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[chaoticallywriting]

Tom Glynn-Carney | House of the Dragon | Max

[chaoticallywriting]

You don't know the half of the abuse.

[chaoticallywriting]

1968 [Chapter 5: Artemis, Goddess Of The Hunt]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 6.6k

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“So you smoked grass in college,” Aegon says, pondering you with glazed eyes as he slurps his cherry-flavored Mr. Misty. You’re in Biloxi, Mississippi where Aemond is making speeches and meeting with locals to commemorate the first summer of the beaches being desegregated after a decade of peaceful protests and violent white supremacist backlash. Route 90 runs right along the sand dunes. If you walked out of this Dairy Queen, you could look south and see the Gulf of Mexico, placid dark ripples gleaming with moonshine. “And swore, and had a boyfriend, and presumably, what, did shots? Skipped class on occasion?”

“Yeah,” you admit, smiling sheepishly, remembering. You stretch out your fingers. “I chewed gum, I talked during mass. And I loved black nail polish. The nuns would beat my knuckles with rulers, I always had bruises. I wore these flowing skirts down to my ankles and knee-high boots. My hair was a mess, long and blowing around everywhere. My friends and I would do each other’s makeup, silver glitter and purple shadow, pencil on a ridiculous amount of eyeliner and then smudge it out. If you saw a photo you wouldn’t recognize me.”

Aegon takes a drag on his Lucky Strike cigarette, weightless smoke and the tired yellowish haze of florescent lights. Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth is playing from the Zenith radio on the counter by the cash register. “I’d recognize you.”

“I used to skip this one class all the time. The professor was a demon. I could do the math, but not the way he wanted me to. Right solution, wrong steps, I don’t know. I learned it differently in high school, and I couldn’t figure out the formula he wanted me to use. So he’d mark everything a zero even if my answer was correct. I couldn’t stand that bastard. Then the nuns kept catching me sunbathing on the quad when I was supposed to be in Matrices and Vector Spaces. I racked up so many demerits they were going to revoke my weekend pass, and then I wouldn’t be able to go into the city with my friends. So I stole the demerit book and burned it up on the stove in my dorm. Almost set the whole building on fire.”

Aegon is laughing. “You did not. Not you, not perfect ever-obedient Miss America!”

“I did. I really did.” You sip your own Mr. Misty, lemon-lime. Across the restaurant, Criston and Fosco are eating banana splits—dripping chocolate syrup and melted ice cream all over their table—and passionately debating who is going to end up in the World Series; Criston favors the Cardinals and the Orioles, Fosco says the Red Sox and the Cubs. The rest of the Targaryen family is back at the hotel watching news coverage of the Republican National Convention, something you can only stomach so much of, Otto’s cynical commentary, Aemond’s remaining eye fixed fiercely on the screen as he nips at an Old Fashioned. “I was wild back then.”

“And you gave it all up to be Aemond’s first lady.”

You think back to where it started: palm trees, salt water, alligators in drainage ditches. “My father grew up in a shack outside of Tallahassee. No electricity, no running water, he dropped out of school in eighth grade to help take care of his siblings when his mom died. They moved south to live with their aunt in Tampa, and my father wound up in Tarpon Springs working as a sea sponge diver.”

Aegon’s eyebrows rise, like he thinks you’re teasing him. “Sea sponges…?”

“I’m serious! It paid better than picking oranges or sweeping up in a factory. It’s dangerous. You have to wear this heavy rubber suit and walk around on the ocean floor, sometimes 50 feet or more below the surface.”

“What do people do with sea sponges?”

“Oh right, you would be unfamiliar. You’re supposed to clean yourself with them, like a loofah. Soap? Water? Ringing any bells?”

He chuckles and rolls his eyes. “You’re a very mean person. Aren’t you supposed to be setting an example for the merciful wives and daughters of this great nation?”

“Painters and potters buy sponges too. And some women use them as contraceptives. You can soak them in lemon juice and then shove them up there and it kills sperm.”

“I suddenly have great appreciation for the sea sponge industry. God bless the sea sponges.”

“So my father spent a few years diving, and he fell in love with a girl who worked at one of the shops he sold sponges to. That was my mother. They got married when he had absolutely nothing, and by their fifth anniversary he had his own fleet of boats, a gift shop, and a processing and shipping facility, all of which they owned jointly. They just opened the Spongeorama Sponge Factory this past April, a cute little tourist trap. But my point is that they were partners from the start. My father listens to my mother, and she works alongside him, and it was never like what I’ve seen from my friends’ parents: dad at the office 80 hours a week, mom at home strung out on Valium, just these…deeply separate, cold planets locked in orbit but never touching each other. I knew I didn’t want that. I wanted a husband who was building something I could be a part of. I wanted a man who respected me.”

Aegon watches you as he lights a fresh cigarette, not saying what you imagine he wants to: And how is that working out? He puffs on his Lucky Strike a few times and then offers it to you. You aren’t supposed to smoke, not even tobacco—it’s not ladylike, it’s masculine, it’s subversive—but you take it and hold it between your index and middle fingers, inhaling an ashy bitterness that blood learns to crave. The bracelets on your wrist jangle, thin silver chains that match the diamonds in your ears. Your dress is mint green, your hair in your signature Brigitte Bardot-inspired updo. Aegon is wearing a black t-shirt with The Who stamped across the front. When you pass the cigarette back to him, Aegon asks: “What music did you listen to? The Stones, The Animals?”

“Yeah. And Hendrix, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin…”

“Phil Ochs?”

“I love him. He’s got a song about Mississippi, you know.”

“Oh, I’m aware. It’s one of my favorites.”

“And I’m currently getting a little obsessed with Loretta Lynn. She’s so angry!”

“She’s sanctimonious, that’s what she is. Always bitching about men.”

“Six kids and an alcoholic husband will do that to someone.”

Aegon winces, and then you realize what you’ve said. Loretta Lynn sounds a lot like Mimi. He finishes his Mr. Misty and then fidgets restlessly with his white cardboard cup, spinning it around by the straw. You feel bad, though you shouldn’t. You wouldn’t have a month ago.

“Aegon,” you say gently, and he reluctantly looks up at you, sunburned cheeks, blonde hair shagging over his eyes. “Why do you ignore your children? They’re interesting, they’re fun. Violeta invited me to help her make cakes with her Easy-Bake Oven last week. And Cosmo…he’s so clever. But it’s like he doesn’t know who you are. He might actually think Fosco’s his dad.”

Aegon takes one last drag off his cigarette and discards the end of it in his Mr. Misty cup. Now he’s fiddling with it again, avoiding your gaze. “I don’t have much to offer them.”

“I think you do.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do,” you insist. “You can be kind of nice sometimes.”

He frowns, staring out the window. You know he can’t see anything but darkness and streetlights. “I should have been the one to go to Vietnam. If somebody had to get shot at so Aemond could be president, I was the right choice. No one would miss me. No one would mourn me. Daeron didn’t deserve that. But I was too old, so Otto and my father got him to enlist. Now he’s in the jungle and my mother has nightmares about Western Union telegrams. If I was the son over there, I think she’d sleep easier.”

I’m glad you’re still here, you think. Instead you say: “Your children need you.”

“No they don’t. Between me and Mimi, they’re better off as orphans. Helaena and Fosco can be their parents. Maybe they’ll have a fighting chance.”

The glass door opens, and a man walks into the Dairy Queen with his two sons scampering behind him, all with sandy flip flops and carrying fishing rods. The dad is at least six feet tall and brawny, and wearing a Wallace For President baseball cap. You and Aegon both notice it, then share an amused, disparaging glance. You mouth: Imbecile bigot. The man continues to the cash register and orders two chocolate shakes and a root beer float. At their own table, Criston is mopping up melted ice cream with napkins and telling Fosco to stop being such a pig.

“Me?!” Fosco says. “You are the pig, that spot there is your ice cream, do not blame your failings on poor Fosco. I have already let you drag me to this terrible state and never once complained about the fried food or the mosquitos. And that thing out there is not a real beach. The water is still and brown, brown!”

“For once in your life, pretend you have a work ethic and help me clean up the table.”

“You are being very anti-immigrant right now, do you know that?”

Aegon begins singing, ostensibly to himself. “Here’s to the state of Mississippi, for underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines.”

“Aegon, no,” you whisper, petrified. You know this song. You know where he’s going.

He’s beaming as he continues: “If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find.”

Now the man in the Wallace hat is looking at Aegon. His sons are happily gulping down their chocolate shakes. Criston and Fosco, still bickering, haven’t noticed yet.

“Oh, the fat trees of the forest have hid a thousand crimes.”

“Aegon, don’t,” you plead quietly. “He’ll murder you.”

“The calendar is lyin’ when it reads the present time.”

“Hey,” calls the man in the Wallace For President hat. “You got a problem, boy?”

Aegon drums his palms on the tabletop as he sings, loudly now: “Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of, Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of!”

In seconds, the man has crossed the room, grabbed Aegon by the collar of his t-shirt, yanked him out of his chair and struck him across the face: closed fist, lethal intent, the sick wet sound of bones on flesh. Aegon’s nose gushes, his lip splits open, but he isn’t flinching away, he isn’t afraid. He’s yowling like a rabid animal and clawing, kicking, swinging at the giant who’s ensnared him. You are screaming as you leap to your feet, your chair falling over and clattering on the floor behind you. The man’s sons are hooting joyously. “Git him, Paw!” one of them shouts.

“Criston?!” you shriek, but he and Fosco are already here, tugging at the man’s massive arms and beating on his back, trying to untangle him from Aegon.

“Stop!” Criston roars. “You don’t want to hurt him! He’s a Targaryen!”

“A Targaryen, huh?” the man says as he steps away, wiping the blood from his knuckles on his tattered white t-shirt, stained with fish guts. “All the better. I wish that bullet they put in Aemond woulda been just another inch to the left. Directly through the aorta.”

Aegon lunges at the man again, hissing, fists swinging. Fosco yanks him back.

“Are you gonna call someone or not?!” Criston snaps at the girl behind the cash register, but she only gives him a steely glare in return. This is Wallace country. There’s a reason why it took four years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to finally desegregate the beaches.

“We should go,” you tell Criston softly.

“Yes, we will leave now,” Fosco says, hauling Aegon towards the front door. Then, to the cashier: “Thank you for the ice cream, but it was not very good. If you are ever in Italy, try the gelato. You will learn so much.”

“I can’t wait ‘til November,” the man gloats, ominous, threatening. His sons are standing tall and proud beside him. “When Aemond loses, you can all cart your asses back to Europe. We don’t want you here. America ain’t for people like you.”

“It literally is,” you say, unable to stop yourself. “It’s on the Statue of Liberty.”

“Yeah, where do you think your ancestors came from?!” Aegon yells at the man. “Are you a Seminole, pal? I didn’t think so—!” Fosco and Criston lug him through the doorway before more punches can be thrown.

Outside—under stars and streetlights and a full moon—Aegon burst out laughing. This is when he feels alive; this is when the blood in his veins turns to wave and riptides. You didn’t think to grab napkins from the table, so you wipe the blood off his face with your bare hand, assessing the damage. He’ll be fine; swollen and sore, but fine.

“You’re insane, you know that?” you say. “You could have been killed.”

