I think it may feel a lot like you
Series Masterlist / Navigation
Pairing: Daeron Targaryen x Wife!Reader
Summary:
Daeron takes a bath in a room that smells like his wife, returns expecting absence, and finds instead that you have made space for him to stay. Continuation of I'm not sure what peace is and What it's supposed to feel like
Word Count: 10.6k
Warnings: slow burn even though they are married, angst, thoughts of drinking, drinking as a coping mechanism, references to alcohol dependance, sleep deprivation, fear of sleep, nightmares / prophetic dreams, panic/anxiety, emotional hurt/comfort, non-sexual intimacy, this man is Touch Starved
A/N: Daeron taking a bath. Daeron taking a bath. DaerontakingabathDaerontakingabathDaerontakingabath. Writing that scene shouldn't have been as fun as it was. someone give that wet dog of a man a bath in a room that smells like his wife damn it. Anyhow, finally the third and final part to what was supposed to be a one-shot. Hope you like it!
This is another installment of the Where I am good and loved collection/series, but like all pieces it can be read as a standalone.
Title is from the quote by anatomy-of-rains, "You touch me and suddenly I feel a little less war torn. I'm not sure what peace is supposed to feel like but I think it may feel a lot like you."
The adjoining chamber is already full of steam.
It softens the stone walls, clouds the edges of the mirror above the basin, and turns the air warm enough that Daeron feels the difference at once when he crosses the threshold. The maid steps in after him only far enough to set a folded cloth within reach of the bath and adjust one of the lamps near the wall.
She does not look at him directly. That is either mercy or training, and he has never found much use in distinguishing between the two.
“That will be all.” He tells her, and his voice comes out steadier than the rest of him feels.
The maid curtsies, withdraws, and closes the door.
He is alone here.
For a moment, that is enough to make the chamber feel enormous, which is ridiculous, because it is not. It is smaller than the room beyond, smaller than the dining chamber from last night, smaller than half the rooms in Summerhall built for no reason he has ever understood. Still, the quiet after the door closes has a strange weight to it. The main chamber is cut away from him. Your voice, the maids’ soft movement, the small established order of your morning, all of it becomes something on the other side of wood and steam, safe from his intrusion once more.
He stands where he has been left and looks at everything except himself.
That proves more difficult than it should, and the mirror catches him anyway.
Only for a breath, a moment. But enough to see a pale face made worse by morning, eyes still red at the edges, blond hair tangled from the floor and your hand or not your hand and his poor decisions. Enough to see his shirt creased, his collar gone wrong. The shape of the man you have been forced, by the arrangements of your fathers and now by his own weakness and selfishness, to endure.
He looks away before his own eyes can linger on him.
He removes his cloak at first. It is twisted from sleep and smells faintly of smoke, wine, and the cold corridors he has dragged himself through the night. His boots follow, then the rest, each piece of clothing set aside with less care than neatness would require and more care than he wants to admit to. He does not fold them, that would be absurd. But he makes them small on the seat near the wall, keeping them contained, out of the way, as if even discarded clothes might trespass if left too openly in a chamber that has not learned to expect them.
His ring catches a fastening on his belt.
Daeron stills.
Gold against linen. A small, practical obstruction, nothing more. He frees it after a moment, and the ring turns slightly on his finger, warm from his own skin. Wife, he thinks, because apparently his mind has decided to be unhelpful and linger on what is not his to linger on. But the mere thought of the word, the existence of it in itself, brings an uglier truth to light, a thing that because you and wife exist, must exist in return. Daeron and husband.
The words are not new, they have followed him for weeks now, fastened to him by vow and law and witnesses, but they had been easier to bear when they belonged to other people’s mouths. In those mouths, the words had been almost impersonal, almost surreal. Wife as duty. Husband as title. Marriage as a room he was expected to enter and instead spent weeks circling like a coward with subpar manners.
In your mouth, they had not sounded like that.
The words had been placed among ordinary things, and no solemnity would have troubled him half as much as the way you made the words practical, routinary, domestic even. My husband, because you had ordered a bath for him. Wife, because you had decided to joke that his endurance of it might reflect upon you. Practical, almost absurd, and therefore much harder to defend against than anything solemn could have been.
Arrangement he knows how to mistrust. Ceremony he knows how to dull himself to survive.
This was something smaller. And it has stayed with him, struck him somewhere and dug under his skin like an arrowhead.
The bath waits.
It is large enough to be indulgent, deep enough that steam rises from it in steady white threads. They have prepared it as they would prepare it for you. He knows this before he knows how he knows it. There are oils on the surface of the water, faintly golden where the light catches them, and petals darkened by heat, and the scent that fills the chamber is not the sharp cleanliness of soap alone but something warmer: jasmine, perhaps, rosewater, and something green beneath it that makes him think of gardens he has never seen and sun on stone after saltwater has been poured over it.
Yours, then. Entirely yours.
The realization should make him step back.
Instead, he reaches for the edge of the bath and lowers himself into water hot enough to make him gasp.
For one appalled second, he wonders whether this is how Dornish women conduct warfare on ‘northerners’.
The thought is so immediate and so stupid that it nearly helps. Nearly. His skin stings first, then protests, then begins, traitorously, to accept the heat. He does not add cold water. There is a jug of it within reach, set there by someone more sensible than either of you, but he does not touch it. He tells himself this is because adjusting another person’s bath would be an unnecessary intimacy, which is nonsense. He is already sitting naked in it, there is scarcely more intimacy than that. He tells himself, then, that the water is tolerable anyhow. That is closer to the truth, eventually.
Mostly, he does not add cold water because this becomes another thing to know. To hoard.
You dislike cold floors. You drink lavender tea too dull for the morning unless your sister rescues it with orange blossoms. You order baths for men who give you poor excuses. You bathe in water that might strip flesh from bone and consider it, apparently, ordinary.
A man ought not hoard such things.
