Archive of Our Own

The Sept was full.

That was the first thing Maekar noticed, not the light through the crystal dome, nor the smell of oils and incense, nor his brother standing beside him. The crowd, every lord and lady the king could summon, packed into the sept like witnesses to a tourney. Which, he supposed, it was. A show of Targaryen strength. A sealing of cracks.

The septon spoke. Maekar let the words wash over him. He had heard them before, at his first wedding. The invocation of the Seven, the binding of souls, words that had meant something once when the woman beside him had been Dyanna, and the future had still been a thing he believed in.

He wonders how he could be expected to bind his soul to Baelor now, when he had done so before, when Baelor had done so with his late ladywife. Perhaps the words uttered by the septon are fitting for their wedding after all, both a poor imitation. 

He spoke his vows when prompted, voice even, careful, blank. 

Beside him, Baelor was still. Maekar had not looked at him properly since arriving in King's Landing two days prior and he did not intend to start now. But he was aware of him the way one is aware of a healing wound; peripheral, constant, dull until you moved wrong.

Baelor spoke his own vows. His voice was steady and sure, because Baelor's voice was always confident if not loud. Maekar wondered if anyone else in the sept could hear the care in it, the gentleness. As if the words were not a formality but a thing Baelor genuinely had meant.

That was worse than anything.

The feast was mercifully brief, with barrels of wine, endless music, and food piled high; a grand celebration. The realm must see its princes sit side by side, a seamless front of harmony and strength, without fissure or doubt. Maekar sat by his brother’s side but he did not smile. He ate, he drank, he answered when spoken to. He allowed lords he did not care for to clasp his hand and offer congratulations he did not want.

Baelor did the work for both of them, like how he had always done. A word here, a laugh there, that particular way he had of making men feel they had his full attention. Maekar watched him from the corner of his eye and thought to himself that he was not needed. Baelor could do this without him, without their farce of a union. 

When it was done, when the last courtier had bowed and the doors of their chambers had closed behind them, the silence came down like a hammer. Baelor stood near the door, Maekar walked towards the window, an endless chasm between them. And it was still not enough space for everything that sat between them.

"Maekar," Baelor said. Soft. The way you soothe a wounded animal.

And perhaps that was what he was. But not what you’d imagine, not a bird with a broken wing, or a rabbit caught in a snare. Whatever was wounded in Maekar had claws, had teeth. Would take the hand that reached to soothe it and make the reaching a regret.

"Don't."

Baelor did not move from the door. "We need not pretend this is what either of us would have chosen, but we are here."

"Yes," Maekar spat. "By the king’s command. And we obey, as we must."

"It need not be a punishment."

"No?" Maekar turned from the window. He looked at Baelor’s two-toned eyes properly for the first time in almost a year and hated how easily the sight of him still landed. A year older, a year greyer at the temples but still the same steady gaze, the same set to his mouth that said I am being patient with you and we both know it. "What would you call it, then?"

"A chance."

Maekar laughed without humour. It was not a kind sound. "A chance. You sound like Father. Stitch the wound shut and call it healed, rot be damned."

Baelor was quiet for a moment. "You think this is rot."

Not a question. Baelor had always done that, taken the worst thing you said and held it up calmly so you could see the shape of it. As if understanding were the same as fixing, as if naming the wound made it bleed less. As if doing the right thing absolved you of what the right thing cost.

It did not.

"I think," Maekar said, "that you cannot stitch what has been cut to the bone."

"I would try, if you let me."

"The way you tried at Ashford?" It came out sharp. "You tried so well for the hedge knight. Moved the whole realm for him. Tell me, Baelor, did you even hesitate? When you stood to champion a stranger over your own nephew, over your own brother's son! Or was your honour worth more than your nephew bleeding in the dirt?"

Something moved across Baelor's face. "That is not fair."

"Fair." The word sat in Maekar's mouth like ash. "You want to speak to me of fair? You stood in a field and chose a stranger over your own blood. Over my son. And now you stand in my bedchamber and call this a chance."

"The trial was just, Maekar."

"The trial nearly killed my boy."

"And that haunts me, you know it haunts me."

