and he felt the shock travel up through his ankles, his knees, his spine, rattling his teeth in his skull. The sheer velocity of the crash tore his fingers from the saddle. The weight of his armor dragged at him immediately, a slow, patient, lethal pull downward into the dark.

Primal instinct flared.

He unhooked himself and practically clawed upward. His lungs burned. The cold was absolute, the kind that doesn’t feel cold at all but rather feels like being unmade, like the sea was simply erasing him a layer at a time. He could see nothing, only dark water and distant fire and the enormous bulk of Vermax somewhere below him, a shadow become a nightmare. He burst through the surface with a gasp so violent it tore his throat.

“Vermax!”

He spun in the churning water, hair plastered to his face, salt burning his eyes. The battle raged on around him, ships groaning and splitting, men screaming, iron raining from all directions. The world had not paused for him.

“Vermax!”

Through the haze of cresting waves, he found him. His dragon, his Vermax, who had carried him since boyhood, who had grown as he had grown, who had been as much a part of him as his own heartbeat was desperately trying to swim. The damaged wings beat uselessly to try to swim up. His great neck was straining upward. His eyes, when they met Jace’s from below the water, held something that a person with less grief in them might have dismissed as imagination. They did not look like the eyes of an animal.

They looked like the eyes of someone saying goodbye. A massive anchor, or debris, Jace could not tell which, tangled around Vermax’s exhausted body. The sea accepted its offering. With a final, sorrowful look that Jacaerys Velaryon would carry with him for the rest of his life.

He never resurfaced.

Something inside Jace broke. Not cracked. Not bent. Broke, the way an old bone breaks, the kind that doesn’t ever quite knit back the same way. He hauled his upper body onto a large piece of floating wreckage with the determination of a body that had not yet received the message from his mind that none of this mattered anymore. His chest heaved in ragged, desperate gasps. He was shaking. He was exhausted in a way that reached all the way down into whatever part of him had believed, until this moment, that he might survive this.

He had not brought enough of that belief. He saw that now.

He thought of his mother.

The image of her face, proud and terrified and trying not to show either rose unbidden. He had done this for her. Had done all of it for her. He hoped she would understand, someday, that locking her in her chambers had been the most love he had ever offered anyone.

He thought of Baela. Of Rhaena.

He thought of-

A sharp, dull impact struck his upper back.

Jace lurched forward with a sound that was almost nothing, barely a breath. Confused, of all things, not yet understanding, he glanced over his shoulder. A heavy crossbow bolt protruded from his shoulder blade at an angle that his mind catalogued with strange, distant calm, the way one notices a detail in a painting.

Slowly, numbly, he turned his head toward the source. A Triarchy war-galley drifted just yards away. Lined along the wooden railing stood a row of Admiral Lohar’s soldiers, unhurried, methodical, their crossbows leveled at the figure in the water.

They knew exactly who he was. There was no urgency in their posture, no battlefield fever. This was an execution.

The heir to the Iron Throne, stranded and defenseless. A second bolt flew. It slammed into his chest. He heard it before he felt it.

Then a third...straight to the neck.

A strange, sudden calm washed over him.

The deafening roar of the battle receded, becoming muffled, distant, the way sounds narrow when one goes underwater. The sea rocked him gently now, almost tenderly, as if it had been waiting all along to offer this small mercy at the end. He had not expected kindness. He was grateful for it.

He thought of his mother, safe on Dragonstone.

He thought of Baela’s laughter.

He thought of his brothers.

And he thought with a softness that surprised him, with something that might have been the very last warmth his body could generate, of you. Of a future that would not be built. Of a promise he was not sure, now, that he had ever been given the chance to make.

The last image to imprint itself on the fading mind of Jacaerys Velaryon was that reflection.

A burning sky, mirrored in the water.

Beautiful.

Tragic.

Then everything went black.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

Jacaerys bolted upright with a gasp that felt like surfacing.

His eyes flew open. His hand flew to his chest and then to his neck, pressing hard against his sternum, feeling for something, a wound, an absence, a bolt buried in bone and found nothing but the soft cotton of his t-shirt and the solid, living rhythm of his own heart. He sat there for a long moment, chest heaving, and simply stared at the ceiling.

White plaster. Crown moulding. A small water stain shaped vaguely like a continent.

No smoke.

No dragon.

No sea.

No battle.

Just a bedroom. His bedroom.

Morning sunlight filtered through floor-to-ceiling windows in long, clean shafts, illuminating the warm disorder of his life: the desk buried under business textbooks and notebooks with pages dog-eared and margins crowded with his handwriting, his laptop open from the night before with a lecture slide still visible on the screen, a hoodie slung over the back of his desk chair. Outside the windows, King’s Landing stretched endlessly in the early light, the city already stirring, glass towers catching the sun.

His alarm clock flashed 7:00 AM.

No swords or the banners of House Targaryen. Jace pressed the heels of both palms against his eyes and breathed.

The memories were still there. That was the wrong word for them, memories. They did not feel like the soft, dissolving stuff of ordinary dreams that faded on the edges as soon as you tried to examine them. They felt like the other kind of remembering, the kind that lives in the body rather than the mind. He could still feel the cold of the Gullet in his fingers. He could still smell the smoke. He could still feel the weight of dragon-riding leathers across his shoulders, the particular pull of Vermax’s movement through the air, the way the saddle had sat against the backs of his thighs.

He could still feel the bolts.

Just a dream, he told himself. The words felt inadequate in his own mouth, like trying to describe a storm with the word weather. He muttered them anyway, pressing his face harder into his palms.

“Just a dream.”

A dream where he had been a prince.

A prince who had died.

His stomach dropped with a physical lurch. The alarm was still beeping. He silenced it with a slap and sat on the edge of the bed for one more moment, just one, breathing in the ordinary scent of his ordinary room.. Then his brain supplied the information he had been avoiding.

Classes.

Shit.

He was already late.

He moved through his morning routine with the efficiency of someone running on instinct rather than thought, shower, clothes, a cursory battle with his curls that ended, as it always did, in a draw. He emerged from the bathroom in jeans and sneakers and his favorite dark hoodie, his hair doing exactly what it wanted. There wasn’t time to argue with it. There was rarely ever time.

The smell of coffee reached him in the hallway. It pulled at something in his chest and he followed it through the penthouse to the kitchen.

His steps halted in the doorway.

Rhaenyra stood at the island counter, reading something on her tablet with the focused, slightly stern expression she wore when she was processing information she found annoying. A coffee mug steamed beside her elbow, forgotten. She was already dressed soft grey, elegant, effortlessly so in the way that had always seemed to come naturally to her and she looked exactly as she always looked in the morning, tired by all the corporate bullshit.

CEO of Targaryen Corporation. One of the most influential women in King’s Landing. The most formidable person he had ever known.

His mother.

The word hit him somewhere unsteady. Something twisted painfully in his chest, relief so acute it nearly hurt, threaded through with the dreaming grief of a boy who had watched her face in his mind as the water closed over him, who had spent his last conscious moment believing she was safe, needing her to be safe, and had been right without ever knowing he was right. He crossed the room before he had consciously decided to.

He wrapped his arms around her.

Rhaenyra nearly dropped her coffee.

“Jacaerys-”

She caught herself, setting the mug down with a firm clink on the marble countertop, and then without hesitation, because she had always been this, whatever else she was, she wrapped her arms around him and held him back.

“Sweet boy.” Her voice was softer now. Her fingers found their way into his curls the way they had when he was very small. “What’s the matter?”

Jace swallowed against the tightness in his throat. The dream came rushing back through him like a tide, the war, the weight of a crown his mother should have inherited without blood, the desperate, bone-deep need to protect her. The image of her face as he had walked away from Dragonstone, toward the dragon, toward the battle, toward the Gullet. The way he had looked back.

He shook his head against her shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

“You are clearly not fine.”

Her hand moved in slow, soothing circles against his back. Despite himself, despite everything, Jace felt something in him begin to loosen.

He laughed. A weak, slightly broken sound, but genuine. “I just…” His voice cracked on the nothing he was trying to say.

Rhaenyra pulled back slightly to look at him. Not the way she looked at her board of directors, or at rivals across conference tables, or at the city from thirty floors up. The other way. The private way, that only he and his brothers ever saw.

“What happened?”

He wiped his eyes quickly, hoping she wouldn’t comment on it and took a breath.

“I had the most vivid dream.”

“What kind of dream?”

He hesitated. There was something strange about saying it. As though speaking about it aloud would make it either more real or less, and he wasn’t sure which outcome he wanted.

“I was a prince,” he said.

Rhaenyra blinked. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not that.

“A prince?”

“Yeah.” A small smile found its way onto his face, unwilling, almost involuntary. “You were a queen.” Something passed across her expression something soft, something she would never have allowed in a meeting room. “Oh?”

“I died fighting a battle for you.”

Silence.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached up and brushed a curl from his forehead with the gentleness that had no performance in it, something she reserved for the three of them and no one else.

“Well,” she said finally, her smile warming to something that was almost, almost teasing. “That sounds exhausting.”

Jace stared. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“You are standing in my kitchen wearing yesterday’s hoodie and telling me about dragon wars, Jacaerys.”

He opened his mouth to protest then closed it. “Fair.” She squeezed his shoulder. “It was only a dream.”

“You know,” said a new voice from the doorway, “some families start their mornings with good morning.”

Luke wandered in carrying a cereal box like a trophy, nineteen years old and permanently, professionally smug. He surveyed the scene with the cheerful heartlessness of a younger brother who had found ammunition and intended to use it.

“Did Jace finally lose his mind?”

Behind him, Joffrey, fourteen and grinning with the particular delight of someone who had been waiting for this squeezed past into the kitchen. “About time.” Jace rolled his eyes so hard it was almost an athletic achievement. “There he is.”

“Dreaming about being a prince?” Luke plucked a bowl from the cupboard with casual ease. “That’s because you’re already treated like one.”

The napkin Jace threw hit him square in the face. Luke threw it back. Rhaenyra sighed with the air of a woman who had calculated exactly how many more years of this lay before her and found the number disheartening.

“My sons,” she said, picking up her coffee. “Truly intellectual giants.”

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Breakfast passed with the comfortable velocity of mornings that had been rehearsed through repetition until they ran themselves. Luke complaining about something, Joffrey eating cereal in quantities that defied his size, Rhaenyra reading from her tablet while simultaneously tracking all three of them with the peripheral attention of someone who had never once been entirely off duty.

Jace was reaching for his coffee when Rhaenyra glanced up.

“Are you still picking up your girlfriend?”

He froze.

The coffee cup remained halfway to his face, arrested in mid-air.

“…My what?”

Luke’s head snapped up. The expression that crossed his face was one of pure, unalloyed joy. He looked like he had been handed a gift.

Rhaenyra stared at her eldest with the patient, faintly incredulous expression of a woman who had not expected to be performing this particular reality check on a Tuesday morning.

“Your girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Jace set the cup down carefully. “Right.”

You.

He had a girlfriend.

A beautiful girlfriend, and she was his girlfriend, and she had been his girlfriend for- he was briefly lost in the arithmetic of it, which was itself a kind of answer and she was wonderful, she was brilliant, she made him laugh, and somehow in the space between waking up with the sea in his lungs and standing in his mother’s kitchen in yesterday’s hoodie, he had momentarily forgotten she existed.

And then, because his brain was apparently in full catastrophic mode this morning: betrothed. Not yet. Not technically. But the word had been sitting in the back of his mind ever since he woke up from his dream.

Heat flooded his face with spectacular completeness. Luke nearly choked on his cereal.

“Oh my God.”

“Shut up.”

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“Only briefly.”

“Only” Luke dissolved entirely, shoulders shaking. Across the table, Joffrey watched with the dignified appreciation of a connoisseur.

Rhaenyra shook her head slowly. “Honestly, Jace.” “It was a very intense dream,” he said, with as much dignity as one can muster while slowly turning the color of a sunset.

“You forgot your girlfriend.”

“The dream had dragons, Mum.”

She gave him the look. The specific look, the one that had been making him feel twelve years old since he was actually twelve years old. “She’s a lovely girl. I wish you’d bring her home more often.”

Jace stood from the table with the decisive energy of a man drawing a conversation to a close. “I was planning to.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Today?”

“…Possibly.”

“Good.” Rhaenyra returned to her tablet, the slight smile at the corner of her mouth saying everything she was too dignified to say aloud.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The underground parking garage was cool and dim, smelling of concrete and oil and the expensive quiet of a building where people took the lift rather than the stairs. Jace’s Porsche sat in its usual spot, Oak Green Metallic, catching the fluorescent light.

Vermax.

He had named the car Vermax which now sounded so ironic to him.

He stood beside the driver’s door for a moment, hand on the handle, the thought arriving fully formed and then sitting there in his chest with an odd weight. He had named his car Vermax years ago. He had thought it was because he liked the sound of it, or because it was the name of a character in a book he’d read, or because of some half-remembered reason that had never quite solidified into anything coherent.

He looked at the car. The deep green of it. The long, low lines of it, built for speed, built for the sky-

Built for the sky.

A strange feeling settled over him, the kind of not-quite-vertigo that comes with recognizing something without being able to name what it is you’re recognizing. Like seeing an old friend across a crowd before you’ve registered their face.

He shook it off. Got in and drove.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The street outside your house was quiet in the way that Tuesday mornings in King’s Landing occasionally managed to be, with the morning light that made ordinary things seem briefly considered. Jace pulled to the curb and sat for a moment with the engine idling, window down.

Then the front door opened and you stepped out. He got out of the car.

The morning light caught your hair the way it always did, making you look almost angelic in Jace’s eyes in that moment. You were still in the act of adjusting the strap of your bag when you spotted him, and the smile that crossed your face. Happy just to see him.

And for one strange, suspended moment, another image overlapped the morning like a transparency laid over a photograph. A figure standing on the cliffs of Dragonstone. The sea grey below and the wind pulling at dark fabric. Watching him leave. The expression on her face, your face, heartbroken and resolute and trying to be neither.

Waiting for him to come back.

The image dissolved as quickly as it had arrived. The morning reasserted itself. You were walking toward the car, your bag settled on your shoulder now, your smile still in place, and Jace found himself already stepping forward already moving toward with certainty that was less decision than gravity.

Before you could say a word, he took your hand and raised it, and pressed a kiss against your knuckles. Deliberatea and unhurried. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, in other rooms, in other centuries.

“How are you, my beloved?”

You stopped.

Looked at the hand.

Looked at him.

And then, because you were you, you laughed, the bright, surprised sound of someone caught genuinely off guard. “What has gotten into you this morning?” you questioned him.

Jace grinned, and the grin felt more like him than anything else had all morning. “I genuinely have no idea.”

“You’re being sooo weird.” You studied him with the narrowed eyes trying to grasp his words and actions. “How weird is this going to get?”

“I had the wildest dream.”

“Oh?” Already your expression was shifting into the one you wore when you were preparing to be entertained. He leaned forward and kissed you softly quick, warm and certain.

“In it,” he said against your smile, “you were my princess too.”

Your cheeks went pink with entirely gratifying speed. “Oh my God.”

“You asked.”

“I asked what was wrong with you, not-”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, I am going to need you to be normal for the next five minutes-”

“I make no promises.”

He opened the passenger door for you, still grinning, and the morning felt lighter than it had when he’d left the penthouse.

The dream wasn’t entirely terrible, he thought, settling behind the wheel. If nothing else, it had done this, sharpened his vision, made ordinary things brilliant again. Made you more vivid than you’d already been, which was saying something considerable. He found himself smiling the entire drive to university.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

University should have felt normal.

Instead, Jace spent the entire morning convinced he was losing his mind by degrees as new details of his dream would hit him.

The dream lingered with a persistence that ordinary dreams did not have, the kind he usually forgot by the time he reached the kitchen. This one clung. Every corridor he walked reminded him of castle hallways, the echo of footsteps on stone, and the smell of torch smoke. Every crowded lecture hall conjured the geometry of noble courts; the subtle theatre of power performed through proximity. His Strategic Management lecture had an entire section on resource allocation that kept pulling his thoughts sideways, toward councils and war rooms and Dragonstone. He stared at his notebook.

He had written, in the margin: Corlys was right about the Gullet.

He had no idea when.

“You’re disassociating again.”

Jace blinked.

Across the seminar table sat Cregan Stark, regarding him with the expression he used on everything: tall, dark-haired, slow-blinking, fundamentally and constitutionally unimpressed by the world and all its events. He was from Winterfell like genuinely, actually from Winterfell, which Jace had always found slightly funny without ever quite being able to explain why.

They’d been best friends since secondary school, the friendship that had calcified into something so much more. They were like brothers in every sense. Also, he looked almost exactly like the Cregan from the dream.

Same jaw. Same eyes. Same expression, the one that said I am listening to you and I find you exhausting. Same, in other words, as he always looked well except his had slightly shorter hair.

“What?” Jace managed.

Cregan raised one eyebrow. “You’ve been staring at me for ten seconds with an expressionless face.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had a strange dream. I feel like I keep repeating these words over and over again.”

“You texted me at four in the morning.”

Jace went very still.

“I did?”

Cregan reached for his phone with the patience of a man who had long since resigned himself to the chaos of being Jace Velaryon’s closest friend. He scrolled briefly, then began reading aloud in the flat, informational tone of a news anchor delivering a weather report.

“‘Brother, imagine if we were medieval nobles.’”

“Oh, God.”

“‘You would have loved Winterfell.’”

“Cregan-”

“‘You were Lord of the North.’” He glanced up briefly. “I’m from Winterfell, Jace. I grew up in Winterfell. I know what Winterfell is.”

“Please stop-”

‘I miss Vermax.’

Cregan lowered the phone.

“I don’t know what Vermax is, if its not talking about your car.” he said.

Jace buried his face in both hands and made a sound that was less a word than a comprehensive statement. “You were never meant to read those.”

“You sent them to me.”

“I was apparently not fully conscious at four in the morning. I don’t remember doing this at all.”

“That’s concerning.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

The question arrived without ceremony, Cregan always asked things he actually wanted to know, dropped into a conversation like a stone dropped into water, watching to see what it displaced. Jace hesitated for long enough that the silence became its own answer.

“Yeah,” he said. Then, quietly: “Not entirely.”

Cregan nodded. He didn’t push. This was something Jace had always valued about him, the Stark capacity to hold space without filling it.

“Tell me later,” Cregan said, and turned back to his laptop.

Mostly, Jace thought. He was mostly okay. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You found him outside the business building at noon, materializing from the flow of students and your smile arrived before you did.

Jace felt the thing in his chest that had been clenched since 7 AM ease, slowly, like a hand opening. There was something about you that operated on him this way, had always operated on him this way, since the beginning. A quality of presence that grounded him, that made the world’s coordinates make sense again. He’d never found quite the right words for it. He’d stopped trying.

You slipped your hand into his without ceremony.

“Better than this morning?”

“A little.”

“Still thinking about your prince dream?”

He laughed, the sound freer than he expected. “Unfortunately.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“I was literally fighting a war.”

“You were dreaming about fighting a war.”

“Details.”

“Jacaerys Velaryon, if this dream becomes your entire personality, I want it on the record that I tried to prevent it-”

“Noted and rejected.”

You rolled your eyes with magnificent feeling. “I make no promises about what I tell your mother.”

Together you walked toward the café nearby. A small, overcrowded place called something Jace could never quite remember but it had had excellent coffee and terrible lighting and was perpetually full of students and professors who had clearly rather be somewhere else. The place that existed to absorb the ambient anxiety of a university and convert it, through caffeine, into something marginally more functional.

You had barely settled into your seats when a familiar voice arrived from approximately two tables away, belonging to someone who had apparently been watching for them.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite nephew.”

Aegon Targaryen dropped into the empty chair beside Jace with the comfortable confidence of a man who owned, and this was literally true, approximately half the building they were sitting in. Twenty-six, blond, expensive, reliably catastrophic. His jacket probably cost more than Jace’s car maintenance for the year, and he wore it with the carelessness never once considering the cost of anything.

He was nothing like the monster from the dream. The dream-Aegon had been something Jace couldn’t fully bring himself to examine yet. Jealous and bitter and capable of terrible things. This Aegon was mostly known for throwing parties that became local legend and mysteriously managing to avoid all professional consequences for anything he did, ever. Jacaerys supposed that has something to do with his mother and his uncle Aemond keeping these things contained.

“To what do we owe the honor?” Jace asked.

Aegon’s attention had already moved to you.

“And how are you?”

“Good,” you said politely.

“Still putting up with him?”

You smiled. “Barely.”

“Excellent answer.”

Jace groaned. Aegon looked absolutely delighted. “You’re blushing,” Aegon observed, with the tone of someone reporting a natural phenomenon.

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

You leaned over the table, and Jace recognized the look on your face immediately. The collaborative look. The look that meant you had identified an ally.

“He was calling me his beloved this morning.”

Aegon’s chair nearly lost him. He grabbed the table.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“In what context?”

