Chapter Text
Maekar held his breath and tilted his head back to take another gulp of his cup. It’s bitter and always leaves a dry, puckering taste in his mouth that takes hours to wash out, but Maekar has been diligent and drinks every last drop.
Holding a hand over his mouth, he swallows and concentrates on taking slow, steady breaths through his nose, willing himself not to throw back up and waste what he’s already drunk. It’s been difficult enough to keep his stomach from upturning at the most inopportune moments of the day and this gods awful tea he must drink never makes it any easier. He wakes up with it from the time he turns to sit up from bed and walks around with it as quietly as he can manage. The drink doesn't help when his mouth inexplicably fills in the middle of the King’s small council, nor does it offer any relief at court when cold sweat beads on his brow in the middle of conversations and must discreetly breath past the need to be sick; but it does mask his scent.
His family was in the middle of a rebellion, yet just before they meant to march out to meet Daemon Blackfyre, Maekar could not afford to let slip that one of the King’s commanders, his youngest omega son, was with pup.
Maekar gagged and tried not to focus on the disgusting taste that made it all worse, “Yech. Fuck me — !” Tilting the rest back, he finally finished and tossed the porcelain cup on the tray it was delivered on.
“I think not,” Brynden sniffs, picking up the tray he has brought up at the same time every morning and late evening. When Maekar’s scent only just started to change and didn't understand yet what was happening, his father's bastard brother caught him hurling into one of his mother's malvales bushes in the gardens, unable to make it to a chamber pot in time. When he pieced together Maekar’s strange scent and him gagging in the gardens, Bloodraven didn’t breathe a word of it. For once, the two agreed on something; no good could come from breaking such news when they were only days from leading the loyalist armies.
Maekar has never been particularly fond of Bloodraven. His father and brothers might think him clever or useful but Maekar has never cared for Melissa Blackwood’s bastard. The two have never been particularly fond of each other and Maekar especially has never liked the way Brynden speaks like he thinks himself better than him, or the way he's always regarded Rhaegel as though Maekar’s brother were someone that did not need including or accounting for. It was especially difficult for him to trust his father’s other bastard brother after Daemon’s betrayals, but quite frankly, Maekar wasn't in any position to question Bloodraven’s loyalties when he has become so dependent on his uncle’s willingness to help keep his condition quiet.
“Perhaps it best not to go repeating what's already gotten you in such a precarious position, Nephew.” If Maekar were not concentrating so hard not to spew everything all back up, he would have told him not to call him that. With a shaking fist still over his mouth, he gives the bastard the bird instead.
“I agreed to help you keep this distraction from your father until after we march on Daemon because you insisted we needed every able-bodied man,” Brynden frowned, eying Maekar critically. “I hope I was not wrong to take your word that still includes you.”
“I’m fine. It’s this gods awful fucking drink,” Maekar muttered between steadying breaths, “Just have your Ravens ready and worry about yourself.”
Brynden and his archers would also be with him at the rear. Bloodraven was gifted Darksister, but he was most known for his skill with a longbow, and somehow this has started a following none of them could rightfully explain. Perhaps it was the weirwood bows and arrows he made, or the way he gifted them to any man he deemed skilled enough, regardless if they were sons from another lord or a lowborn gutter rat from the streets of Flea Bottom. Maekar knows his father watches and has been warned of his bastard half-brother’s growing popularity, but despite their other brothers, Brynden was kept close and is now charged with commanding the bulk of their archers.
“You're not invisible, you know,” Rivers remarks in the snide, know-it-all manner Maekar loathes. “You look like shit and I won’t be the only one that notices, especially after yesterday’s scene.”
Maekar did not appreciate being reminded how council broke earlier than usual yesterday morning after Baelor spoke up in the company of all their father’s advisors and proposed Maekar stay behind in preparations to flee the capital with the rest of their family if their march against Daemon failed. “On all accounts, the Pretender has been chivalrous enough to instruct his men not to reave nor rape. But an omega on the field…if you were captured – ” Furious that his brother would humiliate and weaken his position in front of the entire small council, Maekar had loudly shoved away from the table, his face roaring hot as he stood in outrage. “Everyone is at risk of capture! This is fucking nonsense – !”
