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The six-inch Valyrian steel blade rests flush with the edge of the dining table. Aemond sits behind it, hands folded on antique oak. He let Helaena pick their flat's furniture. He likes to see her happy though it's no easy feat; his sister was made for a world much lighter, paper-thin and iridescent, a world so fantastical that it ripped before it could be created. Aemond was made for the dark. His world is a tide of muck that never ebbs, only subsumes, the steady embrace of a night unending like a dragon's wing descending, cradling.
The lock clicks and Helaena appears in the doorway, her pink mouth a small oh. "Brother, you're home—"
"Early. Yes."
"You're cross."
Her brow stitches together sympathetically. She doesn't know that her smallest moves trigger the heaviest, hungriest thunder that rolls beneath his ribs. They creak and she hurries to his side, the faux-tattered tails of her sleeves and skirt fluttering until she lands on her knees. She puts a hand on his forearm—her right, a luna moth etched in ink on the back of her palm. Its wings flex with concern. "What is it?" she asks.
Aemond's hands slip apart. His fingers curl around his dagger's ebony hilt. The tide begs for something: more liquid, black.
"You were with him." Aemond's teeth are wedded. "Why?"
"Jace is our blood, Aemond. It's not wrong to kindle friendship. He only wanted to see the mantises hatch in the summer garden."
Steel flashes against Helaena's rosy cheek. A pretty cruelty that she bears no scars but the ones she gives herself. Aemond is not so lucky.
"After what his brother did to me? I'd rather they burn."
"Brother, that was ages ago." Helaena lifts a hand to Aemond's scar. She's the only one permitted to trace it, because her intimacy comes at an emotional distance. He is a pet bug in a jar and she is the entomologist who knows living insides only from the outside. His heart is mere study. She'd never come for it, beating. "You've gotten all worked up. Come to bed with me. I'll set things right."
—
The scar runs from Aemond's hairline, through his eye, to the middle of his cheek. He doesn't have that eye anymore. He has a shell of acrylic plastic that sits inside his reconstructed eyelids because when he was ten years old his cousin Luke slashed him. Luke is really his nephew but the family tree is so fucked it's easier to explain him as a cousin, especially given that he was five years old when Aemond merely borrowed his dead aunt's motorcyle. It was bat black outside the estate and raining hard enough to mask the rev of the engine, sputter of the exhaust. But his little nephews are goody-two-shoes shits who couldn't let Aemond's victory fly. "You could never handle her," he spat as they closed in on him in the garage. Moonlight gushed through the window and painted Luke's blade resplendent white, then crimson. Aemond can't remember if he called them bastards before or after but their mother was and is a whore. She opened her legs for half of their father's executives and gave her husband children that looked not a lick like him. Why should their family try to hide it? Right, because Rhaenyra is set to inherit the majority share of TarGo. She'll reign as CEO, assigning the board, and her half-siblings positions. Aemond only wants to play business if he can burn the whole damn thing to the ground. Take the dirty money made by exploiting Essossi workers and fuck-off to the Shadows.
—
Aemond isn't at King's Landing University for business. That's Aegon's lot, a lot he loathes with every fiber of his cutting edge streetwear. He might not graduate if Father dies beforehand—unless Mother can work her magic on the university administration. Aemond is studying political science. His secret is that he could rule an empire if he wanted because he knows Fire & Blood by rote. His copy of Aegon's Conquest has its pages softened to floppy fabric. While his brother fucks off to the frats to snort whatever powder lines up closest to his nose, Aemond claims the library, accessing tomes from centuries and centuries ago, an indomitable boon of attending KLU, touching the words of the Conquerer's closest maesters. White-gloved, of course.
Or else he scrolls the digitized archives from the comfort of his flat. Here he doesn't need to keep in his prosthesis if it gets too mucous-y. He doesn't want strangers at the library to think he's crying for the wrong reason. He doesn't want them to see him cry at all. He saves his tears for Dragonkin —the artists in the first century had a knack for capturing the particular shimmer of a dragon's scales. No modern interpretation holds water. Dragons are dead, and along with them, their beauty. Aemond pretends his Destrier motorcycle can spit flame. Vhagar, he calls her, after Visenya's mount. Only Helaena knows that he secretly converses with Vhagar in High Valyrian, because only Helaena is allowed to ride along with him. She has no capacity for idle gossip. Aemond buries secrets in her like she's his own gaping grave. They'll die with him or her, or ideally both of them, at the same time. Helaena's gossamer butterfly-world is the only light that shines within his darker reaches. They grow darker by day. The Doom, Aemond calls it.
—
He thinks of killing a lot. He thinks of blood coursing in sheets down his wrist, dripping from his fingertips, as it did, that night. It was his own blood but everyone has it. Nothing stopped Luke from spilling him so what's stopping Aemond from spilling others? Gallons, vats, siloes, entire oceans of blood sit trapped by millimeters of derma. Skin is weak. A testament to human fragility. A tidal challenge.
—
It’s why his skin is ruined—Aemond, Helaena, Aegon—their skin is tarnished by thousands of dragons worth of ink. His first was the two-eyed polyphemus moth between his ribs, crowned by the scripted word inferno. His throat reads choke; his knuckles read BURN HARD. Two dragons duel up his ribcage, one red, one black, flames licking across his chest. Sweet Helaena is decorated by butterflies: the morphos on the backs of her palms, a luna moth on her throat. Black and white greenery snakes down her arms. Her knees are spiderwebs. On her spine, fairy wings that seem to weep. Her breastbone says undone. Helaena fights hard. It’s inspirational.
