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Of all the rooms in all the Red Keep that Rhaenyra might have chosen to keep her in, she has given her back her old quarters; the very same quarters that had belonged, long before they were ever Alicent's, to the Princess of Dragonstone herself.
She remembers the day she was given them the way she remembers very few things from before, with a clarity that embarrasses her, how the servants had come bustling in with their arms full to scrub away every last sign of the princess who'd lived there before; the hangings, the little Valyrian trinkets left carelessly on the sill—and how Alicent had shooed every one of them out into the corridor and i nsisted, with a stubbornness no one had thought strange of a girl so devout, that her own handmaidens see to the cleaning instead.
The truth being a thing she had buried so deep she could go whole years without turning it over: that she had wanted only a little while longer, one more night, to lie in those rooms and breathe in what Rhaenyra had left in them—the warm, woody scent of the alpha sunk down into the wool and wood, a shameful luxury she lost the very hour Viserys announced their engagement and a man's scent came to lie heavy over everything she owned, in contrast to his daughter’s, thick and bitter.
She supposes she ought to be grateful. They might have put her below with the others, in the black cells where men go to rot for the crime of having served a king instead of a queen; instead they have put her here, in a room that’s familiar to her, though whatever rage took the new Queen when she rode her dragon home to her father's seat has been let loose in here too, the walls stripped of their hangings and the chests carried off, so that nothing remains but the bed, the writing desk, the single chair before it, and a pair of tallow candles at the sill.
Alicent has been standing at the window for a while, watching the city below – struck by the fact that not much had changed outwardly, and that even though inside the Keep everything had changed, the city still breathed the same way.
The doors to the room open behind her without a knock or anyone asking whether she will receive the visit.
“You could have announced yourself,” Alicent says, and does not look away from the glass, because she does not have to; there is only one person left living in all the world who walks into her rooms as though they have always been hers, even after all these years. “There are guards for that sort of thing, unless you killed them all on your way in.”
“You should count yourself lucky I left you with a door that you can complain about at all.” Rhaenyra retorts
“How magnanimous,” Alicent returns. “I shall be sure to thank you for the privilege of wood and hinges.”
“How tiresome of you, to still pretend you care about manners.” The door falls shut, and in the heat of the room her scent comes in with her—and oh, that is the thing Alicent has been bracing against without knowing it, the real thing and not the ghost of it she'd starved on twenty years past—and something low in her spine comes loose before her mind can name it, and she presses her nails hard into the meat of her own palm and keeps her face to the window.
“I'd have thought a woman who has taken a city would have better things to do than trouble her prisoners.”
“My council would have you in the cells.” Rhaenyra comes no nearer; she does not need to, the room is too small to allow her the dignity of distance. “With the rest of them. You might think on that, before you sharpen your tongue any further. You are not down there with them.”
Alicent turns at that, unwilling to take that with her back turned. “Yes. I see how merciful you’ve grown. The Realm’s Delight, isn’t that what they used to call you, and how fortunate for me there’s some delight in you yet.” she takes a breath, shallow, even as her omega wants to draw Rhaenyra in by the lungs. “I only wonder what the price of all this mercy will be. There’s always a price with you. There always was, even when we were girls.”
Something moves behind Rhaenyra's eyes at the moniker, but she changes the subject before Alicent can focus in on it. “Tell me where Aegon is.”
“I don’t know.”
“Alicent.”
“I don't know.” This much, at least, she can give without the lie souring on her tongue—she'd come home to a son already gone, the bed empty where her boy should have been. “He was gone when I came back, without a word of it to anyone. If you've come for him you've come to the wrong room. And if you've only come to look at me caged—then look. Have your fill. And go.”
Neither of them says anything for a moment, and it is only now that Alicent lets herself feel how empty it is, only the bed and the bare stone and the two of them—and she says, before she can think the better of it, “You've made it very plain I'm to keep nothing. There's not even a chair fit for sitting. You stripped these walls to the bone.”
Her gaze catches on the bared shelf above the desk, where her books had stood, and the loss of them irritates her more than it ought to “Even the books. Tell me, Rhaenyra, did you think them a threat? Did you imagine I would raise an army out of Septon Barth, or beat your knights from the door with the histories of the Seven Kingdoms?”
