(hotd) wife, mistress, queen, chapter two

[mirrorwitches]

WIFE, MISTRESS, QUEEN CHAPTER TWO

🐉masterpost🐉

As always, Alicent shivers when she crosses from the sunlight of the courtyard into the shadow of the royal sept, enveloped by an ineradicable chill that seeps from its stones, but today it is a pleasant one after the heat of the city in the full flower of late spring.

The heat and noise of the city, and now the silence bleeds out too from the stones to wrap her in its arms. The immense silence and echoing stillness, that too promises a comforting always, an expected, welcome inevitable acting upon her body: she goes still, that hush acting upon some responding center of stillness somewhere deep at the core of her. She pictures it as a smooth cool stone, an applecore, a shiny dark pit under the white split flesh, buried in the red ceaseless throb of her vitals.

The heat is typical, but the din of the city, incredibly, has increased, as the trickle of wedding guests has begun its swell to a flood, the tramp of horses and carts stirring up the scorching dust into caking clouds, the bells of harnesses and the shouts of men-at-arms a constant cacophony in street and keep. This is, Alicent calculates, about the last chance they will have to be alone prior to the bedding, and Rhaenar must also seek some quiet and sense the sept can provide, because this once she hadn’t had to coax him at all to get him to join her.

In actuality the fever-dream, festival heady preparations for the wedding of the kingdom’s newly official heir—following only five moons after the solemn pomp of Rhaenar’s investiture as Prince of Dragonstone, half a year after the doomed grand tourney to welcome another prince, this fresh show of the seemingly endless depths of Jaehaerys’ coffers—did not really pause time or the things that filled it, plots and plans, betrothals and negotiations and treaties, no more than the illusion of a still pool of timeless peace that the sept offers and Rhaenar resolutely breaks as he paces restlessly forward among the altars, a continuation of his determination to worry away at the celebratory, frenzied air of merriment in his honor on the journey over, as he fretted about the threat of Laena Velaryon and his father’s perceived snubs: “It’s only been half a year since my mother died, and already tried to marry my father off to get another heir. I know those men and how they plot in their secret councils when I’ve been sent away.”

“These are the ways of lords and kings.” Of course the ways of lords and kings are Rhaenar’s own, and thus Alicent’s, she reminds herself. She is to be his helpmeet, his queen, and it warms her that he comes to her with these worries. “As they will be yours, as long as Syrax is not shot down from the sky by a javelin from some pirate’s lair. You are His Grace’s heir. His only heir. He doesn’t want to risk you. So what if your father were to remarry? Perhaps if the succession was secure, he would be more willing to let you take an active role as prince.”

Obviously, that is what their marriage is supposed to secure. They will not be alone together until the bedding. This is the last time they will be alone together not as husband and wife, but simply as…she does not want to bring that up, this last time, does not wish to bring it in to this last time. Rhaenar apparently doesn’t either, and only stares at her in frustration, speechless, before turning to glare into the flames flickering at the stone-silk slippered feet of the Mother where Alicent has brought them to a stop.

“Your father loves you. He chose you for his heir, once and for all. He invested you as Prince of Dragonstone.”

“He didn’t choose me. He spurns Daemon.”

This had never made sense to Alicent, although the more she read the Valyrian histories, the more she understood Rhaenar’s unease at his place. She had always understood her father’s edginess about Prince Daemon—every child in the Seven Kingdoms knew of evil uncles that took the rightful inheritance of their brother’s sons, Maegor dripping in the gore of his slain kin as he slipped into his niece’s bed the emblem of that horror. For them, it was a horror, because of the unquestioned rightness of a man’s eldest son succeeding to his titles and place. But the more she read the histories to Viserys, the more she understood how her father’s anxieties were perhaps more correct than he knew, less incongruous or paranoiac than might be supposed, although also less accurate in the source of the fear: it was not usurpation on Daemon’s part that was the real worry. The very lack of anxiety on the part of the king with regards to his brother was the proper source of concern for one who had hitched his fortunes to the king’s son through his own daughter. She thought she finally grasped Rhaenar’s worry, his insecurity in his place despite being the king’s eldest son, his only son. In Valyria of old, a brother was as likely to succeed a dragonlord as his son, and often more likely, as the thing that was valued was experience and prowess in dragonbattle, and that and marriage to that brother’s dragonriding daughter often left a son and nephew with nothing, neither patrimony nor sister-wife. Age came before direct descent, and even sex, and although House Targaryen had adopted the mores of their conquered homeland, these principals still lingered, and Alicent could better fathom Alysanne’s previously irrational fancy of considering daughter and granddaughter more fitting than sons and grandsons by dint of birth order.

But Daemon was no longer a threat. He had permanently cast himself out from his brother’s favor or consideration, proven himself unfit. The night of Queen Aemma’s funeral he had taken her living son to a brothel and mocked her dead baby boy, the recent calamity meaning at least no additional threats had been added to his position. He was popular; his men reportedly cleaved to him with an almost frightening devotion. Prince Rhaenar admired his profligate uncle, who was clearly a terrible influence, and who had doubtless sought to drag the prince down to his level, using the unreason of grief and impressibility of youth to tarnish his rival in the king’s eyes. So the Hand had ranted. Alicent, upset at how angry Viserys was with Rhaenar, had been able to confirm that he had indeed been drunk and distraught when he returned from the city, thereby revealing she had gone from the king’s rooms to the prince’s to see if she could provide comfort. You are a sweet girl, Lady Alicent. Wise beyond your years. I believe your steady influence will do Rhaenar great good. He had not been perturbed at Alicent’s midnight visit to her betrothed, although such a thing just a few weeks prior would have been viewed poorly by everyone, including her father, who himself seemed quite pleased when Alicent insisted that Rhaenar was surely not in his right mind and she had cause to know.