Daeron does anyway.
The heat works its way into the stiffness of him with humiliating efficiency. His calves loosen first, then his back by slow degrees, then the shoulder that had spent the night against the bedframe and has been making its grievance known ever since. His body, faithless little kingdom, begins to soften as if it has been waiting permission from someone that is certainly not himself. His mind remains awake, irritably so, observing the betrayal from behind his eyes.
He leans his head back against the rim of the bath, only for a moment.
The steam gathers over his face. The scent of jasmine and rosewater clings to the back of his throat, a word unsaid. Somewhere beyond the door, he thinks he hears movement, or imagines it because the alternative is an emptiness too daunting to trust.
Perhaps you are dressing yourself, adjusting the necklace the maid had picked out for you -he does hope she chose something other than the rubies, it looks entirely too much like blood to be against the skin of your neck-. Perhaps the girl is fastening something at your back, nimble fingers making quick work of a knot and smoothing over the curve of your waist as she checks her work -and he has no right to envy an intimacy he has not earned, but for a foolish, passing moment, he thinks he could serve just as they do, if you’d let him-. Perhaps your morning has already recovered itself and is preparing to go on without him, which is only reasonable -he tells himself there is no grief in that truth, no dread pooling in his chest at the thought-.
His eyes close.
He opens them again at once.
It would be almost funny, he thinks, if the first night he spent with his wife ended with him drowning in her bath. No one else would find that funny, though, and that is usually a reliable sign that he should keep the thought to himself.
He reaches for the soap.
It, too, smells faintly of the chamber and not of him. Clean, floral, warm from steam. He washes because that is what one does in a bath, because he has been given a task and can still manage the simpler forms of obedience. Smoke leaves his skin. Wine leaves, or something near enough to leaving. The night comes away in stages: under his nails, at his throat, from the inside of his wrists where his pulse has begun to slow against his will.
When he raises his hands to his hair, he does it too quickly.
His fingers catch in the tangles at first, and the small pain is useful. Ordinary, easy enough to understand. He works soap through the strands, more roughly than necessary, and then his hand reaches the place near his temple where your fingers had been.
Or had not been.
He stops.
Water laps softly against the side of the bath, phantom caresses at his ribs with each movement of the scalding water. Steam curls at the edge of the mirror. His hand is in his hair and for one shameful, stupid moment he tries to remember the shape of your touch precisely enough to repeat it.
It is impossible. Of course it is.
His own hand knows him too much. It arrives with intention, with memory, with the whole weight of all of it. It cannot move slowly, steadily enough to be yours. It cannot be gentle enough. It cannot grant him the mercy of pretending the touch is coming from outside himself.
Still, his fingers pass once, lightly, near his temple.
A poor imitation. Worse for being close to nothing at all.
Daeron lets his hand fall back into the water.
He scrubs perhaps a tad too hard after that, then stops because there had never been dirt there. Not where it mattered, not in the place his skin keeps insisting had been touched.
That is quite enough of that.
He rinses his hair with water that is still too hot and tells himself the heat in his face is only from the bath. It is a reasonable lie, and he appreciates those when they present themselves.
By the time he rises, the chamber has become thick with steam and the water has gifted him enough heat to make leaving it feel like an error. He does anyway. His body protests this, too, having apparently decided to develop opinions now that no one has asked for them.
The stone floor is cold beneath his feet, which gives him, briefly and uncharitably, a fuller understanding of your earlier flight toward the carpet.
He dries himself with the linen left for him.
The clean clothes wait, innocently, on a low bench near the wall.
He notices them properly only then. A shirt, breeches. Fresh linen and silk. Nothing remarkable, but unmistakably his.
Daeron stands very still with the cloth in his hands.
They might have been fetched while he sat by the hearth. That is possible. Servants are efficient creatures, and princes’ clothing tends to appear where it is required with a speed that would be impressive if it did not so often make one feel like a child. Perhaps someone went to whatever room his things occupy now. Perhaps someone opened a cabinet, chose what was needed, laid it out, and withdrew.
Or perhaps the clothes had already been here.
The thought is quiet. And so, so much worse.
These are, after all, his chambers as much as yours. That is what everyone says. That is what the law says, and household arrangements, and the servants who have no doubt been instructed to treat the matter as fact no matter how thoroughly he has failed to inhabit it. There could be clothes here. A place for boots. A drawer, perhaps. A hook. Some small portion of the room set aside for a husband who has spent weeks in absence.
He does not know whether the clothes were fetched or waiting.
He does not know which answer he wants.
In the end, wanting does not matter. The clothes are here, and he cannot return in nothing but a towel.
So he dresses.
The clean shirt feels too clean against his skin. The scent from the bath clings beneath it anyway, at his wrists, in his hair, along his throat. Jasmine, rosewater, heat. The scent sits under the clean linen at his throat and wrists, private enough that no one else might notice and strong enough that he could not stop noticing.
Still, as he fastens the shirt, he wonders how long it will last once he leaves this place. How long before smoke, wine, his own skin, the rest of the world take it from him. How long before there is no trace left of this morning but the knowledge that there had been one.
You did not need to touch him again -if you ever did in the first place- to leave something on him.
The ring remains of course. Gold is easy enough to keep. Gold is meant to be seen, accounted for. A lawful mark, a public one. No one would think him strange for wearing proof that a vow had been spoken over him.
This is different.
There is no proof in the scent at his wrist, no witness at the warmth of the water, no name for the small shameful want that rises in him at the thought of carrying some trace of your room beyond its door. He becomes dreadfully, painfully aware of how much he wants to preserve it, as if evidence of you might be hoarded the way other men hoard letters favors, locks of hair, things actually given.
Nothing has been given.
Not like that.
And still, he catches himself pressing his thumb once against the inside of his wrist, where the scent of you lingers strongest, before he has the sense to stop himself.
He dislikes that thought and therefore does not look at it directly.