Aegon’s latest tattoo is BAD BOY running up his left temple. It’s only visible when he slicks his hair back. Mother cried when she saw it. You’re good! You’re my good, good boy. Mother is good at a lot of things but not bullshitting. Her shit is polite, like a domestic rabbit.
Why do my babies want to ruin themselves? The Seven made them perfect.
The Seven do not reign over dragons, Mother. Oh well. We tried to tell you.
—
Helaena leads Aemond to her own bed. They keep two bedrooms to keep Mother happy. His sister's room is a one hundred square foot cross-section of forest. A shaggy moss-green rug coats the floorboards. Planters crowd the corners. They descend from the high ceilings and emit green tangles, some with fat diamond leaves, some dark circles, others with strings of pearls. They shroud the mounted shadow boxes of butterflies, moths, mantises, and beetles. Bees and crickets and spiders. A birdeater bigger than Aemond's hand hangs above her headboard. He parts the gauzy curtain and greets it. Who does Helaena think of killing?
Salt lamps turn her pink. She doesn't like fucking but Aemond worries: the right one will gain the same access as him. His access is her skin, her organs. She strips her loose, cropped blouse and matching long skirt and kneels so very pinkly on her fuzzy green comforter. She likes bras that don't have wire or padding, just lace that hugs her breasts and bares her nipples. They're hard.
"Does this cheer you up?" she asks.
Helaena has fretted for Aemond's happiness so long as he's loved her, which is to say, his entire waking memory. His whole life is a crush. And Helaena's whole life is a mystery that serves to blind. Why does she show herself in her bed? Why does she slip one strap from her shoulder, then the next. Her small breasts barely drop. "Sister," Aemond breathes, hard as his cock. It's as if she can sense his animal desire and the consequences of denying it. Stand before Vhagar and tremble, submit. Half of Aemond is a bitch. He's terrified, mollified, awe-stricken by her. She's the half that doesn't descend on sweet Helaena with maximum bloodlust.
"Touch me, please," he asks.
She's the half that sees Helaena as equal. It's Aemond who's bent the knee. He's in bed at Helaena's level cupping her cheeks and pressing his forehead to hers so she knows it's time to tame him. It's Aemond who doesn't like fucking because he's already found the only human being worth sharing his skin and she's a birdeater in a butterfly exoskeleton. Her hand is patient as it works his cock. "I'm so sorry, brother," she says. She's apologizing because she doesn't have to endure erections. Here is the source of your suffering, her grip seems to say. I do not envy you.
I don't blame you.
But you are not a woman, either.
I am a dragon. Don't you know? I am everything.
"Your cunt," Aemond says at the crook of Helaena's neck. He has buried himself here to taste her salt and nourish himself. "Let me fuck you, sister."
She lays him flat on the bed. She is naked and he wears it all: black cargo pants, black belt, black t-shirt, black utility vest that stows his daily carries. His pink meets her pink. It is perhaps the only act that soothes the Doom. The tragedy is that all life is not so soft and warm and welcoming as his sister's cunt. She rides him back to the dark hollow of the womb, to a weightless time before Knowing and Shadow shackled his ankles and drug him to the sour light, a false promise of horizons and tomorrows when in truth night prevails over day. Aemond comes inside his sister, hands trenched in her hips, begging, "Sister, sister please. Take me back."
"You're here now," she soothes, caressing his scarred cheek with the back of her hand. "I'm here with you, always. I love you, Aemond."
"I love you too, Helaena."
—
Aemond sleeps fully clothed, shrouding Helaena's spine. He likes to breathe her hair. Quite literally he'd prefer if it replaced oxygen in his lungs. Air is dark in the dark. But Helaena's hair is silver candy floss, lengths of it that roll to her buttocks. If Aemond sucks in an entire mouthful he can pretend it's become his insides. I'm pretty now.
No, you're ugly. Nice try though.
—
Aemond does and doesn't care about his scar. It draws stares and demands for stories. It turns him into a character, from a storybook, or from history. Losing an eye is for swashbucklers and roustabouts, not for members of the richest family in Westeros. The real wound is his eye socket, empty. Inside it's pink and scaly. Sometimes pink and slick with pus. It's a flesh hole that's not a womb or cunt or lungs. It does not welcome anything but Helaena's touch. "Let me," she says, when it's time for cleaning. His dead eye reopens with her fingers in it. No, let me. Aemond thinks of this when he's hard alone. It is sex from the other side.
—
Sex was always their hobby. Helaena's first, and Aemond's by proximity. She studied the birds and the bees and he buzzed coolly (or not so coolly) at her shoulder. "What are they doing? They're stuck together!" Yes, those two ladybugs were in the midst of fucking. Helaena crouched at their leafy level, centimeters away, unblinking, and pronounced, "Mating. It's how you and I were made."
"Mom's not a ladybug, silly."
"No, she's a human. She made human babies, with Daddy."
Past bedtime in a flashlit tent of floral covers Helaena divulged her secret: an anatomy book titled Mammalian Sexual Reproduction. Pages of animal cock didn't scare a single blink out of her. Hooked, knobbed, spiked, flared, skinny as pencil and just as breakable yet Aemond's hands sweated too slickly for a single bone to snap. The four eyes of the echidna's penis channeled their red exposure into Aemond's socket and reflected the instrument between his legs back at him. But so was hers: the vulva. A flower shrouded in petals of flesh to gently reveal the birthing canal. Aemond's sticky finger snares the glossy illustration.
"Is this what you have?"
"Yes."
"And what Mom has?"
