Chapter Text
Rhaena Hightower died thinking of nothing and everything.
She had just given birth, and the doors were already being locked from the outside, her new pair of daughters taken away by the green-clad midwives as they muttered in low voices. Rhaena was too distant to hear them, but she had been through three pregnancies that only ever brought forth girls, and she could repeat every curse they had ever received verbatim. If she was stronger, perhaps Rhaena would have found it in herself to laugh, to curse the Hightower house one more time before she exhaled for the last time in this aged, destroyed, bleeding body she had been surviving in for years now, but she did not.
Her last moments were spent in a haze of memories. She wasn't certain if this was a punishment or a mercy.
First she thought of her girls, six of them technically, though she had only known four, the first pair — because her girls had never, ever came without company — had been Gael and Alyssa, her eldest she had named after her father's fragile aunt and fierce mother for when she had tried to name them after her own mother and sister, she hadn't been allowed to, they had her ebony skin and her light hair, but their eyes were not mirrors to her own mauve irises, they were green and brown and all Hightower, the first blow to her sanity. Her mind's eye flickered to the flowers bloomed from her second labor then, Maerya and Lynesse, those were even less her own and even more their father's, their names chosen by his house because birthing them had stolen four days from her life and when those were over, it had been too late.
She loved them, she did, but they were not hers, same way the pair of babies she had just screamed for weren't hers, fragile and perfect as they were.
Lucerys's children would've been hers.
The thought should make her feel ashamed, should make her flinch. She was four-and-thirty now, and prince Lucerys Velaryon — because that was his name, no matter what the whispers had said while he still lived — had been dead for exactly twenty years, a ghost no one remembered enough to be haunted by except her. She had been four-and-ten to his five-and-ten the last time she had seen him, hours before he flew off to Storm's End, neither of them knowing one-eye was already waiting. His ring, the one that had been resting on her collarbone for years, was held so tight in her fist she could feel it sink her flesh.
Navy blue and pure, glittering gold, his initials carved inside.
L.V
Proud and possessive and rich, her love had been, Velaryon through and through.
She had longed for the surname once, when she was small and fascinated by the riches her grandfather gave her, and that wish lingered as she grew old enough to understand what it meant of course, though her want for Lucerys became greater than that when she met him. Onwards she wished less for the title of "lady of Driftmark" and more for the prince that would be lord of Driftmark and had been chosen for her before she even knew what that meant.
Baela had mocked her for it when they were young, it had been incomprehensible to her sister that she could want Lucerys for him and not for what their union would mean for herself, Baela's want for Jacaerys had never been for the young man himself but for the position the union would give her, for the idea of queen-hood and how her blood would linger in the iron throne from the birth of her children onwards. They had been friends but never lovers. Jace had been entirely loyal to Baela, until he had been far away from her for long enough — Sara Snow's name hadn't been presented to them until Cregan Stark himself crossed the gates of King's Landing, and by then Baela already had lovers to spare, all women, her sister had only ever loved women, not that it stopped her from screaming Jacaerys's name in anger at the top of her lungs — and neither had she been to him, and to them that was fine.
Perhaps they had been right, the king-who-never-was and Baela the Brave, perhaps the correct way to look at marriages was theirs. A transaction, a mutual agreement that would not have a depth greater than that of a saucer, for bloodlines and pregnancies and names alone, nothing deeper than that. Rhaena hadn't ever looked at it that way, even after she was forced to choose her first husband and then pushed onto the second's grip like a broodmare in desperate need of foals, her mind hadn't changed. Baela, in the years after the war — short as those had been — would argue with Rhaena fervently about the subject, about how "girly, stupid fantasies" would only hurt Rhaena worse than simply accepting marriages for what they were. They had this conversation half-a-thousand times, until Baela was alive no longer.
Baela.
The thought of her twin was distant, rusty, after so long pretending her sister was simply a world away, remembering she was dead felt like a slap. They had understood each other, once upon a time, two neglected girls in a house full of children they did not know, with a stepmother who treated them like they were her own not because she loved them for what they were, but because she pretended they were what she never had from her own womb. They had understood each other then, but that did not linger, the taller they grew the more divergent they became, and after Rhaena's first hatchling died, she went deaf to her sister entirely, her world a gray thing that only ever saw blue, Velaryon blue, Lucerys' brown.
