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kwuini · 29 days ago

Text

*cardinal but my point STILL STANDS🙌🙌

god i love hurt comfort so much and like the draaamaaa?? Yessss save me from the fire and like baptise me to put out the flamessss 🗣️🗣️

scratches such a self indulgent part of me istg

The Keys Of Heaven [Chapter 4: The Giver Of Life]

Series summary: Three years ago, Father Aemond Targaryen performed a miracle. Now he is a cardinal, a media sensation, and a frontrunner to be elected pope. You are a nun who has been brought to Vatican City to assist with the papal conclave. But when your paths cross by happenstance, you must both reckon with your decision to join the Catholic Church…and what you want from the future.

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), references to abuse and violence, volcanoes, bodily injury, death, peril, scheming, pining, some drugs/alcohol/smoking, Catholic trivia you never asked to learn, kangaroos!

Word count: 6.6k

🦘 A very special thanks to my Aussie slang consultant @bearwithegg and also her mum (any mistakes are mine) 🦘

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Tagging: @mrs-starkgaryen @chattylurker @lauraneedstochill @ecstaticactus @neithriddle, more in comments! 🥰

🗝️ Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🗝️

Boats speed past him as he approaches Nea Kameni, fishing vessels, sailboats, small yachts weighed down with tourists and celebrities and business tycoons, and even if they were to turn back towards the erupting volcano—which none of them are—they wouldn’t be able to carry all the people stranded there to safety without going under themselves. This is why when Aemond commandeered a boat from the Old Port of Fira, he chose the largest one, a Grand Banks trawler that can withstand the burden of fifty desperate souls clawing their way abroad. The owner, a man in a suit who looks like he could afford the $2,000,000 price tag, had just been coming down from the cockpit and immediately handed over the keys when Aemond demanded them. Who could mistrust a priest?

“What will you do, Father?” the man had asked in a thick Greek accent, and then, when he saw Aemond’s pale blue eyes flick to the rupturing volcano: “No, you can’t, it’s suicide.”

But it’s not: it’s a resurrection, a chance to be born again. Aemond’s cassock is a humble and undistinguished black, the color of mourning, the death of his old life, the promise of something brand new. Why should people worship Mother Teresa or Joan of Arc or Thomas Aquinas and not him? It is not talent that he lacks. It is only their attention; it is only a miracle.

Now asteroids of pumice and scoria and basalt and obsidian are raining down into the waves thrashing around him, sea spray swashing up over the deck, and the sky is dark with ash and noxious lung-searing fumes, afternoon turned to nightfall. Red veins of lava are snaking down Nea Kameni, and the tourists trapped there are like specks of ants as they flee across the island, their own boat buried in a landslide and useless. And it is not just thankless obscurity that Aemond is leaving behind. It is the person he was when he left Nisyros as a teenager, escaping things he does not think about if he can help it, and most of the time he succeeds.

The ocean is sloshing, swirling, steaming where lava spills into the waves and makes them boil, and to leap into the currents would be certain death. He knows he won’t have long once he docks; even in the shelter of the tiny crescent-moon harbor, the boat will soon be ripped from its moorings by the fury of the sea, and then he will be trapped too and perish in the cinders and the heat and the suffocating toxins that have replaced the oxygen in the air. So he climbs over the deck railing and ropes the vessel to one of the piers that is still standing, and by the time he turns to wave to the castaways they have spotted him and are flocking to his boat in the same way thousands of believers once received the loaves and fishes from Christ.

“Father! Father!” they are screaming in the apocalyptic gloom, the earth quaking and the air like acid, and as they sprint down the embankment he points to warn them: a lava flow that is pouring from the exploded crater, a red-glowing river that will consume them. The tourists look back and see the molten cascade and shriek hysterically, pleading, praying, knowing they cannot outrun it, feeling the lethal heat of it already, blisters bubbling up on their exposed skin.

And then—as Aemond’s hands are still raised in warning, as the tourists have their back to the lava flow as they race for the boat—a new fissure opens up in the earth and Aemond watches as the lava floods down into it, and the besieged visitors to the island are spared. Then they are swarming the boat and Aemond is helping them aboard—Thank you Father, bless you Father—and already he can hear them repeating a lie he does not correct: Did you see that he stopped the lava? It was there and then it was gone, a godsend, a miracle.

