unexpected domesticity shipping meme. you never thought you'd have a home, at least not one you can call completely yours, no strings attached and no one lording above you or controlling you. you may not have even known what a "home" truly is, or thought you wanted one. now, there is a touch of domesticity in your life, no matter what things are like otherwise, because you have a home, though you may not have a house proper.
most importantly, you now have someone to share this new facet of life with - a partner. similar to you or completely different, relationship unspoken or unrealized, heavily romantic or understated, they are slowly but surely becoming someone indispensable to you. you never could have seen this coming. and, of course, with domesticity comes a certain amount of intimacy, perhaps even the ultimate physical intimacy...you may be open to that already or you're working up to it when you'd hardly considered it before.
whether your situation is for the long term as it stands, could end at any moment, or a mere disguise you're using to lay low, you're getting comfortable. how does that make you feel? will you it accept a new lease on life - or will you sabotauge yourself before someone else does?
— Comment with your character, preferences, what tone you want your thread to take, and whether or not your open to smut. — Reply to others.
Home is a word whose meaning shifts and changes, and has not, for a long time, been without bitterness. Home is sunlight on the cliffs and hillsides, and a fire stoked to blazing, and songs of fame and glory sung in her own tongue. Home is the harp playing, the sweet warm smell of fresh rushes on the floor, her uncle's care and her brother's love.
Home is the dark shadows and the prisoning walls. Home is the taunting gaze of tapestries on the walls, of battles she could not fight and wars she could not win. Home is waiting, interminable and bitter: waiting for her uncle to recover or to die, waiting for the Shadow to fall entire, waiting for her cousin's broken body to be borne home as her father's was. Home is dark and watchful nights spent sleepless, and busying herself with the work of court and kitchen to keep herself from thinking, and home is silent reproach and the reek of sickness, and hungry eyes that will not leave her.
Home is many things. But always, home is Rohan.
She has been in the Westerlands, now, for around a month. Autumn draws in, though it is milder than any autumn she has known in the Mark. Still, the nights are beginning to lengthen, and the fires to be lit. And she has begun, with more hope than she had thought she had for such an endeavour, to make herself a place here.
The work of a lady is work which has not lost its bitter tang. She knows how to do it - and now, as she begins little by little to learn the customs of this new place, how to do it well - and she will not complain at it, but it is never absent that shadow of resentment. And yet...
It is a rainy day, and outside, the sea crashes against the cliffs - an unfamiliar sound, to someone from landlocked Rohan, but one which is becoming less strange daily. She has begun to place her own mark on the room she and her husband now share: her sword above the mantel, her wedding chest at the end of the bed. She has begun, too, to put her own mark on the wider running of the place, in small and still wary ways. The morning was spent in the kitchens, learning how they are managed here; the afternoon, before the rain swept in, in the stables. And now she is here, settled in the nook by the window, and as she stitches the rent in one of her skirts (sewing is no passion of hers, but it is easy work to keep the hands busy, and quicker to do herself than to give to someone else), she finds she is humming. She finds, to her shock, that for a moment, she is content.
She expects Jaime's return - another thing quickly mastered, even in a larger castle, is knowing where the crucial people are - and looks up with a smile as he enters, setting aside her sewing and getting to her feet.
"I heated your wine," she informs him, nodding to the flagon by the bed. "In this wet, I thought you might appreciate a little warmth."
The rain came on quick, deceptively so - a fair ways out they'd ridden, far enough that once the sky had torn its seams and the storm had come in truth, they were wheeling their horses about, laughing as the beasts reared, electrified by the suddenness of the deluge. Had it been sudden? If he'd been paying the gathering clouds any mind, and if he'd thoughtfully considered the day's earlier sprinkling bouts, he might have reasoned that challenging his favorite of the keep's guards to a woodland race would not have been wise. But the challenge had been most gamely met, and he'd been on the back of his courser and bounding into the autumn-painted woods before caution could land upon his shoulder.
It was not a day completely lost to distraction, he was proud to note, on the drenched ride back: he had seen to his duties quite admirably, by his own estimation. He had endured without vocal complaint each matter set before him by the doddering maester: he had penned the missives that needed penning (though why they needed to be scrawled by his own hand, he could not say, when the maester himself was perfectly capable of writing), and he had rewarded himself with a lengthy training session in the yard. He had held forth with both his father and a visiting lord, and he had - well, that may have been all he'd done before he'd struck upon the notion of a storm-tossed race.
And now there can be no decisive winner, for how the contest was cut short, and when they canter back into the yard, he is a vision of mud-splattered leather, rain-ruined hair, and laughter that had not been the least bit subdued by the storm. Now he is home, and his besmirched steed is taken into the refuge of the warm barn, and he hurries into the refuge of his own warm keep.
His thoughts do, by this hour, turn with unerring consistency to his wife. She is ever upon the fringes of his thoughts: she is what fortifies him when he is faced with letters and quills, and she is the fond fire that enlivens his blood for the spar. She is the warmth he most looks forward to at the closing of each day, though it is still, after a month, still strange to find himself so anticipating warmth. So much of his life is lived in combustion, thrilling to open flame, riotous and destructive; this sense of returning home, of coming to harbor, of a trusted peace, is thoroughly bewildering.
