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She takes a step.
A leap of faith.
The wind rushing through her ears.
For the first time in her lonely life, she is content.
Her body hits the concrete with a sickening splat, bones crunching and tissue splattering on the ground.
She is dead.
Until she isn’t.
Her new name is Aeraella, as though her mother couldn’t choose between Aerea and Rhaella, so simply combined the two into one.
Her new mother probably didn’t wish to name her daughter after a Septa and a girl who died far too young and far too horribly.
So, Aeraella it is.
The first time Aemond saves Aeraella, he is nine years old.
Aegon had led them through a secret entrance that opened up to a cliff overlooking the Blackwater Bay, ever so proud of himself as the eldest of the group to show off his discovery.
Aeraella had been seven then, small and waif-like, silver curls billowing in the breeze, a perpetually dazed look in her mismatched eyes. Aemond remembers the way she’d walked to the very edge, unnoticed among them until she stopped and looked down at what he remembers had been a ten meter drop to the sea.
And then, she jumped. As easy as walking, as easy as breathing, as easy as taking a life.
Aemond thinks he screamed, knows he scrambled to his feet at the sight of her disappearing beneath the edge of the cliff, remembers the way Aegon screamed her name and Helaena had looked at him with her knowing eyes and said, “We need to save her.”
You need to save her.
And so, he did.
He ran and leapt off the cliff.
Foolish, Aeraella would later call him, both of them soaked to the bones and lying on the shore, breathless as they held each others’ hands. But she’d looked at him then with her odd eyes—a brown so dark it nearly seemed black, and a lilac so light it was almost too bright to look at—and there was something almost like gratitude and regret within them.
For a moment, she almost seemed alive.
Aemond remembers meeting her gaze, salt water drying his lips and parching his throat, nine years old and having just saved the life of his niece.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he told her, voice cracking at the end.
Her next words define what will become of the next years of his life. Perhaps if she’d merely brushed the entire affair off as the childish whim of a girl wanting to dive and swim along the sea, then he would have gone about his life without more than a passing thought for his half-sister’s daughter.
But Aeraella breathed, tightened her fingers unconsciously around his hand, and said, “I’ll do it again.”
So Aemond tightened his hand around hers in return, grounding her to this world and never letting go.
He remembers the way her hair had stuck to her face, the little puffs of breath that escaped her pale lips, the way she closed her eyes and remained as still as a corpse until the Kingsguard arrived and took them to their parents.
He remembers thinking, just a moment before her hand slipped from his as a knight carried her away, how much he wanted to see her smile.
Aeraella doesn’t have a dragon. Just like him, her egg failed to hatch.
Ever since that day nearly a year ago, Aemond has become a constant presence by her side. Where she goes, he is not far behind.
He doesn’t know what makes him follow her so, only that something inside him had shifted that day he jumped off the cliff and dragged her unwilling body to the shore. Breaths stuttering with fear and the knowledge that they may both die. He still remembers how she’d looked then, soaked with salt water and staring up at the sky in a daze.
He thinks that perhaps the reason he is so intent on being so close to her is because he feels the need to keep her safe. He’d been the one responsible for keeping her alive, and now he has to keep it that way.
(Or perhaps it’s the explanation he deludes himself with, because if he allows himself to linger in the sight of her curls gleaming in the light and the way her lips shifted whenever she spoke with her family, not quite a smile but not quite so blank either, he feels as though he might suffocate from the tightness that constricts within his chest.)
“Raella,” he calls her, because Aeraella is a mouthful and everyone calls her that, but for once, Aemond wants to have something for himself. So, Raella it is, because it both falls off his tongue in easy syllables and he can satisfy himself with the knowledge that he is the only person she allows to call her Raella.
“Hm?” she hums, sitting on the ledge of an open window, feet dangling on the edge, and Aemond is quick to seat himself beside her and wrap his arm around her waist. Should anyone see them in such an intimate state, they will come to all sorts of conclusions instead of the truth: Raella is only a passing thought away from pushing herself off the ledge and teasing death. If he were not so worried for her wellbeing, he’d think she did such things for the sake of worrying him.
He shifts so that he isn’t pressed so much against her side. “Aegon and your brothers will have lessons on the Dragonpit at noon. I want us to come with them.”
