Chapter Text
They arrive at the family home to find it near unrecognizable.
“Are you sure we’ve got the right address?” Daemon asks, as if she didn’t live here for the first twenty-four years of her life, and he couldn’t find his way to this gate blindfolded from the middle of the goddamn ocean. This house is in their bones.
Well. A version of it was, anyway.
Gone are the jet-black wrought-iron gates carved with the signature Targaryen three-headed dragon and the bright-red winterberry trees that normally lined the path from the entrance to the door, replaced instead by a sliding silver gate and two neat rows of evergreens covered in festive gold tinsel.
It’s all quite sleek and posh and modern—and immediately nauseating.
This isn’t the home they used to know.
“Obviously we’ve got the right address,” she replies, watching the front gate slide open as they pull up to it. Where was Uncle Harrold, who always manned the old gate during the holidays and took great pleasure in thrusting it open in all its grandeur for each arriving guest? “Seems she’s done some redecorating.”
There’s no need to discuss who she is. Alicent Hightower’s marriage to the head of the Targaryen family was the biggest headline in the news for weeks and weeks when it happened, impossible to escape from no matter how hard one tried.
She would know. She tried quite hard to pretend it never happened in the years following the ceremony, but here they are, confronted with irrefutable proof that Alicent is not only residing in their ancestral home, but has changed it to her liking.
“And Viserys stood for this?” Daemon asks, the disgust clear in his voice, as they park the car.
She follows his gaze out the window to the gold seven-pointed star hanging on the front door in place of the usual blue and black wreath, and sees red.
That wreath was meant for Aemma. Always on the door after the first snowfall, in remembrance of her. To dishonor her mother’s memory like this, with a symbol of that fucking faith no less—
“That Hightower bitch.”
“Hey.”
“Mom’s wreath should be up there. Who the fuck does she think she is—”
“Nyra.” Daemon’s voice, coiled tight with fury, grounds her.
She takes a deep breath, and lets the rage melt away. He’ll stay angry for her. They burn with the same fire, always have, but she’s the diplomat and he’s the enforcer, and that’s why it works.
She can’t afford to lose her temper before the dinner has even started, can’t give them any chance to think she isn’t capable of sitting in Viserys’s seat one day. That’s the only reason they’re here, after all, instead of ringing in the new year somewhere far away and much warmer, surrounded by friends and the family they’ve chosen for themselves. Something about the media will lap it up and at least come for Viserys, he misses you and those boys barely know their sister and maybe it can be a chance for reconciliation. But mostly, the Greens have gotten a little too comfortable in their seats, let’s remind them who’s the fucking heir.
Daemon’s words.
Rhaenyra holds onto them now.
“Let’s remind them,” she says, and knows when Daemon smirks in response that he’s remembering the same conversation she is.
“After you, zaldrītsos.”
-
Alicent is waiting for them in the foyer wearing a floor-length green dress and a seven-pointed star around her neck. It’s the first thing Rhaenyra notices, only because looking anywhere else would be yet another reminder of how much their home has changed in their absence.
Not that it’s really avoidable—out of the corner of her eye, she can see the suffocating amounts of green and gold decoration covering every available surface, not a drop of red in sight despite the festive season, and it would be truly impossible to miss the floor-to-ceiling abstract painting of what she assumes is the Seven-faced God hanging on the entrance wall.
Viserys stood for this? Daemon’s question rings in her ears as she steps toward Alicent with the broadest, fakest smile she can put on. Perhaps he did. Or perhaps he no longer has any control over what happens in his own home.
She can’t decide which one would be worse.
“It’s good to see you, Rhaenyra. You’ve changed these past few years.” Alicent’s smile is smaller than hers but no less fake, a polite, dainty, saccharine little thing just like Alicent herself.
Rhaenyra was never made for that.
“Not as much as this place.” She casts her eyes around for a second, so there’s no doubt what she means, before holding out her arm for a handshake. “But it’s good to see you, too.”
They used to greet each other with hugs. With kisses, even, one on each cheek like they were French models on the streets of Paris, laughing and giggling and unable to imagine somewhere in the world they’d rather be than next to each other.
She’d rather be anywhere else, now, as Alicent looks briefly taken aback but dutifully reaches out and shakes her hand.
“Hightower,” Daemon greets Alicent from beside her, his voice cold enough to freeze fire itself. He hates her as much as she does, but not for the same reasons—there was no betrayal, no childhood friendship discarded in the pink-and-white ashes of the shock wedding of the decade, no flower of young love that withered and grew thorns. He hates her because she’s a Hightower, as simple and uncomplicated as that, and he has never been able to refer to her or even see her as anything else.
“Daemon.” Alicent meets Daemon’s eyes for only a second before she looks away, and Rhaenyra has to suppress her smirk. He’s a terrifying man except when he very actively chooses not to be, and it says more about her than it probably does him that his bellicosity only brings her joy.
Rhaenyra’s attention moves on to the children standing behind Alicent—her siblings, though it’s hard to think of them as such.
