all things die, anakin skywalker

It was on the kitchen island, anchored under the weighted base of the baby monitor. The monitor’s screen was on, showing the grainy night-vision image of Maekar still sleeping peacefully. And on a sheet of paper torn from the magnetic notepad stuck to the fridge, the one you used for grocery lists, for pediatrician appointment reminders, was your handwriting.

I’ve taken a project abroad. I don’t know when I’ll be back. The baby is fed. I’m sorry.

No signature. No love. Just four sentences, the last two practical, the first one a lie.

A project abroad.

You hadn’t worked in over a year. You’d been forced to quit your job at eight weeks pregnant, laid flat by hyperemesis so severe you’d lost fifteen pounds before the second trimester. You’d cried when you submitted your resignation, not because you loved the work - fintech compliance, a job you described as “soul-crushingly boring but mine”, but because it was yours. Your career. Your independence. The thing you’d built while he was being handed vice presidencies in the family empire like party favors.

He’d offered, so many times, to help. To make calls. His father could have had you in a C-suite by Monday, his sister had connections at every major bank, there were strings he could pull with a single text message. And every time, you’d refused.

I don’t want it to be a holdover, you’d said, curled on the bathroom floor between bouts of vomiting, your voice raw. I don’t want my entire life to be a footnote in the Targaryen family ledger.

He’d argued, of course. He was a Targaryen; arguing was constitutional. But you’d held firm, the way you held firm about everything that mattered. The apartment. Your own apartment, a modest two-bedroom in a neighborhood his father had never heard of, paid for with your own money before the wedding. I need a place that’s mine, you’d said. Not an escape hatch. Just…mine.

He’d thought it was romantic at the time, this fierce independence, this refusal to be subsumed. He’d loved it about you. Loved that you weren’t impressed by the family name, that you called his father “Mr. Targaryen” with just enough irony to make Aerion grin, that you’d once described the Iron Throne, the actual multi-billion-dollar corporate headquarters he was supposed to inherit one day, as “aggressively phallic architecture.”

He’d loved it.

He’d loved it, and he’d missed every warning sign it was turning into something else.

The baby monitor let out a soft crackle as Maekar shifted in his sleep. Aerion looked at the screen, then at the note, then at the empty space on the kitchen counter where your laptop used to live.

He called your apartment. The one you’d kept, the one he’d teased you about, calling it the world’s most expensive storage unit. It rang until the building’s generic voicemail picked up. He hung up and called your mother.

“Aerion?” Her voice was surprised but warm. “Is everything alright? It’s late.”

He opened his mouth to ask if she’d heard from you, and then closed it. Because if you hadn’t told her, he didn’t want to be the one to frame this narrative. His wife left him. Left their son. Packed her things and disappeared while he was in another country, shaking hands and making deals, sending you texts you hadn’t answered for the last day of his trip. He’d thought you were tired. He’d thought you needed rest.

He’d known, on some level he was still too cowardly to examine, that you were not alright. Had known it for months. Maybe longer. The way your smiles had become performances, the way you flinched when he touched your shoulder unexpectedly, the way you’d started asking for the precise time his flights would land, the exact minute he’d walk through the door. He’d thought it was love, that meticulous accounting of his time. He’d thought it meant you missed him.

“Aerion?” your mother prompted.

“Sorry,” he said, and his voice came out steady, because he’d been trained since childhood to sound steady even when the ground was liquifying beneath his feet. “Wrong number. So sorry to disturb you.”

He ended the call before she could respond.

The first week was the hardest, and not for the reasons he’d expected.

He’d expected fury. Rage was a familiar landscape; he’d grown up in its shadow and its light, the Targaryen temper that burned hot and fast and left ash in its wake. But fury never came. What came instead was a hollow, scooping emptiness, like someone had reached into his chest and removed something vital, leaving the rest of his organs to shift around the space where it had been.

He didn’t tell his family.

He called his office and said there was a family matter, he’d be working remotely for the foreseeable future. His assistant, a terrifyingly efficient woman who had been with the company longer than Aerion had been alive, said “Of course, Mr. Targaryen” in a tone that suggested she knew more than she was saying and would take it to her grave.

He stayed in the apartment. Your apartment. Yours, not his, though he’d lived there for three years now. He’d never really thought about that distinction before, the way the space was yours even when he occupied it, the way the deed had your name on it in clean black ink. Not his. Never his. He was a guest here, and now he was a guest alone with an eight-month-old baby who didn’t understand why his mother had stopped existing.