Aegon pats your cheek twice and grins, blood on his teeth. “The world would keep spinning, little Io.” Then he starts walking back towards the White House Hotel.

~~~~~~~~~~

When the four of you arrive at your suite, Aemond, Otto, Ludwika, and Alicent are still gathered around the television. The nannies have taken the children to bed. Helaena is reading The Bell Jar in an armchair in the corner of the room. Mimi is passed out on the couch, several empty glasses on the coffee table. ABC is showing a clip they recorded earlier today of Ludwika travelling with Aemond’s retinue after he made an impassioned speech condemning the lack of recognition of the evils of slavery at Beauvoir, the historic home of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The reporter is asking Ludwika what she thinks makes Aemond a better presidential candidate than Eugene McCarthy, as McCarthy shares many of the same policy positions and has an additional 15 years of political experience.

“This McCarthy is not a real man,” Ludwika responds, her face stony and mistrustful. “He reminds me of the communists back in my country. Did you know he met with Che Guevara in New York City a few years ago? Why would he do such a thing?”

Now, Otto turns to her in this hotel room. “I love you.”

Ludwika takes a sip of her martini. “I want another Gucci bag.”

“Yes, yes. Tomorrow, my dear.”

“What happened to you?” Aemond asks his brother, half-exasperated and half-concerned. Criston has fetched a washcloth from the bathroom for Aegon to hold against his bleeding lip and nose. Aemond is still wearing his blue suit from a long day of campaigning, but he’s taken out his eye and put on his eyepatch. His gaze flicks from Aegon’s face to the blood still coating your left hand. On the couch, Mimi’s bare foot twitches but she doesn’t wake up.

“There was a Wallace supporter at the Dairy Queen,” you say. “Aegon felt inspired to defending you.”

Aemond chuckles. “Did you win?” he asks Aegon.

“I would have if the guy wasn’t two of me.”

On the television screen, Richard Nixon is accepting his party’s nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida.

“He’s a buffoon,” Otto sneers. “So awkward and undignified. Look at him sweating! Look at those ridiculous jowls! And he comes from nothing. His family is trash.”

“Americans love a rags to riches story,” you say. And then, somewhat randomly: “He loves his wife. He proposed to Pat on their very first date, and she said no. So he drove her to dates with other men for years until she finally reconsidered. He said it was love at first sight. He’s never had a mistress. And jowls or no jowls, his family adores him.”

Aegon turns to you, still clutching the washcloth against his face. “Really?”

You nod. “That’s the sort of thing the women talk about.”

There’s a knock at the door. You all look at each other, confounded; no one has ordered room service, no one is expecting any visitors, and the nannies have keys in the event of an emergency. Fosco is closest to the door, so he opens it. A man in uniform is standing there with a golden Western Union telegram in his hands. Alicent screams and collapses. Criston bolts to her.

“It’s okay,” you say. “He’s not dead. Whatever happened, Daeron’s not dead.”

Otto crinkles his brow at you. “How do you know?”

“Because if he was killed, there would be a priest here too.” They always send a priest when the boy is dead. Aegon glances at you, eyes wet and fearful.

“Ma’am,” the soldier—a major you see now, spotting the golden oak leaves—says to Alicent as he removes his cap. “I regret to inform you that your son Daeron was missing in action for several weeks, and we’ve just received confirmation that he’s being held as a prisoner of war in Hỏa Lò Prison.”

“He’s in the Hanoi Hilton?!” Otto exclaims. “Oh, fuck those people and their swamp, how did Kennedy ever think we had something to gain from getting tangled up in that mess?”

“But he’s alive?” Aemond says. “He’s unharmed?”

“Yes sir,” the captain replies. “It is our understanding that he is in good condition. The North Vietnamese are aware that he is a very valuable prisoner, like Admiral McCain’s son John. He’ll be used in negotiations. He is of far more use to them alive than dead.”

“So we can get Daeron back,” Aegon says. “I mean, we have to be able to, right? Aemond’s running for president, he’ll probably win in November, we have millions of dollars, we can spring one man out of some third-world jail, right?”

The captain continues: “Tomorrow when your family returns to New Jersey, the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be there to discuss next steps with you. I’m afraid I’m only authorized to give you the news as it was relayed to me.” He entrusts the telegram to Otto, who rapidly opens it and stares down at the mechanical typewriter words.

“I have to pray,” Alicent says suddenly. “Helaena, will you pray with me? There’s a Greek church down the road. Holy Trinity, I think it’s called.”

Obediently, Helaena joins her mother and follows her to the doorway. Criston leaves with them. Otto gives his new wife a harsh, meaningful stare. Ludwika, an ardent yet covert atheist, sighs irritably. “Wait. I want to pray too,” she says, and vanishes with them into the hall.

As the captain departs, Mimi sits up on the couch, blinking, groggy. “What? What happened?”

“Go with Alicent,” Otto tells her. “She’s headed downstairs.”

“What? Why…?”

“Just go!” he barks.

Mimi staggers to her feet and hobbles out of the hotel room, her sundress—patterned with forget-me-nots—billowing around her. The only people left are Otto, Aemond, Fosco, Aegon, and you. The fact that you are the sole woman permitted to remain here feels intentional.

After a moment, Otto speaks. “You know, John McCain has famously refused to be released from the Hanoi Hilton until all the men imprisoned before him have been freed. He doesn’t want special treatment. And that’s a very noble thing to do, don’t you think? It has endeared him and the McCains to the public.”

Aemond and Otto are looking at each other, communicating in a silent language not of letters or accents but colors: red ambition, green hunger, grey impassionate morality. Fosco is observing them uneasily. Aemond says at last: “Daeron wants to help this family.”

“You’re not going to try to get him out.” Aegon realizes.

Aemond turns to him, businesslike, vague distant sympathy. “It’s only until November.”

“No, you know people!” Aegon explodes. “You pick up the phone, you call in every favor, you get him out of there now! You have no idea if he has another three months, you don’t know what kind of shape he’s in! They could be dislocating his arms or chopping off his fingers right now, they could be starving him, they could be beating him, you can’t just leave him there!”

“It’s not your decision. It could have been, had you accepted your role as the eldest son. But you didn’t. So it’s my job to handle these things. You don’t get to hate me for making choices you were too cowardly too take responsibility for.”

“But Daeron could die,” Aegon says, his voice going brittle.

“Any of us could die. We’re in a very dangerous line of work. Greatness killed Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Huey Long, Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Vernon Dahmer, Martin Luther King Jr., does that mean we should all give up the fight? Of course not. The work isn’t finished. We have to keep going.”

“Will you stop pretending this is about America?! This is about you wanting to be president, and everything you’ve ever done has been in pursuit of that trophy, and you keep shoving new people into the line of fire and it’s not right!”

“Aegon,” Otto says calmly. “It’s unlikely we’d be able to get him out before the election anyway. Negotiations take time. But if Aemond wins in November, he’ll be in a very advantageous position. The North Vietnamese aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t kill the brother of a U.S. president. They don’t want their vile little corner of the world flattened by nukes.”

“Still, it feels so wrong to leave a brother in peril,” Fosco says. “It is unnatural. Of course Aegon will be upset. We could at least see what a deal to get Daeron released would entail, maybe his arrival home would be a good headline—”

“And who the fuck asked you?” Otto demands, and Fosco goes quiet.

“Okay, then tell Mom,” Aegon says to Aemond. “Tell her you’re going to pretend Daeron made some self-sacrificial vow not to come home until all the other POWs can too. Tell her you’re going to let him get tortured for a few months before you take this seriously.”

Aemond replies cooly: “Why would you want to upset her? She can’t change it. You’ll only make her suffering worse.”

“What do you think?” Otto asks you, and you know that he isn’t seeking counsel. He’s summoning you like a dog to perform a trick, like an actor to recite a line. He’s waiting for you to say that it’s a smart strategy, because it is. He’s waiting for you to bend to Aemond’s will as your station requires you to, as moons are bound to their planets.

“I think it’s wrong,” you murmur; and Aemond is thunderstruck by your treason.

Without another word, you walk into the bathroom, turn on the sink, and gaze down at Aegon’s blood on your palm. For some reason, it’s very difficult to bring yourself to wash it away.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s mid-August now, the world painted in goldenrod yellow and sky blue. The Democratic National Convention is in two weeks. You and Aemond are posing on the beach at Asteria, surrounded by an adoring gaggle of journalists who are snapping photographs and jotting down quotes on their notepads. You’re sitting demurely on a sand dune, you’re building sandcastles with the children you borrowed from Aegon and Helaena, you’re flying kites, you’re gazing confidently into the sunlit horizon where a glorious new age is surely dawning.

“Mr. Targaryen, what is it that makes your partnership so successful?” a journalist asks as flashbulbs pulse like lightning. “What do you think is the most crucial characteristic to have in a wife?”

Aemond doesn’t need to consider this before he answers. He always has his compliment picked out. “Loyalty,” your husband says. “Not just to me or to the Targaryen family, but to our shared cause. This year has been indescribably difficult for me and my wife. I announced my candidacy, we embarked on a strenuous national campaign that we’re currently only halfway through, I barely survived a brutal assassination attempt in May, in July we lost our first child to hyaline membrane disease after he was born six weeks prematurely, and at the beginning of this month we learned that my youngest brother Daeron was taken by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war. To find the strength not just to get out of bed in the morning, not just to be there for me and this family in our personal lives, but to tirelessly traverse the country with me inspiring Americans to believe in a better future…it’s absolutely remarkable. I’m in awe of her. And when she is the first lady of the United States, she will continue to amaze us all with her unwavering faith and dedication.”

There are whistles and cheers and strobing flashbulbs. You smile—elegant, soft, practiced—as Aemond rests a hand firmly on your waist. You lean into him, feeling out-of-place, bewildered that you’ve ever slept with him, full of dull panic that soon you’ll have to again.

“How about you, Mrs. Targaryen?” another reporter asks. “Same question, essentially. What is the trait that you most admire in your husband?”

And in the cascading clicks of photographs being captured, your mind goes entirely blank. You can think of so many other people—Aegon, Ari, Alicent, Daeron, Fosco, Cosmo—but not Aemond. It’s like you’ve blocked him out somehow, like he’s a sketch you erased. But you can’t hesitate. You can’t let the uncertainty read on your face. You begin speaking without knowing where you’re going, something that is rare for you. “Aemond is the most tenacious person I’ve ever met. When he has a goal in mind, nothing can stop him.” You pause, and there are a few awkward chuckles from the journalists. You swiftly recover. “He never stops learning. He always knows the right thing to do or say. And what he wants more than anything is to serve the American people. Aemond won’t disappoint you. He’s not capable of it. He will do whatever it takes to make this country more prosperous, more peaceful, and more free.”

There are applause and gracious thank yous, but Aemond gives you a look—just for a second, just long enough that you can catch it—that warns you to get it together. Fifteen minutes later, he and the flock of reporters are headed to one of the guest houses to conduct a long-form interview. This will be the bulk of the article; you will appear in one or two photos, you will supply a few quotes. The rest of the story is Aemond. You are an accessory, like a belt or a bracelet. He’s the person who picks you out of a drawer each morning and wears you until you go out of fashion.

Released from your obligations, you return to the main house and disappear into your upstairs bathroom. You are there for fifteen minutes and emerge rattled, routed. You pace aimlessly around your bedroom for a while, then try again; still no luck. You go back outside and stare blankly at the ocean, wondering what you’re going to do. Down on the beach, Fosco is teaching the kids how to yo-yo. Ludwika is sunbathing in a bikini.

“What’s wrong with you?”

You whirl to see Aegon, popping a Valium into his mouth and washing it down with a splash of straight rum from a coffee mug. “Huh? Nothing. I’m great.”

“No, something’s wrong. You look lost. You look like me.”

You gaze out over the ocean again, chewing your lower lip.

Aegon snickers, fascinated, sensing a scandal. “What did you do?”

Your eyes drift to him. “You can’t make fun of me.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

There is a long, heavy lull before you answer. When you speak, it’s all in a rush, like you can’t unburden yourself of the words fast enough. “I put a tampon in and I can’t get it out.”

Aegon immediately breaks his promise and cackles. “You did what?!” Then he tries to be serious. “Wait. Sorry. Uh, really?”

You’re on the verge of tears. “I’ve been bleeding since I had the baby, and I hate using tampons, I almost never do, but Aemond wanted me to wear this dress for the photoshoot and it’s super gauzy and from certain angles I felt like I could see the pad bulge when I checked in the mirror, so I put a tampon in for the first time in probably a year. I’m not even supposed to be using them for another few weeks because my uterus isn’t healed all the way or whatever. And now I can’t get it out and it’s been in there for like six hours and I’m scared I’m going to get an infection and die in the most pointless, humiliating way imaginable.”

“Okay, calm down, calm down,” Aegon says. “There’s no string?”

“No, I’ve checked multiple times. It must be a defective one and they forgot to put a string in it at the factory and I didn’t notice, or the string somehow got tucked under it, I don’t know, but I can’t get it out, it’s like…the angle isn’t right. I can just barely feel it with my fingertips, but I can’t grab it. I’m going to have to go to the hospital to get it taken out, but I’m scared word will spread and journalists will show up to get photos when I leave and then everyone will be asking me why I was at the emergency room to begin with and I’m going to have to make up something and…and…” You can’t talk anymore. There are other reasons why you don’t want to go to the hospital. You haven’t stepped foot in one since Ari died; the thought makes you feel like you are looking down to see blood on your thighs all over again, like you’ll never have enough air in your lungs.

“Did you bleed through it? Because that should help it slide out easier.”

“I don’t know,” you moan miserably. “I mean, I guess I did, because there was blood when I checked a few minutes ago. I had to stuff my underwear with toilet paper.”

“Why didn’t you just tell Aemond you couldn’t wear this dress?”

You give him an impatient glance. “I’m tired of having the same conversation.” When do you think you’ll be done bleeding? When do you think it’ll be time to start trying again?

Aegon sighs. “Do you want me to get it out for you?”

“Please stop. I’m really panicking here.”

“I’m not joking.”

You stare at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I have fished many objects out of many orifices, you cannot shock me. I am unshockable.”

“I’d rather walk down to the sand right now and strangle myself with Fosco’s yo-yo.”

“Okay. So who are you gonna ask to drive you to the hospital?”

You hesitate.

“I’d offer to do it,” Aegon says, grinning, holding up his mug. “But I’m in no condition to drive.”

“But you are in the proper condition to extract a rogue tampon, huh?”

“Two minutes tops. That’s a guarantee. My personal best is fifteen seconds. And that was for a lost condom, much trickier to locate than a tampon.”

Perhaps paradoxically, the more you consider his offer, the more tempting it seems. No complicated trip and cover story? Over in just a few minutes? “If you ever tell anyone about this, I will never forgive you. I will hate you forever.”

Aegon taunts: “I thought you already hated me.”

You aren’t sure what you feel for him, but it’s certainly not hate. Not anymore. “Where would we do it?”

“In my office. And by that I mean my basement.”

“Your filthy, disease-ridden basement? On your shag carpet full of crabs?”

“You’re in luck,” he jokes. “My crab exterminator service just came by yesterday.”

You exhale in a low, despairing groan.

“Hey, would you rather do it on the dining room table? I’m game. Your choice.”

You watch the seagulls swooping in the afternoon air, the banners of sailboats on the glittering water. “Okay. The basement.”

You walk with Aegon to the house and—after ensuring that no one is around to notice—sneak with him down the creaking basement steps, the door locked behind you. Aegon is darting around; he sets a small trashcan by the carpet and tosses you two towels, then goes to wash his hands in his tiny bathroom, not nearly enough room for someone to stretch out across the linoleum floor.

You’re surveying the scene nervously. “I don’t want to get blood all over your stuff.”

“You’re the cleanest thing that’s ever been on that carpet. Lie down.”

You place one towel on the green shag carpet, then whisk off your panties, discard the bloody knot of toilet paper in the trashcan, and pull the skirt of your dress up around your waist so it’s out of the way. Then you sit down and drape the second towel over your thighs so you’re hidden from him, like you’re about to be examined by a doctor. Your heart is thumping, but you don’t exactly feel like you want to stop. It’s more exhilarating than fear, you think; it is forbidden, it is shameful, it is a microscopic betrayal of Aemond that he’ll never know about.

Aegon moseys out of the bathroom, flicking drops of water from his hands. He wears one of his usual counterculture uniforms: a frayed green army jacket with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, khaki shorts, tan moccasins. He kicks them off before he kneels on the shag carpet. He checks the clock on the wall. “2:07. I promised two minutes max. Let’s see how I do. Ready?”

You rest the back of your head on your linked hands, raise your knees, take a deep and unsteady breath. “Ready.”

But he can see that you’re shaking. “Hey,” Aegon says kindly, pressing his hand down on the towel so you’re covered. “Do you want me to go to the hospital with you? I’ll try to distract people. I’ll pretend I’m having a seizure or something.”

“No, I’m okay,” you insist. “I just want it out. I want this over with.”

“Got it.” And then he begins. He stares at the wall to his left, not looking at you, navigating by feel. You feel the pressure of two fingers, a stretching that is not entirely unpleasant. He’s warm and careful, strangely unobtrusive. Still, you suck in a breath and shift on the carpet. “Shh, shh, shh,” Aegon whispers, skimming his other hand up and down the inside of your thigh, and shiver like you’ve never felt before rolls backwards up the length of your spine. “Relax. You alright?”

“Fine. Totally fine.”

“Oh yeah, it’s definitely in there,” Aegon says. His brow is creased with comprehension. “No string…you’re right, it must either be tangled up somehow or it never had one to begin with. Maybe you accidentally inserted it upside down.”

“Now you insult my intelligence. As if I’m not embarrassed enough.”

“I should have put on a record to set the mood. What gets you going, Marvin Gaye? Elvis?”

“The seductive voice of Richard Milhous Nixon. Maybe you can get him on the phone.”

Aegon laughs hysterically. His fingertips push the tampon against your cervix and you yelp. “Sorry, sorry, my mistake,” Aegon says. There are beads of sweat on his forehead, on his temples; now his eyes are squeezed shut. “I’m gonna try to wiggle it out…”

As he works, there are sensations you can’t quite explain: a very slow-building indistinct desire, a loosening, a readying, a drop in your belly when you think about the fact that he’s the one touching you. Then he happens to press in just the right spot and there is a sudden pang of real pleasure—craving, aching, a deep red flare of previously unfathomable temptation—and you instinctively reach for him. You hand meets his forearm, and for the first time since he started Aegon looks at your face, alarmed, afraid that he’s hurt you again. But once your eyes meet you’re both trapped there, and you can’t pretend you’re not, his fingers still inside you, his pulse racing, a rivulet of sweat snaking down the side of his face, his eyes an opaque murky blue like water you’re desperate to claw your way into. You know what you want to tell him, but the words are impossible. Don’t stop. Come closer.

Aegon clears his throat, forces himself to look away, and at last dislodges the tampon. It appears dark and bloody in his grasp. “No string,” he confirms, holding it up and turning it so you can see. “Factory reject.”

“Just like you.”

He glances at the clock. “2:09. I delivered precisely what was promised.” He chucks the tampon into the trashcan and then grins as he helps pull you upright with his clean hand. “So do you like to cuddle afterwards, or…?”

You’re giggling, covering your flushed face. “Shut up.”

“Personally, I enjoy being ridden into the ground and then called a good boy.”

“Go away.” You nod to where he disposed of the tampon and say before stopping to think: “You’re not going to keep that under your ashtray too?”

Aegon freezes and blinks at you. He smiles slowly, cautiously. “No, I think that would be a little unorthodox, even for me.” He pitches you a clean washcloth from the bathroom closet. “That should get you upstairs.”

“Thanks.” You shove it between your legs and rise to your feet, smoothing the skirt of your dress. “I owe you something. I’m not sure what, but I’ll figure it out.”

“Hey,” Aegon says, and waits for you to turn to him. “Maybe I’m not that bad.”

“Maybe,” you agree thoughtfully.

Just before you hurry upstairs, you steal a glimpse of Aegon in the bathroom, the door kicked only half-closed. He has turned on the water, but he’s not using it yet. Aegon is staring down at the blood on his hand, half-dried scarlet impermanent ink.

~~~~~~~~~~

Hi, it’s me again. I’m in solitary confinement. There’s a guy in the cell next to mine; we talk to each other with a modified version of Morse code. Tap tap tap on the wall, he taps back, etcetera etcetera, you get the idea. You’re not going to believe this, but he says his name is John McCain. Well, actually, he told me his name is Jobm McCbin, but I think that’s because I translated the taps wrong. I might be in the Hanoi Hilton, but at least they have me in the VIP section! Hahaha.

