A/N: Hello. This is my first Game of Thrones fic. I have loved Dany and Jorah since the moment I first set eyes on them, but I spent years believing that I would never write fic for them, no matter how much I loved them. Then season eight happened (or didn't happen as I'm choosing to believe). So here we are.
I really, really, really hope this is okay. I'm not confident here, but I adore these characters and their bond. I'm also in the very slow process of writing a season eight fix-it where they actually get together, dammit, but for now I hope you enjoy this, set during A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
Disclaimer: I don't own Game of Thrones.
Usque ad Finem
She's on her way down to Jon in the crypts when she sees him.
He's the only one standing still in the chaos around him, men and women and children all scrambling around to get ready for the long night to come. Standing there, in his fresh black armour, with his breath freezing in the frigid air around him and the shadows dancing across his face in the torchlight, he looks every inch the brave northern knight.
Her brave northern knight.
Jon can wait for a few minutes more. After all, he has done his best to avoid her all day.
Dany's footing is a little unsteady on the wet stairs beneath her feet, iced over as they are. The air is as sharp as any sword against her face, and all the more brutal for it. She is a dragon, and dragons are not accustomed to the cold. She draws her furs closer around her and picks her way through the crowd to her dear bear's side.
His eyes are upon her before she's halfway there; he has the uncanny knack of picking her out wherever she is. Sometimes, when she's feeling angry and unsure, it annoys her that he knows her so well; most of the time it brings her great comfort.
He is always there to protect her, after all. From the people who would have had her killed before now, from the derision of those who do not know her, from herself. There is no one in the world who knows her as well as he does.
He smiles slightly as she reaches him, inclining his head. "My queen."
"Ser," she returns, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. Despite what's looming in front of them, like a dragon's great mouth ready to swallow them whole, he never fails to make her feel at ease. "How are you bearing up?"
He smirks at her turn of phrase, his hand going to the hilt of his sword—a sword that's not his, she notes. "No worse than anyone else."
"This enemy is unlike anything you've ever faced before," she points out.
He grunts. "We have faced them before. And all men turn into monsters in battle. They're a bloody lot harder to get rid of, but the White Walkers don't think the way men do."
Dany begs to differ, but she chooses not to say anything—after all, they all would have perished beyond the wall if it hadn't been for her and her three dragons. This smooth confidence is Jorah's way of papering over the cracks in his nervous visage, is his way of trying to convince her that he isn't as terrified of this war to come as the rest of them are. She doesn't often grant him anything, but she thinks she can grant him that. So she nods at his scabbard instead.
"A new sword," she notes.
"Valyrian steel." Jorah pulls it out in one seamless move, balancing it perfectly in front of her. It's a greatsword, a huge thing, but it looks so right in his hand. She flashes back to what he must have been like all those long years ago, when he was lord of Bear Island and Longclaw belonged to him and not to Jon Snow. She'd promised him one herself, forged from dragonfire. When she takes her throne, it will be one of her gifts to him, with a name to reflect all he has done for her.
"Where did you get it?" she asks.
"Samwell Tarly," he replies, sheathing it again. "It's his family sword. Heartsbane. He asked me to wield it for him."
Dany feels a prickling of nasty shame at the mention of the Tarly boy. She does not regret what she did to his family—they had their choice, and they made it—but she can't deny that she had felt awful standing there in front of him, watching his face crumble. No matter how dreadful his father had been, he'd still been his father. On that level, Dany can sympathise. How many horror stories has she heard about her own? It still doesn't change the facts. He was her father, and she was robbed the chance of knowing him. Most would say that that was a good thing—she knows her father was an awful man—but it doesn't mean that the girl in her doesn't sometimes wish for things to be different.
"That was very kind of him," she manages.
"It was. I didn't want to take it, but he said he's not much of a fighter."
That she can believe. Samwell Tarly has a soft face, not one made for violence and horror. It's a rare trait in a man.
Not that the man in front of her shares any kind of desire for bloodlust. He's good with his sword, has used it so many times in her name, but he does not enjoy the act of killing. He's measured, level-headed; her truest advisor.
"You will be careful tonight, won't you?" she asks, suddenly overwhelmed.
His lips quirk in that familiar way. "Aye, Khaleesi, I will."
"I mean it. Would if I could have you in the crypts with Tyrion and the others."
"I'm not made for sitting around in the dark with the women and children, waiting to find out if the world is about to end," he says.
"Your presence might calm them," she says. "A big, strong knight to fight on their behalf should the worst come to pass."
Jorah snorts. "I'm more likely to get looks of reproach from the northerners. They wouldn't much like me hiding in the crypts with them when their husbands and sons, most of who have never held a weapon in their lives, were out here fighting. Besides, if the worst should happen out here, a hundred knights down in the crypts won't save them then."
It's a chilling thought, and Dany suppresses a shudder. "Then we have no choice, do we? We fight and we win."