And Rhaenyra's mouth curves, and for a moment they are neither of them queen nor prisoner but only the two girls they were, trading small cruelties for all the hurt between them. “I imagined no such thing.”
“Then why?”
“I needed something to light the fire.”
Alicent stares at her, and then, despite everything, her eyes roll in a way that feels almost obscene in its familiarity.
“You burned my books for kindling,” she says, almost in disbelief.
“You’ll live,” Rhaenyra says, too lightly. “More than my sons got.” And there it is, set down between them like always, the dead boys; and for a breath they let it lie. Then Alicent cannot.
“You dare speak of your sons—what about Jaehaerys? A boy in his bed, no less—his mother made to choose which of her children kept its head. Was that your council's will too, Rhaenyra, or only the part of you that's been Daemon's for too long to tell justice from butchery—”
“I never gave that order.” Fast, low, and for the first time tonight the crown slips sideways on her, the first crack in all that conqueror's ease. “Gods, Alicent—a child. You think I would—it was Daemon, and a grief I didn't know he carried like that. I told you as much. I sent it to you in my own hand. I told you.”
And the unforgivable thing, the thing Alicent will carry to her grave, is that she believes her, has always, somewhere beneath the war and the dead, believed her.
Alicent is the one to look away first, and she asks the only thing she has truly wanted to ask since the door swung open.
“Helaena. Jaehaera. Where have you put them, what have you—”
“Your daughter keeps her own rooms. The child is with her. No one troubles them. They are not prisoners, Alicent, whatever you have decided of me. Helaena may walk the Keep if it eases her. Anywhere she likes.”
“And I may not.”
“No.”
“She is free to roam, and I am kept here.”
“Well.” Rhaenyra tilts her head, and there she is again, the ghost of the girl who once knew Alicent better than anyone alive ever has—the one who loved her, and was loved, before a king and a crown and a hundred small cruelties stacked themselves into a wall between them. “You're the dangerous one. Helaena never had it in her, the scheming, hadn't the patience for it—couldn't raise a faction against me if her life turned on the doing of it and we both know it true. But you–You I have to keep where I can see you.”
Then, quieter, not looking at Alicent at all, Rhaenyra’s gaze goes to the empty space by the window where the seat used to be.
“Do you remember when this was mine,” she says, “I’d send the page away and have you brought down after dark, and you’d sit right there and read to me until the candle drowned out.”
“I do.” Alicent remembers, but she will not say the rest of it; how they had lain tangled for hours before Rhaenyra ever presented, before any of them were anything yet, how Alicent would lose her place on the page because Rhaenyra had gone heavy and warm against her side and was breathing slow into the curve of her throat, without contest the brightest part of every single one of Alicent’s days.
The memories prove too much, and Alicent scrambles to say the words that she’d been thinking ever since one of the servants let it slip what happened.
“I heard about Jacaerys.”
Rhaenyra doesn’t move.
“At the Gullet. I know what it is, to put a child in the ground before his time. Whatever you think of me by now, I would never have wished it on you.” Her folded hands are the only thing keeping themselves from shaking. “I am sorry for your son. I am.”
For a long moment Rhaenyra says nothing, and her throat works, and when she speaks at last it’s as if the words pain her. “Don't. Not from you, Alicent—not your sympathy, of all the things in the world I cannot take tonight.” A breath that shakes, only slightly. “The worst of it is that I know you mean it. I have always known when you meant a thing. That is the worst of it.”
And Alicent, undone, the heat and the grief and the twenty years all rising in her at once, takes a step she does not decide to take, against every instinct she has spent those twenty years sharpening, because the look in those endlessly blue eyes is too much, the grief in them a thing Alicent almost feels in her own chest “Rhaenyra, I—”
“Your Grace.” there’s a voice in the corridor, a fist at the door. “Your Grace—the council asks for you. It can't wait.”
And the warmth goes out of Rhaenyra's face all at once and the Queen comes back into it, and she is already turning, already gone somewhere Alicent cannot follow, setting the crown straight on her brow.
Days pass, but Alicent cannot be sure of how many exactly, as she’s lost track of time, kept in her room as she is. They’re feeding her well, the same meals, if not slightly plainer due to the resources needed for the war and the armies, as she’d had under Viserys, and then under Aegon and Aemond. Small mercy— or, more likely, simple thoughtlessness; Rhaenyra has never been subtle about cruelty, and deprivation-by-design would require a kind of pettiness she has never bothered to cultivate when there are blunter tools at hand.