Yet he seeks it all the same, and when he pushes open the door to the chambers he shares now with his lady, it is with a brisk, careless hand, with mud still caked to his boots, and with an impatient, energetic gleam in the cut jade of his eyes. There she is, with sewing in her hand and a smile at her lips, and in his chest is the unfamiliar fist of his heart, pulling so tight it might have been mistaken for sorrow outside this room. It is only in his wife's company that he has found that baffling strain of joy which paces so close beside grief, as if he is only just understanding how deeply the threat of a loss can be felt. He cannot - he will not - imagine an evening when he does not burst into this room to greet her.
He is dripping, he has not taken care to make himself presentable, hurried more by his need to be returned to her than by his need to look the part of a gentleman in doing so. There is a grin on his face when she rises, and there is no couth in the way his eyes lope down her body and then back up, as if he'd come upon her dressed in translucent black silks. She does not take to sewing with any heartfelt devotion, he knows, and she has a talent for sparring and riding as much as she must retain a talent for mastering the details of their castle's running. She is lovely to behold in her enacting of both.
He gives a doggish shake of his head, a rough spray of wet diamonds from the gold of his hair, closing the door behind him with his foot.
"You needn't have troubled yourself if you only sought to warm me," he is all too happy to jibe, though he does cast an approving glance toward the flagon. That will burn down nicely. His hands come absently to the sword belt at his hips, unfastening wet leather.
"You'll be pleased to know that I bested Ser Dorran in a half-league race, rain and all." This would account, of course, for the aroma of fresh rain and trampled greenery and muddied horse that attends him.
He is filthy with mud, drenched and dripping on a floor which, she happens to know, was not long since cleaned; and he is coarse, and he is boastful as always, and he is shaking rainwater onto everything, like a hound returning to its kennels; and why, then, is it not aggravation that she feels first, but a curious sense of relief? His smile is a bright and gleaming thing, in its own way as animal as his coarseness, and it is sweeter for that. There is, for all his braggadocio, nothing openly false in that smile, or in the turn and glitter of emerald eyes; there is nothing hidden and nothing sly, and there is a joy and a vitality that she cannot help but be drawn to. She is not sure which is stranger: that she hated him so vehemently on first meeting, or that she cannot hate him at all now.
"And was that half-league ridden, my lord, or swum?" He brings out in her a humour she had forgotten she had, that dry sarcasm that she had generally considered the province of her brother. Sweeping her hair (it, too, is damp, but only a little; she came in before the rain was nearly so heavy, and has been sitting by the fire long enough to dry the worst of it) back behind her shoulders, she brushes by him to retrieve the wine, pouring him a cup. "As for warming you, my clothes are clean. Settle for the wine, or else set the muddy things aside."
The look she gives him, as she holds out the cup, suggests that this is an invitation as much as a complaint.
The floor most certainly was recently cleaned, and he knows this not because he pays any mind to the routines of basic domestic upkeep that go on around him, but because he knows his wife would never allow such unseemly lapses. Of course the floor would have recently been cleaned, and the sheets recently turned, and the drapes recently straightened, all now freckled with mud from the tossing of his wet hair and sodden leathers. Of course his swaggering entrance into this room they share might make her shriek for just that reason, and of course that was his driving motivation.
She is hardly one to shriek, however; ever is she composed and diligent in her poise. Even with the filth tracked in now flecked upon the various surfaces at hand, she greets him in humor. He follows her with flickering eyes as she breezes by him, the now-familiar scent of her a marvel of intoxication still. There is an ease to her that had beguiled him from the start: the effortless casting of her hair behind her shoulders, the pouring of a cup of wine, the gentle banter. She is fair of face and voice, and in all the work done by hand and wit, too.
"Would you stand in greater admiration if it had been ridden or swum?" He reaches for the cup, the distance between them receding in his enthusiasm to close it, and downs a careless gulp without taking his eyes from her. There is an invitation folded within her complaint - if he has never been overly given to fluency in texts, he has applied himself to learning his wife's inflections with a craftsman's fascination - and he sets the wine aside as swiftly as he'd taken it.
"Or perhaps I should ask which you would kneel for in admiration." A shameless jest, and delivered with a grin as he raises both hands to the damp shine of her hair. With discordant tenderness he combs his fingers through what falls, undisguised in his own admiration even as he fishes for hers, and combatant always against the weather which would threaten health or comfort where she is concerned.
"I would stand in greater admiration of a man with the wisdom to keep dry." And yet, for all the tartness of her tone, she does not move away from his touch, even with the wet mud that clings to him coming so perilously close to her clean gown.
Not, that is, until he says that last part; and then she ducks away from him, and there is a momentary shadow in her expression, an unfeigned irritation as she slips past him and back towards her seat at the window. She knows - already, she understands him well enough to know - that it is her irritation he seeks as often as not; but still, he has hit there upon one of the surest ways to spark her temper.
"And am I so delicate a flower that the spring rains will wash me away?" There is a hypocrisy, perhaps, in her affront, when she has just made so clear a sign that she thinks he ought to have stayed out of the rain himself. "Should I rather cower beneath the eaves, lest a drop of water should accomplish what the ranged forces of a war could not? I am made of the same flesh as you, my lord; as you have proved most aptly, it does not melt when wetted."
