Once upon a time, a white knight fell for a lady in red.
Once upon a star, a star fell for love of the sun.
Once upon a time, Arthur thinks, I was worthy of my sword.
Arthur loved Elia from the day he met her, and knew he could never have her.
Or, well. Not as his wife.
As Sword of the Morning, Arthur was meant for things other than marriage and ruling - Allem and Ashara bore that weight, leaving Arthur free to devote himself to the pursuit of Dawn.
And then-
She was not a distraction. Never that. She was an augmentation - the world was better for having her in it, and he was better for knowing her. She pushed him to be strong in ways she never could be, and in return gave him hours of laughter, and the sort of serious consideration Allem and their mother had always denied him, because he was so clearly not going to rule even so much as a holdfast in Allem's name.
"The brightest star in the sky," Ashara calls him when finally Mother lays Dawn in his hands, but Arthur knows better. He is nothing compared to Elia, who is as the sun.
He is named to the Kingsguard three days before Elia's betrothal to the Prince of Dragonstone is announced, and can only think I can remain her friend now.
He knows in his soul that he wishes more could grow between them than love, but he has forsworn wife and children, has sworn celibacy, and she will be another man's wife in less than a year.
He still kisses her, in a shadowed corner of a dark garden, tasting sourwine on his own tongue and sweetwine on hers. She trembles against him, one thin hand resting against his throat in the open collar of his shirt, and though brief, it lasts his entire life.
She blinks up at him in the gloom, when they've let one another go, her eyes huge and dawn-dark.
"We mustn't," she whispers, fingertips to his lower lip, which feels branded by her kiss. "Not like this."
He kisses her again, longer this time, and finds the curve in her spine where his hand fits best, and curls his other hand through her hair, to cradle her delicate skull. Her hair is thick, lustrous even to moonlit touch, and he wonders how any man could call Elia Nymeros Martell, in all her clever, curious glory, weak.
She tastes so sweet, and he feels more drunk on her than on the wine.
It is stupid, really. Even Ashara, who takes her pleasure where she pleases and damns the consequences, would not take this risk.
But this is Elia. Arthur is a man, flesh and blood, and he has a man's weaknesses. Hunger, tiredness, love. How is he to refuse such a thing, something he never thought to have? Particularly not when Prince Lewyn does not deprive himself, no more than Jon Darry does, or even Lord Commander Hightower - although only Prince Lewyn is even slightly less than discreet. Arthur only knows about Jon Darry's handsome lover because he spied them together, emerging from Jon's rooms in the tower, on his way back from a training exercise with Ser Barristan, and he only suspects about the White Bull - he cannot imagine Ser Gerold ever being so foolish as to be caught, but there are signs, now that Arthur knows what he is looking for.
Happiness, primarily. Arthur feels buoyant with happiness, and cannot imagine a time when he might feel otherwise.
Elia in Rhaegar's cloak pops that soap-bubble buoyancy in Arthur's chest like a pin, and he drinks himself into a stupor to escape the hollowness - he is Prince Rhaegar's dearest friend, after all, childhood companion of Princess Elia, he and Prince Lewyn are exempted from duty on the evening of the wedding for their close relations to the bride and groom.
Arthur wishes, painfully, that he were anywhere else but in the great hall when the time for the bedding comes. He's dreamed of Elia-beneath-her-clothes for years, and cannot bear that he might see it only while she is being presented to another man.
"Arthur," Elia says, voice soft, hand careful on his wrist, below his vambrace and above the night-dark purple bruising left on the back of his hand by the flat of Oswell's practice sword just the day before. "Arthur, are you well?"
He turns to look her in the eye, throat closed with fear that he will betray some truth that will see them both burn, and manages only to shake his head very slightly.
"Oh, thank the gods," she whispers, a smile that sings of heartbreak warming her face. "I thought it was only me."
Again, in the gardens, this time on his one day a week free of duty, this time in pale dawning sunlight, he finds that curve in her back which fits his hand so well, and tastes the summerwine sweetness of her mouth.
"Do not," she murmurs, right on the tips of her toes with her fingers brushing through his hair, over his jaw, down his neck, "think that I have abandoned you even slightly."
"You are wed to another," he reminds her, hardly daring to do so for fear it will cost him whatever little part of her is still his. "I could not give you an honourable life even if you were not Rhaegar's."