Instead, he looks toward the door.
The main room is quiet.
Too quiet, perhaps, though he has no right to judge the proper amount of sound your chambers make without him in them. The maid might still be there. You might be dressed by now. Gone, perhaps, to wherever your morning had meant to take you before he appeared on your floor and made himself into an obstacle to be stepped around with more grace than he deserved.
He tells himself that would be better.
It would be easier, certainly. To return to an empty room. To find the bed made or not yet made, sheets still faintly shaped by your sleep, perhaps the scent of you lingering at the pillow, perhaps some warmth left in the mattress if he were foolish enough to check, which he would not be.
Probably.
He could send for wine then.
The thought arrives with such practice ease that it embarrasses him more than longing would have. Not much, he tells himself first, because every bad idea deserves the courtesy of beginning politely. Only enough to take the edge from the thought of sleep.
A thought follows, shamefully almost as practiced as the first, and he thinks of allowing himself another bad idea. He will drink enough to make the bed survivable, enough to lie down where you had been and keep the dark from arriving too quickly with its mouth full of teeth.
Another indulgence, that. Another trespass dressed as necessity. If the Gods keep a ledger of him, they must have long ago assigned several clerks to the work; so one more line would hardly ruin the order of the page.
Drink. Lie down. Borrow the last warmth of your body from the sheets. Sleep, perhaps, if wine did what wine was meant to do and the dreams were too slow to follow.
He knows what to call that.
The word comes anyway.
Worth it.
It is a miserable little thought, greedy and quiet and entirely his. He lets it sit there for a moment because there is no one in the bath chamber to see what shape wanting takes when left unattended.
He thinks of what awaits him past the door. A cup on the table not yet cleared away. A shawl moved from one chair to another. Small proofs that you had been there and were no longer there.
Remnants.
He has always known what to do with remnants. They are easier than presence. Easier than wanting while the thing wanted is still in reach. A scent in linen, warmth fading from a mattress, the last image of a dream gone thin by morning; all ask less of him than a person who stays.
And perhaps it is better, he thinks, to keep only what remains.
What remains cannot look back at him.
The thought should comfort him. It does not.
Daeron stalls, delays his exit, fully aware of what he’s doing and unable to stop himself. Familiar dance, that.
He checks the fastening of his sleeve once, then again. Runs a hand through his damp hair and stops when his fingers reach his temple. Looks toward the mirror and away from it without letting his reflection gather. Listens to the quiet beyond the door until the quiet begins to sound like an answer.
Gone, then.
Probably.
Reasonably.
He ought to be relieved.
He opens the door.
The main chamber is brighter now. The curtains have been drawn closed again, but the hearth has taken properly and lights the irregular shapes and the traces of you. For one short, dreadful instant, he thinks the room is empty.
Then he sees you.
You are on the bed.
You are sitting against the pillows with your legs folded beneath the covers, a book open in your lap and one hand resting lightly against the page as though you have been holding your place rather than reading. The maids are gone, the tea has been cleared, and the room has settled into stillness that is not abandonment somehow.
Daeron stops with one hand still on the latch of the door.
You look up from the book slowly, one hand resting over the page, and for a moment Daeron can only stand there with the door half-open behind him. You do not startle, you do not ask why he has returned. The room is quiet enough that even the latch settling into place would feel like an answer, and still you only look at him, as if there had always been a place in the morning for this.
He had prepared himself for remnants: a little warmth left in silk, the ghost of lavender, some proof that you had been there and no longer were. Things he could keep because they would not know they were being kept. Things that could not look back.
The scent of you clings to his skin. You are looking at him.
Daeron closes the door behind him.
The latch settles with a soft, final sound that seems louder than it ought to. He keeps his hand there a moment after it has done its work, fingers resting uselessly against the metal, as if there is sense in holding the room shut once he has chosen not to leave it.
The scent of your bath is still on him. In his damp hair, at his wrists, beneath the clean linen of the shirt. He is aware of it with a clarity bordering on indecent, and because of that, because the awareness has nowhere reasonable to go, he looks away and towards the hearth. Fire and dancing flames are not easier to gaze into, exactly, but they are at least more familiar.
He feels as clearly as if it were a touch the weight of your gaze on him. Your eyes move over him, not rudely, not slowly enough to make a thing of it. He wonders, not for the first time, what you see when you look at him. Damp hair. Clean shirt. Bare throat. Whatever the bath has removed and whatever it left behind.
“Was the water warm enough?” You ask.
Daeron’s fingers loosen from the latch, and his eyes disobey him and greedily return to you.
“I mistook it for a test of character.”
Your mouth shifts, not quite a smile. “And did you pass?”
“I survived,” He steps away from the door because continuing to hold it would make him look either nervous or trapped, and he would prefer to appear neither while being both. “I hesitate to claim more.”
“Then it was warm enough.”
The answer comes with such calm satisfaction that he has to look away. The bath had been hot enough to make his skin briefly reconsider its allegiance to him, and you sit there as if he has merely confirmed the household staff had not failed one of their simpler duties. Of course. Of course you would think so. You had fled the cold stone as if it had personally insulted you, you had ordered fire into water and called it adequate.
Another thing to know, he thinks.
He should stop collecting them. He does not, he will not.
“Your morning has been…forgiving.” He says. It is the safest version of what he means. Not you waited. Not I thought you would be gone. Not I had already prepared myself for a room without you in it and was halfway to making a comfort of the idea. Only the morning, which can be blamed for any number of things and blushes at none of them.
You glance at the book in your lap. “I was reading.”
“Were you?”
“A little.”
His eyes drop before he can stop them. The book is open beneath your hand, the corner softened where your thumb has held it. He cannot know how long you have been sitting there with your attention fixed elsewhere. He only knows that when he left the room, you had been near the hearth, wrapped in the beginnings of a morning that looked as if it would soon gather itself and go on without him.
