Work Text:
Helaena was surrounded by the smell of fresh green grass and the dark dead things which made up soil. Bugs and insects, crawling through their own dead brethren of ages past. She gently lowered herself onto her belly, pressing her ear and cheek against the ground to hear the life beneath, one arm curled above her head and the other with her elbow bent, palm flat. She did not notice the damp cold– her riding coat which was the iridescent green of an Essos beetle and her boots of calf leather were both lined with fine white fur, her riding gloves with an inner layer of softest wool. Though the sun was bright, surely warming the stones of the Red Keep miles away, the breeze this high up in the hills was still freezing, and her brother Aemond had gifted her this coat for her last name-day besides.
Dreamfyre huffed from her perch, a silly sound coming from a dragon, and Helaena smiled as best she could with half her face stopped by the ground.
“You can hunt, if you’d like. I’m fine here alone. I’m just going to listen for a little while.”
The dragon tilted her head and laid it down, watching Helaena intently. Dreamfyre had always been gentler to her than other dragons to their riders, but this constant chaperoning was the newest sign of what Helaena already knew: she was with child. Two children. She’d dreamed it in the way any other woman would, twins with silver down upon their heads, and a maester had confirmed her suspicions the day before. Her mother the queen did not know yet because Helaena knew once she told her mother the queen, she would worry and fuss and try to ban Helaena from riding Dreamfyre and collecting specimens and she would be stuck in the keep for six more months wandering the halls. Her mother the queen’s sudden care and attention for a problem she would finally know how to manage for her daughter would smother Helaena. She knew her mother the queen thought her uncanny and messy and perhaps inherently unfit to be a mother without aid; would she dissect and display the fruit of her womb like her insects in order to understand them better?
( Father, I cannot marry her to another family; they will not accept such a mind mixed with their blood. )
But Targaryen women had always ridden while pregnant, and it was said it would make the babies stronger to be near the dragon’s heat. Helaena wanted healthy babies who would be brave and kind and true, who would love her as she loved them and have their own dragons to ride so they could fly together. There was love in her heart for these children which would soon become unbearable.
Helaena sighed, rubbing her cheek against the dirt and closing her eyes to listen to what was impossible in a busy keep: the rustle of grasses, the chittering of squirrels and birds in the treeline, the slide of snakes and tapping of insects. The noises lulled her into sleep– oh, but she had been so tired lately, growing little dragons inside herself, and what danger was a nap alone with her beloved Dreamfyre guarding her? Safer here than her marriage bed when Aegon was in a foul and drunken mood. Dreamfyre didn't even like Sunfyre all that much.
A dragon’s scream woke Helaena from dreamless sleep, her hands curling in such shock that dirt would have packed beneath her nails without the gloves, but she stayed laid flat and trembling until she saw Dreamfyre stand and straighten her neck to meet Vhagar’s descending bulk. Helaena turned her face to the ground, ashamed of her fear, of the spit which had dribbled from her open mouth as she’d slept. It was only Aemond, and he had seen her fearful and had not shamed her. He had seen her sleeping deeply enough to drool before, had had her naked in his bed when her moonblood was upon her. They hid little from each other.
Vhagar’s landing shook the ground. Helaena was jolted and her teeth bit into the softness of her lip; an iron drop of blood spread against the seam. The birds and the squirrels and the snakes and the insects all fled because they knew a dragon was no safety to them as it was to her, so there was nothing else to listen to besides Vhagar and Dreamfyre touching noses and snorting their dragon greetings. It would be a few minutes before Aemond reached the ground given how far above he was in the saddle, and Helaena took a deep breath before pushing herself up on her hands. When Aemond finally made it to her, his stride long and sharp to break the grass that grew to his waist, she was standing with her arms hanging loose at her side. Her bitten lip was throbbing and sore and there was dirt smeared on her cheek, but she smiled at her brother.
“Hello, Aemond.”
“Seven hells , Helaena, I thought you were hurt.” His brows were drawn down, his already harsh mouth a hard line. “Is that–”
His hand came to her chin, tilting her face up, the leather of his gloved thumb pulling over her slightly bloodied lip. She let him manipulate her, mouth softening at his touch even as her hand came to gently grasp his wrist. “When did this happen?”
“Just now. Dragons moved ground and ground moved teeth and teeth drew blood. It is the order of things.” She pressed her lips to his palm, tasted of sweat and leather, lips leaving her mark in blood and spit, these too the order of things. “I needed to be away from the beasts inside the walls.”
“Alone?” Censure, but not a brother’s censure. The proprietary reprimand of a lover. Well. He had the right.