“He kissed my hand. In the street. Before nine in the morning.”

Aegon looked at Jace the way someone looks at an archaeological discovery with facination, slightly appalled, deeply pleased. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened.”

Jace contemplated his options. Leaving. Changing his name and moving to Braavos. Committing entirely to the persona of someone who had never been caught calling his girlfriend my beloved at eight forty-five on a Tuesday.

None of these were practical.

He reached for his coffee and said nothing, which Aegon correctly interpreted as total defeat.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

After Aegon eventually wandered off, ostensibly to a meeting, credibly to cause chaos somewhere else and so the café settled back into its ordinary rhythms. Students came and went. Espresso machines hissed. The ambient noise absorbed itself.

You and Jace remained at your table, and the laughter faded naturally, the way good laughter does, not dying but simply becoming something quieter.

He was staring into his coffee again.

You watched him for a moment.

“You never told me the whole dream, since it has you in a weird mindset today.” you said quietly.

His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around the cup. He was aware of you looking at him, with your full attention, which had always been more like listening than looking, patient and genuine and without agenda.

“To put it simply, there was a war,” he said.

You didn’t ask him to explain. You waited.

“A civil war.” He looked up briefly, then back at the table. “A war over who would rule over Westeros. My mother was supposed to inherit as was the rightful heir to the throne but there were those who didn’t accept it. Didn’t accept her.”

“And you fought for her.”

“Of course.”

The images came without invitation, Dragonstone’s grey halls, the council table, the maps spreading the whole kingdom out before them like a wound. The feeling of duty that had lived in his chest since childhood, not as a burden but as a definition. This is who you are. This is what you do.

You reached across the table and took his hand. He continued.

“I flew a dragon. I know this sounds no so scary but-” Despite everything, he heard the ghost of wonder in his own voice. “Vermax. He was- he was mine. Since I was a boy. He knew me.” The wonder curdled, softened into something heavier. “He died with me.”

Your thumb moved in a slow arc across his knuckles. “The last thing I remember,” he said quietly, “was dying. Floating in the sea, after everything.” He paused.

“It was strange. It wasn’t- it wasn’t the way I would have imagined. It wasn’t terrifying.”

“What was it?”

He thought about it honestly.

“It was sad,” he said. “But calm.”

You were quiet for a moment. Then you reached up, and the gesture was so unexpected that he went still, your hand cupping his cheek, steady and warm, thumb tracing a line beneath his eye.

He leaned into it without thinking.

“I’m glad it was only a dream,” you said softly trying to calm his anxieties that he didn’t want to confess out loud.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

The tightness in his chest released, not all at once but in stages, like a knot worked loose over time. He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips briefly to your palm, and you let him, and neither of you made anything of it. She’s right, he thought. Whatever that was. Whatever it meant.

He was here. Alive. With his family, with his best friend, with his girl.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was, actually, everything.

The afternoon passed.

Classes ended. The university slowly emptied like it did every day at dusk, students and professors releasing themselves back into the city like a pressure valve opening. The parking lot filled briefly with the usual chaos and then thinned.

“My mother wants you over more often,” Jace mentioned, as they walked toward the Porsche.

“Apparently she likes you.”

You brightened immediately. “Really?”

“She said so unprompted. First thing this morning.”

“Good.” You smiled with satisfaction. “I’m charming.”

Jace looked at you sideways. “You are deeply smug about this.”

“I’m charming,” you repeated, pleasantly. He laughed. “Come over tonight?”

You looked at him, with that look you had, the one he’d never found a word for, the one that made him feel simultaneously seen and unsteady in the best possible way. Made him feel a bit giddy.

“I’d love to,” you said.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The penthouse was unusually quiet when they arrived. Rhaenyra was visible through the glass of her home office, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, reading from a document with the focused intensity and it was clear that the woman needed a break from everything. Luke had evaporated somewhere. Joffrey was reportedly studying, a claim no one in the household had ever been successfully able to verify.

You and Jace settled at the dining table with laptops and scattered notes and the collective fiction of productivity.

For forty minutes, it was remarkably functional. Jace had his economics module open. You were working through something, he didn’t ask, didn’t need to and the sound of quiet typing and the occasional turn of a page created a kind of companionable silence that he had always thought of as the specific luxury of being comfortable with someone. presence. You could simply be in it.

He was reading about capital allocation.

“Jace.”

He looked up.

“You’re getting lost in your mind again.”

“I’m not what are you talking about?” he said automatically. Then, because honesty was something he’d apparently committed to today: “I was thinking about- uhhh. Economics?”

“That is not better.”

“You look pretty,” he said simply.

The silence that followed had a distinct texture. You looked at him for a long moment. Then you slowly, deliberately, closed your laptop.

“No,” you said.

“What?”

“You don’t get to say things like that when I’m trying to study.”

“I was simply making an observation.”

“You are impossible.”

He was very pleased with himself. He did not bother hiding it.

An hour later, the economics module had not progressed. The textbooks had been consolidated into a single pile and pushed to the far end of the table, a gesture that meant these exist and will eventually be addressed, which was as much as either of you were willing to commit to. A film had been agreed upon via negotiation.

Blankets appeared.

The overhead lights went off.

And somehow, as these things always somehow managed, you ended up curled against his chest on the enormous sectional, his arm around your waist, the film playing distantly while neither of you particularly watched it. Your breathing slowed first. His heartbeat was steady and familiar beneath your ear.

The city moved quietly outside the windows.

You didn’t remember falling asleep.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The prince stood before you.

The wind came off the sea like a cold hand, whipping through his dark, curling hair, pressing his black riding coat against his frame. Behind him, Dragonstone rose in its glory against a steel-grey sky, all sharp towers and dark stone, magnificent and terrible, built by people who had never believed in half measures. The sea crashed against the rocks far below. Dark clouds gathered on the horizon with the patient, deliberate advance of something inevitable.

“No.”

Your voice came out broken.

“No, please.”

He looked at you the way he always looked at you as if you were the clearest thing in a world that had lately become very unclear, like looking at you was the one thing he could do without effort in a life that had demanded extraordinary effort from him since the moment he was old enough to understand what he was.

“I have to go.”

“You don’t,” you said, even though you knew it wasn’t true. Even though somewhere beneath the desperate present tense of the argument, the truer, older part of you already knew exactly what was coming. Already knew the shape of this farewell.

His hands found yours.

They were warm. Strong and real, so real that makes their loss so much more brutal than the loss of things you never fully believed in.

“You can stay,” you said. Your voice was steadier than you felt. “You can let someone else-”

“I cannot.” His voice was gentle but stern. He was stubborn and so if he made peace with this decisions, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tears burned behind your eyes. The fear inside you was almost unbearable and burning, it was twisted and layered, because you knew. You already knew. This was not a premonition, not a vague presentiment. It was knowledge, carried somewhere beneath language, beneath memory, in whatever part of you had been this person before.

You knew what awaited him at the Gullet.

Fire.

Water.

“You promised.” The words escaped before you could decide to say them.

His expression shifted. Something moved across it, grief, tenderness, the ache of a man who loves something too well to pretend it isn’t breaking. “And I will keep that promise but this is a battle I must fight for both myself and my mother.”

He stepped closer, and you let him, and he pressed a kiss to your forehead so gently it barely qualified as a touch at all.

Then he rested his brow against yours. His eyes never left yours.

“If I do not return- which I intend to,”

The world seemed to hold its breath.

“I will find you.”

A tear escaped. Traced the line of your cheek. He watched it with eyes that were very dark and very steady.

“In every lifetime if not this one. I promise.”

The words landed somewhere deep in you, somewhere wordless, somewhere older than the language you used to think with. A promise that had the weight of truth rather than intention.

You memorized his face. The curls. The strong jaw. The eyes, brown and earnest and alive, so alive.

He smiled.

Then he stepped away.

He turned toward the waiting dragon.

Toward the dark water below.

Toward a destiny that was also a death.

And all you could do was watch him leave. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

You woke with a gasp that tore itself from somewhere past your chest.

For several seconds, you could not find the room. Could not find yourself in it. There was only the dream...the cliffs, the wind, his forehead against yours, the sound of his footsteps retreating and the grief of it, which was specific and devastating and nothing at all like the vague emotional residue of ordinary sleep.

Tears burned behind your eyes. Your heart was pounding.

You pushed yourself upright. A blanket tangled around your legs. The room was dim, the film long since ended, the television showing a menu screen. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, King’s Landing glittered in the full dark of night, the city’s lights reflected upward in a warm wash against the low clouds. Jace must have moved you to his room when you fell asleep.

The bedroom door opened.

Jace stepped in carrying two mugs, steam rising from both. He had apparently, at some point during your sleep, been productive.

The moment he saw your face, he froze.

“Hey.”

The concern in his voice was immediate, the shift from normal to careful happening in the space of a single syllable.

“What’s wrong?”

You didn’t answer. The words were somewhere on the way, but in the meantime your body had already decided what it needed, and what it needed was to close the distance between you and him as quickly as possible.

You stood.

Crossed the room.

The mugs barely survived. He caught them against the edge of the side table with an impressive reflex, setting them down quickly before his arms came around your waist, and you buried your face against the side of his neck, and breathed him in.

“Sweetheart?” Low and careful. His chin came to rest on top of your head.

You stayed there for a moment just letting the reality of him replace the dream of him. The warmth of him. The solidness.

Then you pulled back. Not far. Your forehead came to rest against his, which put you close enough to feel his breath and see the small crease of worry between his brows.

“I had a dream,” you said. It seems it was your turn to utter those words.

Something moved across his face. He went very still in the way that meant he was paying every variety of attention he had.

“What kind of dream?”

“I saw a prince.”

His breath caught. You felt it.

“I saw him leaving for a battle. He was going to fight-”

Your voice faltered, then steadied. “He knew he might not come back. And he said-” You stopped.

Jace’s arms tightened around you, almost involuntarily. “He said he would find me,” you continued. “That if he didn’t return-” Your eyes met his, and something in your chest recognized something in his. “He would find me in every lifetime.”

Silence.

Complete, absolute silence.

Jace stared at you.

Because those were the exact words. Not a version of them, not a paraphrase but the exact promise, the exact phrasing, the exact scene, the stone of Dragonstone under grey skies and wind coming off the sea. He had lived it from one side and you had lived it from the other, and here you both were, in a penthouse above a city that did not have dragons, with the memory of them living in your bones.

His throat moved.

You smiled softly with tears still bright at the corners of your eyes. Your hand lifted, your fingers moving gently through his curls, the same gesture that felt simultaneously new and ancient.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” you said.

“Neither do I.”

“But if it was real-”

His forehead pressed more firmly against yours.

“You kept your promise,” you whispered.

He felt his throat close.

And for the first time since he had woken to the sound of an alarm clock and a bedroom that wasn’t the sea, he stopped wondering whether the dream had been real. He stopped wondering whether he was grieving something imagined or something true. He stopped needing to know.

Because you knew.

You had been there.

You rose onto your toes.

Your lips met his.

It was slow and gentle. He kissed you back like someone returning to something, like a navigator finding a landmark in familiar water.

Like he had been waiting centuries and perhaps his soul had waited for this moment. The moment to return to her. ┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

The knock was soft.

They both startled apart with the excellent reflexes of guilty consciences, then immediately demonstrated the dignity of two people pretending they hadn’t. Jace cleared his throat. Rested his forehead against yours for one final second. His breath was unsteady in the best way.

Another knock.

“Jacaerys?”

Rhaenyra’s voice, measured, carrying through the door with the easy authority of a woman who managed board rooms and board members and the shenanigans of three sons as a single uninterrupted professional skill.

“Dinner is ready.” They heard the muffled voice of his mother.

Jace answered at a volume calibrated for normalcy “We’ll be there in a minute!”

A pause that had weight.

“Five minutes,” his mother’s voice returned, drier than a desert, and entirely aware of everything and perhaps making a wrong assumption of you two being alone in his room.

You laughed, pressing your face briefly against his shoulder to muffle it. He was already smiling.

“Your mother doesn’t trust you.”

“She absolutely does not.”

“And honestly?” You poked his chest. “I don’t blame her.”

“You wound me.”

“Good.” You pulled your hand back, but he caught it, quick and easy, and pressed a kiss to your knuckles again. The same gesture as that morning. The echo of it traveled through both of you clearly.

Your cheeks went pink.

He watched it happen with a feeling in his chest that was too large and too simple to require any examination at all.

There she is, he thought. My girl.

My princess.

He took your hand properly, fingers laced and led you toward the dining room.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈ They heard the argument before they reached the dinner table.

Luke and Joffrey, seated across from each other in the arrangement that the family had collectively accepted as a flaw, were conducting a debate with the commitment of two people who had come to win.

“No, because you’re objectively wrong-”

“I’m objectively right-”

“You don’t even know what objectively means.”

“I literally do.”

“You used it wrong.”

Joffrey groaned with his whole body. “I hate this family.”

“You are this family,” Luke pointed out.

Joffrey considered this. “Exactly.”

Rhaenyra, at the head of the table, was pinching the bridge of her nose with annoyance. This was her normal and yet it was tiring.

The moment she saw you, her face entirely changed.

“There she is.”

You smiled. “Hi.”

She stood and pulled you into a hug with a warmth that was, Jace thought privately, rather more enthusiastic than his own homecoming greeting most mornings. “I was beginning to think my son had invented you.”

“Mum.”

“What? He never brings you over.”

“That’s his fault,” you said.

“Traitor,” Jace said.

“You’re literally my boyfriend.”

“Exactly.”

You smiled sweetly. “I’m allowed.”

Rhaenyra looked delighted in the specific way she allowed herself to look delighted when she was genuinely pleased, a rarity outside this apartment. Luke immediately leaned toward you.

“See? This is why she’s my favorite.”

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Unfortunately.”

Jace threw a bread roll at him.

Luke threw one back.

The war began immediately, and lasted approximately five seconds before Rhaenyra’s single sharp look ended it. She had a look for this. It was very effective.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, settling back into her chair and accepting a bread roll from the basket with the serenity of someone who had already mentally exited the building, “if I raised wolves.”

“That’s insulting,” Joffrey said.

Everyone looked at him.

The fourteen-year-old shrugged with the composure of someone who had thought this through. “Wolves are smarter.”

The silence held for two seconds before Luke’s expression cracked. Jace looked at the ceiling. Rhaenyra’s attempt at severity collapsed at its foundations.

You sat beside Jace with your hand warm against his under the table, and you were already laughing, and the sound of it filled the room the way laughter does when a room is already full of people who are glad to be there.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

Dinner found its rhythm.

Conversation moved in the easy, overlapping way it does with people who have logged enough hours together that they no longer need to manage it consciously. Luke complained about a group project with the vivid resentment of having decided the problem was everyone else.

Joffrey explained something about a game or a film or a historical period but the audience could not quite keep up, but that seemed to be part of the experience. Rhaenyra complained, with great economy, about company politics, and then told a story about a colleague that had everyone at the table paying full attention (It was Aemond who everytone is afraid of in their company).

You listened to all of it.

Jace, mostly, watched.

He had not expected this. Had woken this morning in the sea, or the memory of it. Had spent the drive to university with the dream still active in his body, had sat through lectures half-present, had carried the weight of Vermax’s last look in his chest all day like a stone.

And now.

He watched his mother smile at something you said. He watched Luke do the thing he did when he was actually amused, which was different from when he is pretending. Watched Joffrey explain something to you directly, having apparently determined that you were worth the effort, and watched your face do the thing it did when you were genuinely interested in something, slightly forward, slightly bright, entirely present.

You fit here. Not as a guest, not as someone being accommodated. As someone who belonged. He thought of the dream again.

Remembered standing at the dragonpit of Dragonstone with his armor on and the dragon saddled and the sea grey behind him, and looking back at everything he was leaving, his mother, his brothers, you, the stone halls and the cold salt wind and the ordinary miracle of a morning that didn’t require a king’s son to die for it.

He had wondered, in those last seconds at Dragonstone, if he would ever see any of them again. He had his answer now.

The realization settled in his chest quietly, without drama. Not a revelation, something more like a confirmation. A peace he hadn’t known he was looking for, finding him here, at a dinner table with a bread roll dent in the tablecloth and Joffrey currently holding forth on something no one else understood.

No war. No dragons. No succession. No battles. Just family. Just love.

Just this.

Halfway through dessert, Joffrey’s phone lit up. “Oh!” He reached for it with the speed of receiving news they’d been waiting for. “Dad’s calling.”

Jace felt himself smile before the screen even showed Laenor’s face.

It appeared a moment later, that face, familiar and warm and slightly tanned by whatever sun was currently shining on whatever harbor on whatever coast he was sailing toward. Behind him, a bright blue sky suggested somewhere in Essos, probably. The man was perpetually in motion, perpetually somewhere else and yet found time for them. He was not their real father, but he might as well have been. After Harwin passed away, Rhaenyra had remarried Laenor as more of a deal since Laenor wasn’t interested in anything but he cared for Rhaenyra platonically and it seemed to have worked out great and that’s all that mattered.

“There are my favorite children.”

Luke snorted. “We’re your only children.”

“And yet somehow still my favorites.” Laenor’s gaze found you across the table, and his face smiled “There she is.”

You laughed. “Hello.”

“Good. Finally, someone sensible has arrived.”

“Hey!” Three voices, simultaneous.

Laenor continued as though he hadn’t heard. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m well, thank you.”

Jace groaned. “Why does everyone in my family like her more than me?”

“Because,” Laenor said, and the timing was beautiful, “she has manners.”

The table erupted. Even Rhaenyra, which was a significant achievement.

Laenor spent twenty minutes on the call, chatting about his route, trading insults with. He heard both Luke and Joffery’s rambling. He asked Rhaenyra about the board meeting she’d complained about, and listened to her answer. He asked you about your studies, and remembered something you’d mentioned three calls ago, and asked a follow-up question about it.

The man had walked into their lives years ago and simply decided, without announcement or conditions, that these were his sons. No performance of it. No documentation. Just- love, extended to fill the available space.

Dream Laenor had disappeared. The thought arrived gently, without bitterness. The dream-Laenor, who had been present mostly in his absence, who Jace had barely known, who had been lost before Jace could understand what losing someone meant. This version was here. This version showed up.

And Jace was, quietly and completely, grateful for that. The call ended. The dessert finished. The evening moved toward its natural conclusion with the comfortable inevitability of all good evenings. Luke vanished in the direction of his room. Joffrey disappeared with a quantity of snacks that could feed a whole army. Rhaenyra retreated to finish what she’d started, she always had something she was finishing, this was simply who she was and the penthouse settled into quiet

Which left you and Jace, alone on the balcony.

┈┈・ ✦ ・┈┈

King’s Landing stretched below them without end. The city was all light from up here, not the individual lights, not streets and windows and the moving points of cars, but the collective glow of it, the warmth of a few million people living their lives in proximity, translated upward into something that looked, from this height, almost like its own kind of fire.

A cool breeze moved through the dark, carrying the city’s particular nighttime mixture of warm pavement and distant food and the faint, improbable ghost of something floral from a rooftop garden somewhere below. It found its way into Jace’s curls and did what it wanted with them.

You stood beside him. Close enough that your shoulders touched.

Neither of you spoke. Neither of you needed to. The city was enough, for a while.

Then you broke the silence the way you often did when a thought entered your head.

“Do you think it was real?”

He didn’t ask what you meant.

The dreams. The prince and the princess. The battle. The promise made at the edge of the world on the morning of an ending. The specific weight of standing on Dragonstone and knowing.

“I don’t know,” he said.

You slipped your hand into his. Your fingers were cool from the night air. He closed his hand around yours.

“But it felt real,” you said.

“It did.”

Another silence, this one richer. Weighted, but not heavily, weighted the way a good book is heavy, in a way you want.

“If it was real…”

Jace looked toward you. The city’s light caught you from below, softening the angles, turning you luminous in the warm way of a portrait painted with care. The same thing he’d thought this morning returned, effortlessly, as though it had simply been waiting for the right lighting.

Radiant.

The same as the princess from the dream. The same, and also entirely herself.

“If it was real,” you continued, a smile finding the corner of your mouth, “I think she’d be happy.”

“Who?”

“The princess.”

Your fingers squeezed his.

“Because she got her prince back.”

Something moved in his chest and he felt a giddy sensation.

“And he got his princess,” he said quietly.

The smile you gave him in return was the specific, undone kind that he privately thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He doubted this would change.

“You know,” he said, after a moment, “I’ve spent all day thinking about the battle.”

“The Gullet?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the city. “The part where I died.”

You were quiet beside him.

“And?” you said, finally.

He looked back through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the penthouse.

His mother, visible in her office, signing something. The small movement of her hand showing her actions. Luke in the hallway beyond, typing away at his phone aggressively with determinations of someone looking to win an argument even if he may be wrong.

Joffrey somewhere in his room planning a prank on his mother.