Her affront does come, though because it comes in answer to words he did not purposefully wield to prick her, he is bewildered when she leaves him. She has allowed him only a curt and cursory touch, and like a hound still lapping after scraps, he follows without, for the moment, any capacity for dignified affront of his own.
No delicate flower is she, as was proven before all and sundry on the day they were wed, and for all her ladylike propriety, he knows she is not vapid, as so many other ladies seem content to be. Never will she cower beneath the eaves, at either the sight of an approaching storm or a galloping adversary, and he laughs at the verdict made. They are hardly made of the same flesh, no matter the like-minded wars they have presumably fought, and he makes use of his longer gait and greater bulk to intercede her progress to the waiting seat by the window.
"Perhaps I would stand in greater admiration of a woman who does not pride herself on being so obstinate and thorny a weed." There is a smirk at the corner of his lips, and when he reaches for her now, it is not for her shining hair, but for the neat fabric at the back of her thigh.
"Need I remind you how readily you melt when wetted?"
His hands are muddy, and her dress, as she has so curtly observed, is clean; and she ought not to be warmly disposed to him, under the circumstances. She ought not to encourage him, either. This she has thought several times over their still-short acquaintance, and several times, she has annoyed herself by giving in to his admitted charms.
So she does now; and where she might yet be able to dart out of reach before he does more to muddy her white skirts, she instead finds herself turning into his grip, relenting enough to put a hand up to anchor herself at the sodden neck of his jerkin.
"Need I remind you that I, too, would sooner see you kneel in admiration than stand?" There is, in her tone, still a note of scorn - but teasing now, without the ring of genuine offence; and a hint of a smile plays at the corners of her mouth. "Or that when my obstinate thorns have left their scratches on your back, you have not made much complaint then."
She illustrates her point by raising her hand from his collar to his neck, digging her nails lightly against warm skin. Her irritation lingers, but distant; it was only a passing thing, his insult, made without intent, and his hand on her thigh has - she will confess it - more promise than stung pride. There is, in her upturned eyes, a glint of mischief; another thing that she had almost thought herself beyond.
"See! now you have muddied my dress, too. I told you to take those wet things off." No longer a hint: her smile now mirrors his, unfamiliar on a face more accustomed to dour manners. "One might almost think that was your aim."
It is not only rain which has meandered down the contours of his roped forearms, smearing at his palms. There is mud dappled there, too, for his hands are often unthinking in their work, whether in arrogance or disinterest or bravado. They are streaked now with the bustle of charging pell-mell through the deluge, with the grime which attends sodden leather and mucked horsehair, and never has he lived a day when the thought might have crossed his mind to pause in his dealings and scrub his hands clean. A waste of precious minutes that could be spent pursuing the next diversion.
So it is now, with his hands filthy and his every article of clothing bedecked with streaming rain and resilient mud, and he is thinking only of being close against her. His wife, in her admirably clean skirts - white! - and he is perfectly aware now that any ire of hers will be justly earned. If she whirls away wearing the print of his sullied hands on her lovely gown, it will be a gamble joyfully made.
But she does not bristle away again. Her slim fingers make of his collar a mooring, and his eyes begin to roam across her face, down to the modestly-clad curve of her breasts, mapping all of her in that guileless way he tends toward when she stands so dangerously close to him. Through the clinging aroma of spent rain he fixes on the warmth of her scent, the fingers at her thigh curling with uncomplicated excitement into her skirts. The smile revealing itself at the corner of her lips is all he must see for his own to be baited into a full, boyish grin.
"If I had no wish to be maimed, my lady, I would not return so often to you." But where she is spined she also frequently rewards him with splashes of sweetness. Her nails nick into his skin, flushed still from his superfluous exercises in the storm, and he leans in as if he means to kiss her until her smile turns to gasping.
But he pulls himself away, saunters to the chair which had been hers until his arrival, and reclines there with a well-earned ease. To his own muddy garb he continues to pay no mind, inspired instead by what has come to pass with her own. Too soiled to wear, by her own laws.
"I've no such discourteous aims, my lady, but fortune is once again desperate for my favor." His smile is a cocky knife, most pleased to imagine that fortune courts him, and never the other way around. He gestures to her with his chin, to her compromised gown. "Off with it, before you muddy anything else. But slowly, so that I can see it fall from you at both front and back."
He is infuriating. In how he leans in, how the flash of his teeth and glint of his green eyes stirs her blood and makes her instinctively turn her face up towards his; in how he pulls away, leaving her with muddied skirts and a smear along the bodice of her gown; in the careless way he continues to smear mud and rainwater on her seat, her cushions, no doubt her sewing as well. Most of all, in the fact that for all her aggravation, she cannot be uncomplicatedly angry.
"Bist þu eoforswín se mic baðige ofgǣþ?" she grumbles, stepping back from him, towards the hearth, her arms folded across her now-stained chest. "You are a swine, Ser Jaime. And you are fortunate that I do not turn you back out in the rain, to snort and root with your brethren in the sty. Do not touch my sewing!"
Sharp words, delivered with a ring that might carry some weight in the halls of her youth, but she does not expect much of them here; he has shown no sign of bending to her will. If she is entirely honest, it is part of his charm, aggravating as it is. There is something simple in his cocksure, self-certain attitude, in the consistent drive of his demands, that is refreshing in its ease; there is, too, something exciting in how readily he sweeps aside all that should be in favour of his own desires. And she cannot entirely exorcise the smile from her face, nor the strange thrill that thrums inside her.