It’s almost too dark to see, but Aemond steers the boat out of the harbor and begins crossing the narrow strait of the Mediterranean Sea back to Fira on Santorini. As his passengers cling to each other and meteors of volcanic rock pummel the vessel and splash into the waves, he reaches into one of the pockets of his black cassock—one day red, one day white, he cannot stop himself from thinking—and finds there the rosary that a girl once gave him on a beach in Sydney, Australia. He thinks of her sometimes, but not in a way he could explain to anyone else. She is a ghost, a whisper, far more than a friend, far less than a lover, and yet a ricochet that he hears again and again in moments when he thinks he has forgotten her.

What if I never met her on that beach? What if we had never left?

There is a blinding pain and then the impact of his body hitting the deck and then nothing, and later Aemond will learn that a piece of pumice struck his left eye and fractured his skull. Blood flashes red across the white paint, hemorrhaging like the poisons from the earth. His ash-soiled collar turns crimson and sopping. As the boat is tossed by rough waves and the sky grows ever-darker, the afternoon sun eclipsed, Aemond’s devotees staunch the bleeding and keep him safely aboard, and one of them takes the helm and manages to guide the vessel safely back to Santorini.

And when Aemond wakes up three days later—missing an eye, gaining immortality—the first thing he does is fumble for the remote so he can turn on the television and see witnesses acclaiming his miracle on Alpha TV: Father Targaryen saved us, Father Targaryen made me believe again.

~~~~~~~~~~

“What’s going on between you and the nun?” Lucky asks.

He and Aemond are standing beside the koi pond in the Vatican Gardens. It’s early, and the older cardinals are still scraping their arthritic bones together as they crawl out of their beds. The December morning is grey and dull like iron. Near the bottom of the pond, comets of gold and white and red and black scales travel unhurriedly through rippling water like the darkness of the night sky.

Aemond, preoccupied, puffs on a Karelia cigarette. “I told you. We met when we were children.”

Lucky lights a cigar and takes an impatient drag. That’s not what he meant, and they both know it. “Who is she to you now?”

“Nothing. We’re friends.”

“Not a good enough answer.” Lucky flicks ashes onto the sand-colored tuff pebbles, damp with daybreak mist. “Auclair is running around saying you have an improper attachment to her. Kazi told me there was candle wax all over her face. How did that get there, I wonder? Par hasard?”

Aemond hesitates. His cigarette smolders between two fingers of his right hand, a tiny pinpoint of pulsing red light. “I was consoling her. Auclair...in the chapel, she accidentally dropped a candle on his cassock, and he grabbed her arm.”

Lucky’s brow furrows, incredulous. “He struck her?”

“He startled her.”

Lucky doesn’t understand. “And this compelled you to...lose your composure entirely, risk everything we’ve worked for? Auclair startling a nun?”

Aemond shrugs, peering into the koi pond. “It’s difficult to explain.”

“Aemo, are you serious about this?” About being the next pope.

“Yes,” Aemond replies immediately.

“Because...you know...it would not be the worst thing in the world if Jake got it. Or another moderate, an obscure consensus candidate we could dig up, some old unassuming Italian, the conclave is full of them. And if we pivot now, we might be able to box out Jahoda, even without you.”

“But that’s not what you want.”

Lucky smiles and opens his hands. “I am of the conviction that your gifts are too extraordinary to waste. I think you’re the best of us.”

Aemond averts his gaze as he takes a drag on his cigarette. “I’m not without flaws.”

“Oh, you have them, I’m sure. Pride, wrath, envy, lust.”

“A multitude of earthly motivations.”

Lucky chuckles, a gruff baritone rumble. “And who among us is selfless? Kazi joined the Church because in Poland in 1985, his job options were soldier, coal miner, or priest, and priest was the clear winner. Cam wanted his parents to be proud of him, I wanted a better life in Haiti. And Lando…well…I’m not sure, perhaps that was genuine.” Lucky exhales a plume of smoke and looks at Aemond. “I won’t pretend to know your ignoble reasons for joining the Church, but I’m certain you had them. Mortals don’t often do things out of pure altruism, we are imperfect by design. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still try to make the world better.”

“And you believe my elevation will facilitate that.”

