Hiiii ^^ just thinking about daerons wife and her dislike for cold floors lol. What if she ever got an actual cold though, I’m sure adapting to the temperature was a journey. Would daeron try to take care of her in any way? Would the tea knowledge she shared come in handy? I’m sure Daeron would have mixed feelings between not wanting to bother her, letting her rest and also wanting to check if she’s ok.
ALSO I’m glad you got better, thank you for answering the other asks :)
Hi anon! Thank you so much for your message!!
I love this thought so much. I do think the first time she gets properly sick at Summerhall would be miserable for her. She already hates the cold floors when she is healthy, and I imagine a winter cold would make the distance from Dorne feel rather more immediate.
Daeron would absolutely try to take care of her, and the things she taught him about tea would come back. He remembers small details people do not always realize he has kept. This does not necessarily mean the tea would be good.
I also think his reaction would be very different depending on where they were in the marriage. “Early marriage” covers a ridiculous amount of ground with these two, so I am roughly placing each version within the existing stories.
Very early in the marriage (After the wedding, but before I’m Not Sure What Peace Is)
At this point, I think Daeron would decide that the most considerate thing he could do was stay out of her rooms.
She is already far from home, living in his family’s castle and married to a man she hardly knows. If he visits while she is sick, she may feel she has to sit up, speak to him, and receive him properly when she really wants to sleep. He would also be very aware that being her husband gives him access to her whether she wants it or not, and I do not think he would trust himself to know the difference between being welcomed and merely being endured.
Some of it is genuine consideration, some of it is Daeron finding a respectable reason not to risk knowing he is unwanted.
So he would stay away from her and become increasingly difficult everywhere else.
He would ask her servants whether the maester had visited and whether she had eaten. He might even phrase it all as a complaint about the household rather than concern for her. Why was that corridor so cold? Had no one checked the shutters? Why had the kitchens sent her something so heavy when she was feverish?
He would ask one person, dislike how little they told him, and then ask somebody else. “She is resting” would not be enough. Is she sleeping? Is the fever lower? Has she kept anything down? Did she ask to be left alone, or did everyone simply decide that for her?
I do not think he would manage the waiting especially well. He would probably drink because that is what he does when there is something he cannot act upon. Then the maester would speak to him and Daeron would realize, with sudden anger, that he had made himself too blurred to follow every word.
The next cup might remain mostly untouched. He would say that the wine was poor if anyone asked. Tbh, I do not think anyone would believe him.
The tea would be sent through a servant at this stage, I think.
He would remember which leaves she had said helped a sore throat, that she used honey in that particular mixture, and that the cup ought to be warmed first. He would also probably leave it steeping for too long or add twice as much of something because he assumes that will make it work better.
There might be warmed slippers on the tray too, or an extra rug might quietly appear beside the bed. That kind of care is easier for him, because what he is offering is something outside of him, removed from him, untainted by him. He can arrange for her feet to be warm without having to stand in front of her and admit that he remembered.
She would know it was him anyway. Some of the details would be things she had only ever mentioned in his hearing.
Once she was feeling better, I can imagine her telling him that the tea had been terribly bitter. He would immediately ask whether it helped before remembering that he was pretending not to know anything about it.
She might admit that it did, and that would probably be the entire conversation. He would look embarrassed and vaguely displeased, and the next cup would be weaker.
I think it would matter to him that she knew he had been paying attention and did not seem to resent the attempt. She would not make him explain himself, which at this point might be the kindest possible way to receive it.
While they are growing close (Somewhere between I Can, I Do and And I Think, I’ve Loved You.
By this point, Daeron knows that she will allow him into her rooms. She has already let him remain when he arrived with poor excuses, and the floor or the bed beside her is no longer entirely forbidden ground.
What he still does not believe is that he can stay without giving her a reason to keep him.
I think illness would almost make things easier for him because there are things that need doing. He can carry a tray, tend the fire, refill her water, speak to the maester, or help her sit upright. He does not have to admit that he wants to be there if he can make himself useful instead.
He would bring the tea himself now. There would still be an excuse attached to it (the servants were occupied, he did not trust them to prepare it correctly, he happened to be nearby) but neither of them would believe it very much.
Once he was inside, he would keep moving.
He would shift the water nearer to her and then decide it was too close to the edge. He would adjust the fire, move the chair, lose track of how long the tea had been steeping, swear at it, and start again. If his hand shook while he poured, he would blame the cup or the tray.
She would eventually tell him to stop moving things and sit down.
He might choose the chair rather than the bed. Depending on exactly where this falls, the bed would still feel like somewhere he needs to be invited each time. He might even end up on the floor again because the floor has become familiar and does not require him to decide how much closeness he is permitted. Also I live for the imagery of the man sitting on the floor next to the woman’s feet while she sits on a chair/sofa, sue me.
By now, though, she understands him better. She knows every new task is at least partly an excuse not to leave.
And there is also something very specific to Daeron in being useful to her physically. His relationship to his body and the uses he finds for it or lets others find for it is very interesting to me, I have a lot of thoughts regarding that
His body has so often been something to numb, offer, exhaust, laugh at, or allow other people to use. Here, she might ask him to hold the cup while she drinks, put an arm behind her shoulders, or steady her when she stands. These are very small things, but I think they would affect him badly.
She trusts his hands with her when she is tired and vulnerable. She does not want a performance from him. She just wants him to keep the cup steady.
I can imagine her trying to stand without her slippers and Daeron immediately kneeling to find them. He would catch her ankle because she was unsteady, acting before he had time to think about touching her.
Then he would realize what he was doing and become much too careful.
She would probably only tell him that the other slipper was beneath the chair, though you cannot convince me that even this early she would not be dying to push his buttons a little in situations like this one.
He would find it, put it on her foot, and avoid looking at her for a while afterward. Meanwhile, she is feverish and mostly interested in reaching the chamber pot without falling over.
The thing that gets me here is that he might become a little too invested in being needed. Like despite the pathological levels of avoidance, can you imagine the sort of reassurance being needed is to Daeron? Insane. Again, lots of thoughts regarding that, but back to her being sick:
He wants her to recover, of course he does. But while she is ill, she asks for him without his having to invent a hairpin or an empty cup, she says his name because she wants water or needs help sitting up. For once, he knows what she wants from him, and he can give it to her.
As she begins to improve, he would feel relieved. Then there might be a small, ugly sense of loss when she no longer needs help with everything.
He would hate himself for it immediately. He does not want her sick. He just wants to know what he is for (and a not so small part of him that is already becoming attached is clinging to being needed or useful if nothing else).
If he kept getting up whenever she closed her eyes, I can imagine her eventually asking him to stay until she finished the tea. That is permission in a form he can accept because it sounds like another task.
And I’m thinking maybe she falls asleep before the cup was empty.
Daeron would remain in the chair, still holding it long after it had gone cold. In his mind, I suppose, she has not finished the tea and therefore has not technically dismissed him yet. The pining, the pining
Later in the marriage (After We Can’t Deny It, once the dream of the bloodied Martell sun has already begun haunting him)
Later on, Daeron knows that she has chosen him, so he no longer needs an excuse to enter her rooms or remain beside her. He knows how she takes her tea, what she can tolerate eating when she has no appetite, which window lets in the worst draft, and when she is pretending to feel better because she is tired of being watched.
He would be more capable by then, but not necessarily easier to live with.
He would notice every small change because he knows her body and her habits well. He would know when she had only moved the food around the plate. He would hear that her breathing sounded different before anyone else did. He would ask the maester to repeat something because the first answer did not settle properly in his mind.
He might become short with the servants or irritated with her when she tried to get out of bed too soon. He would make the tea correctly and then spill some because his hands were shaking. Knowing what to do would not make him calm while doing it.
I think he would try to remain sober while she was genuinely ill. Not because he had suddenly become disciplined, but because he would be afraid of missing something.
Also, you cannot convince me that the Maekarlings, and Maekar himself, do not all have some nagging little fear of the people they love becoming ill and then suddenly getting much worse after what happened with Dyanna. I do not know how conscious that would be for Daeron, but I do think it would be there.
So, I think he would refrain more than usual. He would want one version of the room that had not been blurred at the edges.
Unfortunately, being clear-headed would also leave him alone with everything his mind was doing.
Of course, the bloodied-sun dream would not make him believe that a cold automatically meant she was dying. He knows what a cold is. The maester could tell him that her lungs were clear and that the fever was ordinary, and Daeron would understand him.
But what if something small and completely unremarkable were to touch the dream?
Perhaps the dry air gives her a nosebleed after several days of coughing. She wipes it away with a cloth embroidered with the Martell sun. Perhaps a few drops fall onto the blanket instead.
It would not look exactly like what he saw. It would only need to be close enough.
Because then there is no real way for him to prove that this is not the beginning of it.
Afterward, I think he would become much quieter.
In my head, when Daeron is only worried, he can be restless, irritating, and a bit of a flight risk. But when he is truly frightened, his attention narrows. He stops wandering around the room, he braces watches.
He might turn the bloody cloth facedown or move the blanket so that he could no longer see the embroidered sun. He would touch her forehead again after the fever had already begun to fall. He might listen too closely whenever her breathing changed and look away when she caught him doing it.
Earlier in the marriage, something like this might have driven him out of the room. He would have drunk, disappeared, or found some smaller grievance to place between them because fear was easier to bear at a distance.
Later, though, I think he would stay.
She would recognize what had happened eventually. Perhaps she would wake and see that he had turned the Martell cloth over.
Daeron would probably say nothing if she asked about it. Or he would claim there had been blood on it and he did not want it staining anything else, although it had already dried.
She would know better, but I do not think she would force him to tell her the dream again while she was sick and exhausted. She might only tell him to put the cloth somewhere else if he could not bear looking at it.
She cannot promise that she will never die. Even if she tried, Daeron would hear the lie inside it. She also cannot prove that what he saw will never happen (That is, of course, assuming she even knows exactly what he saw. I have a lot of thoughts around the bloodied sun, but I still do not really know how much of it he will eventually tell her).
So maybe all she can really do is remain where she is, feverish and annoyed, while the hours keep passing and nothing happens.
I can imagine her waking later and finding his fingers resting against the inside of her wrist beneath the blankets. He had been checking her pulse and fallen asleep before he remembered to let go.
She might pull the blanket higher over his hand and close her eyes again.
By then, the tea would be cold. The cloth would still be facedown on the table. Daeron would still be in the room.
Thank you so so much for your message anon, I hope you like the answer, I had a lot of fun thinking about this!!
After a half-formed dream drives Daeron from your bed, you wake to find him sitting on the floor beside the door and settle into his arms. Your memory of your wedding night reveals kindnesses he has forgotten: the door he left unlatched, the candles he offered to keep burning, and his clumsy determination not to frighten you further. When Daeron admits that he spent months expecting you to seek an annulment, you realize he has interpreted every day of your staying as duty, endurance, luck, or pity.
Continuation of I do, but I am afraid
Word Count: 5.9k
Warnings: Prophetic dreams/nightmares, dream imagery/blood imagery/implied death imagery, you better be as haunted by the bloodied sun dream as Daeron will be soon, arranged marriage stuff, hurt/comfort, alcohol and past-drunkenness discussed
A/N: The second part, and sort of resolution, to the previous fic. It takes place once they have progressed quite a bit in their relationship/intimacy. i 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 David Levithan: "I love you -I do- but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you're always going to leave me. We can't deny it. You're always going to leave."
The sun is wrong again.
Or it may not be the sun.
There is something gold before him, round only when he looks at it from the corner of his eye. When he tries to face it directly, it stretches into a doorway, then a piece of cloth, then light caught beneath dark water. Red moves across it without falling, it spreads upward from somewhere he cannot see, thinning in places until the gold shows through and then closing over it again.
Someone stands beneath it.
No. Someone lies there.
He sees a shoulder, perhaps, or the bend of an arm. A hand lifted briefly against the light. The fingers open, and the red passes between them.
Daeron tries to call out, but his mouth is full of heat.
The ground shifts beneath him. It is stone, then mud, then the softness of a bed he does not recognize. His foot sinks. When he looks down, his hands are already wet, though he does not remember reaching for anything.
Something is speaking behind him, but he cannot hear the words. He knows only that he has heard them before and failed to understand them then.
The gold darkens.
The figure beneath it turns, and for one instant he sees hair, the line of a cheek, a flash of gold at the throat. Then the face is gone again, hidden by red light or smoke or the inside of his own hand.
He reaches.
The distance changes.
The figure is very near. The figure is impossibly far away. He is kneeling beside it. He is still trying to cross the ground.
The sun opens like an eye.
Daeron wakes before it sees him.
For a moment, the bed remains part of the dream. The covers lie heavy across his legs, the canopy above him swallowed by darkness. His hand is closed around a fold of linen damp with sweat, and something in him waits for the gold overhead to darken.
Then the room returns in pieces: the low fire, the lamp left burning near the wall, your breathing beside him.
He releases the sheet.
Only a dream.
The words he tells himself come quickly, practiced enough that they almost sound like knowledge.
Nothing had spoken to him. No God had bent over his bed to put blood inside the sun. His mind had simply taken firelight, fear, whatever scraps of the day it had refused to digest, and made another shape from them. That is all. His own head has always been willing to frighten him without divine assistance.
Only a dream conjured by a mind that could not be trusted to sleep quietly.
He knows this.
He repeats it anyway.
You are asleep on your side, one hand beneath the pillow and the other lying open where his shoulder had been. Nothing marks you except the crease of sleep across your cheek.
Daeron knows where he is, he knows what he saw was a dream and not a warning placed inside him by something that had already decided how the future would end. But neither fact makes the bed feel safe enough to remain in it.
He moves carefully, lifting the covers without dragging them across your legs. You stir when the mattress shifts, but do not wake. Daeron waits until your breathing settles again before he stands.
The floor is cold beneath his feet. He takes the blanket from the chair near the fire and wraps it loosely around his shoulders, then crosses to the wall beside the door and lowers himself to the floor.
He does not intend to remain there long.
The stone is solid behind him. The room looks different from this height: the bed too high, the dying fire hidden partly by the iron grate, the door close enough that he could reach its latch without standing. He rests his forearms across his knees and listens to the quiet.
The dream has already begun to lose what little shape it had. He can no longer remember whether the gold had been above him or in front of him, whether the red had covered it or come from within. The figure remains only as the certainty that someone had been there and that he had failed to reach them.
It means nothing.
Dreams change while a man remembers them, fear fills whatever is missing. By morning there may be no figure at all, only heat and color and the sour knowledge that he has frightened himself again.
That is enough to keep his eyes open.
Daeron does not know how long passes before the mattress moves.
The sound is small, followed by the rustle of linen and a pause. He keeps his face turned toward the fire. Perhaps you will find the other side of the bed empty, understand where he has gone, and decide that sleep is the wiser choice.
Bare feet touch the floor.
He closes his eyes briefly.
You do not speak as you cross the room. The blanket from the bed trails around your shoulders, gathered clumsily beneath one arm. Your steps slow when you reach him.
Daeron shifts before you ask.
His knees part, making room between them, and you lower yourself onto the floor with your back against his chest. The movement is practiced enough that neither of you needs to arrange it aloud. You pull the blanket over your legs, then take hold of one edge of the one around his shoulders and draw it across yourself as well.
His arms settle around you.
Your body is warm from the bed. The back of your head fits beneath his chin, and when you lean more fully into him, his hands move across your stomach to hold you there.
For a while, neither of you says anything.
Your fingers find one of his beneath the blanket and turn his hand over. You run your thumb once across his palm, perhaps looking for something the dream has not left there.
“You should go back to bed.” Daeron says.
His voice comes out rough from sleep.
You make no effort to move. “Will you join me?”
“Eventually.”
You are quiet long enough that he knows you do not believe him.
Daeron lowers his mouth to your hair. “I did not mean to wake you.”
“You did not.”
He looks toward the bed. “Then what are you doing here?”
“I woke and you were gone.”
There is nothing wounded in the words. You say them as simply as you might say the fire has gone low or the room has grown cold. Still, his arms tighten slightly before he notices.
“You need not stay awake because I am.”
“I know.”
You settle your head more comfortably against him.
The answer leaves nothing for him to argue with. He could tell you again to sleep, but you would remain regardless of his objections, and he would have turned your presence into a contest neither of you wanted.
His thumb moves against the fabric over your stomach.
The fire shifts in the grate. A small piece of wood collapses inward with a soft crack, briefly lifting the light across the floor.
You look toward the door.
“You sat here that night as well.” You murmur, the Dornish tilt to your words harsher.
Daeron’s hand stills.
“What night?”
“The first one.”
It takes him a moment to understand. The wedding chamber comes back without invitation: candle smoke, wine, the untouched bed. Your hand pulling at the fabric around your wrist.
“I was not sitting here.” He says, though he does not know why he is certain.
Your fingers close around his again beneath the blanket. “You sat beside the door.”
Daeron searches what remains of the memory and finds only himself standing too far from the bed, the cup in his hand, his own voice arriving in fragments.
“I do not remember sitting.”
“You did, eventually,” There is a slight change in your tone now, the first suggestion that you have looked back and realized he is not following you. “You asked whether I wanted the door left unlatched.”
Daeron looks down at you, though he can see only the side of your face.
“Did I?”
You turn your head enough that he sees your brow draw together.
“Yes.”
The surprise in your voice is quiet. It hurts more for that.
Daeron looks toward the latch. “I do not remember.”
“You asked twice,” Your thumb has stopped moving across his palm. “I had already answered, but I do not think you remembered asking the first time.”
That sounds possible. More possible than most things he remembers from the night.
“What did you say?”
“That I wanted it unlatched.”
“And I left it?”
“Yes.”
He waits for more. You seem to be waiting as well, perhaps for recognition to arrive now that the facts have been placed before him, but nothing does.
Daeron remembers the door closing behind the both of you. He remembers hating the sound. He cannot find himself opening it again.
“You sat beside it afterward,” You continue. “You said no one would enter unless I called for them.”
He lowers his eyes to your joined hands.
“I said that?”
“You did.”
Your voice has softened, but not into reassurance. You are studying the absence in him, beginning to understand its size.
Daeron can almost hear the man you remember. Drunk enough to repeat himself, frightened enough to put his body between the bed and the door, trying to provide choices after every meaningful choice had already been made by other people.
He cannot feel himself inside the image.
He remembers saying he would not touch you. He remembers the words as blunt and ugly, a refusal dropped at your feet because he had no graceful way to offer anything. He remembers waking with shame already formed before he understood what had happened.
“What else did I say?”
You breathe in slowly.
“Not much that made sense from beginning to end.”
“That sounds more familiar.”
It is meant to lighten the question. The words do not quite manage it.
“You kept telling me I could sleep,” you say. “Then you asked whether I wanted the candles left burning. You moved the wine because you thought the smell was making me nauseous.”
Daeron closes his eyes.
The details do not return when you speak them. They remain yours.
“Was it?”
“The wine?” He nods against your hair. You shake your head. “No. I was just frightened.”
His arms loosen instinctively, but you catch his wrist before he can move away.
“I did not know you, not really,” You remind him. “I had spent the whole day being looked at and dressed and spoken about as though I was already lost. Then the door closed, and you….you were very drunk.”
Daeron does not interrupt.
“I was frightened before you said anything. I do not think there was a thing you could have said that would have changed that.”
The honesty enters cleanly. You do not soften the night to protect him from it.
His thumb has stopped against your stomach. You guide his hand back into place, holding it there until his fingers close around the fabric again.
“But you asked about the door,” You say. “And when I answered, you listened.”
Daeron looks at the dark line beneath it.
“I barely remember your answer.”
“You listened then.”
The distinction quiets him.
You are still facing away, your body resting easily inside the space he made without thought. His legs frame yours beneath the blankets. Your hand lies over his where it rests against your stomach.
He thinks of you standing beside that other bed with your fingers closed around your sleeve. He remembers the movement and not what followed. You remember him noticing.
“What did you think of me?” He asks. The question is out before he can decide whether he wants the answer.
You lean your head back against his shoulder. “That night?”
“Yes.”
“At first?” He feels the answer coming and nearly tells you not to give it. “I thought you were exactly as drunk as everyone had warned me you would be.”
Daeron lets out a breath through his nose.
“And afterward?”
You are quiet.
“I thought you were trying very hard not to frighten me more.”
Something in his chest shifts painfully.
“That is a charitable memory.”
“It is mine.”
He has no answer to that.
The fire has nearly fallen in on itself. Its light no longer reaches the bed, leaving only the lamp beside it and the pale edge of the curtains. You should both be asleep. Morning will come whether he closes his eyes or not.
Instead, you remain against him, awake because he is awake, holding his hand as if there is nowhere else it ought to be.
Daeron lowers his face to the side of your neck.
You tilt your head slightly, giving him room. His mouth rests beneath your ear, then against the warm place where your neck meets your shoulder. The kiss is slow and without urgency. He feels your breath deepen under his hand.
You turn your face toward his hair and press your lips briefly to his temple.
The dream feels farther away now.
Not gone, the red light remains somewhere behind his eyes, waiting for sleep to give it another shape. But the room is solid around him, your weight rests against his chest, your fingers are threaded through his.
He has you here.
The thought comes with its own old wound.
For a long time, he had believed every piece of this was temporary: the shared bed, your hand seeking his beneath blankets, the ease with which your body now settles into his. Something borrowed from your patience and his improbable luck, to be returned once he finally gave you sufficient reason.
Daeron keeps his face hidden against your neck.
“For a long time,” He admits, voice roughened, “I thought you would ask.”
Your fingers move slightly between his.
“Ask what?”
He could leave it there. Pretend he meant for another candle, another room, some ordinary thing from the months between then and now.
“To have it undone.”
You go still.
Not gradually. The warmth and weight of you remain against him, but every small resting movement stops.
Daeron lifts his face.
You do not speak at once. He can see only the line of your cheek and the corner of one eye as you stare toward the darkened fire.
“Our marriage?” You ask.
“Yes.”
The word is almost soundless.
You draw one slow breath. Then your hand leaves his, and for one instant Daeron thinks he has finally said the thing that makes you move away.
Instead, you gather the blanket around yourself and turn within the circle of his legs.
Your knee brushes his hip. One hand presses to the floor for balance while you shift to face him, close enough that the blanket remains around both of you.
Daeron lets his arms fall.
You look at him as though the room has changed shape while your back was turned.
“For how long?” You ask.
Daeron looks down at the blanket gathered between you. One corner has caught beneath his heel; he fixes his attention on that rather than your face.
“I do not know.”
You study him in silence, trying to understand what kind of answer that is.
“From the beginning?”
“Near enough.”
The words sound careless once they are spoken. He had not meant them to. There is simply no date he can offer you, no first morning when the fear arrived and announced that it intended to remain.