Besides, this is what she expected. He is many things, but not subtle; she is many things, but no longer innocent. This is the game she set out to play, and they have the same ending in mind to it, she is sure - it is only how they get to it that they may disagree upon. (And it is passing strange, after these few weeks, to find that she wants him; to find that they are aligned in this, that there is inside her a hunger to match his, and a clumsy humour to grope along with his.) And so, even as she scolds him, she is already reaching for her laces, loosening the edges of her bodice, her eyes not leaving him.
"You know that when I am in my shift, I must flee you again? For it is clean, too. You have not wetted that yet."
His poetry was, by force of habit, kept always folded between the pages of tomes, musings and meter committed to parchment for no one’s sake but his own. It was, unlike his songs, not written so that it might accompany a harp, something intended, even before the words began to lilt in his head, for an audience. For a casual audience, it might well be – a song to be song at a feast, a feature of the entertainments arranged for a respected lord hosted in his father’s court. Songs for merrymaking, to bring amusement to anyone who might care to hear, written with no one’s face in mind. Songs of sorrow came easier than songs of mirth, in truth; he was susceptible to melancholy far more often than he was susceptible to reasonless joys. The songs he sang, then – or the songs which were no more than notes strummed from the silver strings of his harp – were often reflections upon those indistinct melancholies. He had never had someone to address his most poignant pangs to.
His wife, he had been certain from the day they were wed, would be a kindly but lukewarm presence in his life. She would be dutiful, he did not doubt; she would defer to his father, no matter how grotesque his worsening madness; she would take up her embroidery beside his fretful mother, and she would speak gently with the ladies of court, and she would turn a light and able wrist when she poured the wine. She would, if the gods were good, bear him healthy children. Of that he is less certain; in the histories are so many tales of eviscerating woe. So many curses laid and heeded too late, if they were ever heeded at all. Kings who took for granted their martial triumphs, who took for granted the allegiances sworn to them, who took for granted the women they wed and the legacies they were meant to protect. The threat of tangible war upon torn and blazing fields demands too much diligent focus for him to be troubled by unrealized nightmares; the hovering destruction of sorcery and prophecy. That does not keep his heart from falling beneath those very shadows.
And he has, despite the dread that has hounded him from the hour of his birth, found himself writing poetry. Not lines devoted in precise, elegant script to parchment so that they can be hidden and forgotten in the drawers of his writing desk, but lines written with a face in mind. Lines he writes in the spirit of having them be read, or perhaps of reading them aloud, and not for a faceless audience. Lines smithed upon the page as meticulously as if he were dipping the quill into his own fresh blood. Is it all for naught? He does not even know if she will look with any appreciation, let alone fondness, upon such a gift. Would she sooner be left to her own humble work, and not be bothered by his unsolicited approaches? He does not, a disinterested man might surmise, need to agonize this way. His wife is not unkind, and she is not violently resentful of him. She has trusted him to sit astride his dragon with her, supporting her with nothing more than his own body and a promise that there will be no trickery found in the skies or by his own hands. His poetry is a pale emergence between them in comparison.
All that being as it is, his hands are still damp with sweat when he joins her in the hall, at an hour later than they might usually take their final meal, but one which sees them alone beneath the vaulted ceiling, in the company only of the lavender light which is darkening like wine as the sun bleeds its last. He has brought with him the harp which he keeps closer even than his sword, and the rolled parchment upon which he has written his rather smitten ode, and the day has not been spectacularly hot, but his cheeks are aflame even so. There are candles lowly lit, and there is the quiet he has always preferred, and now there is, too, the regal beauty of this woman who is his wife, who has become a fixture in his life as it lived each day, growing as familiar to him as the red pillars which make this hall. There is wine, if not a proper dish yet brought forth, but he does not mean for this to be an evening rushed. So often has time been a leaden weight upon his back, a vice around his chest, or else a long chain ever rattling, or a breath which cannot be caught - but now he looks forward with a strangely boyish anticipation to these hours which belong to him and his lady alone.
He dips his head in greeting, silver hair spilling over his red-clad shoulders, and his heart has developed the affliction, as of late, for rousing itself to a delighted panic whenever he beholds his wife, as if meeting her anew.
“My lady. Long have I awaited this hour, and you are, as ever, more splendid than the dusk, which has had countless centuries to perfect its beauty.”
There are too many echoes, in these halls, of dark days; and she is too aware that it is not a land which her people can ever count as a friend. Even the colours of this place grieve her: black as shadow, red as blood. Even the walls seem cold and alien, hard stone of foreign make. The king is as sick, in her estimation, as ever Théoden was; but where her uncle's ailment was of grief and hollow apathy, Aegon's is bitter and mercurial rage. Fire and blood, indeed; fire that burns without warming, blood that rages without touching the heart. She is careful, she is polite, she is attentive to her father-in-law's moods; and seeing him, without fail, brings a shudder and a pang to that cold and aching place that remembers the touch of the Black Breath.
But then, how could it be else? How many brothers, wedded to sisters? How many abominations in the twisted shrub of this family tree she has married into?