“I do,” Lucky says honestly, then his expression turns fierce. “But you must either commit or get out of the way. You cannot sabotage this conclave and give the Chair of Saint Peter to someone like Jahoda, and you cannot be the pope if you intend to continue indulging your temptations. It is not just a sin, it is murder. When you hurt the Church, you are hurting everyone who might have been saved by it.”

Aemond nods, but he is still distracted. He finishes his cigarette and tosses the end of it into a row of laurel hedges slick with dew. Then he gazes across the gardens at the stone statue of Saint Agatha, eternally young, sinless, vulnerable. He says softly: “I just never thought I’d see her again. I couldn’t remember her name or her hometown, but I knew she wasn’t from Sydney, so how would I ever find her? Then to cross paths with her here...it’s an almost impossible coincidence. And to let her go for the second time seems so wrong. Painful. Intolerable.”

“Do you think I don’t know what it feels like to care for a woman? To love one, even?”

Aemond is stunned; he’s never heard this before. He waits for Lucky to continue like a priest listens silently in the confessional booth.

“I had a girlfriend when I was young,” Lucky says after a while. He kicks away some of the tuff pebbles, drops the end of his cigar in the trough, buries it in the shards of volcanic rock. “And she got pregnant. I couldn’t marry her, I was already planning to join the Church. But I promised that I would provide for her and the baby to the best of my ability. It would have been like Auclair’s situation, you know? Rumors, sure, but that’s all. Visits a few times a week. A child with my face. She took it better than I thought she would, honestly. She understood why I wanted to be a priest, and she knew we would all benefit from my position. She was pragmatic, even at eighteen.”

He has a child? Aemond thinks, astonished. He understands what that’s like?

But no: It would have been like Auclair’s situation, Lucky said. Not it is, not it was.

“She was living with her parents because she couldn’t live with me,” Lucky continues. “And one night when no one else was home, men broke in to rob the house thinking it was empty. They found her, and they killed her, slit her throat down to the vertebrae of her spine. There was no reason for it. She wasn’t trying to stop them or anything. She was hiding in a closet, six months pregnant, just waiting for them to leave. And if she and I had been living together in our own home, she wouldn’t have been there when those men shattered the window and climbed inside. I think about that all the time. It never goes away. Forty years later, and I’m still picking up the phone every day, hearing her father’s voice tell me what happened over and over again.”

The burning in Aemond’s throat makes him think of embers, lava, the gridiron Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on. He lays a gentle palm on his friend’s shoulder. “Lucky, I’m so sorry.”

“There have been times when God spoke to me so clearly it was like He was standing in the same room. And then there were other times...” Lucky closes his eyes for a moment, breathes deeply and unsteadily, shakes his head. “Many, many others, when I heard nothing, and my doubts filled me from my heart all the way down to my fingertips, and it was so heavy and so dark, and it’s contagious, you see, that sort of faithlessness. Contagious and unbearable.” Then, miraculously, he smiles. “But when I saw the news reports about what you did on that island, all those people you saved...parents, children, lovers, friends...all the sudden, it was so much easier to believe. How can one deny the existence of God when a miracle worker walks among us? Fifty witnesses, fifty lives spared, there’s been nothing like it since the ancient times, if you even give credence to those accounts. God has blessed you so abundantly, Aemo. How can we ignore that?”

Aemond lifts his hand from Lucky’s shoulder. What did God have to do with it? “I think I understand,” he says instead.

“In my good moments, I remember the suffering of Christ and all those martyred saints, souls who were so pure and so loved by God, and who were welcomed home by Him when their time came, and who will live on eternally. I have to believe that, Aemo. That we aren’t forsaken, that we aren’t alone, that death isn’t the end. All people have to believe that.”

“Then I’ll do everything I can to win,” Aemond says. When he looks down at the pond again, he sees a dead koi floating there, its scales a vibrant glittering gold. Another one? He gestures to the fish. “Help me bury it.”

Lucky is mystified. “Why?”

So she won’t get in trouble. So they won’t send her away.

“Just help me,” Aemond insists, and Lucky does.

