~Jon~

** Warning: this chapter contains mature content**

I wash quickly in the bathhouse. It was a luxury we'd not had in Winterfell, but one which I'm thankful for every time I step into the moist heat in the dug-out cavern beneath the castle. The dirt and grime of the caves gets into every crease, under every fingernail, between every strand of hair. 

The large basins were kept warm by glowing hot coals beneath and changed several times daily.  I expect I am supposed to bathe privately in my chamber, but it seems a silly notion when the thing is here and I must pass it to get there.

I feel lighter than I have in days. The mining goes well. Daenerys is awake. Not even Jorah Mormont, Daario Naharis, or the issue of the Kingslayer can dampen my mood.

After speaking to the two afflicted stewards, the healer and Sam had both agreed there was no fever within the castle. It seemed the cook's hand and chambermaid were sweethearts and had shared a shellfish broth at a tavern in town.

Dany's fever was still, as yet, unexplained. Though Sam and the healer were just as certain this had not been poison; a lack of vomiting and pain, they said. More likely the queen had contracted a seasonal illness her body was not used to. She had not been long on Westeros, her body not used to the chills and draughts of its air. Its winter. The cold that lived in the stone and brick of Dragonstone.

Were they right?

Or was I foolish not to take the head of the cook? And the boy Elias who'd taken the food to her? The boy already made me uneasy. Though perhaps it was only that from afar he reminded me of Ollie. That the scars over my chest burned whenever he looked at me in that oddly familiar way he did.

The result of all of this however was that castle business had returned to normal. Stewards moved around the yard hurriedly, wagons came and went through the service gates, and the kitchen had returned to a cavern of banging pots and hollering of orders. It almost felt like home.

Bathed, I make my way toward our chamber. Though Dany is not there. Not in bed or at the desk , or sat resting by the fire as had been the healer's advice. Had she gone to take some air?

I'm about to turn and head for the grounds to look for her when something stops me. I change direction and head instead for the small turret door nestled behind the thick curtain in the corner of our chamber. I'm certain I'll find her there, and I do, though what I do not expect is to find Ser Jorah Mormont with her.

They stand close. Too close for my liking, and he holds both her hands in his. His head turns first, then hers, and an odd look comes into her eyes. As though she doesn't recognise me at all.

Gently, she slips her hands out of his. A look passes between them and he nods, bows deeply to her, then to me, before exiting the chamber without a word.

I move toward her slowly, drinking in the sight of her. Alive, flushed with the glow of health, yet fragile with the nearness of death. She has never looked more beautiful. Not even the night she stepped from Drogon's wing into the Godswood to take me as her husband. I want nothing more than to take her into my arms and hold her there tight; let the scent of her hair fill my nose, feel the heat of her against me. We'd had no moment alone since she awoke, and now that we do I am nervous. I know what I must tell her.

Tyrion's words to me the night she fell to the fever have haunted me.

She's a woman as much as she is a queen. She needs to hear from the man she loves that he feels just as she does.

And to think that I may have lost her. That I may have had to live with those words turning to dust inside me.

'Ser Jorah and I had much to catch up upon...' she explains, her hands knotting together, eyes averted.  She's nervous too. 'I thought to never see him alive again.'

'Then you've a measure of how I felt these past nights.'

She glances at me, curling her fingers into her gown. 'Missandei tells me you refused to leave. Even though they told you there might be a sickness in the castle.'

'My place is beside you.'

She frowns. 'Your place is to rule this realm should I be carried off with fever.'

I give her a bemused look. 'I only agreed to rule this realm beside you, in an alliance, Daenerys. I've no interest in doing it without you.'

She blinks, surprised. 'If I had not awoken they would call you King regardless of your interests.'

For some reason the formality in her tone sounds like an accusation. 'They can call me whatever they like, Dany, but without you, I am no king.'

'Not even in the north?'

Would they? Or did they call me traitor even now? I shake the thought from my head for it does not matter. My home was here now, with her.

'I won't discuss this anymore,' I say. Then, softer: 'I've no wish to fight with you, Dany. Not now.'

