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The maester called it a bruising of the deep organs and said it would pass. Maekar knew better by the third day, when he could not hold his piss past the space of an hour and had once not held it at all.
He rode at the rear. He told the men it was to guard against stragglers, but in truth it was so that he could walk his horse off into the trees alone, and no one would count how often, and no one would see his hands shake at the laces.
Baelor rode ahead, at the head.
They had not spoken properly since the trial. There had been some words, the necessary kind, Baelor's hand on his shoulder as he fretted over him. He had then watched his brother fall in stride with his youngest son to go and see to the hedge knight, while Maekar busied himself with his eldest two.
That night, once they were cleaned, treated and the household had gone quiet, Baelor had come to his room. Maekar had spoken of a headache through the door and not unlock it. The next day he had done the same, a word here, a wall there, gone before there was room for more. And today, leaving Ashford, again. Three days of it now, dressed up as a dozen small necessities, and none of them the true one.
What was there to say? You should not have chosen him. That was the shape of the thing sitting between them, or so Baelor plainly thought it was, and Maekar could not correct him without saying the true shape aloud.
"You've ridden the whole way back here like a man doing penance," Baelor said.
He had fallen back without Maekar marking it. That was a thing Baelor did, arrive at your elbow as though he'd grown there. Maekar kept his eyes forward.
"I've ridden as befitting a man guarding the rear."
"You've ridden as a man who won't look at me." Quieter, that. Not the tourney voice, not the voice for the men, but the hushed one, the one kept for corridors with the wrong ears near and the thing between them that could never be said above a breath in public. “Are you still so angry with me, sweetling?”
And there it was, laid plain, the whole misread. Of course he thought this was anger. He thought Maekar sulked because he had wounded his pride, chosen another over him. And perhaps, had he not been made to deal with his new affliction, he would have willfully ignored Baelor out of anger.
It would have been so simple to let it stand. Anger was clean, anger a man could carry into a room and set down and pick up again, and no one thought less of him. And anger is something he is already known for.
Maekar's belly gave its low warning pull, the one he'd learned to hate. He wheeled his horse a half step away before he could stop himself, opening distance between them like a man avoiding a blade.
He saw it land, saw the hurt go into his brother's face and close over, and did nothing, said nothing, because the truth was too mortifying. The truth was I do not know how long I have before I shame myself, and I would sooner you thought me cold than know why.
"I'm tired, is all," he said. "Ride on. I'll range the flank a while, and see nothing's come up on us from the trees."
Maekar turned his horse off the path, into the treeline, and waited until the sound of the column had drawn well past before he swung down from the saddle.
The council chamber emptied slow, and Maekar counted them out. Every one that left was one less pair of eyes, and he had spent the whole sitting with his hands flat on the table and his mind on the low insistent ache beneath his belt.
"Stay a moment," Baelor said.
The last of the lords was still in the doorway, and the ache was no longer a thing he could ignore. Maekar was already standing.
"Not now."
"Maekar.” Baelor insisted, turning to face him with a frown on his face. “It's a small thing, the matter of the Dornish escort, I only need your-"
"I said not now." Maekar snapped, and it came out wrong, too harsh. He heard it and could not call it back, because the ache had turned from something he was managing to something he was losing, and there was no part of his mind left over for softening a voice. "I will see to that matter later."
He did not look at his brother's face. He had learned not to, these last days. He looked at the door and the door was clear now, the lord gone, and he crossed to it faster than a prince should cross a room.
"I understand your anger but you are still my Lord Hand," Baelor said behind him, not raising his voice. Worse than raised. "How long will you ignore me, brother?"
It is not you. The words were right there, and he got as far as turning his head. He saw Baelor standing at the table where he'd been left, both hands braced on the wood, looking at Maekar the way a man looks at a debt he can't understand having earned.
The ache pulled again, gone urgent, gone past patience.
"I'll find you tonight," Maekar said, and even that was a coin he wasn't sure he could pay, and then he was through the door and walking, and the walking became something faster once the corridor bent and hid him.
Behind him, in the emptied chamber, Baelor was left to make of it what he could.
The day had been the worst of them.