“Daemon has already promised Calla Rivers to Bittersteel. He has also made it known he means to take Daenerys to wife if this all should fail.” Tired of hearing about this fixation Daemon has had with their aunt and his insistence their grandfather promised her for his second wife, Maekar scoffed. It was all just a laughable excuse and knew full well Daemon had absolutely no desire to ever touch Maekar, let alone take him to wife. But it did go without saying that if the city should fall, most of them would either be killed or become hostages. Maekar has no doubts, no matter how chivalrous the Blackfyre bastard pretended to be, that their uncle Maron and many others from their mother's court would either lose their heads or hang if they refused to bend their knee. “They are shoring up their legitimacy for the throne. If the rebels seek to stake a secure claim, taking you as his third or selling you to whichever lord the Blackfyres need in the future would only be ideal with you as Daemon’s captive.” Maekar’s lips had peeled back to sneer, shaking his head and turning from the seven-pointed star hanging above their heads. It was not yet dark enough they needed so many candles when the sun shined through the metalware, but at that moment, it had felt more like a spotlight of shame. If only Baelor knew, even if he were wed off, there is another that already takes up a space in his womb that won't help anyone. “Which is why I feel it would be best if Maekar remained here with the King and prepared our family to retreat southeast for a retinue that will meet them if our lines should fall.”
It was a betrayal like none Maekar has ever experienced before from his brother, to use his sex against him, like it was a reason that made him lesser and incapable. “You would have me abandon this battle to flee to exile?” Maekar had gaped in stunned disbelief, but Baelor looked him right in the eyes when he addressed Maekar’s outrage like he was a child that rudely interrupted their lessons and must patiently wait to continue. “I would have you escort our family from slaughter.”
Of course they had to consider the what ifs. Imprisonment was kind. If the rebels were successful, Daemon’s council would all tell him ripping out Daeron’s immediate line by root and stem was best. He would have to kill Maekar’s father. And Aerys, the next in line after their father and Baelor, would most likely be dealt with in the same manner as the Penrose boys, but he suspects Fireball will not show their mother the same mercy he extended to Lady Penrose. Perhaps yes, Maekar would be sold off, but so would Rhaegel. His gentle brother didn’t deserve to be some war prize to be married and mounted by whichever match served Daemon best. He knew all this, but that had not stopped Maekar from staying behind after his father dismissed everyone and insisted he be allowed the opportunity to appeal. Despite Bloodraven’s discretion, Maekar stressed the need for there to be closer blood than just Brynden before Baelor arrived with the Dornish, and even though his father discouraged these insinuations and warned him against brewing any further discourse than there already was, Daeron couldn’t deny the sense in such caution. So after a long discussion about how capability should matter more than his sex, his father granted Maekar this one favor above his brother’s. He just wished he didn’t feel so guilty and dreaded that even if they did prevail, Maekar would no doubt shatter all his father’s trust in him.
When they reconvened and their father announced that Maekar would remain commanding the rear like the matter was nothing more than a small discrepancy, Maekar did not look at his brother to see his reaction.
“I’ve already told Baelor where he can fuckoff if he thinks to use my station against me again,” he growled, “Just because I’m an omega – ”
“He’s the father.”
It wasn’t posed as a question but more as a sudden realization.
Maekar froze and Brynden’s uncomfortably uncanny red eyes shot wide.
“It’s his, isn’t it?”
Unwilling to say it out loud, Maekar ground his jaw and looked away.
”Seven hells,” Brynden cursed, dropping the tray he brought back on Maekar’s table and roughly shoving his shoulder length silver hair behind his ears.“I knew I’d regret this. I knew I shouldn’t be helping you!”
”I never asked you to,” Maekar snarled.
“I never wanted to,” Brynden snarled right back, “I should have turned you into your father the moment I found you wretching in the hedges.”
”Yeah, well why didn’t you?” He snapped, still unsure of the bastard’s intentions himself.
”Because you led me to believe you were with a bastard,” Bloodraven hisses through his teeth, trying to keep his voice down while his face flushes red, “Not the next in line to the throne!”
”It won’t be,” Maekar shouts, his face hot and his breath loud as a heavy silence stretches between them. Biting the inside of his cheek, he stops himself before he says too much.
Brynden huffed out a sharp, exasperated breath. ”You don't mean to tell him?”
“I haven't decided,” Maekar replies quieter, swallowing what is no longer bile but a large dread. “For now, it's just a bastard you know nothing about.”
“You're mad if you think I’ll continue to be complicit in this,” his bastard uncle sneers, “If your family finds out – if Baelor discovers this – ”
“He won't,” Maekar insists, “My brother departs in three days, the rest of us will follow soon after. If you can keep your mouth shut until we get back, my family need never know you were involved.”