Not that Rhaenar had said anything when he found her waiting for him in his chamber. Not that her father had sent her to him for that or any other purpose. No, he had only sent her to the king and when she had read herself hoarse until His Grace was ready for sleep and dismissed her all she could think of was what she had said, All I wanted was for someone to say they were sorry for what happened to me, and Rhaenar’s wrecked face at his mother’s funeral, and how she desperately she wanted to not speak in riddles but to simply say it, how very sorry she was, but he had not been there, Ser Westerling at his door said he had gone somewhere with his uncle, and this seemed only right to her at the time, recalling the sight of Daemon and Rhaenar talking in Valyrian close together by Aemma’s pyre, and as she read and watched the king fiddle with his model she had chance to contemplate that the ways men grieved were very odd, and to try to tell herself it was best to leave Rhaenar to his uncle’s comfort, because she didn’t think she could stand it, if she said the only thing she had ever wanted to hear and got only a polite, stiff thanks in return, but when he returned and she finally could say it he had commenced crying too hard to be able to speak and explain where he had been. It had all come out the next morning.

Best to leave this particular facet of Rhaenar’s current discontent to her father. He had handled the prince’s proposal as thought best and made his own views on the matter plain, and thus clear to Alicent when conveyed through this bitter account of the meeting of the Small Council. She might say that in this case they happened to be in perfect alignment with her own. Alicent did not want her betrothed struck down or captured right before he could become her husband, any more than her father desired to be robbed of a son-in-law. This is as likely to simply redirect his worrying, as he launches in on brooding anew on the idea that her father dreads him as a son-in-law, where the corresponding protest that Otto finds the prospect of the Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Seven Kingdoms as his daughter’s spouse so appealing nothing else matters is as much exactly the problem as it is any comfort. She could play the expected woman’s part and tease him with accusations about being so eager to avoid marriage that he rushed to fly off on his dragon into seas heaving with brutes slavering for such an awesome conquest as slaying a Targaryen or a ransom beyond dream to delay it. Alicent understands this to be untrue and unfair, and fears it is all too true, certainly too true to voice without awkwardness, so true that to articulate it might shatter something between them, somehow the both at once.

She will say, later, her true opinion about Rhaenar being given the responsibility for the choice of the handsome knight they’d both discussed being so struck by at that cursed tourney—much later, a good deal after the funeral, the first moment of brightness either of them had had in months, shared giggles Alicent saw Rhaenar immediately felt guilty about beyond any of the usual reasons—as the new member of the Kingsguard, originally shared with her in high spirits before the rest of his morning descended on him as frustrated gloom, (“It seems such a shame, though, for him to be—well—he’d make a fine husband, surely, even without lands…”;“Yes it’s very tyrannical of me to deny the women of the realm such a face, really for the girls of the Seven Kingdoms I should have chosen the old poacher catcher!”), that it was no petty paying off to be granted the decision of who would guard them as future king and queen and their children for decades to come, that really it was not an insult but a further mark of Rhaenar’s heirdom, and if her father came and meddled and tried to undercut the singular authority he’d deputized in the first place that was the way of the mature with the young.

For now that can all wait. Her father has it well in hand. The Hand has it well in hand, she might jest to see Rhaenar roll his eyes and then laugh despite himself, but the truth is their jesting moods are not exactly infrequent, but certainly fitful and fickle, the queen’s death still casting a deep shadow for her son. And another for her husband, Alicent knows. Not that the king ever speaks directly of it or his late wife, any more than he does with his son.

“Kneel with me,” Alicent murmurs. When after a small hesitation Rhaenar does, she explains, “I find this is a way to be with my mother. Here in the quiet of the sept. I feel close to her. I know it sounds foolish.”

“I don’t think it’s foolish. I don’t.”

“Good. Because I thought you might try.”

“I…”

“If not for me, then perhaps for them.”

Rhaenar lights a candle and twists his hands together, almost childishly uncertain, looking to Alicent as if she contains infinite wisdom. “What do I say?”

“Whatever you wish. It’s only for you and the gods to know.”

The day of the queen’s funeral her father had asked her How is Rhaenar and Alicent couldn’t even put words to the devastation that was the answer to such an unnecessary question. He’s lost his mother was the only response, and asking her own unnecessary question, and receiving the reply that the king was very low. She doesn't know any better than Rhaenar, or the king, or her father, how to speak of this. Here in this hush they do not need to. When all goes quiet, her mother is always close. She can kneel here and her mother is somehow with her on the eve of her wedding as she should be, even if she has no more advice to offer, even if it is an intimacy without any possible communication. She shuts her eyes and lets her mother’s silence fill her.

Rhaenar gasps next to her, one sob loud on the still air before he cuts himself off. He shudders as Alicent places her hand over the cloth of his sleeve.

“I want him to see me as his heir.”

“Mine own father does not know the language of girls, and so when I wish to talk with him, I know I must make the effort.”

She had been filled with uncertainty and doubt when her father called her to his study and instructed her to don her own lady mother’s dress and provide comfort to the king. But she believes she can now perceive the shape of his thinking, the more Viserys talks to her of Rhaenar and the space between their griefs, the edges that can’t seem to meet. Their sadness permeates the very air of the Red Keep but cannot be referred to, and this was familiar, it was much the same with her own father, save for the fact his daughter resembled her mother, making it less avoidable. He would occasionally mention this resemblance and bring mother into the room for a moment, acknowledged. A daughter keeps it in mind. She would be the wife of Viserys’ son and thus his daughter and so a bridge between father and son, and this was her father’s aim, but as she watched Rhaenar go awkward and avoid her eyes when she bid him kneel with her, yet still quickly enough hasten to her side, wary and scornful but somehow grateful and seeking, she understands a daughter mourns.

