Prince Joffrey was a Targaryen, it was hard to deny, even with his plain features. He had his mother’s temper, his uncle’s fierceness and rode his dragon first when he was nine. He followed in his uncle’s footsteps with his sword, falling back on the prospect of becoming a knight as he was the third born son with the title of ‘Prince’ and naught more.

He snapped and he hissed, and his mother swore he could release fire in his outbursts. He was not particularly proud of them after, especially when he got cross with his mother. He dragged his feet back to apologize, all sweaty and dirty from using his sword to vent his frustrations — he was only six and ten, after all. He was a wild dragon, the third son of Rhaenyra.

Despite the shadow that fell across his mother whenever his marriage was raised, Joffrey found, to his own surprise, that he did not share her dread. There had been a time when the very idea seemed distant—almost laughable. His temper, sharp and ill-governed, had seen to that. Lords were reluctant to bind their daughters to a man so quick to anger, even one with royal blood in his veins.

He had once overheard a courtier mutter that he was too much like Daemon. Joffrey had only smiled at that, faint and cutting. They meant it as an insult. He did not take it so.

“I could be a knight,” he said, leaning back in his chair with careless ease, as though the matter required no true thought at all. “Serve the realm. Serve you.”

His voice softened at the last, though his gaze rarely did.

“You have no need of grandchildren from me,” he added, quieter now, a note of resistance threading through the words, as if the very notion wearied him.

Time passed, as it always did. What had once been a point of grim satisfaction—the lack of eager brides—faded into something he simply did not think of at all.

His days filled instead with steel and sweat. He rode in tourneys, fought hard, and won often, taking to heart the lessons his uncle had pressed upon him. Victory suited him. It sharpened him.

And when he rode before the royal box, placing the crown of flowers upon his mother’s head as Queen of Love and Beauty, there had been something almost boyish in the gesture—an offering she alone had earned, for enduring him as she had.

The morning after one such victory, his body aching and heavy with sleep, the news came.

He was to go east. To the Vale. Within days.

His mother had arranged it—some agreement with you, the young Lady of the Eyrie, niece to the late Jeyne Arryn. The words had barely settled before his temper flared. A cup shattered against the wall; a chair overturned soon after. Yet for all the violence of it, he did not go to her. He did not argue. He did not refuse. Whatever defiance burned in him, it did not extend that far.

The journey to the Vale was marked by a brooding silence. He carried his displeasure with him like a storm not yet broken.

Still, he had been raised too well to let it fall upon you.

When at last he stood before you, he bowed as he ought, took your hand, and pressed a measured kiss to your knuckles.

You were not what he had expected.

Prettier, for one. Softer in a way he had not permitted himself to imagine. It unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

The Eyrie itself was another matter entirely. Perched impossibly high, with wind whispering through every narrow stone passage, it felt as though the world had fallen away beneath it. Had he not been so accustomed to heights astride Tyraxes, he might have found it unbearable. Instead, there was a strange calm to it—a distance from King’s Landing and its endless scrutiny. Here, at least, the weight of watching eyes seemed lessened.

He had asked his mother, before his departure, for one small concession—a modest wedding, nothing grand. She had granted it.

And so it would be done.

He would become Lord Consort of the Vale.

Joffrey found, as the reality of it settled slowly into place, that it was not so dire a fate as he might once have believed. The Vale would be his, in part. Just as, in time, he would be yours.