“And what, pray tell, is your plan after, Maekar? If we survive this rebellion and you ride back home showing with your brother’s child?”
”I don’t know yet, but I suggest you shut up about it,” Maekar growled, locking his eyes with Brynden’s unsettling red ones and letting his threat sit heavily between them. “Because you’re already in too deep, Brynden. Turn me in, you’re fucked, too, when my father asks who’s been supplying me the suppressants.”
They both glared like they were children who still stuck their tongues out at each other from behind their mothers' skirts. The bastard opened his mouth like he meant to retort back nastily, only to close it and shook his head. Without another word, Brynden left the tray and stormed out of Maekar’s room, slamming the door behind him on his way out.
Maekar spent the rest of the afternoon preparing himself for whatever came next, sitting and waiting for his father’s summon like a child for his punishment. When he finally got the inevitable knock on his door, Maekar was shocked it wasn’t guards but another of his father’s bastard half-siblings. At the same time he has come to expect her brother, this time it was Sheira who showed up with the servants like she meant to spend luncheon with him.
It wasn’t unheard of, but it was strange and awkward to have an aunt growing up that was two years younger than him. They were never close, especially not to warrant an unannounced audience, but Shiera was closest with Brynden and that was enough to stiffly grant her entrance without a protest from him. Once the table was set and the room cleared, she poured him a steaming cup and slid it closer toward him.
Maekar’s face burned. “He told you?”
”On the contrary, it was I that told him,” she says, her two-toned eyes that matched the emeralds and sapphires around her neck glinting back at him across the table as she smiled. “Drink your tea, Maekar. I believe you still have a part to play in certain things to come. You wouldn't want to be left behind for it all, now would you?”
Unsure what to say to something like that, Maekar was just relieved this perhaps meant he still had some time before Bloodraven went crying to his father. When he tries glazing over the peculiarity in the way they all did with Shiera, Maekar found it was not so easy to ignore the strange things she says this time as he sits and rigidly drinks without complaint.
Maekar stopped going to the yard at his usual hour in the morning. Now he went after his last cup, the time of the day his stomach settled best and there were fewest to see if he needed to take a moment for himself. He’d been sparring with Ser Galtry, a young guard so green he doesn't notice how sluggish Maekar has gotten, or was at least smart enough not to make any remark of it. Despite feeling how his swings have lost their strength and the footwork following turns sloppy, he refuses to let this…unexpected mishap be the reason the King finally decides to agree with the others that murmur about his omega son and protest he should be left outside a battlefield.
His father never denied him much and has always allowed Maekar and Rhaegel every privilege their older brothers ever had. When Maekar struggled with his needlework and stabbed his fingers bloody enough times to stain everything he made, his father didn't protest when it was suggested he might be more precise with a sword than a needle. Rhaegel always enjoyed their dancing lessons together, but Maekar had absolutely no sense of rhythm or success with ever staying in time with the music. After years of being dragged along, Maekar eventually put his foot down and resolved the lessons were nothing but a waste on him, but his King father only tutted and merely sighed that his brother would be most disappointed. “I believe omegas to be the equal to most alphas where strategy is concerned,” his father had said when he first dismissed any outspoken concerns about Maekar and their cousin Elaena being at the loyalists' war council table. But Maekar knows he still must tread carefully, even if Daeron agreed to let him command the rear of their army. It was perhaps a backhanded privilege to be the King’s son set in the back while Lord Donnel Arryn led the front, but Maekar must grit his teeth and be grateful not to be left behind entirely.
So he continues to train, pushing past the constant, bone-deep heaviness he’s been dragging around with him in some attempt to prove himself before he inevitably disappoints his father. When he isn't stuck for endless hours in a chair at the small council table, or shuttered in his rooms hunched over and hiding his chamberpots, he comes to the yard where he can keep up his arm with some of the lads he’ll be commanding in less than a fortnight. Or that’s the excuse he gives if anyone asks. Maekar is being entrusted to lead men to war and has fought loudly for a position to march with his father’s armies, yet now that the time draws near, he would be ashamed to prove to his king that letting him go would be a mistake. If by some chance everything else fell and it did all come down to Maekar’s line, he would at least make damned sure he was prepared to hold it.