Every few hours the guards show up to do a very impressive magic trick: they wave their batons like wands, I turn black and blue. Sometimes one of my teeth even disappears. Isn’t that something? Houdini would love it. There’s a rat that I’m making friends with. I give her nibbles of my stale bread, she gives me someone to talk to. She’s good company. I’ve named her Tessarion.

Allow me to make something absolutely fucking clear.

I would very much like to be rescued.

[chaoticallywriting]

I will never forgive HOTD for making me sit through TWO Rhaenyra births and TWO Rhaenyra weddings…

But never having us see Alicent’s wedding or births. Scenes that would have forced the fans to confront the true reality of how despicable her situation is. It would force viewers to see a child, devastated, as she walks down the aisle to her creepy old man of a husband. It would force viewers to watch a little girl have a child. Completely unprepared and alone, crying for her mother and finding no sympathy. She has no father to protect her. No mother to guide her and comfort her. No husband who cares about her.

It would force team black to stop seeing her as the evil seductress, for even a moment. And see her true vulnerability. See how she doesn’t, and never did, want this. See how these are not consequences of her actions, but instead the consequences of the men around her that she has to suffer for them. Because they don’t care about her. Viserys doesn’t care about her.

These are scenes that are meant to bring sympathy to her character. To give Alicent a reason to be righteously angry at the family and system that broke her down and stole her childhood. It gives Alicent a valid motive to fight aside from fear. And it takes away the chances for team black to deny her suffering at least a little bit.

Because as the current narrative sits, it’s easy to ignore Alicent’s experience and warp it into a much more pleasant story. They see Alicent “seducing” the king and then she is already married. And then she’s pregnant and the babies magically appear. No screaming or crying or bleeding involved. All is good. The teenager definitely didn’t suffer at all. And by doing this some people can’t sympathize as much or they are given allowances to intentionally not sympathize.

Instead. The current narrative allows for Alicent to be the seductress, the crazed woman, the jealous bitch, and the villain. But if we saw what she actually went through. Alone, scared, suffering, neglected, and holding it all in. We would be allowed to see her as she truly is. The victim. Finally crushing under the weight of it all and lashing out.

(And the narrative would be all the better for it because instead of feminist icon team vs crazy trad wife and co (as far as team black sees it), we would have woman fighting against patriarchal narrative for her own claim vs woman fighting against patriarchal narrative to destroy the people who hurt her)

[chaoticallywriting]

1968 [Chapter 4: Zeus, God Of Thunder]

A/N: Can you believe we're already 1/3 done with this series?? I sure can't! I hope you enjoy Chapter 4. I'm so excited to show you where we're headed. The times are indeed a-changin'... 😉

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 7.3k

Tagging: @arcielee @huramuna @glasscandlegrenades @gemmagirlss1 @humanpurposes @mariahossain @marvelescvpe @darkenchantress @aemondssapphirebussy @haslysl @bearwithegg @beautifulsweetschaos @travelingmypassion @althea-tavalas @chucklefak @serving-targaryen-realness @chaoticallywriting @moonfllowerr @rafeism @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @herfantasyworldd @mangosmootji @sunnysideaeggs @minttea07 @babyblue711

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

You unzip the floral suitcase that Alicent gave the nurses to pack for you. Inside are the hundreds of greeting cards sent by people from the Atlantic to the Rockies; downstairs, Eudoxia is distributing a dozen bouquets of flowers throughout the house with appropriate grimness, and more arrive each hour. You lift cards out of the suitcase by the handful and lay them down on your bed. Every movement feels slow, every thought muddled, bare feet in cold wet sand that swallows you to your ankles. The windows are open, the sheer curtains billowing. The wind whips in off the ocean, smelling of brine and sun glare, life and death.

Aemond emerges from the bathroom in a gale of steam. He finishes adjusting his eyepatch and then dresses himself: white shorts, blue polo. Aemond wears a lot of blue. It is Greek, is it American, it is the Democratic Party, it is the color of the sky that was once believed to hold Olympus, it is everything he’s ever been or wanted to be. He’s humming The House Of The Rising Sun. It’s the first time you’ve truly been alone since the night before he caught his flight to Tacoma.

Beneath the greeting cards you find the books, cosmetics, and three new sundresses, none of which you ended up wearing home. Alicent bought you a plain black shift dress, matching gloves and flats, and opaque sunglasses to hide your face from the journalists who waited outside the hospital. And there is one last item to unpack. At the bottom of the suitcase is a clear plastic bag containing fabric, white dotted with bruises of common blue violets. At first you are confounded, and then you turn it over to see the dark, saturated stain of crimson. It’s the sundress you were wearing the day you were rushed to Mount Sinai to have Ari. The nurses hadn’t known if you wanted to keep it, burn it, bury it.

“Why didn’t you come back?”

Aemond’s brow furrows, like he’s surprised by the question. He goes to his writing desk and turns the chair around so it’s facing you. He sits, crosses one leg over the other, leans back and hides his hands in his pockets. His tone is gentle, but his gaze is hard. “By the time I heard that you’d had the baby, it was already over. You were out of surgery, he was in an incubator, and that was the immutable reality. I figured there was nothing I could do at that point to improve the outcome. And that’s true. Me flying back early wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“But you should have been there,” you insist, eyes wet, voice quivering. “You should have known him like I did.”

“Winning Washington was important.”

“Washington is a basket of votes, Ari was our child, he was real.”

“No one told me he was dying—”

“Because you didn’t pick up the fucking phone.”

Aemond is incredulous, like he couldn’t have heard you correctly. “It’s not like I was playing golf or drinking myself under some bar, I was campaigning 20 hours a day and it worked.”

“Nothing on earth could have kept me away from you when you got shot in Palm Beach.”

“So maybe it wasn’t just about Washington,” Aemond says, and his words aren’t gentle anymore. They are razored, dauntless, daring you to battle him. “It’s about the whole picture, it’s about the momentum. If I had underperformed in Washington, the dominoes would fall in Kentucky, and Utah, and Virginia, and then at the national convention in August, and then against Nixon in November. I don’t have the luxury of disappearing from the public eye to sit adoringly by your bedside when we both know there isn’t a single goddamn thing I can do to help.”

“It would have made you look like a better man.”

“But not a better president.”

And like a fracture being snapped back into place, you remember what Aegon said on that bloodstained night in Florida: You’re a vessel. You’re a cow. And one day he’ll be done with you. You stare down at the ruined dress entombed in plastic, still clutched in your hands. You don’t dare to let Aemond see your eyes. You’re afraid you won’t be able to disguise the betrayal glistening there. You ask, a whisper, a whimper: “Why aren’t you sad?” I thought you loved him. I thought you were always so worried about him.

“Of course I’m sad,” Aemond says, more kindly now, patiently, like he’s speaking to someone who can’t be expected to comprehend. “But it’s different for the mother.”

You can’t reply. If you do, something lethal will pour out, smoke and poison and arrows, something that shoots to kill. Ari was quietly interred at the Targaryen family mausoleum in Saint George Greek Orthodox Cemetery in Asbury Park. It had felt so wrong to leave his tiny casket there in a silent stone prison full of strangers.

Aemond is behind you now, trying to knead the tension out of your shoulders. And for the first time in two years, you wish he’d stop touching you. Your belly hurts, your head hurts, your heart hurts, you are a garden blooming with bruises and scars. “I know you aren’t in your right mind. Everything will be better soon. I promise.”

Tears gather on your eyelashes. “I miss him.”

“We’ll have others. Here, let me take that…” Aemond grabs the bag holding your ruined dress and it’s out of your reach before you can think to resist. “You should get ready for dinner.”

“Okay,” you reply numbly, now gazing down at your empty palms. Aemond leaves with his grisly parcel, and you never see it again. But once he’s gone you don’t shed your black mourning dress, blood-soaked pad, bandages, and shake loose your hair and step into the shower. Instead, you walk around the bed to pick up the mint green rotary phone on your nightstand. You speak to a series of operators before you reach the Harbour Rocks Hotel in Sydney. While you listen to the ringing through the intercontinental wire, you sit down on the bed. You’ve never felt low like this. You’ve never felt so unmoored from everything you had believed about your life.

A gruff, familiar voice answers. He’s just waking up, slurping on his morning coffee, dabbing his moustache with a napkin. “Hello?”

“Daddy, I don’t think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

“What?” he asks, and immediately he is no longer groggy but desperately concerned. Your parents are away on a month-long tour of Australia and often incommunicado. By the time they received news of Ari’s death and called Mount Sinai in hysterics to speak with you, you had told them not to rush home. You were about to be released, and they would not make it in time for the funeral regardless. Aemond insisted on a swift, private ceremony, a detour on the drive back to Asteria, like it was something he couldn’t wait to put in his rearview mirror. “What are you talking about, sweetheart?”

“Aemond, he…” He’s not the man I thought he was. I don’t know him, I don’t trust him. “He’s not acting right, he’s not…he didn’t…Daddy, it’s like he doesn’t care. And I don’t want to be here anymore. Can I fly down to Tarpon Springs when you and Mama get back? Can I stay with you for a while? And then…and then…” You don’t even know what words you’re looking for. They don’t exist in your universe.

 “Listen, honey,” your father says with great tenderness. “Are you listening?”

“Yeah.” You’re trying to stifle your sobs so no one downstairs hears you.

“You’ve just been through something terrible. So terrible I can’t even imagine it. And of course you’re feeling out of sorts. But Aemond is your husband, he’s your protector and your ally, your best friend, your partner in life. He’s not the one responsible for what happened. You can’t misdirect your heartache at him.”

“But he’s…Daddy, there’s…there’s something wrong with him.”

“Oftentimes, it’s easier for women to talk about their emotions, both good and bad. But for men—especially men like Aemond who are so self-disciplined by nature—it can be like pulling teeth to express themselves. They don’t like to be vulnerable. They actually think they’re failing in their commitments to their wife if they let her see how much they’re struggling. Aemond is hurting just like you are. He might not show it in the way you expect, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. Of course he cares.”

How do you know, Daddy? Have you cut him open and studied his brain, his ropy nerves, the dark chambers of his heart? “I thought he saw me like you see Mama, I thought he included me in everything because he loved and respected me, but that’s not it. He just needs someone to help him get elected, that’s all Ari and I were to him, and I can’t…I just can’t…the thought of him touching me now…”

“Sweetheart, Aemond is a good man,” your father says. “He does love you. He does respect you. And he’s doing such incredible things for this country. I have friends in Florida who’ve been voting Republican since Hoover, but they’re crossing over for Aemond. They think he’s the one to clean up this mess. Vietnam, poverty, civil rights, the riots, the shootings, the hippies, the drugs, the Russians, the Chinese, someone has to pick up the pieces and create something that makes sense. Do you think Nixon or Humphrey would end the war by this time next year? Do you think either of them would compel the South to enforce voting rights or desegregation?”

“No,” you say, closing your eyes. But that doesn’t mean I can forget what I’ve learned about Aemond.

“Here, your mom wants to say something.” Your father vanishes; your mother’s voice comes piping across the copper submarine cables that span the length of the Pacific Ocean. You wonder—randomly, distractedly—if any of the wires connecting you to Sydney run through Arizona, the place Aegon told you he didn’t want to leave.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

“Oh, honey,” she sighs, distraught, hearing the exhaustion and misery in your voice. “You’ve got the baby blues, and no baby to hold good and close to help them run their course. I’m so sorry. It’s just awful, so awful.”

You speak before you know what you’re going to say. “I don’t want to be married to Aemond anymore.”

“You’re confused, sweetheart. Your hormones are all over the place, you’re in pain, you’ve just had major surgery, and after this year with all the stress from the campaign and that horrific shooting in Palm Beach—”

“He’s not like Daddy.” Tears are flooding down your cheeks; your voice is hoarse. “I thought he was, but he’s not.”

“You cannot make a mistake like this,” your mother says, and she’s turned from silk to steel. “If you do something drastic now, you’ll wake up in a month or six months or a year and realize you’ve ruined not just your life, but the chance this country had at a better future. Don’t you realize what’s at stake here? Every marriage goes through tough times. Every husband needs to learn how to care for his wife, and every wife how to best support her husband. That’s natural, and you’ve only been married two years. Of course you and Aemond are still learning how to navigate life together. It only seems so much worse because of what’s happened to the baby.”

Is she right? Am I wrong? “I don’t know,” you say weakly.

“If you leave now, what happens?” your mother demands. “You abandon the campaign and Aemond’s support plummets. You are a divorcee, a sinner, a failure. You don’t get your son back. But you do lose everything you’ve helped build. Marriage isn’t an experiment, ‘oh let’s give it a try and if we hit any bumps we’ll call the whole thing off.’ No. It’s a covenant. Marriage is for life.”

Yes it is, in just about every faith, and certainly for the Greek Orthodox Church. You are suddenly consumed by mistrust for your own body, this flesh that failed your son and now is deceiving you with doubt so heavy—like cold iron or lead or platinum—it masquerades as truth. How could you imagine a life after Aemond? What waits for you in Tarpon Springs besides the promise of an eventual remarriage that is banal, powerless, bleak, exactly what you’ve always plotted so willfully to avoid?

“Do you understand me, honey?” your mother asks, and she’s soft and kind again. “I don’t mean to be strict with you. My heart breaks for you, and I love you. I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to protect you from yourself.”

“Yes.” There are people getting massacred in Vietnam right now; there are people who can’t afford roofs over their heads. Who am I to complain? Your tears have stopped; your breathing is now slow and measured. “Yes, Mama. I understand.”

After you’ve hung up, you stay where you are for a long time, your hands folded limply in your lap and gazing at the paintings hung on the pale blue walls: small replicas of The Birth of Venus, Romulus and Remus, Prometheus Bound, Perseus Rescuing Andromeda, Echo and Narcissus, Jupiter and Io. Then you get up to sift through the greeting cards you’ve piled on the bed, not really seeing them. Only one captures your attention. Only one jolts you out of the fog like a flash of lightning through dark churning clouds.