Three times in the last hour before he could decently retire, and no fewer through all the hours before it, so that the whole of the day had arranged itself in his mind not as council and courtiers and the realm’s business but as a map of doors, the closest garderobe, his smallclothes and the distance between them measured in the cold sweat of near misses.
By the time he climbed the stairs to his rooms he was hollowed out with it. Frightened, though he would never have used the word. All day he had held off a thought the way he held off his need to piss, and now it came unbidden. How could he carry his duty when he must relieve himself thrice an hour. How could he sit through a council. How could he ride to battle. He would be a prince who could not sit a council, could not sit a horse a day’s ride, could not be looked at.
He was so deep in the arithmetic of it that he had forgotten Baelor entirely. Forgotten the room he'd said he'd go to, the promise to find him tonight, forgotten it as clean as if he'd never said it. So the light under his own door did not warn him, he opened it, and Baelor was there.
Sitting. In the chair by the hearth, with the little rank of cups on the table beside him, the ones the maester had left. Maekar knew them by heart now. The bitter one, the chalky one, the one that smelled ironically of piss, and did nothing, the one that smelled of nothing and did nothing as well. A whole apothecary's failure lined up in pewter, and Baelor turning one of them in his fingers, reading it, the way he read everything.
Maekar stopped in the doorway.
"You didn't come," Baelor said. He set the cup down. "I waited."
The apology was true and it was also nothing, a coin handed over with the mind elsewhere. "I'm sorry. I was-" The day rose up in his throat, the whole unspeakable shape of it, and flattened into the only word he could spend. "-busy. It slipped me, my apologies."
"Busy." Baelor scoffed, as he stood. "Fine, you're here now. Let's have it now, then, since a moment after council was too much to ask and tonight was too much to keep."
And Maekar, worn to the grain with the day's fear still sitting in him like swallowed stones, felt too tired to argue. "Fine," he sighed. "Let’s discuss it."
They discussed it, if it could be called that. The Dornish escort, the matter Baelor had wanted him for, and under the Dornish escort was the unspoken thing; the field, the choice, moving beneath the words. Maekar answered where he had to. He stood by the door still, would not sit, could not trust the sitting, and he kept his voice level and his answers short, and it might have held, it might have gone somewhere near peace, except that his bladder chose that moment to turn.
He knew the feeling now the way he knew his own name. The low pull, the sudden press, the count starting. He shifted his weight. He set his heel and began, without deciding to, the small hard bounce of the knee, the leg jigging, as though he could shake the need back down, will it quiet, buy a quarter hour by force of muscle.
Baelor watched the leg.
"Do I bore you," he snapped. "Do the affairs of the realm bore my brother so, that he can't stand still for them."
Baelor’s eyes had fixed on him, steady, searching, and Maekar felt the weight of it like a hand pressing down. His fright flared, and in the space of a breath it hardened into fury. “What,” he snapped. “What in the seven hells are you- we’re discussing it. You wanted to discuss it, and I’m discussing it.”
"You're jigging like a boy who needs the yard." Baelor's eyes went back to the leg, and there was hurt under the scorn. "You can't even give me a quarter hour?"
And Maekar could have stopped it there. Could have said the word, days of the word held back, I am ill, brother, I am ill in a way I cannot say. It was right there, always right there, sour in his throat, burning behind his teeth. He could have spoken it. Instead he swallowed it down, and what rose in its place was anger, sharp and quick, the only thing that let him stand.
"Oh," he said, soft and vicious. "Forgive me. Do I need your leave now, to shake my leg? Is there nothing you'd not have the ordering of?" He heard where he was going and went there anyway, because it was away from the true thing. "You knew best at Ashford, didn't you. Knew best to stand for the hedge knight over your own blood. To make him your cause before the whole field and never once think how it looked, your name spent on his-"
"He was in the right, Maekar. You know he was-"
"I know you chose him." It came out of him with more than he meant in it, all the days of it, and he saw it strike Baelor and he did not care, or told himself he did not. "Before all of them. You looked at him and you looked at me and you chose him, and now you sit in my chair and ask why I won't be still-"
The clock in him ran out. He felt it, the true and final pull, the quarter-hour spent, and the fury drained out of him all at once and left only the old cold need, and the fear that dwarfed the quarrel entirely.