As the first weeks of the rebellion turn into moons, he walks around exhausted most days but lays wide awake and restless almost every night. The previous one had been no different than the ones before it and found himself especially tired at council earlier that morning while they made the final preparations for Baelor’s ride south. During an excruciatingly long report from their uncle Maron, Maekar caught himself nodding off and having to hastily right himself more than a few times. He had looked around the table the last time he stilled his bobbing head to see if anyone else noticed only to find the mismatched eyes he dreaded meeting most. His brother’s brows had furrowed at him in concern but thankfully gave nothing else away as Maekar straightened in his seat and took a drink from his cup. Determined to keep the lids of his eyes from drooping closed until they were all dismissed for the morning, Maekar refrained from glancing across the table again. When his father broke council until later that evening, he pretended like he was walking out with Elaena and her lord husband Ronnel to speak with them on some insignificant concern until he could excuse himself safely to hide in Rhaegel’s chambers where he knew would be empty most of midday.
After reconvening again for another long confinement in the small council chambers, Maekar came here to the yard instead of taking dinner with Rhaegel and his mother who should be back by now from hawking all afternoon. He stayed to spar with Ser Galtry until the sun fell behind the Keep’s walls and finally decided to rack their swords for the day once the torches became the courtyard’s last source of light. While passing a flagon of water between each other, Maekar caught sight of the unmistakable figure he'd been expecting that lingered in the shadows from the battlements overhead. Sipping the waterskin and only halfheartedly listening to whatever Ser Galtry was making small talk about, Maekar waited for the other to step out.
Ser Galtry stopped mid-sentence and threw himself into a low bow when footsteps approached from across the yard, stuttering a hasty greeting once recognizing whose company he suddenly found himself in. Unwilling to greet the crown Prince so reverently, Maekar turned his back and resigned that he couldn’t avoid his brother forever. He hears the guard dismissed for the night, but Maekar finds there really wasn't much of a point sending the guard away when there was nothing left to say that he has not already said. Or at least, nothing he could say. Everything was still such a raw, gaping wound between them and have barely spoken more than a handful of short, curt sentences to one another while at council in front of their father or at court when in plain sight of their mother.
It felt like he nearly unraveled entirely when the earliest threads of his suspicions were first plucked that Maekar is still fumbling in the dark trying to figure out how to spool himself all back together. It wasn’t until after an offhanded remark from Aerys, just a brief mention about Rhaegel’s absence and how they should not expect him for another few days for his heat, but it felt more like his brother had just dropped a very large stone over his head that came down to crush over everything. In the middle of Daemon’s campaign through the westerlands, Maekar had not given his own cycle much thought and was only then reminded that his heats often coincided with his brother’s.
After calculating how long it had been since his last one, Maekar had rushed to Baelor for consolement, as he inevitably always did, but he would not find comfort from eldest brother this time; because on the same night, Baelor came to him with something else entirely. He was told there were betrothals being negotiated for each of them. After the rebellion was sufficiently settled, Baelor would take a Dondarrion bride while Maekar was being arranged to a Baratheon. Two marriages that would bring two houses closer than they've been in years while also appeasing whatever discrepancies still felt towards the King’s Dornish consort. His brother told him they were both irrefutably advantageous arrangements the King would not be unreasonable to consider like he was already apologizing and keeping an arms length of distance between them.
To hear Baelor bracing like he was already giving them up before they ever even made their intentions known had incensed Maekar; so much so, that instead of blurting out his concerns about his heat like he’d initially intended, Maekar clutched his fear close to his chest and expelled the harshest words he could think to say — You've spent your entire life carrying this burden of being the steadfast, perfect prince. Mother and father’s unyielding pillar. The realm’s soul of chivalry. But in the end, you're not chivalrous, Baelor. You're just a cutthroat. And I no better than a whore. I hope whichever alpha father chooses won’t mind I will not bleed on his cock after I have already spent it on your’s – Now he must carry what he’s said out loud and can never take them back, nor could he undo the shocked, deeply pained expression that came over his brother’s face. Now they must both sit with it between each other while neither knows what to do with any of it. Because now that Maekar has seen how easily Baelor meant to agree to appease their father, even at the cost of them, he cannot bring himself to return to a bed that is so easily ready for another.