Raella turns her head to him, blinking languidly before reaching out to press her palm on the arm he has wound around her.
“Alright,” she agrees easily, just as she always does.
She is rarely disagreeable, rarely voices her thoughts or opinions unprompted. She goes about life in what others may call carefree, unbothered by what comes her way. Aemond knows what the court says about her. A melancholic princess who keeps to herself, always with her head in the clouds, the only company she keeps is that of her uncle.
But Aemond knows Raella is not so disconnected from the world as they make her seem. She has a passion for learning, and she loves sneaking with him to the kitchens to steal a sweet snack or two. She doesn’t like vegetables, but will begrudgingly eat them if prompted enough. She doesn’t have a dragon, but Aemond has seen the lingering looks she directs towards tapestries of Balerion and the Conquest.
Raella is quiet, but if you take the time to speak and get to know her, you’ll find that she is kind and quick-witted, with lofty views and opinions that he knows the Faith would disagree with.
He likes her, his Raella, with her muted looks and distant eyes.
“Raella.”
“Hm?”
“If you had to choose, which dragon would you claim?”
It takes several seconds for her to respond to his question, her head resting on his lap as they laid on the grass in the Keep’s gardens, a Kingsguard knight standing near. Her eyes are lazily following a cloud in the sky, bandaged hands resting on top of her stomach. Raella had had an episode yesterday, one of her usual quiet ones where she hides herself in a dark alcove and stays there until someone finds her.
It had been Aemond who discovered her, crouched behind a statue of a suit of armor and holding a large shard of glass. He thinks she would have plunged it straight to her throat if he hadn’t found her as quickly as he did, or perhaps she’d simply held it to ground herself in reality. Raella always did tell him she had trouble telling whether she was alive or not.
“I don’t want a dragon.”
Aemond’s brow furrows. “But why?”
“I just don’t,” she tells him simply, picking up a lone flower by her side, and that had been the end of it, because when Raella says something, she means it.
Aemond was supposed to be the one to claim Dreamfyre.
He had urged Raella to come with him and bear witness to his proudest moment. He’d spent weeks planning for it, learning the hours with which the dragonkeepers have Dreamfyre fed, sneaking about the Dragonpit and discovering where the pale blue she-dragon was being held. He’d put in so much effort.
She was supposed to be his, not Raella’s.
She doesn’t look pleased, or even elated, or much of anything at all. Raella looks much as she always does—blank, with nary a hint of an emotion behind her eyes. She doesn’t hold Dreamfyre the same way Aegon holds his Sunfyre, all loud laughs and whispered Valyrian spoken between feeding his golden dragon chunks of smoked goat meat. Raella presses her palm against a single scale, but her expression doesn’t change. There is no wonder to be seen, the same way Aemond had looked the first time he beheld the massive she-dragon.
It makes something ugly rear inside him, to know that she acts so blatantly uncaring for something Aemond would have done anything for.
“She chose me,” Raella tells him, mismatched eyes looking back at him as though staring into his very soul, one hand placed on the large dragon’s snout.
It should’ve been me, he wants to scream, but doing so would attract the large dragon’s attention, and however apathetic Raella may seem towards Dreamfyre, the dragon still chose her. Not Aemond.
So, instead of releasing all his pent up anger, he turns on his heel and stalks away, swallowing down the words he would have yelled until his throat became hoarse and the dragonkeepers came to investigate the loud noise.
The first time he gets truly angry with Raella, he is twelve, having returned from the Dragonpit after the humiliation that was the Pink Dread.
“Why won’t you fly on Dreamfyre?”
Raella blinks at him, brows furrowed as though she couldn’t comprehend just what he had asked.
She settles for an unladylike shrug of her shoulders. “Why would I?” She then returns to staring out her window, already losing interest in the conversation—losing interest in him.
And Aemond, fed up with her cryptic words and apathy towards something he prayed to the Seven every night, grabbed her shoulder and forced her to look at him.
“Why are you like this!” He clenches his fists in frustration.
Raella looks at him with bewilderment, hands hovering in the air from where they’d been resting on the window. “Aemond…?”
“You don’t care about your dragon, you don’t care about yourself. You don’t even care if you die!” He screams, angry at the tears gathering in his eyes. “What do you want, Raella? Can you even want something? Do you…” Aemond swallows, hating the vulnerability that’s crept into his tone, “Do you even care about me?”