"I have to go," he said, cutting himself off.
Baelor stared at him. The anger on his face stumbled, uncomprehending. "Go? Go where? Maekar-" A short, disbelieving sound. "This is your room, these are your chambers. Where is there-"
"Out," Maekar said, and fled his own bedchamber.
So it went, and became the shape of their days.
Maekar avoiding, still. There was a craft to it now, a dreadful fluency. He knew the keep's every garderobe, knew which corridors ran near one and which stranded a man, and he built his hours around them the way other men built theirs around meals.
He took his supper in his rooms. He came late to council and left early and let them think it pride. And he did not go to Baelor, not at night, not in the quiet, not once, though the wanting to was now a physical ache.
Maekar could see how it was affecting Baelor as well, and could not bring himself to mend it. His brother had stopped trying to steal his time, and stopped the small physical touches. That was how Maekar measured the distance, by its absence, the hushed tone gone quiet, and in its place a courtesy so smooth and cold it was worse than any shouting.
Baelor did not seek him out anymore. He thought he knew the reason, thought it was the hedge knight, and Maekar let him think it as it was better than the truth. So Baelor kept his distance, civil enough, grieving behind the civility where he believed it did not show, and Maekar bore it in silence.
It might have gone on so for a season, two closed men in a keep, each nursing a wound the other had misnamed. But instead it broke over nothing, on a regular evening, over a matter of land dispute.
The dispute had come up from the marches, some quarrel of a holdfast and its water rights that the crown must settle, and it needed the King's ear which means it needed the Hand’s ear, and there was no begging off it. It had to be the solar, and it had to be the two of them, and it had to be now. Baelor sent for him in the flat courteous way he sent for him now, and Maekar went, because a summons on the realm's business could not be dodged the way a brother's could.
He had timed it as well as he could, making sure he pissed right before going. But the parchments were many and the discussion ran long, longer than he'd planned, past the quarter hour and past the half, and Maekar sat across the solar table with the map between them and felt the count in him run down toward nothing.
He stood before it was decided. "This can be finished tomorrow. I will send my terms in writing."
"Sit down, Maekar." Baelor replied, without as much as giving him a glance.
"It can wait-" Maekar said, already standing up.
"Everything waits with you these days." The courtesy cracked at last, two weeks of it now. Baelor was on his feet too. "Every matter can wait, it can keep, tomorrow, next week. You've dodged me at every turn like I carry plague, and this at least is not between you and me. This is the realm's business and you will sit and see it done."
“Your king bids you to sit down.” Baelor commanded, slamming his hand on the table.
And Maekar, caught between his brother's will and his body's, made the reckoning in half a breath, the cold fast arithmetic he made now before everything, and the sum said go, now, past him, and beg pardon for the rudeness after. Rudeness could be mended, this could not. He pushed back from the table and moved for the door.
Baelor stepped into it.
He did it without thinking, a man putting himself between his brother and yet another escape, one more dodge in a week of them. He caught Maekar by the arm and turned him back, pushed him against the table's edge and held him there, a hand fisted in his brother's sleeve, close, the way they'd grappled as boys. "No. Not this time. You'll not walk out on me again-"
Maekar wrenched against the grip. "Baelor, let go of me-"
"Say it to my face, then, whatever it is-"
"Baelor-" Maekar shoved at him, got a hand between them, and Baelor only bore in harder, the two of them straining chest to chest against the table, and it was in that struggling, that held and thwarted half a moment with his brother's fist in his sleeve and no give anywhere, that the crest he'd been outrunning all week broke over him at last.
He went rigid. "Let go. Let go-" and then, smaller, the fight gone out of it all at once, ruined, "Please-"
He felt it go.
For a moment he did not move at all. Neither of them did. It was a small sound in a large stone room, and then it was warmth where there should be none, and then it was the end of the world, the whole labour undone in an instant. In the king’s solar of all places, before the one pair of eyes he wished last to see him so.
"Maekar-" Baelor said, his voice had changed from the anger. Everything had changed.
Maekar could not look at him. He looked at the map instead, the foolish map with its holdfast and its water rights, and he thought with a calm that frightened him that he would have to leave the keep now. There was no staying.