You take the card Aegon gave you back when you were still a mother and set it upright on your nightstand, consider it for a while, wander into the bathroom to scrub the despair from your skin and change into something less somber for dinner.

~~~~~~~~~~

You’re playing Battleship with Cosmo by the edge of the swimming pool while all the other children splash around, howling with laughter and diving for toys they throw to the bottom and then fetch with their teeth like golden retrievers, G.I. Joes and Barbies and Trolls and even a waterlogged Mr. Potato Head. The nannies are observing intently, poised to leap in if anyone should appear to be at risk of drowning. If Ari had lived, I wouldn’t have wanted nannies to raise him, you think. I would have wanted him to have a normal childhood. I would have wanted to know him.

“Your turn,” Cosmo says with a grin. He’s the one who looks the most like Aegon, or how you imagine Aegon must have looked before the pills and the booze and the long caged decades. His hair is so light a blonde it’s nearly white, his eyes huge and glimmering and mischievous. Battleship is a bit advanced for a five-year-old. Cosmo keeps guessing the same coordinates over and over, so you periodically lie and tell him he’s sunk one of your ships. When you launch a successful attack against his, he seems to think it’s fair game to relocate the vessel to a more advantageous location.

“D7.”

He picks up his aircraft carrier and repositions it. From the record player drifts California Dreamin’. “Nope! Nothing sank!”

“Wow. I’m so bad at this.”

Cosmo is snickering. “Yeah, you are. Really bad.”

“If I got drafted, the Army would be better off leaving me at home. I’d just be a nuisance.”

“What’s drafted?”

“Never mind. Your turn to guess.”

“J12!”

The grid only goes up to 10. Nonetheless, you slap your own forehead dramatically. “Oh no, not again! You sunk my battleship!”

“Yay!” Cosmo cheers, then turns to the Jacuzzi. It’s brand new, just installed last month. “Mom, did you see? I’m winning!”

You glance over at Mimi. She has passed out, her latest Gimlet drained and her head resting atop her crossed arms, propped on the rim of the Jacuzzi. “Uh, Cosmo, run inside and ask Doxie to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, okay?”

“Okay.” He scampers off, toddling on reckless little legs.

With no shortage of difficulty, you manage to stand. Each day your abdominal muscles feel less like they’ve been shredded and then mended with threads of fire, but the pain is still bad, very bad, and there are spots of skin on your belly that are numb when you skim your fingertips across them. You will have a long vertical scar like Aemond’s, an irreparable reminder of the blood you’ve paid to the cause. And for all your anguish, this particular fact doesn’t torment you. It is proof that Ari existed, however briefly, however futilely.

You amble over to the Jacuzzi, your roomy lavender dress flowing in the wind, and shove one of Mimi’s shoulders. “Mimi, wake up. Get out of the water.”

She mumbles incoherently in response. You reach for her before remembering you can’t lift anything. You look around. Alicent and Helaena are on lounge chairs at the other end of the pool; Alicent is trying very hard to look interested while Helaena shows her about 100 different butterfly species pictured in a kaleidoscopically colorful book. Criston is off giving Ludwika a tour of the property, flanked by a flock of Alopekis hoping for treats. Ludwika is Otto’s wife of six months but only newly arrived, 30 years old, perpetually unimpressed, modelesque, golden blonde, if Barbie was from Poland. Aemond, Otto, and Viserys—his sparse threads of silver hair hanging like cobwebs around his gaunt face, grimacing and clutching the armrests of his wheelchair—are conspiring on the lawn between the main house and the pool. They haven’t noticed your predicament. Fosco is sauntering by wearing some of the tiniest swim shorts you’ve ever seen. He is the son of an Italian count, gangly and chatty and from what you’ve seen almost certainly addicted to gambling.

“Will you help me move Mimi, please?” you ask him. “I’m afraid she’s going to drown.”

“Of course, of course, no problem. Let me handle it. Do not hurt yourself.” He has her half-dragged out of the Jacuzzi before Mimi startles awake.

“What’s going on?” she slurs. “Put me down, I can walk.”

“I doubt it,” you say.

“You are alright?” Fosco asks Mimi as he steadies her on the cement, wet with pool water. She clutches at his forearms helplessly.

“I’m fine. Absolutely fine.”

“Mimi, go inside,” you say. “Eat a sandwich. Tell Cosmo you’re proud of him for winning Battleship.”

“Battleship? Well, that’s just ridiculous. He’s five. Five-year-olds can’t play Battleship.”

“And yet you will congratulate him regardless.”

She can feel your impatience, your judgement, sharp like wasp stings. Mimi retreats like a kicked dog to the main house, somehow summoning the will to remain mostly upright.

You look to Fosco. “Do you know where Aegon is?” You want to see him, but you also don’t; each time you’re in the same room now is a disorienting storm of familiarity, curiosity, painful reminders, annoyance, awkwardness, longingness to again feel as close to him—to anyone—as you did during those fleeting moments at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

Fosco chuckles. “Where is he ever? Napping, sailing, drinking, on the phone with one of his lady friends. I could not say. I have not seen him recently.”

“Okay. Thanks anyway.” The music stops—the record needs to be flipped over—and now you can just barely hear what Aemond, Otto, and Viserys are discussing.

“And you criticized me for going too young,” Aemond says to Otto. “What’s your age difference with Ludwika? 40 years?”

“She’s good publicity. She defected from the Eastern Bloc in search of the American Dream.”

“Being married to you?” Aemond quips. “I think she found the American Nightmare.”

“Speaking of wives,” Otto continues. “I assume since yours had one surgery, that’s how all the future children will need to be born, is that right?”

Aemond nods, frowning. “Yeah. And the doctors said she shouldn’t have more than three. It weakens the uterus, I guess, all that slicing and suturing. Do it too many times and ruptures get more likely, and those can be fatal.”

“Very unfortunate,” Viserys rasps. “Children are our greatest legacy. I wanted at least ten, but your mother…well…after Daeron, it just never happened again.” And you know that this is just one of the ways in which Aemond had planned to win his father’s admiration: by contributing more new Targaryens to the dynasty than anyone else. Now that’s impossible.

Otto sighs wistfully. “To have a brand new baby to parade around in the fall…that would have been wonderful.” For the first time in two years, you can sense that you have disappointed him. Fosco is watching you, uneasy, ashamed, sorry without knowing what to do about it.

“Absolutely,” Aemond says, as if this is not the first time the thought has crossed his mind. “But it’s done now. There’s no sense in dwelling on what might have been. We must look forward. It’s feasible that…well…if we try again and get good news by October, we can announce in time for Election Day…”

You can’t listen anymore. Your belly aching, your bare feet hurrying through warm emerald grass, you traverse the lawn and disappear into Helaena’s garden, painstakingly tended and continuously expanded since she was a little girl. There are marigolds and daffodils, tulips and roses, azaleas, asters, butterfly bushes, chrysanthemums, lilies and lupines, sunflowers, violets, life blooming in a hundred different shades. There are tiny statues too, tucked away in random places, stone angels and untamed creatures, alligators and turtles and rabbits and cats, the only sort the Alopekis will tolerate. At the very center of the garden is a tall circle of hedges with only one opening, an arched doorway cut into the thick lush green. You’ve been here before, though only with Aemond. On a property shared with so many family members—and the occasional intrusive journalist—it’s a good place to escape prying eyes. You pass through the threshold with a hand resting absentmindedly on your belly, as if you’re still pregnant. You keep doing this. Each time you remember you’re at the end of something rather than the beginning, it carves you open all over again.

Around the inside perimeter of the circle are twelve sculptures positioned like numbers on a clock: eleven Olympians and Hades, confined to the Underworld. In the middle of the clearing is the largest stature of all, a wrathful Zeus hurling lightning bolts and surrounded by a gurgling fountain of glass-clear water. Under the shadow of Zeus, Aegon is sprawled on the ground and smoking a joint. “So you’re hiding from them too, huh?” He gives you a sly, welcome-to-the-club smirk, then offers you his joint. “Want a hit?”

You shake your head, not taking another step towards him. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

He is confused. “Done what?”

“Any of it.” I told him about my life before. I made the mistake of thinking I could go back.

Aegon still doesn’t seem to understand. “You’re scared I’m gonna snitch?”

You shrug, evasive. It’s not just the fact that he knows. It’s the sensation that you’ve unlatched something—an attic room, a jewelry box, a birdcage—and now you can’t get it locked again, and the door rattles with every footstep and storm wind, and you are no longer Aphrodite or Io but Pandora, a hunger growing in your stitched womb like a child.

“What? What’s wrong with you?” And that’s always how he says it, not what’s the matter or are you alright or what did I do or how can I fix it?

“I’m kind of…embarrassed, I guess.”

“Embarrassed,” Aegon echoes. “Because of me?”

“I feel like I said and did a lot of things that were out of character because I was emotionally compromised.”

“They were out of character for who you’ve been trying to convince everyone you are since you married Aemond, sure. But they weren’t out of character for you.”

He’s treading too close now, arrows piercing their mark, a tremor near the epicenter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Au contraire, I have acquired many interesting revelations recently.”

“Where’d you learn French? From Mimi?”

His smile dies. “Boarding school.”

You don’t know how to reply. You don’t know how to be around Aegon without either hating him or letting him see parts of yourself that you’re trying to drown like Icarus in the waves. You glance yearningly towards the doorway cut into the hedges.

All at once, Aegon is furious. “You don’t want to talk to me? You want to go back to how it was before, you want to pretend Mount Sinai never happened? Fine. You got it. Wish fucking granted. Whatever you have to do.”

He turns away from you. You flee from him. But that night when Asteria is hushed and still—Aemond, Criston, and Otto are attending a fundraising dinner in Philadelphia, and you are temporarily excused from accompanying them as you recover—you creep down into the basement of the main house to apologize. Mimi sleeps in a bedroom on the second floor, but here Aegon can keep odd hours and drink and smoke to his heart’s content, and even entertain clandestine guests, girls who are beautiful and giggling and never invited twice.

Aegon isn’t here. He might be passed out somewhere, or at a party, or maybe even upstairs with Mimi, and something about this idea twists through your mending guts like a blade. In his absence, you take a quick look around his room, something you’ve never done before. You hadn’t had any interest; it wouldn’t even have occurred to you. There’s a large green futon, a matching shag carpet, a television, a bookshelf full of notebooks and paperbacks—Kurt Vonnegut, Harper Lee, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Ken Kesey—and vinyl albums, a record player, and his two acoustic guitars. The first is unpainted maple wood covered with stickers. I’d rather be nowhere reads one; Burn pot not people proclaims another. The second guitar is the souvenir he bought in Manhattan, an aquamarine blue six-string.

There's something strange on his end table. Along with a dozen empty cups is a full ashtray, and there’s a folded piece of paper tucked underneath. You slide the paper out and open it. It’s the receipt you used to solve the long division problem in your hospital room.

Why would he keep this? you think, mystified. There are footsteps above your head, and you quickly return the receipt to where you found it and leave before your trespass can be discovered.

When you emerge from the basement, Fosco is waiting in the hallway and carrying a Tupperware container filled with something that resembles kourabiethes, Greek shortbread cookies. “I thought I saw you sneak down there. What were you looking for?”

You scramble for an explanation. “One of the dogs is missing. Alicent wanted me to check the basement.”

“Ah, yes, I see.” He passes you the Tupperware container. “These are for you. I hope they are not too bad. I baked them myself.”

“Are they…” You shake it. “Biscotti?”

“They are ossi dei morti,” Fosco says. “Bones of the dead. We make them to remember loved ones we have lost. They are hard, so you should dip them in coffee or tea before you try to eat them.”

You open the lid. Inside are long thin cookies coated with powdered sugar. You inhale almond flour, cloves, cinnamon. And you are so touched you cannot find your words.

“You know, there still places in Italy where mothers wear black for years to mourn their children.” This is not trivia; it is an acknowledgement. Your son is gone. There is no shame in the grief that is left behind. In another house, it would be expected, it would be required.

“Thank you, Fosco.”

He smiles warmly. “We are in this together, no? We are pieces of the same machine.”

Then he plods off towards the living room, sliding a rolled-up horse racing program out of the back pocket of his tight plaid pants.

~~~~~~~~~~

You’re in Louisville, Kentucky, where thunder quakes the eaves. An hour ago, Aegon was popping Valium and leisurely plucking at his pool water blue Gibson guitar, slumped against the wall, nipping at a flask filled with straight Bacardi. But he’s not anymore. Now he’s gathered around the small color television with you, Criston, Otto, Fosco, Helaena, and Ludwika. The news is just breaking. There was a civil rights protest at the University of Kentucky in Lexington one hour to the east. Someone threw a rock, or someone claims someone threw a rock, or someone threw something that was mistaken for a rock, and in any event the situation escalated from there and local police who were monitoring the demonstration opened fire on a crowd, killing five students and injuring another dozen.

Outside, word is spreading through the crowd of over 2,000 people that have gathered for Aemond’s planned speech at the historic Iroquois Amphitheater, a New Deal project finished in 1938. Rain is pouring, and the venue has no roof. Aemond is already 20 minutes late. The voices are becoming louder, more demanding, more wrathful. They’re shouting that Aemond is too afraid to face them now, that he’s trying to figure out what his statement will be, that he’s cowardly and calculating; and if President Lyndon Baines Johnson was here tonight instead of cursing his bad stars up in Washington D.C., he would certainly have something to say about the capriciousness of voters who love you, hate you, carry you higher, drag you down, all without ever knowing you.

In truth, Aemond is not stalling on purpose. He’s in the bathroom trying to get his prosthetic eye in. It’s been giving him hell all afternoon. He wears his eyepatch at home, but he’s never made a public appearance without his glass eye clean and perfect in his voided socket.

“He’s going to have to say something about it,” you tell the others as you watch the news coverage.

“Say what?” Otto snaps. “If he doesn’t treat those dead kids like martyrs he’s going to get booed off the stage. If he condemns the police he’s going to lose the suburbs. They’ll run to Humphrey now and Nixon in November.”

The weather report called for storms—which is why Alicent, Mimi, and the children are already back at the Seelbach Hotel for the night after a long day of shaking hands and smiling gamely—but no one expected it to get this bad. The room you’re huddled in is just off-stage, so you can see it all: the wind ripping signs and flags from people’s hands, drenched clothes, sopping hair, snarling faces, rain turning puddles to rivers. The stomping of boots is now as loud as the thunder. Rocks and bottles are being pitched at the stage.

“Is America always like this?” Ludwika asks, scandalized.

“No, not at all,” Otto says. “Goddamn animals…”

Aegon replies, not taking his eyes from the television: “You’d be mad too if cops were shooting your friends and the only graduation present you had to look forward to was getting disemboweled by guerillas in Vietnam.”

“I’ve had it with you and your Marxist bullshit! You want to liberate the dispossessed masses? Why don’t you start by donating your monthly drugs and rum budget to the—”

“We should cancel,” Fosco says. “Just call the whole thing off. Tell them Aemond is sick or something.”

“That’s the headline you want? ‘Senator Targaryen hides from grieving supporters who braved a thunderstorm to see him’?! Just give the White House to Nixon now!”

“I don’t think we can cancel,” Criston says softly. “I think if we tried to leave, they’d swarm the car.”

“It’s a riot,” Otto moans, rubbing his face with his hands. “This is what happens when you court voters like this, college kids and hippies, professional malcontents…”

“Aren’t there police outside?” Ludwika says anxiously.

“Yeah, a handful,” Criston tells her. “And if they try to do anything this will erupt and we can add to the body count in Lexington…”

You leave them and follow a hallway to the men’s bathroom; on the periphery of your vision, you can tell that Aegon is watching you go. You push the door open and find a row of stalls and three sinks, one of which Aemond is standing in front of as he stares into his reflection and attempts to shove the prosthetic eye into his empty, gore-red left socket. His suit is navy blue, his hair neatly slicked back, his shoes so polished they’re reflective like a mirror.

“Fuck,” he hisses, flinching. His right cheek is wet with tears of frustration and agony. It’s July 26th, and tomorrow are the final three state conventions in the Democratic primary. Humphrey is almost certain to take Utah; Virginia will go to Governor Mills Godwin, who is only running in his home state to control the delegates and will hand them over to whoever he feels is most worthy in August. But Aemond is the favorite to win here in Kentucky. Or at least, he was an hour ago.

“What can I do? What do you need?”

“You can’t do anything. It’s…it’s this goddamn nerve pain, it feels like I’m being fucking stabbed, I can’t get the muscles to relax enough…”

Like an apology, you say: “Aemond, the crowd is getting out of control.”

“So you came in here to rush me?”

“No, I’m here to help.”

“You’re not helping. You’re doing the exact opposite.”

“I think you should give this speech with your eyepatch on. It looks good, and you’ll be as comfortable as possible, and the crowd won’t have to wait any longer than they have already.”

“No.”

“Aemond, please—”

“No! FDR didn’t make speeches in his wheelchair and I’m not making mine without my eye in.”

“Do you want me to get you Aegon’s pills? Rum, weed?”

“You don’t think I’ve already taken something?” He tries to force his eye in again and strikes his fist against the sink when he can’t.

Then you ask gingerly: “Do you know what you’re going to say about the shooting?”

“Get out!” Aemond shouts. “You’re making it worse, just get the fuck out! Go!”

You bolt from the bathroom, hands trembling, throat burning. You don’t want to return to the television where the others are standing; you’re worried they’ll be able to tell how upset you are. You go to the edge of the stage, arms crossed protectively over your chest, and peek out into the crowd. Above their chants and jeers and howled threats, lightning splits the sky.

I don’ t think we’re going to be able to find our way out of this one. I think this is the end of the road.

“Hey,” Aegon says, tapping your shoulder. “Back up.”

“I’m fine here.”

“No you’re not.” He grabs your arm and tugs you farther backstage. Seconds later, an Absolut Vodka bottle explodes into crystalline shrapnel where you were standing. You yelp and Aegon gives you a little eyebrow raise. I told you, he means.

“Someone has to go out there,” Otto says, still lurking by the television. Fosco is comforting Helaena, who is quietly weeping; Ludwika is watching the news coverage in horror, surely reconsidering all her life choices. A sixth University of Kentucky student has been declared dead. “We can’t wait.”

