Chapter Text
The baby is born in a thunderstorm.
Her mom dies in a thunderstorm.
Rhaenyra sees the room after they declare her dead, slipping past a doctor and two nurses who try to hold her back. They won’t let her see her mother (“This isn’t how you want to remember her, Ms. Targaryen”), but they can’t stop her from seeing the operating theater where she last drew breath.
OR C, at the end of the hall past the nurses station, second room on the right. She overheard the nurse tell her dad, when they came to get him, and the room is easy enough to find. The door is even still ajar.
Someone is inside mopping the floor, but one look at her tear-streaked face and silver hair, and it’s not hard to guess her relation to the woman who died in here just minutes ago.
“Take all the time you need,” they say, kind and somber, but Rhaenyra barely notices them leave.
She has eyes only for the pile of sheets in a corner, waiting to be disposed of—once white, now drenched almost completely in bright, brutal red.
The red of her mother’s blood.
Bile rises in her throat, and she flees the room as fast she entered, eyes on the tile floor, everything else spinning in circles around her.
She barrels past multiple sets of feet, unable even to look up and see who they belong to in case it’s somebody she recognizes. She won’t stop. Can’t. The thought of speaking to anyone is sickening.
She makes it all the way to the bushes outside the main entrance before she throws up what little she managed to eat for dinner.
Rain pours down all around her. She tips her head to the sky and lets the water rinse out her mouth—she hasn’t thrown up since the last time she was here, rushed into the ED with a sickness that left her bedridden for days, and the bitter-burn taste is one she has not missed in the slightest.
Lightning splits the sky in two, followed immediately by thunder.
The storm must be right on top of them.
The rain hides her tears, and she cries until she’s empty. Not once does she consider walking back inside to see the baby her mom died for.
The baby will still be there tomorrow. Tonight is for her mom.
-
She holds baby Baelon at the funeral. Her dad is needed for the ceremony, but she doesn’t think he would have held the baby anyways—there’s a blank, distant look on his face nearly all the time, as though he barely remembers who or where he is, and it’s mostly her and Aunt Rhaenys who have seen Baelon through his first few weeks of life.
(There are moments when she wonders if he remembers he has a newborn at all)
Baelon is so, so very small. Technically he should still be in the hospital, but it feels important for him to be here, and the place isn’t called Targaryen General Hospital for nothing—there’s a whole neonatal care team stationed beyond the tree line in case anything goes wrong.
It won’t. She will ensure it won’t. She hates Baelon as much as she loves him—he’s a baby and a murderer, but he’s the last thing any of them have left of Aemma Targaryen. Her mom died so this baby could live, so he will live, goddammit, even if it takes everything in her power to ensure it.
Rhaenyra can already tell he will have mom’s eyes, and it’s a blessing as much as a curse to look down and see the familiar lilac staring back at her.
Luckily, he mainly just sleeps, and his eyes stay mostly closed.
Cremation is still the Valyrian way, so it’s a closed-casket funeral. The last image she has of her mother—laying on her side on a stretcher dressed in nothing but a hospital gown, belly swollen, tired but hopeful—will be the last image she has forever.
(“It’ll be okay, sweetling,” her mom said with a squeeze of her hand, before she disappeared behind the large door marked Surgical attire required beyond this point. “These are the best doctors in the world, and they’ll take good care of me.”
And it burns, it burns, that her last words were a lie)
“Here, I’ll take Baelon.” Aunt Rhaenys interrupts her thoughts, and she startles at the feel of a hand against her shoulder before realizing who it is. “You should go say goodbye, Rhaenyra.”
What’s the point of saying goodbye to an empty husk of wood? The mom she knew and loved is gone forever, nothing but ash in the wind, and she started mourning her several weeks ago—in the midst of a thunderstorm, next to a bush coated in her own vomit.
“I’m fine.” She holds Baelon a hair tighter to her chest, as though Aunt Rhaenys might try to take him anyway.