And all of it, all of this life, this ordinary, extraordinary life, glowing warm behind glass thirty floors above a city that had never known a dragon. His family.

“I think that prince would’ve liked this,” he said.

You followed his gaze.

You understood immediately. He could see it in the way your face softened, not with sadness but with tenderness that recognizes grief and holds it carefully.

A life without war. Without the weight of a crown.

Without sacrifice, the kind that swaps one beloved thing for another in an endless, devastating ledger.

Just family.

Just love.

Just peace.

You rested your head on his shoulder.

He turned his head and pressed a kiss to your hair, slow and quiet.

Neither of you saw it.

But just for a moment, a breath, almost a blink, the glass of the balcony door held a reflection that was not quite yours.

Two figures. Side by side. Dressed in black and red, the colours of a house that had once held the world.

Standing exactly as you were standing. Looking out at exactly what you were looking at.

Smiling.

At each other, and at this, and at everything that had managed, against all odds, to survive.

Then the image dissolved.

The glass held only the room behind it, warm and lit and full of the sound of Luke losing the argument.

And Jace, and you.

Exactly where you were always meant to be.

© jacefiles - all rights reserved, please refrain from copying, reposting, modifying or translating my work on any platform.

[kokodrawings]

Time travel shenanigans: Jiraiya and Kakashi end up in the past after Pain kills them

[agentmilayawithshield]

me at 17yo mourning my boyfriend Robb Stark:

me at 19yo mourning my soulmate Daenerys Targaryen:

me at 25yo mourning my husband Baelor Targaryen:

me still 25yo, mourning my sweet boy Jacaerys Velaryon:

[helenvaughans]

[zitasaurusrex]

[targlocket]

THE SEA SHALL NOT HAVE ME, FOR I AM ALREADY YOURS

jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader

cw: hotd season 3 spoilers, fix-it fic!, heavy angst, hurt/BIG comfort, fluff so much fluff, mention of violence, mourning but no death, yearning, kissing, jacaerys loves his wife more than anything, (3.8kw).

synopsis: He promised. To you, to himself, right before giving the order. "I will come back to you," Jacaerys whispered, pressing warm lips to wood, as if sealing his silent vow through the door.

a/n: mama will hold ur hand through this. it'll ALL be okay! bawled my eyes out at this but god i needed it. translations for the high valyrian used at the end!

He had never felt so cold before.

A chill seeping into the marrow of his bones and encrusting muscle and tissue, making it hard to move; to breathe.

His eyes battled the shroud of darkness, yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t halt the certainty, which in that instant appeared like his end. Not slumber, not unconsciousness, but his demise’s unyielding grip curled around him like a serpent and squeezed until it wrung every bit of life out of him.

Jacaerys felt the bite of the arrows like a brand, pulsing like another denominator of what was to come, to swallow him whole. One in his neck, one near his heart, and others in places he couldn’t name, but remembered your hands and mouth touching countless times before.

The Gods were cruel to punish him right where your sweetness had been, where your love had touched and imprinted itself onto him, now stained by sharp steel and blood.

He hopes you’ll have it in your heart to forgive him, for he cannot do so for himself. The more the world feels like a distant memory, the more his heart aches, its beating slowing, as if trying to mimic the syllables of your name one last time before it inevitably stops. One last call out to you, willing to see if you would answer, even if he knows that to be impossible.

Would you cry, he wonders, as if he doesn’t already know the answer. Would you curse him? Would you hate him? Would you damn every moment you’ve spent together, turning it into poison and ash?

Jacaerys would not fault you if you did, but his chest feels hollow at the prospect of causing such vile emotions to bloom in your tender heart, most of all towards him.

You are his most precious jewel, and losing his life is one thing, but knowing that means losing you as well? It tears at him more than those arrows have.

He thinks of his mother, who was so delighted knowing he had found someone to love, and someone to be loved by in return, truthfully and wholeheartedly. You two were meant to have a Valyrian wedding in a few moons, as it is custom, and he had been ardently awaiting to see how beautiful you would look in traditional garments. Trying to imagine it now, just as he had many times before, feels like another arrow aimed straight at his heart, plunging deep. Now, he will never get to teach you how to recite the vows in High Valyrian, won’t get to see the sparkle of joy in your eyes when you’re face to face, exchanging them, binding your destinies together for all eternity, even in death.

Death. Jacaerys supposes that if he dies without binding his soul to yours before his ancestors, he won’t have any pieces of himself that he knows will certainly be kept in the sanctity of your heart.

But maybe it is better this way, for you will not have to carry such a heavy burden ensnared in the crevices of your chest, reminding you of all you’ve lost; of all he’s made you lose.

It might seem callous of him to think so, but the thought of you mourning him brings warmth to his veins, even through the chill of the sea. Knowing you have loved him enough to let tears fall from those pretty eyes of yours makes the inevitable hurt a little less.

Someone had cared for him and felt strongly enough to weep at his departure. That, in itself, is a gift. One of the many you had given him. You yourself have been the greatest one, blessing his days and easing his worries with nothing but a look, a word, a kiss. It had come like breathing to you, and he had never felt like he was out of air until now.

The sea is seldom merciful, and no matter how much he tries to beg the Gods to spare him, Jacaerys knows this time it might be in vain.

But how can he not beg? How can he not plead? If not with his voice, then with the remaining beatings of his heart, with the last vestiges of the memories he has of you.

He wishes he would’ve said I love you more often, for it seems like he had been scarce in his vocalization of it. Now, every day doesn’t feel like enough, because no matter how hard he tries, his throat is clogged with water and the words he means to say, if only for the last time. He would’ve hoped it enough to ease the grievances he knows you would feel upon hearing of his demise.

Jacaerys wonders if you would eventually surrender yourself to another. If there would come a day where another man would sweep you off your feet, chipping away at all the parts of Jace burrowed deep in your flesh and blood. The thought makes him want to weep. You forgetting him, replacing the memories you have of him with those of another, as if painting anew on an old canvas one has no use of anymore.

If his promise would’ve rung true, Jace would be by your side now, celebrating the victory at the Gullet, hugging his mother, then you so tight it would’ve knocked the air out of you both. He would’ve twirled you around while laughing, leaning in to press a multitude of kisses onto every patch of skin he could reach, knowing it’ll make you laugh, cheeks flushed, looking at him like he’s your whole world.

May that be the last thing he wishes for before the sea takes him. May your face be the last thing on his mind before there is nothing but darkness, engulfing every bit of light that was you. May he always remember you, even when buried beneath the sea and the sand, wishing for nothing than to hear your voice saying his name one last time, your gaze softening upon looking at him, and maybe, if the Gods allow him one last mercy, the feel of your soft lips upon his own.

He knows he is not worthy, for if he were, Jacaerys would’ve held onto his promise to come back to you, to his mother, to the Realm. But he couldn’t. The Gods were ever cruel and took from him the very essence of his being, cursed to wait for his impending doom.

And wait, he had. Was it another punishment to still feel like he was hanging on but never sinking deep enough? To will him to replay every single memory of you and imagine thousands of others? To feel so close but so far away from the object of all his affections and desires?

Jacaerys would know you anywhere, he thinks. Even blind, hard of hearing, or sinking into nothingness, he would not fail to know you are close.

So why does it feel like you are? Is this another cruel trick before the ancestors welcome him to them? He swears he can feel the soft lilt of your voice somewhere in his vicinity, and it makes him want to move, to lean towards it and taste it. Make sure it’s real.

Please let it be real. To the Old Gods and the New, let it be real. Don’t dangle such hope in front of him only to take it away, for it would feel like getting speared with arrows again and again and—

“I shall watch him,” your voice sounded, just as sweet and lovely as he remembered, but also tired, croaky at the edges. What had happened? Why were you — “You need rest, my queen. Let me, for now.”

My Queen? Mother?

The sounds were a bit muted, but he could hear footsteps, then the creaking hinges of a door, followed by a thud.

A long, hitched sigh followed, the one people do when they try not to let it show they were hurting, right before the tears inevitably fall.

Were you crying? He couldn’t bear when you were. That pretty face he loved so much, marred by tears, undid him every time.

Jacaerys had to see, had to make sure you were okay, that nothing had befallen you too, that the Gods had been merciful to an angel such as you.

He was struggling. His body was not responding the way it should, barely able to feel his hands and feet properly. But that didn’t matter now, for he only needed his eyes to will open so he could glimpse you, even if it was all a cruel fiction of his imagination, probably allowing him one more wish before taking him to the depths forever.

Please.

Please let him see his wife. His lady. His love.

Please.

One last time is all he asks.

If the Gods had ever looked down upon him and smiled, let them look down and smile once more. Grant him this one mercy. Just this once. Only this once.

He knows he’s begging, but what is there to do other than implore with all the strength left in him for one last look at you? In case he is to meet his end soon, let the sight of you be what he goes down feasting upon.

Blessed be The Mother, for I beg for one last mercy, for I shall gaze upon the one I hold most dear before my death and meet my end with a settled heart—

Jacaerys wonders if you are wearing one of your soft gowns, the ones he loves most, for you look like a Fae from the library tomes you so love. Would you still wear the necklace he had given you, or have you thrown it away in a fit of grief and anger because of his recklessness? He wouldn’t fault you for it. Just wished he could give you another to atone for his many sins, for how much sorrow he must’ve brought you.

But he is wrong.

You are wearing the pendant. Your fingers are wrapped around it, settled at the base of your throat, holding so tight your hand shakes, lips pressed to it, murmuring to yourself, eyes closed in prayer.

Are you praying for him to come back to you, just as he was? The thought makes warmth bloom beneath his ribs, licking upwards towards his chest, weaving until it finds his heart, willing it to beat faster. Even so close to dying, he supposes, you still manage to affect him just the same.

If this is but a dream, he hopes he never wakes up. Because standing here, looking at you, just as beautiful as the day he lost you, brings him more peace than any prayer he could’ve uttered. You are so pretty. His pretty girl. Always, always so very pretty. Even now, looking worn out, expression pinched, and hands shaking.

He wants to see your eyes, at least once, before he can't do so again.

"M-may you look at me, my love? For I want to—"

Jacaerys is startled from finishing his sentence by the loud gasp you let out, body jumping beside him, startled and alert, like a doe sensing hunters on its tail. Your eyes are so, so wide with disbelief, watching him with the sort of bewilderment one would when seeing a creature unknown or some oddity come to life. Why were you looking at him like that? If this were but a dream, then why—

"Jace," you whisper, shaky and soft, like a petal swept by the wind, hands trembling so hard the pendant slips through your fingers. "Jace," he hears you repeat, as if the sound of his name in your mouth is something foreign you have to taste again. "Gods, Jace!" Your voice cracks along the syllables of his name, before moving closer, gazing at him with those pretty eyes he near plead to see, now teary and wide, sweeping over him as if checking to see if he's whole. He knows he isn't, for the battle must've left him with more than grievances and a hollowness in his chest that could only be filled if he still had a chance to live.

Your movements are shaky and hesitant, wanting to reach for him but shackled by a fear he does not know yet. Why won't you touch him? He can tell you want nothing more than to feel him beneath your palms, and yet you waver. Why? If this is to be the last mercy before his death, why is he imagining his beloved faltering instead of pressing close, so close and grasping at him like the air one needs to breathe?

Jacaerys tries to lift a hand, grimacing when his body again does not count him as its master, and makes it hard to move properly, feeling a sharp pain lance through his forearm, pulling a hiss from between his teeth. One to which you react instantly, shaking your head as you plead with him not to move, cradling his hand between both of yours, letting Jace feel the softness of your skin again. "No, no, my love, do not move," you sniffle, blinking back those stubborn tears lining your pretty eyelashes. "Please, you must rest. The Maesters said you are not to tire yourself any further."

The Maesters? What ever could you mean?

Blinking his eyes rapidly to dwindle the fog clinging to his vision, Jacaerys's breath catches when your own room comes into view, surrounding both of you. He supposes his imagination could not help but want to remember you in the place where you felt most at ease, the one where you shared your first kiss, first bedding, and many, many other milestones that now feel like a vice around his heart, squeezing tight. Will this be the last time he gets to pine for what once was and for what could never be again?

"H-how do you feel?" Your voice shakes again, snapping him out of his reverie, gaze finding its way back to yours, feeling himself melt just at the sight of you anew. Gods, you couldn't be more gorgeous. "You had been asleep for half of a fortnight. We didn't know if you would ever wake—"

And oh, his heart shatters into pieces when your words trail off into hiccuped sobs, soft chin wobbling, not being able to hold the weight of your grief and sorrow. His sweet wife was crying beside him because of his own foolishness, and there was no punishment severe enough for his transgressions. He could be put to the sword, and it would never erase the guilt in his chest at making you shed even a tear.

It takes him but a few moments to rear his mind from blame to the words you spoke, eyes widening in bewilderment as he registers the information you bestowed upon him. "Asleep?"

His voice is rough and unpolished from disuse, and he's watching you like you brought both salvation and perdition to his door.

But you only nod, squeezing his hand tighter, bringing it up to your mouth to press warm lips upon his skin, feverish and lingering, before cradling the back of his hand against your tear-streaked, warm cheek. "Yes, my love," you confirm, tone lightening with pure relief. "The Gods were watching over you, breathing life into you anew, just like we prayed for."

Breathing life back into you.

Does that mean—

But he cannot hope yet. What if this is nothing but another trickery? The cruelest way to tear his heart asunder by making him believe he escaped from the unforgiving claws of the sea and is now granted another chance at spending a lifetime with you?

Jacaerys can feel a lump form in his throat, near choking him, his lashes dampening rapidly. "Do not forsake me, please," he pleads, willing his hand to clutch at your fingers again, with what little strength he has. "I cannot bear knowing this is but a dream." It is hard to speak as his chest heaves, blubbering like a child as he begs for a miracle from you, who he now hopes is all flesh and bones and not smoke and ash in front of him.

Your expression pinches, studying him carefully, as you so often used to do with your tomes and books in the low candlelight before bed, thumbing each page as you uncovered the secrets written through the dried ink. He feels like one now, as your eyes narrow, before those soft lips part in a round shape, understanding dawning on you.

"Oh, my sweet prince," you whisper, voice damp from your tears, but then the sweetest sound of all accompanies the wetness of your eyes.

A laugh.

Amidst all this confusion, all this befuddling turmoil between dream and reality, you laugh as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, and your mouth dared to form the shape of happiness again.

You turn your head to press a fervent kiss to his hand before moving closer, cradling his face between your palms. Thumbs soften the traces of tears onto his own pale cheeks from being under slumber for so long, willing to see a flush to them soon. "I am flesh and bone, not a mere mirage," you assure, another soft, disbelieving laugh tinkling between you, as if the mere thought of him believing this to be a play of the mind is ridiculous. "The Gods brought you back to me, just as I wished for, my love."

Gods, he thought he'll never get to hear that sound fall from your lips again. It makes his vision blur with tears, lips trembling as he chokes back from babbling again like a babe, but eager to quiet the ghosts of his mind that insist this is a delusion.

"P-prove it to me," he hiccups wetly, no longer preoccupied with how weak he must look, nothing like a prince and all like a man at the end of his hope, begging you to pull him towards salvation. "Please, ñuha jorrāeliarzy," his tongue wraps around the endearment like it never forgot it, full of longing and desperation. "Show me I still have you, for I cannot bear the thought of losing you again—"

He feels his heart breaking and mending itself back together over and over, waiting for you to grant him this one certainty in his hopelessness.

And Gods, you do.

Your lips are on his before he can blubber another supplication, palms tilting him the way you want to as you slot your mouths together so, so tenderly, like two wings of a butterfly touching while they flutter.

He feels it. He tastes it. Your tears, his tears, your promise, his desperation.

Jacaerys wishes he were stronger, for his body is weakened by the tragedy that befell him, not being able to grasp you as fiercely as he would if his limbs had not forsaken him. He can only will his fingers to brush against the folds of your skirts onto the bed, curling into the material until his hand shakes with the ardent want of closeness; of wanting to do more but being cursed into only hoping.

"You have me," you whisper against his mouth, branding the truth on his lips as you continue kissing him. He can feel you smiling into it, and it is unbecoming of him how that only makes him weep harder, his own tears trailing down your cheeks and chin now, too, from how close your faces are pressed together, smushed in your eagerness to prove what he so feared was nothing but a cruel twist of his mind. "And I have you, dārilaros ñuha."

Gods, your tongue tangles around the words so clumsily, no matter how many times he had patiently taught you the right way before, and still, he would never trade it for the world. Jacaerys wants to hear it a thousand times more, and then tenfold that, for the rest of his days.

He's overwhelmed. All the hopelessness he felt before, thinking he would never get to hear the sound of your voice, taste the sweetness of your lips, feel the warmth of your love. And now you are offering him all of those and more, and he feels like he cannot breathe if you dare stop for even a moment.

"Avy jorrāelan, " he sobs, trembling lips barely able to return the soft kisses you so kindly confer to him still. "Avy jorrāelan. Always," the words tumble from his mouth, choked and utterly devout. "Not a moment went by when I did not plead with the Gods to bring me back to you. I curse the sea for trying to wrench me from your side. For its greed and its cruelty, for—"

But you silence him with a firmer press of lips, swallowing the last of his blubbering with the sweetness of your mouth, tasting salt and love and life. You exhale shakily, drawing back so your gazes meet, lips brushing, leaning to nuzzle your noses together as you whisper, voice fervent with conviction. "No more talk of misfortune," you say, nudging his cheek in reprimand with the tip of your nose. "Let me rejoice in having you again."

Jacaerys had always been weak to your whims, never one to deny you anything, least of all when spoken with such longing, such relief, bodies close and shaking with lingering grief and solace alike.

He nods, gathering strength enough to nuzzle you back, eyes fluttering at the feeling, to which you shakily let out another one of those honeyed laughs as you whisper. "But do not think I shall forgive you for trapping me in mine own chambers before rushing to battle with such recklessness."

Oh.

In the midst of all this, he forgot the events that led him to this whole predicament. Closing his mother's door, then yours, vowing to come back in the end, no matter the cost.

"But I have—"

"Coming back in such a state is hardly enough for me to count this as you honoring your vow," you say, eyes narrowing, even teary and full of adoration as they were. And he couldn't find it in himself to feel anything, but the fullness of his chest as it filled with so much love for you, it damn near burst open. "We shall discuss more of this when you've healed properly."

"Yes, my lady," he whispers, having the gall to look a bit sheepish, but alas, a small smile curls at his lips, the normalcy of your reprimand willing his senses into solace.

You harrumph, trying to show displeasure, but he knows there is too much relief blooming between you two now, softening even this attempt at being stern.

He makes an effort to tilt his chin up until his lips brush your tear-streaked, warm cheek, kissing it softly, not moving for a very, very long time.

"I'm sorry," is pressed against the damp skin, and he knows it'll take time and an exuberant amount of grovelling to will you to forgive him, but he wouldn't have it any other way.

Now that he has escaped death's grasp, he has a lifetime ahead of him to try to gain your favour.

And Gods, what a fortunate way to live out the rest of his days.

tag list: @silkaurum @oldtowrs @mademoisellepetite @dreamgirlevill @0nlybitt3r4may @rhaenyras-crown @ghostlybfgf @pinkdoeweirdo

ñuha jorrāeliarzy — my love

dārilaros ñuha — my prince

Avy jorrāelan — i love you

[writing-fanics]

The Cry Heard Across All of Westeros

Part II

Jacaerys Velaryon x Reader

They had never been born into greatness.

No silver hair had crowned their head. No violet eyes had marked them as descendants of Old Valyria. Their house was so small that many at court struggled to remember its name, and by the time they had come to Dragonstone, there had already been so few left to bear it.

Then the war came.

One by one, they were taken from them. An uncle cut down in battle. A cousin lost to sickness. A mother who never recovered from the grief of burying her husband.

Until there was only one.

One name.

One heir.

One soul left to carry a house that history would have otherwise forgotten. And then, impossibly... A dragon chose them.

The maesters argued. The dragonkeepers whispered. Lords scoffed and insisted there had to be some hidden drop of Valyrian blood tucked away somewhere in their family tree.

There wasn't.

No forgotten Targaryen ancestor.

No Velaryon grandmother. No ancient bloodline waiting to be uncovered. Only them.

A dragon had looked upon someone the world deemed ordinary... ...and decided they were worthy. Jacaerys had loved them all the more for it.

Not because they had claimed a dragon. Because they had never let it change them.

They laughed too loudly.

They knelt beside frightened servants without a second thought. They remembered every stableboy's name.

They gathered seashells whenever they found the sea peaceful enough to swim, insisting each one was unique no matter how much he teased them.

They had made Dragonstone feel less lonely. Now Dragonstone had never felt so empty.

The funeral was attended by queens, princes, dragonriders, knights, and lords. Yet Jacaerys could not remember a single face. He heard prayers being spoken.

Someone was crying.

The waves crashed endlessly against the cliffs below. Vermax stood in the distance, restless, letting out low, mournful cries that echoed across the island.