"Yes."
"Can I see?"
He doesn't believe her or he's already prone to voids. A void first made him prone. His mother cast him from warm darkness and Helaena nonchalantly lifts her nightgown. "Your panties," Aemond says, and he slides them from her hips. She spreads a much tinier flower than the picture, too small to birth a babe. It accommodates a single finger but Helaena gasps and Aemond quickly retreats. He sniffs his finger and smells animals. Usually a mess makes him want to wash his hands with scalding water but Helaena is watching and asks, "What does it smell like?" Aemond stretches his hand up to her.
"Animals," he says. "Insides."
—
His appetite for insides grew alongside Helaena's. When Aemond could steal away from Nerf battles with Aegon and later Super Smash Bros, he found his legs carrying him to the garden, where he was sure to discover Helaena dirt-dusted, her silvery head stuck in a bush or branches or at the creek's surface. Here he witnessed the gelatinous birth of tadpoles or the screech-mating of foxes. It was by accident that he picked up a turtle with an erection the length of its entire body. It sagged in Aemond's hand and squirted seed that soaked the toe of his sneakers. He wanted to scream or run or dash its shell to bloody shards but these were feelings he had to package around Helaena and Mom. They were creepy crawlies that slithered beneath his skin and why can't I see them but I can, brother. She said this with a mere lilac-eyed look.
Later in the bed-tent-womb fogged with adolescent breath Aemond requested the comfort of his sister's vulva. She obliged and Aemond used his pointer randomly (scientifically he thought then) and paid very close attention to his sister's breath and pelvic wriggling. Her clitoris swelled and fluid seeped from her hole. "Sister," he began, querying. "It must be arousal,"she answered, knowing. "Keep going." So he poked and poked and used his other hand to poke her actual vagina and rake out her insides until they stole his finger back with ten times the force, finally. "Brother," Helaena gasped, and she clamped down on his wrist. Her eyes shut as her guts danced and she opened them to say, "I had an orgasm."
"Did it feel good?"
She curtly nodded. "Should we try it on you?"
Aemond's cock got hard sometimes but it wasn't something he could control. He remembered that first night when they looked at the anatomy book and sympathetically his blood prickled down there, mostly when touching the female organs. It got hard in his bed alone and it got harder when he was in bed with Helaena. She liked to admire him even though it turned Aemond's cheeks to ember. He stretched out next to her and shifted his pajamas so his cock jutted out, alive and red. "You're very aroused," Helaena mused.
"I like touching you," Aemond said. "You're very pretty down there."
Prettiness didn't seem to factor into Helaena's analysis of junk. She held Aemond's cock and milked him like a cow but softer and their little bed dome reeked of Helaena's guts, now his, and he saw white and knew it was her hair so he grabbed it in a tender, wet fist and thought if the womb can't have me I'll take the opposite, I'll go blind, I'll rub Helaena's hair in my eye and drink only what comes from udders and breasts and I'll never crave night again I'll burrow in the snow where even if the night descends the moon will rise up in its stead for a world of blue-white, yes, this world is not so bad. It's bright.
He ejected his white in Helaena's hand. She studied it, spiderwebbed between her stretched fingers. "Hm," she said. "The babies are in there."
Aemond, who had to madly blink shadow into his single eye, said, "I want to go back."
"Where?" Helaena asked. But something in her stare was an in-between, not heaven or hell, but purple purgatory.
"I don't know," Aemond answered. "Wherever the orgasm is."
"It's in your blood, I think. Or your nervous system."
"In my brain?" There were lots of nerves there.
"Definitely."
See, Aemond was smart too. He listened. He put his cock away and snuck out to grab a moist washcloth and wipe his sister's hand. "I love you," he said. He went back to his own bed.
—
It took a month of living together for him to outgrow the habit, the urge, but even now that they share an apartment Aemond craves his own cocoon. Here can he retreat with his wings slick on his body as Doom replaces the Good, White, and Her. He can't eat her hair. It looks better on her.
—
They fucked when they were twelve because it was time recreate the book. Aemond lasted a single thrust but didn't make a baby because Helaena hadn't bloomed. Later he would pull out and rue the unnaturalness of seed spilled in open air, on open flesh. Like the turtle on his shoe. Sex has a purpose: to go inside. Aemond never lasts long there.
—
At four AM Aemond skulks back to his lair, black-feeling. Mantis watching, a perfect excuse for escape, if Helaena wasn't brutally, beautifully honest. If she wanted to fuck Jace she would say it. He's just another specimen. The egalitarianism of it is terrifying. Aemond wants to be the birdeater above bed. His room is white-walled and white-lit. Milky steel blades swathe the far wall in a neat row of five: Blackfyre, Dark Sister, Nightfall, Lamentation, and Vigilance. Replicas of the finest swords to grace the Seven Kingdoms, down to the opals, emeralds, sapphires, and rubies set into the gilded hilts. On the opposite wall hangs his heat. Guns are modern swords, life-ending in a single hit. His pistol grip shotgun is mounted above his bed. Vertically lined on either side are the Colt AR, the Benelli MR1, the Dragunov SVU, the Heckler SL8. These are his little pets, his comfort objects. Mom can't stand to enter. Even Helaena blanches in here. You don't need to be a birdeater if you have a gun. Or you already are. Don't fuck with me, his room says. Not a cocoon but something deadlier, slime from a frog that slows your heart in under ten seconds. In his bed—white sheets, white comforter, and a single white pillow—Aemond rests with his hands behind his head, unsleeping. The punch black of his guns on stark plaster enlivens him. Awake, he dreams. Blackest blood fountain spray from strategic jabs to arteries. A snipe-shot from the great oak through the third floor, second from the left bedroom window. Jace masturbates with the lights on and the curtains drawn. He watches gay porn unabashedly. Aemond's thumb squeezes an invisible trigger as Jace loses himself in a tissue and again in bed as he remembers the losing. Jace has the hots for men so why did he hunt down Helaena. Does he know the creature he teases? Vhagar shows no mercy.
