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Alicent Hightower had not, by her own cheerful admission, opened a door for herself in something close to four years. This was not for lack of ability. It was because she was married to Rhaenyra Targaryen, who would sooner have died than let her - and who had once, in genuine earnest, watched Alicent stand in front of a closed pantry for a full thirty seconds rather than turn the handle herself, and had come running like the house was on fire. “I'm allergic,” Alicent had informed her, perfectly serene, examining her nails. “To doorknobs. It's a documented condition.” And Rhaenyra, who knew full well that a documented condition was no such thing and did not care in the slightest, had opened the pantry, and gotten her the crackers, and kissed her, and thought, not for the first time, that she would gladly spend every year she had on this earth waiting on this woman hand and foot.
That was the shape of them, and had been from the very start. Alicent did not carry things, or fetch things, or stand up if there was any conceivable way of not standing up. She had perfected the meaningful look across a room that meant bring me that, and the small put-upon sigh that meant I am cold, do something about it, and Rhaenyra answered every last one of them like it was the great privilege of her life - because it was. Some people called Alicent spoiled. They were correct. Rhaenyra had spoiled her, deliberately, with both hands, for years, and fully intended to keep right on doing it until they were both very old and even more impossible than they already were.
And nowhere on this earth was Alicent more thoroughly, more gloriously spoiled than in their bed.
Because Alicent Hightower, who would not open a door, most certainly did not do things in bed. Alicent received. Alicent lay back against the pillows like a woman who fully expected to be attended to, and was, and considered any other arrangement frankly beneath her. She was a pillow princess of the highest and least apologetic order - and Rhaenyra, who liked nothing in this world better than doing every last bit of the work while her wife came apart and took all the credit, would not have had it any other way.
Tonight Alicent was already in the bed when Rhaenyra came up - propped against the pillows in one of Rhaenyra's shirts and absolutely nothing else, and the look she leveled across the room was not the bring me that look, nor the I am cold look. It was the other one. The one that went through Rhaenyra like a live current.
“I need you,” Alicent said. No preamble. Alicent never bothered with preamble; she had people for that, and by people she meant Rhaenyra. “Come here. I've been thinking about it all day, and I cannot be expected to do a single useful thing until you have dealt with it.” She held out one hand, imperious and already half-wrecked. “Come to bed and take care of me.”
And Rhaenyra went. Of course she went - shedding clothes on the way like the house was on fire all over again, because there was no version of her anywhere that heard I need you in that voice and did anything other than come running.
She got her hands on her wife, all of her, the warm bare length of her under that soft worn shirt, and Alicent melted back into the pillows and let her, because being let was the entire point. Rhaenyra kissed her slow and deep and dragged the shirt up and off, and Alicent lifted her arms to help with that and that alone - because it was the single greatest labor she intended to contribute to the evening, and both of them knew it.
Rhaenyra got her mouth on her tits, because she was Rhaenyra, and they were Alicent's tits, and that was simply the order of things - and Alicent arched up into it with a sound low in her throat and fisted a hand in Rhaenyra's hair and held her there, greedy and unhurried and demanding all at once.
“Don't tease me,” Alicent breathed, already well past patience - patience being yet another thing she had never seen the slightest need to develop. “I don't want slow. I want you to fill me up. I want you to take me. Please, Rhaenyra - I need it, I need you inside me, I have needed it all day, so will you please - please, baby -”
There was no force on this earth that could have kept Rhaenyra from that please. She got the harness from the drawer - because she was the one who got things, that too - and Alicent watched her buckle it on with dark, impatient, hungry eyes, and spread her legs in the sheets like the spoiled, perfect, demanding creature she was, and did not lift a finger to help, and did not have to.
And then Rhaenyra settled between her wife's thighs and gave her exactly what she had begged for. She pushed into her slow and deep and filled her up the way Alicent had asked to be filled, and Alicent's whole body drew taut, and her mouth fell open, and her bitten-short nails dug crescents into Rhaenyra's shoulders -
and Rhaenyra fucked her. Properly. Thoroughly. Devotedly - the way she did every single thing for this woman: like there was nothing on earth she would rather be doing, because there was nothing on earth she would rather be doing. She held her, and moved in her, and watched her come undone, and Alicent lay back and took every inch of it and fell to pieces and did not do one scrap of the work, and it was perfect. It was them. Rhaenyra did the giving. Alicent did the falling apart. The division of labor had never once, in all their years, been in any question.
