Chapter Text
“So, Bran's asleep, Arya's up doing homework, allegedly, and Rickon is in bed but I've had to stop him sneaking out to play videogames twice so keep an eye out, the laundry's in the dryer but than thing is on the brink, and I was about halfway through stacking the dishwasher before you came home.”
Cat sighs heavily and, perhaps more emotional than usual, she pulls the girl into a firm embrace. “Thank you, Dany, you're a life-saver.” It's not like she often needs a baby-sitter; usually, one of her eldest children is available, and if neither of them is she can just ask Jon, but he actually had work this time, and Cat was starting to panic before he volunteered his aunt. In truth, Catelyn doesn't know Daenerys all that well, she's only met the girl the few times Jon has failed to keep his two families adequately separated, but the children have always seemed to like her. In truth, Arya's almost fifteen now and could probably handle baby-sitting on her own, but Cat's always been overcautious when it comes to her babies.
If the hug is a little awkward, Dany doesn't show it, she squeezes Catelyn back tightly. “Don't worry about it,” she says, “I wasn't doing anything tonight anyway.” Once she lets go, she gives Catelyn a concerned look. “Are you alright?”
Cat nods automatically. “Oh, of course, just... tired.” She tries not to work late when she can, but well, she is a single mother now with five children, even though she knows Robb and Sansa do try to help out.
“I see,” Dany nods. “Well, I'll just finish with the dishes, and I'll be out of your hair,” she says.
“What? No,” Cat says, taking her coat off as she finally closes the door behind her. “I only asked you to baby-sit, you shouldn't have to do my chores. Go, be young, enjoy the night. I can stack the dishwasher.”
“You look like you'll collapse if you have to remain standing for a second longer,” Dany tells her firmly. She's rather small, this Daenerys, but has a remarkable strength of will when she wants to. Cat is slightly intimidated. “Go. Put your feet up. If you send me home now, I'm just going to have to finish an essay on the ancient Near East anyway.”
Cat smiles at that. Oh to be young and at uni again (not that she was ever young and at uni simultaneously). “Well, alright,” she concedes. “But I am going to feel very guilty.”
“I'm sure you'll survive.”
“Right, dishwasher is washing, children seemingly sleeping. My work here is done, I'd say.”
“Thank you,” Cat tells her as she curls up on her couch, glass of wine in hand. “Really, you didn't have to do all that. Come, have a drink, it's the least I can do.”
Dany looks bemused toward the empty glass waiting on the coffee table. “Alright,” she says, awkwardly perching next to Cat. She pours the bottle into her glass. Then, as she's about to bring the glass to her lips, she stops. “Actually, it's a good thing you've stopped me. I just remembered. Rhaegar wanted to invite you all to my birthday next week.”
“Oh?” Cat asks. She shouldn't be surprised. Rhaegar has never quite given up on becoming part of his son's other family, even though none of the Starks could ever quite forgive him for the knocking-up-their-sixteen-year-old-daughter thing. Still, Catelyn herself has always gotten along reasonably well with him, debates on literature aside. “Has he told Jon this?”
“...Possibly not,” Dany admits. Cat laughs – Jon's family life is and will probably always be very confusing. Still, the boy seems to cope. “But to be fair, I think half the reason Rhaegar's invited you all is so Jon doesn't half to do the running back and forth between my birthday and Bran's thing again.”
Catelyn nods. That has always been a little awkward for Jon, that Bran and Daenerys' birthdays are so close together – especially when Robb's is only a few weeks earlier. “What about you?” she asks, and the girl looks puzzled. “I mean? Do you want us there? It is your birthday, after all.”
A pause, and then Dany smiles at her. “Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that,” she says. Cat tries not to sigh too obviously with relief. “I like you lot. You're... more stable than most of my blood relatives.”
Catelyn raises an eyebrow. “That's not saying very much,” she says, and Dany laughs.
“True.” A silence falls between them then as they both sip their wine. Perhaps that's Cat's signal that the girl really ought to be heading home now, but she finds she doesn't want Dany to go. It's been so long since she's really been able to sit with someone and talk – it's not as if she doesn't have friends, but since Ned died, she's just been too busy to really keep up with them. She's been too busy for much of anything. Maybe one glass of wine with her nephew's teenage aunt is not quite the same thing, but it is relaxing.
“How old are you turning now, anyway?” she asks curiously.
“Nineteen,” says Dany, and Catelyn thinks of course. Robb just turned twenty, so Daenerys must be turning nineteen. “Crossing the threshold from barely legal to actually legal.”
Catelyn chokes a little on her wine at that, though she thinks she hides it well. “I see,” she says, and she knows there's no reason for her to be blushing as much as she is. She blames the wine. “You remember the age of consent here is a couple of years younger than in the U.S?”
“Yeah, I know, I've just watched a lot of American TV.”
“I see. Just – as a lawyer, I do have to check these things,” she says, and Daenerys smiles at her. She smiles a long time. It gets slightly odd. “Is something wrong?”
Dany looks surprised. “What? Oh, no. Sorry,” she says. “It's just... I admire you, you know.”
Cat blinks. “Huh?”
“You've never given up, you know? Never let yourself be held back,” Dany tells her. “Some girls, if they got pregnant at seventeen, they would have assumed that was the end of all their dreams. Not you. You've done all you can as a mother, but then you went right back and carried on being yourself. That takes strength. That takes guts.”