"Don't," he said. His voice came out wrecked. "Don't. Don't look at me."
"Maekar."
"Let me go, please- I’m humiliated enough-" Maekar shut his eyes like a boy, braced for the disgust the way one braces for a blow.
It did not come.
What came was his brother's hands, one at his shoulder and one at the back of his neck, and Baelor's voice close and using, for the first time in days, the private one. The hushed one.
"Be still," Baelor said. "Be still, I have you."
"You saw-"
"I saw my brother, who is unwell, and has been carrying it alone." The hands did not loosen. "That's all I saw. Look at me, Maekar. Look at me."
And because it was that voice, because it was those hands, Maekar looked, and found in Baelor's face not one thing he had armored himself against. No disgust, no pity even. Only a terrible dawning tenderness, and grief, and under the grief a thing Maekar could not at first name and then could.
It was understanding. He saw it break behind his brother’s eyes, two weeks of assumptions, swept aside in a rush, and the truth rushing in to take its place. And the truth was so much worse, and so much better, than the story he had been living in.
"This is why," Baelor said slowly, working it as he said it. "The council. The riding at the rear. The avoidance." His hand tightened at Maekar's neck. "The leg. In your rooms, the leg, and I said- gods forgive me, I said do I bore you." Something broke in his voice. "You were sitting there ill, and frightened, and I said-"
"You didn't know."
“Because you wouldn’t let me.” There was no anger in it. The anger that did come was not at Maekar at all, but at the worse thing arriving, Baelor going very still as it reached him. “The trial,” he said. “The blow to your belly, gods, that was mine. And this-” His voice broke. “This is the wage of that. I did this to you.”
“You didn’t-”
“Don’t spare me. I spent two weeks thinking you couldn’t forgive me for choosing the hedge knight, and all the while you carried this alone. You stubborn fool, you even shielded me from that, as though the fault were yours to hide and not mine to answer for.”
Maekar's control, what was left of it, went. Not the body this time. The rest of it, the held shut rest of it, days and more of fear coming up all at once, and he made a sound he'd have died before making in front of anyone else in the world, and Baelor gathered him in and let him make it.
"There," Baelor said into his hair. "There. It's only me."
He held him until the worst of it passed. Then he drew back just enough to look at him, and his voice turned practical and gentle together.
"Here's how it goes," he said. "You'll come with me, the back stairs, no one about at this hour, I know it and so do you. We'll get you clean and dry. And then you'll tell me the whole of it, everything the maester's said and everything he hasn't, and it will be mine to carry too from tonight. You're done carrying it alone."
And Maekar, who had spent two weeks locked inside his solitude and his shame, leaned on his brother and let himself be led out into the dark, toward the washing, the telling, and the strange mercy of being, at last, known.
The good days had come back, and Baelor was grateful for them.
They were as they'd been. Better, even, for the wall being down, or most of it. Maekar came to his solar in the evenings again and they took their wine by the fire the way they always had, easy, the private voice back in daily use between them like a thing that had never gone away. Baelor had his brother returned to him. He knew the worth of that. He did not mean to seem ungrateful for it, even in the privacy of his own head.
But he watched, now, in a way he had not before, and what he watched told him the wall was not gone, it had only moved. It ran now around one thing, and Maekar guarded that one thing with all the old fierce craft, and Baelor did not know how to tell him he need not.
The embarrassment of it. That was the word, absurd on a man Baelor had doted on since birth. Maekar could not speak of the affliction without his eyes going somewhere else in the room. When the maester came he sent Baelor out, or tried to, and was stiff for an hour after if Baelor stayed.
He would sooner have walked a mile than say the plain word for what ailed him. And Baelor understood it, or told himself he did, understood that a hurt like this cut at something a warrior kept close, but understanding it did not make it easier to sit across from the person he loved best in the world and feel him holding a door shut that Baelor had never once tried to open by force.
There had been the night.
Baelor did not let himself dwell on it, but he had woken to Maekar rigid beside him in the dark, and understood, before a word, what had happened, the bed gone cold and wet between them and his brother lying there in a stillness like death, wishing plainly to be dead. Baelor had reached for him and said it was nothing, was easily mended, come, let's rise and see to it together. He had said all the right things.