“Okay, sweetheart.” They aren’t close, her and Aunt Rhaenys, but the past few weeks have brought them together as only a tragedy like this could. Anyone else calling her sweetheart might have rankled, but here she doesn’t mind it as much as she once might have.
“He’ll need—” she stops. Baelon is meant to come home with them in just a few days, if the last set of tests come back clear. She’ll have to be back in school by then, family emergency only an excuse for so long before she’ll have missed too much class to make up. He’ll need someone to nurse him, someone to change him, someone to put him to sleep—he’ll need a mom.
“I’ll be around more for the next few months to make sure he’s okay,” Aunt Rhaenys says, somehow reading her mind. “You don’t need to worry about that, alright? It isn’t my first rodeo.”
That her dad won’t be up to the task doesn’t even need to be said. He was barely even in involved in her early life, as much as he was a presence at her mom’s side the whole time. She was the one who held her, cared for her, dropped her at school, picked her up from lessons, smoothed her hurts, sang her lullabies—everything. She was everything, and now she’s gone.
If her dad couldn’t step it up then, with a wife by his side more than ready to hold his hand and teach him every step of the way, what chance is there that he will now?
He’ll have to, for Baelon. Aunt Rhaenys can only be away from her family and her business for so long, and after she returns to her own life, there will be no one else left.
“Thank you,” she says quietly, staring at the outline of her dad’s slumped shoulders. He’s standing in front of the casket with his head bowed, the picture of a doting, devastated husband.
Maybe he is devastated, maybe he isn’t, but it’s too little too late now—where was he all these years when Aemma struggled as a single mom in all but name? Always stuck in meetings building his business empire, that’s where. Too focused on accumulating his own wealth and power to pay any mind to the family desperately needing him back at home.
And in the end, her mom died to give him the very son and heir to Targaryen Enterprises that he always wanted.
“You don’t need to thank me. We’re family, and the blood of the dragon runs thick.”
Se ānogar hen zaldrīzes dakogon qumblie. Their house words, back when the name Targaryen meant something other than a cash-hungry capitalist conglomerate with a finger in every conceivable pot this side of the English Channel.
“The blood of the dragon runs thick,” she echoes in High Valyrian, still staring at her dad’s silhouette, and the words taste like a lie on her tongue.
-
When Rhaenyra is eighteen, she goes to university.
It would probably be more accurate to say she runs away to university—her home doesn’t even feel like hers any longer, taken over by none other than Alicent Hightower. Once her childhood companion, now her dad’s far-too-young-for-him mistress and soon-to-be wife.
Alicent is only a few years older than her. The thought of what they must get up to in her mom’s old bedroom turns her stomach.
University is a welcome respite.
It takes her six years to graduate what was meant to be a four-year degree, attending classes part-time and working as close to full-time as she can manage without collapsing out of sheer exhaustion. But the Citadel is expensive, and with none of the Targaryen family money paying for this degree—her dad was against it as soon as she told him her intended field of study, and this was the only compromise he would accept—she doesn’t have much of a choice.
In the end, it feels worth it. Walking down the aisle, diploma in hand, is the proudest moment of her life by far. Nobody is in the crowd to cheer for her except the friends she’s graduating with, but it feels fitting somehow. She made it to this moment on her own two feet, not a single helping hand except her own, and she’ll end the journey exactly as she started it. A woman instead of a girl, but as just as alone as she’s always been.
The polite applause of the audience crescendos at the end of the ceremony, and she closes her eyes, savoring the moment. If she concentrates just right, she can almost imagine her mom clapping alongside the rest of them.
Her mom never graduated from university. Never had the chance to—she was pregnant halfway into her first year, and while Viserys was willing to marry her for the sake of the baby, he wasn’t willing to sacrifice his education to help care for either of them. That responsibility, along with all the others, fell to Aemma.
“This one’s for you, mom,” she says, drowned out by the cheers of her fellow graduates as they toss their caps into the air, and slips away before anyone can see her cry.
