Work Text:
-Storm's End-
“My lady.”
For the time she had been queen, Storm Queen, she had enjoyed the views of her balcony with authority, with defiance. She had watched each night as the waters of Shipbreaker’s Bay thrashed beneath her reign, mirroring blood that boiled with the rage of the sea gods and the stubbornness of a man who defied them. As a child, her father had barely let her see the view, but the times she had escaped from tutors and maids had been some of the more pleasant memories; the smile that stretched her cheeks as the salt stung her nostrils and the wind whipped at her cheeks, at her hair…
Now her father’s rooms were deemed the lords’ chambers and they belonged to the man who stood by the door.
She turned her head only slightly, capturing the frame of Orys as he stood by the door, only in the corner of her eye, lest it distract her from the only facet of happiness that remained in the keep. Her wrists still stung with the shadow of the chains that bound her, her mouth still heavy with the taste of cotton and her body felt foreign in the looking glass no matter how long she stared at it, but the man’s gaze upon her form burnt worse than the Hells combined.
“Must you stare at me like that?” she snapped, turning her eyes back to the raging sea.
Night had fallen, shrouding her treasured view in blue-black shadows unfairly similar to her husband’s ebony eyes.
“Forgive me,” she heard his voice; tired and breathed in a sigh of what she could read was plain frustration. “I do not wish to make you feel uncomfortable in your own home.”
She wanted to scream, to lift the iron candelabra to her side and send it hurtling at her husband. If Aegon were here, her husband’s beloved brother, she would hold him by the hair of his head and hold him to the embers of the hearth as he writhed and screamed. If his lady-wives were here, oh only if Rhaenys Targaryen were here, she would rain a God’s wrath upon her reign so fierce that dragonfire would extinguish like a candle before bed. For each of her father’s men, she would flog them bloody, parade them down their ugly, bloated, wretched bodies up to the hills of Bronzegate.
“Do you despise me so that you cannot meet my eye?” Orys asked gruffly, yet with the strange touch of tenderness that she had quickly acknowledged as his own for her.
If it was his pity he shed, she would refute him until her dying day.
Mayhaps, instead of wishing for his death, she could have thrown herself from the balcony she adored, down in the swirling currents and the ship breaking rocks. Perhaps the Gods would rage a storm so wild that even Durran would accept defeat and give Elenei back to the sea.
What if, what if.
What if she could stomach the sight of herself without a stitch of clothing or the sight of the very cloak that he had wrapped around her naked shoulders.
“Shall I leave you be?” he asked again when he does not receive a word from her lips.
She clenched her teeth, moronic with rage.
“These are your chambers, my lord,” she whipped around to face him, watching his black gaze study her, “There is no mere woman in Aegon’s realm that can exile you from them.”
She hoped he could see her hands balled into fists, hidden amongst her skirts, like he knew that her eyes thrashed like riptides.
Instead of resuming his pathetic attempt to peep a word out of her, he began to laugh.
“Do you forget what you see in the looking glass my wife?” he smiled, so genuinely she wished the rip the smirk from his lips. “I married no mere woman; I married the fiercest woman the world has ever seen, and I pray to whichever god deems to listen, of my luck.
The fiercest woman would have slit you open, laced your guts around your neck like a noose and hung you from her chamber’s highest beam. For I am just as arrogant as they called my father, there was no cloth in my mouth when I said my vows. I knelt, as cravens do.
“I find no amusement in what I said,” she returned her gaze to the sea, staring at the blackened sky this time.
“Nor I,” she heard him pour wine into a goblet, the sound ripping through her silence. “But from time to time, I must remind myself of the woman I married.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You should sleep my lord, the journey from King’s Landing must have fatigued you.”
She heard the tell-tale sound of him unbuckling his jerkin. She knew of scars that marred his skin, fierce ones that armour could not catch. He was strong, her husband, Aegon’s most prized fighter yet her father had not wanted a soldier.
“I do not like to go,” he said softly. “I prefer days at home, where my blade cannot be soiled with blood.”
Internally, she scoffed, much adept to Orys’ fighting abilities than she was of his diplomatic endeavours.
