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Rhaenyra Targaryen
Crown Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, heir to the Throne of the Valyrian Empire, was four and ten when her mother first walked in on her kissing a girl.
Two things should be taken from this statement: firstly, that this was the first time does not necessarily mean it was the last. Secondly, that it was the first time she was found kissing a girl, which does not equate it being her first time doing so.
The Princess had, in fact, first kissed a girl almost a year earlier, the girl in question being a Qoherys classmate with whom she shared her Belaerys cousins.
(They also shared a common ancestor in Rhaenyra Qoherys, the maternal grandmother of Rhaena, Jaehaerys and Alysanne Targaryen, but that was so far back as to be irrelevant to anyone who didn’t learn their bloodlines at the same time they learned to write their glyphs.)
Elaena and Rhaenyra had “practiced” at kissing for nearly a month before they mutually decided to stop. They remained good friends, however, particularly when Elaena started dating Rhaenyra’s cousin Alysanne in their last year of College, and no awkwardness was had on either of their parts – not even when Alysanne, who had been the only person to know about it while it was happening, would tease them over it.
After Elaena and before her mother walked in on her, Rhaenyra regularly kissed another two girls, though there was never any interest on any of their parts to call what they were doing a relationship.
When her mother walked in on her, it was to Rhaenyra’s second kiss with Daenera Melaerys. Being found in that position mortified Daenera, who had known Aemma Belaerys all her life, and irritated Rhaenyra, whose mother had then insisted on her having an adult chaperone whenever she wanted to spend time with her friends.
(She completely and conveniently forgot that she’d been kissing said friends behind closed doors for almost a year, and given she was the heir to the throne it was an expected precaution to keep scandal from reaching her. As it was, she was lucky none of her friends had betrayed her to the gossip circles.
That she favored her own sex would not be a scandal. That she had secret dalliances with so many high-society girls, however, would be.)
Daenera became her first official girlfriend, though that relationship ended before the first month was up when they both realized that, for all that they had enjoyed their time together, they worked better as friends. Two moons later, Daenera was dating Elaena Qoherys and Rhaenyra had set her sights on Jaenara Belaerys, who became her girlfriend after several moons of flirting.
Rhaenyra was by this point five and ten namedays old, in her second to last year of College, and openly proud of her own tastes. Which is why no one was surprised by her obvious interest in Jaenara and their ensuing three moons as official girlfriends, which ended amicably on both their parts when Jaenara came to realize she wasn’t comfortable with the glaring spotlight that would shine on her should they keep dating outside of the confines of the Imperial College.
Several short relationships followed for the Crown Princess, both official and not, but none lasted long past the two moon mark.
Rhaenyra was nine and ten and breezing through her courses in the Imperial University when she had a chilling realization: she would never get to have the love story she had once dreamed about. She might get married and love her wife, but it would be the slow and steady love shared by her parents after over two decades of marriage, rather than the burning flame that still bound her grandparents.
After all, all the girls she’d ever been interested in had ultimately decided that however much they liked Rhaenyra, it didn’t make the lack of privacy of dating the Crown Princess worth it – and any who she’d met who would think otherwise had seemed more into her title than her person.
This realization stopped her dating life and all her flirtations, but she refused to mope about and sulk about her future not looking like she’d wanted it to look. She didn’t even tell anyone but Alysanne why she stopped, and even her cousin wasn’t given the whole reason.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving up, then. What happened to that love you’ve always wanted?”
A smile. “I just don’t feel like actively looking for it anymore.”
To everyone else, her dating life slammed to a stop because of a desire to focus on her studies and her duties, which greatly served her image as the perfect, dutiful heir to the throne she’d been actively cultivating for most of her life.
Even when she graduated from the Imperial University and followed her grandfather’s advice to go to Blackwater under a fake identity, even considering that only her bodyguards knew who she was and she could’ve started dating again, she decided against it – in part because no one she met caught her attention enough to break her self-imposed rules, mostly because she didn’t see it as worth it to date someone she would eventually have to break up with.
Halfway through her second year in Blackport, she started to debate whether to ask her mother to start looking for dragonladies who could potentially become a worthy Imperial Consort or to remain unmarried and name Alyssa as her heir when the time came for her to rise to the throne – much like Empress Rhaena, her great-great-aunt, had done when she inherited the throne from her father Aenys. That debate was still ongoing when, for the first semester of her third year, she signed up for Introduction to Essosi Politics and Culture with Professor Lucerys Bar Emmon.
And then she met Lady Alicent Hightower of Oldtown. Kind, brilliant, beautiful Alicent, devoted to the Andal Faith of the Seven and seeming, for her faith and her culture, painfully straight. A Westerosi lady of a middle-ranked noble family of the Kingdom of the Reach, niece to the Lord Hightower and nowhere closely related to the Tyrells who now stood at the helm of that vast region, the kind of girl she never would’ve crossed paths with back in Valyria.
Rhaenyra was determined to not fall, but one day Alicent smiled, the setting sun framing her like a vision sent by the Fourteen, and the Crown Princess understood that she would have no Consort if it couldn’t be Alicent by her side.
––––––––o––––––––
Alicent Hightower
Alicent had never found any interest in dating.
As a young adult, she would come to realize this had been due to being under the mistaken impression that she could only date boys, but as a teen she hadn’t understood why everyone around her seemed fixated on romance when the idea didn’t have any appeal to her.
Her father and uncle had both been very approving that she didn’t date and instead focused on her studies and faith, and she didn’t have the heart to tell them the real reason. Her mother, Alicent would think from time to time, must have had some idea, but Alyrie Florent didn’t offer any conversation and Alicent refused to bring it up herself.
