Chapter Text
She is fifteen when she realizes how frustrating a small crush can be.
The unavoidable race of the heartbeat, the annoyingly obvious blush on her cheeks, the stuttering, the babbling.
It's all part of a concealed contract she never signed or agreed to.
She doesn't know when it all started or how she first realized what was happening inside her brain, but she knows there's nothing to be done now.
She is doomed to carry around these unwanted, repelling feelings.
His tall figure leaning above her is always enough to send her into a frenzy of rushed sentences that make no sense, or perhaps they do, to him.
She still converses with him using an odd mix of high valyrian and the common tongue which makes her brain hurt but doesn't seem to displease him. Maybe he's used to it.
She discovers that she enjoys talking to him, probably more than she enjoys talking to anyone else.
He hears her and looks at her as if he actually listens. Unlike her father, unlike everyone else, he knows her.
He takes her out frequently. He always pays for her. He buys her gifts and whatever her eyes linger on a little longer than usual.
He talks about his business trips and all the things that remind him of home when he's away. He makes her laugh with stories about his awfully tasteless coworkers and his resentment of planes and flights.
She tells him about school, her friends, about Alicent and Viserys. She doesn't have to elaborate much.
Her uncle knows everything.
He knows when she lies, when she's irritated, when she's calm. She doesn't have to say a single word for him to act accordingly.
Sometimes he gets the truth directly out of her, sometimes he doesn't.
Still, she knows she can never hide anything from him.
Well, almost anything.
She's surprised that he hasn't figured out the worst secret she would ever have to keep, considering he always reads her like an open book.
She's surprised no one hasn't figured it out with the way she looks at him.
She's also extremely relieved it's not as obvious as she thought because if he knew, he'd despise her. He'd be disgusted, repulsed by her.
And she doesn't know if she could bear that.
It's just a silly crush. It'll vanish into thin air.
No one will ever know.
...
She's just turned sixteen when he returns from a trip to New York and gives her the necklace and she realizes things are not going the way they were supposed to go.
The feelings are still there, very much alive and tormenting.
He puts it on her delicately, not giving her the time to properly react to his fingers grazing her bare neck and collarbone.
She softly gasps at the electrifying spark she feels when his hands touch her skin. She internally curses her body for still suffering the effects of his charm.
"It's Valyrian steel.", his velvet smooth voice makes her stomach tighten in unwanted excitement and she feels her heart trying to burst out of her chest.
She turns around to look at him and he calls her beautiful in their own language and all she wants to do is throw herself at him.
She absolutely loves his attention and she entirely hates herself for it.
His touch elicits an illicit fantasy; their bodies entangled and trapped by one another in the most intimate ways and she senses the quick change in her body, the heat coursing through it.
The shame immediately overtakes her and she politely thanks him for his gift before retreating to her bedroom to internally admonish herself.
When the night comes, she takes off the necklace before getting into bed.
She would rather starve for a whole week than stop wearing his gift, but she uses the deprivation as punishment for the horrendous thoughts about him. A member of her family, her father's brother, her own uncle.
She whines, face buried in her pillow, her insides searing with an unbearable longing for something she can never have.
...
She's seventeen when she acknowledges that all her friends are either in relationships or hooking up with random people. They call it the pre-college romance experience and she wants nothing to do with it.
She convinces everyone that it's because she wants to focus on her studies and partying. She convinces herself that it's definitely not because she still holds on to old feelings and frantic hopes that will never be gratified.
She focuses on graduating high school and having the best time of her life.
She gets her driver's license and a remotely expensive car (a pathetic attempt of a gift from her always-occupied father) and she drives around town with her friends, drinking and dancing in every single nightclub in London.
She enjoys getting wasted and accidentally waking Alicent up with her arrival in the middle of the night.
She enjoys making her father feel guilty enough for marrying her former best friend and destroying whatever was left of their relationship and she enjoys receiving money and freedom from his guilt.
She likes smoking on the rooftop at night, reminiscing about the time she was as naive as they would still want her to be.
And of course, him.
She remembers the day he permanently left for New York, moving there and abandoning her in her own personal hell.
She remembers his cheap apology, the ridiculous excuses about some job, his cold stare and how she almost told him then.
She was ready to scream in his face, to accuse him of claiming her as his own and then leaving her, of stealing her mind and her decency, of lying about that night.
She wanted to hit him and kiss him, to never speak to him and to never be apart from him again. She wanted to tell him to never come back because she didn't need him and to beg him to never leave her because she couldn't breathe without him.
She was mature enough then to know that she was utterly in love and there was nothing she could do about it.
All the ways she had managed to convince herself that the small infatuation meant nothing suddenly seemed relatively ridiculous, especially after the night before he left.
The realization that he had left because of that night and because of her, had been the reason she did nothing to stop him. She did not beg and she did not cry like she used to back when she was a kid.
Recalling their parting, she can almost picture the look he had on his face then. Contained, distant.
