Some days her choreographer is borderline abusive.
Amara does not mind. Perhaps that means there is something wrong with her. In her pursuit of perfection, she doesn’t care if he grabs her and shoves her and forces her into place. The other dancers don’t have the hopes of the company upon their heads.
In the coming month, she is to dance in the Firebird down in London, her black hair trussed up in red ribbons, every inch of her drenched in vermillion and gold. She plays the role of the titular character. If she gets herself a patron, if she attracts attention for the company, there will be money to spend on renovating the building, on buying new shoes, new costumes.
She wishes she could ask Aegon. She wishes she didn’t feel like a puppet with its mouth sewn shut when she wants to invite him to one of her shows. The few times he’d failed to attend when they were still in Sixth Form has made her wary of asking him now. Too afraid of rejection.
Sometimes, she imagines begging him for the money. It would be humiliating. A man with power and wealth, and a girl with a pretty face on her knees before him. A tale as old as time. But the heating doesn’t work in the dance building, and the dancers’ joints get stiff in the cold. It might be worth it.
But she knows her choreographer might not want drug money to fund any part of his beloved company. If Aegon agrees, and the choreographer rejects his offer, that would be far worse. If the choreographer agrees and Aegon declines, that would be just as bad.
Besides, she isn’t his girlfriend. He is under no obligation to fund her hobbies. She’s just the stray cat that climbs in through the window to eat out of his fridge. That’s how she heard him describe her to his friends once. No, associates. Aegon doesn’t have friends. It’s why he’s lonely enough to accept her company.
His mother doesn’t want him home. Ever since Daeron was stabbed, Aegon has been banished from the Hightower kingdom just as their patriarch once was. Amara used to fear she might be targeted as retaliation against him. But they found an easier victim in Daeron when he stepped off the school bus. He’s fine now, has a scar he shows off to his mates. But Alicent still wakes up screaming from her nightmares.
When Aegon’s body breaks into Amara’s, he is searching for old memories inside her.
She still wears the same body spray, perfume, shampoo hoping the scents will comfort him. It is nostalgia, a simpler time, when coming home safe from school was the only priority and Amara would be there at his mother’s house, the lights all on, his siblings shoving and playing and giggling.
Sometimes, she takes the long route to his house. Aegon lives in the fancier part of town now. There is no need to traverse the broken glass streets of their old neighbourhood.
Bully dogs peer over the fences, blue eyes innocuous. They never bark. They just stare. Amara has petted a few before, the kinder ones, the ones who make some noise. The silent ones she knows to keep away from.
Khan has a bully, a monstrous creature with pale eyes. He has been known to sic it on people if he is in a mood. The local newspaper tries to bring attention to corpses found in the river with their faces eaten off. The stories never gain traction.
She thinks of Aegon lying in a ditch, cold and alone, his beautiful face ripped off to the bone. She cries the rest of the way to his house.
“S’wrong with you, lassie?”
His rough voice alerts her to the puffiness of her eyes. She’d dried the tears before she walked in. He stares at her from the open fridge, the blue light throwing his features in harsh relief. They can be so soft when he wants them to be. They are not soft now. Just bemused. A white tank hugs his upper body – all bunched muscle, not a shred of fat – and grey sweats cover the bottom half. He still wears the same chain he wore in school. It’s belonged to his dad.
“Nothing. Long day.” Under the table, Cannibal mrows and swats the chair leg to get her attention. Amara spears some of the salmon out of the sushi roll on her chopstick and offers it to him. He looks up at her with big green eyes as he cleans it up. Maybe this is what it would be like to have a child someday. Pure adoration offered without real reason.
She looks up at the man she used to dream would be the father of her children. Not anymore.
Amara beams. “How was your day?”
He gives her that half-smile, that says I know what you’re doing. He’s so beautiful he makes her insides feel bruised. “It was fine.” He enunciates the words, strips off the northern edge to imitate the clinical, media-ready dialect of the south. “How are the rehearsals going?”
“Fine.”
“Are you going to invite me to the show or not?”
Her heart skips a beat. She shrugs. “Sure. If you’re not busy – you can come – I mean – you should – but only if you want to – there’s no obligation – “
A careless kiss to the side of her head stems the verbal torrent. “I’ll come. Can I bring Helaena? She loves the ballet. You never ask her either.”
Amara nods, says she’ll get them tickets, that he can even ask his mother if she’d like to come. Maybe Alicent is ready to forgive him. Maybe she has forgiven him in her heart but the fear of seeing one of her children covered in blood again forces her to do what she thinks is best.
“I’m afraid of asking.”
“Afraid of what?”
“That the other person might not want to.”
“That’s the point. You ask, they answer. You figure out what it is they want. Can’t just decide other people’s feelings in your head.”
He disappears upstairs for a while.
Amara arches her left foot and then her right, waiting for a twinge of pain. There was something bothering the right one this afternoon. The fear was paralysing. If she loses her body, she’s lost herself. But it’s fine now. Cannibal licks at it, and rubs his head against her leg, meowing again. She asks him what he wants but he just stares at her, and slow blinks. He missed her.
There is an insistent press on the doorbell. Amara does not move. She is not allowed to answer the door when she is at Aegon’s house. She knows why. But it doesn’t make it any easier hearing him answer it. She is prepared to hear a muffled gunshot every time, the thud of a body hitting the ground.
Aegon returns to the kitchen with a package he throws unopened onto the microwave. “You gonna stay over?”
She thinks of the message from Gwen. Heating’s out again. Bastard.
Elizabeth hasn’t bothered coming home for two weeks now. Her parents’ home is always warm and smells divine. She comes back to their shared flat every few days and leaves boxes of jollof, beef stew and fufu for her housemates. Her mother likes them. That’s the best thing about your friend’s mum liking you – the homecooked food.
Go to your boyfriend’s. Don’t spend the night in the cold, Amara texts back.
“Can I stay?” she asks.
“You’ve taken over my entire bathroom cabinet, baby-face. I think that question’s redundant.”
“Still. It’s polite to ask. I’m not your girlfriend.”
It’s out before she can stop it. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye and smiles. She smiles back. No tension. Amara relaxes.
They’d had a horrible fight about it last month. She found out he was sleeping with someone else in the three weeks she’d been down in London. It wasn’t something he’d told her. He hadn’t felt he needed to. Amara didn’t think she had any right to be mad either. They weren’t exclusive. That made it worse.
The cold shoulder from her pulled at his nerves until finally he turned up at her door to ask what was going on. Everything was fine. They went back to his place. Someone said something, a tripwire went off. Ensue the battle. It culminated in a final death blow –
It's not like you have the balls to be my fucking girlfriend! You’re scared you’ll end up like Daeron! And you should be!
It was too late to go back to her place. She stayed at his. He took the couch. She cried in his bed until the clock reached one in the morning. He must have heard her crying on his way back from the bathroom because he came in and climbed into bed with her. She clung to him until he whispered I missed you into her hair and her conscience slipped into that murky place between rainbows and nothingness.
“Aegon.” Her voice sounds small this late in the evening. She doesn’t use it much at work. Her muscles overexert. Her vocal cords sit quiet.
“Hm?” He isn’t looking at her. His attention is on his phone.
“Can you be rough tonight?”
She sees his eyes glaze over before they slowly lift to look at her.
Bruises from the last time have been painted over by new ones. The war is fought every day, new borders redrawn and pushed back. His bruises are her favourite. The ones she gets from dancing are pressure. They battle for control over her flesh.
Aegon comes to stand behind her. His physicality makes her tighten like a coiled spring. Masculine, rough edges, aggressive. He could rip you apart if he wanted. That voice in her head should sound worried. Instead, it’s jubilant.
He leans down, hands splayed on the table next to hers. Amara traces her index over his wrist, tap dancing her fingers over his skin, his rings.
“Why do you want it so often?” he asks.
If he’s worried, he isn’t letting her hear it.
“I don’t know.”
She does know. All her body understands is being forced to work, suffering abuse for validation, the reward of being looked at, praised. Her control over it is rigid. But when he has her, she sinks into spaces inside her head that others have never entered. It is like being under a James Turrell skylight. That square of blue sky, pure and endless, her mind sucked into it like a vacuum. She wants that.
“There’s always something in the back of my head when you ask.”
“What?’
“How tiny you are. And I’m not saying that to flirt with you. Look at this.” He takes up her wrist and shakes it. It’s limp, her hand flopping back and forth. Amara giggles. Aegon does not. “Bird bones. I could break one by accident. It’d be muscle memory.”
She thinks of the first time she saw him break a man’s jawbone. It looked practiced. As if he too had rehearsed, just as she did in the mirrors of her studio, how best to break bones and make it look elegant. Their choreographies aligned.
“Then what do you want me to do? Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.” Amara climbs up out of her seat and sits on the table’s edge to face him.
“I’m talking about breaking your bones, and you’re asking me to order you around.”
She flinches. His tone is not unkind. But something doesn’t feel quite right. She really has had a long day. The tears are seconds from bursting free. He must have seen her cry about a thousand times now. She’s only seen him cry once, when he was waiting outside Daeron’s hospital room.
Aegon grimaces. It is an expression not for her, but for something in his head. He makes a soft shushing sound, even though the tears aren’t here yet. Maybe he can smell them, like the earthy scent of rain before it falls. Amara’s lip juts out in preparation. He laughs, endeared, and pulls her close, until their foreheads touch, and she can count each exquisite line of his crow’s feet.
“I want to see you grow old,” she whispers, choked up.
So that I won’t ever have to see this angel-face frozen forever in its youth.
“I won’t be this hot when I’m old,” he whispers against her cheek.
Her knees touch, ankles angled in opposite directions. His hand is around her neck. No pressure. Just the cage of his fingers, a note of the violence he never lets out around her. He could do so much to her just with one hand. A thumb wedged into a pressure point, her windpipe suppressed.
“You’ll always be hot to me,” she tells him.
She knows he doesn’t care what he looks like. People like Aegon rarely do. There is something inside him that would make him attractive no matter what. Some would call it alpha energy. She doesn’t like that phrase. It’s plebian.
She conjures up her own answer. If there is a god, she plucked a hair off her head and wrapped it around Aegon’s wrist. Its power has soaked him through, turned his blood technicolour.
It is the only explanation Amara has for why falling to her knees before him feels so easy.
“Alright. We’ll do it your way, angel.” Two nicknames, the second used in preparation to breach new depths together, when her soul flees her body, and he catches it and wears it around his shoulders like a mantle of triumph.
We’ll do it your way.
We’ll do it your way.
We’ll do it your way.
How does he coat his voice like that? With that varnished affection, soft and dripping off his tongue like honey? It makes her go blurry eyed. You were made for me, she wants to tell him. You were literally made for me. You’re the sun, and you’ve left me behind to orbit on my own.
His finger is salty on her tongue, and his lips sweet as summer wine on the curve of her jaw. He has never been an acquired taste. She wanted more the first time she had him. It is a gut feeling, that awareness, that knowing. A hundred other universes, parallel versions of themselves, winding towards each other, inevitable, endless.
She doesn’t know how to explain it to him. Her vocal cords won’t work. They won’t work until he commands them to. No one makes her scream like he does. Each note tears open across invisible lines of music, his kisses treble clefs to anchor them, creating a symphony out of directionless chaos.
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(another drabble for my silly little drug dealer!aegon x ballerina!amara au - first drabble is here)
Bones made of glass, eyes lined with kohl. She feels like a creature of myth when she dances. Everyone knows how myths begin. Love, magic, adventure. Everyone knows how they end. Death, tragedy, glory.
She self-soothes, tells herself this is why Aegon won't come to watch her dance. He may see his own death in the gentle knock of her pointe shoes, the golden traces of his touch dripping from her flesh like ichor. She calls him Midas in her head. She wishes he would touch her everywhere, grip her, until she is plated in gold and she can disguise the growing rust in her soul for another sad year.
Magic hands, that's what these are, Alicent would say, kissing her eldest boy's fingers after they'd just finished massaging the tension from her shoulders, her head, her neck.
The night before, those hands wore knuckledusters. Amara heard the sorry scream the boy managed to let rip before Aegon's fists cut a gash into the side of his face. When it catches in the windpipe, blood makes the oddest sound, like a creature attempting to crawl its way out of a carnivorous womb.
He knows she saw him. She'd never seen him so angry, so violent. None of it was aimed at her. But still she ran.
A few days later, she saw the man who Aegon works for. Khan is the only name he is known by. Khan, like the rulers of Mongolia, their hordes running wild across the steppes. Aegon is one of his, the warrior at his right-hand, the one that suffers most if a battle is lost.