"I know nothing of the sort." Maekar's voice was low now. Controlled with effort that took every fiber of his being. "I know that Aerion is in Lys. I know that Daeron is mutilated. I know that my children are scattered across continents because I-"

He stopped. The sentence had too many endings and all of them were true. Because I failed them. Because I did not protect them. Because I broke a boy who had done nothing wrong but be born mine. Because the girls deserve better than a father who ruins everything he holds. Because Egg looked at a hedge knight and saw more worth following than me. Because I am only the fourth son and I have proved every low expectation right.

Baelor took a step forward. "Maekar-"

"Do not come closer." Maekar flinched.

Baelor stopped. His hand was half-raised, Maekar noticed. As if he had meant to reach for him. It fell back to his side, and the careful composure Baelor wore like armour shifted into something that looked like grief.

The silence held. Maekar turned back to the window. The city below was dark and vast and indifferent to the two men standing in a room they did not know how to share.

"You may take the bed," Maekar said. "I will not need it."

The weeks that followed were a study in endurance.

They shared a bed because the alternative would invite talk. Maekar learned the geography of it quickly. His side. Baelor's side. The distance between them no wider than a forearm and vaster than anything he had known. He lay on his back and stared at the canopy and listened to Baelor breathe and did not sleep.

Baelor, he suspected, did not sleep either. But they held the silence between them like a pact.

It was not so different from how Maekar had been living.

Summerhall had been quiet after he had emptied it. Aerion first, sent to Lys before the bruises on his face had even fully healed. Maekar had told himself it was discipline, a boy who could do what Aerion had done needed a firmer hand, a foreign court, distance from the family he had shamed. 

But the truth sat lower than that, in a place Maekar did not visit often. He had looked at his second son and seen nothing he recognised. Not the anger, Maekar understood anger, had lived with his own long enough to know its shapes. What lived in Aerion was something else. Something that enjoyed the hurting. That smiled while it broke things. 

Maekar had searched his son's face for something familiar, of himself, of Dyanna and found only a stranger staring back, and the horror of it was not that Aerion was cruel but that Maekar had let it happen and could not account for when it got so bad. He had sent Aerion to Lys because distance was the only answer he had for a question he could not bear to keep asking.

Daeron had gone next. To Oldtown, to the maesters. Maekar had told anyone who asked that the boy needed discipline. Structure. A firm hand to curb the drinking, the whoring, the slow reckless slide into something Maekar could not watch and do nothing about. And that was true, as far as it went.

But there was the other thing. Daeron had always dreamed, and the dreams had always come true, and Maekar did not know what to do with a son who woke screaming with knowledge no boy should carry. The maesters studied such things, they kept records, histories, accounts of Targaryens who had seen what was not yet real. If anyone could make sense of what lived behind Daeron's eyes, it was Oldtown.

What Daeron heard was I am sending you away. What Daeron heard was you are too much trouble to keep. Maekar had seen it in his face at the docks. Not anger, not argument, just a quiet unsurprised confirmation of something Daeron had always believed about his father. And perhaps Daeron was right. Perhaps Maekar was simply cruel, and the rest was decoration.

The girls went to Starfall, to Dyanna's mother. That one Maekar could almost justify without flinching. They were young, they needed women around them, a gentler household, the Dornish sun and their grandmother's steady hands. Dyanna would have wanted it. 

He told himself that and sometimes he even believed it, though the truth was simpler and uglier. He could not raise them, his older children were proof he was not fit to raise anyone. Every child he touched he damaged or lost or drove away, and the kindest thing he could do for his daughters was to remove himself from the equation.

Egg he had not sent. Egg had left on his own, followed Ser Duncan to King's Landing, followed Baelor's orbit, chosen the hedge knight's road over his father's hall without a backward glance. Of all of it, that was the one Maekar could not dress up in reason. There was no framing that made it anything other than what it was. His youngest son had looked at what Maekar had to offer and found it lacking.

So Summerhall had emptied, room by room, voice by voice, until it was just Maekar and the servants and the sound of his own footsteps in corridors built for a family he no longer had. He had told himself it was penance. He had told himself he deserved the silence. And for a year he had lived in it, and the silence had become a thing with walls and a roof and he had furnished it carefully and called it peace.

Now he was here, in Baelor's chambers, in Baelor's bed. And the silence had followed him, but it fit differently in a space shared with someone else. Silence was worse next to noise. It had a shape, and the cold felt sharper now that there was warmth beside him again.

