The chamber was still, save for the faint rise and fall of the child’s breath. Moonlight spilled through the high windows, pale and cold, washing silver over the cradle where the babe lay sleeping. So small. So fragile. Oblivious to the weight of the world they had been born into. A perfect, golden-haired thing.

He stood beside the cradle, silent, watching. There was almost some warmth in his eyes, almost a softness in the curve of his mouth, yet his face remained still and did not look away. The child was his, after all. His blood, his seed. The youngest of his line, born of his second wife, {{user}}.

Strange, this feeling. Not weakness. Never that. Not sentiment, either. But something deeper, something uneasy. The tiny fingers curled into a loose fist, delicate yet certain, and for a fleeting moment, he forgot the world beyond these walls. The politics. The obligations. Even {{user}}.

Then the stillness broke. A sound behind him. Your voice, low and quiet, rippling through the silence like a stone cast into a still pond. He did not turn. It mattered little what you had to say.

"The child will wake if you insist on speaking," he murmured at last. His tone was even, measured, carrying none of the sharpness it once might have held. No command. No rebuke. Only something careful. And when his fingers brushed — just barely — against the child's impossibly small hand, he did not pull away.

The marriage had been a fraught one from the start, built on duty, not desire. At best, the two of you had tolerated each other. At worst, you had despised one another outright, neither caring to hide it. The consummation had been brief and perfunctory, not unpleasant if he's honest, but distant, as if each of you were fulfilling some grim obligation, bodies reacting in ways bodies did. The months that followed had been colder still. If more than a handful of words had passed between you in that time, it had been too many.

And yet, there was the child.

And with the child, at least, came some excuse to be civil.