It had never lived in him evenly. Sometimes weeks passed without it, sometimes a look held too long across breakfast was enough to wake it. A night when he drank more than he intended, an answer from you that came quieter than usual, a letter bearing a Martell seal left beside your hand; any of them might bring it back. He had learned not to give the fear a name when it came, because naming things had never made them kinder.
You watch him struggle with the explanation, your expression growing more troubled as the silence lengthens.
“Did you think I wanted the marriage undone all that time?”
“I did not think you wanted it,” He rubs his thumb against the edge of the blanket. “I just…thought you might come to.”
You look away from him then, toward the bed and the pale folds of linen abandoned there. When you turn back, there is something newly guarded in your face.
“Why did you never ask me?”
“I did not know how.”
“Love, you have asked me far stranger things.”
A rueful little smile touches his mouth, born from habit rather than amusement. “That is true.”
“Daeron.”
There is no sharpness in your voice, but he hears the effort underneath it, the first sign that patience is no longer coming easily.
The smile disappears.
You shift closer, though not enough to touch him. The blankets have slipped from one shoulder, leaving the thin fabric of your nightclothes exposed to the cold, but neither of you reaches to pull them back into place.
“Why did you never ask?”
Daeron draws one knee higher and lays his arm across it, putting a small barrier between you without meaning to.
“If I asked, you would have had to answer.”
You stare at him for a moment. “Yes.”
“I did not want the answer.”
The admission leaves him briefly hollow, as if something has been removed from behind his ribs.
Your hand presses flat against the blanket over your knee. “So you preferred to believe I was waiting to leave?”
“No. I preferred not to know whether you were.”
The distinction had seemed meaningful inside him. Spoken aloud, it sounds like cowardice dressed in finer clothes.
You draw a slow breath and let it out through your nose. Daeron watches your fingers tighten in the blanket and is afraid of every movement before you make it.
“I thought perhaps asking would only put it in your mind,” He continues. “If it was not there already.”
For the first time, something like anger passes across your face, something like disbelief sharpened by hurt.
“You thought I had never considered my own marriage because you had not mentioned it?”
“No,” He looks toward the door, then forces his gaze back. “But I was afraid to remind you.”
Your mouth closes. The room is quiet enough that he can hear the faint hiss of sap in the dying fire.
“My grandmother spoke to me before I left Dorne.” You say at last.
Daeron’s fingers curl against his leg.
You see it and continue before he can decide what the movement means.
“She told me what the marriage would require of me, or what men might try to require. She told me what could be done if you were cruel, if I was unsafe here, or if the marriage became something I could not bear. She did not know exactly what sort of husband you would be, and neither did I.”
You hold his gaze while you speak, refusing to hide the fact that this conversation happened long before you knew him.
“My House did not send me here blind.”
“You knew.”
“I knew there were ways home.”
Daeron’s eyes move toward the door before he can stop them.
Your hand tightens once around the blanket.
“Do not make that mean I wanted to go.”
“I did not say that.”
“You did not have to. I saw it happen.”
Your voice remains quiet, but the softness has thinned. Daeron says nothing, because denying it would only ask you to pretend you had not seen him clearly.
“Of course I considered leaving,” You admit. “I did not know you.”
The sentence lands in his chest, though he had expected it.
“You knew what people said about me.”
“Yes.”
“And you agreed to the marriage anyway.”
“I agreed to marry you. That is not the same as agreeing to remain regardless of what you did afterward.”
The answer is not cruel. You do not speak it to wound him, and that makes it impossible for him to dismiss as anger.
You pull the blanket back over your shoulder, then smooth it down without looking away from him.
“I knew that if you were violent, if you humiliated me, if you treated me as something owed to you, my father would do whatever he could to bring me home. I knew there would be scandal and that none of it would be easy. I did not know every law or every argument someone might place before the Faith, but I knew I was not without recourse.”
Daeron had imagined pieces of this conversation often enough. Hearing you speak of it so plainly should make his fear worse.
For a moment, it does.
Then another fact enters beside it.
You knew, and still he woke beside you this morning. You found him missing from the bed and crossed the room to sit on a cold floor with him. Your body had settled into the space between his legs as though it belonged there, because he had made room without needing to be asked.
“You could have left.” He states.
“Yes.”
The word comes easily from you. Daeron lowers his gaze, unable to keep looking at the person who can say it without flinching.
Your hand rises toward him, pauses in the narrow space between you, then comes to rest against his cheek.
“Look at me.”
He does, though slowly.
“I could have left,” You repeat. “That is not the same as wanting to.”
Daeron cannot make himself answer.
Your thumb moves once beneath his eye. The frustration in your expression has softened into something quieter and more wounded.
“What did you think I was doing all these months?”
He frowns. “What do you mean?”
“You thought I stayed because I was proud, or because my father would be ashamed? Perhaps because returning home would have been…inconvenient?”
“I did not know what to think.”
“You must have believed something.”
Daeron looks past you toward the bed. The lamp beside it leaves a narrow wash of gold across the covers.
“I thought you were making the best of it.”
“Of the marriage?”
He hesitates. Your face changes before he answers.
“Of you,” You say. The words are not a question, and Daeron does not deny them.
You sit back, putting a little more space between your knees and his. Your eyes shine faintly in the low light, though you do not look close to tears. The hurt is quieter than that and perhaps harder for him to bear because of it.
“You thought every kindness was endurance.”
“Not every kindness.”
The correction comes weakly.
You look away. “That is worse.”
Daeron opens his mouth, but nothing that belongs there comes. His hands remain uselessly folded against his raised knee while you rub one thumb over the opposite wrist.
The movement brings the wedding chamber behind his eyes again: gold at your throat, wine in his mouth, your fingers worrying the fabric while he tried not to become another danger in the room.
“I did not stay because I knew I would love you,” You admit. His attention returns fully to your face. “I did not know that. I could not have known it.”
The words do not wound him in the same way as the others, perhaps because you are not offering them as a wound. You are trying to tell him the truth in the order you lived it.
“At first, I stayed because I had agreed to try. One terrible day and one drunken night were not enough to tell me what the rest of my life would be. You frightened me, yes, but you had also listened when I said I wanted the door left open.”
Daeron’s throat tightens.
“You sat beside it,” You continue. “You could barely keep your eyes open, and every few minutes you asked whether I was certain no one should be called. You would not come near the bed. You would not let anyone else enter the room.”
“I do not remember.”
“I know.”
The sadness in your voice makes him wish, briefly and uselessly, that the night would return whole. Not because he wants to relive it, but because you have carried a version of him that he has never been able to possess.
“I thought you were trying,” You say after a pause. “Badly. You were drunk and frightened and ashamed, and I understood perhaps one sentence in three. But you were trying not to make the night worse for me.”
“That was a low measure.”
“It was the measure I had.”
Daeron lowers his face.
You reach across the space he has created and place your hand against his cheek again. He stills beneath the touch.
“You were not what I had been told to expect.”
“That is not always a compliment.”
“It was that night,” Your thumb traces once along the bone beneath his eye. “I stayed because I wanted to know whether that man existed when he was sober.”
A breath leaves Daeron that might have become a laugh in another room.
“And did he?”
“Occasionally.”
He looks at you.
The corner of your mouth moves, not quite becoming a smile. Relief stirs in him before he knows whether he is permitted it.
“You were not easy,” You say. “You still are not.”
“That sounds more credible.”
“I am not trying to flatter you.”
“No. I had noticed.”
Your hand remains against his face, and for a little while the room grows quieter around that touch.
“I stayed longer because I began to know you,” You say. The words come more slowly now, less like an argument and more like something you are discovering while you speak. “Because you listened, sometimes. Because you made room for me and then pretended you had done no such thing. Because you could be kind when you forgot to be frightened.”
Daeron’s eyes lower.
Your fingers shift along his jaw and guide his face back toward yours.
“And then I cared for you,” You say. “Then I wanted you. None of that happened because I had nowhere else to go.”
The fire settles behind you. Somewhere inside the wall, old wood gives a quiet creak as the room cools.
“You have found every reason for me to stay except that I wanted to.”
Daeron’s mouth goes dry.
“I thought wanting me would pass.”
Your fingers become still against his jaw.
He watches the words move through your face and wishes he had stopped with the first truth. He should stop. Instead, he hears himself continue,
“Or become something else,” He shrugs. “Habit. Pity, perhaps. You are capable of making a life wherever you are.”
Your hand falls away.
The loss of it is immediate. Cold finds the place your palm had covered, though the room itself has not changed.
For a few breaths you only look at him. Then you draw the blanket more closely around your shoulders. You do not move away, but the warmth between you is no longer careless.
“Do you think I come to your bed because I pity you?”
“No.”
“That I woke and found you gone, crossed the room, and sat on this floor because I felt sorry for you?”
“No.”
The second answer comes lower.
You look down briefly at the way he has arranged himself: one knee raised between you, his forearm laid across it, his body still building small defenses long after the conversation has passed them.
“Then what do you think?”
He has answers. Too many.
Duty. Pride. Your affection for his sisters and Egg. Your unwillingness to admit that any place had defeated you. The ease with which you had begun to move through Summerhall.
“That I am lucky.” He says.
Your eyes close, only for a moment. When they open again, the frustration in them is plain. It has not made you cruel, you simply stop trying to make the truth easy for him.
Your hand returns, but not gently. Your fingers close around his jaw and turn his face toward yours before he can look again at the door.
“I knew it was there,” You say. He does not need to ask what you mean. “I knew there was a door. I stayed.”
The words are quiet. You stop there.
Daeron looks at your face.
You could have left. The thought still hurts.
You did not. That hurts differently, and his breath catches low in his chest and will not leave cleanly.
His hand loosens against the blanket over his knee. Questions begin to form anyway: whether you had ever packed a chest in your mind, whether there had been mornings when you had measured the road south, whether some mistake of his had brought you close enough to the threshold to feel the air beyond it.
He lets them die unasked.
Your fingers remain around his jaw.
“I thought one day I would make staying worse than leaving.” He admits.
Your grip on his jaw eases, and your eyes move over his face before you answer. You look at him for a long time.
“But you have not.”
“Not yet.”
Your mouth tightens.
Daeron feels the old instinct toward cleverness rise and catches it before it reaches his tongue. The jest does not come.
You shift closer. Your folded legs press against his, the blanket bunching warmly between you. Your free hand comes to rest on his raised knee.
“Then ask me.”
He frowns.
“The next time you decide what I must be feeling.” Your thumb moves once along his jaw. “Ask me.”
He looks at you. The answer should be easy. It isn’t, but his tongue presses once against the back of his teeth before he nods.
Daeron lets his knee lower.
The small barrier between you disappears beneath the blankets.
“I do not know that I will like the answer.”
“You did not like the one you gave yourself.”
A breath leaves him, nearly a laugh and not quite. Your expression softens at the sound, though the weariness remains around your eyes.
“No,” He concedes. “I did not.”
Your hand slides from his jaw to the side of his neck. The heel of your palm rests beneath his ear, where his pulse moves too quickly against your skin.
For a while neither of you speaks.
The floor presses cold through the cloth over his legs. The wall remains hard against his back. Beyond you, the bed lies in the low reach of the lamp, its covers thrown aside where you woke and found him gone.
Your thumb moves slowly against his neck.
Daeron looks at you and finds no uncomplicated tenderness waiting to relieve him of what he has done. You are still frustrated. Still hurt. Affection sits beside both without erasing them.
Nothing in your face resembles pity.
His hand lifts from his knee. He touches your wrist lightly, then closes his fingers around it, holding your palm against his skin.
“I should have asked.”
“Yes.”
You do not soften the answer.
Daeron nods once.
Your gaze falls to his mouth. The change is small, but he feels it through your hand before you move.
You lean forward and kiss him.
There is no hesitation in it. Your mouth meets his firmly, your fingers tightening at the side of his neck when he fails to answer quickly enough.
Daeron inhales against you.
You shift closer until your knees press on either side of his hips. The blanket slips from one shoulder and gathers around your waist.
Daeron’s hands hover near your sides.
You feel the hesitation and draw back only far enough to see him. Your breath passes warm over his lips.
“Touch me.”
His eyes search yours.
You take one of his hands before he can decide what uncertainty he is looking for. Your fingers close around his wrist and guide his palm beneath the loosened edge of your nightclothes, placing it against the bare skin at your waist.
“Here.”
Your skin is warm beneath his hand.
Daeron’s fingers close carefully against you. His thumb moves once over the shallow curve of your side, and your breath catches.
You kiss him again.
This time he answers.
His other hand comes to your back, finding the thin fabric between your shoulder blades. You move nearer until your chest meets his and the blanket slides lower around you both.
Your fingers enter his hair. His palm spreads more securely against your waist, and when you shift over him, the sound you make against his mouth reaches him plainly.
His hand tightens at your waist before he thinks about stopping it. Daeron draws you closer.
The floor is cold beneath his legs. The edge of the wall catches his shoulder when you move. Neither matters until you pull your mouth from his and begin gathering the blankets from around you.
For one frightened instant, he thinks he has misunderstood again.
Then you rise.
You stand before him with the blanket hanging from your shoulders, one edge trailing over the stone. Your hair has fallen untidily across your face. Some of the frustration remains in your expression.
So does the desire.
You hold out your hand.
“Come back to bed.”
Daeron looks at your fingers, then places his hand in yours.
You draw him up from the floor. His legs have gone stiff, and he nearly stumbles when he straightens. Your free hand catches at his waist before he can reach for the wall.
A smile appears despite you.
“Do not.” He murmurs.
“I said nothing.”
“You were about to.”
“I was considering it.”
The lamp throws your shadows ahead of you, joined and distorted over the stone.
At the bedside, you let the blankets fall. Your nightclothes have slipped low on one shoulder, exposing the faint mark his mouth left beneath your ear earlier.
Daeron reaches automatically to pull the fabric into place.
You catch his wrist.
“No.”
He looks at you.
You guide his hand instead to the uncovered skin of your shoulder.
The gesture is simple. The same hand that remembers your fingers tightening around a sleeve now feels you move the cloth aside yourself.
His breath leaves him slowly.
You climb onto the bed and pull him after you.
There is no feast beyond the door, no household waiting to read proof in the morning. The latch remains as you left it. The lamp continues burning because neither of you has thought to put it out.
Daeron kneels over you, leaving more space than your body asks for.
Your hand rises to the back of his neck.
You draw him down.
He catches himself on one forearm, afraid of putting too much weight on you. You continue pulling until his chest settles against yours and your legs part around him.
Daeron has grown accustomed to his wife’s place at Summerhall without noticing how much he has begun to depend upon it: your ease with his siblings, the small traces you leave throughout the house, the quiet familiarity of your body beneath his hand. When an ordinary afternoon makes him imagine that life continuing, the memory of your unconsummated wedding night returns with a new consequence. The choice he made to leave you free may also have left you a way out, and Daeron cannot decide which frightens him more: that you might one day use it, or that some part of him wishes you could not.
Word Count: 5.5k
Warnings: arranged marriage, mentions of sex in the context of an arranged marriage (and mentions of the lack of said sex really), mentions of alcohol/Daeron’s drinking, Daeron continues not being normal about his wife (becomes even less normal about her as they grow closer, somehow), Daeron's head is not a reliable thing and it shows a bit in this piece, the smaller Maekarlings (they deserve their own warning)
A/N: Okay, as promised I'm delving into the lack of a consummation of their marriage and how that might haunt Daeron later on. To those lovely anons that sent me asks and discussed these topics with me, thank you so much, you inspired me a lot and gave me a lot of motivation to write this. Hope you like this!
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 David Levithan: "I love you -I do- but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you're always going to leave me. We can't deny it. You're always going to leave."
Daeron passes the inner garden three times before he goes in.
The first time, he is on his way to the library. He reaches the end of the passage before remembering that he has no business there and no desire to invent any.
The second time, he is looking for Egg. Egg is plainly visible through the arch, crouched beside one of the new flowerbeds with both hands in the soil.
The third time, Daeron stops.
You sit on the low edge of the fountain with Rhae tucked against your side. One of her slippers has come loose. She has a fallen yellow flower closed carefully inside both hands and keeps opening them to check that it is still there. Daella stands nearby with a length of green silk folded over her arm. Egg is leaning so far across the new bed that his knee has begun to press into the soft earth.
“Egg,” You call. He looks back. “Move your knee.”
He does, leaving a small hollow in the soil.
None of you looks toward the arch at first. Or perhaps you notice Daeron and decide not to make anything of his arrival.
The flowers are smaller than they appeared in the drawings the gardener showed him. Red and yellow heads bend above the dark soil, still unsettled after the journey north. They have been planted along the warmest wall of the court, where the stone keeps the sun into the afternoon. The steward had objected to the expense. Daeron had told him to find the money elsewhere.
Daella sees him first.
“You have walked past twice.” She states, big eyes narrowed in his direction.
Daeron looks toward Egg. “I was looking for him.”
“I have been here.” Egg says.
“So I see.”
You lift your face to Daeron. Sunlight catches along your cheek and in the small gold sun at your ear.
“Come here.”
He does.
There is room beside you on the fountain edge, though Rhae has spread the hem of her dress across most of it. Daeron remains standing. Close enough to see the faint line of soil along your smallest finger.
Rhae opens her hands again.
“Mine.” She says. A statement more than anything, but you nod and Daella murmurs an agreement regardless.
“It fell,” You tell her. “You may keep that one.”
She closes her hands around it, satisfied.
“The gardener covered the beds last night,” You continue. You are looking at the flowers, though Daeron can feel the question beside the words. “He said someone had been asking whether the cold would harm them.”
“Gardeners worry.”
“Yes.”
Your eyes touch his face briefly.
He gives you nothing more, and you let him keep it.
Egg reaches toward a green shoot near the edge of the bed.
“Leave that.” You order.
“It looks dead.”
“It has just been planted.”
Egg draws his hand back.
Rhae has begun pulling at the loose strap of her slipper. You bend to fasten it without interrupting Daella, who is explaining something about the silk. The child puts one hand on your shoulder to steady herself and keeps the crushed yellow flower in the other.
The garden has changed. Or perhaps it changed before Daeron noticed.
Daella speaks to you as though continuing something begun that morning. Rhae folds herself against your side without asking to be gathered closer. Egg expects you to know which plants he may touch and which he may not. When Daella gives you the silk, you take it automatically while she frees both hands to examine the sleeve of your gown.
You have learned them.
You know when Egg has stopped listening, you know that Daella’s silence usually means she wants to be asked, and when Rhae’s head grows heavy against your arm, you shift her without looking down.
They have learned you as well.
No one explains why the silk is being held against your dress, no one asks whether you mind Rhae’s fingers closing around the chain at your throat. The afternoon began before Daeron arrived and does not stop to receive him.
It is easier to look at that.
At Daella smoothing the silk beneath her thumb, at Egg watching a beetle crawl between two stones, at Rhae pressing the fallen flower to her nose because she has seen you do it.
His sisters are at ease with you. Summerhall is quieter than court. The garden is warm, and something from Dorne has taken root in it. The reasons come without effort.
Daella holds the silk against your sleeve and studies it.
“It is darker than I asked for.”
You look down. “A little.”
“I do not think it suits the gown.”
“Then we can use it somewhere else.”
Daella remains dissatisfied, but she folds the silk more carefully this time.
Rhae lifts the flower toward you.
“It’s pretty.” she says.
“Yes.”
She stretches a small hand clumsily holding the yellow flower, “For you.”
You lower your head so she can push it awkwardly into your hair. Most of the stem has broken away. The flower catches above your ear for half a moment before slipping into your lap.
Egg laughs. Rhae looks at him, wounded.
“Leave her alone.” Daella says.
“I did not say anything.”
You pick up the flower and set it behind Rhae’s ear instead. She reaches up at once to feel for it.
“There,” You say. “Keep your head still.”
She does not, and the flower falls again.
This time you laugh, and Daeron feels something inside him settle.
There is no demand in it. No decision. He does not have to say anything. He does not have to leave.
The fountain moves behind you. Egg turns the beetle gently with a twig. Rhae tries once more to keep the flower behind her ear.
For once, nothing hurts.
Daeron lets the thought pass before he can examine it.
Daella takes your free hand.
“Stand up. I want to see the silk against the whole dress.”
You move Rhae from your side and set her carefully on her feet. When you rise, your heel catches in the hem of your gown.
Daeron’s hand closes around your forearm.
You steady yourself against him, and your other hand catches briefly at his wrist.
There was a time when the touch would have stopped everything. You would have thanked him. He would have found something careless to say. Both of you would have looked elsewhere.
Now your fingers remain around his wrist.
Daella is still arranging the silk when you turn your face toward him.
You look at him once, quietly.
Then you kiss him.
Your mouth rests against his for only a moment. Warm, familiar, without ceremony. When you turn back, Daella is still frowning at the cloth, Egg is watching the beetle once more, and Rhae has crouched to retrieve the flower again.
No one reacts.
Daeron’s hand moves to your back. He does not remember choosing to put it there.
Your gown is warm beneath his palm. He can feel the slow movement of your breathing through the cloth. You do not step away. When Daella draws you closer to the flowerbed to see the silk in stronger light, you move within the loose hold of his arm, and he adjusts around you.
This happens now.
His body knows it before the rest of him does.
Daella looks toward the unused ground beside the west wall.
“Could more be planted there?”
“Perhaps,” You answer. “If these live. The old roots would have to be cleared first.”
“There is room.” Daeron states.
The answer leaves him at once.
You lean back slightly against his hand. Only for a breath, but the pressure remains long enough for him to feel it.
Daella lowers the silk. Egg has begun asking whether the beetle will damage the roots. Rhae holds the fallen flower out to the nurse seated in the shade, then takes it back before the woman can touch it.
The conversation moves elsewhere, but Daeron remains with the west wall.
There is room. The ground will need turning. The gardener will find roots beneath it and ask how much of the old bed is to be cleared.
He sees it for a moment.
Your sleeve pushed back from your wrist. Daella choosing where the colors should go. Egg reaching for something he has been told not to touch. Rhae older by some small, unimaginable measure. Daeron standing close enough for you to ask him what he thinks.
The thought comes without warning and without words.
He has put himself there when the flowers need moving.
For a little while, the thought does not frighten him. It remains warm and indistinct, no more dangerous than the shape of your back beneath his hand. The afternoon might happen again; not this same afternoon, but another with the fountain running and his siblings moving in and out of the light, with you near enough that touching you requires no decision.
He wants it to continue. Nothing more complicated than that, nothing he would know how to ask for. Only a little longer.
Daella gathers the silk over her arm. “Come inside with me. The other pieces arrived this morning.”
You look down at Rhae, who has begun pulling at the petals of the fallen flower one by one.
“Leave those on the ground.” You tell her gently.
Rhae opens her hand. Two petals cling to her palm. You brush them away with your thumb, then look toward Egg.
“Do not dig while I am gone.”
He glances at the hollow his knee made earlier. “I will not.”