The nanny came. Her name was Elena, a soft-handed woman in her fifties who had raised four children of her own and never flinched at anything, not even the day Maekar had a blowout so spectacular it had required a bath, a change of clothes, and the complete sanitization of the changing table. Aerion had asked her to come more often that first week, and she had, her dark eyes flicking around the apartment without comment, taking in the absence of you without asking a single question. He was pathetically grateful for that.

But he didn’t leave Maekar with her entirely. He couldn’t. Some part of him was terrified that if he let the baby out of his sight, he would disappear too, would vanish into whatever void had swallowed you. So he learned.

He learned how to mix formula at three in the morning, squinting at the instructions under the dim light of the range hood. The first few nights, he got the ratio wrong, and Maekar screamed with a fury disproportionate to his tiny body, and Aerion stood in the kitchen holding a bottle that was slightly too warm, slightly too watery, and felt like the most incompetent person who had ever lived.

He learned the difference between a hungry cry and a tired cry and the particular shriek that meant I have a wet diaper and I am personally offended by this. He learned that Maekar liked to be held facing outward, one tiny fist gripping Aerion’s thumb, so he could survey his kingdom with the imperious expression all Targaryens seemed to be born with. He learned the exact bounce-and-sway rhythm that would coax his son from fussing into sleep, a movement that made his lower back ache and his heart do something complicated.

He talked to the baby constantly. It started as a way to fill the silence, which otherwise threatened to swallow him whole.

“Your mother,” he said one night, pacing the nursery with Maekar drowsy against his shoulder, “is the most stubborn person I have ever met. And I grew up with my sister Daella, so that is a competitive field.”

Maekar made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and a sigh.

“She once refused to speak to me for three days because I suggested she might enjoy a position at a hedge fund. Three days. We were already engaged at that point. I had to grovel. Me. Groveling.” He shifted the baby to his other shoulder. “I was terrible at it. Not enough practice. You should learn to grovel early, it’s a useful skill. I’ll teach you. Provided you don’t disappear on me too.”

The words came out rawer than he’d intended. Maekar, oblivious, drooled onto the collar of his shirt.

“She’ll come back,” Aerion said, to the baby, to the night, to the empty apartment. “She just needs space. A break. She’s been…tired. You’re a lot of work, you know. Worth it, but a lot of work. And she carried you for nine months, and she was so sick, and I don’t think she ever really…” He trailed off.

I don’t think she ever really recovered, he didn’t say. Because that would be an admission. That would be saying aloud that he’d watched his wife drowning and hadn’t thrown a life preserver, just stood on the shore and assumed she’d remember how to swim.

The second week, he found the folder.

He was looking for the pediatrician’s number, Elena had asked, and he’d realized he had no idea where you kept the medical records, when he came across a manila folder tucked between the baby books on the shelf. Inside were printouts. Articles about postpartum depression. Postpartum anxiety. Postpartum psychosis. A checklist of symptoms, some of them circled in your handwriting: persistent sadness, loss of interest, difficulty bonding, intrusive thoughts, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you’re not yourself.

At the bottom of the folder was a brochure for a maternal mental health clinic. The appointment date on the back was three months ago.

He stared at it for a long time.

He thought about you at three in the morning, nursing a baby who wouldn’t latch, your face exhausted. He thought about how you’d stopped laughing at his jokes. He thought about how you’d flinched when he touched you, and how he’d stopped touching you, and how that distance had become a chasm neither of you seemed able to cross. He thought about the business trip he’d taken when Maekar was three weeks old, and the one at two months, and the one at five months, and how you’d asked each time for his exact itinerary, his flight numbers, the moment he’d be back.

He’d thought you were being thorough, organized. The same way you’d been organized about the engagement party seating chart and the wedding guest list and the nursery color scheme.

He’d been so, so stupid.

“I found your folder,” he said to the empty apartment. He was standing in the kitchen, the brochure in his hand. Outside, the city hummed with the sound of early evening traffic, everyone going home to their families, their lives intact. “The one about postpartum depression. You had an appointment. Did you go?”

Silence.

“Did you go, and it didn’t help? Or did you not go at all? Were you scared? I would have come with you. I would have…” He stopped. His voice had cracked.

He was a Targaryen. Targaryens did not crack.

He sat down on the kitchen floor, his back against the cabinets, and called you again. Voicemail. Your voice, still bright, still professional, still so perfectly fine. He hung up and called again just to hear it.

