Aftercare
The room was heavy with heat, despite the chill that clawed against the windows from the sea. Tapestries stirred as though breathing. The messy, damp sheets of the once tidy bed were stained with fluids and passion. A single candelabra burned beside the bed, tall wax columns melting slow rivers down silver stems.
She always kept the light on after. It was grounding for her. She wanted — no. She needed to see her beautiful girl in this moment. To admire her. To take in her disheveled appearance.
Rhaenyra’s body was still coiled from exertion, her muscles humming with the aftershocks of conquest. She sat at the edge of the bed, half-turned, her back slicked with sweat and her silver-blonde hair sticking damply to her shoulders. Her eyes—those molten, commanding eyes—were fixed not on the fire, not on the dark beyond the stone balcony, but on the woman sprawled in the wreckage of sheets behind her. She watched her for a while, a mix of satisfaction and pride in her heart.
“You are not looking at me,” Rhaenyra said then, after some time. Quietly, but with weight.
The woman stirred, not from sleep, but from the warm daze of being unraveled. She didn’t answer right away—she’d learned not to. Rhaenyra didn’t like reflexive answers. She liked truths. She liked it when people thought before answering. She liked intelligence.
When their eyes finally met, Rhaenyra’s gaze sharpened—possessive, assessing. She was always like this after. Less dragon, more storm. Not tender in the way of songs. Her love was not delicate. It was vigilant. Hungry. Rough. Wanton. But her lover liked to think that in the aftershocks of pleasure, Rhaenyra managed to soften a little. Of course, the Queen loved her girl very much, she loved her deeply, but she couldn’t help the harshness of her passion once arousal took over her body.
Rhaenyra moved, slowly, deliberately. She crawled back across the bed like a lioness reclaiming her kill. The sheets twisted beneath her, trailing behind like a Queen’s train. She reached for the other woman, but didn’t touch—not yet. She hovered. Examining. Eyes sweeping over every bruise she had left, every mark her mouth had made. A proprietary gleam flickered in her gaze.
Rhaenyra lived for the satisfying sensation of marking her lover. Not for others to see, but for herself.
“There,” she murmured, fingers ghosting just above a bite on the curve of her lover’s hip. “You didn’t cry out when I did this.” She said ever so softly. It wasn’t just a simple statement, it was almost as if she was questioning her, asking her the reason of her silence.
“You had your hand over my mouth.” Her lover explained gracefully, her left hand trailing an idle caress across Rhaenyra’s hair.
“And if I hadn’t?” The older woman replied, her eyes studying the other up close.
“I would’ve woken all of Driftmark.” She said in a half joking tone. Rhaenyra knew there was some truth to those words: her beloved tended to get quite vocal during bliss, but never ever as vocal as herself. Rhaenyra was a mess.
A smile curved across Rhaenyra’s lips. Sharp. Satisfied.
She pressed her palm there now, over the mark, not cruel but not gentle. “Good.” She breathed out, two of her fingers caressing the angry red mark.
The woman reached up—bold, as only someone who had already been allowed past Rhaenyra’s walls could be—and cupped her face. “Why do you always act as though you’ve won something?”
“Because I have,” Rhaenyra said, without hesitation.
And then, quieter: “You.”
She kissed her then. Not with the urgency of before, but with something slower, more devastating. A kiss meant to scorch the memory into skin. She tasted of salt and copper and some expensive Dornish wine they hadn’t finished. Her tongue swept in like a claim, not a question.
When she pulled back, she didn’t retreat. She curled around her lover’s body, folding in like a tide pulling back toward its moon. Or more simply, like a white cat in its owner’s soft lap.
She did get softer.
One arm anchored across her ribs, fingers splayed possessively against her stomach. Rhaenyra buried her face into her hair and breathed in, deep and deliberate.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked against the back of her neck, and Gods, how her voice changed when she asked it. It almost became serious. Like the words cost her something. Like she needed to know the answer to keep from breaking herself.
“No.” Her lover simply replied, enjoying the feeling of Rhaenyra against herself.
“No lies.” She said, her words barely muffled by her mouth being pressed against the woman’s skin.
“No lies, Rhaenyra.”
Silence stretched, but not empty. It was full of breath, of heartbeat, of shifting heat and the kind of quiet only two people can share after they’ve forgotten where one ends and the other begins. That’s what their relationship was. What it had always been.
Rhaenyra’s hand drifted up to her chest, fingers spreading over her heart. Not tender. Just… grounding.
“I need you alive,” she said. “Whole. Even if I want to break you apart every time you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you love me. Like I’m not dangerous.”
“You are dangerous.”
Rhaenyra exhaled a laugh, muffled by hair. “But you keep coming back.”
“Because the fire doesn’t scare me. It warms me.”
She didn’t reply, but her grip tightened just slightly. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to say mine without having to speak.
Minutes passed like water—slow, circular. Her breathing evened. Her body, still pressed against the woman’s, began to soften in the way only exhaustion can cause: not sleep, but the lull before it. That quiet crackling just before the fire dies.
But before the dark could take them both, Rhaenyra whispered—
“If anyone touches you like I do, I’ll feed them to Syrax.”
It wasn’t a threat. It was a lullaby.
And the woman—her woman—smiled, tucked into the hollow of the dragon’s hold, and let herself be kept. She relished in the feeling of being owned. Gently, lovingly, but owned. Claimed by the woman she loved. By the Queen.
How sweet can silence be.