“No we can’t,” Criston agrees. Then they both turn to you expectantly.

Your blood goes icy. Tonight was meant to be your first official appearance since the baby. Your hair is up, your dress a navy blue to match Aemond’s suit, gold chains around your wrist and throat, a gold chain of a belt. You thought you were ready. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“Don’t you look at her,” Aegon says, sharp like a scalpel, like a bullet, like something that punctures arteries and lungs. “They’re throwing glass. You figure something else out, don’t even look at her.”

Otto relents, perhaps halfheartedly. “No, you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Criston starts heading for the bathroom to get Aemond. Otto is watching the television again, his face vacuous as his ambitions are carried away by a flood of rain, wind, rage, blood. Aegon snatches his guitar from where he left it by the wall. He tosses the strap over his head, gives the strings a few experimental strums and retunes them, starts walking towards the stage.

“Aegon, what are you doing?” you ask, panicked.

“Someone has to distract the crowd.”

“No, stop, you can’t—”

“Hey,” Aegon says. And when you glance past him at the uproarious, storm-drenched frenzy, he turns your face back to his to make sure you’re listening. His hand is insistent but gentle, his voice steady. “Don’t go out there. Okay?”

“Okay,” you agree, startled.

He gives you one last small, parting smile, a flash of his teeth, a daring glint in his murky blue eyes. Then he’s out in the torrential rain, soaked to the skin in seconds. His frayed green Army jacket clings to him; his hair is ravaged by the wind. As he takes his place behind the microphone, a stone that someone has hurled skates by him and nicks the apple of his left cheek. You can see a trickle of blood snaking down his sunburned skin before the rain washes it away; you feel a desperate gnawing dread that someone will hurt him, not just here but anywhere, not just now but ever. The crowd is still seething, shouting, stomping their feet to join the inescapable growl of the thunder. Aegon’s pick flies over the guitar strings as he begins playing, raindrops cast from his fingers like spells. At first, you can barely hear him.

“Come gather ‘round, people, wherever you roam

And admit that the waters around you have grown

And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth saving

And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times, they are a-changin’”

The audience is settling down now. Some of them are singing along. You can feel that Otto, Ludwika, Fosco, and Helaena are gathering around you, but you don’t grasp anything they’re saying. You can’t tear your eyes from Aegon. It’s like you’re seeing him for the first time, this radiant sunbeam of a man, a light in dark places, a constellation that whispers myths through the ink-spill indigo of the night sky. How could you ever have hated him? How could you ever have thought he was worthless?

“Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again

And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin

And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s naming

For the loser now will be later to win

For the times, they are a-changin’”

Aemond and Criston appear beside you at the edge of the stage; Aemond’s prosthetic eye has at last been successfully placed with no lingering evidence of a struggle. You expect him to apologize for what he said in the bathroom, but he doesn’t. Instead he says when he sees Aegon: “What the hell is he doing?”

“Saving your career,” you reply simply.

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call

Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled

The battle outside raging

Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times, they are a-changin’”

Now Aegon peers pointedly off-stage to where Otto Hightower is gawking. Aegon beams, throws his head back to get his dripping hair out of his eyes, comes back to the mic.

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly aging

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

For the times, they are a-changin’”

Everyone you can see in the crowd is singing and swaying. It’s not just a Bob Dylan song from 1964 but an anthem, a prayer, a rallying cry, a dire warning for the powers at be.

“The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fading

And the first one now will later be last

For the times, they are a-changin’”

The audience is applauding and whistling. Aegon steals a glimpse of where you are standing backstage, checks that Aemond is still there with you and that he’s ready.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Aegon broadcasts with a wicked grin. “I am now proud to present the next president of the United States of America, Senator Aemond Targaryen!”

And Aemond is crossing the stage, no trace of pain or self-consciousness or prey-animal fear, no mere mortal but someone chosen by the gods, and the rain is slowing to a drizzle, and the clouds are opening to let through rare pinprick aisles of daylight, and the riotous spectators are now his disciples, exorcised of any rage they’ve ever felt for the scarred senator from New Jersey. He and his family are not the enemy; they are the solution. They are revolutionaries who have bled for the cause. They bring with them the change that is required. Aegon steps back and the rest of you join him in a semi-circle like a crescent moon behind Aemond. When you walk out onto the stage, the cheers swell to screams.

Aegon takes off his guitar and then leans into you. “He’s lucky you aren’t 35,” Aegon whispers, soft lips that curl into a smile as they brush your ear. And he’s teasing you but he’s not mocking, he’s not mean. He’s so close you share the same atmosphere, the same gravity. “Maybe when he finishes up his second term you can start building your resume for your first.”

“I want your endorsement.”

“From the disgraced former mayor of Trenton? What an honor. You’ll have to fight for it.”

You ball up a fist and playfully bump your knuckles against his chin. He pretends to bite at you. And you laugh for the first time since a doctor and priest entered your hospital room 13 days ago. Aegon slings an arm around your shoulders, pulls you against him, soaks you in his rain.

“Today in Lexington, we lost six brave and brilliant souls,” Aemond says, his voice booming through the amphitheater. A hush ripples through the crowd as they listen, enraptured. “Their sacrifice was for the most noble of causes, but they should never have been forced to pay the ultimate price. They deserved long, full lives in a better America than the one we now call home. This tragedy is a symptom of the sickness that has infected this nation, a fatal failure to empathize with our fellow countrymen, a deafness to pleas for justice, a blindness to mercy. But the remedy is within all of us, for it is our own humanity. When we purge the diseases of war, prejudice, and ravenous greed, we will reclaim our best selves—our true selves—and our nation will at last be cured.”

The amphitheater is illuminated with not only strobing lightning but the flashbulbs of cameras. The journalists have arrived just in time.

[chaoticallywriting]

AEGON II TARGARYEN in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON: SEASON 2 June 16

[chaoticallywriting]

“Aegon is a great example of neglect and indulgence. This is the medieval version of the millionaire’s prodigal son. His mother was fifteen, and his father never paid any attention to him. His father deeply, deeply loved Aemma and Rhaenyra and was [only] having [more] kids to carry on the line. He really didn’t want Aegon—he wanted Baelon, the son that killed his first wife.” - Ryan Condal

Tom Glynn-Carney as Aegon ii Targaryen in House of the Dragon

[chaoticallywriting]

I’m in love with this. I’m a junkie for your writing like Aegon is in all your au’s. The way I squealed when I saw the notification and read this in between busy moments at work! I can’t wait for part three so I can devour it the same way I devoured these two chapters. I need to see Aemond fuck up, I need to see more of Aegon obviously loving her from a distance.

1968 [Chapter 2: Hera, Goddess Of Childbirth]

A/N: Enjoy Chapter 2 a little early! See you on Sunday for Chapter 3 🥰

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 5.4k

Tagging: @arcielee @huramuna @glasscandlegrenades @gemmagirlss1 @humanpurposes @mariahossain @marvelescvpe @darkenchantress @aemondssapphirebussy @haslysl @bearwithegg @beautifulsweetschaos @travelingmypassion @althea-tavalas @chucklefak @serving-targaryen-realness @chaoticallywriting @moonfllowerr @rafeism @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @herfantasyworldd @mangosmootji

💜 All of my writing can be found HERE! 💜

You are buzzed at a private party in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center, Midtown, February 1966, chandeliers and candlelight, pink and red hearts made of paper hanging from shimmering strings and littering the floor. Your roommate Barbara Nassau Astor—yes those Astors, Astor Avenue in the Bronx, Astoria in Queens, “the landlords of New York”—brought you along tonight, and the chance to be swept up into her glittering existence is precisely why your father sent you to a school like Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Barb knows people who know people who know other people and every single individual in that grand design is wealthy and worldly and could possibly lead you into the generous arms of your future husband. You are from Tarpon Springs, Florida, heiress to a sea sponge fortune, and your father nurses powerful ambitions of intermingling his blood with the Northeastern elite.

You scan the selection as you sip your Pink Squirrel. You could marry a doctor and sit in the living room waiting for him to come home at 9 or 10 or 11 p.m., fix him a Whiskey Sour or a Sazerac, listen to him bemoan the complexities of nerves and veins before accompanying him to bed and repeating the whole process the next day. You could marry a lawyer or an advertising executive, and your fate would be much the same. Your own parents are partners in life and business, but you have seen enough to know how rare this is. These men of the Rainbow Room, 65 floors above icy streets radiant with headlights, want a wife whose hands will stay manicured and idle: nannies will tend to the children, maids will clean the house, mistresses will massage the knots out of the muscles of his back. And you—a relative upstart, new money among ancient bloodlines—will have no right to demand otherwise.

A man interrupts your reverie. He wants to know about the pendant you wear around your neck. You sigh before you turn to him; you resist the instinct to roll your eyes. And then you see him. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, with a curious intensity and a teasing little smirk, an Old Fashioned in his grasp like molten gold. You don’t know it yet, but he is a senator from New Jersey, very recently elected, victorious yet still hungry. He steals the oxygen out of your lungs. He drowns you in the amber-musk warmth of his cologne.

“It’s Athena,” you say, touching your fingertips to the silver medallion self-consciously; and you are rarely self-conscious. The black polish has been scrubbed from your nails and replaced with a soft, shimmering champagne. You spent two hours this afternoon having your hair painfully teased and arranged into a Brigitte Bardot-inspired updo.

“Goddess of wisdom.”

“And war and peace. And math.”

“Math?” He is intrigued.

“That’s what I’m studying at school. Math.”

“And yet you are not disinterested in the humanities. You know Greek mythology.”

“Well, Tarpon Springs has a lot of Greeks, and that’s where I’m from, so.”

“Studies math. From Tarpon Springs, Florida. I’m learning everything about you.” He smiles, this magnetic stranger who has captured you like a moon lured into a planet’s gravity. He swallows a mouthful of his Old Fashioned, moisture glistening on his lips. “Do you like Greek food?”

You can’t seem to follow his words. Blood is rushing into your face, hot and dizzying. “What?”

“Greek food. Have you tried it? Hummus, tzatziki, gyros, spanakopita, horiatiki, baklava.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve had it. It’s great.”

“My family owns a house on Long Beach Island,” he says casually. “We eat a lot of Greek food there. You should join us for dinner sometime soon.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Very soon. Maybe this weekend. Are you free?”

No, you’re not; but you’ll cancel plans until you are. “Um, okay. Sure. And who…sorry, I might have missed it, but…who are you…?”

“Aemond Targaryen.” And he shakes your hand like you’re someone who matters. “I’m a senator. I’m trying to end the war.”

With him, you could be a part of something magnificent. With him, you could help save the world.

~~~~~~~~~~

Asteria is the goddess of falling stars, but the home of rising ones. On the north end of Long Beach Island, New Jersey—only 100 miles south of the sleek bladelike skyscrapers of Manhattan—lies the sprawling Targaryen estate. The nine-acre property features one main house and another three for guests, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a ten-car garage, a boathouse, a pier, and an ample stretch of beach that abuts the Atlantic Ocean, open water with nothing interrupting the infinite, miles-deep blue from the East Coast to the Iberian Peninsula. It is the first week of July, 1968, and your 23rd birthday. You are lazing in a lounge chair on the emerald green lawn and eating your third slice of melopita, a cheesecake-like dessert made with honey and ricotta. It originates from the Greek island of Sifnos.

“You two can’t murder each other while I’m gone,” Aemond says. He’s sitting between you and Aegon. His stitches have healed, the worst of his pain has subsided, his poll numbers have only improved since the assassination attempt. He has a glass eye that he can insert for public appearances, but he dislikes it; at home he wears a leather eyepatch that still unnerves the children. Tomorrow, Aemond is flying to Tacoma to campaign ahead of the Washington State Convention on the 13th. Most of the family will be joining him, with only three Targaryens remaining at Asteria: ailing Viserys, useless Aegon, and you, officially too pregnant to travel by plane. You are wearing a floral, flowing, two-piece swimsuit. The sun is blazing in a clear sky. The record player is piping out Time Of The Season by the Zombies.

Aegon waves a hand flippantly, then adjusts his preposterously large blue-tinted plastic sunglasses; he is shirtless, flabby, very sunburned. “I’ll barely be here.”

Aemond looks over at him, amused. “Oh yeah? And what pressing engagements do you have to attend to? I’d love to know.”

You take a bite of your melopita and scatter crumbs across the swell of your belly: seven and a half months along. “I’m sure the prostitutes miss him.”

“They do,” Aegon snaps. “I’m their favorite customer.”

“Well you’re a reprieve for them. It’s always over so quickly.”

Aemond is snickering. Aegon says to him: “23, huh? A 13-year age difference. She could almost be your daughter.”

“And 17 years younger than you. She could definitely be yours.”

“That’s how Aegon likes his girls,” you say. “Too inexperienced to recognize end-stage degeneracy. Still stumbling their way through Shakespeare for English class.”

“Why can’t she stay at the brownstone?” Aegon asks irritably. Aemond owns a historic townhouse in Georgetown for when Congress is in session, though he’s rarely been there since he announced that he was running for president.

“Because Doxie is here to make sure she’s taken care of,” Aemond replies. Eudoxia has been the head housekeeper of Asteria for decades, a formidable battleaxe of a woman who speaks very little English and has a seemingly endless supply of patterned scarves to wrap around her ink black dyed hair. There currently aren’t any permanent staff stationed at the brownstone, and Aemond does not trust strangers. “And because my future first lady is hosting a tea party on the 10th.”

“A tea party!” Aegon gasps, mocking you. “Surely that will patch the wounds of our troubled nation. She’s an inspiration. She’s motherfucking Gloria Steinem.”

“She’s Aphrodite,” Aemond says, beaming with pride, his remaining eye fixed on your belly. He’s lost one piece of himself, but in a month and a half he’ll gain another. “Goddess of love.”

“There must be a more appropriate mythological character. Medusa, perhaps. Lyssa was the goddess of rabies, Epiales was the goddess of nightmares.”

“Aegon, I had no idea you were so…” You search for the right word. “Literate.”

“Io was turned into a cow.” He grins at you, toothy, malicious.

“She’s also one of Jupiter’s moons,” Aemond muses. He draws invisible orbits in the air with his long, graceful fingers. “Beautiful, celestial, pristine…”

“A satellite,” Aegon says. “Mindless. Aimless. Going wherever she’s told.”

Aemond insists as he twists the bracelet around your right wrist, a delicate gold chain he bought during your honeymoon in Hawaii: “Aphrodite.”

“Didn’t she fuck around with, like, everyone?”

“Maybe you should be Aphrodite,” you tell Aegon.

Mimi appears, tottering across the lawn with the straps of her sundress sliding off her shoulders and her Gimlet sloshing precariously in its glass. The children are playing in the surf with the nannies and Fosco, who is entertaining them by diving for seashells and delivering his treasures into their tiny, grasping palms. Criston is supervising from the sand, though he steals frequent glimpses of Alicent as she feeds a wheelchair-bound Viserys—much diminished after a number of strokes—his own slice of melopita, one careful, patient spoonful at a time. “Can we…” Mimi bursts out laughing and almost falls over. She claws her way upright again using the back of Aegon’s chair. “Um…I was thinking…”

“What?” Aegon asks, annoyed, avoidant. If they’ve ever been happy, it was a transient epoch that came and went long before you joined the family. It was before the asteroid killed the dinosaurs.

“We should go back to Mykonos. We had such a nice time in Mykonos. Didn’t we? Didn’t we just adore Mykonos?”

Aegon sighs, glowering out over the ocean. “Yeah, we sure did. Ten years ago.”

“Exactly!” Mimi gushes, oblivious. “When can we go? Next week? Let’s go next week.”

“Mimi, you and the kids will be in Washington, remember?” Aemond says. Alicent will have to be her handler; usually it’s your job to make sure Mimi is ready for photos, eats enough to stay conscious, doesn’t trip over her own feet, doesn’t talk too much to the press.

“Washington?” Like she’s never heard of it.

“The state. Not the city. For the convention.”

“Oh right. Right.” She gulps her Gimlet. You could set your watch by Mimi’s drinking. Tipsy by lunch, drunk at dinner, crawling on the floor chasing the dogs around by 8 p.m. The Targaryens keep a drove of Alopekis, small and white and foxlike. “Well…maybe some other time.”

“After the election,” Aemond says with an abiding, encouraging smile. He tolerates Mimi because he needs her: happy wholesome family, American Dream. Down at the water’s edge, the nannies are giving towels to Fosco and the children as they scamper out of the frothing waves, Mimi’s five and Helaena’s three: Daphne, Neaera—no one can ever seem to spell her name correctly, least of all the six-year-old girl herself—and Evangelos.

Mimi departs, on the hunt for a fresh Gimlet. Aegon reaches into the pocket of his swim trunks—Hawaiian print, royal blue—and pulls out a joint and a Zippo. He sticks the joint between his teeth and goes to light it.

“No,” Aemond says immediately, yanking the joint out of Aegon’s mouth and stomping it into the earth. Then he points down the beach towards the sand dunes. “You know journalists will sneak around trying to get photos. You know we’re never truly alone out here.”

“They can’t tell what I’m smoking!”

“Don’t argue with me.”

“You know there are teenagers getting their limbs blown off in Vietnam right now? I think society has bigger problems than me smoking grass.”

“And yet to solve those bigger problems, I have to win in November. And the suburban housewives will not vote for me if they think I support legalizing marijuana. Trust me, I know. I’ve met them.”

“I wouldn’t want those people’s votes,” Aegon says derisively.

“You’d rather Nixon get them?”

Aegon doesn’t have a speedy rebuttal this time. He contemplates the Atlantic Ocean, the wind tearing at his hair.

“It’s hot as hell,” Aemond says to you, gathering up the newspapers he’s been leafing through, never not thinking about the election, never not strategizing. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”

As you accompany Aemond towards the main house—and of course you follow him, always, anywhere—Alicent waves you over to where she and Viserys are sitting to wish you a happy birthday again. From this vantage point, you can just barely spot Otto and Helaena strolling through her garden, a jungle of butterfly bushes and herbs. The stricken Targaryen patriarch beams at the swell of your belly. Viserys likes you, you are his favorite daughter-in-law, though perhaps this is not so lofty an achievement. Moreover, he likes that you are carrying the child of his decent son. Aemond has already decided on the baby’s name: Aristos Apollo. If it is in fact a boy, you suppose you’ll call him Ari, but he doesn’t feel real to you yet. He belongs to Aemond, to the Targaryens, to the nation, but not quite to you. He is more myth than flesh.

“Nothing is more precious than children,” Viserys tells Aemond, raspy and frail. “I would have had at least five more if I could.” Alicent bows her head, an acknowledgement of her failure in this regard. Viserys expects it. You and Aemond politely avert your gazes.

“Thank God for this baby,” Alicent says. “After the year we’ve had? That the whole world has had? We all need something to be grateful for.”

“Yes,” Aemond agrees, smiling. It must be the promise of a son that has made his maiming go down smoother, and maybe it is his soaring poll numbers too, and maybe it is gratitude that he escaped with his life, and maybe it is even the fact that he has you.

But long after dusk when you’re getting ready for bed—slathering yourself in Jergens, stepping into your chiffon nightgown—as you pass through the sliver of light pouring out of the bathroom, you catch a glimpse of something that stops you. Aemond is standing in front of the mirror with his hands on the rim of the sink, his eyepatch slung over the towel rack, his voided eye socket exposed and gory and irreparably wounded. There’s something in his scarred face that you can’t recall ever seeing before. There is a seething, secret, animal rage. There is fury for everyone who has ever denied him anything.

You remember who you were before you met Aemond at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan at a party you were almost not illustrious enough to attend. You wore your hair long and loose, you downed shots, you smoked, you swore, you slept through class almost every Monday; and then you packed all of this away in your allegorical attic and became someone who could stand beside a senator, and then a candidate, and then a president, someone who could tip the scales of fate.

And you think as you lurk unnoticed in the doorway: Maybe he’s been hiding parts of himself too.