In public they were princes. They sat together at feasts and spoke when spoken to and performed the performance of a marriage the realm could believe in. Maekar had always been good at duty, he could smile when required, answer when addressed, stand at Baelor's side in court and say the right things in the right order. He had been doing it his whole life, wearing the shape of what was expected and keeping the rest where no one could see it.

Behind closed doors they were nothing, there is no performance needed behind a crowd. 

Maekar did not speak to Baelor in their chambers, not in anger, not in coldness, not at all. There was simply nothing to say. He entered, he undressed, he lay down, he rose. Baelor existed in the same space the way furniture existed. Present, accounted for, not addressed.

Baelor tried. He did not speak, he had learned that much. A year of silence had taught him. Maekar turning his back at Ashford before the dust had settled. Letters returned unopened from Summerhall. A door shut in his face when he had ridden three days to see his brother. Baelor was not a stupid man, he knew where words would land.

But he tried in other ways. A cup of wine poured and left at Maekar's elbow without comment, a cloak retrieved from the back of a chair and folded, set where Maekar would find it. Small acts of tending. The language Baelor spoke when words were taken from him.

Maekar noticed all of it and acknowledged none of it. And when the wordless things did not work, Baelor tried words after all.

Some mornings, he’d ask about the children. "Has there been word from Oldtown?"

"No." Maekar replied, succinct. 

"I could write to the maesters, if you wished. Ask after Daeron."

"That will not be necessary."

Silence. The sound of bread being torn. Maekar chewed and did not look up and waited for the conversation to die, and it did, because Baelor was not a man who forced doors that would not open.

But he always came back. A few days later, he asked again over supper. "Your goodmother writes that the girls are settling well. She says Rhae has taken to riding."

"Good."

"She sent a drawing, Rhae's, I think. It is on the desk if you want to see it."

Maekar did not go to the desk. He could not look at his daughter's drawing and not miss them. Could not trace Rhae's clumsy lines and not think of her small hand holding the charcoal, her tongue between her teeth the way Dyanna's used to be when she concentrated.

Some evenings Baelor tried neutral ground. "The new gardens are coming along. You should see them." Or, "I sat in on a case in the city courts today. Reminded me of that business in Starpike, do you remember?"

Maekar remembered. He remembered everything, that was the ache.

"No," he lied.

Baelor nodded and returned to his book and did not ask again that night.

It would have been easier if he could have hated Baelor for it. But there was no performance in these gestures, no audience to play to. This was simply what Baelor was, well meaning and stubborn.

He had been this way since they were boys, the elder brother who remembered what Maekar needed before Maekar knew to ask. Who sat with him through fevers without being asked. Who found him after their father's sharp words and said nothing, only stayed, and the staying had been enough.

Baelor had always hovered. It was his nature, attentive, watchful, one step ahead of what Maekar needed. And Maekar had let him, because it was Baelor, because it had always been this way. He had not noticed when the hovering changed. Only that one summer it had.

Maekar did not let himself think of that summer often. A few months where something between them had shifted, gone soft and strange and warm in a way neither of them had language for. Nothing spoken, nothing acted on. 

Just an awareness of proximity, of skin, of Baelor's laughter landing differently than it used to. They had orbited each other too closely that summer, hands brushing and lingering where they had no reason to linger, shoulders pressed together long after the excuse for closeness had passed. They found too many reasons to be alone together, and Maekar had carried a constant hum beneath his ribs that he did not yet know to call want.

Then Baelor's betrothal to Jena Dondarrion was announced, and the summer ended in a single afternoon. Maekar remembered being fourteen and thinking there is no one in the world like him. He remembered being fifteen and standing in the sept watching Baelor cloak Jena Dondarrion and understanding for the first time that wanting something did not entitle you to it. He had smiled that day. He had kissed Jena's hand and wished them well and meant it, mostly, and gone back to his rooms and sat on the edge of his bed for a long time in the dark.

He had loved Dyanna. Truly, not as consolation. She had been fierce and warm and entirely herself, and Maekar had not married her thinking of his brother. But there had always been a room in him that belonged to Baelor, locked and unvisited, and Dyanna had known about it the way clever wives know things, not because they are told but because they pay attention. She had never asked and he had never offered. It was not something big enough to matter in the end, they were in love and happy. 