Jacaerys never looked away from the coffin. His fingers rested against the polished wood as if he could somehow feel the warmth beneath it.

He knew he couldn't.

He knew.

But his heart refused to listen. "They're cold," he whispered. No one answered.

"They don't like the cold."

Baela turned away, unable to bear hearing him speak. Even Rhaenyra lowered her eyes. His mother had watched kingdoms burn. She had buried a mother.

Her stillborn daughter.

A son.

She knew grief better than most. Yet nothing she could say would reach her eldest boy. Because this wasn't merely the death of someone he cared deeply for.

It was the death of his future.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

Jacaerys stopped attending council. Stopped eating unless someone forced him. Stopped sleeping for more than an hour at a time. His chambers became filled with scrolls written in languages even the maesters struggled to decipher.

Ancient Valyrian.

Asshai'i.

Fragments recovered from Old Ghis. Legends from Yi Ti.

Anything.

Everything.

"There must be something." He spent nights questioning old dragonkeepers. Days speaking with maesters.

He sent ravens across the Narrow Sea. He paid sailors to retrieve forgotten texts from ruined libraries. Rumors.

Prophecies. Myths. He chased every one of them.

"If dragons returned from extinction," he argued one evening, exhaustion making his voice hoarse, "then why not people?"

No one had an answer he wished to hear.

"There is no magic that returns the dead, my prince."

"There has to be."

"There isn't."

"You haven't looked hard enough."

Eventually...

The scrolls stopped arriving. The ravens returned with empty answers. The last hopeful lead ended in another dead end. Even Mushroom, ever eager with unbelievable tales, had nothing to offer.

Jacaerys realized something that terrified him more than death itself. There truly wasn't a way. Not because he hadn't searched hard enough.

Because the world simply did not allow it.

That evening, he climbed the hill overlooking the sea where they had been laid to rest. The sky was painted with the colors of sunset.

Orange.

Gold.

Crimson.

The same colors that had reflected from dragonfire. The same colors that had danced across the sea the day he'd first realized he loved them.

He knelt before the stone.

His hand brushed away the leaves that had gathered there. "I've been angry with you," he admitted quietly. His voice cracked.

"I know that isn't fair." Silence answered him.

"I've been angry because you left me." Another shaky breath.

"Then I remembered..." His thumb traced the carved letters of their name.

"You didn't choose to leave." Tears blurred his vision. "I would've traded anything."

His crown.

His dragon.

His claim.

His own life.

Anything.

"I would've given the gods everything if it meant one more day with you." His shoulders trembled. "I searched everywhere." His forehead rested against the cool stone.

"I tried."

The words barely escaped him. "I tried so hard." The wind swept gently through the grass.

For just a heartbeat... He could almost imagine they were beside him again. Laughing. Smiling. Rolling their eyes when he became too serious. He smiled despite the tears.

"You always told me I worried too much." A quiet laugh escaped him. "I suppose you were right." He closed his eyes.

"If there are gods..."

"If there is another life..."

"If souls truly find one another again..." He took a long, trembling breath. "I will find you." The promise echoed into the evening. "I don't care if you have another name."

"I don't care if your hair is different."

"If your eyes are different."

"If you're born a prince..."

"...or a commoner."

"If dragons are nothing but stories."

"If I spend an eternity searching."

His hand remained upon their grave. "I will find you in every lifetime."

"In every world."

"In every possibility."

"And when I do..."

A tear slid down his cheek. "I'll fall in love with you all over again."

Centuries passed.

Kingdoms rose.

Kingdoms fell. The dragons became legends. The Iron Throne turned to ash in forgotten stories. Castles became ruins tourists wandered through with cameras in their hands.

The world became something Jacaerys never could have imagined. Cars replaced horses.

Cities touched the clouds.

The skies filled with airplanes instead of dragons.

Yet somehow...

Some promises outlived history.

A crowded street.

People hurried past one another without a second glance.

The air buzzed with conversations, traffic, and the distant sound of music spilling from a nearby café. Two strangers turned the same corner at the exact same moment.

They collided.

"Oh!"

One reached out instinctively, steadying the other before they could fall. "I'm so sorry."

"It's alright."

Their hands lingered for only a second. But that second felt impossibly long.

The noise of the city seemed to fade. Neither of them understood why. Their eyes met.

Something stirred.

Not memory.

Not quite.

Something older. A feeling that settled deep within their souls. As though they had spent lifetimes searching for someone they had forgotten they were missing.

One of them laughed nervously.

"That's strange..."

"What is?"

"I feel like..." They shook their head with a sheepish smile.

"Never mind. It sounds ridiculous."

The other smiled too.

"I was about to say the same thing." Neither knew why their heart refused to let them walk away.

Neither knew why saying goodbye suddenly felt impossible.

One extended a hand.

"I'm Jace."

The other took it. The moment their fingers intertwined, an unfamiliar warmth spread through both of them.

As if somewhere, across countless lifetimes...

A lonely prince kneeling before a weathered grave had finally kept the promise he'd made.

And though neither remembered dragons, nor castles, nor a world of fire and blood... Some part of their souls did. This time, they would have the chance to begin again.

[targlocket]

THE SEA SHALL NOT HAVE ME, FOR I AM ALREADY YOURS

jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader

cw: hotd season 3 spoilers, fix-it fic!, heavy angst, hurt/BIG comfort, fluff so much fluff, mention of violence, mourning but no death, yearning, kissing, jacaerys loves his wife more than anything, (3.8kw).

synopsis: He promised. To you, to himself, right before giving the order. "I will come back to you," Jacaerys whispered, pressing warm lips to wood, as if sealing his silent vow through the door.

a/n: mama will hold ur hand through this. it'll ALL be okay! bawled my eyes out at this but god i needed it. translations for the high valyrian used at the end!

He had never felt so cold before.

A chill seeping into the marrow of his bones and encrusting muscle and tissue, making it hard to move; to breathe.

His eyes battled the shroud of darkness, yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t halt the certainty, which in that instant appeared like his end. Not slumber, not unconsciousness, but his demise’s unyielding grip curled around him like a serpent and squeezed until it wrung every bit of life out of him.

Jacaerys felt the bite of the arrows like a brand, pulsing like another denominator of what was to come, to swallow him whole. One in his neck, one near his heart, and others in places he couldn’t name, but remembered your hands and mouth touching countless times before.

The Gods were cruel to punish him right where your sweetness had been, where your love had touched and imprinted itself onto him, now stained by sharp steel and blood.

He hopes you’ll have it in your heart to forgive him, for he cannot do so for himself. The more the world feels like a distant memory, the more his heart aches, its beating slowing, as if trying to mimic the syllables of your name one last time before it inevitably stops. One last call out to you, willing to see if you would answer, even if he knows that to be impossible.

Would you cry, he wonders, as if he doesn’t already know the answer. Would you curse him? Would you hate him? Would you damn every moment you’ve spent together, turning it into poison and ash?

Jacaerys would not fault you if you did, but his chest feels hollow at the prospect of causing such vile emotions to bloom in your tender heart, most of all towards him.

You are his most precious jewel, and losing his life is one thing, but knowing that means losing you as well? It tears at him more than those arrows have.

He thinks of his mother, who was so delighted knowing he had found someone to love, and someone to be loved by in return, truthfully and wholeheartedly. You two were meant to have a Valyrian wedding in a few moons, as it is custom, and he had been ardently awaiting to see how beautiful you would look in traditional garments. Trying to imagine it now, just as he had many times before, feels like another arrow aimed straight at his heart, plunging deep. Now, he will never get to teach you how to recite the vows in High Valyrian, won’t get to see the sparkle of joy in your eyes when you’re face to face, exchanging them, binding your destinies together for all eternity, even in death.

Death. Jacaerys supposes that if he dies without binding his soul to yours before his ancestors, he won’t have any pieces of himself that he knows will certainly be kept in the sanctity of your heart.

But maybe it is better this way, for you will not have to carry such a heavy burden ensnared in the crevices of your chest, reminding you of all you’ve lost; of all he’s made you lose.

It might seem callous of him to think so, but the thought of you mourning him brings warmth to his veins, even through the chill of the sea. Knowing you have loved him enough to let tears fall from those pretty eyes of yours makes the inevitable hurt a little less.

Someone had cared for him and felt strongly enough to weep at his departure. That, in itself, is a gift. One of the many you had given him. You yourself have been the greatest one, blessing his days and easing his worries with nothing but a look, a word, a kiss. It had come like breathing to you, and he had never felt like he was out of air until now.

The sea is seldom merciful, and no matter how much he tries to beg the Gods to spare him, Jacaerys knows this time it might be in vain.

But how can he not beg? How can he not plead? If not with his voice, then with the remaining beatings of his heart, with the last vestiges of the memories he has of you.

He wishes he would’ve said I love you more often, for it seems like he had been scarce in his vocalization of it. Now, every day doesn’t feel like enough, because no matter how hard he tries, his throat is clogged with water and the words he means to say, if only for the last time. He would’ve hoped it enough to ease the grievances he knows you would feel upon hearing of his demise.

Jacaerys wonders if you would eventually surrender yourself to another. If there would come a day where another man would sweep you off your feet, chipping away at all the parts of Jace burrowed deep in your flesh and blood. The thought makes him want to weep. You forgetting him, replacing the memories you have of him with those of another, as if painting anew on an old canvas one has no use of anymore.

If his promise would’ve rung true, Jace would be by your side now, celebrating the victory at the Gullet, hugging his mother, then you so tight it would’ve knocked the air out of you both. He would’ve twirled you around while laughing, leaning in to press a multitude of kisses onto every patch of skin he could reach, knowing it’ll make you laugh, cheeks flushed, looking at him like he’s your whole world.

May that be the last thing he wishes for before the sea takes him. May your face be the last thing on his mind before there is nothing but darkness, engulfing every bit of light that was you. May he always remember you, even when buried beneath the sea and the sand, wishing for nothing than to hear your voice saying his name one last time, your gaze softening upon looking at him, and maybe, if the Gods allow him one last mercy, the feel of your soft lips upon his own.

He knows he is not worthy, for if he were, Jacaerys would’ve held onto his promise to come back to you, to his mother, to the Realm. But he couldn’t. The Gods were ever cruel and took from him the very essence of his being, cursed to wait for his impending doom.

And wait, he had. Was it another punishment to still feel like he was hanging on but never sinking deep enough? To will him to replay every single memory of you and imagine thousands of others? To feel so close but so far away from the object of all his affections and desires?

Jacaerys would know you anywhere, he thinks. Even blind, hard of hearing, or sinking into nothingness, he would not fail to know you are close.

So why does it feel like you are? Is this another cruel trick before the ancestors welcome him to them? He swears he can feel the soft lilt of your voice somewhere in his vicinity, and it makes him want to move, to lean towards it and taste it. Make sure it’s real.

Please let it be real. To the Old Gods and the New, let it be real. Don’t dangle such hope in front of him only to take it away, for it would feel like getting speared with arrows again and again and—

“I shall watch him,” your voice sounded, just as sweet and lovely as he remembered, but also tired, croaky at the edges. What had happened? Why were you — “You need rest, my queen. Let me, for now.”

My Queen? Mother?

The sounds were a bit muted, but he could hear footsteps, then the creaking hinges of a door, followed by a thud.

A long, hitched sigh followed, the one people do when they try not to let it show they were hurting, right before the tears inevitably fall.

Were you crying? He couldn’t bear when you were. That pretty face he loved so much, marred by tears, undid him every time.

Jacaerys had to see, had to make sure you were okay, that nothing had befallen you too, that the Gods had been merciful to an angel such as you.

He was struggling. His body was not responding the way it should, barely able to feel his hands and feet properly. But that didn’t matter now, for he only needed his eyes to will open so he could glimpse you, even if it was all a cruel fiction of his imagination, probably allowing him one more wish before taking him to the depths forever.

Please.

Please let him see his wife. His lady. His love.

Please.

One last time is all he asks.

If the Gods had ever looked down upon him and smiled, let them look down and smile once more. Grant him this one mercy. Just this once. Only this once.

He knows he’s begging, but what is there to do other than implore with all the strength left in him for one last look at you? In case he is to meet his end soon, let the sight of you be what he goes down feasting upon.

Blessed be The Mother, for I beg for one last mercy, for I shall gaze upon the one I hold most dear before my death and meet my end with a settled heart—

Jacaerys wonders if you are wearing one of your soft gowns, the ones he loves most, for you look like a Fae from the library tomes you so love. Would you still wear the necklace he had given you, or have you thrown it away in a fit of grief and anger because of his recklessness? He wouldn’t fault you for it. Just wished he could give you another to atone for his many sins, for how much sorrow he must’ve brought you.

But he is wrong.

You are wearing the pendant. Your fingers are wrapped around it, settled at the base of your throat, holding so tight your hand shakes, lips pressed to it, murmuring to yourself, eyes closed in prayer.

Are you praying for him to come back to you, just as he was? The thought makes warmth bloom beneath his ribs, licking upwards towards his chest, weaving until it finds his heart, willing it to beat faster. Even so close to dying, he supposes, you still manage to affect him just the same.

If this is but a dream, he hopes he never wakes up. Because standing here, looking at you, just as beautiful as the day he lost you, brings him more peace than any prayer he could’ve uttered. You are so pretty. His pretty girl. Always, always so very pretty. Even now, looking worn out, expression pinched, and hands shaking.

He wants to see your eyes, at least once, before he can't do so again.

"M-may you look at me, my love? For I want to—"

Jacaerys is startled from finishing his sentence by the loud gasp you let out, body jumping beside him, startled and alert, like a doe sensing hunters on its tail. Your eyes are so, so wide with disbelief, watching him with the sort of bewilderment one would when seeing a creature unknown or some oddity come to life. Why were you looking at him like that? If this were but a dream, then why—

"Jace," you whisper, shaky and soft, like a petal swept by the wind, hands trembling so hard the pendant slips through your fingers. "Jace," he hears you repeat, as if the sound of his name in your mouth is something foreign you have to taste again. "Gods, Jace!" Your voice cracks along the syllables of his name, before moving closer, gazing at him with those pretty eyes he near plead to see, now teary and wide, sweeping over him as if checking to see if he's whole. He knows he isn't, for the battle must've left him with more than grievances and a hollowness in his chest that could only be filled if he still had a chance to live.

Your movements are shaky and hesitant, wanting to reach for him but shackled by a fear he does not know yet. Why won't you touch him? He can tell you want nothing more than to feel him beneath your palms, and yet you waver. Why? If this is to be the last mercy before his death, why is he imagining his beloved faltering instead of pressing close, so close and grasping at him like the air one needs to breathe?

Jacaerys tries to lift a hand, grimacing when his body again does not count him as its master, and makes it hard to move properly, feeling a sharp pain lance through his forearm, pulling a hiss from between his teeth. One to which you react instantly, shaking your head as you plead with him not to move, cradling his hand between both of yours, letting Jace feel the softness of your skin again. "No, no, my love, do not move," you sniffle, blinking back those stubborn tears lining your pretty eyelashes. "Please, you must rest. The Maesters said you are not to tire yourself any further."

The Maesters? What ever could you mean?

Blinking his eyes rapidly to dwindle the fog clinging to his vision, Jacaerys's breath catches when your own room comes into view, surrounding both of you. He supposes his imagination could not help but want to remember you in the place where you felt most at ease, the one where you shared your first kiss, first bedding, and many, many other milestones that now feel like a vice around his heart, squeezing tight. Will this be the last time he gets to pine for what once was and for what could never be again?

"H-how do you feel?" Your voice shakes again, snapping him out of his reverie, gaze finding its way back to yours, feeling himself melt just at the sight of you anew. Gods, you couldn't be more gorgeous. "You had been asleep for half of a fortnight. We didn't know if you would ever wake—"

And oh, his heart shatters into pieces when your words trail off into hiccuped sobs, soft chin wobbling, not being able to hold the weight of your grief and sorrow. His sweet wife was crying beside him because of his own foolishness, and there was no punishment severe enough for his transgressions. He could be put to the sword, and it would never erase the guilt in his chest at making you shed even a tear.

It takes him but a few moments to rear his mind from blame to the words you spoke, eyes widening in bewilderment as he registers the information you bestowed upon him. "Asleep?"

His voice is rough and unpolished from disuse, and he's watching you like you brought both salvation and perdition to his door.

But you only nod, squeezing his hand tighter, bringing it up to your mouth to press warm lips upon his skin, feverish and lingering, before cradling the back of his hand against your tear-streaked, warm cheek. "Yes, my love," you confirm, tone lightening with pure relief. "The Gods were watching over you, breathing life into you anew, just like we prayed for."

Breathing life back into you.

Does that mean—

But he cannot hope yet. What if this is nothing but another trickery? The cruelest way to tear his heart asunder by making him believe he escaped from the unforgiving claws of the sea and is now granted another chance at spending a lifetime with you?

Jacaerys can feel a lump form in his throat, near choking him, his lashes dampening rapidly. "Do not forsake me, please," he pleads, willing his hand to clutch at your fingers again, with what little strength he has. "I cannot bear knowing this is but a dream." It is hard to speak as his chest heaves, blubbering like a child as he begs for a miracle from you, who he now hopes is all flesh and bones and not smoke and ash in front of him.

Your expression pinches, studying him carefully, as you so often used to do with your tomes and books in the low candlelight before bed, thumbing each page as you uncovered the secrets written through the dried ink. He feels like one now, as your eyes narrow, before those soft lips part in a round shape, understanding dawning on you.

"Oh, my sweet prince," you whisper, voice damp from your tears, but then the sweetest sound of all accompanies the wetness of your eyes.

A laugh.

Amidst all this confusion, all this befuddling turmoil between dream and reality, you laugh as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders, and your mouth dared to form the shape of happiness again.

You turn your head to press a fervent kiss to his hand before moving closer, cradling his face between your palms. Thumbs soften the traces of tears onto his own pale cheeks from being under slumber for so long, willing to see a flush to them soon. "I am flesh and bone, not a mere mirage," you assure, another soft, disbelieving laugh tinkling between you, as if the mere thought of him believing this to be a play of the mind is ridiculous. "The Gods brought you back to me, just as I wished for, my love."

Gods, he thought he'll never get to hear that sound fall from your lips again. It makes his vision blur with tears, lips trembling as he chokes back from babbling again like a babe, but eager to quiet the ghosts of his mind that insist this is a delusion.

"P-prove it to me," he hiccups wetly, no longer preoccupied with how weak he must look, nothing like a prince and all like a man at the end of his hope, begging you to pull him towards salvation. "Please, ñuha jorrāeliarzy," his tongue wraps around the endearment like it never forgot it, full of longing and desperation. "Show me I still have you, for I cannot bear the thought of losing you again—"

He feels his heart breaking and mending itself back together over and over, waiting for you to grant him this one certainty in his hopelessness.

And Gods, you do.

Your lips are on his before he can blubber another supplication, palms tilting him the way you want to as you slot your mouths together so, so tenderly, like two wings of a butterfly touching while they flutter.

He feels it. He tastes it. Your tears, his tears, your promise, his desperation.

Jacaerys wishes he were stronger, for his body is weakened by the tragedy that befell him, not being able to grasp you as fiercely as he would if his limbs had not forsaken him. He can only will his fingers to brush against the folds of your skirts onto the bed, curling into the material until his hand shakes with the ardent want of closeness; of wanting to do more but being cursed into only hoping.

"You have me," you whisper against his mouth, branding the truth on his lips as you continue kissing him. He can feel you smiling into it, and it is unbecoming of him how that only makes him weep harder, his own tears trailing down your cheeks and chin now, too, from how close your faces are pressed together, smushed in your eagerness to prove what he so feared was nothing but a cruel twist of his mind. "And I have you, dārilaros ñuha."

Gods, your tongue tangles around the words so clumsily, no matter how many times he had patiently taught you the right way before, and still, he would never trade it for the world. Jacaerys wants to hear it a thousand times more, and then tenfold that, for the rest of his days.

He's overwhelmed. All the hopelessness he felt before, thinking he would never get to hear the sound of your voice, taste the sweetness of your lips, feel the warmth of your love. And now you are offering him all of those and more, and he feels like he cannot breathe if you dare stop for even a moment.

"Avy jorrāelan, " he sobs, trembling lips barely able to return the soft kisses you so kindly confer to him still. "Avy jorrāelan. Always," the words tumble from his mouth, choked and utterly devout. "Not a moment went by when I did not plead with the Gods to bring me back to you. I curse the sea for trying to wrench me from your side. For its greed and its cruelty, for—"

But you silence him with a firmer press of lips, swallowing the last of his blubbering with the sweetness of your mouth, tasting salt and love and life. You exhale shakily, drawing back so your gazes meet, lips brushing, leaning to nuzzle your noses together as you whisper, voice fervent with conviction. "No more talk of misfortune," you say, nudging his cheek in reprimand with the tip of your nose. "Let me rejoice in having you again."