"We fight and we win," Jorah echoes. "Though if you permit me to say it, Khaleesi, I would much rather you be down in the crypts with the others. A queen shouldn't be fighting a war like this."
"You wouldn't say that if I was a king," she retorts airily, for she knows that to Jorah it's more than that. She is more than just his queen. She is a woman in his eyes too, the woman he loves. It's a fact acknowledged before but unspoken now, for he has come to accept that she loves him deeply—just not quite in the way that he has always longed for. "My brother Rhaegar fought on the battlefield. You fought alongside the Usurper. Each and every one of you fighting for me tonight deserves no less than me fighting for each and every one of you in turn. I shall have Drogon with me. He will be fantastic protection."
They stand in silence for a few moments, static in a world of chaos, drinking in the sight of each other. The low lighting illuminates the gritty determination lining Jorah's features. They might sing songs about him in years to come, Dany thinks, the bear who fought Death.
She swallows hard, tearing her eyes away, trying to fight down the wave of emotion that rises insurmountably inside her like the deadly waves on the Narrow Sea.
"So you will fight and you will be victorious," she says, summoning all of her matter-of-factness with the grim sense of queenly entitlement she is so used to showing the world these days. "Because Tyrion is the Hand of the Queen, but you, Ser Jorah, shall be Lord Commander of my Queensguard, and I will need you with me if I am to take the Iron Throne successfully."
For a few moments, Jorah stares at her, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and a religious kind of elation. "My queen?"
She laughs. "Ser Jorah Mormont speechless, that's a first."
"Not according to Tyrion Lannister," Jorah rejoins wryly, then shakes his head. "It is an honour I never expected."
"Why?" says Dany. "I would have named you Hand if I had known you were coming back to me. But you have been by my side from the beginning, and you deserve a place high in my household. You said yourself that Tyrion's mind will make him a good Hand, and your skills with a sword will make you an invaluable Lord Commander. You will sit on my small council meetings, and you will ride by my side wherever I go. I need people I can trust around me at all times."
Jorah nods; his eyes are misty, like she imagines the lakes of his dear Bear Island might be on an early spring morning. She does not need to say more. His betrayal will always ache a little, like an old wound in cold weather, but they have moved past that now. They are on another level entirely, and she would entrust her life to this man in a heartbeat because she knows that he will never let her down again.
In truth, she has given little thought to the men she will name in her Queensguard beyond Jorah. She would offer Grey Worm a position, of course, but she has seen him whispering with Missandei, and she knows that her friend is ill at ease in Westeros. She is the Breaker of Chains; she will not keep anyone where they do not wish to be.
Her bloodriders will also be gifted the honour, but just imagining the looks on their faces at being presented with the symbolic cloak and armour is enough to make her smile. It was hard enough to get them to dress for the bitter Westerosi winters.
There's still plenty of time to work out the rest. The one and only thing she is sure of is that she needs Jorah by her side, always. She is her best self when she is with him. There are many times she laments that he had not been there to guide her when she'd needed him, however much she'd told herself that she was better off without him at the time.
"It won't be home," she says softly, "but I hope you will be happy anyway."
Jorah raises an eyebrow. "Home?"
"Bear Island," she clarifies. She will never forget that conversation with him, with the heat of the Essos night pressing down around them, humid and suffocating, reflecting her harsh new way of life. The way a lifetime had passed before that one simple word fell from his lips and bound them forever with a shared yearning: Home.
"Lyanna is lady of Bear Island," he says slowly. "And she is doing a far, far better job than I ever could have hoped to do."
"You could go back, if you wanted."
"I doubt my little cousin would be pleased with that. The people of Bear Island are proud folk, and stubborn. I betrayed them."
"Everyone deserves a second chance," she counters. She'd forgiven him—there had been no other outcome. He's proven to her over and over and over that he will serve her until his last breath, no matter the cost.
He shrugs now. "I made my choices a long time ago. And Bear Island isn't my home anymore."
The words linger between them, saturated with the weight of things left unsaid and things said too often.
He is home as long as he is with her.
"We will be happy in King's Landing," she tells him, swallowing hard around the thick lump in her throat. "I promise you."
"Aye, Khaleesi, I don't doubt that," he replies. He's looking at her in that intense way he has, as if he can read through her very soul. It disconcerts her sometimes, unbalances her. Makes her question everything she thinks she knows.
For some, faced with their mortality, it might be exhilarating. Freeing.
She has never been free. Never free from fear, from expectation, from what other people demand from her. From what she has always taken as a certainty.
She has to find Jon.
Taking a step back feels like a finality, and at once Jorah straightens up, slipping back into his role as knight and protector.
"Good luck, my bear," she murmurs. "Stay safe, and I will see you when this is all over."
He inclines his head towards her once more, hands clasped deferentially in front of him, the first drifts of snow dusting his hair. She turns and walks away from him, sending a quick prayer up to any of the gods that might be listening that they make it through this unscathed.
She needs him by her side.