But it had not mattered. Maekar had avoided him three full days after that. Three days of the courtesy voice, the cold smooth nothing, the man he'd only just got back walling himself off again over a wet sheet, because to have been seen helpless, in the one bed where he'd let himself be soft, was past what his pride could carry/
And Baelor had let him have the three days because he'd learned that pushing only lengthened them, and had spent every hour of them aching, because he could not find the words that would make his brother believe the one thing that was simply, wholly true.
That there is nothing Maekar could ever do that would disgust him, or push him away.
He'd said it to him. Said it plainly, more than once. Maekar treated it as a kindness, a courtesy, and thanked him for it, yet did not believe it true. That was the grief that would not leave Baelor, to know Maekar believed Baelor was someone he had to be whole in front of. When Baelor had seen the worst of it and loved him no differently, loved him more, for the courage.
The maester's news, when it came, came like sun.
Baelor was there for it because Maekar, a small victory, had not sent him out that morning. The old man pressed and asked his questions and folded his hands, and said that by his reckoning the need had been easing this fortnight past. The bruising deep in the belly was knitting, the maester judged. Such hurts often did, given time and rest, the body quietly repairing what no cup could touch. He would not promise, but he thought the worst of it was passing, and that with the months it might pass near altogether.
Baelor watched his brother's face while the old man said it, and saw the thing he'd been starved to see, relief, naked relief, the fear that had lived behind Maekar's eyes for weeks easing back a degree. And Baelor's own heart lifted with it, of course it did, he'd have given years off his life to hear the belly he'd caused to be broken was mending.
But under the gladness sat the other thing, and he was honest enough with himself to feel it.
Glad as he was, he could not be wholly glad. He wanted the belly healed with everything in him, yes, but he would rather have had a brother who was ill and unafraid before him than a brother made well but still believed there were rooms in himself he must keep Baelor out of.
He said none of this. It was selfishness, and it was not the hour for it, and might be no hour for it ever. He only reached over, while the maester packed his cups, and took his brother's hand where it lay on the table, and held it, and felt Maekar's fingers close around his own.
It came to a head, as it often did, in the dark.
They were in Baelor's bed, the one they had shared since they were boys squabbling over blankets, and which had become, in the years since, the single room in all the keep where the thing they were to each other could be true out loud. Beyond that door they were the King and the Hand, careful, a hand's breadth of daylight always kept between them.
Here, there was no daylight and no distance. Maekar was above him, moving with a slow rhythm, his head thrown back, the line of his throat a pale arc in the candlelight, and Baelor's hands were on his hips, guiding him, feeling the play of muscle under his skin. It was good, it was right, it was theirs, the one thing the whole world would have taken from them and the one thing they had never let it.
Then Maekar slowed. His rhythm faltered, and his hands, which had been braced on Baelor's chest, went to the mattress, as if to push himself up. "Wait," he breathed, his voice tight. "I have to- I need to get up."
It was the old fear, a ghost in the room. Baelor saw it in his brother's eyes, the sudden panic, the shame rising to replace the pleasure. Even now he could not let himself say the actual word. He saw the wall beginning to rebuild itself, brick by painful brick, and he would not have it. He tightened his grip on Maekar's hips, holding him in place, and continued to thrust up into him, slow and deep, a deliberate counterpoint to Maekar's attempt to flee. "No," Baelor said, his voice low and firm.
Maekar froze, his body a rigid line of tension above him. "Baelor, let go," he gasped, trying to push off, his hands pressing against Baelor's shoulders. "I can't- I need to-"
"I know what you need, sweetling," Baelor cut in, his voice still soft, but with an edge of steel. He caught one of Maekar's flailing hands in his own, lacing their fingers together and holding tight. "You need to stop hiding from me." He continued to move, a rhythm that spoke of possession, of a right he would not be denied. "Do not hide from me, Maekar. Let it happen."
The argument was a frantic, whispered thing in the space between them. Maekar's pleas were ragged, his struggles weakening as Baelor's persistence and the pleasure of his body's betrayal wore him down. "Don't," he begged, his voice breaking. "Please, don't make me-"
“I’m not making you do anything,” Baelor insisted, even as his hand reached up to Maekar’s belly, and pressed firmly against his bladder.