Jacaerys had always been weak to your whims, never one to deny you anything, least of all when spoken with such longing, such relief, bodies close and shaking with lingering grief and solace alike.

He nods, gathering strength enough to nuzzle you back, eyes fluttering at the feeling, to which you shakily let out another one of those honeyed laughs as you whisper. "But do not think I shall forgive you for trapping me in mine own chambers before rushing to battle with such recklessness."

Oh.

In the midst of all this, he forgot the events that led him to this whole predicament. Closing his mother's door, then yours, vowing to come back in the end, no matter the cost.

"But I have—"

"Coming back in such a state is hardly enough for me to count this as you honoring your vow," you say, eyes narrowing, even teary and full of adoration as they were. And he couldn't find it in himself to feel anything, but the fullness of his chest as it filled with so much love for you, it damn near burst open. "We shall discuss more of this when you've healed properly."

"Yes, my lady," he whispers, having the gall to look a bit sheepish, but alas, a small smile curls at his lips, the normalcy of your reprimand willing his senses into solace.

You harrumph, trying to show displeasure, but he knows there is too much relief blooming between you two now, softening even this attempt at being stern.

He makes an effort to tilt his chin up until his lips brush your tear-streaked, warm cheek, kissing it softly, not moving for a very, very long time.

"I'm sorry," is pressed against the damp skin, and he knows it'll take time and an exuberant amount of grovelling to will you to forgive him, but he wouldn't have it any other way.

Now that he has escaped death's grasp, he has a lifetime ahead of him to try to gain your favour.

And Gods, what a fortunate way to live out the rest of his days.

tag list: @silkaurum @oldtowrs @mademoisellepetite @dreamgirlevill @0nlybitt3r4may @rhaenyras-crown @ghostlybfgf @pinkdoeweirdo

ñuha jorrāeliarzy — my love

dārilaros ñuha — my prince

Avy jorrāelan — i love you

[mariposium]

➶ : THE LOST PRINCE — jacaerys velaryon

summary — while combing the beach for treasures, you stumble upon the unconscious, grievously injured body of a soldier. you decide to help him, but in doing so find love in a man that may never be able to return it. (11.4k)

featured — jacaerys velaryon / fem!reader

content — spoilers! tread carefully, fluff and ANGST, angst w/ a happy ending, hurt/comfort, canon divergent, jace lives, light medical descriptions, reader cares a lot for jace, dual pov!!!, inexplicit mental health struggles (reader’s deceased father), dead vermax ☹, 18+ MDNI implied sexual content/fade-to-black, tw there is a baby

a/n — am i anywhere near caught up with hotd? no. did i write this in spite of that? yes. i'm sorry if things don't make sense or are not in line with canon. the wiki and i did our best!

(cross-posted on ao3)

The cerulean waves lap at the silver beach, ebbing and flowing with the morrow’s breeze. Quiet has finally settled on the shores after a night of war and destruction. A battle beyond these argent sands occurred out in the gullet. All night, the savagery had kept you awake. This morrow, you collect treasures from your fish nets.

You step carefully across the sands, adjusting your silk scarf tighter around your mouth and nose. You bend the knee at the first net.

You heave it onto the shore. Nothing except too-small pieces of fabric and inedible shelled fish are in this one. You empty it and release the fish back to the embrace of the sea.

You stand again, taking a few more steps down. Your mind drifts as you fall into a rhythm of checking these nets, pocketing pretty shells and scraps of metal. Wonder pricks at the back of your neck as you imagine the war. As the lone tenant of this pier, you had never had to consider the rites of the Targaryen rulers. Most of your neighbors had already chosen their sides, even if it did not really matter in the scheme of things—neither of those fighting for the throne cared for their subjects, especially not those at the bottom, like you.

Rulers like these bled the common man dry while claiming it to be an act of love.

You move a little rougher with the next net. Nothing but rocks and debris in this one. You imagine it will be a while until you find a worthy treat. The Gods are usually not as generous on solemn days like these. War makes monsters out of men, and the Gods scorn those who partake.

When you stand again, your eyes drift a little further down the bank. At the edge of the shore, a clump of trees catch your gaze. The water is darker there, cloaked in shadow. The shrubbery bends so far, it almost touches the water. You draw closer, eyebrows furrowed.

A dark lump sits entangled by brush, barely concealed by the cluster of foliage. You draw closer, hesitantly. As your eyes adjust, you realize it is not a lump of debris, but a body. Your breaths quicken.

If the person is alive, would it hurt you? Never trust a soldier, your father had once told you.

You bend your knee just as if you are checking a fish net. Your hands unfurl from your sides, reaching out hesitantly. You can only see his body. It is clothed in thick leather, a quality of which you’ve never seen before. Several arrows stick out of his torso. A pool of blood stains the sand maroon beneath him.

You pull back the shrubbery to see his face. You startle at the sight, falling back onto your bum.

His eyes—they were open—albeit, he did not seem to see much of anything. His skin was not grey and placid like the bodies that you had seen before. Worse, you’d heard something when you held yourself over him. A breath, shuddering through his parted lips.

“Alive,” you whisper in awe. To survive so many arrows, then the tumultuous sea… it would take more than just courage. It would take something otherworldly. You know then that your decision has been made.

A huge piece of driftwood sits beneath him in the sand. You push it aside to straddle him. Gently, you grab his arm and sling it around your neck.

The rest of your journey back to the cabin passes in a frenzied blur. You move quickly, trying to spend as little time as possible forcing the grievously hurt man onto his feet. He lets out little grumbles as you move, head lolling this way and that like a puppet cut from its strings. You make it inside and push open the door that your father used to live, laying him onto his back on the bed.

Blood immediately infiltrates the off-white of the duvet, crimson floating before your vision. He groans continuously as you break the ends off of the arrows—serving as a reminder to the heart that still valiantly pumped beneath his ribs. Once they are off, you are able to slide the armor off. 

The tunic comes easily. It seems to be made of a material that deflects water, so when you drop it onto the floor, a puddle of liquid forms in its spot. You struggle a little with his breeches—though, those too come easily with a little pull.

After he is naked, you stare at his body in silence for a moment. You have helped men with injuries before. Arrow injuries just like these, even. But you’d never helped a man with this many. 

You reach out to touch his cold cheek. He is so young—had to be your own age. Too young for the cruel, unflinching hold of war. Gently, you close his eyelids, shutting away the dark brown of his unseeing gaze. He did not need to be witness to this.

You steel your nerves and clench your fists a few times to breathe life back into your numb fingers. Reaching into the bedside table, you grab your supplies—bandages, a bottle of rum, a couple cloths, and several blunt blades.

“I’m sorry, if you are awake,” you tell him, poising the knife along the edge of one of the arrow heads. “This will hurt a lot.”

Hours pass quickly under your blade. Each of the five arrows is cut away, sewn with fishing line, disinfected with rum, and bandaged tightly. Sweat falls into your eyes as you step away triumphantly, and you lift a hand to brush it off. As they are levelled with your eyes, you realize your hands are a bloody mess. Your stomach churns and you force the appendages away.

You hover over him a moment longer. You study the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the fluttering of his eyelids. He had a strong nose and jaw, thick dark eyelashes and a head of water-matted brunet hair. By all appearances, he was quite common-looking. He had the complexion and hair of any man you’d pass on the way to town. But something about him—the quality of his armor, the blemishlessness of his skin, it screamed something ethereal.

But even Gods can be killed. 

Your mystery man is not out of the woods yet. The chances of any of those arrows not nicking anything inside him is next to none. He’s also lost a lot of blood. The sheets are covered in it, not to mention the amount he was sure to have lost at sea.

You draw the hair sea-slicked to his head away from his forehead. Your hand slides to cup his cheek. He might never wake again. Your kind hand may be the last he knows. You wonder how many people missed him—if they were sitting with baited breaths, waiting for him to write. If only you could ease their worries.

You pull away and leave the room before your eyes can fill with traitorous saltwater tears.

There are few certainties in life. Ever since you were but a child, you had recognized this. Life is tumultuous and unfair. It takes and it takes, until you can give no longer. 

The sea is a comfort. She does not take, she gives. Usually, she gives you more valuable things than a body, but you try not to question her motives.

It’s been a day since you patched him and he still has not woken. His chest continues to move despite this disconcerting sign, and that remains your only comfort. You stood near-vigil at his beside for most of the hours following. Anticipatory nerves fill your every waking second, even at night when you lay awake trying to sleep.

You recognize that the danger has not fully passed for him. He had not had water in who knows how long. Eventually, his organs would fail due to dehydration and blood loss. That is, if the internal bleeding didn’t kill him first.

You also cannot help the hope that blooms in your chest as you gaze upon his face. Perhaps it is the fact that his skin seems more alive as of late. The fact that you have seen his eyes move behind his eyelids more and more often. The fact that you were quite insufferably lonely, and therefore latched onto any individual who came your way—alive or barely, as in the case of this man in your cabin.

You want him to survive because you want to know him. It is a thought that scares you as much as it invigorates you.

By his bedside, after a long morrow of scavenging by the tide, you dump your satchel of goodies on the now-clean duvet. (Now that had been annoying to do—having to move his admittedly quite heavy body over to remove the sheets). You begin to sort through them, cataloging them.

The silence is unsettling, so you begin to speak.

“The sea has been kind this morrow,” you say softly. You pick up a smooth rainbow shell, twisting it this way and that in the light. “These will sell for a couple of silvers.”

You put the shell down and then grab your cloth, gently stroking away sand and debris.

“My father taught me to do this,” you tell the man, “he taught me everything I know.”

Satisfied with its shimmer, you trade the shell for a clam. You pop it open forcefully—apologizing profusely to the creature as you did—and stick your fingers into the dark crevice you created.

“No pearl,” you report when your fingers come up empty. You bring the clam up to your eyes, stroking its now-broken shell. “I’m sorry, friend.”

The last piece had been one you were excited for. You grab the shrapnel of metal gently in your palms, categorizing the weight and feel of it with your hands. 

“Probably off a shield,” you decide. “I’m sure a blacksmith would like this.”

You put the metal down and let out a heavy sigh. You stare at the man, worrying your lip between your teeth. Perhaps some foolish part of you had hoped he would wake up to the sound of your voice, like the stories you had read as a girl.

But life is no story, as you had to continually remind yourself. Things like that just didn’t happen.

You go through a few other bits and bobs in silence, mood dampened by reality. A couple of small shells, a nail, and a scrap of maroon fabric. You aren’t sure why you grabbed the fabric—perhaps you’d wanted to try and sew something. It is quite pretty, you decide. It had belonged to someone once.

Once you finish polishing the items, you lift your head up to look at the man. Thoughts and images flash through your mind. What was he like? You wonder. He seems strong, based on his broad shoulders and defined stomach. But he also didn’t have the worn skin of a common man. He didn’t have callouses on his hands or fading scars upon his torso. He had to be a prince, you decide. A prince of a faraway land, hoping to bargain peace between the two feuding Targaryen houses.

You nod, satisfied with that recreation of events. Yes, a prince. A just, altruistic one. Perhaps he knew of the war and wished to come and save the small-folk.

You look down at his pale hand resting lifelessly upon the duvet. You swallow thickly. 

“You must wake soon,” you whisper, “the kingdom needs you.”

He does not stir. You sigh and gather your things into your satchel. If he is still not awake by the morrow, you decide, you will return his body to the sea.

That evening, you sit at the table with a plate of roasted fish and a glass of water. The fish is one of two meals you eat regularly. The other was for special occasions, depending on if you were able to procure bread and potatoes at the markets. 

You always eat the eye of the fish first. You do not like it looking at you as you eat its flesh. It feels wrong. The eye is not very tasty, though. The odd texture always makes you vaguely nauseous–the gooey, chewy ball. Your father had always laughed at you when you ate fish. He was not of an imaginative mind. He did not see the fish as being once alive, like you did. He did not imagine it swimming beneath the tide, with all its other fishy friends–before it was snared by ruthless hands and suffocated by the open air.

You stare at the vacant chair across from you with an empty feeling in your chest. It had been so long since you had a companion at supper time. Your father had not spoken much, but his presence alone was always enough to keep you happy. He is gone now, like with the ebbing of the tide, and all that is left is the shadow of the person he used to be.

His fishing pole, next to the door. His journal, where he kept extensive notes about what he found out on the sea during the day. His bed that now had a new, warm body sleeping in it.

You wonder what your father would have done, had he found the man. You take another bite of the fish, forcing it down with a thick swallow. Would he have left him? You had never thought of him as being cruel, but you also know he loathed unwelcome responsibility. He had enough of an imagination to conjure horrible images of betrayal and hurt, and so you decide he probably wouldn’t have brought him home to you. He had too much to lose to do so. Everyone did.

And so why did you? Perhaps, you think, you have lost everything that matters most to you already.

You stare down at the limp skeleton of the fish on your plate. You had never seen a person die of dehydration. Your father had once told you a story about a man he knew that had, and it sounded awful. 

You pick up your dinner knife, a sharp, clean-edged blade, and hold it in the candlelight. The silver edge catches the light, highlighting the sharp point. Your hand trembles as you study it.

Would it be quick, painless—slitting the sleeping prince’s throat? Or would it be messy and painful? Would it draw him out of sleep and would he gaze upon you with hurting eyes as he clutched the gaping hole in his neck?

Regret gnaws at you. As time draws on, you begin to think that the mercy you had granted your prince had been nothing but a farce. That by saving him for one moment had only just prolonged his suffering.

You put the knife in your satchel and stand. It is cruel, keeping a person alive only to die in a violent manner like this–it is inhumane. 

You take quick steps to the bedroom. 

You have never killed a person before. Your father had plenty. He always said the eyes, you can hear his voice in your mind now, the eyes are always the worst part. 

You can’t eat the prince’s eyes like you can the fish’s. No matter what you did, you would have to see those eyes. And with it, the betrayal. You stand over his prone body now. 

A sliver of moonlight streams in from the open window behind you, casting cool light across the heaving chest. He remains impassive, completely unaware of what you were about to do. You do not realize you are crying until you bring the knife up to your eyes and catch a glimpse of your face in the silver.

“I…I am sorry, friend,” you repeat the same mantra you had told so many clams before as you pried your fingers in their mouths, looking for a pearl. “But this is a mercy.”

Your hands tremble like windblown seagrass as you lift the knife against his skin. A moment of hesitation prevents you from acting. And it is just enough for a pale hand to wrap around your own and for dark eyes to snap open.

“Waaa-ter.”

You let out a sharp gasp and yank your hand away. The man watches you, his visage crumpled with pain.

He repeats himself, voice quieter than the first time. “Water, please…”

You move into action. You dart out of the room, hands fumbling with the metal bucket by your door. You run across the moonlit shore to the well that sits on the edge of the woods. Quickly, you fill the bucket. You curse yourself all the while–mind racing in what-ifs and guilt-ridden condemnations. 

You heave the bucket back into the house and grab the same goblet you had used with your own water. You take a huge scoop and shuffle back into the bedroom like a child caught with their hand on the sweets plate.

The man is still awake when you re-enter, his eyes wide and eyebrows furrowed. You drop next to him on the bed and angle his head and neck up onto the pillows behind him. Finally, you fulfill his request. He drinks like a man in Essos who has wandered the Red Waste for weeks; heavy, desperate gulps of the liquid. Some fall and drip down his side, which you dab away with a nearby cloth.

When he finally drinks it all, he pulls back, his breaths labored and eyes half-lidded.

“W…Where am I?” he finally says once he has caught his breath. You notice him scanning the room as if trying to find the answer written in the stone.

You decide not to answer honestly. You fear what his reaction will be if he forces himself to recall the battle. Instead you say, “you are safe.”

He stares at you as if only just noticing you. His dark eyes are swallowed almost completely by night, exhausted and ridden with heavy bags. He lifts a hand, as if to touch you, but it falls short. His eyes flutter, and then shut.

He falls unconscious. You touch two hands to his chest to confirm his heart still beats steadily. You let out a breath you had not realized you captured when you find his pulse.

Shame hits you like a tidal wave. You were going to… you were going to kill him. You are shocked at the tears that swim in your eyes. You stand in a hurry–not without remembering to pull the duvet back up to his chest–and stumble out of the room. 

The adrenaline has all but worn away now. Tears clog your eyes, slipping down your cheeks. You allow yourself to feel the emotions–all of them. Relief, shame, exhaustion, and fear overwhelm you completely and you can do nothing but sob. On the table in front of you, the skeleton of the fish and the silver knife mock you without having to say a word.

Waking feels like drowning. Fighting against the wave ahead of you, trying to get your head above water. Then when you finally surface, you fall behind the waves again.

Jacaerys wakes to the sun in his eyes and a warmth around his waist. He thinks for a moment, perhaps, he is in a dream. Another barrier between him and wakefulness. Then, the pain hits him. No, dreams don’t feel like this.

The groan stumbles past his lips before he can stop it and his eyes shoot open. Everything is pain. It surrounds him like dragonfire and steals his breath. He trembles as he uses all his strength to cradle his side.

“Gods,” he murmurs. He feels beneath his fingers the familiar texture of a bandage. Someone helped him.

Helped him. Helped him from what? He gasps as memory rolls over him. Drowning. Arrows piercing through skin and muscle. A dragon’s roar of pain. No, not just any dragon—

“Vermax,” he cries out, tears springing to his eyes. No, no, no…

But it was true. His mind had never failed him before. His dragon. His beautiful dragon. Falling to the bottom of the ocean like a ship’s anchor. He tries to move, to jump to his feet, but he can’t. Pain ricochets up his side, and he can literally feel the side of his chest pulling taut. 

He stares at the ceiling above him with tears fogging his eyes and coating his tongue in salt. For one long moment, he despairs. Why? Why would he be punished this way? Forced to live without Vermax? The bond between rider and dragon could not—should not be severed. Not by something as futile as war. He can’t breathe, can’t think. Everything is despair.

He should have died. Living is not a gift in this condition. His knuckles go white against the duvet. Anger sweeps over him—hot, potent fury.

He curses everyone who caused this. Aemond, Alicent, Aegon, even fucking Helaena. He doesn’t care. They’ll all pay.

But not like this. He finally shuffles himself into a seated position, cringing at the pain that shoots from every direction. Every small movement feels like another arrow tearing his skin. 

His feet are unsteady as he finds his footing. For a second, he fears he might not be able to even walk. Then, he finds himself. He grabs his breeches off the table and slowly, painfully, shrugs them on. He leaves his chest bare—unable to even think about having to lift his arms over his head. He keeps one hand on the wall and the other around his waist as he stumbles across the room. 

The place he is in is frighteningly humble. There’s nothing unnecessary here. Everything has a purpose, a function. No gilded armoires, tall candlesticks, or commissioned portraits. Bare, cobblestone walls, sparse furniture (all glaringly handmade and rustic), and cobwebs hanging in every corner. 

Jacaerys moves slowly from the room he started in to the short hallway that opens into a tiny living area. A large fireplace is the only comfort to him. A pot of a molten, unappetizing glob bubbles above the waning fire. 

There are very few personal effects here. Nothing to propose any kind of hint or insight. Out the window of the front of the ramshackle building, he sees amber light flickering across a wide sea.

His breath shudders out of his lips. He doesn't recognize this place at all. He’s hurt. He has no dragon. He’s never felt worse in his entire life.

All of what energy he summoned flees him in that moment. He practically collapses into a nearby chair and it creaks pathetically under his weight. He hangs his head and a soft sob escapes his lips. 

Tears tremble down his cheeks and onto the wood table beneath his hand. His mind races, memory and pain and fury collide in a war of its very own. Vermax, his mind strays. The perfect dragon. Gone. He digs his nails into the grain of the table beneath his hands, trying to recapture something to ground him. Short, hyperventilating breaths escape his lips—his vision fogs.

Then, everything clears. His hands unclench and he leans back in the chair. He stares at the ceiling, measuring his breaths. You are still alive, he tells himself. Therefore you are still useful.

Because perhaps that was his real fear. That he would no longer be of use—that he would no longer be worth fighting for. He’d always measured his worth in terms of what he could provide to his mother. Perhaps the truth is that his worth stretches beyond that.

He hears the sound of crunching footsteps outside. He sits up in the chair, eyes flickering toward the door. Ahead of him, he notices with a jolt, a knife lay discarded on the table. He grabs it before he can think the better of it, brandishing it like he actually could fight his way out of this mess.

He ignores the pain throbbing in his side and pushes himself to stand again. He won’t die now. He can’t.

The door creaks open slowly, and he angles the knife in front of himself protectively. 

But the figure that crosses the threshold isn’t what he’d been expecting. Wide eyes and a mouth fallen open into an oval. Hands clutching a satchel of… is that a seashell? 

She drops the satchel with immediacy, hands flying into the air. Jacaerys thinks he hears something break inside.

He keeps the arm holding the knife up despite the involuntary tremble that has begun in his arm. A cool sweat travels down his temple. His vision wanes. Despite her… figure (she hadn’t brandished a weapon a day in her life, he thinks), he knows looks can be deceiving. 