Then Dyanna died, and Jena followed, and the room had unlocked itself. It happened gradually, without intention. Baelor's hand on his shoulder at council, lingering a breath longer than required. Fingers brushing when passing a cup, a book, a letter, and neither of them pulling away. A late night in Summerhall's library, talking about nothing until the candles guttered, and the walk to their separate chambers afterwards feeling like a severance. Glances that held. Silences that were not empty but full, brimming with something neither of them had named yet.

Maekar had been building toward it. Slowly, the way he did everything, with too much deliberation and not enough faith. He had been choosing his moment, finding the words. Convincing himself that the risk was survivable because he sees in Baelor’s eyes reciprocation. 

Then Ashford.

And the room had locked again, and this time Maekar had swallowed the key.

He came upon them in a courtyard, by accident.

Egg was laughing, bright and unguarded, ringing off the stone walls. He followed that laughter, turned the corner to see the hedge knight instead, sat on a low bench with his long legs stretched out before him, saying something Maekar could not catch. Egg was perched on a barrel beside him, face flushed with delight, looking nothing like the solemn boy Maekar remembered from Summerhall.

Baelor stood nearby, not hovering but present, arms folded, watching the boy and the knight with a quiet expression that Maekar could not read and did not try to.

Egg spotted him first. "Father!"

The boy scrambled down from the barrel and crossed the courtyard at a run, and for a moment something in Maekar's chest lurched toward him, wanting nothing more than to bend down and hold his son close. Then Egg was at his side, talking fast, pulling at his sleeve the way he used to when he was very small. "Father, you must see! Ser Duncan has been teaching me the longaxe, and Uncle Baelor says I have improved, and-"

Ser Duncan. 

The name pulled his gaze back to the courtyard. The hedge knight had risen from the bench, looking uncertain of his welcome. He was watching Maekar with wary respect, and Maekar looked at him and saw only Ashford. Saw the dirt and the blood and Aerion’s broken body. Saw Daeron in the mud. Saw Baelor stepping forward to champion this man, this nobody, this stranger worth more than a brother.

Egg was still talking. Still pulling at his sleeve. “Come, Father. Come and see!”

He could not go closer. He could not walk across that courtyard and stand beside the man his son adored, the man his brother had chosen, and pretend that the sight of him did not make something in Maekar's chest close like a fist.

Maekar looked down at his son. Egg's eyes were bright. Eager. Wanting something from him — approval, attention, something Maekar should have been able to give as easily as breathing. The boy was happy here. That much was plain. He had filled out, grown brown from the sun, moved with an ease Maekar had never seen in him at Summerhall. He was thriving.

In Baelor's city. In Baelor's care. At a hedge knight's heel.

"That is good," Maekar said, setting a hand briefly on Egg's head. "You must show me sometime."

He did not stay. He offered the hedge knight a nod, correct, distant, nothing more, and left the courtyard with his back straight and his pace hurried and the sound of Egg's laughter still hanging in the air behind him like something he had lost the right to.

Baelor followed him.

Maekar heard the footsteps behind him in the corridor and did not slow. He had almost reached their chambers when Baelor's voice caught him.

"You could have stayed."

Maekar stopped, he did not turn. "I had matters to attend to."

"You had nothing to attend to."

"Not all of us have the luxury of idle afternoons in courtyards, Baelor."

"And yet you found the time to come and leave."

Maekar turned then. Baelor stood a few paces behind him, and for once the composure was thin. Not gone, never gone, not with Baelor but thin enough that Maekar could see what sat beneath it.

"What would you have me do? Stand there, smile and clap while my son fawn over your fucking hedge knight?"

"This is not about Ser Duncan-"

"No, it’s about you." Maekar's voice was flat. "So tell me, brother, what do my son need? You do so enjoy knowing best."

"Your son needed his father to stay. That is all."

"My son." Maekar's mouth twisted. "My son who left Summerhall without a backward glance to follow a hedge knight. My son who lives in your household, eats at your table, learns at your heel. And now you presume to tell me how to father him. But of course, a year under your care and you know best. You always know best."

"He did not leave you, Maekar. He is a child. He followed an adventure, that is what boys do."