And he would have forgiven her for everything. Would have gone down his knees and apologized for his words. Would have held her hand and told her he understood, just as he always had.
If only she said yes.
But Raella doesn’t. Perhaps because she doesn’t even understand her own feelings, or maybe she’s lost inside her head again.
Aemond doesn’t know. Aemond would never know, because as the seconds stretched longer with her just staring at him with wide, mismatched eyes, he felt himself grow smaller and smaller, until he couldn’t take the weight of those eyes anymore.
He scowls, hating the way his heart constricts, and turns away from her.
The next morning, he wakes up with his head cooled, wracked with guilt at the words he spoke to her. He should not have been so direct. He knew better than most how Raella could be, and yet…
He left his rooms, ready to apologize to her, when a passing servant tells him that Rhaenyra had taken her husband and children and left for Dragonstone.
Aemond feels as though his world has shattered.
For the next seven months that Aemond goes without Aeraella, he oscillates between worry and longing.
Has she been keeping up with her lessons? Has she been eating well? Has she found herself in another problem that puts her in need of saving? Has she been missing him as much as he has been missing her?
He wants to write her letters. Has written her letters. Sitting on a hard chair for hours on end, the wax of his candles burning into the night, worrying his lip over what would be appropriate to write and what would get him in trouble should his mother catch wind of his letter.
In the end, as much as he longs to tell her not to step too close on the edge of a balcony or scoot too far from the windowsill, he settles for telling her of his day, his progress on his lessons, and how her presence has been missed by him the court.
Raella only writes back once for every three letters he sends. It’s often short and stilted with ink spilling and creases around the edges, as though handled with little care, barely an afterthought. Aemond doesn’t mind. He knows Raella enough to know that her responding at all is more than what she does for even her own siblings.
Once, in one of his harshest days when Aegon’s drunken self makes a comment on Aemond and his lack of a dragon, he’d written to Raella in an almost harried way, the grip on his quill almost painful as he wrote how he wishes she would ride Dreamfyre and visit him in King’s Landing.
You were the only tolerable person here, Raella.
He didn’t expect her to actually come.
What alerts him is the sound of a dragon’s roar. Loud and so very familiar.
Dreamfyre’s roar, much like every dragon, is unique. The same way a person’s voice would differ from another. The she-dragon has a roar that feels almost like it’s looming over you, echoing across the air like a string that’s been plucked. Aemond doesn’t quite know how to describe it save for the fact that it resonates within his soul, the same way hearing Raella’s voice awakens something in him.
He’s racing through the halls before he knows it, heart in his throat and a grin breaking out on his face.
There’s the sound of a mighty thump, the earth quaking for the briefest moment, before he arrives in the courtyard and finds a shock of silver-gold hair dismounting from the pale blue dragon. The guards are all too stunned by the sudden arrival of the princess to do more than stare, especially with the added presence of a large dragon.
It is Aemond that steps close, bravely, fearlessly, and it is Raella that closes the distance between them, burying her face in his chest and wrapping her arms around his middle. And though she doesn’t say it, he knows enough to tell that she has missed him as much as he has hers.
No one dares speak of how intimate an embrace it is, not when there is a dragon large enough to swallow three men whole in one gulp.
They have three hours of bliss, walking around the keep and hiding together, hand in hand, Aemond leading Raella, just as they have always done, until Rhaenyra arrives, hair windswept and looking thunderously down at her daughter.
Aeraella had, apparently, received his letter, gotten her riding leathers, and promptly ridden Dreamfyre with the excuse of wanting to fly. Rhaenyra had, rather predictably, assumed Raella would be flying along the coasts that litter Dragonstone, but then an hour passed with no sign of her. Then a maid showed her Aemond’s letter, and everything clicked into place.
They had gotten away with a mere slap to the wrist.
His father was overjoyed with Rhaenyra’s return and promptly arranged a feast in her honor. Aemond was never one for the social gatherings in court that they call a feast, but after spending the night away dancing with Raella in his arms, he supposed it might not be so bad sometimes.
He won’t see Raella again for another two months, but those few hours spent dancing with her had been enough to curb seven months’ worth of loneliness.
