Work Text:
Daeron has come to know several unalienable truths about being a prince in his time, most of them thanks to his time as squire under his Lord Hightower, including but not limited to: never let them see you hesitate. Keep your tears for your lover. Loyalty above all else.
Ormund is a man of incredible intellect, of negotiation skills his grandfather would envy, a man the likes of which this realm had never seen before. He should not be so nervous, stripping out the hems of his cloak single stitch by single stitch, and yet here he sits in his Lord’s tent undoing the methodical work of the realm’s best seamstresses.
How long did these negotiations take? Should he have insisted on being present for them?
Daeron’s head drops down and he releases his mangled cloak hem to place a clammy hand on the back of his neck and squeeze. Reassuring himself for the hundredth time that Ormund will be out soon with everything sorted seems futile, but he does it anyway.
Almost on cue, the flap to the tent opens. Daeron sags with relief as Ormund steps through, and he moves to him so quickly that he almosts misses the sullen look on his face – almost.
Daeron crosses the room and wraps his arms around him, letting out a breath of relief as Ormund does the same, as his hand cups the back of Daeron’s head and holds him for a moment.
“Well?” He asks, always impatient. He leans back to look up at him.
“You’re going to be okay,” Ormund promises him. “Remember how strong you are. I know you can do this.” He pets a hand through Daeron’s hair, a loving caress that feels sickly out of place for some reason Daeron can’t quite find. “Don’t be brave.”
The words take hold of him like the fangs of a snake on an unsuspecting ankle. “What?”
“I did everything I could,” Ormund assures, but his face betrays him and tells Daeron what his lips won’t: I fear it won’t be enough.
Daeron’s hands slip down his body as worry rises in his body and slips over his bare hip. His lips tremble, a breath escaping him before he can form the words. With the same dread traitors felt when they saw Tessarion rise above them, Daeron asks, “Where is Vigilance?”
Ormund’s face twists in pain, but before he can make the words, Daeron finds his answer. A sharp poke in the side, and Ormund’s arms slipping away. The tip of the sword urges them apart, and Hugh Hammer makes himself known.
“Copping one last feel of the goods?” He asks, digging the point of the sword into Daeron’s gut to push him back another step.
He looks between them in panicked, fleeting glances. Ormund with his face taking on a peculiar color, be it with shame or sickness, and Hugh towering above both of them, herding Daeron backwards into the tent. His legs bump the edge of the table and Hugh lowers the blade.
Hugh holds it at his side; he had always had such admiration for Ormund to wield such a long sword gracefully and with poise. It may as well be a butter knife in Hugh’s hand.
“Take your clothes off,” Hugh commands.
Bile turns in Daeron’s stomach. He’s never liked the man, and recently had been having more fantasies about charring his body than he had arriving in King’s Landing to return to his mother. He was more beast than man and looked it, too. Daeron often thought that had that greasy mop he called hair be sheared from his head, he would find horns growing from his head.
He can see himself being brave: saying no, of fighting back. He can see Ormund dying because of it. Whatever it is that has happened here, he has to trust that Ormund knows best. That he won’t have turned his back on Daeron, that he’ll have made the right choice to keep them both safe – and if not, alive long enough to change that.
Still. That doesn’t change how even having Hugh speak to him like that feels like a violation on its own. Daeron swallows, then lifts his hands to undo his cloak.
His eyes stay trained on Ormund across the room: if he can pretend this is for him, his hands won’t shake. Hugh won’t be encouraged by the fear in his eye. He just needs to pretend that this is a normal day, that the only eyes on him are the ones that belong on him. Perhaps it would be easier to do so if Ormund could face him.
Daeron pulls his shirt off of his shoulders, then balls up the cloth and throws it to the ground. His skin prickled with sick anticipation, with sweat. He could do this. He had battled so hard to get here, and surely if Ormund thought he could live through whatever was in front of him, he could. Ormund would not set him up to fail, this Daeron knew as truth. His Lord was a kind and just one.
Besides: if he could not avoid this rape, at least he had known sex like this before. Surely it wouldn’t be so bad now that he knew what to expect. It was just another way that Ormund had guided him. Even in these unsuspecting moments, he was always that gentle, guiding hand.
He steps out of his breeches and looks up at Hugh. Rage is burning his eyes, working his lips into a fine line, but he will not give Hugh the satisfaction of seeing him cry, hearing him scream.
Hugh himself pulls himself free of his breeches. Where Daeron is soft, small hanging between his legs, Hugh is not. His cock must be bigger than Daeron’s own arm, jutting out from his body. His shaft is curved, and Daeron thinks bitterly that it is just as misshapen and ugly as the rest of him. He can’t help his tongue.
“You call that a cock?” He asks. He’s met with the back of Hugh’s hand, ripping across his skin and sending him landing on the table.
“Daeron,” Ormund’s voice is strained, stressed, a one-word warning.
Hugh puts a meaty hand in Daeron’s hair and fists it, letting his fingers tug at Daeron’s scalp in painful ways. “Your father may not have beaten you enough, but I will not make the same mistake,” he promises.