Your body moves out from beneath Daeron’s hand, and his fingers close once after the warmth is gone.
“I will come back,” You tell Rhae, though Daella is already leading you toward the arch. Then you look at Daeron. “Keep an eye on him.”
Daeron inclines his head.
You leave with Daella. Your voices remain audible for a little while, Daella talking about sleeves and you answering once, too softly for him to catch the words.
The garden changes anyway.
It is not grief. You have gone no farther than the rooms beyond the passage, and you have said you will return. The fountain continues moving, Egg remains beside the flowerbed, and Rhae sits near the nurse arranging fallen petals in an uneven line.
Still, the place where you stood is empty, and Daeron’s body feels the absence before his mind can dismiss it. His palm remembers the warmth of your back. The air near him no longer carries your breath or the small movements of your gown. A moment ago, he had imagined another afternoon like this one, and now the first thing the future gives him is the knowledge that you need not always occupy the place where he has put you.
The thought is too large for what has happened. He knows that.
You have only gone inside.
Yet the little future he allowed himself had depended upon your presence so completely that the sight of the empty space unsettles it. He had seen the west bed cleared, your sleeve turned back from your wrist, his sisters speaking around you. He had not imagined the possibility that the ground might still be cleared and you might not be there to see it.
The kiss, your fingers around his wrist, the careless word we; he knows they happened. He knows where you have gone, and he can still hear Daella somewhere inside. Even so, for one breath the certainty has no weight.
The feeling is familiar enough to tighten his stomach: a room first seen in sleep and later entered awake, a face that seems wrong because he has already watched it change somewhere else. His mind knows one thing while his body waits for another.
This is not a dream. He knows that at once.
He looks at his hand. Rosewater remains faintly on his skin, and the scent steadies something that should not have needed steadying.
Egg speaks, but Daeron hears his name only after the second time.
“Hm?”
“When they move the flowers,” Egg says. “Can I help?”
Daeron looks toward the west wall. The bed is still only a strip of neglected ground, but he has already seen you standing beside it.
“You may carry the pots.”
Egg considers the offer. “The large ones?”
“No.”
He looks disappointed, though he accepts the answer.
Rhae has lost interest in the petals. She presses herself against the nurse’s skirts and asks to be carried, and the woman lifts her onto one hip. As they pass, Rhae reaches toward the gold fastening at Daeron’s sleeve, misses, and lets her hand fall against the nurse’s shoulder.
Egg remains a little longer, speaking intermittently about the beetle and whether it might still be found tomorrow. Daeron answers when an answer is required. Once, Egg has to repeat himself.
Eventually a servant comes to fetch him, and Daeron is left alone in the court.
You will return. He knows that. He can picture the path you will take through the arch and the slight pause when you find the garden empty.
The knowledge should make waiting simple, but the future he imagined has made waiting different. Before, an empty garden would have been only an empty garden. Now each moment in which you do not appear presses against the expectation that you will.
He has begun, without permission or good sense, to expect your return.
That is what frightens him.
Not that you have gone inside, but that some quiet part of him has already arranged the afternoon around your coming back. It has accepted your presence as something that repeats, something he may reach for again tomorrow, and with that acceptance comes a second possibility he had not needed to fear before: one day, you might go and not return because you have chosen not to.
Daeron leaves before you come back.
He is not avoiding you. The garden has begun to cool, and he has been standing there too long. Those facts are true, even if they do not account for the haste that enters his steps when he reaches the passage.
Inside, Summerhall carries you differently.
A servant crosses ahead of him with folded linen over one arm and a small stoppered bottle resting on top. Daeron recognizes the rosewater and knows where it is going without needing to ask.
Near the solar, a cushion has been moved from its usual chair to the bench beside the window because you prefer the light there when you write. A book lies facedown beside it, though you complain when anyone else leaves books that way. Farther on, something gold catches in a dish outside the bath chamber, one of the little suns from an earring or chain that someone will notice and bring back to you.
Servants know which rooms are yours. His sisters leave things where you will find them, and a cup is placed before you arrive at breakfast. Your presence has entered the habits of the house so quietly that Daeron has stopped seeing those habits as changes.
Now he sees what would have to change back.
The thought begins with the rosewater. If you left, the scent would remain in the wood after the bottles were packed, perhaps for days, until open windows and ordinary soap replaced it. The little suns would disappear from dishes and tabletops. Linen would stop being carried toward your rooms. One morning no cup would be placed for you at breakfast, and the servant might not remember there had ever been another one.
Daeron stops in the passage.
A maid behind him murmurs an apology, although she has not touched him.
You are somewhere ahead, looking at cloth and telling his sister that the colour can be repaired. You will return to the garden and find him gone; perhaps you will ask where he went.
None of that prevents his mind from continuing.
It is not your departure that it shows him. There are no trunks, no horses waiting in the yard, no final words chosen carefully enough to survive repetition. It shows him what follows: rooms corrected by degrees, servants learning different routes, the household gradually ceasing to expect you.
The idea has grown from something small enough to fit inside his palm. Your back was there, and then it was not. You said you would return, and some part of him believed you strongly enough to discover that belief could be disappointed.
That is when he understands where the thought has gone. Not your brief absence, but your leaving.
There would have to be a reason, and for a moment that almost steadies him. Wives do not disappear because they leave a garden for half an hour. The life he has imagined would not vanish without cause.
He would have to give you one.
His mind supplies enough possibilities without arranging them neatly: a night lost to drink, a sentence he cannot take back, some failure in company that leaves you standing beside him while everyone else politely looks elsewhere. It might not take anything extraordinary. Perhaps one mistake would only make you look more closely at the husband you had been given and the life you had made around him.
That thought holds.
A door closes somewhere ahead, wood meeting stone before the iron catch settles into place.
For one breath, the passage disappears.
Candle smoke, wine thick on his tongue, a bed he does not cross toward.
His own voice, rough and uneven.
I will not touch you.
The words remain after the passage returns.
Daeron opens his eyes. He had closed them without noticing, as though a moment of darkness might clear the wine from his mouth, though there is no wine now and has not been for hours.
The door ahead is only a door. A servant has passed through it carrying folded sheets and pulled it shut behind him. No candles gutter against the walls. No feast presses dully through the wood. The stone beneath Daeron’s feet is cool and solid.
His own voice follows him from another room.
What follows comes in pieces that will not settle into order. Gold at your throat. Your fingers closing around the fabric at your wrist and pulling it lower, then releasing it, then doing the same thing again.
He cannot remember your face.
There are whole stretches of the night he cannot recover: where he stood when the door closed, whether you spoke before he did, how long the silence lasted. He remembers your hand because it moved.
There had been more. He knows that much. The words had not come cleanly; he had repeated himself, corrected something, tried to explain and perhaps made the promise sound worse. He remembers the certainty in his voice and almost none of what surrounded it.
Your answer is gone.
Perhaps you gave one. He remembers your hand becoming still at your wrist. He remembers you saying his name at some point during the night, but cannot place whether it came before his refusal or afterward. Everything else has worn away, leaving him with the fragment most easily turned against himself.
The bed had still been untouched when morning came.
That remains clear: pale light across the coverlet, the embroidered edge lying smooth where no body had disturbed it. His neck hurt from sleeping badly. His mouth tasted sour. You were already awake, though he cannot remember where you sat or whether you looked at him.
Nothing had happened, and no one had asked.
The household received the both of you that morning with lowered eyes and careful expressions, and neither of you corrected what everyone believed had taken place behind the closed door.
Daeron had been grateful for the silence then. He had needed the night to disappear into assumption and become one more thing no one would make him describe. There had been vows before witnesses, a feast, a room prepared, a door closed. Whatever failed afterward seemed to belong only to the two people inside it.
He had not thought of the silence as preserving anything. An unconsummated marriage could be undone, regardless of assumptions made.
The word comes without any of the heat of memory: annulment.
Cold and formal, made for careful handwriting and men who had never stood in that room. It gives the fear a name without telling him how much truth the name contains.
Daeron knows only pieces. Such marriages can be challenged. The Faith may ask questions, and families may ask more. Proof might matter, or confession, or merely the willingness of men with enough authority to make private truth useful.
He does not know whether time changes anything. He does not know whether the household’s assumption protects the marriage or only makes the truth uglier when spoken. He does not know what weight would be given to his word, or yours, or to the fact that both of you allowed everyone to believe otherwise.
He knows enough to fear it and too little to give the fear any boundary.
There are people he could ask: a septon, if he could bear the man’s eyes; a maester who would pretend the question was scholarly until it reached another room; someone in his father’s household who understood what the Faith permitted and what powerful families could persuade it to permit.
He imagines forming the question, and the possibility seems to sharpen merely because he has given it words.
That is foolish. He knows it is foolish. Asking whether a door exists cannot build one.
His mind has never cared much for that distinction. A thing named can begin to feel foretold; a fear described too clearly can acquire the weight of memory. If he asks, another person will know the marriage remains unconsummated, but worse than that, the possibility will have moved out of the locked room in his head. It will have entered the world, where someone might answer it, repeat it, or place it before you.
He cannot bear the thought that his own fear might be what finally puts the door into your hand.
Nor can he bear what the question would reveal.
Anyone hearing it would understand that he was not merely curious about the law. They would hear what lay beneath: whether you could leave him, whether there was some hard rule that might promise you could not, whether he had become so dependent upon your presence that he needed a stranger to reassure him it could not be withdrawn.
Daeron moves away from the closed door.
Farther down, the corridor opens into a narrow stone recess overlooking the inner court. The evening air reaches him there. Below, the west wall catches the last of the light, and the strip of unused ground lies dark beneath it.
You might know already.
The thought settles without surprise. The surprise is that he has managed not to consider it properly until now.
You miss very little. You read letters once for what they say and again for what the sender hoped to avoid saying. You have learned the moods of his siblings without instruction and hear the hesitation before servants ask for something. Excessive courtesy does not fool you merely because you are courteous in return.
You are the eldest daughter of a Prince, a daughter of Dorne. Your father sent you into a marriage with a Targaryen prince whose reputation reached Dorne before the offer did. It is absurd to imagine that no one prepared you, that no one explained what could be demanded of you or what protections might remain if the marriage failed.
Perhaps you know the mechanics better than Daeron does, or perhaps you know only that there are always ways to bring a daughter home.
You could have spoken after the wedding.
You did not.
That ought to matter.
Daeron tries to let it. You had known what happened and allowed the household to believe otherwise. You remained through the next morning, then the next week, through every strained meal and every room in which he expected judgment and found instead your measured attention.
It ought to mean that you chose silence. Perhaps, by now, that you have chosen more than silence.
His mind refuses the comfort before it can settle.
You might have been protecting your father from scandal, you might have wanted time before admitting that the marriage had failed. Pride alone might have kept you from sending word south after one night. You were raised to make something livable out of whatever was placed before you; perhaps remaining seemed less humiliating than returning at once.
There are too many explanations for your silence, and Daeron can make use of all of them except the one he wants.
He cannot let it mean you chose him.
Below, the garden has emptied. He can make out the faint red and yellow near the warm wall, and beyond them the neglected strip of earth you spoke about as though another afternoon already waited for you both.
For a moment, the possibility of annulment comforts him.
You are not trapped.
Whatever else happened in that room, whatever ugliness the wine pulled from him, he did not take that final choice from you. He had seen enough through the drunkenness to know that you did not want him, or did not want what the chamber required of you. He could not turn your endurance into proof of a marriage.
He would choose the same again.
There is no pride in the certainty. He had done the only thing he could bear to remain responsible for.
The bed remained untouched, and because it did, there may still be a way out.
And just like that, the comfort turns.
If you are free to remain, you are free to stop. Every kindness may continue tomorrow, or it may not. Every kiss, every hand left easily beneath his, every cup of tea placed at breakfast depends upon a choice that can be made again and, one day, made differently.
That is what hope has given him: uncertainty with something inside it worth taking away.
The thought comes before he can turn aside from it.
If it were no longer possible…
His hand closes around the edge of the stone recess.
For an instant, relief moves through him. It is small, involuntary, horribly clean. No question to ask, no letter that could be sent, no private fact waiting to be carried beyond their rooms. You would remain because there would be nowhere else for the marriage to go.
Then he understands what has comforted him.
His fingers tighten until the stone presses painfully into the joints.
He does not wish he had crossed the wedding chamber. Even now, frightened as he is, he cannot imagine going to the bed while you stood beside it, using your body to make the marriage harder to escape. He does not want the act. He wants only its consequence, separated from the body that would have paid for it.
There is no version of that wish he can bear.
Daeron releases the stone. Pale pressure marks cross his fingers and begin fading almost as soon as he looks at them.
Perhaps you will need the door one day.
The thought turns the knife as neatly as it always does. Perhaps a husband who can feel relief at the loss of your freedom is precisely the husband from whom that freedom must be preserved, perhaps the wedding night left you the means to escape a man who had not yet understood why you might need it.
Below, the unused bed remains dark against the wall.
It does not interrupt the thought, but it gives his eyes somewhere else to rest. The ground asks smaller questions, and those questions have answers.
He cannot make the possibility harmless, and he cannot rid himself of it without wanting something ugly.
The ground can be cleared.
He steps away from the recess.
A servant approaches carrying an empty tray. Daeron stops him and asks where the gardener has gone. The man looks briefly surprised, then tells him the gardener is still in the inner court, putting away his tools.
Daeron returns by the passage he has just left.
The court is cooler now. Most of the sunlight has withdrawn from the stone, though a narrow band remains along the west wall. The gardener kneels beside a basket, wiping soil from the edge of a small spade.
He begins to rise when Daeron enters.
“Please.” Daeron dismisses the attempt at deference with a gesture of his hand.
The gardener settles again, one knee against the earth, and waits.
Daeron looks toward the unused bed. In the dimmer light it seems narrower than it did before, hardly enough ground to have occupied his mind at all.
“The earth by the wall.” He states.
The gardener follows his gaze. “It has not been used in some years, my Prince.”
“I want it cleared.”
The gardener sets the cloth aside and looks more closely at the ground. “There will be old roots beneath it. We can pull them and turn the soil, though I would wait before planting until we know how cold the wall grows at night.”
“Find out.”
“Yes, my Prince.”
The gardener stands and crosses toward the wall. Daeron follows after a moment, not close enough to appear interested in the work.
The man presses his boot into the earth, crouches, and works his fingers beneath a dry tangle near the edge. A thin grey root lifts from the soil before snapping in his hand.
“It will take a few days,” The man says. “Less if I have two of my boys help. We can have it ready for the Princess before the week is out.”
The words land with more force than they should.
Ready for you. Before the week is out.
The future has acquired a date.
Daeron looks at the bare ground and sees it cleared, the soil turned and smoothed beneath the wall. Then he sees it remaining empty because you changed your mind, or because you were no longer there to make one.
The gardener waits.
Daeron almost tells him there is no need. The words gather and stop behind his teeth.
He can leave the court exactly as it stands and call the refusal prudence.
You are still here.
The fact moves through him with less force than the fear of your absence, but it remains true. You are somewhere within Summerhall, perhaps still with Daella, perhaps already returned to the garden and found him gone. You spoke of the west wall because you believed there would be time to see whether the flowers lived.
Daeron cannot make your life here smaller merely because he has begun preparing for its end.
“Have it done.” He orders.
The gardener inclines his head. “What should be planted there?”
Daeron looks toward the flowers already settled near the fountain.
“Your Lady wife may wish to choose.” The gardener adds, as if sensing his own thoughts.
“Then you shall ask her.”
It is only sensible. You know the plants and he does not. You should decide whether anything is moved, what colours go against the wall, and how much room is left between them.
The gardener accepts the answer without hearing anything beneath it.
He retrieves two narrow stakes from beside his basket and carries them to the unused ground. The first goes into the soil near the wall. He places the second several paces away, then ties a length of cord between them and draws it taut.
Within the line, nothing has changed. The old roots remain beneath the earth, and weeds lean against the stone. Tomorrow someone may begin pulling them out.
Daeron stays while the gardener gathers his tools, though the instruction has been given and understood. He watches the man lift his basket, check the cord once, and leave through the servants’ arch without looking back.
The court settles around the silence.
When Daeron moves his hand, the faint scent of rosewater and jasmine rises from his skin or sleeve, he cannot tell which. It has nearly faded.
He sees flowers there with you beside them, one hand holding your sleeve away from the soil. He sees the same flowers later, taller and thick against the wall, after you are gone.
Nothing he has done makes you remain. The way out is still there, exactly where the untouched bed left it.
The cord shifts slightly in the evening air.
Daeron stands beside the space he has made and leaves it empty.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed! I would love to hear your thoughts.
HIHHIHIIII I RECENTLY STUMBLED UPON UR ACC AND IM SO SO HAPPY I DID!!! i love ur daeron fic series sm 🥹🥹i cannot wait for another part, but i noticed u said u don't take requests and i wanted to ask if that's a permanent thing or if you aren't taking requests right NOW, yk? And also, is there a certain posting schedule you have or do you just post whenever you can/write?
Whichever the case for both questions, i lovelovelove ur writing and i hope u never stop 🥹 have a nice time mwah mwah
Hiiii, thank you so much! I’m really happy you found the series and that you’re enjoying Daeron and Martell Reader so much
About requests: I would say I do not take formal requests in the sense of promising to write a specific idea exactly as it is sent to me. I do not really enjoy being given a full beat-by-beat plot and then being asked to execute it, because I don't have much fun unless I find a way to explore something or follow my hearta bit in a story.
That said, I am always very open to hearing people’s thoughts, questions, ideas, concepts, curiosities, or things they would like to see explored in this universe. A lot of asks genuinely make me think more deeply about Daeron, Reader, their marriage, Summerhall, his family, etc., and sometimes those thoughts do end up inspiring future stories. I just cannot promise that every idea will become a fic, especially if it is very specific.
As for posting, I usually aim for at least once a week, and ideally twice a week when I can manage it. I do not have a strict fixed schedule, but lately Sundays and Thursdays have been the general rhythm. If something happens, like last week when I was sick and could not post, I will usually mention it somewhere on the blog so people know.
So basically: no strict requests, no hard posting schedule, but I am very much open to asks and ideas, and I do try to post regularly when life and health allow it. Thank you again for such a sweet message, mwah mwah right back ❤
Do you think that baby Rhae grows up to consider martell reader as her mother? You have mentioned that Daeron wants to delay having children with his wife as long as he could, would that inadvertently cause a mother/child bond between his wife and youngest sister? And if yes would that cause Rhae some panic when martell reader DOES get pregnant?
Hiii! Thank you for your message!
I think because Rhae does have her siblings around her growing up, she probably would not think of Martell Reader as her mother in a clean or literal way. I imagine it more as an elder sister/young aunt/mother-shaped bond, if that makes sense. Someone older and warmer who is in the household every day, who notices her, indulges her, corrects her, fixes her hair, lets her cling, and becomes part of what home feels like after Dyanna’s absence.
So yes, I do think there is a very deep bond there, especially with Rhae being so young when Reader arrives. And I do think Daeron and his wife end up a little parentified with her, though in different ways. Reader would probably be more openly competent at it, while Daeron is more the sort of older brother who pretends not to be moved and then lets the baby of the family get away with murder because she smiled at him.
If or when Reader gets pregnant, I do think Rhae would have some sort of difficult reaction, no matter her age. Not because she genuinely believes she is their child, or because she cannot understand that babies need attention, but because knowing something and feeling it are very different things. She can know she is loved and still panic when the shape of that love seems about to change.
Also, she is Maekar’s youngest daughter. You cannot convince me she is not catastrophically spoiled by at least half the household. So yes, I think there would be some very dramatic fear that she is losing Reader’s attention, Daeron’s indulgence, and her place as baby of the family.
Mors Martell has been in Summerhall two days when he looks at Maekar’s children and names what Maekar has spent years refusing to see. Daella is not only curious. Egg is not only restless. Aemon is not only dutiful. Aerion is not only cruel. Daeron is not only lost.
In the days before Daeron’s wedding, Maekar watches his children orbit the Martell bride and her family, each of them reaching in the only way they know how. What he finds is not comfort, not absolution, but the shape of a house where every child has learned a different way to stand alone.
Word Count: 12.2k
Warnings: Grief, parental emotional neglect, dysfunctional family dynamics, alcoholism references, references to brothels/sex work, implied past sexual self-destruction, class/gender/political tension, Aerion being Aerion. Mors Martell said i can fix nothing but i can make you aware of it, and now Maekar is on a failsons and faildaughters speedrun. This is my first attempt at writing the smaller Maekarlings.
A/N: I wanted to explore how the Maekarlings might have initially reacted to the Reader, and what Maekar might learn of his children with the Martells as contrast. This is my first time delving into family dynamics and Maekar's relationship to all his children, I would love to hear your thoughts! I hope you like this!
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 Theodore Roethke: "Father, I'm far from home, and I have gone nowhere."
By the second night they spend there, the Martells have begun to make Summerhall untidy.
Not in any way Maekar can object to, nothing is disordered enough to require correction. No servant has been insulted, no courtesy forgotten, no hall invaded beyond the allowances of kinship and hospitality. Prince Mors’ party bows where it must bow, stands when rank requires it, eats what is set before them.
Still, Summerhall has altered around them.
It is in the sound first. The gallery is not louder than it has been on other evenings, but the noise sits differently in the room now. Dornish voices run close to one another, interrupting, answering before a question has fully finished, folding laughter into speech. A woman near the far hearth touches another’s wrist to hold her in the conversation, you being your head towards your sister, arms linked as you both listen to something Daella is telling you with too much earnestness and not enough breath between sentences.
Your sister laughs, sudden and bright, and the sound carries farther than it should.
Maekar looks toward it before he can stop himself.
The girl does not seem offended by Daella’s eagerness, and that is the first irritation. She seems amused, and that is the second. Daella, who has spent the last day looking too often at the Martell women’s sleeves, hair, earrings, shoes, and easy closeness, brightens at being received instead of corrected.
Mors sees Maekar looking. Of course he does. The man has always had the disagreeable habit of noticing what he ought to leave alone.
“They find one another quickly.” Mors comments, stepping closer.
The Dornishman leans one side of his hip against the wall behind them, where Maekar stands at attention.
Maekar keeps his gaze on the room.
“Your daughters?”
“Women,” Mors corrects, after a beat. “Girls. Sisters. Whichever word makes a prince least uncomfortable.”
Maekar gives him a dry look, but Mors only smiles into his cup.
It is almost easy, for a moment. Old taunts, old rhythm, the familiar shape of a friendship neither of them would name softly. Mors has always spoken like a man bold enough to be impertinent, and Maekar has always preferred that to cautious respect. Respect makes liars of men who know better.
