Chapter Text
I knew something was wrong the moment I heard Daenerys voice on the line.
She had been in Edinburgh for several months and I was glad that she had finally been able to find some peace in her life, especially after Jon Snow had betrayed her in the worst of ways.
Daenerys always had a poor track record when it came to choosing men. First, there was Drogo who she met in college and had drugged her before sleeping with her. Then there was Daario, a cocky young model who thought he was god’s gift to women.
And then there was Jon.
It all happened so fast between the two of them and even though Daenerys refused to see it, she was heading for disaster the longer she spent around him. There was something in Jon Snow that I took a dislike to instantly. I could never put my finger on it, but something about him just didn’t sit right with me, even though he claimed to love Daenerys and had promised her the world.
Somehow I knew that, even from the very beginning, he was no Prince Charming.
I remember Daenerys calling me in floods of tears as she told me about the magazine article where Sansa Stark had claimed Daenerys’ ideas as her own. It hadn’t just been the betrayal that hurt her, but the thought that Jon could claim to love her yet drop her as soon as she was no longer useful to him.
Daenerys had fallen in love with him. Quickly. Madly. Deeply.
She’d built her life in London and it broke my heart to hear her say that she couldn’t stay in the city a minute longer and that she’d taken on a short-term contract in Edinburgh. I hoped that once she’d taken a break from London and had a chance to think things over, that she would come back down to England and reunite with her friends.
But one contract turned into two and before we knew it, six months had passed, and I realised that the chances of my best friend coming back home were growing slimmer by the day. She sounded, if not happy, certainly less downbeat than she had been the day she left London and I couldn’t argue that she deserved some happiness in her life, especially after all the horrible things she’d been through.
I couldn’t deny that Edinburgh was a beautiful city and one that had a different look and feel to the dirty, busy streets of central London, and when I visited a few weeks ago Daenerys seemed happier and healthier than I’d seen her for a long time.
It was just a shame that it had taken me so long to come and visit. My job was hectic and unpredictable and no matter what we did, it seemed as if fate was determined to stop me from visiting my best friend.
It didn’t mean that I didn’t ring and text her every day though.
We quickly got into a routine where we would text each other in the morning and then call in the evening. Those first few weeks when I had to sit and listen to Daenerys sob were so hard and it took everything in me not to tell my employers to stick their job so that I could hold her in my arms while she cried over the awful hand life had dealt her. As the weeks passed into months, it became clearer that Daenerys was finally starting to settle down in the city that was her new home. Gradually, the sparky, playful Daenerys I knew was slowly coming back to life.
Things were going so well, and I was happy that she seemed brighter than I could remember her being for a long time.
And then the daily text failed to arrive, and it immediately set alarm bells ringing in my mind.
Why hadn’t she called?
Was everything ok?
I sent her three text messages before I finally received a reply, but her response was devoid of any of the usual humour she’d infuse her messages with. At least that text message told me she was still alive.
I tried calling her several times, growling in frustration when she refused to answer. I had almost resolved in my mind to catch the next train to Edinburgh when she finally called me back.
“Missy,” she sobbed down the line and I immediately thought the worst.
“Dany, are you ok?” I said, my breath catching in my throat as I heard her continue to sob. “What is it? Tell me what’s wrong,” I begged her. “Has someone hurt you?”
I could hear her shaking breaths down the line as clearly as if she were sitting next to me.
“No,” she said after what seemed like an age.
I could feel myself start to panic now. I was hundreds of miles away from her, but I ached to wrap my arms around her and draw her close to tell her that everything would be ok, even though I had no clue what had happened to leave her like this.
“Has Jon been in contact with you?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think of that would have put her in such a state.
“No,” she sobbed. “It’s worse.”
I felt my mouth go dry. Had someone drugged her and taken advantage of her again?
“Have you called the police?” I asked, my mind immediately assuming that she’d been assaulted like she had back in college.
“No, Missy,” she said on a hiccupping breath. “I found a lump.”
I hadn’t expected her to say that.
