Chapter:
Sunstroke
Part One of Five
Warnings/Tags: Soulmate Au. Hints of Sleeping Beauty.
Oberyn Martell & Haraella Targaryen
I
Haraella Targaryen has never felt warm. Not once, not ever, not at all.
It was no one's fault, really. It was luck of the draw, and Haraella had pulled an ace out the rabbit hole.
A tangled, knotted, piss-stained ace.
It could have been better, of course, like Hermione Granger who had not been able to taste mint until she met Ron Weasley, or her, now, good friend Willas Tyrell who had not seen the colour purple until he had met, through Haraella, Lady Ashara Dayne.
Not surprisingly, they had to be touching their soulmate to taste mint and see purple, even now, but at least they had the option to do so. All Haraella Targaryen had was coldness, frostbite in eternity, but she could not fault her friends for their happiness.
What poor fuckin' sod would be bonded to someone like me, anyway?
One really, truly, unlucky bastard.
It's luck of the draw, what the Gods give and what they take away, all in hopes that whatever was lost would lead one half to another one-half.
Or so the Septons said.
Haraella Targaryen was not a girl who believed in the whole 'Soulmate' ditty. She had died one too many for that codswallop, fought one too many wars, been stolen and stole, been undesirable number 1 and long-lost Princess, had crossed worlds and slipped through realms to think her life was somehow lesser, that she was somehow lesser because she didn't have a man or woman beside her. It all seemed a little disingenuous.
And misogynistic.
She was doing just fine, thank you very much Aerys, and no, feeling like a corpse was not a sin. However, being a mad bastard was, the fucker-
Off point.
But what was on point was very, very simple in theory. Haraella had been, as all others, born this way.
A walking, talking, breathing statue.
Certainly, all was not so bad, even if she felt to the touch like a snowdrift, and all she could sense was this icy numbness. She had her family now, her father Duncan, her aunt Rhaella, her cousin Rhaegar, and a Dragon the size of which had not been seen since the days Balerion had haunted the skies.
What else could she want?
Perhaps, just once, to feel the caress of a sunbeam. Maybe, just once, to see a flame and feel it dance across her palm as she flittered her fingers through the red and orange. Possibly, just once, to feel skin against her own and not feel nothing but this frigid, biting bone-deep chill.
How enjoyable it must have been to hold a hand and feel warmth. How wonderful it must have been to cradle a face and feel a blush. How lovely it must have been to kiss someone, and feel it.
That would be… Nice, Haraella thinks most often in the night. Nice, but it made no difference. The world was a cold, cold place. Haraella, unfortunately, knew that all to well.
Haraella Targaryen lucked out, like she did on many things, when it came to Soulmate-Senses, or as these Westerosi called it, The Touch of the Stranger. She was a Targaryen, a girl who rode an inferno-breathing beast, who laughed the loudest, fought the hardest, and lived the fullest and-
And was one degree above an ice block.
Yet, she was used to it by twenty. Furs helped. Thick leathers too. Not touching people eased the discomfort people had around her, and if, sometimes, she spent a little too long staring into hearths wondering what exactly it felt like to be cozy, a notion so far out of her understanding it was almost too abstract to hold onto, no one was so impolite as to mention it more than once.
Apart from Aerys, but then again, he could go fuck himself with a large pointy-
It did not matter.
Haraella Targaryen, in all her chilly wonder, was doing just bloody fine.
Then Rhaegar got himself engaged to Elia Martell and suddenly Haraella's world was on fire.
II
Oberyn Martell had never gazed upon the sky. Not once, not ever, not at all.
Naturally, he had seen renditions of it, a glimpse from the far corners of his eye, hazy and formless as all things peripheral were. His sweet mother had spent a small fortune on painters and poets to brush and spin him tales of endless blues and rolling clouds and burning suns. Doran had gifted him sketches, and Elia had sewed him tapestries… Yet, the sky itself had always been out of his reach, from womb to Volantis to Dorne again, an unknown hanging right above his head.
You see, whenever Oberyn Martell tried to see the sky, the true vastness above, one clear, clean shot of it with his own dark gaze, he-
Well, he fell into a deep slumber before pupil left horizon.
The whole ordeal had sent his mother into a state when he was a child and had slipped into sleep time and again in the water gardens, once nearly cracking his skull open on the marble steps of the west fountain, before the Grandmaester had declared it his Touch of the Stranger.
An odd sense to have, yes, and rare too, unseen before, and-
And meaningless.
For Oberyn Martell it changed nothing. He grew, as children tended to do, into a man. A man who perhaps kept trouble as company one too many times. A man who knew what he liked, how he liked it, when he liked it. A Dornish Prince who toured the world, who saw wonders no man could dream of, who had once sailed the Smoking Seas, and watched Red Priests sing naked around a bonfire, and old hags dance in Rhoynish waters.
What use was a Soulmate to him?
None at all.
He did not miss a single thing.
Not one.
However, perhaps it would be nice to be able to look up when outside and-
No.
Oberyn Martell was not lesser for his disadvantage. Ask the wives of many a Lord and she would tell you the same; nothing about Oberyn Martell was deficient.
Some of the Lords themselves would say it too, Oberyn would add with a salacious grin.
For those around him however, his mother and father, for the Dornish court, it changed everything. A Martell that could not see the home of the sun?
Ridiculous.
His father, in those first few aching years of unsurety of Oberyn's young childhood, became convinced his Soulmate was of House Arryn. The Eyrie, the falcon, it was to be the only solution, surely? Ravens came back with invitations for a visit, and visits were met with a disappointing nothing.
House Ashford similarly frustrated. Blackmont and Blackwood, Cockshaw and Corbray, Dondarrion and Doniger, from west to east and north and south, all disheartened.
It happened occasionally, the Grandmaester told his mother and father on the eve of his ten and seventh name-day. The Sense, unlike the Gods, was not infallible. The world was ripe with sycophants and sickness, with war and rivalry, and sometimes one half did not find the other in time, and the Stranger would claim what he could when he could.
Oberyn thought, like any man who put too much reliance upon the Gods, the Grandmaester was simply grasping at grains of sand. Nonetheless, dead or indisposed as his Soulmate ostensibly was, this was to be Oberyn Martell's life.
A world of sand and sea and never sky.
It was not so terrible; he told his brother and sister when they dared ask, typically when one or the other was deep in their cups. There was still plenty of sheets to warm in the night. Heaps of wine to be drank. An abundance of life to be had right there on the ground.
What real use was the sky to a man of flesh and hot-blood anyway? Oberyn Martell could not think of one, even when, after asserting such with a wry grin and a roll of his eyes to his siblings, their smiles turned that sickeningly… Consoling.
He did not need pity, as he did not need a Soulmate. Still, he pondered every so often. Wondered what exact shade the sky was at sunset and sunrise. What clouds looked like as they streaked their way across. How far the blue reached, and if it grew darker and lighter in places as clouds spun in from shores like cotton blooms. Marvelled who could be so inherently connected to the sky that without them Oberyn had no hope of ever gazing upon it.
Then, at five and twenty, his sister Elia became betrothed to Crown Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, and as was customary the Targaryen Court came to visit Sunspear, and unexpectedly, Oberyn's world was unbearably larger and brighter and bluer than he could have ever dreamed.
A.N: I'm still getting back into the hang of writing, and wanted to take it a bit easy. So expect this Oberyn shot to have plenty of fluff and smut coming up, and not really that much plot lol. This is practically the only set up you guys are getting for this one lmao. This part is short, but the next one's longer.
Hope you guys all liked this, and if you can, don't forget to drop a review, and until next time, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21