-

It proves true that in the five days between that moment in the sept and their wedding night Alicent and Rhaenar do not have another chance where they can speak alone. Still, when they are finally left alone together, more alone than they have ever been—man and wife—Alicent thought there would only be the usual sort of petty social gossip, what boorish thing Jason Lannister had said while dancing or could she believe her maternal grandmother Lady Redwyne really had dared to bring her pug to the feast, for her to cling to in an effort to put off the inevitable or at least before the inevitable assure herself that Rhaenar, though her husband, was still Rhaenar: the person she knew best in all the world, the beloved boy she had grown up with. But when, after a bedding as miserable as she’d feared, where even the raucous laughter and outrageous innuendo of the drunken guests as they pluck at the Prince and new Princess of Dragonstone’s clothes becomes a little subdued under the stubborn persistence of the grim faces that confront them, neither Rhaenar nor Alicent obliging with the permissible blushes or expected good-natured nervous laughter, so the lords and ladies must troop out with exchanges of raised eyebrows and a palpable murmur of their own tale to tell of tucking two teary children into bed, they have far meatier fare to bandy about the bridal chamber and distract themselves from their nudity and daunting duty with.

Alicent sits up with the sheet clasped protectively to her breasts at the same instant Rhaenar does. She twists around, tangling the bedding hopelessly as she tries to preserve her modesty and catch his eye. He stares toward the door with his face contorted into the same pale dread it has worn ever since the king made his announcement during the toasts, glancing over at her and also squirming about on the mattress so they are facing each other with bodies covered but scooching backwards toward the edge of the bed, as if he might throw back the covers, don whatever clothes managed to make it all the way into the room with them rather than ending strewn through the candlelit halls, and charge off to confront his father, if only he could figure out how to do it without baring his body to his bride in the process.

“Dragonstone?” Alicent hisses, a pang going through her at his bleak expression, an echo of the one she felt earlier when what Viserys was saying sunk in and her gaze sought Rhaenar’s reaction, grateful she can pretend to still be cross about the events of three days ago to possibly distract him from this development and anxiety about what it means for him. “Rhaenar, what were you thinking?”

She isn’t really angry, although she had been vexed when she awoke four days ago, the morning after their conversation in the sept, to her handmaiden Talya handing her a note from Rhaenar explaining that by the time Alicent was reading this Syrax would be halfway to Dragonstone, flying Rhaenar to evict Daemon from his insulting squat in it’s Prince’s seat. After hurriedly dressing, she’d pushed back the yawning then startled seamstresses who had congregated in her antechamber for another dress fitting—a gown for the feast to greet their guests on the morrow, the wedding gown for the ceremony itself, another gown for the feast after the vows, a gown for the wedding breakfast the following morning—to go to her father’s study and break the news hopefully before gossip of the prince’s departure made its way from Dragonpit to Red Keep, as Rhaenar’s note requested she do. Although what she gathered was her role from between the lines of her betrothed’s more grandiose message (“Tell our fathers I have gone to secure our seat as a wedding gift to you”) was to deliver the announcement of this unauthorized act of diplomacy in such a way as to soften the reproach to fall on Rhaenar’s head, as he had from childhood imagined it was in her unique power to do—they never get angry at you, was the rejoinder whenever the reckoning of a shared confession of wrongdoing was at hand—she was relieved when she finally tracked down her father after he was not found in his study already in the Small Council chamber with his frantic, futilely fuming king, and that everyone having already been alerted by merchants bringing their wares into the city by the way of the Iron Gate of the sight bestowed on travelers along the Rosby Road in the purple predawn of a golden dragon flying northeast over the Blackwater, that despite the fact she did her best to soothe the ruffled tempers, she at least didn’t have to stumble over the initial announcement itself.

“I thought to do what you told me I ought to do. I talked.”

“I told you to talk to your father. Not to your treasonous uncle!”

“I did talk to my father. And I really thought...because I couldn't do that, not until—and he seemed to—anyway it didn't even work—”

Rhaenar buries his head in his hands and grinds at his eyes with his palms, a shriek of frustration muffled into his forearms.

“What didn't work?” Alicent asks, lost. She raises her hand and lets it hover over Rhaenar’s bare arm—odd to think, she couldn’t say when she last glimpsed even his bare arm—before resting it lightly on the swell of his bicep. She shivers at how hot his naked flesh is against hers. When he shudders beneath her touch and groans despairingly but does not answer or lift his head she presses softly: “What happened?”

Alicent is apprised of the general outline, of course. Those left behind in the capital had no choice but to wait. Princess Rhaenys had been sent on Meleys after Rhaenar to escort her young cousin home, but Rhaenar arrived back that evening without having crossed paths with her, and the princess was very cross when she herself returned the next day, having arrived on a fruitless errand so late she was forced to accept the hospitality of Prince Daemon and his concubine for the night. As Meleys swooped in an initial exploratory circle of Dragonstone, Rhaenys reported to Viserys, and Viserys vented at Alicent, that castle and island could be seen to bristle with the activity of imminent departure even from the air. When she landed Meleys on the bridge that was the only entrypoint not by boat and Daemon had come out to meet her he had informed his second guest of the day in the blaze of sunset that alas his cousin had come all this way for nothing. His nephew was surely safely back home with father and betrothed by this hour, and he himself would be leaving at first light, but while he remained in residence, his Gold Cloaks had not been allowed in the precinct of the royal quarters.

Daemon told the truth. More messages had followed, from Dragonstone’s castellan this time, as palpable with relief as those that had been sent black-wingward toward King’s Landing when a Targaryen showed up with his dragon and the man had little choice but to surrender the keys had been nearly incoherent with panicked excuses, informing his king that the prince and all dependents and followers had departed.

At last her husband lowers his hands and straightens. “I’m sorry,” Rhaenar says, attempting a smile as he looks at her, one too shadowed by the bleakness in his eyes above to be quite successful. He shifts so he sits with his legs crossed beneath him and Alicent mirrors him, their knees bumping and sheets still clutched to collarbones. “This isn’t what a bride wants on her wedding night.”

What does a bride want on her wedding night? Does he know? The dirty jokes the men had made as they undressed her pulse at the back of her mind. She knew what husbands wanted—if she had been in any doubt of that the lords had eagerly embraced their permission to relieve her of it with her finery, but the same divesting hands had been so overwhelming that the accompanying japes that she was certain to make a sweeter mount than any she-dragon had drowned out what the ladies spoke of hers to Rhaenar.