"I belong to no man," she tells him, sharp, but with her lips touching his. "And my marriage is for the sake of Dorne, and of House Nymeros Martell."
He dares not breathe, for fear she will disappear on a ray of sunlight if he moves at all.
"This," she whispers, nudging her nose against his to tip his head to suit her wants, "is all for me."
His cloak - dark purple, not Kingsguard white because here, with her, he is not the Sword of the Morning - is half ruined by the time they are done, but he does not care. His back is scored by her nails, his shoulders marked by her teeth, and he feels as if his whole soul and heart and being are now entirely in her keeping.
"My Arthur," she calls him, once she has righted her clothing and fixed his hair for him. "Don't leave me."
"Never," he swears, kneeling before her, head bent over her hand, and she laughs when he kisses her fingers.
It is full morning when he returns to his rooms and she to hers, and Prince Lewyn smiles to him when he returns to the tower, tired from his night guarding Prince Rhaegar.
No, not smiles. Grins.
Elia's pregnancy is a cause for seemingly endless celebration for all but Rhaegar.
At first, Arthur fears that Rhaegar's melancholy is because he suspects that he may well have been cuckolded - Elia certainly thinks he has, certain that the babe was conceived when last Rhaegar was at Summerhall, when last Arthur had her to himself for more than a snatched hour here and there.
"Rhaegar has already chosen a name," Ashara tells him, her bent over her sewing while he sits on her windowledge and eats his way through a bushel of sweet pink apples, sent via sea by their brother. "He wishes to call the child, which he has assured Elia is a girl, Rhaenys."
"To match his own name, I suppose," Arthur says, sweet apples souring on his tongue at the thought.
"Oh, no, brother," Ashara says, looking up at him from beneath her heavy fringe, with eyes the same almost-Valyrian purple-blue as his own. "He names her for the first Queen Rhaenys, and will name the brother and sister he is certain will follow her Aegon and Visenya."
Arthur looks into Ashara's eyes and prays, harder than he has ever prayed before, that the child in Elia's belly takes nothing from him save those eyes, if she must take anything at all.
Rhaenys Targaryen, princess and bastard, is born on a clear night, almost into the morning. Ashara looks from Arthur, standing guard at Elia's door on the King's own order, to the babe in Elia's arms, and her eyes flash wide.
"Surely not," she whispers, and Arthur wills away the terrible blush he can feel creeping up his neck. "Surely, surely not."
"Please," he manages, "Ash-"
"For her sake," she says, "but we must speak of this again, brother. You know that Allem and Mama must be told."
Ashara and Mother have a coded language of sorts, a way of writing nonsense and getting their true meanings across which they never saw fit to share with Arthur. Allem understands it somewhat, and even little barely-a-child Allyria has some of it, but Arthur was never to remain at Starfall and so had no need of it.
Ashara translates for him, though, and he finds that his mother is ashamed.
Somehow, looking at Rhaenys' violet-indigo eyes in a face already the very image of Elia's, he cannot share his mother's feelings.
"She is the very image of you," he says very quietly, in a dawn-lit garden, starlight and almost-sun warring to catch on the gold in her heavy black hair, on the high line of Rhaenys' cheekbone above her fat little cheek. She is near three, now, and still alone in her cradle, for Rhaegar's seed seems to run cold, and Arthur has not dared to spill inside Elia since her suffering after Rhaenys' birth.
"And yet," Elia says, "she is not enough. Perhaps because she is so much my image she is not enough, whether for her father or her grandfather or the blasted realm."
Arthur takes Rhaenys, balances her against his chest and watches her stir just very slightly, sucking her thumb as her ringlets, so like Elia's, fall over her perfect little face.
"My husband, I think," Elia says, "is capable of fathering a child. If he would deign to share my bed when it suits me, rather than when he can tear himself away from prophecy and grief, then perhaps he might even do so."
"He will not visit you at the right time?"
"No," Elia says, stepping closer, under the shadow of the dark-leafed copper beech above them. "But I must conceive again, Arthur - I must have a son."
"What if he looks like me?"
"Then he will pass as a Targaryen for as long as necessary," Elia says, fierce, her hand on their daughter's crown and her heart in her eyes. "And if my husband questions it, then I will make sure no one ever hears his doubts."