hardyshoe

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen, chapter twelve - Bouquet.

Masterlist

Also posted on AO3 - here.

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 In the years since you were last really in London, greying and dull in the late May sun of the spring of 1955, it has changed for the better. There are fewer holes in the façades of buildings and people are brighter, in clothing and temperament. Women in bright coats skim down the frosty streets under the mizzly scatter of falling sleet. You watch an old man clip the pavement with his walking stick and pull his coat tighter around his skinny shoulders. 

 You find you have grown accustomed to the city winters, to melted snow in the gutters going grey with road traffic and the way light dances orange and yellow on wet stone. It is comforting to be in a similarity, even if the streets are wider and car horns dominate the auditory landscape. Your hands move over soft little ears, cupping gently and placing a kiss on a fine blond crown. 

 As the streets start to grow dense and narrow, you notice the differences rather than what has remained the same. There are fewer carved out gaps in the terraces, bombsites strike as unfamiliar visages of a bygone struggle, populated with little children playing with stick-swords amongst the rubble, rather than the reminders of loss they had been when you had first seen them. 

 It is a change observed in many places you have been, you have made a habit of tracking the time since the war in the spaces you visit. The first place you stayed, a dingy studio in Paris, there were shrapnel holes all around the entrance. Pockmarked concrete encircling the green painted door. 

 You used to trace them with your fingers while Aegon unlocked the door, counting them with dancing nails tapping over the stone. The raised edges would dig into your back through your dresses on the warm nights that summer when Aegon would press you against the wall and laugh into your neck between kisses tinged with wine and continental cigarettes. 

 Those early days passed in a great blur of exhilaration, mornings spent watching crowds on café corners, crying, overwhelmed, in front of masterpieces that defined your longing in the museums of Paris, evenings dancing down streets and eating in dimly lit restaurants squeezed into buildings far too thin. You spoke only the French you had gleaned from your BBC ‘Repondez s’il vous plait’ records and Aegon’s was hardly better from his French classes. The pair of you jumbled through somehow, blushing and gambling until someone took pity and wagered their own broken English instead. It was like being in your own little world, you understood little of anything beyond what you saw and felt and no one cared to look into what you were doing. The summer was hot and sticky and you were alight with the passion of freedom. 

 One afternoon, you took him through the Musée d’Orsay. Aegon could not pretend to understand art as you did, nor to love it to the point of hysterical tears, but he watched you the entire time, his own personal picture of wonder. He stopped when you did, followed your eyes across cracked oil surfaces and sat on the floor with you in front of Manet’s ‘Le dejeuner sur l’herbe’. Where there were men snickering and ogling Courbet’s ‘L'origine du monde’, he just stared at it with you, appreciating the erotic beauty, then took you home and appreciated you just the same upon the wrangled blue bedsheets of the flat.  

 More time than you can believe now was spent like that, spread out in the city's undiluted sunlight, creeping towards another little death with him. He developed a habit quite early on, one that stuck, of holding you against him when he shivered through his peak. Hands as tight around you as they could be, lips whining against your skin, your ribs feeling like they were defined by his embrace. 

The two of you are always embracing really, never not touching in some way. You know it grounds Aegon, reminds him that you are there with him. For you it has always been about a reassurance that you made the right choice, you miss your parents, miss the girls and the pub crowd, but the life you have lived since Aegon showed up with his hair cut short and his knuckles split, bleeding resignation and relief, is not excised completely from the other. 

 Life is defined, no matter who or where you are, by the choices you make yourself, not the ones others make for you. Many people tried their very best to make decisions for Aegon, to send him places and to teach him certain things, deprive him of joys and expose him to an abundance of miseries. In the end, you chose him and made sure he knew that you would in every lifetime with all their infinite eventualities and consequences. He chose you back just the same. 

 Those first few months were like an extended delirium, Paris, Lille then Saltzberg. Staying in inexpensive rented flats and living off of your money and what Aegon had from his trust. Otto had made a decisive effort to stop him taking any of it when the clerk had phoned him, storming in with Mrs Targaryen to the London bank you and he had been waiting in for some hours by that point. Their shoes had resounded off the pretty tiles of the grandiose building and his fury rippled up the arch of the domed ceiling. Otto shouted for hours, pushed against young tellers who were not paid nearly enough to play party to his rampage and yelled embarrassingly at the men in charge. Alicent spent her time snipping about her husband changing his mind about where he kept his money and shooting you venomous looks when there was no one to listen to her. 

 You and Aegon sat resolutely in the centre of the storm, sinking divots into two orange velvet chairs and bowing further and further into one another. You remember him falling asleep better than you remember anything else, it is funny how that happens, that the moment of quiet sticks more than the deafening boom. 

 His eyelashes had glinted like fine silk and despite everything, nothing at all seemed insurmountable. 

 It turned out, very little could be done on Otto’s part to stop the withdrawal of funds from an account in Aegon’s name. This drove him to a furious brink, he woke Aegon with a finger in his face and a spitting diatribe about duty. Aegon just blinked at him tiredly, stood up and walked to the teller in silence. The look on Otto and his daughter’s face when you turned to glance at them as you walked with Aegon from the building has simmered in your mind vindictively since that day. 

 That money kept you more than floating for the year spent in movement. It was a beautiful fantasy of exploration and you loved everything you got to see. Just after Christmas that year though, you realised you were concerningly late for your monthlies and it did not take a trip to a doctor who did not speak your language to confirm what you already knew. 

 You made good on your promise to him on the side of the East End docks on a cool spring night when you were alight with confessions of long-felt love. He got down one one knee, you followed him down to meet him as you always have been, as equals deserving of each other’s love.

 The photographs of your little wedding in Antwerp that were sent home were picked carefully, ones with your bouquet of sunflowers held low over your cream silk gown. There are ones kept on the mantle wherever you have been where you are twisting in Aegon’s arms to kiss him and your flowers are limp in one hand, it is your favourite not just for how happy you both look but for the way you are showing, however little. 

 From there you kept going, working odd jobs here and there. In Florence, Aegon started teaching English for a holiday programme, it was rudimentary and he had no qualifications but he loved it. The irony of his years spent loathing education in any form was not lost on him but he told you that he genuinely wanted to try teaching. Perhaps it was the chance to give someone what he never had, or the idea of being something good in a few lives, but whatever it was, his mind was made up. 

 He finished his degree in 1958 and has been teaching early years English since then. He has a pride about it that he had not thought possible in himself and he wears purpose like a pair of loose cords and a favourite leather bomber jacket. 

 His hand is warm behind your back now, where he has wedged it between your spine and the leather of the taxi’s seats. He is smiling at you when you find his eyes, raises a brow to ask what you were so lost in. You shrug, drop your head to rest against his shoulder and let him rest his on your crown. 

Heather’s birth had been incredibly hard on both of you. You were in Vienna by then, settled with a sense of permanence that eased something in you when you were eight months along and feeling on the verge of something truly grand. Aegon was working towards enrollment at the university of Vienna for a teaching degree, he got his letter of acceptance the morning the contractions began and jubilation turned into a hysterical excitement. A woman from upstairs in the building came when you started screaming from the pain and ushered Aegon out of the room with a number to phone and a reassurance that she knew what she was doing in accented English. 

 A young woman came half an hour later, tried to move Aegon into the hall and was met by two unwavering glares of dissent and your firmly entwined hands. She gave in and let him stay for the following hours until she examined you for the final time and withdrew with pinched brows and a nod for your neighbour to follow her into the hallway. 

 You were in too much pain to register anything but Aegon still speaks of how it felt to watch them talking in hushed German. The two women flew between your side and the downstairs front door of the building, tight lipped and saying very little when he begged them to say what was wrong. Because something was wrong, the pain was too intense and it has been going on for too long and the only thing they were saying was “do not push, wait for the krankenwagen.”

 Then you thought you felt your waters break, and a great crashing ebbed out of you. It felt like a good thing, a step closer to the end, despite the ladies’ malcontent. The younger woman, the niece of your neighbour as you later found out and, a midwife, looked on with barely concealed horror. Suddenly, movement was everywhere, they were jumping from their positions at the foot of the bed, the older one running for the phone while the young midwife clamoured in her bag for a syringe, wind was blowing in the curtains and Aegon was shouting, panicking. 

 And you were perfectly still, fingers losing feeling and brain starting to fog. Blood was everywhere, soaking the sheets and marring smudges up the arms of the midwife. Your neighbour returned and started patting at your brow with a crimson-soaked cloth, muttering reassurances that you could not understand. 

 Aegon was begging them to do something, a hand wrapped around your shoulders and eyes switching frantically between you and the bloody mess spilling from between your legs. 

 What followed is still a blur for you, memories lost with the blood that haemorrhaged when it should not have. There were screaming sirens and men with a stretcher, a rickety metal ambulance and doctors in white coats all looking anywhere but you. The only thing you can recall is how they stopped Aegon from coming into the room with you, how they put their hands on his chest and let the doors shut obstinately in his face. You can remember the fear, then the nothingness that followed. 

 In those unconscious hours when the world ticked on without you, you would later find out that the doctors asked Aegon who he would like them to save, should it come to that. A question never asked unless that point has already been reached. He tells you now, when that day comes back to him in wicked and cruel dreams, what he said then, that he has no life without you.  

 When you woke, almost a day later, he was weeping in the chair next to your bed, arms full of a mass of blankets and soft pink skin. 

 “Is she okay?” you had asked, because you knew she was a girl somehow, voice rasping on healing screams. His eyes had broken from his daughter, your daughter, to meet yours and his tears started anew. He moved to you like you were a broken bird fallen from a tree, placing the tiniest little baby against your chest and sliding behind your back. 

 “Sunflower. Oh my sunflower,” his tears had run down your hair, soaking soft and warm into your scalp. His hands had woven around you to play with the blankets surrounding the baby’s face, speaking in disjointed tones. “They didn’t think you would- and they wouldn’t let me see you for hours and, and then they let me in and told me you were stable but they still didn’t know and they put her in my arms and, and-”

 He breathed raggedly against your hair, “and she is so, so beautiful.”

 Somehow, in spite of the fear and the pain and everything that had passed, it all felt closer to okay then. You remember looking down at your little girl, waking and fitful, and being unable to suppress the smile from your face, because her eyes were the colour of heather and when she squealed the first cry that you got to hear, she sounded just like you.

⚘⚘⚘

 Aegon squeezes your hand and you come right back to him, to the here and now. Heather is asleep across from you, curling into her young uncle with her thumb obstinately in her mouth, she may not do it during the day but the subconscious move of comfort seems to command her sleeping mind still at the age of four. 

 Daeron first met Heather when she was five months old, he and Aegon wrote constantly and he had developed his brother’s penchant for sneaking out. In early January, when you and Aegon were still staying with your parents after the holiday and the school boys had come back for the new term, a little blond face appeared at the pub window late one afternoon. He clamoured into his brother’s arms, then yours, finally your parents, babbling the whole time about anything and everything, but when he was presented with Heather’s wide eyes and little face, he was silenced. He sat with her in the little spare bedroom for hours, showing her everything he could find, reading her books and counting her fingers over and over. A bond was forged between them somehow, a natural thing born of blood and age and love. Really, they are siblings, no one needs to look any harder than the truth. 

 You look at your husband, find him already looking at you as he so often is, and smile. The night is drawing in around the car and tiredness is starting to hum in your temples, but the journey is almost complete. On your lap, Iris turns her head to look out the window on the opposite side, she quickly switches back just a second later, unable to choose a passing sight to focus on. She’s only one, just seven minutes younger than her brother, yet she seems everyday to be growing into her father’s insatiable curiosity for the world. 

 She makes a decisive effort to turn in your arms and you let her, loosening your hands over her ears to a gentle cup that blocks out the heavy sounds of the traffic around but lets her hear you. 

 “Nearly there now, my little petal.” She nods, babbling something you would be able to understand if you were not quite so distracted. 

 Aegon catches your eye from your periphery, hoists Florian up in his arms carefully so as not to wake him. The little boy has never slept well, unlike Iris, and getting him to stay down is a near miracle. “What’s wrong?”

 You smile at him, a tired little thing. It is not that anything is wrong, just that everything always feels a bit wonky when you come back to London. “We haven’t been here since the twins were born, and hardly even then. It just feels a little bizarre.”

 He nods, knows just what you mean. You did not want a repeat of Heather’s birth, Aegon couldn’t bear the thought either, so the decision was made to come back to England when you were eight months along. You intended to travel up to your parents and stay there until your time came but nature had other plans and your waters broke on the ferry over from france. You had foolishly based the second run on the first, thinking it would take hours to get anywhere near to needing assistance and had taken the train with a frantically paranoid Aegon all the way to London, thinking you could make it up north in time. You could not and Florian was born in the nearest hospital to St. Pancras station just twenty eight minutes after the train had pulled in. 

 They let Aegon stay in the room, only because things were moving entirely too quickly for normal protocol and because you threatened bloody murder if they tried to take him away. Really, everything went as well as it could have, you lost minimal blood and you delivered a baby boy who was screaming healthily. However, five minutes later the pains were getting worse and there was no sign of the afterbirth, the nurses took the baby from your chest and clustered under the white cloth over your legs once again. Confusion, shocked reassurances and harried dashes for a blanket welcomed Iris into the world. She was tiny but healthy, an utter surprise to everyone but her brother who stopped crying the moment she started

 You remember everything about that day, every colour and shade and sensation, the way your muscles ached with a ferocity you had not thought possible and the feeling of hormones breaking through you like tidal waves. 

 You had not let them keep you there longer than a day, once they had assured you that Iris was alright you discharged yourself against doctors’ recommendations. The air from the open hospital windows had felt stagnant, the view was a blown out hole betweens buildings that had still yet to have been filled in with shiny new brutalist nightmares. It was claustrophobic and unsettling and you refused to stay there with your children. 

 You could feel the house in Kensington calling through the streets to Aegon, mocking him and jerking him back. You felt his discomfort and you felt your own, it was too much and by the next evening you were on a train for your old village home, in the pub with the old crowd before the closing bell. 

 You’re going back there on Christmas eve, spending the day with your parents at the pub like you have since Heather was born, but for the few days before you are staying with Davey in Poplar. He got married a few years ago, has a son called Johnny with his wife Annie. You have not met her yet, life has taken you away from the old London streets but Aegon and Davey have written letters every week for the last five years. 

 He is jittering in his seat as best he can without waking Florian, leg bouncing and free hand playing with his fringe. It took time but, as hair does, his grew back. He does not wear it as shaggily as he did when you first met him, it is no longer a shield. It curls ever so slightly behind his ears and stops before it touches his shoulders, he finally looks like he is not trying to crawl out of his skin. 

 “You’re nervous,” you say, lightly and quietly in the little taxi. Heather is breathing evenly, drooling slightly onto your skirt, you brush her hair back and thread a kiss between your fingertips and her temple. 

 He sighs, “being here makes me as nervous as it does you.” A car blows its horn loudly down the road and his nose scrunches at the sound. “I do not know how to pretend I don’t know how close it all is, how close they are and how small that makes me feel.”

 “We are not here long.” Your reassurance comes in that learned whisper of parents when their children have finally dozed off, a light breathing of communication known entirely too well. It is not much, yet it is all you can truly offer. Something about this city makes you both antsy. 

 “I know,” he says, “I think I have been too busy looking forward to seeing Davey to think much about how it would feel. I thought I had outgrown this nervousness, I just feel like a little boy.”

 He looks at Daeron when he says that, his not-so-little brother sleeping with his mouth open and Tesarion clutched shamelessly in his hand. 

 He still looks like one sometimes, you never tell him that but it is a secret observation that you catch in him from time to time. When his hair gets too long or when he cuts himself while cooking and his eyes take on that familiar old vulnerability which no amount of time will ever shake. It makes you smile, reminds you of what you have come from and how wonderfully different he is now. 

 As he sits next to you now, holding your sleeping son in his arms so very carefully, as careful as he always is with the children, like he is afraid they will disappear if he holds them too tight, you are all love, all pride for the man you have come to share a life with. 

 “That is not always a bad thing, I know you try not to think about all of it but sometimes you have to.” His fingers are tracing Florian’s crown, dusting over fine blond hair, his knuckles are smooth and unblemished, that ages him the most you think. 

 “I just don’t like being worried, worrying that they will come and find us and do something to the children, to Daeron,” he looks at you like he did in the pub that night you gave him the handkerchief, that night he started calling you sunflower, eyes brimming with brightness. “It’s irrational, they don’t care anymore, not after all this time but-”

 “But you cannot help but fear that they do,” you finish for him, smiling a little sadly, “I would be lying if I said I did not understand you all too well.”

   He mirrors your expression, drops his head to kiss your cheek briefly, and you catch him in return on his way back. 

 “And if they try anything,” you whisper to him in the gap between you, “then I will remind them just how little they are allowed to care.”

 He chuckles then, cutting up the tension in the back of the taxi, “I am glad you do not have to play that role anymore but sometimes I do miss your fury, it makes you ever so fierce.”

 “And what am I normally?” You tease.

 “Beautiful, sunflower” he says, kissing you into silence, “always.”

⚘⚘⚘

 The taxi pulls into a familiar looking brick tenement, not the same you had graced when you went to the Spinnet Sunday lunch in 1955 but one not too far over. There is a beaten red trike next to the door when you get out and it makes you smile. Heather rises reluctantly, blinking around with suspicious little eyes, ever the analyst. 

 You ease out with Iris and let her down to toddle along next to you. Florian stays asleep for precisely a minute, until Heather pushes the door shut with a slap and he starts to fuss. You and Aegon exchange a glance, a smile of inevitability. 

 “Which one is it, Papa?” Heather asks, one hand playing with the collar of her jumper, the other linked with Daeron’s, she is perpetually aggravated by most clothing but it is a cold night and sleet is gathering in the gutter. 

 Aegon bounces Florian and tries to will him back to sleep while the taxi driver takes your bags from the boot. “I don’t know, petal. Number fifty eight, if you can find it.”

She starts skirting the bricks clumsily, paying more attention to their cracks than their numbers. Though you only spent a few days with her, sometimes your daughter reminds you so much of Helaena it is jarring. You think of that conversation you had, of her proclamation that came true of Heather’s existence, of her birth at the end of summer, you think of your naïvetée and the way you had yearned for her desperately. Being so close to that place of origination feels like proving something, showing them that you got what they never thought you deserved. 

 “Not quite, Madeline,” Daeron says laughing, nudging Heather out of the doorway she has peeked into with her whole body. 

“Are those the dulcet tones of me favorite brother I ‘ear?” A chipper cockney accent sounds from somewhere behind you. Aegon whirls and Iris nearly falls over in her stumbling rotation. 

 “Davey,” Aegon breathes. You take Florian from his arms absentmindedly, letting him skirt past in a haze of relief and joy to fall into his best friend’s arms in a perfect mirror of the scene in that pub down the road all those years ago. Before Aegon knew his own worth, before he was your husband and before he was a father. He is the same man now, in the same brother’s arms, despite all that has come to pass.

 Such is the beauty of life and time, no matter what happens and who you become, you are still you. Aegon is still the man you watched walk dazedly into your pub when you were eighteen, wearing too large corduroy trousers and his heart pinned bleeding and raw to his sleeve. Davey is still too tall and lanky, and entirely too jolly. 

 Ultimately, they are still two five year olds on a train bound for a north they cannot fathom. Two boys in the coal shed. Two brothers. 

 “How are you, me old mucka’?” Davey grins, patting Aegon's cheeks between his hands.

 Aegon smiles a young man’s smile, claps Davey’s shoulder right back. “Bloody happy to see you.”

 “I should hope so,” is the reply, then the man you have come to know best through anecdotes and letters read aloud finds you over Aegon’s shoulder. “And if it isn’t the miracle worker!”

 He embraces you like a friend. You and he have exchanged a few handfuls of letters, congratulations and commiserations and well wishes, sometimes you find he is the only one you can confide in. Sometimes you know you are the same for him. 

 He pulls back to look at the children, ruffles Daeron’s hair then plucks Iris up from the ground when he sees her staring at him with wide, curious eyes. She starts playing with his slightly shabby brown hair the moment it is within her reach and he just laughs and lets her. You see an old familiar heartache in the way he studies them, little faces that reflect a sorrow he carries despite its healing. 

 Heather is four now, her hair white and her eyes lilac. She may have your features but her colouring is all Aegon’s, her eyes too. She studies Davey without expression, it is how she works when she is yet to know a person but it is often mistaken for sadness in strangers. 

 Davey crouches down before her, Iris still pulling on his hair, and smiles, “You look an awful lot like ya’ dad did when he was your age.”

 Heather blinks, stares at him longer than is normally considered polite. The she reaches out to brush his cheekbone with her hand, “Uncle Davey,”

 ‘That is what I was waiting for,” he says as he scoops her up happily. Spinning her until she gives in and squeals with joy. “Come on in, Annie is just finishing supper.”

 “Oh, you didn’t have to go to such trouble-” you hedge, feeling guilty for the hour. 

 He brushes you off, putting Heather down and taking Iris’ little hand to guide her to the light of his flat’s stairwell. “Don’t be daft. You're family, it’s no trouble at all.”

 He makes for a funny sight, bending on an awkward axis to walk with the toddling girl beside him, she’s  hardly taller than his knees. You have missed this familiarity with other adults more than you thought you would, there are a few couples from Aegon’s course that you have become close with, women you chat with in the park or the museum cafés when you take the children out, but it is never quite the same. 

 The tenement is much the same as that of Davey’s childhood home, green tiles walls all the way up the stairs and overpopulated landings. Aegon is lagging behind with Florian while you and Heather pick your way up between prams and milk crates. 

 “Annie, love. They’re ‘ere,” Davey calls out when you get to an open door pouring light out onto the cracked stone entryway. 

 You all file into a home of warmth and evident love. A tiny little woman with red hair comes darting out to meet you all in the hallway, greeting Iris first down on a crouch then hugging you like she knows you. “Oh I have been looking forward to meeting you for so very long.”

 Davey met Annie down at the dancehall, sent Aegon a letter that same night as soon as he got home saying that he had met the woman he was going to marry and that she was a marvellous thing. Both you and Aegon had laughed reading his sweeping proclamation; however, just three months later another letter and a photograph of Davey and a pretty woman half his height came through the door with the morning post. It made sense really, when you thought about it, Davey was a man of strict and decisive conviction and when he made his mind up he stuck with it. 

 That was the winter after Heather was born and not a year later did you receive the announcement of the birth of their son. 

 Annie is everything you expected her to be, the sort of bright and insatiably kind person that you cannot help but smile for. She plays with your hair as you return her sentiments of joy. 

 “And look at these little darlings,” she says, greeting Heather with a kiss and scooping Florian from Aegon’s arms easily. She bounces him as she greets Aegon. Everything feels so very easy, so calm and pleasant that it puts you into a mood without worry. “Johnny is just in the kitchen, come on through.”

 Davey gives his wife a kiss and leads the way. What follows is a night of the warmest company you have ever known, conversation flowing like blood and water and laughter sparking from easy understanding. You find yourself in conversation with Annie, discussing Kerouac’s novels with the relief of common understanding. After a while though, the both of you lapse into a quiet listening in on the two men across the room, both sitting with their sons asleep on their chests. You and Annie exchange a smile. 

 They are talking about Aegon’s family, you could tell from the downtick at the corner of his lips which is so like his mother’s even if you could not hear them talking. 

 “I don’t understand, why though?” Davey asks and Aegon sighs heavily in response. 

 “Neither do I, it’s almost worse this way. I will always be left wondering how much he was actually aware of.” He is talking about Viserys, about the money and the will. 

 Viserys died in Spring 1958, far later than you both expected him to live for. It was a culmination of Parkinson’s and genetic factors that killed him in the end, from what you know he spent the last few years of his life no more than a mass in his own bed, unable to do anything without help. 

 However, a month after he died, his will was read and his beneficiaries who were not there for the reading of the will were made aware of what was now theirs. For Aegon, that turned out to be a long letter and every penny that was initially made out for him, for the heir. The letter was in Helaena’s hand and dated to November 1957. 

 My son Aegon, 

 I am sure this letter will come as a surprise to you, I would like to think that I will see you again before you receive it but that seems unlikely now. I think it is for the best, you were never right for this life, you were not born with the mind for the business or the acumen for the life we live here. I have never been able to see that for the blessing it is before now. 

 Your sunflower is an interesting girl, I remember only a little of her speech but it was impressive. I do not want you to think that I disapprove of what you did, my boy. It may not have been what I expected but it is right for you. I realise I have been less than what you should have had, I am sorry for that. I find myself sorry for many things these days. 

 I have decided to leave you what was always yours, not the business because I know you do not want it, but  enough for a life that you can enjoy. It is the least I owe you really. I never should have sent you away when you were little, I never should have made you attend that school either. I watched you turn against me and your mother and I did nothing to stop it. 

 Maybe I am just an old man filled with regrets but I want to do right by you, even if you never know me to understand. 

 Forgive me for prying but Helaena tells me you have a daughter, that she is healthy and happy. It has brought me a great peace to think of you happy. I am enclosing a cigarette case for her, I know how you kept the things that meant the most to you in yours and I wonder if she might like to do the same one day. 

 Look after Daeron, I ask this of you because I know that you will anyway, that you can be trusted to make sure he is allowed to be good. I can only hope he has in him what you do, that he takes from me what you did, what I let wither when my Aemma died. You do not know me son, I do not know you, that is a great tragedy for which I bear all the blame but You take after the man I once was. That is not the bad thing I am sure you are thinking it to be as you read this.  

 I hope you will not resent me for the rest of your life, I cannot blame you if you do. I wish you well, my boy, I hope you make of life what you want it to be.

Your father,

Viserys

It had taken a week for Aegon to get out of bed after that, he just lay there and cried for days on end, holding the letter tight to his broken heart. You would hold him against your chest while Heather fed and stroked his hair while he sobbed. It was an absolution for him, he let an awful lot of things go with his sorrows. 

 In many ways, it was the first time he let himself believe he was right about anything at all. 

 What followed was a great pretense of a coincidence, two of the three parties involved pretending they had no idea of the occurrences that had led to the convergence of paths. At the beginning of the Summer term, the old headmaster of the boarding school that had so tormented Aegon, and still held Daeron, died suddenly of a heart attack. No replacement could be found, the school carried an unpleasant reputation and an ‘undesirable location’ and despite all attempts from the old guard, its doors shut behind the boys leaving for the summer and would never open again. 

 The choice was made to send Daeron to a Parisian school for him to finish his education. The school had hosted Targaryen’s before, in the late nineteenth century before the move to England and was deemed a worthy establishment. It just so happened that, in the month following Daeron’s letter explaining as much, you and Aegon packed up your flat in Vienna and moved into a lovely Haussmann style building in the seventh arrondissement, just a five minute walk from the gates of a certain ‘École des enfants de Notre-dame.” 

 And when Daeron started at the Paris school in the Michaelmas term, Aegon started to shed his final layers of aching misery. He would take his little brother, now up to his shoulder in height and wearing his hair longer, shaggy behind his ears in more of an homage than a shield, for long walks through little parks. You would all go, you and the children, but inevitably the two of them would lapse into a quiet duet of familiarity. 

 They have both grown since then, two years of easy contact on the weekends and thinly veiled lies about Daeron remaining at school for the Christmas and Easter holidays drawing him so much deeper into the fold of a family that loves his very bones. He and Heather are downright inseparable these days, always on the floor together, drawing and reading. She has picked up more French than you and Aegon put together.

 Davey is pensive, has a hand spread across Johnny’s back where he plays a subtle rhythm with his fingers while the other holds the letter that Aegon still carries around with him everywhere. . “You had to get all that humanity from somewhere, I guess.”

 That cracks Aegon up, “Well it didn’t come from my mother. That’s for sure.”

They both chuckle for a minute, then Davey leans forward to pat Aegon’s arm. “Look, I know it is shit and will always be shit, but you are great.”

 “Thanks-”

 “No, let me finish,” Davey says quickly, sincerely, “You should be really proud of yourself for who you have become and what you have done. You are a good man, Aegon. That is a rarer thing than you think.”

 Aegon goes mute, you and Annie are breathing quietly with each other. At some point you ended up holding her hand, leaning in with her. 

 “I am proud of you.” Davey says finally, folding up the letter and putting it to the wayside on the table, in between finished plates of food. It can be forgotten there, if not forever, for a while enough to live. 

 Nothing is said beyond that, nothing needs to be said. You look over to the rug where the children were playing after supper, see Iris painstakingly rearranging a little doll’s house, next to her, and in their own little world, Daeron and Heather are crowded next to each other, he is reading her one of Johnny’s books. 

 “Et puis, Madeline?” She asks him when he is too slow turning the page. He shushes her and turns to keep going, gingers skimming over colorful illustrations. 

 Annie smothers a chuckle in the side of her hand. “Madeline?” she asks.

 You laugh quietly with her, “he has been reading to her since she was a baby, but when she was old enough to understand and start talking her favourite was Madeline. I think she just liked the way it sounded but she wanted to be Madeline, and Daeron was Madeline, Aegon and I both were for a few weeks but then she forgot about it a little. She never stopped calling him that though, he does the same most of the time.”

 They are bending into each other as Daeron reads, a perfect symbiosis that only each other really understands. He is so protective of her, you wonder if it isn’t that he has been the youngest all his life, and that she is finally someone he gets to take care of. Whatever it is, it is stronger than words can explain. 

 “That’s adorable,” Annie says, shaking her head fondly.

 “Oh, I know,” you agree, “My mother nearly melted when she first heard it.”

 You have Christmas cards in your bag which you show to Annie, telling her about you parents, about Marlene and her little family, her endless and, as of yet, failing striving to have a son. You show her the photograph of her four little girls and laugh with her about the funny ways of fate. Barbara and Mary look as opposite as they always do in the picture sent from Manchester, Mary smiling her cheeks raw below her massive spectacles and above her white lab coat, Barbara giving her happiness only in the fingertips that peek around Mary’s waist, in the glint of a familiar silver christening band still worn on her fine wrist. Joan is the funniest of all, no photograph is included, just a postcard bearing the likeness of the queen and an inscription punctuated with nothing but exclamation marks. 

 Her young soldier husband may have been deemed a dimwit by everyone who met him but Joan was happier than anyone had ever known her to be and that was enough. 

 You’ll be seeing them all again, by the evening of Christmas eve you will be back in the pub with your parents and the old crowd. Christmas dinner will be the grand and communal affair of your childhood, shared between bunched elbows and jovial familiarities with the people who inhabit the furniture of your mind. You will sit with Bill and Brian, watch them try haphazardly to teach Heather how to play darts again, despite her only having interest in the pretty flights. Your parents will dote on Daeron, make him blush about how big he has gotten and the girls will take turns passing the twins around. 

 You are looking forward to it of course, but you are content with the present too. The passage of time is far from your mind in this happy little corner of the world. 

 A garden blooms with flowers, a cluster of beauty and love and intertwined stories of growth. The sunflower is a symbol of what she has witnessed, what she has nurtured. The blooms around her now are ones of support, of familiarity and recognition. She is awash with joy, she turns to the sun only to say ‘look at me, look at all I have seen into being’.

 Aegon is happy, truly happy. He no longer lives with fears and worries plaguing him into a vulnerability he cannot face. He is a husband, a teacher, a brother and a father, and he is wonderful at all of those roles he plays. Daeron is allowed to be cheeky and mischievous, he will grow up to be exactly what he should always have been. Your children will never be shouted at, never made to feel small or undeserving. They will be nurtured into people who know what it is to be loved, in places that let them shake off the melancholies of dark days. 

 You are content. That is all that needs to be said. 

⚘⚘⚘

My dear readers, what can I say. This has been such a labour of love and these last two months trying to get the final chapters out to you in a timely manner have been so hard. This fic was born of a slight fever dream that tumbled and cartwheeled itself into 80000 plus words of madness that I cannot believe people have read. I have hundreds of handwritten pages of this fic that I have written on my breaks at work or on the go when I have been gripped by these characters and their story. I am so very grateful to each and every person who has read my work, even more to those who have interacted and made me feel like a real author.