His glance skitters away from her. She watches him swallow as he becomes absorbed in the point where their knees touch. A red flush climbs up his chest to peek over the sheet and spread across his throat, and Alicent feels an echoing prickle creeping up hers. It is strange to see Rhaenar so shy with her, to be so shy with him. She hates it, has dreaded it, and it would be quite enough to deal with on its own without the rest of it. Not that she can really imagine what that would mean. Still, the king’s toast made it crowd in even more thickly than it might otherwise have.

“A bride hardly wants to be upstaged at her wedding feast by the announcement of another set of nuptials, either,” Alicent says tartly.

Her unexpected pique is enough to startle Rhaenar out of the depths of his gloom, and this smile is much more real. “Why, Lady Hightower! I never—”

She had immediately wished to stuff the words back into her mouth, but the way Rhaenar’s typical relish in any lapses of decorum on Alicent’s part distracts him, even though she is being sharp upon the exact source of his grievance, makes her change her mind and smile back with a little roll of her eyes. She ought not to criticize the king. But one duty of a wife is to take her husband’s part, isn't it? She was Rhaenar’s wife. Her father and the king looked to her to guide him, but she was one flesh, one body, one soul; she must act with him in advocating for his interests, their interests, not against…

“Princess,” she interjects. The prickles race up her cheeks, sparks to set her ears aflame. “It’s Princess Alicent now.”

The source of the heat suffusing her from the sternum up is pleasure, and embarrassment at that pleasure, the swoop of shame and the sting of anxiety. How wonderful it is to at last be Princess of Dragonstone to Rhaenar’s Prince. She knows what the other girls at court think, has always perceived the bitter envy and on its heels the protective scorn they felt towards her and that kept them at a mutual distance, even when they were all only maids-in-waiting to Queen Aemma, never mind now they are Alicent’s own ladies. The relief and satisfaction she’s feeling now they are alone and no longer the center of festivities where they are the prime focus of endless observers would be nothing less than the Lannister twins’ younger sister Tyra, and Ser Westerling’s niece Johanna, and the Strong sisters Roslin and Cecilia, and Rhaenar’s Arryn cousin Anya, and Alicent’s cousin Meredyth (most resentful of all, keenly convinced that her rightful place had been usurped, as she was the daughter of the Lord of Oldtown, not merely of his younger brother) would expect of her. They thought her absorption with Rhaenar smugness, arrogant superiority at having been chosen, her happiness in her husband pure avarice at her elevation. One which after all owed to her father’s place as the king’s most trusted advisor, not to personal charms, for if that was supposed to be the case, the prize of her uncontested beauty was undercut by her timidity, her noted nerves, and the preferment Prince Rhaenar’s childhood partiality for her had granted was nothing more than that, a youthful whim whose indulgence was looked at askance.

“Princess Alicent,” Rhaenar corrects. His own skin reflects hers, slapped giddy, feverish. He looks straight at her, his teasing smile tinted by a softer shading. “It suits you. Better than it does me. I mean, you’ll make a better princess than I do a prince.”

“It doesn’t. But I’m still…”

Alicent knows it as well as any of the highborn ladies bafflingly passed over in her favor. She wants to hasten to clarify what she meant. She had been happy as she said her vows in the sept, overjoyed with the equally sure knowledge that despite this, she was indissolubly Prince Rhaenar’s wife in sight of the gods, the future Queen Alicent. Though she could hardly access it at that time, had not realized that her own trembling as her groom’s fingers shook in unhooking the clasp of her flame-green maiden cloak was part ecstasy until now as they suddenly grinned at one another. It had only been delayed until she could at long last after these exhausting days spent with everybody and anybody else experience yet again the true cause. It was not the titles in themselves, and it didn’t matter if no one believed that but Rhaenar. She hoped he believed it. Alicent hoped Rhaenar knew that she had been blessed for no reason and for no inherent virtues of her own, simply because Rhaenar had chosen her, and this was why she exulted, this was why she was lucky. Rhaenar was a prince, and finally Alicent was a princess. He would be king, and she would be queen. Their destinies were as inextricable to all as before only they understood them to be.

“You’re the perfect princess, and you deserve a wedding to match. It’s me that’s the problem. As always. You’re right, as always,” Rhaenar starts in self-pityingly. “I thought if only I could be a worthy prince—”

“You are,” Alicent insists. “You are a worthy prince. I wish only to be as worthy a wife. And you can’t take it back: I am always right. It’s not your fault father has no taste. Using a toast at his son’s wedding feast to announce his own betrothal, I mean really—”

She claps a hand over her mouth, but Rhaenar is already crowing in delight, bowing forward at the waist to bury his giggles in Alicent’s shoulder. She is abashed for several reasons: letting her irritation get the better of her, and the fact it is provoked by something as frivolous as being shown up at one’s own wedding. Yes, she perceives quite well the full implications of Rhaenar’s panic at his father’s news, and these more serious considerations are a facet of her consternation. Although shares his disquiet and it weighs upon this night and what must happen in it, containing as it does the looming future, she doesn’t share his shock: the king had spoken to her of his Small Council’s urgings and Lord Corlys’ proposal and she had not witnessed whatever conversation Rhaenar had with his father that appears to have convinced him Viserys had put that and the Velaryons’ strivings aside. But she can hear the prim outrage in her own tone at this violation against simple good manners that has made Rhaenar release some of his coiled anxiety in this paroxysm of nervous amusement, in a few last panted snorts, warm breath against her neck raising gooseflesh in its wake as it makes the air of the room sharper against her naked spine.

She expects him to move away once the fit has worked itself through him, but safe with his face hidden against her throat he mutters, “It is embarrassing for him. But only a little. People usually end up smiling at him in the end. The titters were mostly for me.”

“There were no titters.”