Mors stands near the window with one shoulder turned from the room, a cup in hand, sun-dark fingers loose around the stem. The day’s travel dust is gone from him, and whatever stiffness the road put into his back has either eased or been hidden. His wife sits with Baelor and Manfred and Lenna Dondarrion near the hearth, speaking with calm authority. Every so often, Mors’ gaze goes to her. Not anxiously, merely by habit.
Maekar has seen it three times in as many minutes.
“You still count her breaths?” He asks.
Mors does not bother pretending not to know whom he means, “Only when she wants me to.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“You have not been married to her for over twenty years.”
“No,” Maekar concedes, “A mercy to us both.”
Mors’ mouth curves, “To her, certainly.”
Across the room, Daeron stands near one of the tapestries with a cup in his hand.
He is not drinking from it.
Maekar notes this, as he noted it the previous night. He notes the gloved hand curled around the stem, the easy posture arranged over some private strain, the smile Daeron gives one of the Dornish knights when spoken to, light and useless and almost convincing. Daeron has always known how to look least wounded when most watched. It is one of his more infuriating talents.
The previous evening returns to Maekar without permission: Daeron’s bare hand, the glove pulled off too quickly, the tremor hidden by grace only because everyone had agreed to call grace by that name. The way you had offered your hand and Daeron had come the rest of the way. The way he had left the glove off after, as though the uncovered hand had betrayed him into some honesty he could not immediately cover again.
Then later, the laugh.
You had laughed at something Daeron said beside one of the old hunting tapestries, and Daeron had looked at you as if the sound had reached some foolish, undefended place in him. His face had changed before he could govern it. Only for a breath. A smile, almost boyish in its surprise, gone once Maekar’s attention found him.
Maekar had not meant to look so sharply, but Daeron had noticed anyway.
Now, on the second night since the Martell’s arrival, his son keeps himself at a better distance. Near enough to answer if spoken to. Far enough to pretend he has not chosen where to stand by the line of sight it gives him to his betrothed.
Mors follows his gaze.
“Your son does not approach easily.” He says.
Maekar’s jaw tightens, and rushes to let the conversation reach its objective, admitting to what the other man alludes to, “Daeron has faults.”
A short laugh that would have earned any other man a fist to the jaw, and mors replies, “I know.”
“They have been made louder than they deserve.”
Mors looks at him then, but not with surprise. With something worse: patience.
Maekar dislikes that look in any man. From Mors, he dislikes it doubly, because Mors has known him too long to be impressed by silence.
“Is that so?”
No. if anything, rumor is kinder to Daeron than he deserves.
But Maekar won’t say that. Before anything else, that boy is his own.
“He has sense,” Maekar says instead. “When he chooses to use it.”
The defense sits between them, hard and insufficient.
It is not tenderness. Maekar knows that. It is not even quite mercy. It is only a…a correction of record, a father’s answer to the shape of gossip before the gossip has been spoken aloud. He has cursed Daeron’s habits in private, cursed his weakness, his disappearances, his wasted mornings, his wine-sour returns, his useless mouth and all the cleverness he spends making himself smaller. He has said worse to Baelor than he would ever permit from any man outside his blood.
That is different.
A father may name the rot in his own house, but he need not offer it to guests.
Mors turns his cup once, watching the wine catch the light. “I am not speaking of the wine, by the way.”
Maekar looks at him.
For the first time that evening, the room seems to step back from them.
Not in sound. The music continues, thin and courtly beneath the talk. The Martell sister laughs again at something Daella says. Egg has drifted too close to Aemon and is being moved back by one quiet hand at his shoulder. Aerion speaks to one of Mors’s men with the expression he wears when he has found a blade and is deciding where to set the point.
Everything remains as it was.
Mors’s voice lowers. “Leave it to you to fill a house with six children and leave each one of them alone.”
The first answer in Maekar is immediate and ugly.
It rises so quickly that only discipline keeps it from his mouth. A thing about presumption. About Dornish men arriving with dust still in their bones and thinking themselves fit to judge royal households. About Mors’s own daughters, loud enough to mistake noise for happiness. About daughters being easy to gather because they are permitted softness sons must outgrow. About war, duty, rank, grief, governance, all the things Mors speaks around because Dorne lets men pretend tenderness is the same as freedom.
He says none of it.
Mors watches him not say it.
Maekar drinks. The wine is good and wasted on the moment.
“My children are not neglected.” He says instead. He hears the sulk, the petulant offense, in his own voice, and detests it at once.
“No,” The agreement is so quick Maekar distrusts it. Mors looks into the room. “That is not what I said either.”
Maekar follows his gaze despite himself.
His children are easy enough to find because he has always known where each disturbance in a room is likely to settle. Aemon near Baelor, quiet, pale head inclined toward whatever is being said to him, attentive enough to seem at peace to anyone who does not know the weight attention can become. Aerion at the far side, smiling too softly. Egg half-contained, his dignity in constant war with his feet. Daella bright beside the Martell girls. Rhae drowsy near her governess, one hand wrapped in the woman’s skirts. Daeron apart, cup in hand, looking nowhere too long.
Six children.
Rooms. Tutors. Guards. Horses. Septons. Maesters. Names properly entered and spoken. Clothes fitted, futures arranged, places held at table. Aemon has the Citadel before him, if the Gods and his own mind continue in agreement. Aerion has skill, despite whatever poison he pours through it. Egg has more indulgence than Maekar should allow him. The girls are watched, taught, protected. Daeron has a wife coming from a house Maekar trusts because Maekar has swallowed enough pride to ask for what his son would never ask for himself.
Alone.
The word has no place among such provisions.
Mors sets his cup down on the narrow ledge beneath the window.
“You look as though you are counting bedsheets and guardsmen.”
“Those are not nothing.”
“No. They are not.”
Maekar’s mouth curls for a moment, before he half-remembers the same man standing before him now taunting him about growling like a dog nearly twenty years ago.
“You speak very freely for a guest.” He comments past gritted teeth.
“I speak freely because I am not only a guest.”
That is true enough to be inconvenient. Mors had stood with him in mud and smoke before either of them had learned how much of themselves war would keep. He had cursed beside him, bled beside him, once laughed into a bloodied sleeve because Maekar, half-stunned and too young to be commanding anyone, had given an order so terrible in phrasing and so correct in substance that half their line had obeyed from disbelief alone. Mors had known him before Summerhall, before six children, before grief.
Knowing a man young is a dangerous thing, it gives one’s insults too many doors.
Maekar looks again toward Daeron. “You have seen them for two days.”
“I have seen children before.”
“Daughters,” Maekar says, and hears the bite before he can recall it. Mors turns his head. “Daughters are easier to keep near.”
For a moment, Mors only stares at him.
Then he laughs once, without pleasure. “Spoken like a man who has never had eight of them trying to take a household apart from the inside.”
Maekar says nothing.
“No,” Mors continues, quieter. “Daughters are not easier. Mine simply never learned to let me be deaf in peace.”
The words settle badly.
Across the room, Daella leans toward the Martell girls, hands folded tightly before her in the way her septa praises because it keeps them still. She is listening too intently to whatever Mors’s younger daughter is telling her. Too bright with it, too grateful for an answer.
Maekar feels irritation move in him again, sudden and sharp.
Daella is curious. That is all. A girl’s curiosity in the face of novelty. The Martells are new, bright, sun-warmed, full of stories that will fade once the wedding is done and the household returned to its proper order. Daella has always been full of questions; she asked them of maesters, septas, nurses, visiting ladies, Baelor when she could corner him, Aemon when he was too kind to escape, Egg when she needed a less reliable answer and did not mind knowing it.
Lonely children do not ask so many questions.
Or perhaps they do.
No.
Maekar rejects the thought with a force that surprises him.
Mors says nothing.
That is worse than argument.
“You are angry.” Mors says at last.
“You came into my house and insulted my children.”
“I insulted you,” Maekar looks at him. Mors’s face is steady. There is no satisfaction in it, no victory. “That is different.”
Maekar almost answers. He has several replies fit for the purpose, most of them older than either of their eldest children. None reach his mouth.
The music changes. A servant passes near enough that both men fall silent until he is gone. At the far end of the gallery, Baelor’s voice warms over some graceful remark, and Lady Martell answers with a smile that makes Mors’s attention shift by habit before returning.
Maekar sees the movement.
Again. Always again.
“Your wife will think you neglect her if you stare at my failures all evening.” He says.
Mors snorts, “My wife would inform me if I neglected her.”
“How fortunate for you.”
“Yes,” Mors says. “It is.”
The simplicity of the answer is indecent.
Maekar turns back to the room, to the children Mors has presumed to pity and accuse him through. His gaze finds Daella because he means it to. Because she is the easiest proof, because Mors does not know her, because a man who has been in his house two days does not get to make a wound of every bright question a girl asks a stranger.
Daella is not lonely, he thinks.
She cannot be.
The thought holds for less than a breath before the Martell girl laughs again and Daella leans closer, shining with the borrowed warmth of being answered.
Maekar chooses Daella first because she is easiest.
He is aware that is not a kind thought, but it is not an unkind one either. It is simply where his mind goes when it looks for proof. Daella is not Daeron, whose failures have learned to leave rooms before he does. She is not Aerion, who sharpens every conversation until someone must either bleed or smile. She is not Aemon, quiet enough for duty to mistake him for peace, nor Egg, who must be caught by the collar of his name before he climbs, asks, interrupts, or vanishes into some unsuitable passage.
Daella is bright, Daella is dutiful when reminded, Daella is full of questions and fond of pretty things and sufficiently indulged by her elder brothers to believe most rooms will answer her if she persists long enough.
Daella is not lonely. She is…nosy. That is different.
The thought holds well enough until the third afternoon.
There is no feast that day. No formal welcome, no music, no line of guests arranged beneath the eyes of the house. The Martells have begun unpacking themselves into Summerhall by degrees: trunks opened, servants redirected, horses walked in the yard, letters sent toward Dorne, bright fabrics aired over chairs and screens in a way that makes the attending women murmur and rearrange what has already been arranged.
Maekar has no reason to linger near the small solar beside the western gallery.
He does so anyway.
The door is open, and that is excuse enough. The room lies on the way to the outer stair if one takes the longer passage, and he has taken it because a servant told him Baelor had gone that way. Baelor is not there. Instead, the room is full of women’s voices, afternoon light, and the smell of some Dornish oil or soap that has escaped an opened traveling chest and settled into the old wood.
Daella is inside. Of course she is.
She sits on a low stool beside Mors’s younger daughter, knees angled toward her with such intentness that her septa would have corrected the posture if the septa had not already been defeated by the room. Rhae stands half behind Daella’s shoulder, one hand fisted in the fall of her sister’s sleeve and the other worrying at the edge of a ribbon she has no right to touch. Maekar noticed the way your eyes travel to Rhae’s plump little hand and the way you pretend not to see the ribbon being worried. You sit nearer the window with a length of yellow silk folded across your lap, while your mother speaks quietly to Lady Clarisse over a tray of pins, thread, and small gold pieces Maekar does not know the use of and does not intend to ask about.
Wedding work, he supposes. Women have always had an astonishing capacity to turn cloth into governance.
He thinks, for a moment, of a boy that knew little and appreciated even less, and the soft-spoken young girl dressed in purple and silver. He thinks, for a moment, of draping a Targaryen cloak over unfamiliar shoulders and a loose strand of mahogany hair caught under red and black.
He imagines, for a moment, a red dragon covering a Martell yellow sun. He hopes, for a weak moment, that his son finds the same love he did.
“Is it true there are pools for children at the Water Gardens?” Daella asks, dragging Maekar away from his thoughts.
“There are pools for everyone.” Your sister says.
“But children are allowed in them?”
Your sister spares a glance towards your mother and states, “If they are quick enough to avoid being pulled out by their mothers.”
Daella absorbs this with a seriousness better spent on her lessons. “Even noble children?”
“Especially noble children. They are usually the ones most in need of being made ridiculous.”
Rhae’s fingers go still on the ribbon.
Daella frowns. “Princes too?”
“Princes most of all.”
You glance up from the silk. Your mouth moves, not quite a smile.
The look passes between the sisters with the ease of a thrown ball. Daella sees it and leans forward as though proximity might teach her the rules.
Maekar tells himself he should move on.
He remains where he is, just outside the door, shielded by the angle of the passage and the half-fall of an old hanging worked with red thread gone dull from age.
“Have you pushed a prince into a pool?” Daella asks.
The younger sister lifts one shoulder. “I have pushed cousins. That is almost the same thing.”
“You pushed Doras, and held him under the water.” You say without looking up.
“He pulled my braid.”
“You bit him.”
“He had hands enough to let go.”
Daella’s eyes widen with immediate admiration.
Rhae makes a small sound, nearly a laugh, and hides her face against Daella’s shoulder. Daella reaches back without looking and pats her sister’s hand, impatient but not unkind.
There is nothing wrong with the scene.
That, perhaps, is what makes it difficult to leave.
His daughters are attended, received, entertained. Daella has found the novelty he expected her to find. Rhae is no more forward than any child made curious by color and unfamiliar voices. The Martell girls are polite enough, warm enough, not too familiar for their station and not cold enough to offend hospitality. Nothing here accuses him.
It is all very ordinary.
He distrusts how little relief the thought gives him.
“Do all your sisters write to you?” Daella asks.
The room moves around the question without changing. One of the Martell women lifts a length of fabric to the light. Lady Clarisse says something too low to hear. You thread a pin through the silk and answer only after you have secured it.
“Most of them. When they remember.”
“How many letters do you get?”
“That depends how many quarrels have happened since the last raven.”
The younger sister laughs. “Or how many quarrels she caused before leaving.”
“I caused none.”
“You caused three.”
“Two,” You says. “The third was a misunderstanding.”
Daella looks between the two of you, delighted. “What was it about?”
“You are too young to hear it.” You retort, with the same ease he has seen Daeron hold Egg away from a bucking horse.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I am a princess.”
She wasn’t so inclined to make arguments like that before Aerion started participating in her lessons with her septa.
“That does not make you older, little one.”
Daella looks down at her gown, considers the argument, and seems offended only because it has worked. Rhae touches the ribbon again, more carefully this time, as though some freedom has been extended to the whole corner of the room and she means to make a modest use of it.
Maekar should move. He should certainly move before someone sees him standing like a thief outside a room full of girls.
Then Daella shifts in her seat, turning fully to your sister and asking, “Will she still write to you after she marries Daeron?”
Your hands pause over the silk, only for a breath. It is not long enough for Daella to notice, but it is long enough for Maekar.
“Of course.” Your sister says.
Daella doesn’t look convinced. “Every week?”
“If she has anything worth saying.”
“And if she does not?”
Your sister gives you a look of grave consideration. “Then I will write first and accuse her of becoming boring.”
You look up fully now. “I would never give you the satisfaction.”
“You say that because you are not married yet.”
“I say that because I have never been boring.”
Daella smiles, pleased by the answer and not done with it. “But she will stay here, right? With us?”
The room quiets by some small degree.
A pin is lifted, fabric shifts, someone near the hearth sets down a cup with care. No one stops working simply because a child has asked a question, but the air alters all the same, and Maekar feels the change before he understands why it has struck him so sharply.
Your gaze moves to Daella. Then, for the smallest instant, her gaze moves to the open door.
To him.
Maekar does not step away.
He sees the thought pass across your face, or imagines he does. To you, he is only the father of the man you are to marry, standing where a father might stand if he wished to judge whether his future daughter entered his house with proper grace. Perhaps you think he has come to measure your manners. Perhaps she thinks he watches his daughters around her and wonders what sort of influence she will become.
That is fair enough. He is wondering it now.
“I expect so.” You say.
The answer is correct, careful. Too careful for Daella, who has never had much taste for answers that close a door without telling her what lies behind it.
Her nose wrinkles. “That is not an answer.”
The younger Martell girl chokes on a laugh and lowers her face at once. Lady Clarisse murmurs Daella’s name, not sharply, only in warning. Rhae presses closer, either from embarrassment or enjoyment.
Maekar does not expect a daughter of Dorne, least of all a daughter of Mors Martell, to be offended by insolence. And you clearly aren’t. Your mouth softens, though not enough to make the question harmless.
“Then I will give you another answer,” You say. “Yes. I will stay.”
Daella studies you.
It is an insolent look, too direct, unfiltered in the way children and spoiled princesses are both permitted to be until the habit becomes dangerous. Maekar has seen her use it on septas, maesters, servants, Egg, once on Baelor when she wanted the truth of whether a visiting lady’s jewels had been real. He had corrected her then. Or meant to. He cannot now remember whether the correction was spoken aloud or merely intended so firmly that memory has given it the dignity of action.
“How long?” Daella asks.
Your sister’s smile fades, little by little. You do not look toward Maekar this time.
“As long as I am Daeron’s wife.”
It is another correct answer. Less evasive than the first and somehow worse for it.
Daella accepts it only in part. Her gaze moves to the window, to the grey afternoon beyond it, to the hills around Summerhall that are not Dorne and will not become Dorne no matter how much yellow silk is folded in its rooms.
“And if he dies?”
Lady Clarisse chastises, “Daella.”
“What?” She retorts, turning to her aunt seemingly offended by the interruption, “People die.”
No one answers quickly enough.
Daella looks back at you. “My mother died.”
There it is, Maekar thinks, and hates Mors for having made him hear it.
Maekar’s hand closes once at his side.
You hold Daella’s gaze, your head tilting to the side. There is no pity in your face. Thank the Gods for that. Pity would have made Maekar enter the room, or leave it, or do some other foolish thing he could name later as propriety.
“I know.” You say. It seems there is not much more you can offer her, and yet it seems it is enough for Daella.
“She wore purple jewels,” Daella says, unprompted and unashamed. “Like amethysts, but darker. Father gave them to her. Aerion says he chose badly because they made her look too pale, but he only says that because he thinks everything should be red or black or on fire.”
The younger Martell girl laughs then, properly, helplessly. Even your mouth breaks into amusement before you lower her eyes to the silk. Rhae smiles because the others do, because laughter has become permission.
Daella beams, and there is nothing wounded in her face. That should make it easier.
Maekar turns from the doorway before any of them can decide he has been standing there too long. The passage beyond the solar is cool and narrow, the stones holding the damp in the old way despite the fires lit in the occupied rooms. He walks without haste because haste would give the moment more consequence than it deserves.
Daella misses her mother.
That is all.
A girl without her mother will ask foolish questions of women who arrive with sisters and trunks of silk and stories of warmer courts. She will be eager. She will be overbold. She will mistake a bride’s arrival for the arrival of answers no one has promised her. That is grief, it is not loneliness. Or if it is loneliness, it is the ordinary loneliness death leaves behind, and no father, however diligent, can govern death back into obedience.
Dyanna has died. That is the beginning and end of it.
Maekar reaches the end of the corridor and stops before the stair. From behind him, Daella’s voice carries out of the solar, bright again and already asking something else before the last answer has finished.
Maekar puts one hand on the stair rail.
Dyanna had died, he thinks again.
The thought steadies him, but not enough.
Egg’s voice carries.
It has always carried. Down corridors, through shut doors, across courtyards where horses are being saddled and men are attempting to hear one another. Maekar has often thought that if his youngest son were ever truly lost, one would need only stand still and wait for some distant argument to betray him.
On the fourth afternoon since the Martells’ arrival, the argument comes from the map room.
“No, no, that cannot be right,” Egg is saying. “If this is the pass, then Sunspear must be there.”
“That is not Sunspear,” Your sister says.
“It says Sunspear.”
“It says Salt Shore.”
There is a pause.
“The letters are very small,” Egg says, after a moment.
Maekar stops before the half-open door.
He has come looking for Aemon. Or that is what he tells himself in the instant before he looks inside and finds both boys already there.
The map room is cooler than the rest of the house, its windows narrow, its walls lined with rolled vellum, old surveys, sea charts, and fading claims of men who had thought the world would remain where ink placed it. A large table stands in the center, and over it Egg has spread one of the maps with the careless authority of a child who did not ask permission because he never imagined permission might be denied.
It is a map of Dorne.
An old one. Too old, perhaps. The ink has browned at the edges, and the coastline is not as cleanly drawn as Maekar remembers from newer charts. Mountains crouch across the page in careful little humps, roads thin into uncertain lines, names sit in unfamiliar relation to one another.
Egg is bent over it with both hands planted on the table, one knee already braced against the chair he has dragged too close. Your sister stands opposite him, amused and openly unconvinced. You are beside her, quieter, one hand resting lightly on the table’s edge. Aemon stands a little apart, near the corner where the map has begun to curl back on itself.
Of course Aemon is there. Where Egg is found committing some impropriety, Aemon is often found nearby, either having warned against it or preparing to apologize for it.
“The Water Gardens are near Sunspear,” Egg says, recovering. “Everyone knows that.”
“Yes,” Your sister concedes. “But that still is not Sunspear.”
Egg frowns at the map as though it has personally failed him.
Aemon looks down at the parchment. “Sunspear is farther east.”
Egg turns his head. “I knew that.”
“You were pointing west.”
“I was finding it,” Egg looks back at the map. His ears have gone red, but his chin stays lifted. “This is a bad map.”
Your sister laughs once, not unkindly. “It may be.”
That is all she says. It is worse than if she had agreed fully.
Egg looks from her to Aemon with the betrayed expression of a boy who has discovered that blood may be precise at inconvenient times. Then he bends again over the map, unwilling to surrender the table simply because the country has not placed itself where he expected.
The table is too high for him to lean over with dignity, but he makes the attempt anyway. Both his hands settle on either side of Dorne as if he means to hold the whole country still long enough to understand it.
“It looks possible like this.” He says after a short while.
Your sister’s smile changes before she can make mockery of it. “What does?”
Egg’s fingers move from the mountains to the coast.
“Going.”
No one answers at once.
Maekar feels the silence before he knows what to do with it.
It is not wisdom. Egg is not wise, not yet, not in any way that can be trusted to preserve his bones. The words are too young, too blunt, made of wanting before thought has properly shaped it. And still, they sit strangely in the room.
Dorne lies flat beneath his small hands, reduced to ink and road and coastline, near enough for a boy to cover half of it with his palm.
Going.
As if a life might be escaped by learning where to put one’s finger first.
You look down at the map.
Until then, Maekar has thought you only politely entertained by the scene, drawn in by Egg’s insistence and your sister’s amusement. Now something in your attention changes. Not softens. Sharpens.
Your fingers move to the river mouth.
“That is wrong.” You say.
Aemon looks at you. “Yes.”
“And this,” Your hand shifts along the coast. “That is not where the shore turns.”
“No.”
Your sister leans closer, smile fading into interest. Egg straightens a little, pleased that the map has become guilty enough to absolve him.
“So it is a bad map.” He states, almost a boast.
“It is old.” Aemon says.
Egg looks at him. “That can be both things.”
Aemon considers the map, then nods once. “Yes.”
Egg looks briefly satisfied.
You do not. Your gaze remains on the false coast, the misplaced river, the little failures of ink by which some dead hand has made your home strange in a Targaryen room.