“Where? How?” I asked her, my mind still trying to process what was happening.
“My breast,” Daenerys whispered. “I was in the shower and I felt it - “
I went into full-on protective mode.
“What did the doctors say?”
She hesitated.
“You have been to the doctors, haven’t you?”
Again, her silence spoke volumes.
“Not yet,” she said timidly, fully expecting me to lecture her about it.
“Why not?”
“I’m scared,” she replied. “I’m here all alone and I don’t know anyone. What happens if it is cancer and I end up dying and I’m all on my own?”
She was getting way ahead of herself. That lump might prove to be nothing, and I wanted more than anything to tell her that, but I was no doctor, and neither was she. The best thing, the only thing, she could do was make an appointment with her GP.
“Make the appointment right now,” I told her, knowing that she would need someone to take charge while she was still in a state of shock.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” she replied after a brief silence. “It’ll probably go away on its own.”
“Dany,” I warned her. Burying her head in the sand was not going to make any of this better. “Get it checked out. You need to know for certain.”
I could hear her sobbing on the line once more and this time the tears were coming thick and fast, almost to the point where I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Almost.
Even now, a part of me wishes that I hadn’t heard the words that escaped from her lips.
“I don’t want to be on my own. I’m scared, Missy.”
I kept tabs on Daenerys constantly after that, checking up on her each day to see if the test results had come back and within a week, she was told that the lump in her left breast was malignant and she’d need to have it removed.
“The whole breast?” I asked her, feeling my mouth go dry. She was still so young. It didn’t seem fair that she would lose a huge part of what I knew made her feel like a woman.
“Yeah,” she sobbed. “They said it would give me the best chance of survival.”
I felt the blood pounding in my ears. My best friend was barely thirty, with the best years of her life still ahead of her and now hear she was talking about dying.
It happened way too quickly. It felt like everything was spinning out of control.
“When?” I asked. I’d move heaven and earth to be there for the surgery if I could.
“Thursday,” she sniffed, and I knew that she was trying desperately to keep the tears at bay. I knew how frightened and scared she was, and it was made all the worse for the fact that she was in a strange city on her own.
There was no way that my employer would let me have time off at such short notice. My boss was already unimpressed when I went up to visit Daenerys recently and I was already treading a fine line with her. Daenerys’ surgery was scheduled for the day after tomorrow and even though part of me wanted to tell my boss to stick her job, I wasn’t in the position that I could afford to do so.
Had it just been me, I would have dropped everything and caught the first train to Edinburgh, but my mother was in a nursing home and my father had died several years ago. I didn’t want to leave my mother in some generic, sterile home and so I paid for her to stay at a private one, but that came at a great expense. I knew that if I quit my job, I’d have no choice but to take my mother out of the home where she was settled and place her somewhere much less suited to her needs.
“Dany,” I said as the words died in my throat. She knew what I was going to say before the words had even formed in my mind.
“It’s ok,” she told me. “I’ll be fine on my own. I’m a big girl now.”
But even big girls needed a shoulder to cry on and someone to support them and Dany would have neither. She’d go into hospital to have her breast removed and wake up in a sterile room that wasn’t her own. Then there would be the weeks of chemotherapy to deal with. I’d watched my father slowly waste away from the same disease and it had been hard enough when he had his family around him, I couldn’t imagine how lonely and terrified Daenerys must be to go through it all on her own.
“I want you to call me as soon as you’re able to,” I told her, sniffing back my own tears and wiping at my eyes. “I’m going to come up as soon as I can, I promise.”
I knew Daenerys was trying to put on a brave face when she told me not to worry and that she would be fine on her own. She was lying for both of our sakes.
“You don’t need to worry about me, Missy,” she told me as she swallowed back the tears that were threatening to drown her. “You have much more important things to worry about.”
That would never be true. I would always worry about her. She was more like a sister than a friend to me and it was the worst feeling in the world to know that I was letting her down by not being there with her, so I prayed to every god I knew that something or someone would come along and help take care of her when I couldn’t.