“Not then. They kept it to smirking behind hands in the king’s presence, but I’m sure even as we speak the insult to me is causing much amusement in private.”

It is enormously vexing that His Grace can't see how standing before all his guests and declaring, “This has been a day to remember, and luckily it will not be the only wedding the house of the dragon will celebrate this spring…” undermined the heir he had so recently confirmed, if not necessarily the upcoming marriage to Lady Laena itself.

“No one will think of it that way. It is expected of a king of his age to find another wife.”

“It's only been six moons since my mother died,” Rhaenar sits up as if propelled away from her by the despairing rage in his voice.

“Widowers remarry more often than not. Men, especially men accustomed to the—comforts—of wedded life, often soon seek—”

(Although, she can't stop herself from thinking, not Viserys’ own father. Nor hers. Both men were as distinguished for the great love they bore for their wives and the depths of grief they descended to at their loss as King Viserys was, or had been set to be, before this, his queen but half a year dead…)

“Laena is twelve. He won't be seeking comfort from her.”

(Still, even if it is true that Viserys has caused his heir humiliation by his tasteless timing—)

“Yes. It won't be consummated anytime soon.” Alicent’s fingers throb. She's able to wiggle her elbow upward, fast against her body, so it pins the sheet to her breast, freeing her hand up so she can worm a nail into her mouth.

“Yes, so he's hardly in immediate need of comfort.”

She wishes he would stop saying that.

(—it was unintentional, of course, for he would surely not finally name Rhaenar Prince of Dragonstone and spend so lavishly on his investiture and then his wedding only to purposely sabotage him in such a way.)

“The Velaryons were relentless in pressing it upon him.”

“Only because they knew he was weak to their pressing.”

(But then she can’t stop herself from thinking of the day before Rhaenar’s Dragonstone adventure when she visited the king’s chambers after lunch when he said, You do not mention our talks to Rhaenar, do you? He had been aware how that would appear to others…)

“One is always weak, in grief—”

“Because he wants more sons! Because he knows Laena can soon enough give him more sons, if I—must you always apologize for them?” Rhaenar explodes. “For fuck’s sake, Alicent! Must you always conciliate, and downplay, and wheedle, and soothe, can't you ever just acknowledge how things really are? Father’s not so maddened by grief he’s incapable of thought. He finally spoke to me of mother, after all these months, only to—so if that was really the case, he wouldn't—if it was you I wouldn't get over it in half a year, I wouldn't get over it ever—”

This outpouring crescendos until it cuts off suddenly in wet eyes, a chest that heaves with Rhaenar’s rapid breath.

“Maybe you'd be relieved,” Alicent mumbles around a burst of blood from her cuticle onto her tongue. “You'd no longer have to deal with my wheedling.”

A strangled noise erupts from Rhaenar’s lips as he grasps at Alicent’s wrist and tugs her fingers from her mouth. A piece of skin is left behind, snagged on a tooth. He holds her hand up between them as they watch the blood up well from her torn nail beds. He casts about for anything to wipe her clean with but there’s nothing but the sheets they are adrift in. He hisses as the bright red line bubbles and breaks under their gazes, about to spill over to drip onto that sea of bedding, and then the bleeding digit is in his mouth.

Finger: mouth. A place of safety. The tip in her mouth until it’s soft and wrinkled with her spit, her teeth tattering it, can make the rest of her body go quiet, the activity of jaw and molars parting flesh, tongue exploring the whorls and ridges with taste of salt and then rust sending out a wave of peace, not the peace of the still pond but the peace of the ordered, equidistant rings around the deliberate disturbance of the pebble. The thrown stone does not unsettle the entire pond, only the immediate surrounding area. It’s only this, only her hands. Of course it leaves evidence that lasts, it doesn’t disappear beneath a taut, unruffled surface like the stone and the pond that closes over it, but people that aren’t her father don’t really notice with the neatness of the rest of her, and no one but Rhaenar ever notices the act of the throw.

In the dragon’s mouth. She is friendly with every fang she grazes because she has marked them so often in a smile. Her own teeth tear but the gore left behind in the wake of that gnawing churn bumps against these harmlessly, politely sheathed so her fingers popped into the hollow sucking softly behind. If the jaws snapped shut and they were truly as sharp as a dragon’s fangs they would sheer Alicent’s fingers off at the second knuckle. The horror at the very ends of her, she keeps it as close to nothing as possible, would be gone. Swallowed back along with the blood that would spurt but now only seeps from the rents in her with the constriction of Rhaenar’s contracting cheek, carefully tidied off the trailing folds streaming from her with the same motions of a different tongue.

Rhaenar pulls Alicent from his mouth. A little blood, diluted pink with saliva, clings to the shreds. His hand encircles her flexing fingers and squeezes tight so she feels the blood still singing to escape throb against limits, staunched. “Don’t say that,” Rhaenar whispers.

Alicent presents a glossy surface. Her father does not often speak plain but she hears him clearly enough. You are the most comely girl at court. The most comely girl at court was to comfort the king. She listened to Viserys talk of his enthusiasms and provided a pretty, sympathetic face, asking the right questions at the right places. That first night, her eyes still puffy with her tears, her grief for Rhaenar’s mother that would have been hers, she had not been able to speak in riddles. She could only be honest. She thought the king probably did not have anyone to be honest with him, any more than a bereft girl had, in fact rather less, for she had at least had Rhaenar. I’m sorry, Alicent: she remembers the moment after her own mother’s death when he had dispensed with riddles. She had wanted to say it to him, as useless as passing these words back and forth suddenly felt, had gone to his chamber to wait for him after she was done reading to his father and Westerling, fond, had let her in. Unlike then, tonight he is her husband, but perhaps he does not want the right words in the right places, riddling endlessly.

“It does undermine you,” Alicent admits. “Not intentionally. But somewhere, it is perhaps a…” She does not wish to say threat. Of another heir, if Rhaenar fails to provide one. If they fail. If he fails as a husband, and she as a wife, he will have failed as heir. “A prod. A reminder of what is expected.”