He knows Baelor’s intentions are meant to be selfless. He knows his brother must bear so much more than him. He still sees the boy that learned to stiffen his lip and wiped his eyes in private when he thought no one could see, the dutiful son that has always determined to do his utmost, very best. To be the perfect Targaryen Prince was an arduously impossible task when anyone who looked only saw a Martell, but Maekar had watched throughout the years as his brother endured and has sacrificed much of himself to be the closest thing to it. When lords and ladies stared too long or whispered about their crown Prince’s sharp, Dornish looks, Maekar had always been the glaring presence at his brother’s elbow as soon as he was old enough to understand. He could never comprehend how Baelor kept his face so carefully arranged against some of the bolder, more derisive remarks, but Maekar understood the weight of holding yourself up against prying eyes. Especially after accepting his own face would be a thing others would scrutinize when the pox he caught almost a decade ago left scars down both sides of his cheeks.
Beneath the ramrod straight spine and the linked arms behind his back, he knows how strong Baelor’s shoulders must be against all the weight that the world expects of him, but Maekor cannot stand at Baelor’s elbow and be a witness to it all anymore. He wasn’t chivalrous, or gracious, or elegant about claiming what he wanted. Maekar was a king’s son who never needed to please anyone. A fourth born with silver hair and purple eyes who could tell others to fuck off when his brother could not. He has been familiarized with the duties he owes to his family and to the crown, but the weight Baelor carries is much heavier than Maekar ever anticipated. In fact, it was too heavy, especially now when he has already failed so horribly at his own.
Baelor probably assumes their argument and now yesterday’s council was the reason Maekar has been avoiding him, which was true enough; but really, Maekar has moved to the spare yard because the last time his brother got close enough, he immediately smelled the difference in his scent.
He’d seen Baelor notice and discern the change – or rather, its absence – when his brother attempted to crowd him into a corridor he could not so easily slip out or away from him. Maekar heard him take the first pull of air and still feels how he shivered when Baelor nudged closer to smell the glands of his neck. Thankfully the steps of Lord Hayford broke them apart before they were found and Maekar was able to finagle his way out with the excuse he had a letter that needed sending, uncharacteristically offering to walk with their father’s new Hand to the rookery before his brother could think up a reason to keep him. But Maekar knew it would be an impossible task to escape the questions Baelor must surely have before he rides southeast in only a few days' time.
Maekar set the waterskin down and gathered his things. Throwing his cloak over his arm, he made to leave when his brother’s voice stopped him. “You’ve been eating poorly.”
Maekar stilled and raised a brow over his shoulder. “What?”
”You’ve been taking your meals in your rooms,” Baelor says, “But every day I see the trays come back barely touched.”
Maekar can feel the muscles in his jaw clench. He hadn’t considered his meals would draw attention. At least not yet. With his stomach so easily turned, Maekar couldn't bear to even smell the honey lavender roasted chicken that was once his favorite. And the night before, he barely touched the spiced apple butter loaf, nor the bread with whipped brie and berries that was sent up to break his fast. Heat roared up his collar and warmed his face. Too queasy to notice this week's dishes had been nothing but his favorites, Maekar hadn’t considered until now that there had been any intention to them.
“Have you been unwell?”
Maekar scoffed. “Am I unwell?” Turning back to scowl, something that wasn’t his stomach for once threatened to rise up and spew out at the audacity of such a question. “That's what you've come here to ask me?”
“Maekar,” Baelor started, making a step forward, “If you are encroaching on your heat – ”
“It’s no business of yours,” Maekar snapped, bristling with both anger and anxiousness. It was indecent of an alpha to ask an unclaimed omega such an intimate thing, but they had crossed the line of decency a long time ago. “But if you must know, no. I’m not.” He attempts to feign aloofness rather than panic as his heart pounds faster in his ears and shrugs, but it feels more like an awkward jolt of his shoulder than a gesture of nonchalance. “Besides, you’d smell if I was…”
”Would I?”
Maekar’s eyes could not help but flick up quicker than he would have wanted but kept the rest of his face perfectly still. He knew Baelor was watching, that this moment would be examined carefully in the way his brother always did, breaking down every part to piece together its deeper meaning. He always knew it was going to be more challenging explaining away his scent to his alpha brother than the rest of his family, but Maekar commanding the rear all depended on how he handled this night.
“You’re taking suppressants again.”
Once, it wasn't unusual for Maekar to mask himself. In fact, he'd been taking them since he learned there was a way to guard that part of himself.
“What of it?”
”Why?”