—
Aemond doesn't masturbate. It makes his hands dirty with something other than Helaena. She has delivered his every orgasm. Even the ones where she doesn't use her hands. When they moved into the flat she convinced him to try a plug. Aemond objected until she opened up Mammalian Sexual Reproduction and pointed out the blurb about the prostate, another part Helaena didn't have, but she was so curious, oh brother, please? I'll be gentle. Aemond laid with his knees in soft moss carpet and his face in downy comforter as Helaena with lube-cold hands eased three inches of flared silicone inside him. He groaned and gritted as his cock rose up of its own volition. Oh, Helaena, the snake-charmer. She crouched in bed and pulled Aemond up by his hands and settled with his head snug between her thighs, cushioned by her musky cunt. She had convinced him to be fully naked and so on a canvas of pale flesh bounded the alien red staff. They both watched; Aemond's arms wound around his sister's, as without a single touch, his cock grew darker and wilder. True, he clenched. Anatomy won. And the object in his ass filled him the way he thought of himself filling Helaena, but he was Helaena now, he had the cunt and the cunt had what completed it. He opened his eyes eventually and his abs were basted in semen.
"Such fun," Helaena said. "Did you like it?"
Aemond nuzzled the crook of her elbow. His answer was a solid exhale forced through his nose.
They use the plug weekly.
—
Mother calls Helaena crying. “Put your brother on as well. It’s your Father—he’s—he’s passed.”
That’s fine. He never loved them.
—
But Mother loved him. So Aemond goes to the estate because he wants to hug her and let her weep against his chest. She is best when she’s like this, broken, vying to be close. It reminds Aemond of his happiest years, which were quickly followed by his darkest. The estate is a spider’s web and brutally flammable. At the wake, over foie gras canapes, Aemond sees bright orange arson, licking up the walls of Father's library, crackling his model trains to ash and charred plastic puddles. His nephews greet him indifferently and Aemond returns short nods. He refuses most food and drinks a bottle of mineral water he opens himself and pours into a glass tumbler, a quarter at a time.
Dinner is ten courses served by white-gloved staff in the grand dining room. Aemond enjoys the sour plum soup and later the elk filet, though one bite is all he needs to fuel his patrol. Something is funny across the table. Jace chatters Baela into oblivion and sideyes Aegon, who grows restless. Why does Jace’s spine, angled to block Aegon, bother him? It’s nothing new. It’s family: there’s us, and there’s them.
“You don’t even know how to fuck, nephew,” Aegon shouts over a suddenly quiet table. He pregamed the dinner with a half dozen pints at the pub in the nearest village. Booze shows in his cloudy eyes, his slouch, the strands of chin length hair that flop repeatedly from their place behind his ears. Aegon used to be able to intimidate Aemond. Now he'll hardly look him in the eye. Aemond bores it directly into his brother as if it will drill sense into him. He resorts to a swift kick in the shin. "Oh, fuck's sake, Aemond. Ever thought about pulling that stick out of your ass?"
Aemond doesn't look at Helaena. He looks at the platter of roast boar that meatily commands the table and imagines Aegon apple-mouthed in its stead. His brother would like that, is the problem. Aegon was born like Aemond: spiraling perversely toward death.
—
The last time Aemond saw Aegon he was blackout on the doorstep of the flat, puking into the mat of Helaena’s choosing which read Welcome to our Garden. Aemond refused to answer the door so nightgowned Helaena attended Aegon’s incessant pounding, shouldered him to the toilet where he remained for four wretched hours. Aemond sat at the dining table with the textbook for his Dothraki Warfare class, eyeing Helaena as she fluttered to and fro with washcloths, cups of water, a clean t-shirt from Aemond’s dresser.
“I don’t want to sleep in that freak’s room,” Aegon slurred loudly from the bathroom.
“It was never an option,” Aemond called back. “You’d best sleep in the bathtub.”
Helaena appeared with Aegon slung on her arm. “The puking spell is over,” she said. “I think the couch will work fine.”
They fell into the couch together, Aegon’s head in Helaena’s lap. He began to sob. “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. Gods, make it stop.” Fearlessly Helaena carded her fingers through his sticky-looking hair. “It’s alright, brother. I’m here. Try to rest.”
When Aegon settled near dawn, Helaena slipped to Aemond’s side. “You didn’t have to stay up,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder. Aemond shut his book and set down his pen.
“Am I the same as him?”
—
After dinner, again in the library for sherry and cigars, Aemond feigns interest until Jace excuses himself to the bathroom. Aemond listens at the door and contemplates the fortitude of his nephew's stream. Jace looks almost unsurprised when he finds Aemond, stalwart on the other side.
"Nephew," he greets.
"Aemond," Jace returns.
"Did you enjoy your little playdate with my sister?"
"I'd rather not talk about it."
Jace attempts a sidestep but Aemond throws his arms up on either side of the doorframe. He has a six-inch height advantage that he gleefully abuses. "I would. If you ever, ever—"
"Fuck her? Don't worry, I'm not as skeevy as you."