Almost guiltily, she lowers her gaze again. This time to the great painted table. Moving around it, she skims her hand over its ridges and crevices. Her hand touches upon Dorne before moving north, up through the Stormlands and past the Reach to The Neck, lingering over the Bite. Then, onwards past Winterfell to the Wall. From the top of the table she lifts her head.

'I will send the Kingslayer to the wall. I have asked Ser Jorah to make the arrangements.'

I stiffen. So he had convinced her where I had failed. I swallow down the flare of rage and jealousy I feel.

'It will not be the mercy you fear it is,' I say, my voice as tempered as I can make it. 'The Wall is most likely the worst place on earth.' On the map it's nought but a raised strip stretching from one side of the table to the other, but I can feel the chill from here.

'I know,' she says. 'I dreamt of it.'

'You dreamt of the Wall?'

She nods, still staring at it. 'I woke up there... alone. A child was crying somewhere within the castle or its grounds  but no matter how hard I searched, I could not find it. I could remember nothing of who I was, of how I came to be there, or what I was supposed to do.' She looks at me, that strange look in her eye again. As though I am a stranger. 'But I remembered you. I felt you.... and now I think in some ways I have always felt you. In my dreams... in my blood... in my heart.'

The words leave her like a prayer and the scar over my heart kindles aflame.

'Like home,' I whisper, recalling her words to me the night I told her of my scars, of my death, of my return.

From the moment I first looked at you, it felt like coming home.

She smiles, nodding softly. 'I think now...  perhaps you and I were always supposed to find each other. Two lost and broken things.  I think perhaps I understand that now - that only together could we defeat what lies beyond that wall.' Her gaze falls once more upon the map. I hate how hopeless her voice sounds, how lost and afraid it sounds.

'I love you,' I say.

She looks up at me, startled. I feel startled too.

I had not meant to say it so clumsily, so unceremoniously, and so I sigh in frustration with myself.

I go around the table so I'm standing before her. I take hold of her hand. 'When I thought I might lose you, that you might not wake, that I might not get to hear your voice again or see you smile... that your skin would dull and your hair would fade... Gods, Dany I feared it more than I have ever feared anything. More than the Night King or his army of dead men. More than losing my father or my brothers or my home. I'd have lost everything I've already lost a thousand times more if it meant I wouldn't have to lose you too.' I reach out to stroke my thumb across her cheek. 'I love you, Daenerys Targaryen.'

As she gapes at me, wide-eyed, I close the rest of the distance between us and take her into my arms. My kiss is rough and urgent, my lips ravaging hers, our tongues tasting the other with a desperate hunger. Jasmine and starlight. The power she holds within her small body always stuns me, and as I feel her hands clutch at me, returning my kiss with the same fervour, my legs weaken slightly, need curling around my groin.

Kissing my way across her cheek to her neck, I suck and pull at the hot skin there. With a soft moan her mouth finds mine again and she moves her tongue in deep strokes, small teeth biting at my lips. My control snaps.

I push her back so she is against the table, then scoop her up to set her upon it and raise her skirts. When she reaches for my belt, I pull back to look down at her, breathing hard.

'You are well enough?' I ask her. My cock throbs against her thigh and the idea of it being denied her is almost painful. That same strange look comes into her eyes before she nods and reaches for my belt. She pulls it loose as my hand finds her hip and pulls her closer to me I push myself inside her on a deep groan of satisfaction. Dany moans my name and drops her head back, exposing her throat.

'Jon....' she breathes as my mouth licks the length of skin there. She curls her legs around me and pulls me into her as I lower her back onto the table. It's begun. The dance between us. Her body moving against mine, moulding against mine. Made for me. She was. She had to be. No two other souls had ever fit together as ours did. We were the reflection of the other. Her the light, me the shadow. Fire, snow.