“That takes neuroses,” Catelyn says wryly, and Dany raises an eyebrow. She sighs and relaxes back into the couch. “I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I've pushed too hard, tried to be too much. Like I was trying to prove something, that one mistake didn't define who I was. More to myself than anything.” She's not sure she can really say it was one mistake, given she and Ned kept having kids after Robb, one after another, so she was about thirty before she got to go to law school like she originally planned. Still, that's her fault for being so Catholic about the contraception thing. “Maybe I can't really do it all. When Ned was around, it was easier...”
Daenerys does say anything at first, but she listens with a sympathetic look, and Cat finds it surprisingly nice to just be listened to. “I can cuddle you if it's needed,” Daenerys suggests. “You look like you could do with a cuddle. I've been told I'm rather good at it.”
Catelyn blushes again, slightly embarrassed, but she replies: “Thank you.” She's not sure why. Still, before long she has a young woman leaning against her shoulder, winding an arm around her neck, and Catelyn sighs, leaning against her. It's nice to be touched, and the girl is startlingly warm. She's not sure how she's going to explain this if one of her kids gets up in the middle of the night and goes wandering, as they are wont to do, but it doesn't seem to matter at the moment.
“You don't have to be ashamed of needing support,” Dany murmurs. “Everyone does. That just makes you human.”
“I know,” Cat sighs. “Really, I don't have much to complain about. I love my career, and I love my children. I wouldn't give them up for anything. Things might not have gone entirely according to plan, but they are good. I still miss Ned, but on the whole, my life is good.”
“It was worth missing out on your college lesbian experimentation phase then?” Daenerys grins at her. Catelyn blushes again.
“Er. Something like that,” she says, and Dany laughs. “Through I probably would have been too repressed for that anyway.”
“Poor you,” Dany muses. “If it makes you feel better, I missed out on it too. By figuring out I was bi at like fourteen, so there wasn't much point to experimenting. That was stupid of me, really.”
Catelyn blinks. “Wait, did you?” she asks. “Are you?”
Dany stops, pulls out of the cuddle. Catelyn curses herself in her head – that's none of her damn business; she shouldn't have asked. “Did you not know that?” Dany asks.
“No,” Cat says. She doesn't know how she would have known that – Jon might know that, but she can't think of any reason he'd have to discuss his aunt's sexuality with her. At the nervous look on Dany's face though, she feels quite guilty. “But I mean, it's not as if I have a problem with it,” she hurriedly explains. “I'm Catholic, but I'm not that Catholic. Besides, two of my five children are dating people of the same sex. I've had to adjust.”
I'm just overcompensating now, she'll think I really do have a problem, but Daenerys does look faintly relieved. “Oh. Of course,” she says, and shakes her head. “Sorry. I'm just so used to everyone knowing, I find it a bit weird when people don't, you know?”
“...I can't say I do,” Catelyn admits. Dany frowns. “Mostly, I just feel old – you know, that you millenials can figure that out so young. I'd never even kissed a girl at your age.” She pauses. “I've never kissed a girl now.”
“Really?” Dany sounds stunned. “Wow. You really did miss out on your lesbian experimentation phase. But like, you're in your late thirties, right? You would have gone to high school in the nineties. I've seen enough sitcom reruns to know faux-lesbian kissing was definitely a thing back then.”
Catelyn sighs. “Not if your family is as Irish as mine, I guess,” she says, sounding sadder than she has any reason to.
“Well. In your honour, I will now wear all the cherry chapstick I can find,” Dany tells her. Catelyn is just confused. What? “It's a song. Don't worry.”
Cat sighs. Now she feels even older. “I see.”
There's another awkward silence between them, while Daenerys looks her over, expression of confusion giving way to a smile – leaving Catelyn ever more confused. “Would you like to kiss a girl?” Dany asks.
Cat's jaw drops open, she's lost for words, and she's left blushing and averting her eyes. “I – I don't know,” she says. “I've never really thought about it.” That might just be a lie. She may have had passing thought in her teen years – but she thought that was just teenage hormones. After she married Ned, there wasn't much point to wondering.
Besides, the way Robb explained it when he finally told her about him and Theon (at least three years after she'd figured it out on her own), he'd been in love with the boy since he was six, and since then he'd always sort of known. Sansa has never elaborated in as much detail, but Cat suspects it was much the same.
Cat is thirty eight. Surely, if she did like girls, she would know by now?
She looks back at Daenerys, who is simply staring at her, and grinning. Cat doesn't know why she's grinning. Nor does she know why she's moving, leaning in to Cat and–
Oh dear.
Cat lets out a small squeak of surprise as soft lips press down over hers, gentle and almost shy. Daenerys doesn't push with her kiss, she seems to be deliberately leaving plenty of opportunity for Catelyn to break away if she so wishes – but Cat doesn't. After a second, her eyes drift closed, and she starts to kiss back. It's not like kissing Ned, the squareness of his jaw, the roughness of his stubble. But it is nice. Daenerys' fine platinum hair brushes over Catelyn's shoulders as she cups Cat's jaw, pulling her closer. Then Cat realises the girl is crawling into her lap. She's surprised, but she doesn't refuse; hesitant, she lays her hands across the girl's hips, pulling her in further. She parts her lips, and Dany's tongue meets hers with relish. Cat is half-tempted to run her hands over the girl's body, to squeeze her behind or cup her breasts, but she's not quite that brave yet. She's not overly sure what's happening. But she has missed being kissed.
Daenerys is the one to break away, leaving Cat panting a little, looking up utterly bewildered. The girl grins. “I ought to be heading home,” she says, and gives Catelyn one last peck. Cat just sits there, totally dumbfounded, as Dany collects her wineglass and takes it to the kitchen before gathering her things and leaving. "I'll see you at my birthday."