(Sometimes, just sometimes, mostly after one of her friends shared about their dates or romantic interests, she would wonder if there was something wrong with her – if something within her was broken and that was the reason she couldn’t relate.)
In another world, one where she’d shown any interest in romance, or one where her father wasn’t just the brother of a middle-ranked Lord with plenty of heirs of his own, her request to go to Blackwater University to study history would have been met with firm negatives and close scrutiny. In those worlds, she might have even been betrothed already to some lordling or another, whichever provided the Hightowers with the greatest advantage.
This wasn’t that sort of world.
Here, Alicent could do mostly as she wanted, so long as she didn’t shame the main branch of her family, and so long as she didn’t act against their interests. Here, when Alicent went to her father and uncle and told them she wanted to pursue higher education and showed her grades were good enough to get into Blackwater, arguably one of the most prestigious institutions in Westeros outside of the Citadel itself, her request was met with questions instead – where would she live, what would she study, which Sept would she go to, did she have payment plans or did she want the family to pay the full tuition.
(She replied that she could get a scholarship easily enough and would send an application right that day if allowed, she only needed them to pay the difference, if there was any, until she could get a job and pay them back. She could live in the dorms for the first two years, and after that apply for a scholarship to continue living there for the next two years. She wanted to study history, with more of a focus on the political side of it. She would find the closest Sept to the dorms and go there and, if that wasn’t an acceptable place of worship by Hightower standards, she would keep looking for one – and if that meant she had to go to the Grand Sept, then there she would go.)
So she was allowed to go to university, and off to Blackport she went, with a full scholarship that would accompany her until graduation.
The first year passed with nothing of note, save perhaps the fact that she remained uninterested in dating, and she went home with fantastic grades which made her family smile and nod their pride in her – Alicent had always been an intelligent girl, her uncle declared, it made sense that she would do well in Blackwater.
For the first semester of her second year, she signed up for Introduction to Essosi Politics and Culture, a course that for the last fifteen years had been under the sole charge of Professor Lucerys Bar Emmon of the Bar Emmons of Sharp Point – culturally and racially Valyrian, born and raised mostly in Westeros, but with studies in the Volantis College and the Imperial University in the Valyrian Empire. All this made him extremely qualified to teach his mostly Westerosi students about Essos, and Alicent had been very excited to learn.
Then she met Rhaenyra Belaerys. Proud, brilliant, beautiful Rhaenyra, who had a degree in Valyrian Studies from the Imperial University itself but had signed up for this course to get a different perspective on her own native continent. The first week, they were paired up by Professor Bar Emmon to do their final project together and Alicent was envied by the entirety of their class for it.
Later that day, as they were brainstorming ideas for their project, Rhaenyra gave her a smile and Alicent felt her heart skip a beat.
Now, it must be said that just because Alicent had been uninterested so far it didn’t mean she was ignorant – she knew what that feeling was.
She just was confused, because she had never felt it before. Not with boys, who she’d been socially conditioned to at least want to be interested in, and not with girls, which some parts of her own religion claimed would have been a sin.
But she knew what she had felt, and for the next four moons she considered and analyzed her own feelings until she realized – she liked Rhaenyra Belaerys, who was now more a friend than a classmate, and she had liked other girls before, even if none of them had made her hear skip a beat so easily as Rhaenyra.
She kept quiet about this, both because she was sure her feelings weren’t reciprocated and because she couldn’t bring herself to say anything about this part of herself before she told her parents.
So she held her peace until she went back home, and once there she sat her parents down to tell them she liked girls, and more to the point she liked a classmate of hers.
Her mother had been quiet and confused, her father quiet and pensive.
Alicent was already panicking, picking her hands behind her back for the first time in seven years, when her father stood up and told her to grab her jacket and get in the car.
“I know nothing about this,” he’d admitted. “But the High Septon is the representative of the gods on this earth, and I find myself in need of guidance.”
So the driver took them to the Starry Sept, where they, as members of the Hightower family which had always been devout benefactors of the Faith, were given audience with His High Holiness almost as soon as they arrived.
The High Septon, a kind man who reminded Alicent strongly of her Florent grandfather, heard them both out quietly and patiently, fingers caressing his rings.
“It is true that in the past the Faith has taught that attraction between two of the same sex is but a perversion,” the High Septon said at last, a long moment after they’d finished talking. “But with time, we have come to understand that we misinterpreted the Seven-Pointed Star. There is no sin in a woman loving another woman, or a man loving another man.
“After all,” he added, smiling at Alicent in a way that made the resemblance all the stronger, “aren’t we all made in the image of the Mother and Father Above? Aren’t we what they made us be? If it was a sin to love another woman, my dear, you wouldn’t have been born this way.”
“If it were a sin,” her father said slowly, picking his words so carefully Alicent knew he was reviewing the Holy Book in his mind, “the Seven-Pointed Star would have made explicit mention of it at some point. The fact that it doesn’t tells us it cannot be sinful.”
The High Septon inclined his head slightly, just enough to acknowledge the words but not so much that the crystal crown upon his brow would threaten to fall. “Just so, my lord.”
“It will take some time to get used to this,” Alicent’s father told her as they were leaving. “However, if the gods see no sin, then I shall make the effort to unlearn everything I thought I knew to give you the support I must, by the laws of the gods and the love I feel for you, offer you until I die.”
While other people would’ve taken this badly, as a declaration that this support was being offered only by the will of the gods, Alicent knew her father well enough to understand that in his case, the interference of the gods was necessary only to justify what he already wanted to do – not only to himself, but to others who might think to question him.
Therefore, at these words, Alicent smiled.
She was unsure whether she would ever confess her feelings to Rhaenyra Belaerys, but as of right now she was happy being her friend, and this reassurance that her parents would support her should she choose to enter a relationship with another woman was worth more than all the gold in Westeros.