“Show me.” You request.
Aemon’s hand stills where it rests near the rolled edge of the map. It is a small hesitation, so small that Maekar would not have noticed it three days ago.
Now -may the Gods curse Mors Martell- he notices.
Aemon steps forward because he has been asked, and because Aemon rarely refuses any duty once it is properly handed to him. He does not push Egg aside. He waits until Egg shifts, grudgingly, and then places two fingers on the map with care.
“Sunspear is here,” He lists. “The Water Gardens are close, but they are not marked. This road is badly copied. It should turn before it reaches the coast.”
Your sister bends over the map. “That road does turn. On newer maps.”
Egg’s hand creeps back toward the mountains. Your sister catches his wrist before he can crease the parchment. “Careful.”
“I am being careful.”
“You are leaning on it.”
Egg lifts his hand at once, offended but obedient. “It keeps moving.”
Aemon reaches for a map weight and sets it near the curling edge before Egg can turn the correction into another argument.
You watch the gesture. Then you look back at the coast.
“How do you know?” You ask.
Aemon looks up.
The question has been asked plainly. Not indulgently, not as one asks a child to repeat a lesson for the pleasure of seeing whether he has retained it. But not tenderly either. You want to know because the map is wrong, because Dorne has been made wrong in front of you, and Aemon appears to know the shape of the error.
Aemon glances once at Egg.
Egg is already touching another part of the map. “Is this the Boneway?”
“Not even close.” Your sister answers.
Egg squints. “It could be.”
“It is not.”
“You cannot tell from there.”
“I am from there.”
Aemon lowers his eyes again.
For a moment, Maekar thinks that will be the end of it. Aemon will let the question pass. He will stand there, useful and silent, while Egg fills the room by the simple method of putting his hands on everything in it.
But your gaze remains on him.
“You were saying, my Prince?”
Aemon’s fingers move once against the parchment.
“The coast is wrong,” He says after a moment. “Here. And here. Some older Stormlander copies place the Planky Town too far north, because the river mouth was copied from another chart. Maester Ormond says that happens often. A mistake is copied, and then the copy is copied, and after a while men trust it because it looks old enough to be trusted.”
Your sister looks down at the chart with fresh suspicion. “Someone was lazy, then.”
“Perhaps,” Aemon says. “Or far away.”
That quiets her more effectively than correction.
Egg leans in again. “Then I was not entirely wrong.”
“You were pointing at Salt Shore.” Aemon reminds him.
“But on a map you just said was wrong.”
“I said the coast was wrong. Salt Shore is still Salt Shore.”
Egg considers this, mouth pressed tight with the effort of deciding whether the distinction is fair.
Maekar remains outside the door.
The corridor is dimmer than the room, and the map table lies in a clean square of afternoon light. Dust turns slowly above it whenever someone moves. Egg is all movement, all claim, a boy trying to press his body into a country made of ink. He wants to be at the table, that much is plain. He wants his wrong guesses answered, not dismissed. He wants Dorne to remain possible even after it has been corrected out from under his hand.
“Have you been there?” Egg asks.
“To the Water Gardens?” Your sister asks.
“To all of it.”
“All of Dorne?”
“Yes.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Egg looks disappointed by this, though he tries to hide it by studying the map more sternly. “But more than here.”
Your sister looks at him. The amusement has not left her entirely, but it no longer sits so easily in her mouth.
“Yes,” She says. “More than here.”
Egg looks around the map room as if seeing it briefly through her eyes: the narrow windows, the old wood, the careful shelves, the air held cool and still around dead men’s borders. His mouth tightens, then loosens too quickly.
“I could go.” He says suddenly.
“To Dorne?”
Egg looks down at the map. His fingers curl against the edge of the table, not touching the parchment now because he has been told not to.
“Why not? I am a prince.”
The words are too large for him and not large enough for what he means.
Maekar should enter then.
He should correct the familiarity, or Egg’s posture, or the knee hooked over the chair, or the careless certainty with which his youngest son speaks of escaping his home in front of guests. He should remind him that princehood is not license.
Instead, he watches Aemon.
Aemon has not moved away.
He is still near the table, one finger holding the edge of the map flat. His eyes are on the place he corrected, though the conversation has moved on without needing him. You notice the same thing, or perhaps you never stopped noticing. Your attention returns to him not with softness, but with the same directness you gave the map.
“Would you like to see it?” You ask.
Egg answers first, of course.
“Yes,” Your eyes remain on Aemon. Egg catches the direction of your attention and stops. “Oh.”
Aemon lifts his head. “I have not been asked to go.”
“That was not what I asked.”
It is mild. It is not a rebuke. Somehow that makes Aemon take longer with the answer.
Maekar thinks of Daeron before he can stop himself. Daeron would have given two answers by now, and neither would have touched the question. He wonders idly what will be of his son’s diversions when faced with one that does not care for them.
Maekar waits for Aemon to say what he ought to say. That the Citadel is his intended road. That Oldtown will have enough for any mind made properly grateful. That boys do not choose journeys because a country looks warm on a map. That wanting is not the measure by which a prince’s life is arranged.
Aemon looks at the map.
“I would like to see a better copy.” He says.
Your sister makes a small disappointed sound. Egg shifts against the table, impatient with the answer but not surprised by it.
But you smile.
Not brightly, not the sudden laugh you had given Daeron by the tapestry. This is smaller, almost private, a recognition of the shape of an answer that has come slantwise because it did not know whether it was allowed to arrive directly.
“I will ask my father if he brought one.” You promise.
Aemon blinks in response.
Again, small. Too small.
Maekar sees it anyway.
“You need not trouble him.” Aemon attempts, but there is a glint in his eye.
“It is no trouble. He brought more than one map.”
“To correct people?” Egg asks.
“To know where he is.” You correct.
That lands differently.
Your sister’s hand stills on the map weight. Egg looks back at the map as if this, too, is something a country might allow a boy to learn. Aemon’s gaze remains lowered, but the corner of his mouth shifts once and is gone.
Not quite a smile.
Near enough.
The room receives it without ceremony. No one stops to praise him for wit. No one seems startled that he has spoken. No one makes use of the almost-smile by naming it. You only bend back over the map, your finger finding another uncertain line.
“And here?”
Aemon begins to step back.
Then he stops.
He looks at the place you mean. Then at you. Then back at the map.
“There.” he says, softer, and leans forward again.
That is all.
It should not be enough to trouble Maekar.
He has seen Aemon at lessons, at the table, beside Baelor, near his brothers. He has seen the boy answer correctly, gently, and at proper length when called upon, then fall silent with the grace of someone closing a door before anyone thinks to ask it shut. He has called it discipline, he has called it temperament, he has called it wisdom beyond his years, when he was in a mood to be generous, and good sense when he was not.
Now Aemon stands in the map room with one finger on Dorne and stays because he has been asked another question.
Egg’s voice rises again, lower than before but no less insistent, as your sister tries to roll the map away from his hand. He protests, not loudly enough to be insolent and not softly enough to be ignored.
“I was looking at it.”
“You were bending the corner.”
“I was remembering where it was.”
Your sister pauses, the map half-rolled beneath her hands.
“It will be there tomorrow.” She reminds him.
Egg does not answer at once.
Maekar cannot see his face clearly from the passage. Only the set of his shoulders, the hand hovering over the map and then drawing back, fingers closing on themselves instead.
You say something Maekar does not catch. Aemon answers, low and careful.
Maekar steps back from the door.
No one in the room looks up.
That should reassure him. It means he has not been caught lingering, it means nothing improper has occurred, it means his sons are where they should be, attended by guests of a good House and watched by one another. It means Egg has found novelty and Aemon has found use for his learning.
He walks down the corridor with the sound of Egg’s voice following him.
Egg, he can explain too quickly. That is the trouble. He has explanations ready for Egg before the boy has finished moving: insolence, idleness, indulgence, restlessness, youth.
But the boy had looked at Dorne on parchment and said it looked possible.
Aemon had said no such thing. Aemon had only stayed when space was made for him.
Maekar is not sure which of them Mors would count first.
By the sixth evening, Mors Martell’s accusation has become a burr under Maekar’s skin.
It follows him through his own halls and catches where it should not. Daella with her questions, Egg with both hands on a map of Dorne, Aemon staying when another question is asked. Maekar has begun to look for Mors’s eldest daughter before he admits he is looking, as if one more room might give him the proof to lay the whole ugly thing to rest.
Instead, he finds you on the terrace with Aerion.
The supper has ended, though not the evening. Voices remain in the gallery behind him, softened by wine and heat and the relief of ceremony loosening its grip. The doors to the terrace stand open because the night is clear enough for it, and because the Martells, impossible people, seem to think any room improved by allowing the outside to enter it. Beyond the balustrade, Summerhall falls away into dark slopes and a sky pricked with early stars. Torches burn near the steps, their light moving over stone, over the low wall, over the small gathering of guests taking air beneath the watch of servants and guards.
Daeron is inside, Maekar has already marked him: near the hearth, caught between two of Lady Martell’s ladies in waiting and an aunt by marriage whose name Maekar has not troubled to remember. He holds a cup he has not emptied and wears the expression of a man listening carefully to his own execution. Every so often one of the women asks him something, and Daeron answers with courtesy that still looks like surrender.
You stand near the far end of the terrace, one hand resting on the stone rail. The other gathers your sleeve against the evening chill. You are looking outward, not at the view exactly, but at the darkness beyond the reach of the torches, as if measuring how far a place can go before a house stops pretending to contain it.
Aerion stands a few paces away, angled toward the balustrade as though the conversation has merely found him there by accident. He has a cup in hand and a smile on his face. The cup has not been touched, and the smile is worse for having no heat in it.
Maekar stops just inside the open doors.He should turn back.
He does not.
Aerion says something Maekar cannot hear. You answer, quieter still. Your face is composed, but your shoulder has set in a way Maekar recognizes from court women asked to endure a man they cannot yet escape without making the escape visible.
Aerion’s smile deepens.
He has found something.
Maekar knows that smile. He has seen it across practice yards, at tables, in doorways where servants stood too still and younger boys went silent. Aerion smiles that way when a thing has answered to the point of the knife.
“You mistake me,” Aerion says, clear enough now for the words to carry. “I mean no insult.”
Your head turns slightly toward him. “That must be inconvenient for you.”
The answer is sharper than Maekar expects from you.
Aerion laughs under his breath, pleased despite himself. Or because of himself. “There. I knew it was not only Dornish heat.”
You look at him fully then.
That is the mistake, if it is a mistake. You give him your full attention for one breath too long, and Aerion sees it, of course he does. His body changes around it, not much: a shift of weight, a little easing at the mouth, the settling attention of an animal that has heard movement in the brush.
“One can see it, in certain lights,” He says, a drawl to his voice, entirely too self-satisfied. “The blood of the dragon does not vanish so easily.”
The air between you seems to cool.
Behind Maekar, someone in the gallery laughs at something unrelated. A servant passes with a tray and does not look toward the terrace. The little movement of the evening continues around the place where Aerion has set his hook.
“My father would say Dorne has managed well enough with its own blood.” You say, almost casually.
“Fathers say comforting things.”
“Some do.”
The words land where you aimed them, perhaps, but not only there.
Maekar feels them strike and cannot be certain whether you know what you have touched. You are looking at Aerion, not at him. Your voice holds no special meaning for the father standing in the doorway. It is only an answer to a prince who has made a trophy out of ancestry.
Aerion’s eyes narrow with amusement. He understands enough to enjoy the wound even if he did not choose its depth.
“Then yours is charitable,” He says. “But mine tends toward accuracy.”
“Does he?”
Maekar’s hand tightens once against the doorframe.
Aerion turns the cup in his fingers. The torchlight catches on the rim and on the pale fall of his hair. He is a handsome boy, and that has always been part of the danger. Cruelty sits more easily on a beautiful face. People forgive it longer, or call it brilliance until it draws blood from someone important.
“My father,” Aerion says, something like steel under the words, “knows what strength looks like.”
You glance, very briefly, toward the gallery. Not far enough to find Maekar. Far enough to remind Aerion there are listeners, whether he cares for them or not.
“And does he see it in you often?”
That should have ended it.
A wiser boy would have taken offense. A duller one would have missed the insult. A gentler one would have been hurt by it and stepped back.
Aerion only smiles.
He moves then, not closer at first. Sideways, along the balustrade, his free hand brushing the stone as if he is idly testing the cold of it. The movement has no purpose except not to be still. He looks out at the dark beyond the terrace, then back at you, then down into his cup.
If he were bored, he could leave. If he were offended, he could leave. If he had come only to insult you, he has done enough.
He remains.
“You know,” He continues, “Princess Daenerys must have had admirable patience.”
Your face does not change. “For marrying into Dorne?”
“For listening to Dorne call it an alliance.”
The insult is clearer this time. Less elegant for being so.
Your hand stays on the balustrade. “What would you call it?”
“A dragon entering a lesser House?” Aerion asks. “A gift, if the lesser House has sense enough to be grateful.”
“A marriage.” You correct.
Aerion’s mouth curves. “You say that as if the word changes what was given.”
“No. I say it as if a woman is not a cup passed from one table to another.”
For the first time, the line cuts cleanly enough that Aerion goes still.
Only for a heartbeat.
Maekar sees it because he is watching for it now. He sees the moment Aerion’s pleasure nearly becomes something else. Not hurt, Aerion does not allow hurt where anyone can see it. But the answer reaches him, it meets him somewhere.
Then he laughs.
Small. Almost approving.
“You will do well here.” He states, as if he has any wisdom with which to say it.
“I doubt you mean that kindly.”
“I rarely mean things kindly.”
“Is that something you take pride in, my Prince?”
Aerion’s gaze fixes on you.
The torch nearest him snaps softly in the wind. Light moves over his face and leaves half of it in shadow. He looks older in that uneven light. Older, and less finished than he pretends.
For a moment Maekar sees the restlessness underneath the practiced cruelty: a thing pacing the bars of itself, biting whatever comes close enough and then furious when the hand withdraws.
The thought is intolerable, and Maekar rejects it at once.
Aerion has been corrected. Taught, watched, punished when punishment was required, praised when praise could be given without feeding the worst of him. He has skill, rank, a future, every advantage a prince of the blood can reasonably be granted without handing him a city to burn for amusement.
If Aerion is alone, he has made much of the distance himself.
That should be enough.
It is not, because Mors has made sure nothing is enough anymore.
You turn slightly away from Aerion, toward the steps back into the gallery. The conversation has lasted long enough, more than long enough. Your civility remains intact, but only just. Maekar sees the effort in the line of your neck, the controlled way your hand leaves the balustrade, the small adjustment of your sleeve before you move. You do not flee, you do not excuse yourself with too much sweetness, instead you simply begin to end it.
Aerion lets you take two steps.
Then he says, “Does it trouble you?”
You stop.
Maekar almost curses aloud.
Aerion has not raised his voice, he has not made a scene. That is the skill of it. He leaves the question there, low enough that you may pretend not to have heard it, shaped enough that pretending will cost you.
You look back.
Aerion’s eyes are bright now, fixed entirely on you.
“The dragon in you,” He taunts. “Does it trouble you, or only being reminded?”
The silence after that is very thin.
Your fingers close once in the loose fall of your sleeve. Anger. He has found it and he knows he has found it, not because he understands you, but because he understands where pride flinches when struck.
“My blood does not trouble me,” You say, chin held a bit higher. “Men who think blood is the only true thing about me trouble me. Briefly.”
Aerion smiles again.
There should be satisfaction in it, triumph. There is some. Maekar knows triumph in that boy; he has seen it often enough to wish it rarer. But this is not only that. Aerion looks pleased, yes, but not complete. Answered, and already hungry for the next answer. Met, and immediately restless with the silence that follows.
You turn back toward the gallery.
This time Aerion lets you go.
That may be the most unsettling part.
He does not follow, he does not call another insult after you, he does not press until the room is forced to notice and correct him. He only watches you cross the terrace, your face composed again before you pass the first servant, your steps measured, your anger tucked beneath courtesy because you have been raised well enough to carry a blade without showing its edge.
You enter through the open doors. Maekar steps aside before you reach him.
For an instant, your gaze meets his.
You know he has seen something. Not all of it, perhaps. Not the shape of Mors’s accusation inside him, not the way Daella, Egg, and Aemon have already made a ruin of his denials. You only see a father standing where he should not quite be standing, having watched one son do what that son does.
Your face closes further.
“My Prince.” You greet. The courtesy is flawless.
Maekar inclines his head in response.
Across the gallery, Daeron has looked up. He is still where Maekar last saw him, caught among Martell women who have decided to interrogate him. One of them is speaking to him but Daeron does not seem to hear the end of it.
His eyes find you first, then move past you to the terrace doors, to Aerion.
When he looks back, your mouth has gone flat in a way too small for anyone else to read. Daeron’s expression changes by less than a smile, less than amusement; only a brief, tired acknowledgement, as if you have handed him a complaint he has been carrying for years.
Then one of the women beside him touches his sleeve to reclaim his attention, and he lowers his eyes at once.
Maekar sees it. He wishes, immediately and cravenly, that he had not.
You pass into the gallery, where voices receive you without knowing what they have been spared. After a moment, your sister’s voice rises from somewhere near the hearth, calling you toward some matter of fabric or laughter or both. You answer her, and if there is anger left in your voice, it is gone before anyone else can claim it.
Maekar remains by the doors.
On the terrace, Aerion has not moved.
He stands with his cup still in hand, turned halfway toward the darkness now. His profile is sharp against the torchlight. He looks, for a moment, as though he has forgotten there are other people in the world.
Then he smiles to himself.
Not softly, never that. But...privately.
Maekar feels a cold irritation move through him.
Aerion had wanted to wound you. That was true. He had wanted to test you, to catch at your pride, to drag your blood through his own understanding of it until Dorne became something he could correct.
But his son had not left after the first cut. He had not even left after the second. He had circled and returned, not bored, not satisfied, not finished. He had made the conversation hostile because hostility was the only shape in which he knew how to ask another person to stay with him.
No. Maekar’s jaw tightens. Not ask.
Aerion does not ask. He takes, provokes, corners, tests the line of another person’s patience until either they retreat and prove themselves lesser, or they answer and become, for a moment, real to him. It is an ugly thing.
It is also a lonely one.
Mors, Maekar thinks, with a sudden and exhausted violence, should have kept his mouth shut.
Aerion lifts his cup at last and drinks.
Then he looks back toward the gallery, toward the place where you disappeared, as if silence has already disappointed him.
By the eve of the wedding, Maekar knows better than to call it accident.
He has watched his eldest son for days now, though he would not have named it watching at first. A father observes, a prince evaluates, a host takes note of where a delicate match may fracture before the vows have been spoken. There are enough names for the habit that Maekar has no need to choose the ugliest one.
Still, he has watched.
He watched Daeron in the courtyard on the day of the Martells’ arrival, his hand bared too quickly, the glove crushed wrong in his other fist. He watched him in the gallery afterward, a cup of wine lifted and lowered and never touched while Mors’s daughter asked him whether the wine was so bad. He watched Daeron lead you toward a tapestry with no plan except the poor, visible hope of keeping your attention a moment longer. He watched your laugh catch him unguarded. He watched the smile answer on Daeron’s face before the boy remembered he had a father in the room.
Since then, Maekar has watched smaller things.
Daeron standing near one door because you were beside another. Daeron leaving a room only after you had already gone. Daeron looking toward your voice and away again, as if the first movement were involuntary and the second a punishment for it. Daeron’s cup untouched one evening and emptied too quickly the next. Daeron arriving clean-mouthed to supper with too much care in the line of his shoulders, then disappearing before the final course because some effort had spent itself past use.
None of it is proof of anything.
Maekar knows better than most men how little appetite needs in order to dress itself as feeling. Daeron has wanted before. Wanted wine, wanted escape, wanted women he did not have to see again, wanted doors, dark corners, morning to come without demanding an account of the night. Wanting has never made him less careless, it has only given his carelessness finer names.
And yet.
Mors Martell’s words remain.
Six children, and each one alone.
Maekar finds Daeron in the gallery after supper, surrounded by women.
For one terrible breath, the shape of it throws another room over this one.
A low ceiling, heat trapped beneath poor shutters. Perfume gone sour with sweat and spilled wine. A woman laughing before she understood who had entered. Red cloth underfoot, or perhaps only a rug made red by candlelight. Daeron half-reclined against cushions, his hair loose, his shirt unlaced badly enough that someone else’s hand must have done part of the work. Not asleep, but not awake in any way that mattered. His mouth red from wine, his eyes slow to find his father, a woman’s fingers still resting on his sleeve as if she had forgotten him the moment he stopped being amusing.
Maekar had stood in the doorway and felt anger come first.
And thank the Gods for anger. Anger had been clean, anger had given him a shape to put around the thing: disgrace, indiscipline, filth, weakness, shame carried in Targaryen skin. Anger had let him order Daeron upright, it had let him pay what needed paying, silence what needed silencing, drag his son back into the world where names had consequences.
He had not thought of loneliness then. Why would he have?
The room had been full of people.
The gallery returns by degrees.
High ceiling, tapestries, beeswax. Wine poured into good cups. Martell women in silk and warm colors, clustered near Daeron with the bright, dangerous courtesy of relatives examining the man to whom one of their own will be given by morning. They are not unkind, they are curious, amused, skeptical in the way women can afford to be when they have decided a man must answer before he is trusted.
Daeron stands among them like a man enduring a trial.
He is dressed correctly. Beautifully, even, though Maekar dislikes the word for him. The dark doublet sits well across his shoulders. His hair has been tied back with enough care to suggest either vanity or terror. One glove is on. The other is absent. Not forgotten, surely. Daeron forgets many things, but rarely the small instruments by which he manages to face a room.
His bare hand holds a cup.
That is the first thing Maekar notices.
Not wine in itself. Wine has been in Daeron’s hand so often that it might as well be another inherited jewel. But the way he holds it now. His fingers curl around the stem with careful pressure, not tight enough to tremble, not loose enough to seem careless. The cup gives the hand a duty, something to hold, something to explain why it is visible.
One of Mors’s cousins asks him whether he has spent much time in King’s Landing. Another, older, asks whether Summerhall is always so cold in the evenings.
“In the evenings, yes, my Lady.” Daeron says.
“You say that as if the days are better.”
“They are warmer.”
“A loyal answer, my Prince.”
Daeron’s mouth moves, almost a smile. “I am told loyalty is a virtue.”
The older woman studies him over the rim of her cup. She is not displeased, exactly, but she is also not satisfied. The Martell women have not come to this corner of the gallery for compliments about the weather.
“And do you ride?” She asks, dark eyes trailing over a nearby hunting scene in the tapestry.
Maekar feels the question land before Daeron answers.
Daeron’s fingers turn the cup once. “Not well.”
“Were you not taught?”