Strangest of all, then, to find that she sees no sickness in her husband. She has looked for it, waited for its appearance, for experience makes her loath to trust what seems too fair; but all she has seen in him is sorrow and melancholy, and those are her own lifelong companions, almost trusted friends. Above all else, he reminds her of that high and grim nobility that had drawn her first to Aragorn, when wedding had seemed a freedom and home a prison; that air of almost Elven thought that had seemed so strange. Now she is here, and in this place which must somehow contrive to be a home, and it seems to her that it is the homeliest thing there is. His songs are not the ones she longs for; they are sung in another tongue, and played in another way, and they ring more of the meditative than the martial; and yet, a harp is a harp, and a singer a singer, and if she closes her eyes, there is not so much distance to the firelit halls of Meduseld, and the songs that ring there.
She has said none of this to him. In truth, it embarrasses her; and, too, some part of her believes that if she does not speak of her homesickness, it will fade the faster. Nor is she ever entirely comfortable with his more poetic nature when it is directed at her; at times it feels strangely false, as though he seeks to convince himself that they might have loved first, and married after.
Still, she welcomes the time that is for them alone. Whatever her doubts, he is pleasant company, and he is kind, and she has been lonely too long to ever truly mind the presence of someone who is attentive, who yet demands little of her.
She is surprised by how late this dinner is, and a little concerned. Life has so swiftly fallen into a rhythm - one which is not entirely happy, does not answer the hollow ache in her own heart, but which is simple enough to give oneself over to - and she finds herself unsettled by the skipped beat. It is an unease not settled by how he looks when he does arrive: the high and almost fevered colour on his cheeks, the hints of sweat gleaming in the candlelight.
She stands to meet him, answers the dip of his head with a shallow curtsey. She is, as always, pale in the shadows; she cannot bring herself to wear her adopted colours, and the greens and blues of grass and sky still find their way into most of what she wears. Dusk, she thinks abstractly, as he speaks; ever dusk, and long-worn night. Would that I could rather match the dawn. She does not find splendour in the dusk, only an old and unwithered dread. But his words are well-meant, and she smiles a little at them, drawing a little closer to raise a hand to his arm. A gentle touch; a small concern.
"Is it some hour of more import than I have been told? You look... troubled."
Troubled is not quite right, but she cannot find a better word for that almost feverish look in his eyes.
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bakerstreet2021-10-03 01:42 pm
Éowyn | Lord of the Rings | OTA
for perforo
Home is a word whose meaning shifts and changes, and has not, for a long time, been without bitterness. Home is sunlight on the cliffs and hillsides, and a fire stoked to blazing, and songs of fame and glory sung in her own tongue. Home is the harp playing, the sweet warm smell of fresh rushes on the floor, her uncle's care and her brother's love.
Home is the dark shadows and the prisoning walls. Home is the taunting gaze of tapestries on the walls, of battles she could not fight and wars she could not win. Home is waiting, interminable and bitter: waiting for her uncle to recover or to die, waiting for the Shadow to fall entire, waiting for her cousin's broken body to be borne home as her father's was. Home is dark and watchful nights spent sleepless, and busying herself with the work of court and kitchen to keep herself from thinking, and home is silent reproach and the reek of sickness, and hungry eyes that will not leave her.
Home is many things. But always, home is Rohan.
She has been in the Westerlands, now, for around a month. Autumn draws in, though it is milder than any autumn she has known in the Mark. Still, the nights are beginning to lengthen, and the fires to be lit. And she has begun, with more hope than she had thought she had for such an endeavour, to make herself a place here.
The work of a lady is work which has not lost its bitter tang. She knows how to do it - and now, as she begins little by little to learn the customs of this new place, how to do it well - and she will not complain at it, but it is never absent that shadow of resentment. And yet...
It is a rainy day, and outside, the sea crashes against the cliffs - an unfamiliar sound, to someone from landlocked Rohan, but one which is becoming less strange daily. She has begun to place her own mark on the room she and her husband now share: her sword above the mantel, her wedding chest at the end of the bed. She has begun, too, to put her own mark on the wider running of the place, in small and still wary ways. The morning was spent in the kitchens, learning how they are managed here; the afternoon, before the rain swept in, in the stables. And now she is here, settled in the nook by the window, and as she stitches the rent in one of her skirts (sewing is no passion of hers, but it is easy work to keep the hands busy, and quicker to do herself than to give to someone else), she finds she is humming. She finds, to her shock, that for a moment, she is content.
She expects Jaime's return - another thing quickly mastered, even in a larger castle, is knowing where the crucial people are - and looks up with a smile as he enters, setting aside her sewing and getting to her feet.
"I heated your wine," she informs him, nodding to the flagon by the bed. "In this wet, I thought you might appreciate a little warmth."
no subject
It was not a day completely lost to distraction, he was proud to note, on the drenched ride back: he had seen to his duties quite admirably, by his own estimation. He had endured without vocal complaint each matter set before him by the doddering maester: he had penned the missives that needed penning (though why they needed to be scrawled by his own hand, he could not say, when the maester himself was perfectly capable of writing), and he had rewarded himself with a lengthy training session in the yard. He had held forth with both his father and a visiting lord, and he had - well, that may have been all he'd done before he'd struck upon the notion of a storm-tossed race.