"Watch yourself, nephew. That skeeviness runs in your blood. Go tell your stepfather-uncle, or whatever he prefers to be called."
"Uncle."
But it's a greeting. Shadow drapes Aemond's shoulders. Behind him, Daemon smirks. "A little traffic jam, boys?" Aemond drops his arms but Daemon grabs one anyway, pulls him so Jace can scurry back to Baela. Aemond's attempt to brush off Daemon's hand results in Daemon shoving him two steps inside the bathroom. Wainscott details collide with Aemond's spine. Daemon slams the door shut with the heel of his brogue and claims his advantage of two inches. "Careful, Aemond. I think you should play nice with my sons."
"I always do," Aemond bites out. "Besides, they're not yours. We can only guess where that pretty black hair comes from."
The dark tide commands as it storms beneath Aemond's skin but it evokes only the glitter of cruel amethyst in Daemon's eyes. "Bratty little boy," he breathes, all scotch. "You've had fight in you since you were little. Not like your spineless older brother."
"I'll fight you now, if you dare challenge me."
"And what? Suffer your mommy's wrath? You're not half so appetizing."
Daemon spares a hand, fingers spread as he swipes down Aemond's button-up to his gilded buckle. His hand invades Aemond's briefs and Aemond can't move: the worms writhe, the dragon flaps its wings, the dark waters churn, yet the maelstrom is suspended by flesh. The maelstrom shows up, traitorously, in his cock.
"Gods, so hard for me, nephew. Have you been dreaming of me? Of this?"
Daemon feeds Aemond wet breath of liquor and smoke as he pumps Aemond's cock and refuses to surrender his stare, at least until Aemond groans for the pleasure of blackness turning so black it goes white; where past death lives the divine eternal day. He hates his uncle and it makes him hard because he's picturing amethysts popping from Daemon's skull into a sorbet cup from which Aemond contendly slurps, but upon realizing they're gems, spits them into the mountainous loot he keeps piled forty men high. Then Daemon is kissing with lip-bites that tear and leak while snugly choking any protest from Aemond's throat. He has none: he comes.
Daemon smears the come on the wall beside Aemond's head. "My condolences, nephew," he says. He checks the hallway before he leaves. Aemond slides to the well-waxed floorboards, one eye wide. He's going to kill his uncle, he decides.
Ten minutes later he washes his cock with soap and water until it's raw and all with visions of the damn thing falling off, slipping into the drain or else being tossed in the trash. He wipes the come from the wall and wipes the wet spot dry. He smooths his hair and the creases in his trousers. I am the dragon. So is he.
Dragons die.
It's never pretty.
Aemond returns to the library and stands behind Helaena. He rests a still damp hand on her shoulder. She crosses her arm over her chest to hold it. A quick glance up and she knows.
—
Daemon loves children in the worst way. Aemond learned this when he was little in whispers from Mother and her dear friend Criston, how Uncle Daemon had a particular bond with Rhaenyra that resulted in Father’s ire. Beds shared, trips taken that ended in unsavory locations. When Aemond was seventeen Aegon took him to one such spot but the stench of bodies wilted any chance of sprouting his cock. Aegon thinks Aemond is a sissy. He’s more right than Aemond would ever care to let on. Because once Rhaenyra was off to college Daemon’s sights had to land somewhere. He already played more roughly than Father ever did. Chasing, grabbing, lapsitting on what Aemond only after his time with Helaena knew to be boners. In dark corners of the estate he would kiss and grind and demonstrate the effect youthfulness had on him. Aemond was twelve when Daemon first demanded he stroke his uncle’s cock. He retreated to his brain where he knew Daemon was a mammal and this stiff organ was brought about by chemicals largely uncontrollable. This is me, he thought. The burden of blood.
Uncle was attractive. When Aemond confessed to Helaena she wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross,” she said. “He’s an adult.”
“I think I like boys. You can’t ever tell.”
“I won’t, brother. I promise.”
—
That night Aemond absconds to Helaena's room, her old room, from when they were little. She is curled under the covers with her phone, watching an entomological lecture from Dr. Gerardys. "Hi brother," she says, clicking her screen black. "Want to join me?"
Aemond slips in behind her. Her hair smells like human smoke. This is his nightly arson, remarkably benign.
“What happened with Daemon?” Helaena asks.
Clever Helaena, puts her crown where Aemond cannot resist but to kiss. With sore lips basted silver he answers, "He threatened me by jerking me off."
"I thought so," says Helaena. "His hand smelled of you."
—
For a few weeks after Aemond's run-ins with his Uncle his dragon departs: he feels no fire, male or female or monster in his head. He is the way his brother sees him: impotent. He goes to class. He studies in the library. And when he returns to his flat, he heads straight to Helaena's room. Often he passes her knitting on the couch, humming along to a Taena Swyft record. Tonight she's already inside, at her desk, with her pet tarantula Cannibal in her palm. Aemond falls into her covers.
And she is there, all soft-cooing, a mush of words that only women seem capable of conjuring. Sweet little nothings that satisfy sugar-crazed kids but ten minutes in the shelter of Helaena's armpit and Aemond is a babe again. He shivers and clutches at Helaena's ruffled shirt. She runs a hand down the length of his hair. Shhh, shhh, shhh. She frees a breast and he latches.
Ah, safe.
—
"I'm not a girl," Helaena says absently, one of these nights. Aemond's head rests against her belly; he's had his fill of invisible milk and all that remains is the cooling spit on his lips. Cannibal crawls along his sister's arm. They are watching.
"Not a girl," Aemond repeats. He supposes she's a woman. But she says, "I'm not a boy, either. Neither of those terms apply to me, I think. I'm nonbinary."
