Work Text:
Alicent feels the spark while lying down, half-asleep on the worn leather couch in her living room: the all-encompassing desire to create.
It causes her to sit upright with her brown eyes wide and alert. The image has impressed itself on her eyelids and everytime she blinks it comes to her, vibrant and mosaic in the darkness.
Scrambling onto her feet, she slips down her apartment’s hallway. She passes the ajar door where a visiting Rhaenyra sleeps soundly, exhausted from her busy schedule, and into the tiny hall closet she uses to host her art supplies.
She’d come to stay for a while because Alicent hadn’t been feeling well lately. Sometimes life has its way of bearing down on her in ways that she couldn’t entirely control and Rhaenyra had come to keep her company. But most importantly, she’d brought plenty of food with her.
Alicent takes a plastic box of pastels and graphite pencils from the lower shelf and then reaches the stack of ingres paper she keeps on the upper shelf. She grabs a few pieces and stealthily sneaks out of the closet, shutting the door softly behind her.
“Alicent,” Rhaenyra’s soft, tired voice comes from behind her, startling her enough that she almost drops her supplies. “It’s two in the morning, what’re you doing?”
Alicent turns slowly, guilty, towards Rhaenyra’s groggy shadow in the guest bedroom’s doorway.
“Why’re you awake?”
“I heard a mouse ruffling through the closet.” Her fingers rub into her eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I need to draw,” Alicent urges. “I was nearly asleep, I swear, but then this image came to me and I have to draw it before I forget.”
Rhaenyra seems to stare at her in silence for so long that Alicent's afraid she’s fallen asleep upright with her eyes open. She shifts anxiously on the balls of her feet.
“Nyra-”
“Yep! I’m awake.” Her mouth stretches with a long yawn. “Don’t stay up too much later Ali. Okay?”
Alicent rolls her eyes. “Yes mom.”
Rhaenyra waves her off, turning back into the room and closes the door fully this time. Alicent scampers back into the living room and lays her things down onto the carpet.
She needs blue. Not just blue, though. A soft aquamarine reminiscent of the untouched waters of some foreign island. A vibrant shade of green that makes up the illusive rainforests of the Amazon jungle.
If there is such a thing as peace, she wishes to discover it through the effects of her thoughts channeling onto the pages of her notebook. It’s the only thing that can calm her some days.
While some unleash emotions in sharp hits to a punching bag or fierce typing in word documents, Alicent sees the act of creation as one of the purest forms of release. She has the ability to produce something beautiful or hideous that abstractly reflects the way she feels inside despite everything battering her from the outside.
Allowing her hands to lead the way, her mind goes on autopilot in her half-dazed sleepiness as she scribbles in curving lines and smears blotches of color onto the page. She intently works until she slows and the heaviness on her lids weighs too much for her to continue.
She slips into sleep while leaning against the front cushions of the couch, a sunshine yellow pastel loosely held in her grip, her mouth ajar.
Alicent wakes with a start and a blanket slips down off of her shoulders. She’s on the couch, but she doesn’t remember falling asleep there.
The pads of her fingers message her swollen eyes as she tries to push past the early morning grogginess clouding her focus.
“And once again, coffee is the smelling salt equivalent to rousing Alicent Hightower into consciousness.”
She waves off Rhaenyra's quip, squinting around the bright room for her drawing from last night, but finding it nowhere in sight. Even her pastels and notebook have vanished. Rhaenyra takes a sip from her coffee with her eyebrows raised in her direction.
Alicent uses a hand to comb back the straggling hair falling over her face. “Where is it?”
“Good morning sunshine,” Rhaenyra coos with a bright smile. “Exactly how many hours did you sleep last night?”
“Enough.” She kicks her legs over the side of the couch and arches her back into a stretch. “Where is it?”
“I hung it up on the refrigerator.”
“You really are my mom. But I wasn’t finished.”
“It’s a very beautiful drawing as is Alicent. You really have a talent for these things.”
Alicent slides her eyes over to the genuine expression on Rhaenyra’s face and looks away. “Yeah well, thanks. I thought of you when I drew it.”
“What’s the drawing of? I mean, I know it’s abstract—”
“I dunno. Peace, maybe? It’s just…” She stares down at her hands clasped in her lap. Aquamarine stains the crescents of her nails. “Thinking about it made me happy and drawing it almost made me feel as if I was putting that emotion into something tangible.”
Rhaenyra nods. “You mean the way I feel when I’m around you.”
“Stop it.”
She just smiles at Alicent’s embarrassment. “I made you eggs.”
“You should’ve led the conversation with that.” She cracks a grin at Rhaenyra’s annoyed expression. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you sometimes.”
“I know.”
Alicent rolls her eyes with amusement as she walks down her apartment’s hallway to the kitchen. As promised, on the stainless steel refrigerator is her sloppy drawing of light pastels blended and scrawled across the paper. It nearly looks like a splatter of color that a baby vomited onto the fiber, but there’s something in the arrangement of the hues that pleases her.
Maybe it’s the way that the yellow splotches seep into the aquamarine puddles, or the way violet speckles against the grass green shade in the background. Perhaps it’s the frame of brown scribbles that waggle their way along paper’s perimeter like Rhaenyra doing one of her silly dances.
Two stenciled stick figures hold hands in the bottom corner of the drawing, nearly fading into the sea of color.
Alicent smiles softly as she fixes her plate.