“I’m sorry,” he said after the beep. “I don’t know what I did, or didn’t do, but I’m sorry. Please. Just call me. Just tell me you’re alive. I don’t need you to come back, I don’t need you to…just tell me you’re okay. Please.”

He didn’t send it. He deleted the message and recorded another one.

“It’s me. I’m home. The baby’s fine. He’s started doing this thing where he scrunches up his face before he sneezes, it’s…you’d laugh. I hope you’d laugh. I hope you’re somewhere safe.” A pause. “I’m not coming after you. I won’t. If you needed to leave, if you needed to get away from…from me, from this, from everything, I won’t hunt you down. Just…a sign. A text. Anything. So I know you’re breathing.”

He sent that one. Then he sat on the kitchen floor until his legs went numb and Maekar woke up crying for his midnight bottle.

The third week, he took the baby to the park.

It seemed like the kind of thing a competent parent would do. Elena had the day off, he’d insisted, she’d argued, he’d won, or maybe she’d let him win because she could see he was two bad nights away from a complete breakdown, and the apartment walls were closing in.

He strapped Maekar into the stroller, a contraption that cost more than some people’s monthly rent and that you had spent three weeks researching before purchasing. If I’m going to push a tiny human around for the next three years, I want it to have good suspension, you’d said, and he’d laughed and kissed your forehead and said you could have whatever stroller you wanted, whatever made you happy, whatever you needed.

He’d thought that was enough. Saying yes. Giving you whatever you asked for.

He hadn’t noticed you’d stopped asking.

The park was crowded with families, children shrieking on the playground, parents slumped on benches clutching coffee cups. Aerion felt spectacularly out of place in his cashmere sweater and Italian leather shoes, pushing a stroller that probably cost more than the playground equipment. A woman with a toddler on her hip gave him a curious look, and he realized he was muttering.

“Sorry,” he said, and then didn’t know why he was apologizing.

He found a bench in a quiet corner, near a patch of flowers that had seen better days, and lifted Maekar out of the stroller. The baby blinked in the sunlight, his eyes the pale almost-purple that ran in the family, and grabbed for Aerion’s nose.

“No, that’s attached,” Aerion said, gently detaching the tiny fingers. “How about we look at the flowers instead?”

Maekar was not interested in the flowers. He was interested in Aerion’s watch, which he grabbed with both hands and attempted to shove into his mouth.

“That’s worth more than your nanny’s annual salary, do not put it in your mouth.” Aerion extracted the watch. Maekar’s face crumpled. “No, don’t...here, here, take my finger. Chew on my finger. Everyone chews on my finger lately.”

The baby gnawed contentedly on his index finger, and Aerion felt something shift in his chest. Something painful and warm. He was holding his son in a public park, alone, with no idea where his wife was or when she was coming back or if she was coming back, and he was somehow, improbably, doing okay.

Not well. Not good. Just…okay. The okay of a man who had learned to function on four hours of sleep. The okay of someone holding himself together with sheer force of will and the desperate, pathetic hope that if he just kept going, if he just stayed here, if he didn’t go back to the family estate and admit defeat, you might come home.

“Your mother has an apartment,” he told Maekar, who was not listening. “Did I ever tell you that? She bought it before we were married. Said she needed somewhere that was hers. I didn’t understand it at first. I grew up with everything handed to me, and anything I didn’t have, I just…took or asked for or demanded.” He shifted the baby on his lap. “But your mother, she needed to make things. Build them. Her career, her home, her life. She didn’t want to be a Targaryen acquisition. She needed to be her own person before she could be mine.”

He thought about the empty closet. The carefully made bed. The note, which he’d folded and put in his wallet like some kind of tragic token.

“I think I might have been suffocating her,” he said quietly. “Without meaning to. Without noticing. I think she’s been drowning for a long time, and I didn’t see it, because I was too busy…I don’t know. Being a Targaryen. Being busy. Being important.” He said the word like it tasted bad. “And now she’s gone and I’m here, and I’m coming to the deeply uncomfortable realization that I don’t actually know how to be a person without her. She was the one who did that. Made me a person. Made me someone who sat on the floor and changed diapers and worried about things that weren’t quarterly reports.”

Maekar pulled his finger out of his mouth and made a questioning sound.

“And before you ask, no, I’m not angry at her. I should be. My father would be apoplectic. Disappearance is not an acceptable exit strategy in the Targaryen family. We prefer dramatic confrontations, ideally in public, ideally with witnesses.” He paused. “But I’m not angry. I’m just...I miss her. That’s it. I miss her so much I can’t breathe, and I don’t know if missing her is enough.”