The eldest, Aegon, looks much the same as the last time she saw him, short and stocky with unruly hair and an expression of deep disinterest on his face. She admires him, in a way—at least he, not unlike Daemon, shows his displeasure openly instead of hiding behind etiquette and hospitality. He wears a dark green button-down that clearly once saw the inside of a dry cleaner’s but has since been wrinkled and quick-washed on cold beyond repair.
Aemond is the most changed, unsurprising given that he was barely a boy when they last met. His hair is nearly as long as hers, now, that characteristic Targaryen silver-blond, falling in such neat lines down his shoulders that she’s confident he must take a straightener to it each morning. There’s a patch over his eye now that suits him better than it has any right to, and he stands with a confidence that could not be more different from Aegon’s slumped posture if he tried.
He reminds her, strangely, of Daemon, but not in any way that she likes.
Helaena, the youngest of the three, is the only one not in green. She wears a baby pink dress over skin-colored tights, the kind of soft pastels appropriate for a girl her age, and Rhaenyra spares a moment to hate that this is what it’s come to between her and Alicent—fighting each other through gestures made in clothing and decoration, going so far as to drag their children into it, all in an effort to one-up each other without disturbing the tentative peace.
She pushes the thought away. War is war, whether fought on the battlefield or in the boardroom or right here at home, and whenever it begins, this is not a war she plans to lose.
“Helaena, how much you’ve grown!” she says, and doesn’t have to fake the warmth in her voice. None of this is Helaena’s fault, and if circumstances were different, she would have loved nothing more than to be a big sister. “You look beautiful in that dress, darling.”
Helaena doesn’t meet her eyes, but her lips quirk up into a little smile, and Rhaenyra knows her words were well received.
“Aegon, Aemond, it’s nice to see you again.”
These words garner a stormier reception, a half-scowl from Aegon and a flat, “Welcome, sister” from Aemond, but she leaves it be. She is as much to blame as Alicent for the distance between her younger brothers and herself, and doesn’t expect them to hold any great love for her in their hearts.
“And where are your children, Rhaenyra?” Alicent asks, as though she will hardly believe in their continued existence unless they materialize in front of her.
Rhaenyra grits her teeth and swallows, twice, before trusting herself to respond in a way that won’t get her thrown out on the doorstep. The Rhaenyra that Alicent must remember had no desire for children, scoffed at the very notion of marriage and motherhood and settling down. Maybe it isn’t so surprising that Alicent never expected her to create the family she has, or derive as much strength from them as she does.
“Our children”—she takes care to put special emphasis on the possessive, because they are, all five of them, her and Daemon’s children now—“will be here soon with their grandmother.” I wanted them to spend as little time as possible in your presence, she doesn’t say, but thinks very strongly, and suspects it might reflect on her face by the way Alicent’s smile wavers.
Or maybe that’s just the effect of the knowledge that Rhaenys herself, de facto CEO of Driftmark Enterprises and matriarch of the Velaryon family, would be arriving with all of her grandchildren in tow in a show of unity that the Hightowers were unlikely to have predicted in their schemes to snatch Corlys Velaryon’s shipping empire right out from under her nose.
“I look forward to it,” Alicent says, in a way that suggests she very much does not.
“This chitchat is lovely,” Daemon cuts in, and Rhaenyra has to stifle yet another smirk at just how clearly his tone conveys the opposite. She can’t take him anywhere—and it’s one of the things she has loved about him from the start. “But we aren’t here to make small talk. Where is Viserys?”
“Of course we’re here to make small talk,” Rhaenyra chides, quiet enough that it will sound like a private reprimand, but knowing full well Alicent can hear her. This is all part of the plan. Daemon acts his grumpy, inconsiderate, acrimonious self over the course of the evening, and she holds him in check—a clear demonstration that she has tamed the wildest of their family’s dragons, that he listens to her as he has listened to no one else over the course of his roguish, hedonistic life and will support her claim to the bitter end.
The truth, of course, is that they are neither of them tame, but that is for her to know and the Hightowers to rue.
“However, my husband is correct,” she continues, taking great pleasure in the pinch of Alicent’s lips at her use of Daemon’s title. He is, in fact, her husband, a fact that bring her immeasurable joy every day, but she knows how that truth must chafe at all of Alicent’s morals and sensibilities. She never could understand their Valyrian customs. “I would like to see my father before dinner, if that’s okay.”
“He wanted to come greet you himself, but his illness has taken a turn for the worse. He’s resting in his room, you know the one.”
She does. It feels important, somehow, that he still has not moved out of the room he shared with Aemma. To do so would have been easy enough—it wasn’t as though they were lacking for rooms in the massive Targaryen manor—which makes the choice feel all the more intentional, and therefore significant.
“Great. We’ll see you all at dinner then,” Rhaenyra says, smiling toward her siblings and nodding at Alicent, before striding toward the spiral staircase that would lead toward Viserys’s room.
Daemon follows her lead, his fingers curling around her outstretched hand just as she reaches for him. Perfectly in sync.