For Amara, Khan never has anything but a smile. He smiles at her like a kindly uncle, hazel eyes wrinkled at the corners, skin browned from a recent visit to the motherland. He donates to orphanages and soup kitchens, built a new community centre, a mosque, cuts ribbons at the town hall -
And he hits Aegon like the father he never had.
It was Khan's rage she saw in Aegon's fists as they broke the face of a boy who looked no more than eighteen. He is alive. But he isn't pretty anymore. His mother screamed and cried and begged the cops to do something about Khan and they looked uncomfortable, shuffled their feet, told her they would support her in any way they could. Now she has taken her boy and they've left the city.
A trace of him is still on the hem of Aegon's favourite football shirt. The washing machine hasn't done its job. Amara reaches out to touch, imagining the blood might still have the power to stain her, wet and viscous.
"Don't you want something to eat?" she asks.
He looks at her like a sleepwalker awakened from a dream. The TV is on - Only Fools and Horses, his dad's favourite show - and he has been staring at the screen with such rapt attention, Amara didn't want to interrupt.
"What?" A bruise burns under his right eye, the colour of spoiled wine and grief. When she repeats her question, the ice on his face melts and he shakes his head.
"I've listened to your stomach rumble Symphony No 9 for the last ten minutes. Don't lie to me."
"There's nothing in the fridge."
That's not true. There is always something in the fridge. Not a thing goes to waste in the Hightower home. Alicent chides her children if she hears the tell-tale scrape of a knife against a plate tossing food into the bin. If it can be put away, then it will be, wrapped in a shiny veneer of cling film with notes attached by whoever intends to finish it later.
Fuck off - Aemond
No touch me grub! - Ronnie (no one who loves him calls him 'Daeron' anymore)
Peepeepoopoo!!! - Hel
Mummy's food (you can have a bit if you're really hungry ❤️) - Mum
Amara reads their notes sometimes and pretends she is one of them. Aegon never leaves notes. He doesn't put things away. He eats everything, or he doesn't eat at all.
"Your mam left a plate with your name on it." She sets the warmed up plate of pasties before him. He is still in the same position, a can of Guinness balanced on his knee, the ring on his finger clicking against the aluminium.
They don't speak as he eats.
She didn't think of him all day at school. That's progress. Back when he first latched onto her conscience like a flesh-eating virus, his absence could ruin her entire day. She fucking loathed maths. But it was made fun because she got to go the route through the greenhouse, up the terracotta steps, past the courtyard where he sat during free period. Aegon would always look at her as she walked by. It was never brief. It was a stare. The memory of his dark grey eyes lit the synapses of her imagination and got her through maths class. She'd doodle his name around her estimate of the interquartile range. She'd give Pythagoras a personality and conjure it up in her mind so she had someone to talk to about her crush. She couldn't tell her friends. They were all "nice" kids. They didn't hang out with the likes of him. She had to make do with a fantasy version of a Greek polymath.
They'd judge her if they saw her now, the pretty little thing curled up at one end of his mother's couch, her eyes completely lost.
Beside her, he moves, graceful even when he fumbles. The hideous neon jacket comes off, leaving only the grey shirt underneath, his left hand bandaged (did it hurt when you hit that boy like he didn't have a mother whose heart would break at the sight of him?)
The silver hoop in his left lobe winks in the light. Amara realises he isn't looking at the TV anymore. He's looking at her.
When did the tension seep in? It tastes of sugared pops and sour candy. Her favourites when she was little. He shoplifted them for her, and they'd run away, a seven year old and an eight year old, giggling like they had reached the pinnacle of worldly achievement.
"What?" Amara says.
Aegon doesn't answer. He looks scary when he is focused. His eyes are set deep, brow bone protruding. He gets that from his dad.
Amara doesn't remember when Daemon stopped coming around. It's easy when the children are small, hope still nurtured in their tender hearts. Today is the day my Daddy will finally love me enough to stay. The older they got, the more they clung to their mother, the one who stayed, the one who bothered to be strict, the one who didn't have money to buy them the expensive Christmas presents.
"Won't your parents be wondering where you are?" Aegon asks.
Amara glances at the clock. Her heart is squeezed in a fist of iron. He wants me to leave. She nods, wordless, and picks at a scab on her arm as she sits up. It gives her something to focus on so humiliation won't swallow her alive.
He touches her hair. She flinches. His hand retracts. Her gaze drops to the discolouration of his knuckles, the bandage on his other hand. She wishes she hadn't seen him beat that boy up.
"Do you want to go home?"
She shakes her head.
Home is home, but it is quiet.
The Hightower house is just as quiet right now, but it will soon be alive as Alicent's children return, when she herself gets back from her shift at the hospital, when the lights are on and winter is banished behind fogged up windows. Amara's house is empty. She is the only child. She feels like a scab, a leech, the forgotten attachment on a vacuum when she makes excuses to stay at Alicent's place. Aegon's mother is liberal in offering her food, as she always has been with any of her kids' friends . But Amara hates accepting. It feels like she's taking advantage. She makes sure to bring food that she claims her mother had "to spare" but which she buys fresh with her own pocket money. It helps return the favour in her mind.
"Then why are you getting up?"
She glances at the clock again. "I don't know. Sorry."
"You've been acting like I'm a ticking bomb all evening."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to - "
"Stop apologising." He softens the pseudo-command with a chuckle, and her chest eases up enough to let her breathe. "Felt like I was keeping you hostage."
I wouldn't mind if you did. The thought is so sudden and so vivid, Amara's eyes wide. She giggles nervously as if she's said it out loud. His lips curve downwards - that upside down smile she could draw from memory - and it feels like they're seven and eight again.
Until he reaches for her and catches a ribbon of her hair instead of her face. She thinks he meant to touch her lips. Her teeth ache. His calloused fingers caress the strands, pulling down, a gentle gesture that brings her closer. The TV has no sound. The house dissolves into a rush of static in her ears. The thread of silver around his neck glints, a lighthouse over the turbulent waves, inviting her in.
"Aren't you dating Katie now?" The question is out before she can think it through.
Their faces are so close, every breath he takes is pulled from her lips. But he doesn't lower his eyes from hers, save to fixate on the shape of her mouth, stained with raspberry chapstick. It doesn't stop her from biting the skin off them. Just makes them taste better when she does.
"Probably."
The ache in her teeth spreads like a blot of ink on tissue paper. Her whole face feels numb. She doesn't know where to put her hands. The chain glints again. Amara touches her finger against its lowest point. Aegon pulls her in.
It's not easy kissing someone you've been in love with since you were thirteen. The body reacts like it's in the clutches of a fever; not exactly conducive to kissing someone so well that it's all they'll think of until the next time. He's kissed her before. She forgets every single time that he's kissed her before. It's always feels like a first.
Aegon slips his tongue under the rim of her top lip, eyes opening halfway to look at her. When she gives in and opens her, he bites down, gentle violence, and her lips relinquish their hold on the gates.
He enters, a confident invader, a dragon with three heads emblazoned on his chest, sword arm aloft. Her defences are gossamer thread, dancing in the wind, and she lets him cut right through even as she understands that later, in the cold safety of her bed, she'll hate herself for kissing another girl's boyfriend.
The kiss breaks, but he seems reluctant for it to end. He runs his lips over hers, corner to corner, holding them there, open and breathless. And then they travel across her cheek, and the scratch of his regrowing stubble makes her insides feel as faint as dandelion clocks.
She grazes the silver hoop in his ear with her fingers. She doesn't get to be this close to it usually. It's nothing special, just a curl of sterling silver embedded into flesh. But when she thinks of it in her dreams, it may as well be mithril.
"I think I should go," she murmurs. Amara moves to get up, and for a fraction of a second, Aegon grips her arm as if he won't let her. But then his fingers uncurl from her flesh and she is free to make more sensible decisions. "I'll be fine," she says, when he stands up to go with her. "It's just a few doors down, Egg."
He doesn't bother explaining why he's going to go with her anyway. It's a given that he will.
They walk at a respectable distance from each other. Amara makes herself laugh when she imagines they're in an episode of Bridgerton, and this is the bit where they 'promenade' for the judgement of the ton. Aegon would make a very unlikely member of the peerage.
He doesn't take his eyes off her as she unlocks the door to her house. The tension is back. Maybe in his head he is encroaching again, his body a shadow over hers, until she has no choice but to kiss him back. But there are a dozen eyes behind every window that surrounds them. Everyone here knows everyone else. They know her. And they know he has a girlfriend.
Amara thinks she mumbles bye. She isn't sure. The hallway is cold, and the heat of his body is trapped outside, a slab of painted red wood between them. She sinks to the floor and plucks at the nylon of her tights. She counts how long it takes to burst into tears.
“She feels like a scab, a leech, the forgotten attachment on a vacuum when she makes excuses to stay at Alicent's place.”
For some reason I can only focus on Amara’s loneliness, how she clings to the warmth of Alicent’s couch. How she apologies to Aegon for nothing. It speaks of a specific kind of loneliness that clings to you like a shadow. It’s something old, something that curls up in your chest when you are really small, and often times, stays with you until the end.
She is very lonely :((( She wants to be part of his family so bad, in her head she probably has a hundred wedding scenarios, a scrapbook of how to marry him and get into the family that way. Like she's in love with him, but even if she wasn't, she'd try to fall for him just so she could become a Hightower and be with them forever
It’s like this fist clenching at the mouth of your stomach, it’s a hunger that comes from wanting something that is just right there yet is almost unachievable. When you just wish you belonged somewhere else. I get her. I hope at one point he holds her as tightly as she wants to be held.
(another drabble for my silly little drug dealer!aegon x ballerina!amara au - first drabble is here)
Bones made of glass, eyes lined with kohl. She feels like a creature of myth when she dances. Everyone knows how myths begin. Love, magic, adventure. Everyone knows how they end. Death, tragedy, glory.
She self-soothes, tells herself this is why Aegon won't come to watch her dance. He may see his own death in the gentle knock of her pointe shoes, the golden traces of his touch dripping from her flesh like ichor. She calls him Midas in her head. She wishes he would touch her everywhere, grip her, until she is plated in gold and she can disguise the growing rust in her soul for another sad year.
Magic hands, that's what these are, Alicent would say, kissing her eldest boy's fingers after they'd just finished massaging the tension from her shoulders, her head, her neck.
The night before, those hands wore knuckledusters. Amara heard the sorry scream the boy managed to let rip before Aegon's fists cut a gash into the side of his face. When it catches in the windpipe, blood makes the oddest sound, like a creature attempting to crawl its way out of a carnivorous womb.
He knows she saw him. She'd never seen him so angry, so violent. None of it was aimed at her. But still she ran.
A few days later, she saw the man who Aegon works for. Khan is the only name he is known by. Khan, like the rulers of Mongolia, their hordes running wild across the steppes. Aegon is one of his, the warrior at his right-hand, the one that suffers most if a battle is lost.
For Amara, Khan never has anything but a smile. He smiles at her like a kindly uncle, hazel eyes wrinkled at the corners, skin browned from a recent visit to the motherland. He donates to orphanages and soup kitchens, built a new community centre, a mosque, cuts ribbons at the town hall -
And he hits Aegon like the father he never had.
It was Khan's rage she saw in Aegon's fists as they broke the face of a boy who looked no more than eighteen. He is alive. But he isn't pretty anymore. His mother screamed and cried and begged the cops to do something about Khan and they looked uncomfortable, shuffled their feet, told her they would support her in any way they could. Now she has taken her boy and they've left the city.
A trace of him is still on the hem of Aegon's favourite football shirt. The washing machine hasn't done its job. Amara reaches out to touch, imagining the blood might still have the power to stain her, wet and viscous.
"Don't you want something to eat?" she asks.
He looks at her like a sleepwalker awakened from a dream. The TV is on - Only Fools and Horses, his dad's favourite show - and he has been staring at the screen with such rapt attention, Amara didn't want to interrupt.
"What?" A bruise burns under his right eye, the colour of spoiled wine and grief. When she repeats her question, the ice on his face melts and he shakes his head.
"I've listened to your stomach rumble Symphony No 9 for the last ten minutes. Don't lie to me."
"There's nothing in the fridge."
That's not true. There is always something in the fridge. Not a thing goes to waste in the Hightower home. Alicent chides her children if she hears the tell-tale scrape of a knife against a plate tossing food into the bin. If it can be put away, then it will be, wrapped in a shiny veneer of cling film with notes attached by whoever intends to finish it later.
Fuck off - Aemond
No touch me grub! - Ronnie (no one who loves him calls him 'Daeron' anymore)
Peepeepoopoo!!! - Hel
Mummy's food (you can have a bit if you're really hungry ❤️) - Mum
Amara reads their notes sometimes and pretends she is one of them. Aegon never leaves notes. He doesn't put things away. He eats everything, or he doesn't eat at all.