~~~~~~~~~~

“It’s like Whac-A-Mole with all these Italians,” Kazi says over lunch, miming smacking them with a mallet. He means the three candidates that have rapidly surged and then fallen again when it became clear they didn’t have the votes: Cardinal Edoardo Rossi, Cardinal Davide Marino, Cardinal Frederico Abatantuono. The frontrunners remain unchanged; but in the last ballot, only a single vote separated Aemond from Jake, and they both lagged conspicuously behind Jahoda. Lando, now with five silent, anonymous supporters, is clearly stymied.

Outside, it has been drizzling. You and the other nuns are delivering baskets of bread and bowls of Sicilian-style fish stew to the cardinals: garlic and herbs and vegetables and sea bass, capers, golden raisins, a steaming broth of white wine and blood red tomatoes. Across the dining hall, the nonagenarian Cardinal Bogdi Marcu of Romania has spilled soup on himself and Sister Nuru is helping to clean him up. The lean, white-haired Cardinal Auclair is stalking between the tables, pausing to whisper to other cardinals, who frown and nod at whatever he is telling them. You feel your stomach drop, but try not to appear nervous.

He’s duplicitous, and everybody knows it. He’s a sinner, he’s a liar. And he doesn’t have proof of anything.

“How’s it going?” you ask brightly as you set a bowl of stew down in front of Aemond. “I didn’t get to say hi at brekkie.”

You certainly didn’t; he was absorbed in conversations with his companions and had barely looked at you. Now he is still evasive, sipping his glass of water and pretending to brush bread crumbs from the sleeve of his red cassock. Randomly, you wonder what he is wearing under it. Beneath your white wool habit, you have on a simple navy blue cotton skirt and a light jumper, striped with black and white. “Hello, Sister,” Aemond says flatly, fidgeting with the large gold cross that hangs from his neck.

Kazi gives you a brief smile but then resumes his commentary on the revolving door of Italian candidates. Lucky and Cam don’t acknowledge you, in the same way so many cardinals treat the nuns as invisible. You are perplexed; your heartbeat is thudding, hot and ashamed.

What do they know?

“Thank you, Sister,” Lando says quietly as you serve him his stew.

“Everything alright?” you ask Aemond, trying to sound cavalier.

Please don’t ignore me. Please don’t decide this is over.

“I think it’s best to keep some distance for now,” Aemond replies, a low murmur without eye contact.

“Sure.” You steel yourself, keep your expression impassive like a statue’s, then hurry back to the bowls of stew that are still waiting to be delivered. Your white runners squeak against the tile floor. The thin iron chain of your medallion is cold against your throat. Your composure must waver once you’ve turned away from the cardinals; Rhaena is concerned when she sees you.

“Are you good, mate?” she asks.

You force a smile. “Yeah, just a bit knackered.”

“Have a snooze this arvo?”

Before you can reply, there is a loud voice from across the dining hall, Kazi cackling as he points to one of the windows: “Oh look, there is a rainbow outside. No one tell Jahoda, he will spend all afternoon lecturing it about how it is destined for Hell.”

Cardinal Auclair leaps up from where he was hissing to a group of cardinals from Ireland. “Brother, can we desist with this slander? In his work on the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Jahoda played a pivotal role in the drafting of the Dignitas Infinita of 2024, which condemned violence and discrimination against homosexuals—”

“While the Church itself remains prejudiced against them. How many stones can we hurl from our glass house?”

Auclair smiles patiently, as if he is speaking to a child. “Cardinal Jahoda has unfailingly advocated for the dignity and salvation of every person, no matter how imperfect. Perhaps if you read more, you would know that.”

“I read about how he spoke out against the distribution of condoms, even in the midst of HIV outbreaks,” Kazi flings back.

Jahoda stands, his chair screeching against the floor as he pushes it out. All gazes snap to him. Cardinal Auclair looks on with eyes that flash like silver coins, grinning. “You progressives, you visionaries,” Jahoda growls, his voice deep and commanding. “You will take a system that works for ninety out of a hundred people and burn it to the ground until we can all suffer together. The Bolsheviks promised liberation. The Soviets promised equality. The Enemy wraps sin and chaos in beautiful words and thus we are seduced, but Brothers, we must resist this temptation. Our Faith has endured for two thousand years, but what is the Church without traditions? What should we ask the over one billion Catholics on the planet to believe in if we do not know ourselves, if we are forever redacting and revising and daring to place our weak mortal judgment over God’s?”