And now there can be no decisive winner, for how the contest was cut short, and when they canter back into the yard, he is a vision of mud-splattered leather, rain-ruined hair, and laughter that had not been the least bit subdued by the storm. Now he is home, and his besmirched steed is taken into the refuge of the warm barn, and he hurries into the refuge of his own warm keep.
His thoughts do, by this hour, turn with unerring consistency to his wife. She is ever upon the fringes of his thoughts: she is what fortifies him when he is faced with letters and quills, and she is the fond fire that enlivens his blood for the spar. She is the warmth he most looks forward to at the closing of each day, though it is still, after a month, still strange to find himself so anticipating warmth. So much of his life is lived in combustion, thrilling to open flame, riotous and destructive; this sense of returning home, of coming to harbor, of a trusted peace, is thoroughly bewildering.
Yet he seeks it all the same, and when he pushes open the door to the chambers he shares now with his lady, it is with a brisk, careless hand, with mud still caked to his boots, and with an impatient, energetic gleam in the cut jade of his eyes. There she is, with sewing in her hand and a smile at her lips, and in his chest is the unfamiliar fist of his heart, pulling so tight it might have been mistaken for sorrow outside this room. It is only in his wife's company that he has found that baffling strain of joy which paces so close beside grief, as if he is only just understanding how deeply the threat of a loss can be felt. He cannot - he will not - imagine an evening when he does not burst into this room to greet her.
He is dripping, he has not taken care to make himself presentable, hurried more by his need to be returned to her than by his need to look the part of a gentleman in doing so. There is a grin on his face when she rises, and there is no couth in the way his eyes lope down her body and then back up, as if he'd come upon her dressed in translucent black silks. She does not take to sewing with any heartfelt devotion, he knows, and she has a talent for sparring and riding as much as she must retain a talent for mastering the details of their castle's running. She is lovely to behold in her enacting of both.
He gives a doggish shake of his head, a rough spray of wet diamonds from the gold of his hair, closing the door behind him with his foot.
"You needn't have troubled yourself if you only sought to warm me," he is all too happy to jibe, though he does cast an approving glance toward the flagon. That will burn down nicely. His hands come absently to the sword belt at his hips, unfastening wet leather.
"You'll be pleased to know that I bested Ser Dorran in a half-league race, rain and all." This would account, of course, for the aroma of fresh rain and trampled greenery and muddied horse that attends him.
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"And was that half-league ridden, my lord, or swum?" He brings out in her a humour she had forgotten she had, that dry sarcasm that she had generally considered the province of her brother. Sweeping her hair (it, too, is damp, but only a little; she came in before the rain was nearly so heavy, and has been sitting by the fire long enough to dry the worst of it) back behind her shoulders, she brushes by him to retrieve the wine, pouring him a cup. "As for warming you, my clothes are clean. Settle for the wine, or else set the muddy things aside."
The look she gives him, as she holds out the cup, suggests that this is an invitation as much as a complaint.
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She is hardly one to shriek, however; ever is she composed and diligent in her poise. Even with the filth tracked in now flecked upon the various surfaces at hand, she greets him in humor. He follows her with flickering eyes as she breezes by him, the now-familiar scent of her a marvel of intoxication still. There is an ease to her that had beguiled him from the start: the effortless casting of her hair behind her shoulders, the pouring of a cup of wine, the gentle banter. She is fair of face and voice, and in all the work done by hand and wit, too.
"Would you stand in greater admiration if it had been ridden or swum?" He reaches for the cup, the distance between them receding in his enthusiasm to close it, and downs a careless gulp without taking his eyes from her. There is an invitation folded within her complaint - if he has never been overly given to fluency in texts, he has applied himself to learning his wife's inflections with a craftsman's fascination - and he sets the wine aside as swiftly as he'd taken it.
"Or perhaps I should ask which you would kneel for in admiration." A shameless jest, and delivered with a grin as he raises both hands to the damp shine of her hair. With discordant tenderness he combs his fingers through what falls, undisguised in his own admiration even as he fishes for hers, and combatant always against the weather which would threaten health or comfort where she is concerned.
"You shouldn't have been out in the rain."
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Not, that is, until he says that last part; and then she ducks away from him, and there is a momentary shadow in her expression, an unfeigned irritation as she slips past him and back towards her seat at the window. She knows - already, she understands him well enough to know - that it is her irritation he seeks as often as not; but still, he has hit there upon one of the surest ways to spark her temper.
"And am I so delicate a flower that the spring rains will wash me away?" There is a hypocrisy, perhaps, in her affront, when she has just made so clear a sign that she thinks he ought to have stayed out of the rain himself. "Should I rather cower beneath the eaves, lest a drop of water should accomplish what the ranged forces of a war could not? I am made of the same flesh as you, my lord; as you have proved most aptly, it does not melt when wetted."
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No delicate flower is she, as was proven before all and sundry on the day they were wed, and for all her ladylike propriety, he knows she is not vapid, as so many other ladies seem content to be. Never will she cower beneath the eaves, at either the sight of an approaching storm or a galloping adversary, and he laughs at the verdict made. They are hardly made of the same flesh, no matter the like-minded wars they have presumably fought, and he makes use of his longer gait and greater bulk to intercede her progress to the waiting seat by the window.