The words hung between them. Baelor did not seem to hear what he had said. But Maekar heard it. An adventure. As if Egg had wandered off to chase frogs and would be back by supper. As if a boy choosing a hedge knight over his own father was something to be shrugged away.

"An adventure," Maekar repeated. "My son left me for a hedge knight, and you call it an adventure."

"I only meant-"

"How easy it must be to see clearly from where you stand, Baelor. How simple everything must look when none of it costs you anything."

Baelor's jaw tightened. "That is not true and you know it."

"Do I?"

"I am trying to help, Maekar." His voice strained at the edges, the closest to raised Maekar had heard it in years. "That is all I have ever done."

"Help." The word came out like something bitten. "The way you helped with Aerion? Let him be beaten bloody-"

"Yes, help!" Baelor's hand cut through the air between them. "Aerion needed boundaries. He needed to be held accountable for what he did. The boy was out of control and someone had to-”

"Someone." Maekar's voice was very quiet. The quiet after Baelor's outburst made it worse. "You mean me. Someone had to, and I did not, so you stepped in."

"That is not -"

"You wanted to help with Aerion. You wanted to help at Ashford. And now you chase me down corridors because I would not smile and play the grateful father while the man who made my life miserable-”

"Ser Duncan is not to blame for what happened at Ashford." 

"I was not talking about Ser Duncan." Maekar hissed.

The corridor went very quiet. Maekar watched the words reach him, watched them land, watched Baelor's face go completely still, the way a man goes still when he has been struck.

Maekar did not wait for an answer. He turned and walked into their chambers and closed the door behind him.

After that, something changed.

It was not immediate, there was no single morning Maekar could point to and say there. But the cups of wine stopped appearing. The cloak stayed where he left it. Baelor no longer lingered in their chambers when Maekar entered, he would nod, sometimes, the way one acknowledges a stranger, and then continue whatever he had been doing. Reading. Writing. Existing in his own space as if Maekar's presence in it required nothing of him.

In public, nothing changed. They were still princes. They still sat together, still performed. But behind closed doors Baelor no longer reached. He did not ask about the children, did not make small talks. He did not leave doors open. He came to bed late and turned away and slept, or seemed to, and the space between them no longer hummed with anything at all.

Maekar told himself it was a relief.

He told himself this for a week, then two. Then he stopped telling himself anything because the telling had begun to sound like a lie even inside his own head. Truth was, he had grown used to Baelor's persistence. 

He found himself listening for things that no longer came. The scrape of a cup placed at his elbow, a breath held in hesitation before Baelor thought better of speaking. The particular way Baelor's weight shifted in the bed when he was lying awake and trying not to show it.

Baelor slept with his back to him now. Not in anger, not in hurt. Just the ordinary way a man sleeps when the person beside him does not concern him.

One evening Maekar returned to their chambers to find Baelor reading by the window. He looked up when Maekar entered. He said nothing, and returned to his book. Maekar stood in the doorway for a moment longer than he should have. Then he undressed and went to bed and closed his eyes and tried to name the ache that was sitting on his chest.

It came apart on an ordinary evening.

Maekar walked into their chambers and found servants. Two of them, folding garments into a trunk with practised efficiency. Baelor stood beside the wardrobe, directing them quietly.

He was packing, Maekar realised. 

Maekar stood in the doorway and watched and felt the room tilt beneath him. Baelor was leaving, and he had not told him. Had not mentioned it over their silent meals, had not thought to. 

Something in his chest seized. Not anger, he was too hollowed out for anger. Something worse, something without a name that lived in the space between wanting to be left alone and to actually being forgotten.

He stepped back. His shoulder caught the edge of the door and his hand slipped and the cup he had been carrying struck the stone floor with a crack that rang through the room like a bell.

Everyone turned.

Maekar bent to retrieve the cup. His hands were not quite steady. He willed them still and they did not listen. "Forgive me," he said, and his voice was almost even, almost right, and he straightened and turned to leave because he could not be here, he could not stand in this room and watch another person leave.

Baelor's hand caught his arm. "Maekar."

"I will leave you to-"

"Maekar. Look at me."

He should not have, he knew even as he turned that this was the mistake, that the last wall standing was the one that kept his face in order and if he looked at Baelor now it would fall. But his body turned anyway, because Baelor had asked, because even now, even after everything, he could not refuse Baelor when he used that voice.