He didn’t go back to the Targaryen residence. His father called, twice, and Aerion let it go to voicemail. His sister Daella texted: Rumors are flying. Are you both okay? He texted back: We’re fine. Just taking some time. Daella, who had always been able to see through him like glass, sent back a single question mark. He didn’t answer.

Because going back to the estate would mean admitting something had gone wrong. That his wife had left. That the perfect Targaryen heir, the golden son, the one who was supposed to carry the family legacy into the next generation, couldn’t even keep his marriage together. Was it about the marriage? He didn’t know anymore. Maybe it was about something deeper, something that had started before the wedding, before the pregnancy, before the illness that had hollowed you out and left something brittle in its wake.

You’d always been so careful to maintain yourself. Your boundaries. Your space. He’d admired it, that unbreachable core of you that remained yours no matter how close he got. And then the pregnancy had stripped everything away. Your body. Your career. Your energy. Your control. And all he’d done was offer to fix it, offer to pull strings, offer solutions that were really just more ways of absorbing you into the Targaryen machine.

I don’t want it to be a holdover.

He hadn’t understood. He was beginning to.

He spent the fourth week in a strange limbo. Elena came three days a week, and Aerion did conference calls from the kitchen table, Maekar in a bouncer at his feet. The baby had started babbling, a stream of consonants that seemed to contain the secrets of the universe. Aerion talked back. He talked about everything. He talked about how he’d met you at a terrible bar near campus, both of you too overdressed for the venue, how you’d argued about the role of regulation in financial markets and he’d fallen in love with you by the end of the first hour. He talked about the wedding, a small thing that had driven his father to tears of frustration: a Targaryen wedding with only forty guests, Aerion, what will people think, and how you’d worn a suit instead of a dress and looked like the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

He talked about the day Maekar was born. How you’d labored for eighteen hours and then needed an emergency C-section, and how the sight of your face, gray with exhaustion and terror, had undone something in him he hadn’t known could be undone.

“I should have been there,” he told the baby one night, rocking him in the dark. “After. I should have stayed home. I should have noticed. She was asking for my flight times because she was terrified. Not because she missed me. Because she was clinging to the schedule, the predictability, the one thing she could control. And I just…left. Every time. Business trip after business trip. I thought I was providing. I thought that’s what a good husband did.”

Maekar was asleep, his mouth slightly open, his head a warm weight against Aerion’s chest.

“I am not a good husband,” Aerion said to the ceiling. “I’m trying to be a good father. I don’t know if I’m succeeding. But I’m trying.”

The message came on a Tuesday, six weeks and two days after he’d found the note on the kitchen counter.

He was making coffee, Maekar propped on his hip, when his phone buzzed. An email. From you.

He almost dropped the baby.

He fumbled the phone open, his heart hammering, and read:

Aerion. I’m alive. I’m safe. I’m getting help. I can’t explain everything yet. I needed to leave before I broke something I couldn’t fix. I didn’t want to break you. I didn’t want to break our son. I’m sorry. I don’t know when I’ll be ready. But I wanted you to know I’m not dead. Please don’t look for me. Please don’t send anyone. I need this. I need to get better. I need to know I can be a person again before I can be a mother or a wife. I know this isn’t fair. I know. I’m sorry.

Don’t let anyone call me a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother. I’m just sick. I’m trying to get well.

Tell Maekar I love him. Tell him every day. Even if he can’t understand it. Especially because he can’t understand it. Tell him his mother loves him, and she’s coming back, she just doesn’t know when.

He read it five times. Then he sat down heavily on the kitchen floor, his back against the cabinets again, Maekar balanced on his lap and reaching for the phone with grabby hands.

“That’s your mother,” Aerion said, his voice strange and cracked. “That’s your mother. She’s alive. She’s getting help. She’s...” He had to stop. His throat had closed up.

Maekar grabbed the phone and tried to put it in his mouth.

Aerion let him. It was waterproof. Supposedly. Then he remembered how you always worried about germs and had to extract it back.

He sat there for a long time, holding his son, the phone getting progressively slimier against his thigh. He thought about calling your mother. He thought about calling his father. He thought about getting in the car and driving to every hotel in the city until he found you, because you’d emailed him, you’d broken your silence, and he could trace the IP, he could hire someone, he could find you in a heartbeat if he wanted.