"Perhaps I would stand in greater admiration of a woman who does not pride herself on being so obstinate and thorny a weed." There is a smirk at the corner of his lips, and when he reaches for her now, it is not for her shining hair, but for the neat fabric at the back of her thigh.
"Need I remind you how readily you melt when wetted?"
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So she does now; and where she might yet be able to dart out of reach before he does more to muddy her white skirts, she instead finds herself turning into his grip, relenting enough to put a hand up to anchor herself at the sodden neck of his jerkin.
"Need I remind you that I, too, would sooner see you kneel in admiration than stand?" There is, in her tone, still a note of scorn - but teasing now, without the ring of genuine offence; and a hint of a smile plays at the corners of her mouth. "Or that when my obstinate thorns have left their scratches on your back, you have not made much complaint then."
She illustrates her point by raising her hand from his collar to his neck, digging her nails lightly against warm skin. Her irritation lingers, but distant; it was only a passing thing, his insult, made without intent, and his hand on her thigh has - she will confess it - more promise than stung pride. There is, in her upturned eyes, a glint of mischief; another thing that she had almost thought herself beyond.
"See! now you have muddied my dress, too. I told you to take those wet things off." No longer a hint: her smile now mirrors his, unfamiliar on a face more accustomed to dour manners. "One might almost think that was your aim."
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So it is now, with his hands filthy and his every article of clothing bedecked with streaming rain and resilient mud, and he is thinking only of being close against her. His wife, in her admirably clean skirts - white! - and he is perfectly aware now that any ire of hers will be justly earned. If she whirls away wearing the print of his sullied hands on her lovely gown, it will be a gamble joyfully made.
But she does not bristle away again. Her slim fingers make of his collar a mooring, and his eyes begin to roam across her face, down to the modestly-clad curve of her breasts, mapping all of her in that guileless way he tends toward when she stands so dangerously close to him. Through the clinging aroma of spent rain he fixes on the warmth of her scent, the fingers at her thigh curling with uncomplicated excitement into her skirts. The smile revealing itself at the corner of her lips is all he must see for his own to be baited into a full, boyish grin.
"If I had no wish to be maimed, my lady, I would not return so often to you." But where she is spined she also frequently rewards him with splashes of sweetness. Her nails nick into his skin, flushed still from his superfluous exercises in the storm, and he leans in as if he means to kiss her until her smile turns to gasping.
But he pulls himself away, saunters to the chair which had been hers until his arrival, and reclines there with a well-earned ease. To his own muddy garb he continues to pay no mind, inspired instead by what has come to pass with her own. Too soiled to wear, by her own laws.
"I've no such discourteous aims, my lady, but fortune is once again desperate for my favor." His smile is a cocky knife, most pleased to imagine that fortune courts him, and never the other way around. He gestures to her with his chin, to her compromised gown. "Off with it, before you muddy anything else. But slowly, so that I can see it fall from you at both front and back."
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"Bist þu eoforswín se mic baðige ofgǣþ?" she grumbles, stepping back from him, towards the hearth, her arms folded across her now-stained chest. "You are a swine, Ser Jaime. And you are fortunate that I do not turn you back out in the rain, to snort and root with your brethren in the sty. Do not touch my sewing!"
Sharp words, delivered with a ring that might carry some weight in the halls of her youth, but she does not expect much of them here; he has shown no sign of bending to her will. If she is entirely honest, it is part of his charm, aggravating as it is. There is something simple in his cocksure, self-certain attitude, in the consistent drive of his demands, that is refreshing in its ease; there is, too, something exciting in how readily he sweeps aside all that should be in favour of his own desires. And she cannot entirely exorcise the smile from her face, nor the strange thrill that thrums inside her.
Besides, this is what she expected. He is many things, but not subtle; she is many things, but no longer innocent. This is the game she set out to play, and they have the same ending in mind to it, she is sure - it is only how they get to it that they may disagree upon. (And it is passing strange, after these few weeks, to find that she wants him; to find that they are aligned in this, that there is inside her a hunger to match his, and a clumsy humour to grope along with his.) And so, even as she scolds him, she is already reaching for her laces, loosening the edges of her bodice, her eyes not leaving him.
"You know that when I am in my shift, I must flee you again? For it is clean, too. You have not wetted that yet."
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His wife, he had been certain from the day they were wed, would be a kindly but lukewarm presence in his life. She would be dutiful, he did not doubt; she would defer to his father, no matter how grotesque his worsening madness; she would take up her embroidery beside his fretful mother, and she would speak gently with the ladies of court, and she would turn a light and able wrist when she poured the wine. She would, if the gods were good, bear him healthy children. Of that he is less certain; in the histories are so many tales of eviscerating woe. So many curses laid and heeded too late, if they were ever heeded at all. Kings who took for granted their martial triumphs, who took for granted the allegiances sworn to them, who took for granted the women they wed and the legacies they were meant to protect. The threat of tangible war upon torn and blazing fields demands too much diligent focus for him to be troubled by unrealized nightmares; the hovering destruction of sorcery and prophecy. That does not keep his heart from falling beneath those very shadows.
