"I haven't seen Jon around lately."
"I wasn't given to understand you two got on well during your time together."
"I think you have more than a simple understanding of it after his comments last night." Lyanna waited, but Rhaegar didn't seem inclined to discuss the episode she was referring to. He had yet to drink more than a mouthful of the wine he had poured them, while her glass was long empty. "Did you ask him to stay away from me?" she prompted, not about to let it go.
"No. I told him to."
For some reason this information did not satisfy her as much as she would have expected.
"Why?"
"Because it is glaringly obvious to me that no good can possibly come of the two of you being in the same room."
"Because he hates me."
With a sigh, Rhaegar set his goblet on the desk he had been lingering near. "Because you hate each other."
"You are wrong. I had never even met Jon Connington before Moat Cailin, while he has apparently held me in the high regard of being responsible for your death for the past eleven years." Here she paused and looked down to the dregs in the bottom of her cup. "And I suppose Arthur Dayne was of much the same opinion."
"It does not matter what they believe."
"Doesn't it?"
The only sounds to follow for a long while were the crackling and snapping of the kindling he'd added to the fire.
Lyanna got up and took the liberty of refilling her glass.
"Arthur blames me," his voice finally broke through the silence. Not aggrieved or indignant, just accepting.
She set the pitcher of wine down, her gaze lingering on the rim of her goblet. When she did look towards him, she realized he'd been watching her and waiting for her reaction.
"Is that why he isn't here?"
"No."
The question had drawn him away, and she regretted asking it immediately. Lyanna felt the distance growing between them as keenly as she had the day he'd ridden from the Tower of Joy towards the Trident and his death.
She didn't know she'd been gripping it so tightly until the glass cracked beneath the pressure of her grasp and wine trickled down to the floor, splattering her skirts. Staring seemed all she was capable of as fat red drops slid down her wrist and dripped onto an ever growing stain in the rug.
The hands that closed around hers were warm by comparison and achingly familiar. They lifted away the broken glass and then trapped her fingers in the soft folds of a handkerchief, drying the spilled wine from them.
"You didn't cut yourself."
It was an observation, not an inquiry, but Lyanna was as helpless to respond as she might have been if asked to explain why the sun rose each day.
Rhaegar must have taken her reticence and refusal to meet his gaze as discomfort, because his hands released hers and he made to step back.
"Wait." The word burst forth abruptly, its urgency surprising even to her own ears. She couldn't stand the awkwardness and the forced civilities, not with him. She'd given him her innocence freely and eagerly all those years before, and if all that was left now were strained silences and guilt, then she knew exactly what she had to do. Sansa was in the Vale, and she needed whatever comfort an aunt she had never so much as laid eyes on could offer. It was only torture to remain here, in this state of limbo if there was nothing more left of what they had shared.
His hands had already fallen back to his sides, but it wasn't these Lyanna reached for. Slowly, she brought first one palm and then the other to rest against the front of the boiled leather jerkin he wore, and even through this and the tunic layered beneath she could feel the steady rise and fall of his chest. It was exhilarating.
If anyone had tried to tell her the effect simply being this near to a man could have on her before the Tourney at Harrenhal, she would have laughed in their face at the ridiculousness of it. But that was before Rhaegar. The first time he had caught her watching him, she'd been humiliated. He wasn't even on the field, he'd been standing apart from the lists with Arthur Dayne and some others, and his face had been lit up in a rare moment of lightheartedness by something someone had said. Everyone thought that the Dragon Prince's beauty lay in the way he seemed to wear his melancholy around his shoulders like a cloak, but when his violet eyes had met hers in that fleeting instant of laughter, Lyanna had not been able to breathe. She knew her cheeks flushed, she could feel them burning like a beacon of her embarrassment for all who cared to notice. But Rhaegar had only inclined his silver head a fraction and turned his attention back to his companions. She had wanted to be angry with herself for her foolish reaction afterwards, but for the brief time their gazes had locked she had never felt more alive.
Summoning what little strength of will remained to her, Lyanna looked up into those eyes again now. Though they were the same startling colour, they gave away none of the secrets of the mind to whom they belonged.
Rhaegar's face was a practiced mask of neutrality, and this wounded her far deeper than if she'd seen the same contempt so clearly burning in Jon's eyes for her reflected in their Targaryen counterparts. But it was worse than that.
"I'm going to the Vale. To Sansa," she informed him, and the singleness of purpose brought with it a measure of calmness she knew would not last.