“You prefer a foreign castle with a wife that scorns you?” she asked, mirth in her voice and enough arrogance to send most men with flying fists.
He sighed, tiredly as she expected. He must have made his journey from the capital with the same tiredness. The thoughts of a wife who would never love him, whose only words that spilt from her lips were uttered just to spite him, like oil to a burn.
“A castle and I wife that I call my own,” he insisted, a smile in his voice. “I never wish to leave—”
“But you will! Always, you will leave with a sword in your hand, you will go to war after war as your king commands. You will leave me fattened and bloated with your child; a son ripped from his Durrandon blood and I shall sit here, in my father’s castle, growing old and bitter when they come back to tell me you have perished in battle.”
She saw a fire grow in him and something lightened in her.
Yes, out comes a bastard's rage.
Orys thumped his fist on the table, sending his weapons into a clutter.
“You are a Storm Queen until the Gods expire Argella! Not some common seamstress.”
Her eyes went fierce; two swirling maelstroms She walked over and lifted her skirts, kicking the chair of her father’s desk flat to the ground.
“I am naught but a woman in chains!” she yelled back, tears suddenly blinding her vision and watched him distil into silence. “A woman in chains that belongs to you and your brother’s boot you kiss like a maiden. The Storm Queen died the day you wrapped your cloak around my shoulders, and thus died my spirit!”
“Oh Gods, Argella,” Orys made the sound of a dying boar from the back of his throat and turned his stance to run a hand down his face. “How much longer must you torment me?”
“Until the Gods expire,” she hissed, panting and red face as the hulk of her dark-haired husband with his dark eyes glared back at her in almost disbelief.
Orys had not laid a finger on her only until she told him was her to duty her, and even then, he was purely hesitant when his touch made her flinch. Their wedding night had been no different, he had only begun to remove her garb when she had told him to. She dared her thoughts not to dwell on the night of unexpected passion, he loved like a man who had loved before, yet it had only meant that when he touched her where she never thought she would let him, she sang like steel.
You slew my father like a pig in the slaughterhouse, what do you expect of my willingness?
But for the duration of their brief marriage, Argella had not raised her voice to be heard against his word as a crack of lightning drowned out many merry a conversation and send children tumbling for their mother’s skirts. Part of her knew that Orys knew it existed, but he seldom got a taste. She had long ago learnt to hinder her fury for her safety, even to martyrs like her husband.
But after a near year had turned, much to her dismay and the credibility of her hatred towards him, Orys behaved like no Targaryen, not a day in their marriage.
She heard him begin his nightly tradition; his sword belt hitting the table and the ritual sound of him placing down his sword somewhere safe. For a warrior, he was so careful with his touch, on her and his belongings, and the thought scared her more than storms scared him.
“Wars he shall send me to, aye, but you,” she heard his boots thud across the room with every careful step. “Are the one I shall return to.”
She felt the warm clasp of his hand on the bone of her shoulder, searing through the thin material of her shift.
She willed herself not to move.
“Even though I imagine you pray to the Seven here to wish for my demise.”
Out of the blue, she let out a smile, one so odd it felt foreign on her lips.
She turned and watched her husband’s slight smile that she learned was reserved for only her, not even his beloved Aegon.
“For the first time you have smiled at one of my jests,” his hand slipped across the other shoulder and held her comfortingly. “And humour is no strength of mine so you might have done my ego a favour.”
“You are mistaken my lord,” she felt her lips raise ever so slightly. “I found no jest in your comment.”
Instead of removing his grip from her as any sane man would have, he begun to chuckle as well.
“There seems to still remain a Storm Queen in my eyes.”
Outside the weather brewed, ugly and ragged where the winds began to howl, and rain whipped. Suddenly a breath of thunder shuddered through the room, hushing the candles silent and bathing the room in darkness.
She felt Orys tense next to her and a few seconds later, he jumped as lightning streaked the night, flooding the royal chambers with crisp white light.
“How much longer will the storm last?”
Argella watched his face as he studied the sea, something like childish curiosity flickering in his black eyes and moonlight dancing against his black hair and his beard. She looked back at the night and let herself smile.
“For as long as the Gods will it.”