"Your mam left a plate with your name on it." She sets the warmed up plate of pasties before him. He is still in the same position, a can of Guinness balanced on his knee, the ring on his finger clicking against the aluminium.
They don't speak as he eats.
She didn't think of him all day at school. That's progress. Back when he first latched onto her conscience like a flesh-eating virus, his absence could ruin her entire day. She fucking loathed maths. But it was made fun because she got to go the route through the greenhouse, up the terracotta steps, past the courtyard where he sat during free period. Aegon would always look at her as she walked by. It was never brief. It was a stare. The memory of his dark grey eyes lit the synapses of her imagination and got her through maths class. She'd doodle his name around her estimate of the interquartile range. She'd give Pythagoras a personality and conjure it up in her mind so she had someone to talk to about her crush. She couldn't tell her friends. They were all "nice" kids. They didn't hang out with the likes of him. She had to make do with a fantasy version of a Greek polymath.
They'd judge her if they saw her now, the pretty little thing curled up at one end of his mother's couch, her eyes completely lost.
Beside her, he moves, graceful even when he fumbles. The hideous neon jacket comes off, leaving only the grey shirt underneath, his left hand bandaged (did it hurt when you hit that boy like he didn't have a mother whose heart would break at the sight of him?)
The silver hoop in his left lobe winks in the light. Amara realises he isn't looking at the TV anymore. He's looking at her.
When did the tension seep in? It tastes of sugared pops and sour candy. Her favourites when she was little. He shoplifted them for her, and they'd run away, a seven year old and an eight year old, giggling like they had reached the pinnacle of worldly achievement.
"What?" Amara says.
Aegon doesn't answer. He looks scary when he is focused. His eyes are set deep, brow bone protruding. He gets that from his dad.
Amara doesn't remember when Daemon stopped coming around. It's easy when the children are small, hope still nurtured in their tender hearts. Today is the day my Daddy will finally love me enough to stay. The older they got, the more they clung to their mother, the one who stayed, the one who bothered to be strict, the one who didn't have money to buy them the expensive Christmas presents.
"Won't your parents be wondering where you are?" Aegon asks.
Amara glances at the clock. Her heart is squeezed in a fist of iron. He wants me to leave. She nods, wordless, and picks at a scab on her arm as she sits up. It gives her something to focus on so humiliation won't swallow her alive.
He touches her hair. She flinches. His hand retracts. Her gaze drops to the discolouration of his knuckles, the bandage on his other hand. She wishes she hadn't seen him beat that boy up.
"Do you want to go home?"
She shakes her head.
Home is home, but it is quiet.
The Hightower house is just as quiet right now, but it will soon be alive as Alicent's children return, when she herself gets back from her shift at the hospital, when the lights are on and winter is banished behind fogged up windows. Amara's house is empty. She is the only child. She feels like a scab, a leech, the forgotten attachment on a vacuum when she makes excuses to stay at Alicent's place. Aegon's mother is liberal in offering her food, as she always has been with any of her kids' friends . But Amara hates accepting. It feels like she's taking advantage. She makes sure to bring food that she claims her mother had "to spare" but which she buys fresh with her own pocket money. It helps return the favour in her mind.
"Then why are you getting up?"
She glances at the clock again. "I don't know. Sorry."
"You've been acting like I'm a ticking bomb all evening."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to - "
"Stop apologising." He softens the pseudo-command with a chuckle, and her chest eases up enough to let her breathe. "Felt like I was keeping you hostage."
I wouldn't mind if you did. The thought is so sudden and so vivid, Amara's eyes wide. She giggles nervously as if she's said it out loud. His lips curve downwards - that upside down smile she could draw from memory - and it feels like they're seven and eight again.
Until he reaches for her and catches a ribbon of her hair instead of her face. She thinks he meant to touch her lips. Her teeth ache. His calloused fingers caress the strands, pulling down, a gentle gesture that brings her closer. The TV has no sound. The house dissolves into a rush of static in her ears. The thread of silver around his neck glints, a lighthouse over the turbulent waves, inviting her in.
"Aren't you dating Katie now?" The question is out before she can think it through.
Their faces are so close, every breath he takes is pulled from her lips. But he doesn't lower his eyes from hers, save to fixate on the shape of her mouth, stained with raspberry chapstick. It doesn't stop her from biting the skin off them. Just makes them taste better when she does.
"Probably."
The ache in her teeth spreads like a blot of ink on tissue paper. Her whole face feels numb. She doesn't know where to put her hands. The chain glints again. Amara touches her finger against its lowest point. Aegon pulls her in.
It's not easy kissing someone you've been in love with since you were thirteen. The body reacts like it's in the clutches of a fever; not exactly conducive to kissing someone so well that it's all they'll think of until the next time. He's kissed her before. She forgets every single time that he's kissed her before. It's always feels like a first.
Aegon slips his tongue under the rim of her top lip, eyes opening halfway to look at her. When she gives in and opens her, he bites down, gentle violence, and her lips relinquish their hold on the gates.
He enters, a confident invader, a dragon with three heads emblazoned on his chest, sword arm aloft. Her defences are gossamer thread, dancing in the wind, and she lets him cut right through even as she understands that later, in the cold safety of her bed, she'll hate herself for kissing another girl's boyfriend.
The kiss breaks, but he seems reluctant for it to end. He runs his lips over hers, corner to corner, holding them there, open and breathless. And then they travel across her cheek, and the scratch of his regrowing stubble makes her insides feel as faint as dandelion clocks.
She grazes the silver hoop in his ear with her fingers. She doesn't get to be this close to it usually. It's nothing special, just a curl of sterling silver embedded into flesh. But when she thinks of it in her dreams, it may as well be mithril.
"I think I should go," she murmurs. Amara moves to get up, and for a fraction of a second, Aegon grips her arm as if he won't let her. But then his fingers uncurl from her flesh and she is free to make more sensible decisions. "I'll be fine," she says, when he stands up to go with her. "It's just a few doors down, Egg."
He doesn't bother explaining why he's going to go with her anyway. It's a given that he will.
They walk at a respectable distance from each other. Amara makes herself laugh when she imagines they're in an episode of Bridgerton, and this is the bit where they 'promenade' for the judgement of the ton. Aegon would make a very unlikely member of the peerage.
He doesn't take his eyes off her as she unlocks the door to her house. The tension is back. Maybe in his head he is encroaching again, his body a shadow over hers, until she has no choice but to kiss him back. But there are a dozen eyes behind every window that surrounds them. Everyone here knows everyone else. They know her. And they know he has a girlfriend.
Amara thinks she mumbles bye. She isn't sure. The hallway is cold, and the heat of his body is trapped outside, a slab of painted red wood between them. She sinks to the floor and plucks at the nylon of her tights. She counts how long it takes to burst into tears.
“She feels like a scab, a leech, the forgotten attachment on a vacuum when she makes excuses to stay at Alicent's place.”
For some reason I can only focus on Amara’s loneliness, how she clings to the warmth of Alicent’s couch. How she apologies to Aegon for nothing. It speaks of a specific kind of loneliness that clings to you like a shadow. It’s something old, something that curls up in your chest when you are really small, and often times, stays with you until the end.
(a drug dealer!aegon x ballerina! amara drabble - bECAUSE MARY ASKED and i have time today to do stuff)
There is restraint in his hands. She had no idea restraint could be tangible, something beyond a word she usually associates with caution and boring.
The restraint in his hands is potential. It reminds her that he is smoke and mirrors, and her reflection in his eyes is distorted, fooling her into believing an illusion. The nicotine traces on his tongue, the cheap aftershave, the beer her grandfather favoured but her grandmother loathed. She rebuked her husband for abandoning his religion in its pursuit.
But when Amara tastes it on Aegon's lips, it feels like religion.
He has never grasped her. There is the restraint again. Her small hands grab his, tickle his palms, play with his fingers, and he lets them. But his remain open, ghosting over her head, the curve of her spine, more a priest's detached blessing than the touch of a man that wants her. Even if she knows he does.
She knew the first time she pressed a kiss to his cheek in gratitude and he turned his head, expectant, waiting for her lips to complete the journey and find his, as if they belonged there. Anything else was out of the question. But they hadn't. She felt his stubble on her skin and thought about licking it, like some kind of deranged cat. He might have let her. He always seems curious, as if he is working her out, an algebra equation he hasn't yet fully mastered.
They are both still in their school uniform. Hers hangs off her like scrap material. His fits him like an afterthought. The buttons on his collar have never properly fastened since she's known him. His friends are strewn around the room, over the spare couch, on the floor, against the wall. In the kitchen, Aemond is slamming a tray of fish and chips into the oven, and yelling at Daeron for drinking straight from the box of orange juice. The football game reaches a crescendo on the TV screen. Aegon isn't paying attention to any of it.
He stabs the button on the calculator on his phone as if it has done him some personal wrong. She leans over to peer at the calculations scribbled on the back of his mother's shopping list pad and knows what this is. If he doesn't turn a profit, the man who employs him will take his dues the only way violent men know how.
Amara wants to ask him about the bruises, the cigarette burns, where he goes in the dead of night when she looks out of her window and sees him standing alone under the copper street light, his breath fogged up like crystal mist. She has never seen Aegon cry. She imagines he might do when he is alone at midnight, his fists forced into his threadbare pockets to fight the cold the way he fights everything else - with rage only a boy in his position could have.
Last week, he bought Helaena a new coat. All the other girls in her class have puffers, but she wanted a suede coat with fur trim. Amara saw her spinning about in it, showing it off to her friends, like something straight out of Daisy Jones, her blonde hair flying on the wind.
Is that why he doesn't have a new jacket yet?
At lunch, she counts the holes in his favourite grey hoodie from afar, and adds new ones to the tally. He doesn't spend. He saves. He is afraid. He has had to scrimp and save with his mother so long, that now he's making money, he won't spend on it himself in case the way to make more disappears.
But he bought his sister an expensive new coat without a second thought.
"What d'you want, lass?" Aegon says without looking up.
She thinks he's talking to someone else, until she realises she's the only girl left in the room. The others have drifted into the garden.
Katie's been trying to catch his eye, but there's no dealing with him when he's focused. Tonight, when they all end up going to the party at Matty's house, Katie will show up in the red dress he likes, her blonde hair tied into a chignon and she'll put her arms around him with an innocence she doesn't allows others to see. And he'll kiss her as if she's the centre of his world.
"Nothing," Amara beams. "I like the way you write the number four. All quirky around the edges."
He frowns at her the way he always does when she says something weird, and then goes back to it.
She wonders if he knows Katie calls him her boyfriend when others ask. Or if Katie knows Aegon kisses whoever he wants, Amara included. The silver chain around his neck is stained with a dozen fingerprints. Your Honour, I present Exhibit A as part of the prosecution's case against the defendant. He is a scoundrel, a rake, Byron at his worst, a whore.
She yawns, stretches like a cat, and reaches for the bag with her used and abused pointe shoes held inside. Might as well go outside. He's in no mood to talk.
As she crosses around the table, she stumbles, and he reaches out to steady her, a hand to the small of her back. "Careful." He's looking up at her instead of the scribbled numbers, the corner of his mouth curled into a half-smile. It fades slowly.
His hand is still steadying her, but she is already upright.
She wants to stay here, curled up in one corner of the Hightowers’ beleaguered couch, every inch of it covered in clothes, toys, books, loose change between the cushions. Alicent always makes sure all her kids check the cushions before she goes grocery shopping. When he was seven, Daeron made a little jar labelled couch change and it's always half full. None of their pockets were made to hold things. They're designed to lose them.
"Thanks." She leaves the room with a heavy feeling in her stomach. It is going to pick at her until she kisses someone else to erase the shape of Aegon's mouth from her memory.
But his aftershave, and his favourite beer clings to her like a stubborn stain of cherry wine. It reminds her she belongs to a boy with restrained hands and empty pockets, but that he does not belong to her.
"Nothing," Amara beams. "I like the way you write the number four. All quirky around the edges."
something about this made me think of an Aegon that didn't do well in school because he somehow struggled to learn. maybe dyslexia or adhd, that no one understood for what it was and not for lazyness or mischief. an aegon that got so scolded and shouted at when he was little that he never wanted to go to school but always did because he 'had to set the example'. or 'can you take Daeron to nursery please love?'-when mum was so sad or tired she wouldn't leave bed. maybe think, that's why he's so careful with his hands, his touches. because he knows how fragile life can be around him.