Aemond chews on this, these truths that are his but spoken aloud by his sister. How does she know to sink her feather antenna into his viscous unknowns and extract his thoughts, delicately seeded into words. She wears dresses and she is not a girl. Her hair is long and she is not a girl. She likes lace and knitting and silly, frivolous things like a fairy who lives in a boot and uses bramble thorns for needles and thimbles as teacups. She is fantastical: she is neither.
"I am too," Aemond says.
"What pronouns do you like?"
"None." But he thinks, your majesty. No better address than undying fealty and absolute power.
"I think I'll use she-they. My feminine is very strong. I like her the best."
"My feminine…" Aegon starts. Helaena, though physically weak and mentally elsewhere, has straightened out whatever chaos dominates her. "She's strong too. But she won't win."
—
But who will. Aemond stands in front of the bathroom mirror naked which he treats like church, the closest to the Gods he will ever come. Flesh is the ultimate weakness and to bare it begs a price of submission. Aemond wants as little involvement with his flesh as possible. At ten years old he researched diets and determined the most efficient way to eat; his macros are infallible and he never strays; breakfast is two eggs, dark toast, four ounces of cheese, a sliced tomato, pomegranate for vitality; lunch is a salad of ancient grains and legumes and not more than two tablespoons of olive oil; dinner is four ounces of rare veal and leafy greens; he counts these leaves as they leave the paper bundle in which Helaena stows them. He measures the exact 22 grams of coffee he steeps in 350 grams of water, and a single tablespoon of raw milk to accompany it. He does not consume a calorie more than necessary. His muscles are wire stretched on bone taut under his skin. It is imperative to diminish his flesh. He will not become a feast for any man least of all himself. Devour this, he taunts Gods who are not real but live in his head regardless. Or else he is talking to Vhagar again. But she is no judge of beauty, only flame and ferocity. He cups his chest and thinks of breasts. They wouldn't suit him. Helaena can carry that burden; that extra flesh that requires extra garments. Aemond carries the cock. It has been soft for two moons now and is now lost in white pubic hair that must go. He bites his cheeks as he wets it and drags his razor scathingly through the softest part of his body with visions of crimson metal flashing rapidfire behind both eyes. Blink and they reappear stronger and more aggressive: dash the metal through your cock, your testes, smash the razor under boot extract the blades free your flesh, your majesty, you are higher, lighter, too exalted to endure this: hell.
"Shit."
His teeth grit and blood seeps at the base of him because it had blinded him. He holds himself like a babe as he sinks to the floor. He cries. Helaena finds him.
"Brother, what happened?"
She hurries to wet a washcloth and kneels to wipe Aemond's cock. "Was it on purpose?" she asks. Her wrists bear similar kisses.
"I don't know," Aemond answers. Then, "Yes."
Helaena cleans him and dresses the one-inch slice with a bandage. She helps into a t-shirt and clean boxers with joggers and a hoodie as additional protection. All black, always. He sleeps the entire night in her bed.
—
He grew out his hair when Helaena grew differently than him. Puberty was a nightmare because their bodies were supposed to match forever, how could the Gods make them change? But they did. Helaena grew breasts and Aemond never cut his hair again, save for quick trims. We are one.
They are, they are, they are. We are they.
—
They're always together. At night, they run off to one another's rooms. They get in bed together. What are they going in there, under those covers, giggling, whispering, breathing more heavily than they ought, then breathing the slow breath of sleep? They are up to something. They were kissing in the garden and Mother found them but her look was like she knew what they had been doing all along since their eggs separated in her ovaries and now fully fleshed and gutted they're making their way back to a simpler, rounder state where fluid membranes comfortably connect. They're moving out, and moving in together. They love each other and are in love with each other and at the very least they take care of each other the way she never could. It was at five years old when Aemond forcibly weaned that they first found their first way to Helaena's bed. It was only natural to remove them from the breast, the womb, etc. But they are insatiable. They are perpetually clawing at their surroundings with an inscrutable eye and ducking into themselves when the ribbons they've created reciprocally lash out. Why are you tearing your world apart? Justice. An eye for an eye.
—
Aegon arrives at the flat when Helaena is out, at an overnight research excursion for her ecology class. Aemond doesn't think their brother knows this and yet he is here, oddly sober, with clean wispy hair tucked behind his ears. "Brother," he says. Aemond doesn't correct him because he doesn't have a colloquial alternative.
"Brother," he says. Aemond is a butterfly with false eyes on his back. When he blinks his left eyelid grazes slick acrylic.
"Well, are you going to let me in?"
Aemond does. Aegon pensively roams the flat like he's never entered before, which he hasn't, not without foreign substances commanding his bloodstream. Aemond watches from the landing but eventually offers their brother tea because it's apparent this visit will endure longer than desirable; the least he can do is go total butterfly and imitate Helaena. Aegon carries his cup of lapsang into Aemond's room. Overcome with the evening's solitude Aemond forgot to shut the door and thereby created an invitation.
"You're so weird," Aegon says. He's staring at the gun wall. "You know that, right?"
Aemond, whose cock is still bandaged and burning slightly, answers, "Yes."
“I heard you and Helaena don’t believe in gender anymore.”
“I suppose not.”
Aegon turns to face Aemond. He's shorter, his head square instead of Aemond's rectangle. Bad boy. He has the same white hair and rosy lips. "Does Daemon touch you?" the lips ask.
"Yes," Aemond answers. "Every time he's visited since we were kids. Why?"