I have to say the biggest shoutout to @neithriddle for being here since chapter one and always commenting and sharing love. You have kept me powering on since then and I hope you know how much it has meant.

Love to all of you, one last time, SlaginSecret xx

[hardyshoe]

Final chapter update!!

The final chapter of Sonnenblumen WILL be up this friday my dearest readers. I cannot apologise enough for the wait, it has been so hard to write and I have been so very busy. Not long now, I promise xx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen announcement.

Hello my dear readers, I am currently working on the final chapter of Sonnenblumen and will have it posted as soon as it is ready. I apologise for leaving you in the dark and not having it ready sooner. As it turns out, it takes a lot to be able to finish your baby. I am working an awful lot at the moment and free time is few and far between but it is coming and it will be soon, I promise. Thank you all for your patience. Love you all, SlaginSecret xxx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen - Chapter eleven, Gladioli, for strength of character.

Masterlist.

Also posted on AO3 - here.

⚘⚘⚘

 You are awoken the next day by a careless rap on the door. You're tangled up in Aegon, hands in his skin and twisted closer to him with sheets tightening the two of you together against marked skin. He has a deep red mark of your own design low on his collarbones, between the peaks of his bones like vellum laid across a rack, between the highlights like a tracheotomy scar. You put your thumb on it as he rouses, a groan eliciting a vibration against your slight pulse. Like a smudge of poppy, it bleeds into his usual translucence, sharper life visible on his chest. 

 The knock sounds again, a sense of urgency is found at last. 

 “Fuck, what,” he mutters, rising to sit with you still crowded against him. The sheets part and your chest aligns with him in a way that makes him shiver subconsciously. “If that is you Mills, do not come in, I am not decent.”

 Despite how close you are to being caught, you chuckle. He gives you his manic smile with all his teeth on show, top and bottom, and points you to his wardrobe. It's mad and so classically clandestine that it makes you shake with suppressed laughter. You skirt across the room, naked as the day you were born with his eyes on your exposed flesh the entire time. You give him a smile of cheek and fire before you close yourself in the mahogany scent of his huge wardrobe. 

 It's almost cavernous inside. Divided into a section for handing longer garments and a shorter section for shirts above a stack of draws. The rail glimmers sharply in the middle with the scant light piping through the crack between the doors. The wood brushes unpleasantly against your back as your shimmy between hanging fabric in a twisting dance to seclusion. Everything smells of him in tandem with the heady wood of the panels and you let the extension of his brush against your bare skin in a hum of corduroy and loose knit. It is a bizarrely intimate experience. 

 From everything beyond, you hear his voice muffled with reluctance. “Come in.”

 A door clicks and Aegon sighs. It is not the voice of Mills that follows. “Where is she?”

 You move to crouch in front of the little keyhole, light blinding for a second in the darkness when you peek through. Otto is dressed too sharply for the early house and he has suspicious hands crossed over his jacket. His long beard is tickling at the golden pin in his tie. 

 “Who?” Aegon asks in deliberate nuisance. He is sitting up properly now, sheets bundled up to his neck in an effort of propriety, or to cover the deep redness of love bites decorating him. He falls victim still though, to the dichotomy of their states of dress, looking vulnerable in the bed. 

 “Don’t be obtuse, boy,” he says. Your eyes catch on the sneaking beadwork of the skirt of your dress as it peaks from under the bed. “Your headstrong little friend, where is she?”

 Headstrong, there goes that word again. Pride shivers in your spine despite the way he spits it as a curse. 

 “You’re being equally obtuse, you know sunflower is not ‘my friend,’” he puts sarcastic emphasis on his echo of Otto’s words. 

 “Answer the question.”

 Aegon’s jaw ticks and his lip pitches in a repressed sneer. “I thought she would still be in bed.”

 Otto takes a threatening step forward and your quiet intake of breath is hushed by the forest of fabric that holds you up. “Mills went to inform her that breakfast was ready and received no response.”

 Aegon shrugs, you still completely. The white sheets slip a stretch down his shoulders, his Adam's apple lights softly with morning sun. You do not move again until you are sure they are not going to. “She is a deep sleeper.”

 It is a lie, you sleep in a vague drop into the surface of the unconscious. Drifting up easily at sounds and light and movement. Otto does not know this, but he knows it is a falsehood, his eyes nearly glow. “Stop this charade, boy. You will not live in degeneracy under this roof.”

That catches your ear for its weakness. The house, not for lack of trying, is not Otto’s at all. It is a castle over which he presides like a hopeless prince regent, however, he lacks even the hope of conquering one day. All he can do is poison his grandson into doing his bidding like a rotten porcelain marionette. You wonder if the strings pull when Aemond moves around or if he has grown so accustomed to them that he no longer feels their alien tug like a hair in his mouth. 

 “That’s rich, I would argue you are responsible for any so-called degeneracy that goes on here.” His tone is sour. 

 A shift is visible in him, from yesterday and from how he was when your first spoke to him of his family. He has shucked his defeatism and dug his heels in for the fight. It is remarkable what difference hope can make for morale. Still, there is more to this change in him, a promise of the scramble being temporary. While neither you nor him, not even Helaena with her apparent long vision, know what the aftermath really will look like, pacifism is not worth the moral standing in this war.

 “She has poisoned your mind, you fool. All this is her talking, think for yourself.”

 Aegon laughs, actually laughs, eyes shining with hysteria as his cheeks redden. “What the fuck are you talking about? I mean really, can you hear yourself? Or are you so blinded by yourself that you have lost touch completely.”

 Otto nearly splutters with anger, wispy ends of his beard catching and pulling unnaturally on the tie pin. Aegon does not give him a chance to butt in this time. 

 “No, it’s okay, you do not need to answer. That was mostly rhetorical anyway.” He tucks his knees up against his chest and leans forward to rest his elbows and chin against them. Somehow, he manages a power in his movements despite the way the sheets pull back and expose the side of his thigh to the room. 

 “You know, Otto, lately I find myself cleansed by her.” There is more to his voice than you have heard before, an edge and a dazzling precision. “She loves me and that is the most wonderful thing I have ever felt. You will never know what it is to be loved by her and that really is a horrible thing. I would be angry too if that was the world I lived in.”

 Pride drapes over you, love clasps you in. 

 Time stretches in an impasse, a metal button twitches cold between two of your lowest vertebrae. Your tailbone feels like it is fizzing. Aegon still has his head propped up on his legs and you want a photograph of him. Framed by the keyhole, hair falling down his cheekbones which are coloured with his emotion.

 You can see the painting he would make so vividly, so much white it is like a dove in cold-driven snow. His pale hair, skimming his fine skin, wrapped in soft white cotton. Like this, his eyes are crackling purple, the vein that runs down his right temple traverses the fragile dip in bone like lightning. He is defined briefly by the colours of himself, by their absence too. A study in contrast and the way that nothing is ever so dissimilar at all.

 He looks ever so beautiful. 

 Otto appears unaffected, he tilts his brows down with impatience and hums tersely. Yet, his eyes look grey and weary.  “Well then, you tell her, when she wakes from her apparent coma, that I expect her in my office at eleven.”

 Aegon jumps immediately, “Not alone you do-”

 “Come if you want,” he says, a brusque wave as he makes to leave. “It is of little consequence to me.”

 With that he sweeps out, a great shuddering of vengeance lifting the corner of your dress under the bed.

 You open the wardrobe slowly, your nakedness suddenly a weakness in the face of the threatening demand. You pull a shirt down from a reluctant hanger, hearing it thunk hollowly against the roof of the wardrobe when one side of the collar gives way and slips before the other. The sound draws his gaze to yours and you drop from the raised inside to the floor in a shy step. 

 He has hardly moved, dropping onto the side of his face to look at you. He smiles despite everything. “You are lovely.”

 It is an echo through space and time. A boy in a pub with a fearful reverence and a girl fascinated beyond sense. It takes no effort to let the echo ripple through you too. “So are you.”

 This time, you can see he understands. He grins and lets the sheets fall loosely down to open and let you in. his hastily grabbed shirt is forgotten in a limp drifting to the floor and you become one skin, one body, two hearts, once again. 

 “What does he want?” Aegon asks, though, you think he knows as well as you do. 

 “I think this will be a last ditch attempt to frighten me off,” you say and he hums in agreement. His leg wraps around yours under the covers, tiny hairs on thighs and shins catching on each other. “I would be annoyed if I believed he had the capacity to do anything but underestimate me. As it is, I do not.” 

⚘⚘⚘

 Otto’s office is precisely what you expected, a great chamber of imposing wood panels and shelves covered in books you know he has not read. They lope together on the slightly bowed shelves, giving in a drowsy dip in the middle from their weight. They are supposed to convey an education and a superiority but they just serve to bolster your idea of the grim man, the walls cloaked in a vague impression of tradition. 

 He sits behind his desk with his hands clasped over the green leather that shines across the table top. Aegon is not with you, it is your choice and one he resisted. You will not have whatever Otto wants to say derailed by your own inability to sit quietly while he insults Aegon, Aegon’s own inability to hear the same foulness spewed at you. As much as you do not want to be here alone, you know it must be done. 

 Daeron pulled Aegon back out to the garden despite the pooling darkness of imminent rain. You cannot tell if the sky has broken yet from here, the office has no windows and light is given only from the harsh blue of the glass shades over the wall sconces. 

 “Alone, I see,” he says like he has won something. 

 You do not deign to fight back against what he is assuming to have succeeded in. The chair across from him screeches violently on the waxed parquet floor and his left eye twitches at the offense. 

 “What is it you want from me?” You ask him outright. You could have been satisfied with the slight tick of surprise in his brows at your overt question but, as it is, you are just pissed off. 

 He slides a piece of paper across the desk at you, thick stock cream paper which must cost far too much for its worthlessness. He is looking right at you.

 The text is not densely packed, broad spewing lines of insanity in his own controlling hand bleed into your mind. You stop on the unsigned line at the bottom. Your cackle abounds in the room just as it had in the dining room.

 His hand smacks across the top of the page, sending a jolt of air lifting the contract. One corner catches under his finger and you laugh harder at his aggravation at the crease. “Nothing about this is funny, you vile girl.”

 “Oh, I assure you, it is,” you say as you wipe your eyes. “Did you honestly think I would agree to that? That there is any world in which I can be bought and silenced?”

 He scoffs angrily, “I would have thought you wise enough to at least know what is good for you. You ought to be grateful for what I am offering you. You could have a life which you have never dreamed of from that nasty little corner of nowhere you crawled out of.”

 It could make you angry, does a little in a deep down cavern of your soul that loves your home and where you have come from. On the surface though, it is hysterically funny. 

 His hand slams again, “Stop laughing, I will be taken seriously in my own house.”

 “I will stop laughing when you stop pretending to know anything about me,” you say, defiant in a perhaps foolishly defiant way. You can tell you are pushing him closer to a violent fury, maybe it is morbid curiosity that has you shoving him further or maybe it is just vindication. “I have wanted to leave that place since I was old enough to understand the feeling that haunted me my entire conscious life. I have spent years dreaming of places untouched by coal fumes and the sorrows of mundane stagnation and even when I had the money to leave I did not.”

 He doesn't ask why but you can see a reluctant curiosity in the way he watches you. You rip a shred from the contract and tear it into fine confetti while you go on. “And I never knew what it was that was keeping me there until Aegon came into my life with all of his wonder and fear. I have known since then that whatever life I have, rich or poor, will be quite fine by me as long as he is in it.”

 His voice is lowered into an almost mocking tone when he replies, “That is a fanciful notion.”

 You shrug, ripping off another strip of paper, tearing through the line you were supposed to sign. The paper tears with a hollow sound, the edges littered with broken fibres and rich ink sinking between layers. “Perhaps, though I find I do not care much whether you deem my dreams stupid or wistful.”

 “He has a role to fill here, he cannot just go jollying off across the continent because you have turned his head.”

 “I find it interesting that you think he would stay when there is no space for him at all. No one could live a life in a cage designed for another.” The books on the shelf groan quietly in the lapse. “What is the point in trying to make him be something you know he cannot?”

 The genuine question does not rock him, but you see him sway just a little. “He is the oldest son, it is his job, his duty.”

 You nearly yell with frustration but you temper yourself, for a hysterical woman gets nowhere whe that is precisely what is expected of her. “Duty is a meaningless word. Duty goes hand in hand with mindless killing and brutality but, if you really want to talk of it then I say his duty to himself is greater than any he has to you.”

 “You have no idea of our world, of his world. He cannot just shirk his responsibility to his family.” Though you can hear how fiercely he believes his own words, you can see the cracks like a teacup about to shatter. 

 “He can. If I did not love him I would ask him in a heartbeat, if I did not know him I would have taken him from you already.”

 “But you love him so much it makes you want to weaken us with him?” He spits and you have to repress another wash of hysteria. 

 “No, I could not do anything for you even if I wanted to.” You say as you tear the final edge of the paper into two strips, crossing them over one another and dropping them in floating shreds to the desk. “But he knows as well as I do that if he went with any doubt in his mind that he would spend the rest of his life wondering if there was an ounce of decency hiding under all of your hatred.”

 Otto crossed his arms, looking between you and the pile you have created on his desk. “So what? You show him that we are all just the caricatures you have made us out to be without knowing us? ‘Look Aegon I was right all along, now give up the good life waiting for you and come and live in ruin with me’”

 He gives a weak impression of you and you raise a brow at him. “I did not have to show him anything at all.”

 “What makes you so different? You walk around like Lady magnanimous herself, like you are not using him just as everyone uses everyone.”

 It is a damning glimpse into his outlook on the world, his warped perception of humanity. 

 “I have never used him, I would not know how to.”

 Otto leans forward when you stand up, you have had enough of trying to reckon with insanity. He spits again, “I could ruin your life, girl.”

 The little scraps of the spoiled contract flutter up briefly when you tuck your chair back into its respond place. “I know you could, but I would rather risk your attempt than surrender myself to ruining two lives by giving up.”

 He does not say anything when you turn from him and walk to the heavy wooden door.  Your back is exposed and open, he could toss a knife and splice the gaps between your ribs and your lungs but you do not think he really has anything left to throw.

  ⚘⚘⚘

 The week that follows your night out and consequent conversation with Otto is one of a strange transience. Time passes in an irregular fashion without definitive moments like seconds or hours. It is time spent in a strange haven with Aegon in the garden when the sun is out, playing with Daeron down in the grass and forging a strange bond of companionable silence with a Helaena who has not spoken since that fateful dinner some nights ago. You feel bad for sending her into a reticence but she seems more pensive than troubled most of the time. 

 She declines the invitation to join you and Aegon on your second trip to Poplar when asked, a gentle dissent in the shake of her head, a faraway look in her eyes. Daeron cannot be dissuaded from the idea of coming, despite your and Aegon’s fears of the punishment he will get if you take him with you. Mrs Targaryen and Otto are gone on Sunday when the taxi comes for you though, and the little boy is so hopeful you cannot resist. 

 He spends the entire ride with his eyes glued to the window, watching the paint begin to peel from buildings and the streets thicken with foot traffic. Aegon is relaxed, big blue corduroy trousers under his leather jacket, hair parting down the middle and tucked loosely behind his ears. 

 You have a bouquet of flowers across your lap, spilling a gentle fragrance of orchids into the back of the black cab. You are so relieved to be out of the house again, little excursions like this seem so foreign within the walls of the house. Until you saw it for yourself, you had no grasp on just how isolating existence within that house could be. No one goes anywhere, apart from Otto and Mrs Targaryen on their obscure trips into town. Helaena lives in her bedroom, sitting on the soft pile of the carpet with her insects and rocks. Daeron runs between his siblings’ rooms and finds an excitement still in the boundary of the end of the long garden, a daring cheekiness in going beyond the sight of the house’s windows. 

 Aegon is the worst of all really, the enclosure is just too small for his endless energy. He seems to batter against the walls when he walks through and everything fights back against him. He takes comfort in following you through the maze of doors, laying with his head in your lap when you go to sit with the paintings in the gallery. You shimmy down moonlit corridors on a familiar path every night, sliding between his sheets and enclosing him in you again and again. In the mornings, you slip to your own room to dress for breakfast and stare at the blank carpet where you know you had left footprints just hours ago. 

You can feel the endeavor to erase you even before you have left, clothes left draped over the chair in the corner of your yellow room are tidied into the closed wardrobe when you are not there and doors are shut by invisible servants when laughter pours from the open passages. 

 It feels an awful lot like an attempt at a murder.

 Here, as you look at the streets of Poplar, dirtier in the light and busier than they had been days ago, you feel alive. Daeron holds your hand and pulls you along the street, seemingly unaware of the eyes that follow his little blond cowlick as he goes. 

 Aegon smiles at the open population before him, the washing hanging on lines strung between tall Victorian blocks and women chatting in the streets with children darting between their legs. Davey waves with a grin from an open door a few blocks down, skipping down the step and coming to meet Aegon in a crushing hug. 

 “Ma’s been going spare all week ‘bout you, you know?” He says, ruffling up Aegon's hair. They both laugh. “You’d think the Queen was coming with how much bloody food she’s made.”

 “We are very grateful,” you say, accepting a kiss to the knuckles with a chuckle. 

 Davey flaps a hand at you, “don’t worry ‘bout it, she loves an excuse for a feast.” His eyes fall on Daeron then, the little boy gaping up at the lanky man with awe-struck eyes. For a moment, Davey just stares at him. There is something in his eyes you cannot place, but it shakes free with his quick grin when he crouches down on legs like a praying mantis. 

 “You must be Daeron?” He says as he holds a hand out for the little boy to shake.

 Daeron squeaks something that might have been “yes!” but gets lost in his excitement and judders when Davey makes a great exaggeration of the hand shake, pulling him back and forth until he is giggling. 

 “It’s nice to meet you, my little brothers will enjoy having someone new to play with.”

 “I brought my Tessarion!” He exclaims happily, holding up his stuffed rabbit with its chewed ear. Davey, for his part, doesn't even blink at the name, just nods sagely then ounces and hoists Daeron over his shoulder. 

 “Come on then, Ma is probably workin’ herself into a conniption waiting for me to come back.” He starts up the stairs with Daeron squirming and laughing on her shoulder the whole way up. 

 The two of you follow behind, up the twisting stope steps with their green tiled walls. The flat is up on the third floor, past landings busy with prams and people weaving in and out. Aegon is grinning vastly. 

 “Is that you, love?” calls a woman from the next stop in the stairs and a woman whose voice you have known only over the phone and whose face you have pieced together with scraps from your second hand knowledge of her comes into view. She is short, remarkably so considering her son’s lank, and her hair is pulled back in a swoop from her face, graying at her temples but still brown over the crown. She has a blue chequered apron over a flowery dress and flour decorates the respective fabrics in cloudbursts of white. Joan Spinnet is welcoming and warm and so very sweet. 

 She comes down to meet Aegon with open arms, patting flour onto his cheek and smiling at him like he was one of her own. “Oh, look at you. How lovely it is to finally meet you in the flesh.”

 Aegon is teary-eyed despite himself and returns the embrace with bashful ferocity. “It is nice to meet you too.”

 Mrs Spinnet bustles back and pats his cheek fondly, turning to you. “And you! Our little miracle worker, Davey didn't say you were so beautiful!”

 You blush and smile as she tucks you under her arm and pulls you inside. “Those boys owe an awful lot to you, dear.” You make to minimize what she is saying, shoot down her meaningful words because you really did not do that much but she doesn’t allow it. “It does not matter that it was easy for you, it matters what it means to them. To me too.”

 She gives you a grateful smile before going over to say hello to Daeron and corral him into the busy front room of the flat that is far too small for so many people. Children of various ages are everywhere, squished together on the sofa or kneeling before a game of snakes and ladders and accusing each other of cheating. A few adults comprise the crowd too, siblings older than Davey with spouses and their own children to add to the mix. It is an abundance of joy and love. Daeron is herded to the two boys nearest his age who are playing pirates in a corner, jaunty black hats and eyepatches on their heads. He is given a wooden sword and joins the fray with a slightly dazed look. 

 Davey and Aegon and standing next to each other while you assess the room. You hear the taller man speak in his cockney twang, voice more serious than you have heard. “Almost thought I were goin’ mad when I saw him,” he says, nodding his chin to Daeron. “He looks just like you did when I first met you. Happier though.”

 Aegon nods a little sadly, “He is too much like me.”

 “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Davey says with a curious look.

 Aegon foot scuffs at the floor, “It has only ever gotten him in trouble, he looks up to me and I hate it because it will only get him into shit.”

 Your eyes meet Davey’s while Aegon is looking down at the floor and an understanding passes between you and him. 

 “Not here it won’t,” he assures Aegon. It is true, you can see Daeron’s shyness breaking away with the passing game, his eyes lighting up at having people his own age to be with. 

 “That’s something, at least,” Aegon concedes, taking in everyone around him.

 “There is always something.” Davey is sure and certain. 

 The family seems to notice him all at once, descending on the much talked about stranger with open arms that hold tight to someone they have never met but have accepted as a part of themselves nonetheless. You are introduced to every sibling and their wives and husbands and while you will probably forget the countless names, you are happy for the inclusion. They all seem to have heard of you, a great thankfulness falls on your shoulders and Aegon beams with less trepidation with every person who comes to clap him on the back. 

 Mr Spinnet comes back then, arms laden with groceries, and kisses his wife proudly when he ducks through the door. He shakes Aegon’s hand warmly and tells him he is welcome to whatever he wants, there has been a place at their table for him for more than a decade now, just waiting for him to pull out the chair.

 The Sunday roast is eaten on any surface that is flat enough for a plate, children in circles on the wooden floor and adults perched on chairs and arms of sofas while conversations chatters around the room happily. You end up talking to Mrs Spinnet more than anyone else, learning about her life and her story. She is an endlessly giving woman, always with a kiss for a child running to her and words of advice for those who ask. She looks upon her crowded little living room with pride and contentment. 

 It is not a big life, she is not known outside of her family and her friends, but it is a life for certain. You find yourself yearning for a little slice of what she has.

 Aegon laughs happily with the other brothers, eating heartily and chipping stories into the fold. He catches your eye every now and then, pausing on a smile or an anecdote to soften and just stare back at you for a while.

 ⚘⚘⚘

  When the Easter holidays draw to an end, you leave with the three Targaryen brothers for the train back home and to school. You feel a weight lift at the prospect of finally chasing away the constricting walls, of leaving Otto and Mrs Targaryen’s heavy stares behind. Helaena bids you farewell with a frail smile and a warm hand on your own. She says not a word but you feel her sentiment all the same and you are sorry to be leaving her behind. 

The train is full of boys in their school uniforms who give you funny looks for the company you keep. It is a bizarre feeling, somehow juvenile and foreign to wave Aegon and Daeron goodbye at the platform and watch them be swallowed by the crowd of youth. You feel small and lonesome in your solitude as you walk your suitcase across the field back to the pub and everything feels abstract and changed somehow when you fold into your parents’ waiting arms. 

 Reflection is clarity and it is damnation. Happy as you are to be home and away from London, you feel choked on coal smoke and you cannot tear out that part of you that longs for a now known escape. You fear for how Aegon will manage in the face of what he has now seen outside of his prisons. 

 Your fears are hardly mollified the first time he sneaks out to come and see you, his knuckles are bruised and split and his smile lacks any jauntiness, just a bone-deep consolation at being away. It has only been a week but you have suffered harshly in your solitude and you see that same struggle mirrored in his eyes. 

 “I don’t know how I did it all those years,” he confesses to the rim of his half-finished drink. His finger bisects the sad little drawing of the sun he has forged in the condensation and a lone drip runs down his wrist and darkens his sleeve. 

 Darts thunk on the board across the room and conversation dims to a hum without your attention bringing it into focus. The statement strikes you in a way, something about his genuine confusion.  “What do you mean?” 

 His finger swirls the cork mat under his glass, “it feels different now is all, worse somehow.” 

 His voice reminds you of those letters that spurred you down to London back in April, those heartbreaking and terrifying words that had bordered on insanity. He is not cracking but he is not entirely whole either. 

 There is this ferocity in the bouncing of his knee under the table, the flick of his wooden-heeled shoe on the carpet like a foreign morse code. He is not done speaking though and you let him keep spinning his web. “I don’t know if it is you, knowing how close you are and not being able to talk to you every moment of every day or if it’s the memory of that look in Otto’s eyes when you said that you loved me but,” he draws a deep sip of his drink, you watch his throat constrict and loosen with the swallow, “I really do not think I can do it much longer.”

 It sounds like an admittance of defeat and you hate that he cannot see that it is not a failure. 

 ⚘⚘⚘

 When a routine of longing and missing has been established, a letter arrives with a companion, a normal paper unlike the thick and expensive ones Aegon writes on. Aegon’s delivery is far thicker in the envelope, the weight of a few sheets of substantial outpouring, yours just a normal correspondence but you read it happily nonetheless, tucking Aegon’s into your apron pocket for when he next comes in. It will perk him up if nothing else, his state of misery has been haunting the both of you. 

 Dear Sunflower,

 I hope you do not mind me calling you that, in all honesty i forgot what Aegon said your name was. I would be sorry but I know he calls you what he does with affection, I have a lot of affection for you too. So does my mam. I told her about everything and she said “oh that young lady was very nice on the telephone, I knew she must be a lovely girl.” I did not thank you nearly enough for what you did, quite literally the impossible. Aegon told me many things that night, things he asked me not to repeat because they made him blush and hide in his fringe. What I will say is that he loves you a lot, more than I thought he could love a person to be honest. I have always thought love would be something he moved around, something that brushed against him and he reached out with but always missed. I have never been so happy to be wrong. 

 Anyway, I hear you have some nice ales on tap, and a friend who feels quite strongly for the monarchy. I wonder if she would be interested to know that one of my great grandads was a member of the King’s guard and we have his hat in a cupboard somewhere…

 Give him a hug from me, a kiss from my ma. Give your friend my regards.

 From,

Davey

 You smile to yourself, shaking your head at his cheek. It is nice to have a comrade in Davey, you wonder what he would make of the school. You can see him raising a brow followed by a finger to anyone who thinks anything about this is alright.

 ⚘⚘⚘

 My dear sunflower,

 They are not letting me out. They know where I have been going, figured it out somehow though I do not know who let it slip. Detention has been hell, just me and the headmaster for hours most nights. He stares at them the whole time, mocks me or insults me even if I stay silent. It is torture.

  I just want to see you, I do not want to be here.

I will find a way out, 

I promise. Your Aegon.

 On one wet Wednesday, he is preceded by a letter. It is harshly scrawled and there is a damning rusty smudge down the left side. His words are bordering on illegible, vowels and consonants swooping together in an uncomfortable slant. You just about made out that he has got detention, that is tried last night but he does not think he can get out. It makes you worry not yearn, there is an easier peace these days in knowing that he will return. Everything is a constant state of him coming back to you, like the stretch between reality that is punctuated by sleep.

 When he comes, he sits next to you in a little booth or ducks under the style door to stand behind the bar with you. You and him talk in low sincerity about where you are going to go, a leaving date unsure but somehow drawing closer every time he comes. He likes the sound of Belgium, you have read wonders of the Antwerp fine arts museum. You lean in to entwining conversations composed of low tones and pretty words. He paints you a picture of the future that you are struggling more and more to look away from. 

 Anything but the present, that’s how it goes. When he is reminded of where he must return to, his shoulders drop with all the weight of the world. You cannot bring yourself to be the cause of this. 

⚘⚘⚘

 In the end, he was never going to have been able to make it to the summer, to the final train journey which would have taken him away from the austerity of the school’s horizon scraping cruel buildings. You think, after Easter, after his promise to the future and the beginning of the long yearned for communication with Davey, it was all too much. Staying in that vile place became truly untenable and, in the end, you cannot help but be a little relieved. 

 Until you see him that is. 

  Almost a week and a half after that letter, the one you have been reading and rereading while you think about putting on your war clothes and marching down to the gates to rattle at some bones, he shows up. It takes everything in you not to sob when you see him. 

 One in the afternoon was not his usual hour for arrival. Marlene is sitting across from you with Babara and Joan bickering about something or other (probably the fact that Joan is supposed to be at work at the present moment) between the two of you. Elsie is on your lap and has a firm hand bunching your collar while she babbles aimlessness. Marlene has started showing properly, her clothes rounding over the bump of what she swears is a boy. She has a hand constantly changing kicks and movement and ushers someone to feel whenever she does, Joan yanks her hand away with squealing freakiness everytime, like she finds the whole experience slightly terrifying. Barbara, on the other hand, looks on with awestruck wonder, her hand staying firm on the tightly stretched rib of her friend’s blue knit jumper. 

 “You cannot name him Frederick,” Joan says, her horn-rimmed glasses low on her nose while you all talk passionately about the idea for the hypothetical boy’s moniker. “It’s so…”

 “German?” Barbara offers.

 “Boring?” You chip in.

 Elsie mumbles something that might sound like ‘girl’ or might also be a loose request for something to eat. 

 “It’s traditional!” Marlene insists. Bill and Brian have overheard this discussion on their way to the bar and lean over each of Marlene’s shoulders, empty glasses drying up in their hands. 

 “Brian is a very traditional name,” Bill says, tapping her on the cheek. 

 Brian nods sagely, “Could be named after the great William Shakespeare like this one here.”

 You look at Bill confused, “I thought you were named after William Wallace?”

 You recall a Hallowe’en night when you were ten and Bill had come to the pub with bright blue face paint and a leather pair of trousers on. Helen Blackburn made him put on a shirt and smacked her husband on the arm until he stopped laughing at his friend. 

 Brian puts a finger over his lips out of the sight of Marlene’s peripheral and winks. 

 You hear the door rock open being you but you do not turn to see, it is probably one of the old boys on the Carlsberg coming in to start their afternoons.

 Marlene is still insistent, though this is the eighth time she has been “completely sure” in the last month. “It’s cute!”

 Joan groans but her suggestions have all been along the lines of Phillip, Edward or George. Henry on a bad day. 

 Suddenly, Barbara’s eyes go a bit wide and she looks at you like a mouse trapped under the fallen slap of the arm of a metal trap. Bill and Brian are laughing their way to the counter and Marlene is trying, shrilly, to defend herself. 

 You pitch your brows in confusion, it is a look you have never seen on your stoic friend’s face. You are more worried about her for a second but she just shakes her head, gesturing with a subtle nod of her chin to the space behind you. Turning around is a bridge you cross before realising its significance. 

 All you see is his ears, a damning and hurtful realisation that you know them so little. Then you recover from the shock of his presence and the still spiking excitement of seeing him to understand what you are seeing. Because his hair is short, cropped abruptly above his ears and hanging in uneven chunks and parts over his scalp. You see more of his neck than you ever have and develop a fearsome relationship with his temples. 

In the background, you register that the conversation has stopped and heads have swivelled to join the same direction as yours. Joan mutters a horrified, “oh my god.”

 Aegon looks around dazed, trying to find you in the thin crowd of midday patrons, his eyes are too wide and his shoulders look like he is being rattled. He is wearing his school uniform and you can see crimson sparking from his cuffs. You are out of your seat before he sees you and the girls sitting down, depositing Elsie into Joan’s waiting hands. 

 “Aegon, Christ what-” you cannot finish before he drops into you with his whole weight, arms grappling at your back and mouth sucking in harsh breaths against your neck. 

 “It’s over,” he says as you are trying to parse his emotions out. “It’s done.”

 His cheeks are hot and flushed under your palms. “What happened?”

 You can feel the girls watching you, not unkindly or obtrusively, just to make sure he is alright. He is not, that much is evident, yet there is a relief skimming off of the hot skin at the back of his neck. 

 “They finally expelled me,” you think he would smile if he was not so horrendously tense. His fingers rise to brush at the short-cropped hairs at the nape of his neck and he retracts as if burned. “I tried to skip detention last night to come here and the headmaster caught me, I was not being careful as I should have to be honest. He caned me, fucking again, second time this week it was agony.”

 He looks brittle then, fragile in a way you have never seen him before. “I couldn’t hold myself back, I cannot pretend to care anymore, it just felt so pointless.” He is holding something back, you can tell.