Aaahhh I was thinking dyslexia when I wrote that he doesn't pay attention in class in another post about them! Aemond being a whizz kid and Hel and Daeron also excelling probably made Aegon feel so useless, and he made his peace with the fact that he's providing for them to be able to continue to do well. He's the oldest son/father/man of the house against his own will (bc Dad ran off) and now he doesn't know how to play any other role. I love the little bit about being careful with his touches, and it sort of speaks to how violent he is when he's extorting money out of people for the man he works for vs how gently he holds his family. With Amara, he hardly dares even close his hand over hers in case something breaks (metaphorically) and that's when she notices the restraint. He basically lets her cling to him and explore him without doing it in return (as aggressively as he wants to).
its actually funny how i zeroed in on the writing and not on his hands (for once) JHKKJHJKH. its how he had to be the responsible one, how most of his needs where never met. and Amara, she's so small and he can't help but see her as so breakable. however i do imagine that for some reason he likes to observe his touches on her skin. its an odd rare thing for him, to touch something so beautiful, hence why he is so aware of how restrained he needs to be.
I do see them a lot in his dingy trailer in late afternoons and she dances for him and he just loves watching her and how the sun dances on her skin and the smoke of his cigarette seems to dance with her too.
(a drug dealer!aegon x ballerina! amara drabble - bECAUSE MARY ASKED and i have time today to do stuff)
There is restraint in his hands. She had no idea restraint could be tangible, something beyond a word she usually associates with caution and boring.
The restraint in his hands is potential. It reminds her that he is smoke and mirrors, and her reflection in his eyes is distorted, fooling her into believing an illusion. The nicotine traces on his tongue, the cheap aftershave, the beer her grandfather favoured but her grandmother loathed. She rebuked her husband for abandoning his religion in its pursuit.
But when Amara tastes it on Aegon's lips, it feels like religion.
He has never grasped her. There is the restraint again. Her small hands grab his, tickle his palms, play with his fingers, and he lets them. But his remain open, ghosting over her head, the curve of her spine, more a priest's detached blessing than the touch of a man that wants her. Even if she knows he does.
She knew the first time she pressed a kiss to his cheek in gratitude and he turned his head, expectant, waiting for her lips to complete the journey and find his, as if they belonged there. Anything else was out of the question. But they hadn't. She felt his stubble on her skin and thought about licking it, like some kind of deranged cat. He might have let her. He always seems curious, as if he is working her out, an algebra equation he hasn't yet fully mastered.
They are both still in their school uniform. Hers hangs off her like scrap material. His fits him like an afterthought. The buttons on his collar have never properly fastened since she's known him. His friends are strewn around the room, over the spare couch, on the floor, against the wall. In the kitchen, Aemond is slamming a tray of fish and chips into the oven, and yelling at Daeron for drinking straight from the box of orange juice. The football game reaches a crescendo on the TV screen. Aegon isn't paying attention to any of it.
He stabs the button on the calculator on his phone as if it has done him some personal wrong. She leans over to peer at the calculations scribbled on the back of his mother's shopping list pad and knows what this is. If he doesn't turn a profit, the man who employs him will take his dues the only way violent men know how.
Amara wants to ask him about the bruises, the cigarette burns, where he goes in the dead of night when she looks out of her window and sees him standing alone under the copper street light, his breath fogged up like crystal mist. She has never seen Aegon cry. She imagines he might do when he is alone at midnight, his fists forced into his threadbare pockets to fight the cold the way he fights everything else - with rage only a boy in his position could have.
Last week, he bought Helaena a new coat. All the other girls in her class have puffers, but she wanted a suede coat with fur trim. Amara saw her spinning about in it, showing it off to her friends, like something straight out of Daisy Jones, her blonde hair flying on the wind.
Is that why he doesn't have a new jacket yet?
At lunch, she counts the holes in his favourite grey hoodie from afar, and adds new ones to the tally. He doesn't spend. He saves. He is afraid. He has had to scrimp and save with his mother so long, that now he's making money, he won't spend on it himself in case the way to make more disappears.
But he bought his sister an expensive new coat without a second thought.
"What d'you want, lass?" Aegon says without looking up.
She thinks he's talking to someone else, until she realises she's the only girl left in the room. The others have drifted into the garden.
Katie's been trying to catch his eye, but there's no dealing with him when he's focused. Tonight, when they all end up going to the party at Matty's house, Katie will show up in the red dress he likes, her blonde hair tied into a chignon and she'll put her arms around him with an innocence she doesn't allows others to see. And he'll kiss her as if she's the centre of his world.
"Nothing," Amara beams. "I like the way you write the number four. All quirky around the edges."
He frowns at her the way he always does when she says something weird, and then goes back to it.
She wonders if he knows Katie calls him her boyfriend when others ask. Or if Katie knows Aegon kisses whoever he wants, Amara included. The silver chain around his neck is stained with a dozen fingerprints. Your Honour, I present Exhibit A as part of the prosecution's case against the defendant. He is a scoundrel, a rake, Byron at his worst, a whore.
She yawns, stretches like a cat, and reaches for the bag with her used and abused pointe shoes held inside. Might as well go outside. He's in no mood to talk.
As she crosses around the table, she stumbles, and he reaches out to steady her, a hand to the small of her back. "Careful." He's looking up at her instead of the scribbled numbers, the corner of his mouth curled into a half-smile. It fades slowly.
His hand is still steadying her, but she is already upright.
She wants to stay here, curled up in one corner of the Hightowers’ beleaguered couch, every inch of it covered in clothes, toys, books, loose change between the cushions. Alicent always makes sure all her kids check the cushions before she goes grocery shopping. When he was seven, Daeron made a little jar labelled couch change and it's always half full. None of their pockets were made to hold things. They're designed to lose them.
"Thanks." She leaves the room with a heavy feeling in her stomach. It is going to pick at her until she kisses someone else to erase the shape of Aegon's mouth from her memory.
But his aftershave, and his favourite beer clings to her like a stubborn stain of cherry wine. It reminds her she belongs to a boy with restrained hands and empty pockets, but that he does not belong to her.
"Nothing," Amara beams. "I like the way you write the number four. All quirky around the edges."
something about this made me think of an Aegon that didn't do well in school because he somehow struggled to learn. maybe dyslexia or adhd, that no one understood for what it was and not for lazyness or mischief. an aegon that got so scolded and shouted at when he was little that he never wanted to go to school but always did because he 'had to set the example'. or 'can you take Daeron to nursery please love?'-when mum was so sad or tired she wouldn't leave bed. maybe think, that's why he's so careful with his hands, his touches. because he knows how fragile life can be around him.
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Summary: Amara discovers just how different the Hightower brothers are
Now that Amara is secured in King’s Landing, news of her wedding reaches Dorne within a fortnight of her arrival.
They are already writing songs about her in the city. It was only going to be a matter of time before Dorne heard of it. The bards name her the Dornish princess now, a fancier replacement for ‘the Volantene lady,’ rolls off the tongue better. Musicians from all over the land will crowd the capital and vie for the attention of the royals once the wedding festivities begin. The best of them hope to gain a musician’s job at the Keep, or better yet, as personal bard to Lady Amara, whose beauty is spoken of in such terms, one would think she was a goddess, not a human girl.
A month goes by, and Amara finally receives a letter from home.
It is in Lord Uller’s steward’s hand, impersonal and swift.
Daughter, I bid you to recall our conversation in the Field of Meraxes. I await your response.
She pictures her father’s fist shaking with rage as he twirls his moustache. He always does it when he’s agitated. She used to tease him about it and mimic the motion.
When she was nine, as they walked through the Field of Meraxes, Amara swore in no uncertain terms that she would not get married. She claimed she would remain childless and enter a symbolic marriage with Hellholt. She told him that he and mother would have to produce another daughter to have babies that could become Amara’s heirs. He belly-laughed at the notion and reassured her that if she chose to marry it would be to someone she desired (as long as he wasn’t a drunken fool).
“But – and you must heed me on this – not all men reveal their truths straight away. Some will be kind and sweet as a lamb until it serves them not to be. Then, the snake springs out from the skin of the lamb. Should you find yourself so deceived, slide a knife across his throat and be done with it. No man’s life is worth more than the happiness of my girl.”
he'd be her weed dealer, and she's the only one of his customers who fucks him for weed (when she doesn't have the money)
ok, excuse me?! ok, hot!!!
gif credit: recluseraven
well absolutely!
i picture this aegon as very laid-back, kind of has that rasp to his voice from smoking more than he should. usually smells of cheap beer and petrol (he's also a part-time mechanic). and amara's this pretty little thing he used to watch traipsing down the road on her scooter back when they were both in secondary school.
now they're a little older, and she still does ballet, but struggles with paying for pointe shoes and all the other bits and bobs (it's an expensive hobby, i'm told). but she's a very good dancer, and often her teacher will just pay for the things to keep her with the troupe, and so she has money to spare for weed. she claims it helps with her aches and pains (she's constantly over exerting physically and aegon always notices some new bruise or other so he feels bad and discounts the prices, but only because she's pretty - he's still shallow like most men).
when she realises he's giving her special treatment, she's like *sabrina brier voice* oh! and then decides a further discount would be nice, and she'll suck his dick for it because he's hot and she doesn't have any time to commit to a boyfriend but people have needs, okay?
it's a very casual relationship to begin with obviously. but over time, she gets more comfortable climbing in through the window of his house, and he'll come home to find her curled up on the sofa watching TV with food from his fridge ("just add the food to my dick-sucking tab, it's cool.")
first time she brings him to the ballet studio to show off to the other dancers, they're a little ???????? at first because he's kind of not what they were expecting. but he does have good drugs, and though amara doesn't do the harder stuff, some of her dancer friends do, so they get attached very quickly.
and in reverse, she's basically his shadow, always curled up in the passenger seat of his car (and even helping keep track of who owes him what when he goes around to 'collect.') he keeps her away from the rougher side of what he does, and she knows about it, but is happy to stay away. she prefers sitting in his garage watching him work anyway, and usually turns up after work in her pink leg warmers and ballet shrug.
everyone basically considers them boyfriend and girlfriend at this point, but they've never had the talk (i think they know they are though).
Summary: Aegon meets the Hightower hostage aka his new bride.
“Awaken, sweet prince.”
In the throes of sleep, the fingers dancing down the bridge of his nose bear the fleeting quality of faerie wings. Aegon suppresses the tickle in his nostrils and continues the pretence. But eventually, it’s too much. He lunges away and releases a bellowing sneeze.
Laughter rings out behind him, bright as wedding bells.
He groans and falls onto his back. “She’s a whore, she’s a liar…with her hair kissed by fire.” His voice is deep with its freshly woken rasp but carries a tune well. He strums an invisible lyre, the way he has seen countless buskers do around the taverns he frequents. They always know where to angle themselves for a chance to be heard by royal ears.
“Have you considered leaving your position as prince and becoming a bard? Sit on the street corner and use your hat to collect coin. I guarantee it’d be heavy by the evening.”
Aegon pinches the corners of his eyes. “Not in this city it wouldn’t. Braavos perhaps. Everything’s twice as big there. My cock would fit right in.”
Lucena giggles, rolling off the bed and springing to her feet, arms arched over her head like a dancer. Red hair falls like a curtain of flames over her pale skin, curling against the blue veins visible on her thighs, her breasts, the curve of her hip. She claims it to be a gift from the Tully father who never claimed her. From the Lyseni courtesan who birthed her, she claims only wit and beauty, both far better gifts than red hair in Aegon’s opinion.
“You are to meet your new wife today.”
He pales. “I thought I dreamt mother coming in to yell at me.”
Lucena twists an auburn lock around her fingers and looks guilty. “She came in, but I feigned being fast asleep. She’s never liked me.”
He clicks his tongue to soothe her conscience. “Never. She’d send you packing if she disliked you.” He throws off the sheets and pads around looking for a clean cup to pour the remnants of last night’s wine into. It is a sweet Dornish red, a portent of his future. He’s never fucked a Dornish woman before. He can’t wait to see what the fuss is all about. “As it happens, I think mother rather likes you. Better you than all the variety down in the Street of Silk. Can’t fuck up my new wife’s womb by passing her a sexual plague for a wedding gift.”
Aegon raises the cup in a toast of mockery, but Lucena does not smile. For weeks she has avoided the topic of Amara’s arrival when it is all anyone else has been talking of.
“Ever the romantic.” She turns away and tosses her dress over her head, arms slipping through the sleeves like the branches of a limber tree. “I hear women from Volantis are adept in the sexual arts. She might just be your soulmate.”
“She is not of Volantis. She is Dornish.”
“Of course. I forgot. But everyone knows what they say about Dorne.”
All manner of gossip erupted at court when they discovered the bride was Dornish.
Ladies who kept an eye on fashion trends slipping in and out of the capital, were suddenly asking their tailors and seamstresses to cut dresses in Dornish styles. It began to feel like the approach of a festival, which is apparently the general mood around a royal wedding.