(When the king made his toast Alicent first looked to Rhaenar, and then looked to her father. She found him looking back at her. In his face she found what she had expected, as she had with her husband. His flawless courtier’s mask remained firmly fastened, and it was doubtful the cheering guests could make out what she could behind his own polite smile as he clapped along with them. Anger at the insult. Anxiety at what this meant for his plans. And when their eyes met—disappointment? That in conjunction with the relief filling her more powerfully than even Lord Corlys’ beaming suggested made for a sickening lurch of realization she still tried to stave off. What had her father truly wanted her to do when he sent her to the king’s chambers? If his impending marriage to Lady Laena meant she had failed…She was his son’s wife now. In that particular relief, too, so intense that it left her almost weak at the knees when shortly after they stood for the bedding, relief not nerves, she knew it was not just Rhaenar’s titles that led to that earlier in the sept, at the initial seal on their bond, that made her almost light-headed with holding back incongruous giggles as they worked toward the daunting final seal, because at least it was with Rhaenar, at least Alicent as Princess, not as a greater title yet.

Her father had continued to stare at her as everyone rustled up from their seats for the bedding, as Alicent and Rhaenar made their way off the dais and Jason Lannister led the charge by pulling off one of her sleeves right there in the throne room. Before Ser Strong could toss her over his shoulder to carry her away their gazes locked for a long beat as Viserys made to stumble after his son and his bride and his Hand held him back with a palm on his arm, a whisper in his ear. He gave Alicent a small nod and then turned his back as Harwin got a good grip on her hips to haul her up as if he could not bear to see it and she knew that he had spared her that most unsettling part of this ceremony, , that he had done this confident he and the groom’s father did not need to be there making japes to ensure she knew exactly what must be done.)

“How could I possibly ever need a reminder?” Rhaenar scoffs. “Getting an heir is all anyone ever fucking thinks about.”

Fingers still trapped, Alicent releases her bottom lip from her restless teeth and takes a deep breath, says gingerly, “Yes. Will that be a problem?”

One of the many things in Alicent’s life that is spoken around, never directly of. Even now she hedges, and it is actually another question that is smuggled into this one, and one countless girls ask themselves: will my husband desire me?

She immediately sees that even this straightforward of a question is a mistake, as always, in a familiar hardening of Rhaenar’s features. The smile that had flickered to such tenuous life and collapsed sweetly around her fingers is reborn after this interval as a mocking sneer. “What problem could I possibly have with getting a child on my beautiful wife?”

If Alicent appeases, when confronted with a question he can’t bear to answer with full honesty, Rhaenar distracts, or blusters. She can’t storm away as she would like at this infuriating ploy to avoid having any actual conversation, but she yanks her fingers from his grasp and twists around in the sheets so she’s turned away from him, staring into the hearth with stinging eyes. “Good. Are you going to get on with it then?”

This is not what she wishes to ask either. Small wonder if Rhaenar bristles at her clumsy questions, that try to maneuver delicately around all their tender spots and in that awkward dance only make those avoided spaces ache with the fear of how it would hurt if she ever accurately dug in. You aren’t worried about your position or You want your father to have another son contain the brutal core of, “You are not the son your father wants, and he might seek to replace you, and what would happen to us then?” In the same way, Will that be a problem is only a transparent front for “Will you, inadequate son, be able to consummate this marriage?”

Alicent wants to speak of it, without riddles, even if it hurts, but she doesn't know how. If she only knew how to ask, perhaps Rhaenar would be able to answer. As it is, this careful edging around makes her no more capable of actually discussing anything honestly than he is.

“Don’t be like that,” Rhaenar sighs, and it’s provoking enough that she turns back around with her mouth open to tell him he’s impossible but before she can he has sealed it with his own lips upon hers.

Interesting, that kissing prevents speech, but, as it turns out, not laughter. So after long laughing moments Rhaenar has to break the kiss to murmur against her laughing mouth, “You’re laughing? Your husband kissing you is laughable?”

She attempts to sober up, not wanting him to take it as an injury to his pride, but Rhaenar is laughing too, hot puffs of air against her tingling lips from where he’s pulled back just enough to speak, his forehead resting against hers, and so she lets herself giggle. “No! Sorry, it’s just—”

Rhaenar sits all the way back up—they draw toward each other, flinch away—and Alicent covers her flushed face with her hands. Her sheet slips and Rhaenar emits a squeaking snort as one hand flashes out to hold it to her, causing his own to slip so the other flails about wildly before securing it. “No. It is. Absurd. It’s absurd.”

Her shielding hands lower to renew their responsibility for her absurd modesty, but Rhaenar doesn’t remove his. She places her palm over his hand, presses its burning weight to her heart, still smiling. “Maybe a bit.”

He is too, fingers flexing under hers as he huffs, “They’ve known we would have to do this the whole time, but we’ve never been allowed to—I know you so well and yet somehow it’s like I don’t at all and it makes it all so…”

This whole time. Alicent’s brother Gwayne is a scant fifteen months older than her, which means he’s only a month short of a year older than Rhaenar, and in raising his children at no doubt the court where he served his king Otto Hightower expected his son would be the prince’s special friend, his daughter his bride, building a web of bonds binding their family to the Targaryens, but in the end it turned out to be just the one, as the prince had never had much use for Gwayne. They did everything together. It was Rhaenar and Alicent who showed each other bloody teeth spat out into palms, whose heights their mothers had documented with notches into a bit of wood wall left over from the Aegonfort. It was mostly considered lucky, how fond they were of each other, and when they were very young, not so odd, and not at all strange to some. She remembered Daemon calling on Queen Aemma in her chambers one afternoon when she and Rhaenar were maybe around ten, Rhaenar straining to listen to the adult conversation as they pretended to be absorbed in their game of checkers on the hearth rug, always hanging off his uncle’s every word. Oh, it’s natural, Daemon had said in his sullen way, contesting something she didn’t catch for the queen’s softer voice. He doesn’t have a sister.