“You’re up.” She does not immediately acknowledge the weapon in his hand. She’s either brave or simply ignorant. Jace is not sure what he’s more afraid of.

“Who—“ he starts to speak, but he breaks into a coughing fit. His throat feels like it is on fire. She takes a step forward, as if to help or harm him, but he freezes her in place when he turns his gaze back onto her warningly. “Who are you?”

She tells him her name. Then she quickly adds, “you washed up on the beach in front of my cabin. I found you.”

He bends over to clutch his side. He notices her eyes widen.

“Please, I’m not sure you should be up. You sustained massive injuries,” she tells him. “Your body needs rest.”

“I cannot—“ he scoffs, then coughs again. “I cannot simply rest. I must leave. I must…” 

A pang in his side makes him gasp and hunch over. The knife falls with a clatter against the floor but he can’t seem to bring himself to retrieve it. Everything feels like it is in slow motion, out of his reach and control.

She grabs him around the waist before he tips over. He stays conscious long enough for her to lead him back to bed, but he falls within the waves again the second his head hits the pillow.

Consciousness returns to him in fragments. The sound of footsteps by his head. A burning pain spreading up his chest, to which he thinks he shouts, but cannot prevent. The feeling of a wet cloth soaking his tears and sweat. 

When his eyes finally flutter open, it is dark in the room. A candle burns to a nub on the nightstand next to him, wax coating the wood. Sorrow fills his chest again so quickly it nearly steals his breath.

He sees her slip into the room like a wraith come to haunt him. It is ridiculous, he thinks, that she should be the one to stand over him. On any other day, in any other circumstance, she would not put up much of a fight. Now, he is at her mercy.

“You tore one of your stitches.” Her voice is soft, but it reverberates in his ear drums and skull like a dragon’s final roar. He clenches his jaw and turns his head toward the moon that hangs like a silver noose in the sky. “I had to sew it back while you were resting.”

Jace doesn’t reply. He isn’t sure he would know what to say. How does he encompass all his feelings—or even one of them, into a coherent thought? It isn’t possible.

She draws closer and he tenses. She notices. “Are you going to try and hurt me again?” 

He considers her for a moment, then shakes his head.

She pauses, thinking about something, then she settles upon his side of the bed. Jace notices for the first time since she’s entered the room, that she has a bowl of that wretched-looking soup in her hands.

“Here,” she says, outstretching the bowl. He leans back. She pulls away slightly. “Sorry.” She cringes like even she realizes that the soup is nothing to write home about. “It is all I have.”

Jace swallows thickly. He reaches a trembling hand out. She smiles, relieved.

He goes to take the bowl, but his arm feels weak. He pulls back. “Perhaps…” he pauses, clears his throat. “Perhaps you could…”

Asking for help has never come easy to him. Being weak is not something he is accustomed to. His other hand clenches the sheet in his fist.

She nods. He does not have to be explicit. He untenses his hand as she leans forward, a small bit of soup in the wood spoon.

The first bite makes his face twist. She laughs.

“I truly am sorry,” she says. “I know it is probably not what you are used to.”

It takes every bit of his strength to swallow the offending liquid. It is strangely salty. It tastes like the brine that filled his mouth when he— 

He cuts the thought short. No need to ruin his own mood again.

“Something happened to you out there,” she says as if she’d read his mind, and although it should be a question, it is not, “something bad.”

He swallows another gulp of the soup. He does not reply. 

She must realize he does not want to speak on that, for she does not press the matter. She lifts the spoon again and he forces down another sip.

“The soup has fish and some potatoes—oh, and they had carrots at the market today, so I put those in too. Perhaps those are the disgusting parts. I won’t purchase them again.”

Jace does not have the energy, or perhaps the heart, to tell her it is certainly not the vegetables that have made the soup taste like what sea captains scrape off the bottom of their ships.

She scoops another bit of soup and he forces it down. His mouth had begun to retain that saltiness even when he no longer had the soup in his mouth, like a stain one can’t wash away with soap and water.

She does not speak for a long pause, but Jace suddenly feels a bit antsy. It feels too intimate an act to not be speaking.

He swallows another mouthful, then clears his throat to speak. “Did you catch the fish?” he asks, his voice hoarse.

“Oh, no, no,” she replies to him like it is a preposterous suggestion. Like killing fish is below her standards. “I just buy them.”

He frowns around the spoon in his mouth and hurriedly swallows the liquid. “Then why were you on the shore when you found me?”

She stirs the foul soup around for a moment, thinking hard about something, then she looks up at him. “I collect things. Shells, scrap metal, and fabrics. You would be surprised what comes with the morning tide, and even more what people would pay for them.”

An odd business, Jace can’t help but think. It seems like a hard thing to have to rely solely on the Narrow Sea for food and shelter. The Narrow Sea, he remembers with a sudden clarity. That is near where they fought.

“Are you going to tell your name?” Her head is tilted as she asks this, the soup bowl now empty and forgotten upon her folded legs.

He ponders the question for a moment. He could tell her his full name, but it might backfire, especially if she harbors a grudge against his family. He doesn’t think she has it in her to cause him harm, but he knows that many do not until they are cornered.

“Jace,” he finally tells her. “Just Jace.”

She smiles and her entire face lights up like nothing he’s ever seen before. Something twists in his stomach. “Nice to meet you, Jace.”

One, two, three, four. You count the shells noiselessly as you thread them onto the fishing line. They clink together softly as you pull the line taut around your wrist, measuring the width mentally. You remove the bracelet and add a few more of your little shells.

A few days had passed without much event. Jace drifted in and out of consciousness throughout the day and slept soundlessly through the night. He did not complain, but you had seen his thinly-veiled winces and his shuddering breaths. You know that he is suffering more than he lets on. 

It is an odd thing, you think, to be harboring a man in your home that you know next to nothing about, but had inexplicably formed an attachment to. You still know nothing more about Jace than his name and even that had not been an answer easily wrought.

You slide the shells all to one side and swiftly tie a knot at the end of the line, forming a perfect circular bracelet. Putting it to the side, you cut a new piece of fishing line and begin sorting through your shells again.

Just as you go to slide the first shell on, you hear something behind you. The creaking of wood as light footfalls go across.

You turn your head, body tense.

“Jace,” you say, surprised by his appearance. You stand.

He had not been up since he’d ripped that stitch a few days ago, actually heeding your pleas to rest. But a part of you knew even then that the peace would not last long. He is a restless creature, like a bird stuck behind the bars of a cage.

“Do you need something?” You clutch your fingers together across your front, as if doing so could somehow steel your nerves.

He takes a step into the room. You notice his gait seems more steady today. He looks around every bit of the room, his eyes taking in all the pieces that make up your home. You gnaw your lip between your teeth. Did he approve of what he saw?

His voice comes suddenly, a blade cutting through the silence. “What are you doing?” 

It is not accusatory nor standoffish, instead it seems almost curious. You grab the bracelet you just finished and hold it out to him.

“A bracelet.”

Jace steps closer, tilting his head. “For what purpose?”

You let out a short laugh. “It has no purpose. It is just pretty.”

“Hm.” He stares at the offending object like he’s never thought about making something just for the sake of making something before. You smile. He averts his eyes to the other side of the room.

“You said you do not fish,” he says, “and yet you have a fishing rod.”

You follow his eyes to where the thing sits near the door. It sits, forgotten, in the corner of the room—there to haunt you and the person you’d never become, you’re sure.

“My father…” you start to say, but something gets caught in your throat. You forcefully swallow past the blockage. “My father used to fish.”

Jace’s accusatory eyes soften around the edges. He hobbles closer and takes the seat across from you at the table. Your father’s seat.

“And your father—“

“He is dead,” you answer curtly, “he has been for two summers now.”

You pick up the bracelet you had only just starteda nd slide a seashell onto the line. Hurt does not fill your chest like a cavity anymore—now all you feel is numbness as it spreads from your lungs to your heart. 

Jace turns his head to look out the window at the night sky. “My father is gone too.”

Your eyes leap toward his in a flash. He does not look at you, his hand tracing repetitive shapes on the table. The deep circles beneath his eyes have all but faded now, but the weariness to his expression remains. He possesses the gaze of someone who holds more than they can carry–a gaze your father shared.

Your throat bobs as you force yourself to swallow. You feel hollow, but a bit of warmth has reentered your chest. Two children, you think, without a parent—an awful thing, certainly, but not especially rare in Westeros.

You slide another shell onto the bracelet, fingers trembling. “He went mad.” Telling the truth, those three words, stings like betrayal. “He was a knight before I was born. He never… he never forgot what he had to do. The faces of the men he killed… they haunted him.”

Jace goes pale. His dark eyebrows furrow, the line of his mouth pulling down. “I-I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.”

You nod. Put another two shells on the line. Desperately, you search for a way to change the subject. “He always wanted to teach me,” you say, gesturing to the rod, “but he never did.”

He drags a quick hand through his curly brown hair, then pauses as he gets caught in a tangle. He huffs irritably.

“Perhaps,” he says, onyx eyes catching the amber light of the candle flickering on the table, “if I could summon the strength to get dressed and brush my hair, then I could show you how.”

You swallow thickly. “You do not have to—“

“It is the least I can do,” he murmurs. “You saved my life.”

To smile feels inappropriate, so you avert your eyes and begin to tie a knot in another bracelet.

Jace stares at himself in the mirror that stands in the corner of the bedroom with solemn eyes. His eyes glaze over the bandages that wrap around his chest and lower torso, then the unfamiliar slightness to his shoulders and waist. He feels as though he looks at a person he no longer recognizes, like his mind has been transported into the body of someone much weaker than he used to be.

The old house is quiet in the morrow. Every once in a while, a soft breeze will make the house creak. One may occasionally hear a sea bird calling in the distance. Other than that, everything exists as if completely removed from reality; untouched by the war that rages just beyond the sea’s reaches.

His eyes flick back to the mirror and he sees her standing behind him with a deep green doublet wrapped in her arms. 

“It was my father’s,” she says, drawing closer. “It might be a little large on you.”

Jace nods. She hands him the doublet. The material feels like cheap linen, nothing to the quality he had worn before. He does not mind. It would be odd, he thinks, for him to expect anything better.

He lifts the top over his head and she helps guide it over. She seems to be trying not to touch his skin, like she thought he might be made of glass. He clenches his jaw when he feels the familiar tightness in one of his wounds as his arms stretch over his head.

The doublet falls over his body easily, but it does hang on him a bit like the robes a septa might wear.

He hears the sound of muffled laughter from behind him and he turns his head.

“My apologies.” She can barely get it out through her thinly-suppressed amusement. “You do look a bit funny, though.”

Jace feels his lips tug upwards in the first semblance of happiness he’d felt in days. It feels odd and out of place, and so it disappears with his next blink.

“Shall we go?” 

Jace nods. He follows her out of the bedroom and into the living area, watching as she bends to grab the fishing pole. He walks behind her as she leads the way outside, too slow to match her pace.

The brush of a briney mist against his skin feels like flying across the humid air on top of Vermax. His chest pangs and he forces the thought away. His eyes brush the swaying grasses that stand cloistered around the sea’s edge, each one caught up in a current of air drifting by. He watches the woman as she strides ahead of him.

She is quite plain. She does not have the dresses of the courts he is used to, nor the manners of a highborn lady. She moves unhindered by corsets and the plumes of expensive dresses. Her soft legs pump quickly across the sands, barefoot, like she has mapped every inch of the shore to near-perfection and knows without looking where she must go.

Seeing her slip ahead, her hair tangled in the sea’s mist, then as she turns over her shoulder with a jovial grin, it feels so different than anything he’s ever known before.

Baela is beautiful. She is poised, and gentle, but with a rough edge that assures him she could—and would—easily hurt him if pushed to it. But his stomach never flipped when she spoke. He never searched for her eyes from across the room. He never grasped her hand and wished he never had to let it go. He had known her for so long, he assumed she was all he’d ever need, that the feeling of content he felt in her presence was love. Now he isn’t so sure. 

She reaches the shore and stops when her feet hit the tide.

He meets her gaze as she turns to him. His heart pounds in his ears.

“Is it not wonderful?” She sweeps her arm in a half-arc as she speaks, eyes glimmering beneath the high morrow’s sun.

Jace draws his eyes away from her figure to the open waters. It is wonderful, he thinks. If not wrought with pain and regret.

He forces his gaze away. “Yes.”

“So,” she says, shifting on her heels, “how do we begin?”

Jace steps forward and picks up the rod. He retrieves the little scrap of maroon fabric that she had found a few days back and attaches it to the end of the hook. 

“It is always a good idea to have some kind of bait,” he explains, “fish are attracted to movement. If you can find insects or worms, those work even better. But this fabric may do. We will have to see.”

He moves close to the edge of the water and lets the rod scrape the top of the ocean. “Most fish do not swim right by the shore, so you will need to throw the line out a little ways. Make sure that you do not catch your skin with the hook.”

She nods, eyebrows drawn together in deep contemplation. Jace nearly smiles at the way she’s taking this all so seriously, before he catches himself and schools his expression.

Jace steadies his hand and propels the line out into the ocean. One of the wounds on his side complains at the movement, but he ignores it. He watches the line bob in the water with a softened expression. His memory flits between days spent under the sun at Driftmark and Dragonstone, laughing while he chases Lucerys with a wood sword; Laenor showing him how to fish among the tidepools; a fierce burn from the sun that is soothed by his mother’s affectionate hand.

“Who taught you this?” Her voice breaks through the silence that had settled between them. Her eyes keep steady on the line, lashes squinting against the harsh light.

“My father,” he replies after a moment’s hesitation. 

Another pause. 

He feels her shift to look over at the side of his face. “I’m sure he would be quite proud of the man you have become.”

Jace’s breath halts in his throat. Hands suddenly feel clammy. His heart hiccups and thuds against his skin. He had not thought of Laenor in a long time, Harwin even longer. It feels like decades had passed since he had seen either of them, a forgotten moment in his life overshadowed by tragedy after tragedy.

“Oh, look,” she says suddenly from beside him. “A conch shell.” 

She wields the massive thing toward him. Her entire face is bright with delight as she shows him the object that any normal person would completely disregard. She is anything but normal, though.

“These always sell for a few silvers at the markets,” she informs him, “the rich folk think they are good luck.”

He is not able to reply before his arm suddenly jolts and he is pulled a few inches forward. On the end of the line, something stirs in the water. 

“Come,” he orders her urgently. “Something is biting.”

She draws close, her eyes wide. The conch shell drops to the sand. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, “here, you hold the rod.”

“What? I don’t know how to catch a fish!”

He thrusts the rod into her hands. “I am too weak to reel it in. You have to.” It is a lie, but she does not seem to recognize it.

Her hands slip all over the rod as she tries to fight the beast at the end of the line. Jace, pitying her struggle, slides behind her and steadies her hands by placing his on top of hers. She freezes for a moment, then begins to pull. Jace clutches her hands gently within his own and he notices that they tremble like seagrass beneath his own. 

“Hold it steady,” he says against the shell of her ear, “pull only when you feel it stop fighting. You do not want–”

Suddenly, the pressure is removed from the end of the line and they are both sent stumbling backwards onto the sand. Jace lands on his bum, but she is able to catch herself as she tumbles beside him. The line must have broken. The fish is long gone now.

“Oh Jace, are you okay?” He looks over at her as she crouches beside him. “You did not reopen your wounds, did you?”

The laugh that tumbles out of his lips makes her jolt back. Distantly, he is not sure why he is laughing. The fish got away, he landed on back on the sand, and now one of his cuts hurts. But he had just felt so alive. So unburdened by responsibility, like any man of ten and eight without the entirety of their mother’s empire resting upon their shoulders ought to feel. 

The laughter eventually abates, and all that is left is the open sky atop him and the sun beating down on his skin.

“Do you think that the fish I cooked last night was spoiled?” she asks in response to his exuberant mood. “Once, my father caught ill from bad potatoes…”

Jace feels another chuckle escape his lips. “Sorry,” he tells her. “I have… not felt that free in a long time.”

She lets out a soft ‘oh’ and moves to lay next to him in the sand. Far enough away that there is no chance that they will touch, but close enough that Jace can smell the lavender on her skin.

Jace stares at the clear sky ahead of him until he begins to feel his body ache with exhaustion. He pulls himself into a seated position, but she does not move immediately. She looks at him with soft eyes from where she lays against the sand, a small, affectionate smile upon her lips. Her chest rises and falls slowly, hand absentmindedly drawing pictures in the sand.

His stomach churns as he turns away. He stares out at the rippling current with half-lidded eyes. 

“How far is the nearest town?” His words are nearly carried away with the next tide that pulls up the shore. She hears him all the same, sliding to sit up next to him.

“Not far,” she replies, a toothy grin on her breath, “would you like to come and help me pick out a fish for dinner tomorrow?”

Jace does not reply. The hope tinged in her words makes something inside him feel rotten. Like he is corrupting the world wherein she lives. As he takes longer and longer to reply, he notices something settle upon her face. A realization that fades into melancholy.

“Oh.” She looks to the sea in an attempt to hide the dewiness in her eyes, but Jace notices all the same. “You wish to leave.”

“My mother,” he says, “she will be looking for me. She will not stop until she finds me.”

She nods.

Something compels him to continue. “I would stay. I would, truly,” he says, “but this is bigger than me. Bigger than this–”

“I understand, Jace.” But Jace is not sure she does. Her lips purse, her eyebrows drawn to form a small wrinkle between them. 

“I would at least stay a couple more days,” he tells her, “I need to make sure I do not simply hurt myself again by leaving too soon.”

She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head upon them. “It sounds like a good plan,” she agrees quietly. “Perhaps… Perhaps I could pack you some food as well.”

“Yes,” he says this far too enthusiastically, but he notices her brighten at the joy in his voice and so he continues to smile. “That would be wonderful.”

She nods, pulling at a frayed edge of her dress. “Then it will be done.”

The two of them watch for a few more moments as the red sun burns a hole against the sky and as the water ripples with wrath.

“I will leave on the morrow”--That is what he had told you over dinner the previous evening. 

In the morrow, the sky opens and floods them with her tears. 

You stand by the window of the cabin looking out at the frightful weather. Rain falls like daggers against the darkened, tumultuous sea. Waves crash against the shore. A crack of lightning makes you flinch.

“The Gods are angry,” you say to the still air of the cabin. 

Jace sits halfway over his plate of roasted fish as you say this. Then he straightens, his eyes flickering briefly outside. The dark brown of his irises reflect the grey of the clouds swirling above. “Or they do not grant me leave.”

You force yourself to pull away from the window. Turning your head, another flash of brilliant light comes across the floor, painting everything white. You fall into a silence as you step carefully across the cabin.

You knew that from the moment you found him, that it would not be permanent. Just like the rains that fall from above now, this momentary storm in your life will too pass. You had not even wished for him to stay, initially. You recall that first night, sewing his wounds with fishing line, as your eyes stretched across his alien visage. You had told yourself that his presence would be temporary as a comfort then, now you tell it to ground yourself in reality.

Jace had become more friendly in the past few days. Conversation came easily to him and made the thought of him leaving that much harder. Now you were the one that deflated at the sound of his voice across the hall, the one that shrunk from revealing the parts of yourself that had not seen the light in years.

You are selfish. It is a quality that had always lurked behind your eyes, but had sharpened since your father’s death. It is a survival tactic. Every animal, even humans, wish to hold onto the things they hold dear. It does not matter if it is not much. Everything you have is in some way worth keeping–including Jace.

But you could not fight logic. His mother, his family–they had a higher claim to him than you did. You could not keep him like a bird with clipped wings. It is cruel to even think it. 

You scrub the dish in your hands until your hands feel raw and achy. The only light comes from behind you in the smoldering fireplace and the flash of light that illuminates the sky. You hear the clatter of the bowl from behind you as Jace finds his footing–the screech of the chair as it rubs harshly against the floor.

You feel his warmth as he comes to stand beside you. He reaches a hand into the soapy mess over the wood bucket and fetches your hand from the fray. 

“You have made yourself bleed,” he observes quietly, a finger stroking over the cuts. 

You feel your throat bob under the weight of his probing stare. You slip your hand away from his and turn your back to dip the bowl in the bucket of soapless water.

“Have I done something to upset you?” he murmurs. His words are echoed by a rumble of thunder in the distance.

You still your movements for just a second before continuing. Your cuts throb at the feeling of the cool water cleansing the blood from your hands. “No,” you reply simply.

“Then why have you been so quiet as of late?”

You drop the bowl onto the wood surface in front of you and turn, drying your hands with a near cloth. “I just haven’t had much to say, I suppose.”

Another flash of light. Rain as it beats ceaselessly against the metal roof. You face him, clenching the towel in your fist.

“Shall we remove your stitches?” It had been suggested a few days ago as the first thing he would do before departing, so he would not have to bother with finding someone to do it for him on the road. 