For some reason, the Westerosi nobles who’ve never gone near the realm to the south, have turned Dorne into a fantastical place in their minds, where the people walk around half naked in the sweltering sun, smell of the most wonderful perfumes, and fuck all night and all day.
It's just gossip, else Aegon would have long ago dyed his hair black and run off to Dorne.
Read the rest on AO3
tag list: @maryonaccross @allicentsallure @kravitzwhore @krisaaas @amiraisgoingthruit @alaskagirl50 @brutalera
this story carries such a specific type of sadness, at this point particularly how untethered they both feel even if for different reasons.
"He thinks of the things scattered across Amara’s bed, her nightwear, the indications that she is as human and vulnerable as he is. Seeing her in the costuming of her own land, bright and fierce and beyond anything he can emulate, puts her on a pedestal he can’t reach. But he has seen what she wears under them. She is a slip of a girl under all the padding, nothing more."
this bit broke my heart a little as seeing Aegon trying to see Amara in a more human light, for me speaks about how inadequate he feels in every situation.
He remembers when his mother's hair was that length. He called it mermaid hair and loved pushing his face into it. Tucked into its softness, the world would become a distant bad dream. He remembers the day is mother told him to stop behaving so childishly. She cut it the very next day.
And this, I always love the way you explore Alicent's and Aegon's relationship. How its mainly sustained on pain and loss. I still have a very present mental image of the i love the bones of you moment in ysmmc. It will stay with me for a long time.
I'm also loving the fact that we get to see both Amara and Aegon as individual people right now. And Sunfyre, always Sunfyre to brighten our days. :')
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Summary: Aegon lands himself a mail-order bride with a massive chip on her shoulder.
“Behave yourself,” Alios tells her through clenched teeth when it comes time for them to bid each other farewell. There are onlookers. He is watching his tone, just as she has to watch hers. “Remember the bounty hunters that travel this region. They’ll find you if you try to run before you get to the ports and will deliver to me your head on a platter. A wasted investment of ten years.”
“Do not worry, uncle,” Amara beams, squeezing his hands between her own. “I will make you proud. I will speak nothing but praise for your name, so that it is known in King’s Landing exactly who and what you are.” She delights in the way he looks as if he truly believes her adoration. Men can be brutal and vile and monstrous, and yet remain such idiots, it is hard to believe they hold any advantage over women at all.
She continues. “And when the time comes, I will return with my husband’s dragon to this Old Valyria of yours and allow you the joy of reliving a glory you were never a part of. And then, that dragon will burn you and your legacy to the ground faster than you can cry out to your false gods.”
She rips her hand from his grip which has now turned bone-crushing and clambers into the carriage without requiring assistance from the slaves. Alios hisses something under his breath and whirls back the plum velvet of his robes to climb the stairs to his house.
Read the rest on AO3
someone asked to be tagged so i'm making my first ever taglist! if you'd like to be added on the second chapter after this one, please let me know because otherwise i won't tag again ^^
"They are the strong words of a very young girl with little idea of how bad the world can get."
I could go onto a massive comment on the feelings this fic is making me feel already but I think I'll leave this for future chapters. As first chapters are beginnings and beginnings are more often than not light and bright. I will however say that it's beautiful that with every lifetime Amara goes through she becomes wiser and Aegon never changes. it's like she's ever evolving and he's yet to learn, well...anything really. xD
I find you do this beautiful thing Daisy where you almost set out the whole story for us in the first chapters, if only we're paying attention and are curious enough to look into both the too dark and too bright corners of the story. I for one, can't wait to keep on reading it.
"Aegon Targaryen, you’ve no idea the kind of madness you have invited into your life." - no he really has no idea, and I have a feeling that neither do we.
When The World Is Crashing Down [Chapter 1: Am I More Than You Bargained For Yet]
Series summary: Your family is House Celtigar, one of Rhaenyra's wealthiest allies. In the aftermath of Rook's Rest, Aemond unknowingly conscripts you to save his brother's life. Now you are in the liar of the enemy, but your loyalties are quickly shifting...
Chapter warnings: Language, warfare, violence, serious injury, a brief history of burn treatments, alcoholism/addiction, references to sexual content (18+), a wild Sunfyre appears, catching feelings for literally the single most inappropriate man on the planet.
Series title is a lyric from: "7 Minutes in Heaven" by Fall Out Boy.
Chapter title is a lyric from: "Sugar, We're Goin' Down" by Fall Out Boy.
Word count: 5.3k.
Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.
💜 I’m going to tag like a bazillion people since this is the first chapter of a new fic, but I WILL NOT TAG YOU AGAIN unless you ask me to. I hope you are all doing well, wherever you are in the world! 💜
Let me know if you’d like to be tagged in future chapters!
You scream when he grabs you, this lightning strike of a man with a grip like an animal trap that splits bones. He pulls you away from the soldier you’re soothing—a young dark-haired Norcross, disoriented, doomed, his intestines spilling out onto the grass and blood on his lips—and through the forest of smoke and corpses and pine trees. Your eyes sting and water, your boots snag on gnarled roots. When you yelp and stumble to the earth, the man drags you upright again. You struggle like a beast with a blade at its throat, cold, serrated, pressure on the jugular. You shove and scratch at him, trying to plant your boots in soil strewn with gore and glowing embers.
“Stop, stop it, you’re hurting me!”
“Hurry up.”
“You’re going to break my wrist—!”
He wrenches you around to look you full in the face, and only now do you know who he is. A gasp hisses through your teeth; the acrid air in your lungs vanishes. Every muscle and tendon and ligament of you is taut with horror, tight enough to snap. It’s like meeting one of the Seven, the Warrior or Stranger or Smith, a shade you know only from myths and nightmares. It’s like being led to the executioner’s scaffold. His long silver braid hangs over one shoulder. His eyepatch conceals the childhood maiming that left him half-blind. There’s blood and ash on his scarred face, a ruthless breed of fear in his remaining eye, icy blue, creek-shallow, soulless. The man clasping your wrist is Prince Aemond Targaryen. “I’ll break your neck if you don’t come with me now.”
He does not wait for your protest or acquiescence. You couldn’t give it anyway. Your muddied boots move numbly as he tugs you forward, this man they call Aemond One-Eye, a monster, a murderer, a kinslayer. The earth is littered with carnage from the battle, charred ribcages and disemboweled horses, scattered armor and severed limbs. Ashes fall from the smoldering treetops like dark snow.
What does he want from me?
Rape seems unlikely; everyone knows Prince Aemond’s deviancies do not run in that direction. He is cold, hateful, dispassionate, made of stone. He does not lust for anything but power and retribution, fire and blood.
To kill me?
But why not do it here, now? There is a sword hanging from his belt, a dagger in one fist. There is no reason to wait.
To take me prisoner? To feed me to his dragon? To torture me for information?
Surely there are more knowledgeable people around to torture. What use could you be, a healer, a woman? Unless…
Unless he knows who my father is.
You glance down at the fabric band looped around the upper half of your right arm, the only mark you wear of your house, stark white banner, skittering red crabs. It is soaked through with blood. It is unreadable.
Someone is shrieking, but not like a dying man. He has too much fight in him for that, too much glass-clear agony, unwanted blistering consciousness. He screams like someone being flayed, gutted, burned alive. You’ve only ever heard this sound once before. You choke on the greasy, putrid, metallic sweetness of scorched human flesh as it sears down your throat, not knowing if it is real or remembered.
There is a tent in the midst of the pine trees, fluttering canvas that’s green like emeralds or jade. The wind is picking up; you will need to evacuate soon. The cinders will spread and the forest will blaze. Somewhere a dragon is roaring, wounded and mournful like the cry of a lost child. The screams of the man grow louder; they fill your skull like a fever, scalding and senseless and red. Aemond yanks the tent flap aside and pulls you in. And when you breathe it is nothing but the sickening miasma of burnt flesh, coppery blood, suffering, sweat, ruin.
He’s writhing on a wooden table, the man the Greens call king. It has to be him: white-blond hair down to his shoulders, blue eyes and fine aristocratic bones. Two ancient, shaky-handed maesters—hastily commandeered from the defeated House Staunton, you assume—confer nearby, clutching glass bottles of milk of the poppy. A man in armor is cutting tatters of clothing from the so-called king. When he lifts the fabric away, skin sloughs off with it. Aegon wails, struggles, begs him to stop. Aemond goes to his brother and carves away scraps of melted leather and charred cotton with the swift blade of his dagger.
“Shh, shh, don’t fight us, we’re trying to help—”
“Aemond, let me die,” the burned man rasps. He is trembling violently, he is half-mad with pain. Meleys’ flames claimed a swath of his right cheek, his neck and chest and back, his arms down to his wrists, his belly to the crests of his hip bones. “Please. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want it to hurt anymore. Don’t try to help me. Just let me die.”
Aemond looks back at you. “Can you treat this?”
He thinks I’m a Green, you realize with panic, with relief, with terror. And of course he would: you had wandered into the Greens’ side of the battlefield and therefore did not surrender or flee or die with the other Blacks, you were tending to a Green soldier when he found you. Aemond the Kinslayer would not comprehend the notion of service to humankind without a line drawn down the middle of it, of uncategorical compassion.
“Can you help him or not?!” Aemond shouts; and you know that he is not just afraid but shattering, spider-leg cracks inching across a window or a mirror. Perhaps the Greens have souls after all.
You shed your paralysis like daylight erases the stars and approach to examine the so-called king. You do not touch him; still, he whimpers, sobs, quakes like waves in a storm. “He needs more milk of the poppy. A lot more of it.”
“Yes,” Aegon agrees immediately. His streaming eyes—a bleak, murky blue like the sea off Claw Isle—list to you, agonized and grateful.
The maesters gape. “More could kill him,” one says. And they are petrified of being blamed for it. They are plagued by visions of Aemond hacking off their heads and displaying them on spikes above the stone walls of captured Rook’s Rest.
“No drawbacks at all then?” Aegon manages between moans.
“If his pain does not abate, he will die of shock,” you say. “He must be unconscious.”
“Knock me out,” Aegon pleads, pawing at Aemond. “Tell them, tell them.”
Aemond looks to the man in armor: dark-haired, olive-skinned, Dornish. Sir Criston Cole, you realize. The Hand of the King. The Kingmaker. After a moment, Criston nods. “Do it now,” Aemond orders the maesters.
Grimacing, grim, they pour the opalescent liquid into Aegon’s mouth. He gulps it down as quickly as he can. “Enough,” you tell the maesters. Instinctively, you reach out to comfort Aegon: a palm rested lightly on his forehead, fingers threaded through silvery hair that’s filthy with soot and blood. You should hate him, but you don’t. When you look at the Greens’ broken king, you cannot see a murderer, a usurper, a depraved hedonist, a consumer of innocence. You can only see a man worn threadbare by ill-advised bravery.
“Hello, angel,” Aegon murmurs as he gazes up at you, a ghost of a smile on his lips. His eyes really do remind you of home: ocean currents like iron, fog like flint. “Welcome to the end of the world.” And then he’s out, extinguished, eclipsed.
Servants bustle into the tent carrying heavy buckets. “What is that?” you ask.
“Pork lard,” one of the maesters says. “For his wounds.”
“No, no, no, some of these burns are nearly down to the muscle. They’re too deep, too fresh. Lard is for later, to help with scarring, although olive oil or rose oil would be better. He needs to be cleaned with vinegar diluted with water. Or red wine, if that’s all that can be found.”
“Vinegar?!” one of the maesters exclaims.
“It helps prevent infection. Nobody knows why.”
The same maester turns to Aemond, imploring him. “My prince, I can assure you, the Citadel recommends pork lard or cow dung as topical cures, or both used alternatingly. There are also reports of cases where frogs have been helpful, warmed in oil and then rubbed on the affected area.”
Criston blinks. “I’m sorry, you do what with the frogs…?!”
They’re going to kill him, you think. Not with malice, but with stupidity. A wasted life, a wasted death. You demand of the maester: “When was the last time you treated burns this severe?”
He glowers at you, sharp dark eyes like flecks of onyx in a nest of wrinkles. And you know you’ve won when he replies: “When have you?”
“My brother was burned in a housefire started by an upturned lantern. It was five years ago, but I remember the direness his injuries. And what was done to save him.”
Silence in this tent the color of summer: green grass, unsinged trees. Aemond waits for the maesters to produce some astute rebuttal. When they cannot, he orders the servants: “Vinegar, water, rags. Now.” They dash off to oblige him, wide-eyed and quivering like small dogs. Then Aemond looks to you. “What next?”