She’s not sleeping well, and to add insult to injury, the room has begun to smell faintly of Rhaenyra again, which is oddly comforting.
She’s sitting at her writing desk, with nothing to write on or write with, tracing the cracks on the wood, which she has not yet brought herself to ask for because asking Rhaenyra's household for things is still a concession she is not prepared to make, and the knock comes sharp, the same rhythm as when they were girls.
Rhaenyra marches in once Alicent gives the go-ahead—performative as it is for a prisoner.
Rhaenyra has taken to wearing leathers since the conquest, dark ones, well-cut. She looks every inch the alpha queen she has always been in the process of becoming, and Alicent finds the composure increasingly difficult to maintain when Rhaenyra is standing four feet away in that particular coat.
So she keeps her eyes on the desk.
“Lord Manderly,” Rhaenyra says without greeting. “He is demanding lower taxes in exchange for renewing the fealty of his bannermen. Tell me how to refuse him without losing his support.”
“Strange of you to ask your prisoner instead of your council.”
Rhaenyra gives her a look that says she has already done that, and the look tells Alicent everything she needs to know about how that went.
She ought to leave it there, but Rhaenyra looks terrible – hollows under her eyes, hair down, free from her braids but in such a way that does not look purposeful or skilled, but messy. The sight strikes something in Alicent she long thought dead.
“Lord Manderly is eighty years old,” Alicent says. “He has requested the same terms from every ruler since Jaehaerys. He does not expect you to accept. He expects the Crown to thank him warmly for his loyalty, praise his long memory of service, and invite his grandson to court-– the taxes are a formality.”
Rhaenyra is quiet for a moment, and then she turns to leave, still facing the door, “What’s the grandsons name?”
“Orros. He’s twelve.”
Rhaenyra gives her a nod, seemingly unable to thank her with words, and leaves.
She does not know when the books appear.
The omega comes back from her evening walk, something she’s making use of ever since Rhaenyra permitted so — the corridor and back, a guard's footsteps behind her, eleven minutes if she takes it slowly — and they are on the shelf; six of them, then the next day two more, materialising without comment or ceremony. She recognises them all. The Histories, Baelor's Commentary. The small green volume of Dornish verse, Septa Marlow’s writings.
The following evening Rhaenyra arrives to ask about the lords of the Reach, and Alicent has the green book open in her lap, and neither of them mentions it, and Alicent watches her settle into the chair across the desk and sees the tension in her brow, the way she rubs at her fingers before she stops herself, and thinks — she is not sleeping, she has not been sleeping — and says, “The Reach lords will not move without the word of the oldest of them all. Stop courting the bannermen and write to Lord Grimm directly. Flatter him. Tell him you remember his long standing loyalty to your house and he will answer.”
Rhaenyra looks up. “You could write it,” she says, carefully, not quite an ask.
“I could,” Alicent says, and picks up the green book again, and turns a page she is not reading, and after a moment she says, “You would need to bring me paper, though.”
That night she does not manage sleep at all. The room is too warm,the heat sitting under her skin like a thing with its own slow pulse, and when she finally drifts off it is into dreams she does not remember the day after, barely a few hours until sunrise.
The paper is brought to her rooms by one of Rhaenyra’s servants in the morning, with her breakfast.
Alicent does not think to ask why she is not in the dungeons until the third visit, when Rhaenyra has arrived looking already harrowed from the day, without a question for once, seemingly content to stand in front of Alicent’s window and gaze at the streets below. The scent of her fills the small room the way it has taken to doing of late, and Alicent finds she has read the same line of verse three times over—She blames the poor light.
“Why am I not in the dungeons?”
Rhaenyra glances at her sideways. “Feeling poorly treated?”
“Curious. Your council does not trust me. Daemon wanted me in chains before your father’s death, and I doubt grief has made him fonder of me. Corlys Velaryon cannot be pleased either. One has to wonder where all this mercy comes from.”
“They are gathering our armies in the Reach.”
“So I have heard. And yet here I remain, with a bed, a writing desk, my dresses, and my books returning one by one.”
“You know why.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Because I need someone who knows what they’re doing. My council argues, every man for his own interests, and none of them know this court the way you do. You ran it for fifteen years, Alicent. You ran it without anyone understanding how much of it was you, and I need—” She stops. “I need someone who will tell me when I am about to do something irreversibly foolish.”