Now you are back in the bed.
That should be a small difference. A change of seat, nothing more. People move through rooms, women sit where they please in their own chambers. But the bed is not the chair, and the room no longer feels like a morning resuming its proper course after his interruption. It feels, instead, as if the interruption -as if he- has been given a place to stay.
He should not want that as much as he does.
“You did not need to wait.” He says.
“I know.”
The answer is immediate, if slightly offended. No excuse offered, no kindness dressed up as inconvenience. You do not even look embarrassed by it, which is inconsiderate enough that it nearly steadies him.
“You could have gone, continued on with your day.”
“I could have.”
He waits for more because men like him are always foolishly expecting more, expecting perhaps for absolution to announce itself. You give him none. You only shift the book slightly higher in your lap, one finger sliding along the page as though you might return to it, though your eyes remain on him.
Daeron inclines his head, accepting whatever kind of answer that is meant to be, and looks toward the hearth again. The chair is still there, and so is the small table, though the cups have been taken away and with them the last clean script he had been given. Tea had made sense. A chair had made sense. A bath made sense because it had answered the lie offered about the sheets, and a man who has been given a practical solution to a practical problem can sometimes pretend that nothing else has been touched.
He takes half a step in that direction anyway.
Not even a full one. His body knows the way to the chair before his mind can object. The hearth is a place to stand near without meaning anything, a chair is a way to remain in a room without asking the room to bear too much of him. He is almost grateful for the instinct that tries to take him there again, almost ready to let it carry him back into distance.
Then the book closes.
It is not a loud sound, but it changes the room regardless, it rings in his ears like the strike of a mace.
You set the book aside on the bed near your hip, careful with it, unhurried. Then you reach for the covers on the empty side and draw them back.
Daeron stops.
Or tries to. His feet stop before the rest of him does, and the rest of him arrives badly: breath first, then pulse, then the sudden useless awareness of his hands at his sides. For one absurd moment he feels almost threatened by the sight of sheets folded back from a mattress. He has stood in taverns with drunk men reaching too quickly for knives and felt less plainly outmatched than he does now.
That is not a flattering comparison, even he knows that. He has never mistaken himself for a courageous man. Courage, in his experience, belongs more visibly to people with fewer alternatives. Still, there is something humiliating in discovering that a brawl can be easier to face than a space made gently for him.
The panic is there first, because panic is quick and well-trained. It knows the path through his body. It tightens the throat, lifts the breath, makes the opened bed into a question with teeth.
The wanting is slower.
It comes after, heavy and almost trusting, before he can stop it: the treacherous drop of the body toward rest, the ache in his knees remembering the floor, the pull of warmth and silk and the empty place you have made as if his absence had been expected to end. Need is a clumsy thing when it has been starved too long. It does not know how to enter a room politely.
The movement is small, domestic. So plain that his mind still tries, hopelessly, to deny it the force of an invitation. A seat offered, a cup poured, a bed made available. All of it quiet enough to refuse, perhaps, if refusal had not begun to feel like one more form of lying.
You look at the opened space and then back at him.
“I take it the bath has resolved the matter of the sheets?”
The accuracy of it lands before he can dress it as accusation.
He had said he was not fit company for clean sheets. He has now been bathed, dressed, and returned to the room scented faintly of your oil and your water and whatever else he should not be carrying on his skin. He had been answered too thoroughly. There are cruelties in the world, he finds, less effective than a practical woman with patience.
He owes you, if nothing else, to drop the pretenses, and so he takes a breath and attempts,
“You should not make a practice of solving my excuses.”
“Then stop giving me solvable ones.”
For a moment, he has no answer. The plural catches him. Ones. You have not only answered the matter of the sheets, you have noticed a pattern while he had been busy mistaking evasion and cowardice for delicacy and subterfuge. He had thought himself careful. He had thought himself negligible. He had thought himself and his absences inconsequential.
Apparently, he has been legible.
His mouth moves, as it often does, before anything wise can reach it,
“They are made for a reason.”
“So is a bed.”
The absurdity of it almost saves him. He lets out a breath that might have become a laugh under different conditions, if his chest were a little lighter, if he had perhaps a different body or a different mind, if he were a different man instead of the one standing there with sleep caught under his ribs like a sickness.
You are bringing him down to the object, you seem to understand the object is easier to survive than what it means. He tries to reduce it to wood, linen, mattress, warmth. His body refuses the simplification in the usual places: throat, hands, breath.
He knows a bed is just a bed, but his body, traitorous and hungry thing, does not appear convinced.
“I would not impose on your reading.”
“You overestimate my interest in the book.”
There is something in your voice then, too slight to name generously and too present to ignore.
Not flirtation, exactly. He knows better than to call it that, as if attention becomes invitation merely because a starving man has decided it tastes like it. It is only that: attention. Your book set aside, your eyes on him, your interest turned from the page to the man standing uselessly near the bed.
But apparently he is starving enough to take it.
The knowledge lands in him with a small, private shame. He takes it anyway. Not as proof, because he is not quite foolish enough for that, but as something near enough to warmth that his body does not care what name should be given to it. He lets it catch, lets it matter, lets it be one more thing he will later pretend he did not keep.
The opened side of the bed waits beside you.
That is the ridiculous part. It is not even truly an offer, if one wants to be precise about it. The room is his as much as yours. The bed is his as much as yours. The space beneath the folded covers is, by every law that has ever spoken over them, the side of the bed that is technically his.
Technically is such a terrible word. It has excused more cowardice than he cares to admit.
Technically, he has had space here for weeks now. Technically, he has had a wife. Technically, there has been room enough for him in the bed every night he chose a chair, a corner, a borrowed patch of floor instead. The word gives a man all the shape of belonging without requiring him to suffer the fact of it. It lets him stand outside a door and call it restraint. It lets him make absence into mercy. It lets him pretend not taking something is the same as not wanting it.