“That's it,” Rhaenyra breathed into her throat, driving deep, watching her wife unravel beneath her. “There's my girl. I've got you. I am going to take such good care of you. You don't have to do a thing, baby - you never have to do a thing - just lie right there and let me fill you up and take care of you. That's all. That's all you ever have to do.”
And Alicent, who never had to do anything, did the one thing she always did: she came completely, helplessly apart, sobbing Rhaenyra's name into the dark and begging for more, and harder, and don't stop, without a shred of shame - because shame was for people who opened their own doors. She came around her wife with her back arched clean off the bed and her bitten nails leaving marks Rhaenyra would wear for a week. And then, breathless and imperious even in ruins, she demanded that Rhaenyra do it again.
Rhaenyra, devoted to the very last, did.
After - wrecked, boneless, thoroughly and completely seen to - Alicent lay sprawled across the ruined sheets and did not move, because moving was entirely out of the question, and watched through half-shut eyes as Rhaenyra got up, and got the water, and got the cloth, and cleaned her up, and tucked her back in. All of it. Every last bit of it. The way she always did.
“You're very good to me,” Alicent murmured, already halfway to sleep, glowing and held and utterly, thoroughly spoiled.
“Mm.” Rhaenyra pulled her in close, pressed a kiss to her hair, and drew the blankets up over the both of them. “Somebody's got to take care of you. What with the doorknob allergy and all.”
“It's a documented condition.”
“I know it is, baby.” And Rhaenyra held her wife - the most spoiled and demanding and beloved woman in all the world - and would not have traded one single impossible inch of her for anything under the stars. And then she reached over, because Alicent would certainly never do it herself, and turned out the light.
***
There was, however, one night the arrangement reversed - exactly once, and Alicent would maintain to her dying day that it did not count, that it set no precedent, that it was a documented exception - and it was the night Rhaenyra got sick.
Not a little sick. Properly sick: flattened by some vicious flu, burning up and shivering and entirely useless, the woman who carried everything suddenly unable to lift her own head off the pillow. And Alicent - who had not made herself so much as a cup of tea in four years, who regarded the kitchen as a foreign country she was occasionally escorted through - looked at her wife laid that low, and felt something fierce and unfamiliar rise up in her, and got out of bed.
She was terrible at it. That was the truth of the matter. She made the tea wrong, twice. She googled, with deadly seriousness, how do thermometers work, and then how high is too high fever adult, at two in the morning, sitting on the cold bathroom floor. She opened her own doorknobs - several of them, furious about each one - and fetched her own water and carried her own blankets, and did, with grim, fumbling, unpracticed devotion, every small thing she had spent four years refusing to do. Because the one person who usually did them could not. And someone had to. And there was no one else. And she found, to her enormous and genuine surprise, that she did not mind. That she would have opened every doorknob in the world. That carrying the weight, just this once, for her, was not a burden at all but a kind of terrible privilege she was only now beginning to understand.
“You're up,” Rhaenyra croaked at one point, blearily astonished, watching her spoiled, imperious, doorknob-allergic wife materialize at the bedside with a fresh cold cloth and a glass of water and an expression of fierce concentration. “You got up. For me.”
“Do not,” Alicent said, pressing the cloth to her forehead with great and incompetent care, “get used to it. This is a documented exception. I will deny it under oath.”
But she stayed up the whole night. She watched the fever break near dawn. She did not lie down until she was certain - and when Rhaenyra, weak and grateful and looking at her like she had personally hung the moon, tried to thank her, Alicent shushed her, and held the water to her lips, and took care of her, clumsy and devoted and completely out of her depth, because that was what you did. That was what Rhaenyra had been quietly teaching her all along, in four years of opened doors and fetched crackers and ordered dinners, without Alicent ever once noticing the lesson: that taking care of someone was not weakness, and being taken care of was not a debt. It was only love, going back and forth, in whatever direction it happened to be needed.
In the morning Rhaenyra was better, and Alicent went directly back to not opening a single door, and demanded breakfast in bed with all her usual imperious entitlement, and Rhaenyra - restored, devoted, hopelessly in love - brought it to her gladly.
But she never once forgot that her wife had gotten up. And Alicent never once admitted she would do it again in a heartbeat. And they both knew anyway, the way they knew every other thing about each other, that under all the spoiling and all the doorknobs, the whole impossible arrangement only worked because it ran, when it truly had to, in both directions.