A sennight before Laena Velaryon’s death is announced in court, a rumor spreads like wildfire through King’s Landing.
That night, Aemond stabs his pillow until it is nothing more than a feathery mess and wishes it were Jacaerys Velaryon’s face.
It lingers.
Envy. Greed. Jealousy. All the ugly little things Aemond keeps locked away in his poor, fragile heart.
“They’d make a good couple, eh? Or as good as two bastards can be. Let’s hope the children inherit their mother’s looks, otherwise I fear for the future image of our House,” Aegon snickers into his ear, breath hot and stinking of wine and something more abhorrent.
Aemond shoves him away, finding satisfaction with the way his brother stumbles, drink sloshing in his cup and into the ground. Aegon merely laughs like this is all so hilarious to him. Aemond wishes he had the privilege of ignoring his problems by drowning them all in wine and debauchery.
Aegon snorts. “No smart words from you, dear brother? I half expected you to be a sniveling little mess the moment you laid eyes on your precious Raella and her would-be brother-husband.”
Aemond would never admit it, but he had considered leaving the funeral feast and holing himself in his rooms, if only so he may escape the constant stream of nobles gossiping about the latest match Rhaenyra has made for her children. Princess Aeraella and little Prince Jacaerys with his dull brown hair and bastard brown eyes and a face that looked more fit to be Raella’s servant than her husband.
Aemond wants to scream.
Raella meets his eyes across the room, light lilac and dark brown against his own purple irises. She blinks at him, almost questioningly, as though wondering why Aemond hasn’t glued himself to her side as he was wont to do before she’d been whisked away to Dragonstone.
Then, his eyes find Jacaerys’s pudgy, bastard face, and he feels his expression contort into something rotten at the sight.
“Easy there. People might begin to wonder why you’re glaring so hard at our nephew.”
“Shut up, Aegon,” Aemond hisses, spinning on his heel and leaving his brother to laugh himself silly.
He clenches his fist, eyes narrowing at the spray of wind that hits his face.
Hopelessness weighs at him like an anchor, bringing him down with it to drown in his insecurities and pitiful self-worth.
If only he was father’s firstborn son. If only mother had fought more for their cause. If only Jacaerys didn’t exist. If only Rhaenyra wasn’t so vapid and impulsive. If only…
If only he had a dragon.
A dragon that would dispel any word of him being more Hightower than Targaryen. A dragon that would be strong enough to face Jacaerys’s puny little Vermax.
The largest, most fearsome one of all. Enough that he would have nothing left to prove, nothing left to argue about why he deserves Raella more than Jacaerys or Lucerys or even Aegon.
Aemond stares at the small ‘hill’ that’s formed over the beach, each breath sending waves of sand scattering along the wind.
The largest living dragon from the Conquest just so happened to be riderless at the moment.
It all happens so fast that Aemond barely has time to process it.
There his two bastard nephews are, two curly heads of silver behind them, and just beyond his reach stands Raella, a white nightgown on, hair spun gold in the torchlight. She looks like the Maiden in the flesh.
Aemond takes a step towards her, a smile beginning to grow on his face—
And then, Jacaerys Strong decides to intervene.
There is a scuffle. A fight. Four against one.
He remembers pushing Rhaena to the ground, pulling Baela’s hair, punching Lucerys in the face, and shoving Jacaerys hard enough that his head cracks against the stone floor.
He licks his lips and tastes blood. His palm hurts with how hard he’s holding on to the rock in his hand. His body is vibrating, with fear, exhilaration, excitement? He doesn’t quite know.
Nor will he ever know, because Lucerys unsheathes a dagger that glints in the torchlights and, and, and—
Raella.
Oh, Aemond thinks with dawning horror, he’d forgotten about her.
High Tide’s maester claims she will live, that the would was shallow and only needed a few stitches. The risk of a fever was still present, however, so they must take careful watch of her condition.
They try to get Aemond to leave, but he remains stubbornly rooted in place, a deathly cold hand held between his. And when they attempt to physically get him to leave, he bares his teeth in a snarl and realizes only after the Kingsguard are rendered silent that Vhagar unleashed a roar loud enough to shake the very foundations of the keep.
They leave him alone after that.