“I’m not alone. Never when I’m with Dreamfyre.” Behind Aemond, Vhagar and Dreamfyre nuzzled each other, until Dreamfyre nipped at Vhagar, the larger dragon squealing and flinging her head away in play. Light blue against bronze, noon sky against dusk. Did anyone else know Vhagar was capable of play?
Aemond’s tone was conciliatory as he said, “You could have asked me to join as your protector.” His hand slid from her face, down the curve of her neck to cradle her head against his chest. Helaena pulled back, put her hands on her slightly swollen belly. Aemond let her go. He would never cage her up if she did not wish it. He had learned that early on.
He watched her hands with his uncovered eye; she watched his face, leather-gloved fingers pressing into the fabric of her coat. Aemond watched her so very much, like a dragon its rider, or her mother the crown upon her father’s head. It was not so many moments, really, until he realized what she was protecting with those clasped fingers and his eye widened, shoulders drawing back. Helaena laughed at her brother’s expression because he looked like an affronted cat, kept laughing even as he knelt heavily before her in a parody of how one day he would swear fealty to her as his queen.
“They are barely anything yet, dear brother, yet they are there. Hatchlings in the same egg.”
A pause but not a cessation as his hands raised to caress hers, then nudging her own hands apart to gently unbutton her riding coat from the bottom, the coat he himself had commissioned to keep her warm. (The tailors do not make sure your clothing fits. This will.) Helaena loved his hands, which had never been cruel to her like their brother’s. Possessive and forceful, yes, but never cruel. They were strong and scarred, nails kept neat. He was fastidious about his appearance the same way she was careless with hers.
Helaena had asked him once when they would next have a tourney so she could tie her favor to his lance, and he had scoffed at fighting like it was acting upon a stage. At her hurt expression, he’d softened and said he’d carry her favor with him when he trained with Ser Criston, if that would make her not look so sad. The handkerchief she gave him as her favor was one of her first attempts with embroidering using Meereenese knots, complicated and clumsy and impossible to undo once made, but Aemond carried it with him to the training yard all the same. He still did after all these years, as far as Helaena knew, indulging his favorite sister.
( I am your only sister!
Yes, and if I had others they would still not be half as dear as you are to me. )
With her coat opened and his hands slid under it to grasp her hips, Aemond leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her clothed belly. With the back of his head exposed to her, Helaena took advantage and undid the knot of his eye patch, lifting it off his face, gloved thumb brushing against the red mark it left in his soft skin. The length of the ties wrapped around her hand exactly three and one quarter’s times, as they had every time she repeated this little ritual, the patch itself bound to her palm.
When he’d lost his eye, he’d wept when she lay her bare palm over the angry red wound of his socket and said that the price was paid. In private and in public he from then on affected great solemnity which in time turned to true icy stoicism, but at the beginning he had once wept to his sister.
“Tell me you are not displeased we’ve accomplished our duty.”
His god’s eye– a sapphire the deepest color of Dreamfyre's scales which she’d placed herself into the empty socket as a fulfillment– winked in the sunlight as he looked up towards her. She loved to see the jewel exposed in the candlelight of her chambers, matched with the living violet eye so much like her own. She loved to see it exposed in full sunlight, when it was them alone on a windy hillside. In storm and in fire, she loved that eye which saw nothing, for it only saw her.
“Why should I be displeased? We have done what our brother could not accomplish and created life together.”
“The wheel turns. Life and death and life again.” She put her hands on his face, holding his gaze to her own. She stared into the sapphire as if it was able to truly see, fingers tightening so that the fat of his cheeks pressed into odd shapes. “Do not leave me when the wheel turns to birth, next to death.”
Aemond’s hands left the fur-lined warmth of her coat and pried her hands from their savage grip before capturing them and standing so she had to raise up her chin to maintain eye contact. Between his hands, her palms were pressed together like in prayer. “The Stranger can challenge me himself before looking at you before your time.”