Throughout the dining hall cardinals are muttering, some in disapproval, more in concurrence. Kazi rises to his feet. “But the Church is always changing, Brother. Should we never have permitted Mass to be held in local languages, or moved away from our teachings on the divine right of kings, or improved our working relationships with other faiths—?”

“And yet it is this tolerance of other faiths and doctrines that so often imperils the most vulnerable!” Jahoda says, and now some of the cardinals are applauding. “I still remember that summer when Brezhnev’s tanks rolled into my country. I remember helping my neighbors paint over all the road signs so there were none left except those that pointed the way back to Moscow, I remember giving the soldiers wrong directions as they threatened us with their guns, we who were children, we who were having our innocence destroyed before our own eyes.”

Kazi sighs; he’s heard this so many times. “Yes, yes, Brother, we all know you were there in Prague championing democracy—”

“And my father took a bullet for it!” Jahoda thunders, and no one has anything to respond with except hushed awe or reflection or shame, and after a moment Kazi sits down and gives Aemond an apologetic glance like he knows he’s made a mistake.

Maybe Aemond won’t win, you think, and what you feel in your ribcage glowing warm and low like embers might be hope.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Sister!” you hear someone shout frantically, and here comes Sister Penny hurtling out of the Domus Sanctae Marthae just as you are headed there to tend to the washing. There were two more ballots in the afternoon, two clouds of black smoke loosed from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, and so there is no new Holy Father yet. Dinner is in a few hours. You are ravenous to see Aemond again and yet dreading it; he fills your skull like sea water, stormy, swirling, full of riptides.

What is happening to me? Where can this lead?

“Sister Penny?” you answer. She is characteristically frazzled, strands of unruly red hair escaping from under her veil, her pale freckled face flushed. She canters to you, huffing from the exertion.

“Would you do me a favor, Sister? I’m so sorry to spring it on you like this.”

“No wukkas, mate.”

“Would you please ride with Cardinal Marcu to the airport?” Sister Penny says. You envision him: slow and stooped and shaky, wrinkled, archaic, a relic of a far older Church, here only as an advisor to the cardinals, over eighty and therefore ineligible to vote in the conclave. “He has an urgent medical appointment he can’t reschedule, a CAT scan or something. Sister Augustina had arranged for him to travel home to Romania today, and she promised she’d accompany him to the airport, but obviously she’s not here anymore and I just found out about all of this when I saw Cardinal Marcu in his room packing his suitcase. He’s expecting a chaperone, and I have to supervise the dinner preparations.”

You study the brick wall that surrounds Vatican City. “But I’ll be allowed in again, right?”

“Of course,” Sister Penny assures you. “We have a driver, you’ll stay in the car the whole time. As long as you don’t speak to anyone outside, you haven’t violated your oath of secrecy.”

You smile, relieved. “Beautiful.” No one assisting with the conclave can contact the world beyond the Vatican for any reason aside from an absolute emergency, not even greeting the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square, not even a phone call or a text. To break seclusion is to risk not just expulsion from the conclave but excommunication from the Church, lifelong banishment, perpetual dishonor.

“Assistants from Cardinal Marcu’s parish have flown in and will be there to meet him at the airport and escort him the rest of the way. You’ll just keep him company in the meantime.”

“Schmick.”

“What?”

“Cool, I got it.”

Sister Penny exhales, mollified, and pats your shoulder gratefully. Behind her, you see Cardinal Marcu shuffling out of the Domus Sanctae Marthae with one of the other Romanian cardinals, who is carrying Marcu’s suitcase for him and soaking in those last convoluted ramblings of wisdom. “Thank you so much for your flexibility.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” you say cheerfully. “To help.” And as far as Sister Penny knows, that’s true.

Soon a Vatican employee arrives, sitting grim-faced behind the wheel of one of the tiny white Fiat Pandas in a black suit and sunnies. He is heaving Cardinal Marcu’s suitcase into the boot and Sister Penny is wishing the elderly cardinal farewell when you notice Aemond watching from a side street, one of the narrow snaking paved paths draped in the shadows of the buildings. You wander over to meet him when it becomes clear he’s waiting for you to.

