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He cannot get the bullet out, he thinks, he can't, and then he does. A little piece of grit to build a pearl around.
Midnight June. Midnight July. They've been going at it for days now.
Getting the bullet out.
Digging out the bullet and holding it up to the light, the light. Digging out the bullet and holding it up to the light.
—Richard Siken, the Dislocated Room
1.
Viserys calls her Aemma on their wedding night, huffs it into her ear as he sticks himself into her and spills a babe inside of her womb, a son, an heir, the very thing that he carved out of Aemma Arryn, the woman that he claimed to love, the woman he still murdered, despite the fact that he loved her, despite the fact that she was the Queen.
(At the end of the day, Aemma Arryn might have had a royal womb, but she was just that—a womb.)
2.
Her father calls her Alyrie, once, the first two syllables convincing her for just one moment that she is safe, but then the second two slip out, fond, possessive, as he beholds Alicent in her mother’s dress, as he sees Alicent in her own wedding dress, as he takes the bridecloak from her shoulders, steals Hightower green and gold protection in exchange for selling her off to a man who will see her as a ghost of a mother, of a wife, will not see her.
3.
Ormund Hightower calls her Your Grace, but it is not her that he sees as a queen. Not her that he wishes to consume whole.
No, to Ormund, Alicent is the Mother, and that might have been a compliment otherwise, to be not a ghost or a wife or an echo but a person unto herself—
But she is not a person to him, not in truth, and neither is her son.
Ormund comes to court and his hand is on Daeron's shoulder and it curls tight, curls as Daemon's hand did around Rhaenyra's neck on her wedding night, and she looks at a boy with her auburn braids, her mother's braids, an echo, a ghost, and she should see Viserys, should see a man who carved her open, but all she sees is Rhaenyra’s bright eyes inside of her own face and a boy who is being carved open and she is fifteen again in a wedding bed being split open at the point of a knife, to be sacrificed to a king's wants and needs and this is her boy—
4.
“Tell me about my son,” Alicent says, and it as much a prayer as it is a plea.
Gwayne’s response is measured, but no less true. “He is a good boy. A kind boy. Clever. Stalwart—”
But that's not the question.
“Tell me about our cousin,” Alicent says.
Her brother looks at her, and there are ghosts in his eyes, and she has to wonder about what Otto and Ormund saw in him as well.
And Gwayne answers, speaking to a knife that he has been carved away at by just as well.
5.
“Let me tell you about your father,” Alicent says, a goblet of wine clutched in hand, to Rhaenyra Targaryen, a girl who has always worshipped at her father's knee as much as he was devoted to hers.
But Alicent's fingers are picked raw, her blood an offering to gods that never answered her prayers, and she will not see her boy consumed as she was, as Rhaenyra was.
“Let me tell you about a girl, and a wife, and a daughter, and a niece, and a ghost.”
The curtains fall from Rhaenyra’s eyes, sliced through by Alicent's words, and Alicent doesn't grieve for an innocence that the woman should have lost a long time ago.
All that Alicent can grieve for is the fact that she sent her babe into the same hell that she has languished in for so long.
6.
Viserys the Peaceful lives up to his name and dies peacefully in his sleep.
He’d been ill for so long, don’t you know?
His wife mourns him and his daughter burns his body and he passes onto the next life as befits a Targaryen.
No one will ever think to check to see if he was poisoned. Why would they? He’d been ill since before his daughter was married. Everyone from his cousin to his daughter to his wife can attest to that.
(Do not check to see the empty bottle that his daughter tosses out into Blackwater Bay the next time that she flies on the back of Syrax.)
7.
Otto Hightower has his neck slit in a back room, a beheading before he is ever called before a court, much less sentenced.
(Gwayne Hightower's blade is clean of bloodstains, of course. There is no rust. None at all, because the blade was sharpened by his own hand that very night.)
8.
Ormund Hightower chokes to death, found strangled by a gold cloak, fingernail marks carved into his skin.
And Alicent pulls the son who carries the braids of a girl who never got to live into her arms and runs her fingers through his hair and promises, “You shall fly, my boy. He shall never stop you again.”
9.
Daemon Targaryen stumbles, drunk, into the Dragonpit one night. He was seen in the Street of Silk earlier this evening, deep in his cups, grieving his brother, grieving the state of his marriage, reckless, restless—
Is it truly a shock that he wrecks himself as he tumbles into the Dragonpit and ends up taunting a dragon?
It is his fault that Tessarion had to put him out of his misery. Everyone knows not to mess with a dragon, after all.
10.
Rhaenyra Targaryen is Queen, and her Hand is the former Queen Dowager—an unusual choice, but one that none can argue with, thanks to the dragon she rides and the fact that the Queen Dowager's children's dragons all ally beneath their sister's banner, repayment for a deal some whisper was made long ago.
Within a year, Ser Gwayne Hightower is quietly named to her Kingsguard, thanks to the fact that he is said to have saved the life of a royal family member and the Queen is trusting him with even more lives.
Some wonder how it could be so. Would others not know of such a feat? Would others not have been aware of Gwayne Hightower’s heroism?
(Some say it is because the Queen is rumored to have taken her father's wife as her own in the style of Old Valyria, blood on their lips, dragonfire in their veins, and that this is merely an excuse.
The truth, of course, does involve kisses in blood and the way that Rhaenyra and Alicent's bodies finally have carved something soft and tender out of the hatred and ache that once flowed between them, but that is not the whole truth, is it?)
11.
But on a cold winter night in the Princess’ chambers in the Red Keep, Daeron Targaryen collapsed into his uncle's arms as he spoke a truth that every soul in the room knew all too well.
And, well—
As Gwayne ran his fingers through his nephew's hair as he gasped out a confession, a truth, a ghost, Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen exchanged a look across the decades, straight back to two girls that yearned for each other before they were split apart by the press of duty and devotion and marriage and a crown that weighed of iron and smelled of blood-rust.
And a pact was sewn out of ghosts and ache and blood on the sheets.