One thing had finally been obvious; she needed him like oxygen and he couldn't care less.
She was just his niece, a little girl, his brother's daughter.
The night he had given her the best feeling she could have ever wished for had meant nothing to him. He had just pretended it never happened.
The thought had made her blood boil, it'd made her outrageous bubble burst and she'd evacuated any silly hopes of falling into her uncle's arms and submitting herself to a secretly shared passion.
So she had pretended too. Too much vodka, only a few foggy memories. He wouldn't know that she hadn't been drunk, he wouldn't know how real everything had been for her.
Because he never felt the same.
She is older now. She knows.
She realizes she's always had him as much as she has him now, now that he's in another continent, probably not wasting a single thought on her.
She doesn't cry at the realization anymore. She smokes a cigarette to get rid of the lump in her throat and goes back inside to sleep.
...
She's twenty when he comes back.
The front door opens and her world stops.
His hair is longer, his face as sharp and controlled as she remembers. She can almost feel the edge of his jaw and the hardness of his shoulders under her fingertips.
His stare immediately falls on her the moment he steps into the house and she has to hold on to the staircase to make sure her legs still work.
Explosive anger bursts inside of her. She doesn't know who it is directed at.
Maybe at herself, for letting his arrival have the same effect on her as it had back when he used to return from his long trips.
Maybe at him, for coming back to once again fuck up her already flawlessly fucked up life.
Unwanted memories of hands tangled in her hair and lips trailing across her neck flash before her and the burning sensation in her chest intensifies.
She's over this, she's over him. She has to be.
"You're back." , she hisses in high Valyrian before she can stop herself.
Viserys looks at her in surprise, confused by her tone. He doesn't interfere.
"I am.", her uncle replies simply, his eyes even more frigid than she remembers.
She hates the way her body still responds to his voice and him speaking their intimate language after all this time.
She hates him.
"What do you want?"
"Only the comforts of home.", he switches to the common tongue as if to interrupt their own personal conversation.
Great. So now he won't even speak to her using the language he taught her.
"I thought home is a place you actually step foot in.", she retorts coldly, ignoring his intense gaze on her.
"Rhaenyra-", Viserys starts, but Daemon is faster.
"My home is where my family is.", his dead tone makes her want to scream. "That doesn't mean there's a reason to stay glued here."
She's furious. It feels like he's fucking mocking her. He came back after all these years to taunt her.
Maybe he didn't believe her when she told him she didn't remember.
Perhaps he knew about her stupid feelings and he was sick enough to be entertained by them. In that case, he's probably bounced back to make fun of how much she wants him still.
A little girl with a stupid crush.
She hates him with all her will.
She's no longer a little girl and she isn't a toy to be renounced and then reclaimed. He doesn't own her. He won't.
"So you decided to finally visit us.", Viserys bursts their loaded with tension bubble and hugs his brother.
"It's been way too long.", Daemon simply replies.
Rhaenyra stays fixed on her place, too dumbfounded to move.
"Won't you come here and greet your uncle properly? He hasn't seen you in three years.", her father urges.
Daemon's attention is back on her, studying her, eyes burning with something she can not perceive. Disgust? Regret?
She looks away unable to maintain eye contact anymore, a lump forming in her throat.
Before anyone can say anything, a woman enters the house behind Daemon, a rather large bag hanging on her right shoulder.
He turns around and takes the bag from her, giving it to a passing butler.
"So this is the infamous Laena.", Viserys is the first to acknowledge her.
The stranger is tall and beautiful, curvy and elegant.
Rhaenyra has never seen her around before.
How does her father know this woman?
"You must be Viserys. Honored to meet the owner of the company.", she smiles, giving him her hand.
"And you...are?", she turns to Rhaenyra, confusion evident on her face.
"This is my daughter.", Viserys explains with a rather perplexed expression.
"Oh, you have a niece?", she turns to Daemon, troubled. "You never told me.", she awkwardly chuckles. "I'm Laena, his fiancee. He doesn't talk much, does he?"
Rhaenyra sees red.
She opens her mouth but the lump is bigger than ever and nothing comes out.
Daemon now looks at her as if she is the object of his resentment and she can no longer bear it.
She turns around and sprints up the stairs without another word, covering her mouth with her hands so nobody hears the violent sob that escapes her throat.
She slams the door of her bedroom behind her and locks it swiftly.
She falls on her bed and buries her face in a pillow, letting it all out; The pain, the anger, the longing, the jealousy. The hate. The love.
The burning desire.
She used to be a part of his family, his favorite part of the family and now he doesn't even think of her when asked about home.
He hasn't even once mentioned her to his fiancee.
He is engaged.
A new wave of sobs overtakes her and she slams her hand on the mattress again and again.
She cusses her stupid, stupid heart for refusing to let him go.
She needs to forget about him. She needs to once and for all put out the fire that starts in her every time she remembers.
She hasn't got a single clue about how to do that.