I’m going to let dogs eat your corpse, he thinks, your filth is not worthy of a dragon.
Daeron fights his tears down, biting his lips together so as not to let out a sob. A tear slips down his nose as he looks to Ormund while his face stings.
Ormund shakes his head in an urge for him not to fight. Daeron cements his position of not crying, refusing to let Hugh have the pleasure of hearing him scream. If his body cannot be Ormund’s alone, his voice will be.
“Fetch me the oil, Ormund,” Hugh says, and he pushes Daeron against the table how he would like. His toes still touch the ground, but he’s laid out from hip to collarbone against the wood. His body fights with his mind: he can keep a mental grasp on being calm, even out of spite, but his body is another story. It knows what is coming and tenses uncontrollably, wanting to fight with every last shred of dignity and energy to protect himself.
Ormund knows best, he reassures himself. If he thinks I can take it, I can take it. He wouldn’t do this if there were any other way. I can do this for him.
He watches Ormund pick up the jar of oil and carry it to the table. For a moment, he’s so close. Close enough to run his hand through Daeron’s hair, to bend down and reassure him that it’s all going to be okay, that he’ll be close, that there is still tenderness waiting for him. Ormund passes him and sets the oil on the table.
He begins to move back but Hugh stops him.
“Don’t you want to see when he bleeds?” Hugh asks him. Daeron recognizes the rage in Ormund’s eyes, in the thin line of his mouth. It looks just like his.
Ormund stills, then folds his hand behind his back and fixes his eyes on the table. For what it’s worth, even knowing he exists in Ormund’s peripheral steels his nerves. He won’t be intimidated by the sound of Hugh slicking his member when Ormund is watching.
He tries not to let his body seize when he feels the blunt head of Hugh’s cock at his hole but finds his efforts crushed under the sheer pain that follows just behind it as Hugh sinks into him.
It’s like nothing he’s ever felt before; like being ripped apart in one fell swoop, like being sliced open from the inside. His body stretches so much around the violation that it burns inside of him like dragonfire, a searing pain unlike anything he has ever known. The air is pushed from his lungs and his body goes taut. The blood that rushes in his ears deafens him, and his mouth is flooded with the taste of iron, with bile that sneaks up his throat. Tears prickle in his eyes and every part of him trembles in sheer stress – his body knows. He can’t calm the endorphins rushing through him that tell him intruder, intruder, wrong, wrong, help, please help.
He shakes like a reed in the wind, but his mouth stays closed. He may waver, but he will not fall. Hugh may violate him, may ruin his body, but he will not have the satisfaction of hearing a prince cry. If Daeron cannot be brave in the sense that he can fight back against Hugh physically, he will fight back like this.
Ormund is watching, he reminds himself. He has to show him that he’s okay. That he can handle what Ormund knew he could.
Daeron’s hands have clenched themselves into fists and he focuses on breathing through it. Tears leak from his lilac eyes onto the table, but moving to wipe them feels incriminating. He’ll pretend not to notice them.
Hugh laughs behind him. “Trained him well, didn’t you?” He asks Ormund. Daeron imagines taking that ugly hammer of his and caving in his skull. He imagines Ormund taking him beside Hugh’s body, tender and careful like he always is.
He thrusts once, twice, thrice into Daeron’s body and then pulls himself almost completely out. His head remains stuck in Daeron’s tender hole and he laughs to himself.
“Not well enough, eh?” Hugh asks. “Bleeding like a fucking virgin, aren’t you? Uncle Ormund didn’t play with your cunny well enough?”
Rage sears him almost enough to dull the pain. He shouldn’t talk about Lord Hightower in any fashion, and for a moment Daeron wishes he were alone to bear this if only so Ormund wouldn’t have to see him like this. He can’t break because he can’t let Ormund down. Even though his body tells him to do whatever he can to get away, to scream and cry and fight – he can’t let Ormund down. He won’t.
Hugh curls over him, resting his thick, heavy forearms on Daeron’s back and forces himself in again. Blinding pain returns, an agonizing, burning ache in his body. He feels as though his spine is being broken with every thrust, as though each roll of his hips is tearing open a new part of him – literally. Hugh’s cock was quite literally ripping him open now.
If it weren’t bad enough that his cock was punching breaths out of him, violating him so deeply that not even his lungs were safe, the weight on his back makes things worse tenfold. He forces breaths in and out of his nose, his hands shaking – though he cannot tell if his body is struggling to hang on or if he is clenching his hands so hard that his body shakes with the effort.
“Come on, then. Let it out. We can see you crying, poppet,” Hugh taunts, digging his elbows into his ribs. Daeron wonders if his bones will give out under his force, if Hugh will split him open like a lobster.
He clenches his teeth together harder. He heaves in a breath through his nose and stays perfectly quiet aside from his inhale and exhale.
“Do you think you’re making him proud?” Hugh taunts in his ear.
Yes, Daeron thinks. He looks up at Ormund’s bowed head, how pale he’s gone.
“You don’t want him to have to hear you cry?” He asks.
