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"Domeric."
Bethany was controlled, but colder than she normally was towards her son, colder than she was when he had turned to her as a rare source of warmth and affection in his youth. The name was a command, clipped and dusted with frost that made the hair on the back of Domeric's neck stand on end, as if he'd pressed ice to his skin.
His mother's harsh, unfamiliar tone drew him tentatively from the edge of the doorway where he'd been loitering, unwilling to enter the room without explicit permission, unsure of the reason for her unexpected summons.
"You ... called for me? Mother?" Domeric's hesitance turned the statement into a question, adding the last word like an afterthought of sentiment. Still he stuck close to the entrance hall, reluctant to broach the room's threshold on account of its other occupant usually being his father. Though Roose was away right now, thank the gods, his presence lingered and it set Domeric's nerves on edge.
When finally he gathered up the courage to obey her, Domeric entered the room with a series of tentative steps, loud in the dead, heavy air, to see his mother sitting at a small vanity.
Bethany was wearing a gown of deep red, detailed with intricate black embroidery though she was lacking for any jewels. Even plainly adorned with her dark hair untied and hanging in a pin-straight curtain over her back, Domeric's mother cut an imposing figure as she held a mirror critically to her face, setting down the comb she had been ostensibly running through her hair before Domeric arrived.
"I have ... concerns." She spoke immediately, as soon as Domeric's footfalls announced his presence.
The pause between her words was just long enough to be purposeful, unnatural. When she spoke Bethany didn't turn to face him, though she seemed to be carefully holding the mirror she still held in front of her in such a way as to give herself a view of his face. Her fingers brushed over the table beside her and rested on a delicate string of pearls, carefully laid out with other pieces of her finer jewelry.
"Come here," she added, before giving Domeric time to respond.
It was a mere ten steps, but Domeric walked them like a man approaching the gallows. Anxiety twisted in his stomach, to invade his father's - his parents'- room and privacy was deeply wrong, and many a time Roose had advised him against setting foot here with a chilling lack of subtlety. Of course he had spoken with his mother before, often in her own quarters and often in the presence of a handmaiden or two. This was different, this was the bedroom she shared with Roose, and though she was decent and alone Domeric still felt as though he were intruding, violating a sacred intimacy, breaking an ancient law.
Nothing of the sort inhibited you last night some self - destructive part of him thought and though he tried to bury said thought as quickly as possible he prayed to the old gods and the new he hadn't reacted physically to that particular memory being drawn up. It was dreadfully easy to see a blush on his pale skin, and dreadfully embarrassing to admit to.
Ramsay likes the way I blush though... says it makes me look alive, makes me look pretty, and noble-
Gods be good, Ramsay had him. He couldn't even bring himself to curse Ramsay for sinking his claws so deeply into him. Even now, even here, it was almost impossible not to think of him, so powerful was Ramsay’s influence, permeating each thought as if Domeric’s mind had been poisoned.
And even the most innocent of thoughts could fall victim; he remembered the way Ramsay had knelt close to him, smirked dangerously at the sudden flush of his face when their lips were close enough to touch -
Domeric tried desperately to clear his mind of any thoughts regarding Ramsay at all, for the moment at least, squirming shamefully in his mind as he stood just behind his mother, a familial closeness (a poor choice of words, he chided himself internally for it) but respectfully distant.
Without turning to look at him, Bethany held the pearls in her hand, angling the mirror so he could just see a sliver of her face reflected back at him when he looked over her shoulder.
"Fasten this for me." Another command, one Domeric didn't hesitate to perform. Often his mother had approached him rather than a handmaid with this and other small, symbolic tasks, as if she trusted Domeric more, which thrilled him so as a boy. He had been younger then, and she had knelt to allow his small arms to reach her neck and she had smiled at him with genuine warmth in her eyes, glowing golden like the summer sun.
Now she sounded almost detached and any semblance of affection seemed to have vanished overnight, her familiar gaze deadened and hardened by the first frost into something terrifying.
The necklace was cold in his hand, a lifelessness that added to the vague sense of unease he'd been suffering from since he'd stepped inside. And yet, when his trembling fingers moved to brush the black hair aside, when the pale, smooth neck was revealed, he thought involuntarily of Ramsay and the night before- thicker hair, a thicker neck, but his hands had moved with the same reverent fear.
STOP
He closed his eyes, breathed, and begged his mind to drop that particular subject, for the duration of this interaction at least. Already he could feel the heat of blood rushing to his face and… less innocent places. If he'd been nervous before Domeric was practically writhing with anxiety now as he held Bethany's hair away from her neck with one shaking hand and clasped the precious pearls in the other.