 “So?” You ask, almost scared of his answer, after all his years of antics you know it must have been quite awful for him to be here, in front of you, now. 

 “He had been going at my hands for a good ten minutes and I got to this point where my brain was kind of shutting down from the pain and I just started talking.” His hands are fidgeting and you pull him to sit next to you on an empty bench, careful of the harshly split skin on the backs. “Answering his questions even though he hates me ‘talking back’. I told him where he could shove that cane of his and precisely how little I cared about being there aside from making sure Daeron is okay.”

 There lies the crux of why he has not snapped sooner, his need to ensure his little brother’s safety despite it not being his responsibility. One cannot live a life for others though, no matter how hard you try it will tear you up and leave you with nothing left to give. 

 “And he started going for me harder for saying as much and-” his breath hacks a bit at his throat, “and i lost it, I hit his back, right on the mouth. I am not proud of it but you should have seen his face, covered in my blood. It appeased something in me in a way that I am terrified of.”

 You can see the fear in his eyes now as he speaks, like he is scared that he finally cracked and found that innate thing that runs in his family thicker than blood, that ability to derive pleasure from someone else’s pain. He is spiralling, can’t stop touching his hair and bowing his head to hide back the thin blue veins that trace his temples. 

 “Do you want to do it again?” You ask simply, unafraid of what he will say. 

 He shakes his head with his whole body, “no, no, I didn’t even want to do it in the first place, it just happened.”

 His jaw flickers and he shakes his head in an instinctive move to hide behind his long fringe, he remains exposed. “You are not one of them, you never could be. What you have just said proves there was never a chance.”

 His eyes jolt with dissent, “but-”

 “Could you take that cruelty out of them?” You ask him firmly.

 “No,” he says and he knows it to be the truth just as you do. No childhood hopes for a kinder existence or beliefs that if he was just a little better could ever really hope to change human nature. 

 You kiss the blood fraying in fine, dry cracks on his knuckles, “You could not take the goodness out of you just the same.”

 “You really believe that?” He asks in that small voice of uncertainty.

 You no and let him grapple with the cuffs off your shirt just like Elsie had. “With my whole heart.”

 That is enough, for then and that moment and he holds you tight for a minute more, letting himself recover as best he can with your heart beating a tandem rhythm with his own. 

 “Can I ask what happened?” You tread lightly, a hand skimming across the short brush of hair where you have been used to a soft tangle. 

 “My housemaster and the head decided together that expulsion was not harsh enough for my insolence, pinned me down and went at my head with classroom scissors.” He looks genuinely traumatised recounting that, you do not know what to do with all the anger in your blood. 

 “How dare they?” 

 He catches your vitriol and looks at you with vulnerable eyes, “It doesn’t matter, it will grow back.”

 He hardly sounds sure of himself and you hate them, you hate these faceless men so much it might kill something inside you. “It does matter, you are still beautiful and you are still yourself but they took something they had no right to take.”

 He does not have a response, he just pulls you back in and breathes heavily until he is most of himself once more. 

 “We can go to the flat if you want, the girls are here but they won't mind if we leave them.” you say quietly.

 “No, no it’s okay. It would be nice to see them.”

You are relieved in a way, time in kind company can only be good. You do rush to get a warm washcloth from the kitchen for his hands though. He follows you like a lost sheep and hardly even winces when you wipe the crusting blood from his skin. It is alarming how little he seems to feel of his frayed nerves but you think you understand a little of it too. He turns his palms, glistening with water and raw skin, under the light, examining them with a curiosity of fleeting finality. This time, when they heal, it will not just be a candle-in-the-wind fight to close before they are split open again, this time it will be for good. 

 He sits on the end, greeting everyone with a sincere but brittle smile. They do not stare but it is like he can feel everyone’s eyes on himself where he has been robbed of his paper-blond shield. Elsie makes a squealing yelp of excitement at the new stranger and makes a bid for him across your lap from Joan’s arms. Aegon scoops her up without thinking, a relaxed sort of smile on his face when she paws at his Adam's apple. 

“Hello little one,” he says, voice deepened by how she presses at his neck. “Who are you?”

 A little weight drops from the group and Marlene trills a laugh, “That is my Elsie, she is terribly handsy I’m afraid.” 

 “She had to get it from somewhere…” Joan says.

 “Hey!”

 Marlene and Joan start arguing, even though both of them are grinning. You forget to pay attention to them because Aegon has a hand steadying the little girl who is standing on his legs and is holding her own tiny one in his other hand and you cannot take your eyes away. You feel like the air is growing thick around you but no one else is noticing, his smile is wide and caring and he is babbling back to Elsie making just as little sense and she is. The little girl looks at him like someone finally gets it and he laughs so innocently and so purely that the vision blurs and fragments with the tears in your eyes. 

Barbara gives you a look, not unkindly, and you laugh a little wetly until you recover enough to talk. 

 Aegon bounces Elsie from one leg to another, smiling indulgently at her with his eyes crinkling at the corners. Her tiny hands brush the rawness on the backs of his and he does not wince, just turns them so she is balancing on his palms. The conversation has picked back up, Barbara is talking about something you would find interesting if you had ears to listen.

 Lilac eyes full of trepidation and surety meet yours, a little girl with a curious gaze waits on his gaze. “I am done, sunflower.”

 You nod at his words, you know you could not bear to see his knuckles split again. He has been beaten down enough for a hundred deserving lifetimes, let alone one undeserving one. He gestures with his chin towards the front door and you nod, Marlene reaches for her daughter and no questions are asked of you at all. You are thankful for that. 

 He has a hand in his pocket, you catch a shining glimmer of old brass between his fingers. He tucks a leg up against the brick wall and looks at you, it is funny how little of a difference his hair really makes. He is still him

 “Let’s go,” he says simply. It is simple really, the knowledge that it is time. 

 You have only one question. “Where?”

 He shrugs, “Anywhere you want, I’ll empty my account as soon as we get to London and we can leave as soon as we can get flights.”

 He is damningly sure, it should be harder than this to agree. Maybe it just makes sense. 

 “You can do that?” you ask because it should be harder than this, nothing has ever felt so straight forward. 

 He scuffs his foot on the brickwork, “there are things even Otto does not control.”

 Hope and excitement fizzle down your nerves and light little fires in your joints. You feel like jumping just to excise some of the mounting joy. Then a great quenching occurs, embers spit and spark. “What about Daeron?”

 You have to ask, though you feel bad for the pressure you drop onto him in doing so. His fingers tighten on the cigarette case and he closes his eyes for a long moment. Breath comes and goes with the wind. 

 “He understands, as well as he can. I have been speaking to him about this for some time and he knows it has been coming,” you can hear how much it hurt him to have prepared his little brother for his own leaving. “It might be for the best-”

 “That’s not true-”

 “Just for now,” he says, tracking the flight of a crow across the afternoon sky, “whatever I do, it will get him in trouble. He is better at fitting in than I was and he is not bitter about everything yet. He will be one day, but I will write and we will visit. It won’t be much different to me leaving school at the end of the year, really.”

 You know he does not believe his own words, nor does he really expect you to either, but if he must justify it somehow then you will let him. It feels so very wrong not to be whisking Daeron away too, doing everything in your power to keep him safe, but you cannot do anything here. 

 There are casualties in every war, surrender never leaves an army unwounded. That night as you board the train for London once more, goodbyes accepted for their haste, you will cry for that precious little boy and will every favour the universe still might own you into granting his safe passage until you have the power to do something. 

 Aegon moves to stand in front of you, hands in his pockets, “it will be okay.”

 It is a funny feeling to have him comfort you in this moment but you accept it heartily, weaving into his arms. You know he means to comfort himself as well and you echo back his words into his jacket. 

 It is not perfect, as few resolutions are, but it is not without hope either. You are dizzy with the thoughts of cities yet unknown running through your mind and Aegon’s hand is warm on your cheek as he bends to kiss you. You have time enough to be angry, time enough to panic and laugh and explore and reinvent. You will take things as they come for now, enjoy the feeling of lightness in your bones at the finality of what it means to finally go and go properly. 

 Love clatters and soars in your heart as you make back for the doors to the pub with Aegon’s hand entwined with your own, bittersweet peace soaks you through completely. 

 He saw it in you, you in him just the same. In the end, you can only ever do your best and hope it is taken for what it was intended to be, even if it doesn't quite feel like enough sometimes.

 ⚘⚘⚘

My dear readers, I cannot apologise enough for my absence. You may have seen my intermittent posts but Ilife has just been exceedingly busy recently and it has stood in the way. I suppose I also struggled with the ending of this chapter, I knew what I had to do and I knew it would break my heart even though I had to leave Daeron behind. I am sorry on all counts, thank you all for sticking around if you have. All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

@neithriddle

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen update!

Hello my beautiful readers, I am so sorry that I still do not have chapter eleven ready for you. Things have been busy to say the least. I am intending and hoping to finish it this weekend and to post it on Sunday. All things being well, thank you all for your patience. Love you all, SlaginSecret xxx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen announcement!!

I am so sorry about this my dear readers, I said I would not do this but a full time job and dying dog have gotten the best of me and I have not been able to finish tomorrow's chapter and I do not think I can in time. It will be up as soon as it is finished and I am so sorry again! All my love, a very sorry SlaginSecret xxx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen, chapter ten - Heather, wishes will be fulfilled.

Masterlist.

Also posted on AO3 - here.

⚘⚘⚘

 The scullery maid who takes you into the back of the house, behind the shiny veneer of the main rooms, keeps looking at you with suspicion. She is an unassuming girl, who would be pretty if it were not for the horrible spectacles she has, they make her look like an old marm. 

 You were hardly expecting a riveting conversation from her but she speaks no more than a few words in a papery voice, she has an accent you cannot place and she seems skittish. She closes every door in front of her with a small hand before you can see what lies behind inside the cupboards and storeroom.

 Mills, the man who first greeted you at the front door, pokes his head and the young maid goes stock-still. “What is she doing back here?”

 “Sir I was just-” she starts, voice stuttering and uncertain. 

 “I asked to see the phonebook,” you say with a smile, feeling a little bad for putting her in a spot. 

 His eyes narrow, he moves into the hallway proper. “We can make any call you need, there is also a phone in the hall for your personal use.”

 “Oh no, I am looking someone up,” you say, the lightness in what you thought to be an easy request lands like you asking for the keys to the shiny black Bentley that sits outside the front door. “It won’t take me more than an hour, I’m sure.”

 You can tell he does not want to give you anything, not a look into the darkened room from whence he came nor a smile in reciprocation of your politeness. The maid beside you has a finger wrapped tightly in the apron she loops the hem of around it. 

 “I assure you, we would have no problem finding someone.” You are beginning to get annoyed by him, the ache in your ankles from balancing the razor’s edge for the last day is already nearing unbearable pain. You feel closer at base to irritation and the mask of ease you have scraped onto your face feels like it is breaking your flesh into a rash at the corners. 

 “I will only be an hour,” you say finally, in the same precise manner of speaking as you would tell the young miners that the last drinks have been poured. 

 He gives a short hmph that pinches in his nose in a grim nasally whine, then turns back to his little dungeon and shuts the door. In the wake, you look at the maid and find only the back of her head, she is staring resolutely at the skirting boards with their too-thick yellowing pain that attests to the juxtaposition between the front and the back of the house. You are not all too sure that he is coming back but you will stick around until asked to leave. 

 It is no different really to how you have been made to feel by Mrs Targaryen and Otto. Perhaps if Mr Targaryen was cognizant enough to register your presence he would too but as it stands, he has been firmly reduced to the wheelchair that aches and strains across the floors. Though, in fact, both the mother and grandfather of the family seem to be playing a similar game wherein they ignore you as much as they physically can. You have been addressed directly precisely twice by the former and once by the latter, including when they had arrived home and your stay was announced. 

 They had both left after breakfast with Aemond in tow, some nonsense in town you did not care to pay attention to. Now, with just you and the other children in the house, you wonder if there will be any change when they return. You do doubt it, maybe they intend to pretend you are not there until you have left. 

 You play games counting the pattern in the bizarre floral damask of the wallpaper, it is faded and the seams between the sheets have darkened a little. It is age without damage, just a little bit of wear. What jars you the most is the full deep red carpet that runs down the middle of the corridor, the worn-light strip of decades of footsteps down the very middle. The echo of ghosts rather than a sign of life. 

 The door clicks open and you jump, hand pressing into the softness between your ribs as if you push your heart back into a resting rhythm. Mills has a thick cream book in his hand and a rodenty look in his weird little eyes. 

 “Thank you, I will bring it back as soon as I am finished," you say, reaching out to take the book. He holds onto it like he is playing a joke but his face is fully stern. It is meant to make you feel like you are taking it without permission, like you are doing something wrong. It is a stupid and unfair game and it makes you wish you had not thanked him. 

 He says nothing and you give him nothing more, taking the book with a jerk and a thin smile. The maid still has her eyes on the floor and you hope she does not get it in the teeth for your request. 

 You make your way through the house again, feet padding on cold tile, up the stairs to the room down at the end of the little hallway upstairs. 

 Helaena’s rooms is warm somehow, full with mid morning light beaming off glass artifact cases and fragmenting through rainbow makers that hang from the cross poles of the yellow curtains. It is a comfort stepping into here, a room entire that hums with character and the very essence of a person. 

 You hardly heard her quiet permission to enter and you find her sitting on crossed legs in the middle of a wide blue rug in the centre of a room too big for a girl who hardly seems to take up any space at all. 

 “Hello,” you greet her warmly and she looks up at you from whatever it is in her lap that has her captivated so. “Aegon was dragged out to play knights.”

 She nods, twisting in her gauzy, nightgown-like dress to look behind her at the wall that leads to the garden. Her gaze is absent, like she can see right through the wall. The sun does not reflect off of her, rather seems to take it in like a lifeforce, it shines in her veins like liquid gold and she glows. She looks like a pre-Raphaelite painting, distracted and unaware of the viewer’s gaze. 

 “They will be gone some time,” she says, hands shifting to bridge flat in front of one another again, a little flash leaps between the two. “Daeron likes to win and Aegon does not like to lose.”

  That makes you smile, you tip onto your toes to see their figures swimming in silent joy at the very end of the garden, right in front of the gangly green stems of the unbloomed sunflowers. 

 “I thought as much, do you mind if I join you in the meantime?” You wave the hefty phone book at her. She looks confused but gestures to you to sit with the hand not lying flat in the air in front of her. The soft pile of the blue carpet is a welcome relief from the stone and polished wood of the rest of the house in the way the one of the servant’s quarters had not been. Warmed by the sun as it falls in patches and swathes across it is a contrast to everything else. 

 You have never been much good at sitting with your legs crossed like she is, it gives you pins and needles too quickly, but you do not think she will begrudge you a little eccentricity. So, you stretch a leg out into a particularly bright patch of sun so it glints off your stocking and tuck the other up on a bent knee. The book flops open heavily on the middle L section, you flip on further and tuck the springing back section under your toes to stop it flipping shut again. 

 “What are you looking for?” She asks, you look up and finally see what is roaming across her papery knuckles. A plumed black and yellow caterpillar bounces its front end across the dips between her fingers. It is a lovely little thing. 

 You let the book shut, nails exploring the tiny dipped depression of the townhouses printed below the blocked title, ‘London postal area, alphabetical telephone directory.

 “I am half afraid of saying it aloud, it feels like such a long shot as it is,” you tell her but there is nothing in her that would take the information and do anything malicious at all. You are not sure she exists on the same planet as the word. So, you explain it to her.

  Helaena gets her eyes from her mother, not the colouring of course, but the open wideness and the shine like she is on the brink of tears. You remember thinking of a taxidermied deer when you first saw Mrs Targaryen, looking into her daughter’s, it is like seeing what she could have been in life. The lilac is her lineage but the acute sadness that permeates her waterline is all her mother. 

 She does not respond for so long that you return to the dense walls of text in the book, skirting down alphabetical columns while her gaze shrouds your shoulders. You do not know if she is not responding for a lack of remembrance of a figure long repressed or if she does not know what to say, it doesn’t really matter either way. It just feels nice to have unburdened yourself.

 The letters jumble closer to that holy grail name of abstract familiarity and you feel your muscles getting antsy and tense at the drawing up to final understanding. 

 “Heather will suit her,” she says, voice lilting in that uncommon intonation of hers. You are startled and find her looking almost clean through you, like she is seeing something far beyond the room you sit with her in. “Blooms in the summer, flowers all through the autumn.”

 It is cryptic and strange and you do not know what to make of it yet you feel those intangible memories of hope calling at you again, unbidden. Aegon tucking tiny hands through the sleeves of his own huge jumper, the way he has looked at you holding his brother’s tear streaked face against your shoulder. In the meeting of your eyes those months ago you had felt it, seen a future in the space between. 

 What can you say? How can you put it into words? The yearning you feel from what she has just said despite the mad prognostication. The regret you had felt, despite the madness of such a feeling, at the first blood you had shed two weeks after you learned your carnal knowledge of each other under the dangling, waxy lightbulb of his dorm. You had laid in your bed with your nails digging into the flesh of your cramping womb and cursed the fact that something there was yet no place for had not taken root to grow. 

 It was silly and juvenile but there had been a brief period of hope against sense that had fleeted with the cycle of the moon. 

  You look at her and she is focused on her pretty little caterpillar. Maybe she meant nothing by it, maybe it was nonsensical and she is truly mad. Your thumb digs into the flesh of your stomach all the same and your heart beats thick over dreams and wishes. 

 Then you see it, and you gasp. Helaena looks up at you sharply and you show her the tiny little name in between all the others of insignificance on the page. You are nearly squealing to yourself when her little comment slips between your twitching fingers and giddy smile. 

 “You suit him, like you were made for him. I think he was made for you.”

 ⚘⚘⚘

Supper on that second day in the house is a taciturn affair, more formal than any meal you have ever eaten. Served in courses of meticulous but unappealing intricacy. You successfully picked your way through a thin cress salad with bits of meat you truly could not identify if pressed but you are struggling with an artfully vile salmon mousse. Aegon is across from you, drinking his wine too quickly and giving you grey smiles when you catch his eye. Daeron is to your left with Helaena across from him, she is rearranging a small stack of blue and purple rocks. Mrs Targaryen winces visibly whenever the little stacks clatter down.

 You are wearing a dress which was originally Helaena’s, Aegon told you about their habit of formal dress for evening meals and you had sheepishly shown him your good dress for Easter and christenings. It was nothing grand at all, really, a pink chiffon thing with a scalloped neck and little flowers in the layers of the skirts but, you remember being given it for your sixteenth birthday and how you had pranced around in your lamp-lit room in your mother’s white shoes she had married your father in, feeling so terribly grown up.

 When you wore it last night though, you felt drab and outdated. The men, even Daeron with his little black shorts, were in full suits and waistcoats. Aegon looked like he wanted the fabric to catch fire and burn up with him inside it, he fidgeted with his collar the entire evening and when you had peeled back the cotton later that night, his skin was flushed angrily underneath. Mrs Targaryen was in the finest gown you have ever seen in the flesh, nicer even than Marlene’s wedding dress. She looked like the prettiest of painted ponies and the way she looked down on you. 

 This morning, Helaena had brought you an intricately beaded champagne gown dripping with blue and amber accents. It fit like a glove and you had protested her giving it to you but she just left it on your bed when you tried to return it. Aegon told you she wouldn’t wear it for the way the beadwork itched against the bare skin of her arms anyway. 

 Now, clad in her lovely gift, you look at Helaena and see the differences in her attire more clearly. She is bathed in gauzy fabric in a light blue, it clings nowhere and when she had drifted into the room with Daeron traipsing behind, she had almost been carried by the ghosts in the room. Mrs Targaryen had looked between the two of you, her will ‘o the wisp daughter and you, and given you a look of utter contempt. 

 The table is too long and too wide, an uncomfortable thing too beautiful to be eaten off of which was made for hosting not family dining. There's a triangular band of deep walnut running the length of the middle of the table, serving to divide you from those across from you. Everyone has to raise their voices to be heard, even by the person across, fostering a weirdly public conversation which feels too watched to really accomplish anything. 

 You have managed to stretch your leg out far enough to scuff at Aegon’s socked foot but it isn’t enough. He isn’t talking and you can feel him drawing further into the shadowy corners of the room. He periodically tries to catch the eye of the server with the wine but the young man remains looking resolutely away. 

 Daeron too, is quiet, he is poking at his loose tooth between halfhearted mouthfuls. His mother is shooting him foul looks from down the table but he doesn’t notice. 

 You lean over to whisper in his ear when he gets so fully distracted that he misses the clearing of his grandfather’s throat. Mrs Targaryen’s mouth has ticked down further at the corner and her eyes narrow every time he wiggles at the loose tooth. 

 “Do you think the tooth fairy likes salmon mousse?”

 He startles out of his own little world, looking at his barely touched plate before shaking his head solemnly. 

 It is such a serious gesture that it makes you cackle, Daeron looks taken aback for a moment but he cracks quickly, devolving into a fit of giggles. The sound smacks off the walls with an unfamiliar echo, like they don't know how to reflect the foreign sound. When you tip back in mirth, the rafters seem to jerk dizzily with the atmosphere holding them up.

 The strange coldness of the room and its stilted politeness catches up to you and you find yourself laughing to the point of tears, a borderline hysteria creeping at you. Daeron has his head in his hands and can see his cheeks blooming pink behind them. Something in that warmth punctuating the cold sobers you a little, just enough to wipe your eyes and take a breath. It is the first bit of unmitigated joy you have really seen from any of them and that troubles you deeply. 

 Aegon has that look on his face and he knocks his foot against your under the table, his fingers tracing the pattern just out of your reach. 

 “Would you care to share with the rest of us what it is you find so funny?” Otto’s voice curts sharply through the stale air between the children and the adults. The fact that Aegon sits amongst them and not you does not escape your notice. There is a difference of five or six cavernous inches between his placemat and Otto’s and your own. 

 You and Daeron look at each other and start giggling again. Otto’s ire grows with each second he goes unanswered but youre so happy to see the little boy smiling despite the anger that you don’t care. 

 “It was just a silly joke about the tooth fairy,” you say, smiling despite your discomfort at the way you feel like you have to shout to be heard. Daeron starts up again and you have to cover your mouth with the back of your hand. 

“Yes, well, if you would please refrain from such outbursts again. It is not good for digestion.” Mrs Targaryen’s tone brokers no argument despite the absurdity of her words and Daeron tucks his chin to his chest, silent again. 

 “Mama!” Aegon exclaims, looking riotously pissed off.

 You would try to stop what you know is coming but he has a glint in his eyes which speaks of a final straw starting to splinter. 

 “Aegon you know I cannot bear shouting,” she dismisses, hiding behind movement as she pats at her senile husband’s mouth.

“They weren’t shouting though, were they?” he counters, inciting a tut from Aemond. Aegon glares at him. 

 “There really is no need to be difficult,” she says, eyes narrowing in warning at him. Something about the way she looks at him lights a flame under your pretty velvet cushioned seat. “I’m sure your friend meant no harm but we don't behave that way at the dinner table.”

 She means to chastise you like a child, fortunately you had a mother loving enough to teach you when punishment is deserved and when it is not. The emphasis on friend is deliberate and it ticks you off, you watch Aegon bristle too. 

 Helaena has stopped stacking her stones, hovering over the unfinished tower with the final tiny rock between her pale fingers. She is looking down at them with an air of resigned trepidation. 

 Aegon leans forward in his seat, laying his cutlery across his plate in an angle for a fight. You can feel things nearing a point of no return, you think Aegon has already gone far beyond the line. Funnily enough, you have little desire to pull him back when every step further feels like an achievement. “You’re being rude on purpose.”

“I will not be spoken to like that, by you.” The hurt she feigns is brittle. 

Aegon’s hand smacks against the table, jumping the silverware and tinkling up the stem of his empty glass. Helaena’s tower topples, crystals scattering across the varnish.  “And you will not speak to her like that!”

 A flare of warmth drags through the mire of uncertain worry within you. 

 “I won’t do this here, Aegon,” she warns. You watch Viserys blink at her tone, alertness twitching in him, though he manages nothing more than a pitiful groan which goes ignored. 

 Otto has his fingers curled around the handle of one of his dinner knives, the gesture is almost frighteningly intentional. 

 “Why not? You must know that I will tell her whatever it is you want to say to me in private.” 

 Aemond’s brow raises in the most overt display of surprise you have seen from him. He looks at you, speaking low but somehow carrying his voice across the distance. “Such fidelity.”

 You’re quite sick of him, the way he speaks like he has any idea of what lies between you and Aegon. You don’t think he would understand if you hammered it out in stone. You smile at him and shrug, he purses his lips and quiet rage twitches his jaw. 

 “Those are very strong words for someone you hardly know.” Mrs Targaryen is playing a game, she surveys the table like chess pieces on a board each time she finishes speaking. Unfortunately for her, you don’t know the rules and have very little interest in trying to guess them enough to play the proper way. 

 “Family matters are private, boy, they are not to be discussed with those whom they do not concern.” Otto says, like he is reciting an ancient law. 

 “You are literally talking about her!” Aegon shouts, his neck is warmed with fury and he jumps from his seat to stand. “She is sitting right there and you're talking about her like she can’t hear you.”

 They all seem unaffected by his outburst, like they don’t care enough to react. The unopened pot of vitriol for these people is boiling under the lid in such a way that it is dancing with escaping energy. 

  Mrs Targaryen lays her hands on her lap calmly. “I’m afraid, if you allow strangers to come and stay without warning then you cannot expect us to be overjoyed.”

 “I cannot believe how you’re acting right now,” Aegon says, then huffs a humourless laugh. “Actually, I can. I just thought that there might be the tiniest chance of you at least pretending to be nice. Sunflower has done nothing but lovely and kind and you're acting  like she doesn’t matter, like she is a problem to will away.”

 Mrs Targaryen somehow manages to maintain an infuriating cool. She doesn’t even blink. “There is no need to be so dramatic”

 “You’re being fooled, boy,” Otto spits, flinging a hand in your direction while still not looking at you. “You must be able to see that, or maybe you are just as stupid as I always thought you were.”

 “Are you fucking insinuating what I think you are?” Aegon asks, suddenly cold in a way you have never seen him. He has a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the table and his shoulders are shaking. You can define that as the very moment your own control falls apart, a wave of steam and fury boils over, the lid clangs to the floor. 

 Helaena is staring openly at the conflict while Daeron sinks lover and lover in his chair. Something in her expression speaks of fear, something else of morbid curiosity in the way she watches her brother’s hand go bloodless on the table.

  Mrs Targaryen chastises him slowly for his language but it gets swept up in the tension of the room. Viserys is shaking his head limply but no one is looking. 

 “Well, she certainly isn’t here on account of your glowing personality and witty humour, is she?” Otto asks, voice mocking and sarcastic. 

 You find you have had quite enough of all their shit. The screech of your chair’s legs on the parquet floor is like the cry of a wounded animal.

 “Don’t talk about him like that.” For the first time in the evening, they actually look at you. Three pairs, and one incomplete pair, of eyes turn to you in varying degrees of shock and anger. “You are more than welcome to speak about me however you like, I couldn’t care less, but you will not speak about Aegon like that.”

 Mrs Targaryen looks at you with offense radiating from her low brows. “He is my son and this is my house, I will speak however I want to.”

 “Just what is it you are aiming to accomplish here?” Otto asks, eyes narrowed and disturbingly cool. “A little social climbing with the thickest rich boy you could find?”

 Helaena is watching you speak with an almost unnervingly solid gaze. 

 “You don’t know me. Don’t pretend you have any idea about me at all.” You say, voice almost unrecognisable to your own ears but the resolution that drips from your tongue is all yours. Aegon is looking at you with bright eyes, he looks frightened in a way, though not of you. Looking at him you know your decision to be right. 

 “I am here because I love Aegon,” you hear him take a ragged inhale but you need to finish what you are saying so you force your gaze into Otto and Mrs Targaryen, even Aemond and Viserys. “He is my sun and my every star and I would follow him to the centre of the earth and stand by him until the world ends.”

 They gape at you, you think it must be the sincerity that gets them. Even Aemond looks startled, the expression playing out on his features like they haven’t moved that way in a very long time. That gives you a rather sick sense of pride. 

 “But, the world is not ending. Instead he is here, being treated like nothing more than an inconvenience to you. How you can expect him to be this shining model of fallacy you so want him to be when he is staring down the barrel of the misery it would cause him I really do not know. Maybe you would have to be a bit stupid not to see how that is doomed to fail.”

 You look right at Otto with that final line and he ignites, voice raising in the first show of emotion you have seen from him. “You insolent girl-”

 He is cut off though, unexpectedly, by his daughter. “You don’t love him,” she says, meeting your gaze with eyes of fire. “You don’t even know what love is.”

 You look at the way she is sitting, chair turned in towards Viserys’, her hand on his arm and her whole body twisted towards him. Yet the entire thing is a façade, she cannot see him at all. He is looking at her helplessly, head lolling weakly on his shoulders and mouth moving in some approximation of words without sound and she cannot see any of it. It is pathetic.

 “Funny that, Mrs Targaryen,” you say her name like an officer addressing a soldier of lower rank. Pity runs thick in your tone. “You speak like you do.”

 “How dare you?” She goes white with rage and you feel a relief in finally seeing her crack, you don’t know what that makes you but you don’t find you particularly care when Aegon is staring at you like that across the table. 

 “Like I said, I do not care what you think of me but I happen to care very much about what you say about him. I won’t stand here will you abuse the man I love and suggest I am here for the money or what comes with it. Look around you,” you implore, gesturing to the tactless opulence and feeling your movement echoed in the tension hanging in the air, laughing a little at the absurdity, “there is nothing here anyone would want.”

 You can see she is racing in the corner of your eye but you don’t care to see, you are looking at Aegon. He is watching you, his chest rising and falling with quick breaths and his fists clenched tight at his sides. You nod at him and he nods back, stepping away from the table. 

 You bend to kiss the top of Daeron’s head, whispering a promise in his ear, before standing and walking to the door. You don’t want to leave him but he will be okay, the blame is squarely on you and that is precisely where you want it. 

 Voices raise in anger and protest behind you but you aren’t listening. You make your way to the end of the eventual end of the fucking table and meet Aegon in the middle. He looks shell shocked when you find his eyes and he links his fingers between yours like a lifeline. 

 When the door to the dining room swings shut behind you he stops and pulls you in quickly to an embrace that has you twisting your hands into his horrible suit jacket and blinking furiously. He is taking deep, tortured breaths and his lips are on your hairline.

 “Can we get out of here? Please, even if it's just for a bit.” He is desperate and you hold him tighter, keeping the pieces of him together. 

 “I have no intention of staying here right now.” you say, his response coming in a relieved fanning of a sigh across your forehead. 

 He releases you but takes your hand again, pulling you upstairs to get a coat and your purse. He takes off the suit jacket, trading it for his leather one, and you watch just a little of his tension drop with it into a crumpled heap on the floor.

 The house is eerily quiet as you walk out, footsteps loud on the hardwood and breathing echoing off of the chamber walls. The first step outside is like emerging from a frozen lake and when he shuts the door behind the two of you, Aegon stops looking quite so much like he is scared he is going to die. However, he remains silent as you walk down the automobile lined street and he seems to pay little mind to where you are going. You don’t mind, you know he needs some time with this in his head first and you will not force him to speak. Instead, you hold his hand tightly and bring the joined pair to your lips from time to time to kiss the back.

 After some fifteen minutes of walking without purpose, just going anywhere further from the chasing ghosts of the house, you come to a phone box and squeeze Aegon’s hand before ducking inside. He looks confused but you ask him to trust you and he nods in return, sitting on the edge of the pavement. 

 The lights are harsh inside compared to the murky water of the street lamps. It smells vaguely of damp and forget but you ignore that, fumbling through your bag for the little piece of paper you slid between the two mirrors of your enamel backed compact a few days ago, it has a line of dusty powder down the side now but that hardly matters. You slot a few coins in and dial up the number, hoping against hope that someone will answer. 

 Six rings later and, “-Yes hello, hello. Is that you Marge? I was just bathing the little ones.”

