Chapter Text
Delphine Fossoway had never learned the careful art of grief, and from her earliest years, loss found her ill-prepared. When she was seven, her brother Raymun brought her a small bird he had rescued, and when it died, as such delicate creatures often do, she wept for a full week and made herself sick with sorrow. At twelve, when a cherished playmate was sent away to another holding, she refused to speak for months.
Her mother often said that it was because she grew attached too easily, and when she chose someone, she gave them her whole heart without reserve. Delphine had always understood that when people left, they carried pieces of her with them that would never be returned. Such knowledge might have taught caution to a wiser soul, but she was never cautious in matters of the heart. Instead, she delighted in meeting new people and offering each a fragment of herself, just as she carried fragments of them in return. Thus, she moved through the world as a living mosaic, shaped by every kindness and fleeting bond, remade after every interaction.
It was inevitable, then, that when a girl such as Delphine fell in love, she would give herself wholly and without measure. And who better to give her heart to than Prince Valarr Targaryen, eldest son of Baelor Breakspear. He was good, and he was kind, and he never told her that she spoke too much, nor did he belittle the things that delighted her. On the contrary, he seemed to take genuine pleasure in listening, which was a marvel beyond all marvels in her eyes, and with him, she was loved entirely and unflinchingly.
But if life had taught Delphine anything, it was that the more of oneself one gave away, the more unbearable the parting became.
When the Great Spring Sickness stole her husband from the world, Delphine was left inconsolable. This was no injured hatchling or childhood companion lost to distance. This was the only man who had ever loved every excess of feeling, every wandering thought, and every unguarded hope she'd ever dared to have. She had never been a particularly devout girl, but death made zealots of most, and in her grief, she prayed to every god she could name, old and new alike, begging that somewhere, on some distant plane of existence, she might one day find him again.
And find him again she did, though not in death, or the gentle afterlife promised by religion. What Delphine had believed to be her final hour proved instead to be a second chance to return to the last year of her life, with all its joys and its looming ruin yet unspent.
Thus resolved, she determined that this time she would make every moment count. She did not know whether this strange mercy was an act of compassion or a cruel amusement of the gods, granting her knowledge only to watch her fail a second time, but it mattered little. She would try because to do nothing would have been the greater sin.
She began, of course, with Prince Valarr, even though it was where her heart most fiercely rebelled. She would stay away from him, for perhaps her absence might prove the one alteration capable of sparing his life. The resolve cost her dearly, to stand aside and watch him laugh, and live, and perhaps one day fall in love with another, but she could bear it with dignity if the sacrifice ensured his survival, even if he was never hers again.
But fate was not so easily outmaneuvered.
For Prince Valarr, in this second telling of the tale, strayed from the path memory laid before him, speaking words he had never spoken, and making choices that unsettled the future Delphine thought she could predict. He was changed, whether by instinct or the same unseen hand that had returned them to the past, he no longer followed the script history demanded of him.
And in that widening breach between what was remembered and what now unfolded, Delphine Fossoway applied herself most diligently, unwilling to let the gods have the final word again.