Baela hadn't missed her, or at least she had pretended not to so well no one questioned her. Baela, with her chopped, unkept hair and her swagger and her desperate hunger to be the new Daemon Targaryen if she couldn't get the true one to look at her for more than a handful of minutes at a time. She had been good at pretending, or at least that's what Rhaena thought she remembered through the fogginess of the years she had walked through alone. Baela hadn't learned politics because she thought she didn't need them, thought the same people who feared her when Moondancer lived — however small the she-dragon had been — would fear her after the hatchling was killed, thought marrying Alyn would be better than marrying Thaddeus Rowan and then screamed at him so loudly when his betrayals came to light that—
That the rumors said he silenced her.
Permanently.
Rhaena had been alone after that — not that she hadn't been in the last years of her sister's life, thrown at Old Town because her half-brother and king had refused to allow her Morning to stay —, entirely removed from the world she had known if not for her dragon.
Her Morning. Rhaena's dying body lurched at that, the dying flicker of a dimming candle that suddenly felt the wind. Her Morning lived, her Morning was outside, her Morning would be alone if she let herself close her eyes. One fragile, ebony hand, far more withered than that of a woman her age should be, gripped the bed sheets beneath her, the slit between her legs — now ripped due to birth, bleeding profusely — on fire even though it was wet and blood-soaked, she choked on a sob when she finally managed to sit upon the bed, her feet dripping the same liquid down on the wooden tile floor beneath her. The door was locked, she did not even try to open it for she knew it wouldn't be opened for hours yet, she walked the opposite way, gripping the humid stone walls and pulling her half-starved body farther.
The balcony, she needed to get to the balcony. Her Morning would answer her call, she always did, she always—
Rhaena faltered, gasped, the ghost of contraction tightening somewhere deep in her core, her body colliding with the wall side-ways.
'No,' she pleaded, though she wasn't sure if she was using her own voice or simply mad with grief, 'No, no, please gods let me see her one more time, please,' she took one step forward, another, her shoulder being scraped raw.
She crashed through her balcony door, she fell forward on the stone beneath her, she cried for her dragon louder than she ever had before.
She didn't see her land.
She wasn't alive to.
She did not know her terrific, bloody, dehumanizing death had been the last straw for the boy — man? — so long removed from the world.
The wheel of the gods had never known such gamble.
Lucerys Velaryon had been a ghost for so long he had forgotten what limbs felt like.
He felt air invade his lungs and the burn was dizzying, a wail he had been unable to voice for decades — ever since Storm's End, ever since he was ripped from life and forced to watch the people he loved suffer, ever since Rhaena was forced onto marriage after marriage while crying for him — finally crawling out of his mouth, loud and furious and terrible, his legs kicking while his arms stretched as far as they could, his hands grasping for something to rip into pieces and finding nothing.
— A boy, princess! Another boy! — the voice was feminine and far too close for comfort, but Lucerys recognized it. Elinda Massey. His mother's most loyal, trusted lady, the one who had carved out her own eyes when Rhaenyra was set aflame.
His vision was a blurry thing, and his wail continued, the fury still bubbling through his veins, but through the foggy figures he could hold onto and the barely lit, crimson-stoned walls he would recognize always, he knew. The Red Keep was around him, and if Elinda was the woman attending whoever had just given him life again, it could only mean...
— Let me see him, let me, — Rhaenyra's voice, his mother's voice.
Lucerys' loud, broken wails paused for only an instant before they resumed, though now they were less fury and more confused, pained plea. Elinda rushed to her princess' side, cradling him to her rib, and no matter how unfocused his brand new eyes, his mother's silver-white curls were not something he could misplace, nor was her voice that was oh so much closer now, her heat much more prominent than her lady-in-waiting's had been.
— Oh, oh sweet, sweet boy, look at you, — she said, her arms covered in sweat from her labor, her throat raw from screaming, yet still good to him, always good to him, — Sweet, brave boy, hush for muña now.
And he did, however angry and desperate and lost, Lucerys quieted.
For her, he did, from now on only for her and for Rhaena he would, only for them.
His vision, already blurry, began to swim, his mother's heat lulling him like a drug, her gentle, hoarse humming cloaking his mind like a veil.
Sleep took him, at last.