~~~~~~~~~~

July 10th, 10 a.m. He’s snoring on a couch in the living room, the one patterned with sailboats. He’s hugging his acoustic guitar like a child clinging to a teddy bear. Sometimes he plays it for the kids: Get Rhythm, Twist And Shout, Stand By Me, You Can’t Hurry Love. That’s about the extent of his involvement in their lives. He has a law degree from Columbia that his father bought for him. Aside from a brief and disastrous stint as the mayor of Trenton, he has never been gainfully employed. You pour the cupful of ice cubes you collected from the freezer all over his bare chest.

“What the fuck!” Aegon screams as he startles awake. “What is wrong with you?!”

“The guests are arriving in two hours. And you’re going to help me host.”

“I’m not slobbering at the feet of those manicured elitists.”

“It’s easy to say ‘vive la révolution’ from your family’s mansion that you reside in as a professional failure.”

“Yeah, you’re right, I’m so worthless. If only I spent more time hosting tea parties.”

“I can’t small talk with governors and congressmen, so I have to charm their wives instead. That’s how it works, you idiot.”

Aegon rolls off the couch and rubs his forehead, wincing, hungover. In the dining room, Eudoxia is readying cups and plates, polishing silverware, folding napkins. The caterers will be here soon, and there are also three dishes that you made yourself: stafidopsomo, a bread with raisins and cinnamon; rizogalo, Greek-style rice pudding; and baklava you spent hours chopping walnuts for. At least one show of domestic prowess is an expectation, two is impressive, three is above and beyond, something for the other political wives to chatter about. You know the importance of making a good impression on them. They are as much a part of their husbands’ careers as the speech writers, communication directors, fundraisers. “I need a Bloody Mary,” Aegon groans.

“You need to pull your goddamn weight. Everyone else is working to get Aemond elected. Your five-year-old kid is out on the campaign trail and you can’t walk around with a tray of hummus and mini spanakopitas? Are you serious?”

“I’m dead serious,” he says, standing with some difficulty and then shoving by you. “Fuck off, Miss America.”

“Aegon!”

But he’s padding off towards the kitchen with his bare feet, tiki print boxer shorts, bedraggled hair. You follow after him in your spotless white heels and sundress patterned with common blue violets. Your earrings are pearls. You’ve wrangled your hair into a tidy French twist. Aegon is getting a pitcher of tomato juice out of the refrigerator, a bottle of vodka from a cardboard Apple Jacks box. He keeps booze and pills hidden everywhere; you’re always stumbling across his caches.

You open your mouth to unleash something hurtful, something hateful, but then you feel the cold flare of liquid on your thighs as the ocean breeze gusts in through the windows. My dress, you think, alarmed. What did I spill on it? One of the ice cubes you threw at Aegon must have caught on the skirt somehow and melted. That’s your first guess, and it is welcome; water doesn’t stain, and you aren’t sure if you have another outfit that is both formal enough and will still fit you. But when you reach down to touch your leg—now the liquid reaches your knees—your hand comes away red.

You look up at Aegon. He’s staring back at you, thunderstruck, horrified. His Bloody Mary ingredients are now forgotten on the countertop. He shouts for the housekeeper: “Doxie?!”

There is indistinct, cantankerous Greek grumbling in return.

“Doxie! Call an ambulance!”

“I don’t understand,” you say to Aegon, bright clotless blood dyeing the whirls of your fingerprints. I ruined my dress, you think nonsensically. “It doesn’t hurt. Shouldn’t it hurt?”

“Don’t move, don’t do anything, just wait for the paramedics.”

But the edges of your vision are going dark and hazy, and the room spins like a flipped coin. Your knees and ankles fold, bones turned to paper. As you drop, Aegon dives for you. You clutch at him, but there’s nothing to grab onto, no suit jacket, no tie, only skin that glows with sunburn. “If I don’t wake up, tell Aemond—”

“You’re not dying, bitch. My luck’s not that good.”

But his eyes are panicked; and they are the last thing you see before you black out.

~~~~~~~~~~

Arteries of cement, bones like lead, heavy eyelids opening to reveal strange white walls.

Am I dead?

But no: you hurt all over. Heaven isn’t supposed to hurt. There are needles pierced through the backs of your hands, a splitting rawness in your throat.

Was I intubated? Did I have surgery…?

You try to sit up. The pain is blinding; the severed and sutured latticework of your abdominal muscles is a pit of glass. You gasp, moan plaintively, fumble for the nurse call button on the wooden nightstand.

“Will you stop moving?” Aegon says as he walks into the room. He’s slurping on a straw that pokes out from a Dairy Queen cup. The fluid inside is clumpy and red. Instantly, you think of blood, and a wave of nausea punches through the shredded gore that was once your belly. Aegon flops down into the salmon pink armchair beside the bed and props his combat boots up on the ottoman. “They sliced you up like the Black Dahlia. You’re gonna rip your stitches.”

“They did a c-section…?”

“Yeah, you had some kind of uterus…thing. I don’t remember.”

The baby?? Is the baby alright?? “An abruption?”

More slurping. “No…I think it started with a P.”

“Previa?”

“Yeah, that one.”

You remember waking up a few times: on the kitchen floor as men were lifting you, in an ambulance as the siren shrieked. Someone said you were being taken to Mount Sinai in Manhattan. And that makes sense, that would have been Criston’s plan. Mount Sinai is one of the best hospitals in the country. You look around the room for a bassinet or a crib. Instead you see a wheelchair and a myriad of flower bouquets; word has already gotten out, and so the customary well wishes are pouring in. Lady Bird Johnson sent bluebonnets, the state flower of Texas; Abigail McCarthy sent lilies of the valley; Muriel Humphrey sent roses, traditional, safe, uninspiring; Pat Nixon sent blood orange gladioli. Mrs. Wallace, newly deceased, neglected to call a florist. “Where’s the baby?”

“He’s fine. He’s downstairs in an incubator.”

Ari, you think, though he still doesn’t seem real yet. “What…?”

“His lungs are underdeveloped. But the doctors think he’ll be alright. You want a Mr. Misty? There’s a Dairy Queen like two blocks from here.”

“No, I don’t want a Mr. Misty,” you say, incredulous. “I want to see the baby.”

“Well they can’t move him and they can’t move you, so you’ll have to wait.”

“I’m going to see him—” You swing your feet off the bed and feel daggers, fire, a splintering like someone has taken a hammer to your bones. You almost scream; it takes everything in you to choke it down and only gasp as your flesh becomes an inferno. I want a joint, you think randomly, an urge you’d believed you had exorcised from yourself, an archaic relic of a past life.

“Told you,” Aegon says smugly.

You lie panting, helpless, glancing at the phone on the nightstand. “Aemond knows?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve called everyone. He knows.”

“Good. So he’ll be here soon.”

“Sure,” Aegon says, perhaps a tad noncommittally.

“Okay.” You’re still trying to catch your breath. Tacoma is a six hour flight away. Even if Aemond doesn’t leave until morning, he’ll be here by sundown tomorrow. “You can go now.”

“Go?!” Aegon exclaims, then laughs, one of his reckless, taunting cackles. “Oh no. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You definitely are.”

“No, I’m not,” he insists, grinning. “For once in my life, I’m the person who’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. I’m the honorable one. The sacred heir of the favorite son has just been born, and the blessed mother has been sawed in half like Saint Simon the Zealot, and where is Aemond? Where is literally everyone else? Across the continent shaking hands and forcing smiles to win him the great state of Washington. I’m not going home. I’m collecting every second I spend here like coins from a slot machine. I won the jackpot, babe. No one is ever going to be able to call me the family fuckup after this.”

The pain is horrible, insurmountable; you can’t think through it. You close your eyes and try not to sob, to wail, to split yourself open in body and soul. I can’t let him see me break down.

“What’s up?” Aegon asks. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I want a Mr. Misty. Go get me a Mr. Misty.”

“Okay,” Aegon says doubtfully. “What flavor?”

“I don’t care. Not red.”

“They have orange, lemon, grape—”

“Just pick one!” you shout, tears brimming in your eyes. Get out, get out, get out.

“Calm down, psycho!” he yells back, heading for the door.

As soon as he crosses the threshold, you snatch the call button off the nightstand and press it frantically until a nurse arrives. You get more morphine and sink into a stillness like deep water, down, down, down.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s dark outside, stars and a crescent moon. On the television is grainy footage from the Battle of Khe Sanh. American soldiers younger than you are dragging their wounded brethren to a Chinook helicopter for evacuation: bandages, burns, missing limbs and faces. Aegon had dozed off in his chair—assisted by an ample amount of Vicodin, surely—but is stirring awake now. He blinks groggily at the screen.

“It’s so fucking awful,” you say, and Aegon’s eyebrows shoot up; it’s the first time you’ve ever sworn in front of him. You trained yourself to stop when you met Aemond. “30,000 Americans dead, God knows how many Vietnamese peasants, Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, and for what? So we can say we did everything we could to stop communism? So we can humiliate the Russians? There is no liberation of Vietnam. All we’re doing is making those people hate us. And we’re destroying ourselves too.”

“I didn’t know you cared about the war.”

You look at him, mystified. “Everything I do is about the war.”

“But you never really talk about it.” Aegon yawns and stretches, reaching up towards the ceiling. “You talk about Chanel dresses and tea parties.”

“Well yeah, because it’s…it’s unseemly, I guess. For me to speak on the war. Me specifically.”

He snorts. “Because you’re a woman? Who told you that? Aemond?”

You hesitate, watching the television again. Now there are napalm bombs incinerating villages and rice paddies. “I had a boyfriend before Aemond, you know.”

“What, in kindergarten? Chasing each other around the playground? Illicit snuggles beneath the slide?”

You chuckle, shaking your head. “A real boyfriend.”

“No way. You did not.”

“I did,” you insist, smiling a little. “We met at a party my freshman year of college. He was at NYU studying…oh, I always forgot, that was one of our jokes. It was either archaeology or anthropology. I actually thought I was going to marry him for a minute there.”

“Scandalous.” Aegon is gazing at you with his murky blue eyes, grinning, playful. “What happened?”

“He had a moral crisis about poor kids getting shipped off to Vietnam to be slaughtered while he was tucked safely away in his ivory tower. So he enlisted, and honestly it was shocking how quickly I started to forget about him. We exchanged a few letters, it didn’t last long, I think he was forgetting about me too. But he ended up getting killed in action in October, 1965. His old roommate told me.”

Now Aegon is thoughtful. His crooked grin dies. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s his parents I feel bad for. He was an only child. I heard his father drank himself to death.”

“You’ve been carrying a story like that around with you and you never used it? Not in an interview or an article, not at one of your asinine little tea parties?”

“I can’t,” you confess. “Aemond doesn’t want me to. He doesn’t like to be reminded about…you know. That there was someone else before.”

Aegon throws his head back and cackles, combing his fingers through his disheveled blonde hair. “As if Aemond was a virgin when you met him.”

But it’s not the same. It isn’t to Aemond, and it wouldn’t be to the rest of the world either. It is your eternal disgrace. It is something you will be expected to atone for until you’re in the grave. “Give me a joint.”

Aegon is amazed. “What?”

“I know you have some, you always do. I want one. Give it to me.”

“You smoke grass?”

“I used to. Then I gave it up. But I’m making an exception.”

He gawks at you for a while, then slips a joint out of one of the front pockets of his green army jacket. He places it between his lips, lights it with his little chrome Zippo, and inhales deep and slow. Then he offers it to you.

“I don’t want herpes.”

Aegon laughs. “I don’t have herpes. I swear.”

“Not yet, maybe. Give it time.”

“Are you gonna smoke or not?”

You take the joint and fill your lungs with earth, floral notes, a tinge of spice. It’s been years, but it comes rushing back in an instant as the high hits your bloodstream: calm quiet weightlessness, a sense of wellbeing that fills the honeycomb hollows of your bones. “I need to see the baby.”

Aegon stalls. “The doctors were really insistent that you stay here.”

“And all the sudden you care about rules.”

He considers this, drumming his palms on his thighs. His jeans are ripped; he’s biting his lower lip. Then abruptly, he stands. “Alright.” He grabs the wheelchair and pushes it up against the bed. “Let’s go.”

You take another drag and then discard the joint in your empty Dairy Queen cup. You throw off your blanket and try to touch your bare feet to the cool linoleum floor. It hurts, it feels like razor blades, but you keep going. Then you remember you still have one IV in the back of your left hand. “Wait, how am I going to…?”

“You’re in luck. I am well-versed in needles.” Aegon holds out a palm. Nervously, you give him your hand. He peels off the medical tape, takes a moment to examine the vein, then slides out the needle so smoothly you don’t feel it at all; it barely even bleeds. He balls up a Kleenex from the box on your nightstand and secures it to the wound with the same strip of tape. “You’re welcome.”

“Junkie.” You try to lower yourself into the wheelchair and a yelp rips from your throat.

“Oh, this is pathetic,” Aegon says, but not quite unkindly. “Here.” He leans down in front of you. Too desperate to be prideful, you link your arms around the back of his neck. Aegon’s shaggy blonde hair tickles your cheek; his hands skim gingerly to settle on your waist, steadying you without too much pressure. He helps you into the wheelchair, where you collapse gasping and sweating bullets.

“If you ever mention this again, I will guillotine you.”

He winks. “Relax, little Io. I never kiss and tell.”

“I’d assume you’re usually too plastered to remember the details.”

“Be nice. I could roll you down a staircase.” But he doesn’t; he rolls you into the hallway instead.

The lights in the corridor are dim for night, for dreams. You see a few nurses shuttling in and out of other rooms from a distance, but none seem to notice you and Aegon. He steers the wheelchair into the elevator and you ride it down two floors, then cross another hallway and pass through a set of doors. There must be a dozen incubators, half of them occupied. The nurse on duty—currently cradling a tiny infant in her arms, a girl judging by the pink hat, and feeding her from a bottle of formula—gapes at you.

“Ma’am? You aren’t supposed to be—”

“Shut up,” Aegon tells her, and the nurse doesn’t say another word.

Aegon pushes the wheelchair down the line of incubators until you reach the one with a name card labelled Targaryen, Aristos Apollo. And there he is: unmistakably fragile, impossibly small, blue veins like a roadmap beneath translucent skin, tangled in tubes and wires. In his sleeping face you don’t see Aemond or even yourself, but rather an inexplicable familiarity. You feel like you’ve met him before. You feel like you’ve known him all your life.

You press your hand to the clear, domed wall of the incubator; shadows in the shape of your outstretched fingers fall over Ari’s face. “He’s real.”

“Of course he is.” Aegon is watching you; you can see him on the periphery of your vision, a blur of blonde hair and high cheekbones. When you turn to him, he immediately looks away.

“What?” you ask.

“Nothing.” But his voice is distracted, bewildered, like someone fumbling for a light switch in a dark room.

[chaoticallywriting]

House of the Dragon, ep.4

[chaoticallywriting]

this shot is too funny because you have criston and arryk giving everything with the swordfighting and then aegon just being dragged by aemond

[chaoticallywriting]

[chaoticallywriting]

His shitty attitude and grabbable waist have bewitched me

[chaoticallywriting]

1968 [Chapter 1: Ares, God Of War]

Series Summary: Aemond is embroiled in a fierce battle to secure the Democratic Party nomination and defeat his archnemesis, Richard Nixon, in the presidential election. You are his wife of two years and wholeheartedly indoctrinated into the Targaryen political dynasty. But you have an archnemesis of your own: Aemond’s chronically delinquent brother Aegon.

Series Warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, character deaths, New Jersey, age-gap relationships, drinking, smoking, drugs, pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird Greek names, historical topics including war and discrimination, math.

Word Count: 5.7k

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Let’s begin with a definition.

Disaster is a noun derived from Ancient Greek: dus, a prefix meaning “bad,” and aster, or “star.” In the time when humans worshipped Zeus and Hera, Hephaestus and Aphrodite, it was believed that tragedies resulted from the inauspicious positioning of celestial bodies: a volcano erupts because of Jupiter, a returning comet brings with it a flood. There is a certain helplessness inherent in this mythology. There is predestined suffering that lies in wait until all the jewels of the sky have malignantly aligned.

Have you ever met someone who made you ache to change the stars?