His mother once called him a very impassioned boy who felt a great range of many things and was not quiet about telling a room whatever he was feeling so strongly about. Rhaegel affectionately teased that when they smelled the sharp burst of bitter orange peel and zesty bergamot, their family all knew to beware the rampage of his little brother’s temper. It was Brynden that made the comment about Maekar’s scent that forever changed the way he felt about it. Before Maekar had even presented, he remembers the way Melissa Blackwood’s boy scowled at him with Daemon, both bastards complaining how Maekar stank up the yard whenever he couldn't keep his elbow up enough or was too slow to stay in time with Ser Quentyn’s count. Can we not have time in the yard anymore without having to hold our noses every time you throw a tantrum? It only dawned on him then how embarrassing he’d been.
He was three and ten when his scent matured, and for only a week after his first heat, Maekar permitted himself to smell like the neroli blossoms his mother grew from the garden of southern flowers Daeron planted for her. He couldn’t bear it; the looks and sniffs, the smirks and the disgusting remarks. After that week, Maekar went to their Grandmaester and asked for every way he could suppress it all.
His mother initially forbade it; the fiery temper he inherited from her flaring when she demanded to know who or what was said to suddenly desire something so unnatural, and in her eyes, archaic. His father had frowned while he listened to both mother and son argue about his decision with what to do with his own body but eventually shocked the room when Daeron resigned that a sleight of hand was not such a terrible thing for Maekar to have if it was what he wished. After his father gave his consent and closed the matter against any further dispute, the sudden disappearance of Maekar’s scent was still snickered about in the halls and the yard, but in time it passed, as do all things when interests pivot somewhere else.
Eventually, Maekar learned it was not just his mother who disapproved. When weeks passed and the first uproar about it all died down, he’d been relieved once the subject of his scent became an afterthought. Yet Maekar had been surprised by his brother when it was just the two of them and told Maekar that he did not think it a thing he needed to do, but Baelor understood. “More than most,” he said late one night they lingering in the yard, the both of them uninterested in washing up for dinner just yet.
Maekar remembers it so clearly. It was almost exactly a night like this one, when they used to have the time to train twice a day and would sit together after racking their swords. They had still been laughing about the state Ser Quentyn had shown up in earlier that morning, rumpled and stinking of omega. Maekar had laughed along with everyone else, but the japes about the smell had made his quieter than most. He wondered if the omega Ser Quentyn had been with knew their scent was being smelled by the entire yard and lewdly remarked about. Maekar only knew if it were his, he’d be mortified. “I know what it feels like to be under the scope of criticism. To be looked at and judged not for what you truly are but for what you can't control,” Baelor had told that night, almost five years ago, when a shadow had barely begun to darken his lip and Maekar’s hair was still long. “You need not ever feel that way with me. There is no need to suppress yourself around me.”
His family has been distracted and wringing themselves dry planning for Daemon’s approach, but he shouldn’t be surprised Baelor can smell the difference in Maekar’s scent. Before this last year, Maekar kept his scent and his heats suppressed until his father finally agreed with their mother that he should give his body a break from the herbs or else risk harming his chances of conceiving once the time came for a marriage. Without suppressants, Maekar went to great lengths to learn how to control his scent himself, something only few omegas still practiced; but when it was just the two of them again, not in the yard but years later in his brother’s bed, Baelor assured Maekar he did not need to exercise such restraint with him. So Maekar had grown accustomed to unmasking his scent when with his eldest brother, but now that he has taken it away, Baelor has the audacity to look hurt when it was he that pulled away first.
“Why do you think?” Maekar sneered, “I expect it best not to remind the men it will be an omega that leads them. Even if it is from the rear.”
”Maekar, there is no need for such measures — ”
”There is every need,” he snarls, hearing his voice begin to raise and sharpen, “I would not give anyone another reason to find me insufficient.”
He watches his brother’s face tighten and his jaw tense as Maekar throws the easiest thing he hopes will hurt and does his utmost best to raise his chin against the hard stare he’s leveled with.
“To suggest I've ever regarded you as insufficient is unfair,” Baelor says, quiet and incisive, “I understand you are angry with me so you are aiming low. But you know that isn’t true.”
“I’m not suggesting anything,” Maekar huffs, crossing his arms. “You have. Already, before all our father’s war council.”
“Maekar, everything hangs on the hope I will make it back in time. Without the Dornish and the Stormlanders, we don't have the numbers. If I arrive too late, it will be to a battle already over,” Baelor tells him, his mismatched eyes gleaming bright and disarming in the torchlight. “You would hold resentment against me because I’m afraid to show up to find you already dead?”
