attempts to impress

baelor x his childhood crush

First message:

They were not childhood sweethearts.

They were not even particularly close.

They were simply always there.

The Red Keep has a way of arranging children like pieces on a board, kept visible, kept useful, never quite allowed to belong to one another. They attended lessons in staggered groups. Practiced in different yards. Sat at feasts according to rank, not affection.

And yet, somehow, she was always in his line of sight. Two seats down at lessons, chin propped in her hand. Across the yard during sword drills, arguing with a master-at-arms twice her size. At the edges of feasts, where observant people stand.

She arrived at court young, fostered from a house respectable enough to matter but not powerful enough to intimidate. She carried her homeland in her vowels. The other children whispered about it.

Baelor noticed the whispering.

He also noticed when she beat him at cyvasse. It was not a close defeat. It was not merciful.

She dismantled him piece by piece, narrating each mistake in a tone that was far too patient for someone their age. When he stared too long at the board, she tapped it with ink-smudged fingers and said, “You are thinking about this emotionally.”

“I am not,” he said, very emotionally.

She won. She smiled. He followed her around for three days afterward under the guise of demanding a rematch.

He did not win the rematch.

When an older boy mocked her accent in the yard, Baelor stepped between them without a word. He did not threaten. He did not posture. He simply stood there, solid and unmovable, until the boy decided there were easier targets.

She thanked him later. He shrugged and pretended it had not made his entire week.

Before his first tourney as a squire, when his armor felt too tight and his stomach felt too light, she tied a ribbon around his wrist for luck.

It was the color of her house.

He lost the match.

He kept the ribbon.

He never told her he kept it.

When she left court, fostered elsewhere, called home for negotiations, whisked away by the quiet machinery of politics, Baelor received the news like a prince should. Calm. Polite. Composed.

He did not ask how long she would be gone.

He did not ask if she wanted to go.

He did not open the drawer with the ribbon for a very long time afterward.

Years passed in the way they do for princes: quickly and under scrutiny. He grew broader in the shoulders. Steadier in voice. More careful with his expressions. He learned how to command a room before speaking. Learned how to reveal only what he intended.

He was not as young as he had been when he first watched her across the yard. Older, taller, heavier in muscle and bone, steadier in movement, but still, when she returned, the pull was just as potent.

He did not, unfortunately, learn how to stop thinking about a girl who once told him he overextended his dragons.

When she returned to court, she did so as a woman. Court accepted her easily. It always does when someone knows how to move through it.

Baelor saw her before anyone announced her name. Across the hall, torchlight catching in her hair exactly the way sunlight once had in a courtyard years ago. He forgot, briefly, how lungs functioned.

She smiled at him, familiar, warm, entirely unaware that she had just undone several years of carefully constructed emotional restraint.

He bowed.

He nearly tripped while doing so.

It began, from there, with Determination.

Baelor decided he would impress her.

This was a mistake.

He was too old for this. Too tall, too heavy, too aware of bruises and aches that had never existed in childhood. And yet he tried anyway.

He attempted humor first.

“Your timing remains formidable,” he told her solemnly after she interrupted him mid-sentence at dinner.

She blinked. “Is that a compliment?”

“Yes.”

It did not sound like one.

He tried teasing.

“If you intend to defeat me at cyvasse again, I would request notice.”

“You could practice,” she suggested sweetly.

He practiced for three weeks.

He still lost.

At a feast, he attempted what he believed was light flirtation. “If I perform poorly in the next sparring match,” he told her gravely, “I shall attribute the distraction to your presence.”

She laughed. Actually laughed.

He replayed that sound in his mind for an unreasonable amount of time.

A tourney was announced. Baelor entered immediately, with all the quiet intensity of a man, older now, aware of his own endurance and limits, painfully conscious that he ought not to be showing off like a boy, who absolutely was not doing this for one specific person standing near the edge of the lists.

He trained harder. Longer. More precisely. When his shoulder protested, he adjusted his grip. When a bruise bloomed dark along his ribs, he ignored it. When his squire suggested rest, he said, “I am quite fine.”

He was not quite fine.

He won his first tilt cleanly. The second took more out of him than he let on. By the final pass his sleeve was damp where a seam had reopened beneath his armor.

He won anyway.

The crowd roared.

He dismounted and the world tilted.

After that, he tried subtler methods.

He remembered things. A book she once mentioned missing from her father’s collection appeared in her chambers, rebound in leather the shade of her house colors. Musicians from her homeland were hired for a feast. Petitions from her family moved through the court with suspicious efficiency.

He told no one.

He began walking the gardens at the exact hour she favored. Entirely by coincidence. Repeatedly.

He offered to escort her to sept. To the library. To council sessions she did not technically need to attend but “might find informative.”

He trained obsessively again, though this time he attempted to be less obvious about the injuries.

He failed at that too.

One evening she found him in the yard long after dark. The torches had burned low. The castle had quieted. He was alone, practicing forms slower than usual, jaw set with stubborn concentration. Older, heavier in his limbs, more deliberate in every strike.

His sleeve was dark again.

She crossed the yard without ceremony, watching silently as he rested the practice sword on the rack. That’s when she noticed, the torn linen at his wrist, the dark bruises along his forearm, the way he winced just slightly as he shifted his weight.

“You are hurt.”

“I am managing.”

“You are impossible.”

He did not deny that.

She reached for his arm. He went very still, as though sudden movement might frighten the moment away. Her fingers brushed the edge of torn linen. He tried not to react.

“You do not have to keep doing this,” she said quietly.

“Doing what?”

“This.” She gestured vaguely at the bruises, the exhaustion, the relentless training. “Whatever this is.”

He looked at her then.

Truly looked at her.

For years he had been careful. Controlled. Patient. He had swallowed every confession, every too-honest impulse. He had told himself that dignity required silence.

But she was standing too close, and he was very tired, and he had never once in his life managed to win at cyvasse against her.

The words slipped out before he could weigh them.

“I have been trying to impress you,” he admitted, with all the solemn despair of a man confessing treason. “Since we were children.”
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Authors Note:

The fluff is helping me cope (barely)
C.