Body Part
The sea-wind always found a way in. Even here, in the stone-sheltered courtyard where Rhaenyra had carved out a rare sliver of solitude, the breeze crept between the hedges and stirred the ends of her silver hair. She didn’t brush it away. She never did. She let it tangle, let it move—there was something in her that refused to be overly managed, even now, years into the tight-laced performances of court.
She leaned against the edge of a marble bench, her boot resting against the low wall, watching her lover from across the garden.
The other woman stood in the sun, sleeves rolled to the elbow, posture careless but sharp. She was instructing the young steward on the layout of the new archives—always organizing, always strategizing. Her voice, even when clipped and quiet, carried. It had a cadence Rhaenyra had learned in pieces: how it smoothed when she was bored, how it sharpened when she cared.
Rhaenyra wasn’t listening to the words. Not really. She was watching her neck. The way it moved when she spoke, the subtle tendons beneath the skin, the shadow at the base of her throat where sweat had pooled from the climb up the keep.
She had kissed her there last night. Left her teeth there. She could still taste it when she closed her eyes.
When the steward finally left, the woman turned and caught her watching.
“What?”
Rhaenyra didn’t answer. She simply tilted her head and made a humming sound, one corner of her mouth curling—not quite smug, but close.
“Don’t look at me like that,” her lover said, but she was already walking toward her. Already smiling.
“Like what?”
“Like you want to swallow me whole.”
Rhaenyra leaned back on the bench. “Maybe I do.”
The woman stopped in front of her and rested one hand on the stone wall beside her head. The other, casually, slipped beneath the Queen’s chin, tilting her face up with just enough pressure to be presumptuous.
“Eat me after dinner,” she said. “There’s a small council meeting in an hour.”
“Then kiss me now, before I forget I’m meant to behave.”
Their mouths met—not frantic, not heated. Just full. Real. The kind of kiss that already knows how the other tastes, and lingers there anyway.
In the Hall of Scrolls, candlelight barely lighting the walls.
They were not meant to be alone here. But the servants had been dismissed hours ago, and the guards knew better than to interrupt.
Stacks of vellum and open ledgers littered the wide oak table. Dust hung in the air like memory. The chamber smelled of wax, ink, and old parchment—a holy kind of quiet.
Rhaenyra stood at the table’s edge, robe loose, nightclothes peeking from beneath the silk. Her fingers were stained with ink from an interrupted letter. She hadn’t written a word in half an hour.
Her lover stood behind her, arms wrapped around her waist. Chin resting on her shoulder. Eyes not on the page, but on her hands.
“You always forget how to write when I’m near,” she teased.
“I forget everything when you’re near.”
Rhaenyra turned, slowly, until they were chest to chest. Her hand came up to the other woman’s shoulder, then collarbone, then the curve of her breast—but it stopped there. Just a touch. Just a thumb running lightly over fabric.
“Sit,” she said.
So she did.
Rhaenyra straddled her lap, skirt pooling over both of them, and kissed her like they hadn’t kissed in months. With the kind of patience that felt like worship. Her hand cradled the back of the woman’s head, fingers tangled in hair.
It was then that her lips broke from hers and moved lower—to her jaw, her neck, her throat. She kissed there once. Then again. Then slower. She mouthed words she didn’t speak aloud.
Here.
Here, where you’re soft.
Here, where you trust me.
Here, where your voice lives.
Her lover exhaled shakily. Rhaenyra pulled back, barely.
“You always offer this part of yourself to me,” she whispered. “Even when you think I haven’t noticed.”
“And you always look at me like you want to memorize it.”
“I already have.”
Later, in the Dragonpit at dusk.
Smoke and scale. The warm rot of hay and blood. Rhaenyra’s boots crunched over gravel as she led her lover down the narrow path between the stalls. The dragons were restless tonight—snorting, shifting, sensing something coming on the wind.
Syrax loomed in the far end, golden as firelight, her eyes gleaming in the dark.
Rhaenyra approached her without fear. She always did. She placed a hand on her snout, whispered in Valyrian, and the beast lowered her head.
“Tell her hello,” Rhaenyra murmured, glancing back.
The woman hesitated—still not entirely comfortable around the creatures, but she stepped forward anyway. Rhaenyra watched the way she moved: cautious, deliberate, reverent.
When her hand brushed against Syrax’s warm scales, Rhaenyra stepped behind her. She placed both hands on her back, steadying her.
“You’re shaking,” she murmured into her ear.
“She’s watching me.”
“She sees what I see.”
“And what’s that?”
Rhaenyra slid her hands along the curve of her back, slow, possessive. “Strength.”
She did not mean brawn. She meant something deeper. The ability to remain, even when everything burns. The stubbornness of presence. The ability to stand her ground.
Rhaenyra kissed her shoulder. Not gently. Not sweetly. Just firmly. Like punctuation.
“You’re mine,” she said. “And I will carve that truth into the stone of this place if I must.”
⸻
The storm began after nightfall. A soft percussion on the stone windowframes, a rhythm like a lullaby sung by the sky itself.
They lay tangled in the sheets, bare, breathless. Rhaenyra’s hair was damp with sweat, plastered to her lover’s shoulder. Their legs were twined, impossible to tell whose was whose.
Rhaenyra’s head rested in the hollow where shoulder met neck. She liked it there. She always did. She said nothing, but she was mouthing something against her skin.
“What are you doing?” her lover asked.
“Kissing the part of you I want to keep forever.”
The woman turned her face toward her. Rhaenyra leaned up slightly, the lines of her body sharp in the candlelight. Her back arched as she moved, effortless and proud. Her skin glowed like something holy.
“You are all fire,” the woman whispered, touching her lower back. “But here, you melt for me.”
Rhaenyra kissed her again—too tired to speak, too full to stop.
And later, just before sleep took her, she reached out and laid her hand on the curve of her lover’s neck. Her thumb settled over the pulse. Steady. Strong.
She didn’t say it aloud, but she didn’t need to.
Here, the touch said. Here is where you are mine.