Alicent studies her.
“That may take a great deal of my time.”
Rhaenyra almost smiles. “Then I suppose I should be grateful you are not in the cells.”
The visits happen more often and last longer, even without a concrete reason behind it, though neither one of htem comments on it.
Rhaenyra comes in the late afternoon and stays into the evenings, legs stretched out in front of her, and sometimes she has a question and sometimes she does not. She looks better, marginally.
She is still making the plan. In the back of her mind, still — the route, Helaena's rooms and how far they are from the east gate. She has not stopped wanting to go. She tells herself every evening when Rhaenyra's scent has settled into the walls again and the room has taken on that specific quality of warmth that it only has when they are both in it — she tells herself: this is not what it was. Too much has happened. You are not fourteen, and she is not the girl who used to fall asleep against your shoulder while you read to her, and you are not staying because of anything other than the fact that you have nowhere to go.
Two days before it breaks, they are arguing about Septon Barth and Alicent is reading aloud to make a point and looks up to find Rhaenyra watching her with her chin resting on her hand and something in her expression that is simply, openly, fond, and the heat moves through Alicent from the base of her spine to the back of her throat in one long wave and she looks back down at the page before it can reach her face.
It happens in the middle of an argument about grain.
They are deep in it—the Crownlands stores, how much can be spared for the riverlands without starving the city through winter—and Alicent is mid-sentence, halfway through telling Rhaenyra exactly why the stores were kept at such levels under Viserys, when the pain folds her over the desk.
It comes without warning, low and deep and wrenching, a cramp that has nothing to do with hunger or illness and everything to do with something she has not felt in so long that for one disoriented moment she does not recognise it. Her hand grasps hard the edge of the desk. She is suddenly, horribly aware of her own skin — too hot, damp at the back of her neck, the borrowed silk sticking to her — and of the slow heavy turn of heat low in her belly that the cramp leaves behind it.
“Alicent.” Rhaenyra is half out of her chair, tone horribly worried,“What is it? What–” she starts, and then immediately stops.
Alicent watches it happen even bent over the desk as she is — watches her straighten slowly back into her chair, watches her nostrils flare and her pupils blow wide and dark as whatever has just flooded the room reaches her. She is looking at Alicent the way she imagined the knights looked at girls in the songs, the way she perhaps did not know she still could, and underneath the alarm there is something far older and far hungrier surfacing in her face that she is plainly fighting to keep down.
Oh, Alicent thinks. Oh, no.
“My heat is starting.” she says aloud;there is no point pretending otherwise when the evidence is currently filling the air of the room.
“You—” Rhaenyra's voice comes out rough; she clears her throat, tries again, and it is not much better. “You can't be. You've been—the whole time you've been here you haven't—”
“I know.” Alicent presses the heel of her hand against her sternum and breathes through another slow pull of it. “It should have come before the city fell. Weeks ago. I was—” She stops, but says it anyway, there is no dignity left to protect in front of the one person who has seen her without any. “I was too frightened. For months. The war, Aegon, the children, then the city taken and not knowing if I'd be killed in my bed–”
Rhaenyra is uncharacteristically quiet, seemingly realizing exactly what changed at the same time as Alicent does. “And now..”
“My body has decided it is — safe. Here. With—”
Rhaenyra’s expression shifts too quickly to name.
“I'll send for Gerardys at once,” she says, standing, all business suddenly, “He'll have suppressants, something surely, I'll have him bring everything he has, we can stop this before it—”
“It is too late for suppressants.”
Rhaenyra stops with her hand already at the door.
“You take those at the first signs,” Alicent says, “in the day or two before. Not once it's begun. Once it's begun they do nothing but make you sick on top of everything else.” She straightens with effort, and the look she gives Rhaenyra is steady even as the sweat sits at her hairline.
“And there is something else you should know, since you are clearly about to do something foolish out of panic. I have not had a heat since before Daeron was born. Viserys could not—” she gestures, unwilling to speak of it even now, “—and there was no one else, obviously, so for years I simply took the suppresants and rode out what little broke through. Years, Rhaenyra. Whatever is coming is not going to be a small thing.”