Jace looks like he might say something. Then he shakes his head. “On the bed?”

You nod. “That would be easiest.” 

You slip behind him as he moves toward the bedroom. On your way, you light the spill near the fireplace and bring it with you. Your eyes find his figure as it slinks through the darkness. He’s healed so much better than you had ever expected he might. He should not have survived his injuries—should not have been able to heal so quickly. You think the Gods must favor his survival much more than they favored the own laws they stipulated.

He slides off his doublet and lounges back into the bed. You let the flame on the end of the spill touch the end of the wick of the candlestick and the room is bathed in a soft glow. You suffocate the flame and put the spill onto the table next to the bed.

Jace watches you as you do this quietly. When your eyes move up to his face, you notice his eyes are lidded, the tips of his ears red. You feel a warmth catch hold of your skin at his gaze and you avert your eyes to his chest.

You begin your work in silence. You lift the knot of each stitch and easily slice through it with the sharp edge of your knife. At the end of your first removal, you are happy to see that the wound has faded to a pinkish stripe.

“Who taught you this?” 

You startle at the sound of his voice after several long minutes of silence. It is a deep baritone, rough around the edges. Its unexpected richness has you shifting in your place on the edge of the bed. A flash of white light from out the window bathes his face in color. 

“My father.” You do not elaborate further. You think it self explanatory. Your father taught you everything.

“Was he hurt often?” 

You cut another knot. “There are no maesters in the far reaches,” you tell him. A hint of bitter frustration lines your words. “I have assisted several people who have needed help in the village.”

“I did not know,” he replies softly, “that is quite kind of you.”

“We all share responsibility here, no one is without duty.” You put another piece of the fishing line to the side. “It is how things function when you do not have the entire Seven Kingdoms at your disposal.”

You notice Jace’s eyebrows furrow. His stomach tenses beneath your hand. “How did you…”

“It is obvious,” you say, “your voice, your cadence, the way you were dressed when I found you… you have no scars, no callouses. You did not offer your house’s name, so I can only assume—“

“Jacaerys Velaryon,” he says, “that is my name.”

You still. Your eyes dart to his, alarm filling your chest and stealing your breath. “Velaryon,” you echo, heart racing. “That is the name of…”

“Perhaps you know of Corlys Velaryon,” he offers, “the Sea Snake. He is my grandfather. Or Rhaenyra Targaryen, my mother—“

You stand, breathing panicked. “You must leave,” you say, “why did you stay so long? The realm… your mother… the Seven Kingdoms need you.”

Jace leans forward to grasp your arm. You allow him only because you fear you may topple over without the stability.

“I am of no use to them in this condition,” he scoffs. You notice a faraway look in his eyes. The same look he sometimes got when he stared upon the ocean or recalled stories of his father to you. “My dragon is dead, my body a wreck. There is nothing left of me for them to scavenge.”

“T-That is not true,” you stutter. “You must at least find out if they are safe. You have been healed for days… you could have left—“

“I stayed for you.” You fall silent at the sincerity in his voice. His hand drifts down the bare skin of your wrist to thread between your fingers. He cups your hand between his own.

“You cannot stay,” you tell him.

“It does not matter if I stay one more day. The realm will not fall today,” he replies, “we cannot travel in this ruinous weather, anyway.”

Your eyes drift to the window, where the wind throws its tears against the pane. You nod slowly and find your seat again.

You grasp the knife from where you sat it on the duvet. You slide the other to rest upon his warm stomach. His breaths quicken beneath your hand as you drag it up to the next wound.

“I almost killed you the day after I found you,” you whisper, “I thought it would be a mercy. The fact that you are here at all… alive, breathing. It is a gift from the Gods.”

He leans forward. “What stopped you?”

Your movements pause from where you had started to cut away another knot. “You did.”

His throat bobs. His hand moves from where it clutches the sheets to where your hand rests upon his sternum. He strokes the skin of your hand gently.

You lean forward without realizing what you are doing. He does not allow you to back away. He brings his other hand to the nape of your neck and leans forward to seal your lips with his.

The kiss is languid. His tongue probes the seal of your lips and you allow it to slip inside. You bring your hand up to cup his jaw and he drags the hand cupping your neck to your hair. You let out a soft moan against his lips and he responds to the noise by pulling you forward onto his chest.

You do not lean your weight onto him in fear of hurting him, but you feel his hands crawl to settle upon your heaving ribs. You gently settle your lower half onto his hips, settling your hand down on a part of his chest that had no injuries.

You and Jace continue to kiss for what feels like hours. It is exhilarating. It feels like flying. Your stomach feels warm and fluttery, and your lips are throbbing.

You shift your hips and Jace lets out a groan. You pull away from the kiss, concerned. His hand moves to grab the flesh of your hip, sliding you back some. There is a hardness beneath you that makes a pleasant chill slide down your spine.

“Are you alright, Jace?” 

“Unless you wish for us to have sex,” he grumbles, “you should move off my hips.”

You swallow thickly at the insinuation. Sex. A novel thing. A thing that should be saved for marriage. But marriage seems so far from your mind now, drifting away like a current.

“And what do you wish for us to do?” you murmur. You slide forward an inch and he throws his head back onto the pillows. His chest heaves.

“You know what I wish,” he groans. “Is it not obvious?”

You lean forward so that your lips barely brush his own. “Then take it.”

Sunlight streams through the window ahead of you, branding the side of your face with heat, and your eyelids flutter against the intrusion. You fist your fingers in the sheets and twist your legs close to your body. As you shift, you feel an arm pulling you backwards.

You grasp the hand splayed across your stomach between your trembling fingers.

“Stay,” he murmurs against the shell of your ear. Tears bead in your eyes, but you keep them at bay.

Your thumb finds the pulse that thrums beneath his skin and you count his heart beats. The Gods are cruel, you think. They had kept Jace here long enough for you to miss him when he leaves.

You turn your body over to face him. You are not surprised to see him already staring back at you. His dark curls are a mess on the pillow beneath him. His lips pull upwards at the corners, but do not reach his eyes. He brings his hand up to stroke your cheek.

Your chin wobbles and he blinks away a frown.

“It will not be forever,” he tells you softly, reverently,

“I will return to you one day.”

You bring a hand up to wipe away the stubborn tears. “I suppose you do not know when that will be.”

He leans forward to give you a kiss and you know that is the only way he can possibly tell you no. 

Pulling away from the kiss feels like saying good-bye.

You stay in bed as he stands, sluggishly dressing himself as if he was still looking for reasons not to leave. You do not think he finds one. He turns his head to look back at you and his expression falters. 

A small smile curls at your lips as you mouth the word—go.

He heeds your instruction and leaves your cabin with a satchel of roasted fish, a map to the nearest town, and a bracelet strung with seashells.

ONE YEAR LATER…

The nets are full this morrow. The tide ebbs and flows, slinking across the silver sands. Birds let out cries of rejoice overhead for the plentiful bounty gifted by the sea. 

You bend the knee to heave the first net out of the water. You clutch your chest protectively as you search through the things with the other hand. 

“Hm,” you murmur, “a rainbow shell.” 

You bring the shell up to the light and small reflections bounce across your vision. Tucking it into your satchel, you search some more. A piece of metal, two scraps of fabric, and a clam.

You pocket the metal and one of the ratty pieces of fabric, but allow the clam to slide back under the tide. You bring your dry hand to rest upon the head of the babe swaddled against your breast.

“Shh,” you whisper to him as he begins to stir. “It is alright, my prince.”

He brings his head up slowly to peer at you. A splatter of sea foam settles on the side of his face, but he does not seem to mind. He gives you a gummy smile and you return it lovingly.

He watches with bleary eyes as you sort through the next net of things. You show him each individual item as you retrieve it. Your heart skips when you feel a familiar shape and weight in the palm of your hand.

“A conch shell,” you inform him with a giddy grin, “these sell for several silvers at the market.”

He stares at the shell with wide eyes. The pattern, a dark brown and white mottling, you think, must confuse or enrapture him by the way he looks at it.

The small of your back has begun to hurt. You straighten up and lift a supportive hand to rest underneath the baby’s bum.

“This will be enough for today,” you decide. “The sea has gifted us more than we need.”

The little boy smacks his lips as if agreeing with the statement. You nod and carry your satchel and the boy up the familiar path to the cabin.

However, your footsteps slow as you grow closer until you stop right before the door. Something is not right. You protectively cradle the back of your son’s head as you touch a hand to the door.

It pushes open with little resistance. You slide the knife you kept on you at all times to your hand in one swift movement as you step inside.

You take not but two steps beyond the threshold before you freeze. The knife clatters to the ground and a gasp shudders from your lips at the sight in front of you.

He stands across from you like he never left. He’s dressed in black gilded leathers, his body a tad leaner and steadier. His face looks older, more mature and shaped by circumstance, just as you imagine yours must too. His mop of dark hair curls around his ears, longer than when you saw him last.

His lips with awe. He stares at you and your face as if trying to map something with his mind. 

“Jace,” you say breathlessly. “How…”

“I saw you by the shore as I rode in from town,” he murmurs, taking a hesitant step forward. He lets out a soft laugh that sends your stomach aflutter. “I thought I might surprise you. I guess I am lucky to not have received a knife in my throat.”

Your throat bobs. Mistiness clouds your vision. “You came back for us.”

“For us?” Jace echoes, eyebrows furrowed. He comes so close he can reach out to you with his arm and you know that he has seen him then, by the shock that melts his features.

The boy turns his head to the best of his ability in your swaddle, his eyes searching for the unfamiliar voice. Jace’s mouth comes nearly unhinged, a trembling hand lifting as if to stroke his head, but it falls short.

He forces his eyes to look at you. “He… he’s mine?”

You bite your lip to suppress your smile as you nod. You reach around your neck with one arm while the other supports the baby’s bum. You unravel the swaddle easily, and the chubby baby flails his arms with relief. Never one to like a cage.

You outstretch him toward Jace and he takes him eagerly. He holds him with practiced ease. He supports the baby’s head and bum as he gazes down at him, tracing his forehead to the slope of his nose to the flutter of his lashes with only his eyes.

Jace finally breaks away from the baby long enough to look up at you. “And I just… I just left you. You and my son.”

Your heart skips a beat at the name. Son. You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from grinning like a fool.

“You had to,” you say, stepping forward to lay a gentle hand upon his upper arm. “Your family needed you.”

He clenches his jaw. “Nothing we did… nothing we accomplished… equals this.”

He strokes a featherlight touch against the boy’s cheek and he wrinkles his nose.

“Will you…” you pause. You try to steel yourself for the rejection that may very well follow, hands clammy by your sides. “Will you be staying long?”

Jace’s eyes rush to meet yours. He steps forward. The baby whimpers in his arms at the movement. 

“I would stay forever if you would have me.”

You feel your heart skip a beat. “What? What of the throne? Of your family?”

He shakes his head. Your stomach drops.

“My brother Aegon will be the next ruler. Wed to his cousin.”

“And you?”

His dark eyes soften as they consider this question carefully. He clutches the lost prince to his chest protectively.

“I am right where I want to be.”

© mariposium ; do not copy, feed into ai, redistribute, reupload, edit, translate, or otherwise steal my works, thanks!

[floatyflowers]

Accept the Traditions|| Dark! JACAERYS x Sister Reader

Warning: Dub-con

The candles had been snuffed save two, one on the mantle, one beside the bed, so the chamber lived in half-light, all warm stone and long shadows. The kind of darkness that softened edges. That was the point.

You lay beneath him with the silk drawn across your eyes, dark Myrish weave, folded twice.

He had tied it himself with hands that did not quite hold steady, and you had let him, and for a few merciful minutes the arrangement had worked precisely as Daemon had promised it would.

A presence, warmth and a weight above you that belonged to no face, no name, no set of dark curls you had pulled in childhood roughhousing, no earnest brown eyes that had watched you across the breakfast table every morning of your life.

Just someone. A husband, in the abstract. A duty being discharged in the dark.

You had closed your eyes beneath the blindfold, redundant, perhaps, but instinct, and turned your mind to the sea. To the sound of waves against Dragonstone's cliffs. To anything, anything at all that was not the familiar cadence of his breathing or the specific way his thumb traced the curve of your hip, knowing, as though he had memorized the shape of you long before he had any right to.

It was bearable. It was almost nothing. You could do this.

Then the silk moved.

You felt it before you understood it, the slight tug at the back of your head, the brush of fabric sliding upward across your cheekbones, the sudden cool of air against skin that had been covered. Your eyes opened to candlelight, to shadow, and to Jacaerys.

He was looking down at you with an expression you had never seen him wear, or perhaps had always seen him wear, and only now, pinned beneath him with nowhere to retreat, were you forced to recognize for what it was.

It was not cruelty. It was not even hunger, not precisely. It was certainty. The quiet, immovable certainty of a man who had decided something and would not be moved from it, and the decision was you.

The blindfold dangled from his fingers. He let it fall to the side of the bed.

"No."

The word tore from you before thought could give it shape, raw, animal, the sound of something snapping shut. Your hands flew upward past his shoulder, fingers stretching for where the silk had landed, grasping at the rumpled sheets.

"Jace, the blindfold, please, give it back."

He caught your wrist.

Not roughly. As Jace was never rough. That was the particular horror that would stay with you long after this night had ended, the gentleness, as though he were handling something sacred.

He guided your arm back down to the pillow beside your head and laced his fingers through yours, palm to palm, the way you used to hold hands crossing the bridge at Dragonstone when you were small and the wind was strong.

As if this were tender. As if this were love.

"Stop," he said.

His voice was wrecked. Low and thick with exertion, stripped to its raw grain, but beneath the breathlessness there was something steady. Something that had already been decided, perhaps long ago, perhaps in the sept when the septon wound the ribbon around your joined hands and Jace had looked at you with such helpless, radiant joy that you had had to fix your gaze on the altar to keep from being sick.

"Jace, please."

"I should not have agreed to it." He was still moving. Slowly. Deliberately. Each motion precise and unhurried, as though he meant to imprint himself upon you so thoroughly that no amount of silk or darkness could undo it.

"The blindfold was Daemon's solution, not mine. It was a courtesy, and I gave it because I thought..." He takes a breath. His jaw clutched. "Because I thought you needed gentling. As one gentles a horse that does not yet know its rider."

"Put it back."

"No."

The word was quiet. Final. It landed in the space between you like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples of it spread outward until they touched every wall.

"You would have me be a ghost," he points out. "A shadow in the dark with no name and no face. You would have me be anyone but who I am." His thumb moved across your knuckles, slow, steady, maddening.

"I have tried to be patient. I have given you a fortnight of patience, and every night you have handed me another lie dressed in a different gown. Exhaustion. Illness. Your moon blood. Your fear."

He lowered his head until his forehead nearly touched yours. You tried to turn your face to the side, to the pillow, to anywhere that was not the unavoidable fact of his dark eyes inches from your own, but his free hand came up to cradle your jaw and hold you still.

"Mother said you were frightened of me. Daemon said you were frightened of the act itself."

Something shifted in his expression, a flicker of hurt so deep it had curdled into something harder, something with edges. "But that is not it at all, is it?"

You pressed your lips together. Your chest heaved. You could feel tears building behind your eyes, hot and furious, and you would sooner bite through your tongue than let them fall.

"You are not afraid of what we are doing," Jacaerys said, and his voice was terribly, terribly gentle. "You are disgusted. Because I am your brother."

The word hung in the air.

You saw the moment it ceased to be speculation and became knowledge, the slight tightening around his eyes, the way he read the answer in your silence as clearly as if you had screamed it.

He had always been able to read you. You had loved that about him, once, when you were children and it only meant he knew to bring you lemon cakes when you were sad.

"Is that not what you are?" you whispered. Your voice sounded nothing like your own.

"I am your husband."

"You are both."

"Yes." Jace said it simply. Without shame or care for your feelings.

"I am both. As Daemon is both husband and uncle to our mother. As Aegon the Conqueror was both husband and brother to his queens. This is what we are. This is what we have always been." He shifted above you, and you gasped, unwilling, involuntary, and hated yourself for it.

"The blood of the dragon does not follow the laws of common men. You know this. You have always known this."

"Knowing is not the same as..."

"As wanting?" Something raw moved through his expression. "No. It is not. I have wanted you since I understood what wanting meant, and I have watched you look at me and see only a brother, and I have borne it, night after night, year after year, with every grace I could muster." His grip on your hand tightened, still not painful, never painful, just there, inescapable.

"But we are wed now. Before the gods and the realm. And I will not spend my marriage as a ghost in my own bed, wearing a blindfold's permission to touch my wife."

A tear dropped. You felt it track down your temple and disappear into your hair, and Jacaerys's expression fractured, for just a moment, just a breath, the old Jace surfacing, the brother who would have done anything to keep you from crying. His thumb caught the next tear before it fell.

"I would never force you," he said, and his voice roughened.

"If you tell me to stop, I will stop. I will walk out of this chamber and I will not return until you bid me. But I will not put the blindfold back. That I will not do." He swallowed.

"If you let me stay, you will look at me. You will know who holds you. And in time, you will cease to flinch when you see my face above yours. I have to believe that. I must believe that."

The fire popped in the grate. Somewhere beyond the window, the sea broke against the rocks far below, the same waves you had tried to retreat into minutes ago, now impossibly distant, belonging to a world you could not reach.

You looked up at him. At the face you had known your entire life, the strong Velaryon jaw, the dark curls falling forward, the brown eyes that had looked at you across every table, every hall, every dragonback ride and rainy afternoon for as long as memory existed.

Your brother. Your husband. The man who would one day sit the Iron Throne and who, even now, in this worst and most honest moment, could not bring himself to be cruel.

That was the thing you would never be able to explain to anyone, not to your mother, not to yourself, not to the gods who had arranged this fate with whatever grim humor they possessed. It would have been easier if he were cruel. If he were Aegon, drunk and grabbing.

If he were Aemond, cold and cruel. You could have hated a cruel man.

You could have built a wall against cruelty and lived behind it.

But Jace was looking at you the way he had always looked at you, like you were the best and most important thing in any room, and asking you to love him back, and you could not, and the impossibility of it was a kind of violence that left no marks.

"You will not put it back," you said. Not a question.

"No."

"And if I tell you to stop? Truly stop?"

"Then I stop. And we will be as we have been. And Alicent Hightower will call our marriage a mummer's farce, and our mother will face another battle she does not have the strength to fight, and we will..." He exhaled.

"We will manage. Somehow. I will not compel you."

The choice he was offering you was not really a choice at all, and you both knew it. He had simply arranged it so that the weight of consequence fell on your answer rather than his hand, and you understood, with a clarity that felt like swallowing glass, that this was as close as Jacaerys Velaryon would ever come to being ruthless.

Jacaerys was still watching you, waiting while being inside you, still gentle, and the familiarity of him was the thing that made it unbearable and the only thing that made it survivable, and you did not know how both of those could be true at once, but they were.

You closed your eyes.

"Keep them open," he orders

You opened them.

Only for your eyes to land on the three headed dragons painted on the ceiling above you.

But you saw no dragons, you only saw monsters, monsters that forced you to be in this undesirable situation.

A moon's turn later, the maester confirmed what you knew was going to happen.

"Oh, my sweet girl."

Rhaenyra is the first to receive the news after Jace. Your mother looked better than she had in months, months of worry about your grandfather's health and the Hightowers.

She took your face in both hands the way she used to when you were small and had scraped your knee or lost a tooth. Her thumbs brushed your cheekbones. Her eyes shone.

"I knew once you found your courage, everything would fall into place."

Behind you, Jacaerys stood in the doorway. You did not need to turn around to know what expression he wore. You could feel it. That quiet, smug satisfaction.

Rhaenyra released you and went to him, pulling her eldest son into an embrace. He returned it while smiling at you over her shoulder.

"You have made me so proud," she said, looking between you both. "Both of you."

Disgust and guilt fills you up at the whole twisted situation, you wanted to pack your things, ride on your dragon, and leave everything behind.

Rhaenyra turned back to you. Her expression softened into something quieter. Something only for you.

"I know how frightening this is," she said. "The first time is always the hardest. Your body changes in ways no one can prepare you for. There will be days when you feel like a stranger inside your own skin."

She reached out and took your hands in hers. Her grip was warm and firm.

"But I will be with you, every step. You will not do this alone. I did not have my mother when I carried you, and I have carried that absence with me ever since." Her voice broke, just slightly.

"You will not carry that same absence. I promise you that."

For the first time in your life, you felt like your mother never understood you.

Rhaenyra has always been there in every important detail of your life, and defended you friecely when needed.

Yet, she didn't even feel how you cried yourself to sleep every night because of pure disgust and guilt.