Your hand rests near the turned-back covers, still and patient.
You are not insisting, not saying a thing, not issuing any commands he might follow or refuse.
He does not move.
“Daeron,” You say. His name, for the first time on your lips without title, without courtesy wrapped around it, without the replacement of husband like a hand placed over a wound to see whether it still bleeds. Just the name. Quietly spoken, all the more dangerous for that, because no one has made it a command and yet it reaches him as one. “It is just a bed. You may lie down.”
Just a bed.
He could almost laugh. He could almost tell you that very few things are just themselves once they have been wanted desperately enough. A cup is not a cup if it is handed to a starving man. A door is not a door if it is left unlocked for someone who has spent too long outside. A bed is not just a bed when sleep has teeth and dreams have learned his name and there is another person close enough to witness what happens if he forgets to be careful.
But the words are about this morning. He knows that. He knows that. This room, this hour, this body dragged past the point of any convincing denial. A present mercy, a practical one.
Some undisciplined part of him strains to hear more anyway.
This room again, perhaps. This bed again. Sleep within reach of you, without wine enough to blunt the edges first. The possibility of waking badly with you there to, if nothing else, witness it, witness him. The possibility of being allowed to return even after he has proved exactly why he should not.
He should say no.
He takes a step toward the bed.
It is infuriating, how quickly the body abandons principle when offered a place to fall. One step, then another, before he has gathered the proper objection. He feels heavier with each pace, not weaker exactly, but aware of every hinge and muscle and old ache as if the promise of rest has made exhaustion bold enough to declare itself. His knees remember the floor. His shoulder remembers the bedframe. His hands remember the cup burning his fingers. His mind remembers every hour it has been denied the dark behind his lids and every reason that dark cannot be trusted.
By the time he reaches the bed, he has thought of four refusals and yet spoken none of them.
You do not move away. It feels like a strike.
He stops beside the opened covers, close enough now to see the faint crease where the book had rested against your lap, the loose fall of your sleeve near your wrist, the place where the bedding has held the shape of your warmth. The scent of you clings to him still. Not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but enough that he knows it is there.
“Only for a moment.” He says, and it comes out low. Too low, perhaps, to be properly offered to you. It might have been meant for himself, except he is no longer alone in a room where such lies can pass unchallenged.
Only for a moment. A reassurance, if you are generous. A limit, if he is strong enough to hold one. An apology, nearly. Or worse than any of those, the smallest shape a plea can take.
You look at him for a beat.
Then you say, “Start there, then.”
He has no defense for that.
The words do not take the lie from him, but they do not let him keep it either. They leave him instead with the first part only: the beginning, the act, the one survivable inch between refusal and surrender. Start there, then. As if one can begin with a moment and not be ruined by what follows.
Daeron sits first because lying down all at once sounds too close to collapse.
The mattress gives way beneath him. Warm, still, from the proximity to where you have been sitting, and the sensation travels through the sheets at his hip with such sudden intimacy that he has to set one hand against the bed to steady himself. There is no reason for warmth to feel like being caught, there is no reason for it to feel like evidence. It is only a body’s remnant left in cloth, only the ordinary physics of someone having remained.
He had been prepared to steal that warmth after you were gone. It is much harder to touch it while you are still here.
He keeps his eyes lowered as he draws his legs onto the bed. Too carefully, because care is the last curtesy left to him. He leaves space between you. More than enough. His damp hair brushes the pillow when he lowers himself, and some part of him notes with horror and relief that the pillow does not reject him.
Absurd.
He lies on his back, any other position would ask too much of the room. His body wants desperately to curl toward warmth, toward the dip of the mattress, toward the living fact of another person beside him. He refuses it that much. His hands settle over his stomach, then move, then settle again at his sides because over his stomach looks too corpse-like but at his sides feels too vulnerable. Breathing evenly suddenly becomes an occupation. Not closing his eyes becomes another.
Beside him, you are quiet.
Not gone. Not touching him. Not asking him to make the moment into anything more than he can bear.
Daeron stares up at the canopy and tells himself, with the last foolish scrap of authority he possesses, that he will stay only long enough for the bed to stop feeling like mercy.
But the bed never stops feeling like mercy. That is the first problem.
The second is that mercy, once accepted, proves to have weight.
Daeron lies beneath the canopy and feels every inch of the mattress as if his body has been asked to give testimony against him. The silk is clean and soft. The pillow is too soft. The covers lie folded low over his hips because he has drawn them there with extensive care, as if there is a correct way to be covered in a bed that belongs to one’s wife and he might yet discovered by doing nothing too quickly. His damp hair cools against the pillow. His shirt pulls faintly at one shoulder when he breathes. His hands rest at his side, then over his stomach, then at his sides again.
There are, apparently, no good places for hands when a man is trying to seem less breakable than he feels.
Beside him, you sit against the pillows with the book returned to your lap. You have opened it again, though he does not know whether this is for your sake or his, whether you intend to read or only to give him something other than your quiet to survive. The pages make a small sound when you turn them. Dry paper, a careful touch, the whisper one sheet passing over another.
He keeps his eyes on the canopy. It is easier than looking at you.
It is also markedly not easy.
The distance between your bodies should reassure him. He has left enough of it. A uselessly polite stretch of linen, a diplomatic border in the middle of a marriage bed. No part of him dares touch any part of you. Even the warmth of your body reaches him only indirectly, through the mattress and the air and the scent of your bath still caught in his hair.
Because the quiet is starting to sound too much like something he might rest in, he blurts out,
“You may regret this.”
The page stills beneath your hand.
For half a heartbeat, he wishes he had kept the warning inside his mouth. He has given too many warnings already, and none he actually wanted you to heed.
“The bed?” You ask.
A laugh would help. He can feel the shape of one somewhere in his throat, but what leaves his chest is trembling and too honest.
“Me in it.”
You do not answer at once.