They have always done everything together. Of course they must also do this together. All of a sudden, she relaxes, the immense tension vanishing so quickly it leaves her dizzy.

“Show you yours, if you show me mine?” Alicent says cheekily, or tries to, before frowning in confusion. “Wait—”

That grin of Rhaenar’s, dazzlingly bright. “Uh huh—”

“Shut up—”

“What was it? Count of three?”

A few years before that instance of eavesdropping, a mutual wrestling with another piece of illicit acquired wisdom. The fact of their differing anatomies in itself was not exactly secret, but the dim apprehension that this divergence would result in subsequent acts had dawned to the end of joint fixation, and only so much horrified, disbelieving whispering could keep at bay the terror in its yawning unknowns. A linen closet secured by a chair jammed beneath the door handle, stripping themselves of clothing with their backs to each other, turning around with closed eyes and an agreement that they would count to three and open for simultaneous revelation. It had felt incredibly fraught with a profound trust—for the possibility the other would open their eyes early, or not open their eyes at all, leaving you alone—that must first be confirmed by looking into the other’s utterly uninteresting face before the intended investigation could commence. It did not illuminate much about everything that already did and apparently must follow from what one possessed and the other lacked, but there they stood in bafflement at least shared.

“Alright. One…”

“Two—”

“Three!”

Their hands fly up in concert, and the sheets slither free. Finally, all these years later, the foretold fate has come to the moment of its passing. Everything, together. It’s too much to bear, but laughter remains. A kiss, too, proves very good for pouring all the feelings Alicent can’t begin to sort out into, as the lips are a capable vector for transmitting laughter back into Rhaenar’s jittery eyes. Their giggles die away and the sounds that follow are somehow louder, the wet contacts of tongue and the breaths they manage to take between them. They got a look at the flesh that told their trust was rewarded, longer than the flashes glimpsed between the bodies of their wedding guests as they were deposited in the marital bed, and Alicent snatched glances at the corded muscle that told of what they had not done together, of the training yard and the sword what she had once confirmed he possessed and lacked had granted him and denied her, interspersed with the face that she could observe register her own possessions and lacks, the result of her bleedings and the promise of her future beds, in wide eyes and parted lips. She could laugh, an uncontainable burst of hilarity that released the excessive energy of this absurd tension, and he could laugh with her, and then they kissed and one sense was relieved as they closed their eyes and concentrated on the hot exchanges of their mouths, and that was a bit easier, but when Alicent moves back after she feels another burst of dizziness because she can never manage to take enough breath into her lungs before pressing back in with her lips, and Rhaenar’s sight works at her again and his touch makes to follow, a raised hand above what makes his eyes darken with the sight of it and a “Can I…” in a roughened voice, and she still rather breathlessly responds, “They’re yours,” show you yours, a jest referencing a fumble, that she realizes was a truth and so no jest at all the instant the touch of his hand succeeds that of his eyes, they’re his, they become his because it is his hand that makes her entire body sing at the call of his caress, the first awareness of the painful little buds of her emerging breasts had her mother assuring her they were for made for babes, although ladies did not usually use them for such so what were hers for for but mother had no answer, she must not have known this, although maybe she wouldn’t disapprove the discovery too much, because they were her husband’s, but they are her husband’s because she had not discovered herself how good they could make her feel, because her own hand surely could not be as bliss-coaxing as his. She anchors herself from shaking apart with her fingers gripping his shoulders, his chest, so maybe Rhaenar can learn he has them, too, but the juddering shock of this previously denied skin searing against hers has not weakened.

This truth is again confirmed when Rhaenar shifts his hand to the join of her thighs, Can I, It’s yours, “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says as he kneels before her, and still less did know she had this, it’s his, for his babes and his pleasure, breached first by his finger, show me mine, it’s hers, becomes her finger as it makes her squirm, she wonders if he realizes his finger is hers, if he understands he has it snug in her insides, that’s the last thought she has as she shatters into nonsense.

“Do you ever…” Rhaenar asks, voice strained.

“Not—not inside.”

“How? Show me,” he demands, sounding breathless despite the heavy pants that have accompanied the movement of the fingers he now withdraws from her body.

“Oh, um, I—usually I just—I lie on my belly and put my pillow between my legs and…” Rhaenar went to the training yard and she to the solar and how strange, that she was not to share all with him, that she was not supposed to let this spill from her when Rhaenar noted her expression creased under the weight of the staggering event of her first blood, how bizarre she had to whisper it in a corner, darting glances to make sure they weren’t overheard, if they eavesdropped brazenly on adults they knew the walls had ears for them too, of the eternal curse that had been placed on her, that she had started to bleed and would now bleed forever, unceasing, even if she knew from her mother’s own whispered instructions this was a shameful thing to stay between them and her septa and her handmaiden who whisked away her soiled cloths, that it was meant to be quite repugnant to Rhaenar, but she had told him anyway and he had confidently said that he had heard of this and she was all wrong, you didn’t bleed forever, silly, you only bled once when you became a woman, and never again, how incomprehensible it was to be forbidden to laugh together when they learned they were both wrong, and what exactly had they thought moonblood meant, when one day because of it they would be this impossibly close, when he would be inside her.

Rhaenar giggles once more as he moves to sit beside her on the edge of the bed. Her hand rises and flutters above the thing that has drawn her gaze and repelled it since the count hit one. She’s seen cocks before. One of the things they talk around, that lurks behind the problem of this night: taking turns putting their eye to a chink in the keep’s curtain wall to watch some blacksmith’s apprentices bathe in the river, how their attention was equally avid, the results of which produced its own twin blushes. She’d seen Rhaenar’s, but back then she had stared far more boldly, so divorced was it from the vivid reality of this night’s problem. Now it is here it is not one, not if it was confronted together with him, and so it is her turn to say “Can I…?” But Rhaenar closes his fingers around hers again and in the second they disappear in his palm the image of those weeping wounds she carries with her seem to flicker across her mind and they curl up in their cocoon like a bug poked with a child’s stick. “I—I want to please you,” she stutters. He’s hard, and she thinks he wants her, and though that doesn’t matter to duty, it does to her, and now with a sudden intensity whose ferocity she couldn’t have anticipated before the revelation that she heretofore only guessed at, hoped for, and can’t even begin to sift through tonight, that she does want...