[spicyhotcheeto]

˚⟡˖ ࣪By The Sea You Will Find Me˚⟡˖ || jacaerys.velaryon

summary: when word gets out about the brown haired boy that washed up your shores to the iron throne- three dragon riders fly to your seaside village to introduce themselves to your family; one of them in particular catches your eye- lucky for you, you had caught his as well.

word count: 3.4oo+

pairings: jacaerys velaryon x fisherman/smallfolk!reader

a/n: have i finished hotd? no! will i make more chapters? most likely :) are the characters a lil ooc? idk, like i said i didnt finish it

warnings: slight angst | fluff | lucerys lives au! | amnesiac luke au | disabled luke au | flirt jacaerys | incest adjacent (?) | reader is smallfolk and not related to them by blood | but lucerys and reader call each other brother and sister | platonic!lucerys x reader

credit to: @enchanthings for the dividers!

The air in your small sea side cottage was tense.

There was no laughter for today's dinner. No younger siblings running and cheering as you sang songs of salt and sea. There was no chatter about the day either: whether the fish were kind enough to provide you a suitable haul for the market, or if the shells that washed up on the shore would fetch for a good enough price once polished- just lips pressed into thin lines, heads down to avoid offending their betters.

The flames from the fire pit grew low too, as if it knew to snuff out any warmth left behind it's four wall.

It was strange- this whole situation was strange- you were all privy to that fact.

"We only have the fried fish My Queen..."

It took you quite awhile to finally find the courage to speak. You bet you looked like a fool, throat dry and hands far too shaky as you take another sip of your drink; as if enough ale could calm down your nerves and forget this day ever happened, but for your brother Lucerys you endured. Even when everything in you urged you to shrink back and hide away with your sisters upstairs.

"I am sure it is... different from what you are use too. I apologize for sullying your tastebuds."

You could hear screeching over the sounds of crashing waves from outside your window, along with the cries of the goat and sheep your neighbors had kindly offered in the stead of your own, just while your shoulders tense up; all to cement your reality further.

Three bloods of the dragon were sitting in front of you with eyes of amethysts and hair like white gold, while their fire breathing beasts were bathing beneath moonlight at the front of your lawn.

They had arrived unannounced- scaring half the island to death while waking up the other- when they landed their mounts to shore.

Only one of them didn't have the striking Valyrian features their kin were known for, a man right about your age, seated to the left of the Queen- his mother- but he remained princely all the same.

You could see the resemblance between him and the boy you had taken in as one of your own. Though he was much more handsome, with a stronger jaw and poutier lips, leaving your face hot whenever your eyes would meet.

Right now, he was looking right at you- dissecting you fully. And you tried to avoid his gaze as effectively as you could.

The Gods, whether the old ones or the new, could strike you down right now and you would thank them for it. Just so this awkwardness would end.

"It is quite alright." Queen Rhaenyra waved a hand in the air as if to dismiss your words. "We are grateful that you have invited us in."

Despite the kindness of her tone, no food touched her lips. The consort and the Prince did not touch their plates either.

It didn't escape your notice but you weren't about to point it out.

You blamed it on the nerves. You preferred your head to be attached to your neck after all.

Your brother Lucerys had a different thought all together.

"You should eat what my sister made for you... She worked hard to prepare it."

Underneath the table you wanted to kick his shin. He had a tongue on him. Always had beneath his sweetness, him using it was rare, yes, but he had it in him to do so. But when he wrapped his fingers around yours in comfort, to remind you that he was there, you couldn't bring yourself to follow through.

Sweet boy. Always looking out for you despite you being older, even in the face of dragons. Even in the face of his blood.

"Do not disrespect our mother by speaking to her with that tone." Jacaerys did not raise his voice, but the firmness in it was clear.

"Do not disrespect my sister by refusing our food."

The crown prince's brows furrowed and he sneered.

"She is not even your blood." he spat the words like fire. Hoping the truth would burn into his younger brother's skull and make him remember. "We are your blood."

Rhaenyra's hand struck the table and the bickering between the two princes stopped.

Since she arrived she had never laid her eyes on her second son's face- fearing she'd wake up and realize it was a dream like most nights after his supposed death- but she wasn't asleep anymore.

This time, she looked at him. This time, he didn't melt away.

Only one tear had escaped her then.

"I apologize, sweet boy." Lucerys bristles at her words, the familiarity in her tone. It was odd hearing the endearment from her lips instead of his sisters. "It is only right we eat what is given. We did not mean to offend."

"I am not offended-" Rhaenyra doesn't wait for you to finish before taking a bite.

"This is ridiculous." Daemon grumbled, picking at it like he had never seen a fish before. Though you would imagine he had never been served a fish this small.

But Jacaerys, ever his mother's son, quickly followed her lead. The king consort was the last to do so.

You had handed them the three largest fish you and Luke had caught a day prior. Doused in every fresh herb you could find from your cupboards.

At least now, you and the rest of your kin would live until dawn.

"It taste like lemons." Jacaery's compliment was hollow, but you took it anyways.

"Thank you M'lord. It 'twas my mother's cooking." a light laugh escaped your lips.

Maybe you could imagine this as a simple dinner with extended family. Maybe then you wouldn't want the earth to open up and swallow you whole.

"You must teach us how then, so when we take my brother back, he will have something to remember you by."

He went straight for it, not giving anyone a moment of respite.

Rhaenyra wince. She was hoping for a more subtle approach. "Jacaerys-"

"No." Lucerys digs his palm into the table to lift himself up, rattling the plates and cups. His mother and brother raised from their seats trying to catch him, eyes drawn with worry- but Lucerys pulls away, choosing you for stability instead.

You sighed at his coldness. Handing him the large staff he used in place of his missing leg.

"You can't take me away from the only family I have ever known as if I am a mere pet that you can pick up as you please!"

"Of course not, that was not what your brother meant at all."

You never thought royalty could be so desperate. You never thought the Queen of the realm would break under the eye of the boy who- not a week before- had slipped into some cow dung, and when he caught you laughing, threw it at your face.

The Queen rambled on and you pitied her for it.

"We would never intend for you to cut ties with them- we could give them land, titles even-" a scoff bellowed out in the corner. "You could even marry her if y-you so wish. I would approve of it, if it means you would stay happy. If you would return home."

The suggestion only seemed to anger him. "I call her sister, and your solution to my fears is to have us wed? This home is of the faith of the seven, do not bear your sins as if they are our own."

Daemon grits his teeth. His sheathed blade, dark sister, peeked through the slits of his cloak. "You are of fire and ash, boy. You might have fucking forgotten that but your blood does not."

Lucerys had not backed down in the slightest, unflinching despite the intimidation. He had never been so brave, at least never in his memories.

"I am of the sea and the salt. A fisherman, not a dragon."

"Mind your tongue," Jacaerys raises his hands in frustration, as if he couldn't believe the words out of his mouth. He to agreed at the ridiculousness of it all. "Or else I'll strap you to Vermax myself and fly into the night."

"I would like to see you try-"

"Enough." you pull Lucerys back and for once the stubborn boy had listen and you praise the Sevens that he did so.

You could feel the stare of his blood brother on your back, a steady presence on your skin, and you wonder to yourself if staring was his favorite past time.

"Clearly, there are a lot of pent up feelings as of now... Maybe we should rest and talk about it once morning comes."

"I say we go with my plan. He will accept his fate soon enough." Jace quietly mouths to his mother.

Rhaenyra squeezes his shoulders gently before shaking her head. "I agree, we should rest." her response was diplomatic and because she was Queen- and their mother, and their wife- they followed.

Daemon had grumbled. Jacaerys had pursed his lips. But they did so anyways.

You, like the proper host you were, had given your guests the biggest room. While the rest of your siblings were cooped up in the smaller one.

"Truly, we are grateful you have allowed us to stay." The Queen's hands were gentle on your free arm, thumb strumming against the roughspun before she retreated into the room for the night.

"D-do you plan on giving me to them?" Lucerys had asked in a shaky breath. Your sister's eyes were blood shot, their arms around him tight in fear that he would leave.

You turn to fully face them, gentle hands ushering them into the other room.

"Father said that blood does not make family." His voice grew louder once you were inside. "He said that he was my father and you my sisters despite it-"

Your hand had found his way to his cheek and it had silenced him mid sentence. "We will discuss this in the morning, do not make your sisters afraid."

At least for tonight, the reminder you still saw him as kin was enough to quiet his doubts and let himself rest.

It was not the most comfortable of sleeping arrangements.

Their snoring, the tight fit atop the bedding, the way their tiny feet and Lucery's stump would dig into your sides, had left you sweaty and restless. Forcing you to slip away from thin sheets and tiptoeing down creaky stairs just to get a fresh breath of air.

"Oh Sevens-" You quickly bit your lip and spun at your heels, trying to stay quiet as you shut the front door, heaving against it.

It was not fresh air that had greeted you, but a large body of scales.

The dinner had been such a mess you had almost forgotten that there were other, more dangerous, beings that neared you.

"Fuck..." You closed your eyes, hand against your chest to steady your breathing. You had never been so close to a dragon before.

"Is that where he gets it from?" A sudden voice asked followed by the sounds of heavy boots hitting wood.

You lifted your eyes to find Jacaerys. Sleep had missed him as well.

"My brother's sudden rudeness... did it come from you?"

You point at yourself, confused. "What are you talking about M'lord?"

He sighs, now at the bottom of the steps. "Forget it... I know better than to blame you."

Jacaerys was closer now, large hands running through his brown locks.

They curled like the waves. You noted the freckles on his skin. The way he was prettier up close.

"We're you about to go outside?" His voice no longer held roughness, with less bite than the one at dinner.

"No," You lied through your teeth. "Just wanted to see if the dragons were asleep which they- um- are. Goods, yes?"

With your hands at your back and your posture stiff, you tried to exude ease- as if dragons were not tales of legend but mere talking points in common conversation.

You wonder if he could hear the way your heart was beating rapidly against your chest. If he had, he was not subtle in his amusement.

"Asleep? Why? If you had caught them in their wake, would you have sung to them until they find their rest?"

"I could have..." You turned your head to look away. Damn him.

"Its alright if they have frightened you." A half-smile was on his lips, more than what you were use too from him. "It is only natural to be frightened."

"I am not afraid-" But when he had reached for the metal loop and your hand had sprung out to take his wrist, it was clear to him that you were.

The rustling from outside had startled you too.

"Hmm?" His smugness rolled out in waves. In this light he looked more boy than man.

"I thought you unafraid?"

You should strike him, wipe his face clean of that grin. He looked similar enough to Luke Lucerys that you think you could get away with it if you claim your sight had been hindered by the dark.

Instead- you remembered yourself. Dropping the offending hand to smoothened out your skirt in a nervous tick. You could feel his breath against the curve of your ear and you shivered, and his dimples deepened.

"If it is fresh air you seek, I should escort you outside." the distance between you grew as he took a step back, palm extending outwards to you. "Take it as an apology for my actions from earlier. The dragons will not harm you in my presence."

A sigh escapes you and you begrudgingly agree, his palm warm against your own.

For a moment, beneath the stars, you forget you are fisher folk and that the man beside you was a dragon prince. Imagining yourself as a girl simply breathing in the ocean breeze rather than what you actually are- a girl trying to find solace from her plights.

The shawl you had brought- which your mother had made long before you were even born and the one your father took inspiration from so Lucerys would have a matched with his girls the week after he had arrived- was tight around your shoulders as you watched the sea from a distance.

"Thank you..." Jacaerys whispers, finally speaking. "For taking care of him..."

Like he had promised the dragons paid no attention to you, even when a few of them had stirred themselves awake, keeping themselves busy by flicking their tails and leaving claw marks into the dirt.

"It was nothing really." you shifted your feet awkwardly at his thanks.

A lull. Then he speaks again.

"You could have turned him away... I'm sure most people would have, especially in his current condition."

"Well, he was sleeping on my father's boat when we had found him so he wasn't easy to ignore. Besides, my father loved to take in strays and I am certain the boy would have found a way to hobble after us if we had left without him."

You smiled at the memory, at the young boy with a damp mop of curls, shivering and sniveling inside your lowly fishing both. He had no memory of who he was. How his leg had gone missing- the only truth he knew of was that his name was Luke and that he was alone.

Pirates, you suggested once. Dragons, your father suggested back.

Many small folk had been made victim to the dance and by then, word had gotten out that its reach had spread to your shores. Your father thought that Luke must have been one of them- whether his boat had got caught by a hungry beast, the wind carrying the scent of the fish nets up into the air and to its senses- or hit by a stray breath of flame.

Unlikely but not wholly impossible.

Back then you had laugh. Dragons were of the air, what dangers did they pose in the sea?

Now, you are certain that he was the one bellied over in laughter.

"What are you smiling for?" Jacaerys asked. You whipped your face at his voice.

"Nothing." You insist. "It's just... if my father were here, I am certain he would find this situation most amusing."

"He was a happy man, your father?"

You nod. "The happiest."

At the corner of your eye, you could see that Jacaerys looked pleased at that fact.

"I am glad... that in the five years he has been gone- he had found his way into a happy home. Trust us, when we say that we will reward you for your efforts."

"We did not take him in for a reward." His eyes were wide, caught off guard by your quickness. You raised your hands up defensively.

"Truthfully, I never thought he was a Lord. Much less a Prince." you continued on, crinkling your nose in a playful jest.

You had given that boy to many clouts in the ear- chores you doubt he was ever expected to do in his time in King's Landing- and had laughed with him and acted without propriety to his true born station.

"Of course not-" his words stumble for a bit before it regained its footing. "I did not mean to imply that you did so, nor did I mean to imply that you held ulterior motives in your heart."

He was trying to be polite. You couldn't help but laugh at that too.

Stretching your arms out, you could feel your body lax before unceremoniously making a bed out of the grass- tired from staying on your feet for far to long.

Supposed you could go back inside and lay in a proper bed with the rest of your siblings- but this day had been stressful and you believed you deserved a moment of calm.

"He got sea sick the first time we took him out fishing." Another laugh escaped your lips, scratchy in its timber and leaving a bitter sweet taste on your tongue. You could feel a tear dip down to your temple before disappearing into your hair. You caught the next one before it could drop.

So many thoughts had filled your head: about your family, about the Targaryens... the little paradise you had made by the shore- but there was nothing you could make sense of.

The Prince tilts his chin down to meet your eyes, gaze focused even as he takes up the empty space of grass beside you. You bet you looked like a fool.

"He hurled all over the nets and we had to cancel the trip short- said he couldn't handle the waves rocking him. To think... that boy may leave us to be the Lord of Driftmark."

Jace had never forgotten the way his brother was at sea. The irony was not lost on both on you.

He rest his head on the grass, hair weaving into its blades in soft motions. He turned his head so he could still look at you as he spoke. "He was the same when he was a boy."

"I can imagine the same green face in fancier robes." you sniffled.

"Oh I'm sure you can." he raised a hand to the sky waving it around as he told tales of youth, of stories between him and a Luke you hadn't meant yet, making a show of it.

"I have always been better at the sword than my brother." he commented after telling you a story of them sparring by the shore. He moved to a more comfortable position, grace measured as his muscles flexed beneath the velvet- catching your eye.

He smirks, satisfied, before continuing. "I hope we could continue to spar once he warms up to me."

"He will M'lord. He is a friendly boy."

It was colder now, the wind had picked up and the sounds of the waves crashing against the rocks had grown louder.

"Are you not cold, My Prince?" The shawl slips off your shoulders so you could offer it.

He rubbed his hands together for some warmth, cupping it around his lips so he could blow in some hot air. "What kind of a prince I would be if I took a young Lady's shawl?"

"A warm one." you retort, throwing half of it over his frame, while the other half remained on yours. A few seconds later the tremble in his lip stop. The wool was not much but it did its job blocking the wind well enough.

"Is it your habit to save Velaryons?" he says breathlessly.

"I hardly call sharing a shawl saving, My Prince."

"I could die from a simple cold." his tone was matter-of-fact. "You very well could be saving me."

A snort rumbled from your throat. Jacaerys didn't seem to be put off by the sound. "We should head back shortly. Morning will arrive sooner in our sleep."

He nestles deeper into the shawl but nods.

"Yes, we probably should."

a/n: yayyy i hope you like it! im thinking of making the next chapter about them exploring the little town luke had grown up in for the past five years rather than cutting it straight to kings landing. what do you guys think about that plan? anyways hearts and reposts will be greatly appreciated!

[enchanthings]

◦˚~ SET OF BLUE DIVIDERS ~˚◦

Requested by: @rosaeh Info: these were all made by me. please follow my rules & reblog/like if use!

[wouldgaysexfixthem]

the philosophers of our time are on tumblr dot com

[spevvy]

Actual footage of everyone watching Young Sherlock

[mtomauw]

"I know I'm not made in your likeness, I do try but I'm hopeless"

[kiisc0ld]

── .✦Your husband, 𝑨𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒐𝒏 , hates sweet things. Too bad you are the epitome of it ‧₊˚

From the minute your betrothal to the brightflame prince became public knowledge, gossip started filling every corner of the castle. The more you heard the crude whispers about him, the more your heart wilted. An odd emotion bubbled up in your chest—defensiveness perhaps. But you were uncertain whether it was for your honour or your soon to be husband's.

He was supposedly the cruelest person in Westeros, not in possession a single kind bone in his body, no place for sweetness in that bitter black heart of his.

An extreme contrast to your nurturing personality. Everything about you—from the honey on your cheeks absently smudged during your baking escapades, to the sweet scent of vanilla that always followed you—was sweet.

So when you left the comfort of your home to go to kings landing, you fortified yourself for the imminent life filled with heartache. Rejection. And you prayed that it wouldn't come to it but you braced yourself for it nonetheless—humiliation.

And how utterly wrong you were.

Because Aerion Targaryen was addicted to you at first glance.

A whiff of your cloying sweet scent, so distinct from the overpowering perfume of the whores, kept him wanting more, and more. His fingers on the dips and curves of your body , his tongue tasting the sweet honey that somehow found its home on your skin, the vanilla scent that always permeated his bed chambers—he was a man gone.

Aerion prided himself as a tough soldier, basked in the fear that he influenced in others. There wasn't any place for softness or sweetness. Yet , when you shyly waited at the corners of the training grounds with the cloth wrapped sweets that you baked with your own hands, he couldn't bring himself to deny you. Not when your cheeks were tinted pink from the heat and your eyes peered up at him with such gentleness. He took a bite out of every single one.

It was a naive attempt of yours, wanting to please your new husband.

You had heard of his aversion to baked goods and sugary treats. So you had taken extra caution with the amount of sugar and honey you added, keeping it the most minimal. You had expected him to refuse your gesture. So you were the most surprised to see him take a bite of every single piece.

You became extra cautious from the next day—decorating his desserts beautifully, planning the recipes almost to perfection to suit his taste. You enjoyed baking. And you enjoyed it even more when you did it for your husband.

Neither was Aerion soft nor was he slow in his passion. He did not do gentle. So his actions confused him almost to frustration.

Why did he find himself slowing when he took you from between the silken sheets every night ? Why did he find himself worshipping you, inhaling your sweet scent and savouring your quiet sounds of pleasure ? And why did he always find himself pulling you just a little bit closer to hear your breathing slow down as you drifted off ?

Aerion hated sweet things. And the kisses you always left on his cheeks every morning were the most obnoxious, yet the sweetest things he had ever experienced.

But he found himself craving those kisses anyway.

Craving the smile that lit up your face as you made a show of kissing him with loud smooches . He was vaguely aware that his lips were quirking with the barest hint of a smile—too lost in your glittering eyes and rumpled messy locks as they flowed down your bare shoulders.

Aerion did not understand intimacy.

There wasn't any sense or logic in his actions , just you in his arms, running your fingers through his hair as he buried his nose in the juncture of your neck. Where the honeyed scent was the strongest. Or when he kissed your palms, where the scent of sweet fruits and dough made his mind whirl and his senses dull.

He snapped sometimes. You knew of his anger, volatile and hot roiling in his veins. He was the brightflame prince after all. You could see the resignation in his gaze immediately after, expecting you to finally run out of your reservoir of forgiveness.

But if there was just one admirable virtue of yours—it was patience. You knew how to knead and mould the dough just right, add just the perfect amount of sugar and honey. Perfection wasn't attained in a day. You have worked on the same recipes again and again.

Giving up on something wasnt what you were accustomed to.

Not on baking.

And certainly not on your husband.

In those moments , you just let your arms wound around his neck and placed your head against his chest. Listening to his heart beat, letting the days grime and sweat on his warriors uniform onto you.

It was enough. Him, in your arms , was enough.

Your husband wasn't the ideal husband, you knew so. But when he sagged in your arms and ran his fingers down your hips, you couldn't deny that he was yours.

How could you deny your heart when he kissed you so sweetly, and touched your skin with so much reverence despite the callouses that marred his palms ? When, despite his avoidance of sweets, he still tasted your creations without complaint ?

Your husband hates sweet things, yes.

Too bad you are the epitome of it.

And too bad he is in love with you—just as you are with him.

𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓃𝑜𝓉𝑒— just a fluffy word vomit cuz I can't stay away from my ooc hubby for too long 🥹 🫶