Chapter Text
They don’t say anything.
She walks everyday by him, greets him good morning and evening. No one suspects a thing, fore they couldn’t. They’ve done nothing wrong. In a world in which everyone does what they want, they hold true, they set an example for the children. To them, the stories, the lessons, they might be fiction to everyone else around them. Rhaenrya’s giggles down the hall, the pleasured moans of Laenor in the walls, and Ser Strong laughing in the distance as his Princess challenges him to do it harder.
But theirs is the righteous path, the steadfast path. In a world where the rules don’t matter, they take honor in setting themselves apart. And the restraint, the trammeled chains of duty and chastity, in the purpose of the passing look, the sink hole of the other’s presence in a room filled with people. It made what they felt richer and deeper than any lapse of judgement or nihilistic want of naked flesh.
They knew how they felt, they knew that there was nothing they wouldn’t do for one another. That to feel her warm body in green silk in his arms, to nuzzle her nose in those perfect waving curls, and to smell his musk as he buried his tired and sorrowed countenance into her soft dowdy breasts. It was beyond the hopes and dreams of a gallant knight and his beautiful queen. Yet, it sustained them, year after year, the knowing, the certainty, that their love was real, was so potent that it did not have to be expressed, to be spoken.
He stands by her door at night and knows that beyond it she lays her head against the other side of that divide of everything they fought for in the quiet stillness. He hears her finger tapping against the iron wood. The sliding of her luxurious copper locks against the studs’ echo behind him. She bears languishingly the longing and need, the need for him to know that she sees him, feels him. And he smirks with glassy eyes.
They cannot hold each other, cannot kiss, but they can be there, every day, for the rest of their lives. They know that no matter how sad, how hopeless, and how isolating this life could be, that neither were truly alone as long as he stood beside every door, her voice his compass, and his presence her shield.
The grey of dawn washes out the dark pearly glister of the moonlight upon the Blackwater that rose and spilled by the jagged rocks under the Red Keep. The rushing current of the morning tide reflecting the inner turmoil, the unsettled change, in Criston Cole’s heart as he stood by her door night after night. The rising tide of anger, the roar of memories and sensations, aggressive, heated, … and false. Then, the lapping retreat, the rolling trickled sloshing of the receding that reveals the fresh washed blackness of the hard and deadly rocks – all that remained when the torrent came and went.
It was anger, a darkness, a tempest of untamable hate, that he could not control. Years have passed, days and weeks of many smiles and wonder. Yet, the deepness of the night, like the passing snap of a cur saving it’s pride, carries with it demons that circle the mind like crows, squawking and picking at the insecurities, the vulnerabilities, and the weaknesses that no armor, no matter how castle forged or white, could protect him against. Shame, guilt, and self-loathing built a furnace about his very heart, its pumping bellows spouting fire from his lungs as it forges blades and barbs of hate that it quenches in his very soul.
Night after night, the armory is overfilled with black venomous weapons to use against the one that had wrong him so, that used him shamefully, that filled him with a deep regret that he could not wash out. Her smile, her dismissive flick of hair as she passed him, the blatant secret looks between the Commander of the City Watch, knowing that they can all see it … that he can see it. Every moment, every sketched capture, colored in blacks and reds, is like the echoes of the hammering of his smithies working through the night to fully arm his army of terrible urges and thoughts, readying to strike. The night passing slow and bitterly with nothing but the rushing waves that fill his brain with its roars and chaos.
But when the hours of darkness pass, and the first light of the day touches the sky - the songs of the lark in the distance echoing in chorus along the bay – their comes the first chimes of a holy order that rings the end of war beating. It is but a short moment, a small window, but fundamental to everything that he is and would remain. It is in this time of the day, as lightning bolts of purple and orange fracture the sky, the breaking of dawn in the dreams of spring, that he goes to his altar to pray for forgiveness for the night’s blasphemies and war mongering.
It was merely five minutes, every morning, for a decade, in the transition of the change of guard. The door slides open quietly, the shuffled rattle of white armor breaking the silence, and the metal reflecting the silver desaturation of the bedchamber. He stops at the bedside and looms over a figure laying awake, always awake - eyes cast out beyond the balcony that overlooks the sea. She says not a word, her mind troubled, her heart guarded, and her body wearied from the long tumult of dangerous mornings and sleepless nights that have passed, afear of one more dawn and what it might bring. Will today be the day? Will this be the day she has dreaded for ten long years?
She says none of this to him, she needs not say a word, for he knows – always. She rubs a finger across her lips in worry, her gaze heavy, eyes watered. If it is a sob she sputters, it is covered with a sigh. Then, she reaches out and takes his hand. They have all night, but a few strides, a second’s worth of paces and she could be his, they could join. But honor and right, a greater and holier devotion, gives them but this moment and only this moment to have for themselves. He kneels by her side and she presses his hand to her cheek and exhales as if his touch was oxygen that the night of demons and doubts had stolen from her very lungs. He was the warmth from a long cold night, and her milk soft skin the cooling refreshment from the solitude of hellish heat in the rage of memories.
She nuzzled her cheek into his sword hand - the hand that protects her children, that protects her. And like a salve on deep burns and old wounds, her need, her reverence for who he was, who she believes him to be, washes away the sharp ridges and hard edges of a rock and makes him a stone, glassy and polished - venerable again. Every morning since his failure at the god’s wood, they come to one another, they save one another, over and over again. They reassure each other that whatever comes, they have each other ... to the death.
She is naked under the covers, but he dares not touch her, despoil her. Their lips could touch, but they would not sully such a perfect moment with human desire. This, them, in the purple light of a new dawn, was not about lust or carnal satisfaction. It was about love – true love – untainted, devoid of sin, and pure.
She sits up and rubs her cheek against his, sighing contently at the scratchiness of his stubble, the warmth that is in contrast to her naked creamy breasts and hard rosy nipples against his ornate chest plate. He does not touch her, cannot bring himself too, for she is beyond this world, beyond a tainted and unrighteous man. But still he cherishes her touch, the feeling of salvation in her love, her forgiveness for his failings as a true knight night after night.
The hour grows late, the change of guard almost upon them. Soon, another day, another fight, was to come. And he takes his leave with a chaste kiss to her brow, her hand trailing across his handsome features. He watches the beautiful queen get up to reveal her nudity as she pads to the balcony to look out at the dawn across the sea. She was the pinnacle of true womanhood, her body smooth and fair, her luxurious copper tresses touching the cleft of her pert and shapely bottom. There were flaws - stretch marks on her hips and a belly just a little softer than taut - but they somehow made her all the more beautiful in his eyes. The Mother and the Maid as the light fell over her chaste and graceful feminine figure. When her door closes softly, Alicent’s gaze is drawn to it painfully, longingly. When she closes her eyes, feeling his parting, she girds herself as she dawns anew the heaviness of the mantle that she puts upon herself once more when her comfort, her strength, and her shield is withdrawn.
But when he remerges in the mid-afternoon, and reports for duty to her, she will give the softest of private smiles and a nod. No one would ever know, nothing in the histories written, and their names synonymous with tragedy in a single color. But if the stones of the Red Keep could talk, perhaps they’d whisper of the white knight and his sainted queen. It would bespeak for them of everything they could not and would not say for themselves but felt in the very brim of their souls within every glance and nod that meant nothing to those about them … but the very world to them alone.
It would speak, indeed, of the most devoted oath of loyalty, of the truest love, that a realm would never know nor see the likes of again.