-
Every bone in her body screams not to do it, but she can’t help herself. Baelon was just a little boy when she left, two years old and toddling everywhere with his thumb in his mouth. He had her dad’s wispy silver hair and her mom’s lilac eyes and her penchant for mischief, licking everything he could get his hands on, opening any door with a handle he could reach, babbling the whole while in a mishmash of coherent words and baby talk that was even more adorable than she could have imagined.
Leaving him was the hardest part of cutting all ties and running away to the Citadel. The only part she sometimes regretted, under the covers of her dormitory bed and homesick for something she lost long ago.
Going back to see him promises a thorny reunion with her dad and his new wife, but not going was never really an option at all.
Even after all these years, her dad hasn’t changed the locks—her old key is dusty and dented from being shoved in the bottom of her backpack for half a decade, but it still opens the front door to the manor with nothing more than a quiet snick.
She steps inside the family home she hasn’t returned to since the day she left, and in many ways it feels as though nothing has changed. Finding her old room is easy—it’s nearly untouched, the only indication of the time that has passed the coating of dust across all of the furniture. Even the Citadel acceptance letter she left on her bed is still there, as though her dad simply closed the door to this room the day she left and hasn’t opened it since.
If that were true, it wouldn’t even surprise her.
She continues wandering through familiar hallways, cataloguing the changes. What mainly jumps out is how much of the red and black Targaryen regalia has been removed from the walls, replaced by replicas of classical paintings and photos of a family she no longer belongs to.
It seems that in her time away, Alicent has given her dad new children. A boy and a girl, both with traditional Targaryen hair and pale eyes, though she notes with some satisfaction that they are not in fact the signature purple.
Baelon is present in some of the photos, mostly at the age when Rhaenyra still knew him, and conspicuously absent from others. None of the newer photos, with Alicent’s children looking their most grown up, include him at all.
A knot starts to form in her stomach. Something doesn’t feel right here.
Her suspicions are further confirmed when she peeks her head into the various bedrooms she comes across. Two are labeled on the door with the names AEGON and HELAENA in cute block letters, and looking inside reveals the kinds of rooms she would expect for young kids. Bright and airy, littered with rugs and toys and colorful baubles. One painted lime green with stickers of animals all over the walls, the other painted pale blue with a racecar bed dominating the space.
Aegon and Helaena, she thinks with mostly indifference. Her half-siblings.
The third room that draws her eye is all the way down the hall from them. No lettering on the door, but something pulls her toward it anyways. This used to be where they put guests, so that they could stay without bothering the family at the other end of the manor, but something she can’t explain tells her this is Baelon’s room.
She pushes open the door, and her very blood turns to ice.
-
When they step out of the car, it’s raining. Thunderstorming, even, lightning crackling across the sky followed a few seconds later by a clap of thunder loud enough to shake the ground itself.
Baelon flinches in her arms, and she smooths a hand over his hair instinctively. “It’s okay, buddy. It can’t hurt you, I promise.”
He doesn’t say anything. Won’t, can’t, she isn’t sure, but he hasn’t spoken since she found him on his bed with tears streaming down his cheeks. Even now he looks very far away, eyes hollow, pupils blown wide like he’s seeing something no eight-year-old should even be able to name.
He’s heavy in her arms, but it’s a weight she bears gladly as she walks them up the entryway.
There’s nowhere else she could think to run save here.
The blood of the dragon runs thick, she hears in her ears, and rings the doorbell.
Silence for several seconds. Then she hears the gentle patter of footsteps behind the door, followed by the click of a deadbolt taken out of its hinge.
The door opens.
Except looking back at her isn’t Rhaenys, or even her husband Corlys, but a face she barely even recognizes save from an old family photo album now hidden away in the attic.
Short-cropped Valyrian silver hair, deep violet eyes, pale skin, a scowl twisted across his lips. She hasn’t seen him since grandfather’s funeral, but there’s no doubt who it is.
Her dad’s long-estranged brother, Daemon Targaryen.