~~~~~~~~~~

Gunshots explode through the lobby of the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida; you feel the wind of the bullets as they clip by, fragmented metallic rage. Aemond is on the marble floor, blood pouring down his face, blood all over the white shirt beneath his navy blue suit jacket when you rip it open, tearing a button loose. He’s reaching for you through the jostling and the screams, leaving crimson handprints on your mint green dress. And you think: He just won the Florida primary. He’s not supposed to die. He’s supposed to be the president.

“What happened?” Aemond murmurs, his right eye dazed and only half-open; the left has vanished beneath a cloudburst of gore. Perhaps ten yards away, people have caught the assailant and pinned him against one of the vast Venetian windows until the police arrive. They’re roaring at him in red-faced fury, their closed fists strike his ribs and his cheekbones, their knuckles paint him scarlet and indigo.

“You’re alright, you’re alright.” You brace both palms over the maroon stain spreading rapidly across Aemond’s chest and press down as hard as you can. Your fingers are drenched in seconds, warm fading life. He’s bleeding to death. You shriek through the turmoil: “Criston?!”

“Is he okay?” Aemond asks faintly. He means the baby; you’re six months pregnant with his first child, his greatest treasure, his Atlantis, his Holy Grail. Aemond has already decided that it’s a boy. Sometimes you fear what will happen if he’s wrong.

“Yes, honey, the baby’s fine, don’t worry. Criston!”

Aegon is here instead, sweating out rum and ruin like he always is, hair too long, veins full of pills, colliding with you and pawing at his dying brother with untrustworthy hands. “Aemond?!”

You shove Aegon away, splattering him with blood. “Get back, he needs air!”

“Where’s he shot?! Let me see—”

“I told you to get back!”

“Goddammit, you don’t own him! He’s mine too!”

Criston has fought his way through the maelstrom and is dragging Aegon away by the collar of his frayed olive green army jacket, stolen from Daeron when he visited home after basic training, a uniform of embittered revolution worn by a man who’s never fought for anything. “Aegon, make sure someone’s called for an ambulance, then meet the paramedics at the door and help them find us.”

“But—”

“Go!” Criston roars, and Aegon scrambles to his feet and is lost within the crowd. You can hear Otto bellowing at journalists and hotel employees to make space for the fallen senator; there are flashes of cameras and prayers shouted aloud. Above your head are crystal chandeliers and a vaulted ceiling hand-painted by 75 Italian artists in the 1920s; swimming in your skull are visions of Jackie Kennedy in the pink suit filthy with her husband’s brains. It’s just before midnight on Tuesday, May 28th. Upstairs in their oceanfront Imperial Suites, nannies will be shaking awake the absent adults of the Targaryen dynasty, who retired with the children before Aemond made his victory speech in the hotel ballroom: Alicent, Helaena, Fosco, Mimi.

Criston’s hands—larger, stronger—replace yours over the gushing wound in Aemond’s chest. What did the bullet hit? His lung, his heart? He’s not speaking anymore, his right eye is closed. His bloodied hands rest open and empty on the floor. “Criston, he’s dying,” you sob.

“No he’s not. We’re not going to let him.”

“What’s the closest hospital?”

“Good Samaritan is just across the bridge on the mainland.” It’s Criston’s job to know these things, though he had been thinking of you when he plotted his meticulous notes in his day planner: in case you eat a bad cheeseburger, or trip on the stairs, or catch the flu and start burning up with fever. Aemond worries about the baby. Aegon has five children, Helaena has three, and Aemond will feel that he has been robbed of something if he does not swiftly procure a family of his own. He needs you on the campaign trail, but still, he worries.

Across the lobby, the police have arrived to arrest the aspiring assassin. He puts up a fight when they try to handcuff him and earns a nightstick to the gut, an elbow to the nose. He is choking on his own blood. Perhaps he is drowning in it. Good, you think.

“Don’t kill him!” Otto booms at the officers. “I want him alive for trial! I want him to ride the lighting up in Raiford, you keep that son of a bitch alive!”

“Aemond?” You thread your fingers through his soaked hair. What happened to his left eye? Is it somewhere underneath all that carnage, or is it gone? “Please wake up. Please stay with me. We need you. The baby and I need you.”

“He’s going to live,” Criston promises, both hands still clamped over the bullet wound to slow the hemorrhaging.

“Aemond, please…” How can he be the president with only one eye?

An old woman in a yellow striped skirt suit is lumbering close with a homemade prayer rope clenched in her fist. “A komboskini for the senator!” For his last rites. For his soul.

“He doesn’t need it!” Criston says. “He’s not dying! No one is dying tonight!”

Still, you take the komboskini from the lady, each of the 100 knots a prayer unspoken. She is a devotee of Aemond, and you must show her gratitude. “Efcharistó, aderfí. O Theós na se evlogeí.” They are some of the few Greek words you’ve mastered; you’ve used them often since Aemond announced that he was running for president. Thank you, sister. God bless you.

The paramedics arrive, splitting the crowd like a laceration, white uniforms and a stretcher to ferry Aemond away. People are wailing, cursing, swearing vengeance. Aegon has returned and is peering down at Aemond with those large, glassy, muddled eyes, afraid to ask. “Is he…is he still…?”

“He has a pulse,” Criston replies. He helps the paramedics drag Aemond onto the stretcher and strap him to it. Your husband’s shirt is now drenched in red like garnet, like cinnabar, like the poppies that commemorate the boys butchered in World War I, like the wasted blood being spilled in Vietnam, men reduced to memory. “Good Samaritan?” Criston confirms with the paramedics.

“Yes sir,” the most senior one agrees. And then to you, with great deference, with compassion that transcends what somebody can harbor for strangers: “Ma’am, there’s a place for you if you want it.”

“I do,” you say, tear-streaked face, hands bathed in blood. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

The ambulance is idling outside the main entranceway of the hotel. Criston grasps your hand to steady you as you step up into the back, and you take a seat on the red leather bench beside the stretcher. The paramedics are placing IVs, holding an oxygen mask to Aemond’s face, muttering urgently into their radio, abbreviations and code words you can’t understand, a secret language of organic calamities. High above the stars are crystalline and radiant in a clear sky. In your own chest—unshredded by metal, unpierced by rage—your intact heart is pounding.

The lead paramedic turns to you again and says: “We can fit one more person.”

It’s your decision. You are the senator’s wife; you were supposed to be the next first lady of the United States. You look through the ambulance’s open doors. Aegon stares back expectantly, his hair falling in his face, his arms thrown wide, petulant, combative, useless, drunk. “Criston.”

“Bitch!” Aegon hisses at you as Criston climbs into the vehicle. The doors slam shut, the engine rumbles, the siren squeals as the ambulance races westbound on Breakers Row towards County Road, which connects with Flagler Memorial Bridge and the mainland.

Through the rear window you watch Aegon as he stands in the white-gold hotel luminescence, becoming smaller and smaller until he vanishes, and all you can see are streetlights, and all you can smell is blood.

~~~~~~~~~~

Every story needs its cast of characters. Here are the major players in the summer of 1968.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson is in the White House watching the clocks tick towards November 5th, when his successor will be ordained. He has chosen not to seek reelection. Since his ascension upon Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Johnson’s domestic focus has been unprecedented civil rights legislation and his War On Poverty, yet what has infected the media like blood poisoning is the war in Vietnam. On the television are napalm bombs incinerating Vietnamese peasants, caskets draped with American flags, riots being beaten down by police, college students torching draft cards and chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Now the president is sick in body, in spirit, in heart, and this is not a metaphor: he suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest in 1955 and another shortly after John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas. He will die almost exactly four years after leaving office. Had he sought another term, he would have been unlikely to survive it. The public eye is something like a snake bite; it sinks its fangs in and you hope the venom burns clean before it can curse you with clots or hemorrhages or paralysis, before it can drown you in the dark waters of infamy.

In the void left by President Johnson’s surrender, four factions have emerged within the Democratic Party. The old guard—the same labor unions, congressmen, and local political machines who have steered the platform since the days of Franklin D. Roosvelt’s New Deal—has flocked to current Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey is competent yet uninspiring, a mid-fifties Midwesterner who flinches at the unpolished fury of antiwar protests and sedately lectures Black Power activists on the dangers of “reverse racism.” He is not a threat. He is a sheep in sheep’s clothing, and this is the time for wolves.

Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota is unapologetically opposed to the Vietnam War, a moral crusader, a reluctant warrior, a man who wears his lack of taste for the presidency like a badge of honor. He feels compelled to run, but he does not crave it. He thinks this makes him a saint; but Joan of Arc was burned at the stake and Saint Lawrence was roasted alive. Like Halloween candy plunked into a child’s neon orange plastic pumpkin, McCarthy has collected his own coalition, college students and posh urbanites who believe themselves to be the future of the Democratic Party. In 2016, people will conjure McCarthy’s ghost when drawing comparisons to a controversial left-wing senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.

If McCarthy is the future and Humphrey is the past, then former governor of Alabama George Wallace is downright archaic. He is the candidate of choice for Southern white supremacists, averse to Republicans since Lincoln and still reverent of Depression-era New Deal programs that kept them from starving to death. Wallace is best known for his promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and pledges to end the chaos that has besieged America through strict law and order. He is running not as a Democrat but as an Independent, hoping to peel away enough support from the major party candidates to force the House of Representatives to decide the election and then leverage his votes to negotiate an end to federal desegregation efforts in the South. His devoted wife Lurleen just died of uterine cancer, a diagnosis which Wallace kept hidden from her for years; doctors are in the habit of informing husbands of their wives’ ailments and giving them carte blanche control over the treatment plan, which unfortunately in Lurleen’s case was nothing. She was 41 years old.

In his short-lived castle of red corridors like the marrow rivers of bones, President Johnson hides from the hippies who jeer and spit; Humphrey frowns at them, McCarthy tries to appease them, Wallace says the only four-letter words they don’t know are “w-o-r-k” and “s-o-a-p.” But Aemond climbs down from podiums to meet them like old friends. He is young, only 36. He has a brother serving in the swamps of Vietnam. He is focused, determined, insatiable; he devours every scrap of news that is printed about him and writes his speeches by hand. As the self-admitted runt of the Targaryen family, Aemond knows what it is like to be underestimated. He wants a better America, and he wants to be the president, and he wants these things in equal, relentless measure, each fueling the other until these ambitions become inseparable. He has grown up hearing slurs against Greeks and consequently has no tolerance for discrimination, which he contends is antithetical to the American Dream. He attends civil rights marches in labyrinthian cities, antiwar protests on college campuses, union meetings in coal mining towns of West Virginia and Kentucky and Wyoming, music festivals crowded with long unwashed hair and braless women, fundraisers flush with the deep pockets of the Northeastern elite. Aemond’s coalition grows each day, bleeding away strength from his rivals like a Medieval surgeon. Their flesh turns cold and anemic, while Aemond’s heart pumps scalding torrents of blood.

If Aemond wins the Democratic primary at the convention in August, his opponent will almost certainly be the Republican frontrunner Richard Nixon of California. Nixon wants the White House just as badly, and he’s much smarter than he looks. He was Eisenhower’s vice president for eight years in the 1950s and lost to the ill-fated John F. Kennedy in 1960 by a whisker; some say he did not lose at all, but instead was cheated out of 100,000 votes by Kennedy’s mafia connections in Chicago. But with the Democrats divided and their incumbent president floundering, Nixon’s timing has never been better. He was once a poor boy with two dead brothers who earned a scholarship to Duke Law. Now he will become whoever he needs to be to win the presidency of the United States.

1968 is the year of wolves. The fangs are sharp, and the bellies ache with hunger.

