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He awakens in the pale dawn light, feeling Daenerys stir at his side. The ship is quiet but for the soft pitch and rock of the cradling sea, and it seems the crew are mostly slumbering – few footsteps, no voices. Only the breath of the dragon queen, and his own, in his cabin, and the ever present wash of the oceans beyond them.
If he hadn’t felt the heat of her bare skin before he’d opened his eyes – gods but she runs hot as wildfire – he might assume he’d dreamed her visit the night before. The ache in his chest, the rasping cough, the exhaustion set deep in his creaking bones – all slipping away the moment there came a tap on his door, and Daenerys, looking in on him, cautious and shy.
It’s the middle of the night. He doesn’t care.
“I saw you had a candle lit,” she’s in a night gown, too thin and fine for the climate – it must have come with her from Meereen – a heavy woollen shawl about her shoulders. “I hope I’m not disturbing – ”
“No,” he manages, “no, not at all.”
She looks small in her bedclothes. And uncertain. He’ll warrant that’s a rare thing to behold.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she murmurs, closing the cabin door behind her.
“No,” he repeats, “no, I imagine not.”
She smiles so sadly that he aches for her, and goes to the window of the cabin, peers out at the ink-black sea, her back to him. The silence is long and strange but not uncomfortable, though he decides he must talk to her, at least a little. To have her stood in his bedroom, undressed, for no clear reason at all and with only a few words and the empty air between them, feels inexplicably dangerous.
Still, they have much to discuss, and it becomes easy to do so.
There is something unreal about the next hour spent in conversation, as she nurses tea and then wine and then something that smells strong enough to strip tar off wood – a Dothraki spirit, she says, laughing when he tries it and it makes his eyes burn. He lies in bed and does his best to keep up with her, until he has to tell her to sit down because her pacing about so is making his head ache.
He hadn’t quite meant for her to sit down on the edge of his bed, let alone so close that he might encircle her waist with an arm, if he wants to – but that is where she chooses to plant herself, absently swinging her feet where they don’t quite reach the floor. He is reminded, powerfully, of Sansa – of Arya – of so many young noblewomen forced from their childhoods too soon.
And whilst she sits there, swinging her feet, the night seems to draw in around them, close, warm, endless.
They wonder from the subject of war and land and history and death, to softer things. He tells her some of his childhood in Winterfell, and she hers in the free cities; from his siblings to her brother, what few kind memories she has of him. The ease between them grows as the night stretches on and he doesn’t want to sleep, doesn’t want to let her go and lift the veil that seems to have descended upon them to hide them from the world.
In spite of himself, he enjoys being alone with her. He enjoys witnessing less and less of the stormborn queen, and more and more of Daenerys; intelligent, driven, witty and kind, her burning heart cupped in her hands. He only hopes she is growing used to Jon Snow the way she claims to have grown used to the King of the North. So when their conversation falters some, he asks her more about Meereen, about her friends, her advisors.
Danaerys tells him of Missandei’s love of honey, butterflies and books – tells him of the night Missandei had disappeared and the Unsullied, whose leader holds a particular affection for her, had half stormed the city streets in search of her, fearing she’d been kidnapped – only to discover that she had simply fallen asleep whilst reading in the great library of Mireen.
After that Missandei had been obliged to tell Grey Worm in advance if she planned to spend more than a few hours there, or else Daenerys’ general would turn sullen as a kicked dog until he was certain of her safety.
(Jon had glimpsed the Unsullied general named Grey Worm, who had seemed, like all Danaerys’ soldiers, stoic and steady and lethal as a bear trap – he cannot imagine such a man fretting in any such capacity, although he knows love would drive even the most unlikely of people to distraction well enough).
Then Daenerys tells of Tyrion Lannister getting drunk and spouting outrageous stories and delivers such a fair impression of him that Jon laughs hard enough to disturb the dressing on his wounds and has to ask her to stop.
frets for him, until he promised that he is not in pain, and takes her hand in his, on an impulse likely quickened by the sip of that Dothraki spirit.
And there is a moment, sat in silence, with her fingers laced through his and the night as close about them as a blanket, where they understand the precipice on which they are stood.
“How old are you, Daenerys?”
“Twenty two.”
Gods, barely older than Sansa.
Still, now he considers it, he is little past his twenty third year himself.
“Do you think me too young to be a queen?”
“No, your grace,” he sees her mouth curl, her gaze warm with something other than drink as she watches him, “I think we are all too young to be – in charge of anything. I mean it all seems like… quite a lot, do you not think?”
He has definitely had a little too much of that Dothraki spirit. Whatever he meant to say – he’s sure it was going to be meaningful – slips out of his grasp, lost in the shadowed violet of her eyes by candlelight. He feels addled by her, all of a sudden. They are still holding hands.
And Daenerys draws breath as if to reply, and then only laughs, light and girlish and freer than any noise he has yet heard from her lips.
(He should not be considering her lips at all, he knows).
(He wants to kiss her so badly it bruises, deep in his bones, in his scars, beneath his heart).
He has not truly desired any woman since Ygritte. Not once. And to even think of her in the same moment as he thinks of Daenerys makes him feel a little sick with guilt. But had he not met her, wanted her, loved her, as deeply as he did, he might not have understood what it is that stirs in him for the woman sat at his bedside now. It’s a strange sensation – like the tingling of blood rushing back to a foot that has gone numb, a part of his character stirring awake again after a period of deep, deathly sleep. A part of his anatomy too, if it’s not too crude a thing to consider.