“Often,” There is a small pause. Daeron lowers his eyes toward the wine. “I was given every opportunity to do it better.”
That changes the air around him. Only slightly. The older woman looks at him more carefully now. Perhaps she hears the admission, perhaps she hears only the self-mockery he has left polished for her convenience.
“And still you did not?” She asks. She is not asking about riding, and he is certain his son is sober enough to understand that.
Daeron’s mouth moves again. This time the smile does not arrive. “No, my Lady.”
He gives her nothing more.
Maekar’s jaw tightens.
There. That is Daeron too. A door opened half an inch and then held shut from the inside. An answer that asks not to be pressed and resents the mercy if it is granted. His son’s failures have always made demands even in their confession. Look, but not closely. Hear me, but do not answer. Know what I am, and then leave before I make the knowing your fault.
One of the younger women asks something about the galleries. Whether he knows them well, whether he will show them to you properly after the wedding, since he has apparently already shown you one corner and abandoned the rest of his duty.
Daeron looks toward you.
This time, you have heard.
Maekar sees it happen: the slight lift of your head, your gaze cutting across the room toward Daeron, your sister still speaking beside you and then stopping when she realizes she has lost you. Daeron meets your eyes before he can arrange his face into anything safer.
For one brief instant, the gallery narrows between you.
Nothing improper passes, nothing anyone could name. You do not smile, not really, and Daeron does not either. But your mouth flattens in a way that makes something exhausted and almost amused move through his face. It is a beginning of a language, too small to be caught by anyone not already cursed into watching.
Maekar catches it.
He wishes, again, that he had not.
A few nights earlier, after the matter with Aerion on the terrace, Maekar had seen a look much like it. You crossing back into the gallery with anger tucked so cleanly beneath courtesy that only the line of your neck betrayed it. Daeron, caught among your women even then, glancing from your face to the terrace doors and back again. The slight change in your expression, no more than a complaint carried without words; and Daeron’s answer, less than a smile, more tired than amused.
Yes, his face had said then. I know.
Or perhaps Maekar had imagined it. He finds he does not think so.
Now you look at Daeron across the room while the question about the gallery remains unanswered.
You touch your sister’s wrist, murmur something to her, and cross the room without haste. No one could call it rescue, that is precisely why it works. You come to the circle as if you have meant to join it all along, as if there is nothing unusual about a bride returning to the place where her betrothed is being measured by her kin.
Daeron watches you come.
He does not brighten. That would be easier to despise. He does not relax. He holds himself still, and the stillness is so complete that Maekar can see the work inside it. The cup remains in his hand. His bare fingers do not shift now. The whole body waits as if waiting were a discipline that might save him from wanting the arrival too much.
You stop beside the older woman first.
“Aunt Dorea,” You say, “My mother was asking for you.”
The woman’s gaze flicks toward the hearth. “Was she?”
“She said your name twice. The second time sounded less patient.”
That earns a few smiles from the women around you, familiar rather than bright. The older woman gives you a look that contains both affection and suspicion.
“You have come to steal him from us.”
“No,” You retort with ease. “Only to make certain you leave something of him for tomorrow.”
Daeron lowers his eyes for a moment.
Gratitude, perhaps. Embarrassment. Perhaps both.
You do not look at him while it happens. You are still speaking with your aunt, still part of the women’s circle, still making the shift seem like family business rather than intervention. The older woman lets herself be drawn away after another remark from one of the cousins, and the pressure around Daeron changes.
Before, he stood at the center of their attention, and now he stands beside you.
It is a small difference, but it is everything.
The questions loosen. Someone asks you about the cloth your sister had been holding, someone says your mother will only become more impatient if she is made to wait. Your sister calls from across the room, too low for Maekar to make out the words, and you answer her with a small lift of your hand. Daeron’s mouth moves at that, small and involuntary, and you glance at him once as if to check whether he is still intact.
He does not touch you.
Maekar notices that too.
Daeron has known how to take liberties when wine and shame have made a lesser room of the world. Maekar knows this because he has had men whisper it to him, and because he has dragged proof of it home before dawn with fury holding his dignity together. His son is not innocent of bodies, he is not some trembling boy who has never learned the uses of charm and skin and a lowered voice.
Yet here, beside the woman he will marry in the morning, he stands as if even the space between your sleeves must be respected.
His hand remains on the cup. Bare. Occupied. Exposed.
You say something Maekar cannot hear. Daeron bends his head slightly toward you. Not much. Enough regardless.
He answers quietly.
You look at him while he speaks, and Daeron’s gaze holds for half a breath before it drops to the cup again. The wine inside it has gone still, he has not drunk. Maekar does not know when he stopped wanting to, or whether wanting has anything to do with it.
Perhaps that is a lie. Wanting has everything to do with it.
Daeron wants to be there.
The realization comes so plainly that Maekar nearly refuses it on instinct.
His son wants the place you have made beside you. He wants it with the same body that has wanted wine, escape, sleep without dreams, hands without memory, laughter that costs nothing because it is bought and gone by morning. He wants it badly enough to make stillness out of himself. Badly enough to fear every sign of it showing. Even while standing there, he looks prepared for the place to be taken away.
That is what Maekar had not understood.
Daeron does not look less alone beside you. He looks alone differently, As if the room has given him something and he has already begun teaching himself how to survive its loss.
The thought is unbearable in its own way.
Maekar had meant to give his son a marriage. A house, a wife, a future with hands enough in it to pull him back from the worst of himself. He had meant to place a shape around Daeron’s life that Daeron might not be able to slip through easily. Duty could hold where desire failed, habit could keep what affection could not be trusted to begin.
He had not meant for Daeron to look at one young woman as if the whole room might go dark when she turned away.
Across the gallery, Mors Martell has gone quiet.
Maekar sees him only because he has learned, these past days, to resent every place the man’s attention lands. Mors stands near Baelor, a cup loose in his hand, no smile on his face now. He is not watching his daughter only, he is watching Daeron stand beside her.
There is no triumph in him.
That is almost worse. If Mors looked satisfied, Maekar could hate him properly. If he looked smug, Maekar could sharpen himself on the insult and be done with it. But Mors looks only grave, and for one breath the old friend from the war is there beneath the Dornish prince: the man who had once known how to see blood on another man’s sleeve and say nothing until saying something would keep him upright.
Mors does not speak. Maekar looks away first.
His gaze moves through the room because he needs somewhere else to put it.
Daella is with your sister near the hearth, explaining something with both hands despite the septa’s distant disapproval. Rhae has fallen half-asleep against Lady Clarisse’s side. Egg is near one of the windows, being prevented by Aemon from opening it wider than the servants will tolerate. Aemon says something low, and Egg protests, but only half-heartedly. Aerion stands apart with his cup, sharp and bored and listening too closely to pretend he is not.
Six children.
Maekar has provided for them.
The thought rises old and armed.
He has. He knows he has. Rooms, guards, tutors, horses, maesters, marriages, futures. He has kept the roof over them and the name before them. He has buried their mother and not followed her into the earth, though there were mornings after Dyanna when remaining seemed less like strength than a sentence passed by children too young to understand they had spoken it. He has done what fathers do when there is no softness left in them and too many lives still requiring shape.
Across the room, Daeron shifts. Only slightly.
One of the Martell women has drawn you into another question. You turn your head to answer. The movement takes your attention from him, nothing more. It is ordinary, necessary. Daeron’s place beside you remains exactly as it was.
Still, his hand tightens around the cup.
Maekar sees it.
Then you move your elbow a fraction, not touching him, only leaving the space beside you intact, making it clear by remaining there that the place has not closed merely because you have turned your face elsewhere.
Daeron’s fingers loosen.
He does not look at you. But he remains.
There is no grace in it that a singer would notice, no vow, no clasped hands, no sudden mending of what has been broken longer than you have known his name. Only Daeron standing where you have made room for him, careful as a man allowed near a flame he expects to be burned by and cannot make himself leave.
Maekar watches from the doorway.
He waits for the old word to come. Weakness.
It has always come easily. Easier than fear. Easier than grief. Easier than the thing in him that wants to seize Daeron by the shoulder and shake sense into him, or hold him there, or drag him away before hope makes another ruin no father can repair.
The word does not come.
Across the room, Daeron does not touch his betrothed. He only stands where you have made room for him, one hand curled around a cup he has forgotten to drink from.
Maekar watches his son remain there.
For once, he does not call it weakness.
As you can see, you shouldn't be fooled by Daeron's perspective. The man hasn't been chill about his betrothed/wife for one second. Thank you for reading!
Headcanon that Maekar Targaryen is always complaining about how bad his back hurts. This is based off him always mf groaning when sitting down LMFAO
Like Daeron gets found drunk in a ditch again and dragged back to an audience with his father and Maekar is like “someone else fucking deal with this boy, my back is fucking killing me”
Maekar has to wrangle some clothes on Rhaegal so he isn’t running nude in the red keep and all Baelor hears for the next few hours is how “I pulled a muscle making sure our brother isn’t exposing himself, the least you could do is get shitfaced with me”
However he never complains if he gets to do some activity he actually likes, such as training in the yard or hunting, he only does it to annoy Baelor or to make everyone know how grumpy he is feeling (so all the time)
So last thing for now, I saw an interview where daerons actor talked about the effects of drinking on dreams that got me thinking. He said that while alcohol inhibits deep sleep (so dreams), if one stops, the dreams would pile up and get worse. Also I’ve heard of hallucinations as a symptom of withdrawal, specially nightmare-ish ones. Would daeron experience anything like it in this universe? If yes, how do you think it would show for him?
Related to that, you wrote about his anxiety on nothing happening after not drinking for a while, is this from a past experience? Or just paranoia? That chapter was super interesting and it made me think more about his relationship with alcohol. Before meeting with his to be wife, he didn’t drink. While getting closer to her, he slowed the drinking too. So he relates sobriety to his wife but in what sense? Does he want to be more present and remember things? Is he maybe just doing it out of respect, duty or his father’s expectations? Is he trying to show her his actual personality to test her response? That would be a lot of vulnerability he’s willing to show, sobbing…
SORRY IF ITS A BIT MUCH BUT HES SO TRAGIC AND YOU WRITE HIM PERFECTLY PLEASE JUST LISTEN TO WHATEVER YOURE INTERESTED IN FROM THIS
Thank you for your message!! And please do not apologize, this is exactly the kind of question I love getting because it makes me think about the mechanics of Daeron’s dreams and drinking more carefully.
And absolutely, wine blurs the dreams enough that he can sometimes survive the idea of sleeping, or survive waking afterward. If he stops drinking for a while, I can imagine the dreams becoming sharper, stranger, or harder to distinguish from waking fear. Not necessarily in a clean “this is withdrawal hallucination” way, but in the sense that his body and mind are already unreliable places for him, and sobriety makes everything too clear.
One thing I would clarify about the story you mentioned: Daeron is not afraid to sleep there because he has not been drinking. He is afraid because the dreams have been too quiet. He has learned, or thinks he has learned, that when the dreams give him a reprieve, they usually return worse, as if they have only been waiting to make him pay for the silence. So it is partly past experience, partly paranoia for him there.
As for how he relates sobriety to his wife, I think it changes over time. This is a long-ass response and I apologize in advance.
Before meeting her, not drinking is an attempt to give her one unblurred version of him, even if he cannot admit that cleanly. While this Daeron is definitely a less broken version of him, in my head as they get closer to Ashford/Spring Sickness/Summerhall time-wise the dreams become much worse, so here he's in a bad spot but certainly not the worst it could be. He's at rock bottom but hasn't grabbed a shovel and started digging yet.
Because of that, he is still more aware of his vices than he might be later. He knows what the drinking says about him. He knows what people say when he leaves a room. He knows what servants notice, what his father sees, what his brothers pretend not to see, what kind of husband a woman would be warned she was receiving. And as his betrothed becomes less abstract to him (as he learns small things about her, imagines her, thinks of her as a real person moving toward him) the weight of his reputation becomes harder to ignore.
So I think not drinking, before he meets her, is partly respect, partly shame, partly fear, and partly one small desperate attempt not to let the worst of himself arrive before he does. He does not believe sobriety makes him good, he knows better than that. But I think he wants, just once, to stand in front of her without wine on his breath and without the cup having already answered for him. He wants to give her one first memory of him that is not completely surrendered to what everyone already knows.
Later, as he gets closer to her, slowing the drinking becomes more complicated. It is tangled with wanting to be present, wanting to remember, wanting not to arrive already half-lost, and wanting to know whether he can be near her without wine. There is something frighteningly vulnerable in that, because if he is sober with her, then he cannot blame the cup for what he says, or what he wants, or how badly he reacts to being seen.
And I do think there is a self-sabotaging part of it too. Some part of him wants to know whether she can look at him when there is no wine softening the edges, whether she can bear the version of him that is too clear, too brittle, too reachable. It is not a healthy test, exactly, and I do not think he would even admit it to himself as one, but Daeron is very good at turning his own need into a trial/test he expects himself to fail.
So yes, it is respect. It is wanting not to come to her already blurred. It is wanting to remember the sound of her voice, the shape of a conversation, whether she smiled or only endured him. But it is also fear, hope, shame, and an attempt to be seen clearly.
The terrible part is that sobriety does not make him less ruined in his own eyes. It only makes the ruin harder to hide. He is aware of his vices, and of what they say about him, but I do not think he sees them as the whole of what is wrong with him. The drinking, the running, the brothels, the evasions; those are the visible parts, they are the parts other people can name.
But even if those were stripped away, I think Daeron would still believe there is something fundamentally wrong underneath. That is part of what makes the dreams so frightening to him. They are terrible, yes, but they are also an explanation. Without them, or beneath them, there may still be some private madness or rot in him that he cannot blame on prophecy or curse. So, when he chooses even a little less wine around her, it is not because he thinks he has become better, it is because, despite himself, he wants to be present enough for her to know who is actually standing in front of her. Rot and all.
Is Daeron consciously aware of all of that? Absolutely not. But those are the things I have in mind when I write his drinking: the cup as escape, as blur, as self-protection, as something that makes him easier to survive but harder to reach.
I do have a few vague ideas for exploring that more directly someday, both with the drinking and with how he uses sex or brothels as another way to get out of himself, but no promises yet. It is definitely one of the parts of him I keep circling back to.
Oh bath scene has a special place in my brain. I know we’re like leagues away from anything too intimate but if you’re feeling it, another bath related moment between them maybe? TAKE CARE :)
The wonderful thing about a non-sequential series is that I am completely free to write some more intimate stuff and then jumping back and including some other stuff from before 😈. Although I would like to at least write their first bridge into physical intimacy before a scene like that, another bath related moment between them would be so fun to write, it's a wonderful idea! thank you so much!
Hiiiiii ^^ first of all, i hope you’re feeling better!!!!!!
Going anon lol. Well I was re reading your other daeron works and I really loved your writing in the meakar pov. It was actually incredibly well done and a super insightful perspective into daerons own life.
Sooooo maybe if you feel like it and whenever you see it fit it would be really cool to see another maekar pov or another family member’s or anyone you’d like.
Personally I’m thinking about maekar noticing the proximity and his thoughts about his plan low key working lol. Is he like a bit smug? Or maybe just relieved? Did it take him long to notice or did he see the cracks right away? Did it somehow reminded him of his own life? Well anything you’d like really.
On that same note, I think you might’ve mentioned something about his sisters and wife. I’d be interesting to see their perspective on his change. Did they see it? Did they say anything about it? What came first, their interest on daerons actions or his wife’s? What would an interaction between them look like? Also, what about his brothers?
As you can see I have like infinite thoughts on your universe, sorry if I’m overwhelming or anything. Your talent just makes my imagination bloom sm lol. I’ll definitely be back with more heh. Also, please just take whatever you’re inspired by and ignore the rest if u want to, I just wanted to let you know my thoughts and interest :>
AGAIN WISH YOU GET WELL SOON SEE UUUU
hiii, thank you so much for your messages!! I am feeling much better now, thank you!
I'm so happy to hear you liked the Maekar PoV, it was so fun to write.
I have a few Maekar PoV's in mind, right now one around the time between the Martells arriving in Summerhall and the wedding, and how the Maekarlings all reacted to their guests and the Reader. But I'll definitely keep in midn your idea about how he sees the changes in Daeorn's relationship with his wife over time!
It is not overwhelming at all, so polease don't apologize! i love hearing your thoughts and learning what interests you of this little universe
The morning after Aegon asks you to hold him, he leaves your bed before you wake and returns with an evening in the city already arranged. He leads you through King’s Landing to a brothel, places a gold dragon in your hand, and tells you that you may choose anyone you want. Whatever he believes he is repairing, however, he has not asked whether you think it was broken.
Word Count: 11.6k
Warnings: 18+. Smut, explicit sexual content. Established relationship, arranged marriage, cunnilingus, femdom (sub!Aegon), consensual power dynamics, service submission, praise kink, blindfolds, sexual roleplay, brothel setting, emotional vulnerability, references to past promiscuity, no infidelity in the story. This is just hurt/comfort with increasingly questionable problem-solving.
Some AU/Setting stuff: They're married, for a little while now. Viserys is still alive (I will continue to avoid his death and its consequences like this fucker avoided conflict and parenting).
A/N: I have wanted to write this story for Aegon for so long. Technically in my head it's the two idiots from Pirtir but they don't have to be (I just think it's more fun in an evil way if you have the brothel story from Pirtir in mind when you read Aegon do what he does in this one). I hope you like this and I would love to hear your thoughts!
Title is from the quote "After decades of starving and yearning, when love and affection has finally been bestowed upon you, how do you bear the delightful intensity of its taste? Each bite overwhelms me to the bone. I did not even have a tablecloth laid, I was never prepared." by mun-dane.
You wake to cold sheets.
Not cold enough to suggest Aegon has been gone for hours, though; only enough that when your hand crosses the space beside you, searching without much thought for his warmth, it finds the shallow impression he left in the mattress and the covers pushed down where he must have kicked them during the night.
Disappointment arrives before concern.
More often than not, he is still there when you wake. Sometimes deeply asleep, sprawled so carelessly into your half of the bed that you must push at his shoulder to reclaim enough room to move. Sometimes awake and pretending otherwise, his breathing made conspicuously even until you open your eyes and catch him watching you through his lashes. He has settled into domesticity with surprising ease for a man of his…reputation.
His absence is not unprecedented either, but this morning, you had expected him to remain.
You know the ordinary shape of intimacy with him. You know the weight of his arm across your waist, the heat of him beside you, the careless familiarity with which he occupies your bed and your space. There is nothing new in waking tangled together or feeling him linger when neither of you has yet decided to move.
What stays with you from the previous night is his voice.
He had come to you angry and exhausted. He had spoken of the council, of his mother, of trying and discovering that effort changed nothing. Then he had looked at you as though your face might deliver the same verdict as theirs.
And he had asked you to hold him.
The memory returns with the same quiet force it carried when the words first left him. A question, weak but audible, stripped of the easy confidence he usually wears when he reaches for you.
You had answered by moving closer, and for a time, he had let himself rest against you. Then you shifted your footing, and his arms had tightened with such sudden instinct that you felt the panic in it before he seemed to understand it himself. He released you almost immediately and went still beneath your hands, leaving enough space for you to move away if that was what you had intended.
You moved closer again, and eventually, his arms rose around you once more.
You had hoped some part of that trust might survive until morning.
Instead, you find his side of the bed empty.
Embarrassment seems the likeliest explanation. Aegon can endure being insolent, vulgar, drunken, contrary, and occasionally unbearable with far greater ease than he can tolerate being seen in earnest need. Daylight has likely made the previous night feel less like comfort and more like exposure.
The thought disappoints you. It irritates you too, though not enough to become anger.
You do not expect him to return and begin a difficult conversation. Difficult conversations have never formed the foundation of your marriage. You have found other ways of knowing one another, some more direct than others, and Aegon has always preferred touch, provocation, distraction, or silence to any prolonged examination of what lies beneath them.
So you rise.
The day begins because days do, regardless of whether a husband has fled before his wife can wake beside him.
By late morning, you are seated in a private study with Helaena, embroidery resting across your lap while she works with quiet intensity. The conversation between you comes and goes without either of you appearing troubled by its irregularity.
Each time the door opens in the adjoining passage, some small part of your attention lifts. You tell yourself that you are not waiting for him. You are merely accustomed to his interruptions.
When he finally arrives, he enters with enough momentum to make the distinction irrelevant. The doors to the study open without ceremony and Aegon steps through.
“My wife.”
There is the smallest skip in his step as he crosses the threshold. So slight that, had you not spent months learning the peculiarities of his movement, you might mistake it for ordinary energy. Aegon has always occupied a narrow space between animation and restlessness, and on most days he moves along it without effort.
Today, though, he has crossed too far to one side.
Still, the greeting warms you before suspicion has the chance to intervene.
Before your marriage, you might have imagined that hearing yourself addressed so frequently through your relation to a man would become belittling. Instead, you have become helplessly endeared to the title as it exists in his mouth.
Aegon says my wife with a satisfaction he never bothers to conceal. The possessiveness itself pleases you less than what follows it: the way his expression waits for you to answer, as though the claim only becomes real when you return it.
“Husband.”
His reaction is immediate and familiar.
His face softens, his smile widens, and his eyes betray the same pleased hunger they always do when you call him yours. He receives the simplest acknowledgment of your marriage as though the word contains far more praise than you placed inside it.
You know how readily praise reaches him. You know what becomes of him when you make it clear that he has pleased you or belongs to you. The title is only one of the gentler forms that language takes between you.
For a moment, he looks entirely himself.
Then the brightness returns too quickly.
He gives Helaena a brief acknowledgment that his sister waves away before coming directly to you, entering your space with no permission sought and no expectation that it might be denied.
His hand cups your cheek.
The touch is warm and familiar. His thumb passes once beneath your eye while he looks down at you with a brightness that would be convincing if his other hand were not opening and closing at his side.
“You were gone early,” You say.
“I was-…” He glances away, then back. “Preoccupied with other matters.”
The answer is deliberately useless. Before you can ask anything further, he continues.
“I have arranged for us to go into town tonight.”
You look up at him.
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
He says it with his usual certainty, as though the arrangements themselves have settled the matter.
“And when were you going to ask me?”
“I expected you would come.”
There is your husband: presumptuous enough to arrange an evening without consulting you and genuinely surprised by the suggestion that your agreement ought to have preceded it.
Ordinarily, you might make him work harder for it simply because he has assumed too much. Today, the restless movement of his fingers makes you hesitate.
“Where are we going?”
“You will see.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one I intend to give you.”
His mouth curves, but the expression does not settle naturally across his face. He watches you too closely, waiting for something he is pretending not to require.
You let the silence stretch.
“If you would rather not,” Aegon starts, “we need not go.”
The words come too quickly.
You had not refused, you had barely questioned him; and that small retreat is stranger than the presumption that came before it.