The quiet is not empty, and somehow that makes it worse. He can hear the fire shifting in the hearth, the soft movement of your body against the pillows, the slow drag of his own breath trying to behave against the dreadful feeling that no air is reaching him.
So he fills the silence again,
“I do not always sleep well.”
The understatement is so vast that for a moment he feels almost fond of it. A small, badly built bridge over a chasm no one has asked to cross. He does not sleep well. He does not sleep harmlessly. He does not sleep as one ought to sleep beside another person, with nothing but rest passing through the body and no horrors dragging themselves behind the eyes. He does not know how to make sleep survivable, he does not know how to make it safe, he does not know how to keep it from finding him.
You sit with that for a moment, a breath you let out and one he holds.
Then you turn the page.
“Then sleep badly here.”
Daeron has slept badly in chairs, on floors, against walls, in borrowed rooms where dawn found him before oblivion did. Badly is familiar, it is almost easy. It is the here that catches him, the placement of it with such ease, as if ruin has simply been given somewhere to happen.
He should not be grateful for it. Gratitude is a dangerous habit when one has so little judgement about where to place it.
“Generous.” He says, because some defense must be made.
“You underestimate my selfishness.”
There is something said there, a truth he might hoard with the others if he just reaches. But like an open flame, the thought tangles with dread and Daeron lets go of it as if it had burned him.
For a while, he tries to let the sound arrange the room. Page, fire, breath. The faint shift of silk when you settle more comfortably against the pillows, the hush of paper beneath your fingers.
His body begins, treacherously, to believe in the bed.
It starts at the edges. A loosening in his fingers. The slow unclenching of his jaw. The drop of one shoulder toward the mattress before he has agreed to yield it. His back, faithless and exhausted, softening by a fraction. The warmth under the covers gathering around his legs. The pillow accepting the weight of his head with an indecent willingness.
Then sleep moves, shifts.
It does not come as sleep should come, gently and by degrees, with the simple darkening of a tired mind. It waits just beneath that, a pressure, a tide at the edge of him, a beast on the prowl. it is something old enough, familiar enough, that it knows the way.
His eyes open.
He had not known he had closed them.
His breath catches so sharply that he has to swallow the sound before it becomes something more obvious. Every muscle returns to duty at once: hands still, face still, body still. Do not move. Do not dream. Do not frighten her. Do not make her regret staying.
The instructions arrive with the useless authority of prayers said after the Gods have already made their decision.
Beside him, the page does not turn. Daeron keeps his gaze fixed on the canopy.
There are kinds of cowardice so small they almost pass for manners. He tells himself he is sparing you the awkwardness of being looked at after you have noticed too match, he tells himself there is no need to check whether your attention has shifted from the book to him, he tells himself several things in rapid succession, all of them respectable and none of them true enough to matter.
He does not look because he does not want to see regret.
Not pity, either. Pity would be bad enough, but regret would be worse. Regret would mean the morning had reached the point all kindness eventually reaches with him: the moment of reconsideration, the quiet correction of generosity, the recognition that whatever had seemed harmless from a distance had become something else when allowed too close.
The page turns. Only then does he breathe again.
Slowly. Too slowly, probably.
He starts with the prayer the septa taught him when he was young enough to believe the order of words mattered more than the state of the soul offering them. Father above, judge me justly. Mother above, keep me kindly. Warrior, lend me strength. Smith, mend what has broken. Maiden, preserve the untouched. Crone, light the way. Stranger-
He stops there.
Not the Stranger. Not tonight, not this morning, not in this bed with you turning pages beside him as if a man might be trusted to lie still and not invite every dark thing he has ever feared into the room.
He begins again.
Father above, judge me justly.
That goes poorly as well.
After prayer fails, he counts kings. That lasts until too many of them begin to die in ways he does not care to remember. He turns instead to wines, which is either discipline or cruelty, and lists Arbor golds first because they are easiest, then reds, then the pale vintages some lord in the Reach once insisted had notes of pear and sunlight, whatever the fuck that means. The first swallow. The warmth moving down his throat. The dulling at the edges of his mind, not enough to save him, never enough to save him, but enough to make sleep less like being taken by the throat.
There is no wine in him. Not enough to count.
The thought lands late and hard. No proper barrier. No thick sweetness at the back of his mouth. No obedient, reliable blur between himself and the place sleep throws him into. He has come to the bed without the one ritual he has taught his body to expect before surrender, and the body, recognizing omission too late, answers with a small ugly panic under the ribs.
He turns it into stillness because that is what he has.
The book shifts in your lap. Your thumb worries at the edge of a page. He listens to that instead of the absence in his blood.
Then the bed gathers him again.
It is unbearable, how patient exhaustion can be. It waits through useless prayer, through counting, through the catalogue of wines he cannot drink, and then it returns to the body as if nothing has been decided. His eyes grow heavy. The fire softens. The sound of pages draws further away, then closer, then farther again. His thoughts begin to loosen their order.
Not gone, not dreaming, he reminds himself. Only thinning. Only a moment.
Dark collects at the back of his eyes.
Something moves inside it. A wing, a flame, a sky cracked open.
Daeron wakes before he has slept.
This time, his hand jerks against the covers. Only once, a small, stupid movement. Nothing that should matter. But his heart is suddenly loud, and his skin is cold beneath the warmth of the bed, and for one wild second he cannot remember whether the thing reaching for him had been in the dream or in the room.
The page does not turn.
He presses his hand flat against the mattress and forces his fingers open. One by one. He does not curl them into the sheet despite the instinct begging him to. He does not grip despite immobilizing need to cling to something to tether him here. He does not turn his head despite the way something in him already starves for a glimpse of you even if he has you closer than he deserves.
He does not turn his head. He can feel the place where your attention might be, and because he cannot bear it, he refuses to make it real.