Baelor's expression shifted. Whatever he saw in Maekar's face, the wet eyes, the set jaw, the terrible effort of holding something together that had already broken, it changed something in him. 

The efficiency was gone, the calm direction of servants and trunks and doublets was gone. There was only Baelor, looking at him with worry.

"Leave us," Baelor commanded.

"That is not necessary-" Maekar interjected, trying to remove himself but Baelor held on tight. 

"Leave us. Now."

The servants went, the door closed. And they were alone with the open trunk and the scattered garments and the wine pooling on the stone floor between them.

Baelor's hand held the nape of his neck, the other cupping his face, willing him to look up. "What is wrong, brother? Tell me, please-"

The gentleness undid him. Not the question but the way it was asked. Soft and careful. As if Maekar were something worth being careful with. As if Baelor still thought of him that way after months of silence and slammed doors and every cruelty Maekar had committed in the name of his own pain.

"Have I tire you already?" His voice came out wrong. Rough and too thin and nothing like the voice of a man who had spent a year perfecting his indifference. "Leaving without a word. Not even-" He swallowed. 

"Maekar." Baelor's hand tightened on his nape. "I did not think you wanted to be disturbed. You have not wanted anything but space from me in months."

The words were not accusations, that was the unbearable thing. Baelor said them the way one states the weather, a fact observed, adjusted for, accepted. Maekar had taught him this. Maekar had trained him through a hundred silences and a hundred refusals to expect nothing, and Baelor had learned the lesson, and now the lesson was killing Maekar.

"I thought it was what you wanted," Baelor said. "Distance. Space. I thought- If I could not make you happy, the least I could do was stop making you so unhappy. Even if it meant-" He stopped. "All I ever wanted is for your happiness, Maekar. Even if you do not believe that."

"Happy." The word broke something open. "I do not deserve happy. I am- look at what I have done, Baelor.” Maekar looked into Baelor’s eyes in penance. Tears falling down his pockmarked cheeks. 

“Look at my children. Aerion is in Lys because I did not see what he was becoming until it was too late. Daeron thinks I banished him. The girls are in Starfall because I cannot be trusted to raise them. Egg left me- Egg left me and he was right to because I am-"

His voice gave out, it simply stopped working, the way a muscle stops working when it has been held too tight for too long. He stood there with his mouth open and nothing coming out. He could see the panic in Baelor's two toned eyes, the way his brother's composure broke.

His usual composure morphing into something raw, something that looked like fear. And how strange, Maekar managed to think to himself. Fear was not an expression he had seen on his brother’s face. 

Baelor had never been afraid of Maekar's anger, but this was not anger, it was pain and hate, and Baelor was seeing it for the first time, and he did not know what to do.

"Maekar." His name in Baelor's mouth, rough and urgent. "Maekar, look at me. Stay with me."

But Maekar was not fully there. Maekar was in Summerhall watching Daeron's face at the docks, Maekar was leaving Lys, wondering if Aerion will have anyone who’d sit with him when he is alone. Maekar was leaving Dorne, watching his daughter’s teary faces getting smaller and smaller before disappearing completely. Maekar was in a courtyard listening to his youngest son's laughter and walking away from it because he could not stand beside the life his boy had built without him.

"I ruin things," he said, when he finally replied. "That is what I do. That is all I have ever- everything I touch, Baelor. Everything.  should not have been a father. I should not have-" 

His breath hitched. "Dyanna would be ashamed of me. She trusted me with them and I could not- I could not even-"

He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. A rough, graceless gesture, like a boy trying not to cry and failing at that too.

"The king was right to leash me. Our father was right. Every man who ever looked at me and saw the lesser prince was right. I am not- I cannot even make my own children-"

His voice broke again.

"And now you are packing a trunk and you did not think to tell me because why would you. Why would you tell me anything. I am just the man who shares your bed and cannot even do that without making it a punishment. I have punished you for loving me and I have punished my children for needing me and I-"

He did not finish, there was nowhere left to go. The ache had eaten everything, every justification, every wall, every carefully constructed reason for his own solitude and left him standing in the wreckage.

Baelor pulled him in.