“If you try to wait it out alone,” Rhaenyra says slowly, “after that long –”
“It could go badly for me. Yes.” Alicent laughs once, without humor. “The maesters have a great many careful words for what happens to an omega who white-knuckles a heat this severe, and none of them are reassuring.”
Rhaenyra comes back from the door. She does not sit. She stands a careful distance away — alpha enough to know exactly how careful she is being, ignoring her own instincts.
“Then there is only one solution that does not place you in danger.” She says it to the wall, mostly. “If you have a preference. As to who. I can see whether there is anyone in the Keep you would trust, I can have them—”
“Rhaenyra.”
“—it would be handled carefully—”
“Rhaenyra.”
She stops.
Alicent looks at her — the stupid, noble distance, at the woman standing four feet away offering with a perfectly straight face to go fetch her some other alpha as though the entire room is not already saturated with the answer, as though every line of her own body is not straining toward Alicent even as she stands there being noble about it — and Alicent feels something that has been twenty years coming finally give way in her chest.
“It's you,” she says, and rolls her eyes, and her voice cracks straight down the middle of it. “You impossible woman. It's you. It has always, always been you. Since I was fourteen years old it has been you. Who else in all the world did you imagine I was going to ask.”
Rhaenyra stares, as if her brain needs a moment to slowly go over the words again.
“Say that again,” she breathes.
“Rhaenyra—”
She is across the room in a flash, all that careful distance abandoned at once, her hands coming up to frame Alicent’s face “Say it again. Do you—do you mean it? Truly? You’re certain, you’re—Alicent, if this is the heat speaking and not you, you must tell me now, I could not—” her voice breaks, “—I will not bear it if you wake tomorrow and—”
“You are a fool,” Alicent says, and her own voice is shaking now, and she does not care. “You are the greatest fool in all the Seven Kingdoms, and you have just taken a city, gods help us all.” Her breath catches, heat rolling merciless, and she lifts her chin anyway, stubborn “Do you want me to write it down? You have given me pen and paper now. I shall draft it like a decree—I, Alicent of House Hightower, want—” her breath stutters, and the honesty of it burns, “—have always wanted— shall I have it sealed, shall I read it before your council, would that finally—”
Rhaenyra kisses her, and it ends the sentence, and it ends a great many other things too — the war between them, or the part of it that lived in this room,. It is not gentle, exactly, but it is careful, like Rhaenyra cannot quite believe what’s happening and what she’s allowed.
She tastes faintly of wine and saffron, she tastes the way Alicent has dreamed she would taste and refused, every morning after, to remember dreaming.
Alicent's hands have gone up of their own accord and are gripping the front of the leather coat, fisted in it, and she does not recall deciding to do that, but she does know that if Rhaenyra tries to draw back now she will simply pull her down again, prisoner or not, queen or not, council in the corridor or not. The heat is doing something low and demanding in her belly and the rest of her does not, for once in her sensible life, disagree with it.
Rhaenyra draws back anyway—only far enough to look at her, only far enough to set her brow against Alicent's, both of them breathing hard.
“Good gods,” the alpha breathes against her lips, “the sounds you make, Alicent—”
“Don’t be so smug about it,” Alicent manages, causing Rhaenyra to let out a laugh, kissing under her ear, the omega’s knees as a result doing something undignified that would have sent her to the floor if not the desk behind her.
The heat is rising in her in earnest now, the slow tide of it building, and she can feel Rhaenyra answering it without trying to—the alpha of her flooding the air thick and close, the pupils blown black, the careful courtesy fraying at every edge. Rhaenyra's mouth at her neck. Rhaenyra's hand splaying open at the small of her back to press her closer. The line of Rhaenyra's thigh moving between her own, and Alicent's hips rocking forward against it without her permission, and the low ruined noise Rhaenyra makes at that, into her hair.
And then Rhaenyra stops.
She does not pull away—does not give Alicent that, mercifully—only stops, her forehead dropped to Alicent's collarbone, her breath fanning against the hollow of her throat.
“The door,” she says, hoarse. “Alicent, the door is unlocked. Anyone could—anyone could walk in, and I will not have you—I will not have anyone see you like this. Not for the world.” Alicent makes a small noise of complaint before she can stop it, and Rhaenyra hears it, diving in to kiss it away, seemingly unable to bear it even for a second.