“All men must die,” Maekar scoffs, not accepting this excuse, even if Baelor’s words do soften and pull at something in him. “Whether it be on the field or the birthing bed, we cannot plan for it. You could die, even if you make it back in time. But you will not see me stepping out to stop your horse from leaving because I would never think to humiliate you in such a way.” He almost falters, brushing so dangerously against something he cannot afford to linger on now. When he was a small child, Maekar remembers their grandmother died during her labors, and the babe she had did not live long after, either. Maekar knew that he could survive this battle and still return to die some moons later in childbed, but lingering on that wouldn't do him any favors.
“No. I resent you because I've been a fool.” Maekar swallows past whatever has grown and now lodged itself in his throat, making it difficult to both speak and keep his voice steady. “To think you would want me beside you on the field when you’ve already made it plain you'd rather me beside someone else.”
Baelor’s eyes widened like he’d just been struck across the face and stepped closer. “Maekar, I – that is not – ”
He saw his brother’s hand move like it meant to reach for him and took a step back. The curve of his belly was still so very new that no one would notice anything under the padded gambeson he was wearing, but it suddenly frightened him Baelor would feel it if he came too close. All it would take was one touch, one brush across his stomach could throw everything into more of an upheaval than it already was. It was why he has been avoiding and dodging the alpha that knew the feel and smell of him well enough by now to know something more than his scent has changed.
He watched his brother notice the step backward and stilled his approach. Baelor looked across the distance Maekar set, and for once, resented how careful and courtly his brother could meticulously arrange himself as a refined prince of the realm, but never so well with him. A hurt settled in his shoulders that stiffened the other man’s shoulders before they sagged completely. Baelor let the distance stand and the hand retreated back to his side.
“Would you have rather I answered for you?” Baelor eventually says. He couldn’t hide the hurt that gleamed back across the courtyard, but his voice carefully took on the pulled back, restrained manner Maekar knew his brother used when expected to take on a difficult thing.
“You would rather I told father who you can or can’t marry, like some proxy?” Baelor asked, crossing his arms behind his back and finally breaking their stare to sigh at his feet. “It would have been selfish of me, to keep you for myself without telling you there could be another choice.”
“I would rather you told father the truth,” Maekar says and must look away, tired of the same argument they have already had. He blinks his eyes and commands them to stay dry, the lump in his throat only growing larger. “But no. Of course you still can’t. Because Seven forbid, Baelor Breakspear steps out of line and does anything unfavorable.” Maekar swallows and bites his lip. He hears himself and hates how petulant this man makes him, his head shakes but he doesn't know if it's at his brother or himself. “Perhaps I wanted you to. For once. For me.”
Taking a soft, sharp breath, Maekar must be careful but he could not be a coward. He forced himself to meet his brother's mismatched eyes and found he felt lonelier than ever. Despite his desire to still march for Daemon, despite the betrothals, Maekar still wished he could tell him everything.
“You know it is not such a simple thing,” Baelor says, “Our father was raised idolizing Baelor the Blessed – my namesake, the shadow I live under — he would rather see our line continue through intermarriages. Ones that would bring the realm together, not tear itself apart with more endogamy,” his brother tells him, staring with eyes that were half their mother and half their father. And like their father, Baelor rarely ever raises his voice, but like their mother, his brother is capable of still cutting deep without ever needing to draw a sword, always knowing how to reduce Maekar back to just his troublesome little brother. “And now with Daemon’s campaign…it would be better to wait – ”
“This isn't about timing! This is about you being bold and brave for everyone else but me!” Maekar’s fists shook at his sides after furiously wiping his face of the tears that betrayed him and didn't realize how loud he’s shouting until he was practically panting. Even taking suppressants, Maekar couldn't hide everything.
Baelor stared back stunned. His eldest brother who has always been so eloquent and well spoken now stood with his mouth open and fumbling for what to say. When it took too long, Maekar clutched his cloak closer. Baelor’s loss for words was an answer enough. Maekar has always known how much duty is threaded through the very fabric of his brother’s being, that it was something Baelor held above all his own personal wishes and desires. Maekar just hadn’t anticipated how much it would hurt to accept that also included him.
Deciding he was done waiting, Maekar steadied himself and raised his chin, even if his face was still tear streaked. “You think it’s hard living in Baelor the Blessed’s shadow? Try living under yours.”
Unable to remain a moment longer without saying more he might regret, Maekar turned and left.