Aemond says uncertainly, looking at the gate and then back to you: “You’re breaking seclusion?”

“I’m not breaking anything.”

“But you’re leaving.”

“I’ve been asked to accompany Cardinal Marcu to the airport. I’m not stepping foot outside the car or speaking to anyone else. No phone, no radio, I won’t even roll the windows down. I’m not being unduly influenced. I’m not violating any rules. It’s cruisy, I’ll be back in an hour.”

Aemond glances uneasily at the gate again. “Tell them to send someone else.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have the authority to refuse Sister Penny’s requests. But you do.”

But of course he won’t say anything; he can’t be perceived as interfering on your behalf, he can’t fuel the rumors. And so Aemond only frowns, vexed, conflicted, powerless in a way he so rarely is now.

“Goodbye, Cardinal Targaryen,” you quip as you turn away.

But he’s not done yet. “What if something happens and they won’t let you back into Vatican City?”

“You can’t talk to me anyway, so why do you care?”

Aemond doesn’t reply. He only watches you leave, his remaining blue eye fixed and brooding.

You spin around and walk backwards a few steps. “See you at dinner,” you say with a smirk. “From a distance, of course.” Then you whirl towards the car, your white habit gusting in the brisk December wind. On the periphery of your vision, the red pillar that is Aemond stalls a moment longer and then strides off in the direction of the Domus Sanctae Marthae. From the other side of the brick wall, you can hear that the crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square with their signs and their prayers and their candles are singing Joy To The World.

You climb into the back seat of the Fiat, and there the prehistoric Cardinal Bogdi Marcu is eagerly awaiting you. You have the sense he would be just as pleased to see Sister Rhaena, or Sister Penny, or Sister Nuru, or Sister Helvi, or anyone else, really; he just doesn’t want to be alone. This is one of the great triumphs of the Church, however marred it may be by the inexhaustible failings of mankind. You get a family for life, and it is over a billion souls strong.

As the driver exits Vatican City via a skinny paved street—passing through a gate monitored by the Swiss Guard—and follows the perimeter of Saint Peter’s Square, Cardinal Marcu points with gnarled arthritic hands and describes the features to you: nearly three hundred marble columns encircling the piazza, cobblestones made of volcanic basalt, two fountains, an ancient Egyptian obelisk that has stood at the center since the 1500s. Then he begins yammering about the horribly sinful shows he’s stumbled across recently while home in Romania—Big Brother, Survivor, Love Island—and how there’s been no decency on television since that shameless American president spoke about his affair with a White House intern, something Cardinal Marcu seems to think transpired just a few years ago. You smile and nod along politely.

Ordinarily, the ride to Leonardo da Vinci International Airport would only take half an hour, but traffic is bad and many of the roads near the Vatican are closed or altered to accommodate the tens of thousands of tourists who have made the pilgrimage here to witness the ascension of the next pope. From the back seat, you watch Cardinal Marcu toddle out of the Fiat and into the waiting arms of two assistants, and by the time you’ve returned to Saint Peter’s Square, dusk is descending and the sky is pink and gold. The driver sighs as he waits in a long line of taxis, the route blocked by a tour bus that took a wrong turn and is now being directed by a fleet of police officers to spin around on the narrow street. Your driver, avoiding the radio, turns up the volume as he listens to an Andrea Bocelli CD. You have the ludicrous temptation to ask: Can you play some Bruce Springsteen? Can you play Atlantic City?

From the far end of the piazza, you gaze at the façade of Saint Peter’s Basilica, where statues of Christ and his apostles preside over the sea of congregants with their flickering candles and their handwritten signs. You see supporters of Cardinal Jahoda waving miniature flags of the Czech Republic and Hungary and Germany, Jake’s followers from Lebanon and Jordan and Syria and Cyprus, Aemond’s devotees from Greece and Italy and the United States. One woman’s poster reads, alongside a newspaper article about what happened on Nea Kameni framed in blue glitter glue: I believe in miracles!