Yes, Daeron thinks with a desperate edge. He doesn’t deserve it, either. He shouldn’t have to hear it, to see him like this.
Hugh lifts off of him and for a half second Daeron can take in a full breath. In the same second, he grinds his hips against Daeron’s and forces himself impossibly deeper, pressing that same breath out of him, and pulls Daeron up by the hair to bounce his face off the table.
His nose hits first, the cartilage giving way to the wood and bursting with blood. His bottom jaw follows, and he doesn’t have the time or sense to release the chunks of flesh he’d been biting to keep himself quiet; his teeth slice right through them and fill his mouth with blood. His mangled lips part and his hands grip at the wood of the table, and only barely does he manage not to cry out more than a choked noise. He wants to scream; his body shakes with the effort of holding back his sobs, with the effort of coping with all of this pain.
Blood leaks freely down his nose and his mouth opens. Blood gushes from that wound too, and a chunk of flesh from his upper lip falls to the table. Hugh pushes him back down to lie in his mess.
“Is it worth it?” Hugh asks behind him. “Fighting so hard and he can’t even look at you.”
Daeron doesn’t want him to, he thinks. He looks up and finds Ormund’s eyes closed, his expression pained and twisted. He would bet anything that there are tears on his lashes, too. If Ormund doesn’t look and Daeron can keep quiet, then it’s like this didn’t happen. Ormund won’t have had to see any of it, and when it’s all over – well, when it’s over they’ll figure out the rest. Daeron has to live through it. No sense in making them both watch.
Hugh won’t have it. He pulls out and drives another thrust into Daeron’s unwilling body; he reacts too much, lets himself tense all over at the violation.
“Look at him,” Hugh taunts. “Look at him!” He sings it like a song, but he’s wretched. The chords are broken, warped, like playing a broken cello.
Daeron can see the way Ormund’s jaw trembles, and he keeps his eyes resolutely shut. Daeron wants to swell with pride, but he’s choking on the blood gushing from his nose and it hurts to inhale so deeply. He can still be brave enough not to look, to disobey. That much is still good. Maybe Daeron imagines it, but he feels Hugh’s cock wilt just a touch. It feels like winning.
Hugh moves behind him and in a single movement crushes that little spark of hope like a bug beneath his enormous boot; he raises Vigilance and poises it at Ormund’s chest, right at his sternum. Hugh doesn’t even have time to order him to look again before Daeron is crying out.
“No!” Blood sprays from his broken lips, ”No, no, no, please!” Daeron cries, his chest seizing even further. The pain in his ass has begun to go numb, but his erratic heartbeat is beginning to blur out anything that isn’t what he can see before him. He lets himself sob, sucking in a shaking breath.
Ormund cringes, turning further away from him. Daeron wants to scream for him to run, to get as far away as he can. Leave Daeron and save himself, to wait for him somewhere far and safe for Daeron to crawl back to him. Nothing could keep them apart, and Daeron was being wasted here as it was. There was no nobility in torturing himself with Hugh’s depraved spectacle.
There were pieces of him, too, drowned out by the agony and fear, that worried that Ormund might open his eyes and be disgusted with what he saw: another man inside of him, his mangled, broken face, his own blood spread across his body.
“Oh,” Hugh sounds amused now. “Is that it?”
Daeron sobs without hesitation, shaking his head against the table. “Please,” he begs, screaming. His pride was nothing in comparison to Ormund’s safety and life.
“Finally good for something,” Hugh mutters to himself, and Daeron feels him shift behind him, feels his arms swing; before the sword has even cut through the air, Daeron lets out a scream like he’s dying. The loudest, rawest noise being ripped from his throat, the same noise he should have let out when Hugh forced his cock into Daeron’s hole. It comes from him like blood, hot and gushing uncontrollably, never ending, running through shaking fingers.
No, this is what dying felt like. If Hugh raping him was agony, a new word would have to be invented for this. The rape felt like child’s play.
His head hits the table before his body hits the ground, and Hugh picks it up in one horrible hand to set him next to Daeron’s face.
He flails, trying to push himself away, trying to turn to the other side, trying to scramble across the table itself, but Hugh stops him. He pins Daeron’s bloody, wet, snotty face against the wood and makes him face Ormund’s severed head.
It doesn’t feel real, even looking at him. Daeron tries to look up, down, back at Hugh, but his face – so handsome, so regal, so comforting – is in his peripheral no matter which way he looks. He’s so handsome, so pale, but his eyes are lifeless. Blood leaks from his neck and onto the table. Another gasping, choking breath gets dragged into his lungs and he wails again, thrashing under Hugh’s heavy hold, shuddering sob racking through his breaking body.
“That’s it,” Hugh says behind him, and he lets Vigilance fall to the ground, grabs Daeron’s arms to pin them behind his back so tightly it feels that the bones will break. He sounds pleased, proud, for finding what it took to break him.
Daeron screams through another cry; the idea of resistance is long gone, and to the sweet music of Daeron’s agony, Hugh finally starts to fuck him.