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Rhaenyra awoke in her chambers, laid out on top of the blankets. Her mind felt still fuzzy with sleep as she lifted a hand to her forehead, massaging the skin with the tips of her fingers. How had she found herself here, she thought, she could not recall. She had been at council, her third youngest at her side when a raven had come. From Daemon.
The Queen turned to stone in her movements as it hit her. As surely as the icy water of Breakwater Bay had hit her son as he plunged into its depth. The memory of tearing off the seal, reading the words frantically and letting out a feral scream felt like a dagger to the heart all over again. Like she was there, living it again rather than remembering it.
The room had fallen silent as their Queen clutched at the table for purchase, knocked sideways by the words scrawled on the scroll. One of her council members had asked her what was wrong but she could not speak, she could not do anything but cry out. She must have fainted, she must have been moved here by her Queen’s Guard or a councillor.
Rhaenyra’s hand trembled as she moved it to her hand to suppress her sob. She wanted to scream again, she did scream, she was already screaming. She shoved her face into the furs and screamed. Her chest tightened and contracted with the pain of doing so, trying desperately to match the pain she felt in her heart. She did that until she felt she could no longer, settling instead for sobs.
She didn’t know how long she was lying there, but she was tired when she finally pulled her face from the mattress, just enough to let herself breathe. Even if the act of doing so was so hard she thought it might kill her.
When she felt a hand lay on her shoulder, Rhaenyra did not even find it in herself to flinch. “Leave me.” She pried her face from the bed only long enough to make sure she was heard. She imagined it to be one of her maids or her son.
She did not even think that the door had not opened, no footsteps across the stone floor until she heard a voice response. “I never could, not really.”
Rhaenyra’s blood turned to ice in her veins, letting out a sharp breath that she half expected to wisp in the air. The hand on her shoulder busied itself with rubbing circles into the flesh there. Even now, she remembered the feeling of those large, calloused hands rubbing her shoulders, her back, her flesh. They were impossible to replicate or forget.
She dare not look over her shoulder in case this was a trick, or madness. “But you did.” She reminded him, her face crumpling with grief once more. An old grief. A grief she had never truly got to experience.
She remembered the day that she was received the raven. Much like today, she was not there to see the Stranger come, only felt the knife slip between her ribs in hastily written words. She remembered how she walked to the beach on Dragonstone without saying a word to anyone, a woman possessed.
So alarming to her husband that he followed her down to the surf, confessing later that he had half expected her to let the waves take her or to fling herself from the cliffs, such was the look on her face. Laenor, her only companion as she fell to the sand, let out a bloodcurdling scream much like today. In the distance, she’d heard Syrax echoing her fury and her grief.
She’d stood there for gods know how long, cried and cursed until her voice was hoarse.
And then, she packed that grief into her chest like a captured firefly and ignored it for the sake of her sons, who in turn captured their sorrow and crushed it under palm. Nobody could see how deep the wound had been, she would not even let them see the scar. Now it coalesced with this new grief, like two flames joining into an inferno, turning the ice in her veins to flames that threatened to smoulder her soul to ash.
“You left.” She spoke again. “And you never came back.”
“It was not my choice.” He reminded her softly. “Nor was it Lucerys’ to leave you.” He assured her, his voice tender as another hand came to brush her hair back from her face. Rhaenyra clenched her eyes tight to stop tears spilling over, reminded of so many days and nights where he had brushed her hair back like this. Even now, all these years, her heart pounded in her chest at the feeling.
Rhaenyra reached for the hand on her shoulder, not sure what she would find. A ghostly composition of flesh? Skin burnt beyond recognition? Nothing? She found herself twisting her fingers with a hand she had thought long gone. She could ever swear she could smell him, that familiar scent in the air still so recognisable after all these years. “Aemond Targaryen murdered him.” She whispered.
“He did.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the scroll sat on a table, next to a small cup. Daemon had wrote with passion, fury as he spoke of her half brother’s crimes. He promised her vengeance because that was what he knew, that was how he thought to soothe her loss. Her loss. Daemon had loved her sons, that was true, but they were not his. He could not claim his love matched hers, his anger would not counter hers. The idea that he could try set her teeth on edge. He was not their father.
The only one entitled to such anger and sadness was both long gone but somehow by her side. She could feel it in his skin as surely as she was sure that he could feel it in hers. She felt her resolve harden as the tears on her cheek began to dry.