As car horns blare and the driver mutters in Italian, your eyes trace the perimeter of the square. Perched atop the marble columns like benevolent gargoyles are the statues of over a hundred saints: Saint Lawrence who was roasted alive on a gridiron, Saint Sebastian who was pierced by arrows, Saint Lucy whose eyes were gouged out, Saint Thomas Aquinas who died comfortable and revered. Absentmindedly, you touch the plain iron medallion that hangs from your neck. You wonder which of the statues is Saint Agatha.

A small, flimsy-looking metal fence separates the road from the entrance to the pedestrian area. The Fiat rolls forward a few sluggish meters, then stops again. The driver groans. You have to get all the way around the piazza before you can enter Vatican City via one of the stone gates manned by the Swiss Guard. You imagine—against your will, and yet undeniably—that Aemond is waiting there, anxious to ensure that you are granted reentry and thus your stolen time together is not yet over.

“I can walk from here,” you offer, before you remember that isn’t allowed.

“Stay in the car, Sister,” the driver barks in a thick Italian accent, then he gets out and slams the door shut behind him. Through the windshield, you watch him jog over to where the tour bus is still blocking the road and start shouting at the police officers. At first they yell back, then the driver shows them a badge identifying him as a Vatican employee and the police officers are suddenly much more accommodating, pointing him towards a side street that is blocked off by orange traffic barrels but will presumably be opened for him.

As you wait for the driver to return to the Fiat, you peer through the window at the crowd again. It is beginning to thin out, now that today’s ballots are past and twilight is approaching. The sky is turning fiery, blood orange and incandescent amber. The driver is walking back to the car and the traffic barrels are being moved aside. Your eyes catch on a group of Filipino tourists carrying massive cardboard cutouts with Lando’s face on them, and they are laughing as they chat with each other and share a package of Sky Flakes, and you smile and then—

There is a vicious jolt, the shriek of metal on metal, and the Fiat is spinning as it crashes through the metal barrier and into Saint Peter’s Square. Pedestrians are screaming and running; your head whips around and cracks against the window, and for a few seconds the pain is blinding, your vision black and your hands flying up to cushion your skull, and when you start getting glimpses of the world again you see just enough to realize what has happened: a lost tour bus has rocketed out of the side street and collided with the car, and as the bus squeals to a stop near the edge of the piazza, the whirling Fiat smashes sideways into one of the massive marble columns. The door you’ve been pinned against by the centrifugal force caves in; you are thrown from your seat and then yanked back by the seatbelt so forcefully the air is wrenched out of your lungs. You gasp for breath, letting your head rest against the cool window.

You think nonsensically, your skull hammering: I’m just going to have a quick snooze.

Your eyes dip shut for what could only be a minute or two. Muffled through the mangled car, there is the distorted, dreamlike warbling of voices: Italian, English, other languages too. You don’t want to wake up; being conscious is where the pain is, and the weights dragging you down into the darkness are overwhelming, intoxicating.

It’s too hot. Why is it so hot?

Your eyes flutter open, and what you see through the car window is rising threads of black smoke and the dusk-colored radiance of flames. Pedestrians from the square are pounding on the doors and shouting that there is a nun trapped inside.

That nun is me, you think dazedly, and then you lurch into full and horrifying alertness.

You click off your seatbelt and bolt across the back seat; both doors on your side of the Fiat are barred by the marble column. You unlock the door from the inside and then yank the handle...but the door remains closed. You try again, and again, and the car is getting hotter. It’s no use. The impact of the bus warped the door somehow and now it’s stuck, and you can’t get free. Pedestrians are pulling on the outside handle and trying to bust out the window, some are attempting to roll the car away from the marble column to unblock the other doors. The flames are growing taller, and now there is so much smoke the faces of the people trying to save you are obscured.

You scramble over the center console and into the passenger’s seat, where you tug franticly on the handle. This door won’t open either; you are imprisoned, you are entombed. The people outside are backing away as the heat becomes unbearable. They are calling for firefighters who will be able to extinguish the flames or pry a door open or break a window, but by then it will be too late.

“No!” you scream, pounding your fists on the window. “No, don’t leave! Don’t give up yet! I’m still alive in here, please help me!”

But the fire is scorching, the fire is lethal; the metal inside the car is hot enough to scald you when you touch it. You are in an oven. You are dying. You are Saint Joan of Arc tied to the stake; you are Saint Lawrence being roasted alive.