But you’d asked him not to. You’d said please. And he’d spent too long not listening to what you were actually asking for.

So he didn’t.

He replied instead.

Thank you for telling me you’re alive. I’ve been terrified. Maekar is fine. He’s perfect. He looks like you when he’s about to cry. I tell him about you every day. I’ll keep telling him. I won’t look for you. I won’t send anyone. I’ll be here when you’re ready. I’ll be here. However long it takes. I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t see how much you were hurting. I’m sorry I didn’t help. I’m sorry I left. I’m going to do better. I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to figure it out. Stay safe. Get well. I love you.

He sent it before he could second-guess himself. Then he picked his son up under the armpits and held him at eye level.

“Your mother is coming back,” he said. “I don’t know when. But she’s coming back. And until then, you and I are going to hold down the fort. Can you do that? Can you hold down the fort with me?”

Maekar drooled. It was, Aerion decided, probably an affirmative.

The months that followed were not easy. Nothing about them was easy. There were nights when Maekar woke up every forty minutes for no discernible reason, and Aerion paced the nursery with bloodshot eyes and a running monologue of despair. There were days when the emptiness of the apartment was pressing down on him until he could barely breathe. There were moments when he almost called his father, almost packed up the baby and the bags and retreated to the estate where nannies and housekeepers and family fixers would descend and make everything smooth and easy and wrong.

But he didn’t.

Because this apartment was yours. This was the place you’d built with him, your own stubbornness, your own need to be something more than a Targaryen footnote. And if he left it, if he gave up and went home, it would be like admitting you were never coming back. It would be like closing the door on something that wasn’t finished yet.

So he stayed.

He learned to cook, badly. He learned to do laundry, and turned half of Maekar’s onesies pink before he figured out the whole separating-colors concept. He learned the names of every pediatrician in a ten-mile radius and the exact temperature at which a baby’s fever required an emergency room visit. He learned that the vacuum cleaner could soothe Maekar to sleep in under five minutes, a discovery that changed his life and also his electricity bill.

He talked to the baby constantly, a stream of consciousness narration that covered everything from stock market fluctuations to the plot of the book he was reading to whatever he remembered of his own childhood, which was mostly cold rooms and colder expectations.

“Your grandfather is not a bad man,” he said one afternoon, sitting on the floor of the nursery while Maekar did tummy time on the play mat. “He’s just…a product of a particular system. Targaryens have been running things for a long time, and we’ve gotten very good at it, and we’ve also gotten very bad at being people. I didn’t realize how bad until I met your mother. She looked at the whole thing: the money, the power, the legacy, and just…wasn’t impressed. It drove me insane. I wanted her to be impressed. I wanted her to think I was worth something.”

Maekar lifted his head, wobbled, and planted his face directly into the mat.

“Exactly my point,” Aerion said. “It’s all just posturing. She saw through it. She always saw through it.”

He thought about the apartment you’d kept, the one that was probably still sitting empty across town, your name on the lease like a declaration of independence. He hadn’t been there since you left. He didn’t have a key. He wasn't welcome. But sometimes, in the quiet moments between feedings and changings and conference calls, he imagined you there. Curled on a couch he’d never seen. Eating takeout from a container. Slowly, painstakingly, remembering who you were.

He hoped you were. Remembering. He hoped it was working. He hoped, with a desperation that had become as familiar as breathing, that you would come back.

And in the meantime, he waited.

He waited through Maekar’s first word, which was “da,” and which Aerion chose to interpret as “dad” rather than the more likely “random syllable.” He waited through first steps, wobbly and triumphant across the living room floor, captured on video he didn’t know if he should send you or not. He waited through the first birthday, a quiet affair with just him and Elena and a cake that Maekar mostly wore rather than ate.

And every night, after he put the baby to bed and the apartment settled into silence, he sat in the kitchen with his phone in his hand and re-read the email you’d sent. I’m getting help. I’m trying to get well. Tell Maekar I love him. He’d memorized it by now, every word, every comma. It was a lifeline. It was a promise.

I’m coming back, you’d said. I just don’t know when.

That was enough. It had to be enough. He would make it be enough, for as long as it took, because you were the one who had taught him how to be a person instead of a Targaryen, and now he was going to be the kind of person who deserved you. Who waited. Who stayed. Who did the work, even when it was hard, even when it was lonely, even when the only witness was an infant who didn’t understand a word he said.

He would be here. When you were ready. Whenever that was.

I’ll be here, he’d written back. And he meant it. Every word.