“His wounds should be treated with honey and then bandaged. The dressings must be changed frequently, at least once per day. He must be repositioned so the scar tissue does not immobilize his joints. He will suffer, it cannot be avoided, but he should suffer as little as possible. Listen to him when he says the pain is too much. Let him sleep. When he is awake, he must drink plenty of fluids. He is losing water through his burns, and it must be replaced. Milk is preferable. Tea and fruit juices are good as well. Some wine is acceptable if that’s what he likes best.”
“And it certainly is,” Criston mutters. You’ve heard the same: that the Greens’ king is a drunk, an adulterer, a coward, a ghoul. You cannot speak to any of this. You know him only as someone who is horrifically pained and sick to death of fighting. Again, without thinking, you comb your fingertips distractedly through his hair as he lies unconscious on the table, bleeding from everywhere. He’s so young, so breakable, so unlike the monster you’ve been led to believe he is.
“Get honey and bandages,” Aemond tells the maesters. They depart, casting each other incredulous glances: Are these our new overlords? Men who heed the wisdom of impetuous young women filthy with blood and earth?
“I’ve heard salt can be helpful for wounds,” Aemond says. “They used it on me when…” He gestures to his eyepatch, to his scar. Lucerys Velaryon took that part of him in self-defense; at least, that is what you have always been told. But you’ve read enough to know that for every event, there are at least two stories. Whatever the truth is, Luke paid for that eye. He paid, Rhaenyra paid, the world continues to pay the price over and over again.
“Because it dries. It absorbs moisture.” You skim your palm over Aegon’s forehead, without lines of fear or anguish as he sleeps. There is a ring on his left hand, a gold dragon with glinting dots of jade for eyes. You twist off the ring so it will not hinder circulation as his fingers swell and give it to Aemond. “But burns weep as they heal. They need to be wet. If they get too dry, they will crack open and fester.”
“Is that what happened to your brother?” Aemond asks.
“Where we did not pay enough attention. The backs of his knees, the soles of his feet.”
“But he survived.”
“Yes,” you tell Aemond; and you can see how desperately he is searching for hope in your face, your words. “He did.”
The servants return with buckets of water, handfuls of rags, glass bottles of vinegar that is cloudy and rust-colored.
“What’s it made from?” you say.
“Fermented a-a-apples, my lady,” one of the boys sputters. He watches Aemond out of the corner of his eye like sheep look for the shadows of wolves. He shivers, he sweats. This boy, who last night was fetching meat and mead for Lord Staunton, has heard the same stories you have: the degenerate king, his murderous brother.
“That’s fine then.” You haul over one of the water buckets and Criston helps you lift it up onto the table. You empty half a bottle of vinegar into the water, mix it by wobbling the bucket back and forth, and then soak a rag in the pungent liquid. “You can help,” you tell Aemond and Criston. “Dip a rag in the bucket, wring it out, then press it to his wounds. Remove any dirt or scraps of fabric. But don’t rub. Try not to damage the skin he has left.” You demonstrate: dabbing at flesh that is torn and bloody and blistered, a black-and-ruby wasteland that at best will leave him irreparably scarred and at worst will swallow his life like ships sink in storms.
Tentatively—with hands at ease with killing but not tenderness—Aemond and Criston join you, studying your movements and imitating them with great care. There is a sniffle, a teardrop that falls onto Aegon’s filthy but unburned left hand and glistens there like a splinter of glass; you are alarmed to see that the Kingmaker is weeping.
“Criston,” Aemond says gently. “We are doing everything we can for him.”
“Since the day he was born, I promised…”
“I know.”
“Your mother…”
“I know,” Aemond says again, and you think: The Greens aren’t demons, they aren’t savages. They’re just patchworks of memory and flesh and suffering, the same as any of us. “He will live. And his sacrifice won us a victory today.”
As you tended to wounded men caked with blood and pine needles, you saw them tangled above in the overcast sky, scales of scarlet and gold and an ancient muddy viridescence. There were flames and shouts, and then all three dragons hurdled towards the earth and out of view. “The Red Queen?” you ask Aemond, mindful to keep your voice perfectly level.
“Dead,” he says: dark satisfaction, fearsome pride. “And so is her rider.”
“The gods are good.” You are amazed at how easily it slips out, a reflex of self-preservation while your mind is elsewhere. Does my father know yet? Does Rhaenyra, does Daemon, does Corlys? People will be searching for you soon. If you do not appear from the smoke and chaos of the battlefield, your eldest brother Clement will come looking with his sword in hand. Everett, scarred and unagile but clever, will be pouring over maps to see where you might have ended up.
There is no suspicion in Aemond’s face when he glances over at you. He is gingerly cleaning soot and charred strips of ruined skin from Aegon’s chest, which rises and falls in deep, slow breaths. “Which family is yours?”
House Celtigar, but you can’t tell him that. You scramble for a noble family of the Crownlands whose accent you share, whose history you have been taught, whose men fight for the Greens but are not so distinguished that Aemond will know them well. “House Thorne.”
He nods. “Are you one of Sir Rickard’s sisters?”
You startle. Perhaps you have chosen the wrong disguise. “Far less illustrious than that. Just a cousin.”
The two maesters return, their archaic hands piled high with linen bandages and glass jars of honey, a fiery gold like sunset. “Set them down over there,” Aemond orders, pointing. He has a presence, it cannot be denied. He is tall, fierce, swift yet calculated. He moves like a man who has killed once, twice, again until it is no longer something that keeps him awake at night. It is something that has become a part of him like arteries or bones. “Prepare a room in the castle.”
“For Prince Aegon?” one of the maesters says, then quickly corrects himself. “I mean, for the king?”
“For until we decide what to do with him.” Aemond stares at Criston. Criston stares back, his dark eyes huge and shiny. There is a war to be waged, but Aegon will not be able to help them. Not for months, at least. Not ever, if he dies. The maesters disappear again, grumbling to each other. Unwelcome tasks, unwelcome guests.
Rhaenys is dead, you think as you work. It doesn’t feel real. Meleys is dead. Hundreds of Black soldiers are dead. Rook’s Rest is the Greens’ greatest victory yet, and one they desperately needed. This war is nowhere near over. And the betting odds keep changing.
You say to Aemond and Criston: “Help me turn him. We must clean the burns on his back as well.”
They listen, they obey, they help you because helping you means helping Aegon. When he is washed as well as he can be, you spread a thin sheen of shimmering honey over his wounds—an amber river that will trap moisture and discourage inflammation—and wrap him in bandages. The only burn you leave uncovered is the one on his right cheek. It creeps up over his pale face like red tentacles, curling and grasping, hungry, insatiable. They match now, you think. Two brothers, two scars.
Criston assembles a group of Green soldiers and Aegon is carried in a litter to the castle that serves as the seat of House Staunton, once allies of Rhaenyra, now traitors, now dead men walking. Outside rain has begun to fall, putting out flames born from dragonfire. The pine forest is saved; wounded men lie in the dirt with their mouths open hoping to quench their thirst. By the time Aegon is placed in an opulent bedroom with a view of Blackwater Bay, he has already bled through his bandages. You clean him again, bandage him, dribble milk of the poppy down his throat when he begins to stir and whimper. Aemond gives you command of a makeshift fleet of caretakers: the two requisitioned maesters, three maids, servants to bring food, drink, bandages, wood for the crackling fireplace.
My family is searching for me, you know as you battle to save their enemy’s life, this maybe-king with silver hair and eyes like deep water.And then: I cannot leave him. Not now, not yet.
In the night, as cool rain patters against the ocean and Aemond and Criston are slaughtering House Staunton men down in the castle courtyard, you dose Aegon with milk of the poppy every few hours. The maesters refuse to take responsibility for it; if the king is poisoned, it will be you who swings from a rope for it. You hold cloths dripping with cold water to his forehead. You feed him nibbles of bread and venison when he is conscious enough to eat, cinnamon tea, pomegranate juice, goat milk. You inspect him for any signs of infection. You braid a small lock of his hair before you’ve stopped to consider why you’re doing it.
And when no one else is watching, you untie the bloodstained armband of your own house and burn it to ashes in the fire.
~~~~~~~~~~
Someone is jostling you, grabbing at you. You fell into an exhausted, sporadic sleep in the next room long after midnight. It’s morning now; warm sunlight blooms like flowers on your face, yellow roses and buttercups and daffodils. When your eyes open, they are sore and unfocused. Aemond is a blur of white hair and black leather. He is tugging on you again, his lithe fingers like a vice around your forearm.
“Stop it, get off me!” You shove him away. He waits, bemused. “You can’t keep dragging me around like this!”
“Why not?”
Because my father is one of the wealthiest men in the Seven Kingdoms. Because I may not have silver hair or a dragon, but if you cut me open the blood of Old Valyria would spill out like red waves. Because the man I am pledged to marry is good at killing, very good at killing, maybe even better than you. “Because I’m a noblewoman. I’m a lady.”
“You don’t act like one,” Aemond counters. “Ladies flee from blood and gore. Ladies are nowhere to be found on battlefields.”
“I like being useful.”
“Then I have brought you a gift. You are needed now. Aegon is asking for you.” And then, when you hurry out of bed, finding your footing on chilly wood floors: “Well, that certainly got you moving quickly.”
“He’s in pain?”
“Not especially, from what I can tell. I think he just wants you.” Aemond glides out of the bedroom. You follow him to Aegon’s chamber. The Greens’ king is propped up in bed on a great mass of pillows, bandaged, limp, eyes glazed and barely open. There are men huddled around him. You recognize Criston, though not the other ones, some old and some young and all in armor. You hope that none of them are Sir Rickard Thorne.
You feel Aegon’s forehead for fever. To your relief, he is no more than modestly warm. He catches your hand, holds it tightly, doesn’t let go. After a moment’s hesitation, you sit down beside him on the edge of the bed. There is a curl of his lips, just a whisper of a smile, just a phantom of one. Aemond glances at you and Aegon with mild interest, then turns his attention to Criston.
“Aegon,” Criston informs the king, patiently, like a good father would. “We have to move you back to King’s Landing.”
“No,” Aegon says. His voice is so low and weak that he’s difficult to hear.
“Your recovery will be long and arduous,” Criston explains. “Aemond and I will be needed in combat. We cannot stay to guard you. The Blacks may try to retake Rook’s Rest. You staying here is not an option. King’s Landing is safer. It is well-supplied, it is protected. And we have our own maesters there who will help tend to you.”
“Can’t leave,” Aegon croaks. “Sunfyre.”
“Aegon—”
“I can’t leave without Sunfyre,” he forces out with immense effort. Then he gasps and moans, tears pooling in his eyes. You offer him milk of the poppy; he guzzles as much as you’ll allow him to have.
Criston sighs. “You can’t stay. And Sunfyre can’t leave. One of his wings was nearly ripped off, he’ll never fly again. We have no way to transport him, he’s too heavy.”
One of the armored men mutters: “And that’s assuming he wouldn’t incinerate anyone who ventured close enough to try.”
“Where is he now?” Aemond asks the man.
“Down on the beach, my prince. Eating dead soldiers.”
Criston shudders. Working in close proximity to dragons has not given him a liking for them.
“Can’t leave him here,” Aegon whispers, shaking his head.
“You must,” Aemond says.
“What if it was Vhagar?”
“I’d leave her. I’d have no choice.”
Aegon frowns, squeezing his eyes shut. It’s all too much for him. “Not the same.”
No, perhaps not; Aemond’s dragon may be the largest and most lethal in the world, but Aegon’s bond with Sunfyre is said to be what legends are built of, words written in ink and stone. You watch the agonized confliction on Aegon’s drawn face: can’t leave, can’t stay, can’t fight, can’t run. You say softly: “Could Sunfyre be assigned a detachment of guards?”
Aemond looks at you as if just remembering you’re here. “What?”
“Men could be tasked with ensuring the dragon is secure and fed. From a safe distance, of course. They could report on his health. Then perhaps when he is stronger, he can be reunited with the king.” The king. Again, it stuns you how easily the treason rolls out, like waves bubbling over rocks and sand.
Aemond turns to Criston. “Could it be done?”
“I don’t foresee many men volunteering for the task. But it could be done, yes. Sure.”
Aemond asks his brother: “Would that make a difference?”
Aegon’s eyes drift to you. They are churning with sluggish, clunky thoughts, heavy burdens to bear on raw shoulders. The braid that you wove absentmindedly into his hair is still there. “Alright,” Aegon agrees at last. “I’ll go.”
“Good,” Aemond says. “We leave at dawn tomorrow.” Then he looks to you. “You will come south with us.” His tone invites no argument. He doesn’t even conceive of it as a possibility. Why would you refuse? Why would you, a purportedly devout Green, shy away from the opportunity to nurse your king back to health? You bow your head in compliance. You wonder what is being discussed in the Black Council; you wonder what your father is thinking, what Everett believes happened to you.