"I heard it, last time. I heard him—"
Aemond kisses Aegon.
"What the—" Aegon staggers back against Aemond's dresser. He swipes his lips with the back of his palm and grimaces at whatever he sees there. "You're sick. You and Helaena and Daemon. This whole fucking family. I don't want it. I don't want whatever you have. It's contagious."
Aegon loudly discards his mug in the sink on his way out the door, muttering as he goes. When Helaena returns the next night, Aemond's cock gets miraculously hard. He kisses her before she can set down her bag and grinds her against the wall. "I kissed Aegon," he confesses. "He was here last night and I kissed him."
"Brother," Helaena softly scolds. "Why?"
—
Helaena is the only one of them to ever have been dumped in a psychiatric facility. Not even Aemond could stop her from dragging razors across her wrists, her thighs, the slight meat in her belly that she wanted gone, gone, gone. Mother could stand kisses but not gore, not the sight of two of her children in a puddle of blood, one calm and bleeding, the other calm and covered in it. She's hurting, that's all. She's getting rid of it. It all seemed logical to Aemond at thirteen years old who had hurt too but bundled it up instead of carving it out. He got evaluated but Vhagar would never let strangers take her for a ride. Not even now, as he logs into websites no search engine can find and load up a cart full of ammo to be paid tracelessly by crypto. Boxes accumulate under Aemond's bed, rounds and clips and powder enough to turn a whole family of freaks inside out. Aemond has it, alright. Maybe he should act like Helaena and self-excavate first but Aemond's skull has already been hollowed by his own blood; it's their turn now. The boxes are too heavy for Helaena to lift. "What's in there?" she asks. "Bullets," Aemond answers. "Lots?" "Yes." "You won't hurt anyone."
"Brother?"
"I am the dragon now."
—
Helaena eats a heroic quantity of mushrooms and Aemond sister-sits as her pupils dilate and her mind disappears. On these nights Helaena is the bug and Aemond is whatever he wants to be because Helaena will not resist him. He spends time tracing the ink that stains her: spiderwebbed knees, her moth throat, undone, undone, undone, at her breastbone. In the crooks of her elbows beetles fly as Aemond extends her arms and thus their wings. Oh, to be a bug. What is a bug if not a smaller, armored dragon with simpler concerns. Aemond sees the appeal. He strips Helaena’s lacy undergarments and she watches as he stoops over and runs his cock along her cunt. It stiffens and he hates the bare sight so he buries it in Helaena, collapsing with his chest pressed to face. Her eyelids flutter against him. He doesn’t move. He is anything he wants and what he wants is a harder shell and fewer thoughts. He lays with his hard cock still inside Helaena for over an hour until the mere notion of her warmth summons his seed. And even then he doesn’t move until another warmth blooms between them. “Oh,” Helaena says. “I’m sorry, I forgot.” Aemond helps her to the toilet and watches as his seed slops into the bowl.
He changes the sheets and they climb into bed. Aemond hasn’t redressed and Helaena softly touches the healing cut on his pubis. She straddles him and takes out his fake eye and inserts her finger. High as she is, her eyes copy this gape. Inside her is Aemond. See, a success.
—
Near dawn she finally sleeps and her phone buzzes and Aemond decides to answer. He doesn't always look at her messages but this one glows Jace and the bloodcurdling words, Aegon asked me out 🫣 I think we’re official…
You sick fuck, you, you, you. You're sick inside. You have a Sickness that Consumes without your Consent because that was how you were born. Mother, please, why, why this, why this black stew that sludges inside my skull. Why this cacophonous, unruly pulse with blood that insatiably hungers. Drain it or give me more to prove that others suffer the same. You are sick and there is no cure but red or black. Her blues and greens are deceptive. Eat, Brother, eat.
"Brother, you're trembling. What's wrong?"
It's true. The ponderous rage of a thousand dark tides throttles his bones. The phone is a beacon in his lap and Helaena picks it up. She sadly sighs. "They asked me to keep it a secret, both of them. I promised, Aemond. I couldn't—"
A set of icy fingertips locks around his wrist. In a hot-steel flash Aemond dodges her touch and cuffs Helaena's cheek. "Brother," she whimpers. Blood seeps as drool from the corner of her lip; she holds herself; a tear slips like crystal down her knuckles. She is broken yet her fangs are inches deep in a softness Aemond cannot help but to loathe. His sister, his lover, his butterfly girl. She is what Aemond could be if he hadn't been cursed. He is a worm. His heart is dirt.
"I want to kill him," Aemond says.
"But he's our brother. And Jace—"
Aemond gouges Helaena with the one eye he has left. Say it, he dares. He is good and well and shouldn't we be happy? So what if Jace is our nephew? Our brother is just like us.
He's sick. It's in his blood.
"You need help, Aemond. Will you get help for me?"
Aemond cradles the darkening patch on Helaena's cheek that will soon bloom purple. "She will not win," he says. He leaves Helaena crying.
—
Aemond wanted to bury everything in her. He wanted to fill her up to banish the void that so gleefully occupied his face. He would delete her negative space and put himself where he would be welcome. But she was pure black, an open hole with no end who Consumed simply by existing prettily, floating as a fairy farce. She had Aemond's eyes on her wings and his hair down her spine as a trap for he was but a predator who required deception to necessitate her survival. He cracked her ribs and shoveled in his muck, pound by pound by pound by pound, because sickly, he wanted to see her sink. Be like me, wear the shackles, swallow the thick, imminent Doom. But how much weight did his brother put into her? And his nephews—how many worms were in Helaena's care, writhing as she tended, or else clawing, swarming, a number so great she became fodder. She is food yet she ate his hurt. He wanted both of them to be dead for the dark. He wanted surrender, together, as one.