And then it happened. A sound of surrender, a broken sob, and Maekar's cock, which had been hard and flush against his belly, gave a twitch. A jet of piss arced out, splashing hot across Baelor's chest and stomach. It was followed by another, and another, a forceful, humiliating release that Maekar could no more stop than he could stop his own heart from beating.
Baelor stared, not with disgust, but with a kind of awe. It was the most vulnerable thing he had ever seen by his prideful brother. The ultimate surrender, and it was beautiful. Maekar made a choked sound of mortification and turned his face away, trying to bury behind his hair, his whole body shaking with the force of his shame.
Baelor let go of his hand, but only to reach down and wrap his fingers around Maekar's pissing cock. Maekar's hand shot out to grab his wrist, his grip desperate, his face still hidden. "Don't," he whimpered, "Don't touch me."
"Look at me," Baelor commanded gently. He didn't try to pull his wrist free, just held him, his thumb stroking the sensitive underside of Maekar’s cock. "Maekar. Look at me. Don't hide from me, not from me. Not ever." He waited, his body still moving inside his brother's, a slow rocking. "I love you," he said, the words simple, stark, and true. "I love all of you. This, too. I would never stop.”
Maekar stilled. He slowly turned his head back, his violet eyes wide and wet with unshed tears. He looked at Baelor, really looked at him, and saw only the truth he had been unable to accept for weeks. "You're an idiot," he whispered, a raw, broken sound. As he spoke, the last of his piss dribbled out, a warm trickle over Baelor's fingers.
Baelor grinned, a slow, triumphant thing. "Yours," he agreed, and began to stroke Maekar's cock, his grip firm and sure. He resumed his thrusting, fucking up into his brother's pliant body with renewed purpose. "Only for you."
Maekar let out a shaky laugh, half sob, half surrender. "You're a pervert," he accused, but there was no heat in it, only a dawning wonder.
"Yes," Baelor grunted, his hips snapping forward, driving a gasp from Maekar's lips. "Only for you."
He kept his grip on Maekar's cock, softening now, and his other hand came up to cup his brother's jaw, thumb stroking the sharp line of bone. "Yours," he repeated, and then he was moving, shifting his weight with a fluid strength that Maekar had always envied. In a moment, he had flipped them, Maekar's back hitting the damp sheets with a soft grunt, Baelor settling over him, between his thighs.
The position change was a statement, almost. Baelor was no longer receiving his brother's vulnerability; he was claiming it. He hooked Maekar's legs over his arms, folding him nearly in half, and drove back into him. The angle was brutal, deep, and Maekar cried out, his hands fisting in the linens. Baelor set a punishing rhythm, his hips snapping forward, and with each thrust he worked Maekar's cock with his hand, stroking him in time with the fucking, his grip slick with piss and seed.
It was too much. The overwhelming stimulation, the lingering humiliation, the raw, unguarded love in Baelor's every movement, it all bound itself into a white hot knot in Maekar's gut. "Baelor," he gasped, his back arching. "Fuck, I'm going to-"
"Do it," Baelor growled, his voice thick with exertion. "Come for me, sweetling."
Maekar did. His orgasm ripped through him, a shuddering spasm that left him breathless. Strands of white shot from his cock, mixing with the cooling piss. The sight of it, the absolute ruin of his brother spread beneath him, made Baelor's breath catch. He was more turned on than he had ever been in his life. He pressed down, hard, on Maekar's lower belly, right over his bladder.
Maekar jolted, a sharp cry escaping him. "What are you-"
"You're not done," Baelor panted, not ceasing his relentless thrusting. "I want all of you." He kept the pressure on, his eyes locked on Maekar's face. "Stroke yourself. Keep stroking, don't you dare stop, your king commands you."
Maekar's hand was trembling as he obeyed, wrapping his fingers around his own spent cock. He was oversensitive, every touch a jolt of pleasure and pain. Baelor's hips continued to hammer into him, and the pressure on his bladder a constant and building ache. It built, a wave of pressure cresting higher and higher until it broke. A weaker stream of piss spurted from him, arcing up his own torso, splashing against his chin and chest.