His hair is unkempt, dark bags lining his eyes. His clothes are from two days ago, having only changed after his mother practically begged him to. There’s still dried blood under his nails, dark and crusty. He wishes they were his, wishes more than anything that he had taken that blow instead of, of—
Instead of.
Three days have passed since Laena’s funeral, since he claimed Vhagar, since the incident.
It’s on this third day that Raella finally wakes up, eyes groggy and dazed. Her hand tightens around his for the barest of moments before it loosens into something slack, relaxed.
The first thing she says is, “I’m not dead.”
Aemond stares for what is perhaps a good few minutes before he regains enough of his composure to answer. “No, you’re not.”
“Hm,” she hums, throat raspy from three days of disuse. She looks as normal as ever, unbothered, detached from the world, staring into the ceiling with her mismatched eyes as though she has just woken from a nap instead of an injury that spanned her shoulder to the side of her neck. If it hadn’t been for Lucerys redirecting the blade at the very last moment, it would have gone to her throat, would have sliced at her neck. And then… and then…
And then, he finally breaks.
A tear slips from his eye, and another, and another, until rivulets of it are running down his cheeks. His hands are shaking, lips wobbling, mouth dry, and throat parched.
He wants to tell her so many things. Scold her, hug her, cry into her arms. But all that leaves him is a weak, quiet, “Why?”
Slowly, Raella moves her eyes from the ceiling to meet his, but instead of stopping, she continues to rake her eyes across the room until she meets his own again.
When she speaks, it is in a voice clearer than anything he has ever heard her speak before.
“I never asked to be born into this world.”
There’s something wistful in the tone of her voice, something Aemond has never heard from her.
“I didn’t ask to be Aeraella Velaryon. Adventure wasn’t something I actively sought out. I wanted a life of peace, free from suffering and pain.” Something bitter twists at her mouth. “Of course the moment I finally decided to choose my own fate, the universe throws me into the bloodiest world in its bloodiest era.”
Aemond feels his brows furrow in confusion, not quite understanding her words, but at the same time, something in him urges him to be quiet. To listen. This is the longest time he’s ever heard Raella speak.
“I didn’t want to acknowledge this new life. I wanted to go back to being dead.” He feels a shock of something zip through him, a few pieces slotting together and forming a picture he does not want to see. “It was…odd, being here, seeing you all, and feeling nothing. Everything was just so dull, like life was mocking me somehow. I didn’t feel alive, so I didn’t act alive. At least, that was how it was before,” at this, Raella turns to him, something soft in her gaze. “I hated you a little, you know, that day you first saved me when I jumped off that cliff all those years ago. I kept trying to end my life, but somehow, like a little miracle, you were always there. Always on time. Just enough to stop me from myself.”
He doesn’t know how to feel about it. Of her finally admitting that all those things she’d done in the past were a bid to end her life. And then, he feels himself go cold, because she had hated him?
But he’s given little time to sort through his thoughts, because Raella isn’t done yet.
“You grew on me. I suppose I didn’t realize it back then, but really, I should have known from the moment I rode Dreamfyre for three hours straight to visit you just because you asked.” Her smile is reminiscent as she tells him this.
Then, her fingers ghost over the bandages around her shoulders and the side of her neck, something pained in her expression. Raella squeezes his hand with her own, her mismatched eyes boring into him.
“I’d say I didn’t do it for you, that I had purely selfish reasons, that I did it in the hopes that I’d die…but then I’d be lying.” Her voice is soft, scratchy and dry from going so long without drinking water, but soft. “It was like something possessed me. I knew what was about to happen, knew that you’d be fine, but I couldn’t just—I didn’t want you to suffer.” She takes a shaky breath, eyes faraway. “It occurred to me as I laid there looking at you, blood on my neck and all, that it was the first time I’d ever wanted something. And when I saw you crying for me, unable to do anything but stare, I’d never wanted to live so badly as I did then, if only so I could tell you that it’ll be fine.”
They stare at each other, watching, gauging for the other’s reaction.
Aemond doesn’t know what to feel, what to think. It feels like everything he’s ever known has been turned upside down, but at the same time, it’s like everything has slotted into its rightful place.
His head is a mess of anxiousness and terror that has weighed on him for the past few days. He doesn’t understand half of what she said, but he knows enough to realize that Raella has bared her heart out to him, has spoken of her feelings and her past and how she finally wants to be alive—because of him.