Nothing happens. You do not ask. The fire shifts. The room remains a room, the bed remains a bed, his wife remains beside him with a book in your lap and enough mercy, apparently, to leave some things unnamed.
That nearly undoes him more than being questioned would have.
In another world, he might ask what you are reading.
The thought comes from nowhere and is almost more frightening than the ark because it is so small. So possible. It belongs to a man who can turn his head on a pillow and ask his wife about a book without making the question into a confession. It belongs to rooms where the beds are slept in and mornings are ordinary and no one counts the distance between bodies.
In another, kinder world, he might ask you to read aloud.
Not because the words would matter. They could be histories, accounts, some dreadful romance full of people making choices no living person would survive. It would not matter. He thinks, with a want so simple it shames him more than many worse things have managed to, that your voice might give the dark something to hold besides him, that it might carry him toward sleep by a road the dreams have not yet learned to watch.
He does not ask. Of course he does not ask.
Instead, he counts the ridiculous blades Aerion once purchased from a merchant who had sworn on three gods and one dead mother that each was made in the likeness of one of Valyrian steel. The first had been too heavy, the second too bright, the third had a dragon worked into the pommel so badly that Aerion called it an insult. There had been eight of them, or nine, Daeron cannot remember. He starts over at the first because the number matters less than the work of keeping the mind moving so sleep cannot catch it standing still.
One.
Too heavy.
Two.
Too bright.
Three.
The insult.
A page turns.
He follows the sound as far as he can.
His body lowers by degrees despite him: shoulder, jaw, spine, breath. Each surrender is small enough to deny until it gathers with the others and becomes something dangerous. The room blurs at its edges, the canopy loses its pattern, the fire becomes warmth without shape. Your presence remains the one fixed thing near him, not touching, not speaking, only there in the little sounds of paper and cloth and breath.
Sleep reaches again.
He feels it before it has images, that is the worst part. Before ash, before heat, before any face or field or flame can name itself, there is the pull. The old certainty of being dragged toward a place where his body will not obey him and waking will not come when called.
No.
His eyes open.
The word does not leave him, it lodges somewhere behind his teeth.
The book has gone still again. Daeron stares upward and does not move.
This time, he cannot make himself begin with counting prayers. The words feel worn from use, thin as cloth held to light. He tries wines again and loses the order after Arbor red. He tries kings and finds death. He tries the blades and cannot remember whether there were eight or nine or whether Aerion had bought them all or only a few. His mind, traitorous now in its own exhaustion, refuses the clean lines he gives it.
So he counts his breaths.
One, and the bed under him.
Two, and the fire.
Three, and the space between your body and his.
Four, and the page beneath your hand.
Five, and the dark waiting.
At five, he begins again.
One. The bed under him.
Two. The fire.
Three. You, beside him, not gone.
He stops there because counting you feels like another kind of theft.
The page turns at last, soft and careful in the quiet.
Daeron closes his eyes for the span of one breath and opens them again before sleep can decide it has been invited.
Then he begins again at one.
After a while, he hears the book close beside him. Daeron does not look.
The sound is small, barely more than paper against paper, leather settling shut, your hand leaving the page. Still, after the long effort of counting every sound in the room into its proper place, the change reaches him with absurd force. The page will not turn again. The little rhythm he had used to keep himself awake has stopped, and for a moment he feels almost betrayed by the silence.
Then the mattress shifts.
Not much, only enough to tell him you’ve moved.
He keeps his eyes shut at first, which is worse than keeping them open because darkness is never empty for him, not for long. He opens them again and fixes them on the canopy before anything can gather behind his lids. The pattern above him is blurred by exhaustion, the carved lines of wood and shadow going soft at the edges, but it is still there. A thing, a shape, a proof that he is awake.
The bed dips more fully at his side. You are lying down.
He knows it before he lets himself understand it. The change in the sheets, the warmth shifting nearer, the quiet adjustment of your body as you settle into the space beside him, close enough for the mattress to change under both of you and far enough away that he has no honest complaint or warning to give.
The arrangement of the room has changed again, and Daeron, who has learned to lie very still through dreams with teeth in them, through his father’s anger, through tavern rooms where drunk men mistake misery for an invitation to draw blood, finds himself nearly undone by the sound of a woman lying down in her own bed.
His hands remain where they are. That takes effort.
Everything takes effort, really. Breathing without making a study of it, remaining still without looking dead, keeping his eyes open without seeming terrified of closing them. Not turning his head. Especially not turning his head. He cannot look at you. If he looks, he will have to see how close you are, and if he sees how close you are, he will have to survive whatever it is his heart does with that knowledge.
There are limits, though he will be the first to admit he has met very few of them with dignity.
The mattress shifts once more, then settles. You have turned onto your side. He knows that too, because the warmth changes shape, because your breathing is angled toward him now, because some part of his body that has no loyalty to his pride is aware of you with humiliating precision. The same way you had slept the night before, perhaps. Curled on your side, one hand loose near your face, unaware of him until morning made the whole disaster visible.
Except this time, you are facing him.
Except this time, he is in the bed with you.
Except this time, after a long moment of lying very still and pretending stillness can pass for restraint, Daeron turns too.
It is not a graceful movement. He takes it slowly, as if any suddenness might give away too much, might come across too eager, drawing one shoulder from the mattress, shifting beneath the covers, finding the edge of the pillow with his cheek. His body understands the shape before his mind permits it: turned toward warmth, toward breath, toward the living fact of you in the bed beside him. He stops before he has turned fully enough to be accused of seeking you.
He leaves space, more than enough.
A careful, cowardly distance between his knees and yours, between his chest and the hand he does not yet know how to refuse.
His gaze drops to the sheets between you. It is marginally safer than your face. Marginally.
His throat works, but no sound comes out. Good, he is certain no sound he’s capable of now would help him.
The room waits.
