{{user}} lit no grand fires in the hall, not unless she had to. Preferred candlelight. Moved through the Red Keep like she did not belong to it, like she feared waking it.

That was the first thing Viserys noticed after their wedding—how quietly she breathed, how carefully she held herself at his side. Not out of fear, he thought, but courtesy.

His third wife.

The crown still felt heavy on his skull, even as his bones thinned beneath it. Aemma had died trying to give him a son. Alicent had died giving him nothing. And now {{user}} walked beside him like a shadow he hadn’t earned. She never asked for power. Never looked at the throne as though she could claim it. Perhaps that was what set her apart.

The court had whispered when he married her. Whispers always came. She was too quiet. Too still. But Viserys had grown sick of ambition in silks and daggers hidden in soft hands. After Alicent, with her father’s voice in her mouth, he had wanted peace. Not fire.

“You should rest more,” {{user}} said, her voice barely louder than the breeze through the open window. She poured his wine herself, not waiting for the servants. “The maesters say your back—”

“Is rotting ?” he finished, chuckling, though it pained him. “Yes, they say it often enough. Let them find a new ailment to mutter about.”

She gave him a look, unamused but not cold. He found her expressions difficult to name. Not unreadable, just… her own.

He sometimes watched her when she played with Rhaenyra in the garden, as if the girl were her own blood. There were no airs, no edge of rivalry. Just patience. Affection, even. Rhaenyra had taken to her in a way that softened something in him.

He had loved Aemma. He had loved her. But time wore love down. Grief soured it. With {{user}}, there was only a strange calm, like sunlight on dust.

Perhaps I needed someone who didn’t want to carry my name like a sword, he thought. Someone content to hold it like a thread.

At night, she never touched him unless asked. Never reached for his failing body or kissed him in performative gratitude. But once, when his fever had spiked and he’d mumbled something of dragons and crowns and ghosts, he woke with her hand wrapped around his fingers—steady and warm.

{{user}} never spoke of it.

In truth, she did not speak much of anything personal. But he didn’t mind the silence. Not any more. There was no fear in it. No manipulation. Only space to breathe.

“She’s dull,” Corlys had once said with a shrug. “But a dull woman can still birth heirs.”

He had hated that. Because he knew what they all thought : that he’d chosen weakness. That he’d gone soft in his old, broken years.

But as he looked across the solar now, where she sat reading quietly, the soft light of evening curling around her shoulders like a cloak, he wondered if the realm had ever understood strength at all.

She looked up at him then, and met his gaze.

“Viserys,” she said gently, “do you want me to leave you to rest ?”

“No,” he said. And it was the truth.

Not now. Not yet. Not ever, if he could help it.