It would only be fair if Aemond returns the gesture. Words aren’t enough to encompass everything he wants to say, everything he wants to tell her, everything that makes him so undeniably fond of her. His mind is too exhausted to think, much less come up with words suitable enough to this moment, so he doesn’t. Think, that is.
Aemond presses his palm to the bed, leaning in across the distance that separates them, and plants a soft, gentle kiss on Raella’s lips.
When he backs away, lips tingling and feeling giddy because of what he’s just done, he sees her looking at him with wide eyes, a gobsmacked expression on her quickly reddening face.
“Y-You…I—what?”
He feels himself grin at how shocked she is. It’s odd to see Raella being so expressive, but he finds that it isn’t unpleasant. It’s rather refreshing, to see her look so alive and to know that only he is there to witness it.
Raella brings a hand up to her mouth, the tips of her fingers running over her lips.
“I can’t believe you just…does this mean that you like me? As in romantically?” There’s a hint of something hysteric in the tone of her voice.
Now, it’s Aemond’s turn to turn pink.
“I’ve always been fond of you, ever since that day I saved you from drowning. I, I have shown it to you, yes?”
“Yes, but I didn’t think—I thought you were just being protective because I’m your niece!” Raella begins to frantically rake her hand over her hair. Despite this, though, her other hand is still holding onto his tightly.
He frowns. “Can I not be fond of you as both a man and your uncle?”
That seems to knock something within her. “Sometimes I forget which House I’ve been born into…Targaryens, honestly.” But then she blinks, lips twitching. “…Aemond, you’re only thirteen.”
“What of it?”
“You’re hardly a man.” He scowls, but before he can respond, she continues, “And…I’m sorry, but you have to stop liking me.”
“…What?”
Raella sighs, pulling her hand away from his grip, only to fail when he grabs on tighter. “Look, you can’t—we can’t. You’re my uncle and I’m your niece. It would be…wrong.”
Something ugly rears its head inside him at the mention of her close relation with him being wrong.
“So you would rather marry your brother?”
She looks at him with confusion that bleeds into understanding. Instead of denying his question, she merely smiles in amusement.
“That was a rumor, Aemond. My mother doesn’t plan for me to marry Jace. She’s quite set on a match between him and Baela. One of the nobles at court must have been bored and spread it.” Slowly, with each word that passes through her lips, he feels the weight that’s been hanging over him loosening, until it disappears entirely as she squeezes his hand. “And besides, I don’t want to marry anyone from my family.”
And just like that, Aemond’s scowl returns back to his face. “And me? Would you not marry me?”
With Jacaerys out of the way, Raella was free to choose who she wished. She was the rider of one of the largest living dragons and the daughter of the Heir to the Iron Throne. Her marriage prospects would not be inconsequential.
With her dragon, it would be best that she marry into the family. Aegon is already betrothed to Helaena. Jacaerys has already been discredited as a candidate for her hand. Which leaves him, Lucerys, and Daeron.
The most obvious choice was Aemond. He couldn’t see cowardly little Lucerys who clung to his sister’s skirts ever managing to bed her, and Daeron was too young anyway. Aemond, on the other hand, was close in age with her and the rider of the largest living dragon in Westeros.
“Aemond, I can’t. You’re my uncle—”
“When has blood relation ever stopped our family from marrying who they want?” Aemond tugs on her hand, leaning close so she may see how serious he is. “And I am telling you, Aeraella,” he feels her startle at the sound of her full name on his tongue, “I want you.”
Raella looks at him like she’s seeing him for the first time, and she looks so different, so alive, that Aemond drinks her every expression in and etches it into his mind.
For a moment, it seems like she’s about to give in, to let herself loose of whatever morals she has created for herself, but then the doors to her room are opened, and Aemond leans away lest they be accused of anything improper.
Rhaenyra gasps at the sight of Raella awake and immediately engulfs her daughter in an embrace. Aemond has to let go of her hand in order to give them a measure of space, fighting to keep the frown off his face at being disturbed.
Raella, for her part, seems to have gone back to her solemn self, but he can tell something’s different. Her eyes are brighter, more attentive, less detached from the world.
From above her mother’s shoulder, Raella meets his eyes and smiles.
Aemond decides that’s a smile he will spend everyday working to keep.