No hesitation, no careful approach, no slow hand offered and waiting to be refused. He pulled Maekar against him and held on tight with both arms and Maekar felt the shudder that went through his brother's body and realised Baelor was crying. Quietly, the way Baelor did everything, but unmistakably. His breath came in pieces against Maekar's hair.

"Stop," Baelor said, and his voice was wrecked. "Stop, Maekar. Please."

Maekar could not stop, he did not know how to stop. His hands came up and gripped the back of Baelor's doublet and he held on the way a drowning man holds on to whatever is nearest, and the sound that came out of him was not a word. It was just grief. Shapeless, graceless, long overdue.

Baelor held him through it, held him the way he had held him through fevers when they were boys, steady and immovable, except he was not steady now. His hands shook against Maekar's back. His voice shook when he spoke.

"You are not a failure. Listen to me. You are not."

"You don't-"

"I do. I know exactly what you are. You are the man who sent his sons away not out of cruelty but because you loved them enough to know they needed what you alone could not give. Who let the girls go to Starfall because you loved them more than you needed them. And Egg-" His voice cracked. "Egg worships you. He talks about you so often that Ser Duncan has started calling him 'little Maekar' and the boy beams every time, Maekar. He beams."

Maekar shook his head against Baelor's shoulder. Denying it, unable to hear it, unable to receive the comfort he did not deserve. Baelor's arms tightened.

"I should have told you about my trip. I should have told you about everything. I stopped because I thought silence was what you needed and I was wrong. I was wrong and I am sorry."

"I have much to be sorry for." Baelor pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were red, his face stripped of every composure Maekar had ever resented. "I am sorry I did not break down your door at Summerhall. I am sorry I let you send yourself away from your own life. I am sorry I left you alone in your grief."

Maekar stared at him. Baelor's face was blurred through his own tears but he could see enough. The red eyes, the trembling mouth, the cracks running through the composure Baelor had worn like a second skin for as long as Maekar had known him. And beneath it, just a man. Just his brother, afraid of losing him the same way he is afraid. 

"And Ashford." Baelor's voice dropped. "I should have come to you first. Before the trial, before I stood for Ser Duncan, I should have told you what I meant to do. I should have looked you in the eye and explained why. Instead you found out the way you did, as if you were- as if you were no one to me." He swallowed. "I was a coward. It was easier to do the right thing than to face you while I did it. And I cannot undo that. I wish I could undo that."

Something shifted in Maekar's chest. A key turning in a lock he thought he had swallowed.

"I never stopped loving you," Baelor said, almost a whisper. "You need to know that. The quiet was not- it was never that. Not for a single day."

Maekar's hands loosened in Baelor's doublet. Not letting go. Just shifting. Maekar's forehead dropped against Baelor's and they stood there, breathing the same air, and Maekar thought of that summer when they were boys, of the hum beneath his ribs he did not yet know to call want. It was still there, after everything. After Jena and Dyanna and Ashford and a year of silence and a marriage neither of them had chosen. Still there.

Baelor kissed him then. Soft, barely there. Just the press of his mouth against Maekar's, brief and careful and trembling, and Maekar felt the sound that left him, small and broken. He leaned in, and the kiss deepened, with the slow aching weight of something that had waited decades to be allowed. Baelor's hand tightened in his hair and Maekar opened his mouth and let him in.

The kiss was not a fix and it was not a promise and it was not quite enough, but it was the first true thing that had passed between them in over a year.

"Don't go," Maekar said, against his mouth.

"I won't."

"Don't leave me."

"I won't."

"I am so tired, Baelor." 

"I know." Baelor's hand came up to the back of his head, cradling it the way one cradles something fragile, and Maekar let him because he was fragile, because he had always been fragile, because the armour had never been real and they both knew it now. "I know you are. Rest, brother. I am here, I am not going anywhere."

Maekar closed his eyes and let his face fall into the curve of Baelor's neck. He breathed in and found warmth there, and skin, and the familiar scent of him, ink and cedar and something underneath that had no name but that Maekar's body knew the way it knew its own heartbeat. He let it settle over him. Let Baelor's arms and Baelor's voice and Baelor's steady presence anchor him to something solid, something real. 

For the first time since Ashford, he felt tethered. He breathed. Baelor breathed. And the room that had felt like a punishment since Maekar had entered it months ago did not feel like one anymore.

It felt like the beginning of something. Small and uncertain and bruised. But there.