She still wears her coat, fastened by three small silver clips, each carved into the shape of a dragon's head. In the dying light, they glint at me from their position over her left breast. She leads the dance then; my speed, my depth, my mouth, my cock. All of it under her rule. All of it hers to command. Before it is over she pushes me from her body and stands, turning her back to me and bending over the table so I may enter her from behind. I'd taken her like this many times before, but this time feels different, as though we have become the magnificent beasts that roam the sky outside, fire running through our blood and legend alive in our souls.

oOo

I awake beside her in a pile of clothes by the fire, the moon high in the sky outside, our bodies cooling under the growing chill. Daenerys is awake, sitting up and staring hard into the flames. Shadows dance over her flesh, the silver of her hair, her delicate profile. I reach out to sift my fingers through the lengths which rest at the low of her back. It's soft, like spun silk. She turns to me. The tenderness in her voice had not prepared me; unshed tears shine there. 

'Do you ever think of your mother?' She asks me then. It feels like a knife through my heart. I had not prepared for it and so breath stops cold in my throat, a frozen fire.

'Not anymore,' I reply, surprised at how steady my voice sounds. When I was a child, I would think of her almost every day. Wonder about her, the sound of her voice, the shape of her smile, the colour of her hair. Whether my father loved her. Whether she loved him. Whether she loved me. 'Not since I was a child.'

She is waiting; I think. For me to say more. And I want to. Mainly because I like this closeness between us, as though there was nothing we would not tell the other as long as it is done here and now. I also want to speak of my mother because for so long she has been just another dead thing inside me. Was it when my father died? When I knew I would never know her name, never hear it spoken. Or was it before?

Whatever the reason, she felt alive again here in this moment.

'I dreamt of her once,' I say, and Dany turns to look down at me. Her eyes are wide and soft. 'Or at least I thought it was her. Her voice was sweet as a song and her eyes were kind like a child's and I am sure that she loved me.'

'I am sure that she did,' Dany whispers, a sob caught in her throat. Was she thinking of her own child? Who she believed a witch's curse had taken from her. The others she believed she would not have because of it. I reach out and take her hand, settling it gently over my heart.

'I'd always felt as though a part of me was missing. Not knowing her. Not even her name.' When I turn my gaze into the fire, then I am sure I see my father's face staring back at me. You promised me, father, you promised me. 'The last time I saw my father, he told me that when next we spoke, he would tell me of her.'

Dany is crying now. Silent and soft. I sit up so we are facing each other.

'But I don't think about her anymore,' I tell her. 'I no longer feel as though part of me is missing.' I'm still holding her hand and I raise it to settle it back over my heart, hoping she understands.

With a small fist, she wipes her cheek and looks up into my eyes. She no longer looks sad, merely resigned. 'Perhaps my destiny was always this. You.' She draws her fingers over the scars on my chest, gentle, featherlight touches over the gnarled and ruined skin.

I catch hold of her hand and raise it to my lips, kissing the dragon-shaped ring that sat atop her finger. 'Your destiny was to be queen of the seven kingdoms - the greatest queen this realm has ever seen. I knew it the moment I looked at you. I knew you were the only hope this realm had; that without you it was dead. And so was I.'

Hours seem to pass while she looks at me, while she searches every part of my face. She reaches forward to touch her lips to mine, eyes closed tight. 'I love you, Jon. Whatever comes next... I love you... too.'

oOo

My body jolts awake in the early dawn light. Stomach growling from hunger and licked with a chilly kind of dread. I reach out for Dany to find nothing but a pile of furs, long cold.

Scrubbing a hand over my face, I sit up and gaze around our chamber. We'd returned here. Ate. taken our pleasure again. Slept again. I'd slept through her rising? Though perhaps it was not a surprise given I'd sat by her bed for days. My bones groan and crack as I stand. A gleam of light spears through the open window and my eye follows it across the chamber to her desk. Was that...

I charge across the chamber to the desk; the dread creeping further up my spine; the fear rising higher in my chest.

The dragon-shaped ring she never removes sits atop a folded sheet of parchment. My name written across it in her hand. The ring itself is provenance of whatever it contains, as she knew and intended it to be. I lift the ring first, holding its substantial weight up to the sunlight. Red jewels glitter in the dragon's eyes, the head itself carved flawlessly from polished silver. Fisting it tight in my right hand, I lift her note, take a deep breath, and read.