 You smile a little at the flustered voice on the other end, clearly a woman who receives few calls she isn’t expecting. “No, sorry. This is a little odd and I do apologise for telephoning out of the blue but, are you Mrs Spinnet?” 

 She pauses for a second and you twist the cord around your finger, directing your hope somewhere. “Yes dear, who is this?”

You give her your name though she will not know it, you don’t want to keep her so you get to the point. “I was hoping to ask about one of your sons.”

⚘⚘⚘

 London shines from the window of the taxi, lights glimmering from windows behind curtains and people milling from bar to clubs. You watch them devolve from polished glamour to more normal looking outfits devoid of furs and dripping jewels as you get closer to your destination.

 Unlike the first ride you took, you do not talk with the driver this time, he is a quiet gentleman anyway who seems content to let you sit in silence and watch the streets go by. Aegon fell asleep on your shoulder some minutes into the journey and you aren’t planning on waking him until you arrive. He was so drawn out, and you know how terribly he slept last night. He needs a bit of time to recalibrate so you trace shapes on his skin with your fingertips and try not to move. 

 With his soft breaths huffing against your collarbone, the world seems smaller, everything more achievable. Leaving the house, however temporary the exile, has left you lighter, no longer toting around the weight of the cold lack of privacy and the uncomfortable tension that lingers in every corner. 

 Here, with the sounds of the city washing over the car, you feel a quietude fall over your very being. Each hour you have spent at the townhouse has had you feeling angrier and more off-kilter. It is a disorienting experience. You cannot fathom living there, existing as Helaena does with the breadth of her world confined to those observant walls. It makes you feel like pulling out your hair. 

 As the streets start to narrow down, resembling the Victorian photographs in the books you have at home , you think back to the phone call and to the relief of Mrs Spinnet’s excitement at her remembrance. She had given you the pub to find and a wish to pass on a love you did not know she would be harbouring. You have not told Aegon that yet, waiting to see if he will be okay first. 

 He rouses with the stopping of the car, lulling into you heavily before blinking awake with a hum. 

 “Hello again,” you say, hedging your bets on him having recovered a little. 

 He smiles softly and you breathe a sigh that takes the weight of worry with it. “Hello sunflower.”

  A throat clearing the front pulls your eyes from his, you and Aegon fumble for money to pay the driver but he beats you to it. You thank the driver and poke Aegon in the arm, he waves his wallet at you and grins in victory, 

Still, he stocks you under his arms when you have both ducked out onto the street. You can see the pub a few doors down and a small spike of anticipation rocks you at the sight of the raided navy sign with its gold letters. 

 First though, you take Aegon to the riverbank and lean with him against the mossy bricks to look over the shining water and the docks. Like this, everything is just you and him. He is the water and you are the light, he is the stars in your sky. The moss wedging between your brickwork. 

 “You love me?” he asks quietly, voice laced with a trepidation like he does not know if he is banking on a dream. 

 It does not break your heart like it would have if you had said it sooner and received the same response. You know it is not you he doesn’t believe, rather his own judgement. 

 You turn under his arm, stare at him for a second and get lost in his eyes and the way his hair looks in the dancing light of the Thames. “I have loved you long enough now to know that I did even when it was too soon not to doubt myself.”

 He looks struck, like it is too much. You shake your head with a smile playing on you. “I love you, Aegon.”

 For nearly a minute, the world is just you, and him looking at you, and a definitive surety for the first time that he knows he is loved by at least one person. 

 A tear drops heavily from his waterline and you are in his arms before it hits his cheek. When he has you plastered to his chest, your arms weaving into his hair and the creased leather of his jacket, he laughs. It is a ragged, wet, glorious sound. He spins you until your feet forget their weight of your own body as they glide through the air. 

 The world keeps spinning when his hands find the sides of your face, the tips of his indexes lining the dips of your temples. “I hope you know, I am going to ask you to marry me one day.” 

 That silly, selfish part of yourself who had mourned the stain of blood in your knickers  those months ago asks ‘why not now?’ The rest of you cannot stop the grin from splitting your face, would not want to try if it could.

 “One day, Aegon Targaryen,” you tell him between the kisses he is planting on your lips, “I am going to say yes.”

 He places his lips definitely over your own, then he turns to the docks and yells in a perfect shout of jubilation, it echoes across London and you hope it bounces like the aftershocks of an explosion against the Targaryen house. 

 “Come on,” you say through smarting laughter, pulling him by the hand down the road as it is populated by milling dockworkers and factory men, “I did not bring you here without reason.” 

 He walks in a bouncing dance, energy spilling out of his smile, “alright, nutcase.”

 You are too giddy to feign annoyance, the doors of the snug terrace building swoosh with the force of your joy when you push them open. 

It is bizarre how stepping into a pub, even one so far from home that rings with cockney accents and lights unfamiliar faces with its fire, calms you. Something in the heady air of hops and ale, a room warmed with drunken adulation, feels like home. It puts you at ease when it smacks in contention with the coldness of the unpopulated Targaryen house. How welcome the feeling is to be somewhere where noise is celebrated. 

 “You know, there are pubs nearer Kensington that this one,” he teases, a smile playing on his lips. 

 He receives a sharp look in return, bluntened by your affection. “Oh ye of little faith.”

 He makes to follow you as you step towards the bar but you still him with a hand pressed against the half-done zip of his jacket and an evasive grin. His eyes follow you the whole way and you can feel the pull of his lips smiling morphing your own. 

 The barkeep is friendly, a middle aged gentleman who pours your drinks happily and asks about your accent. There is something nice, you think, in being the different one for a reason outside of your personality. No one expects anything of you and most people you have encountered so far have worn an edge to their questioning like they agree that your little mining corner of the world is a bit of a dead end. Though, when you look at the worn faces of the older dockworkers, you see nothing but a reflection of the miners back home. Grit worn so deep under fingernails it has become a part of them and chairs that sag impressions of the men who inhabit them for the hours in between their residence. 

 Maybe nowhere is ever that different really or maybe this is the England you cannot run from.

 A few lads give you funny looks when you ask what you need to of the barkeep, looking to Aegon where he stands near the door searching around with wide and inquisitive eyes, foot tapping on the mucky green carpet. He makes for just as funny a sight as usual, hair too blond, eyes too bright and utterly too alive. He is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

 You give the lads a shrug when they ask why you are asking after who you are, smiling back at the man you love who loves you too and feeling a little dizzy with the maelstrom of feelings ripping a tornado through you. 

 Two pints slide across the bar, one too full and dripping down the side onto the glossy wood, and you are pointed towards a booth near the back which is crowded with young men and circled with too many chairs and young men sitting wherever they can find purchase. 

 You jerk your head in their direction and Aegon follows on, head shaking with confusion even as he follows you. In all honesty, you feel unsure too. The plan you muddled together felt hazy and impossible until now, too variable and too reliant on people who may have forgotten things, people even. However, you think back to Aegon asking you in the cold corridor of his dorm whether you would be willing to go a little further for him, and how you had known then that you would go anywhere should he ask; you know he will trust you just a little longer.

 On the way, you put down your drinks on an adjacent empty table, smoothing down your skirt and begging the universe once more for this little kindness. 

  A crowd of intrigue assesses you when you greet the table as a whole, voices quieting and drinks being sipped in the recess. You flit from face to face, looking for recognition where you cannot hope to find any. Warmth lines your back as Aegon comes to stand behind you, a hand skimming through the volume of your evening dress.

 “Sorry to bother you all but, I was wondering if you know where to find-”

 “Hells teeth!” Exclaims a young man from the back of the table, his face bare with an amalgam of shock, and something you think might be damned close to miraculous joy. “Aegon?”

 You spin on a penny, neck tweaking a little with your speed, to find said man in an equal state. His mouth parts and you can see his throat catching on the importance in the air. He sounds like he has been gargling disbelief when he speaks. “Davey?”

 What follows is a struggle of the unassuming brown haired man practically crawling across the table while Aegon nearly knocks it over himself in his own effort to meet him in the middle. When they finally do, Aegon half pulling Davey from the floor as he rolls off the wooden top now covered in spilled beer, it parts the world like a dam breaking. 

 They grip each other desperately, clapping each other on the back while their common laughter bursts in harmony. It is jubilant peace and you are, for a time which feels like an aeon, not worried a shred about the future. 

 Words bounce quickly in unanswered questions between the two, Davey holding Aegon’s face between his hands in a way that squishes his cheeks and makes him look terribly young. A pale hand stays firm on a factory uniform’s shoulder, fingers digging tight into the blue material. 

 “Where have you been all these years I-”

 “Canny believe it, after all this time.”

 “-So sorry, you have no idea how sorry I am for leaving-”

 “Missed you like hell-”

 “-Thought I would never see you again.”

 They laugh, both pulling together again in a way that highlights the funny similarities between them. While Davey is lanky, a string bean of a man who’s cuffs ride high on his ankles, and Aegon wears his hair long and uncropped, they both simmer with energy and they share a mirrored glint in their eyes which promises a mischief that would make any school teacher run for the hills. 

 One of the lads at the table pipes up, sleeve wet with drink spilled in the scuffle and eyes on him like he has been elected spokesman for the bewildered gaggle. “You going to tell us who this is that you’re greetin’ like your best china plate?”

 “And if the fine young lady he brought with him is spoken for…” Chips in a bugger at the back with fewer teeth than buttons done up on his shirt. 

“Impatient bastards, the lot of you. More than ten years since I have seen ‘im and you all want to talk to ‘im. Wait your bloody turn.” Davey says, shooting withering looks at the loudest ones of the group though you can tell it is with good meaning. He shakes Aegon’s shoulder and twists him to face the waiting crowd. “This boys, is Aegon. My brother.”

 Aegon turns his head to look at Davey, a gaggle of confused men racketing questions at the pair, and finds the taller boy grinning at him with relief dripping from his form. Aegon smiles so very wide. 

 “And who is his lovely friend?” Jeers a the dentally challenged one from before. 

 Aegon gives him a look and the boy shrugs unapologetically in return. You are pulled by the hand into the fold of energy. 

 “This beautiful, brilliant woman,” Aegon says to the group, though his eyes are dead set on yours. “Is the love of my life. My sunflower.”

 Your cheeks flame and your brain goes a little fuzzy. He runs his thumb over your naked ring finger in a way that feels like a promise. 

 “Well it is an absolute pleasure to meet you Miss,” Davey offers his hand and a wide smile. He kisses your knuckles instead of shaking and you get a sense of the boy Aegon has told you so much about, he has this cheekiness laced into the fibres that comprise him and it's hard not to watch him. 

 It is clear he is something of an unofficial leader to the rowdy gaggle, they look to him for cues when Aegon grabs your two drinks from the table behind and makes you sit down. A great shuffle takes place, displacing boys onto the high tops of the benches and some onto more crowded chairs around the end. You end up on Aegon's lap at the edge of the bench, his arm belted around your waist and his chin perched on your shoulder when he isn’t speaking. 

 The conversation is quick and loud, excitable as the boys fall into a rapport that feels so natural. While he is still in his crisply ironed suit trousers and his accent is so very different to the rest, he fits in here. He seems rattled when his jokes are found funny or when people listen with interest to the things he says, blinking in confusion the first time the group laughs with him, looking at you for a second with pinched brows. 

 You lean forward to whisper in his ear, ignoring the whistles from the surrounding crowd, “They can see you for what you are, Aegon.” You kiss him on the tender flesh that bridges his cheekbones and the cartilage of his ear, feeling the dip of softness into the hollow, “Let that be a good thing.”

 His intake of breath, catching on his tonsils and the vulnerability of his palette, rises louder than the whoops and whistles of those around you. He turns to look at you in such a way that his brows entangle with yours, twisting and bending back and unifying. Perspective warps in your now tiny field of vision, his eyelashes elongating and darkening your periphery while his lavender eyes meld with your own in colour and light. 

 His eyes close and you watch his waterline fragment with shining moisture, a crystalline juncture between the darkening blond of his fine white eyelashes. Then they open, and the dissipating vacuum brings some of that glitter back into the way he looks at you and he nods in a scraping of hairs and a commingling of the oils of your respective skins. 

 And the conversation continues, Aegon is swept into Davey once more and the two begin to talk in low tones with an almost unbelievable familiarity. You split your time between listening in on them when the conversation is loud enough for the public and chipping in with little comments with the boys around you. 

 Davey talks in meant extremes, definitive promises of jubilation. He grips Aegon’s arm and shakes his joy into him, in time, Aegon shakes back and laughs in a harmonic tune with him. With who ought to have been his flesh and blood all along. 

 Aegon gets up to go to the bathroom after a while, sliding you across the groove between his legs and onto the shiny red leather of the seat. You and Davey both watch him shimmy between patrons to the brass plated door of the loo. 

 “Thank you, really, thank you,” Davey says, eyes still on the door. You look at him and his brown gaze flicks to yours and he nods, “I didn’t think there was any chance of finding ‘im after all this time.”

 You shrug, evening dress squeaking a bit on the leather. “I just looked you up in the phonebook, Aegon wouldn’t have-”

 “Thought of it,” he laughs, nodding knowingly, “You know, I had to tell ‘im what a chamber pot was?”

 He pitches around his blue factory uniform, grimy black at the creases and giggles to himself. “I mean, can you imagine a bastard with indoor bogs in nineteen thirty nine? I thought he was taking the mick but he wasn't of course, just came from that fucked up castle of his. Oh, sorry for my language,”

 “It’s quite alright ,”you tell him, the sinew in your cheeks aching for your smile at his story, the fondness in his story nearly killing you. “My parents run the pub he sneaks out to twice a week, I assure you I have heard worse.”

 “I knew you were good from the minute you came over,” he tells you, a hand massaging into his intercostal muscles between fits of boyish giggles. He wipes his tears and sobers just a little, “You are the best thing that could have happened to him, you know?”

 It does not make you still like it would have if it had come from a mouth that had known him less, instead it makes you smile. “I have thought the same of you for quite some time.”

 Davey just tilts his head like it is nothing, because it is nothing to love someone who means the entire world to you. “He is my brother.” he says simply, his finger drawing a spiral down the condensation of his pint glass. 

 Just then, the bathroom door swings open and Aegon comes out. His eyes meet yours and his face splits clean into a grin. He is framed momentarily, in a picture you will never forget for the rest of your life, against the brown lacquered wallpaper and the waxy yellow lights that shine through his hair like the light of the sun. 

 He is light itself, he is the sun and the stars and he is everything. For the first time, you let yourself truly become something new, see a different painting in your reflection, “Bauerngarten mit Sonnenblumen.’ All those bright flowers entwined with one another, a garden of vibrancy and joy and love. In that painting of Klimt’s, the sunflower is not the subject of the painting, she is not observed as a new thing and a dangerous thing. No, she is beautiful for how she is one with the rest, for how the poppies of his blood and the violets of his hair are just as much singular as they are a unity. In those others, the future glimmers in technicolour like you have only ever seen on Pathé reels. 

 ‘Heather will suit her.’ Helaena had said and you want to weep for the yearning it inspires in your blood to know what she means. 

 In the seconds of you standing to let him slip himself below you, he absorbs all of it. 

 “Dancing!” One of the gobby lads proclaims, “let’s go to the dancehall!”

 A hearty groan of dissent rings around from his position, you realise it is the git without teeth and you shake your head at him in disbelief. Aegon’s hand is playing with the beading on the darts of mesh at your waist, a pale finger defining the pattern as adjacent to itself, and you just look at him.

 Davey shrugs, looking at Aegon to see what he thinks, Aegon proceeds to defer to you. It is comical. 

 “I am up for it,” you say, a little delighted by the idea of some more adventure in this already spontaneous evening. You feel like you are fizzing. “I have to get some wear out of this dress.”

 “You heard the lady, let’s go,” Davey says with a jaunty grin, smacking his hands on his knees. The group rises like a flock of startled birds in a single flurry of movement and jostles into the street. You bring up the rear alone, happily following between a dichotomous pair who leap around in broken tandem. They flick and jump against each other and you think of the atoms Mary had told you about, how they smacked and ricocheted. They are an ever increasing chain of energy.  

⚘⚘⚘

 What follows is hours of spinning and cavorting around a dimly lit hall, your nice shoes clipping with your movements and you dance on the worn down wood. The group peels off with the young women sitting around the edges of the dance floor and the night plays in with you in Aegon’s arms, occasionally in Davey’s with you and him trading stories back and forth about your lovely interlink. 

 Aegon looks around the bustle enraptured, captured by the music and the movement and the boundless way couples jig and laugh with one another. He seems so thoroughly amazed it nearly sparks his hair alight. 

 It makes you think of all he has missed, what he has been robbed of by his particular prison and how little he has experienced of this world which seems to fit him so perfectly. He does not seem to mind his suit trousers so much when he loops one of their legs around the back of yours to dip you comically at the end of the final song for the night. When the lights come on, signalling the end of the evening’s revelry, his face is pink and his grin could light up the entire city. 

 He and Davey share an embrace as he puts you into a taxi home, he and Aegon trade contact details and you give him yours too so he can send letters there instead of the school. He kisses your knuckles again and pats Aegon on the cheek. 

 “Next time, you are coming ‘round mine for Sunday dinner, both of you,” he insists, a demand not an invitation. “Mum is going to be so annoyed to ‘ave missed you.”

 “I look forward to meeting her,” Aegon says, so sincere it hurts a bit. “I will see you soon, I hope.”

 Davey laughs, “sooner than another decade, me old mucker, I promise you that.”

 Aegon is still laughing happily to himself when Davey has shut the door and shot him a last jaunty grin before jumping to click his ankles and waltzing off down the road.

 The car ride that follows is primed by the frenetic energy of the night and you have to stop yourself from going mad by steadying yourself in the weight of his hand high on your knee. 

 The front door clicks shut behind him with a deafening echo and he winces and he pulls you up the stairs, there is no question of splitting for different rooms as sleep has taken everyone in the house. If it has not taken Mrs Targaryen, as you remember Aegon saying she slept so rarely, if ever, she could politely go fuck herself. You have entered into a feeling beyond care of what she thinks.

 You want many things as he pulls you down to lay beside him, things intangible and rawly distinct. He wants them too, you know as much as it is laced through his breaths, warm against your neck. You can feel as much when you shiver and he draws your back against himself with a hand yearning through the thin cotton of the slip you are left in. 

 “I do not think I will live another moment without thinking of you,” he whispers, voice soft like water damp feathers, beaten from your pillow and soaked in the indecency of your dreams. 

 It hardly feels like breathing at all, what you are doing then, more of a great sharing of something in the thin air between you and him. A simultaneous engagement of existence, drawn from one body into the other, to be let out into the other again. And again, and again. 

 “I haven’t stopped thinking about you, not really since you first came into my sight.” Your words fall on his skin like a balm and he stutters the relief of healing in his tightened grip on the soft skin of your abdomen. For a brief moment that leaves you permanently altered, you want to crawl into his skin so as to feel everything just as vibrantly as him. 

 “Not even…” He cannot finish the sentence, but he does not need to, not now when you understand him as you do. 

 “Never,”  you breathe, fingers shifting under his still buttoned shirt to dance across his lowest rib. You play along the slight ridges in the bone and find the very line where his intercostal muscle ends in a furrowing flicker. You feel made from him like Eve, homemade for you like Adam. 

 You measure his reaction in the sinew that comprises him, how sensation chases from his bowed spine down his arms, culminating in the fibrous contraction of the ligaments in the backs of his hands. It is captivating, watching the moon’s shadows pitch themselves in a bending absence of light across the dance under his skin. 

 “Can I-” He chokes off when you turn in his hold to find him through the material of his loose underwear, tracing the pockets of air between him and you and the fabric. “Please, sunflower, let me have you.”

 “You already have me, I am yours in totality,” you tell him in a hum, then you kiss him in an act that feels more like a reinvention of life. 

 In a conjunction of time that warps perception, any vestiges of clothing are dragged from where they do not belong. Pulled in stitches that ache as they are taken away from skins that were only ever meant to be touching. He is nearly feverish against you, you burn up at the touch of his full alignment with your own body. Everything is skinned down to nerves, lingering in the air left behind when everything else is stripped away. 

 An attempt is made by the house, a prickle of air on what is still exposed to its clammy, unkind hands. You smile against Aegon’s lips, tilt your head back and catch laughter in your thorax as he presses his lips to your beating heart and his thrums under the hand you still have tangled in between his ribs. Really, it is a weak and futile retaliation. You blossom from naval to clavicle in a mottling of flushed desire. 

 His hand trembles down you, dipping into the softness between your legs with roughly padded fingers and old cicatrice against your innards. It is a reckoning, a harmonisation. He finds that spot where the memory of his tongue has lingered outside the reach of the trepidation of your own hands on yourself since it left you. Ecstasy strikes through you in a flash of blinding white. It is almost too much because he is everywhere and yet he is not lacing himself into your fibres and it is all you want. 

 So you stretch the desire crystallising in your muscles and take his hand away, relishing in the way he does not look confused, just knows what you mean. You are one, after all. 

 “I love you,” he tells you when the meat of your legs is sticking to the sides of his hips and he has clustered you against his heaving chest, one with you again. He has a hand cupped against the back of your head, holding you safe from dropping clean back in weightless abandon, fingers holding your skull between the dips of tendons. 

 You make a sound you did not know you could, forges in vocal chords tunes by his ministrations and affections, he mirrors it back like birds calling out to one another in the dawn’s early light. “I love you,” you surrender again, feeling close to losing control as you relinquish yourself to the fervor of your hips' instinctive movement against his. 

 You want him to climax first, only so you can watch him as he crests. His eyes grow heavy and his lashes fan out in mercury threads across his warm flushed cheeks. Through your madness you can feel him drawing closer to the edge and you smile with a dazed mania as he starts to falter in his pace, starts to whimper at the height of his breaths. 

 Then he breaks, and it is like watching the sunrise. His mouth falls open and he goes perfectly still, spine taught like the strings of a violin. The only movement is a shimmer behind his eyelids when his eyes roll back. He sounds like a chorus of fallen angels, voices plied to sing songs of a god who rejected them, tempered by flames into a cry of beautiful freedom. 

 Watching him like that is enough, and as his heart stutters under your hand, you follow him into the void, you hear the second he feels it against himself. It is like watching the birth of the universe, the colourful death of a star. History and time and rapture explode in the ends of your nerves and you hear yourself like a stranger in the abstract. 

The come down is all him, his hands still on you, his lips soothing your pulse in your neck on their way to your own and his hair sticking in waves to your collarbones. When your vision fades back into clear view and the image of him is solid once more, you find him grinning.

 “That was the best thing I have ever seen,” he says, stroking up the curve of your spine with his fingertip. It sends a shiver in its wake. 

 You tip your forehead against his and feel the salt of exertion slide in unity. “You should have seen my view.”

 His lips find yours and mould the two of you together. 

 The sunflower could almost be smiling for her relief. She blows warm in the wind, and eternal embracing with that which she holds dear. The little flowers all around her reach for her and she reaches back. When the petals touch, their downy holds brush against each other with aching permanence. 

 “I do not know how to thank you for tonight, for finding him,” he says deliberately, pulling you back to meet his sincerity laced eyes, “I am not worrying.”

 You smile but he shakes his head. 

 “No, sunflower I-” a hand rakes through sated clumping hair, “I have worried for Davey every minute since I waved him goodbye at that shitty little train station eleven years ago and now, suddenly, I know he is okay and I know I will see him again and I did not know just how much it was hurting to carry all of it around.”

 You try to kiss him but he does not quite let you, holding your cheeks in his gentle grasp. “You are brilliant and beautiful and I love you.”

 It is a compliment of such searing truth and intention that it has your instincts itching to hide away in your blushing cheeks. However you do not, he does not let you, he holds your face in his gaze until you feel like you're going to cry the blood from your veins. 

 “Do you believe me?” He asks, jogging you with light emphasis, “because I will tell you every chance I get if you do not just yet.”

 You do not know what to say, not in the face of the absolution from more than you knew was aching at your muscles. You shed fears of never belonging, that nigh unkillable frightening dream of being petrified into the coal mines and being forgotten there. You do not want a big life, that is not what you are asking for.; no lights and glory and praise, all you want is for your own little dreams to come true. Nothing more. 

 “I believe you,” you say, because you do. You would be a hypocrite not to after every time you have asked him to have faith in your judgement over the hundreds of others he has felt. 

 The universe gives you a little more, breaks the crest of the clouds to let the moon filter through the gap in the curtains and you shudder at the touch of her featherlight rays. 

 “Good,” he says simply, kissing you finally. He lets you sob against him, even when your teeth knock against his and the slickness of your cheeks goes cold in the night air. He just holds you tighter and blesses the tracks of your tears with his touch. “Because I am going to tell you all the time anyway.”

 You laugh wetly against him and shiver with the delicious vulnerability of being loved with abandon. Tomorrow you can have another staring match with his mother and pity his rotting father in his moldering chair. You will unpack your weapons and your armour and march down into battle at the breakfast table, fight the good fight for the man you love because that is who you are.

 In the light of this waxing moon, you trace his face as fatigue creeps into his bones and let yourself be nothing more, and nothing less than content.

⚘⚘⚘

Dearest readers! Happy Friday! I dearly hope you are all well and have enjoyed this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is bloody long (eleven thousand words! I am so sorry but I could not help myself) and I have been looking forward to posting it for so long. Please let me know what you think, I would love to know. All my love, SlaginSecret xx

@neithriddle

[hardyshoe]

Bauerngarten mit Sonnenblume (farm garden with sunflowers) by Gustav Klimt, 1907.

I am bestowing this upon you in anticipation of chapter ten tomorrow, my dear readers. A mark of a shift if you will. See you all tomorrow. All my love, SlaginSecret xx

[hardyshoe]

hiii 💛 omg the past few chapters have been so good 😭 so many different heavy/intense emotions to process from aegon and sunflower PLUS a really good plot and character development in terms of more background info on both of them. was not suspecting aemond to be the one stealing her letters but i was getting suspicious about his absence in the plot once daeron showed (who by the way is so freaking sweet, i wanna squeeze him 🥰). also LOVED the way you changed up how he lost his eye vs just making a modern version of what happened in the book/show. its a fun "what if it was so and so who did it instead" to ponder over.

i feel like i say this every time (and I'm going to keep saying it), but you really have such an amazing way at evoking emotions and imagery through your writing and you're just such a talented author overall! not sure if this is the first thing you've ever written but i hope you keep going with it and selfishly on my part i hope you continue to share it with us 🥹

So lovely to hear from you again! Thank you for your kind words, dear reader. So much of the backstory was me reworking it into something that really mattered, i refused to include things if they were canon to HOTD but did not have an impact on the version of the characters seen in Sonnenblumen. Aemond's eyes was something that came to me and it felt right, twisted people need their reasons no matter what time period it happens in.

You say it as many times as you like my dear, it lights me up with joy whenever i read that my work means something to you, it really does. This is my first really long project and it was something of a test to see if i could. It means a lot that you think that and if inspiration strikes me in the same way then i will have no choice but to keep on writing! xxx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen, chapter nine - Poppies, for consolation.

Masterlist

Also posted on AO3 - here.

⚘⚘⚘

 My sunflower, 

 I am writing to you on the train back to London and I shall post this before I get into the car on the other side. I hope it arrives quickly, I want you to know how much I miss you already and that I am thinking of you. I always am. 

 Mother is trying to read what I am writing through the paper, she looks vexed, though that is sort of just how she looks. She keeps making snippy comments when the silence has stretched on too long. She called you ‘headstrong’ which she meant as an insult but I am inclined to agree with her. You were wonderful, truly. No one has ever gotten under her skin like that. I will write more on this when I am alone, until then I will think about the look in your eyes when you spoke to her and smile to myself with almost hysterical glee.

 It will no doubt amuse you to know that Daeron has been singing your praises since we left school, much to mother’s chagrin. He has also been reading this (or trying to, he is struggling with my chicken scratch), over my shoulder and would like to add something. 

 ‘Dear Miss sunflower, thank you for letting me stay in your house and letting me look after Rosy bear. My hands feel much better already! Sorry that I stole your mummy’s handkerchief, it was an accident but Aegon says you wont mind. See you soon!’

 You will see that he made me try and write neater because he can’t hold the pen himself right now and his handwriting is apparently much better than mine. He really is very fond of you. Wise boy if you ask me. 

 Anyway, I will finish here, I have more I want to say but Daeron is being nosy. I should only be gone a week, and though it feels insurmountable now, it could be worse. I am going to search Aemond’s rooms for your letters when I get to the house, he is not as subtle as he likes to think. Until I hear from you, or go crazy enough to send you another letter straight away,

 Your Aegon. 

P.S. Daeron insisted on drawing

 a picture for you. It is his Tessarion

 and Rosy bear. I think. 

⚘⚘⚘

 He is right about his handwriting, it's messy as all hell and written on a complete wonk. Images of too-large jumpers and a cluttered dorm swim into your mind affectionately. Daeron’s little drawing is similarly abstract, you think you can make out Rosy bear’s ears although they are bisected harshly by a line of ink, clearly the product of the train jolting on the tracks. 

 You read it six times, cheeks stinging with the intensity of your smile.

 “Letter?” your mother pries over her morning porridge. You’re entirely too giddy to feign annoyance over her intrusion. 

 “From Aegon,” you say, flipping the page in her favour to show her briefly. Her eyes widen a touch at the length and the state of the script, when she reaches the end she raises a brow at the drawing, “and Daeron.”

 She chuckles and returns to her breakfast. There is a hint of relief in her shoulders and when you are halfway through another reading of the letter, she speaks again. “I’m glad it worked out.”

 “Me too, mum.”

 Her smile pinches a little at her eyes when you look at her, “just know that, if those are the lengths they will go to just to interfere, be wary of what else they might do.”

 You open your mouth to speak but she holds up a hand, “I am not trying to warn you off, my girl. God knows I couldn’t even if I tried. I am merely saying that some people are best held at arm's length.”

 “I am not trying to befriend Mrs Targaryen, nor Aemond,” You say sourly. The very idea of playing nice with them has you feeling that familiar burning irritation. 

 She laughs, “I think you would struggle.”

 It takes a second for you to simmer through your rage but her laughter soo has you cracking into fits of giggles too. She reaches for you and clasps your hands over the letter on the table, recovering before she speaks. “I hope you know how proud I am of you, how proud your father is too.”

 “For what?” You ask, confused. 

 She shakes her head, muttering something you cannot catch under her breath. “For sticking by him, even when you thought he had done you wrong.”

 “He needed help-” you begin.

 “And most people would not have been able to look past their pain enough to give it.” She is tracing the veins on the back of your hand like she used to do when you were a child. “Nor would they have seen how desperately he needed it in the first place.”

 You feel so very little then, like you couldn't be trusted to leave the house without wellies on if it were raining or would still instinctively reach for hand to hold when crossing the road. You are struck with a memory, one of your earliest, you pushing a tine pram around the pub with Rosy bear sitting inside. You had shown her to every person in the pub and nodded at them with an exaggerated politeness when you had bid them farewell, one of your mother’s hats falling low over your eyes. 

 Now, you can almost feel the bakelite handle in your grasp, feel the sole loose screw clicking and spinning under the side of your thumb as you lose balance on uneasy legs not yet well practiced enough for grace. 

 “I just hope he knows what a special thing you are.”

 Your finger sits on his nearly memorised letter, the lines that are worming their way into your very being. 

   “He does,” you assure her. 

 “Then I am satisfied,” she says, holding your hand the whole time it takes her to finish her porridge. 

⚘⚘⚘

 Barbara comes in on Wednesday morning, bringing pastries from the café and news that Joan is still in employment, she has a slightly stunned look on her face with that revelation. When she sits though, it morphs into a stern assessment that tells you to explain what the hell you are still doing sitting across from her on the bench that has blackened at the seam with remnant coal dust. 

 You explain what had happened, voice rising shrilly with each sardonic rise of her brow and tightening of her crossed arms. “I am going! I promise I am, that has not changed,” the dubious glint in her eyes does not diminish, “I just couldn’t, not after that. Surely you understand I couldn’t leave him or Daeron in that state.”