This isn't hard
Catching a glimpse of the mirror, Domeric saw her look sidelong not at him, for that would require turning around, acknowledging his presence, but next to him, eyes flashing with a dark and violent bitterness.
Domeric shivered, hopefully not visibly. Roose might be intimidating in his stillness, but while Bethany was known to smile, he had also seen her at her most terrible, the chilling wrath of a mother threatened, a woman scorned.
It had been the evening after his father had seen the infant Ramsay. Domeric had been a boy, too young to understand, but he had shrunk in fear from the silent, searing glare Bethany had fixed upon Roose that evening, golden eyes turned to cold flame.
He had cried then, and though what he saw in her now was but a shadow of that spectral anger, he still had to steel himself before he caught a glimpse of her face again, disdainful, disgusted.
"I have concerns regarding your own safety." Her words were clipped and businesslike, colder than the tone she took with servants who displeased her. "I was ... disturbed last night."
Oh no
"I heard you cry out, often, and loudly. You said the Bastard's name-"
This cannot be happening
"- and sounded... distraught. There were gasps, as if you were in pain, and I believe I heard you crying as well."
That had been the guilt, then.... Afterward
Domeric could only stand there, embarrassed into silence, eyes fixed on some indiscriminate point above Bethany's head while internally he panicked.
As if to remind him the world had not stopped to witness this display of complete ruination, there was the click of the necklace he had held until just now, apparently, colliding with the stone under his feet.
He hadn't even noticed, though in his shock and horror he supposed his hand had opened involuntarily. Frozen in place as he was, Domeric only saw it when he bowed his head to stare resolutely at the ground, feeling that familiar blush creeping up his face with a vengeance.
No words would come, if any were needed. If any would be of use, even, it didn't matter, Domeric was seemingly separate from his mouth and lips and limbs.
Bethany studied him carefully from the mirror, although with his gaze fixed determinedly on the floor he could only see the movement of her arms. It wasn't as though his body language had been subtle though, and he prayed Bethany wouldn't probe further, prayed with a fervor he hadn't felt since -
since last night his mind supplied helpfully.
"You are trusting to a fault, Domeric." It was the sort of thing he expected from Roose, a chastisement disguised as a compliment and he wondered through the fog of horror if his father had put the words in her mouth. "You are gentle, and kind, and forgiving. Admirable traits in moderation, but I am afraid they are impeding upon your common sense." The words were gentle alone but Bethany was sharp-tongued and merciless. She had been applying some sort of makeup Domeric was a stranger to but she lay the small brush down with a sense of heavy finality.
"You are inclined towards... Romantic tendencies, I know-"
Of course before she had even finished speaking that part of him responsible for such tendencies, still in a sort of daze from the night before, immediately brought to mind the memory of Ramsay, climbing into his lap, Ramsay, kissing the tears from his eyes-"- but do not lie to protect him if it will hurt you. If the bastard assaulted you-"
"Ramsay. His name is Ramsay, and he's my brother"
Domeric was surprised his voice didn't betray his fear, more surprised he had managed to speak at all, that his throat hadn’t been turned to stone. Against his better judgement, he had lifted his head just slightly in his unplanned defense of Ramsay and he could see a bit of his face reflected back at him, flushed a bright, traitorous red, just as he’d suspected. Damn the hereditary translucence of Bolton skin, and damn his own easy tendency to blush deeply when he's so much as mildly teased.
In Bethany's mirror he saw her raise an eyebrow just slightly.
Domeric's heart pounded, too loud and he breathed, too shallowly, blinked too fast, so nervous he all but wrung his hands.
Bethany narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and scrutinized him through the delicate angle of that silver mirror.
"I do not care if you consider the bastard son of some common wench to be a brother to you. I have concerns about your own
safety," she continued, Domeric's own slowly dawning shame the only remnant of the words he'd just spoken. He hadn't meant to say anything and Bethany was ignoring his outburst with a practiced particularity.
"He is a violent boy, with violent blood. Roose was right about the blood, it runs hot with the poison of his birth. If he assaulted you, I will have him removed. Although I think your father should have had him killed when he had the chance."
"That's not necessary," Domeric responded, a little too quickly. Bethany's expression did not change. "You do not need to- do not get rid of him, you can't, not now."