He nodded, whether in acknowledgement or agreement she couldn't be sure and didn't much care. "I'll have a party assembled to escort you."
Lyanna's fingers dug into the toughened leather. "You told me once I was everything. Am I nothing more than a reminder of your failings now?"
"Look around you, Lyanna," Rhaegar insisted firmly and with finality, his gaze never wavering from her own. "There is nothing left. We can't go back."
"I wish I had never met you." A weight settled over her as those words, spoken in a whisper so quiet she had difficulty hearing them herself, broke free. They hung there in the air, in the small amount of space separating his body from hers. For eleven year she had not thought those words, and now suddenly she felt them in every bone, every muscle, with every fiber of her being.
If he was afflicted by the statement, he hid it well. The only reaction Lyanna could detect as he stood regarding her was a sort of grim validation, as though he had been anticipating things would come to this all along. As though it had been inevitable.
She was startled by Rhaegar's calloused fingers when they brushed along her cheek, and then irate. Something of her anger must have translated to her expression, because the moment before his lips found hers, she saw his half-smile. And then her eyes closed automatically and she saw nothing, but felt everything.
Lyanna knew what that kiss meant, knew it was goodbye, and it twisted her insides into excruciating knots. Because even though she knew, she couldn't stop the quickening of her heartbeat. She couldn't pull back and she couldn't push him away. Her hands had closed around fistfuls of leather, and they wouldn't release it.
"I hate you," she breathed the second his mouth receded enough that she was able.
His hand slid around to the back of her neck, and she could tell he had not drawn back far when he exhaled and it fanned hot against her face. Beginning at her chin, his lips left a searing trail of kisses all the way up her jaw and to the sensitive skin behind her ear, where her pulse thrummed wildly. From there he worked downwards, teeth grazing along her throat so that every swallow became a struggle, every intake of air bringing him closer to the bodice of her gown, which Lyanna now found uncomfortably constricting. Her chest heaved against the straining fabric and beneath his mouth.
It was all wrong, but it was all so real. Too real. Nothing she had imagined or dreamt in those eleven years could have prepared her for this. She was overwhelmed and she was suffocating.
Leaning back, she attempted to escape, to regain at least one sense that was not filled with Rhaegar, but the strong set of hands at her back prevented her from moving more than a few inches. It took Lyanna a second to realize what was happening, and then it was too late. She heard the material tear and felt it slip off her shoulders, but his arms pinned the dress to her sides, preventing it from sliding all the way down.
Lyanna dragged several full breaths of air into her lungs as her eyes fluttered open in relief.
Rhaegar was regarding her, his indigo irises darkened by the intense desire she was minutely aware he was only just controlling.
She forced her cramping fingers to let go of the jerkin. As she mitigated her breathing they shakily traveled upward until they skimmed his hair and threaded themselves through the pale strands, prompting him to lower his head.
"Tell me this is nothing," she challenged softly.
His eyes shut, but that mattered little.
Pressing her forehead to his, she allowed their lips to barely graze. "Rhaegar."
"You know I can't," came the strangled reply.
Lyanna's mouth could not close the minuscule distance to his quickly enough, and she was greeted by a carnal groan released from somewhere deep in his throat even as he crushed her to his chest. Their tongues began a familiar back-and-forth duel for control, breaths mingling together. But the contact wasn't enough, and she knew he'd recognized this as well from the way he suddenly seized the torn gown and yanked it down over her torso. Disentangling her fingers from his silver hair, she tugged her arms free of the clinging fabric, shivering as it drifted down to pool at her feet.
And all the while their lips never parted.
When they next revisited the jerkin, Lyanna's hands made swift work of the metal clasps that held it closed, but something else was keeping it from sliding off of his shoulders. Her fingers had to search all the way down to his hips before they discovered the problem lay with his swordbelt. She wasn't sure if the blade which hung from it meant anything to him, but he didn't seem overly upset when it thudded to the floor.
In fact, Rhaegar was preoccupied with the newly exposed skin her thin shift was giving him access to, his own hands completing a thorough exploration of her back. He did, however, pause to shrug the leather garment off before his thumbs continued their route along her ribcage, delving underneath the shift to brush across the undersides of her breasts and cause a faltering inhale.
After some frustrated moments spent trying to loosen the lacing at the collar while his fingers traced patterns lower and lower over her abdomen, Lyanna finally drew the tunic up and over his head, breaking their heated kiss. Her breath hitched as she took him in, his shoulders not broad but well-developed and tapering down to a narrow waist. His chest was no longer the perfect expanse of smooth skin over lean muscles that she remembered. She lifted a hand to run down from his collarbone to his navel, and along the way it encountered both the raised flesh of scars long healed over and the sharp angles of cracked and misshapen ribs. Robert's hammer had made a ruin of his entire left side between nipple and hipbone, the damage hard to behold even now, eleven years after the fact.