“You did,” Rhaenar says. “You do. You will. You felt so good on my fingers.”

“What did it feel like?” Alicent whispers it, even if they are alone, and certainly no one could object to what she did with her husband.

“I can’t believe you’ve never—I would never do anything else, if I had your cunt.”

Incredibly she can still blush at the bluntness of the word describing where, if not with precision what, has already been done, even as Rhaenar accompanies his words with their physical affirmation: a gentle play with the curls, a stroke to the slickness beneath. Alicent wants to explain to Rhaenar that she couldn’t have done that else, before, but does not possess the words any more than he had. She nods shyly.

With his established grip on her hand he guides it down her own belly, through the thatch of hair on her mound, straightens her destroyed fingers so they can dip into the cleft below. “You feel so—wet and warm and tight and you squeeze around me—yes, just like that—does it feel—”

“Good,” she whines, rocking up against her palm. “Although I can’t reach as well as you, my fingers aren’t as—o-hhh you’re r-right, it’s—tight.”

Alicent can feel it—the way she tightens on her knuckles, thinking of Rhaenar’s rubbing so wonderful and firm against the wet warmth that squeezes around them.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” it’s his turn to whisper.

“You won’t. Or only for a moment. They say it hurts a bit, but just for the first time.”

“The childbed can hurt far more than a bit,” Rhaenar counters.

They keep their mothers close.

“I would only want your children. It’s alright, if they’re yours,” Alicent persists. Of course she would owe whoever she had wed children, but although she can’t even really imagine it, her ability to concentrate upon that eventuality curiously weak, she can’t seem to picture it at all, really, and her mind glances away from the attempt to understand what it really means that the result of this night could be her own motherhood, she still feels that since she is to be a mother being mother of Rhaenar’s children must be sweetest.

“Only want me to kill you?” Rhaenar says bitterly.

Yes. Of course. Who else? That’s what Alicent thinks. But the usual impulse kicks in as she corrects: “I would only want you to be my children’s father.”

Rhaenar appears more upset at that, if anything, so inexplicably distraught that Alicent blurts out without thinking: “We don’t have to. Not tonight, we can wait…”

She trails off. “Do you not want to?” Rhaenar says, biting his lip. She looks at him in such blank incomprehension they both laugh again. “They’ll ask. You can’t lie.”

“I will!”

His smile is as fond as it is queasy. “Yes, but they’ll know. You’ve never been able to sell a lie a day in your life, not when confronted directly.”

“Yes,” Alicent concedes glumly, with a miserable nod. “I’m sorry.” She’s ashamed. She should be able to lie for her husband!

“Don’t be,” Rhaenar bumps his shoulder against hers. “Oh, fuck it. Who cares? As long as we say we did, even if you’re crying while you say it, they can’t actually do anything. They can’t take you away from me,” he finishes furiously. The fiery defiance burns through him fast, and he visibly splutters, slumps forward. “I just don’t want them to take you away from me,” he confesses.

She grabs his hand with damp, panicky fingers where it has, all this time, continued to pet her sex where she rests her fingers in it, as if for comfort. “Do you think—”

Alicent can’t even finish this question, and doesn’t need to. He nods again, gazing at her with wide eyes. They could, and would.

They have no choice. “I don’t want—not if it’s not with you,” Rhaenar vows, gripping her hand back tightly.

It does hurt a bit. Alicent admits this when Rhaenar asks her how it feels in a tense voice, eyes screwed shut. If it hurts.

“Hurts,” she whimpers, incapable of multiword answers. Then she cries: “Full.” Thinking of how wet and warm and tight she’d felt. How she squeezed around his fingers. How it must feel. She tightens and watches Rhaenar’s forehead above her wrinkle before he buries it in her throat, and she feels less impossibly full as he starts to go soft inside her.

“Does it—does it hurt?” Alicent moans, clenching around him desperately. A ridiculous thing to ask, probably, no one ever said it hurt for men, but she’s so full, so tight, a stinging pinch somewhere deep within, as if something in her doesn’t want him there and yet he is.

He doesn’t answer. He groans and his face goes redder, tearier as his eyes flutter open, hips hitching against hers as he swells in her and stuffs his mouth full of the pillow by her head, some of her trailing hair in his teeth. “Say that again,” he mumbles, just barely intelligible.

“Does it—hurt.”

Rhaenar grinds his brow into her shoulder, whining. “How does it—”

“Hurts,” she slurs, although it’s no longer the only truth. “It hurts.”

She does not bleed. She could laugh if she could do anything at all but sit up stunned amidst the bedding and allow an immense exhaustion to sweep through her. There is no proof save Alicent’s entrenched earnestness that renders her incapable of lying. Rhaenar gets up from the bed and finds the belt that managed to make it to the chamber with them and retrieves a small enameled dagger from it. He cuts into the meat of his own palm at the plushest point, and wrings three drops of blood onto the sheets sticky with another form of evidence, should any be needed.

“Your maidenhead, wife,” Rhaenar says cheerfully, and then they do laugh into a kiss a final time. But after Alicent blows out the candles and crawls into bed, in the dim hearthlight she sees the lines of amusement harden into something else before he lies down with his back to her. She stares at the shifting planes of his shoulder blades, vibrating with noisy inhalations that stir the dark. She hesitates for a moment before laying her cheek against them, looping her arm around his waist to press her hand to the silky skin of his belly that shivers beneath her palm for only a second before his fingers lace with hers and grip tightly, then draw them up his lips, perfect stopper for a suspiciously loud exhale.