“I will make him pay for it.” She promised.
When she turned to look at the long lost love, to vow vengeance for their son, he was gone.
If anger was tinged her grief when Lucerys was slain, the news of Jacaerys’ death brought the deepest sadness. A sadness that she did not know could go deeper than it had before. She had been tossed into those waters first with her lost girl, then with Lucerys and now, it opened into an ocean that she tread water in without hope of rescue.
Her first baby, she thought. The one who had changed her so irrevocably. All her children were her dearest joys but Jace, he had been the first. The one she had held in her arms and realised truly for the first time what a dynasty meant. What it meant to things pass down to your children.
To look at another human being, hand them the things you had held dearest, the things that made up you, things you had worked for all your life and asking them to take care of them for you. Not just titles and lands and thrones, but knowledge and dancing and jokes and language and your eyes and your hair and your frown and your hopes and your dreams.
Hopes and dreams that felt so far away now.
Rhaenyra found herself on the cliff of Dragonstone, staring out to the ocean. It seemed to laugh at her with its calmness. To remind her that it had claimed two of her sons. What use is fire against the might of the waves? The gulls seemed to scream. Your dragons will not save your sons from my icy depths, the wave seemed to taunt as they crashed around the rocks.
When the hands came to her shoulders, she did not flinch this time. She had almost been expecting him. She lifted her own, icy cold hands to his and squeezed. “Our baby…” She whispered, not worried that the winds would carry her words away. He would hear her, he always did. “I still remember the first day you held him.” She told him.
“I will never forget.” He assured her. “I remember how small he was and wondered how you could have possibly been so big.”
Rhaenyra smiled sadly. She had been huge with child, so huge she too had been surprised when they’d handed that tiny babe to her. But she’d loved every ounce of him from that moment, even long before. When she had first felt him move inside her. When she had first known he was coming. She had loved him since then, and loved him even now after he was gone. He had helped her face her fears, shown her that she could walk from the birthing bed victorious and bloodied.
“But he grew. Gods, how he grew.” The words brushed against her ear, disturbing her hair. He was so close, she thought. He must be real or she must be mad, she thought. She would take either.
“He will grow no more.” She replied.
She glanced down at the cliff edge, at the rocks and the waves below her. Would they pierce her organs like Jace’s had been? Would her blood stain the rocks? Would the fish know it was the blood of Old Valyria? Would she wash up on the beach like Luke had? Her foot shifted slightly between her skirts, edging a half inch closer to the edge. It looked almost inviting for the moment.
The hands tightened on her shoulders. “He did not die so you could follow.” The voice was both stern and reassuring. Rhaenyra kept her eyes on the rocks, tried to will her feet to move. They would not. The voice was back at her ear. “We all miss you, but none of us wish to see you so soon.”
Somehow that word comforted her. That single word. Us.
“You have work to do, Rhaenyra. You have his legacy to build now. too.” He whispered, pressing the ghost of a kiss to her cheekbone. And then he was gone again.
Rhaenyra felt the hollow, all seeing eyes of Balerion the Black Dread on her as she sat propped up against the opposite wall, legs extended out and her skirts filthy with the dust. She had never so little a Queen, or felt so little like one. What use was being Queen when the price you paid was those you loved?
Down here, the sounds of screaming, the disquiet in King’s Landing, the roaring of dying dragons could not be heard. But the old dragon, the one who had conquered Westeros, stared at her with the weight of her bloodline in the shadows where its eyes should have been. Mocking her, taunting her. She imagined the beast could talk, whisper her failures to her.
She closed her eyes to it, tears dry on her cheeks. It had been hours since she had left the Maester’s room where they had pulled a white shroud over her third son, a broken back from trying to save Syrax from the riot in the Dragon Pit. His body twisted and contorted unnaturally flashed behind her eyes, Syrax’s final roar echoing in her eyes.
She sobbed once more.
A few seconds later, she felt the air around her change. Rhaenyra did not allow herself to linger on these moments after they happened, did not tell anyone for fear that she would be seen as mad, or that she had gone mad. But she wondered sometimes if it was the sound of her heart breaking that called him here, to her. That sound must echo across Death, she thought.
“Please do not…” She murmured as she felt someone sit down beside her, exhaling softly with the effort.
“Do not what?” came the response.
“I do not want to talk to you.” She admitted.