~~~~~~~~~~

A local deli has opened early and sent sandwiches to Good Samaritan Medical Center for the family and friends of the senator from New Jersey: ham and Swiss, cucumber and cream cheese, tuna salad, egg salad, pimento cheese, BLTs, Cubans. The lobby is filling up with bouquets of flowers and handwritten notes. You pace and count the knots of the komboskini over and over again as you wait; Aemond has been in surgery for hours. The nurses periodically bring you Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, scalding watered-down sweetness to distract you from the fact that some surgeon is currently rooting around inside your husband’s ribcage.

Alicent—a convert to the Greek Orthodox faith just as you are, though far more zealous, far more sincere if you dared to admit it—is pleading for God to save her son as she clasps her own prayer rope. Helaena is seated beside her, eerily calm. Helaena’s husband Fosco is wandering around boredly and inflicting small talk upon the nurses, ogling out the third-story windows, playing with his red Duncan yo-yo. Otto is making a series of calls using one of the phones at the nurses’ station. Criston is there too, leaning over the countertop and speaking with Otto in low conspiratorial whispers.

Aegon is sitting alone and glaring at you. He takes a rattling bottle of pills—prescriptions that doctors are too afraid not to write for him when he asks—out of a pocket on the front of his green army jacket, spotted like a leopard with your bloody handprints. He opens the amber-colored, cylindrical container and pours two, no, three tiny white tablets into his palm. He tosses them into his mouth and washes them down with a swallow of his own mediocre hot chocolate, still glaring. You ignore him.

“How could this have happened?” Mimi says again from where she’s slumped in her chair. Aegon’s wife has a Snow White sort of beauty, but with a perpetual ruddiness in her nose and cheeks from the gin she sips constantly. You suppose it would make anyone a drunk, being married to a man like that. Her maiden name was Marina Marceline Leroux, but everyone has always called her Mimi, even the press on the rare occasions when she makes an appearance. Her children—Orion, Spiro, Violeta, Thaddeus, and little Cosmo, only five years old—are all back at the Breakers Hotel with the nannies, the same as Helaena’s. Mimi blubbers to nobody in particular: “How…? Who…? Who would want to hurt Aemond…?”

Someone needs to sober her up. You fetch a BLT off the platter of sandwiches and offer it to her. “Here. Eat.”

“I’m not hungry. Who on earth could be hungry at a time like this? I’m absolutely nauseated, I’ll never want food again—”

“Mimi, eat the sandwich.”

“Fine, fine,” she slurs morosely, then takes an unenthusiastic bite. She listens to you, all the women do. They listen to you, and you listen to Aemond, and the circle is closed and complete.

Criston is walking over now. You turn to him, needing good news, bad news, any news. “It was a Wallace supporter,” Criston says. From his seat, Aegon is watching Criston with his slow drugged gaze, listening intently. “Some bell pepper farmer from up by Jacksonville.”

“He’s been taken to the local jail for holding?” you ask, and then add: “Alive?”

“Yeah, and he already has a record. Assault and battery. His brother-in-law is apparently a Grand Dragon in the Klan.”

“What the hell is a Grand Dragon?”

“Well, it’s higher than a Goblin, but not as illustrious as an Imperial Wizard, does that answer your question?”

“Perfectly.” You smile at Criston, a pained, wry smile. He returns it and places a palm over your belly. You are still wearing the mint green dress Aemond picked out for you this morning, before he won the Florida primary, before he was shot twice by the disciple of a political adversary and laid at death’s doorstep. You are still covered in your husband’s blood.

“You’re feeling alright?” Then Criston smirks, knowing how ridiculous he must sound. “You know. All things considered.”

“We’re both fine. The baby’s moving around, I can feel it.”

“You can feel him, you mean,” Criston teases, knowing Aemond’s preoccupation with his unborn son; but you can’t bring yourself to appreciate the joke.

Aegon says to you suddenly: “How the fuck did you let this happen?”

“What?” you answer, stunned.

Aegon stands and approaches, lurching, raging. “You always have to be right beside him, in the photographs, in the headlines, in the soundbites, but you let some psychopath run up and shoot him? Twice?!”

“I thought he just wanted to shake Aemond’s hand, or maybe get a quote for an article—”

“You didn’t notice the gun?!”

“Aegon, sit down,” Criston orders.

“It happened in seconds,” you say. “You think you would have done better? You and your Valium, and your Librium, and your Percodan? You think your reaction time would have been so superior to mine?”

“Please,” Alicent moans, mopping tears from her pink cheeks with a handkerchief. “Please, don’t fight, not now…”

“We are all friends here,” Fosco adds in his thick Italian accent, yo-yoing by a window.

“You want to be the first lady so bad but you can’t handle it!” Aegon shouts, his voice echoing through the lobby. “You’re not some prodigy, you don’t have all the answers, you’re just a girl who stitched yourself to Aemond and then you let him get shot, he’s being operated on right now, maybe he’s even dying, and you still act like you’re so fucking perfect—”

“You’re mad because you know that everybody here is thinking the same thing,” you tell Aegon, cold and cruel. “That if someone had to get killed tonight it should have been you.”

Aegon’s mouth drops open; he stares at you with that slippery, opaque, stoned woundedness, pathetic, infuriating, illogically childish. Everyone else pretends they haven’t heard you. Alicent sniffles into her handkerchief. Fosco begins humming I Want To Hold Your Hand. Mimi chews sluggishly on her BLT. From the nurses’ station, Otto says, holding the phone to his chest: “It’s George Wallace. He’s calling for Aemond’s wife.” Then he waits to see if you’ll agree to take it.

Of course you will. You have to. You are acting in your husband’s stead. You go to the nurses’ station and grab the handset when Otto passes it to you. “This is Mrs. Targaryen.”

“Ma’am, I just wanted to offer you my sincerest condolences.” He has a pronounced drawl, born and raised in what he has praised as the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland. You animal, you think. You braindead bigot. “I do hope the senator makes a hasty recovery. I sure would like to beat him at the ballot box, but I have no stomach for anarchy. An act like this is repugnant to me, as it should be to any red-blooded American.”

“It was one of yours, do you know that?” you say, dripping venom. “One of your hateful ghouls.”

“I have no such knowledge. But if the shooter does turn out to be a supporter of my campaign, I disavow him utterly. He deserves a nice long sit in Old Sparky and then to meet his maker.”

“You inspire men to commit violence, and then you renounce them when they spill blood. I’m still wearing my husband’s. It’s on my hands, it’s on my dress, and I will not absolve you of blame. You are a gardener of discord. You grow it like roses or wheat. You tend to it until it blooms.” Otto is studying you, bushy eyebrows raised. “If you’d truly like to repent, perhaps dropping out of the Democratic primary would be a good start. And then you could find something useful to do, like drowning yourself.”

From whatever office he’s currently lounging comfortably in, his shoes kicked up on the desk, Wallace chuckles. “Aemond is very fortunate to have as ardent a defender as you, my dear.”

“Yes, a devoted wife is such a treasure. It’s a shame you killed yours.”

“Ma’am, once again, I just wanted to express how terribly sorry I am for your family’s hardship. I would never wish for an incident like this—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be emboldening white supremacists then!” You slam the phone as you hang up.

Otto looks at you. He says: “Did it go well?”

The heavy double doors leading to the operating theater swing open, and a surgeon steps through them, still drying his hands with a dark blue towel. He has changed his scrubs and washed his skin, but you notice a spot he missed: a fleck of half-dried blood up by his temple. That’s Aemond, you think. That’s a piece of him.

Everyone rushes to gather around the doctor, even Mimi; she lists like a ship taking on water as she walks, gnawing at all that remains of her BLT, just a sliver of white toast crust.

“The senator is alive,” the doctor says, and Alicent cries out in relief. Criston rests a palm on her shoulder. “But we could not save the eye.”

“He’s half-blind?” you ask. There’s never been a half-blind president. There’s never been a Greek one either. And the only reason this is stuck in your mind is because you know it will consume Aemond’s.

The doctor nods. “We had to remove it. The bullet that struck Senator Targaryen in the head, fortunately, was more of a graze. It ricocheted off his skull and didn’t cause any trauma to the brain, but his eye was…” He hesitates, trying to find a more polite word than shredded, macerated, pulverized. “Destroyed.”

“You stopped the bleeding?” Aegon says, astonished. “He’s okay? He’s really okay?”

“The second bullet pierced the thoracic cavity and was lodged less than an inch from his heart. He was very lucky. We repaired the damage to the best of our ability, and I am optimistic that the senator will make a full recovery. He’s resting comfortably now, but he should be awake soon.”

“Oh, thank God,” Alicent says, glistening dark eyes raised to heaven. The salient points gathered, Fosco wanders off again, his yo-yo dangling from its string.

Otto asks: “When can he resume campaigning?”

The doctor is caught off-guard; it takes him a moment to answer. “That will depend on the senator’s stamina as he regains his strength. If he chooses to stay in the race at all.”

Otto scoffs. “Of course he’ll stay in. This is what he lives for. You really can’t give me a ballpark figure?”

The doctor is determinately impassive. “I would estimate a month or two before he can withstand the rigors of the campaign trail again.”

“California is June 4th,” Otto recalls, counting off dates on his fingers. “Illinois is the 11th, New York is the 18th…”

“Look, there are people outside!” Fosco announces excitedly as he peers through one of the windows. “Hello! Hello everybody!”

“Fosco, you idiot, stop waving,” Otto snaps. “Go sit down.”

“But they are cheering.”

“Not for you.”

Fosco, somewhat deflated, grabs an egg salad sandwich off the platter and plops into a chair to eat it. He’s dressed in a green plaid sport coat and tight white trousers, very chic, very European. You’ve never been able to imagine Fosco and Helaena being passionately romantic with each other. They’re both a bit too doll-like for that, closer to Barbie and Ken than flesh and blood, blank stares and vague ambitions.

“Someone should talk to them,” Alicent says softly. She means the crowd that is forming in front of the hospital: journalists, cops, local politicians, mutilated veterans, college kids, farmers, fishermen, women and children, the future and the past. Everyone turns to look at you.

“I’ll do it,” you volunteer. You will, you must. Aemond could have chosen a hundred similarly suited women to be his wife, but he chose you, and when he did your vows became a blood oath.

Criston accompanies you downstairs to where the crowd has gathered just outside the front entrance of Good Samaritan Medical Center. The night air is warm and humid, the stars bright. You had thought of so many things to tell these people as you’d stood in the elevator as it descended, but now your mind is empty, fearful. There are photographers with blinding camera flashes and apostles waiting with famished eyes. From the depths of injustice and poverty and war, they have come to pay their respects to the man they believe is destined to save not just themselves but their world. What should I say? What would Aemond want me to say?

“I am very pleased to share with you all that Senator Targaryen is out of surgery and regaining his strength.”

There are cheers and applause and prayers; you are still clutching the komboskini that the old woman gave you in the lobby of the Breakers Hotel. You see more prayer ropes in this flock, and rosaries too, Bibles and dog tags, copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Joanne Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

“We would like to thank you for your heartfelt support. Aemond and I are so very grateful, and he is looking forward to being back on the campaign trail soon.”

More clapping and whistling, and then the crowd waits. You aren’t sure what they want to hear as you stand in the glow of the hospital luminance; your hands are trembling wildly, so you clasp them together as you hold the komboskini. Criston glances over at you, concerned. You settle on the truth.

“The man who tried to kill my husband tonight is a supporter of former Alabama governor George Wallace and an avowed white supremacist. Any ideology that advocates for violence and prejudice is a threat to our bodies, our nation, and our souls. We will not surrender to it, not even when our lives are in jeopardy. We will not concede that hope for a better world is lost. We will press ever onward with the knowledge that God is on our side, and that the future of this country is worth fighting for.”

You are bathed in flashbulb lightning; your ears ring with the thunder of the applause. You are shaking hands now, nodding, beaming, Criston following you like a shadow as you move through the congregation. You stop to listen to a middle-aged woman in a floral dress who wants to give you marriage advice: never get bossy, don’t become selfish, remember that you are his safe harbor in the storms of life. It is your job to gift her your momentary veneration. You have beauty, but she has wisdom; or at least, that is the bargain that has been struck, that is the presumption everyone agrees upon. She must have some advantage over you, otherwise the decades she has spent in service of her parents and husband and children have been wasted, she has carved away pieces of herself to feed hungry mouths until she vanished like the doomed nymph Echo. In return, she tries not to envy you too much, not to dismiss you as foolish or frivolous or lustful. Sometimes you think that women are filled with such vicious, relentless self-loathing that it feels good to direct it at someone else for a while, to pick apart another body, to tally up the deficits of her spirit.

“Aemond is so lucky to have you,” the woman says. You can barely hear her over the roar of the crowd.

And you smile as you dutifully reply: “I think it’s the other way around.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There is a television mounted on the wall in Aemond’s room. The news coverage, the volume turned way down low, oscillates between his own near-assassination and the stalled peace talks in Paris. Representatives of the United States and North Vietnam cannot agree, and so each day more body bags are flown home to return the bones of the nation’s sons and fathers to Missouri, Alabama, Idaho, Maine, Wisconsin, Maryland, Arizona, California, New Jersey, everywhere else. Someone has to end it. Aemond will end it.

“I dreamed I won Florida,” your husband mumbles, and that’s how you know he’s awake, here in a hospital bed and wearing IVs like strings of Christmas lights around a pine tree.

“You did,” you tell him, gently smoothing back his hair from his forehead. His left eye—where his left eye used to be—is bandaged; his words are soft and labored. “Humphrey was second. Wallace got third. But you won. And you’re going to be okay.”

“McCarthy?”

“It seems you’re devouring his coalition.”

Aemond’s lips slowly curl into a grin, triumphant. “It is God’s will.” And this is what he always says. It is God’s will that he survives, it is God’s will that he wins the presidency, it is God’s will that you give him sons.

“Yes,” you agree, lifting his right hand to kiss his knuckles. Then you press the komboskini you’re still carrying into his weak grasp. It means more to Aemond than it does to you. “Yes it is.”

Aemond sinks into unconsciousness again, morphine and dreams that blur with reality. There will be pain soon, and plenty of it, but he is free from that impending truth for now. You rise from your chair to tell the rest of the family that Aemond is beginning to wake up. Alicent and Criston will want to speak with him.

When you open the door, Aegon is standing there: an eavesdropper, a trespasser. He glares at you with his large wet ocean-blue eyes, hazy with pills, glinting with resentment. Reluctantly, you step aside to let him in. Aegon wobbles as he passes you and has to grab onto the doorframe to steady himself, scrabbling like a trapped animal.

“You’re a disaster,” you say, caustic like acid, biting, repulsed.

Aegon whirls and jabs his index finger against your chest, bloodstained mint green wool bouclé by Chanel. “You’re a vessel. You’re a cow. And one day he’ll be done with you.”

You feel something hitting you like a bullet, cracking ribs, piercing lungs, tearing muscles and ligaments. Your lips have parted, but you can’t fathom words. Aegon has said many things to you—bitter things, belittling things, things in mixed company, things when you’re alone—but never this. For the first time since you met him two years ago, he has won one of your sparring matches. He has the upper hand. He has wounded you.

Aegon can see this, certainly. But he doesn’t seem pleased with himself. He looks a little shellshocked, like he can’t quite believe he said the words, like maybe if given the chance again he wouldn’t take it. But the moment is over now, and you can’t get time back, it is a thread that unspools until every inch is gone, spent, tangled in a thousand webs.

Aegon staggers into the hospital room. You flee from it. Out in the lobby the phone at the nurses’ station is ringing again. They’ll all be calling now to give their requisite sympathies. Humphrey counsels prudence, McCarthy prays for peace, LBJ offers the empathy of someone who has felt the cold gaze of Death in his own doorway, Nixon praises Aemond’s resilience and quotes the ancient philosopher Seneca: “There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”

[chaoticallywriting]

Aegon, staring at Y/N with heart eyes:

Aemond, gagging: I liked you better when you were a whore.

[chaoticallywriting]

THIS

from twitter

[chaoticallywriting]

they did it for the hand kink girlies

[chaoticallywriting]

Made this y'all

Thank you, @c3rvida3 , for making your post