“I wish,” he says, and loses the thread of his thoughts again immediately. Her eyes are so blue, her mouth so red and soft, her face so close he might count the spider-leg shadows cast by her eyelashes down her cheeks.
“You wish what?”
So many things. Mostly that he was not king of the north and she not the usurped heir to the seven kingdoms and they are two entirely dull, ordinary people born into a long and peaceful summer. It would be much less dangerous to kiss her then.
“I wish…” he tries again – nothing. His tongue lies thick in his mouth.
The hand in his tenses just a little. She knows – she must know – where his mind has journeyed to. If he looks into her face again he’s certainly she’ll know. And by all that is holy what is he attempting here? The weight of Westeros lies across both their shoulders and here he is endangering their still delicate alliance by dallying with her alone, after dark, in his bed, as if there were nothing more at stake than his heart.
But before he can gather to courage to look up at all, and tell her to go – she has taken the front of his shirt in her spare hand, and kissed him. Soft and sweet as snow melting in the spring, she presses her mouth to his, and everything else in his head goes silent as the grave.
“Was that too bold?” The question comes from her whilst he can still taste her, her forehead dipped low against his own.
“No,” he manages, before he can stop himself, “you could be bolder, if you wanted.”
“Do you – want?”
“Yes.” The word comes out rougher than he means it too, but he’s certain that if he cannot hold her close now his soul will crawl from his skin with longing
What happens next comes on like a miracle.
She climbs into his lap and he holds her, and kisses her, and kisses her until there’s no breath left in his body and he can feel her hands shaking where they tangle in his hair, and the night seems only to have drawn in closer about them so they might be the only two people left in the world.
He doesn’t allow himself to think, barely allows himself to breathe – he is only want, only desire, only a desperate, consuming, adoring man utterly, blindly in love.
He feels her through that perilously thin nightgown and is too aware of his skin burning. Her hands go to the next of his shirt, wrenching it up – he has to help her.
They are clumsy and fumbling but intent on each other, and it’s quite clear that Daenerys knows what it is she desires and intends to have it – and hells, Jon has no interest in denying her.
And if she only means it to distract herself from her own grief, if this is only the foolishness committed by two bodies exhausted beyond their minds, then there will be time for recrimination in the morning. Now, lifting Daenerys’ nightgown over her head until she is gloriously bare and precious in his arms, there is only her and him and the endless, dreaming night.
Except, of course, that the dawn comes sure as winter.
Once they have spent themselves, once she has shaken herself to pieces in his grip, dragged her teeth against his throat, gasped his name as he claims it from her lips, filled herself with him with an abandon he would not have thought the prim, armoured, stiff-shoulder queen of dragon stone capable of – once they have satisfied themselves entirely, they fall asleep in his bed. And some hours later, the dawn steals into the cabin, and Jon feels the heat of the dragon queen against his chest before he opens his eyes.
She has tucked herself beneath his chin. He thinks, for a moment, as he casts his gaze down at the fall of thick, silver hair on his pillow, the small hand pressed to his chest, that he might just keep hold of her. What harm could there be in lingering like this forever? Take the ship far away to the middle of the ocean where none of their troubles could follow them. Live on fish and dothraki spirit. Rut like beasts every night and lay about in bed all day, sated and obnoxious with adoration.
It’s a stupid thought, fanciful and ridiculous, but it entertains him for a moment, winding a strand of her hair through his fingers as he lets the scenario play in his mind’s eye.
She is stirring, though, and when she sits up, it’s with a frown.
“How long have we been asleep?” Her voice is soft with fatigue, her bare shoulders bathed in pale gold light.
“I don’t know,” he admits, “but the ship’s not roused yet.”
“I must go,” she pulls away from him, plucking her nightgown from where he tossed it the night before, “Missandei will come looking if she finds me gone.”
“Dany,” the name slips out before he can stop it – he’s already reaching for her, half stumbling out of bed, though he’s still too weak to be attempting to walk at all.
She has to grab his arm to steady him, and he becomes immediately aware that he is still naked. A staggering, bare-arsed fool chasing after a pretty girl hastening from his bed: what a delight the bastard king of the north must be.
“Jon,” she returns, just lightly enough to be teasing. He meets her sardonic gaze with his own. “If you must insist on calling me that then I will call you Jon.”
“You can call me whatever you like,” he informs her, and she smiles and he is addled again.
He never did have so much as a hope of resisting her, did he?
“Go back to bed, Jon,” she murmurs, giving him a gentle push.
“Will you kiss me first?” He’s feeling bold, because, frankly, any man would be after what he’d done with her last night.
“Then will you promise to rest?”
“Aye, my queen.”
She kisses him, tender and open-mouthed, and he holds her as tightly as he dares.
“I don’t regret it,” she tells him, a moment later, close against his brow, “I can’t. It was a kind of honesty between us, wasn’t it?”
“Honesty,” he has to agree – it was nothing if not honest to allow their physical passions to play out unimpeded. “Yes, I’d say it was at least that.”
“But it would be unwise of us to let it happen again,” her hands barely tremble as she says it, drawing her fingers over his scarred chest, her gaze cast down.
“Yes,” that too he cannot disagree with. “Unwise.”
He cannot let go of her, either. She is biting her lip, shifting her weight from one foot to the other – and every inch of her like this continues to be a revelation, so ordinary and yet still so much a queen – his queen.
“Good morning, Jon,” she wrenches out of his grasp at last, her gaze an apology as she backs toward the door.
“Good morning, Dany.”
She leaves and he lets her, as he sinks back into bed. The silks and furs still smell like her, and like him, and like what they did – and for now, that must be enough.