“One moment and I’m all yours.” Rhaenyra swears, hand caressing Alicent’s jaw before retreating. She leans back against the desk, watching as Rhaenyra slides the heavy bolt in, turns the key, tries to open the door just to be sure, and once satisfied, turns back around.
Alicent barely has time to push off the desk before Rhaenyra is on her, hands sliding under her thighs and lifting her clean off the floor as though she weighed nothing, as though it were the easiest thing in the world; and Alicent makes a startled sound she does not quite recognise as her own, her arms going around Rhaenyra's neck on instinct, every part of her registering at once the strength of the grip and the heat of the body against hers and the dizzying realization that she’s finally at Rhaenyra’s mercy.
Her back meets the bed a moment later, the coverlet cool against her skin, and the shock of it pulls another gasp from her, Rhaenyra following her down at once, mouth claiming hers in a kiss that is deeper now, messier, no longer careful, tasting of pure alpha want. The small hairs at the back of the omega’s neck startle.
Alicent's hands have lost all their usefulness, scrabbling at the lacings of that dark leather coat without coordination or patience, mind alight with just the knowledge that she must see what’s underneath, must finally make all the sacrifice and pain worth it, to be skin to skin to Rhaenyra after all of it.
Rhaenyra fares better, clearly the more experienced one out of the two of them. Her hands are swift, tugging the gown up and off with little ceremon. The smallclothes beneath fare no better—ripped and tossed aside. Alicent’s breasts spill free into the air and Rhaenyra’s palms cover them immediately, thumbs brushing over her nipples, drawing a sharp cry from Alicent that dissolves into a broken moan when the alpha’s mouth follows.
The alpha draws back just long enough to look at her — bare to the waist now, flushed, wrecked.
But Rhaenyra does not linger there. The scent of Alicent’s heat is thick enough to drown in, sweet and heady and pulling at every alpha instinct she possesses. She kisses a wet path down Alicent’s ribs, over the soft give of her belly, nipping once at the jut of her hipbone just to feel the omega jolt beneath her.“Rhaenyra—” Alicent’s voice is already fraying, thighs trembling as strong hands push them wide apart.
“You’re unbelievable, Alicent. Look at how messy and wet you are, fuck.” she murmurs, voice low. “I cannot believe you’ve been this perfect all this time.”
She means it, Alicent thinks, and the realisation is dizzying in a different way than the heat is, a vertigo that has nothing to do with her body and everything to do with the fact that even after bearing four children, the scars of it, and the twenty years of changes to her body, Rhaenyra is as spellbound as ever.
She settles between Alicent’s legs like she was born for it, holding her open, and then her mouth descends—hot, wet, and ravenous.
The first broad stroke of Rhaenyra’s tongue drags straight up through slick folds and Alicent’s back arches clean off the bed with a strangled sound.
Her hands fly down, one fisting in silver hair, the other scrabbling uselessly at the coverlet. Rhaenyra makes a low, satisfied noise at the taste of her and does it again, like a dragon savoring its dinner, tongue curling deliberately around Alicent’s swollen clit before sucking it gently between her lips.
“Oh—gods—”Alicent’s thighs try to close around Rhaenyra’s head but the alpha simply presses them wider, pinning her open with effortless strength. Long, hungry licks that gather every drop of wetness, going from slow, gentle The sounds are obscene—wet, filthy, accompanied by Rhaenyra’s own low groans of pleasure as she feasts on her. Alicent is beside herself, head thrashing against the pillows, red curls sticking to her forehead
Every breath comes out a whimper or a broken plea. The heat inside her surges higher with every stroke of that clever tongue, coiling tighter, sharper, until she feels she might shatter from it.
“Rhaenyra—Rhaenyra, please—” Her voice cracks on the words. She cannot tell if she is begging for more or for mercy; both feel true. Her body is no longer hers. It belongs to the mouth between her legs and the alpha who wields it so ruthlessly.
Rhaenyra pulls back just far enough to speak, lips shining, voice wrecked. “That’s it. Let me hear you — that’s my good girl.” Then she dives back in, tongue pushing inside her, fucking her in shallow thrusts while her nose grinds against Alicent’s clit, and she’s tipping over the edge, in freefall, as her thighs lock around Rhaenyra’s shoulders, hips rolling desperately against her face as pleasure rips through her in waves.
Rhaenyra does not stop. She moans into her cunt and keeps licking her through it, gentler now but relentless, drawing out every last tremor until Alicent is shaking and oversensitive and still somehow aching for more.