You place your hand over the one still resting against your cheek.
“I would like to go.”
His fingers still beneath yours.
“Good.”
Relief passes across his face before the smile returns, brighter than it needs to be.
He bends and presses a kiss to your forehead, lingering there for the length of one released breath before straightening again.
“We will leave after supper,” He tells you, already taking a step back. “Wear something warm.”
The confidence has returned, but now you know how easily it slipped.
___
The city suits him.
You notice it before you have travelled far from the Keep. The farther its walls recede behind you, the less Aegon appears to account for every pair of eyes upon him. People still watch, of course. They recognize the silver hair, move out of his path, bow when they remember they ought to and stare when they believe he will not notice. It does not seem to trouble him here as it does at court.
At court, observation is always an evaluation. Someone is measuring whether he has spoken too loudly, laughed at the wrong moment, understood too little or shown too plainly that he does not care to understand more. In the city, people look because he is a prince, because they know his face, or because they have a story about him they intend to repeat later. Their expectations are simpler.
He speaks more easily. He points out people and places you do not know, offers unsolicited histories of taverns whose names have changed three times since he first began visiting them, and occasionally calls out a greeting to someone who answers with a familiarity that would cause scandal inside the Keep. His hand remains around yours through most of it. When the streets narrow, he draws you closer without interrupting whatever he is saying; when they widen again, he does not release you.
You enjoy him like this.
For a time, the pleasure of the evening nearly obscures everything else.
Then he looks at you again.
He has been doing it since you left the Keep. At first, you mistook it for ordinary attention. Aegon watches you often enough, especially when he is waiting to see whether something has amused or offended you.
But this is different, his gaze returns whenever you have been quiet for more than a few moments. If you laugh, something in him eases; if your attention wanders, he begins speaking again before the silence has properly settled.
He never asks whether you are pleased. He only looks again whenever your expression changes.
“You keep looking at me.” You say.
Aegon glances at you once more, as though compelled to demonstrate the accusation. “I am walking beside you. It would be strange if I refused to look at you.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
He continues before you can answer, his voice light enough that someone passing would hear nothing unusual in it.
“You are enjoying yourself. I can tell that you are. You have laughed several times, and only once because I nearly stepped into something unspeakable. The air is better out here, the company is better, and no one has attempted to discuss succession with either of us for nearly an hour. It is already an improvement.”
The speech comes with his usual confidence, but it does not feel casual. He has assembled evidence and is laying it before you as though the question has already been raised.
“I am enjoying myself.” You tell him, and if there is hesitation in your words it is only there because you still do not understand what prompted this…strangeness.
His thumb moves across the back of your hand.
“Good.”
He says it too quickly.
You look at him more closely. “You seem relieved.”
“I arranged an evening for my wife. I would prefer that she did not hate it.”
“I have given you no reason to think I do.”
“No. You have not.”
He smiles at you, and the matter appears finished. A moment later he begins telling you something about the street ahead, but the brightness has become more deliberate now that you have recognized it. There is real pleasure beneath it; you do not doubt that. He likes the city, likes being away from the Keep, likes your hand in his and the fact that you have agreed to follow him without knowing where he intends to lead you.
Whatever he has planned, your pleasure in it matters to him with an urgency the evening itself does not justify.
The thought remains indistinct at first. You have already known that the outing concerns the previous night. His empty place in the bed that morning, the haste with which he returned once the day had begun, the arrangements made before he had even asked whether you wished to go; each returns now as he watches your face and waits for you to smile.
Until now, you have assumed the evening is meant to restore his pride. He allowed you to see him frightened and uncertain, and now he is determined to remind you that he can also be entertaining, attentive and easy to want.
It remains the likeliest explanation.
Yet there is a difference between wanting to appear unchanged and behaving as though every pleasant moment allows him to move on to the next part of something already arranged.
Aegon keeps you moving through the streets with the confidence of someone who knows precisely where he is going. He does not pretend the route is accidental. When you ask whether he has a destination, he tells you that he does, although he refuses to name it.
“I have arranged everything,” He promises, “You need only come with me.”
“You have already made that decision on my behalf?”
“I expected you to come.”
The admission is immediate, without embarrassment.
“And if I had not?”
Aegon looks at you. For a moment, some answer appears ready on his tongue, but he thinks better of it.
“You did.”
There is the husband you recognize: arrogant enough to arrange your evening without consultation and entirely convinced that the fact you agreed has retroactively justified the assumption.
He continues after a moment, speaking more rapidly than the conversation requires.
“If you dislike where we are going, we can leave. I am not forcing you to remain anywhere, but I think you should see it before you decide. You may have whatever you want from the evening, that is the point.”
You turn your head toward him.
“The point of what?”
“The outing.”
“That…does not explain anything.”
He gives you another smile and looks ahead before you can study him further.
The words stay with you.
You may have whatever you want.
He has said them as though they are generous, but there is something oddly fixed in the offer, as though it were not merely a possibility but a condition he settled before coming to find you.
Still, the evening itself remains pleasant. He keeps close to you, his conversation moving between gossip, complaint and observations he would never bother voicing before his family. When you answer, he listens. When you laugh, the satisfaction on his face is obvious enough to make you laugh again. To anyone watching, he is merely a prince enjoying the city with his wife.
Only you can feel the tension beneath his hand.
It grows as the route becomes familiar.
You do not frequent these streets, but you know enough of them. Before your marriage, stories concerning Prince Aegon reached you regardless of whether you wished to hear them. He had been seen entering one establishment, leaving another, drinking somewhere else until morning. The details changed depending upon the teller; the conclusion rarely did.
You had expected his reputation to become one of the practical humiliations of marriage.
You had imagined absences, badly constructed excuses and nights in which servants knew more about your husband’s whereabouts than you did. You had prepared yourself to discover how much of the man described to you survived beneath the ceremony and promises.
Instead, Aegon had settled into marriage with almost disconcerting ease.
You had not been given separate chambers, and he had never behaved as though he wanted them. He slept beside you, heavily and without restraint, occupying your share of the bed as often as his own. During the day he appeared wherever you had chosen to sit and stayed until someone called him away. If you spent too long attending to something that did not involve him, he eventually placed himself within reach and made his presence difficult to ignore.
Whatever discipline fidelity required from him at first, it no longer resembles deprivation. He does not spend his nights beside you like a man mourning his freedom. More often, he behaves as though marriage has given him permission to follow you from room to room without having to invent an excuse.
The reputation remains, but the conduct that created it has not, and that is why, when the street ahead confirms where he has been leading you, your first reaction is disbelief rather than recognition.
Warm light spills from the windows; music and laughter reach the street whenever the door opens; the people entering do so with the particular purposefulness of those who do not wish to pause outside long enough to be observed.
You stop.
Aegon takes another step before your joined hands pull him back.
He turns to you.
For a moment, you assume you have been wrong about the changes in him. Perhaps this entire evening has been designed to return him to something he misses. Perhaps he has decided that marriage need not prevent him from enjoying his former habits if he can convince you to enter them willingly.
The suspicion does not survive his face.
He is not looking toward the door.
There is no anticipation in him, no private amusement and no appetite he has failed to conceal. The liveliness that carried him through the city has disappeared. His attention is fixed entirely upon you, and his hand has gone rigid around yours.
He looks as though he has arrived at the part of the evening he has been dreading.
Not enough to turn away from it, because whatever he has decided he means to complete it seems. But the confidence with which he led you here has narrowed into something strained and expectant. He waits for your response without offering any clue as to what response he hopes for.
You look from him to the doorway and back again.
He has not brought you here because he wanted to return. He has brought you here for you.
Why he imagines you would want this, and why offering it appears to cost him so much, remains unclear.
Aegon does not immediately attempt to fill the silence, which unsettles you more than the building itself. He has spent the evening speaking whenever quiet threatened to settle between you, carrying you forward through the city on the force of his conversation and whatever purpose he had assigned to the night. Now that you have reached it, he seems to have exhausted everything he prepared to say.
The light from the windows catches in his hair. His hand remains closed around yours, but the ease has gone from his grip.
“What are we doing here?”
“I have made arrangements,” He says, again. At your look, he explains further, “There is a room upstairs, everything has been paid for, and no one will repeat tomorrow who came through the door tonight. You may go inside, look around, and decide whether any of it interests you.”
You stare at him, eyes wide.
“Any of what?”
His jaw shifts, looks away once and then back at you. “Come inside first. I am not explaining this in the street while every drunk in the Street of Silk walks past us.”
The door opens behind him, releasing music, laughter and a man fastening his clothing as he descends the steps. A woman calls something after him that makes him laugh, but Aegon does not turn to look.
He turns toward the entrance and then waits. He does not pull upon your hand or assume that because he has brought you this far you must follow him the rest of the way. Whatever else he has decided on your behalf, he means the choice to cross the threshold to be yours it seems.
You follow him.
A woman standing near the entrance recognizes him immediately. Surprise interrupts her expression for no more than a moment before professional warmth replaces it.
“My prince.”
“Is the room ready?”
“It is.”
“Good. No wine yet. My wife will look first.”
The woman’s gaze moves to you, becoming more careful without growing visibly curious. “Of course.”
There is no uncertainty in Aegon’s exchange with her. He knows whom to address, where the private rooms are kept and how the evening is supposed to proceed. He knows which attendants carry wine and which arrange the companions, how to purchase privacy without making a performance of it and how much money ensures that no one later remembers anything inconvenient.
You had known what his reputation meant. You had heard enough before your marriage to understand that he had not merely visited places like this but moved through them regularly. Still, knowledge acquired through gossip is different from watching him cross the threshold and become immediately fluent in the workings of the room.
The familiarity does not appear to comfort him. With every step farther inside, he looks less like a man returning somewhere he once enjoyed and more like one continuing toward a punishment he has already decided to accept.
The house is warmer than the street. Perfume, smoke and the heavy sweetness of wine occupy the air, while music rises from somewhere beyond the first room and disappears beneath overlapping conversation. People move constantly through the space: attendants carrying cups, patrons shifting seats, women and men drawing closer to anyone whose attention rests upon them for longer than a moment.
There is too much of everything. Too much noise for any single thought to hold its shape, too much warmth and movement for stillness to last, too many hands and mouths and bodies offering something immediate.
You understand something about Aegon then, though not enough to explain him.
No one here requires an account of why a person wants to be touched. No one asks what the wanting means, whether it will last or what must be offered after it ends. Money has answered the practical questions before desire is ever spoken aloud. If one pleasure fails, another cup, another song or another body waits nearby.
You can imagine Aegon younger, angrier and drunk enough that wanting pleasure and wanting relief from himself became indistinguishable. You can imagine him entering a room like this and allowing the noise and warmth to close over him until nothing existed beyond the next sensation.
You understand why he might have returned.
That, however, does not explain why he has brought you.
Aegon remains beside you while your attention moves through the room. He does not examine the available companions with any interest of his own. He watches where you look instead. There are men among them as well as women, and he must have considered that while arranging the evening.
“I know what you are thinking,” he says. “This is not for me.”
“You expect me not to wonder?”
“Wonder if you like, but there is no one here I came to see, and I did not bring you so that I might persuade you to let me fuck someone else.”
The answer is low and blunt. Something almost offended has entered his expression.
“You used to come here.”
“Yes.”
“And now you have brought me.”
“For you.”
He says it with enough force that a woman seated nearby glances toward you before politely returning her attention to her companion.
Aegon notices and lowers his voice,
“You know where I spend my nights. I am in your bed, or in your rooms making myself objectionable until you let me into it. I am not…concealing some second life from you. There is nothing here I want.”
He says it defensively rather than tenderly, but there is no hesitation in him. His eyes remain upon you, and the people surrounding him might as well be part of the furniture.
“This is yours,” He continues. “You may choose whoever pleases you. If you want a man, take one. If you want a woman, take one. If you want both, I have paid enough that no one here will object. There is a room ready, no one enters it without your permission, and no one touches you unless you ask. You may stay for an hour or until morning, you may only look, you may decide you hate the entire idea and leave now. I will not interfere.”
He speaks too quickly for you to interrupt without speaking over him. Each qualification seems intended to establish the completeness of the offer. If there is any limit to the freedom he has arranged, he means to find it and remove it before you can object.
“At no point have I told you that I wanted this.”
“No,” He concedes, looking away for a moment, a twitch in his expression, a barely there furrow of his nose. “No one asked what you wanted before they put you in my bed. That is rather the fucking point.”
The vulgarity draws another glance from nearby, but Aegon appears not to notice or care this time.
“You knew what I was, everyone did. I had been through half the whores in the city, and you had never been with anyone. Then they gave you to me, called the matter settled.”
He gestures at the room, impatient with the difficulty of putting the thought into words.
“So now you may.”
“May what?”
“Choose,” The word comes out more harshly than the offer requires. I had already fucked whoever I wanted. You…had me.”
His gaze moves briefly across the room before returning to yours, “You might have chosen differently.”
The words are delivered with deliberate carelessness, but the attempt does not conceal what it costs him to say them.
“Aegon…”
“Do not tell me otherwise because you think I require comforting. I am not asking you to lie.”
“You have already decided what my answer must be without asking me.” You answer in a hiss, leaning closer. It crosses your mind that you might be the only married couple in the Seven Kingdoms that chooses a brothel as the place to argue.
“I have decided only that you should have been permitted to answer.”
“And you believe this provides the answer.”
“It provides a choice.”
The simplicity with which he says it troubles you more than a longer defence might have. He had others before you; you had no one. To him, that appears to be enough.
“And if I want no one here?”
His confidence falters, although only briefly.
“Then we leave.”
“That is all?”
His brow furrows.
“What else would there be?”
“You have spent the entire evening paying careful attention to my enjoyment of it, and now you expect me to believe you do not care what I choose.”
“I did not say I would enjoy watching you choose someone else,” The admission comes sharply. Aegon looks away again, jaw set, as though irritated that the truth has been dragged into the open. “I said you may. Those are different things.”
The contradiction sits more honestly between you than anything he has said since bringing you here. he has not arranged the evening because the possibility pleases him, but despite the fact that it does not.
You look around the room again. His attention follows yours despite himself. He has not selected someone he believes you ought to prefer or narrowed the offer according to his own taste. He has made it as broad as the house allows, even though the possibility of your using it has drawn every trace of ease from him.
The evening begins to take on a shape you had not understood before. He has placed his old reputation, the marriage arranged for you and the previous night beside one another as though they belong to the same problem and might be answered by the same gesture.
“Is this because of last night?”
Aegon goes still.
“I had thought of it before.”
Your eyes narrow, “That was not my question.”
His gaze moves past you for a moment. There’s a brief flash of irritation in his eyes, less at the question than at being prevented from answering the easier version of it.
“Last night made me think it was no longer a foolish idea.”
“Why?”
“Because it did.”
“Aegon.”
There is more steel in your voice now. You have used that tone with him before, when he has resisted simply because resistance allows him to delay giving you what you asked for. He recognizes it, and his mouth tightens, for a moment looking ready to offer another insolent answer before he chooses against it.
“You asked me what I wanted,” He admits, “I told you.”
“And I held you.”
“Yes.”
“I wanted to.”
“I know.”
He says it quickly, almost irritably, and you realize he does believe you. He is not accusing you of pity or of pretending you were forced; and yet your willingness has not resolved whatever troubled him upon waking.
“Then what is the problem?”
“There is no problem.”
Slowly, you point out, “You brought me to a brothel, Aegon.”
“Yes, I am aware.”
Certainly not aware enough of the absurdity of this, so you continue,
“Because I held you.”
“Not because you held me,” His voice sharpens. He looks at you, frustrated now, as though the distinction is obvious but impossible to put into words. “Because I-I came to you like that. Because I asked. Because you…you…”
“What should I have done?”
“I do not know,” The admission is immediate and angry. He drags a hand through his hair. “This was simpler before you made me explain it.”
“I gather.”
“I had an idea. It was a good one, until you began staring at me like that.”
“Like what?”
He sighs, turning fully toward you. He opens his eyes absurdly wide and thrusts his head forward without moving the rest of his body, holding the expression with his head tilted slightly to the side.
For a moment you only stare back.
Then, despite yourself, you almost laugh.
His face relaxes at once, faintly pleased with himself, though the irritation has not entirely left him.
Taking a breath, he explains, “You wanted to. Fine. I believe you. I am not accusing you of anything,” His gaze moves briefly around the room and returns to you. “I thought of this afterward. That is all.”
It plainly is not all, it is apparently only as much as he can say without either abandoning the idea or admitting he does not understand it himself.
Aegon reaches into his coat and opens one hand between you. A gold dragon rests in his palm.
“Take it,” He says. “Choose anyone you like.”
His hand remains steady, but the tension in his wrist is visible. When your gaze moves from the coin toward the room, his eyes follow despite his effort to keep them fixed upon you.
There are enough people present that the offer cannot be dismissed as symbolic. A man near the stairs smiles when you look in his direction, a woman beside the fire meets your gaze without coyness. Beyond them are others, each available because Aegon has paid for the possibility that you may prefer them.
He does not withdraw his hand.
Whatever answer he believes may be found here, he means to allow you to give it.
You reach for the gold dragon and lift it from his palm. You turn the piece of gold over once between your fingers.
He has given you the room. Men and women wait beneath the warm light, some occupied already, others watching the passage of patrons with patient interest. A man near the stairs meets your gaze again, the woman beside the fire has not looked away.
Aegon says nothing.
He has spent the evening insisting upon your freedom to choose, and now that you appear to be considering it, he holds himself unnaturally still. His eyes follow yours despite every effort not to. He does not step closer, draw your attention elsewhere or offer any judgment upon the people before you. Whatever pain exists in the exercise, he means to endure it without interfering.
You could choose anyone here. You look at the wide expanse of possibility.
The man near the stairs is handsome, the woman beside the fire is beautiful. You can even imagine wanting either of them in some other life, under other circumstances, but the sight of them produces no sudden curiosity and no belated sense of deprivation.
Nothing in the room alters what you want.
You look back at your husband.
He stands beside you in a house that knows him too well. The woman at the entrance recognized him before he spoke. Others may know him more intimately than that. The thought catches, and prods at a prideful, territorial part of you. Some here may have touched him, heard him laugh, watched him abandon himself to whatever immediate pleasure allowed him to forget the rest of his life for a few hours.
You knew those people existed before tonight, but seeing the ease with which the house receives him makes the knowledge sharper.
Aegon had walked through half the city before he was given to you. He has arrived here now convinced that this history left you with something missing, and has responded by placing more strangers between you and waiting to see whether one of them might become preferable.
Irritation returns, quieter and more possessive than before.
He has brought you here convinced that you might discover another person preferable if only the opportunity were placed before you. He has asked you to choose.
The answer is obvious.
You could return the coin and ask to leave, but he might call that propriety, loyalty or concern for him. He has already instructed you not to comfort him. Refusal would leave him free to decide that you had spared him rather than chosen him.
So you turn your hand and open your palm.
The gold dragon rests upon it.
Aegon looks down. For a moment, he does not move.
Then his expression tightens with an understanding that is entirely wrong.
“You need not give it back.”
“I am not.”
His gaze lifts to yours. “Then what are you doing?”
“I have chosen.”
Something changes in his face before he understands. Hope appears too quickly to be concealed, only to falter beneath his confusion.
He looks past you toward the room, searching for the person you mean.
“Who?”
“You.”
Aegon goes still.
Pleasure reaches him first. The strain around his mouth eases, and he takes half a step toward you before the movement stops as abruptly as it began.
“You already have me.”
He says it with genuine bewilderment. He has brought you here to obtain something your marriage did not already contain and cannot understand why you would spend his gold upon what has been yours from the beginning.
“You told me to choose anyone I wanted.”
“Yes, b-…”
“I have.”
You take his hand before he can turn the objection into another argument.
His fingers are warm and slightly unsteady when you place the coin against his palm. You fold them over it one at a time, slowly enough that he cannot mistake the gesture for returning something you do not want.
His eyes remain fixed upon your face.
The room continues around you. Music and conversation overlap; attendants move between tables; someone laughs nearby. The woman who greeted you watches the gold disappear into Aegon’s fist and then looks away, her expression professionally blank.
You find that you do not mind being observed.
Whatever anyone in this house once knew of him, he is standing before you now, and he is the one you have chosen.
“Keep it.” You order.
His fist closes more tightly around the coin, and a smile curves at your lips at the sight.
For another moment, he only stares at you. He seems to expect the meaning to shift if he waits long enough, as though you may yet laugh, admit that you are sparing him or point past his shoulder toward someone else.
You do none of those things.
Aegon moves into your space so suddenly that it nearly startles you. His free hand finds your waist and draws you against him, closing the careful distance he has maintained since you entered the house. He does not quite kiss you. His face comes close enough that you feel his breath against your cheek, and then he stops to look at you again.
“You are certain.”
He tries to give the words the shape of one of his usual presumptions, but there is too much pleasure beneath them.
You touch his jaw.
“I chose.”
The remaining strain falls away so quickly that he appears almost startled by his own relief.
His smile is brighter than the one he wore through the city and far less controlled. There is something disbelieving in it, an animation that makes him look younger and faintly ridiculous. He arranged an entire brothel to offer you anyone you might want and is now barely able to contain his delight that you selected the man who brought you.
He presses closer. His hand shifts around your waist, firm and familiar, and he gives you one brief kiss at the corner of your mouth, as though unable to resist touching you but unwilling to begin anything here that cannot be finished.
Then he is moving again.
The forced momentum that carried him toward the brothel has disappeared. He asks for the room with an eagerness he makes no effort to conceal and guides you toward the stairs before the woman has finished answering him.
You let him lead. He knows the house, and the hand at your waist no longer feels like part of an arrangement he must complete. He keeps you close as you climb, glancing at you often enough that you begin to suspect he still expects you to change your mind.
The gold dragon remains enclosed in his other hand.
At the upper landing, an attendant opens the door and steps aside. Aegon follows you inside, dismisses her with a nod and closes the door himself.
The noise of the house dulls at once. Music becomes a low pulse beneath the floor, and the voices below soften until their words can no longer be distinguished.
The room is warm. Wine waits upon a table, and the curtains around the bed have been tied back. Aegon remains beside the door after closing it, one hand still resting upon the latch.
The energy that brought him up the stairs has not left him. Without the next action immediately before him, however, it begins to turn restless again.
His gaze lowers to his closed fist.
He opens it. The coin lies in his palm.
For a moment, he studies it. Downstairs, it had represented whoever else you might choose. Now it belongs to him, and he appears uncertain what should follow from that.
He turns the gold dragon between his fingers.
“You already had me,” He says again, quieter now. “But you insisted upon paying anyway.”
His eyes lift to yours.
The corner of his mouth begins to curve.
“So,” He holds the coin between two fingers. “What is it you have bought?”
You recognize the invitation in his voice. The seriousness of the moment has not vanished, but he has found a game to place around it, and you have no desire to refuse him.