 “I will not watch you get stuck here because of him,” she warns. 

 “You say that like you’re trying to get rid of me,” you joke, the jibe is light but Barbara shakes her head seriously. In her bag you can see her mother’s prescription tucked in between her shopping. The brown glass bottle with its shiny white plastic lid stands out harshly against the tomatoes and beans. Your attempt at levity goes down like a lead balloon. 

 “I can’t go without him,” you tell her, voice low but serious. It is a sentiment you have not spoken aloud before yet it is a truth you have known for some time. The sound of the words hanging in the mixed air of the pub, heavy with the particles of dust and old comfort, feels so achingly solid. “Anywhere I went I would spend every moment trying to fill the space beside me that he should be taking up.”

 For a minute or so, she just stares at you, a little absent behind the eyes as her fingers dig around the thin silver christening band on her fine wrist. You squint your eyes a little and you think you can make out the delicate inscription between the tiny scrapes and dents of a lifetime of wear. The sloping italicised writing is familiar when you finally understand it, Mary Elizabeth Crillen. 

 “You love him,” she says, no question in it, just a statement of truth.

 You don’t feel the need to answer in such simple terms as yes or no. Barbara can see your reply in the very way you are. “Would you think me naïve if I told you I knew this is it for me? When he is here I think I could stay a little longer, I am not saying I will!” You add on quickly when she opens her mouth to start up again. “But sometimes, when he is here, I know that he is half of what I have been missing all this time.”

 You think she will be skeptical, think you are blindsided and foolish. Barbara has always been so logical and pragmatic, working in sureties, things that were probable and definitive. 

 And yet, “I don't think you are naïve.”

 She is as light in tone as you have ever known her, voice scraping every so lightly on her vocal chords and giving her a gentle, reverent rasp. You know she understands and it nearly kills you how much you wish it was not the pain of longing she knew but the ecstasy of hope. 

 “Barbara-”

 “Don’t, please,” she cuts you off quickly, eyes flicking to yours and head jerking in dissent. “My situation is what it is, I cannot do a thing to change it and neither can you. Yours is not the same and if you squander your chance to be buried in ground that isn’t laced with the same miseries you have spent your entire life dreaming of shaking off I will never forgive you.”

 In the time between your eyes meeting and the seriousness dropping into your stomach, it takes all you have not to sob. For her and for yourself and the impossibility still of leaving your parents behind. 

 “Do not let yourself down,” she says finally. 

 “I-,” you start, choking a little, “I won’t, Barbara.”

 “Promise me,” she demands. Behind your blinking eyes, a visage of a gangly girl with legs too long and eyes too dark flickers in your mind, how she used to sit on the ground of the little school courtyard with the backs of her legs going red and speckled with imprints of concrete just because Mary liked to spend hours plaiting and unplaiting her thick dark hair. You can still remember the severity beyond age in her voice when she had shaken your hand on a promise to send her a postcard from Paris one day. 

 “I promise.”

 She nods and finally tears the corner off of her flaky croissant, the little scraps of pastry tumbling across the willow print plate you fetched her from the kitchen. 

 “You could hire someone to-” 

 She says your name quietly, with all the gravity of a fallen tombstone. “I know how you are, it is what makes you so brilliant, but you can’t fix this. One day it will be okay, but if I wish for that day to come any sooner than it is supposed to I would be a horrible person.”

 The horrible vision of someone living their life for someone else sends a cold fissure of dread down your spine and you feel selfish for being upset on her behalf. 

 “Okay,” you say simply. 

 The ale pumps shine in the yellow overhead lights and one of them is being hit at such an angle that it tweaks in the corner of your vision. 

 “Mary wants to be a chemist in Manchester, it’s not so far from here and she will be done with at St. Andrews in a few years.” She slips in her delicacy when she stirs her tea, spoon clanging against the side. “The leading professor of mathematics at the university says I show a lot of promise.”

 There lies her hope, bare and obvious in the tiny smile at the side of her red painted lips. Living for an eventuality. 

 “Of course you do, you have a mind beyond what I can even comprehend.” You really mean it, she is wickedly intelligent. She used to run laps around the sweet old teacher who did maths in the upper half of the village school. 

 Barbara goes a little pink in the cheeks and you smile, it isn’t that she is insecure about her mind rather that it is the only compliment you could pay her that would really mean anything.

 “Yes, well, it is not for certain but…”

 “It’s something,” you finish for her and she nods down at her plate. 

 Across the room, the swinging door to the back of the bar flaps in a great swish of air. The clock is nearing eleven and the old group will be in soon, days unfilled with the mentalities of work and labour they surrender themselves to the familiarities of each other's old stories and mournful jokes. There is a thinly worn patch of the carpet at the corner of the bar where they congregate, a bit of the faded red and green floral repetition that had given way to a threadbare glimpse of the beige threads and glue holding it to the floorboards. A testament to monotony.

 When Barbara goes, she tells you she will be back later with Joan and Marlene, if her husband will look after Elsie for the evening, you agree and let her go with a weight still stretching between the two of you. The little pills in her back rattle as she walks to the door and the sound seems to clamour louder when the door has shut behind her.

⚘⚘⚘

 My dear sunflower,

 Bad news. I hate to start my letter like this but it is all I can think of. I am not hurt, do not worry about that, but I will not be coming back up before the hols. Daeron will, he was only given a week's suspension but they gave me two and it was decided that it would be ‘for the best’ if I did not return for the week and a half before school breaks up. I fought like hell, I want you to know that. I didn’t know what else to do, I do not want to be there but I want to be here even less. 

 Otto smacked me and I left it for a while but I am going to keep trying. I am also going to send your Christmas present with this, since I am not sure I will be able to give it to you myself anytime soon. I hope you like it. 

 I have been spending time with Helaena now that I am here, she asks for stories about you when we are sitting under the tree in the garden. She likes that I call you what I do, she likes the sound of you very much. She and I planted some sunflower seeds down the end of the garden, she says they will only take a few weeks to bloom then I can watch them from my window and think of you when they dance in the sunlight. 

 I miss you, I have been keeping your last letter in my pocket since it arrived and I take it out to read every time the distance starts to itch at my joints. I am still looking for your others, I will find them, it is about all I am thinking of in the quiet moments alone. 

 I look forward to hearing from you, you cannot know how nice it is to be sure you will write again. nor how miraculous it is that I am sure at all.

 Your Aegon

P.S. I wrote the notes many moons ago

 but I have not changed them, I still mean

Every word.

⚘⚘⚘

 His second letter arrived a week and a half after he left you. You know, by now, that Daeron is back at the school. A fact that haunts you as you try to sleep every night, but Aegon is still down in London, still further than you can reach him. Even after so little time, the worry is creeping on you at the tone of his letter. 

You stare at the door still, on Wednesdays and Fridays when he should be there but isn’t. It is not that you think he is going to be just that you cannot stop searching for him when he is not around. The Easter holidays are a week away when it comes and you feel a bit of dread at the thought of not seeing him for another month still. 

 It arrives mid-morning, the postie lugging it with a thick parcel wrapped in brown paper, the two bound together with a looping white string tied in a haphazard bow. You read the letter first, though that creeping excitement of a present itches at you and reminds you of your birthdays as a little girl. How you would open your cards first, saving the biggest present for last always. 

 The paper is waxy under your fingers and you prise the shiny sellotape from it in a line of scraping paper that leaves behind an imprint of a perforated edge. It is not wrapped neatly, too much paper wrapped around the object itself that it takes you a few minutes to get into it as you fiddle around on the creased yellow sheets of your unmade bed. 

 It gives way to an unassuming grey cover with a white cotton binding on the spine. You find the lettering of the title is depressed when your fingers skirt on the dull roughness of the paper finish, ‘The story of art in photographs’. The words themselves spike excitement in you but when you open the cover your heart leaps.

 ‘Merry Christmas sunflower, one day I will take you to see every work in this book but, for now, this will have to do.’ 

 Over the page you turn to a photograph of a crouching Hellenistic statue of Aphrodite. She is beautiful and feminine in a raw way, her pose highlighting the folds of the curve of her abdomen and the deep setting of her absentminded eyes. It is the margin of the page that catches your eye though.

 His messy handwriting coats the glossy page in a dull matte of blue ink, your fingernails change pitch when it crosses the border between the two. ‘I see you in the look in her eyes, the way you looked at me when I first told you about my family.”

 It stuns you nearly to death, you feel your heart stop and stutter back into rhythm. You read and re-read the message. When you slide your finger between the pages to flip to the next it slides with uncomfortable speed against your cuticle in a close warning of a papercut. 

 The next is a photograph of the Caryatids of the Acropolis, the draped women forever holding up a roof that crumbled thousands of years ago. They catch your mind as they always have, a timeless companionship stretching between you and them. Then you see it, lining the grey border of the photograph, ‘You would fit among them, with your blazing strength. I would hold Athens up for you, when I see them I think you would for me too.’

 And so it continues, an almost hysterical searching of the shiny blank edges of the photographs for his words. Each page reveals a different version of yourself that he has played witness to and somehow, every version is the person you had seen in yourself when you had first seen each painting. 

 The way Constanza Trenta reaches for her husband, even in death, in ‘the Arnolfini portrait’, ‘how his hand looks for hers in the air, it is how I always feel when you are further than I can reach.’

 "Something in the pearl makes me think of your face, I do not know exactly what but I think it is how you shine against the darkness,” is written on the page of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the pearl earring’.

 Every little note sends you into a deeper spiral and you have to run the harsh knit of your cardigan under your eyes to stop the fat tears from splashing onto the beautiful pages. You follow a path of his perception of you like it was a painting of your face done in his hand. You have never been so touched in your life, so bowled over by feeling. 

 You love him and you haven’t told him yet. You love him and he sees you in the water of Monet’s painting of the Thames. You love him and he is reminded of the bones of your spine when he looks at Egon Schiele’s sketches of the human form. You love him and he is not here. You love him and he is miles away and you are worried sick that he is hardly okay. 

 ⚘⚘⚘

 My dear sunflower, 

 I am so glad you liked the book, it has brought me joy to think of you happy. I am glad of that at least. I miss you terribly and the flowers at the end of the garden are still only stems. I have been spending a lot of time in my mother’s little gallery room, no one ever goes in there unless she is hosting and the privacy is nice. I know it would make you sad to think of the paintings not being looked at all so I have been going in there to think of you. 

 I do not want to be here anymore, it's been three weeks and I cannot do another four. I know I cannot. I hope you do not think I am weak for that. Last night I snuck out after supper and walked until I got lost. It was an embarrassingly short amount of time and it took me nearly an hour to find my way home. Knowing you and seeing how big the world is through your eyes has made me glaringly aware of how little mine is, just how much there is that I have not seen because I haven’t pushed against the walls I have been put in here enough. It is not your fault, do not think it is a bad thing, but I feel so claustrophobic here now. More so than before, I used to want to leave because I didn’t like it and I wanted to get away from Otto and my mother, not have to watch my father decaying at the dinner table. Now I struggle to sleep because I have this irrational notion that the walls are going to cave in on me and trap me in the rubble forever. 

 Am I going mad, do you think? Sorry if I am and you are being subjected to my nutty ramblings. I think if I did lose it I know I would hallucinate you here with me, and sometimes I long for that in a way that frightens me. 

 I made Aemond give me your letters, I could not find them for the life of me. I am so sorry he did what he did, your words were so beautiful and it hurts to read your pain at his hands. I miss you sunflower, I miss feeling like a real person instead of a shade of failure. 

 Sorry that this is such a miserable letter, I will be okay, I do not want you worrying. Daeron is back now and he and I have been playing knights in the garden where Mother won’t shout at us for the racket. It takes my mind off things a bit, seeing him so happy. 

 I hope to see you in my dreams so that I may touch you again and hear your voice. I do not know what else to say other than I miss you, so I will leave here before you think I really have gone barmy. 

Your Aegon

⚘⚘⚘

 It is that letter that is your final straw. You are standing behind the bar with your father when it arrives and he seems to sense the worry coursing through your blood, he looks at you with concern. The pub is fairly quiet given the hour, the dull thunk of darts hitting the board and the low and easy conversation of the older men. 

 “I need to go to him,” you say to him. He has a rag over his shoulder and it sags with his shoulders when your words hit him, like he knew this was coming. He looks worried too.

 “When?” Is all he asks and you appreciate that. He knows you will go, he would not try to stop you but you know he knows this is the beginning of your absence. 

 “There will be a train tomorrow morning,” you say simply and he nods. 

 “Go and tell your mum, she will want to help you pack.” He jerks his head to the door to the flat and you fold Aegon’s letter carefully into your pocket. You do not say it but there is not much packing to be done, you have been existing in a state of transience for the last few weeks with your suitcases only relieved of the clothes you have been wearing and your daily things. Your summer dresses are still neatly folded, probably deeply creased into their tightly packed shapes. 

 You just hadn’t been able to unpack them. When Aegon and Daeron had been taken back with their mother you had sat on the floor before them, the metal clasps digging into your fingers, but you had not been able to open the largest of them. The thought of putting all your clothes back into your dresser and pinning your pictures to the wall again felt like such a betrayal. So, you have lived like a visitor in your own bedroom and you have slept with your eyes on the half packed bags since that night. 

Your mother does indeed want to help though, and she sits patiently as you iron your travelling suit and hang it on the back of the wardrobe door, pulling tiny bits of inconsequential lint from it with your nails. 

 “Does he know you are going?”

  You shake your head and she gives you a look, not of concern but something closer to intrigue. You pass her the letter from him and watch her eyes narrow and her face pinch in a grimace as she reads. “I am not waiting a week for permission I know will be granted, not when I do not know exactly how he is.”

 She seems to understand and helps you tuck your ‘Sonnenblume’ into your scrapbook. The space that is left on the wall feels unshakably permanent and you trace the dark square of unbleached wallpaper in bed that night. 

 When you put on your travelling suit the next morning, the tailored jacket top with its light flare at the bottom holds you like an embrace and you delight in the way the navy skirt swishes against your legs. You feel terribly grown up in it, your back straighter and your hands moving more deliberately like when you had first been allowed to paint your nails. 

 Of course, you have thought of how it would feel before, many times since you realised that the feeling that festered in your bones had only one cure. However, the practice is different than you realised it would. 

 April’s early sun is soft as down on your face and a frenetic anticipation tickles in unstoppable movement between your joints. Your father has your two big cases and your mother has the littlest one in one hand and is holding yours in her other. The powder blue of the cases shines happily in the light of day, bright plastic handles gleaming. You are sandwiched between the two of them on the thin field path that cuts through to the station. 

 A spike of raw, beautiful excitement leaps in your chest at the sight of the station’s black and white sign and you lag behind in bold faced disbelief as everything hits you properly. You have not been this far before, standing so close always felt like too much of a temptation and a teasing for you to venture so far. What you did not expect having to reckon with is the strange sadness that washes over you like a chill on the breeze, a preemptive longing for your parents and familiarity. It does not sting even nearly enough to make you think about staying but it is there, just a dull little ache between your organs. 

 Your mum's hand pulls tight in yours as she keeps on walking, they both turn back to you and you give a little embarrassed laugh at the way your eyes spark with close tears. The hairs on your arms are standing on end with excitement.

 They pull you into a hug between them, suitcases sitting prettily among the green grass. 

 “Once it is all sorted, you have the most fun. Okay, my girl?” Your father says, arms tightening around you. His voice is a bit choked and you fight a swelling wave of emotion, nodding into him. 

 Your mum is crying outright, sobbing into your arm. “I will be back mum,” you insist with a watery voice. 

 She shakes her head and pulls back to pat you on the cheek, “this time.”

 It could very easily be seen as her pressuring you not to go but you know her better than that. You do not have a response, just a slightly sad and knowing smile which she smothers by pulling you back in again.

 They walk you onto the platform and help you put your bags onto the train. The platform is nondescript with its brown wooden shelter and little old seller who looks surprised to see anyone there when you go to buy your ticket. The sun beats off the shiny red train like glowing stained glass.

 “You’re sure you know where you’re going when you get there?” Your father asks as you poke your hand through the carriage’s window to squeeze his one more time. 

 “As well as I possibly could,” you assure him, thumbing the slip of paper with his address that he had given you all those months ago in your pocket. If you kept a cigarette case of sentimentalities it would be on the top of the stack always, close enough that you could take it out to trace his handwriting from time to time. 

  “And you will send us a letter when you are all sorted?” Asks your mum, reaching for you too as the train starts to clatter into motion. You hold onto them for as long as you can before they are pulled from your reach. 

 “As soon as I can.” They both nod and start to wave you away. You call after them, “I love you!”

 “We love you too!” Their voices are half swallowed by the receding steam and screeching wheels but you hang out the window until the borders of the station are stolen from your vision all the same. 

 In the green velvet carriage, you sit down, a bizarre buzz of silence tingling at you. You are still sure of yourself and your decision but it is one thing to plan and another entirely to be sitting on a train bound for a place you have dreamed of for years. 

 As the view out the window blurs with the speeding engine, you open the window and breathe in deeply. There is a stream of chimney smoke bleeding past the window and this time, as it fills your lungs, it smells like excitement. 

⚘⚘⚘

 London feels like a different country entirely when you step off the train. You thought you might be wearied by the journey when you finally arrived, nearly six hours on the trains and three changes from station to station, the distance stretching between you here and home is another weight on your shoulders. However, you can’t seem to find the burden in it now, just fervent anticipation at being so very close. 

 The station is busier than you have ever known any place to be, paths of every direction forged by men in suits with dripping umbrellas and women with herds of little children. You get swept up in watching it all for a minute, standing near the ticket gate with your bags tugging your shoulders half out of their sockets. It feels oddly calming, being so still among such movements. You feel like the viewer in Boccioni’s ‘the city rises’, observant to a cloud of sound and colour and unstoppable life. 

 Through the station, you carry yourself like a lighthouse, head circling to every angle in an attempt to capture a permanence of some kind, something in this that you can revisit when life gets too quiet when you inevitably return home. 

 Outside, a porter in a navy cap and uniform kindly puts you into a black taxi, rain sluicing off its sides and down the windows and doors in an interminable cascade. It is bizarre, watching the droplets chase each other down your watery reflection when it had been so hopefully warm back home. 

 The city blurs outside in a mirage like haze of colourful shop fronts, people in beautiful clothes and quick paced life. What a dreadful hurry everyone seems to be in. 

 “I apologise for the hold up, Miss. You know how it is when it’s tipping it down, everyone thinks they are made of sugar.” The diver’s accent is thick, you think it must be cockney though you are not quite sure. The thing is, you don’t know how it is. You’ve seen miners trudging home in rain so thick it pulls the coal from their skin and washes into the grass at the roadside. You laugh anyway, because the dichotomy is blinding and it tickles you to be included. 

 “It’s quite alright, I’m in no rush. Besides, I am enjoying the view.” You catch his eyes in the rearview mirror, he is an older gentleman with hair greying in his brows. His eyes twinkle with amusement and smile at him. 

 “You don’t sound like you're from around these parts. First time in jolly London?” He asks and you find his innocent question funny in the way that he acts as though he is not curious. 

 “Yes, it is. I am visiting a friend,” you say, though it feels wrong to describe Aegon in such a way. He is so very much more than just your friend, no word seems right to capture what he is to you though. 

 “Must be a very fancy friend living in Kensington, if you don’t mind my saying so,” he tacks on the last part in a bit of a rush, as if worried he might offend you. 

 “I think you might be right,” he raises his eyebrows and you explain, “I have never been to see him before, you see. In all honesty, I do not know what I should be preparing myself for.”

 That makes him chuckle, “A shiny white townhouse by the address, quite a large one I should think.”

 You alight the picture negative of your bague conjuring of the Targaryen house with his description, they align like different angles of the same shot. “That sounds about right, though I am sure it will still surprise me.”

 He nods and turns back to the traffic, the roads have quieted a little with distance put between you and the station, the passers by growing more sharply dressed. You watch a woman in a tight white dress clipping through the rain in heels of impressive height, a man beside her carries an umbrella aloft above her quaffed hair. 

 “This fella a good friend of yours?” the cabbie asks. 

 “Something like that,” you offer and his lips quirk at your evasiveness that absolutely gives the game up. 

 “Well, I hope you have a good stay, Miss,” he bids as he slows right down in front of a gleaming terrace of white stone, bejeweled with neat black metal fences and front doors in glossy reds and blues. You are glad then for your travelling suit, a mast of tightly tailored manners to wear into batter. Everyone needs an armour of sorts, you wear yours in the sharp darts at your hips and hide away your sorts and bombs between the shoes in your suitcases. 

 The driver takes your bags to the door and parts with a nod, you return with a smile and a wave. His car starts up behind you and your knocking is underscored by the lowering hum of his motor. 

The doors swing open after the whir has faded, revealing a portly old man with ruddy cheeks and a suspicious glare.

 “Good afternoon,” you greet brightly. Your smile is not returned. 

 “Can I help you?” he asks, eyes on your bags stacked next to you on the step.

 “Yes, thank you. Is Aegon home?”

 If possible, his eyes narrow further, “Master Targaryen is at home.”

 You can tell he is being intentionally evasive. No matter. “Could you fetch him for me?”

 “And whom might I say is calling?”

 You smile at him again, playing your own turn at evasiveness. “Just tell him it’s his sunflower, he will understand.”

The man nods curtly, shutting the door in your face once again. Left alone, you step back from the house to look up. There is something a little frightening about the long stretching façade of the street, for a building clearly some hundred years old or more, the stone sparkles like new. The black paint on the wrought iron stair rails and balconettes has nary a chip in it. 

 This lack of weathering is strangely off putting. There should be a grime of living and age in everything. 

 Compared to the surroundings you have left behind, the houses on this road are downright clinical, polished white teeth giving you a mocking, condescending smile. Greying straw in old thatched roofs and wooden benches green with lichen play in your mind. 

The door bangs open suddenly, framing a dishevelled Aegon. “Sunflower!” He is wide eyed with disbelief, sweeping you into an all consuming hug which lifts you clean off the floor. “How are you here?”

 He pulls back to cup for face between his hands, as if checking you are real.

 “You told me I ought to come and visit, I thought I would take you up on it. Though, if I am an imposition I can get a hotel-”

 “Don’t be silly, this is the loveliest surprise. You have no idea how happy I am to see you.” There is a jubilant relief in his tone and you feel a pang of concern at the pain peeking out from behind his joy. 

 “I think I might have some idea,” you say, lightness burning through you in increasing waves of magnitude. 

 The moment of harmonious happiness is broken with the clearing of a throat. The butler has your bags in his hands and a disapproving look on his face. “Where might I be taking these, sir?”

 “The yellow room, please Miller, nearest my mother’s gallery.” The older gentleman nods, leaving with a final narrowing of his eyes. 

When his form has disappeared up the stairs, you whisper to Aegon, “He seems a right miserable sod.”

Aegon cackles, kissing you squarely on the lips. It feels like exuberance and tastes like relief. “Come in, I’ll give you a tour if you want? Though, you’re probably too tired…”

 You shoot him a glare, “of course I’m not too bloody tired.”

 He grins and pulls you in by the hand. 

 The moment you get past the door, you are covered in a hush like entering a cathedral, a clocheing like someone has their hands over your ears. A feeling of being alone and watched at the same time. Every step you take bounces off your patent leather shoes and up the walls, licking across the ceiling and back into your ears. Aegon is barefoot and you think it might be for that very reason.

 A great staircase curls into the impossibly high ceiling, its polished bannister adorned with geometric decorations in painted wood. Your eyes twist after it as Aegon starts to speak again.

 “You’ve come at a good time, Mother is in town with Otto and they won’t be back till supper,” he says as he drags you into a cavernous living room, though, you’re not sure how much living actually goes on in here. There is not a speck of dust anywhere, and each chair, however beautiful in their cohesive, art-deco glory, seems placed at a certain and precise angle. 

 Every piece in the room is beautiful, sun beam like decorations in rich wood on the backs of the sofas and corresponding greens and blues linking each fabric in the room. Yet something is off. For all the art-deco beauty, the room feels like a subsidisation of the movement. Like a veneer on ply board posing as solid oak, it lacks the weight.

 You have a book at home on modernism and art deco, it has always been one of your favourites. Something about the period has fascinated you since you first read about it, about the wild art scene in Berlin and the conveyance of pain and misery through the art. You should be excited by everything you see here but it leaves you feeling empty and angry in a way. 

 For a period defined by such deep feeling, perhaps the sharpest in human history, modernism has always been fascinatingly melancholic to you. The décor in the Targaryen house is so obscured from that message it looks like a caricature. Aegon had said his grandfather came here after the war, that his family had, if anything, benefitted from the conflict because of the deal made to produce uniforms for the army. 

 The room reeks of that lack of understanding and a burning desire to assimilate. None of the usual sorrows play this room in their eternal shows on the raised piano stage. There is no vestige of the desperate grasp for vivacious pleasure in the face of incomprehensible loss, no guttural guilt at being alive to see another day only to drink it away in a frenzied dance. No, this room is nothing more than a farce, and it is ugly and rotten for the gall it has to pretend to understand. 

 Room after room follows the same pattern, too neat, too cold and far, far too big. Aegon flits around the mausoleum, pointing things out like they were headstones of long forgotten relatives.

 What strikes you most is the complete lack of human presence, no one has left so much as an indent on a dining chair and you begin to understand that night with the handkerchief more. How the evidence of anyone is something to be cleared away quickly by an unseen maid once they have left the room. You poke your fingertip onto the shining top of a side table as you leave the dining room in spite, relishing the visage of the spiralling print left behind.

 He takes you up the stairs, waxing poetic about the times he had ridden them down on his mattress because he knew it would wind his mother up  something awful. 

 The upper hall is wide and lit coldly by the late afternoon sun that pours in from a blue and white stained window at the end. Every door is shut tight and you follow him down the shut off maze until he turns you down a shut off corridor. He looks at you cheekily and knocks on the first door on the left, the sound echoes and fills the silence as Aegon holds a finger over his lips. 

 The door opens and you look down to see Daeron kneeling on the floor in front of an open book, he looks up and yelps when he sees you, jumping at you with his whole weight. “Miss sunflower!”

 With arms full of the little boy and the hand of the man you love steadying you between your shoulder blades, you feel the cold of the house chased back a little. You kiss Daeron’s soft hair as he babbles on about the first week of his holiday, the highlight of which being his first loose tooth which he pulls back to wiggle proudly.

 “Oh! How exciting!” you exclaim and he nods happily.

 Aegon snickers behind you, “I told him how Davey took my first tooth out and he thinks I am going to do it to him now.”

 Daeron yelps, “I won’t let you! I won’t”

 You turn to him, his maniacally smiling face calming some of the worry in your heart. “Don’t tell me-”

 “Tied it to the door handle and kicked it shut,” he nods proudly and Daeron hides behind you fully, hands over his ears and a low sound of fear coming from his mouth. 

“Good god,” you say, hand over your mouth. 

 “It was wicked, I got blood on Mrs Thompson's cream carpet and we spent the night in the cold shed but we couldn’t stop laughing.” His eyes pinch, fond somehow despite the darkness, “I did not tell him about that bit.”

 “What is going on?” Comes a fine voice from down the hall, it would startle you if it weren’t so soft. You look down the row of doors to see a girl just younger than you standing with a hand around her wrist. Daeron stops his panicky sound and runs to her. 

 “Helaena, come and meet Miss sunflower!” He demands, taking her wrist and dragging her towards you. She is beautiful in a fragile way, a stiff breeze would bowl her clean over and she seems to almost float across the floor instead of walking. Funnily enough, she is exactly how you expected her to be and you smile in greeting. 

 She has a shining gemstone in her hand and she looks you over before she does anything. Perceptive lilac eyes swimming in the space around you before meeting yours. 

“I have heard a lot about you.” Her voice lilts gently, intonation a little different that normal parlance. “You look like a sunflower.”

 It is a funny thing to say and you don’t quite know what she means but it makes you smile nonetheless. “Thank you,”

 She just nods, putting the rock into your hand and closing your fist over it. The clear purple is the same as her eyes, as Aegon’s and Daeron’s and it is warmed by her touch. 

 “Come and read me your tenses,” she says to her little brother, he protests but when Aegon mimes tying a string around his tooth he bolts in front of her. You laugh brightly. It is a kind act of tact from Helaena, as much as you have been looking forward to meeting her and seeing Daeron again, you cannot let more time go without making sure Aegon is okay. 

 “We will see them later for supper,” he assures you and his smile turns cheeky “I believe there is a gallery you might be interested in.”

 He pulls you back into the main upper hand and down to a room in the middle, when he opens the door, shooting you a broad grin, you nearly yell with excitement and slip through the door in front of him. This room is unlike the others, the walls are plain blue and there is no furniture, just rows of neatly hung paintings on the walls which hum with importance. 

 You can hardly believe what you are seeing, Picasso’s sketches just like Aegon had said the first time you met him, a richly moody Turner that stops your heart, a river scene in sharp coloured oils by Constable. Other names jump in your mind with familiarity that startles you and you are breathing shallowly as you take in the twenty or so works. 

 You stop in front of a small canvas, a pensive young woman in a field under a dark sky, her skin translucent in a way that could only have been the hand of Millais. You are in front of it for some time before you feel Aegon’s presence behind you, the warmth of him hanging in the scant space between you. His voice is low when he speaks, laced with trepidation, “I am scared you are going to disappear if I look away from you.”

 It breaks your heart to hear how sure he sounds that you might not be real, and you turn to meet his unblinking gaze. “I am here Aegon, I’m not going anywhere. I promise I am real.”

 “Well, you would say that…”

 You kiss him, tenderly and slowly. Hands in his hair and twisted in his loose shirt. He melts into you and the way he holds you is as much a hug as it is a sigh of relief. He kisses your cheeks and your eyebrows and your temples in frenzied succession and you laugh. 

“Mother is going to be furious,” he says, a little bit gleeful. 

“I find I do not care much,” you say and Aegon dances around you with untameable giddiness. 

 Later, when you have snuck down the corridor to his room and tucked yourself between his sheets, you will ask him if he is alright and you will hold him while he cries because he is not. You will chase away the cold and the emptiness of the house as best you can and you will find a phone book and make good on the promise you made yourself when the thought first popped into your head. When he knows you are not a dream you will tell him how much you love him. Right now though, you laugh with him and kiss him freely and openly, holding onto the untouched happiness before anyone can try and scrape it out of your hands. 

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Happy Friday dearest readers! I apologise for this going up a little later than six but I had some final edits to make. I really hope you enjoy it, I love writing letters and I was waiting to reveal the belated Christmas gift to you all week. Thoughts and comments are always appreciated. All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

@neithriddle

[hardyshoe]

Love love love characters that present themselves as emotionally open social butterflies but the more you see of them the more obvious it is that they’re the most closed off fuckers in the story. Sure, they want to help you with your personal problems and messy emotions, but if you turn that shit back on them, they’ll shut down or deflect every time. Why are you sticking your nose in their business anyway? It’s not like it matters. They’re not a person, they’re just a role being played. They’re the guy who fixes things and saves people. Please ignore the man behind the mask, he’s fine. Everything’s fine.

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen, chapter eight - Irises, for hope.

Masterlist.

Also posted on AO3 - here.

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 Blinding watery light lances through the strands of his hair like fine threads of golden silk. He is compelling even as he shakes like a winter leaf, it is not from the cold though, despite the wicked chill from the breeze. 

 No, his hands are buried deep in the pockets of his new jacket, now worn over his baggy blue cords and a jumper of your fathers that ought to look silly with how big it is but manages to swallow his frame in a beautiful way. 

In the ten minutes since the two of you have reached the little hill at the end of the far fields he has not said a word and neither have you. Every so often, his mouth will open like it is about to begin only for him to choke on his words. You are giving him time, you know you are asking something of him which he has never had to give before and you will wait here until you both freeze into the landscape if that is what he needs. 