Rhaegar's hands had stilled, his entire body tensing as she touched the area so that she wondered if it didn't still cause him pain. His eyes were open again and pensive as she raised her chin to meet their stare.
"Were you expecting me to be mortified?"
He couldn't have responded should he have wanted to, because the query was followed directly by her teeth as they nibbled his lower lip.
Flattening both palms against chest, Lyanna guided him backwards slowly, stepping out of the fabric puddled around her ankles as she moved. She gave a firm nudge when his heel struck the edge of the only substantial piece of furniture in the pavilion apart from the desk, and he lurched rather unceremoniously back onto the bed. She could hardly help the smirk that lifted one corner of her mouth as she knelt to remove his boots.
Levering an elbow beneath him, Rhaegar sat up and studied her with a furrowed brow. "I've never known what to expect from you."
"It galls you, doesn't it?" she quipped when she'd finished with the task. Her fingers slid up his calves, over his knees.
"It unsettles me," he amended. When he reached for her, Lyanna leant in, their mouths colliding again ardently. His hair fell forward, the interwoven scents of pine and smoke and sweat intoxicating as it tickled her neck.
Her hands crept ever higher along his thighs until they closed around her, and utterly trapped, she issued an impatient huff. She could feel him smiling his amusement against her lips, but one sharp nip from her teeth soon saw her freed. Lyanna rose up from the floor and hitched the shift's hem up past her knees as she stepped over his legs. Straddling him, she settled herself in his lap.
Rhaegar's fingers were swift to pick up their perusal of her body, slipping the flimsy fabric they came across down over her shoulders and clearing a path for the ministrations of his tongue and teeth. Every inch of skin they covered felt as though it had been scorched, tingling and burning in their wake.
Lyanna sucked in a lungful of air when he began to pay particular attention to her breasts. Her arms encircled his neck to hold him close and she arched her back, the action bringing her up against the evidence of his obvious arousal. Fighting through the delicious haze of pleasure his mouth was creating, she rotated her hips experimentally and was rewarded with a moan caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy. While his lips continued a halting assault, she could tell by the way his fingers dug into her thighs that every grinding movement she made against him was bringing him closer to madness.
With a muffled oath his arm wound around her waist and he twisted, collapsing onto the bed with her body pinned beneath his. They were both panting now, but every exhalation of Rhaegar's hot breath puffed over her peaked nipples, making her whimper for more. He was busy dragging the shift the rest of the way down her torso, and sat back to draw it over her hips and off. His hands skimmed the length of the inside of each leg after it had joined the rest of their attire on the floor.
While he'd been preoccupied with the shift Lyanna had unlaced his trousers, though by this point her fingers felt slow and numb and it took far longer than she preferred, so that when his weight once again pressed down on her the only article of clothing separating them still clung to his hips. His kisses were dizzying, but Lyanna determinedly clawed the offending garment down until he finally kicked them off and there was nothing between them.
As he settled over her again, Rhaegar was shaking with the effort of holding back. He brushed his lips against the fading bruises at her temple, choking back another groan when her warm thigh grazed his hip.
"Rhaegar," she pleaded with him desperately. Her lips hovered next to his ear, and when he at last pushed inside her the sheer bliss of the sigh that escaped them nearly undid him.
The steady pace he set was merciless for them both, and the more Lyanna's body writhed beneath his the more impossible it became to keep up. Her luxurious sighs soon turned to breathy whispers of his name which coupled with her biting nails to drive him closer and closer to the limits of his control. When her legs wrapped around him, drawing him deeper inside her with every stroke, urging him on, he lost all command over his body. Her cry of release was the only he heard before his senses were overflowing with Lyanna and he was drowning in her very essence.
"I hate you," she was murmuring even as she caressed his shuddering body.
But Rhaegar wasn't surprised or shocked, only exhausted. Burying his face in her dark locks, he struggled to regain the use of his quivering muscles.
"I hate you." Her voice was breaking, betraying her lack of conviction in the words.
She wanted to hate him, and this he knew. Because even though it wasn't possible for him to be touching more of her, even though he was inside her and there was nothing either of them could have done to bring them closer together, the entire Seven Kingdoms still sat squarely between them.
"I love you."