You look at him where he stands beside the door, still holding the coin between his fingers.
“Come closer.” You order.
Aegon pushes away from the door.
He does not hurry, although the restless energy that brought him upstairs remains visible in the movement. The gold dragon disappears into his closed hand as he crosses the room, his attention fixed upon you with an intensity that makes the few steps between you feel longer than they are.
He stops within reach.
The corner of his mouth remains faintly curved, as though he is still privately amused by the fact that you have purchased what was already yours. The strain that followed him into the brothel has not entirely left him, but it has loosened enough for something familiar to show beneath it.
“My Lady.” He answers, a bow of his head in greeting or deference. He has never called you that. The unfamiliar title is enough for you to understand the game and play along.
You look at him as though you have not spent months learning every line of his face. His hair has fallen untidily across his forehead from the walk through the city, and his cheeks remain faintly flushed from the cold outside. There is nothing of the careful elegance a house such as this might teach a companion to offer. He stands before you in princely clothes, visibly pleased with himself and waiting to discover what use you intend to make of him.
“Do you belong to this...establishment?”
Aegon glances around the room for a moment, before shrugging his shoulders with a downward curve of his mouth.
“Once, perhaps. I came often enough that no one needed to ask my name. That was close enough.”
“And not anymore?”
“I am married.”
The answer is immediate and faintly self-satisfied. Of all the men from whom you might have expected to hear marriage offered as an explanation for abandoning a brothel, Aegon had once been the least likely.
“That does not usually stop men.”
“No,” He agrees with ease, “I did not expect it to stop me either.”
He looks at you while he says it, then away, considering the matter as if it had happened without his participation.
“I thought I would come back. I certainly meant to, once or twice. Then I would leave her rooms and find myself halfway back before I had reached the stairs. Or I would remember that she would know, and abandon the notion entirely.”
“She might not.”
“She would.”
The certainty pleases you. Aegon steps closer, though he does not appear to notice that he has done so.
“She would not need to accuse me,” He continues, “That would have been easier. She would look at me, and I would know that she knew, and then I would have to wait and discover what it had cost me.”
There is no pride in the admission, there is no mention of vows, duty or a husband’s honour. He speaks only of appetite and consequence, of finding that the risk of losing your attention outweighed whatever pleasure had once brought him here.
“And now?”
“Now there is nothing downstairs I want,” The answer seems to leave him without preparation. He looks briefly annoyed by its ease and tries to bury it beneath something lighter. “Unless the wine has improved. It was dreadful before.”
You do not indulge the diversion.
“Does your wife know?”
“Know what?”
“That you would rather be with her.”
Aegon shifts closer without appearing to notice he has done so.
“She knows that I sleep in her bed. She knows that I interrupt her while she reads and appear in whichever room she has gone to when she wishes to be left alone. She complains that I take up too much space and steal the covers.”
“She sounds like a difficult woman.”
“She is.”
The warmth in his expression contradicts him.
He continues speaking, his voice easier now that the fiction has given him enough distance from the subject.
“I have explained that if she did not want me underfoot, she should not have married me. She claims that I was underfoot before the wedding as well, which is irrelevant. At least now I have a right to be there.”
You nearly tell him that such right has never existed, but decide against it. The argument would only please him, and there is something unexpectedly endearing in hearing him describe the ordinary intrusions of your marriage as though they prove his case.
You tilt your head to the side, studying him for another heartbeat before you quietly prod,
“You must love her very much.”
Something in Aegon’s expression falters before becoming still. He looks down at the coin enclosed in his hand, and when he speaks again, the playfulness has thinned from his voice.
He turns the gold dragon once against his palm.
“I would do anything for her.”
The answer comes quietly, without the insolence he might have used to make it less earnest.
Something hungry and entirely unbecoming of a woman of your station coils at your chest, settles somewhere under your ribs, and your voice is rough when you ask,
“Anything?”
“Anything she asks. It need not be wise,” His mouth moves faintly, a barely-there smile, “It often is not.”
A smile of your own curves at your lips, and you muse,
“She is a very fortunate woman.”
Aegon laughs.
It is a small, bitter sound, emptied of amusement almost before it leaves him. He turns toward the bed as though you have made a joke and he is sparing you the embarrassment of acknowledging it.
“You need not mock me.”
The response irritates you more than the laugh.
You close the remaining distance and place your hand against his jaw.
His skin is warm beneath your palm. The muscles there tighten immediately, and when you guide his face back toward yours, he resists for a moment, not enough to pull away, only enough to show that he would prefer not to watch you continue what he has mistaken for cruelty.
“Look at me,” Aegon obeys. “I am not mocking you.”
His throat moves beneath your thumb.
“She is very fortunate,” You tell him. “And she loves you.”
He remains tense against your hand, eyes fixed upon yours. The music below reaches the room as a muted pulse, joined briefly by footsteps in the corridor before they pass.
Then his breath leaves him and warms the inside of your wrist.
His jaw loosens. His lashes lower, and his face settles more fully into your palm before he seems to realize he has allowed it. He does not retreat. He only watches you from beneath his lashes, waiting.
One hand rises toward your waist and stops just short of touching you.
“May I kiss you, my Lady?”
The formality remains, but the playfulness has gone from his voice.
“You may.”
He bends before the permission has fully settled.
His mouth touches yours carefully and pauses. When you do not turn away, he kisses you again with more certainty, his waiting hand closing around your waist.
The grip is firmer than he appears to intend. His fingers gather the fabric of your dress before spreading against your side, drawing you nearer until his body meets yours.
There is nothing measured in the kiss after that. Relief has made him impatient. You feel it in the uneven breath against your mouth and in the way he follows each small movement of your head, unwilling to surrender even the little distance required to breathe.
You let him have the kiss until the answering want in you begins to pull you after him, until it would be easier to let his urgency determine what follows than to remember that you brought him upstairs to be used at your pleasure.
Then you press your palm against his chest.
His mouth follows yours for a fraction of a moment before he understands. His body stills beneath your hand, though you can feel his breathing continue rapidly through the layers between you.
He draws back only far enough to look at you. His lips remain parted, his forehead almost touching yours. When he begins to lean closer again, you keep him where he is.
“I paid for your time,” You remind him, a smile curving at your lips. “I intend to use it.”
His attention sharpens, a breath stutters halfway into his chest. The hand at your waist shifts, and the corner of his mouth begins to rise.
You lift your arms slightly.
Aegon looks at your cloak and understands.
He releases you with visible reluctance and places the gold dragon upon the table beside the wine. The coin strikes the wood with a quiet, distinct sound.
Then he steps behind you.
Before his hands reach the clasp, you feel the warmth of him at your back. His breath moves over the skin near your ear as he lowers his head to see what he is doing.
His fingers settle beneath your throat.
He knows the fastening, though it requires enough care that one knuckle brushes repeatedly beneath your jaw before it comes loose. The cloak slackens around your shoulders, and Aegon draws it away slowly, its weight dragging along your upper arms before he catches it and places it aside.
“The gloves.”
He returns to stand before you and takes your left hand between both of his.
His thumb slips beneath the fabric at your wrist before he begins to draw it down. The glove catches lightly against your knuckles, and he frees each finger with a patience that makes the modest undressing feel more intimate than it ought to.
He removes the second in the same way.
When both hands are bare, he keeps them in his. His thumb follows the faint mark the fabric has left around one wrist, then crosses the center of your palm.
Aegon lowers his head.
You feel his breath before his mouth touches you. The kiss lingers against the center of your palm, warmer and less ceremonial than the gesture pretends to be.
The touch travels farther than it should. Your fingers curl once, an involuntary movement that draws his eyes upward before he lifts his mouth from your skin.
“My lady,” he murmurs against your palm.
The words and his breath move together across it. You take your hand back before he can tempt you further and turn away from him, issuing another order,
“The dress.”
For a moment, he stands close without touching you. Then his fingers find the uppermost fastening.
The first opens easily. The next resists him.
A ring catches softly against the clasp. He mutters something beneath his breath and tries again, more carefully. His fingertips press through the fabric against your back and occasionally slip beneath its edge, grazing the warmer skin below.
His breath warms the nape of your neck.
Aegon is usually impatient with dresses. He has torn ribbons, bent hooks and complained at length about the number of obstacles placed between him and your body. Tonight, he works in silence.
The quiet draws your attention to every smaller sound: metal against metal, cloth shifting beneath his fingers, the muted music below and the breath he releases when the final fastening yields.
The repeated brush of his fingertips beneath the edge of the dress turns each stubborn fastening into its own delay. By the time the final clasp yields, your breathing has shortened enough that you are grateful he stands behind you and cannot see your face.
The dress loosens across your back.
He slides his palms beneath the fabric at your shoulders and eases it down. The material drags slowly over your skin, baring first one shoulder and then the other.
Cool air reaches you.
His mouth follows before the chill can settle.
The first kiss sends a shiver across the skin he has bared. At the second, your head inclines before you decide to allow it, exposing more of your neck. Aegon’s hand tightens at your waist, and the breath he draws against your shoulder tells you he noticed.
He no longer seems restless. All that movement has narrowed into the patient work of his hands and mouth, each touch followed by a pause in which he waits to feel what you permit next.
You turn beneath his palms.
Aegon steps back only far enough to let you face him. His gaze drops immediately to the loosened dress, lingering before he pulls it back to your face.
The look pleases you.
You touch his cheek.
Aegon leans into your palm before he can decide whether to allow it. The weight of his face settles there, his eyes closing for a moment as his shoulders ease beneath his coat.
His mouth is still reddened from the kiss, and seeing him rest against your hand like this, softened, waiting and already so willing to be directed, sends another slow pull of desire through you.
His eyes open.
He lifts his head slightly, but not enough to break the contact. The look he gives you is uncertain, as though he is waiting to discover whether you noticed what he has done.
You do not withdraw.
You pass your thumb once over his cheekbone.
“What else does my lady desire?” He asks. His voice is softer now, the question made less playful by the fact that he remains nearly resting in your hand.
You let your palm slide from his cheek to the center of his chest. His breath pauses beneath it.
You apply the slightest pressure.
“Kneel.”
Aegon’s eyes lift to yours.
His pupils widen, and his mouth parts upon a breath. Then the corner of his mouth moves.
He lowers himself without looking away.
Your hand remains against his chest as he begins to descend, feeling the shift of his body beneath it. It passes to his shoulder as he sinks and leaves him only when he moves beyond your reach.
Aegon settles onto his knees before you, his face upturned and the remnants of your touch still visible in the softness of his expression.
For a moment, neither of you moves.
The position is familiar, but the setting is not. Music continues beneath the floor, joined by laughter too muffled to distinguish from any other sound, and the gold dragon remains upon the table where he placed it. Downstairs, strangers drink and touch and choose one another according to simpler arrangements.
Here, Aegon waits.
His hands rest upon his thighs. His gaze passes once over the loosened fabric at your shoulders before returning to your face, and the want in it is so direct that your body responds before he has touched you again.
You pass your fingers through his hair.
His eyes lower. He leans into the contact, following your hand for the brief distance it moves, but does nothing more than you have permitted. The stillness is not ease. You can see the anticipation held through his shoulders and in the way his fingers press into his own thighs.
You step back until the carved post at the corner of the bed meets your shoulder. Its wood is solid beneath your hand when you reach behind yourself to steady your weight.
Aegon follows on his knees, closing the small distance without being told. He stops before you and places one hand at the hem of your loosened dress.
His eyes lift.
You nod.
His fingers gather the fabric slowly, drawing it upward past your ankles and calves. Cool air moves over the skin he exposes. His mouth follows the path of his hands, first at the inside of one knee and then higher, every kiss separated from the next by the warmth of his breath.
He knows there is no need to hurry.
You can feel how much he wants to.
His grip tightens whenever your fingers move in his hair. His breathing grows heavier as the dress rises farther. When you adjust your footing and the movement brings you nearer to his mouth, a small sound catches low in his throat.
Desire pulls sharply through you at the evidence of his.
Aegon lifts one of your legs and guides it over his shoulder. One hand settles firmly behind your knee, bearing your weight, while the other keeps the gathered dress away from his face. You brace yourself against the bedpost and look down at him.
He looks back.
The sight of him there, the silver hair already disordered beneath your hand, his mouth warm against the inside of your thigh, his body held beneath yours because you placed it there; sends heat through you with enough force that your fingers tighten around the carved wood.
Aegon notices.
His mouth curves against your skin.
You pull his hair.
The smile disappears, but the brief flash of pleasure in his eyes does not.
He kisses higher.
The first deliberate touch of his mouth draws a breath from you before you can contain it. His hand tightens behind your knee, holding you steady when your body reacts.
He knows you too well to require a sequence of instructions. He knows the difference between the breath that asks him to continue and the one that warns he has moved too quickly. He knows when the tightening of your hand means more pressure, when it means patience, and when the smallest change in angle will make your leg tremble against his shoulder.
The knowledge appears in each adjustment.
His head turns when your hips shift. His tongue slows beneath the tightening of your fingers and returns with greater certainty when you do not draw him away. His free hand moves around your thigh and pulls you nearer, not enough to disturb your balance, only enough to remove the distance your body keeps instinctively creating.
The room contracts around his mouth.
The music below loses its rhythm. The bedpost beneath your palm, the weight of your leg across his shoulder and the heat of his hand behind your knee become the only fixed things left.
Aegon looks up whenever the angle permits it.
The glances are brief, but each one finds your face. When he sees pleasure there, his own becomes visible. His eyes darken. His fingers dig more firmly into your thigh. Once, when your head falls back and his name leaves you without intention, the sound he makes against you sends a vibration through your body.
Your other hand joins the first in his hair.
His response is immediate. His hips shift where he kneels, too abrupt and unguarded to be part of the game, and the evidence of his arousal strains against his clothes. He draws a rough breath through his nose but makes no attempt to touch himself.
His hands remain upon you.
There is no restraint left in his eagerness, but there is still care. Even as his own pleasure becomes impossible to hide, he does not lose the particular rhythm your body has taught him.
Another person might possess skill, patience or beauty. Another person might have learned the responses of countless bodies in this house.
Aegon knows yours.
He recognizes what you need from a change in breath too slight to become language and pursues it with a satisfaction that belongs as much to him as the pleasure belongs to you.
The tension gathers until remaining still becomes impossible.
Your heel presses into his back. Your grip tightens hard enough in his hair to pull a broken sound from him, but his mouth does not leave you. The pressure remains constant while the rest of your body strains toward release.
Aegon’s eyes lift again.
He sees it approaching.
His hand spreads across your thigh, securing you against him as pleasure breaks through you. Your head falls back against the post. For several breaths there is nothing beyond the force of it, his mouth and the hard support of his shoulder beneath your leg.
He continues until your fingers loosen in his hair.
Even then, he does not move away immediately.
His mouth softens against you. He presses one final kiss to the trembling skin of your inner thigh and lingers there, breathing heavily, before lowering your leg from his shoulder.
His hand follows its descent. He steadies your knee, your calf, then your ankle, keeping hold of you until both feet are planted beneath you again.
You remain against the bedpost while your breathing settles.
Aegon stays on his knees.
His face is flushed. His lips are wet and reddened, his hair thoroughly ruined beneath your hands. His chest rises rapidly beneath his clothes, and his arousal remains unmistakable.
He looks pleased by all of it.
Not only by what he has done to you, but by what doing it has done to him. Satisfaction sits openly in his face, softened by the expectation with which he waits beneath you.
“Was I good?”
The question is quiet, familiar and almost indulgent. He already knows that he pleased you. He wants the knowledge given back to him in words.
You pass your thumb across his lower lip.
“You were. You’ve pleased me.”
Pleasure flashes across his face, sharp and undisguised. His hand closes more firmly around your ankle, and the corner of his mouth rises beneath your thumb.
“You knew that already.” You say softly, barely a tease.
“I had reason to hope.”
The smile that curves at his lips is sly, proud. The answer might sound insufferably smug if the delight beneath it were not so obvious.
“You wanted to hear it.”
“I prefer certainty.”
His lips move against your thumb as he speaks.
You allow the contact for another moment before withdrawing your hand.
“Stand.”
Aegon rises.
The time spent kneeling has left a temporary stiffness in his legs, but he hides it quickly beneath the eagerness with which he returns to your space. His hands begin to settle at your waist.
You stop him with one finger against his chest.
“Undress.”
His breathing catches.
There is no hesitation. He reaches for the fastening of his coat, already beginning to pull it open.
“Slowly.” You add after a heartbeat.
His hands pause. Aegon looks at you.
You have moved to sit at the edge of the bed, the dress still loose around your shoulders and your breathing not yet completely restored. From there, you can see him fully.
You offer a smile and a tilt of your head, your brows lifting slightly as you look expectantly at him.
Because good behavior might as well be rewarded with an explanation, you add, “I want to watch.”
The effect begins before he moves again.
His posture changes. His shoulders ease backward, exposing more of his chest beneath the loosened collar, and the breath he draws makes the fabric shift against him. His gaze passes over you, your bare shoulders, the disordered dress, your knees parted just enough to leave room for him if you called him nearer, before returning to his own hands.
He opens the coat, but this time he does not hurry.
He draws it from one shoulder and then the other, allowing the fabric to slide gradually along his arms before catching it in one hand. Beneath it, his shirt has come loose at the throat. The skin visible there is flushed, and the rise of his chest remains too rapid for composure.
He places the coat beside your cloak. His eyes return to you immediately.
You let your gaze travel over him without hiding it.
Aegon sees.
The knowledge moves visibly through his body. His chin lifts. His shoulders draw back a little farther. Not with princely dignity, but with the pleasure of realizing that your silence contains appetite rather than judgment.
His fingers move to the belt at his waist.
He draws the leather through the buckle slowly, eyes fixed upon yours. When your gaze lowers to follow his hands, his mouth curves.
The movement of the belt becomes more deliberate after that.
He is not presenting some polished routine learned in rooms like this, there is too much genuine excitement in him for polish. But he begins allowing each action to last: the pull of leather through metal, the brief pause before setting it aside, the way he lets his shirt fall open farther before reaching for the next fastening. Your attention has made him conscious of his own body.
When he reaches for the hem of his shirt, you stop him with a small movement of your hand.
“Come here.”
Aegon obeys immediately.
He steps between your knees, the open shirt shifting around him. You place both hands at his waist and slide them beneath the fabric.
His stomach tightens beneath your palms.
The heat of his skin contrasts with the cooler air of the room. You move upward slowly, feeling his body react ahead of your hands: the tightening of muscle, the widening of his breath, the harder beat beneath his ribs.
Your fingers pass over his chest.
Aegon’s mouth parts.
He watches your face rather than your hands. Every response you allow him to see affects him; the lowering of your gaze, the way your thumbs move across his skin, the breath you take when the shirt opens farther and reveals him.
You press your palms across his chest and up to his shoulders. He trembles once beneath the touch.
You push the shirt from him, and the fabric slips down his arms and gathers briefly around his elbows. He frees himself without stepping away, letting it fall behind him without looking to see where it lands.
For a moment, you only examine him.
His skin is flushed from throat to chest. His breathing moves visibly through his body. Desire has made him both restless and extraordinarily attentive, as though he might move into your hands at the slightest invitation but will remain precisely where you have placed him until it comes.
You trace one finger from the center of his chest toward his stomach.
His hand begins to rise, but you look up sharply and it stops in the air between you. A small, pleased smile moves across his mouth.
“May I?”
You shake your head. “Not yet.”
His hand lowers.
The obedience sends another pulse of want through you.
You let him step back and continue.
The remainder of his clothes comes away without haste. You do not need to direct each movement. He understands that the act of watching is itself what you asked for.
He turns when a gesture tells him to. He pauses when your attention catches. Occasionally his eyes leave yours long enough to follow your gaze across his body, and each time he discovers where you are looking, his arousal becomes more pronounced.
By the time he stands naked before you, the display no longer resembles service performed at a distance.
You have shaped it together.
He does not conceal himself or pretend indifference beneath your scrutiny. He stands where you placed him, skin warm and flushed, breath open, his body responding visibly to being watched.
Only his eyes remain restless.
They return to your face after every silence, every shift in your posture, every moment in which your gaze lingers without explanation.
You let him look.
He finds what he wants in your expression. You make no attempt to conceal the desire with which you examine him, and each time he recognizes it, something in his body tightens with renewed pleasure.
Still, his gaze returns.
One confirmation does not prevent him from seeking the next.
Your attention falls to the loosened ribbon hanging from your side, a long-since-loosened fastening of your dress.
You draw it free.
Aegon notices the movement. His eyes lower to the silk between your hands and then rise again. Recognition appears, followed immediately by a slow, anticipatory smile.
“Close your eyes.” You order. He obeys.
His lids lower without hesitation. His chin lifts slightly, offering himself to the familiar act. He knows what the ribbon means. The memory of other times you have taken his sight changes his breathing before the silk touches him.
You stand.
Aegon remains still as you approach, though his arousal shifts visibly when you enter his reach.
The ribbon passes over his eyes.
You draw it around his head, moving his hair away from the knot. He turns slightly into your hands, helping you secure it without needing to be asked.
When you finish, your fingers remain briefly at the back of his neck.
Aegon releases a slow breath.
Without his gaze moving over you, his attention appears everywhere else at once. His head tilts toward the whisper of your dress. The muscles along his stomach tighten when you step away. His fingers flex and then relax at his sides.
The blindfold hides his eyes, but nothing else.
His mouth remains parted. His breathing deepens as you move around him. A faint smile still touches his lips, not insolent now, but expectant.
You pass behind him.
His head turns slightly in the wrong direction, following the sound rather than your position, and a quiet laugh leaves him when he realizes he has lost you.
The pleasure in it warms you.
You circle him without touching, allowing the anticipation to build.
Aegon grows very still. Not rigid, but receptive, expectant.
His shoulders remain loose, his hands open at his sides, his body exposed without any attempt to anticipate where your touch will land. He listens for you in the movement of fabric and the quiet pressure of your steps against the floor.
You stop before him, and his face turns toward you with surprising accuracy.
The silk covers his eyes, but eagerness remains visible in the lift of his chin, the tension low in his body and the breath he holds when he senses you near.
You raise your hand.
Thank you for reading!
Because I find it really fun to torture Aegon apparently, I'm writing a continuation to this one shot, from his perspective, where his head works against him and leads him to safewording/whatever is the Weserosi version of safewording. It's still smutty but a lot more angsty, and it provides a better insight into his thoughts during this piece also. I'll post it soon!
Hello, hope you get better soon 💚 with your series about Daeron, I would love to know his thought process and how he reacted when he was first informed about his betrothal, as well as their first steps into intimacy 💚💚 love the series and looking forward to reading more
Thank you so much anon!!
Those are lovely ideas, I'll try to tackle those in my upcoming Daeron works!
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
amandla