She had no answer. He had put death into her, she knew, the kind of death that became inevitable when one moved from Maiden to Mother and all too soon to Crone, and that made her melancholy. Helaena often visited the Sept and stood in front of their statues, waiting to discover if they would speak to her like her dreams. The Seven spoke not a whisper. Every night she would visit her mother the queen to pray together before retiring to sleep, and reciting the empty prayers was a ritual done by rote which left her anxious and grasping for something she could not easily name and her mother the queen could not define when asked. Seeing how upset her mother the queen was at her questions silenced Helaena. In the rooms of her father the king, Helaena was mostly heard, was mostly useful, and he did not make her pray. Instead they read of Old Valyria together, of gods which made more sense to the puzzling display box which was her understanding of the world. Sometimes her father the king thought Helaena was her sister Rhaenyra, but that was all right, as long as she could still visit. His rooms were safe from Aegon, from the whispers of other girls who knew she was different somehow and not just because she was a princess and was to marry a brother who publicly derided her at ball and hunt. They did not hate her, but they certainly did not bring her into their inner circles. The double-talk language of girlhood was foreign to her. Aemond had viciously told her over his copy of Aurion's Musings that she did not need those silly girls of the court who would never be queen and would never understand what it was to ride a dragon, she only needed her family. She only needed him, who was truly a Targaryen in ways their brother wasn't.
If Aemond claimed he would protect her from the Stranger, then he was free to make the attempt. If the Stranger was real, then Aemond would win. He almost always did in the training yard, and he had more than once used his fists against Aegon when their brother’s behavior had crossed a line of Aemond’s choosing. Often the line involved disrespecting Helaena, who cowered from the loud noises with her head covered until the scuffle ended and Aemond came to her with his hand outstretched to pull her towards him, making himself a safe haven against the overwhelming terror the world sometimes presented, even if he had caused that terror. Aegon had touched her on their wedding night only in order to satiate the law and church’s desire for consummation. It had been impersonal and brief and decidedly unsafe , as if he was not seeing her at all; they both laid facing away from each other afterwards, subdued over their shared breakfast the next morning until Aegon snapped at her to not be stupid, she couldn’t possibly have a baby in her yet and he wasn’t interested in having screaming children around anyways.
Her mother had hissed months later at him in her receiving room as Helaena and Aemond sat reading in front of the fire. Can you not even do this part of your duty to beget an heir, when you seem to enjoy your whores so much– stop speaking. Do not think I am so completely ignorant of how you spend your time. Aemond had looked at Helaena slant-wise instead of reading his own book, and she blushed but did not look away when she met his gaze.
When the babes came, she would be only a few months from her nineteenth name day, the same age as her mother the queen when Helaena herself had been born. The wheel turned and turned, and the spool spun and unraveled, and here she was at the apex of the wheel, the beginning of the undoing of the spool. In this moment it was simply herself and Aemond at the gentle tipping point into the unknown territory of parenthood, where only she would be able to knowingly tread.
It was like this: She learned to display her collection from the maesters who cared for her father the King, and in a moment of lucidity her father the king had asked her grandfather the hand to commission an illustrated compendium of her specimens from the library in Oldtown. Bound in leather to look like a beetle’s wings, Helaena kept the book in her rooms. Aegon had barely veiled his contempt for the thing, her mother the queen thinking of things other than the miracle of the antennae as Helaena tried to show her. Aemond had asked to read it and seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience, even as his sister frequently leaned over his shoulder to point her finger to interesting details on the page. Some of these illustrations Aemond knew well as he and Halaena had flown together to seek new specimens, Dreamfyre and Vhagar in strange harmony through the clouds.
It was soon after that, when her moonblood came still and her mother the queen despaired at Aegon in her receiving room before kissing her daughter on the head, that Aemond had come to her in the solitary dark and pushed back the silver cloud of her hair behind her ear and he had not said anything, did not need to say anything. He was her brother and he would do his duty to her when Aegon would not because he loved her in the ancient sacred ways of Old Valyria. Helaena had nodded and taken his hand; Aemond would consent to being led if only by Helaena to her bed, as Vhagar yielded to Dreamfyre's bites. He claimed her in entirety, but only with her supposed permission, as if he had not chipped away at her defenses like the long siege of their childhood.
“You went over the sea again.” Aemond’s voice was soft, soft and soothing as it ever was with her, like a just-hatched dragon needing to learn to trust its rider, his hands rubbing up her arms though her hands remained together.
“Oh.” Helaena blinked, Dreamfyre’s shape coming into focus from behind Aemond. “I am back in the harbor.” The wind tore down the hill, blowing her loose hair across her face and hopelessly tangling it, the strands stinging her cheeks. It went into her mouth; she rubbed harshly at her face to clear the offending hair. “I need to tell our mother the queen now. I won’t say you’re the dragon I made the egg with.”
“Our secret always.” Aemond reached down and unwound his eye patch from her hand, but before he could tie it back on, Helaena touched the bared jewel of his god's eye again as she moved past him, frowning.
“One could drown in it, you know,” she said, curling her fingers as if grasping a secret hidden in the wound, walking back to Dreamfyre.