From here, you can see the town stretching back in the distance, smoke pluming from chimneys and rising to bleed into the sparse clouds. Beyond the little village and the tacked on pre-fabs at the edge, hills of coal churn from the earth and black blooms on the horizon. It is a sight you are not fond of, sometimes you think you wouldn’t feel nearly so claustrophobic if it weren’t for the mines.there has always been something about the darkness and the depth that has played an ominous tune in your nerves. Perhaps it is the eyes of the men who spend so long down there that daytime is unfamiliar and so much as firelight chimes in their retinas like an assault. The unnatural disquiet of that sits in the back of your neck with an all-consuming dread that makes you feel almost ill. 

 Now though, that horrid, morbid curiosity ensnares you and you cannot take your eyes from the sooty gash in the earth. Not even when the bottom drops from your stomach at the distant mechanical whine of the coal belt turning. A clustered group of starlings fly en masse at the sound and you watch them make for the south with envy. A moment of perfect stillness lingers when their cracking wings have been silenced by the horizon. 

 “I don’t know where to start, there’s so much just…” He pushes his hands out in his pockets and you understand. The weight of it is heavier than steel. 

 You're about to reassure him that it is okay if his thoughts come out in a jumble when he goes on. 

 “My mother doesn’t sleep.” The words are definitive yet bear an edge of apprehension, a funny twang of his tongues passing unfamiliarity with the expression of the thoughts. “In my whole life I have never seen her asleep.”

 He digs his ankles harshly as he can into the frozen hillside and you feel him ground himself. You lay a hand upon the crisp blades of grass between him and you, the solid fibres giving way, almost instantly, to melting softness as the almost imperceptible warmth of your hands break them down to a thawed retreat. The cold stings and your skin whitens with numbness as imprints of the fine blades dig deep into you but your offering remains resolute. This you have given, and so it shall remain. 

 “She has these migraines, though I am not entirely convinced they are actually medical, and she would retreat to her rooms for days on end, even before I was sent away,” he says, that familiar inevitable regret creeping on him. “But she was never sleeping even then.”

 A hand emerges from a pocket quickly to rake through his hair, pulling light-gilded strands away from his pink skin. “I think that’s why she’s the way she is, always so close to irritation and anger.”

 “Why does she not-” you begin the ask, so bewildered by the place he has chosen to start you cannot help yourself. 

 “My father,” he cuts, voice edging with a roughness. “They don’t love each other, he might have felt that way for her once and she used to be far better at pretending but it was always quite obvious, I think she is terrified of him deep down.”

 A magpie drops in a bombing dive from the sky to settle onto the field before you, close enough to see the bands of green and blue laced through its feathers but too far to see the worms it is pecking for. The wind blows a great gust as the little bird is snatched, ever so briefly, from the soil. Your untaken hand twitches against the ground. 

 “I don’t know if you remember how I said I was only sort of the oldest when I first told you about my siblings but that is the root of most of it. My older sister was the daughter of my father’s first wife, she died in childbirth when Rhaenyra was about fourteen and she was never deemed to be an adequate heir to the business because she was a girl. The family’s money comes from the cotton mills we own out in East of Europe, Bulgaria, Serbia, places like that.”

 He takes his hands from his pockets to start running the strips of the corduroy of his trousers with his short thumbnail. “The family were relatively wealthy in that venture for a good few centuries, tracing back from some ancestral merchant who was chummy with the renaissance Calimala and Seta guilds.” It all comes out with a waft of scorn and jaded mockery. “And it got built up over the years until the factories were given the seal by some Serbian royal and it became somewhat of an empire.”

 The magpie tips its head back in a jerking motion, an unseen bit of prey choked down. “Then the tensions started rising at the start of the century and my grandfather saw an opportunity in the promise of a war, made a deal with the army and had their uniforms in production throughout the war until the Austro-Hungarian empire fell and things got…difficult out there.”

 A wail of wind laps around the hill and finds fleeting refuge in the folds of your coat, pushing the fabric against your skin harshly before retreating. 

 “So, the business was moved and the empire expanded over the British Isles thanks to a deal made with the Hightower family, landed opportunists in a sticky situation at the end of the war thanks to the death of all their young men. Otto Hightower has been my father’s financial advisor for the entire time he has been running the business, he helped my grandfather run it too though I never met him.”

 Hands pinked from the cold return to pockets, leather squeaks quietly at the movement. “Otto is a cunt. He plays with people and situations to sort everyone else’s lives into things that benefit him. When my father’s first wife died, Otto saw that he knew he needed to remarry so a successor could be produced.”

 He motions to himself sardonically. “So, Otto pulled his strings and the decision was made and his daughter married my father when she was freshly sixteen.”

 Cold and icy disgust forges a path through your veins but you do not look at him. Your own feelings at the idea of that twisted union are not his to defend or agree with. He is the product of that, no matter how he feels about it, and you will not for a second have him thinking that you are disgusted with him by extension. 

 “It drove my sister off the rails, or at least was the catalyst. They had been best friends and within a year her companion had become her step mother, birthing her replacement and falling pregnant again.” His boots are filthy, he keeps wedging them deeper and deeper into the ground and the ends of his loosely tied laces have begun to cake mud in flimsy stalagmites. “I will warn you now, this is the bit where it gets filthy.”

 Still you do not speak, despite the want to question how what you have already heard is not the worst of it. You know, clear as his damage skirts his silhouette, that it takes a lot more than an immoral marriage to create his situation. 

 “Rhaenyra, from what I have been told, though I am not sure how well my mother can be trusted as a source on the matter, then ran off with my father’s brother.”

 That does shock a sound from you, unbidden. Breaking beyond the barriers of your control, too grim to comprehend. 

 He huffs a sickened and ghostly crumpling of a laugh. “I know, trust me. It is foul and it caused a massive scandal in the papers at the time. Unfortunately, it was not the first instance of such a case in my family, just the first since we had moved to England. This look is not normal.”

 He gestures to his hair and his eyes, the stark paleness of his skin. It is funny trying to look at those most beautiful features of his through this new lens he has affixed to your corneas. You cannot find them ugly no matter how defiled they ought to be given their roots. A new understanding falls into your mind at his discomfort in his own skin, the baggy clothes, unstyled hair and just the general unwillingness to draw attention to his unusual features. You can see how he wears their cause in his constant bouncing of his leg and the way he pulls his sleeves down over the fine skin of his wrists where the blue of his veins bleed underneath like ink. 

 And still he is beautiful. The most beautiful thing you have ever known, because he smiles with lips inbred to pinch with disapproval, flashes mischief across his teeth where they should know only sneering rejection. His hair is unkempt from his constant messing and his eyes glimmer an openness that must be the product of a mutation because there is nothing but honesty in the way he looks at you, always. 

 You want to say all of this and more, but this is not the moment. Too much is still to come off of his chest and you are not going to stand in the way of his unburdening. You can tell him he is lovely when he knows you mean it in spite of all that you know.

 He goes on, voice steadying to a tone of slightly unnerving stillness, continuing on how every step had been taken to remedy the reputation of the family in the following years. How his being sent away likely would not have been deemed so necessary if it was not for the constant fixation on fixing what had been left in tatters by a scorned daughter and an uncle craving more than was afforded to him by birthright. 

 The winds almost harmonises with him after a while, rising in speed and whistle when he talks sharply of the way he was treated before he was sent away, ebbing down to a gentle gust when he tells you about how Helaena used to put an insect on his fingertip and coax it to walk the entire length of his arm just to make him sit still. 

 He recalls his time spent evacuated again, dwindling again on his unfounded guilt at leaving when he was forced too. This time though, he takes you back on the train with him and lives his uncertain return to his family as well.

 “They didn’t understand why I was upset, thought me ungrateful for not being overjoyed at the prospect of being with them again. Otto in particular, was vocal about how little he approved of the way I was acting. But I missed Davey, they wouldn’t let me talk about him or about what had happened to me with the Thompsons. I told them he was my brother once and my mother slapped me round the face. Told me ‘you have a brother, he is not a dirty boy with no brains.’”

 In your faceless graveyard, a crack draws heavy across the stone floor, a flame licks through the gap with the promise of more and gnashes at the feet of the inhabitants above. Otto’s feet are scalded and blister harshly. The shadow of his face is too indistinct to show any feeling.

 “And I used to go to bed every single night and think about Davey’s kitchen, make a version of it from all the bits he told me. Blue checked oilcloth on the table, yellow flowers on the walls. He had a photograph of his parents in his suitcase, used to tuck it on the windowsill between us when we watched the fields at night. It was a blurry photo, it had ‘Joan and Fred Spinnet, 7th of June 1932’ written on the back and it was just them at the civic hall on their wedding day, and they were smiling and looking at each other…”

 He trails off and swallows on a choking breath. “And my parents have never looked at each other that way, I knew then that they never would. So I would lie in my bed and I would think about how Davey’s parents would probably hug me goodnight just like he did, and that they wouldn’t shout at me if I made a mistake and it was like knowing I had been robbed of something. You cannot live normally with that knowledge.”

 It is almost overwhelming how desperately you want to wrap him in yourself. Such a helpless feeling rises up your back like a creeping ghost, it sits in your throat and stings with the tears that drop from your eyes. They burn when they roll down your frozen cheeks. You hand clenches around freezing air. 

 You do not think you will ever be able to shake the little boy crying in a too-big bed, unable to stop his hurt little heart from longing for a family who just loves him. A little boy who treads on egg shells every moment of his day because he is trying desperately to remember how to exist when he has flipped from one abuse to another. 

 A little boy who missed his fucking brother. 

 “I’m sorry, this is miserable you don’t need to hear-”

 “Don’t apologise, I cannot bear you thinking you are doing something wrong in telling me all of this,” you say through the thickness in your throat. “I will sit here while you tell me every single thing you think is going to frighten me away, because I will not go another day with a single reasonable doubt in your mind about whether I am here.”

 He looks at you for a breathless, speechless moment, you reach out to place your hand on his cheek and when the warmth of his skin blooms against the cold of yours, he breaks, curling into the gap between you and him to sob into your skirt. You bury him in your warmth and hold him while his arms band around your waist and he shudders with a lifetime of unexpressed hurt. 

 Your heart should be shattering as his body wracks with irrepressible emotion. Yet relief washes from him like the sea leaving sand sodden and glistening, the memory of the salt water remains but there is always the promise of the ebb. His tears feel like him coming up for air for the first time. 

 The magpie stops his feasting to stare at you across the field, wings fluttering with the passing breeze, his eyes piece right into yours. You think about what a sight he must be looking upon, two figures on the hill, framed in winter’s white sun. One crumpled upon the other, both inexorably one. His agony resonates across the land, permeating into the earth and the grass in seams like the coal. 

 As if afraid of intruding, the magpie shakes itself and takes to the sky. He swoops low above you as he goes iwith fleeting compassion.

 A sunflower and the buds she cradles resolutely are left alone in the field, a sense of peace settles in the privacy.

⚘⚘⚘

 Aegon cries until his body stops shaking, long after he has run out of tears. His gathering is slow, measured in the deep breaths he takes against you and the slowing of his pulse beneath your fingers. When he finally sits up, arms still around you like he is not yet ready to let go of his steadying force, he does not apologise. You brush back his damp hair and kiss his salty cheeks. 

 “I think I need to tell you about Aemond now,” he says, voice roughened with what he has just let go of but steadfast in a way you have not heard before. 

 You look at him openly, letting him gather himself and shift until he is sitting next to you again, leaning on you heavily and draping his limbs around you wherever he can reach. 

 “When I was fifteen and Aemond was thirteen, I was made to attend one of my mother’s parties for the first time. I was so pissed off at the idea of wearing a suit and parading a room of liars and twats and Aemond was so jealous that he was still too young to be allowed down. He and I were still on decent terms then, not great but he didn’t hate me, so I made a plan with him and knicked us a bottle of whiskey from the party and snuck out about an hour in. I was a bit wankered already and he still listened to me, so we ended up on the roof at the back of the house.”

 He breathes out heavily and you bolster yourself, knowing this cannot lead anywhere good. “For a while we were having a conversation like we never had, one of those drunken fix-the-world kind of things.” He clears his throat, a crest peaks. “But then he asked me why I didn't want it, how I could be so ungrateful about everything he has ever wanted and he got so angry with me when I said it was all bollocks.”

 The breeze blows the wispy ends of his hair across your cheekbones and it is like every part of you is being caressed by him, one hand fiddling with the end of your blouse, the other circling a depression into the meat of your thigh. There is a trepidation in how he moves though, a final hesitation like his exploration might find some uncharted rejection in you. There is no way to combat that until he has seen that you do not possess the ability to dislike anything about him.

 The pad of your thumb aligns with the softness at the nape of his neck between the tendons, you can feel your own pulse twisting with his silken hair.

 “I just can’t understand what he wants about it, and I asked him outright. Do you know what he said?” He asks, voice shrill with ludocrisy. “He said ‘I would not expect you to understand, some people are made for it and some are not, but I want to do something important with my life.” 

 You hadn’t heard the restarting of his tears but when he breathes it it judders over the tightness of his throat viciously. “And I relive it every single day, so clearly it feels like it is happening before my eyes, but he had this look in his eyes and this tone like he really knew I would never do anything of any good. He spoke like he really believed it was a good thing, something right, and it terrified me.”

 A breath, a swallow, a tensing you feel against your thumb. “I hit him, not hard, I mean I meant to do it I just did mean for him to… I just wanted to snap him out of it but I was too harsh.”

 The image is loud and violent and you can feel your heart pinch like you were there to see it. Aegon’s undoing just as unstoppable to you as it was to him then. “He lost his footing and slipped and he fell and I couldn’t fucking catch him. So he dropped of the roof and he hit the ground and he didn't cry out and-”

 You are reminded of the first time you met Daeron, of how he has sobbed out his confession of perceived guilt. And, and, and. A constant promise of worse to come. 

 “I left him there, I scrambled down and I left him because I was a coward who didn’t know what the fuck else to do. I went to bed and hid under the covers and drowned in the sound of him hitting the floor until I heard my mother screaming and knew they had found him.”

  The dream that eats at you is one akin to if you had been there too, an inevitability and a terror that you cannot unfreeze from your veins. 

 “He broke his arm and his wrist on his good arm and when he caught the side of the gutter it pretty much took his eye out. The doctors said there was no chance of saving it.” That irritational second-hand squeamishness yanks a phantom squeal behind your eyelids and you squeeze them shut in pained retaliation. “He spent two weeks in the hospital and when he came out he wouldn’t look at me, never really does unless it’s to scowl at me. Which is what I deserve.”

 “That’s not-” you begin, only to be quickly cut off.

 “Please do not say it is not my fault, or try and make me feel okay about it somehow. It was my fault and living with it as I do is the least punishment I should be suffering.” However, when your fingers tense in his hair, he leans back almost imperceptibly, hopeful in a way that kills you a little bit. “He used to be the captain of the cricket team, and I know this sounds like a trivial little thing but he couldn’t play after that, he lost the depth perception needed to bowl or catch and his wrist never recovered properly. He's left handed now for fucks sake, he always had the most incredible penmanship, I was constantly told I should follow in his example and now his writing is almost as bad as mine because he had to relearn how to write against what his brain though was natural.”

 He is a tortured man, the fingers of his left hand are curling in on themselves and the way his ring finger catches and awkwardly speaks of that unpractised difficulty to which his brother was surrendered. 

 “He is reminded of it every time he does anything, he pretends it doesn’t bother him but when he does things I can see he is conscious of how clumsier he is and that he knows what it was once like to move perfectly. Then there’s the patch, he had this sapphire eye fitted but it agitates him if he wears it too much so he has a black patch. We are othered enough, not English, too blond, too desperate for a spot among the old families; he fucking hates it and I caused that. I can never undo what he has to live with, I will always be the boy who ran away and left him down there.”

 The silence that follows is filled with his guilt and with regret. Punctuated by his heavy breaths and the squeak of his jacket where it is pinched in the death grip of his fist. It takes you a few minutes to collect your thoughts, order the words you want to say correctly and you can feel him drawing further in on himself with a resigned reluctance. 

 You will not let him go further than you can reach him. 

 The worst thing in all of it is that he was just trying to do a nice thing for his little brother, make him feel included when he had been disallowed from a saccharine event. What he received was another reminder of how he was wrong somehow, not good enough and the lashing out of a drunk and hurt fifteen year old resulted in permanent hatred from his brother. Aegon’s supposed worst crime is just another example of him trying his best, only for it to go wrong somehow.

 “Aegon, please let me say what I am going to okay? Trust that I understand the gravity of what you have just said and that I am not ignoring the importance of it,” you say, pausing until he sighs and nods against your hand. Though it feels wrong not to look him in the eyes when you say your piece and you want him to sit face to face with you, taking in his mottled pink cheeks and the inward retraction of his shoulders. “What happened was awful and there is a certain amount of blame that falls on you for the position he is in now but he also followed you onto that roof.”

 “Don’t-” 

 He receives a raised brow, hushing with a tensing jaw. “You tried to do a nice thing and it went wrong, your intentions were not bad and accidents happen. Should you have pushed him? No, but he should not have said what he did either. You may think I am corrupt for how I am looking at this but I do not think any less of you for knowing what you have just told me.”

 His hair skirts across his nose in the wind and he starts to shake his head slowly, disagreeing. 

 “You are just the same to me as you were before I knew that.” 

 “How can you believe that?” He asks hoarsely, you can tell he is not letting himself process your words for what they are. The truth. “Don’t lie about this, please sunflower, I can’t take it.”

 His face is frightfully cold between your raised hands, he falls into your hold with an ease you think scares him. 

 “I would never.” You say firmly, not offended with his line of pleading. It is a reflection on himself not his perception of you. “I believe it because I know you, I know you to be a good man and I know you did not do anything with malicious intent. Everyone makes mistakes that haunt them for the rest of their lives at some point, some worse than others but ask yourself, did Aemond have malicious intent when he took my letters and do you think that has haunted him for a single moment? Does he feel any remorse at all?”

 “It is payback if anything-”

 “That doesn't solve anything, nor will it actually make him feel any better if he has any feelings at all.” He nods with a bit of hesitance. “So, answer my questions, did he mean to hurt you and is he sorry?”

 It takes a reckoning for him to be able to answer you with the facts. A little widening of his eyes and a swallow that plays along the insides of your wrists in a swift tense and retraction. 

 “He did want to hurt me and he is not sorry.” He says in as much of an admittance to himself as to you. 

 You smile at him a little sadly, having known the answer before he said it. “In the end, Aegon, some people want to have something to use against you, you cannot change that. What you can do is move on, let them stay there if they want but you do not have to.”

 “But Aemond will still be half blind, he still cannot use his right arm properly,” he tries weakly.

  “You know Brian at the pub?” You ask, thinking of a parallel that is almost folklore in the village, he nods. “He lost his arm in the first world war, blown clean off by a shell.”

 He gives a sigh of gravity. You understand, Brian has always been so jovial. His humour so removed from the inhuman darkness of the great war’s trenches. 

 “He lost it because he was trying to get Bill to get to shelter with him,” Aegon’s mouth drops subtly at that, “There was this young man in their regiment, a boy who signed up by lying about his age, and he was shot to bits, the way they both tell it, but Bill refused to leave him even if there was no hope for him. Brian wouldn’t leave his friend, so they carried the boy between them, arms and legs back to the trench.”

 Despite how many times you have heard the story, how vividly you have played it in your mind, it never fails to make your throat catch with inevitable panic. “Then a shell dropped and by the time the fog cleared the boy was dead and Brian had one less arm and was deaf in his left ear.”

 “But they are so close, there is no animosity between them.” He says, unable to make sense of it. 

 “Because Brian knows he put himself in that danger and he knows that it was not actually Bill’s fault. Part of it is that Brian could not hold a grudge if he tried but part of it is knowing the difference between being angry at a situation and being angry at someone. The latter is often a lot easier.”

You smooth back the hair from his face, watching him blink rapidly when a strand catches on one of his pale eyelashes. “I am not saying the situations are the same, I am saying that you have done all the blaming of yourself that you can. Kicking yourself is not going to bring back your brother’s eye, there is no point in tearing yourself apart more than you already have.”

 He draws a sharp breath through his teeth when you plant a gentle kiss on the scar on his forehead, covering the price he paid for trying to run from what had happened and what he thought he caused with your lips. “Being sorry is enough.”

 Instead of sobbing, lone tears drop from the corners of his eyes. “So you don’t want to go?”

 It is the first hope you have heard him allow into his tone, an unstoppable glowing which warms the roughness of his overused vocal chords. 

 You shake your head and smile at him with all the sincerity in the world. “I am not going anywhere if you are not there ever again.” 

 He moves with the wind, a sudden gust of movement that flattens against you and curls around the borders of your silhouette. His hands are everywhere, skirting across your back and clinging desperately to the fabric of your coat. He breathes you in, you exhale him back, and on and on and on. 

 His relief bleeds into contentment, contentment morphs into happiness which dawns into a bright and colourful elation. He is laughing against your neck and the sound billows across the fields like the first warm rays of the summer sun. 

 The sea washes out with the tide and the sand dries behind it. You can feel so much falling from him in his laughter, his own disbelief yes but also the release of so much of what he has carried for so long. It is not everything, the tide will come back in and there will be other troubles that tweak in his marrow, but you think he might finally be living for the ebb instead of dreading the flow. 

 A vibrant, echoing call flies above you behind the swooping figure of a returning magpie. He takes his place on the ground again but he does not start pecking until he has looked at you, piercing, beady little eyes shining when you smile at him. He shakes his wings and returns to his worms. 

 You shake your head and return to the beautiful, gleeful man who is beaming with more happiness than he has ever allowed to reach his eyes. 

⚘⚘⚘

Compared to the pensieve trepidation of the walk out, the way home is loud and bright. Aegon is laughing and beaming and he keeps letting go of your hand to dance a circle around you in a way that makes you feel dizzy with joy.  The bird sings praises and the wind circles you with an embrace. It is light and easy and he looks close to catching flight.

 When he shuts the back door behind himself, Daeron’s head peeks round the corner of the adjoining kitchen wall. He is still sniffling, cheeks a little too pink, and his hair is askew from his nap, but he looks happy. 

 “Do you like Aegon again?” He asks outright, tactless in the way only a curious child can be, innocent in his intrusion. 

 You look at Aegon and find his cheeks flushing sheepishly. Daeron does not back down so you walk over and crouch down to his level, gently laying your cold fingers on his warm cheeks. He squeals and tries to get away. 

 “You know what?” you still the squirming boy with your hands on his shoulders.

 “What?” he asks, still laughing. 

“I never stopped liking him,” Daeron’s brows pinch and you smooth the line out with your thumb, “And you know what else?”

 His eyes go wide and he starts bouncing with unabashed curiosity, “What, what?”

 “I never will.”

He stares at you a little awed and you grow even more fonder than him than you thought possible. There is something so fiercely wonderful about his open emotions, you are scared of where that will get him in a world that molded Aegon into who he is now. When you can see the traces of the younger in the older, you wonder how different things can possibly be. It makes you feel claustrophobically angry. 

 Daeron leans forward to whisper a question into your ear, “Does that mean Aegon won’t be sad anymore?”

 He is so lovely it hurts, you give his shoulders a little squeeze for emphasis with your reply, “not if I have any say in the matter.”

 You can see his trust in the way he nods, looking to Aegon over your shoulder, he bounds over to him and Aegon sweeps him up into his arms, letting his little brother lean into his ear as well. He grins at you while Daron talks, winking when he turns to covertly reply. Daeron giggles, weaving the tips of his fingers that peak through his bandages into the ends of Aegon’s hair. 

 Their familiarity is precious, beautiful in the way a pearl is. Its lustrous shine speaks of a forging in the darkness and the grit. You draw a frame of reverence, like the sun-bleached border of the Sonnenblume, around the picture of the two of them and hand it high on a wall of importance in your mind. 

 “Is it lunchtime yet?” Daeron asks, breaking the mood from what it had settled into. His flitting brain is naively overactive. 

 Aegon laughs and you check your watch, finding it to be nearly one o’clock. Aegon gives you a questioning look and you shrug, “We could go out?” 

 Daeron’s eyes widen and he wiggles down from Aegon’s arms, bouncing from foot to foot in a clumsy mirror of his brother. “Can we please, Miss sunflower? Can we?”

 Aegon looks at you a little grimly, “I haven't any money I’m afraid.”

 You wave a flippant hand, “don’t be daft, I do and it’s no problem.” You can see him twitching to protest but you will not have it. “Besides, I’m pretty sure Joan is working in the café today and she will be giving me a discount for the delight of finding out I am still here. If I have any say in the matter.”

 The tension bleeds out with his appraisal of your surety, though you know he still fears a little like he is asking too much, that is something that cannot be drained from him without a great deal of time. 

 He takes Daeron upstairs to find him something to wear in your boxes of childhood hand-me-downs and you watch him go, a magnetic pull drawing your eyes to him even as he has gone. You find your eyes tracing the invisible form of him through the ceiling along the creeks of floorboards. 

 You have longed for his presence for time enough now that it is not unfamiliar but it has not been like this before. Like the air has been pulled in a vacuum from your lungs, his absence is akin to an arm being taken straight from the socket, leaving the gory remnants of gristle twitching and spasming in the air. 

 You have a word for it then. Not a new one, not even one new to the situation, just one you are so sure of it's like you were born to feel it. Molten mercury slips through your veins and silver threads draw together in a cocooning embrace around your heart. 

 Loving Aegon is so natural it comes like living. The magnitude of the feelings overwhelms you like the knowledge of just how improbable that life is in the first place. Ten metres further from the sun and there would be no life at all, ten hours later without him showing up under your window and there would be only a ghost of feeling to be haunted by. 

 The stairs jitter with someone’s descent and Daeron comes into view dressed in his uniform with one of your old red cardigans to cover the school crest and keep him warm. It's far too big for him but he seems happy, copying the way Aegon shakes his hands upright with his elbows bent to push his too-large sleeves down his arms. Your mum tucks a handkerchief under an elastic band around Daeron’s wrist for his running nose and the little boy pokes at the wad of material under his sleeve as he walks between you and Aegon down towards the village. 

 Town is quiet, Tuesdays see no market faring and with the hour, most people are at home for lunch or at work. However, the few who do mill the streets stare openly at the three of you. It must be an odd sight, you know that. The brothers’ hair is so white it almost sparks against the dull red bricks of the shop buildings and Daeon jumps from window to window, peeking through the glass at the goods on offer. 

 Watching the little boy darting around makes you even more curious about Aemond. The juxtaposition between the stern and straight, now one-eyed, Aemond in your head and the two Targaryen boys you know is almost violent. 

 Daeron is so like his brother in so many ways yet the differences are there too, there is no darkness to him and his curiosity goes far beyond Aegon’s somehow. In fact, Daeron is looking around like it is his first time seeing any of it. 

 When you look at Aegon, walking next to you with his hand in yours, you find him already watching his brother. He finds your eyes and smiles, a little sadly, “He doesn’t go out much, none of us do really, he has only ever seen what he has been shown of the world.”

 Everything you learn of the Targaryen house makes it sound more and more like a prison. No child should be quite so fascinated by a normal walk down the highstreet. 

 Aegon sees you balk slightly and gives you a shrug that says, ‘I know, but what can you do.”

 You think of what he was of the world when he was Daeron’s age, of the side of human cruelty and love he was exposed to in his exile to the country. How that must have shaped his yearning to get out of the polished incarceration he was put in. 

 You have to call Daeron back when you get to the café as he has already gone further down the road in his exploration of window displays. He runs back and takes your other hand, you smile down at the awed way he looks at the tinkling bell above the door when you walk in.

There’s only one other customer in the little shop, a tiny old woman who coos at Daeron as soon as she sees him.

 “Joan!” You call, knowing she will be hiding out the back with a magazine. She may be a friend but even you can admit she is not the most diligent of workers. 

 Her mousy head pops out from the curtained of back and she squeaks. Loudly. 

 “What on earth are you still doing here?’  She asks in a high pitched tone, sweeping you into a crushing hug. 

 You feel winded when she pulls back, you don’t have time to answer before she sees the two brothers with you. 

 “Explain, now.” She demands, impatient and bewildered. You pull her down to a seat and run her through a brief account of the events of last night, reducing the letter debacle into something which does not reveal the depth of hurt lying behind the actions. She does not need to know so much. She takes it with surprising ease, thrown only by Daeron’s presence. He is still fidgeting with his sleeve. 

 Joan nods, looking a little shell shocked but putting up a good front. You think she can see the relief radiating from you and is putting aside her real grilling for a later date. Thankfully. “Right, you’ll uhm, be wanting some food then I suppose.”

 “Yes, and if you would please remember how grateful you are to see me when you are ringing us up, that would be much appreciated.” She laughs and makes for the kitchen again.

“Wait!” Aegon bursts out, fumbling for his cigarette case from his pocket. He opens it quickly and starts rifling through the myriad sentimentalities. One day, you think, you will ask him to explain each and every one to you. 

 Daeron is leaning almost all the way over the table to look at the scraps of paper. You can see how desperate he is to understand this thing his brother holds so close. 

 When you see the yellowed edge of the Australia ticket your veins glow with that old familiar vitriol on his behalf. 

 “Aha!” Comes his exclamation as he stacks a little group of bifold cards on top of each other and hands them to Joan. 

 You catch a swirling of black calligraphy between golden filigree borders before she takes them, looking as confused as you feel. 

 However, when she has opened the top card she goes white as a sheet and makes a sound like she has been smacked across the face. 

 “What are they?” You ask him, unable to contain your intrigue further. 

 “Oh my god,” Joan whispers, flicking slowly through the tiny papers like they might disappear if she blinks. 

 You turn to Aegon fully, swivelling on your shiny wooden chair. “I need to know if I should be ready to catch her if she faints.”

 Joan says your name very seriously and you look at her worried, “If you do not marry that man I am going to be very, very cross with you.”

You gape at her, Aegon blushing in the corner of your eye. She takes mercy and places the cards on the table in front of you. When you look closer, they are place cards, beautiful, fancy place cards. The names on them make your pupils blow a little. The third one in the stack reads ‘HRH Princess Margaret’ and bears a simple, elegant signature. Every card has one on it when you look. 

 “I got bored after dinner, the christmas party was dull as anything, as per usual,” Aegon explains, finally.

 “You met princess Margaret?”

 He nods, smiling wryly, “She thought it was hilarious actually.”

 Joan looks like she is about to drop and feels a little faint too with the unbelievable kindness of what he has done for your friend, despite only having met her twice. You know he would dismiss it as a laugh, a way to kill time at a boring fête, but he smiles at you warmly and you know there is more to the gesture. 

 “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Joan practically gushes, collecting up the cards like precious artifacts. “Whatever you want is free, for as long as I work here.”

 As if overcome, she rushes to the back and disappears behind the curtain. Aegon leans over, “Can she do that?”

 You laugh, “No, definitely not.”

 He chuckles, you're about to say something else but he beats you to it. “I did get you a Christmas present, just so you know.”

 “He did!” Daeron says, nodding enthusiastically, “it’s a-”

 Aegon leans over the table to cover his brother’s mouth with his hand quickly, shooting him a look. Daeron narrows his eyes and a second later Aegon is yelping and pulling back his shining hand. Daeron licked him. 

 “I should not have taught you that, little beast,” Daeron sticks out his tongue at that but he changes his tune when Aegon wipes the spit on Daeron’s cheek.

 The little boy sputters and pulls out the handkerchief your mother gave him clumsily, hands rendered clunky by the bandages. Aegon takes pity and helps him. You file away the resolution to wrap his hands better when you get back, you can tell the lack of mobility is frustrating him. 

 When he is done, Aegon unfolds the cotton to look at the little flower embroidered on the corner. Another one of your grandmother’s designs, a tiny purple iris. He traces it with his fingertips and a smile at the corners of his lips. 

 For hope. 

⚘⚘⚘

Daeron rides his brother’s shoulders the whole way home, happy, if still a bit stuffed up. Aegon has his crossed ankles in one hand and yours hand in his other. 

 When you walk into the pub, the afternoon crowd is picking up and you are stared at more intently than you were in the village. Bill and Brian give whistles from their corner of the room and you shoot them a glare which they return with innocent smiles. You catch Aegon looking at Brian pinned up sleeve, and at the way he and Bill laugh together. 