“Why not?” The voice that answered was slightly hurt by this revelation but not entirely surprised. Rhaenyra felt that familiar hand tangle with her fingers. And gods, how she wanted to squeeze it tight, to hold it to her chest and relish every moment that this was real to her. But she could not, she dropped the hand and brought her hands to her face, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, forcing herself not to look.
“I cannot bear the shame of doing so.” She admitted in a pained whimper, her bottom lip trembling. She sniffed and laid her head back against the stone, dropping her hands to her lap. “You gave me three beautiful sons, they were gifts that I have squandered and now they are gone. Each of them. And you are gone with them, truly. I let the last piece of you go.” She explained, tears leaking from underneath her closed eyes.
A few moments passed and for one of them, Rhaenyra thought that he had gone. That perhaps she was right, and she did not deserve comfort from him. Her failure as a mother, as a lover, as a member of a great dynasty weighed on her chest like Balerion himself had his great claw on it. You are a disgrace to your name, to your children, to the man who you once loved, he snarled.
But then one of those calloused hands wrapped itself around hers, fiddling with one of the rings on her smallest finger. “Maybe I gave you the boys. I think we gave them to each other.” He agreed softly, his words only for them, and the rats, and the ghost of the Great Dragon. “But they are not gone, you have simply given them back. And I will take care of them.”
Rhaenyra ducked her head and sobbed once more, her hair loose and messy as it fell around her face. She fell into her sobs so wholeheartedly that she did not even notice the hand was gone until long after her tears had run dry. When she looked up and around, nobody but her and Balerion to witness her shame.
She saw him once last time.
Rhaenyra sat on the bed, humming softly as she tried to tempt Aegon to sleep. A young lad so confused by what was happening, why she and him had been locked in this room when they’d arrived on Dragonstone. Arrived to find it occupied by her half-brother, crawling with her enemies. She stroked his white blonde hair and tried her best to soothe him.
It was sunset and long shadows were cast on the floor from the balcony. It was in these that she first saw him, as if he had appeared on the balcony. She cast her eyes towards the shape and blinked a few times.
She looked back to Aegon, pressing the hand that had been playing with her hair onto his chest. She exhaled in relief to find him still breathing. After only feeling this flash of madness when she lost a son, she felt the luckiest woman alive to know that at least was a pain she had been spared.
But then….
“Why are you here?” She asked softly, keeping her eyes on the shape on the floor rather than the figure it was attached to. After all these years, she had told herself she could not look for forbidden, unknown answers. Madness does not need reason, she had told herself on the long nights where these moments had come back to her.
He did not answer.
And then she realised. “Oh.”
And then, grabbing her fate with both hands, she looked up.
He was exactly how she remembered him all those years when they’d said goodbye. At the time, it had been for now. And then she had thought it would be forever. And now it seemed the long wait was over. His face was kind but sad, eyes glassing with tears that he was trying not to shed for her sake. In his arms, he carried a bundle of blankets that slowly wriggled. Rhaenyra frowned for a moment before realisation dawned.
“Visenya.”
The name, the sight brought her to tears, bringing her free hand to her mouth for a moment. Of course, he said he would take care of them for her. Of course, a man such as he would take care of even the child she had bore another man, a child who had not even lived. Any child of yours is a dream to me, he had once told her.
“I am sorry, Rhaenyra.” He told her, like it was his fault. Like he had walked her down this path, like he had caused her death and not the other way around.
She sniffed and shook her head, her blonde hair shaking around her face as she did. “Do not be. I just...” She replied, looking down at her son, who slept on. "I just need some time.." She admitted, realising once she'd spoke that time was the one thing she could not have if he was here.
But the knight simply inclined his head and she took the permission to soak in the last of her minutes. Her chest shook as she wondered whether to wake Aegon before deciding against it. She could not have his last memories of her, perhaps his last minutes be full of confusion and fear. She instead took him in, trying to remember every detail. All the ways he was like his older brothers and all the ways he was not. She imagined for a moment that he would be King one day, but she found herself unable to care truly.
Just live, she pleaded silently of her beautiful son, do that for your Mother and I will walk into dragon fire to see it done. She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his forehead, tears on his skin as she did so. She lowered herself to lie besides him, watching his chest rise and fall, her nose in his hair as she cried. And her shield silently kept his post, the setting sun their only companion as the room was slowly plunged into darkness. And there she stayed until she heard a banging at the door, the guard come to take her to her half-brother.
She looked up and saw Harwin was gone.
It did not matter, she would see them again soon.