—
It is night, wet, streaky-lit, and Aemond is out for a walk. His boots stomp puddles and his jaw is a vise. His dagger thuds in his left thigh pocket. He is out for blood.
He finds Aegon's frat house.
"Oh, yo, Aegon's freaky brother is here," some golden-blond twat calls over his shoulder.
"Oh shit," says another twat. "Better let him in. Aegon's, um—"
Pissing his life away in the room that oozes skunky smoke so thoroughly you'd think fit to call the fire department. Aegon sits slumped on a wood-trimmed antique sofa, waving away the bong his bros are passing. They go quiet and wide-eyed when Aemond looms over their little circle.
"Brother," Aemond says. A bro nudges Aegon’s ribs.
"For fuck's sake, Aemond," Aegon grumbles, sitting upright. "Not the time."
"I know about Jace."
Aegon finds his fire and hurries Aemond up two stories to a bedroom so rank with body soil—sweat, come, furious masturbation—that Aemond stifles a gag. Aegon paces amidst the rubble of dirty laundry and empty beer cans, running his hands through his greasy hair. He stops. His eyes are wild and wet.
"You don't know anything, okay?"
"Is that right?" Aemond closes in. He is tall. Tall is power. "You go around, calling me a freak, calling me sick, and all this time—you want him. Rhaenyra's bastard cunt of a son. You're the pussy, Aegon. It was always you. You're the sickest, because you deny it. You can't drink it away. You can't fuck it out of yourself. You're just as trapped as I am, brother. Fuck. You. " Aemond shoves a finger into Aegon's polo-shirted chest. Aegon watches the assault. When he looks up, his eyes squeeze shut. He begins to sob. He sobs and he falls and Aemond catches him. Aemond wants Helaena but she is nowhere but inside him and all around him, everywhere but those few millimeters that confine his black and red. His brother's hair carries offensive skunkiness and Aemond's knees weaken and they're on the ground. "I wish you were dead." He holds Aegon's shirt as strong as Aegon holds his. Aemond shakes his brother but he falls too. His arms wrap around Aegon's neck. Aegon was blubbering but now he's quiet.
"Daemon touches me too," Aegon whispers to Aemond's ear. “He caught me—and he took it as an invitation. He made me this way. It's him. Not me. Not me."
"Brother—"
Aegon is a weak thing on the ground. His two eyes are puffy and red and barely open. His cheeks are blotchy and despite his agony, his lips rise to a lopsided smirk.
"Thinking of kissing me again? I can feel you, Aemond."
Aemond thrusts up from his brother's insufferable airspace. He smooths his pants. His cock betrayed him. "I tried to cut it off a few moons back," he says.
Aegon snorts. "Part of the whole genderless thing?"
"Something worse."
"You should get help, Aemond. You and Helaena both."
"Likewise," Aemond spits. His dagger weighs him down as he stalks home, unblooded.
—
At dawn Aemond sits in Helaena's car without Helaena. Five oblong carrying cases crowd the trunk. His pistol rides shotgun. He holds it in his hand as he contemplates the way thick orange beams penetrate the many-windowed facade of the estate. Surely he's in there, perhaps raping his wife, maybe fondling one of her children, or one of his own, or even the babies. Why stop at one? Why extricate yourself when you can have it all, a nonstop banquet of tender, yielding meat. Daemon is the true birdeater. It is a known and celebrated quantity. He is ruthless, he is ferocious, he is undeniably He. Here is a cock who champions himself. Who commands without a lick of hesitation. This stiff staff leads itself boldly into sensitive waters and surfaces slick but unscathed. He does not suffer because he is a Real Man, the dragon himself. He victoriously guards a trove of wounded children, talons nestled in accommodating flesh.
I am not a wound.
No, I am.
It is all I am.
He knows it. He has for a very long time. Aemond holds back what burns his nose and clings heavily behind his eyes. His thumb rolls over the hammer. One more wound will do.
The muzzle is in his socket when his phone rattles the dashboard. Zz zz zz. A call. Helaena.
“Brother, please don’t.”
"I'm sorry," Aemond says. "But I have to."
"But I need you, brother. I'm not whole without you—you know that.”
"Helaena." Her name flutters from his mouth. The muzzle trembles within its inch of purchase through his skull. "I want to be dead. Please let me."
Helaena sighs. "Okay. If you have to do it, tell me when. I have my pills. I’ll go with you. But before you go, I have to tell you one last thing.”
“What?”
“I’m pregnant, brother.”
The sunrise lapses blindingly over Aemond. Light folds in on itself, cleansing his bleakest turmoil. He feels white. His head drops against the headrest. The tears fall abundantly; his tide releases. "Is it mine?" Aemond asks, weak.
"Brother, they're ours. We’ll have twins."
—
Nine months later Jahaerys and Jaehaera are born at the estate, with Aemond at his sister’s side. There is a babe each for them to hold and each babe is a sun in Aemond’s arms. They are the light reflected from a billion shiny scales amassed through a magnifying glass to burn a perfect hole through his heart. Oh, bringer of life and death alike. Here is life:
A true dragon is meant not for slaughter but for endurance. Mortality is a triumph, propelled by one fiery breath to the next, ad infinitum. Vhagar holds Aemond aloft and Aemond holds his children. There is sun and there is night, and even in the night, there is the moon. He calls her Helaena. She won, armed with nought but softness.