“Help me!” you sob, beating your hands against the window. Sweat is slick on your palms and pouring down your face. Your skin is flushed and burning. The rubber soles of your runners are melting into the floor. “Help! Someone help, please!”

But your would-be rescuers are gone. No one can withstand the flames. You can just barely decipher their silhouettes through the wall of thick, churning grey.

You curl up against the window, fumble your rosary out of the pocket of your habit, and clasp the white pearl beads, taking deep trembling breaths into your lungs. Dark acrid smoke sears your trachea and capillary beds. Sweat stings when it streams down into your eyes.

“I’m not ready to go,” you tell God in a choked, terrified whisper. “Please don’t abandon me. I’m not ready, I’m not ready. There are too many things I haven’t done yet.”

And then you see him cut through the smoke like a red blade, undaunted by the inferno, moving swiftly so he won’t be consumed by it, won’t be claimed, won’t be incinerated. The fire glows on his face; the flames are reflected in the blue of his eye. Aemond rips his gold cross off his neck and then there is a clang and a snapping sound; later, you will learn that he shoved the cross into the door gap and struck it with the heel of his hand so hard he split his palm to the bone. The car door pops open, and you collapse into his arms.

You try to flee from the blaze with Aemond, but you can’t walk; your knees and ankles buckle, your skull is throbbing and the world spiraling. You stumble and Aemond grabs you, drags you, pulls you singlehandedly back from the brink of oblivion.

He’s on fire, you think dizzily as the smoke begins to clear and the clamoring pedestrians reappear, shouting in relief and astonishment.

“That’s him!” you can hear people saying. “That’s Cardinal Aemond Targaryen!”

Aemond feels the heat of the flames licking on his shoulders and rips off his cassock, and it billows in the wind like a red sail. Underneath he has on black trousers and a white dress shirt, the top few buttons torn open in the turmoil, a small gold medallion glinting against his bare chest. You’ve never seen this before. Through the haze of shock and smoke and pain, you wonder who he is wearing.

Aemond realizes before you do that the wool of your white habit has caught fire, and in seconds he has tugged it off of you; but underneath your navy blue cotton skirt and light jumper are smoldering too.

Is he going to strip me? you think, disoriented. Here in front of everybody?

But no, Aemond has other ideas; he hauls you into the cold pattering water of one of the fountains and splashes into the pool with you, cradling you as you sputter and shake violently, the adrenaline evaporating, the agony in your skull and spine all-consuming. You are crying as you cling to him. Your rosary is still tangled in your fingers. By the marble column, the Fiat is now entirely engulfed in flames. The sirens of firetrucks are approaching.

I almost died. And if that was the very end, what regrets would I have?

“I’m here, I’m here,” Aemond is saying, taking the pins out so he can remove your veil, smoothing back your hair with the hand he’s not yet aware he is hemorrhaging from, blood pouring from his palm like a stigmata. “You’re safe now. Shh, you’re alright. Nobody will hurt you. I’ll never let anything hurt you.”

Cardinal Seaborn appears, panting from his sprint across the piazza. His crimson cassock is rumpled and his zucchetto blown away, his face furious. Behind him, the metallic shell of the Fiat burns luminously. “You broke seclusion!” he booms at Aemond. “You could be disqualified! You could be excommunicated!”

“Then do it!” Aemond roars back, his blood running down your face, copper on your lips, scarlet salt on your tongue.

But of course, Cardinal Seaborn cannot dismiss him, this man who has just performed his second miracle and will so effortlessly be declared a saint upon his death. Pedestrians have gathered around the fountain like pilgrims to a holy site and are taking photos and video clips, they are cheering, they are praying, and they are chanting loudly enough that even the cardinals inhumed within the walls of Vatican City must be able to hear: “Targaryen, Targaryen, Targaryen!”

You murmur to Aemond as he holds you, icy water lapping at your charred jumper, your skirt fanning out like a koi fish’s tail: “Well, you’re defo going to win now.”

And then there in the fountain, as the dusk sky spins high above, you black out and sink into an infinite, starless sea of silence.

#aemond targaryen x reader #aemond targaryen #fic #fic rec #hotd #house of the dragon #series

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