And he has, despite the dread that has hounded him from the hour of his birth, found himself writing poetry. Not lines devoted in precise, elegant script to parchment so that they can be hidden and forgotten in the drawers of his writing desk, but lines written with a face in mind. Lines he writes in the spirit of having them be read, or perhaps of reading them aloud, and not for a faceless audience. Lines smithed upon the page as meticulously as if he were dipping the quill into his own fresh blood. Is it all for naught? He does not even know if she will look with any appreciation, let alone fondness, upon such a gift. Would she sooner be left to her own humble work, and not be bothered by his unsolicited approaches? He does not, a disinterested man might surmise, need to agonize this way. His wife is not unkind, and she is not violently resentful of him. She has trusted him to sit astride his dragon with her, supporting her with nothing more than his own body and a promise that there will be no trickery found in the skies or by his own hands. His poetry is a pale emergence between them in comparison.
All that being as it is, his hands are still damp with sweat when he joins her in the hall, at an hour later than they might usually take their final meal, but one which sees them alone beneath the vaulted ceiling, in the company only of the lavender light which is darkening like wine as the sun bleeds its last. He has brought with him the harp which he keeps closer even than his sword, and the rolled parchment upon which he has written his rather smitten ode, and the day has not been spectacularly hot, but his cheeks are aflame even so. There are candles lowly lit, and there is the quiet he has always preferred, and now there is, too, the regal beauty of this woman who is his wife, who has become a fixture in his life as it lived each day, growing as familiar to him as the red pillars which make this hall. There is wine, if not a proper dish yet brought forth, but he does not mean for this to be an evening rushed. So often has time been a leaden weight upon his back, a vice around his chest, or else a long chain ever rattling, or a breath which cannot be caught - but now he looks forward with a strangely boyish anticipation to these hours which belong to him and his lady alone.
He dips his head in greeting, silver hair spilling over his red-clad shoulders, and his heart has developed the affliction, as of late, for rousing itself to a delighted panic whenever he beholds his wife, as if meeting her anew.
“My lady. Long have I awaited this hour, and you are, as ever, more splendid than the dusk, which has had countless centuries to perfect its beauty.”
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But then, how could it be else? How many brothers, wedded to sisters? How many abominations in the twisted shrub of this family tree she has married into?
Strangest of all, then, to find that she sees no sickness in her husband. She has looked for it, waited for its appearance, for experience makes her loath to trust what seems too fair; but all she has seen in him is sorrow and melancholy, and those are her own lifelong companions, almost trusted friends. Above all else, he reminds her of that high and grim nobility that had drawn her first to Aragorn, when wedding had seemed a freedom and home a prison; that air of almost Elven thought that had seemed so strange. Now she is here, and in this place which must somehow contrive to be a home, and it seems to her that it is the homeliest thing there is. His songs are not the ones she longs for; they are sung in another tongue, and played in another way, and they ring more of the meditative than the martial; and yet, a harp is a harp, and a singer a singer, and if she closes her eyes, there is not so much distance to the firelit halls of Meduseld, and the songs that ring there.
She has said none of this to him. In truth, it embarrasses her; and, too, some part of her believes that if she does not speak of her homesickness, it will fade the faster. Nor is she ever entirely comfortable with his more poetic nature when it is directed at her; at times it feels strangely false, as though he seeks to convince himself that they might have loved first, and married after.
Still, she welcomes the time that is for them alone. Whatever her doubts, he is pleasant company, and he is kind, and she has been lonely too long to ever truly mind the presence of someone who is attentive, who yet demands little of her.
She is surprised by how late this dinner is, and a little concerned. Life has so swiftly fallen into a rhythm - one which is not entirely happy, does not answer the hollow ache in her own heart, but which is simple enough to give oneself over to - and she finds herself unsettled by the skipped beat. It is an unease not settled by how he looks when he does arrive: the high and almost fevered colour on his cheeks, the hints of sweat gleaming in the candlelight.
She stands to meet him, answers the dip of his head with a shallow curtsey. She is, as always, pale in the shadows; she cannot bring herself to wear her adopted colours, and the greens and blues of grass and sky still find their way into most of what she wears. Dusk, she thinks abstractly, as he speaks; ever dusk, and long-worn night. Would that I could rather match the dawn. She does not find splendour in the dusk, only an old and unwithered dread. But his words are well-meant, and she smiles a little at them, drawing a little closer to raise a hand to his arm. A gentle touch; a small concern.
"Is it some hour of more import than I have been told? You look... troubled."
Troubled is not quite right, but she cannot find a better word for that almost feverish look in his eyes.
Ginny Weasley | Harry Potter | OTA
Midoriya Izuku | MHA
mayuko shiraki | fruits basket | m/f
peko pekoyama | super dangan ronpa 2 | m/f
kazami tachibana | root double | m/f
aohitsugi samatoki | hypmic
keqing | genshin impact | ota
Zoey Westen | Original Character
jyn erso || rogue one || ota
cassian andor || rogue one || ota
rey || star wars || ota
ben solo || star wars || ota
bodhi rook || rogue one || ota
rose tico || star wars || ota
childe | genshin impact | ota
Nico Acosta | OC | OTA
Evie Montgomery | OC | OTA
Arha Masaari | Star Wars/The Mandalorian| OC
Jyn Erso | Rogue One | OTA
Cassia Andor | Rogue One | OTA
Essa Erso-Andor | Rogue One OC | OTA
Cassian Andor | Rogue One | OTA
Rey | Star Wars | OTA
Ben Solo | Star Wars | OTA