Domeric felt himself panicking, the words pouring out of him in a hasty flood that meant nothing to Bethany, he knew. Still, he couldn't bring himself to stay silent and thus implicitly condone her slander. Ramsay was flawed, deeply so, and Domeric would be the first to admit that he was, perhaps, too forgiving of said flaws. For all his faults, however, everything he had done to Domeric had been with Domeric's express (and enthusiastic, he remembered) consent. He winced internally as he remembered what exactly had elicited a reaction that could have been... misconstrued by Bethany. Yes, he had asked, no, begged for it. Ramsay shouldn't be punished, not for something Domeric- not for that, no.
"I'm teaching him," Domeric continued, heedless of Bethany's pointed stare, of the deep red flush across his face, of the increasing pitch and speed of his voice as he began to panic. "I'm changing him, I'm - I'll take responsibility for him, I promise you. He did not assault me, I swear to you, Ramsay did me no harm- "
Domeric spoke without thinking, inhaled sharply, bit his lip to keep himself from revealing anything else, though his stomach sank as he began to suspect he had damned them both.
If he hadn't been damned the instant he laid his eyes on Ramsay and felt his heart beat just that much faster, that is.
Bethany didn't speak, not at first. Domeric refused to watch her expression change in the mirror but he noticed the way her shoulders tensed against the thin fabric of her gown, the slight shift in the uniform curtain of her hair as she raised her chin.
Domeric heard his breathing in the tense quiet, too fast, too shallow, and the moment of dread stretched into a silence that lived just an instant too long.
"Then what was-"
Bethany spoke with a formal frigidity, as if she already knew the answer and was asking merely as a formality, to hear him speak the crimes aloud, to bear witness to Domeric's humiliation.
"What was the cause of the ... disturbance, last night, then? And the use of his name specifically? Will you offer an ... alternate explanation?"
Domeric stared intensely at the ground, felt the salty prick of unwelcome, bitter tears forming at the corners of his eyes.A second silence was born, and lasted for a thousand years. Bethany sat motionless, though the cold fury in her golden eyes, like the sharpened edge of bronze, was invisible to Domeric who stared with equal intensity at his own feet, hands balled into trembling fists at his sides. Domeric prayed to any god who did not yet despise him to leave him the remainder of his strength now, if it hadn’t dissipated wholly in his terror, to line his voice with steel.
It seemed he had been forsaken, however, by the old gods and the new, for when the courage to retaliate came to him he spoke with a tremor, each word shaking with fear, so softly they were barely audible to his own ears.
"He didn't... assault me... Ramsay didn't... he wouldn't... there was no violation of my... nothing I didn't..."
He couldn't bring himself to finish, squeezed his eyes shut as if that could stop the tears from falling, as if not being able to see Bethany's reaction could nullify its effects.
Eventually he opened his eyes, though he did not dare to take them from the ground, not anticipating the moment of lifting his gaze to see Bethany glaring at him in that horrid mirror she held to her, to avoid making direct eye contact with him no doubt, he thought bitterly. She'd known the whole time what had occurred, she just wanted to put him through this ordeal to let him know she was aware, to remind him she could wield a righteous fury. She meant to shame him before her, as if he wasn't suffering himself, as if his knees weren't bruised and bloodied from kneeling in the Godswood until the sun had risen behind the trees.
He couldn't bring himself to feel anger, not towards his mother, though he could almost feel her shutting him out. Towards himself, yes, the same burning guilt, come to life that first shameful night after he'd first met Ramsay, clawed in him.
This time the silence itself was eternal, deafening.
Domeric wished the gods would kill him, if they hated him so sincerely (so deservedly). But he supposed the real punishment would be to let him live in his ignominy, unable even to apologize to his mother. How could he, knowing that this very night he would be back in his brother’s arms, letting Ramsay do what he pleased to him, reveling in the lust and love and guilt of it all.
Absently, his gaze landed on the pearl necklace he'd dropped to the ground, and absently, he bent to pick it up. And he knew then, that Bethany was still examining him, condemning him probably, for she snapped at him as soon as his fingers closed around the cold pearls.
"Leave it. I will call a handmaid."
Domeric obeyed, remembering with a pang of sadness when only he had been allowed to clasp his mother's necklaces around her neck. And he felt the ache when he realized she would never allow his hands to touch her again.
Slowly, he backed away from her, hesitantly, foolishly hoping she would call him back, apologize, even chastise him out loud. Anything was better than the frigid silence, harsh as the storms of a Northern winter and half as merciful.
Not once did he look upon Bethany's face but he could feel the cold burning of her eyes, critical and angry and deeply upset, piercing his flushed and fragile skin as he turned his back on her and slipped from the room as swiftly as he dared.
He was halfway down the corridor before he began to sob.