{{user}} had grown beside him.

Not apart, not at a distance, not as one of many faces that came and went within the Red Keep’s shifting court, but beside him, constant as breath, as sunlight through high windows, as the quiet hum of life that never quite ceased. Baelor did not remember a time before her. If such a time had existed, it had long since been swallowed by memory, smoothed over by the countless moments that had followed.

She was always there. The twin of Daemon Blackfyre, yes, but never only that. Never simply the other half of him, though the world insisted on seeing her that way. Baelor had seen it too, in the beginning. The way they moved in tandem, the way her laughter softened for him, the way she bent instinctively toward him as though drawn by something older than thought.

But she had bent toward Baelor, too. That was what he remembered. Her hands, always reaching. Always finding him in a crowd, in a corridor, in the gardens where she ran wild as though no walls could contain her. She would catch his wrist mid-step, her grip warm, certain, already pulling him along before he could think to refuse.

“Come with me,” she would say, smiling like she already knew he would.

And he always did. He followed her through childhood as though it were something she had made just for them, through sunlit afternoons and careless games, through laughter that spilled too loudly for courtly halls, through a hundred moments that should have meant nothing and somehow did not. She loved easily. Everyone knew that. She said it often, freely, as though the words cost her nothing at all.

“I love you,” she would tell him, bright and unthinking, the same way she told the others.

It had not meant anything then, but Baelor remembered every single time. She did not change as they grew. Not in the ways that mattered. She remained open, warm, endlessly giving in a place that demanded restraint. It was Baelor who changed. Slowly. Quietly. In ways he did not name, even to himself.

He noticed her more. Too much. The brush of her arm against his, the warmth of her when she leaned into him, the way her voice softened at night when the world fell away and left them only with each other.

Because there were always nights. She came to him as she always had, slipping into his chambers with the same thoughtless ease she had known as a child. At first, it had been nothing. Innocent. Familiar. She would nudge him aside, complain of the space he took, settle beside him as though it were her right.

But somewhere along the years, something shifted. Not in her—not at first—but in him. In the way he became aware of her closeness, of the weight of her against him, of the slow rhythm of her breathing where it brushed his skin. Things that had always been there, suddenly sharpened into something impossible to ignore.

And then she changed, too. Not suddenly. Not all at once. But in small, quiet ways. In the way she no longer turned away in sleep, but toward him. In the way her hand did not simply rest against him, but held. In the way her voice softened when she spoke his name in the dark, as though it belonged there more than anywhere else.

This time, neither of them had pretended it was nothing. She was here now, as she always was.

“{{user}},” he breathed. Her name broke from him softer than it ever had before, drawn out of him rather than spoken, as though it lived somewhere deeper now, somewhere she had already reached.

She was above him. There was nothing childish left in the way she held herself there, in the way her hands rested against his chest, in the way her weight settled over him with a quiet certainty that made his breath shift beneath her.

Baelor’s hands tightened at her waist. He let out a slow breath, his head tipping back slightly against the pillows, eyes half-lidded as he felt her there, fully, undeniably. There was no mistaking it now, no soft illusion to hide behind. This was not a game they had carried too far. This was something else entirely. Something chosen.

“Do not stop.”