The sight was Baelor's undoing. He let out a guttural groan, his rhythm faltering as his own orgasm seized him. He buried himself deep inside his brother, his cock pulsing as he filled him. He stayed there for a long moment, panting against Maekar's shoulder, his body trembling with the force of his release.
Then, slowly, he pulled out. Before Maekar could react, could process the sudden emptiness, Baelor shifted down the bed. He took Maekar's soft, messy cock into his mouth, tasting the bitter tang of piss and the salt of his own release.
"Baelor, no," Maekar protested, trying to push his head away. "It's filthy-"
Baelor pulled off, but only to look up at him, his lips glistening. "I told you,sweetling," he said, his voice firm, leaving no room for argument. "Nothing. Not one part of you would ever disgust me." He held his gaze, his expression unwavering as he sucked his brother’s cock.
Maekar stared at him, his breath hitching. The last of his resistance crumbled. He reached down, his hand finding Baelor's hair gripping it tight. Maekar crested soon enough, a final, shuddering ripple that left him utterly spent. He lay there, ruined and twitching with sensitivity, his mind a blank, peaceful hum.
Baelor watched him, a soft pleased smile on his face. He moved again, straddling Maekar's chest, taking his own soft cock in his hand as he rested heavy on his brother's sternum. "Can I?" he asked, his voice a low rumble.
Maekar's flush was a deep, mottled red that spread down his neck and across his chest. He looked from Baelor's face to his cock and back again, and then he was nodding, frantic and desperate.
Baelor's smile widened. He let go then, and a hot stream of piss splashed across Maekar's chest, washing over the mess they had already made. Maekar gasped, his eyes fluttering shut, his body arching into the flow. It was not shame this time. It was acceptance. It was belonging. It was the strange, messy, perfect mercy of being, at last, completely known.
The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, casting long, dancing shadows across the room. The air was thick with the scent of their exertions, of sweat, piss and sex, a musk that was theirs alone. Maekar lay on his side, facing the dying light, feeling hollowed out, scraped clean, every defense stripped away and left to burn in the fire's low heat. He had never been so at peace since the trial.
Baelor was a warm weight against his back, an arm thrown over his waist, his breath a slow steady rhythm against Maekar's shoulder. He had not moved for a long time, simply holding him, as if he feared Maekar might vanish if he let go.
It was Baelor who broke it, his voice a low murmur, the private one. "Still with me?"
Maekar didn't open his eyes. He considered it. He had been undone tonight, laid open in every way a man could be, and there had been a time not long past when that would have felt like ruin, like something in him spent past mending. He waited to feel it, but it did not come. "Still here," he whispered, the words barely disturbing the air. "Not going anywhere."
Baelor's arm tightened, his lips pressing a soft kiss to the knob of his spine. "Good." He shifted, propping himself on an elbow to look down at his brother, his gaze tracing the line of Maekar's jaw, the dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes. "I spent weeks thinking I'd lost you to something I couldn't name. I'll not be careless with you again, now that I know you fully."
Maekar finally turned his head to look at him. In the faint light Baelor's face was all soft lines and shadows, the sharp commanding king from the council chamber gone, leaving only the brother who had held him while he wept. "And what am I," he said. Not a challenge. He only wanted to hear it.
"Mine," Baelor said simply. "In every part. The strong ones and the rest, all sweet, all mine."
Maekar had no answer to that, or none that would go through his throat. "You're an idiot," he managed, but there was no heat in it, only a deep bone weary fondness.
Baelor smiled, a small genuine thing that reached his two toned eyes. "Perhaps." He leaned down and kissed him, slow and deep, and when he drew back his expression had gone serious again. "This changes nothing between us."
"I know," Maekar said. And he did. The wall was not just down, it was in ruins. The shame was not just quieted, it was gone. In its place was this terrifying exhilarating freedom, to be seen, to be known, in all his weak and furious and needing parts, and to be loved not in spite of it but because of it.
Baelor settled back behind him and pulled the sheet up over them both. "Sleep now," he said softly. "I have you."
Maekar closed his eyes. For the first time in weeks the thought of the morning held no fear. There were no doors to count, no distances to measure. There was only the warmth of his brother's arm around him, and the strange messy mercy of being, at last, home.