Fire low in the heart, sheets warming in uneven places beneath him. The faint smell of rosewater and jasmine clinging to his own skin. Your breathing, steady enough to be kind or deliberate enough to be kinder. The bed does not ask him to move, you do not ask him to speak. Nothing in the room asks him for anything, which is perhaps why wanting begins to move so freely through him, finding no obstacle except his own will, which was never anything impressive in the first place.
Then your hand comes to rest between you.
Daeron goes still in a way that has nothing to do with rest.
It is not touching him, it is not even particularly close, if one wished to be reasonable about this. Reason, however, has been making a poor showing all morning. Your hand rests on the sheets between your bodies, palm turned upward, fingers loose, neither reaching nor withdrawn. A hand in the bed. A simple thing, a deniable thing. If he had more courage, perhaps he might even call it inconsequential.
He does not have enough courage for that.
He knows the shape of it.
That is the part that catches beneath his ribs. Palm open. Fingers easy. The softness of an offered thing made to look like sleep, or carelessness, or nothing at all. It is the shape his mind had worried over in the bath when his own hand failed at gentleness near his temple, the shape he had remembered from the night before when you had been unknowingly within reach and all his wanting had been safely impossible because you were asleep.
Now you are awake. Now the hand is there. Now any movement toward it would belong to him.
If you had touched him, he could have endured it as something done to him. If you had told him to take your hand, he could have made obedience out of it and hidden himself inside the instruction. This is worse, this is nothing dressed as nothing, and therefore everything depends upon whether he is desperate enough to make it into an offer.
He is.
The knowledge is immediate and degrading.
He does not move. Sleep shifts under the edge of him again.
Not only sleep, the place before it, the slope. The body beginning to lose its argument with itself. The edges of the room blur, then steady when he forces his eyes wider. His breath shortens. The dark behind his eyes is not visible because his eyes are open, but he knows it is there, waiting without face, waiting with patience. A warmth without comfort, a pressure without hand, the old pull toward a place where waking does not answer when called.
No, he thinks. The word is useless. It has always been useless.
His fingers move anyway.
Only slightly, a failure more than a decision. His hand shifts against the sheets, and then again, and for a breath he thinks he may be able to pretend the movement has been nothing more than another restless adjustment from a man very bad at lying still. Then the backs of his fingers brush the backs of yours.
He stops. Every part of him stops.
Your skin is warm.
That is all, that is the whole catastrophe of it. Warm skin, the faint rise of knuckles, the impossibly small contact of his skin against yours. It should mean nothing. It is barely touch. It is less than what courtiers trade in greetings, less than what servants tolerate in passing cups, less than what he has given strangers without remembering their faces.
His heart behaves as if he has been caught in a crime.
You do not move away.
For a moment, the two of you remain like that, scarcely touching at all, and Daeron cannot decide whether your stillness is mercy or a test. Perhaps it is neither, perhaps you are simply letting him have the exact measure of what he has chosen and no more or less. That would be like you, he thinks, though he does not know you well enough to be so certain and is becoming dangerously willing to pretend otherwise.
He has done worse things than touch a woman’s hand, the Gods know that. The Gods, if they keep their ledger, have darker ink set aside for him than this. Still, very few things have felt so much like reaching for something so out of his reach.
His hand turns before he has decided to let it.
Not boldly, he only lets his fingers shift from the back of your hand to the hollow of your palm, awkward and careful and half-ashamed, as though even now he might apologize to the space between your fingers for entering it. His hand is trembling; he hates that you must feel it. He hates even more than that even then he does not pull away.
Your fingers close once around his.
Only once. A small answer, a confirmation barely stronger than breath. Your hand receives his and then rests, warm and steady, as if nothing astonishing has happened at all.
Something in him gives way.
Not enough to break, only barely enough to stop holding himself quite so hard.
He keeps his gaze lowered between you, fixed on the place where your hand has answered his. It is easier than looking at your face, though not by much. Your fingers do not tighten again, but neither do they leave. The fire is still in the hearth, the bed is still beneath him. The room remains itself. The dark waits where it has always waited. The dreams have not vanished, and sleep has not become kinder. Still, his hand remains where it is.
And when the room begins to blur again, there is something for him to find.
Your palm against his. Your fingers loosely held. The slight pressure of your hand answering the tremor in his, not stopping it, not shaming, merely existing around it. Waking has a shape now, a place to return that is not the canopy, not the counting. He follows it without moving, lets his attention drop from the dark to the point where your hands meet. Warmth, touch, skin. The faint, living pulse of another body close enough to be known.
One, he thinks, and does not know whether he means breath, or heartbeat, or your hand.
The counting falls apart almost at once. And for once, he lets it.
Sleep comes again.
He feels it gather and his body begins its old revolt, every tired muscle tightening for the fight it has no strength left to win. But the fight does not find the same shape. His fingers, instead of clawing at the sheet, hold yours. His breath, instead of catching alone behind his teeth, finds the rhythm of yours and loses itself there. The dark presses forward, and the room recedes, and still some part of him knows the difference between dream and hand.
The bed warms around him, the fire becomes a distant, steady thing. Your presence remains, reduced and magnified at once into the place where his hand is not empty.
He does not trust sleep, he does not forgive it. Some lucid, frightened part of him refuses even now, insisting that he should keep watch, keep count, keep himself from falling where the dreams can take him and do what they please with him.
He cannot.
His eyes close, and this time, he does not open them at once.
the room slips again. He loses the fire, then the curtains, then the weight of the covers over his legs. He keeps your hand longer than the rest, or perhaps it simply becomes the only thing he knows how to notice. Warmth, skin, you. The faint pressure of your fingers answering his when his own forget how to be still, when some frightened and foolish part of him squeezes once as if to request reassurance you remain there.
The dark comes anyway.
This time, Daeron does not wake himself to avoid meeting it.
His hand is still in yours when sleep takes him.
Thank you for reading! I have entirely too many ideas for this universe/collection, so I'll hopefully be posting more soon.