 Daeron scrambles his way down the floor, looking around with fascination on his face.

 “I have decided on a few places to take you in London, by the way,” he says and you look at him a little startled. He continues on like he hasn’t said anything out of the ordinary. “I thought you could come down and stay, during the Easter holidays maybe. Only if you want to of course…”

 You are a little dumbstruck by his casual offer but you can feel the vulnerability in how he says it. Like he has no idea he is offering you a beginning.

 “I would love to,” you say, and you really mean it. Even if it means entangling with his awful family. You would rather understand him, see exactly where it all went wrong first hand. You would also be lying if you said you weren't desperately curious about them. 

 Aegon beams at you, bending down to kiss you gleefully on the cheek. You smile at him widely when he pulls back.

“Mama!” Daeron shouts suddenly and you both jump. Aegon’s eyes track his brother as he runs across the room. He blanches. 

 “Fuck,” he breathes and you try and see what the problem is with rising dread but there are people standing in from of your. “I should have known he would pull something like this.”

The crowd parts a little and you see what, or rather who, it is. 

 Sitting at one of the tables on the wall, looking still and uncomfortable even as Daeron runs to them, is a primly beautiful red-haired woman with a vicious downtick at the corner of her mouth, and a pale boy with straight blond hair and an eyepatch. 

 The woman does not rise to greet her youngest son but she does give him a pale caricature of a smile, the expression looking strained and almost unnatural. The boy, Aemond, is staring straight at you, lips pursed. It's incredibly unnerving. 

 “You don’t have to stay, I will deal with this,” Aegon mutters, trying to drop your hand and walk over. You don’t let him, weaving your fingers tighter between his.

 “Fat chance,” you say, pulling him over with you. From the corner of your eye you can see him smiling. 

 “Good afternoon,” you greet them brightly, unflinching in the face of the glare you are still receiving from Aemond. “You must be Mrs Targaryen.”

 You do not offer your hand, neither does she. 

 “Indeed,” she says, so cold it sets you on edge. She is beautiful in the way of a taxidermied deer. Preserved and cared for and intended to be looked upon, but dead and wrong. Mutilated somehow. Her eyes are too glassy and her skin bears no warmth. She is a frightening construction of beauty.

 She hardly looks old enough to be Daeron’s mother but something fizzles behind her eyes when she looks down at her oldest son’s hand in yours. It burns like quiet anger. “And you must be…sunflower.”

 The way she says it makes your spine feel hot like an electric wire. You say your name firmly and her eyebrow hikes. Mouth ticking further at the side. “That’s what you may call me.”

 “I see,” she says and if there had been any part of you wanting for her approval it would have shrivelled and died at her tone.

 “She's great Mama, she let me borrow her Rosy bear to sleep with and her parents fixed my hands!” You appreciate the little boy fiercely for that.

Aemond is still staring at you in the impasse. You stare back. There is a scar sparking out of the top and bottom of the eyepatch like tendrils of lightning bolts. There is something unnerving about the very essence of him, a cutting calculation that bleeds into the space around him. His lips quirk as he assesses you in kind. Funnily enough, you find you couldn't care less what he thinks he discovers in you. 

 “What is wrong with you Aegon?” Mrs Targaryen hisses, clearly finished with common civility. “Why is it that you insist on making a mess of everything? And to drag your brother into it too..”

 Daeron is shriveling in his mother’s lap, tucking his bandaged hands up his too long sleeves. Aegon is digging his thumb into the webbing between your fingers. 

“Can you not see his hands? He had a fever and matron wouldn’t see him.” His voice is insistent in a defensive way, pitching at the end of his sentences. 

 “Because of you,” Aemond adds and Aegon’s head turns to him. You can see his heart bleeding across his face in your periphery while Aemond just stares definitely back at him. 

 “You didn’t see him on the stairs afterward,” comes Aegon’s small voice, you can hear a plea in how he addressed Aemond. 

“He looks well enough to me.” Mrs Targaryen is downright accusatory, not even deigning to look at Daeron’s hands.

The pair of them make you feel bitterly angry. What gets you even more though, is how Aegon doesn’t even seem to feel it. He is just shrinking further in on himself where he stands. Now, after everything he has told you, you will not stand by and watch him be so reduced. 

 “Aegon was trying to help, I can assure you it was quite necessary.” There is a venom crawling up your throat and it laces your words thickly. 

 Mrs Targaryen looks at you slightly shocked, like she had forgotten you were there and is appalled by you reminding her. “I Hardly think it is your place to speak on this.”

 “And I Hardly think it is yours considering you were not here to see the state that both yous sons, both of them, were in last night. 

 A moment of almost frightening stillness follows. 

 Then she stands, lowering Daeron to the floor. “Daeron is strong, he does not need to be taken away from somewhere he was perfectly safe to an…establishment such as this. He does not need your protection.”

 She wants it to hurt, to take you down somehow, but she is shorter than you and pride is not a high pedestal to stand on. 

 “You willfully ignored the most important part of what I just said.” Her eyes widen at that slightly, in a way you would find satisfying if you could properly focus on it. As it is, your brain is humming slightly with rage. 

 She doesn’t say anything, taking Daeron’s hand quickly and looking at him with startled eyes when he yelps at her too tight grip, the bandages an unexpected barrier between them under her grasp. She stares at him for a movement, hand falling limply at her side when she lets go. Her cold porcelain mask is back in place by the time she looks at Aemond. 

 “We are finished here,” she says and he nods. 

 Mrs Targaryen’s white fur coat stands out garishly in the pub, it reminds you of her sons’ hair and you wonder if she wears it to be one of them or as something of a threat. 

She is almost out the door, unaware of the onlooking patrons, when she realises Aegon has not moved from his place next to you.

 “Aegon,” she calls, impatient and stern, as though he were a child still. You don’t like how she says his name, it is petty and silly but it sounds just as his nickname for you had in her mouth. Warped and wrong. You want to covet it, have it ruled that only you can call him by his name. 

 It is a fiery little part of you that wants for such a thing but since meeting him, those flames have been tended and stoked until they lick at the walls of their enclosure. 

 He does not move and she grows more insistent. As little as you want to admit it, you know he must follow. One day he will not have to abide by her beckon call but not today, best not make it any worse. 

 “Go on,” you tell him, rising on your toes to lay a kiss on his jaw. “There is no way out of this now.”

 He nods, resigned. “I will write, I promise I will.”

 “So will I.” 

 As he starts to walk, something else lies unsaid between you, something that you will tell him in a moment of unmitigated joy. Until then, you watch him go painfully, hand cold without his and body a little numb with rage. 

⚘⚘⚘

Hello my dear readers! So lovely to see you all again! This chapter was properly down to the wire and it is much longer than I expected it to end up being. Massive shout out to my brother for scanning over my handwritten pages for the ending just in time. IT is a lot and it is heavy and I really really hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think! All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

@neithriddle

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen masterlist. (Aegon Targaryen/reader, 1950s alternate universe) COMPLETE.

Also available on AO3 - here

Summary

Over the trees of the far fields, from the windows of the pub, the peaks of the buildings of the boarding school bleed dark into the sky. From the first time you see him, you are captivated by the beautiful stranger who sneaks out to come and light the cracks of your world. Fascinated by his unending energy, the way life clatters under his skin, and the ever present clouds of misery which crowd his eyes when he isn't laughing, you find yourself inexorably drawn to him.

Aegon would run until his feet bled to get away, if it weren't for what he cannot leave behind. Every day you choke harder on the fear of staying there forever, becoming a piece of the furniture, thinly coated in the dust from the miner's uniforms. Tracing the cracks of hesitation, fear and relief as they bleed across his skin, you wonder if there is more to the depthless blame he wears and whether you could ever know anyone more interesting.

⚘⚘⚘

Chapter one - Carnations, for fascination.

Chapter two - Sunflowers, for strength.

Chapter three - Arnica, let me heal thy grief.

Chapter four - Camellias, for longing.

Chapter five - Roses, for passion.

Chapter six - Anemones, for anticipation.

Chapter seven - Queen Anne's lace, for complexity.

Chapter eight - Irises, for hope.

Chapter nine - Poppies, for consolation.

Chapter ten - Heather, wishes will be fulfilled.

Chapter eleven - Gladioli, for strength of character.

Chapter twelve - Bouquet.

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen announcement!

Hello my loves, as a companion to this weeks chapter, for those of you who read on here and not on AO3 where you can see chapter count, I wanted to announce that there will be 12 chapters to the fic instead of the 10 I said originally. There was just more to the story I wanted to write!

I am going to put up a masterlist within the next few days too, so everything is in one place on here.

All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen - Chapter seven: Queen Anne's lace, for complexity.

Masterlist.

Also posted on AO3 - here

⚘⚘⚘

 You can feel every spring in your mattress underneath you where you are laying on your side. The light from the moon is coming in through the gap in your curtains but you don't move to close them. Late as it is, you know sleep will evade you tonight. The sunflower is watching you, you can't bring yourself to look at it. It is imprinted on your mind enough to taunt you anyway. 

 You can feel the green blue background rising on the flower, drawing a shadow over its head and beckoning it deeper into the haze. As for the flowers on the base, the darkness has swallowed them into the green. 

 It is not that you are changing your mind, there is nothing truly keeping you here anymore, it is that you cannot stop hoping. You are not a pessimist by heart and you cannot think of this in terms of giving up on him, that is now how it is. 

 Still, you know you cannot take down the sunflower and fold it into the pages of the scrapbook to come with you. 

 You turn onto your back and huff, lifting your head to let it drop back onto the pillow. You are closing your eyes, wriggling deeper into the duvet when you get one of those jarring snaps of a feeling like falling. Paired with a phantom calling of your name, it has your heart hammering. 

 You turn on your bedside light and sit up, curling over your knees as you draw them to your chest. The light stings your eyes and you screw them shut against the assault. You are just getting a hold of yourself when you hear it again. It is tainted with the same unsurety in its wake as the first but something about the voice makes you raise your head. 

 Then, “sunflower?”

 You're out of bed before you can temper yourself and stumble to the window, your foot catches on the corner of your rug and you nearly fly face first into the bedside table. The pink lamp is knocked to the floor in your struggle but you hardly notice. One hand pulls back a curtain while the other passes straight through the gap to splay on the glass, the warmth of your skin on the cold surface ringing an imprint of soft fog.

 Your eyes don't even need time to adjust, not when the moon has his hair lit in silver like molten mercury. 

 Your heart stops beating, so much so that you can feel it twinge when it starts thumping rapidly against your ribs again. Your pulse hammers in your neck, your wrists, even the pads of your thumbs feel as though they are throbbing. 

 Then you see that he is carrying something, a dark mass of familiar green wool. You wouldn't have been able to make it out from the way it hangs heavy over his arms, if it weren’t for the white-blond head poking out the top. 

 Your bedroom door slams as you fly out of it, it will wake your parents but you can’t stop to feel bad. They probably should be up. Nothing about this feels right or good.

 When you miss a step on your way down you have to shutter away memories of when you had last raced down these steps to meet Aegon, a bloody handkerchief in your hand. There is no light and warmth to greet you on the other side now, just a startling wall of cold when you open the door.

 “What is it?” The Mid-February dew feels like needles under your bare feet as it melts from frost on your skin, somehow the feeling only registers in the abstract, “What happened?”

 Aegon just stands there, letting you pull back the coat from Daeron’s face enough to see that he is asleep. There are blotchy pink tear streaks down his face and his tiny white eyelashes are clumped together with salt. The tip of his nose is bright pink, so are his ears. What really worries you though is the heat coming off of his forehead when you place the back of your hand over it. You know it is not just the difference between him and the night air. 

 “It’s my fault, it’s all my fault,” Aegon whispers. He is looking right at Daeron when you lift your head to him. 

 “What happened,” you repeat but it is like he can’t even hear you. He just repeats his admission of guilt again and again. 

 You grab his face between your hands and force him to look at you. When his eyes meet yours he jerks like he has been struck. You cannot focus on that right now, “Aegon, I need to know what happened.”

 You hear the back door rattle against the wall behind you and you are aware that your parents are calling out for you but you don't look away from Aegon. 

 “He has a fever, I don’t know what it is but he went to the matron and she said he was lying. He tried to call our mother again, just like last time…” white horror goes through you and you are pulling at the fabric of the coat before he can finish talking.

 You find Daeron’s hands in the tangle of wool. In the darkness, they look as though he has dipped them in thick black oil. 

 “Mum!” She is next to you in an instant, aghast when she looks down to the blood now on your fingers as well. “He’s not well. I don’t know what to do-”

 She senses the rising panic in your voice and shushes you gently. She then turns to the older of the brothers. “Aegon, can I?”

 She doesn’t leave much room for argument in the way she begins to peel Daeron from his brother’s hold but Aegon puts up no fight. As soon as your mother has Daeron in her arms, Aegon drops like a sack of potatoes, falling to his knees and dropping his head into his hands. 

 His shoulders are shaking so violently that you cannot tell if she is shivering or crying. 

 “I am going to take him in,” your mum says, hoisting Daeron up higher. She looks at Aegon on the floor and then to you, “I will have your dad make up the spare room.”

 You nod and watch her go back to the door, speaking in low tones with your dad who gives you a concerned look before going inside. 

 Alone with him, you can hear his heaving breaths. You realise that there is no bike anywhere on the lawn and your worry piques again. 

 “Did you walk-”

 “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for coming here. I just-” he curls further in on himself and sobs between sentences. “Matron left and he was so hurt and he just kept getting worse.”

 He looks at you and it punches the air right out of your lungs. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

 Maybe it is the look in his eyes or the way his sweat soaked shirt is clinging to his chest in a way that must sting with the biting wind, maybe it is just that it is the right thing to do, but you know you won’t turn him away. Really you know that at the root of it, it is because it is him. 

 “It’s okay,” you give him, unable to offer anything more. “Will you come inside? It’s too cold for you to be out here dressed like that.”

 He glances down at the thin blue shirt like he doesn’t recognise it. “It didn’t feel cold when I was running.”

 A shiver cracks his spine as you process what he has said and he pulls himself awkwardly off the floor. The knees of his jeans are dark with dew and you know there will be wicked grass stains there in the light. 

 You want to touch his shoulder, the side of his face, anything, but you also couldn't bear watching his move away from the gesture. 

 “Come inside, it helps no one if you get ill too from the cold,” you tell him, a weird feeling playing on you at the unfamiliarity of the way you do not know how to talk to him. You line your arms down your sides stiffly and walk back towards the house, relaxing just a bit when his footsteps start up behind yours. 

 Inside, your mum has Daeron on her lap while your dad wipes the blood from his hands with a cloth. The little boy is wrapped in a quilt and his head is resting heavily on your mum’s shoulder.

 They all turn when you appear in the doorway, your dad flicking between you and the presence behind you. 

 “He’s still asleep?” Aegon asks, voice small behind you.

 “It’s for the best,” your dad says, wincing when he looks back at the raw cuts on the unmoving little hands on his own. You can see his quiet rage in the stiffness of his shoulders as he works. 

 Aegon makes a sound and your mother nods you towards the kettle on the stove. She speaks like she might spook him if she is too loud or too fast. “While the fever breaks and we clean up his hands it is better that he stays asleep. He is going to be just fine, he needs rest, a warm bed and time.”

 You watch Aegon nod blankly, still staring at his little brother's blood on the flannel. My fault, you hear in the silence. 

��“They can share the spare bed,” your father says as you push a warp teacup into Aegon’s hands. “Show him where it is and give him a pair of my pyjamas. We will bring this one up when we have sorted out this mess and given him something for the fever.”

 “His name is Daeron,” you say, fiddling with your own cup in your hands while you wait for your parents to take it in before turning and leading the way to the upstairs of the flat. 

 The awareness of him behind you makes you feel almost as though you have forgotten to walk. It is like the inability to breathe normally when you think about it. You feel so watched despite knowing that his eyes are probably on the floor. 

 At the top of the stairs, you turn on the light and go to the linen cupboard. Every sensation is heightened, each movement feeling so much more important than it has any right to. You dig down the pile of towels for one that doesn’t feel so rough and well washed as the others. You tell yourself there is no reason for the action. 

 He doesn't move when you go into your parents room and take a pair of blue striped pyjamas from the bottom of your dad’s drawer. He is still just standing there when you emerge. You think he might be blinking at his own reflection in the tea but you don't stare for long enough to be sure.

 “Come on,” you say, taking him down the hall to the guest room. Your dad has gotten as far as putting out the sheets and laying them on the bed. Aegon doesn't even look around, he’s almost catatonic and it is making you worry more and more each second. 

 “I will go and turn on the hot water so you can wash, it will only take ten minutes or so to warm up.” 

 He nods, it's maddening. 

 “Aegon?” you might as well have been speaking underwater for all he hears of you. 

 You move to stand right in front of him and it's like he is looking through you. You try again, firmer this time, “Aegon.”

 You know you’re overstepping but you cannot think what else to do so, you brush his hair from his forehead with your hands very lightly. He finally looks at you. 

 “How is any of this your fault?”

 He shuffles back to sit weakly on the edge of the bed, you try not to take it as a rejection. He takes a gulp of tea that almost certainly burns his tongue and rubs his free hand over his face. “I used to pretend to be ill all the time, I was awful with it, but I just hated lessons so much that the infirmary didn’t seem so bad in comparison.”

 “That’s not-” but he isn’t finished.

 “Matron didn’t believe him because of me, thought he was a little liar as well. Aemond came and told me, told me it was all because of my own selfishness that she wouldn’t believe Daeron and-”

 He looks up to the ceiling and blinks before lowering his head to continue, you watch his jaw tick while he talks. “I went and shouted at her, told her to send him to the infirmary. I mean, he was burning up. He had this blotchy red thing on his neck and he was so weak.”

 He finishes the tea, bites the tip of his tongue as he winces. “She shouted back but I just kept going. She took her back and left, said she wouldn’t be seeing anyone after how she was treated, and left. Then I realised Daeron wasn’t there anymore.”

 Your hand is over your mouth and you instinctively want to cover your ears and hide from the next bit but you can’t, you’ve already seen his hands.

 “Aemond and I found him, we knew where he was going to be but,” he puts the empty teacup on the bed next to him, like he is afraid he will shatter it if he doesn’t, “the housemaster found him first.”

 You can hear how it pains him to say it, he has a hand on his throat like he is scratching for air. 

 “Then he sent Daeron to bed, told me I ought to stop influencing him into misbehaving if I wanted him to have a chance in life. I followed Daeron up the stairs and he couldn’t even make it to the first floor, he could hardly breath he was crying so hard. I put him in my coat and started running after he fell over for the second time. Aemond didn’t even try to stop me.”

 There is an electrical impulse skirting down your wrists, it pushes your hand towards his shoulder. He moves out the way so quickly he nearly falls off of the bed. “Please, don’t- I can’t bear it.”

 It stings so hard you have to blink back the hotness at your waterline. You push it down and step back, picking up his teacup from beside him. “None of that is your fault Aegon. You cannot be blamed for cruelty and immaturity on the parts of adults who should know better when all you did was try and help.”

 He goes to talk again but you just shake your head, “I can’t do this right now, you’re not in the right state of mind and neither am I. Go and get cleaned up then go to sleep, come and talk to me tomorrow if you really need me to explain to you that you did not cause any of this.”

 He goes back to staring at his hands. You're about to turn when he speaks again, “can you-”

 “He’s okay, I’ll make sure he is.” he nods and you leave him sitting on the end of the bed like Rodin’s Thinker.

 There is little evidence of blood and pain when you get back to the kitchen. Daeron’s hands are bandaged in white like mittens and he is still sleeping in your mother’s arms. 

 “How is he?” you ask, drawing their attention to you. You try your best to ignore the looks of concern they give you. You can feel exhaustion emanating from you and the wet hems of your pyjama trousers grow more uncomfortable by the minute. 

 “As well as to be expected,” your mother says, voice calm and even. She is brushing his fine white hair from his face with her fingers, your heart hurts. There is a bottle of Fenning’s fever mixture on the table next to a small glass of the clear liquid. “I need to wake him up so he can take this but I don’t want to frighten him.”

 “Let me do it,” you say, offering no explanation as to how the little boy knows you. In truth you don’t know if he will recognise you but you would rather try than risk him panicking in the unknown environment. 

 They exchange looks but your mum hands him over to you anyway. He is warm and heavy in your hold and you are comforted by the fact that they have wiped the remnants of tears from his cheeks. He makes a low whine when he is moved and shuffles around in the quilt. You squeeze his shoulder gently and say his name gently.

 It takes him a minute to blink his eyes open, staring owlishly at your father across the room. He frowns and tries to free one of his bandaged hands to wipe at his eye, the realisation of the sensation of material where there hadn't been before only serves to confuse him further.

 When he looks at you he seems to relax a little bit but still rakes his eyes across every feature on your face. When he speaks his voice is hoarse from crying, “Miss Sunflower?”

 You are sure you have misheard him, mouth falling open before shutting again quickly. Your brain runs at a mile a minute, falling over itself and scrambling to keep up. His face falls a bit and you shake yourself. “Hello Sweetheart.”

“Where’s Aegon?” The fact that he doesn’t seem to care that he is somewhere he has never been before startles you a bit.

 “He is upstairs. You're at my house.”

 “I know,” he says, yawning into the quilt, “Aegon said he was taking us here, he said you would help like last time.”

 You can feel your parents' eyes on you but you don’t look away from Daeron’s face.

 “That’s right,” you say, tucking him up tighter. You are not going to try and complicate things with a tired and poorly five year old, “I need you to drink this so the fever goes away.”

 He nods and accepts the glass when you bring it to his lips. He scrunches his face at the taste but drinks it all anyway, sticking out his tongue when he has finished it like he doesn’t want the flavour in his mouth anymore. 

 He is so sweet it hurts. He has the same eyes as Aegon, lilac with a ring of deeper purple on the outside of the iris. He looks remarkably like his older brother apart from his nose, his more upturned ever so slightly.

 The sound of the shower turning on shudders through the pipes and your dad excuses himself to go and make up the spare bed. Your mum gets up to dig in the cupboards for a hot water bottle and Daeron watches her sleepily. 

 “Is that your mama?” he asks in a tired whisper and your mum chuckles with her back turned. You tell him yes and he nods, taking it in.

 “Does she know my mama?” It is one of those bizarre questions that children ask, like all mothers must know each other somehow. It makes you smile. 

 “No sweetheart, she doesn’t.” His face falls again and you have to stop yourself from drawing another similarity between him and his brother. “Why do you ask?”

 “Because I want to talk to my mummy and tell her I want to go home,” he is red faced and you can tell he is on the brink of crying again. “I don’t like school, I want to stay home with Helaena.”

 You pull him to you to try and quell his tears but it only works a little. “I know it’s horrid but right now all you can do is sleep and tomorrow we can try and figure out a solution, okay?”

 He nods and winds a hand around the back of your neck. You mum takes the hot water bottle and disappears up the stairs. 

 “Do you want to go to bed now? You’re staying here with Aegon for the night.”

 He nods against your collar again and you struggle to your feet and walk up the stairs with him slowly. The bathroom door is still shut, mercifully and your mum has put the hot water bottle in the bed already. You lower him down next to it and tuck him in, heart panging when his arm tightens around your neck before letting go. 

 He watches you straighten the sheets through half lidded eyes but you can tell something is wrong with the way he shuffles his hands around the bed under the covers. You ask despite having a pretty good idea as to the problem, “what’s wrong?”

 “I don’t have Tessarion.” he pouts, lip quivering.

 “Is that what your teddy is called?” he nods and you think quickly. “He isn’t here but you can look after my teddy tonight if that would make you feel better?”

 He considers it for a moment before saying, in the smallest voice, “yes please.”

 You tell him you'll just be a moment and nip to fetch your worn little bear from your room. The lamp is still on where it lies on the floor and the curtains are pulled half open. You go for your bed where Rosy bear normally is before realising that she is not there.

 No, you know where she is. 

 Your turn to the stacked suitcases before making a decision, one that goes far beyond looking for a teddy, and open the largest of the three. It is a decision that feels more solid than it should. You know there is a finality in how you do not shut it again afterwards. 

 Daeron accepts Rosy, tucking the pink bear under his chin and closing his eyes. You give him a kiss on the forehead in a mirror of the last time you saw him and shut the door on the way out. 

 Your mum is waiting for you in your room when you go in, she takes one look at you and holds her arms out. You tumble into them and weep in great, hysterical sobs. She doesn’t say a word and neither do you, none need be said at all. She just holds you tighter when you hear the bathroom door open and the bedroom door shut a few seconds later. 

 When you have calmed a bit and she has replaited your hair for bed, she kisses you on the cheek. You feel so small. 

 “Follow your own advice, my girl,” she rights the light on the table and draws the curtains for you, “All of this is for tomorrow.”

 “I love you, mum.”

 She smiles and pats your cheek, there is a sad twinge at the side of her eyes. “I love you too.”

 Despite your fears, when she has gone, sleep comes easily. There is too much to think about to really think about any of it at all. 

⚘⚘⚘

 When you wake, you are not quick to rise. It is already nine but there is an anxiety that keeps you from leaving your room just yet. You brush your teeth in your bedroom sink and get back into bed, not to sleep, just to sit for a while with your thoughts. 

 It isn’t long before the silence starts to overwhelm. With the clarity of morning light and a lack of fatigue, the events of last night and the wee hours of the morning replay. Hot embarrassment runs through you as your brain catches again and again on him moving away from your touch. 

 You don’t know what to make of any of it, he was a wreck and what had happened was so awful that you cannot blame him for poor judgement but it still seems so strange to come here. It hurts to think of him almost as much as it hurts to look at him. 

 You had been doing such a good job at pushing him down, of putting the thoughts away until you left but now, looking at the opened suitcase across the room for you, it is almost frightening how far from that decision you feel. 

 A door clicks open down the hall and you sit up against your will, the footsteps approach and you watch the shadow of two feet dance in black spots under your door. When he knocks, it still makes you jump.

 “Come in,” you say. You know you have to get it over with at some point but the feeling of dread that creeps up your windpipe feels like it might kill a vital part of you. 

 He is still in your dads pyjamas and he is swimming in them, the hems fall heavily over his feet and you can hardly see his hands under the sleeves. He stares at you sitting in bed for a second before clearing his throat and stepping into the room properly. 

 The tension is so thick it feels humid on your skin. It is clear that neither of you know what to say. 

 He clears his throat again, shuffling his feet. “Daeron is still asleep. I take it that is your bear he has?”

 You nod, feeling so vulnerable all of a sudden. You push back the duvet so you are left sitting cross legged at the head, you gesture to the other end for him to sit even through the fear of him saying no. He doesn’t but he keeps firmly on his side of the wall of sheets in the middle. You cannot see his hands but you know he is fiddling with his nail beds. It feels like knowledge you no longer have the right to possess. 

 “I’m sorry for coming here,” he says, not looking at you. “I know it’s probably the last thing you wanted.”

 He is wrong but he also isn’t. To say that you had not wanted him to come back would be a lie but to say you wanted him to come back and sit across the room from you like a stilted stranger would also not be right. 

 You don’t say it’s okay, even though your instinct to pushes at your tongue. “I’m just glad we could help Daeron.”

 It feels cold to say it in such a way, one that ignores him completely but it is probably the right thing to say. 

 You can see in his spine when he sees the suitcases, the open one packed tight with almost everything you own. “You're leaving?”

 It feels mean and unfair for him to seem upset about it. “I was going to yes.”

 He ignores the tense of that sentence just as much as you do. “When?”

 “There is a train at eleven thirty today for Manchester…” You trail off and huff a weak laugh at the damning irony that he would show up last night of all nights. 

 He sits like he is warring with himself, shoulders stiff and taught. You turn your head to look out the window, trying to find anything at all to say. The light of the morning is crisp and blue, cold in appearance and feel. The dead trees outside burn white at the edges of their spindly branches where the light catches on them on its way to the ground. 

He breathes in sharply, almost a whistle, and you turn back to find him staring at the Sonnenblume. His eyes are wide and unblinking, his fists are clenching and unclenching. You aren’t breathing for caution of disturbing him. You don’t know what to do. 

 Your voice feels too loud in the silence. “Aegon-”

 “Why didn’t you write?” he asks suddenly, finally looking at you properly. 

 The words hardly process in your brain, you think he must be joking. “What do you-”

 He cuts you off again, speaking quickly like if he doesn't get it all out in the next minute he won’t be able to again. “I waited and waited, I was so sure you would. Then you didn’t and I kept thinking you might be holding off until you had something good to say or that you were busy.”

 You try to get a word in edgeways but he just barrels on, your confusion is mounting with your indignation. “But when the new year came and I still hadn’t heard from you I gave up hoping. I knew you would eventually realise but it just felt so sudden.”

 “I don’t understand.” you whisper.

 His eyes are bright and pleading when he looks at you, “Don’t ask me to spell it out please, you know what I mean.”

 “No, I don’t,” you cannot connect up the information he is giving you with what you had been thinking, it is too much to take in. You know for one thing though that you have to correct him. “Aegon, I did write to you.”

 He shakes his head and his arms curl around himself, “please,” is all he manages to say.

 “I wrote you a letter a week, sometimes two before I realised you weren’t going to respond. I sent the first one the day your train left and I didn’t stop even after I came to terms with the fact that if you were going to write, you would have already.”

 It is his turn for confusion, he shakes his head slowly. You can tell he isn’t letting himself believe you and you don’t have the capacity to reason with him. You get up and crouch to dig under your bed, hands easily finding the wrapped parcel you had shoved to the back weeks ago. You thrust it into his hold and he takes it but only holds, nothing more. “What?”

 “It’s the present I bought you for Christmas. I got it in the first week of the holidays and I was going to give it to you when you came back.”

 He still doesn’t unwrap it, looking up and down between the parcel in his hands and you where you are standing in front of him.

 “Look, I don't know what’s happened but-”

 “Aemond,” he says, drawing a breath like a gasp, eyes flashing open again.

 “Aemond?” you echo in question. 

 He stands quickly, the present falling onto the bed next to where he had been. He has a hand over his mouth and the other in his hair. “He knew.”

 He sees the bewilderment on your face at his vagueness and stumbles to elaborate, “About you and about me coming here. He found me sneaking back in one night and he told me how little he approved of ‘my little excursions’.”

 His index and pointer fingers wag in the air as punctuation. “I told him about you and he…well, he wasn’t pleased.”

 You would be offended if you cared about the opinion of Aemond Targaryen. As it stands he is just a sixteen year old boy. One who you are gathering might be responsible for quite a bit of hurt. 

 “So, you think he did something?”

 “I think he took the letters. He was acting particularly…” Aegon waves his hands indistinctly, you don’t know what he means but you suppose it must be something he cannot convey in words.

 “Would he really do that?”

 Aegon huffs a laugh without humour, “You don’t know him. There is an awful lot my brother would do if he felt the means justified the ends.”

 That attests to something you won’t ask about now but, someday. 

 He is looking at you, face bare and expressionless in a way that screams of vulnerability. “You really sent me letters?”

 You nod, relief so palpable it burns rolls off of you. “Of course I did.”

 He smiles and it feels precious to look at. However, there is one last thing you need to know.

 “Why didn’t you write though?”

 His smile turns self deprecating and something in you promises that this will be one of the last times you see that look on his face. “I was waiting for you, I was…scared. Then when I didn’t hear from you I-”

 He coughs and looks away. “I thought you wouldn’t want me to.”

 You realise then, that for every misery you suffered he has suffered just the same. Aemond joins his mother and Otto in the shadow prison of faceless names. 

 “Aegon, I waited for the postman every single day. Even when I knew he had nothing for me.” his eyes haven’t left yours. Gravity feels stronger in your little room. 

 “Fuck, he nearly ruined everything. I never should have said anything this is all my-”

 You cut him off, knowing exactly where he is going, “I won’t hear it, don’t say that, don’t lie. You must know it isn’t true.”

 For the first time, you notice the distance between him and yourself now you are both standing. Only a metre or so, just a few steps. It feels much further than it looks. 