She feels more than sees Rhaenyra ease back, pressing a last soft, reverent kiss to her slick folds before crawling up her body. She gathers Alicent close, kissing her trembling mouth so she can taste herself on the alpha’s tongue. “Beautiful,” Rhaenyra whispers against her lips, brushing damp curls from Alicent’s forehead with a gentleness that feels almost sacred after the ferocity of moments ago. “My Alicent. Mine.”
Alicent turns her face into the hand that is brushing her hair back and lets herself be held, what feels like a lifetime later, body humming with heat – she knows even with her limited experience, this will not be enough to sate it completely, but allow her some time to gather her thoughts and bask in the full weight of Rhaenyra’s attention.
This is what I have been missing all this time, she thinks, almost drugged with it, her cheek against the alpha’s shoulder. This is why men go to war for and septas warn against in their indirect ways, the thing she read before in her books and concluded it a simple exaggeration by the authors for dramatic flair, because nothing in her own bed resembled it.
And yet — and this is the thought that comes to her unbidden, after, the one she will examine later when she has the wit for examination — she does not think it would have been this even with another. She does not think any alpha in the world could have laid her open like this, set her down so gently in the aftermath, made the heat into something other than the violence it had threatened to become. No one other than Rhaenyra.
Minutes pass while Alicent catches her breath, so the reprieve is, as she predicted, short lived. Another deep cramp rolls through her core, causing Alicent to whimper into Rhaenyra’s neck, hips shifting restlessly. The emptiness inside her suddenly impossible to manage. The alpha’s tongue had been magical, devastating even, but she needed to be claimed fully, nothing else would be enough for the heat or the years of starvation for this particular alpha.
“Rhaenyra,” she breathes, voice hoarse. She presses closer, one leg sliding over the alpha’s hip, seeking. Her hand trails down Rhaenyra’s chest, bolder than she has ever been. “I need more. I need you.”
Rhaenyra stills, then pulls back just far enough to meet her eyes. The blue is nearly swallowed by black. “Alicent…”
“Please, Rhaenyra. Give it to me. Don’t you think I’ve waited long enough? I’ve wanted you for so long and we fought and then we were with others–” at the mention of it, either Viserys or Criston, Rhaenyra lets out a growl, silencing her with her lips again, before moving again, settling over her.
Gods, the weight of her. Itt is not a thing Alicent has ever known herself to want. She had often found the oppressive press of her husband or her lover too much—choking, suffocating, a reminder of how trapped she was, how little her own body belonged to her. But Rhaenyra settling over her is the opposite: warm and grounding where it had once been harsh. The alpha’s presence pins Alicent down into the furs completely, rendering her unable to move, and instead of panic she feels only a deep, bone-melting relief.
Just to prove her theory, she tries, a small bit of rebellion, testing the give of it. She shifts a hip and finds Rhaenyra’s weight does not yield to it, and the realization hits her that she is going precisely nowhere unless Rhaenyra decides otherwise, and that she has no wish at all to be elsewhere. It is the safest she has felt in her life. It may be the safest she will ever feel.
“Oh, you like this, huh?” the alpha grins, grinding down into her almost cruelly, the length of her pressing against her entrance teasingly.
“Yes,” she admits immediately, no room for pretense, not in this room. “I love belonging to you, knowing I’m yours.”
She wants to listen to Rhaenyra, move when she bids her to move, speak only when spoken to, couldn’t resist her before, and especially not now, with the warmth of her attention caressing her.
Rhaenyra’s control frays visibly at that. She kisses Alicent once more, slower this time, almost reverent, and then she pushes inside in one long, steady thrust. The stretch is everything and more than she’d ever thought it would be; Alicent’s head falls back against the pillows broken groan as Rhaenyra fills her completely; thick, hot, finally the heat inside of her quieting, satisfied by the sheer fullness.
Tears slip from the corners of her eyes, not from pain but from the overwhelming rightness of it.
Rhaenyra stills once she is seated to the hilt, breathing hard against Alicent’s neck. “Alicent… seven hells, you feel—”
“Move,” Alicent whispers, legs wrapping tighter around Rhaenyra’s waist, heels digging in. She clenches around her deliberately, drawing a ragged groan from the alpha. “Please. I need you to move. I need you to take me.”