“But I have to see him first,” Aegon says.
Aemond does not understand. “See who?”
“Sunfyre.”
“But you can’t walk to the beach,” Criston says. “You can’t walk anywhere.”
Aegon grins, showing his teeth. His dazed, deep blue eyes glitter mischieviously. His hand has not disentangled itself from yours. “Then carry me.”
The deal is struck, like a face minted onto a coin or a bolt of lightning meeting the earth. Soldiers transport Aegon down to the stony, mist-sopped shoreline. Blade-sharp agony is flooding back into his face, but he refuses more milk of the poppy. He wants to be awake when he gets there. He wants to be himself.
The soldiers cannot get too close to Sunfyre; no one besides Aegon can. He is helped off the litter and then tries to amble across the wet, grey sand. After a few steps he collapses. You rush to him, dodging Aemond and Criston’s grasps as they try to stop you.
“No,” Aegon says when you attempt to help him to his feet. He is panting from the pain, his face flushed with torment and exertion. His white-blond hair whips in the wind. “Do not follow me. Not even if I pass out, not even if I’m dead. I don’t know what Sunfyre would do to you.” And then he crawls forward alone on his hands and knees.
Waves crash, spraying saltwater into the air. Crabs scuttle over rocks. Gulls swoop low to claim mouthfuls of flesh from bloated corpses in worthless uniforms. The dragon known as Sunfyre the Golden is curled up on the beach. Many of his metallic scales are singed; the pink membranes of his wings are tattered like lace. His right wing hangs at a ruinously odd angle. You would know how to set that if he was a human. And you could do it without the threat of being reduced to ash and history.
Sunfyre unravels as Aegon nears him, long angular face rising, frayed wings settling by his sides. You have seen dragons before, of course—Syrax, Caraxes, Arrax, Vermax, Meleys—though never from this close. They horrify you. You cannot look at them without thinking of the devastation they sow like a plague, of how they so unmistakably no longer belong in this world.
Sunfyre’s head stretches out towards his rider, a half-dead man kneeling in wet sand and wearing only bandages and loose cotton trousers. Beside you, Sir Criston Cole sucks in a noisy, nervous breath. Aemond watches Aegon, his face like stone. His hair hangs in long, damp waves.
Aegon embraces Sunfyre, clinging to him, resting his face against the dragon’s. They stay like that for what feels like a very long time. Then Aegon crawls back to you, sobbing with pain by the time he is lifted into the litter. You give him milk of the poppy and he accepts it eagerly. He is unconscious again within seconds. Down the beach, Sunfyre looses a soft desolate cry like a plea: Don’t go. Don’t leave me. You might never come back.
~~~~~~~~~~
The drivers have been instructed to proceed slowly and with caution; still, the carriage pitches and jolts as you traverse the Rosby Road towards King’s Landing. In addition to the caravan’s most precious cargo—the Greens’ fragile and intermittently sentient king—it transports also two severed heads: Lord Simon Staunton’s in a basket, and Meleys’ in the bed of a mule-drawn wagon. High above in slate-grey clouds, Aemond and Vhagar are safeguarding your progress. Criston rides on a monstrous warhorse just outside the carriage. You are leafing through a book that you found in the castle library at Rook’s Rest: anatomy, surgery, sicknesses and cures. Aegon is bandaged and heavily medicated in the cushioned seat across from you. While servants flit in and out frequently, you are the only passengers in the carriage at the moment. You do not know that Aegon is awake until he speaks.
“Sinful,” he says. His voice is groggy, only half-here. He is gazing blearily at the illustration on the open pages of your book: a quite detailed naked man, his arteries and veins mapped like the roads of Westeros, his cock bare and sizeable.
“It’s informative,” you reply in your own defense, smiling.
“My father would have hit me for looking at something like that. If he’d noticed.” Aegon smirks, resting his head against the back of his velvet seat. His hair has been scrubbed and rinsed by servants, the braid you made for him undone. “He probably wouldn’t have noticed.”
“Mine has a great love for all books.” Bartimos Celtigar is eternally turning pages: computations, records, revenue. He does not just sit on Rhaenyra’s council. He is her Master of Coin. He funds her war effort, he fuels her like wood to a fire. “Besides, I have seen naked men in person. No book can scandalize me now.”
A little twitch of his silvery eyebrows: fascination, amusement. “He does not lose sleep over your spent innocence?”
“He has other things on his mind presently.”
“Like what?”
Like helping Rhaenyra win the war. You find a different truth to tell him. “Some men consider one daughter to be too many. My father has four. His attention is thoroughly divided.”
“He doesn’t like you?”
“He likes me plenty. He just doesn’t need me.”
Aegon nods. His eyes travel over you slowly and meditatively, not leering but learning, memorizing slopes and angles, taking you in like he’s never been able to before. He is in the brief lull between doses of milk of the poppy: lucid enough to speak but not so much that he can feel the full extent of his injuries. “Are you married?”
This is a bit of a fraught subject. “I am betrothed.”
“Oh,” he says, with what might be disappointment. “And he wouldn’t rather have you home right now? Putting all that knowledge of male anatomy to good use? That’s difficult to believe.”
You peer evasively down at your book. “He has a role to play in the war. I’ve been given permission to serve in my own way until it is over.”
“Permission,” Aegon echoes. He finds this interesting. He studies you for a while before he asks, his voice gentle: “What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He’s honorable, he’s brave. He’s marvelously formidable. He could carry you around like a sack of potatoes.”
Aegon chuckles, a slow reflective laugh, curiosity, intrigue, something to think about besides the fact that he’s missing half his skin. “Do you fear marriage?”
What is the answer to that question? Do you even know yourself? “I fear being possessed. And having no remedy if the circumstances are not to my liking.”
“You can’t get one of your three superfluous sisters to marry him instead?”
You smile faintly. “No, we’ve met. He chose me, he favored me. I’m not sure why.”
“Probably because you’ve read all there is to know about cocks.” Aegon grins, drowsy and crooked and playful. “Who is he?”
“Just a man,” you say. You can’t tell Aegon more than that. It would give your Black affiliations away.
You are betrothed to the Warden of the North, Lord Cregan Stark.
Maggie, did you really decide to bring a little bit of joy to sunday evenings again?? Its been a while since NTTF and this is surely a treat! glad to have you back on this side!
Lamps glazed in rainbow glass were once a Dornish invention (a phrase oft spoken with a slight curl to the lip and a sycophantic scoff).
It is customary to both scoff at, and crave the Dornish. The kingdom that is still not theirs. It is an elusive predator disguised as prey. Bring the subject of Dorne up at dinner parties, and watch the air shimmer with heat and frustrated debates.
No one likes Dorne. Everyone wants Dorne.
Besides, the lamps were an Amara invention. But before she carved a name for herself at court, she was turned into a representation of her "mad" countrymen, this slip of a girl with light brown skin and dark eyes and a laugh that could drive even the gods into a frenzy. When she presented her rainbow lamp to the king, her lips painted red and her eyes in blue, with the intention to look as insane as possible, everyone muttered: a Dornish invention, pah!
And then Aegon liked the lamp.
He ordered for a hundred more to be made and laid out in the throne room on cold nights to soften the looming harshness of his ancestors' statues.
Suddenly, all the courtiers were fawning over the Dornish invention. Amara, with the king's permission, got to open her own little workshop in King's Landing, where a few artisans learned the craft and proceeded to meet the high demand with replications of her original. That one was kept at Aegon's bedside.
She only frequented the workshop a month or two before the visits were stopped. Aegon would not abide her attention to be anywhere but on him. The jester had her little stool at the foot of the Iron Throne. She squatted on the edge of his marble bath and told him stupid things she'd seen his courtiers do and say. She even spread the rumour that she wiped the king's royal arse when he was too lazy to do it himself. Half the things she says are to amuse herself. It always seems to startle her when others find her funny. A jester, of all things.
But the jokes were all a campaign. Becoming invaluable to the King of the Seven Kingdoms is no easy task, not if the king is surly and cruel. Viserys was an easy master to fool. Aegon will listen, and listen, and listen and then his anger will thunder like the storms that rage over his wife's childhood home. He only listens so that he might destroy the victim of his dislike with cruel jabs to their pride. If that doesn't work, an execution always does.
Just last week, a minor lord saw his castle snatched away, his wife sold to a brothel, and his children let loose into the woods to fend for themselves. The insult was apparently committed whilst Aegon was drunk. When he became sober, he did not want to admit he didn't remember what the man had done. All he knew was that he had ordered the punishment and so he stuck to it.
Amara had begged for leniency. That discussion hadn't gone well.
She is sitting in a corner of the banquet hall now, scratching drawings onto the wall with a soft-ended piece of coal. Her dress is dirty from wandering the grounds all day, and her hair streams down her back, long and black and free. No one questions her attire anymore. Aegon likes her to appear just as she is.
He watches her rub at some dirt on her cheek, and smiles when it is replaced by a smudge of coal. He looks to the right to see his mother staring at him.
"Doesn't she remind you of Helaena?" he grins. "Mad little girl wandering the corridors with a glazed look in her eye."
As is usual, when the king speaks, ears are perked, even if people don't turn their heads deliberately in his direction. Alicent glances about, fully aware of this, and smiles, a dimple pushed in deep.
"Your Grace, would it not suit you to summon your sister back to court?"
"Helaena is happy where she is."
"She is without her family - "
Aegon's smile wilts. "She should have thought of that when she refused to marry. Threatening to bite your future husband's cock off on your wedding night is hardly royal behaviour. She is exactly where she should be. A tower with a heavy padlock. Do not fear, mother. The septas say she is coming along nicely. They might even restore her sanity by the next full moon."
At his left, Cassandra inhales, sharp and long. Aegon turns to observe her as if he has never seen her before. His hand reaches out and she recoils. He laughs, sensing the discomfort of those around them at bearing witness to this uncomfortable domestic affair. She never recoils when his head is between her legs, but then, he is certain she pictures him as someone else. He does not blame her. He does the same thing.
"Don't worry," he drawls. "I was only checking."
"For what?" she snaps.
"That you could still breathe through those pinched nostrils that run in your family. As pinched as the state of your Baratheon arseholes."
Alicent mutters a prayer for patience, and ducks her head down for a moment. When she lifts it, she immediately strikes up a merry conversation with Lady Rosby, and the hapless woman is forced to play along.
Cassandra grabs her cup of wine - half of it spilling over - snaps her fingers at the maid to bring along her favourite cat and storms from the room as the guests get up to bow. Aegon stands too, and they rise again. He pretends to sit back down. They lower. He gets back up. They rise. It is a game he could play forever.
But the look on Alicent's face is not to be trifled with. She has finally learned how best to discipline him, even now that he is fully a man and no longer the boy she once slapped around. She comes to his room each night and recites from the Seven Pointed Star as he tries to sleep. Just sits in the corner and mutters, until he begs her to leave and apologises for whatever wrong she has decided to punish him for.
"Sit back down, you cunts," he mutters, accepting the cane from his chamberlain.
It has rained all day. The leg always acts up on rainy days. Half his face is still disfigured from the battle of Rook's Rest, but it is improving. Alicent swears it is her prayers that have done it. Cassandra gives her own maester the credit. Aegon thinks it was Amara's odd-smelling salve that she pulled out one day and told him was made of dog turds and pig urine. She says the wildest things with the straightest of faces.
"Come," he tells her, poking her with the cane where she is seated in a squat.
"I'm not your dog to summon," she retorts.
"Yes you are. Come on, little doggie." He jabs her with the cane again, delighting in the way she squirms. The place of a jester at court is an odd one. On the one hand, they can say what everyone is thinking but no one would dare say. And on the other, they are victim to the royal whim in a way most courtiers are not.
But it appears she is less jester tonight, and more whatever creature she used to be before she spirited herself into his presence. She grabs the cane and shoves it, throwing him off balance. A collective gasp rings out. Two guards catch him just in time before he hits the floor. The third flies at her with a raised fist.
"Don't you dare!" Aegon roars.
The man stops in his tracks, and Amara straightens, the coal dropping from her hand. She seems unsure, both of what she has done, and the king's reaction.
Aegon jerks his head at her to indicate she is to come with him and any further protest from her will have her tongue cut out. She is good at reading his non-verbal gestures now. She does not need to be told when his playfulness has ebbed away to reveal the anger and violence he cradles to his chest like a newborn babe.
"Forgive me," she says, the moment they are alone and he has dismissed the kingsguard (they obey reluctantly, eyeing her with mistrust).