 He blinks and a single tear drops heavily from his eye, catching on his cheek and leaving a glossy, shining strip on his pale skin. His cheekbones are lit in pink and the cold morning light is catching on his white lashes and hair. He looks so beautiful. 

 “Please,” he says and you nod. Whatever he is asking for you are willing to give, it is already his anyway. 

 He surges forward, all space forgotten, and takes your face in his hands. It is so quick yet you feel it echoing in slow motion, the feel of his warmth against you again, his fingertips brushing into the hair behind your ears, the way he kisses you. 

 Bright technicolour bursts behind your eyes and you gasp at the power of it. 

 He hums like he knows what you mean without you needing to say it. You think there is a good chance he might know exactly. 

 When he pulls back to look at you, he is beaming and you can feel it in your blood. You did not think you would ever see such a sight again. It's downright rapturous. 

 “Fuck, sunflower. My sunflower,” he kisses you again, “I missed you so much I thought it might kill me.”

 He wraps you in himself, arms tight around your back, one hand burying in your hair where it has come loose from its plait and the other pressing its fingers between the gaps in your ribs. Every sense of yours is consumed by him.  

 “Would you think me an awful person if I said I wanted many horrible things to happen to your brother?” Your voice is thick against his chest, you're sure you must feel how his shirt is soaking through against his hot skin from where it pressed against your eyes. 

 His laughter drips like molten silver down your spine. “It would make me a hypocrite if I did.”

 The pair of you remain like that for some time, relishing in the unbound feeling of each other’s hold. Reality drips back into focus slowly and it lacks the commanding power of clarity that it usually holds, made frail and unreal by giddiness and relief. 

 It is the call of your mother from downstairs that draws you reluctantly away from him, not before spinning you in a circle by the hands. 

 He pulls you out your bedroom door, only relinquishing your hand to let you put your dressing gown over your yellow striped pyjamas. When you have tightened the belt you look at him, find him already watching you. “You are the loveliest thing I have ever known.”

 You would disagree, in your old nightclothes and rough and messy hair you must look a right state, but the sight of him in the same position lights your nerves with affection. 

 As if overcome, he kisses you on the forehead before laughing so brightly that you think the sound may play in your mind until the end of days. He pulls you from the door just as your mother shouts again. 

 “Wait, wait,” you say quickly, he turns to you expectantly. “Let me go and explain this to my parents, they don’t know exactly but they have been here with me for the last month and a half.”

 He winces and nods, squeezing your hand. “I’ll go and check on Daeron, I’ll come down in five?”

 “Five is good,” and because you can, you kiss him once more. 

 Your arms stretch like a bridge between you and him, pulling taut before you let go and dip down the stairs. 

 The twin looks of concern on your parents' faces morph into shocked bewilderment when you walk in. Despite your effort, you can still feel a grin pulling at your lips. 

 Hesitance mars your mothers tone, “Are you alright?”

 “I was wrong mum, I was so wrong.”

 She tilts her head forward and puts down her teacup on the table. Your dad speaks, “We might need a little more than that to understand why you’ve gone from the picture of misery to about as happy as we have ever seen you.”

 “I was not the picture of misery!” you object, voice shrill with affront. Two sets of brows raise and you narrow your eyes between them. 

 “I feel that may be slightly beside the point,” your mum says, voice leading.

 “He didn’t get my letters, not one of them. His brother took them away and he had no idea. He thought I didn’t want to talk to him!”

 “Daeron? Why would he do that, he’s only little.” your mum asks and you can tell you are only confusing them further with how little you have actually explained of Aegon’s life. It just hadn’t felt like your place to divulge and then speaking about him had become rather difficult altogether. 

 “No, he has another brother, Aemond. He’s sixteen, goes to the school as well. I think he might be altogether quite unpleasant.” 

 Your father’s fingers are working at his temples, “I see.” but you think he might not until he has had some digestion time. “So, Aegon is no longer persona non grata?”

 “Not at all,” you say, jolly and warm.

“And you’re okay?” your mum asks, that same tone of voice she had used last night when asking if you were sure if you wanted to go. How long ago that feels now. 

 “I’m okay,” and it is, for the first time in quite a while, the truth. 

⚘⚘⚘

 Aegon does now come down alone, he has a still sleepy Daeron on his back who is clutching your Rosy Bear against his brother’s neck. He looks better than he did yesterday, no longer flushed with fever but still clearly not a hundred percent. That will take time. 

 He swings his brother round himself gently in what looks to be a practised move, depositing the bleary eyed boy on a free chair. Daeron waves at you with a heavy arm and a bandaged hand . You wave back and smile.

 Your mum gets up to fuss around him, sticking a thermometer under his tongue and fixing him another little glass of the clear fever medicine which he looks at with narrowed eyes. The effect is diminished by the funny way his lips pull around the glass stick in his mouth. 

He drinks the glass, pulling just as much of a face as he did the first time while your mum appraises the thermometer. “Much better, still high but not worryingly so.”

 Aegon breathes a sigh, “I can’t thank you enough for helping him.”

 Your father waves a hand like it is nothing and keeps eating his breakfast. 

 “What will happen with the school now?” Your mum asks.

 “Oh, I will be suspended I expect,” he is so flippant but you can tell that he really could not care less this time. “I haven’t exactly been on my best behaviour since the hols.”

 Daeron giggles, it startles you all to see him so perky. You raise an eyebrow at the little boy and he just laughs harder, Aegon looks a little sheepish when you turn your gaze to him. 

 “Well, I may have gotten up to some…unwise things here or there.”

 “He put pants on St. Oswald’s head!” Daeron burst out, kicking his feet where they dangle from his chair. 

 “What?” you ask a very red faced Aegon. 

 “He’s the school’s saint, we have a statue of him in the small courtyard which most of the lesson buildings overlook.” He has a hand on the back of his neck, “I got told off for not paying attention in chapel, Father Harrison said I was disrespecting him and gave me a week of written detentions. So I went out during morning lessons and…well,” he gestures to Daeron who is still laughing.

 To both yours and Aegon’s surprise, you hear your father chuckling low across the table. Daeron thinks it’s brilliant and claps happily. Your mum holds a hand over her mouth and is looking pointedly out the window. 

 It is such a bizarre atmosphere, time feels unreal and you have a lightness under your skin like you might lift right off the ground.

 Aegon huffs a slightly embarrassed laugh and you smile at him, head shaking in disbelief. “Anyway, that was the last incident and I have been on final warning since then.”

 “And what of Daeron? I cannot say I want him going back until those hands are better. I have little faith in your matron after last night.” you mother has a stern concern in her voice, you know she has been infected with the same irrevocable care for the two brothers as you have.

 “I am not sure, I expect Aemond will telephone our mother and have her tidy it up for him somehow. I am a lost cause but he isn’t.” 

 “Well,” your father says, “you’re welcome here in the meantime as long as it won’t get you into worse trouble.”

 Aegon shrugs, “call it starting my suspension early. Thank you for your hospitality.”

 “You’ll have to pull your weight,” comes the humoured reply of your dad.

 “Can I pour drinks?” He says, sitting forward in his seat, seemingly greatly excited by the idea. You smile at him warmly. Fear and uncertainty of the consequences of his actions pushed aside in the face of the contentment that washes over you. 

 You father gives him a relenting look and Aegon drums his fingers on the back of your hand with glee. It all feels too easy, too good, but you cannot be bothered to sit and wait for another shoe to drop when you are so happy.

 Maybe the universe won’t agree with you but, you think, perhaps selfishly, that you have earned just a bit of happiness. 

⚘⚘⚘

Hello again my lovely readers!

I hope this chapter makes up for the misery caused by the last. Sorry again for doing that to you all, thank you for sticking with me despite the angst. This one was both hard and easy to write, I am sure you can understand why. Do let me know what you think! All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

@neithriddle

[hardyshoe]

If Aegon and Sunflower quoted poetry to each other you know this is what they would be doing.

— Lina A.

[hardyshoe]

Sonnenblumen - Chapter six: Anemones, for anticipation.

Masterlist.

Also posted on AO3 - here.

⚘⚘⚘

On the twelfth of December, you pull on two jumpers under your thickest coat and walk out into the field. It had started snowing in the night when you were in Aegon’s dorm, he had woken you when the sky was bleeding orange into purple and kissed you until he started swearing at the hour. The magic of fearful excitement had chased you to the perimeter of the grounds, past the backs of buildings and in between tree lined paths. He had taken you all the way to the back gates under the crystalline dawn, his white hair glowing pink under the catching snowflakes.

There is no colour to the sky now, just a roiling mass of grey clouds. You stand in the middle of the field, close enough to startle the birds from the trees when you clap your boots together to shake the clumping snow loose.

It is ten o’clock, and the sun has forgotten to rise.

Your nose burns from the cold with every breath you take and you can feel the ends of your hair begin to stiffen and freeze but you stay where you are.

A mechanical screech in the distance pulls you in its direction, just a step, and you rock forwards onto your toes when the steam starts to pour from the tree line as though the woods themselves were on fire. The first glimpse of the locomotive, burning forwards in all its crimson glory, evokes flames in the base of your lungs. They smoulder with the deep breath you take to try and douse them.

You watch it shuttering past in flashes, speeding up as it rockets away for a distant destination. You remain rooted to the spot even after the last gasps of steam have cannibalised themselves in the sky. In the wake, the air smells like longing, and your veins course thickly with powerlessness.

When you walk home, turning with reluctance from the woods, you feel alone in a way that you hadn’t when you left.

As small as it makes you feel to do so, you let the tears burn down your cheeks without wiping them away. Not even when they start to chill at your neck on their way down. However, when you get to your room and are faced with your reflection, the tracks of fine, pale salt start to irritate your skin. Confronted by the silence of his absence, everything starts to feel too much, too hot, too tight. Wrong in an unfixable way.

You start shedding off the clothes you're wearing with frantic panic making your hands fumble. The necks of the jumpers catch on the pins in your hair and pull harshly at your scalp, leaving your two plaits wispy and tangled. Left only in your slip, the cold catches up on you quickly and your numb fingers sting against your feverish skin as they trace across the neckline to hover shakily over the yellowing bruise he had left that night with his lips and his teeth. It is all you have of him to cling to and the way it loses its colour at the edges, the border between you and the barest visage of him fading, makes you feel all the more powerless.

How unfair it seems that, in a few days, you will be robbed of this too.

⚘⚘⚘ Dear Aegon,

I hope you have made it back to London safe and well and that it is not as miserable as you feared it would be. I went to watch the train go past, I confess I had a moment of wanting to chase it. I will also confess that I am writing this the same afternoon. I don’t know when it will get to you but I expect you will be itching to leave again by then.

If you have a great escape planned, which I am sure that you do, please don’t let it be some faraway land that will keep you away from my dull corner of England. Please don’t come back with any new scars either, you must save some space for ones made in happiness, not moments of pain.

It is mad to say, but I miss you. I missed you when you left me at the gates and I missed you all the days in between. I think I miss you every moment that you are not around. However, watching you steam away made it feel all the more difficult. I can feel the distance stretching between us even as I write this.

I want you to know that I don't regret a thing of what we did the other night. I did not know it would be like that, so tender and so lovely. I feel as though you took a little bit of my soul when we did what we did. I don’t mind, I am glad for it, I give it willingly. I will treasure what you have given me of yourself forever.

Please tell Daeron that I say hello, I dearly hope he is doing better now that he is home. Tell him that the next time I see him it will be under better circumstances when I can get to know him better.

I will end here, with you being away I fear I will have very little to report on and I must therefore ration what I want to say. I look forward to hearing from you, though saying it like that feels an understatement.

Your sunflower. Ps. I would very much like to kiss you right now, so much so that I can think of little else.

⚘⚘⚘

The girls come back, one stronger than last time with the return of Mary. Barbara seems lighter with the tiny girl by her side, smiling easier. She has shed her self-conscience, no longer moving like her legs feel too long.

Mary is just as you remember her, so happy that it pours from her. She hasn’t stopped smiling since they arrived, when Barbara tucks her under her arm in the corner of the booth, she laughs at nothing and leans in closer.

It is nice to be among them, to think about something other than the fact that it is a Wednesday and Aegon is not coming. Still, your reflexes have you watching the door when the conversation lulls.

Since telling them that he has gone home for the holidays, they haven't asked you anything at all. You think they can sense that their teasing would not go down in the way it had last time. The odd numbness badgering at you still has you excusing yourself under the guise of needing another drink.

“Where’s your gentleman caller then?” Bill asks as he sidles into the space next to you at the bar, shaking his glass at your mother over your shoulder.

Brian appears on your other side, the pair making for an almost humorous dichotomy with Bill towering over you and Brian hardly coming up to your shoulder. “Yes, we were planning on challenging him.”

“Challenging him?” you echo, not quite following.

They both mine throwing darts, “to a game of course.”

“Oh,” is all you can muster. The pair are known for being territorial over the board. You recall a time, some years ago, when the young mining boys had come in, still sooty and blinking at the overhead lights. They had sat themselves down on the nearest table to the board and waited for their turn. Four hours and many rounds later, they had given you dismayed shouts when you had rung the bell for the end of the night. Bill and Brian had clapped them on the backs as they made their way to the door.

“You see, young lady, on the very rare occasion that he isn’t staring a hole in that there door, waiting for you to come down,” Bill starts, poking you in the arm until you watch him gesture over to the door up to the flat.

Brian finishes, “He watches us play.”

“I’ve even caught him lining up shots in the air a few times.”

You can picture that so vividly it makes you laugh weakly.

“So,” Brian continues, a cheeky grin on his face to match that of his best friend, “we have decided to challenge him for the affections of our favourite barmaid.”

It's incredibly sweet, especially coming from two men who so rarely leave their little corner. You don't quite know what to say.

“We need to make sure he’s good enough for you, don’t we Bri?” The man in question nodes sagely.

You're a little choked up when you finally do find your words. “You two are too good to me.”

“Not at all,” Brian says, Bill nudges you on the arm with his pint. They head back to the darts board and you call after them as they go.

“I will tell him when he gets back in the new year, but you have to promise me not to be too hard on him.”

“Anything for you, my dear,” Bill says but you watch him elbow Brian in the side where his shirt sleeve is pinned to the shoulder of his shirt. They share a wry smile.

You hardly have a moment to recover before you are called for again.

“Come back to us quickly,” Marlene begs as she takes you by the arm. “Barbara and Mary have started using big sciency words and I think they have short circuited Joan.”

You laugh and let yourself be dragged along, picking up the end of Mary’s fast and excitable rambling. “-an essay on benzene in organic chemistry from one of the girls in my class, it’s absolutely fascinating. She was kind enough to let me take it to the library and run it through the xerographic copier so you can read it too, Barb.”

Barbara smiles happily and lets her witter on.

“Where’s my present?” Joan asks and Marlene swats her on the arm for it when Mary’s face falls.

“Oh! I’m so sorry Joan. Did you want a copy too? I didn’t think it was your sort of thing but I can go and make another one if you want?” Her genuine sincerity has Barbara burying her face in Mary’s shoulder. You hide your laughter in your drink but Marlene cannot contain herself.

Mary looks at her, confused, which only makes Marlene laugh even harder. Mary then starts to pester Baraba for an explanation of what is so funny. You turn to the room, still chuckling, and look onto the Christmas tree near the fireplace.

Your mind begins to float in a familiar direction, the tides unchanging. Leading back to the same shore every time.

What must he be doing? All those hundreds of miles away. You have tried picturing his house so many times, always a tall, grand thing somewhere terribly important; on a road lined with shining motorcars. He looks so funny when you try to put him there with his rolled trousers and cardigans missing half their buttons.

You are glad, at the very least, that Daeron has gone home. The image of him in that freezing corridor haunts you. You think of how he had cried for his mother and hope that she has it in her to show him some kindness. Perhaps some of what she has withheld from her eldest son.

You hear your name being called and leave the thoughts of a shaggy blond head silhouetted in the darkness, up high in the window of a house he is too alive to haunt.

“Yes, yes. Sorry.” You say, shaking yourself. Barbara squeezes your shoulder and you blink hard at the understanding in the gesture.

“We were asking if you wanted to come Christmas shopping with us next week?” Asks Joan, somewhat tentative.

It is both a step forward and back. Out from your cave of self-imposed exile and back into the village. You try to quell the disquiet by speaking before it can overwhelm you. It is an imperfect solution but it works for the moment.

“That would be nice, thank you.” You say and they all smile at you. It's nice, nice as it always was. You still feel like you're having to leave a bit of yourself behind for it though.

⚘⚘⚘

Dear Aegon,

I am sorry for writing to you again before you have replied to my first letter but I truly do not know what else to do with my thoughts. The girls came by on Wednesday, it was nice. Barbara is so happy now that Mary is back. I kept thinking you would come through the door, they would say something and I would laugh and forget for a moment and then the door would open, and it wasn’t you.

I am going to go shopping with them in a few days, and might even get you something if you're lucky…

Anyway, I really hope you're doing okay. I am looking forward to hearing how you are, what you're getting up to and such.

Your sunflower. Ps. You might like to practise your darts playing, I don’t know if you have ever played but unless you want your arse handed to you by Bill and Brian you really ought to spend some time on it. They were very sweet, I think they are quite fond of you really. Not that they would say as much though.

⚘⚘⚘

Your mother is elbow deep in a bowl of mince pie filling. You sit across the table from her shaping little pastry cases. The kitchen windows are open on her insistance that the chilled air is better for the butter in the pastry. The day outside is bright in that watery-pale way of midwinter.

Frank Sinatra’s ‘Songs for young lovers’ is spinning on your player, brought down from your bedroom to sit on the kitchen counter. Her choice, you raised an eyebrow but she just smiled evasively.

You've been at it nearly half an hour, working in comfortable silence. Then she speaks, “So,” she starts and you know to brace yourself, “How is Aegon?”

She isn’t looking at you, eyes focused deliberately on the red gingham oilcloth on the table.

“I haven’t heard from him yet,” you say, trying to keep your tone lighter than the weight of the words on your tongue.

“Oh?” she questions, her brows pinching. You can see that she is looking at you but you keep your eyes on the little cases.

Her tone doesn’t help with the game of avoidant denial you have been playing and you try not to let your shoulders drop visibly. It has been a week and a half since you watched the train take him away and still, nothing. No thinking can make post go that slowly even on a second class stamp, not if he had sent one even a few days after getting your first.

“I don’t know, he might just be really busy. I know he told me that Christmases there aren’t quiet, his mother hosts all these events…” you trail off, she catches the hint and leaves well alone for the moment.

“Hurry up with those, my girl or I will make you stir the next batch of mince.”

You follow her instructions quickly. It is a tradition every year at the pub. In the days leading up to Christmas, you and your mother make a truly obscene amount of mince pies and sell them for two shillings with a pint. This is the first year in memory that your mother hasn’t had to do a whip around of ration points for something. It was only butter last year but it had still left her with a funny energy, guilty despite the kindness she was doing.

She is taking the opportunity to go all out, more of everything than you have ever seen before. She sent you to the grocers for the currants and the old man and his wife had smiled and only let you pay for half. They said they were looking forward to coming down to the pub when the pies were ready.

It is therapeutic in the way that a diverting task always is, the sense of accomplishment when the first batch comes out steaming and bubbling, alleviating something from your chest. It will take the whole afternoon to bake the hundred or so little pies but you don’t mind, there is nothing else to do but think.

⚘⚘⚘

Dear Aegon,

Are you alright? I know this will be the third letter without a word in return from you but I cannot stop myself from worrying about you. I am sorry if I have done something to make you not want to write back to me but if I have then I do not know what it was. Please tell me if I have, I want to make it right if so.

I desperately want to know that you aren’t having too bad of a time. If it isn’t my place to ask then you need only let me know but I can’t stop thinking about all that you have told me. I want you to remember how lovely you are, that it isn’t all your fault. I care for you deeply, that cannot change.

Please, if only this, just tell me how you are?

Your sunflower.

⚘⚘⚘

The windows of the village streets are bright with decorations, strings of tinsel hanging from a tree in the café and paper snowflakes littering the books in the window of the bookseller’s. You duck in there with Joan on your tail, you for a copy of Arthur Miller’s newest play ‘The Crucible’ and Joan for a biography of King George the sixth.

Marlene has Elsie in a pram but the little girl soon kicks off and ends up passed between the five of you, her pram filling with your purchases. She babbles indistinctly all the way, Mary agreeing with everything she says like she understands while holding her. She has a tiny tweed coat on and you smile when she is passed over to you.

Barbara and Marlene go into the butcher’s together, the latter for the ham for her small family’s christmas lunch and the former for the dinner she will make for herself and her mother. Barbara’s mother has been unwell for years and, since her father had died from black lung when she was ten, Barbara had looked after her. You all knew that was the only reason she hadn’t gone up with Mary and the injustice hands a little on Marlene’s shoulders, like she could have done anything at all when really it is just life getting the best of everyone as usual.

While they are in there, quickly followed in by Mary who wouldn’t leave Barbara’s side for a moment and Joan who felt left out, you cross the road with Elsie to the town square. You pick through the mucky streets, browned with dirt from horse carts and pedestrian footfall, to where the snow still clings to the stone of the war memorial in the centre. You sit and bounce Elsie, reading through names absentmindedly. She pulls on your coat buttons and you smooth down her little woollen hat.

You watch the postman pass by the shops in the corner of your eye and have to force yourself not to watch him to see if he turns to walk up the road to the pub.

“Sad,” Elsie says, vowels pulling wrong and consonants too heavy. At a year and a half old, she can say a few things but mostly chooses to communicate through grabbing things and pointing.

She jabs her mittened hands into the corners of your mouth to force them upwards and it's so clumsily sweet that you actually do.

“I’m sorry darling,” you say, muffled by her hands still pressing into your cheeks. “I’m not sad, I promise.”

She starts singing a disjointed song comprised entirely of non-words and you kiss her on the forehead.

You wonder though, if she can tell so easily with her terribly limited scope of emotion that something is wrong, how clear his absence must be in the way you carry yourself. You wonder if there is a ghostly Aegon following you like Mary’s apparition hangs around Barbara when she is gone.

You just wish so desperately that you could think straight, get past the personal bits and be rational about it for a minute. You know you are clouding your own judgement but you can’t stop that, not now, after everything.

Not asking questions just isn’t in your being, you are curious by nature and the idea that you are missing something here because you haven't thought about it enough is causing you so much grief it is becoming overwhelming.

More than anything, you can’t shake the idea that something else is afoot. In your heart of hearts, you know you haven’t done anything wrong and Aegon had given you nothing but warmth and joy when you had left him in the snow. It does not make sense, you hate that you can’t figure it out.

You are so worried you feel sick with it.

When the girls come out, pram laden heavily with even more good, you get up with Elsie to rejoin them. You try to leave your thoughts of Aegon behind but, inevitably, some follow anyway.

“I just want to go to the men’s dress wear shop, John wanted a new dinner jacket for christmas.” Marlene says as she steers the group down one of the side roads off the square. Joan poaches Elsie from you and takes her on a trip to the haberdashers for some ribbon with the other two.

You would blame it on your cold hands if anyone asked why you followed Marlene instead of them. Thankfully, no one does, flimsy an excuse as it is.

The shop is not large, one wall dominated with denim overalls for the miners and the rest populated with more traditional suits and day jackets. You run your hand across the various tweeds and wools, letting the fabrics itch at you as you go. Marlene is asking the shopkeeper about lounge suits and you lose yourself in the racks while she chats.

You stop short when your hand meets buttery soft leather instead of scratching wool. It is a big brown leather jacket, far too much room in the shoulders and too short to look tidy. You think of Aegon instantly and, despite everything, you take it from the rack and replace the bare hanger in the space left behind.

Images of his skin flushed pink from the cold and the way he would bike back to school without even a jumper take you to the counter.

“I wouldn’t have pegged your father as liking this sort of thing,” the slim cashier behind the counter says, peering at the jacket over the half moon spectacles perchen on the end of his nose. You don’t care to explain anything to him and offer him a paltry shrug instead. He rings you up without asking anything else. It isn’t cheap, in fact it is the most expensive piece of clothing you have ever bought, but you so rarely spend money on anything but books and journals and you work so often that it is hardly a dent in what you have saved.

The money sits in tightly rolled wads of cash in a box under your bed, waiting for a day when you can spend it on a suitcase and a train ticket. The cloud of uncertainty hanging over that disquiets your mind further but you try not to dwell.

The paper wrapped jacket is heavy in your hands, almost as heavy as Marlene’s questioning gaze when she returns to the counter with a deep brown jacket for her husband. You stare at her and she gives you a hug you did not ask for, but needed more than you knew.

⚘⚘⚘

Dear Aegon,

It is snowing again here. I am not sure what the weather is like where you are but it looks like there’s going to be a blizzard tonight. I’ve been staring at the school these last few days, at least I can see of it over the trees from my room. It is hazed out with white right now. I have a lot on my mind which I cannot quite get into a sense of coherence.

I have so many questions, I hate this silence. I don’t know how to shut off the part of my brain that is still listening out for you.

I worry about you all the time and I miss you even more. I remember realising that nothing would be the same after I met you but I could not have known how true that was at the time.

I wish I could show you how you look in my eyes, how wonderful I think you are. The truth is, I do not care what anyone else has to say about you, not when I have so much to support that they are all so very wrong. I just need you to know that I don’t think of you any differently for what you have told me of yourself. You keep saying that I will when I learn bits of you but I just don’t think that is true.

If you are worried you gave too much or that I do not want to hear more then please do not be. I am listening.

Still your Sunflower.

⚘⚘⚘

Christmas is a huge affair, the pub heaves from opening with people pouring in from all over the village. You are moving between the front and back of house, helping your mother finish cooking the huge dinner for as many people as she can, and serving people alongside your dad behind the bar.

It is warm and jolly and the fire is roaring in the corner. Everyone is smiling, even you despite the hectic atmosphere. Every time you step out onto the floor you are pulled into a hug by someone or another. You and your mother receive a deafening toast when you finally bring out the food.

There are plates and plates of potatoes and roasted vegetables and stuffing. The star of the show is the assortment of roasted meats which your mother glows at. The last thing to be taken off rationing, meat had always been scarce in the Christmas dinners of years before but not this one.

You are sandwiched tightly between your parents on one of the tables, paper crowns on all your heads. Cracker jokes are read around to varying levels of disapproval. Bill and Brian take turns making up rude ones and pretending to read them from the scraps in their hands. When one of them says a truly crass one, Joseph Blackburn, much to his wife Helen’s dismay, throws his empty cracker at them and Brian falls off his chair backwards.

Everyone laughs raucously and you feel warmed to your bones. You are not letting yourself think about the wrapped jacket under your bed or its absentee recipient today. You can worry again tomorrow.

Gasps of excitement go through the gathered crowd when your father lights the brandy on the massive christmas pudding. It burns blue and orange and Joseph burns his finger when he pokes it too soon.

Helen pulls you and your mother aside to congratulate you on the feast and you thank her warmly. She mutters about her husband under her breath but you catch him chasing her with mistletoe later and she cannot wipe the smile from her face.

You excuse yourself when the night starts winding down, leaving your father to do the rounds of waking the patrons who have fallen asleep after a good meal and far too much to drink.

Your ears ring in the quiet of your room and you can feel voices through the floor but you need some time away. You close the door and breathe for a minute before turning on the light.

You stand in front of your bed and run your fingers across your present from your parents again. A beautiful, navy, two-piece travelling outfit, it is far nicer than any of your clothes and you adore it. But that is not what you love the most.

That spot goes to the three piece set of matching powder blue suitcases, stacked inside one another’s open mouths. The viscerally tangible excitement that they evoke makes you giddy.

⚘⚘⚘

Aegon,

I do not know if I will send more letters after this. I am not stopping for any other reason than that it hurts to hope that you will respond more with each one I send.

The new year begins tonight and I know you will come back to school in a week. I hope you will come back, I hope there is some explanation for all of this. I hope you are okay and I hope you do not have any regrets just as I do not. I hope an awful lot these days, sometimes I think it is all that I am running on.

There is still space for you here, that has not changed. Nothing has on my end, nothing at all. I just don’t know how many times I can watch the postman come and go without anything from you.

I suppose I don’t have much to say, not without knowing that you want to hear it. I have so many things I have been waiting to tell you, I am not sure where to put them anymore.

Your sunflower, I hope.

⚘⚘⚘

You do not go out to watch the train go past on its way back to the school.

The girls are in for one last night before Mary goes away again, you settle down with your drink next to Joan but move to stand again when you see that Marlene doesn’t have one. “Sorry Marlene, did you want me to fetch you something while I’m up?”

She widens her eyes at you and says no quickly, “I am fine, thank you. I don’t fancy it tonight.”

You can tell she was trying to be subtle in a way but she is perhaps the least subtle person you know. Well, apart from one.

The others stop talking and look at her, she flushes pink and smiles awkwardly. Joan gasps and Mary hides a squeal behind her hands.

“You're not!” Joan exclaims, nearly leaping out of her seat.

“I didn’t want to say anything! It’s Mary’s night and it’s still so early on…” she trails off and Joan almost tackles her with an embrace.

“Oh don’t be daft Marlene. This is far better news than me going away, now we have something to celebrate!” grins Mary. You all take turns shuffling around the table to hug your friend.

Marlene is glowing, from more than just happiness too. She has tears in her eyes when she smiles, “Thank you all.”

“Here she goes,” mutters Barbara and you laugh as Marlene starts to sob with joy. It is so lovely you find yourself emotional too, even Barbara is bright eyed.

Joan and Mary start asking her questions at a frantic speed, due date, names, what she thinks it is. Marlene can hardly stop crying enough to respond.

It is only later, when they have left and you are alone again, that you realise you didn’t even hear the train whistle as it went past.

⚘⚘⚘

The first Wednesday has you bounding on your feet behind the bar, uncertainty coursing in your veins all night. However, as you watch the clock run further towards closing you sag more and more. The final drinks bell ringing like a death knell in your ears.

The routine follows much the same on Friday.

He misses the first quiz night of the year and you lose a little bit of hope. More dies with each evening he does not come in.

You have half a mind to march over to the school yourself and find him, but you don't think you could face it if you actually tried. It has gotten to a point where you cannot even think of what you would say if he did come back.

Marlene comes in a lot, mostly for tea in the mornings. You know she knows that something is wrong but she doesn’t ask. It is nice to have company though.

By the time February hits, you start to make up your mind about some things. You cannot bear staring at the suitcases in the corner of your room anymore, nor can you bear the undying hope that prickles at your mind every sodding time the door opens for someone who is not him.

You make the decision and your parents smile at you hesitantly, they had known this day was coming for years but you know they don’t feel so sure about it all the same. Marlene cries when you tell her and makes you promise her Joan and Barbara one more night in the pub. You acquiesce.

So, you pack your clothes into the three suitcases. You take down the clippings you love the most and paste them into the scrapbook that Barbara had given you for Christmas. You do not touch the ‘Sonnenblume’. Its frame of reverence grows around it with each cutting taken from the wall.

Your mother helps you, folding things on your bed while your father stands in the doorway and watches quietly. By the time the sun sets, your wardrobe is empty save for the things you do not want to take and your walls are so bare you don’t want to look at them.

“Are you sure about this, my girl?” your father asks as you sit back wearily on your heels.

They both wait for your answer patiently and you pick at the pile of your pink rug. “No, but I don’t think there will ever be a time when I am.”

“It will hurt less with time, but you cannot force time with distance” your mother says and you blink hotly at the floor.

“I just,” you ball your fists up in your lap until your nails burn sharply against your palms, “I need to do this.”

When you look up at them, they nod in understanding and do not say a word when you cry in their joint embrace.

They leave you alone with reluctance, telling you they love you on their way out of the room. You turn off the lights and get into bed. Frenetic energy sizzles between your skin and blood. Sleep will not come easily tonight as you try to chase away dreams of a blond miracle with thoughts of places far away.

⚘⚘⚘

Happy Friday dear readers! lovely to see you again! Please don't hate me for this chapter, I know that probably will not help but oh well. This was the hardest chapter to write for me but, in the end, it had to be done. Shout at me if you must! All my love, SlaginSecret xxx

@neithriddle