The words seem to knock the air out of Rhaenyra’s lungs, as if she cannot believe what she’s hearing, and her hips immediately start moving in relentless, long thrusts that grind against that perfect spot inside her every single time. The alpha moves with a ferocity like she’s been holding it all in for too long and is only now finding the perfect valve, fucking her like every stolen glance, every harsh word during the years led here.
Alicent relaxes further against the pillow, safe in the knowledge that she only needs to hold on, let herself open for Rhaenyra, that Rhaenyra will take care of her, fill her up, give her what she needs. She has never felt so thoroughly claimed. So wanted. So safe in her own skin.
Rhaenyra shifts the angle slightly and Alicent cries out, loud and shameless, hips trying uselessly to rise to meet her. The weight holding her down only makes it better. She cannot run from the pleasure. She can only take it, again and again, until she feels herself beginning to unravel.
I would have given you everything, Alicent thinks, helplessly, riding the building edge of it, I would have burned it all down, I would never have married him, I would have—
“That’s it,” Rhaenyra pants against her ear, voice wrecked. “Let go for me, my love. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
My love. The words hit Alicent immediately, washing over her. She realizes, at once, that this is everything she’s ever wanted and could never let herself realize for it would hurt too much given their circumstances.
She comes apart with a shattered cry, Rhaenyra’s name fracturing into a sob as the orgasm crashes through her harder than anything before. Her walls clamp down tight, pulsing around the thick length buried inside her, and still Rhaenyra keeps moving, fucking her through it with deep, possessive strokes that prolong the pleasure until Alicent is shaking, but the heat inside her is still alight — craving the only possible solution, and Alicent finds herself utterly devoid of want to deny her inner omega.
She presses her face into the curve of Rhaenyra’s neck and whispers, voice hoarse and desperate against sweat-damp skin.
“Inside me—Rhaenyra, please. Fill me. I need you to come inside me.”
The alpha groans, hips stuttering at the words. “Alicent—are you sure—”
“I know it’s foolish,” she gasps, the confession spilling out between broken moans as Rhaenyra keeps thrusting. “Gods, I know—we’re at war, it would be madness—but I don’t care. I want it. I want you to breed me. Want you to fill me until I’m dripping with you, until I can feel it for days.” Her voice cracks, another wave of heat rolling through her. “I’ve never wanted that from anyone else. Only you. Only ever you.”
The words seem to unravel what little control Rhaenyra has left. The alpha growls low in her throat, and the pleading in her voice is enough to finally let go, hips stilling to a halt, mouth frozen in a silent scream as she lets go, thick spurts of come filling her up, Alicent’s heat finally quenching.
She lets herself go boneless beneath the alpha, pulling her closer until they’re sharing breath, the omega has not felt this still in years, her brain and body both quiet, not thinking of the next step.
“I cannot believe you,” Rhaenyra murmurs into her mouth, “I cannot—gods Alicent, are you alright, tell me—was I too rough?”
“Mhm.” Alicent lets out, words proving too challenging at the moment, especially as Rhaenyra is warm and safe and right there. She burrows further into her, hoping it’s enough of an answer.
“Alicent?”
“You were perfect,” she yawns, and finds that she means it. From the weight of her, the gentleness, the heat still warming her insides.
Rhaenyra shifts, hips moving as if to pull out.
Alicent makes a soft, distressed sound in the back of her throat and tightens her legs around Rhaenyra’s waist instantly, heels digging in with surprising strength for how boneless she feels.
“No,” she mumbles, voice thick with exhaustion “Don’t. Stay.”
“Alicent, I’m heavy, and you—”
“I don’t care.” Alicent burrows closer, pressing her face into the warm curve of Rhaenyra’s neck, breathing in the mingled scent of them—sweat, sex, alpha, hers. “Stay inside me. I want you close. I need you close.”
She settles back down, careful not to crush her, and slides one arm beneath Alicent’s shoulders to hold her tighter. The other hand strokes slowly up and down her spine, grounding and tender.
The redhead hums in quiet satisfaction as the heavy, comforting weight of her alpha settles over her again. She can still feel Rhaenyra inside her, softening but not gone.
Alicent lets herself fall asleep, entwined and still joined with Rhaenyra, for once perfectly content to let the world outside of those doors burn down if it meant no one would come knocking.