Aegon says nothing, cane striking the stone floors as they move through the colonnaded walkway, a rainbow lamp set between each column. The light dances over her skin as she moves a few steps before him, too light on her feet to ever slow her pace for him as devotedly as Alicent or Cassandra would.
He is moving slow on purpose . There was a time when he could barely hobble down a corridor without feeling his body scream in protest. These days, he feels his age again, five and twenty, no longer the burnt corpse struggling to open his eyes as Sunfyre shrieked and raged from the highest tower of the Red Keep. Dragons recover faster than men.
"You are not sorry. Do not insult me with your false apologies," he says.
"You are right. I am not sorry. And you are drunk as a skunk. Two things can be true at the same time."
He hates that he wants to laugh. He keeps it held inside. Amara eyes him, almost anxious, as if she was waiting for him to at least chuckle. He gets a perverse satisfaction out of seeing her face fall. Aegon is never content with allowing himself to have favourites. He must always knock them down a peg or two to ensure they never cross their limit. He does not wish to be like his father, weak-willed with a soft spine, letting anyone guide his intentions.
"Someone called me a Dornish dog the other day," she admits. "So when you poked me with your stick, it brought back the memory."
Aegon stills. "Who?"
"It does not matter - "
"Who?" The anger in his skull is painting his vision red.
She purses her lips. "It is a woman. And I will not have you known for torturing silly little women who have only known the four walls of a castle all their lives. Her existence is miserable anyway. She has a husband who loathes her, and he tortures her every night to force her to get pregnant. I don't care if she calls me a dog. I spat in her face and it was done. I won't let you hurt her."
The description of the accused's personal life does nothing to quell his fury. He makes a mental note to ask Larys later. That strange little man knows everything that is said and done within these walls - he will have heard of the incident.
Amara's entire demeanour suddenly changes as she swoops forward, flitting like a butterfly. Taking his arm, she skips on the spot, encouraging him to walk faster. "Come on, old man! Get moving!"
"You're only a year younger than me, wench."
"Ah, but I will look young for years. You, on the other hand, will grow shrivelled as a prune, and I will kiss your prune-like face, and remind you of the days when you were handsome and young and insisted on hobbling around like an old man! I know you can walk, Aegon. You're just being dramatic."
She takes the cane before he can stop her, and runs out into the middle of the open courtyard, lunging and spinning with it as if it is a blade. The clouds disperse over her head, revealing a veil of stars spread across the face of the night. She makes eye contact with the king and wiggles her hips.
"Off with your head," he says, no conviction in the words.
She is right. He can walk just fine, no pain. The wine must have fooled him into thinking his leg was bothering him again. There is no accounting for what his body becomes when his veins are clogged with Arbor Red.
"Off with your cock," she counters.
"Off with your mermaid hair."
"Off with your tongue."
"Off with your legs."
"Off with your fingers!"
"Why are you listing all the parts of me that might give you pleasure?"
His question throws her off. Just a split second, a heartbeat. And then her face cracks into a delighted grin. "You're always thinking about fucking me, aren't you? Pervy old man."
"You?" He sneers, making a show of looking her up and down. He has to fight to keep the appreciation off his face. All the women in the banquet hall are primped and curled and pinched and rouged within an inch of their lives, and he can't stop looking at the way her muddy skirts falls down over her hips. "Look at the state of you, you wretched creature."
"I am exquisite!" she cheers, whirling round and round, her hair flying like ribbons cut loose in the wind.
"You are mad," he tells her.
She slows down, breathless, and wanders back to offer him his cane. Aegon startles her by grabbing it at both ends and lifting it over her head and down against her back, trapping her against him. Old man indeed.
But Amara is not phased. She does not blush and stutter. She doesn't even blink. It upsets him, as much as it soothes. He cannot make her heart race, but neither does he frighten her.
"Perhaps I am truly mad," she concedes, big brown eyes savouring every detail of his face as if she is hunting for a truth he doesn't know he possesses. "Perhaps I have Targaryen blood. People here think it's just the Uller in me. But some nights..."
Her expression becomes pensive, and Aegon realises he is hardly breathing as he waits for her to finish her sentence.
"...it feels as if there is a fire within me, waiting to ravage me whole. And nothing can put it out. Nothing except - "
Amara looks up at him again - gods, those long, dark lashes - and he isn't breathing this time. He is sure of it. His head feels light. A small hand, gentle as a dove's virgin feather, trembles against his chest as she leans up to bring their faces close. He can smell the sweat on her, the mud, the dirt, the petrichor, the jasmine oil she dabs behind her ears. She smells like a child of the forest, hair tangled, fingernails dirty. He wants to open his jaw as wide as Sunfyre does and swallow her whole.
" - making a fool out of a king."
She bites at the thin air an inch from his nose and bursts into a wild cackle, ducking under the cane and back to freedom before he can stop her. She sings a lewd ditty she no doubt picked up in one of the Flea Bottom taverns, and runs at the walls, trying to gain enough momentum to somersault in the air and land on her feet.
"He wants to open his jaw as wide as Sunfyre does and swallow her whole."
the first thing i'm curious about is if amara is actually half mad here or just remarkably smart. it takes a special kind of brain to be able to use half madness in their favour. to have the courage to taunt to king and trust it will land right and also to accept that people will laugh at her cost and humiliate her to her face and behind her back. it also comes with a special kind of freedom i imagine, for when they all think you're mad, people no longer care for what you do. lets you play outside the rules.
and aegon, funny how this feels like the truest representation of him yet (had he survived the dance). the cruelty, paired with vices and the hunger, completely mercurial. yet very smart and dangerous.
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(it was in my head, okay? and now i'm in love with it)
Not many would have the courage to creep up behind the king. In this respect, jesters are a creature of miracle.
She crawls towards the bed, her bones limber, her movements inhuman. She's positive he doesn't know she's there. He is hunched over, the way he always is after a fight with Cassandra.
Usually, it's about nothing much, but the one time Amara eavesdropped, she heard - well maybe if you tried shooting your fucking seed inside me once in a while - and decided she wasn't going to eavesdrop anymore. She knows all about the king's inclination for wasting the efforts made by his royal ballsac to finish on the backs of his partners. Many a maid has scurried out, dress wrapped oddly to hide the pearly stains twisting down their nubile spines, which meant their front was now vulnerable. Amara felt sorry for them.
And extremely thankful her services in this regard were not required. Besides, she thinks she could never let a cock near her. Funny, ugly little things. They shouldn't be allowed to go inside anyone. Too hideous.
"What are you doing?" Aegon rumbles, without turning.
She stops, knee bent awkwardly by her head. She was about to lunge onto the mattress and pounce. "Checking the royal bedpan, Your Grace."
"Left a giant turd just for you."
"Yes, I see that." And she really can see it. It's right there under the bed. "Gods, what did you eat, Your Grace?"
Aegon giggles. "Fuck off. You think I really left that?"
"It wasn't Sunfyre was it?"
"It was Daeron's poodle. The childhood obsession has developed well into manhood."
Amara straightens from her contorted squat on the floor and whistles so sharp, Aegon hisses and covers his ears. A chamberlain enters, fidgeting with his itchy blue stockings. When he sees the king, he pales and puts his hands behind his back with a stiff bow.
"What happened to you, boy? Caught the crabs?" Aegon snorts.
"No, Your Grace - 'm a virgin, sir, I would never - "
"Never what? You plan on staying a virgin then?"
"No, Your Grace. Just waiting to get married first."
"Pft. Marriage is a farce invented by idiots to bring the wise to heel."
Amara is certain the chamberlain has no idea what he's talking about. She knows the boy's betrothed, a sweet, blonde girl from the kitchens who likes to nibble on cakes. The last time she saw them kissing in a cupboard, she heard him whisper that she shouldn't worry about her weight, because he couldn't even imagine a prettier girl, never mind having seen one. It was the only reason Amara didn't chase him out of the kitchen with a broom (she sent him to fetch her some honeyed tea, but clearly, he was distracted).
Half the servants in the Red Keep do Aegon's bidding as well and as fast as they do because Amara breathes down their necks. A well-fed, well-drunk, happy king is the only way she gets him to laugh at her jokes, and the more he giggles at her jokes, the more invaluable she is. It is a business she runs (in her head) and she won't let anyone ruin it.
"Take the turd out, boy. Stop gawping." Her tone is fierce, but she winks at him when he stoops before the bed. She notices him cast a worried look Aegon's way as he leaves, and then bursts out laughing. "He thought you dropped it."
"Boy looked afraid of it, like it was going to attack him," Aegon cackles.
Good, he's laughing.
Amara bounces onto the bed, knowing the path is safe now, and lands beside him, tilting her head to peek at his features. He is incredibly handsome. Though the way he drinks and eats, he is determined to lose half his looks by thirty. If he even lives that long. Dragon-flying and all. Nasty business. Amara prefers her station on the ground, good and solid.
"Why the glum face, Aegon?" In private, she is allowed to call him Aegon.
He clicks his tongue to indicate it is unimportant. "Tell me about Hellholt again. About that little shop with oddities from around the world. And the coloured glass bottles the man makes by hand, with faerie heads on the stoppers."
Whenever he wants distraction, he always asks her to tell him about Dorne, her native land. And she does. She smooths down the edges of her home, and turns it into a kingly lullaby for him to fall asleep to. She does not tell him about the bad parts. Only the good. And really, when you've been away from home for as long as she has, everything looks good in retrospect.
"Let us make a deal - I'll tell you about Hellholt, but you must first tell me what bothers your kingly head."
Aegon's eyes flash in her direction. "You'll make deals with your king now? You ungodly wench."
He grabs her hair - not too hard - and shoves her off the bed. Amara makes a show of squealing, but lands as graceful as an acrobat, somersaulting a safe distance away. This is familiar territory.
The first time it happened, she hadn't known what to do, was truly afraid for her life. on a whim, she bit back and Aegon was delighted. The dynamic was set.
"Ungodly? Me?" Her voice elevates to a shrill caricature of itself. "The first time I saw your royal arse, you were pounding Mirian in Balerion's skull! Has that dragon not suffered enough headaches in his lifetime?"
Aegon opens his mouth to continue the charade, but he can barely keep the smile away. He has to take a breath to compose himself. And then another breath. One is not enough. Amara is making a very stupid face.
"Sounds like jealousy to me."
"Sounds like delusion to me." She flips over and mimics Mirian's nasally voice pleading for more of the royal cock. Aegon bends over and buries his head in his lap to hide the laughter (she can see his shoulders quivering). Amara flips back the right way, and stabs a finger in his direction. "Harlot."
"Rapscallion."
"Wastrel."
"Witch."
"Halfwit."
"Tart."
"U-surper."
The air in the room turns very, very cold.
Amara lets the word hiss off her tongue like a serpent unwinding from the branch it calls home. The king is no longer smiling.
Aegon moves faster than she anticipates and grabs her hair, right at the base of the braid. This time, it is not gentle when he yanks her to her feet. "What did you say?"
Usurper. The beginning of his reign was plagued by that word like a head filled with lice. There are still factions in the realm that believe he upended his sister's right to the throne and his head is weighed by a false crown. If rumour is to be believed, Aegon went to his coronation crying and snivelling like a little bitch. The thought entertains her. But that Aegon is long dead.
She lets out a nervous giggle, softens her mouth. "Usurper...of my heart, Your Grace. Of the hearts of all your people. It makes me grieve to see you sad. I merely wanted to lighten your spirits."
He searches her face, and she waits, heart balanced on a needle's point. The thing is, Aegon knows she's clever. But Amara banks on the fact he also believes she's half-mad. It's the only thing that keeps her from losing her head to a butcher's axe each time she says things that make him pale before she loosens the noose with laughter.
Yet again, his belief in her madness wins. But he is still angry, and he shoves her away to return to the bed. "Call Mirian. And get out of my sight."
That last sentence means nothing. By the evening, if she truly has hidden herself, he will have the Keep turned upside down with bellows of where is my jester? because the lack of her makes him feel like a limb is missing. He said that to her once when he was drunk. Amara shrugged it off. Or at least she tried. Jesters must treat everything like...well, a jest.
"You know..." she pauses at the door to give him a sly smile over her shoulder. "...wherever your royal seed falls, it is a holy place. The queen should be delighted. She is practically a blessed relic."
Aegon runs his hand over his mouth, but he can't keep the laughter out of his eyes. "I'll turn you holy in a minute."
"Gods forbid! I'm saving myself for marriage, damn you!" Amara cries, and makes a dramatic show of rushing from the room.
"The first time I saw your royal arse, you were pounding Mirian in Balerion's skull! Has that dragon not suffered enough headaches in his lifetime?" - this made me cackle on an otherwise lackluster day. Love these two in any shape, form or universe.
